Mark Feldmeier was too old for family vacations, but no one had invited him anywhere else. Unless he wanted to stay home alone for a week in an empty house in Milwaukee, he had no choice but to accompany his parents and little sister on their kid-friendly Caribbean cruise. Yes, this was a supremely dorky way for a nineteen year old to spend his spring break, but Mark secretly thought he might prefer playing Go Fish with his family to getting wasted in Cancun alongside a horde of other college students. After all, he wasn’t really the partying type.

“Ahoy there, landlubbers,” the speakers sang out as Mark and his family boarded the ship. “Welcome aboard the Fiesta Rainbow, departing from San Juan and making stops in Grenada, Barbados, Dominica, Antigua, and St. Bart’s. We’re proud to tell you that this ship truly lives up to its name: in charge of your experience this week are staff members from over fifty different countries, including Armenia, Bulgaria, Colombia, Canada, Cyprus, Fiji, Singapore, South Africa, Venezuela, and more. We all take great pleasure in ensuring that you have a truly joyful experience aboard the Rainbow, so pleased sit back, relax, and get ready to soak up our special Fiesta brand of love.”

As the three thousand passengers trudged, cattle-like, up the gangway, a wave of enthusiastic applause crashed over them, and Mark cringed. Contrary to his expectations, he was far from the only person his age on the Rainbow. Lining the decks were hundreds of beautiful, well-groomed young people, all smiling identical, dazzling grins.

***

The Fiesta brand of love was the stuff of a shy person’s nightmares. Everywhere Mark turned, he was met by another devastatingly good-looking staff member who was eager to accost him with cheer. There was Marisol, the cruise safety specialist from Argentina, who tightened his life jacket for him, her coral-painted fingernails brushing his chest; Asha, the Indian blackjack dealer, who passed him his chips with a wink, and white-blonde Hilje, from Estonia, who announced gleefully that she would be his family’s server for the whole week.

As Hilje launched into her dinnertime patter, charming his sister, flattering his mother, and flirting with his dad, Mark hunched his shoulders up to his ears and wished he could fling himself into the ocean. He didn’t understand how his family could bask so unselfconsciously in Hilje’s practiced corporate warmth—it was like they didn’t even notice that she used the same canned lines on the table right next to them, and that her beaming smile never quite reached her eyes.

On the second afternoon of the cruise, Mark sat by one of the Rainbow’s seventeen pools, nursing a miserable crush on Hilje and loathing himself. God, how the staff must hate the passengers, all of them: they were greedy, oblivious monsters, adults and children alike. The chaotic buffet line was a riot of snouts shoved into muck; the pools a seething mass of pink and brown flesh. At night, when the kids went to bed, it only got worse: the adults turned into cackling drunkards, leering at each other in front of their spouses and leaving their vomit in the elevators for the staff to clean up.

Overnight, the Rainbow had slid into port, and this morning it had ejected a bolus of passengers onto a rounded green island that looked smaller than the ship itself. Mark had stayed onboard, hoping for a little bit of peace and quiet, but the number of people on the Rainbow appeared to be constant; the discharge of a thousand tourists onto the island had done nothing to ease the mind-numbing thrum of the crowd.

Mark applied another layer of clotted, coconut-scented sunblock and tried to come up with a joke that might earn a genuine smile from Hilje, but failed. Maybe he could ask her a question about Estonia? The problem was that when it came to Estonia, Mark had lots of questions, but they were basic ones like, where is it? and do they speak English there? that seemed profoundly unlikely to charm.

Mark was trying to remember the name of Estonia’s capital (Riga? Tallinn? Minsk?) when a very small, very tanned child climbed out of the pool, dashed past the “No Running” sign, slipped in some water, and cracked its face against the leg of Mark’s chair.

“Shoot,” Mark said. “Are you okay?” The child goggled at Mark, wild-eyed, its mouth a red puddle of blood. Mark looked around for help, but Sven, the Swedish lifeguard, was too busy wrangling a feral pack of unsupervised preteens to be of any help. Mark stood up, searching for worried adult faces that bore some resemblance to the one bleeding in front of him. He didn’t see any, but he did spot a pale, black-haired girl in giant mirrored sunglasses. She was lying amidst a swarm of larval bodies that looked like they might be the co-spawn of his charge.

“Bruno,” the girl said, as Mark deposited the child at her feet. “What happened? Did this bad man do something to you?”

Bruno ran to her side and buried his face in her shoulder, smearing it with gore. She sighed deeply, reached into her straw handbag, dug out a crumpled tissue, and dabbed at her skin before pressing the tissue to his face.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ve got extra teeth.” She extracted another blonde child from the mass. “Petra, take your brother and go get a Popsicle.” The two children dashed off at top speed, once again ignoring the signs.

“Sorry if he got blood on you,” the girl said to Mark. “Trust me, it could have been worse.” A distorted version of Mark’s head loomed at him in her reflective glasses, and he was briefly distracted by the way his huge nostrils gaped.

“Dude,” the girl snapped, misinterpreting his look. “I said thank you already. What do you want, a blow job? Jesus Christ.”

Mark let out a little horrified snort. At least three kids were still piled at her feet, but even apart from the ethics of saying ‘blow job’ in front of small children, he was pretty sure she hadn’t said thanks. She waved her hand at him dismissively. He turned to leave, and as he did, another tanned blonde child ran at them from a different direction, barreled straight into the pool, sank to the bottom, and didn’t come up.

“Is that one of yours?” Mark asked.

“None of these are mine. Do I look like their mother? Come on.”

Mark peered down into the aquamarine water, where the child still sat at the bottom of the pool, a line of glistening bubbles trailing from its mouth. “Do you want me to get him for you?” he offered.

She frowned. “Yeah, do you mind? That’d be great.”

Mark jumped into the pool and dredged up the child, who scampered happily back into the pile. “Now I really fucking owe you,” the girl said, with a hint of despair. She handed Mark a towel that smelled faintly like cat food, and he wiped his dripping face. “I see you skipped the island excursion,” she said as he dried. “I respect that. It’s fun if you enjoy being hated. Otherwise, thanks but no thanks, you know what I mean?”

“No, not really.” Mark said, as the faint clang of reggae music drifted towards them on the breeze.

“Everybody there hates all of us,” the girl said fiercely. “Why wouldn’t they? We pull up and dump all our sewage and garbage and rotting corpses and condoms into their harbor, and in exchange, we, what, buy a couple of elephant carvings, and my God, do you see any elephants here? Of course they fucking hate us. I hate us. I’ve been on this cruise for eleven straight trips and I hate myself a little more every time.”

“Absolutely,” he agreed. “It’s horrifying. Wait, did you say eleven?”

“I’m a freelance nanny. Cruise ships are my specialty. Especially this one. There’s a whole website for it. German families like to pass me around.” She seemed to interpret his confusion as skepticism, because she added grimly, “I’m really good at my job.”

That brought the conversation to a close. “Well,” he said. “It was nice to meet you all.” He waved goodbye to her, and then, awkwardly, to the jumble of limbs at her feet.

“Stop,” she said in a rush. “I still owe you. How should I pay you back? I know. Let’s meet here after dinner. A lot after dinner. Like, three a.m.”

“Um. I don’t think so?”

“Don’t look so terrified. I’m going to show you something fun. Not cruise ship fun, real fun. I promise.”

“Okay,” he said. She was right—he was terrified—but he was on spring break, and he didn’t have anything better to do.

***

She was already there when he showed up at 2:50, sprawled in the same beach chair he’d seen her in that morning, and still wearing her sunglasses, as though she were tanning by the light of the moon. When she saw him, she jumped out of her chair and came towards him. “You’re late,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for over an hour.”

“What? No. You—”

“Follow me.”

He trailed after her as she descended into the bowels of the ship. They passed by dozens of empty rooms that were usually filled with activities—yoga, Zumba, acrobatics, magic shows, Bingo, shuffleboard, sports trivia, movie trivia, guided meditation, Duck Duck Goose. At this time of night, most of the guests were either asleep or at bars, and none of the usual staff were around. Instead, a second set of workers had emerged, sweeping, scrubbing, and polishing, but they were neither as friendly nor as aggressively good-looking as the daytime staff; they were also, Mark noticed, a slightly darker shade of brown.

The girl led him silently through the ghostly common areas and down through the floors filled with honeycombed passenger suites. The light here was dim and refracted strangely off the hideous magenta carpets. “Wait a second,” he said, stopping. “What’s happening here? Where are we going? What’s your name?”

“We’re having fun, not much farther, and Agnes,” she said. She handed him a water bottle. “Here. Have a drink.”

He did. It was vodka. He almost spat it out, but then he changed his mind and swallowed. What the hell, he reminded himself: spring break.

They kept walking for what felt like hours, taking dozens of unpredictable turns. He’d known the ship was big but he hadn’t understood just how enormous it was; soon, he was sure they must have covered at least a mile. Agnes kept passing him the vodka and he kept drinking it; once, when she passed it back, she also took hold of his hand. He wasn’t quite sure how he felt about that. Her hand, which dwarfed his, was knobby and a little bit clammy, but it also felt good to be led.

***

At last, she stopped in front of a door, identical to the thousand others they’d passed. “Here we are,” she said, and knocked. The door swung open, and on the other side was a curvy, olive-skinned girl with dimples. It was Marisol, the cruise safety specialist.

“Sven invited us,” Agnes said, and barged in.

Mark tried to say hello to Marisol, but she’d already disappeared into the crowd. The room was packed with at least fifty people, and many of them looked vaguely familiar, though it wasn’t easy to tell. The lights were off, the music was pounding so loudly he could feel it as a buzz in his teeth, and the close air stank of cigarettes, spilled liquor, and weed. Underneath it all, though, Mark was pretty sure this was a Premiere Stateroom, a suite identical to the one in which his family was staying. The centerpiece of the main room was a king-sized bed, and as Mark squinted at it through the gloom, he realized that what he’d thought was pile of coats was actually several bodies lying on top of one another. Someone re-opened the door, and in the light that came inside, Mark saw a flash of bare hip, white breast, and blonde hair.

“What can I get you?” Agnes shouted over the music. “A Slippery Nipple? A Fuzzy Navel? A Sex on the Beach?”

“No, thank you,” he said, but Agnes shoved a solo cup into his hands, and he drank its contents to try and calm himself down. This was a staff party, definitely, where the people who worked on the boat went to get away from the people like him. If someone recognized him as a guest instead of a staff member, would they be pissed off? He scanned the room for Hilje, then looked down and saw that he had a condom wrapper stuck to the bottom of his shoe.

Agnes dragged him over to a corner by a closet, then sat on the floor, pulling him down. The carpet was sticky and linty beneath him; he was pretty sure he was sitting in someone’s spilled beer. “Thanks for inviting me?” he said uncertainly.

Agnes took off her sunglasses, climbed on top of him, and stuck her tongue in his mouth. She tasted like shrimp and vodka, and her tongue, like her hands, was disproportionately large. Oddly, though, he didn’t really mind it. After a minute, he opened his eyes to see if anyone was watching them. No one was, so he slid his hands up her shirt and under her bra. He thought about Hilje, and then about Marisol, and then Agnes undid his jeans, tucked her underwear to the side, and slid onto him, and he didn’t think about anyone else. After a while, she made a little whimpering noise, brought his hand to her mouth, and bit down on his knuckle, and that was the end of it for him. He thought he’d lasted long enough, but he couldn’t be sure. It was only his second time.

She rolled off of him and readjusted her clothes, and only when it took him four tries to button his pants did he realize he was drunk. He tried to think of something to say to Agnes, but couldn’t come up with anything, so he kissed her cheek. Her skin felt chilly, and a little waxy, as though bits of it might have flaked off on him. Agnes, he thought, and practiced mouthing the syllables of her name.

“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” someone said.

There was a rush of confused movement all around them, and then the music shut off abruptly, and the lights came back on. Mark blinked. He’d never seen Agnes in the light before, without her sunglasses, and her face looked rabbity and strange. It took him a second to realize why: she didn’t have any eyelashes. Her eyelids were pink and sore-looking, so she’d probably been plucking them out.

“We should get out of here,” she said, and stood up. “Are you coming?”

“Yes, I’m coming,” he said, but then a crowd of people swirled past her and she was swallowed up in them and disappeared. He tried to follow her, but he tripped on a crumpled beer can and fell over, and when he managed to get up again, the room was empty, except for three men sitting on the bed. “Hey you,” one of them said in a thick European accent. “Help.”

“What? Me, no.” Mark said. The room was rolling even more than it usually did on the cruise ship, and he understood, blurrily, that he was much drunker than he’d originally thought.

“Yes, you, asshole. Unless you want us all to get busted. Come here.”

That seemed compelling. Mark walked over to the bed and he saw that actually only two men were sitting on it. A third man was lying down, but his face was a dark gray, mottled purple at the edges, and there was a ring of dried puke around his mouth. After a moment of thought, it became obvious to Mark that this was no longer a man, but a corpse.

“Get his feet,” one of the living men said.

Mark didn’t move.

The two men stared at him expectantly.

“I don’t want to do that,” Mark said.

The men looked at each other. “Goddamnit, you moron. Karl could be here any minute! Get your ass over here, now.”

Mark thought about running, but then he remembered tripping over the beer can. He was very drunk and scared, and the man yelling at him was very angry.

“I’m not fucking kidding, here!” the man shouted. “This is on all of us. Move!”

Mark walked carefully over to the body lying on the bed. His hands were shaking, but he slid them under the corpse’s sneakers and lifted. He felt dizzy, and as though he might throw up; the sour stench of puke in the room was very strong. They got the body off the bed and clumsily maneuvered it out the door. Mark half-expected to see a policeman outside, and he was ready to drop the body and run away, shouting, they made me do it! but the hallway was silent, empty, and bright.

“Stairs or elevator?” said one of the men behind Mark.

“Elevator,” the other man said.

On the way up, Mark noticed that the corpse’s gray leg was covered in a layer of crisp, black hair. He was also wearing green socks printed with little yellow ducks. I’m probably dreaming, Mark told himself, but he wasn’t even slightly convinced.

When the elevator doors opened, the three of them got out, ran to the railing, and heaved the body over the edge. It tumbled down, down, down, and disappeared in a small frothing burst of white foam. They gazed at the black, featureless ocean in silence, and then the cruise ship’s horn sounded, a nasal, braying honk that landed like the punchline to a joke.

“Thank you,” one of the men said to Mark. Mark expected him to follow this with, and don’t tell anyone about this or we’ll murder you, but instead, the man clapped him on the shoulder. “It’s not easy, but our position is tenuous. You know how important this is for all of us, right?”

Mark nodded. “Right. Yes. I do.”

“Good man,” the other one said. “Okay, that’s it, then. I’m sorry this had to happen. Take care of yourself. We’ll see you around.”

They got into the elevator and Mark waited for them to descend several floors before he screamed and ran away as fast as he could.

***

Mark ran past the locked ice cream cart, the closed pool, the stacked deck chairs, the shelves piled high with fluffy towels, the locked ice cream cart, and the closed pool before he slammed into the stack of deck chairs and realized he’d run in a circle. The tower of chairs teetered and fell down with a crash, taking Mark with them. He landed face-first, his palms splayed against the pebbled deck, stinging, and then he rolled over and stared at the white expanse of the ship’s tower, monstrously large against the starlit sky.

What the fuck just happened, he thought. He saw the corpse disappearing into the waves again, and remembered that it had bounced once before it sank, like a poorly tossed skipping stone. He needed to call the authorities, the navy, the international police. No, first he needed to tell the captain of the ship, because they needed to turn the boat around, pull the man out of the water, and make sure he wasn’t still alive. Oh God, what if he’d still been alive? Mark pictured the man’s matte gray face, his glassed-over eyes, the vomit crusted on his lips. No, definitely not alive—but remembering that face made Mark need to throw up too, so he did. He wiped his mouth on the front of his shirt, tentatively stood up, and wobbled down the stairs below decks. He wandered, lost, through a maze of locked doors for what felt like hours. “Hello?” he called. “Is anyone around? I need some assistance, please? Help?” He was about to give up and go find his parents when he turned a corner and bumped into a bald man wearing a spotless uniform lined with epaulets.

“Oh, thank God,” Mark cried.

“What’s wrong, son?” the man said. Mark opened his mouth to speak, and then his vision started foaming, and he collapsed against the man’s starched white chest.

***

Shortly thereafter, Mark lay on a scratchy couch in a cramped office. The walls were papered with photographs of people on cruises, whose teeth all looked bluish under the bright florescent lights. The bald man sat across from Mark in a large, wheeled leather chair. A plaque on his desk read: Karl V. Karpovich, Cruise Director.

“Tell me everything,” Karl said, and Mark did.

When Mark was finished, Karl leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers together. “That’s quite a story,” he said.

“It’s all true,” Mark insisted. “I’m not making it up.”

“I don’t doubt you. Not for a second.”

“Really?” Mark asked. He was having a hard time believing himself.

“Not at all. You know, this is far more common than you might think. Not this kind of incident, necessarily. But people disappearing off cruise ships? Oh, absolutely. Suicides, accidents, murders, cover-ups of mistakes. People practically pour off of the edge of these boats. Not that this is something we advertise, you understand, but yes, we’re prepared. We’ve got a whole protocol in place. Multiple protocols. Lots.”

“That’s… reassuring. I guess.”

Karl came around the desk, knelt down, and sandwiched Mark’s hands between his. “Son, you are in capable hands. What I want from you—what I beg of you!—is to trust me. Under my supervision, this will all be put right. I have some leeway to remedy this situation; much more than I would if we were stateside, which—fortunately for you and for me—we are not.”

Mark looked down at the cruise director’s capable hands. On the tip of Karl’s middle finger sat a fat pink wart. “So…I’m not in trouble?”

Karl chuckled and smacked Mark between the shoulder blades, inadvertently slapping loose a small burp. “You mean, for the drinking? Son, we’re in international waters. I won’t tell your parents if you won’t. How about that?”

Mark hadn’t meant the drinking at all. He said weakly, “But I’ll need to testify, right?”

Karl pursed his lips, and his small black eyes flickered. “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it, shall we? I think, for the moment, the most important thing is for you to get some rest. In the meantime, I promise you I will take care of this.”

Mark nodded gratefully and stood up. His drunkenness had mostly subsided, ceding its space in his skull to the most punishing headache of his life. “Thank you,” he said.

Karl nodded. “My pleasure. Oh,” he added off-handedly, glancing up as Mark opened the door. “Just one more question. You mentioned you were at a staff party, where there was drinking and drugs. May I ask you—at that party, did you see anyone you specifically recognized? Anyone you knew by name?”

Mark hesitated, thinking of Marisol. “Everyone kind of blurred together,” he said.

***

Mark slept through breakfast, but he groggily joined his family by the pool and had a corndog and a pineapple slushy for lunch. He let the sun bake the remnants of alcohol poisoning out of him as his brain circled in a wobbly dual orbit around the sex he’d had with Agnes and the dead body bouncing on the waves. At some point, surely, he’d have to tell his parents what had happened at the party—except that he had the distinct impression that somewhere in their conversation, Karl had hinted he would not. Ethically, that made Mark feel a bit queasy, but it wasn’t as though he wanted to confess.

Mark’s little sister, Maddie, returned triumphantly from getting her long red hair braided and strung with dozens of jangling beads. She’d learned a new card game from the other kids on the boat, and he played Spit with her for hours, all the while keeping an eye out for Agnes, who never showed up. Mark realized, unhappily, that Agnes had sixteen other pools to choose from; if she decided to avoid him, he might never see her again.

Throughout the afternoon, even as Mark’s hangover faded, a different, vaguer discomfort began to mount. Something is wrong, he thought, as he bought Maddie a frozen Mars Bar from the ice cream stand. He thought it again as he joined his mother for a session of hatha yoga, and once more as he accompanied his dad for a round of gambling in the afternoon—and it was a wrongness distinct from the awful events of last night. Though he couldn’t quite put his finger on the source, it permeated the ship like a stench; he had the nagging feeling that if he weren’t so tired, he could have figured it out. As it was, he merely spent the day rattled by the certainty that something was off.

At dinner, Maddie was telling him the meaning of each of her thirty-two friendship bracelets when a pretty blonde woman approached. “Hello, Feldmeiers!” she said. “Did you have a fun day today?”

“I beat Mark eight times at Spit,” Maddie announced. “He is very, very bad at that game.”

“Or maybe you are very, very good,” the blonde lady said. “That’s what all the other kids on the boat are saying—that Maddie, she’s a real card shark, watch out.”

Maddie grinned proudly. “So what can I get you to drink?” the woman asked them. She went around the table, listing their usual orders: “Shirley Temple, white zin, Coors Light, a Coke?”

Mark waited until she had left before turning to his family. “Who the heck was that?” he demanded.

Mark’s mother cocked her head. “That was our waitress. Are you feeling all right?”

“That wasn’t our waitress! Our waitress is Hilje from Estonia. That woman’s nametag said Antje from Latvia and I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

Mark’s mother frowned. “No, I’m pretty sure it’s always been Antje,” she said, placing her hand on his forehead. “How much time have you spent in the sun?”

***

Mark stalked the ship from top to bottom, accumulating evidence everywhere he went. A sparkling-eyed blackjack dealer named Shala from Bangladesh. A lifeguard named Ulrik from Norway. A freckled Irish girl named Siobhan, who smiled at him from the same ice cream stand where a Welsh girl named Bronwen had smiled the day before. Finally, Mark strode up to a staff member who was polishing the railings near the lifeboats. “Excuse me,” he said. “I have a question about safety.”

“Sure! How can I help?”

“I’d prefer to speak to the cruise safety specialist,” Mark said.

“Of course! Soledad is at dinner right now, but I can have her come find you as soon as she’s free.”

“I don’t want Soledad,” Mark said, his voice cracking. “I want Marisol. Even if she’s off-duty, can you find her for me? Pretty girl; short, curvy, dimples. Marisol.”

“Right. You mean Soledad,” the staff member said.

***

Mark’s family had eaten dinner at 5 pm, on the early bird shift, and he began a panicked hunt for Agnes, praying that she and her charges had decided to stay late at the pool. Against all odds, he found them at pool number seven. “Agnes!” he said. “I need to talk to you. Please.”

Agnes did not appear pleased to see him; behind her sunglasses, he was sure she was rolling her eyelashless eyes. But she finished slathering the child on her lap with sunblock and dropped it onto the ground, then joined him at the railing, where they gazed out at faded blue sky that was just beginning to blush.

When he told her about dumping the corpse, Agnes’s pasty face didn’t flinch—yet when he got to the conversation with Karl, she punched him, hard, in the bicep, her pointy knuckles digging into his flesh. “Are you joking?” she hissed. “You told Karl on everyone? What were you thinking? Jesus Christ!”

This was not the part of his story he’d imagined would upset her. “A guy died. And they threw him overboard. What else was I going to do?”

“Literally anything,” she said flatly. “It was none of your business, you rat.”

“Well,” he said. “Okay. But there’s more.” Knowing how ridiculous he sounded, he told her about how Hilje and Asha and Sven and Siobhan and Marisol had apparently been replaced by Antje and Shala and Ulrik and Bronwen and Soledad overnight. He expected her to tell him he was being an idiot, or at least punch him again, but instead, when he was finished, she responded with a fatalistic shrug.

“Yeah,” she said. “That makes sense. The Rainbow is famous for churning through staff members. I’m not surprised they keep a spare set below decks.”

“I’m sorry, but what did you say?”

“Karl’s a dick,” she said. “You shouldn’t have tattled. Now look what’s happened. You goddamned tool of the system. Fuck you.”

***

Mark was unable to fully comprehend what Agnes had just told him, so as he ran down to Karl’s office, he tried to pummel it into a shape that would fit in his brain. He thought she’d suggested that when Karl had found out what the cruise ship staff had done at the party, he’d gotten rid of them all and replaced them with an entirely new set of employees, sweeping the ship clean and starting again—but that was impossible; so surely, what she’d meant was, that Mark had inadvertently gotten a whole lot of innocent staff members in trouble, and now he was obligated to go make that right.

Karl’s office was, once again, locked, but Mark pummeled on it with his fist and shouted: “Hey, hey Mr. Karpovich! It’s me, Mark, from yesterday!” and Karl opened the door. Mark hadn’t noticed before the way the curve of his skull vanished into his meaty neck, or how one of his bushy, v‑shaped black eyebrows was bisected by a ropy, caterpillar-thick scar.

“How can I help you, young man?” Karl asked.

“I—” even in its pummeled down form, the accusation was too huge to articulate. “Where’s Hilje?” he shouted instead.

“Excuse me?”

“Our waitress! Hilje! Where is she? Is it her day off? What about Marisol? Is it her day off, too? Did they get in trouble because of what I told you? What happened to them?”

Karl smiled politely, revealing too many spit-slicked white teeth. “As you may be aware, there are nearly a thousand staff members aboard the Rainbow, so I can’t tell you where your waitress is right at this precise moment. But if you’re have a complaint about your table service, I suggest you speak to your head waiter; I have no doubt he’ll be able to smooth everything out.”

Karl tried to close the door, but Mark jammed his foot in it. “Why are you pretending you don’t recognize me?”

“I’m pretending nothing of the sort,” Karl said. “You’re the young man who was involved in the unfortunate incident yesterday evening. However, as I promised, I’ve taken care of that situation, so I see no reason to continue this discussion. Good night.”

The door closed and locked, loudly; from the inside, Mark could hear the scrape of an opening drawer. Oh Jesus, he thought. His palms were slick and his head was swimming; he wanted nothing more than to lie down, cover his face with a pillow, and not wake up again until the ship had reached land. People practically pour off the edge of these boats, Karl had said, and though the scale of what Agnes had suggested was impossible, for a brief, terrible second, Mark imagined the Rainbow churning through thousands and thousands of bodies, leaving an oily, stinking stream of chopped flesh in its wake. No. That was nonsense. If nothing else, it was premised on an endless pool of replenishable labor, somehow bubbling up from the bowels of the ship. All those bright-eyed, friendly young staff members—Marisol, Hilje, Asha—they were individual people with names and personalities, not a collection of interchangeable, disposable parts.

Again, he strained to beat his fears into submission: employees were missing and they might be in danger; Karl was a bad man who was abusing his power. Poor Marisol! He needed to help her. Yes, that was a wrong on a scale he could handle; he thought he might even know what to do.

***

“Hi everybody,” Mark said as he entered the cabin. His parents and sister looked up from their endless game of Go Fish. “Maddie, could you go play at the pool for a little while?” Mark said. “I have to say something only grownups should hear.”

Maddie gave him a dirty look but ran off. As the door closed behind her, Mark’s parents sat up straight. “I’m going to confess something,” Mark says. “You’re not going to like it. But I need your help, because I think something terrible is taking place on this boat.”

His parents listened as he spoke, their faces reflecting disappointment, anxiety, fear. He tried to use phrases they’d believe, instead of the nightmarish ones that kept presenting themselves to him as possibilities; he said accident, cover-up, employee mistreatment instead of horror, evil, and death. “A girl I met who’s been on this ship lot of times said that the cruise director has a history of treating the employees really badly,” he said, though this was such a diluted version of what Agnes had told him that he had trouble saying it with a straight face.

But his strategy worked. “We’re proud of you for coming to us with this,” Mark’s dad said when he was done. “What you’ve said is very disturbing.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Well, first, I’m going to call my lawyer. I’m going to have him contact the cruise line and go right over this Karpovich character’s head. Apart from the appalling working conditions you’ve described, he had no right to keep this a secret. We’re your parents, and we paid for your ticket; if you were involved in something like this, he ought to have come to us first.”

Mark didn’t think this was exactly the crux of the problem, but his parents looked so wonderfully solid—his mother, in her pearl earrings and teal sweater set, his father, with his swept-back, distinguished white hair—that he felt reassured all the same. He imagined them cutting through Karl V. Karpovich with the confidence of a reinforced hull carving through ice. Mark’s dad was the vice president of his company; he had the kind of authority that made people listen. His mother, meanwhile, was tireless; whenever someone wronged her, she clung doggedly to the problem and never gave up. One way or another, Mark believed, the two of them would uncover the rottenness at the heart of the Rainbow and drag it into the light.

Mark hugged his parents as they left, and then curled up on the bed. Through the porthole, he could see the sun melting into the ocean. As the sunset spilled over the water, the vast curving arc of the Rainbow’s wake frothed red.

***

When Mark woke up again, it was midnight and the cabin was empty. His parents and sister hadn’t returned. He sat up, terrified, and ran out into the hall.

“Maddie!” he cried. “Mom! Dad! Where are you?”

A pair of drunken revelers in blue sequined dresses parroted him as they tottered by, squawking “Mom! Dad! Where are you?” but Mark pushed past them and into the elevator. He rode to the pool where Maddie liked to go, but it was far too late to swim. The elevator doors opened onto an abandoned deck, but Mark rushed through it nonetheless, crying Maddie’s name. His voice was swallowed up by the implacable roll of the ship’s thunderous engines. “Maddie!” he screamed—but then the engines stopped, and the night was infinitely quiet again.

In the silence, Mark heard a child’s faint, piping voice calling out: duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck…

He trailed the sound to a brightly decorated room, full of yellow light. A group of children were sitting in a circle, supervised by a fresh-faced young woman who waved at him with a smile.

“I’m looking for my—”

“Goose!” the child screamed, and a little girl jumped up from the circle and ran straight into Mark. Her long red hair was threaded with dozens of beads, and her wrists were ringed with friendship bracelets, yet her freckled face was both familiar and strange. He pushed her away, and ran back to his cabin, where he saw his parents sliding their key into the door—only it wasn’t his parents; it was another woman in pearls and a teal sweater seat; another man with swept-back, distinguished white hair.

Mark stumbled away from his room and down a maze of corridors, turning left then right then again, until he’d lost all sense of direction; he wandered for hours, maddened, disoriented, terrified, until at last he opened a door, ran down a flight of stairs, and emerged into a different identical corridor, where a pale, black-haired girl in sunglasses was herding a host of blonde children into a room.

“Oh,” said Agnes. “It’s you.”

He fell on her, babbling and grateful, desperate to explain.

“Dude,” she said. “Breathe.”

He tried—but then, reflected in her giant sunglasses, a familiar face loomed behind his.

“We’ve had reports of a guest causing a disturbance,” Karl V. Karpovich said. “Won’t you come to the infirmary and lie down?”

Karl was flanked on either side by two security guards: Angelo from Italy and Declan from Scotland. They were broad-shouldered and muscular and they towered over Karl, which gave Mark some small sliver of hope.

“You have to tell them!” Mark begged Agnes. “Tell them what’s happening! We have to stop it! Help me, please!”

Karl turned to Agnes. “Do you know this young man?” he asked her.

Agnes peered at him over her sunglasses, and her bald pink eyelids twitched. “I don’t know…” she sighed. “I think his name is Michael, maybe? Or Marty? Or Matthew? I wish I could be more helpful. Marshall? Marcel? Maurice? I’m sorry… I guess he seems sort of familiar —Maxwell? Miles? Malcolm? Mason?—I think I’ve seen him before, but you know, he looks like every other college kid on spring break.”

The post The Rainbow appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We are thrilled to present Kelly Link’s weird and wonderful short story “Lull,” with special permission by the author. “Lull” copyright ©2002 was first published in Conjunctions 39 and reprinted in Kelly Link’s Magic For Beginners (Random House, 2014).

There was a lull in the conversation. We were down in the basement, sitting around the green felt table. We were holding bottles of warm beer in one hand, and our cards in the other. Our cards weren’t great. Looking at each others’ faces, we could see that clearly.

We were tired. It made us more tired to look at each other when we saw we weren’t getting away with anything at all. We didn’t have any secrets.

We hadn’t seen each other for a while and it was clear that we hadn’t changed for the better. We were between jobs, or stuck in jobs that we hated. We were having affairs and our wives knew and didn’t care. Some of us were sleeping with each others’ wives. There were things that had gone wrong, and we weren’t sure who to blame.

We had been talking about things that went backwards instead of forwards. Things that managed to do both at the same time. Time travelers. People who weren’t stuck like us. There was that new movie that went backwards, and then Jeff put this music on the stereo where all the lyrics were palindromes. It was something his kid had picked up. His kid Stan was a lot cooler than we had ever been. He was always bringing things home, Jeff said, saying, You have got to listen to this. Here, try this. These guys are good.

Stan was the kid who got drugs for the other kids when there was going to be a party. We had tried not to be bothered by this. We trusted our kids and we hoped that they trusted us, that they weren’t too embarrassed by us. We weren’t cool. We were willing to be liked. That would have been enough.

Stan was so very cool that he hadn’t even minded taking care of some of us, the parents of his friends (the friends of his parents), although sometimes we just went through our kids’ drawers, looked under the mattresses. It wasn’t that different from taking Halloween candy out of their Halloween bags, which was something we had also done, when they were younger and went to bed before we did.

Stan wasn’t into that stuff now, though. None of the kids were. They were into music instead.

You couldn’t get this music on CD. That was part of the conceit. It came only on cassette. You played one side, and then on the other side the songs all played backwards and the lyrics went forwards and backwards all over again in one long endless loop. La allah ha llal. Do, oh, oh, do you, oh do, oh, wanna?

Bones was really digging it. “Do you, do you wanna dance, you do, you do,” he said, and laughed and tipped his chair back. “Snakey canes. Hula boolah.”

Someone mentioned the restaurant downtown where you were supposed to order your dessert and then you got your dinner.

“I fold,” Ed said. He threw his cards down on the table.

Ed liked to make up games. People paid him to make up games. Back when we had a regular poker night, he was always teaching us a new game and this game would be based on a TV show or some dream he’d had.

“Let’s try something new. I’m going to deal out everything, the whole deck, and then we’ll have to put it all back. We’ll see each other’s hands as we put them down. We’re going for low. And we’ll swap. Yeah, that might work. Something else, like a wild card, but we won’t know what the wild card was, until the very end. We’ll need to play fast—no stopping to think about it—just do what I tell you to do.”

“What’ll we call it?” he said, not a question, but as if we’d asked him, although we hadn’t. He was shuffling the deck, holding the cards close like we might try to take them away. “DNA Hand. Got it?”

“That’s a shitty idea,” Jeff said. It was his basement, his poker table, his beer. So he got to say things like that. You could tell that he thought Ed looked happier than he ought to. He was thinking Ed ought to remember his place in the world, or maybe Ed needed to be reminded what his place was. His new place. Most of us were relieved to see that Ed looked okay. If he didn’t look okay, that was okay too. We understood. Bad things had happened to all of us.

We were contemplating these things and then the tape flips over and starts again.

It’s catchy stuff. We could listen to it all night.

“Now we chant along and summon the Devil,” Bones says. “Always wanted to do that.”

Bones has been drunk for a while now. His hair is standing up and his face is shiny and red. He has a fat stupid smile on his face. We ignore him, which is what he wants. Bones’s wife is just the same, loud and useless. The thing that makes the rest of us sick is that their kids are the nicest, smartest, funniest, best kids. We can’t figure it out. They don’t deserve kids like that.

Brenner asks Ed if he’s found a new place to live. He has.

“Off the highway, down by that Texaco, in the orchards. This guy built a road and built the house right on top of the road. Just, plop, right in the middle of the road. Kind of like he came walking up the road with the house on his back, got tired, and just dropped it.”

“Not very good feng shui,” Pete says.

Pete has read a book. He’s got a theory about picking up women, which he’s always sharing with us. He goes to Barnes & Noble on his lunch hour and hangs around in front of displays of books about houses and decorating, skimming through architecture books. He says it makes you look smart and just domesticated enough. A man looking at pictures of houses is sexy to women.

We’ve never asked if it works for him.

Meanwhile, we know, Pete’s wife is always after him to go up on the roof and gut the drains, reshingle and patch, paint. Pete isn’t really into this. Imaginary houses are sexy. Real ones are work.

He did go buy a mirror at Pottery Barn and hang it up, just inside the front door, because otherwise, he said, evil spirits go rushing up the staircase and into the bedrooms. Getting them out again is tricky.

The way the mirror works is that they start to come in, look in the mirror, and think a devil is already living in the house. So they take off. Devils can look like anyone—salespeople, Latter-day Saints, the people who mow your lawns—even members of your own family. So you have to have a mirror.

Ed says, “Where the house is, is the first weird thing. The second thing is the house. It’s like this team of architects went crazy and sawed two different houses in half and then stitched them back together. Casa Del Guggenstein. The front half is really old—a hundred years old—the other half is aluminum siding.”

“Must have brought down the asking price,” Jeff says.

“Yeah,” Ed says. “And the other thing is there are all these doors. One at the front and one at the back and two more on either side, right smack where the aluminum siding starts, these weird, tall, skinny doors, like they’re built for basketball players. Or aliens.”

“Or palm trees,” Bones says.

“Yeah,” Ed says. “Sure. Palm trees. And then one last door, this vestigial door, up in the master bedroom. Not like a door that you walk through, for a closet, or a bathroom. It opens and there’s nothing there. No staircase, no balcony, no point to it. It’s a Tarzan door. Up in the trees. You open it and an owl might fly in. Or a bat. The previous tenant left that door locked—apparently he was afraid of sleepwalking.”

“Fantastic,” Brenner says. “Wake up in the middle of the night and go to the bathroom, you could just pee out the side of your house.”

He opens up the last beer and shakes some pepper in it. Brenner has a thing about pepper. He even puts it on ice cream. Pete swears that one time at a party he wandered into Brenner’s bedroom and looked in a drawer in a table beside the bed. He says he found a box of condoms and a pepper mill. When we asked what he was doing in Brenner’s bedroom, he winked and then put his finger to his mouth and zipped his lip.

Brenner has a little pointed goatee. It might look silly on some people, but not on Brenner. The pepper thing sounds silly, maybe, but not even Jeff teases Brenner about it.

“I remember that house,” Alibi says.

We call him Alibi because his wife is always calling to check up on him. She’ll say, So was Alec out shooting pool with you the other night, and we’ll say, Sure he was, Gloria. The problem is that sometimes Alibi has told her some completely different story and she’s just testing us. But that’s not our problem and that’s not our fault. She never holds it against us and neither does he.

“We used to go up in the orchards at night and have wars. Knock each other down with rotten apples. There were these peacocks. You bought the orchard house?”

“Yeah,” Ed says. “I need to do something about the orchard. All the apples are falling off the trees and then they just rot on the ground. The peacocks eat them and get drunk. There are drunk wasps, too. If you go down there you can see the wasps hurtling around in these loopy lines and the peacocks grab them right out of the air. Little pickled wasp hors d’oeuvres. Everything smells like rotting apples. All night long, I’m dreaming about eating wormy apples.”

For a second, we’re afraid Ed might tell us his dreams. Nothing is worse than someone telling you their dreams.

“So what’s the deal with the peacocks?” Bones says.

“Long story,” Ed says.

So you know how the road to the house is a private road, you turn off the highway onto it, and it meanders up some until you run into the house. Some day I’ll drive home and park the car in the living room.

There’s a big sign that says private. But people still drive up the turnoff, lost, or maybe looking for a picnic spot, or a place to pull off the road and fuck. Before you hear the car coming, you hear the peacocks. Which was the plan because this guy who built it was a real hermit, a recluse.

People in town said all kinds of stuff about him. Nobody knew. He didn’t want anybody to know.

The peacocks were so he would know when anyone was coming up to the house. They start screaming before you ever see a car. So remember, out the back door, the road goes on down through the orchards, there’s a gate and then you’re back on the main highway again. And this guy, the hermit, he kept two cars. Back then, nobody had two cars. But he kept one car parked in front of the house and one parked at the back so that whichever way someone was coming, he could go out the other way real fast and drive off before his visitor got up to the house.

He had an arrangement with a grocer. The grocer sent a boy up to the house once every two weeks, and the boy brought the mail too, but there wasn’t ever any mail.

The hermit had painted in the windows of his cars, black, except for these little circles that he could see out of. You couldn’t see in. But apparently he used to drive around at night. People said they saw him. Or they didn’t see him. That was the point.

The real estate agent said she heard that once this guy had to go to the doctor. He had a growth or something. He showed up in the doctor’s office wearing a woman’s hat with a long black veil that hung down from the crown, so you couldn’t see his face. He took off his clothes in the doctor’s office and kept the hat on.

One night half of the house fell down. People all over the town saw lights, like fireworks or lightning, up over the orchard. Some people swore they saw something big, all lit up, go up into the sky, like an explosion, but quiet. Just lights. The next day, people went up to the orchard. The hermit was waiting for them—he had his veil on. From the front, the house looked fine. But you could tell something had caught fire. You could smell it, like ozone.

The hermit said it had been lightning. He rebuilt the house himself. Had lumber and everything delivered. Apparently kids used to go sneak up in the trees in the orchard and watch him while he was working, but he did all the work wearing the hat and the veil.

He died a long time ago. The grocer’s boy figured out something was wrong because the peacocks were coming in and out of the windows of the house and screaming.

So now they’re still down in the orchards and under the porch, and they still came in the windows and made a mess if Ed forgot and left the windows open too wide. Last week a fox came in after a peacock. You wouldn’t think a fox would go after something so big and mean. Peacocks are mean.

Ed had been downstairs watching TV.

“I heard the bird come in,” he says, “and then I heard a thump and a slap like a chair going over and when I went to look, there was a streak of blood going up the floor to the window. A fox was going out the window and the peacock was in its mouth, all the feathers dragging across the sill. Like one of Susan’s paintings.”

Ed’s wife, Susan, took an art class for a while. Her teacher said she had a lot of talent. Brenner modeled for her, and so did some of our kids, but most of Susan’s paintings were portraits of her brother, Andrew. He’d been living with Susan and Ed for about two years. This was hard on Ed, although he’d never complained about it. He knew Susan loved her brother. He knew her brother had problems.

Andrew couldn’t hold down a job. He went in and out of rehab, and when he was out, he hung out with our kids. Our kids thought Andrew was cool. The less we liked him, the more time our kids spent with Andrew. Maybe we were just a little jealous of him.

Jeff’s kid, Stan, he and Andrew were thick as thieves. Stan was the one who found Andrew and called the hospital. Susan never said anything, but maybe she blamed Stan. Everybody knew Stan had been getting stuff for Andrew.

Another thing that nobody said: what happened to Andrew, it was probably good for the kids in the long run.

Those paintings—Susan’s paintings—were weird. None of the people in her paintings ever looked very comfortable, and she couldn’t do hands. And there were always these animals in the paintings, looking as if they’d been shot, or gutted, or if they didn’t look dead, they were definitely supposed to be rabid. You worried about the people.

She hung them up in their house for a while, but they weren’t comfortable paintings. You couldn’t watch TV in the same room with them. And Andrew had this habit, he’d sit on the sofa just under one portrait, and there was another one too, above the TV. Three Andrews was too many.

Once Ed brought Andrew to poker night. Andrew sat awhile and didn’t say anything, and then he said he was going upstairs to get more beer and he never came back. Three days later, the highway patrol found Ed’s car parked under a bridge. Stan and Andrew came home two days after that, and Andrew went back into rehab. Susan used to go visit him and take Stan with her—she’d take her sketchbook. Stan said Andrew would sit there and Susan would draw him and nobody ever said a word.

After the class was over, while Andrew was still in rehab, Susan invited all of us to go to this party at her teacher’s studio. What we remember is that Pete got drunk and made a pass at the instructor, this sharp-looking woman with big dangly earrings. We were kind of surprised, not just because he did it in front of his wife, but because we’d all just been looking at her paintings. All these deer and birds and cows draped over dinner tables, and sofas, guts hanging out, eyeballs all shiny and fixed—so that explained Susan’s portraits, at least.

We wonder what Susan did with the paintings of Andrew.

“I’ve been thinking about getting a dog,” Ed says.

“Fuck,” we say. “A dog’s a big responsibility.” Which is what we’ve spent years telling our kids.

The music on the tape loops and looped. It was going round for a second time. We sat and listened to it. We’ll be sitting and listening to it for a while longer.

“This guy,” Ed says, “the guy who was renting this place before me, he was into some crazy thing. There’s all these mandalas and pentagrams painted on the floors and walls. Which is also why I got it so cheap. They didn’t want to bother stripping the walls and repainting; this guy just took off one day, took a lot of the furniture too. Loaded up his truck with as much as he could take.”

“So no furniture?” Pete says. “Susan get the dining room table and chairs? The bed? You sleeping in a sleeping bag? Eating beanie weenies out of a can?”

“I got a futon,” Ed says. “And I’ve got my work table set up, the TV and stuff. I’ve been going down to the orchard, grilling on the hibachi. You guys should come over. I’m working on a new video game—it’ll be a haunted house—those are really big right now. That’s why this place is so great for me. I can use everything. Next weekend? I’ll fix hamburgers and you guys can sit up in the house, keep cool, drink beer, test the game for me. Find the bugs.”

“There are always bugs,” Jeff says. He’s smiling in a mean way. He isn’t so nice when he’s been drinking. “That’s life. So should we bring the kids? The wives? Is this a family thing? Ellie’s been asking about you. You know that retreat she’s on, she called from the woods the other day. She went on and on about this past life. Apparently she was a used-car salesman. She says that this life is karmic payback, being married to me, right? She gets home day after tomorrow. We get together, maybe Ellie can set you up with someone. Now that you’re a free man, you need to take some advantage.”

“Sure,” Ed says, and shrugs. We can see him wishing that Jeff would shut up, but Jeff doesn’t shut up.

Jeff says, “I saw Susan in the grocery store the other day. She looked fantastic. It wasn’t that she wasn’t sad anymore, she wasn’t just getting by, she was radiant, you know? That special glow. Like Joan of Arc. Like she knew something. Like she’d won the lottery.”

“Well, yeah,” Ed says. “That’s Susan. She doesn’t live in the past. She’s got this new job, this research project. They’re trying to contact aliens. They’re using household appliances: satellite dishes, cell phones, car radios, even refrigerators. I’m not sure how. I’m not sure what they’re planning to say. But they’ve got a lot of grant money. Even hired a speechwriter.”

“Wonder what you say to aliens,” Brenner says. “Hi, honey, I’m home. What’s for dinner?”

“Your place or mine?” Pete says. “What’s a nice alien like you doing in a galaxy like this?”

“Where you been? I’ve been worried sick,” Alibi says.

Jeff picks up a card, props it sideways against the green felt. Picks up another one, leans it against the first. He says, “You and Susan always looked so good together. Perfect marriage, perfect life. Now look at you: she’s talking to aliens, and you’re living in a haunted house. You’re an example to all of us, Ed. Nice guy like you, bad things happen to you, Susan leaves a swell guy like you, what’s the lesson here? I’ve been thinking about this all year. You and Ellie must have worked at the same car dealership, in that past life.”

Nobody says anything. Ed doesn’t say anything, but the way we see him look at Jeff, we know that this haunted house game is going to have a character in it who walks and talks a lot like Jeff. This Jeff character is going to panic and run around on the screen of people’s TVs and get lost.

It will stumble into booby traps and fall onto knives. Its innards will sloop out. Zombies are going to crack open the bones of its legs and suck on the marrow. Little devils with monkey faces are going to stitch its eyes open with tiny stitches and then they are going to piss ribbons of acid into its eyes.

Beautiful women are going to fuck this cartoon Jeff in the ass with garden shears. And when this character screams, it’s going to sound a lot like Jeff screaming. Ed’s good at the little details. The kids who buy Ed’s games love the details. They buy his games for things like this.

Jeff will probably be flattered.

Jeff starts complaining about Stan’s phone bill, this four-hundred-dollar cell phone charge that Stan ran up. When he asked about it, Stan handed him a stack of twenties just like that. That kid always has money to spare.

Stan also gave Jeff this phone number. He told Jeff that it’s like this phone sex line, but with a twist. You call up and ask for this girl named Starlight, and she tells you sexy stories, only, if you want, they don’t have to be sexy. They can be any kind of story you want. You tell her what kind of story you want, and she makes it up. Stan says it’s Stephen King and sci-fi and the Arabian Nights and Penthouse Letters all at once.

Ed interrupts Jeff. “You got the number?”

“What?” Jeff says.

“I just got paid for the last game,” Ed says. “The one with the baby heads and the octopus girlies, the Martian combat hockey. Let’s call that number. I’ll pay. You put her on speaker and we’ll all listen, and it’s my treat, okay, because I’m such a swell guy.”

Bones says that it sounds like a shit idea to him, which is probably why Jeff went and got the phone bill and another six-pack of beer. We all take another beer.

Jeff turns the stereo down—

Madam I’m Adam

Oh Madam my Adam

—and puts the phone in the middle of the table. It sits there, in the middle of all that green, like an island or something. Marooned. Jeff switches it on speaker. “Four bucks a minute,” he says, and shrugs, and dials the number.

“Here,” Ed says. “Pass it over.”

The phone rings and we listen to it ring and then a woman’s voice, very pleasant, says hello and asks if Ed is over eighteen. He says he is. He gives her his credit card number. She asks if he was calling for anyone in particular.

“Starlight,” Ed says.

“One moment,” the woman says. We hear a click and then Starlight is on the line. We know this because she says so. She says, “Hi, my name is Starlight. I’m going to tell you a sexy story. Do you want to know what I’m wearing?”

Ed grunts. He shrugs. He grimaces at us. He needs a haircut. Susan used to cut his hair, which we used to think was cute. He and Andrew had these identical lopsided haircuts. It was pretty goofy.

“Can I call you Susan?” Ed says.

Which we think is strange.

Starlight says, “If you really want to, but my name’s really Starlight. Don’t you think that’s sexy?”

She sounds like a kid. A little girl—not even like a girl. Like a kid. She doesn’t sound like Susan at all. Since the divorce, we haven’t seen much of Susan, although she calls our houses sometimes, to talk to our wives. We’re a little worried about what she’s been saying to them.

Ed says, “I guess so.” We can tell he’s only saying that to be polite, but Starlight laughs as if he’s told her a joke. It’s weird hearing that little-kid laugh down here.

Ed says, “So are you going to tell me a story?”

Starlight says, “That’s what I’m here for. But usually the guy wants to know what I’m wearing.”

Ed says, “I want to hear a story about a cheerleader and the Devil.”

Bones says, “So what’s she wearing?”

Pete says, “Make it a story that goes backwards.”

Jeff says, “Put something scary in it.”

Alibi says, “Sexy.”

Brenner says, “I want it to be about good and evil and true love, and it should also be funny. No talking animals. Not too much fooling around with the narrative structure. The ending should be happy but still realistic, believable, you know, and there shouldn’t be a moral although we should be able to think back later and have some sort of revelation. No and suddenly they woke up and discovered that it was all a dream. Got that?”

Starlight says, “Okay. The Devil and a cheerleader. Got it. Okay.”

The Devil and the Cheerleader

So the Devil is at a party at the cheerleader’s house. They’ve been playing spin the bottle. The cheerleader’s boyfriend just came out of the closet with her best friend. Earlier the cheerleader felt like slapping him, and now she knows why. The bottle pointed at her best friend who had just shrugged and smiled at her. Then the bottle was spinning and when the bottle stopped spinning, it was in her boyfriend’s hand.

Then all of a sudden an egg timer was going off. Everyone was giggling and they were all standing up to go over by the closet, like they were all going to try to squeeze inside. But the Devil stood up and took the cheerleader’s hand and pulled her backwards-forwards.

So she knew what exactly had happened, and was going to happen, and some other things besides.

This is the thing she likes about backwards. You start out with all the answers, and after a while, someone comes along and gives you the questions, but you don’t have to answer them. You’re already past that part. That was what was so nice about being married. Things got better and better until you hardly even knew each other anymore. And then you said good night and went out on a date, and after that you were just friends. It was easier that way—that’s the dear, sweet, backwards way of the world.

Just a second, let’s go back for a second.

Something happened. Something has happened. But nobody ever talked about it, at least not at these parties. Not anymore.

Everyone’s been drinking all night long, except the Devil, who’s a teetotaler. He’s been pretending to drink vodka out of a hip flask. Everybody at the party is drunk right now and they think he’s okay. Later they’ll sober up. They’ll think he’s pretentious, an asshole, drinking air out of a flask like that.

There are a lot of empty bottles of beer, some empty bottles of whiskey. There’s a lot of work still to be done, by the look of it. They’re using one of the beer bottles, that’s what they’re spinning. Later on it will be full and they won’t have to play this stupid game.

The cheerleader guesses that she didn’t invite the Devil to the party. He isn’t the kind of guy that you have to invite. He’ll probably show up by himself. But now they’re in the closet together for five minutes. The cheerleader’s boyfriend isn’t too happy about this, but what can he do? It’s that kind of party. She’s that kind of cheerleader.

They’re a lot younger than they used to be. At parties like this, they used to be older, especially the Devil. He remembers all the way back to the end of the world. The cheerleader wasn’t a cheerleader then. She was married and had kids and a husband.

Something’s going to happen, or maybe it’s already happened. Nobody ever talks about it. If they could, what would they say?

But those end-of-the-world parties were crazy. People would drink too much and they wouldn’t have any clothes on. There’d be these sad little piles of clothes in the living room, as if something had happened, and the people had disappeared, disappeared right out of their clothes. Meanwhile, the people who belonged to the clothes would be out in the backyard, waiting until it was time to go home. They’d get up on the trampoline and bounce around and cry.

There would be a bottle of extra-virgin olive oil and sooner or later someone was going to have to refill it and go put it back on the pantry shelf. You’d have had these slippery naked middle-aged people sliding around on the trampoline and the oily grass, and then in the end all you’d have would be a bottle of olive oil, some olives on a tree, a tree, an orchard, an empty field.

The Devil would stand around feeling awkward, hoping that it would turn out he’d come late.

The kids would be up in their bedrooms, out of the beds, looking out the windows, remembering when they used to be older. Not that they ever got that much older.

But the world is younger now. Things are simpler. Now the cheerleader has parents of her own, and all she has to do is wait for them to get home, and then this party can be over.

Two days ago was the funeral. It was just how everyone said it would be.

Then there were errands, people to talk to. She was busy.

She hugged her aunt and uncle good-bye and moved into the house where she would live for the rest of her life. She unpacked all her boxes, and the Salvation Army brought her parents’ clothes and furniture and pots and pans, and other people, her parents’ friends, helped her hang her mother’s clothes in her mother’s closet. (Not this closet.) She bunched her mother’s clothes up in her hand and sniffed, curious and hungry and afraid.

She suspects, remembering the smell of her mother’s monogrammed sweaters, that they’ll have fights about things. Boys, music, clothes. The cheerleader will learn to let all of these things go.

If her kids were still around, they would say I told you so. What they did say was, Just wait until you have parents of your own. You’ll see.

The cheerleader rubs her stomach. Are you in there?

She moved the unfamiliar, worn-down furniture around so that it matched up old grooves in the floor. Here was the shape of someone’s buttocks, printed onto a seat cushion. Maybe it would be her father’s favorite chair.

She looked through her father’s records. There was a record playing on the phonograph, it wasn’t anything she had ever heard before, and she took it off, laid it back in its empty white sleeve. She studied the death certificates. She tried to think what to tell her parents about their grandchildren, what they’d want to know.

Her favorite song had just been on the radio for the very last time. Years and years ago, she’d danced to that song at her wedding. Now it was gone, except for the feeling she’d had when she listened to it. Sometimes she still felt that way, but there wasn’t a word for it anymore.

Tonight, in a few hours, there will be a car wreck and then her parents will be coming home. By then, all her friends will have left, taking away six-packs and boyfriends and newly applied coats of hair spray and lipstick.

She thinks she looks a bit like her mother.

Before everyone showed up, while everything was still a wreck downstairs, before the police had arrived to say what they had to say, she was standing in her parents’ bathroom. She was looking in the mirror.

She picked a lipstick out of the trash can, an orangey red that will be a favorite because there’s just a little half-moon left. But when she looked at herself in the mirror, it didn’t fit. It didn’t belong to her. She put her hand on her breastbone, pressed hard, felt her heart beating faster and faster. She couldn’t wear her mother’s lipstick while her mother lay on a gurney somewhere in a morgue: waiting to be sewn up; to have her clothes sewn back on; to breathe; to wake up; to see the car on the other side of the median, sliding away; to see her husband, the man that she’s going to marry someday; to come home to meet her daughter.

The recently dead are always exhausted. There’s so much to absorb, so many things that need to be undone. They have their whole lives ahead of them.

The cheerleader’s best friend winks at her. The Devil’s got a flashlight with two dead batteries. Somebody closes the door after them.

Soon, very soon, already now, the batteries in the Devil’s flashlight are old and tired and there’s just a thin line of light under the closet door. It’s cramped in the closet and it smells like shoes, paint, wool, cigarettes, tennis rackets, ghosts of perfume and sweat. Outside the closet, the world is getting younger, but in here is where they keep all the old things. The cheerleader put them all in here last week.

She’s felt queasy for most of her life. She’s a bad time traveler. She gets time-sick. It’s as if she’s always just a little bit pregnant, are you in there? and it’s worse in here, with all these old things that don’t belong to her, even worse because the Devil is always fooling around with time.

The Devil feels right at home. He and the cheerleader make a nest of coats and sit down on them, facing each other. The Devil turns the bright, constant beam of the flashlight on the cheerleader. She’s wearing a little flippy skirt. Her knees are up, making a tent out of her skirt. The tent is full of shadows—so is the closet. The Devil conjures up another Devil, another cheerleader, mouse-sized, both of them, sitting under the cheerleader’s skirt. The closet is full of Devils and cheerleaders.

“I just need to hold something,” the cheerleader says. If she holds something, maybe she won’t throw up.

“Please,” the Devil says. “It tickles. I’m ticklish.”

The cheerleader is leaning forward. She’s got the Devil by the tail. Then she’s touching the Devil’s tail with her pompoms. He quivers.

“Please don’t,” he says. He giggles.

The Devil’s tail is tucked up under his legs. It isn’t hot, but the Devil is sweating. He feels sad. He’s not good at being sad. He flicks the flashlight on and off. Here’s a knee. Here’s a mouth. Here’s a sleeve hanging down, all empty. Someone knocks on the closet door.

“Go away,” the cheerleader says. “It hasn’t been five minutes yet. Not even.”

The Devil can feel her smile at him, like they’re old friends. “Your tail. Can I touch it?” the cheerleader says.

“Touch what?” the Devil says. He feels a little excited, a little nervous. Old enough to know better, brand-new enough, here in the closet, to be jumpy. He’s taking a chance here. Girls—women—aren’t really domestic animals at the moment, although they’re getting tamer, more used to living in houses. Less likely to bite.

“Can I touch your tail now?” the cheerleader says.

“No!” the Devil says.

“I’m shy,” he says. “Maybe you could stroke my tail with your pompom, in a little bit.”

“We could make out,” the cheerleader says. “That’s what we’re supposed to do, right? I need to be distracted because I think I’m about to have this thought. It’s going to make me really sad. I’m getting younger, you know? I’m going to keep on getting younger. It isn’t fair.”

She puts her feet against the closet door. She kicks once, like a mule.

She says, “I mean, you’re the Devil. You don’t have to worry about this stuff. In a few thousand years, you’ll be back at the beginning again and you’ll be in good with God again, right?”

The Devil shrugs. Everybody knows the end of that story.

The cheerleader says, “Everyone knows that old story. You’re famous. You’re like John Wilkes Booth. You’re historical—you’re going to be really important. You’ll be Mr. Bringer-of-Light and you’ll get good tables at all the trendy restaurants, choruses of angels and maître d’s, et cetera, la, la, la, they’ll all be singing hallelujahs forever, please pass the vichyssoise, and then God unmakes the world and he’ll put all the bits away in a closet like this.”

The Devil smirks. He shrugs. It isn’t a bad life, hanging around in closets with cheerleaders. And it gets better.

The cheerleader says, “It isn’t fair. I’d tell him so, if he were here. He’ll unhang the stars and pull Leviathan right back out of the deep end of the vasty bathwater, and you’ll be having Leviathan tartare for dinner. Where will I be, then? You’ll be around. You’re always around. But me, I’ll get younger and younger and in a handful of years I won’t be me at all, and my parents will get younger and so on and so on, whoosh! We’ll be gone like a flash of light, and you won’t even remember me. Nobody will remember me! Everything that I was, that I did, all the funny things that I said, and the things that my friends said back to me, that will all be gone. But you go all the way backwards. You go backwards and forwards. It isn’t fair. You could always remember me. What could I do so that you would remember me?”

“As long as we’re in this closet,” the Devil says, he’s magnanimous, “I’ll remember you.”

“But in a few minutes,” the cheerleader says, “we’ll go back out of the closet and the bottle will spin, and then the party will be over, and my parents will come home, and nobody will ever remember me.”

“Then tell me a story,” the Devil says. He puts his sharp, furry paw on her leg. “Tell me a story so that I’ll remember you.”

“What kind of story?” says the cheerleader.

“Tell me a scary story,” the Devil says. “A funny, scary, sad, happy story. I want everything.” He can feel his tail wagging as he says this.

“You can’t have everything,” the cheerleader says, and she picks up his paw and puts it back on the floor of the closet. “Not even in a story. You can’t have all the stories you want.”

“I know,” the Devil says. He whines. “But I still want it. I want things. That’s my job. I even want the things that I already have. I want everything you have. I want the things that don’t exist. That’s why I’m the Devil.” He leers and it’s a shame because she can’t see him in the dark. He feels silly.

“Well, what’s the scariest thing?” says the cheerleader. “You’re the expert, right? Give me a little help here.”

“The scariest thing,” the Devil says. “Okay, I’ll give you two things. Three things. No, just two. The third one is a secret.”

The Devil’s voice changes. Later on, one day the cheerleader will be listening to a preschool teacher say back the alphabet, with the sun moving across the window, nothing ever stays still, and she’ll be reminded of the Devil and the closet and the line of light under the door, the peaceful little circle of light the flashlight makes against the closet door.

The Devil says, “I’m not complaining,” (but he is) “but here’s the way things used to work. They don’t work this way anymore. I don’t know if you remember. Your parents are dead and they’re coming home in just a few hours. Used to be, that was scary. Not anymore. But try to imagine: finding something that shouldn’t be there.”

“Like what?” the cheerleader says.

The Devil shrugs. “A child’s toy. A ball, or a night-light. Some cheap bit of trash, but it’s heavier than it looks, or else light. It shines with a greasy sort of light or else it eats light. When you touch it, it yields unpleasantly. You feel as if you might fall into it. You feel light-headed. It might be inscribed in a language which no one can decipher.”

“Okay,” the cheerleader says. She seems somewhat cheered up. “So what’s the next thing?”

The Devil shines the flashlight in her eyes, flicks it on and off. “Someone disappears. Gone, just like that. They’re standing behind you in a line at an amusement park—or they wander away during the intermission of a play—perhaps they go downstairs to get the mail—or to make tea—”

“That’s scary?” the cheerleader says.

“Used to be,” the Devil says. “It used to be that the worst thing that could happen was, if you had kids, and one of them died or disappeared. Disappeared was the worst. Anything might have happened to them.”

“Things are better now,” the cheerleader says.

“Yes, well.” The Devil says, “Things just get better and better nowadays. But—try to remember how it was. The person who disappeared, only they didn’t. You’d see them from time to time, peeking in at you through windows, or down low through the mail slot in your front door. Keyholes. You might see them in the grocery store. Sitting in the backseat of your car, down low, slouching in your rearview mirror. They might pinch your leg or pull your hair when you’re asleep. When you talk on the phone, they listen in, you hear them listening.

The cheerleader says, “Like, with my parents—”

“Exactly,” says the Devil. “You’ve had nightmares about them, right?”

“Not really,” the cheerleader says. “Everyone says they were probably nice people. I mean, look at this house! But, sometimes, I have this dream that I’m at the mall, and I see my husband. And he’s just the same, he’s a grown-up, and he doesn’t recognize me. It turns out that I’m the only one who’s going backwards. And then he does recognize me and he wants to know what I’ve done with the kids.”

The last time she’d seen her husband, he was trying to grow a beard. He couldn’t even do that right. He hadn’t had much to say, but they’d looked at each other for a long time.

“What about your children?” the Devil says. “Do you wonder where they went when the doctor pushed them back up inside you? Do you have dreams about them?”

“Yes,” the cheerleader says. “Everything gets smaller. I’m afraid of that.”

“Think how men feel!” the Devil says. “It’s no wonder men are afraid of women. No wonder sex is so hard on them.”

The cheerleader misses sex, that feeling afterwards, that blissful, unsatisfied itch.

“The first time around, things were better,” the Devil says. “I don’t know if you remember. People died, and no one was sure what happened next. There were all sorts of possibilities. Now everyone knows everything. What’s the fun in that?”

Someone is trying to push open the closet door, but the cheerleader puts her feet against it, leaning against the back of the closet. “Oh, I remember!” she says, “I remember when I was dead! There was so much I was looking forward to. I had no idea!”

The Devil shivers. He’s never liked dead people much.

“So, okay, what about monsters?” the cheerleader says. “Vampires? Serial killers? People from outer space? Those old movies?”

The Devil shrugs. “Yeah, sure. Boogeymen. Formaldehyde babies in Mason jars. Someday someone is going to have to take them out of the jar, unpickle them. Women with teeth down there. Zombies. Killer robots, killer bees, serial killers, cold spots, werewolves. The dream where you know that you’re asleep but you can’t wake up. You can hear someone walking around the bedroom picking up your things and putting them down again and you still can’t wake up. The end of the world. Spiders. No one was with her when she died. Carnivorous plants.”

“Oh goody,” the cheerleader says. Her eyes shine at him out of the dark. Her pompoms slide across the floor of the closet. He moves his flashlight so he can see her hands.

“So here’s your story,” the cheerleader says. She’s a girl who can think on her feet. “It’s not really a scary story. I don’t really get scary.”

“Weren’t you listening?” the Devil says. He taps the flashlight against his big front teeth. “Never mind, it’s okay, never mind. Go on.”

“This probably isn’t a true story,” the cheerleader says, “and it doesn’t go backwards like we do. I probably won’t get all the way to the end, and I’m not going to start at the beginning, either. There isn’t enough time.”

“That’s fine,” the Devil says. “I’m all ears.” (He is.)

The cheerleader says, “So who’s going to tell this story, anyway? Be quiet and listen. We’re running out of time.”

She says, “A man comes home from a sales conference. He and his wife have been separated for a while, but they’ve decided to try living together again. They’ve sold the house that they used to live in. Now they live just outside of town, in an old house in an orchard.

The man comes home from this business conference, and his wife is sitting in the kitchen and she’s talking to another woman, an older woman. They’re sitting on the chairs that used to go around the kitchen table, but the table is gone. So is the microwave, and the rack where Susan’s copper-bottomed pots hang. The pots are gone, too.

The husband doesn’t notice any of this. He’s busy looking at the other woman. Her skin has a greenish tinge. He has this feeling that he knows her. She and the wife both look at the husband, and he suddenly knows what it is. It’s his wife. It’s his wife, two of her, only one is maybe twenty years older. Otherwise, except that this one’s green, they’re identical: same eyes, same mouth, same little mole at the corner of her mouth.

“How am I doing so far?”

“So-so,” the Devil says. The truth (the truth makes the Devil itchy) is, he only likes stories about himself. Like the story about the Devil’s wedding cake. Now that’s a story.

The cheerleader says, “It gets better.”

It Gets Better

The man’s name is Ed. It isn’t his real name. I made it up. Ed and Susan have been married for ten years, separated for five months, back together again for three months. They’ve been sleeping in the same bed for three months, but they don’t have sex. Susan cries whenever Ed kisses her. They don’t have any kids. Susan used to have a younger brother. Ed is thinking about getting a dog.

While Ed’s been at his conference, Susan has been doing some housework. She’s done some work up in the attic which we won’t talk about. Not yet. Down in the spare bathroom in the basement, she’s set up this machine, which we get around to later, and this machine makes Susans. What Susan was hoping for was a machine that would bring back Andrew. (Her brother. But you knew that.) Only it turns out that getting Andrew back requires a different machine, a bigger machine. Susan needs help making that machine, and so the new Susans are going to come in handy after all. Over the course of the next few days, the Susans explain all this to Ed.

Susan doesn’t expect Ed will be very helpful.

“Hi, Ed,” the older, greenish Susan says. She gets up from her chair and gives him a big hug. Her skin is warm, tacky. She smells yeasty. The original Susan—the Susan Ed thinks is original, and I have no idea if he’s right about this, and, later on, he isn’t so sure, either—sits in her chair and watches them.

Big green Susan: am I making her sound like Godzilla? She doesn’t look like Godzilla, and yet there’s something about her that reminds Ed of Godzilla, the way she stomps across the kitchen floor—leads Ed over to a chair and makes him sit down. Now he realizes that the kitchen table is gone. He still hasn’t managed to say a word. Susan, both of them, is used to this.

“First of all,” Susan says, “the attic is off-limits. There are some people working up there. (I don’t mean Susans. I’ll explain Susans in a minute.) Some visitors. They’re helping me with a project. About the other Susans, there are five of me at the moment—you’ll meet the other three later. They’re down in the basement. You’re allowed in the basement. You can help down there, if you want.”

Godzilla Susan says, “You don’t have to worry about who is who, although none of us are exactly alike. You can call us all Susan. We’re discovering that some of us may be more temporary than others, or fatter, or younger, or greener. It seems to depend on the batch.”

“Are you Susan?” Ed says. He corrects himself. “I mean, are you my wife? The real Susan?”

“We’re all your wife,” the younger Susan says. She puts her hand on his leg and pats him like a dog.

“Where did the kitchen table go?” Ed says.

“I put it in the attic,” Susan says. “You really don’t have to worry about that now. How was your conference?”

Another Susan comes into the kitchen. She’s young and the color of green apples or new grass. Even the whites of her eyes are grassy. She’s maybe nineteen, and the color of her skin makes Ed think of a snake. “Ed!” she says, “How was the conference?”

“They’re keen on the new game,” Ed says. “It tests real well.”

“Want a beer?” Susan says. (It doesn’t matter which Susan says this.) She picks up a pitcher of green foamy stuff, and pours it into a glass.

“This is beer?” Ed says.

“It’s Susan beer,” Susan says, and all the Susans laugh.

The beautiful, snake-colored nineteen-year-old Susan takes Ed on a tour of the house. Mostly Ed just looks at Susan, but he sees that the television is gone, and so are all of his games. All his notebooks. The living room sofa is still there, but all the seat cushions are missing. Later on, Susan will disassemble the sofa with an ax.

Susan has covered up all the downstairs windows with what looks like sheets of aluminum foil. She shows him the bathtub downstairs where one of the Susans is brewing the Susan beer. Other Susans are hanging long, mossy clots of the Susan beer on laundry racks. Dry, these clots can be shaped into bedding, nests for the new Susans. They are also edible.

Ed is still holding the glass of Susan beer. “Go on,” Susan says. “You like beer.”

“I don’t like green beer,” Ed says.

“You like Susan, though,” Susan says. She’s wearing one of his T‑shirts, and a pair of Susan’s underwear. No bra. She puts Ed’s hand on her breast.

Susan stops stirring the beer. She’s taller than Ed, and only a little bit green. “You know Susan loves you,” she says.

“Who’s up in the attic?” Ed says. “Is it Andrew?”

His hand is still on Susan’s breast. He can feel her heart beating. Susan says, “You can’t tell Susan I told you. She doesn’t think you’re ready. It’s the aliens.”

They both stare at him. “She finally got them on the phone. This is going to be huge, Ed. This is going to change the world.”

***

Ed could leave the house. He could leave Susan. He could refuse to drink the beer.

The Susan beer doesn’t make him drunk. It isn’t really beer. You knew that, right?

There are Susans everywhere. Some of them want to talk to Ed about their marriage, or about the aliens, or sometimes they want to talk about Andrew. Some of them are busy working. The Susans are always dragging Ed off to empty rooms, to talk or kiss or make love or gossip about the other Susans. Or they’re ignoring him. There’s one very young Susan. She looks like she might be six or seven years old. She goes up and down the upstairs hallway, drawing on the walls with a marker. Ed isn’t sure whether this is childish vandalism or important Susan work. He feels awkward asking.

Every once in a while, he thinks he sees the real Susan. He wishes he could sit down and talk with her, but she always looks so busy.

By the end of the week, there aren’t any mirrors left in the house, and the windows are all covered up. The Susans have hung sheets of the Susan beer over all the light fixtures, so everything is green. Ed isn’t sure, but he thinks he might be turning green.

Susan tastes green. She always does.

Once Ed hears someone knocking on the front door. “Ignore that,” Susan says as she walks past him. She’s carrying the stacked blades of an old ceiling fan, and a string of Christmas lights. “It isn’t important.”

Ed pulls the plug of aluminum foil out of the eyehole, and peeks out. Stan is standing there, looking patient. They stand there, Ed on one side of the door, and Stan on the other. Ed doesn’t open the door, and eventually Stan goes away. All the peacocks are kicking up a fuss.

Ed tries teaching some of the Susans to play poker. It doesn’t work so well, because it turns out that Susan always knows what cards the other Susans are holding. So Ed makes up a game where that doesn’t matter so much, but in the end, it makes him feel too lonely. There aren’t any other Eds.

They decide to play spin the bottle instead. Instead of a bottle, they use a hammer, and it never ends up pointing at Ed. After a while, it gets too strange watching Susan kiss Susans, and he wanders off to look for a Susan who will kiss him.

Up in the second-story bedroom, there are always lots of Susans. This is where they go to wait when they start to get ripe. The Susans loll, curled in their nests, getting riper, arguing about the end of some old story. None of them remember it the same way. Some of them don’t seem to know anything about it, but they all have opinions.

Ed climbs into a nest and leans back. Susan swings her legs over to make room for him. This Susan is small and round. She tickles the soft part of his arm, and then tucks her face into his side.

Susan passes him a glass of Susan beer.

“That’s not it,” Susan says, “It turns out that he overdosed. Maybe even did it on purpose. We couldn’t talk about it. There weren’t enough of us. We were trying to carry all that sadness all by ourself. You can’t do something like that! And then the wife tries to kill him. I tried to kill him. She kicks the fuck out of him. He can’t leave the house for a week, won’t even come to the door when his friends come over.”

“If you can call them friends,” Susan says.

“No, there was a gun,” Susan says. “And she has an affair. Because she can’t get over it. Neither of them can.”

“She humiliates him at a dinner party,” Susan says. “They both drink too much. Everybody goes home, and she breaks all the dishes instead of washing them. There are plate shards all over the kitchen floor. Someone’s going to get hurt; they don’t have a time machine. They can’t go back and unbreak those plates. We know that they still loved each other, but that doesn’t matter anymore. Then the police showed up.”

“Well, that’s not the way I remember it,” Susan says. “But I guess it could have happened that way.”

Ed and Susan used to buy books all the time. They had so many books they used to joke about wanting to be quarantined, or snowed in. Maybe then they’d manage to read all the books. But the books have all gone up to the attic, along with the lamps and the coffee tables, and their bicycles, and all Susan’s paintings. Ed has watched the Susans carry up paperback books, silverware, old board games, and holey underwear. Even a kazoo. The Encyclopædia Britannica. The goldfish and the goldfish bowl and the little canister of goldfish food.

The Susans have gone through the house, taken everything they could. After all the books were gone, they dismantled the bookshelves. Now they’re tearing off the wallpaper in long strips. The aliens seem to like books. They like everything, especially Susan. Eventually when the Susans are ripe, they go up in the attic too.

The aliens swap things, the books and the Susans and the coffee mugs for other things: machines that the Susans are assembling. Ed would like to get his hand on one of those devices, but Susan says no. He isn’t even allowed to help, except with the Susan beer.

The thing the Susans are building takes up most of the living room, Ed’s office, the kitchen, the laundry room—

The Susans don’t bother with laundry. The washer and the dryer are both gone and the Susans have given up wearing clothes altogether. Ed has managed to keep a pair of shorts and a pair of jeans. He’s wearing the shorts right now, and he folds the jeans up into a pillow, and rests his head on top of them so that Susan can’t steal them. All his other clothes have been carried up to the attic

—and it’s creeping up the stairs, spilling over into the second story. The house is shiny with alien machines.

Teams of naked Susans are hard at work, all day long, testing instruments, hammering and stitching their machine together, polishing and dusting and stacking alien things on top of each other. If you’re wondering what the machine looks like, picture a science fair project involving a lot of aluminum foil, improvised, homely, makeshift, and just a little dangerous-looking. None of the Susans is quite sure what the machine will eventually do. Right now it grows Susan beer.

When the beer is stirred, left alone, stirred some more, it clots and makes more Susans. Ed likes watching this part. The house is more and more full of shy, loud, quiet, talkative, angry, happy, greenish Susans of all sizes, all ages, who work at disassembling the house, piece by piece, and, piece by piece, assembling the machine.

It might be a time machine, or a machine to raise the dead, or maybe the house is becoming a spaceship, slowly, one room at a time. Susan says the aliens don’t make these kinds of distinctions. It may be an invasion factory, Ed says, or a doomsday machine. Susan says that they aren’t that kind of aliens.

Ed’s job: stirring the Susan beer with a long, flat plank—a floorboard Susan pried up—and skimming the foam, which has a stringy and unpleasantly cheeselike consistency, into buckets. He carries the buckets downstairs and makes Susan beer soufflé and Susan beer casserole. Susan beer surprise. Upside-down Susan cake. It all tastes the same, and he grows to like the taste.

The beer doesn’t make him drunk. That isn’t what it’s for. I can’t tell you what it’s for. But when he’s drinking it, he isn’t sad. He has the beer, and the work in the kitchen, and the ripe, green fuckery. Everything tastes like Susan.

The only thing he misses is poker nights.

Up in the spare bedroom, Ed falls asleep listening to the Susans talk, and when he wakes up, his jeans are gone, and he’s naked. The room is empty. All the ripe Susans have gone up to the attic.

When he steps out into the hall, the little Susan is out there, drawing on the walls. She puts her marker down and hands him a pitcher of Susan beer. She pinches his leg and says, “You’re getting nice and ripe.”

Then she winks at Ed and runs down the hall.

He looks at what she’s been drawing: Andrew, scribbly crayon portraits of Andrew, all up and down the walls. He follows the pictures of Andrew down the hall, all the way to the master bedroom where he and the original Susan used to sleep. Now he sleeps anywhere, with any Susan. He hasn’t been in their room in a while, although he’s noticed the Susans going in and out with boxes full of things. The Susans are always shooing at him when he gets in their way.

The bedroom is full of Andrew. There are Susan’s portraits of Andrew on the walls, the ones from her art class. Ed had forgotten how unpleasant and peculiar these paintings are. In one, the largest one, Andrew, life-sized, has his hands around a small animal, maybe a ferret. He seems to be strangling it. The ferret’s mouth is cocked open, showing all its teeth. A picture like that, Ed thinks, you ought to turn it towards the wall at night.

Susan’s put Andrew’s bed in here, and Andrew’s books, and Andrew’s desk. Andrew’s clothes have been hung up in the closet. There isn’t an alien machine in the room, or for that matter, anything that ever belonged to Ed.

Ed puts a pair of Andrew’s pants on, and lies down on Andrew’s bed, just for a minute, and he closes his eyes.

When he wakes up, Susan is sitting on the bed. He can smell her, that ripe green scent. He can smell that smell on himself. Susan says, “If you’re ready, I thought we could go up to the attic together.”

“What’s going on here?” Ed says. “I thought you needed everything. Shouldn’t all this stuff go up to the attic?”

“This is Andrew’s room, for when he comes back,” Susan says. “We thought it would make him feel comfortable, having his own bed to sleep in. He might need his stuff.”

“What if the aliens need his stuff?” Ed says. “What if they can’t make you a new Andrew yet because they don’t know enough about him?”

“That’s not how it works,” Susan says. “We’re getting close now. Can’t you feel it?”

“I feel weird,” Ed says. “Something’s happening to me.”

“You’re ripe, Ed,” Susan says. “Isn’t that fantastic? We weren’t sure you’d ever get ripe enough.”

She takes his hand and pulls him up. Sometimes he forgets how strong she is.

“So what happens now?” Ed says. “Am I going to die? I don’t feel sick. I feel good. What happens when we get ripe?”

The afternoon light makes Susan look older, or maybe she just is older. He likes this part: seeing what Susan looked like as a kid, what she’ll look like as an old lady. It’s as if they got to spend their whole lives together. “I never know,” she says. “Let’s go find out. Take off Andrew’s pants, and I’ll hang them back up in the closet.”

They leave the bedroom and walk down the hall. The Andrew drawings, the knobs and dials and stacked, shiny machinery watch them go. There aren’t any other Susans around at the moment. They’re all busy downstairs. He can hear them hammering away. For a minute, it’s the way it used to be, only better. Just Ed and Susan in their own house.

Ed holds on tight to Susan’s hand.

When Susan opens the attic door, the attic is full of stars. Stars and stars and stars. Ed has never seen so many stars. Susan has taken the roof off. Off in the distance, they can smell the apple trees, way down in the orchard.

Susan sits down cross-legged on the floor and Ed sits down beside her. She says, “I wish you’d tell me a story.”

Ed says, “What kind of story?”

Susan says, “A bedtime story? When Andrew was a kid, we used to read this book. I remember this one story about people who go under a hill. They spend one night down there, eating and drinking and dancing, but when they come out, a hundred years have gone by. Do you know how long it’s been since Andrew died? I’ve lost track.”

“I don’t know stories like that,” Ed says. He picks at his flaky green skin and wonders what he tastes like. “What do you think the aliens look like? Do you think they look like giraffes? Like marbles? Like Andrew? Do you think they have mouths?”

“Don’t be silly,” Susan says. “They look like us.”

“How do you know?” Ed says. “Have you been up here before?”

“No,” Susan says. “But Susan has.”

“We could play a card game,” Ed says. “Or I Spy.”

“You could tell me about the first time I met you,” Susan says.

“I don’t want to talk about that,” Ed says. “That’s all gone.”

“Okay, fine.” Susan sits up straight, arches her back, runs her green tongue across her green lips. She winks at Ed and says, “Tell me how beautiful I am.”

“You’re beautiful,” Ed says. “I’ve always thought you were beautiful. All of you. How about me? Am I beautiful?”

“Don’t be that way,” Susan says. She slouches back against him. Her skin is warm and greasy. “The aliens are going to get here soon. I don’t know what happens after that, but I hate this part. I always hate this part. I don’t like waiting. Do you think this is what it was like for Andrew, when he was in rehab?”

“When you get him back, ask him. Why ask me?”

Susan doesn’t say anything for a bit. Then she says, “We think we’ll be able to make you, too. We’re starting to figure out how it works. Eventually it will be you and me and him, just the way it was before. Only we’ll fix him the way we’ve fixed me. He won’t be so sad. Have you noticed how I’m not sad anymore? Don’t you want that, not to be sad? And maybe after that we’ll try making some more people. We’ll start all over again. We’ll do everything right this time.”

Ed says, “So why are they helping you?”

“I don’t know,” Susan says. “Either they think we’re funny, or else they think we’re pathetic, the way we get stuck. We can ask them when they get here.”

She stands up, stretches, yawns, sits back down on Ed’s lap, reaches down, stuffs his penis, half-erect, inside of her. Just like that. Ed groans.

He says, “Susan.”

Susan says, “Tell me a story.” She squirms. “Any story. I don’t care what.”

“I can’t tell you a story,” Ed says. “I don’t know any stories when you’re doing this.”

“I’ll stop,” Susan says. She stops.

Ed says, “Don’t stop. Okay.” He puts his hands around her waist and moves her, as if he’s stirring the Susan beer.

He says, “Once upon a time.” He’s speaking very fast. They’re running out of time.

Once, while they were making love, Andrew came into the bedroom. He didn’t even knock. He didn’t seem to be embarrassed at all. Ed doesn’t want to be fucking Susan when the aliens show up. On the other hand, Ed wants to be fucking Susan forever. He doesn’t want to stop, not for Andrew, or the aliens, or even for the end of the world.

Ed says, “There was a man and a woman and they fell in love. They were both nice people. They made a good couple. Everyone liked them. This story is about the woman.”

This story is about a woman who is in love with somebody who invents a time machine. He’s planning to go so far into the future that he’ll end up right back at the very beginning. He asks her to come along, but she doesn’t want to go. What’s back at the beginning of the world? Little blobs of life swimming around in a big blob? Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden? She doesn’t want to play Adam and Eve; she has other things to do. She works for a research company. She calls people on the telephone and asks them all sorts of questions. Back at the beginning, there aren’t going to be phones. She doesn’t like the sound of it. So her husband says, Fine, then here’s what we’ll do. I’ll build you another machine, and if you ever decide that you miss me, or you’re tired and you can’t go on, climb inside this machine—this box right here—and push this button and go to sleep. And you’ll sleep all the way forwards and backwards to me, where I’m waiting for you. I’ll keep on waiting for you. I love you. And so they make love and they make love a few more times and then he climbs into his time machine and whoosh, he’s gone like that. So fast, it’s hard to believe that he was ever there at all. Meanwhile she lives her life forward, slow, the way he didn’t want to. She gets married again and makes love some more and has kids and they have kids and when she’s an old woman, she’s finally ready: she climbs into the dusty box down in the secret room under the orchard and she pushes the button and falls asleep. And she sleeps all the way back, just like Sleeping Beauty, down in the orchard for years and years, which fly by like seconds, she goes flying back, past the men sitting around the green felt table, now you can see them and now they’re gone again, and all the peacocks are screaming, and the Satanist drives up to the house and unloads the truckload of furniture, he unpaints the pentagrams, soon the old shy man will unbuild his house, carry his secret away on his back, and the apples are back on the orchard trees again, and then the trees are all blooming, and now the woman is getting younger, just a little, the lines around her mouth are smoothing out. She dreams that someone has come down into that underground room and is looking down at her in her time machine. He stands there for a long time. She can’t open her eyes, her eyelids are so heavy, she doesn’t want to wake up just yet. She dreams she’s on a train going down the tracks backwards and behind the train, someone is picking up the beams and the nails and the girders to put in a box and then they’ll put the box away. The trees are whizzing past, getting smaller and smaller and then they’re all gone too. Now she’s a kid again, now she’s a baby, now she’s much smaller and then she’s even smaller than that. She gets her gills back. She doesn’t want to wake up just yet, she wants to get right back to the very beginning where it’s all new and clean and everything is still and green and flat and sleepy and everybody has crawled back into the sea and they’re waiting for her to get back there too and then the party can start. She goes backwards and backwards and backwards and backwards and backwards and backwards and backwards and backwards and backwards and backwards and backwards—

The cheerleader says to the Devil, “We’re out of time. We’re holding things up. Don’t you hear them banging on the door?”

The Devil says, “You didn’t finish the story.”

The cheerleader says, “And you never let me touch your tail. Besides, there isn’t any ending. I could make up something, but it wouldn’t ever satisfy you. You said that yourself! You’re never satisfied. And I have to get on with my life. My parents are going to be home soon.”

She stands up and slips out of the closet and slams the door shut again, so fast the Devil can hardly believe it. A key turns in a lock.

The Devil tries the doorknob, and someone standing outside the closet giggles.

“Shush,” says the cheerleader. “Be quiet.”

“What’s going on?” the Devil says. “Open the door and let me out—this isn’t funny.”

“Okay, I’ll let you out,” the cheerleader says. “Eventually. Not just yet. You have to give me something first.”

“You want me to give you something?” the Devil says. “Okay, what?” He rattles the knob, testing.

“I want a happy beginning,” the cheerleader says. “I want my friends to be happy too. I want to get along with my parents. I want a happy childhood. I want things to get better. I want them to keep getting better. I want you to be nice to me. I want to be famous, I don’t know, maybe I could be a child actor, or win state-level spelling bees, or even just cheer for winning teams. I want world peace. Second chances. When I’m winning at poker, I don’t want to have to put all that money back in the pot, I don’t want to have to put my good cards back on top of the deck, one by one by—

Starlight says, “Sorry about that. My voice is getting scratchy. It’s late. You should call back tomorrow night.”

Ed says, “When can I call you?”

Stan and Andrew were friends. Good friends. It was like they were the same species. Ed hadn’t seen Stan for a while, not for a long while, but Stan stopped him, on the way down to the basement. This was earlier. Stan grabbed his arm and said, “I miss him. I keep thinking, if I’d gotten there sooner. If I’d said something. He liked you a lot, you know, he was sorry about what happened to your car—”

Stan stops talking and just stands there looking at Ed. He looks like he’s about to cry.

“It’s not your fault,” Ed said, but then he wondered why he’d said it. Whose fault was it?

***

Susan says, “You’ve got to stop calling me, Ed. Okay? It’s three in the morning. I was asleep, Ed, I was having the best dream. You’re always waking me up in the middle of things. Please just stop, okay?”

Ed doesn’t say anything. He could stay there all night and just listen to Susan talk.

What she’s saying now is, “But that’s never going to happen, and you know it. Something bad happened, and it wasn’t anyone’s fault, but we’re just never going to get past it. It killed us. We can’t even talk about it.”

Ed says, “I love you.”

Susan says, “I love you, but it’s not about love, Ed, it’s about timing. It’s too late, and it’s always going to be too late. Maybe if we could go back and do everything differently—and I think about that all the time—but we can’t. We don’t know anybody with a time machine. How about this, Ed—maybe you and your poker buddies can build one down in Pete’s basement. All those stupid games, Ed! Why can’t you build a time machine instead? Call me back when you’ve figured out how we can work this out, because I’m really stuck. Or don’t call me back. Good-bye, Ed. Go get some sleep. I’m hanging up the phone now.”

Susan hangs up the phone.

Ed imagines her, going down to the kitchen to microwave a glass of milk. She’ll sit in the kitchen and drink her milk and wait for him to call her back. He lies in bed, up in the orchard house. He’s got both bedroom doors open, and a night breeze comes in through that door that doesn’t go anywhere. He wishes he could get Susan to come see that door. The breeze smells like apples, which is what time must smell like, Ed thinks.

There’s an alarm clock on the floor beside his bed. The hands and numbers glow green in the dark, and he’ll wait five minutes and then he’ll call Susan. Five minutes. Then he’ll call her back. The hands aren’t moving, but he can wait.

The post Lull appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Nathan Ballingrud

I recently interviewed Ballingrud via email about his writing and what he went through writing the stories in North American Lake Monsters, among other things…

WFR.com: What kinds of stories did you read growing up? What do you recall standing out as particularly unusual, weird, or out of the ordinary?

Nathan Ballingrud: I’ve loved the aesthetic of horror fiction as far back as I can remember. My favorite stories were always ghost stories, or stories about creepy old houses with slimy things crawling around in the basement. When I got older my mother introduced me to Stephen King’s work (or maybe I just grabbed one of her books and started reading without her knowing; I don’t remember). There was no looking back after that. I didn’t read much science fiction or fantasy as a teen; in fact, the only fantasy I remember reading was Stephen Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant books, of which there were six at the time. I remember being captivated by the idea that the protagonist was a bad human being. He was violent, ugly, and selfish, and yet he was still the hero of the story. I found that exciting and transgressive. I considered myself to be ugly and selfish, too, and my thoughts were certainly violent, if not my actions; it was profoundly affecting to see a character like that portrayed as a someone with value, with something in him still to be loved. Aside from horror fiction, though, my other great passion was spy fiction. I started out reading everything I could get my hands on by writers like Robert Ludlum, Len Deighton, and Helen MacInnes; as I grew older and my critical facilities matured, I discovered Graham Greene and John LeCarre. I still read them both, and I expect I will for the rest of my life.

As far as what stands out, I still vividly remember a book a read when I was a kid, called Witches, Ghosts, and Goblins: A Spooky Search for Miranda’s Cat, by Ruthanna Long. This book cracked my world open. In fact, it might be the cornerstone for my entire life as a reader and a writer. I haven’t laid eyes on it since I was seven or eight, probably, but I remember it so well: it had giants, pirates, ghosts, a midnight ride on a witch’s broom, and it was gloriously illustrated by Paul Durand. I’m feeling the old stirrings of excitement just writing about it. At the time, I was just consumed by the story and the art. Looking back as an adult, I’m struck by the breadth of its scope and the generosity of its vision. It was at once kind, frightening, beautiful, spooky, and wildly adventurous. I think, subconsciously, it’s been my North Star ever since. One day I hope to write something as wonderful. If there is any benevolent force in the universe, someone will find this spectacular children’s book and reprint it.

A couple years later, though, two stories in particular went off like depth charges in my little brain: “The Monkey’s Paw,” by W.W. Jacobs, and “Sweets to the Sweet,” by Robert Bloch. The first is a profoundly heart-breaking story that derives its power from the grief of bereaved parents; the monster, if you can call it that, never appears on the page. The horror is entirely psychological. It remains one of my favorite horror stories of all time. “Sweets to the Sweet” just shocked me. It has a more visceral punch, and there’s no doubt what horrible thing happens at the end. The child is genuinely evil, and as a child myself I found that both terrifying and very right.

WFR.com: How would you define or describe your personal aesthetic as a writer, in your own words? Your stories frequently get read in the context of horror or weird fiction, but there’s honestly much more to them than just that.

Ballingrud: With the stories in North American Lake Monsters, I wanted to write pieces that hurt. I wanted to write about people we’re conditioned to regard as contemptible, or dull, or even as villains, and get to their humanity. If I can get a reader to feel some empathy for somebody on the cusp of joining a white supremacy movement, or an ex-con who treats his own family with the same hostile suspicion he felt for other inmates, or a man who turns his back on his mentally ill wife, then I’ve succeeded in my intent. I have no interest in redeeming any of these characters, necessarily. But we live in a society that encourages us to view each other in simplistic and tribalistic terms, and that leads to an erosion of empathy, which is destructive to the human condition – to our ability to live successfully in an integrated society. It’s important that we look at people we think of as evil or irredeemable, and find the thing inside them that can still be loved. We’re doomed, if we can’t do that.

As I grew older and my reading tastes evolved, I discovered writers like Ernest Hemingway, Richard Ford, Virginia Woolf, and others. They provided an entirely different kind of pleasure, and I grew addicted to it. They wrote about how it felt to be alive. They made a lonely night in a diner feel like hearing the strains of a cello. The preparations for a social gathering, wandering a parking lot late at night, fishing in a slow-moving river: these experiences were given a gorgeous spiritual weight, and I responded to them just as enthusiastically as I had to the aesthetics of horror or weird fiction.

In the early nineties I’d just sold my first professional short story. It was called “She Found Heaven,” and it sold to Kristine Kathryn Rusch at F&SF. I had the latest copy of the magazine to hand; the cover image was of a dragon standing in front of a cinema marquee, dressed in sparkling finery, while the press snapped photos and shoved microphones in its face. But I was flipping through the collected short stories of Hemingway, and I settled onto a tiny piece called “A Day’s Wait.” A few minutes later I had tears in my eyes. That story kicked me in the heart. And it was so small: like a little bullet. I put the book down, and my glance fell onto that goddamned dragon. I knew I had to change my life. I didn’t submit a story for publication again for several years.

Furthermore, I think my own aesthetic is still in flux. Now that North American Lake Monsters is out, I have a yearning to try something less serious. I love pulp fiction, I love comics. And I want to throw everything I love into the pot. The next book will probably be very different. It may be harder to gain a dedicated readership that way, but the world is too big – human experience is too varied and exciting – to do the same thing over and over.

WFR.com: What do you think makes for a truly compelling horror or weird fiction story, when you encounter it in reading or writing?

Ballingrud: I’ll speak directly to horror stories, since they’re what I’m more familiar with. I think of horror as the literature of antagonism, and this is why it’s so valuable to us. For me – and of course I speak entirely of my own preferences – a good horror story is upsetting. It does not reinforce the status quo. It’s an act of hostility to some cherished assumption, whether it’s the durability of familial bonds, the presumed benevolence of God, or even the basic decency of our own hearts. Horror fiction should harshly interrogate everything that makes us feel content. It’s the devil’s advocate of literature. We absolutely need that, and that’s why it abides, whether we call it horror, or Gothic, or strange, or weird. It’s all an interrogation.

WFR.com: What would you consider your favorite stories, and why?

Ballingrud: What a tough question. There are just so many. I’ll write some down, and think of a dozen more. Well, some of them I’ve already mentioned, such as “The Monkey’s Paw” and “A Day’s Wait.” I love “Rock Springs,” by Richard Ford; it’s a beautiful piece of realism about a man, his daughter, and his girlfriend evading the law because he’s written too many bad checks. It’s a story about the small but inexorable ways life comes at you, and it’s written in an spare, elegant prose. It’s one of those stories I can feel, like a pressure in my chest. “The Mud Below,” by Annie Proulx, is a gorgeous story about a young rodeo performer. Proulx’s prose is incandescent, and she illustrates the protagonist’s hard collisions with life unflinchingly and with great compassion. That’s a combination I always find irresistible. One of the most effective horror stories I’ve read is “Occultation,” by Laird Barron. It’s a small-scale piece about two lovers sharing a hotel room, playing a game called “Something Scary.” The mounting dread is pitch-perfect. It’s one of the few stories I finished with a very real prickling along my scalp. “The Two Sams,” by Glen Hirshberg, is a heartbreaking ghost story, both tender and creepy at the same time. But my god, there are so many: “Black Step,” by Daniel Woodrell, “Z.Z.’s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers,” by Karen Russell, “Laika Comes Back Safe,” by Maureen F. McHugh, “Names For Water,” by Kij Johnson, “A Jew of Persia,” by Mark Helprin, “Dragons May Be the Way Forward,” by Leni Zumas … I can literally go on all day.

WFR.com: What writers or storytellers do you look up to the most?

Ballingrud: This is another tough one, because there are a lot of ways to answer this. I suppose I can say that I really admire writers who are able to marry the pleasures of genre to the ambitions of literature. I want to be able to read about monsters and also get that wonderful frission that happens when a writer touches on something deeply human. Lucius Shepard does this very well, and I consider him to be a kind of literary father. Whenever I feel like I’m losing focus, or forgetting my purpose, I can read him and be reminded of it. At his best, he’s one of the finest American writers alive. John LeCarre does this phenomenally well, as did Patrick O’Brien. And, of course, Michael Cisco may be the best living example of this.

WFR.com: You mentioned earlier in the interview that with the stories in North American Lake Monsters that you “wanted to write pieces that hurt,” which forced us to take a second look at people or things we might find difficult to examine otherwise. In light of that, which of the stories in your collection was the most difficult for you to write, personally?

Ballingrud: There were a few that were personally troubling, most specifically “S.S.” and “The Good Husband.” But the toughest, without question, was “You Go Where It Takes You.” I had the germ of that idea for some time, since before my daughter was born. But when I sat down to write it she was two years old. It was precisely because she had arrived, because I knew what it felt like to be a parent, that I was able to do it. But when it came time to write that last scene, I had to step away for a while. I found her in the other room, playing with her toys, and I picked her up and held her, then sat down and played with her for a while. Just had fun with her. I had to apologize to her, in a way, for the scene I was about to write. I had to make it known somehow, maybe just to myself, that the story was not real. That nothing terrible was really about to happen.

The worst criticism I’ve ever received came from someone who read that story, and told me, “You must really not like being a father.” It hurt to hear that, because the truth is I would not have been able to write that story without a profound love.

But I’m hardly the first writer to be confused for the characters in his story.

WFR.com: Finally, what do you consider the weirdest story you’ve read, and why?

Ballingrud: At this point in my reading life, that’s an impossible thing to measure. But I can tell you what struck me at the time as the weirdest, and changed everything that came afterwards for me. And that was “In the Hills, the Cities,” by Clive Barker. Barker is another of those writers that changed my life; I read Stephen King growing up, of course, but it wasn’t until I read Barker that I thought of horror fiction as something truly beautiful and truly dangerous. King offered catharsis and fun; Barker scared me, goaded me, and seduced me. He was writing antagonistic fiction. And that story … oh, my god. I had never read anything like that in my life, and my imagination has never been the same since. Those who have read it know what I mean. Those who haven’t should come to it clean, so I’m not going to go into what happens. But – like Ruthanna Long, Hemingway, and W.W. Jacobs – Clive Barker is part of my bedrock. I owe them all everything.

The post Interview with Nathan Ballingrud appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

And from this “nautilus shell” of his seventeenth century house “wherein time has stopped,” Arrivabene’s masterful paintings in turn have the ability to stop time and create suspended intense moments outside quotidian time. Arrivabene has written of his work as forming a “wunderkammern” or “a room of curiosities,” such as those created to display the trophies brought back by adventurers returning from foreign expeditions. This points to the painter, Arrivabene, as an explorer  returning with  bizarre and extraordinary fragments or treasures  from  strange, new visionary worlds.

Swimmer of Abysses, 2012

After his initial training at art school, in which, Arrivabene says, he learnt next to nothing, he toured around Europe and studied the paintings of old masters. He researched how to grind his own pigments, lapis lazuli, indigo, cinnabar and madder, dragon’s blood, orpiment and bistre, and almost forgotten techniques of painting like mischtechnik, a painting technique used by artists such as Albrech  Dürer and Grünewald. In mischtechnik, egg tempera is used in combination with oil-based paints to create translucent layers which, when laid over each other, refract light through the painting creating a sense of light and luminosity. This attention to the minutiae of his craft has resulted in Arrivabene’s paintings  actually embodying a process of alchemical  transformation,  in which  the physical matter of painting itself, the lead, the ground pigment, the egg, the oil,  is transmuted through the agency of his craft  into extraordinary  light-filled visions. The other notable thing about Arrivabene’s work is how densely saturated it is with the history of painting, as his works resonate with a lineage of visionary artists from the past – we can see glimpses of Francisco Goya, Leonardo da Vinci, Gustave Moreau, William Blake, Odd Nerdrum, and even in some of his pencil drawings, Mervyn Peake. And yet, despite this sense of continuity and connection with past masters, Arrivabene’s work feels fresh, contemporary, and distinctly his own.

Light with, in Arrivabene’s words, a “blue pearl color much like that of the exhumed dead” is visible in his 2011 painting Martyrium S. Dorotea, of the martyrdom of Saint Dorothy. The disturbing blue of the flesh is visible in the back of the naked woman who is turned away from us. Her body is painted in a level of detail reminiscent of the realism of Lucien Freud, who has been widely characterized as depicting his models with a forensic focus, creating a dispassionate, unsparing vision of the body. Yet from this forensic portrayal of the blue-tinged flesh of the body in this painting, Arrivabene has used the same pearl blue color to create extraordinary plants and flowers growing directly out of the flesh of the woman’s upper back and shoulders. The materiality of the paint itself underscores the inter-relationship of the matter of the woman’s flesh and these plants. In a sideways glance to the symbolic landscape backgrounds of renaissance portraits, flames are painted in the background behind the woman, representing the heat and pain of the dying flesh.

Martyrium S. Dorothea, 2011

Ultimately, the physical pain of the body is represented, and yet we see in this painting the transmutation of pain and suffering, and its metamorphosis into the fantastic. Arrivabene says that one result of his mother dying when he was very young is that it let him move beyond the taboos associated with death, and showed him new ways of considering life, and “so death became for [him] the way to amazement and wonder.” This painting on one level references the story of the martyrdom of St Dorothy, in which at her death an angel appeared bearing flowers and fruit for her persecutors, but it can also be read as an embodied metaphor about the relationship of death to life, and how life itself re-emerges in different forms through the process of the disintegration and absorption of the physical matter of the dead and dying body.

In the 2010 painting Ea Exit, the firmaments of da Vinci and H.R. Giger collide with a lateral reference to the Hans Holbein painting The Ambassadors. Ea Exit references the top third, the head and upper torso, of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa,or La Gioconda. The two paintings share a backdrop of what Arrivabene calls “a wild uninhabited space of rocks and water stretching to the horizon” placed at the height of the eyes of the central figure, suggesting an unknowable, untamable element to the subject herself.   The two paintings also both show women with strange, mesmerizing smiles. The famous, unfathomable smile of the Mona Lisa has inspired much speculation as to its origin, including one suggestion that the smile is in fact a visual representation of the Italian word ”Gioconda”, which translates as the word “happiness”, but also refers to the married name of the subject of the painting, who is believed by many to have been Lisa Gheradini, the wife of Francesco Giocondo.

Ea Exit, 2010

The girl in the Arrivabene painting is smiling too, and her smile is equally enigmatic, looking as though it is turned inwards and is part of her internal state of being. She seems almost ecstatic. The hair of the girl portrayed in the Arrivabene painting is curly and unruly, escaping its restraints, and the small tight curls on the top of her head take on the form of little skulls. The skulls gradually increase in size, and are seen floating away from her head tethered to her only by trails of light. They form a headdress of skulls of all different shapes and sizes: children’s skulls, bird’s skulls, aliens’ skulls (which reference Giger’s drawings), and coroneted skulls. At the front of the painting we see a skull that has grown so large it has become untethered from her headdress and is moving around her, leaving a trace of itself behind it as it moves. The shape of it references the anamorphic skull seen in the Hans Holbein painting The Ambassadors. Arrivabene brings all these diverse influences together to create a stunning image, an ecstatic meditation on death, and on the unknowable mystery and strangeness of being itself.

The 2013 painting The Dream of Sappho, as a depiction of a state of creative being, is extraordinary. We see the poetess, her head turned away from the viewer, her eyes closed, and from the crown of her head a headdress of corals and pearls springs. Veiled, unreachable, the poetess dreams, her creative energy pushing its way through the bone limits of her skull, bringing new thoughts, new poetry into being, and transmuting her life force into the blood-formed corals and pearls of her poetry.

The Dream of Sappho, 2013

Arrivabene is becoming increasingly prolific and there are many new and wonderful works to be seen on his website. A small sample of his artistic portfolio is featured here as part of this article. The first major retrospective of Arrivabene’s work is being shown in the Panorama Museum in Bad Frankenhausen, Germany from 29 June to 30 October2013. The exhibition presents 20 years of the artist’s work.  One hundred and thirty works will be on display including paintings, drawings and etchings as well as many of his moleskin sketchbooks. You can visit this link to find out more about the exhibition.

I interviewed Agostino Arrivabene in the process of writing this article, back in June of this year.

Lavers: I have read that you live in an old manor house near Milan, and that you have a housekeeper who looks after you – is this right?

Arrivabene: Yes, this is partly true. The ‘manor’ is in fact not a manor but rather an old rural farmhouse in the middle of fields, surrounded by nature. My housekeeper is certainly an important woman who keeps me company

Life in the city does not suit my psychological disposition. I have always loved contact with nature, contact with water which should always be near human dwellings; the flow of the aqueous element is fundamental. It is liberating and purifying for both body and spirit. Water is the elixir that nourishes my thoughts, the panacea to my anxieties.

Lavers: I would like to ask you about your rhythm of working — What time of the day do you prefer to paint?

Arrivabene: There really are no rules in my life; I have never liked them. My spirit is free, I don’t like external conditions, and so when they present themselves, I disdain or shun them categorically. I don’t like impositions from collectors, from purchasers, and especially not from curators or art critics, who for me are a kind of satellite human category or species … revolving around my flow or my vision, which must not have any distractions.

Usually, however, morning is the time when I don’t paint. Waking is slow, very slow, in fact. The hours that I prefer to work are those evenings up very late at night or those long dark hours of winter afternoons.

Lavers: Do you ever use images from your dreams in your work? Is dreaming or lucid dreaming a part of your creative source material?

Arrivabene: Yes, often the dream-world during sleep is a source of inspiration and also of speculation … As a young man at the end of the 80s, I had a dream of an astral flight, a detachment from my body in order to experience the imaginative dimension, an instant flash which imprinted itself into my memory as soon as I woke up, becoming the most persistent obsession I have ever had. A bird’s eye view of a verdant Greek valley, of eternal and impenetrable forests, an intense green never seen in nature, a valley without end where the horizon could not be distinguished from a sky without earthly dimension, but more golden. This landscape guarded a small perfectly circular lake of an intense blue, comparable to the deepest blue of the rarest lapis lazuli, a lake that survived on the edge of an abyss, a nightmarish, bottomless, icy, black darkness, into which flowed a rivulet of water, a small waterfall that overflowed from the lake and fell in the darkness. It was an immediate image, persisting over the years and still now strong and clear. Many times it has been depicted in my paintings over the years, becoming almost a canon, a leitmotif that characterized every image.

Lavers:  How do you respond to the description of your works as ‘visionary’ – are you happy with this term? I am referring to the tradition of visionary art that is represented by artists such as Goya, Fuseli, Blake, Gustave Moreau and more recently Odd Nerdrum.

Arrivabene: The “visionary” works you mention in association with eminent examples of great artistic expression are, for me, reference points along my artistic development, and among those artists you listed, there are two in particular, though far removed from each other temporally, Gustave Moreau and Odd Nerdrum, two important poles that I have… studied in order to then distil them within my idiom, a personal style which constitutes my own poetic vision.

Lavers: I have seen you describe your work as ‘wunderkammern’ or ‘rooms of curiosities.’ This metaphor implies that you are, in some ways, an explorer venturing into unknown lands and returning with trophies or images from uncharted territories, in this case, of the mind. If this is so, what is your thinking about these fragments, these images, that you return with?

Arrivabene: The excavation work of my mind into my dark inner world is comparable to the journey of Persephone in Hades, or equally Orpheus’ journey into the underworld. They are travel rituals, Orphic or Eleusinian in their urgent desire to steal from the dark world flashes of truth, the glimpses of which are the keys to a parallel realm that must reveal the interior world through an accumulation of images or a babel of languages, the very mystery, just as eagerly sought by ancient civilisations…. My dream is to steal the royal crowns of Persephone and Hades, to bring them to men back on earth to help them understand the centrifugal mystery of life in regards to death, and death that gives rise to life. It is one of my greatest desires to give to the world such royal emblems; to deprive the ancient gods of their symbolic power.

Lavers: Your images would seem to evolve out of a heightened non-quotidian state of awareness.  How do you sidestep the rational part of your brain? Do you have any techniques for achieving this?

Arrivabene: I have never tried to give weight to the origin of an image. It emerges slowly, like botanical gemmation, or instantaneously, like an archetypal image. Sometimes only by overturning the orientation of the painting do I find the solution, and what was once a clear image. By turning the painting itself upside down, either vertically or horizontally, I find the solution that brings me towards a new painting, which layers onto the previous work a new vision, thus changing the meaning of the image.

It’s not surprising then that under the skin of many of my paintings are hiding actual burials of old images, whole paintings, hidden regrets that sometimes serve as a regenerating humus for the new image, which a new observation manages to perceive, transforming it into a new vision.

Blooming Man II, 2010

The means of altered consciousness have certainly always intrigued me, having been an assiduous reader of the works of Aldous Huxley, but drugs like tetrahydrocannabinols, or opium or hallucinogens, have never been close friends to me. Occasionally some soft drugs have sporadically helped overcome gestural blocks, but not very often. I don’t need them. The real source of connection with a stage of excitement is definitely music.

Music pervades my sessions of realising a work, completely, absolutely. And it is always powerful and symphonic music like that of Brahms, Beethoven and his symphonies, Bach and his Brandenburg concerts, or my favorite artists Mahler and Wagner, or Ciurlionis, who besides being an artist was also a composer of sublime musical pieces. Nor do I exclude new contemporary composers like Arvo Part, Sbignev Preisner, Vassilis Tsabropoulos, the band Sigur Ros, or Lisa Gerrard and Michael Nyman.

Lavers: Your work is informed by the work of so many artists — how do you see your relationship with these painters who have gone before you?

Arrivabene: I believe that history is a babel of knowing that is enclosed by human memory like a Borges-esque library. Everything that precedes us is like a cache of layered wisdom which nourishes new, still unexplored veins.

The history of art has been able to sharpen the gaze and the search for the ideals of beauty, of harmony, and of the mystery linked to these values. Art has become like a religion, and in these most recent years, artists have come to understand that we are like shamans, the perfect link between man and the imperishable, since before this period, art depicted religion, but now art is itself a religion.

This awareness has …[enabled me] to draw on this layered knowledge, ..[laid down by]and confirmed by illustrious minds of geniuses who have given much to the world, and in an age so full of confusion, chaos and languages ​​which hybridize with one another or annihilate each other unproductively, there still exists an underground river that even if hidden vibrates powerfully to enhance the enigma of beauty.

Gustave Moreau was our closest answer to Leonardo, a confirmation closer to my time, who was able to take from the Renaissance master a sense of harmony of forms. Gustave Moreau was, in my early formative years, the founder of a movement that I still felt vividly in the years from 1990 to 2000, and not overtaken by the avant-garde.

Moreau is one of those artists who represents in a single life the entire journey of the history of art. He is an encyclopedic dictionary of more extreme styles and languages; he shows us levels of maturation that anticipate the abstract painting that appeared following his artistic experience …. His capacity for synthesis of form and color are true experiences of the avant-garde for an artist of that era.

Odd Nerdrum on the other hand is clearly an inscrutable and fascinating artist, with an unbridled talent for the construction and texturing of a painting. He knows how to empathise with the pictorial ductus of Rembrandt and Titian or Eugène Carrière, with a capacity and self-assurance which is unique.

Lavers: You have said that ‘The hardest part of being an artist is that period of gestation, when the images prepare to emerge and forms sublimate, then…everything flows…” Where do you find the initial stirrings or the seeds of an image generally come from?”

Arrivabene: This question could have a single and simple answer. Obviously I could tell you that it is life itself that gives every opportunity to be translated into art, and certainly not the bucolic accumulation that current-day artists produce in relation to images, detaching them from the pathos of living.

But … every image that I construct … is the product of a definitively diversified method. For every painting there exists no single procedure, at times it can be a strong suggestion originating from an urgent desire to better focus on an idea captured by a philosopher, or from a story or a mythological reference, or sometimes it can be a specific fact that happens in my life, for better or for worse.

Painting is frequently the urgent medium for sublimating life. It is the medium that translates every dormant impulse, which risks festering in unresolved internal compartments. On the other hand it is at times the magnitude of the mystical quest which is decisive, and which in me becomes the fulcrum to lever archetypal images which are born either by chance or by unconscious surfacing, but which then over time express a meaning and show clearly that through this gesture or that painting, or that particular symbolic element, I wanted to highlight a mystery, still hidden within me, still unsolved and cryptic.

Floatings, 2010

Journeys are often the necessary pathways to be able to verify my thirst for knowledge and curiosity, like those multiple occasions on Greek soil where I confirmed my theories, and taste, or performative gesture, in order to then translate it into painting.

And in exactly the same way in large cities where museums and their collections become springboards to launch into daring experimental techniques. But then almost always the trip has also been in order to realize small sketchbooks of notes of germinal ideas, … which then mature and sometimes transform themselves into works, growing into more complex images. I have a collection of moleskins, hand-bound incunabula or leather notebooks, very simple, where life translates itself in a diary through images or written words, ideas as notes. I am very possessive of these fragments of writings and drawings, they are the furrows left by my life on this earth, enclosed in paper and pages.

Lavers: To see such a mastery of the techniques of draftsmanship and painting is extraordinary in these days when the system of apprenticeship and learning from masters has broken down almost entirely. How did you go about learning about the material processes of your art?

Arrivabene: In fact, I am at the end of a journey without haven or protective shelters. In my early formative years I definitely followed paths, at times purely academic and necessary, and subsequently followed paths which have also been daring or brave in the construction and drafting of an image.

Clearly I have not had master-teachers. My formation has been solitary, everything has come from myself alone, and also through dialogue with the great masters of the past, observing at great length their painting, daring too, at first, a rhetorical process and genuine attempts at reconstruction appropriate for the outset, studying these implementations in long sessions that filled my day. I preferred from the outset to do away with instinctive and random learning processes, rather pursuing the reconstruction of a bridge that could reconnect a blocked road, namely, that from the traditional craftsmanship of the handling of raw materials used in the masters workshops, bridging the enormous gaps in the processes of contemporary drawing and painting.

Apart from this aspect, from childhood, drawing has been for me the language through which I relate to others. I have never been a talkative person; in my younger years, my conversations were private and hidden in my mind between me and Leonardo [da Vinci], in whom I placed my faith from the outset.

Leonardo is the supreme master whom I have been able to observe from my early years. He is like a father who has guided my sign, my hand, my taste and a way to intuit the harmony of forms both drawn and in nature. He has educated my gaze right from the beginning, proof of which are my first preparatory studies of some paintings such as Nix, a small drawing on wood created with pencil and silver tip, which has strong echoes of the preparatory study of the Virgin Annunciate now in the Uffizi Gabinetto in Florence.

Proserpino Wetnurse, 2010

Lavers: “Debauched monasticism” is a phrase you have used to describe your life — it is a very intriguing description, I was wondering if you could elaborate?

Arrivabene: Certainly loneliness has always marked the progress of my days. I’ve always loved to surround myself with books which plumb those mysteries, inherent in humans, linked to the spirit, to mysticism; books of poetry or anthropology, myths, alchemy, esotericism and philosophy, precisely because they are texts that investigate the hidden wisdom inside us as well as that which is external to us, that is, of the universe that surrounds us and that pierces us.

My sense of religion is absolutely crucial for my pictorial gesture, for the inspiration of the ideas which subsequently emerge. I have always aspired to discover what lies beyond death, the mystery of that threshold that obligatorily completes man. I have never been satisfied with a superficial atheism, never satisfied with a relativism that now permeates the minds and hearts of most human beings.

Man is a lump of flesh and blood and bones that surrounds an eternal core, a memory that permeates the centuries and time and that is never interrupted, which flows continuously in a continuous surge, a rising towards a sharpening, such as a mathematical and numerical increase of the Golden Ratio. … It is no accident that I’ve always loved the Golden Form, that Golden Ratio implanted like a genetic code of the entire universe. Fibonacci is my guardian angel.

Lavers: I would like to ask you about the importance of the face in your work. It interests me how in some of your most evocative works the faces are completely or partially hidden – I am thinking of the paintings of Lucifer and the paintings of cherubim. Sometimes the faces are hidden in clouds of what look like bacteria as seen under a microscope. Does the face have a particular significance to you?

Arrivabene: The denial of the face is simply my introspection into myself, but at the same time also my outward reflection on the more mysterious dimension of existence.

The denial of a face obviously often corresponds with iconographic codes relating to deities, or demons/‘daemons’, or creatures superior to humans. The denied face is the kingship of God manifested in his denial to men, and his beauty is impossible to behold by the human eye; the denial of his face is the evocative act of a reality so ideal for human cognition. Clear examples are the painting of “Endymion” of 2007 and the painting of “Lucifer” in 1997, two visions which are mirror opposites: Endymion expresses its beauty through its very elimination by the bright light that assails his face at the moment of the erotic union with either the god or goddess, depending on the version of the myth, …. In one version of the story he is visited by Diana, in another by Zeus.

On the other hand, Lucifer, the biblical angel, is the most beautiful but also the darkest, and is therefore denied his attribute of beauty – his face – which thus reveals a gaping void, total blackness, a dark hole that engulfs, [capped by] his crown of floating flowers.

Bacteria are an atavistic obsession, an obsession born of my hypochondria, my absolute terror of disease.

Luci-fer, 1997

Lavers: What are you working on at the moment? Do you have any new work in mind?

Arrivabene: At the moment, after a long process of collection and planning, I am about to inaugurate my own retrospective exhibition at the Panorama Kunst Museum in Bad-Frankenhausen, Germany.

From 29 June to 20 October, more than 120 works will be exhibited to the public, works never seen before because they have been hidden in private collections, works which bring together over twenty years of my work and which the curators Gerd Lindnr and Rosaria Fabrizio have been able to collect, [curating them around]…the concept of Pathei Mathos, that is, an ancient Greek term which represents the search for truth or understanding through pathos, or rather, through pain and suffering; essentially the disquiet of life expressed by Aeschylus in the tragic opera Agamemnon.

I’m… starting to delve into Giordano Bruno and his ‘wheels of memory’. …I’ve also been working for some time on illustrations from Dante’s Divine Comedy, illustrating the entire work, all three canticles, hell, purgatory and paradise, which up till now I have kept hidden from the public as they are still works in progress.

Lavers: Are there any living visual artists, film-makers or musicians who particularly inspire you?

Arrivabene: The musicians I have already been mentioned. Artists are for the most part sources of inspiration and mainly stem from ancient art, without any creditable contemporary reference, apart from the very few and rare, such as Francis Bacon, Balthus, Lopez Garcia and Odd Nerdrum.

Lavers: What books have influenced you – are there any writers that you love and you see as having had an impact on your thinking and your work?

Arrivabene: The first were definitely the …poets, Rimbaud and Baudelaire above all, followed by Thomas Mann, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Joris Karl Huysmans, and definitely the philosophical works of Plato, of Marsilio Ficino, or the wonderful letters of Michelangelo Buonarroti, the archaeological works of Robert Bauval and the philosophical works of Giordano Bruno, and, more recently, the diaries of Simone Weil and the contemporary philosophy of Franco Rella.

Lavers: What are you reading now?

Agostino Arrivabene: At present I’m reading the De Umbris of Giordano Bruno and the Castello Interiore of St. Teresa of Avila.

Acknowledgements

Katie Lavers’ questions were translated from English to Italian by Paola Vertechi, from the Italian Institute of Culture in Sydney.

Agostino Arrivabene’s answers were translated from Italian into English by Neville Chiavaroli. An Italian and Latin translator, Neville Chiavaroli’s translation (with C. Mews) of a medieval Latin manuscript was published in The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard (St. Martin’s Press: New York, 2009).

References

1. Arrivabene Agostino, Tekne International 2006

www.nuovo-tekne.nohup.it/dett_artista.php?id_artista=13&lang=en‎

2. Artists and Writers Who Ignited Us in 2012, Combustus, December 22, 2012

www.Combustus.net

3. Agostino Arrivabene, Oil Painter, Milan, Italy,  Combustus, May 11, 2013

www.Combustus.net

4. Interview: Agostino Arrivabene, welcome to the Wunderkammer!  Chiara Sestini, C‑Heads, February 29 2012

www.c‑heads.com/…/interview-agostino-arrivabene-welcome-to-the-wun…‎

5. Mona Lisa — Portrait of Lisa Gheradini„ wife of Francesco del Giocondo, Louvre Museum Paris

www.louvre.fr/…/mona-lisa-–-portrait-lisa-gherardini-wife-francesco-del…‎

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Google Franz Hellens and you’ll probably get the mournful portrait above by Modigliani, more famous now for its artist than subject. Born in Brussels in 1881, Hellens was unfit for service and sat out World War I in Nice, where he met Modigliani, as well as his future wife Maria Marcovna. In a late book of essays and reminiscences entitled Documents secrets [Secret Documents], Hellens tells how Modigliani tossed off the portrait a few hours while downing three liters of wine leavened by the occasional stroll for a bit of fresh air. Hellens and Maria were disappointed with the portrait. He describes his reaction in one of his more famous stories, “A Clairvoyant”:

“… it was alive, animated; it ‘spoke,’ as connoisseurs were fond of saying. But there was really no resemblance.

It must be said that not for a single moment had the painter thought to flatter the face before our eyes. It was strangely elongated; stretching the oval emphasized a thinness no doubt full of character, but one unlike my own. Moreover, he had completely done away with the shoulders, such that what little of the body he granted the portrait further contributed to that lack of volume which could not have come from his sitter. Lastly, the few wrinkles already lining my face back then had been exaggerated. That face gave off an air of mental and physical exhaustion justified by the difficult life I’d led till then. Despite all this, what struck me the most was a youthful, even childish character, as disproportionate and paradoxical as the rest, stemming from the deliberate fragility of the construction, and something else still that I could not explain.”

Hellens was a tall, raw-boned man with large, voluble eyes, reminiscent of Jeremy Irons; the planes of his face aged into gauntness. Years later, Hellens was to find Modigliani’s portrait the spitting image of his youngest son, Serge, and this formed the basis for the story, from his 1941 collection Nouvelles réalités fantastiques [New Fantastical Realities].

Franz Hellens is one of three names bandied about, along with Jean Ray and Thomas Owen, in the (un)holy trinity of Belgian fantastical fiction. Rounding out the pantheon at five are two writers who made their name in other literary fields, but each contributed a single memorable collection to the genre: symbolist playwright Michel de Ghelderode with Sortilèges [Maledictions], and poet Marcel Thiry with Les nouvelles du grand possible [Stories of the Great Possible].

Unlike Ray and Owen, Hellens evolved the fantastic away from horror and toward magic realism. His early works were hailed as shining examples of the “real fantastic,” and this was to decide his aesthetic direction: first in fiction, and much later in life, essays where he tried with middling success to codify a theory of the fantastic. The “real fantastic” is a slippery concept at least partly lost to its historical moment. It can sound a lot like the traditional fantastical tale, which takes the shape of reality unsettled by the inexplicable, but for Hellens, it was a much more specific concept, an “unusual refraction of daily reality” that left reality displaced and disoriented. Rather than begin with a far-fetched presence, his general approach was to push reality to the edges of the known and believable, the “extension of reality into the imaginary.”

At the time, dreams and the imagination were the cutting edge of the inner frontier. Hellens’ pursuit of an “inner fantastic” that was “the product of a lyrical soul… essentially poetic” prefigured the Surrealists’ cult of beauty, their explorations of the occult, and their veneration of imagination’s liberating powers. He tended toward emotions gentler than terror, the haunting rather than the haunted, and in this way paved the path for later writers who used the fantastic to mourn lost realms, like Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud and André Hardellet. If death stalks Hellens’ fictional landscape, it is less fearful and macabre than “a far better place to go to,” or at least a far stranger and often ironic one. For like many fantastical writers, Hellens is concerned with the weird in its embryonic, etymological sense: the turns and vagaries of fate.

To read Hellens now is to revisit an earlier stage in the evolution of the genre. His themes are fairly classical: doppelgangers, reincarnation, possession, the cursed object, mind-reading, séances. If stories of the fantastic begin with any invocation to the muses, it is to the gods of belief, and like tales from a certain time, Hellens’ stories do not stint on such prefatory exhortations:

“There are times in the lives of men and nations when the miraculous—or the extraordinary, if you will—becomes the rule for a while and winds up astonishing even the most empirically minded.”

“For any man given to observation, the most pragmatic life offers up, at one moment or another, truly extraordinary circumstances wherein one’s senses are overturned, wherein one’s consciousness takes a strange turn and loses its way amidst inextricable fantasies.”

“What happened—truth to tell, quite extraordinary—at a crucial hour of his life is due neither to his character, since he had none, nor his will, nor the influence of someone close to him.”

De rigueur throat-clearing aside, Hellens’ style is fluent, gentlemanly, and enjoyable, ushering the reader briskly through webs of hearsay and coincidence to mystery’s doorsill. Events are impartially juxtaposed as if the fruit of mere chance, while over the story as a whole the hangs the unreal, an inescapable and faintly menacing atmosphere. A down-to-earth banker finds eternity in the contemplation of a gourd. A Russian businessman is cured of gambling by a brush with a woman in black. In an early story reminiscent of Kipling’s “The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows,” the Armenian Nadajan, obsessed by statue of Shiva, sinks into opium addiction. Succumbing to inexplicable impulses, a notary rights an old wrong and is rewarded with the best meal of his life. A woman must exorcise herself of an ex, but the ensuing altercation ends with her death. A man with an eye for the worm in the apple doubts his friend’s marriage. Only when that marriage ends in murder is he able to see, in photos, what has always been obvious to everyone else: how happy they were as a couple.

Doubles, representations, the demonic metonymy of objects that stand in for absent people: Hellens was one of the most dedicated explorers of the doppelganger and all its permutations, which figure in some form throughout his short fiction. A father whose son is missing on the front is drawn by voices to that son’s childhood room, and dies in his son’s bed. A son wears the suit his father left him to his father’s funeral and, feeling increasingly constricted in it, dies, only to be buried in it. A bust slowly usurps the lifeforce of the businessman it’s modeled on. In a psychic twist on traditional vampirism–no less agonizing, and oddly timely in our age of intellectual property–a famous writer at a career lull finds his every idea fleshed out to perfection by a lesser upstart with whom he once shared a brief mental connection at a séance. And in a very short tour-de-force somehow reminiscent of Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, heir to a Dutch East Indian tobacco plantation externalizes his own meekness as twin sister, marries her, and has a child.

This story, for its swiftness and the way it keeps upping its own ante, is one of Hellens’ best and lends its name, “The Double,” to a recent volume of selected stories from Espace Nord, Belgium’s equivalent to the Library of America: a partly government-funded imprint to keep its literary treasures alive. Hellens published six collections of short stories over his career, with some overlap between them, and The Double includes fifteen stories from five of these. Although it focuses on his contribution to the “real fantastic,” sidelining his early experiments in Symbolism and allegory, it is a fine introduction to Hellens’ fantastical work, though this is only one facet of a writer whose prodigious output included essays, memoirs, and many novels only one of which, alas, has been translated into English: the faintly magical realist Bildungsroman Memoirs of Elsinore, by the excellent Howard Curtis. Of interest to fantasy lovers as well is his early novel Mélusine, a Surrealist conflagration if ever there was one, which features the wizard Merlin, a cathedral of translucent stone, and the mythic fairy of the title. First published in 1920, its definitive edition from Gallimard in 1954 won the Grand Prix de la Société des Gens de Lettres (1956). Ten years later, he won the Grand Prix for French Literature reserved for non-French citizens. In a 1971 interview, no less than Vladimir Nabokov, known for his pronounced opinions (and who thought Robbe-Grillet the finest French writer of his time), said, “It is a shame that Franz Hellens is read less than that awful Monsieur Camus and even more awful Monsieur Sartre.”

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This story was originally reprinted here at WFR.com in November of 2011, in our first week of operation, and the story’s translator, Edward Gauvin, has recently updated and revised his translation to this current form. – The Editors

* * *

Of all the music hall acts as stupidly dangerous to public and performers alike, none fills me with such supernatural horror as that old number known as the “Society Tiger.” For those who haven’t seen it—since the new generation knows nothing of the great music halls from between the wars—I shall recall this hoop-jumping spectacle. What I can neither explain nor attempt to convey is the state of panicked terror and abject disgust into which this display plunges me, as if into suspect and fearfully frigid water. I should simply avoid theatres where this increasingly rare number still figures on the bill. Easier said than done. For reasons that have always remained murky to me, the “Society Tiger” is never announced, I never expect it, or rather, I do—an obscure, barely expressed menace weighs on the pleasure I take from the music hall. Though a sigh of relief may lighten my heart after the evening’s final attraction, I know but too well the fanfare and ritual announcing that number—always performed, I repeat, as if impromptu. As soon as the orchestra starts in on that brassy, ever-so-typical waltz, I know what is about to happen; a crushing weight squeezes my chest, and I feel the live wire of fear between my teeth like a sour, low-voltage current. I should go, but I no longer dare. Besides, no one is moving, no one else shares my anxiety, and I know the beast is already on its way. It also seems the arms of my seat are protecting me, but how feebly…

First, the theater is plunged into utter darkness. Then a spotlight comes up on the apron, and the beam of that pathetic beacon comes to illumine an empty loge, usually quite close to my seat. Quite close. From there, this pencil of light seeks out a door to the wings at the end of the promenade gallery, and while the orchestra’s horns dramatically tackle into “Invitation to the Waltz,” they enter.

The tamer is a heartrending redhead, a bit weary-looking. The only weapon she bears is a black ostrich fan, whose plumes at first hide the lower half of her face; only her great green eyes show over the dark fringe of undulating waves. A plunging neckline, bare arms iridescent in the light as if in the mists of winter dusk, the tamer is sheathed tightly in a romantic evening gown, a strange gown with a heavy sheen, black as the deepest depths. The gown is cut from an incredibly supple and delicate fur. Atop it all, hair of flame spangled with golden stars erupts in cascades. The whole thing is at once oppressive and slightly comical. But who would think to laugh? The tamer, toying with her fan, reveals pure lips frozen in a smile, and advances, followed by the spotlight’s beam, toward the empty loge—on the tiger’s arm, as it were.

The tiger walks in a fairly human fashion on its two hind legs; he is suited up as a dandy of a refined elegance, and this suit is so perfectly tailored that it’s hard to make out, beneath the gray flared slacks, the flowered waistcoat, the blindingly white jabot with its flawless ruffles, and the frock coat fitted by a master’s hand, the body of the animal beneath. But there is the head, with its appalling rictus, the crazed eyes rolling in their crimson sockets, the furious bristle of whiskers, and the fangs that sometimes glitter under curled lips. The tiger advances quite stiffly, holding a light gray hat in the crook of his left arm. The tamer walks with a measured step, and if sometimes she arches her lower back, if her bare arm tenses, showing unexpected muscle under the tawny velvet of her skin, it is because she has just made a violent, hidden effort to straighten her suitor, about to fall forward.

Here they are at the door to the loge, which the society tiger swats open before stepping aside to let the lady through. And once she has taken her seat, even nonchalantly set an elbow on the worn plush, the tiger drops himself into a chair beside her. At this point, the room usually bursts into blissful applause. And I—I watch the tiger, wanting to be somewhere else so badly I could cry. The tamer gives a noble greeting with a nod of her controlled blaze. The tiger goes to work, handling props laid out expressly in the loge. He pretends to study the audience through an opera-glass; lifting the lid from a box of bonbons, he pretends to offer some to his companion. He pulls out a silk handkerchief, which he pretends to sniff; he pretends, to the great amusement of one and all, to consult the program. Then he acts the gallant and, leaning toward the tamer, pretends to murmur some declaration in her ear. The tamer pretends to take offense and, between the pale satin of her beautiful cheek and the beast’s stinking snout sown with saber blades, coquettishly raises the fragile screen of her feather fan. At this, the tiger pretends to fall into despair, and wipes his eyes with the back of a furred paw. And all throughout this lugubrious pantomime, my heart beats fit to tear inside my ribcage, for I alone see, I alone know that this whole tasteless charade hangs by but a miracle of willpower, as they say; that we are all in a state of horrifically precarious balance the merest trifle could shatter. What would happen if, in the loge beside the tiger’s, that little man with the look of a lowly office worker, that little man with pallid skin and tired eyes, should for so much as a moment stop wanting? For he is the true tamer; the woman with her red curls is but a figurehead. Everything depends on him; he is the one who makes a puppet of the tiger, an automaton more tightly bound than by cables of steel.

But if that little man should suddenly start thinking about something else? If he died? No one suspects the potential danger of every passing moment. And I who know, I imagine, I imagine—but no, better not to imagine what the lady in furs would look like if… Better to watch the end of the number, which always ravishes and reassures the public. The tamer asks if someone in the audience would like to entrust her with a child. Who could refuse anyone so charming? There’s always some unthinking woman who’ll tender, toward that demonic loge, a delighted baby, which the tiger cradles gently in the hollow of its folded paws, turning a drunkard’s eyes on the little fleshly morsel. In a great thunder of applause, the theatre fills with light, the baby is returned to its rightful owner, and the two partners take a bow before exiting the way they came.

As soon as they’ve passed through the door—they never come back for an encore—the orchestra erupts into its most deafening fanfares. Shortly after, the little man wilts into his seat, mopping his brow. And the orchestra plays louder and louder, to cover the roaring of the tiger, itself again once past the bars of its cage. It howls like hell itself, rolls around shredding its handsome clothes, which must be replaced at every show. Vociferations, tragic imprecations of desperate rage, furious and devastating leaps against the sides of its cell. On the other side of the bars, the false tamer hurriedly undresses so as not to miss the last metro. The little man awaits her in the bistro by the station, the one called The Great Never.

However distant they sound, the hurricane of howls unleashed by the tiger tangled up in ribbons of fabric might leave an unpleasant impression on the public. That is why the orchestra plays the Fidelio Overture with all its might; that’s why the stage manager, in the wings, hurries the burlesque bicyclists onstage.

I hate the society tiger number, and I will never understand the pleasure the public takes in it.

(Original French publication in book form: Le Mécanicien, Gallimard, 1953; repr. Finitude, 2010)

The post The Society Tiger appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

I recently interviewed Marshall via email about her writing, how she sees herself fitting into the spectrum of weird fiction, and how she is influenced by medieval literature and art, among other things…

WFR.com: What kinds of fiction or stories did you read and watch growing up? And how have your tastes changed between what originally captivated you and what seizes you now, if at all?

Helen Marshall: I read pretty eclectically growing up. My favorite days were when we would get the Scholastic book catalogue at school, and I’d just pick whatever struck my fancy. I was pretty genre-blind, but eventually I found myself veering more toward the mythic and the fantastic. Guy Gavriel Kay was an author who had an early hold on me. I loved the way he blended history and fantasy. Charles de Lint as well. My earliest short stories were all attempts to write about this artsy, Bohemian lifestyle I imagined all authors lived. I could never get those stories to work for me. At some point, I realized this was because I didn’t actually live an artsy, Bohemian lifestyle. My lifestyle, more or less, involved being (happily) shut up in a lot of libraries. I’ve never grown out of a love of the fantastic, but I find myself drawn more and more to poetry and experimental fiction, because it gives me the same feeling that reading straight fantasy did as a kid: the feeling of having the world disassembled and rebuilt around you. That feeling you get when you take a speed bump a little too fast and the road drops out underneath your car.

WFR.com: What would you consider your favorite weird or uncanny story or stories, and why?

Marshall: I love Kelly Link’s writing, particularly her story “The Cannon” which is sweet and bizarre and nonsensical, and—for all those reasons—terribly brave. Robert Shearman’s collection, Love Songs for the Strange and Cynical, was one of the first tuning fork collections I ever read. It showed me a way to write that just clicked. I love “Granny’s Grinning” because it is disturbing and twisted in a way that makes laugh (because sometimes I just laugh in delight when an author catches me out and that’s what this story does.).

WFR.com: What writers or storytellers do you look up to the most?

Marshall: I’m also a big fan of writers like Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, the late Ray Bradbury, Gemma Files, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, and, more recently, Lisa Hannett and Angela Slatter. Those are just a few, though! These writers constantly take me by surprise, and when I read their work I always think to myself, “That’s the kind of thing I want to write.” That list has a lot more horror or dark fantasy in it than it would have five years ago, but I’m interested in figuring out how horror works right now so that’s where my head is at.

My favorite poets are probably Anne Carson, Lorna Crozier and, most recently discovered, Ann Sexton (who I wish I had read years ago!). They are…transcendent! Gorgeous! There isn’t any other way to say it. They use an entirely different kind of language, one that’s joyous and cutting all at the same time. And they are storytellers too in their own way, although poets tend to get the short end of pretty much every stick. They shouldn’t! We should all read more poetry.

WFR.com: Absolutely agreed! Now, on that note: how do you perceive the relationship between your poetry writing and your fiction writing? It’s evident that you have a different set of influences and favorites for each. What makes you want to write a poem, as opposed to wanting to write a story?

Marshall: I find there’s actually a lot of back and forth conversation between my poetry and my fiction. I started off writing poetry, in part, because it’s very short. Disposable. If an experiment didn’t work then I could easily throw it out and try again, whereas the investment for a story was much bigger. But now I find the difference is more…formal, I suppose. With poetry, you can focus more on concept and language; a poem often involves only a single narrative or emotional “turn” if you know what I mean. Fiction is about the slow, successive build. It’s less about concept and more about exploration and character.

Let me try this again. Poetry is making something happen to you. Fiction is making it happen to someone else. Right now, I’m enjoying making things happen to other people.

WFR.com: How would you classify yourself as a writer? What kinds of traditions or conventions do you see yourself more often than not drawing from, or perhaps even challenging?

Marshall: This is a genuinely difficult question: when I put out Hair Side, Flesh Side, I hoped that better critics than me might be able to place it in the field, and the response seems to be that many of the stories are horror. This surprised me to some extent. I didn’t read anything that I would have considered to be horror until I started working for ChiZine Publications because I’m very susceptible to it. I will spend nights up, awake and terrified. At the same time, because of that genuinely visceral response I find myself more and more interested in what horror is and how it works because it’s so affective. And that’s what art should be, isn’t it? Art should move us. Art should scare us. Art should go too far. And so in some ways I like that horror really can be a sort of avant garde art form even though it’s seldom recognized as such.

The other place I tend to draw a lot of inspiration is from the structure of magic realism. Magic realism has become a bit of a catch-all phrase that doesn’t mean much in some circles beyond a fancy way to re-label “fantasy” for grant applications; but to me magic realism functions at odd ends with fantasy. It deliberately normalizes the fantastical element in order to explore it as simultaneously as real (that is, concrete) and as a metaphor for something else. I like stories that manage the balancing act between real and metaphorical readings. That’s cool. You’re always left feeling vaguely uneasy, like the author is playing a trick on you.

That being said, I really did come at things backwards. I can now align my writing with other genres in a way I couldn’t at all when I was writing because I hadn’t read that widely in horror or magic realism. At the time it felt like I was lost in the wilderness, making it up as I went along. That’s the glory of first books: you don’t know all the rules. You don’t know enough, and so you make up what you don’t know. Even now I find myself almost deliberately trying to keep from reading too comprehensively. I don’t really want to know how other people are doing it—I want to read stuff that spurs me on to do my own thing.

WFR.com: Some of your stories seem to derive a lot of significance, for characters and readers, from being in dialogue with other writers and their lives and works. Most obviously, I’m thinking of “Sanditon,” which involves Jane Austen’s final, supposedly unfinished manuscript being written on the inside of a young woman’s skin, and “Dead White Men,” where you have this woman who brings men to cemeteries so they can be possessed by famed dead writers before coitus. What drives you to write stories like these? Is it something in those writers’ work that you feel resonates with your own?

Marshall: There was definitely a specific set of issues I was trying to work out in Hair Side, Flesh Side relationship to writing, editing, and researching. I mean, as writers we always carry about the baggage (for better or worse) of the people who have come before us. We’re always trying to measure up to them. As a literary scholar I found there could be a distinct tension between wanting to write and wanting to act as…well, a sort of medium for dead medieval writers, wanting to find a way to recover something of their contexts or their lives that had been lost over the ages. There’s something about the idea of the Great Writer that I find interesting. Because when you get down to it, we’re all doing the same thing. We’re all sitting in front of a page and trying to make something happen, so what makes someone Great? What does it mean to be Great? “Sanditon” and “Dead White Men” are really just two sides of that question. In “Sanditon”, an editor with writing aspirations finds her body literally taken over by someone else’s text, and in “Dead White Men” Ernie tacitly agrees to transform himself—to lose his identity—so that he can become the kind of person that Celia might love. There’s something exceptionally ironic about that! (Also, between you and me, I just fell in love with the idea of staging an orgy of sorts in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey!)

WFR.com: How about your story “The Mouth, Open,” which we’ve reprinted elsewhere on this site? What inspired you to write that story in particular? Please walk us through the process of the story from inception to completion.

Marshall: That story? That story is true. I just wrote it as it happened. Mostly, anyway.

Croatia, 2010. Me feeling bloated after spending four months in England drinking nothing but pints of lager and eating fish and chips, then being forced to cram into a bathing suit in a place where everyone is used to wearing bathing suits.

I was lucky enough to spend a week driving across Croatia with my sister, Laura, and my brother and his wife, Valerie, who had a great deal of family scattered across the country. We arrived in Zagreb, Valerie told us a series of rules and customs regarding food, and how we had to make sure we always had food on our plate until the very end where there could be nothing left on the plate, and it would be rude to turn anything down.

I’m desperately afraid of heights. I get nervous driving over bridges. And Croatia is a place of many, many mountains. Beautiful mountains! Gorgeous mountains! Very, very high mountains. So as my brother drove and we were weaving around these hairpin turns, me white-knuckled the entire time,  I started using the time to write down what was happening on the trip so that I didn’t have to look out the window and see how perilously close we were to death.

WFR.com: How does your experience and interest in studying medieval literature enmesh with your writing, exactly? It would seem there are definite parallels, not the least withstanding the often macabre subject matter of many notable medieval texts and artistic works.

Marshall: The Middle Ages is a wondrously strange place: it’s a world in which people assumed, for the most part, that reality had a depth and complexity to it that we’ve mostly flattened out at this stage of history. Hair Side, Flesh Side very much came out—not of medieval literature itself—but of the process of studying it. When you’re working on a Ph. D, you end up narrowing your focus more and more and more, almost rigidly locking off the bigger questions that prompted you to go to graduate school in the first place. I sort of hit a wall in the third year of my Ph. D. I was in Oxford, and I had just gone through a phase of being a very productive, very industrious little graduate student, but then suddenly I was on my own for four months for the sole purposes of researching where Middle English literature came from, mostly by doing somewhat obtuse tasks like measuring the punctuation marks in fourteenth-century manuscripts. Writing fiction became a way to humanize that process. To enliven it.

When you work with something as intensely as I work with medieval literature, though, you start to develop a…kind of shared vocabulary that you don’t even realize you’re using anymore. I’m not talking about at the level of words. I mean more at the level of ideas. I find myself interested in the idea of sanctity and sacrifice, and then I realize that the terms we use to talk about it now are entirely different from the language I’m used to reading. Or death. Can you imagine a half of the population wiped out? Just like that? That was the big crisis of the fourteenth century. Half the population suddenly gone. That’s crazy! We don’t really think in terms like that for that most part. We don’t have the frame of reference. But that’s what history is…that sense that the world as you know it, everyone you know and understand, the things you love, they could be radically different in fifty years. History is about scale. Fiction is about particularity.

WFR.com: Do you have any other projects currently in the works now?

Marshall: I’m currently working on a second collection of short stories that will feature bears, some wicked prophesying, a disappearing silk top hat, what lies on the other side of a mother’s bellybutton, a floating bull shark who may or may not be the angel of Death, a very sad can of tomato soup, several signs of the end of the world, and at least one happy ending. I hope. I’m also slowly working on a novel called Icarus Kids about children who come back from the dead. With wings.

WFR.com: Finally, what’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever read, and why?

Marshall: Probably the work of the Canadian horror writer Tony Burgess. Pontypool Changes Everything and Idaho Winter are both…just very strange and trippy and very scary in their own way. You’ve gotta love any writer who, when he receives an editorial note saying he changed the gender of a character mid-way through the novel, just shrugs and decides to let it ride because it fits with the story.

The post Interview: Helen Marshall and the Weird appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

“He was a little man, round all over. A sharp eye behind round glasses, close-shaven head, high-pitched voice, and a potbelly that recalled Ubu’s gidouille.” ~ Raphaël Sorin

Though Jean Ferry (1906–1974) primarily made his living as a screenwriter, he was involved in many notable movements of 20th century French literature. He was a satrap of the College of ‘Pataphysics, an Oulipo guest of honor, and the greatest specialist of his day in the works of Proust’s eccentric neighbor and cult figure, Raymond Roussel.

As a screenwriter, Ferry had an illustrious career, best known for his collaborations with Luis Buñuel, Louis Malle, and Georges Franju. He is known to have done script doctoring on no less than Marcel Carné’s Les enfants du paradis, and co-written Henri-Georges Clouzot’s classics, the murder mystery Quai des Orfèvres and Manon, an updated adaptation of Abbé Prevost’s Manon Lescaut. Late in life, he indulged his fondness for the fantastic by adapting Jean Ray’s gothic masterpiece Malpertuis for director Harry Kümel.

However, Ferry was also a nimble storyteller with a gift for whimsical detail:

It’s just like with the gas that fills the balloons. No one’s giving it away to the anglers; as if by chance, the factories just happen to sell it, and fix prices as they see fit. And so they effectively indenture these poor people. Everything conspires to overburden the bird-anglers. If the catch is bad, if winds are high and the balloons must stay grounded for a week, of course bird prices rise, but factory owners make it up by raising the price of gas. And when the catch is plentiful, it’s the price of birds that goes down. Sometimes it sinks so low that anglers have been spotted tossing the fruits of their fatigue back into the air, rather than surrender them so cheaply. And yet the factories always turn a profit. At the sparrowplant (where children, the sickly, and anglers’ daughters toil for a pittance), the bosses in the olden days were more humane, and left workers the heads (removed before canning). Now they sell them off to coal merchants. Really! That’s what they call progress, I guess…

At night, keeping vigil, they tell stories of the olden days that make youngsters tremble in the baskets where they’re pretending to sleep. They tell of the great serpent of the skies who swallows balloons whole. They curse cargo planes that pass thoughtlessly through fields of traps, moored to small air bladders, that are nowhere to be found the next morning, when it’s time to pull them in. They also tell the story of the angler who left one day and didn’t come back till twenty-five years later. His wife was dead, his children didn’t recognize him. Exiled by tempests far from his usual routes, his balloon had run aground on a deserted cloud. There, thanks to miracles of ingenuity, the brave, tenacious man had managed to survive entirely on carrier pigeons, thriftily sipping water from his cloud (for fear of shrinking it too much), until by sheerest luck a reconnaissance plane came and saved him. This angler’s name—so they say—was Robinson Crusair.

His fiction is playful, rueful, ironic, and absurd, merrily obsessed with what he sees as fundamental, inevitable tragedies: failure and fatigue.

They have flat little heads, whitish and triangular, like certain phonograph needles, needles of a model I believe has been forgotten. The little creatures are nice as all get-out, and easy to feed. They eat whatever I give them: sorrows, pulled, wounds (to pride, and other things), worries, sexual shortcomings, heartaches, regrets, unshed tears, lack of sleep—they down all these in a single gulp and ask for more. But what they like best of all is my fatigue, which works out well, since there’s no risk of that running low. I glut them with it, they never finish, and there’s always leftovers; I can never get rid of it all.

His tone can combine the journalistic pithiness and clubby bonhomie of a latterday Algonquin Round Table acolyte like A.J. Liebling with a truly subversive imagination, casually prolific with original, unsettling imagery:

Who among us, at that age when we grow curious about fantastical tales, hasn’t been captivated by the story of that character who describes himself as endowed by the creator with the face of a hyena, lips of bronze, eyes of jasper, and a reproductive organ much closer to the deadly viper than a harmless phallus? Among other peculiarities of a personality that seems to have been difficult, this individual, mired throughout his brief, unhappy life in what he calls “the green membranes of space” (we credit the expression entirely to him), insists on having it known that it was impossible for him to laugh. I won’t mention here the curious experiment that followed this confession, whose principal accessory was a well-sharpened razor.

Subtle transitions reinforce the veracity of skillfully deployed fantastical conceits, virtuoso passages of invention sustained by mastery of the long sentence and a deeply felt sense of humanity’s plight in a colossally indifferent universe:

The old woman sat down at the table with its oilcloth and coffeepot, and poured herself a brimming cup. Without turning around (from their accent, I could tell they were Scottish, and from the old Davy lamp hanging from the hearth, that they were a family of miners), the young woman said:

“Mother, there’s a mountaineer on the wall.”

The old woman glanced vaguely my way, then turned back to the young woman. “Been there long?”

“I don’t know, I spotted him just now in the mirror.”

Ferry’s prose reputation is founded on a single volume passed almost samizdat in varying versions from publisher to publisher, first appearing in 1950 from Cinéastes Bibliophiles in a 100 copy print run before finding a home at Gallimard in 1953, under the  editorship of Jean Paulhan, in their Métamorphoses imprint (print run: 1650).  Entitled The Conductor and Other Tales, it was reprinted most recently by the small Bordeaux press Éditions Finitude, who added for the first time in book form four stories previously scattered to the periodical winds, from internal publications of the College of ‘Pataphysics to Gallimard’s prestigious house organ, the Nouvelle Revue Française.

It is difficult to fit Ferry’s output in a single English category: his fictions run short, to flash (narrative) or the prose poem (atmosphere), although a few feature full-fledged, traditional plots. Structures vary: some are letters, some essays, some dramatic monologues, some frank reports of dreams. The sprightly, dilettantish charm of his voice belies expert concision, thoroughly figured thematics, and a felicity for sudden, vertiginous invention.

What I really wanted to tell you is you must never to come to this land. To be sure, one wants for neither food nor water, and the houses are rather comfortable, if one can adjust. No, what’s troubling is the manner of existence. I’ll never get used to it. The solitude here is too populous for me. It’s bearable by day, but at night… the noise of thousands of invisible breaths astonishes and, let me tell you, terrifies. It’s hard to explain. But you’ll understand. Haven’t you, in the dark, ever reached out with your foot for the final step of a staircase, only to find there wasn’t one? Do you remember the utter disarray you felt for a moment? Do you remember those patient explorations in bed at night when, just as you were about to fall asleep, your leg suddenly relaxed and you almost fell who knows where? Well, this land is always like that. Matter itself here is made of the same stuff as that step missing from your staircase. You never get used to it, I promise, and you must never come here.

Perhaps because of this unclassifiable ingenuity, Ferry’s writings are poised to enter several of our own literary conversations in English, at a moment when boundaries between genres are blurring and border-crossings between discourses encouraged. This fact is attested to by the variety of editorial visions across the periodicals in which I have published his work; we live in a cultural moment when Ferry’s deserving fictions might find a wider readership than they did in his own day, as elements of  many avant-garde movements that marked him have, in a process like sweet poison leaching into soil, permanently altered mainstream tastes.

Ferry’s witty and seditious “Kafka, or ‘The Secret Society’” and the abrupt “Robinson,” for example, are firmly of the parable class. “The Traveler With Luggage,” a sordid account of crime and amnesia, would not be out of place in a genrebending “neo-noir” anthology, while his shorts “The Garbagemen’s Strike” and “Homage to Baedeker,” featuring (respectively) a trash heap come to life and bird-fishermen in hot air balloons, might find a home in many a fantasy venue. Pieces like “Carbuncles” and “My Aquarium” extend the tradition begun in French by critic, poet, and painter Max Jacob, whose 1916 classic The Dice Cup is now seen as a link between Symbolism and Surrealism.

No doubt I’m mistaken. Perhaps carbuncles are simply creatures of the Great North, a cross between walrus and caribou, with nothing to do but wander in the fog looking for moist blue-green lichen. There’s so much fog they’ve never seen each other. But–no, no, carbuncles are like her, they burn. It was that detective, with his pipe smoke, who filled my head with fog, fog so you can’t tell the Thames from its banks.

Nor are carbuncles a species of globular insect that stoops to speaking with eagles. Well, then?

Ferry has the sheer writing chops to pull off a piece on idiosyncrasy of voice and opinion alone, as in “On the Frontiers of Plaster: A Few Notes on Sleep.” His 1953 story “Bourgenew & Co.”,  a unique revision of the Shangri-La tale first published in the Nouvelle revue française, was adapted by Claude Andrieux in 1990 into a short film that won several festival prizes in Switzerland, Italy, and France.

Ferry’s single most famous story, “The Society Tiger” (1946), has been anthologized multiple times in both French, most notably in Marcel Schneider’s 1965 Histoires fantastiques d’aujourd’hui, and André Breton’s 1966 Anthology of Black Humor, where Breton said that Ferry’s letterhead should read: “Psychological constructions a specialty.—Large selection of paradoxes, brash ideas, etc. —Always in stock: strong, human subjects.—Poetic details: upon request.” Breton, who also provided the introduction to original edition of Le Mécanicien, is said to have taken Ferry¹s wife Marcelle (a.k.a. Lila) as the inspiration for his book L’Amour fou. Les quatre vents [The Four Winds] was an innovative if short-lived ’40s revue whose regular features included “Master of the Fantastic,” where they reprinted Stoker’s Dracula; “Check and Mate,” devoted to crime fiction; and “Beyond the Walls,” for translations. When “The Society Tiger” first appeared in issue 5 of this magazine, Breton called it “the most sensationally new poetical text I have read in a long time.” It has been translated into English three times by different translators in various anthologies, but never has it or have other scattered translations of Ferry appeared in the context of his other work: the original collection, The Conductor. Nor has any greater investigation into his literary legacy been attempted, when in fact his cavalier stylistic brilliance and thematic cohesiveness are best showcased by a more comprehensive presentation of his work. Already a chilling and unforgettable tale, “The Society Tiger” is deepened and broadened when set beside “Memories of Childhood,” which, whether fact or fiction (the latter is likelier), plumbs psychology that “Tiger” stunningly leaves as symbol.

Miss Florence won’t mean a thing to today’s generation, but perhaps some survivors of the golden age (Tziganes and a prix fixe for 60 centimes) will not have forgotten that splendid girl who for two seasons running sent shivers of insidious dread down their spines at the Nouveau Cirque. Miss Florence would walk into the ring in a great evening gown, like a heroine from Henry Bataille, which meant yards of lace and velvet, black glacé kid gloves with pearl buttons, dazzling opaline shoulders, and eyes that were green just so, and suddenly all the men became serious, attentive, focused. And that great fan of pink swan feathers! But she wouldn’t keep her pretty dress on for long, not Mama. With two kicks and a roll of her hips, voilà, there she was in a black satin swimsuit, calves laced up like a genuine Mack Sennett bathing beauty (something still unknown to us then). That packed quite a wallop for the crowd, from the box seats to the back rows, way up there, where the ring below looked like a saucer of light. Monsieur Loyal didn’t need to ask for silence; no one thought about laughing while Miss Florence climbed a rope ladder to the top of the tent. Stirring thoughts filled your head as you watched that sublime derrière, those wild, golden, diamond-spangled tresses, rise toward the heavens. Afterwards, it all went very fast: a line of pink light swept from top to bottom, a splash, and Miss Florence, all smiles and wet skin, sprang from the little bathtub no one had initially believed she’d get in so dramatically. And they clapped, to free themselves of the fear they’d come looking for: to see that sweet, tempting, velvety machine become in a second a flattened pile of bleeding meat, punctured by bones and screams…

A nephew of the great avant-garde literary publisher José Corti, Ferry’s presence on the fringes of many major movements makes him, quite apart from the evident quality of his writing, a fascinating historical figure, a prism that can be turned at will to shed light on disparate literary traditions. Through him, we can trace the lyrical protests of Surrealism, the mechanics of Oulipo, the human heart of ‘Pataphysics, the long shadow of Kafka on the European fantastic, the sadistic excesses of the Panic movement. Ferry both embraced these currents and enjoyed their esteem, gave and received influence. His work, shot through with allusions from Anouilh to Dickens, Klossowski to Bataille, exists at a nexus of other authors like Boris Vian, Pierre Jean-Jouve, André Hardellet, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, and Marcel Béalu, whose affiliations with multiple movements often left their work forgotten in the cracks between. But as Roussel did with his marvelous and extravagant tableaux, Ferry has made a place for himself among the sui generis.

An unjustly neglected writer of limited but significant output, Ferry and his oeuvre are ripe for rediscovery, from this, his single volume of prose fiction, to his more personal screen work (Fidélité, written in collaboration with Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, but never filmed). Ferry’s stories have also been translated into Spanish and German. My translations of his work have appeared here at WFR, in The Coffin Factory, and The Café Irreal; more are forthcoming in Subtropics and Sentence. The Conductor and Other Tales will make its English debut in November 2013 from Wakefield Press with an introduction providing further critical and historical context.

The post Jean Ferry: A Figure of the French 20th Century appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Yoko

Stephen Snyder is the translator of Revenge. He is the Kawashima Professor of Japanese Studies at Middlebury College. is translations include work for Kenzaburō Ōe, Ryu Murakami, Natsuo Kirino, and Miri Yu.

The following story, “The Last Hour of the Bengal Tiger,” can be found in her latest book, Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales, a collection of interlinked short stories, which will be released January 29 courtesy of Picador Books. – The Editors

***

I left the bypass and followed the road south along the river, then hesitated just as I was about to cross the bridge. If I turned and headed downtown, I could be at her apartment in just a few minutes.

It was a stifling afternoon. The breeze had died and the trees along the avenues seemed to wilt in the heat. The air shimmered above the burning asphalt; the sunlight reflected from the oncoming cars was blinding. Even on full, the air conditioning did little against the heat coming through the window. The steering wheel burned my hands.

I had been playing a game with myself from the moment I left the house. If the next stoplight was red, I would make a U‑turn and go home. If the silver sports car passed me, I would keep going. If the terrier puppy I’d seen yesterday in the pet shop window had been sold, I’d turn back. If there were more than three buses parked at the terminal around the next corner, I would go on to her apartment.

I’m not sure why I found myself hoping that the sports car would turn off, that the cage would be empty. I seemed to believe it still possible to turn back, despite my apparently firm decision to confront her.

Just before I reached the bridge, the traffic suddenly slowed to a crawl. It was probably an accident, since they had closed one lane. I turned on the radio, but the reception was so bad I turned it off again. I rode the brake as we inched forward.

What was I going to do when I saw her? It was a question I had asked myself a thousand times. Slap her? Scream insults? Demand she give my husband back? How ridiculous. It would be better to lose him than look so utterly foolish.

Good afternoon. I would probably just wish her “good afternoon” like an idiot, as though she were a teacher at my daughter’s kindergarten.

My husband had left for the United States three days earlier to attend a medical conference. I would never have found the spine to do this if I thought I might actually catch him at her place, so I waited until he was gone before setting out. I wasn’t really looking for a confrontation with the two of them, and I don’t think I would have been especially upset even if I had found them naked in one another’s arms. That was, after all, what they had been doing in secret all along. That much was obvious. I simply didn’t want to make things more complicated than they already were, so it was better to see her when he wasn’t there, when the two of us could sit down and discuss matters calmly and equitably. Or so I had been telling myself.

What was the name of his conference? I’d forgotten. My husband’s specialty is respiratory medicine, specifically the treatment of a syndrome called pulmonary infiltrates with eosinophilia, though I don’t really know what that means. He hasn’t bothered to explain it to me, and I’m not particularly interested in finding out. But I suspect she knows. She’s a highly regarded secretary at the university hospital.

I know it’s ridiculous to be jealous about the name of a conference, but not by the idea of them naked together, but that’s just the way it is. Jealously seems to make me suffer in the most unexpected ways.

The traffic crept along. A family was having a cookout under the bridge, and the smell of roasting meat wafted down the road, making the heat seem even more oppressive. Some seagulls were preening themselves, perched on posts in the sandbar. The river was dotted with windsurfers and small fishing boats. At the sound of an impatient honk the gulls fluttered up into the air. As I squinted into the sunlight I could see the ocean shining in the distance.

A truck had overturned on the bridge. It was probably going too fast and had hit the median. At any rate, the cab on the driver’s side was crushed, and a tire had come loose and jumped the guardrail. An ambulance and a wrecker and several police cars were pulled up at the scene with emergency lights flashing.

I was pretty sure the driver was dead. His bones and organs would have been crushed by the steering wheel. But somehow this seemed less shocking to me than the fact that the surface of the road was covered with tomatoes. Not that I realized what they were right away. At first I thought I must have driven into a field where an unfamiliar red flower was blooming. Or that the driver’s blood was covering the whole road.

But it was tomatoes—flawless, ripe ones—shining in the sunlight. A workman with a shovel was trying to gather them up, but he was making no visible progress. A number of people stood near the accident looking dazed, and some men were trying to cut open the cab of the truck with an electric saw.

Some tomatoes rolled in front of my car and must have been crushed under the tires, but I could barely feel them. They offered no resistance, as though they had wanted to be smashed all along, smeared across the road.

The other cars swerved to avoid the tomatoes, but I decided to try to hit as many as possible. If I got more than ten, I would go on, I would follow the road where it led. In the rearview mirror, I could see a strip of crimson stretching out behind the car. Did hitting tomatoes feel the same as hitting a person? I began to count: one, two, three, four, five…

I’ve only seen her once, from a distance. My husband had forgotten some research notes he needed for work, and when I went to take them to him, I stopped by the secretarial pool and peeked in. I knew right away which one was his girlfriend, even though I had never seen any of them before. I knew because she fit so perfectly in the various scenes I had imagined on the nights he failed to come home—a room in some apartment, a table at his favorite restaurant, the deserted lot behind the hospital.

Still, I have no memory of the face I saw that day. I can’t recall how she wore her hair or makeup. The only thing I remember is that she was busy with some sort of complicated task.

She was standing at her desk, sorting documents. Thumbing through them impatiently, she would write on some, tear others to pieces, and attach labels to still others. Her face was half-hidden by her limp, sweaty hair. When the phone on her desk rang, she called rudely for someone else to get it. Finally, it seemed she had finished putting all the papers in order, but then something must have happened because she made a disgusted noise, audible even from where I stood, and started the process again from the beginning.

But no matter how many times she started over, it didn’t seem to work out. Something always went wrong. She was constantly erasing things she had just written, folding and refolding, stamping something here and there—as though trying anything that came into her head. But the longer she worked—and it seemed as though she might go on forever—the more chaotic the papers became. Nor, through all this, did anyone come to help her.

At last I gave up and left the hospital. I had wanted to see her discharging her duties in an elegant manner, efficiently typing one of my husband’s papers. But how could I feel jealous of someone so pathetic?

I pulled into the parking lot behind city hall, intending to walk the short distance to her apartment. I could have found a spot on the street closer to her building, but a parking ticket on a day like this would have been too depressing.

Apartment 508… five-oh-eight. I muttered the number to myself as I climbed out of the car into the sweltering heat. Almost instantly, I was dripping with sweat. The powder I had applied with such care began to melt under the blazing sun.

As I walked, I recalled, one by one, all the times I had ever been rejected. This process had become something of a ritual with me since my husband’s affair had started. I would unearth memories, beginning in childhood, of places and occasions when someone had hurt me. In that way, I believed, I would see that my pain was due not only to my husband but to the cruelty of countless others besides. I found it somehow comforting to think that his coldness was in no way special or unique.

At first I could recall only two or three instances. But as the connections between them became more apparent, the number grew and the details became more vivid. One by one, incidents I had completely forgotten came back to me as if from nowhere.

In kindergarten, when we paired up to dance, I was always the only one without a partner. I would end up dancing with the teacher, which was terribly humiliating. With an odd number of students in the class, why would the teacher have insisted on dancing in pairs in the first place?

Then there was the time before the class trip when my name was left off the list of room assignments for the inn where we were to stay. I thought I must have missed it the first time, so I checked again. No mistake: my name wasn’t there. Of course, I told myself, it was unintentional, a simple oversight, but my rationalizing did no good. In the end, I didn’t go on the trip. Not because of the list, but because I woke up that morning with tonsillitis.

At fifteen, I took an overdose of sleeping pills. I must have had a good reason for wanting to kill myself, but I’ve forgotten what it was. Perhaps I was just fed up with everything. At any rate, I slept for eighteen hours straight, and when I woke up I was completely refreshed. My body felt so empty and purified that I wondered whether I had, in fact, died. But no one in my family even seemed to have noticed I had attempted suicide.

Then yesterday, at the hairdresser’s, when I asked the stylist to trim in back a bit more, she gave me this nasty look and clacked her scissors as if to say I had no business telling her how to do her job. And she was a young girl, probably just a trainee.

When I looked up again, I realized I was lost. I had studied the map carefully, but it seemed now as though the city had warped in the heat. Each time I turned a corner, the scene that appeared was different from the one I remembered. The people passing by stared gloomily at the pavement; a stray cat crouched in the shadows of an alley.

Rows of roofs stretched into the distance, and beyond them I could see just a glimpse of the back of the tower. The clock struck two. Though the day was still, the sound seemed to swirl around somewhere high above me before reaching my ears.

When the echo died away, I suddenly noticed an odor in the air. It was sweet and persistent but not at all unpleasant. I took a deep breath and let myself be guided by the smell.

“Fern,” I murmured.

I was standing in front of a large, stone house. The heavy iron gate was half open. A massive oak cast a cool shadow. Without a moment’s hesitation, I went in. I walked toward the house, looking up at the windows, then passed around to the back on the west side. The smell was coming from there.

I found a beautiful and meticulously tended garden. Shrubs trimmed with amazing precision lined little green paths. A few blooms still clung to the climbing roses, and clear water flowed from a fountain at the center. Next to the fountain, a tiger lay sprawled on the ground, and next to the tiger crouched an old man.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Come see,” said the man, who was apparently not at all surprised to find me standing there.

“Is it dead?”

“No, not yet,” he said, waving for me to come closer.

As I approached the fountain, I felt a pleasant breeze. Small birds chirped, and it seemed as though the heat that covered the town had suddenly abated.

The tiger was enormous, stretched out against the curve of the stone basin. Its legs were limp, its mouth half open. Its breathing was weak and labored.

“Is it sick?” I asked.

“Yes, it won’t last long.” The old man held the animal’s paw as he knelt beside it, and he seemed so comfortable and confident that I felt no fear. He gestured again for me to approach. He was dressed very formally for a hot summer day, but he did not seem to be sweating at all. He wore an elegant jacket, a bowtie, and pearl cufflinks. His white hair was neatly combed.

I knelt beside him and found I couldn’t resist the urge to rest my hand on the tiger’s back. The smell I had thought was fern seemed to be coming from the animal.

I was struck by the warmth of his body. This was no stuffed beast or a figment of my imagination but a living creature. Its hot mass pulsed under my palm.

“It’s magnificent,” I whispered.

“Magnificent indeed,” the man said as he continued to caress the beast. Its black and yellow fur shined in the light filtering down through the trees. The beautiful stripes, the enormous size—everything about the animal was perfect. Even lying prostrate, it seemed to be coiled and ready to attack; the paws looked heavy. The jaw was powerful, and sharp fangs peeked out from its mouth. Every bit of the tiger seemed to have a purpose, to be ideally suited to the hunt.

“It is yours?” I asked.

“It is.” The old man nodded. A shudder ran through the animal’s belly and it groaned.

“Poor thing,” I said. I tried to concentrate my energy in the hand stroking the tiger’s back. The fur was very thick and soft and pleasant to the touch. The more I stroked it the more the scent of ferns filled the air.

“There now,” the man murmured. Then he turned toward me for the first time and smiled.

The tiger’s ears drooped and its tongue rolled from its mouth. It began to drool. With its last remaining strength, it pushed closer to the old man.

“There now,” the man repeated, wrapping his arms around the tiger’s neck and rubbing his cheek against its face.

The roses swayed in the hot breeze. Tiny insects danced above the lawn. Spray from the fountain misted down on us.

“I’m afraid I’m disturbing you,” I said, realizing that I was intruding on their last moments together.

“Why would you say that?” the old man said, a hint of reproach in his tone. “You must stay with us. We need you here.” Then he looked back at the tiger, his eyes full of pity.

The tiger’s breath grew fitful. Its throat rattled; its fangs clattered together. The tongue looked rough and dry. I continued to rub its back; it was all I could do.

The old man held his cheek against the animal’s head. The tiger’s eyes opened and sought his face. When it was satisfied that he was still nearby, the eyes shut again in relief.

Their bodies had become one. Cheek and jaw, torso and neck, paw and leg, bowtie and stripes—everything melted together into a single being. The tiger let out a roar, and as the echo died away so did the beating under my hand. The clicking of fangs stopped, and a final breath seeped from its lungs. Silence descended on us.

The old man continued to hold the animal in his arms. I rose as quietly as I could and left the garden.

I put the key in the ignition and looked down for a moment at my palms. I wanted to remember what they had just done. Then I turned the key. On the way back, the tomatoes were nowhere to be seen.

The post The Last Hour of the Bengal Tiger appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Algernon Blackwood (1869 — 1951) was a prolific English writer best known for his supernatural horror. In tales such as “The Willows” (1908) unease is generated by ambiguity that mixes the weird with a talent for writing about wild or rural places—a break with the past and the classic haunted house. Although Lovecraft thought Blackwood a master of the ghost story, Blackwood famously was not as impressed with Lovecraft. Noted critic S. T. Joshi has stated that Blackwood’s short story collection Incredible Adventures “may be the premier weird collection” of the twentieth century. Along with Alfred Kubin and F. Marion Crawford, among others, Blackwood helped usher in the modern era of weird fiction. 101 Weird Writers is delighted to present this appreciation of Blackwood and “The Willows,” written by our newest contributor, James Machin.

- Adam Mills, editor of “101 Weird Writers”

***

‘Of the quality of Mr. Blackwood’s genius there can be no dispute; for no one has even approached the skill, seriousness, and minute fidelity with which he records the overtones of strangeness in ordinary things and experiences’ —  H. P. Lovecraft[1]

‘Tennyson, you remember, says, “the cedars sigh for Lebanon,” and that is exquisite poetry, but Blackwood believes the cedars really do sigh for Lebanon and that […] is damned nonsense!’ — Arthur Machen[2]

Algernon Blackwood was born a high Victorian and died a television star. He is now usually remembered, if at all, as a writer of atmospheric Edwardian ghost stories, who, through his creation John Silence, provides a link between Le Fanu’s Van Hesselius and Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki in the literary history of the psychic detective.[3] However, this is a misleading and reductive approach to take to his bewilderingly prodigious output. It might be a fair presumption to make that he is the only one of the 101 Weird Writers whose work has directly inspired a successful West End musical. Over the course of his long life he acquired a mere suitcase-full of possessions, and most of his accumulated paperwork was destroyed in a direct hit on his nephew’s house during the blitz, a disaster from which Blackwood himself was extremely fortunate to escape with life and limb intact. His bildungsroman was the flight from the repressive doctrine of his father’s evangelical Christianity by means of clandestine investigations into Buddhism, the Baghavad and Blavatsky’s theosophy; from the stern discipline and claustrophobia of his schooling at the hands of the Moravian Brotherhood at the edge of the Black Forest, into the solemn immensity of the wildwood itself: ‘he saw the narrow slit windows with the vistas of enticing field and forest beyond’.[4] His escape route would eventually lead him to the sublime elevations of the Alps and the desolate, snowy expanses of the American north. These tensions between domesticity and wilderness, between society and nature, between God and Nature, established so early, created resonances that exerted an enduring fascination over his life and dominated his work. In both he seems constantly tossed back and forth between their unresolved opposition.

His youth was an itinerant one of false starts and frustration, interspersed with immersions in the wilderness whenever an opportunity presented itself. He crossed the Atlantic to credulously pursue failed business interests; dairy farmer and hotelier; a short, miserable spell as a journalist in a New York still under the squalid shadow of Tamany Hall; the publication of occasional magazine pieces; successfully playing at being a Pinkerton man and tracking down and presenting to the police a sleazy business partner who had brazenly defrauded him over a course of months. When desperate, he would occasionally pick up work as an artist’s model, once being painted by Robert W. Chambers, whose fictional, nebulously baleful play ‘The King in Yellow’ inspired Lovecraft’s infamous Necronomicon.[5] Over a winter Blackwood experimented with morphine, but by spring the call of the wild proved the more powerful drug and he left the city once again to hunt, fish and canoe in the forests of upstate New York. By his late thirties he had acquired the deeply tanned and lived-in skin of the trapper, a sun-lightened and piercing gaze, and a skill at expertly holding the listeners’ attention with a hunting anecdote or an allegedly authentic ghost story, or the combination thereof upon which his reputation as an acknowledged master was eventually built. He returned to England lured by the offer of a near sinecure with a dried milk company, but the chance discovery by a friend of a drawer full of Blackwood’s manuscripts led to their publication. His third anthology, John Silence – Physician Extraordinaire­, was promoted by an innovative advertising campaign which saw the beatific gaze of that most pleasant of occult detectives emanating from vast advertising hoardings across London, and led to immediate commercial success and a generous advance on future royalties. Almost by chance, Blackwood found himself, by then nearing forty, a professional writer.

S.T. Joshi argues for a ‘tripartite distinction of [Blackwood’s] stories by type: stories of awe, stories of horror, and stories of childhood’. Ignoring, for the purposes of this essay, the last category, it still remains difficult to bifurcate the remainder of Blackwood’s oeuvre precisely between the first two, and as Joshi certainly acknowledges, Blackwood at his most potent expertly comingles both awe and horror to profoundly unsettling effect. This is never more evident than in ‘The Willows’ (1907), possibly the most widely anthologised of Blackwood’s stories (followed closely by 1910’s ‘The Wendigo’), and if not exactly representative of his variegated output, it is perhaps the story in which Blackwood’s powers are most astutely and artistically deployed. Beginning as a genteel Mittel European travelogue chronicling the months-long canoe trip of two men along the Danube, Blackwood expertly strips away the quotidian from the engulfing landscape until, by its climax, it is perhaps a near perfect exposition of Lovecraft’s idealised ‘true Weird Tale’:

A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain — a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the dæmons of unplumbed space.[6]

This describes almost exactly the cumulative power of ‘The Willows’, and the experience of its protagonists, who, with the shifting wetlands of the Danube delta slowly disintegrating beneath their feet, witness the fabric of reality being relentlessly tested by a vague and oppressively hostile outer force. However, Blackwood shuns what China Miéville describes as the ‘teratology’ of the ‘haute Weird’; the liminal antagonists in ‘The Willows’ are tenebrous and obscure, in the tradition of Fitz James O’Brien’s ‘What Was It’, Guy de Maupassant’s ‘Le Horla’ and Ambrose Bierce’s ‘The Damned Thing’. They are like Borges’s entity in his Lovecraft homage ‘There Are More Things’, which reveals its anatomy only ‘implicitly, like an animal’s or a god’s, by its shadow’. Even when directly witnessed by the narrator, we are given little more information than that they are vague ‘shapes’ or ‘presences’. For the most part they are detected by implication alone; in the unaccountable stirrings of the foliage with which they are in sinister allegiance, in the inexplicable rent in the canoe that otherwise might provide a means of escape, and in ‘deep hollows formed in the sand […] basin-shaped and of various depths and sizes, varying from that of a tea-cup to a large bowl’. Perhaps the tangible, tentacular monsters of the haute Weird are redundant when landscape itself undergoes such a disconcerting transmutation:

This weird immanence is difficult to account for in hauntological terms; Blackwood’s wildernesses are ahistorical and the ‘weird entities have waited in their […] outer circles of space since aeons before humanity’.[7] Simon Hay subsequently struggles to plausibly account for ‘The Willows’ in his otherwise cogent hauntological reading of the Victorian and Edwardian ghost story, and in the end concedes that the ‘story is an unusual ghost story in that it has no interest in the question of the past and how we inherit it; no interest in history, understood as such.’[8] Following Miéville’s insistent advice to ‘stay sharp’ on ‘teratological specificity’, one would have to also acknowledge that ‘The Willows’ includes no mention of ghosts and therefore shouldn’t be considered a ghost story at all.[9] Similarly, despite being set geographically proximate to the homeland of the old-world revenants of Dracula, because of its ahistoricity, it seems absurd to parse ‘The Willows’ in this context either. Another approach, and one that is certainly commensurate with Blackwood’s life as well as his writing, is to situate his use of landscape within the frame of new world, colonial anxieties.

Marcus Clarke, in his 1879 introduction to a collection of Australian poetry, says of the hostile, depopulated wildernesses of Australia that in them ‘is to be found the Grotesque, the Weird, the strange scribblings of nature learning how to write’.[10] Gerry Turcotte has associated these geographical liminalities with ‘a fear of being negated, stripped of identity, or blanked out in a land “without history”’.[11] This terror of engulfment seems a consistent one in much of Blackwood’s writing, and potently imbricates two anxieties — colonial and religious – which resonate and amplify each other, each serving as the other’s metaphor. Although raised in an atmosphere of stern and repressive evangelical Christianity, from an early age Blackwood indulged in an illicit autodidactic education in eastern religion. He enthusiastically engaged with the fin de siècle occult scene and Buddhism before arriving at his own brand of theosophical pantheism. The shift of focus of the Christian obsession with the continuation of personality after death, of an everlasting, infinite ‘I’, finds its polar opposite in the Buddhist aspiration for the extinction or assimilation of the ego, its absorption into the whole. This concept can appall as much as appeal, and Blackwood’s weird stories can subsequently be read as expressions of a sublimated dread of the world view he ostensibly rejected Christianity to subscribe to. In ‘The Wendigo’, although the trapper Défago does eventually go mad and die, the focus of the horror of the story is almost entirely on his absorption by the illimitable wilderness, depicted to be, as it was for the early settlers, a threatening, predatory entity as much as a liberating, emancipating blank canvas upon which to paint a new life. The wilderness (the colonial frontier) ‘swallows up’ as much as it provides an opportunity for self-fulfilment. It is not only absorbent but conscious and grasping. When Défago, seduced by a maniacal wanderlust, returns from his grotesque frolic in the ‘fiery heights’, it is in body only. His personality seems to be entirely absent; and this, more than his hideously deformed, charred feet, inspires the horror of his companions:

“You ain’t Défaygo! You ain’t Défaygo at all! I don’t give a—damn, but that ain’t you, my ole pal of twenty years!” He glared upon the huddled figure as though he would destroy him with his eyes. “An’ if it is I’ll swab the floor of hell with a wad of cotton wool on a toothpick, s’help me the good Gawd!” he added, with a violent fling of horror and disgust. It was impossible to silence him. He stood there shouting like one possessed, horrible to see, horrible to hear—because it was the truth.

The ultimate expression of this trope in Blackwood’s fiction is ‘The Man Who the Trees Loved’, where the inexorable ‘amalgamation’ of Mr Betticy by the collective consciousness of the forest is as awful as it is terrifying; and is one that is both set in opposition to his wife’s Christianity and explicitly linked to his seduction by the jungles of India, while working at the edge of the Empire. This anxiety about the ambiguity of man’s place in the natural world was one that must have been keenly felt by Blackwood, whose obsession with the wilderness was accompanied by a troubled acceptance that the significance of the individual must be in inverse proportion to the exaltedness of Nature. Here, his Buddhism and his love of the natural world comingled into a fearful awe, an emotional perspective expertly articulated in his stories. His Sensucht for the sublime landscape is ultimately unfulfilable, since it could only be sated by his extinction in nirvana.

This ambivalence provides a regular equipoise to the more visionary flights of mystical yearning of the protagonist O’Malley in The Centaur, a novel cited by Joshi as a key text through which to understand Blackwood’s world view. It is as much an exposition as a narrative, regularly quoting great swathes of Gustav Fechner and William James, and promulgating something approaching a Gaia hypothesis of sentient planethood through the experiences of O’Malley (clearly a proxy for Blackwood himself). O’Malley travels to the Caucuses in the company of an Urmensch; a ‘Cosmic Being’, both pre-modern and more highly developed than the ‘thick human crowds [who] stain the world with all their strife and clamour’. Again, the risk O’Malley exposes himself to is the loss of personality. The price of enlightenment and connection with the Earth’s ‘super-consciousness’ is engulfment: ‘Complete surrender would involve somehow a disintegration, a dissociation of his personality that carried with it the loss of personal identity.’ Throughout the novel, O’Malley oscillates between an unbearable yearning to achieve ‘genuine cosmic consciousness’ and an equally acute dread of the implications of its attainment; for ‘this, surely, was the inner catastrophe that he dreaded, the radical internal dislocation of his personality’. As so often in Blackwood’s writing, the threat to O’Malley is one of absorption and amalgamation within a greater, overwhelming whole, rather than death or madness. This is perhaps a key differentiation that can be made between his writing and that of his actual and approximate contemporaries. Lovecraft’s sanity-shattering ontological paradigm shifts and Machen’s drawing back of the veil on the adumbral numinous are not entirely absent, but the focus is on the annihilation of the ego; the loss of personality; engulfment.

When Blackwood became a best-selling writer, he at last achieved a livelihood that no longer impinged on his wanderlust. In fact, it gave him the means to indulge in it freely. Seasons could be spent in the Alps, and trips to Egypt, the Caucuses and Eastern Europe were both facilitated by his work and fed directly back into it. The Great War saw him volunteering in the Red Cross and there were rumours of espionage under the auspices of John Buchan (whose own weird tales deserve to be far more widely read). In the 1920s, Blackwood studied at Fontainebleau with Gurdjieff, whose Meetings With Remarkable Men shares some of the vision of Blackwood’s The Centaur. As the century progressed, Blackwood’s weird output dropped off, and his later writing focussed more on children’s fiction and whimsy, including a theatrical collaboration with Elgar  (The Starlight Express – later regurgitated by Andrew Lloyd Weber as a popular 80s musical). Like many of his literary avatars, Blackwood made a point of avoiding the accumulation of possessions. This unfortunately seemed to include personal wealth, and after his initial success and comfort, financial troubles persisted into his dotage. His last bow was as a popular broadcaster; his twinkling avuncular eyes, striking features and whiff of the exotic combined with his prodigious gifts as a story teller made him a natural and instantly popular star of the new medium of television. Alas, recordings of the broadcasts with which he entranced a rapt nation seem lost to perpetuity. The stories themselves, thankfully, are not.

The post WFR’s 101 Weird Writers #19 — Algernon Blackwood appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.