Art by J.K. Potter

Falling. Falling. Am I no more than some goldfish to be plopped back into the cold water when the sun runs so warm over my scales? Does the eater of the dead deserve no more ceremony than this? Oh, but all of a sudden I am ravenous for so much more than the dead. It is life I would bite—I have acquired a taste for it. There is blood in the ocean and I have determined the source. Ruth, or what is left of her, is drifting somewhere amid the earthly influx. Hundreds of murders, suicides and carrion shuffled off in their sleep and only one I want. But where? Clinging to the underside of an prehistoric whale with its skeleton picked clean, hoping to be forgotten in Lethe’s arduous rapids or clogging the drains and ditches of Elysium?

I strain against the current and brace my webby fins against Hell’s accrual. For all I know, I have never been so far up. Sights I lack the eyes to appreciate foam at my passing: recycled civilizations swallowed whole, once-proud divinities transformed into insensate eels and the bright bodies of enormous fallen angels suspended in the shallows like fishing vessels seen from the bottom. And above even that, a conflagration: the lake of fire where the fat of the land beyond is roasted. My headlamp is a thousand times outmatched. Such radiance would turn me to salt were I not so eminently insoluble. And then I see you, my little worm, spinning daintily at what, if the netherworld had a circumference, I would dub the water’s edge. It is, at any rate, where the water meets its opposite and turns to mist. A fine red mist.

Swim into my mouth, Ruth Blossom.

***

Part Three: The Lost Girl Ruth Blossom

A flake of spite and an iota of crazy met in the ovule and gradually took the shape of a girl. You were unwelcome in the world and, as it could not throw you back, it tried to lose you in the crowd. It would have been easier had you not stood out so, with your incompatible eyes, birdlike bones and unsavory expression. From the start, you were doomed to be an orphan; your parents, running scared from the thing they had made, left you in a copse. Left you no words but the language of nature, which is extremity: The nuns of the orphanage to which you were shortly consigned censured you for the savagery with which you pursued your native tongue, while girls feared you and the boys saw nothing they could twist, bend or break. Could something as eldritch and impartial as that sneering zygote in pajamas be said to have a soul worth saving? But, ah, you adored animals. Especially dead ones; you filled your bunk with stiff kittens and skinned squirrels so that when roll was called and you failed to appear, the proctors pulled the covers back and were greeted with the terminal daze of fresh road kill.

You carried out a ruthless campaign of sabotage on the sedans and SUVs that sat in the lot while their owners came inside to sign the papers to deliver the lucky Johnnies to their new suburban residences; and you stocked the home’s crawlspaces with a trove of pilfered letters, wallet-sized photos and keepsakes stolen from the other children so you could improvise an imaginary family of your own from their deceased mothers and distant relations. But by the time you were ten, you’d boomeranged back from two adoptive families whose complaints—that you were unsociable, vulgar and deceitful—turned you off kin for good. The third time, you opted to run away before you could be retuned like a faulty spigot. It was much better to be born fully armed from the planet’s scalp, needing no one, pleasing to nobody but yourself. Having folks meant having expectations to live up to; you expected nothing. And nothing was a prospect you could aspire to.

As unkempt and clever as an outhouse rat, you fed yourself on crusts and fair-weather charity, getting yourself in and out of backroom encounters in less time than it took to tell. Not that there was a word of truth in the screeds you unfurled whenever you found yourself sitting opposite a social worker. They wanted tragedy on a grand scale. The odyssey of bodily abuses you gave them—centering on bonfires, cheap motels and vacant strip mall lots—could have illuminated the pages of all the storybooks missing from your childhood. As a teenage vagabond working co-ops and the occasional con, you learned to focus the same rangy strength that raked a hoe across a fertile ditch into the little fingers with which you pinched a wallet, plucked a dollar from the collection plate or tickled the prick of a sugar daddy weekender.

You loved flowers best. You loved the way they crumpled in your hands when you squeezed their soft doll-heads. Unable to abide the sensation of being watched in your sleep, you took care to smash all the buds before bedding down in a deserted garden grove on a blanket made of petals. It was in an orchard that you first heard the music crackling in the heart of the woods. Its source was something other than the wandering minstrel you’d expected: a smiling man sitting on a log with a semi-functional radio warbling from the hollow. Such pretty songs. The one about hunchbacks and pedestals ended with a line that made you shiver like the scraggly hawthorns and honey locusts that enclosed you: It is your turn, beloved/It is your flesh that I wear. When you asked how the song was called, my ancient enemy replied that it was one of the Songs of Love and Hate.

“Was that a song of love or a song of hate?”

“They are the same song. Both make the little flowers grow.”

“Does music make the flowers grow?”

“It brings things to the surface.”

But if there was ever a being that seemed content to remain underground, it was Cody Horn-Naquin. You’d heard him spoken of by your fellow vagabonds and sisters of the road: One of the last denizens of a ghost town whose few surviving buildings trembled when the wind blew, he’d elected to stay behind when the government had come to evict the last desperate farmers and exercise sole authority over the cornfields— he was said to have lit them all ablaze, as though to spite the earth. A sinister figure then, possibly the Devil, said to be acting as shepherd to a stable of juvenile criminals and vicious lunatics. These, he claimed, were children that could claim rightful lineage to the Garden of Eden, their ears so close to the primordial soil that they were set free from the erroneous belief in “progress” that plagued the rest of the flat places. For those who thrived in such places, he had nothing but contempt.

“Their feet are swift to shed blood,” he said gesturing at the snaky head of the highway running under the cloud formations, “I am little more than a witness. We’re all witnesses where I live. But for all that, we are prepared.”

“For what?”

“For when the mist grows too thick to see through. My father was a sheriff, you see, and I am his successor in one regard. I keep the peace.”

As he told you of his people, his “No-People,” you awaited the customary creep of good intentions, the moment when this latest minister would try to save you. In fact, he did not even ask your name (fortunately for you, who scarcely had one to give him). Instead, he offered shelter in a place between places, a way station for the willfully lost.

“Sounds like a damn Church to me.”

“Far from it. But at my house, we have the same number of mansions. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?”

There were so many wonderings rolled into the bolus of strange that sat before you that it seemed pointless to ask any question at all. Instead you offered the only assertion you had handy and said, “I’m Ruth.”

“Like the convert in the Megillat.”

“Like the Babe,” you said, having picked up a line or two from your travails in the unclean motels and truck stops of Gatlinburg. Cody just laughed and asked if you had a surname to hang on that mouthful and when you replied that you’d used up all the ones ever given you, he crushed flowers in your hair and—for all that he was not a priest—baptized you anew.

Ruth Blossom: a strange name by most standards, but not one that especially distinguished you among the No-People, who had dwelt for years under the nose of the state troopers in an old chicken ranch consisting of a house, a smattering of trailers and a dozen leaky bathtubs, living off their own harvest and leaving no traces. There you had friends like Eula Dogwood, who had rowed her canoe away from a sexual reorientation camp called Refuge one warm Tennessee night and never looked back; Clifford Milkweed, the carny’s boy who up and left the fairground in despair of a destiny biting the heads off chickens; and your very best friend, Molly Birch, who still wore the hospital bracelet that said she was insane. Their birth-names belonged to somebody else—to the pieces of paper stapled to the side of telephone poles, the databases they hacked to erase any record of their existence and the backs of the cartons that were the sum of their impact in the commercial sector. You were the missing persons. A society of self-preservationists disappeared from group homes, delinquency centers or what, with ironic redundancy, the chorus of castaways called “a bad situation.” Everything set adrift must come to rest somewhere; from a communion of loners came unity.

The actual population of runaways calling the ranch home shifted with the years. But the number was always holy. A beacon to prodigals who learned of it via rest stop graffiti or resolved to investigate crude rumors pertaining to a secret nerve center of angelic rejects. Sometimes, it was true, you couldn’t help but think of yourselves as angels. Hair bathed white by the light of the burgled computers, limbs insect-thin from spending the bulk of your days indoors, you monitored the progression of the planet’s decline from the anonymity of the Internet. Operating under a variety of screen names, you crunched numbers on global warming, despoliation of the glaciers, calculated the likelihood of meteors colliding with earth and distributed classified information from agency motherboards. It was impossible to know from which direction the end of the world would come, but Cody maintained the No-People as the last line of defense against the Apocalypse. It was better, he said, that the planet be defended by an impartial jury.

Not that your role as civilization’s secret saviors consumed all your time. Board games, for example, were treated with a severity that bordered on the fanatical. Split into teams, you fell asleep in your trailers planning the opening gambits of the next day’s round of Risk and the No-People’s jargon, online soubriquets and inside jokes revolved around these alliances. Your particular passion was for Stratego; you excelled at picking off the spies and miners as they idled down the game board with their numbers withheld. Cody seemed to attach particular importance to this game, which was held to be even greater than Clue, one of the few games that he actively played. Usually his role was as arbiter, gamesmaster.

He only had one friend of his own that any of you knew of: the old preacher Ridley DeLeure. From the windows, you’d see DeLeure taking a jaunty step out of his old Trans Am and fanning the clouds of tailpipe smoke with his wide-brimmed hat. For the most part, he never fraternized with the rest of you, preferring to meet Cody privately, in the rumpus room. The two of them would stay up talking excitedly, arguing sometimes over vague theological matters that were of little interest to the No-People, whose first experiences of God had been uniformly unpleasant (some, like Molly Birch, had even been subjected to exorcisms in their youth). In any case, Clifford, Eula and the others paid little attention to him—after years tending the digital wheel that kept mankind on the road, the local realities couldn’t help but recede somewhat—but your curiosity was piqued by the strange old hermit. He had the dogged squint and defiantly leveled chin of Stratego’s 9 piece. But if someone grabbed his corners and turned him around, you strongly suspected they wouldn’t find a man at all, but a bomb.

Sneaking around the grounds and going ear-to-door-crack in the dead of night to listen in on the plotting of Settlers of Catan strategies and memorize Battleship moves had been second nature since the games began. Waking one night to shouts ricocheting off the wood paneling, you crept to the top of the stairs on feet like little unpeeled fruits, knelt and listened to the argument unfolding:

“Now Cody, I thought you oughta have fair warnin’. It’s just like you told me in the barn when we was sprouts. There is a plan and I’m dog tired of standing outside it.”

“But you have no right, DeLeure! Universal sin belongs to the universe, to take personal offence at the isolation into which we’re all plunged is worse than heretical, it’s megalomaniacal. I never tried to stop you from going up on that hill and blowing your horn of Jericho because I never believed you’d be so willing to bury us in the rubble. When you came to us in the woods outside Good-Morrow, what were you but a meager false prophet, handling snakes and denuding other fools with parlor tricks? Now it’s the same swindles, but the power is real. Is the truth worth so little that you’d turn around and walk back into the flames from whence I delivered you?”

“I mean to return the favor. History’s not a wheel, it’s a cul-de-sac. No man before me that has had the knowledge that I have has had the sand to turn back toward the source.”

“And become the Christ you ceased to believe in when I showed you the secret.”

“If that’s what it takes. No man has a right to stand outside the fold, Cody. We must be held to accounts. Otherwise progress is impossible.”

“You and I are exceptional creatures, DeLeure, but only one of us is wrong. We alone comprehend that it is death that keeps the Beast at bay, death that keeps him forgetful. When I breathed the red mist inside your mouth, I showed you your place in a design whose watchword is freedom, not the craving for slavery, the hateful wish to lead and be led into pastures. But that freedom has ever been a burden for you.”

“No, old friend, this time the scales have really fallen from my eyes. I accept the burden and the promise of a new earth, you’re the one living in defiance of the righteous judgment. You stand by while innocents perish for the sake of an evil, sinful mankind. I heed the signs and hear proof of our condemnation in the tolls of the dead and the long list of crimes we perpetuate upon the defenseless so that the wicked may thrive and the earth be renewed behind its allotted time. It is an unbearably dirty place, my friend. It must be cleansed for the one to come. Cleansed for the flood.”

“You can’t be serious. You really intend to wake the Beast. And how do you intend to—” And then there came a silence during which a draft like the wind from a pair of enormous winds threw open the door you’d left slightly ajar and Cody muttered, “Goddamn you, of course. He’s here, isn’t he? Listening in.” Before you could scuttle back to your bed, he came running up the stairs, caught you by the shoulders and commenced shaking you until your teeth chattered.

Life among the No-People adopted a dramatically different character in the days following the preacher’s last visit. Convinced of the brutal campaign that would shortly bloody Belladonna’s bluffs and ditches, Cody commenced a less passive mode of resistance. The ranch, which had offered solace to so many waifs and strays, became the site of a training camp where children were prepped to become the foot soldiers of an invisible army. Rifles replaced Diplomacy’s plastic pegs and war games were played outdoors, in the woods behind the ranch. It was an exhausting regimen. Capture the Flag was the highlight of the daily exercises, which began with strenuous laps and hole-digging, followed by a mandatory hour on the shooting range. Taking aim at old mannequins and battered road signs, you wonderedwhat had hardened Cody Horn-Naquin, who had seemed such a charming surrogate, into this cruel and exacting general.

“A place at my table is worth more than rain or tears,” he barked when Eula pinned your arm behind your back in the farmhouse. The others cheered and clapped from the loft as, both clad in fatigues, you fought for the favor of your patron, “Those that sit beside me are the inheritors of the kingdom. Those who falter or display weakness aren’t fit to lick up our crumbs!”

Later, nursing your strained limbs and picking at your plates on the stoop while the winners of the day’s contest dined indoors, you and mad Molly Birch resolved to flee together. Better to take your chances on the uncertain promenade as a bon vivant than continue to exist amongst the merciless No-People, whose once-fortifying spirit of competition had matured into bitter rivalries: Eula Dogwood had matured into a cruel centurion and Clifford Milkweed practiced weird experiments with corpses he dug up and kept in his trailer, the smell of the chemicals he poured over their flesh ruining the taste of what few bones you were thrown. You knew too much about the sadness of dogs to wish to be treated as one, even a dog of war. In short, you wanted no part of whatever Crusade you were being readied for.

The two of you stole away through one of the obstacle courses set up in the gorge, sneaking under the brambles on sore elbows and crawling through a culvert until you emerged in the county’s ragged outskirts. You and Molly hugged each other close, certain of your deliverance. That was before you saw the black car dogging your wayward tracks. Over the following year, your rovings straddled the state line but never completely cured you of the contention that you were being watched from behind dark glass; only being allowed to lope about like a half-starved wildcat until such time as the car that waited for you outside motels and snarled its engine while you licked the backsides of strangers in the rigs of their tractor trailers opened its rusty doors and ushered you back into your station at Cody Horn-Naquin’s side. He had always claimed to have special plans for you. “Little flower,” he used to say, “you will be planted so deep in the garden that none will know you for my serpent.” But no one knew you for anything. In that anonymity was power. You were certain of this and certain that whatever role the sheriff’s son had in store for you would make the ones you and Molly played in certain grainy amateur films look like home movies.

Still, your premonitions was/were? nothing to the signs that Molly Birch seemed to discern all about her: “My golly, Ruthie, I swear. Today I scratched off three sets of seven, not all at once but over time outta ten lottos. That’s the seven churches of Asia, the seven seals and the seven trumpets. And then I did multiples of the other numbers and you know what I got? That right, 666. So then I started looking at them out-of-state license plates and matching them to the verses in the pocket bible they’s got for sale and you know what I read? The Beast and the false prophet are cast into the lake of fire. I just know it was meant for us, Ruthie. I feel like an angel’s tryin’ to reach you and me, but can’t find the way. And I don’t know why we can’t open our hearts wide enough. What do you think it all means?”

It meant that when the angel came, his white Bigarno opened for the one between the two of you sane enough not to spoil a good racket with continual reference to Eschatology For Beginners. And, though you felt bad about ditching her inside the Higgledy Piggledy, when Doc came you saw the surest way to avoid getting pinched alongside Molly, whose testimony would probably include confession to St. John’s beheading and the crucifixion on top of anything you’d actually done. Doc was so sweet with his “Laisser le bon temps rouler, girl!” and scratchy beard. You were very much in love; a small, blighted bird’s love. The bird the sits atop the rhinoceros or flosses the teeth of the yawning croc. To the grande dame philanthropists and slum-church counselors who had harped upon the goal missing from your life, you could now reply: You wanted to be every animal eventually.

In The Church of Gehenna, you switched out your predator’s fur for a martyr’s feathers. You could plainly see that, in Stratego terms, it was a matter of going from red to blue on the same board, but at least here were new records to play. Cody’s taste in music seldom went beyond Country. And in place of the proud loneliness of the No-People, Ridley’s nightly sermons promised that you might someday be found:

“Listen, friends,” he said, “the word is given to us and the word is water. Water is the flood and the wellspring, the pump and the handle, that which we are given and to which we return  when our arms are freed from this straitjacket of flesh. All the land is encircled by water, our veins are full of it, and I’ll tell you a secret: It’s all the same water, friends. We’re all part of the same pool, and when it trickles through the earth it connects us to Hell. With water we will quench the fire! I’m here to tell you today that we stand upon the spout. The pressure when that cork is finally popped will make us level with Heaven. And when others are drowning, we will float by on a boat laden with enough seed to sow a new earth where this one ran so woefully aground.”

But DeLeure’s commentary on seed spores and budding flora never did address what would become of the wild game when the zoos and jungles were all submerged. The first flood had seen fit to conserve the animals, but Ridley’s cargo was strictly human. He imagined that being beastly meant being without a soul; and so it fell to you, who knew better, to stock Gehenna’s hollowed trunks, gardens and the expansive cave system you called Colonel Mustard with species never yet singled out for radical evolution. But in the age to come, who knew? Perhaps it was not the descendents of apes that would inherit the earth at all, but the offspring of Thistle, the baby goat you found munching plastic at the base of the mountain, or the snouty brood of Balonius Monk, the boar you saved from slaughter a town away and reintroduced into Belladonna’s wilderness.

Going beyond the Church grounds was, in Doc’s words “arrete toi.” All your rescues were, perforce, conducted in secret and under cover of the secondhand moonlight as it reflected in the frog-pond and radiated from the honeysuckle. Your routine consisted in sneaking from your bunk and stealing across the land like an unhinged sister of mercy, whisking opossum from the path of speeding vehicles, nursing wounded deer in their glen, and shepherding the animals into some cove or barn and wait for Doc to find you:

“Sometimes I wonduh why we always gotta meet thusly, pop chock.”

“Because great love never starts at home. And you love me so much, bird dog.”

“I surely do. So keep outta the caves, n’est pas?”

Had you heeded Santo Campo, I might never have heard you coming. Instead, the chicory stabbed your feet. I, undulating through the mineral deposits, perked up. Juniper petals covered the trail of blood you left behind you so Doc, who tore his coat on fences as he searched for you in train cars and boarded-up nightclubs, was too late to keep you from coming ever closer to where I was swimming, deep in the mountain. Amid the wild pigs and rattlers that nested in Colonel Mustard, your mind became twisted as the roots that protruded from the stone and snagged between your toes. Little girl, you were lost. There was no one but dumb herds to hear you scream when you slipped into a crevasse and found yourself plummeting through the darkness, then clutching at nothing and feeling the cold slick stringy nothing clutch back. Dangling above a black subterranean sea, you stared into the void, unaware that it was staring back. Until, gradually, a light came on—a lamp that locked your blue and green eyes with mine, which are no color at all.

You felt yourself slip and, not for the first time, gave yourself up for lost. But the one you had left never left you: your advocate in the valley of doubt, he cried your name as my spittle flecked your boots. And as the monstrous angler leapt like some gibbering piranha out of the underground lake, Cody Horn-Naquin’s arm shot out of the gulch and hauled you back.

What lies did he whisper in your ear, Ruthie, what was the news from Cody Horn-Naquin—if I must still address the adversary by that ridiculous epithet—as he swaddled you in his dark arms? This point of your tale must be surmised, for all I could hear in that catacomb was myself, screaming. Besides, I know what that caitiff said to you, before he pinned a flower in your hair and left you in a clearing for Doc to find. He told you about me. I know because I see the canal I made through your dreams, luring imaginary fawns into my light, gnashing to death the loving parents that appeared to you when you slept. You dreamed my dreams for me, Ruth Blossom, and to you they were horrible nightmares from which you awakened and saw the black car parked outside the Church’s windows. When you put your pink nose to the glass, it roared away in reverse, kicking up gravel and leaving a rose to remind you of your mission. Yes, night by night, the adversary came to you to remind you of your part—that you were charged with nothing less than building a dam against my incursion into your planet’s fetid waters.

But, you fools of Canaan, how could that plan succeed when you are already dead and absorbed into the very Beast you labored to delay? When I see all that you see? And so you were not only Cody’s spy in Ridley’s church, but mine as well; and as you prowled about the compound, reading forbidden magazines, carefully removing alarms and tagging the trees with ciphers for the encroaching No-People, I saw Ridley watching. It was he who had called me, he whose memories nourished me. He practiced for his fated appointment with my small intestine. Eager to give his life so that I might live; who am I to deny the sacrifice of a personal savior? What to call such a man, but a Christ? Though you would call him by a different name.

On the last day, it was not the black car that brought tidings of the coming engagement. Instead, as you woke in the early hours for your usual trip—there was a particular mastiff you were planning to liberate from his masters in Lenoir City—and, walking down the hall with candle in hand you saw your own rain-battered reflection at the dirty window. But then—a ghastly smile split your second face. You reached out to touch your sneering double and she reached back at you, like a living painting that then jerked out of the frame to unlatch the window that Doc had bolted against your flight. Pulling you out and into her arms, the second girl put her arms around the shadow that had cast her and kissed you on the lips.

“Oh Ruthie, isn’t it wonderful? It was Clifford Milkweed—can you believe it?”

It was mad Molly Birch, chemically transformed into the spitting image of Ruth Blossom. She spoke with your mouth, telling you how my adversary had reclaimed her after your desertion. How my enemy had given her new purpose in the salvation of man and remade her in your sweet-limbed likeness. This was how Doc would be deceived into leaving his post, at which point war would erupt in the hills and by a great sin, the world would be saved.

“Molly, no, Doc’s a sweet old thing. It’s not up to you, just let me try.”

“Sorry, Ruthie baby, it is no longer even I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me as I give myself for you.”

And as her white, remodeled throat spilled Cody’s putrid scripture, you heard music. A guitar being strummed in the woods outside the church, where the black car rested. “G’bye now, Ruthie,” said Molly Birch and stepped backward into the ravine. Up jumped Cody Horn-Naquin and deftly strangled her with a guitar string. The whole time he kept her green eye level with your blue one. When you were done watching yourself die, the prophet spoke, saying “It your turn, beloved.”

He thought he knew what pieces he could stand to lose, but I will hold him to this crime too. You watched without specific feeling as he hurled Molly’s body into the back of the black car and drove slowly backward over the smoking ground. Only after he was gone did you allow the candle to drop from your fingers. And such was the dispassion your proxy execution had awakened that if it hadn’t been snuffed out in the fall, Cody’s army might have arrived to find a crispy burnt offering instead of Gehenna’s faithful. But they did not find you, for by then—even as Doc was finding you missing and tracking Cody into the trap you’d both set—you had gone to the caves to release your menagerie. Nature was the only good you still believed in. Its natural state was wild. Craziness, as you’d learned from Molly, was pure. Perhaps too pure to live. Little Ruthie, weeping there as you rode the cattle out of Colonel Mustard, you resembled some fairytale princess. Birds fluttered up from the handmade birdhouses you had fixed for them, you uprooted bats from their belfries and even threw open the doors where you’d hoarded bobcats. The mountain became a paradise, a striped spotted exodus that moved as one body through the countryside, stamping the leaves with their hooves and thundering across the kudzu-covered bridges. The only beast uninvited to join your menagerie was myself. For, once you returned to hide in plain sight at the The Church of Gehenna, you played my hated enemy’s last card and closed your eyes.

In this manner I was denied a glimpse of the carnage that followed. I could only listen with mounting impatience as the cries of wild horses mingled with gunfire and the No-People launched their offensive. Judging from the din, which bore a more-than-passing resemblance to the shriekings of the newly-damned, the long-rehearsed coup wracked the Church, upending idols and pitching its statues through the stained glass. Icons fed a fire that soon singed the vinyl of each record and improvised its tongue up doorcracks even as the building was evacuated. The heretics had arrived at your front door, Ruthie, bringing a purely localized, controlled Judgment Day. It must have been something to witness the walls crumbling, the children-warriors dressed in paint and feathers unfolding from the trees with their rifles and grenades. Timbers fell and glass broke, but you did as the adversary had told you and kept your spying eyes shut. I heard the laments of Ridley’s believers as they whimpered in captivity, the wails that rushed down the same hallways where you blindly felt your way to Ridley’s quarters. What could I do? You would have been safer in my stomach. Instead you refocused your orbs on the enormous sharpened crucifix my herald Ridley DeLeure was engaged in hanging from the ceiling.

“The cross of Saint Peter,” said DeLeure, as he leapt from the ladder and turned to face you, “Looks good, don’t it? Carved outta onyx. You’re just in time girl. I was just fixin’ to put the finishing touches on it.” So saying, the onetime prophet of Good-Morrow placed three nails into you palm and asked, “Care to give me a hand?”

“I am come to give you a whole hell more’n that,” you said, and dropped the nails between their flattened relatives in the floorboards, “I’m keepin’ you from doin’ something terrible to yourself and every other person too.”

“I would have waited, but the red mist has forced my hand once again. Have you heard of the red mist, child? It is the mist that wells up from the netherworld and takes the form of Hellish things. We give up water and gain smoke. But our age has bequeathed an awful misbalance. Far too much water has been spilled and only a chosen few have the mist. I got it from Cody, who tried to keep me from the sacrament, I gave it to Doc and—poor little Ruthie, I’ve often wondered if Satan himself was your Daddy. I reckon he might as well’ve been. You of all folk should know the iniquity of man.”

“In the eyes of God, man is an animal too. He don’t know no better. Have mercy, Ridley DeLeure, have the mercy that’s missing every damn place else.”

“Don’t let’s be ungracious.” And putting a hand into your sticky hair he added, “After all, it is for your sake that I go to my reward.”

“But,” you demurred, “I don’t want you to die for me. I want you to stay here with me and Doc and even Cody Horn-Naquin, who loves you and wants to keep you.”

“Ah, but I was not speaking to you,” he said and twisted your hair hard as he stared into the flaming pools of your eyes and I frothed up at him, all attention, “I was speaking to you, Leviathan. I have remembered everything, in order, I have arranged my soul for your scrutiny so that you may find the way. I have everything covered on this side. By now Cody will have disposed of Santo Campo. Both my servants shall go down beside me—a gambler and a whore. Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about seeking whom he may devour.”

“But,” screamed my mischievous bud though she knew herself to be nipped, “what if you never get to Hell? What if you go to Heaven?”

Ridley flung you to the ground and cursed, “Oh, I am aware of the righteous life I lived, always doing God’s work and fumigating the land for His next crop. Until this moment, I have never sinned. That’s the task left for you, Ruthie. Let’s see how many sins we can work out between us.”

And so? saying, he fell upon you.

*          *          *

Too soon! Too soon am I vanquished! A story cannot subsist without characters and all of mine are dead. A story needs a beginning, a middle, and an end. But the lives of these three are all mixed together. Muddled and fused. They plummet with tremendous weight, passing out of life. I fall with them, shrunk to the size of a minnow. Flip, flop, I am tossed by the finger I longed to bite back into my bottomless parlor. Pity your poor angler, for I have no eyes left to see. No living witness remains to testify on my behalf. But I can hear Cody Horn-Naquin gloating, hear his relief that another of our duels is closed. Standing over the slaughter, flames licking audibly over his skin, the adversary speaks:

“So the dust is dust and the rose petals lie trampled upon the ground. I know you have heard this before, but in this exchange, as in all our conflicts, I take no pleasure. I remember what we were. I recall how we were split. It is mine to remember and yours to forget. But the souls are the same, split evenly between us. They’re all yours and all mine. It’s only smoke and water. Creation, at its base, consists of only the two of us. You are my audience, Leviathan, the world is what I write for your entertainment, and because there is nothing else to do. The token of such a covenant is friendship. And love. Love is what they took from you. I tried to show it to Ridley, and that was my mistake. Now, at last, I have accounted for it. And all that’s left to say is that you will always be my friend. I keep a close watch on this heart of mine. Try to remember.”

The post Backwater, Part III of III appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Hell used to be such a chaotic, disorderly place. A strict plutocracy. Every theology and system of divine accounting vied for dominance. The Devil retained a power of veto, but was assiduously petitioned by disgruntled representatives of the Sumerian underworld, Haitian lua and Limpopo Death gods who complicated the road to heaven with obscure injunctions. Now Hell is in the hands of the Allotment, the combined force of every Titan, Æsir and minor Nephilim. Everyone—or at least everyone dead—is raked across its pillar, bardo or eightfold path in turn. Prior to taking the chute that feeds my river, each soul faces an impartial jury: Osiris takes the heart in hand and places it on a scale, whereupon its lightness is determined against the requisite feather. Odin hangs the same soul from a branch of Yggdrasil, the World Tree, so as to discover whether the strength of its faith in Valhalla outstrips the steely bark. Kali dances upon the dead body’s bones until they are ground and with her six arms unriddles the dust of which he is made to reveal aspects of lepers and kings, inspecting each life to see whether this was the best. This way no one is unrepresented, disappointment is minimalized and no religion is privileged over another way of life. But bordered by so many checks and balances, salvation becomes impossible.

I exist to put out the fire of life. The Allotment will not find I have shirked my task if I devour the souls that interest me first. And now, though I have lost DeLeure forever, a new knot of essence, congealed with Elysian kelp and radiant with my rival’s conspiracy, comes drifting into view.

Why such an exodus from the land of living? Was there a massacre? A war? Or did I overslumber on the flat places’ final day and spend the Judgment preening the parasites from my scales? Either way, to be at all is to be related to me. Dogpaddle along the stream if you will; all things wind up crushed between my jaws. Swim into my mouth, Luther Santo Campo, called “Doc.”

***

Art by J.K. Potter

Part Two: The Gambler Luther “Doc” Santo Campo

We all end in flies, it said or seemed to say. The insect had landed on your infant eyelashes and, perched iridescently above your face, it allowed you to count its eyes. To see the world through its wings. It agreed to become your patron; a fly in swamp country, where Christmas lights hung from the willows year-round and news came by pirogue, was a most capable agent. From that day forward, your care and attention to detail operated at a minute distance from the surface. Yes, you knew where all the small things were. Your mind ably crossed-stitched the cleavage between acts and their consequences and so your friends called you Doc. Eventually you forgot all about Luther Santo Campo, the poor river-rat son of Cajun shipbuilders, pushed off from your birth-shore and got well afloat before the raft commenced its spinning and you sensed me in the water, nipping at your toes when you chanced death.

A player of propositions was a natural occupation for someone blessed with an algebraic gaze. You needed but cough and possibilities narrowed to their outcomes: you bet on mosquito bites, weighing by their size precisely how much blood each insect could carry; owned a prize bullfrog that always caught an odd number of flies; gambled on the moods of chameleons and guessed at the combined age of all the local obituaries. At Gondola’s Casino, you made a gentleman’s agreement with the staff: you would lose occasionally. Watching the hypnotic juggle of cigarette tips, the feckless tells of those desperados with mullets like Roman Centurions, you came to the conclusion that Gondola was piping in a custom blend of nitrous oxide and a faintly toxic agent filched from the swamp to encourage spending by disorientation. Par en sous. When you calmly confronted the impresario with your findings, you found yourself with a place on the staff and a generous check you gladly cashed in exchange for a prematurely aged exterior. And then there you were: A gray bearded folk hero with kind eyes and a ring of bones around his hat. Your title—Problem Solver—amused you and, in time, it was how you learned to see yourself. Dit mon la verite!

“Hey Doc, we got us a belligerent in the Santería room. We took his knife at the door, but the dude came in tanked. He’s falling all over the regulars and losing steadily.”

“Well now junior, it don’ madda. Dat’s a problem gonna take care of itself. Jus’ give dat dude a chance to embarrass himself. Cracher en l’air ca va tomber sur le nez, that’s what ah say. Say now kiddo, what kinda shirt is bel homme wearin’ asteur?”

“Alligator pattern Doc.”

“Caimon? Well that’s good for starters peeschwank, now pay attention ‘cause ah like you—say, was that there knife be’s bein’ a big ol’ cocain skullfucker or one of them weenier moochons?

“Skullfucker, Doc.”

“Well, there you go, Junior, guy’s got the gumbo. Here’s how we’re gonna play it. Dis couyon starts to bother any of dem nice people again, you tell the guys jus ask him is dat a crocodile or alligator and when he’s thinkin’ it ova he’ll forget to hide his cards, get all fout pas mal and get himself disqualified. Den he’s the bar’s problem and they can jus wait for him to fall asleep and haul him to the banket. Now is that a plan or am ah funnin’ you?”

Two minutes later, you felt like a boogalee Octavian before the security monitors:

“You were right Doc. It did work itself out.”

“What did ah tell you, podna? Pass a slap if ah ever steer you wrong, it worked itself on out, right junior?”

“You said it, Doc. Worked itself out.”

The casino closed for Yule and to avoid being caught moping around the grounds, you fled to the landlocked states with no purpose but to go rodee’ and do the fly’s work for a spell, flitting between dung piles. You bought and reasonably restored a boat-sized stunt speeder with the words GRANDE BIGARNO painted on the side and whose last owner had left it with a sequence of improvements that began with a convenient flame retardant coating left over from the filming of Stand Up For Bastards! and ran all the way to a secondary fuel tank, which it’s a shame no one told you never got hooked up to the gauge because you wound up left in the lurch when the beastly claptrap ran out of fuel in some corncobbly Nowheresville off Highway 81.

Noticing how the brightening headlights lit up the recently laid street tar, you opted out of the usual thumbery and attempted shadow puppets. Spider-doing-pushups and sea-anemone missed the mark, but rabbit lured a charitable motorist to the curb.

‘Scuse me podna,” you said as you slumped, a sopping wet mound of smoke-smelling leather, into the passenger’s seat, “Seems ah’m a castaway of de broke-down variety. Here’s hopin’ you ain’t a swinger or nothin’.”

“Far from it, my brother,” said the stranger and pulled the raincoat loose from his collar so you could see he was a priest, “My church was made for castaways.”

“Reckon ah done gambled away mah credit wit’ de upstairs department.”

“And yet you were selected,” his grin wider than the highway strip, “I prayed for a herald to do God’s work on earth and He sent me you. I knew you by the sign of the mendicant.”

“Qui c’est q’ca? Ah was intendin’ a hare.”

“Close enough.”

The car followed the signs west until roadside hotels and billboards disappeared and all the manifold trauma of cities seemed pinned between the yellow lines of the road. Around here the towns were one-street ramshackles, blazing white churches and bent track. Some two dozen hectic years of progress and decline in the outlying world faded before the barbed wire and rebar that looped in this infinitely slighter planetoid, as though to ensnare the rare visitors from the highway. In regions of such primeval isolation, the Great Flood or Second Coming is a greater heartache than the elections or wars that preoccupy the spoony masses of the flat places. You were closer to Hell than you could have guessed and after an hour of this diabolical landscape, the priest asked if you could make out a black car in the rear view, following at a distance of a mile with its lights off. You replied you couldn’t, but that you knew it was there as surely as you knew that the mouse hides silver dollars in his hole or that stagnant juice goes boozy in the open air. Even odder was your certainty that this was not the first fog that had hid the black car’s metallic, scum-covered shanks from you.

“I knew it,” said the priest, “It follows me wherever I go.” Only then did he introduce himself: he was the deacon of Good-Morrow and his name was Ridley DeLeure.

The flies that attended your birth circled in a halo as you reached the crest of a rising, many-precipiced hill. (“E ou ce qu’il reste?”) A pointed, venerable church stood there, covered in a stained glass Savior of riotous hues. Your patron took you inside his city of refuge. Never had you seen such an amassing of sacred things: chthonic gods kept watch over victory gardens that sprawled like portable Edens around the perimeter; miniscule arches and cupolas dressed model cities of Babylon, Jerusalem, Nineveh and Antioch; mounted pike wheels strung with Bible verses turned in perpetuity; the brick path to the ziggurat was overhung with latticework and studded with mirrors.

“Where we at, preacher?”

“Belladonna County. A place that used to be called Good-Morrow. But now it is no-place. Home to the no-people. I call it the Church of Gehenna.”

Inside the church were quarters to house a community roughly the size of Gondola’s nightly clientele and a rectory basement that widened into a catacomb stockpile. You touched the walls where they left off stone and became what you strongly suspected was the excess metal of recycled school buses. You estimated expiration dates for the amassed vegetables and sealed packets of condensed foodstuff and registered that you’d found yourself transported to a fortress against the final days. Rooms had been prepared to mimic an uninhabitable outer world, with dioramas devoted to days at the circus, evenings under stars that turned out to be zodiacal trompe l’oeils. Indoor duck ponds, beaches and veldts; a life’s work in cultivated fauna, mail-order flora, laborious handicraft and soldered metal trees. In one room, you found your face or at least a striking resemblance.

“That’s The Gambler by the prophet Kenny Rogers. This is the record room. So that the children that inherit the earth can have all that I, in my youth, was denied. I have quite a collection, but I began with this. You see? Your place in the Divine plan.”

This part you never questioned, for what’s the harm in swapping one illusion for another when the stakes are small and everything appears like a temporary clot on the windscreen? Life was a game for you, Santo Campo (called Doc) and what were you but a player? Take a chance and place your bets, said the fly, and if Judgment Day does come, you’ll have a roof over your head and records to play. In Ridley DeLeure’s Church of Gehenna you’d been dealt a strange hand indeed. But you never questioned his mission, never mocked his garden of earthly delights—the most fruitful plain in a receding world where he proposed the future would begin.

“The snake is on its climb, Doc,” quoth Belladonna’s homegrown prophet, “but I found the way out. For thirty years I’ve broken rocks and soldered metals so that the saved may have an ark when the kingdom comes. But it’s no good without the wretched.  Without the meek.”

“The meek, n’est pas? Y’hear so much about dem.”

“Those to whom the earth is unfriendly. Go forth and find them. Fill my church with the ones worth saving.”

When you returned to the Grande Bigarno with an urn of oil tucked behind the seatbelt, an invisible clarion hummed in your ears. The song of an archangel who had found his calling. As for the blessed few fated to survive the Reckoning, you knew you’d know them when you saw them. Some you would recruit, others would have to come to the new church under false pretenses.

You painted your orange car white and chased roads back where they came from. As for the elect, your judgment never faltered, and it was the same game as before, wasn’t it, except instead of guessing at clubs and diamonds you were weighing the best among men. The hopeless, the lost, the trod upon, broken and holy; you looked into their hearts like I’ve eaten into yours and saw how marked they were for salvation, smoking alone outside pizza parlors, bent over gas pumps. You became adept at sweeping them from the chairs of tattoo parlors, finding them asleep on benches and, when forced to enter the cities, you lay in wait in your car with the same song playing over and over. Every night on earth had one absolutely perfect song. Finding it was just a matter of paying attention to the way the wind clattered and the trains howled their requests for the jukebox. You let songs guide you to the strays and lost souls Ridley’s church required. And when they approached, you opened the door and carried them away like an angel come for? a sick man. That’s right—we have a ferryman here too, as you may have heard, and you acted as a perfect antipode. In this way, the two places came one step closer to the equilibrium that Heaven has always bandied about and Hell has always shunned.

Lands long believed fallow bristled to life under your care, as the children you saved colored the hillocks with their shirts and playthings: toy airplanes that had run afoul of the updraft and fallen between two sulking crags, rocking horses left to blanch in the sun, wiffle bats and wooden dolls imprinted in a patch of moss. These were the only clues that the topsy-turvy peaks were anything but deserted. The pines were hung with secret chimes, so that when one of your flock spotted a distant lineman’s maintenance vehicle or stray hiker distending the perfect flatness of the horizon, the community, in a flurry of sneakers and Big Wheels, fled to the sanctuary of the catacombs and huddled in a storied nook until you or DeLeure announced over intercom that the danger was passed.

Even during those tense intervals, when silence and fear trespassed in Ridley’s peaceable kingdom, all it took was one wink from you, a scratch from your whiskers or a coin snatched from an ear, and once again childish laughter wafted like honey down the halls. The Church of Gehenna was a happy place, free from the wounds that festered in the land below. No magazines or books entered the complex without your review; you alone were the measure of how much secular matter mingled with DeLeure’s gospel truth. And so you were certain no one knew of the black car that sometimes circled the base of the mountain in the forlorn and secondhand starlight of the early morning.

The first time you saw little Ruthie, she was in the parking lot of the Higgledy Piggledy Mart rifling through a dumpster. And—beaucoup crasseux!—it was the presumptive Dumpster of the Covenant! She’d accrued an astonishing pile of cast-off dresses, wigs, socks and a pair of platform shoes. There was no need to be picky—Ruth had one blue eye and the other one was green, so everything matched. And she wasn’t so little, not really. Even in the lights of the Bigarno, you recognized an experienced demoness in local costume: Daisy Dukes, navel pierced with a ruby snare, red tank top with spaghetti straps, hair like a startled skunk. The girl was mal pris; yours was not the first car Ruth Blossom had climbed inside. She told you, once the night music soothed her initial alarm at encountering kindness, that her diet consisted of the milk they left in front of the department store in the morning supplemented by sparkly ChapStick and fingernails.

“J’ai gros couer. Yuh poor darlin’ pop chock.”

“Pop chock?” Ruth Blossom twisted inside the seatbelt, “What is pop chock?”

“It means little bird. And I’m the bird dog’s gonna take you home to roost.”

But it wasn’t in Ruth’s nature to roost, was it Doc? She was an occupational runaway like you were a gambler: inevitably, the same sleepless nights you spent playing solitaire in your office were the ones when Ruth slid out her window on a knotted bedsheet and hastened through the sycamores. “Mais, jamais d’la vie,” you’d sigh at the first report of Ruth’s truancy, don your hat and coat off the hook on the door (“E you ce qu’t’as mit mon chapeau?”) and commence checking the local caverns, grottoes and the abandoned homesteads that littered the gorge below. Often she’d leave polite little trails for you—dice, rose petals or paper dolls—that you’d follow to a half-burned barn and find her sleeping in the hayloft. Gazing at her face criss-crossed by the cataract-colored light that leaked through the beams, you’d shrug and softly say “Fais do-do, pop chock.” Opening the green eye, she’d reply, “Hello, bird dog.”

Outside a few close calls in the mountain’s dankest crevasses, she usually didn’t get far—there was nowhere to go and, besides, running was how she showed her affection. At least, that was how you explained it to Ridley when he worried aloud that this painted serpent might inveigle the compound into widespread defiance.

“She don’ mean to make the misere, Ridley. Girl’s jus’ otier foux. Half-crazy’s better den all.”

“Your faith in this particularity is greater than mine,” answered Ridley DeLeure, and mused quietly, as though speaking to himself alone, “That girl has the red mist inside her.”

That was all he said. Co faire? Mention of the red mist always came at the end of the priest’s conversations, never at the beginning, so you took it for the curious euphemism of an obscure dialect. Then came the unusually misty morning in December when, playing the Madame in your customary slippers and crawfish-motif apron, you roused your wards for breakfast and found neither Ruth among them, nor the bebette overslumbering in her bedroom nor any tracks to show you where she might have gone. Not even the barest print of a cleated sole, much less her customary trail of telltale flotsam. And yet there was one thing. You noticed how the dew sparkled on all the mountain’s frosty surface but for the treads of your daily passage worked into the road that ran under every outcrop and sheer cliff. No stranger to the sense of being certain despite the odds, you concluded another car had come this way, up the hill in reverse so as to trace your tire marks with uncanny precision. You also concluded that Ruth Blossom had not left of her own free will, but that she had been taken against it.

The Grande Bigarno, fired up to full stunt-car capacity, raced backward over its own circuit through Belladonna’s backwoods. Like a spider pulling in her laundry, you undid a day’s progress in an eighth of the time. For thirty miles phantoms crawled across your rearview mirror, coyotes crowded your wake; you paid no mind, zeroed in to the hairpin turns where the tracks of the second car diverged ever so minutely from your own. In chicken country, wire fences and mangy muttering cockatrices—things more lizard than bird—guarded the gravel road that reached out over the dirt where you could plainly see the grooves your phantom had driven into the earth smoking in the early morning. You swung the wheel hard, sending feathers flying and raining down a hail of pebbles on the stray hounds that nipped at your hind.

Ridley had deceived you when he’d called this land deserted. Not that you’d ever really doubted that some of the godforsaken houses of the region still had inhabitants in them. The same Santo Campo who’d always been able to guess which of two warblers would yield the more oblong egg could feel them scratching behind screen doors, these all-but-invisible no-people that seldom left the rooms where they lived out their strange, solitary lives. You’d long suspected that transients tended to the stunted vegetation and battled wild pigs for food here on the mountain’s inverted dark side and had seen no point in making a bahbin. So you weren’t shocked at the human debris riddling the ranch behind the fence—milk gushing from hastily dropped pails, weathervanes creaking over hay bales bearing fresh fingerprints in the straw, ominous coops aglow with feral, cannibal eyes—but the scale of the secrecy required for a whole commune to function under your nose was impressive.

In the driveway was a black car. Scraping ice from the window, you made out a stripped girlish form lying akimbo over the torn leather. With a crowbar fetched from the Bigarno’s caisse, you smashed away the glass and hauled the dead body (“Zeerahb!”) out and into your arms. It looked like Ruth; but there was no fooling the fly, poised as he was on the imposter’s blue lips, then crawling down to where you could plainly see how the mole on the back of her broken neck had been moved too close to the hairline. The piercings still bore tiny scabs, the makeup was two shades too bright and, most tellingly, the eyes were the right colors but in the wrong order. Contacts, skin bleaches, expert surgery: someone had gone to a lot of trouble to convince you you’d come too late. But judging from the abandoned bowls of cereal that greeted you from the farmhouse’s hardwood tables, you’d arrived ahead of schedule.

Soc au’ lait! Blinking computer terminals, radios and a multitude of board games marked an outpost almost equal to the Church in its microcosmic sprawl. But whereas you and Ridley had stocked closets full of jigsaws, devotional poetry and illustrated bibles, the search you conducted across the grounds turned up instruments of guerilla warfare: bullet-riddled targets, drawerfuls of stolen keys tagged with the addresses of the doors they opened, maps covering all Belladonna’s bulwarks and potential caches. The trailer-barracks out back suggested a company being trained for an invasion; the rows of lockers cleaned out but for bullet casings suggested one already in progress. In something like thirty-five years (since you looked twice your age anyway, you’d frankly lost count) the fly had never failed you, so you had only your own head to swat when you realized the trap you’d walked into. Sure enough, when you turned to leave, a shot fired through the kitchen window from the almost perfect cover of the woods kept you indoors.

Stay with me, Santo Campo—don’t dare shirk from the moment you’ve been trying to sequester within more buoyant mind droppings. This was the occasion of your ultimate dishonor, en bouts des dents. Coming here had left the Church open to attack, bereft of anyone with your eye for impending catastrophe. Who was this army of shadows and how many were marching this very minute to take Ridley’s tabernacle by force? Meanwhile, you were a hostage, hemmed-in by warning shots. (“Foutre!”) Any way you sliced it, you’d walked into fate with your zipper down, and there was nowhere to go but down, over shag-carpeted stairs into the wood-paneled rumpus room. And what a rumpus awaited you there.

A comfortable modern den, refuge of some long gone hobbyist whose model train piped through a painstaking miniaturization of the county as it would have appeared a generation past. The rest of the décor was made up of the unsold goods of a dozen yard sales: basket chairs, neon beer signs, ceramic frogs and, in the center of the room, a card table with a deck radiating through the smoke and ichor.

Humped over a bar as you entered, you were sure you were shot when he turned around. Instead Cody Horn-Naquin—a wicked rock and roll changeling retaining childish mien despite the gray in his wild pompadour—handed you a glass of whiskey with his left hand and toasted you with the identical tumbler held in his right.

“Here’s to you, Doc,” setting both glasses on the card table, “and to honky tonk angels and The Queen of Country Music.”

“You de capon dat drives dat ugly chouchoot?”

But the sheriff’s son only arched his eyebrows so that there could be no confusion, though you were neither of you behind the wheel, concerning who was the driver and who the passenger at this moment. You scanned the room for some detail to use to your advantage and registered only that a third place was set at the table.

“Dis party only fo’ me? Or you spectin’ some other skinny mullet?”

“For the one you bring with you, though if we’re lucky he won’t recall the courtesy. He sees with your eyes, watches our present in a time yet to come. But then, time flows differently underwater and makes allowances for the master you do not know you serve.”

“Poo-yee-yi, Parron DeLeure’s a size’ble distance from heah.”

“Ridley?” My enemy shrugged, “I don’t love any man better. Not in this life, at any rate. What we have is a sort of, uh, an ontological disagreement. I was speaking of someone else. But never you mind,” Gesturing to the cards, “Shall we get down to it?”

“De bon coeur. And if ah win?”

“Don’t guess you will, Doc.”

But it was the same tired rahdoht you used to hear at the bourré tables; Cody Horn-Naquin was simply enough of an amateur to believe a good cheater superior to a natural born Acadian. He hadn’t reckoned with a real gambler, one liable to knock back a bottle of whiskey and beat six hands like a personal acquaintance of the royal family. Which is just what you did, the legendary Luther Santo Campo back whole hog after years of having only seventeen-year-old sharps and yourself to play against. Again the couyon shuffled his trick deck and dealt his marked cards and again you pretended not to notice when he hid an ace (It ain’t gon’ help him none). You obliged your rival at every juncture, switched from regular poker to stud, then to blackjack and even exotic variants like pontoon and lansquenet. Once Cody Horn-Naquin was reduced to mucking his hand, you decided enough was enough (“T’en cas toi, boy, you jus’ don know when to fold’ em.”), swept the cards and whiskey off the table and showed him your slappin’ hand.

After a few minutes you said, “Gar ici, ah’m lookin’ fo a little cher, answers to Ruthie,” and lifted Cody’s face—the sharp parts of which you’d seen fit to blunt—out the indoor plumbing so he could answer you properly.

“She didn’t make it.”

“Somebody didn’t,” You had a strict policy for dealing with cheats; you confiscated their knife and gave them the business. Technically, the house was supposed to keep the weapon, but you stowed a few for posterity like the treacherous, gold-handled stiletto with which you commenced to shave Cody Horn-Naquin on both sides. He made an awful potain, then, at long last, laid his cards on the table.

“She’s not here, Doc.”

“Alohrs pas,” Of course not, “Where’s she at den?”

“She never left,” said my scolded foe, “Only made you think otherwise.”

“Fait pas une esquandal,” Which was to say, ‘knock it off,’ and in lieu of exclamation you plunged him into the model town where he lay like a fallen monument and finally spat out the extent of Ruth Blossom’s betrayal:

“It was always the plan. The only way to save Ridley’s life, Doc. He’s in terrible danger and such run the stakes that we had to take you off the board any way we could. It’s not your fault you’re on the wrong side of Heaven. But make no mistake, Ruthie would have killed you if I had asked her to.”

“Boy, your game been in the pochom all day and that’s your worst play yet. Why would she go an’ do a awful thing like that for?”

“To avert the end of the world. That good enough for you, Doc?”

Good? You no longer knew the meaning of the word as you dragged Cody upstairs and walked outdoors with him held before you like a gris-gris to ward off the snipers in the trees. You’d played for the better part of the day, but instead of bringing on the night, the sky was turning a sanguine shade of red. The Sun scabbed over. The air turned to poison. Cody howled to the congealed heavens, “Looks like doomsday’s coming early, Doc. The Beast cometh down. Sweet Jesus, he’s going to remember everything. Come on, we haven’t much time.” Then the red mist came swirling out, forcing out all annular logic like color and shape, forcing the fly from his perch between your eyes, forcing out the stars and forcing out me, as my meal finally gives up the ghost and I come to the last of Luther Santo Campo.

The post Backwater, Part II of III appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Last week began and ended with work from the French–not my own, but translations by Kit Schluter and Katie Assef, doing wunderkind Weird precursor Marcel Schwob and twisted Belgian fabulist Nadine Monfils, respectively. Last week also saw the highlight of a classic favorite by Kelly Link, courtesy of Adam Mills (all hail Adam Mills!) who until recently was WFR’s very capable managing editor (he will be sorely missed–is already, in fact). Then on Thursday we took a turn for horror humor with a gory vampire redneck tale from proud South Carolina native Grady Hendrix, and on Friday finished up with some delectably perverse doings in Venice.

This week at WFR, I am proud to present J.W. McCormack’s visionary short novella Backwater, serialized in three installments. McCormack grafts his heady, pyrotechnic prose to the Biblical backbone of a rip-roaring Armageddon adventure in a Weird update of deep Southern Gothic featuring snake preachers, Cajun gamblers, cult compounds, and teenage runaways–all narrated by Hell’s own anglerfish, who gleans life stories from souls as he digests them. This will be accompanied by images from J.K. Potter, well-known for his covers and art for Subterranean Press.

Backwater will appear Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, while Tuesday and Thursday will showcase an original sequence of weird prose poems by G.C. Waldrep inspired by the work of outsider artist George Widener.

Bringing the Weirdness,

e.g.

The post Summer Solstice appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Art by J.K. Potter

Swim into my mouth and I will tell you who you are. Have I said this part before? It’s impossible for either of us to know for sure; I can’t recall, and you’re certainly in no position to answer. The same forgetful straits that washed you down here confine utterance to the randomly spurting intervals between your death and my digestion. Memory is scarcer than air, more precious than daylight. It has been such a long time since I have seen the surface. But the memories you bring with you from the flat places tell me little has changed since I dwelt there, under the sun. Ah, that sun. Always streaming. It has left some light there, in your eyes. But the light that hangs over me is brighter. You are so deep now that only consequences can breathe. Gently, now: It is no longer consequences you need to be afraid of. It is me. I am coming to get you. Have I said this part before?

I am the anglerfish of Hell and all its rivers flow into my pool. Only the words have not rotted inside your skull, only the words remain. I’ve worked up quite a little collection. Benthic means bottom-dwelling, but you need but witness my dorsal tread—the casual, almost dainty, swish of my denticles—to realize that this valley is without depth. I am the eater of the dead. Swim into my mouth or be dashed upon the rocks; evanesce or be reborn according to your worth.

My own worth must have fallen short of the ferryman’s fee, for I retain no eyes of my own. But I will see you when my lamp, bobbing back and forth in the wrinkled water, lights up the life you have left behind. It is always the same. For all I know, it is always the same.

The skin is tough, but the meat is familiar. Have I eaten you before? Or was this your first birth? You did poorly enough that it might well have been your first birth. And the way you tried to hide behind the slender corals and protozoa, as though single cells could conceal you. Poor soul, you are not the first to flee from this subaqueous servant of eternity, to try and slip away inside the suspended bottles that, from the beginning of time, have entrenched themselves in the drifting offal; they contain phlegmatic humors, Chinese dragons, Saturn and the last remains of ichthyosaurs. They also contain hope—corked.

The truth of the matter is even more horrible than I am. Day down here is night with human-shaped holes. This is what you have come to: a dim spore that passes through my scabby fins and is no more. I have choked one thousand sparks and never the one I want. Because the underworld is a place where no particular prejudice orbits another, hatreds hold equal. I have nothing against anyone but my enemy. When I devour the adversary, whose hatred is my sole conviction, it will be sweet. I will be content when I have gnashed his ghost between my fangs. Perhaps I will be released.

When first I was flung into this tumbling sea, when the Allotment offered me this function, they promised that one day my cold and slivery stomach would be warmed by the much cooler fire of my foe. I have been looking for him among the schools of the reincarnate, swimming to and fro. But I have never caught him in my lamp. I am no longer even sure I would still know him if I saw him. Or perhaps I swallowed him long ago. Have I said this part before? No matter—it is time to tell your story and learn how human you managed to become. Will you go down easy, little child, or will you stick in my throat? Swim into my mouth, Ridley DeLeure.

*          *          *

Part One: The Antinomian Ridley DeLeure

Your race, those residual aromas in your overall flavor, emigrated from vividly painted bogs to a land so dry that the f withered from the family name, from Fleure to Leure, for it was thought that no flower could prosper here. And yet prosperity was fully one half of the gospel your parents engraved in your larval self. The other half was pain and they did it with prayers, snakes, and switches on your skin. The combination raised welts under your clothes, poisoned your blood, left you lit up from the inside (which, owing to the luminous algae you have become, makes you easy prey).

The community also took you in its gullet, for you were a holy boy, pale and thin as a wafer, were you not? Yes, groomed to succeed a line of preachers, spawned by a harridan who spoke in tongues and, taken with the ecstasy, showed her breasts to the crowds that clustered inside the tents that propped open to punctuate Belladonna County’s own bare hills. You ripened against a backdrop of white boards crossed over windows, twisty dirt paths you trod like a ghostly princeling and fields of starveling cows chewing cud that turned fossiliferous from constant regurgitation. But the memory that drains out of you in death lingers at the pulpit.

Testify, Ridley DeLeure, sing of Melchizedek, John of Patmos and the Witch of Endor. Pronounce the sermons that held the crowd rapt before you, though you were only five, six, seven, eight, a child-shepherd flanked by his masters. There was your sharpened father, hung with timber rattlers, and your mother, naked as a new Eve, her skin reticulate with tattoos that retold the three temptations of Christ. Do you remember when the snake slithered loose from your father’s roiling side? How its kiss upon your ankle interrupted the exaltations of the congregation? That was the first time you sensed me. Paused on the frozen surface of the river Styx you peered into an open fissure and knew I was waiting, waiting for that ice to crack. But you stayed safe in the flat places that day, for your father had employed the two teeth left in his head and sucked the poison out.

This same faculty for suction that antediluvian applied to the penitent flock: those hair shirts in short-cut sleeves who passed the donation box as they watched him raise you from the dead (a practiced swoon promptly incorporated in the roving act) and to whom you taught the Fear. By the time you were ten, the DeLeures had siphoned the lingering wealth from a county upon which your newly built church perched like a crown.

In that shrinking district, strange things turned up in the crusty soil. Kittens with their fur kinked by sacrificial fire, the bones of enormous birds, fetuses whose hasty interment jealously discouraged the growth of anything but weeds. Fishermen reported dancing lights glimpsed along the deserted coast and strolling insomniacs still heard the howls of the Wampus Cat echoing across the ridges. Against these hardened expectations, the peculiar scholarship that distinguished Good-Morrow from the heretical denominations of Darktown and the stadium-lit Baptist hives looming just out of the highway’s reach was taken as another revelation of the righteous word underpinning appearances.

Citing discrepancy between the Commandments as set forth in Exodus and Deuteronomy, some spiky pod on your family tree deemed them provisional. For that saw-toothed old theologian, the injunction against profanity was nothing but a crowd-pleasing concession to popular morals. The odd harping upon the Sabbath Day was an obviously slapdash replacement for the first tablet, the one Moses smashed on the peak of Sinai when the Book says he waxed hot. And the bull-titted uselessness of dithering with adultery when covetousness sufficed to admonish unfaithful husbands, and wanton brides invited those born in the grace of Good-Morrow to read between the lines. Knowing holy substance, the letter of the law was theirs to abrogate at their leisure. Everything was permitted, allowing that it was done in God’s name.

Idols were likewise restored to the laity, for what else could you call the more-than-manmade monolith that resided in your basement? The automaton Chemosh, God’s mouthpiece through which He revealed His plans for you: a terra cotta warrior’s ransom in spare parts that turned its wooden face from the wall at your entrance—the first time they shut you in here, oh how you quaked to see this angelic mouthpiece stir to life and shamble in your direction with its coat of tiny bells, its eyes of coiled wire and beard of pages. When that hollow voice spoke out in the dark, words were cleansed of accrued implication, leaving truth. By older boyhood, you no longer had to be made to meet Chemosh, but knew instinctively when it was your turn to confess and receive the content of your next sermon. Your father would turn his key in the lock and, stripped to your waist to show your mortifications, you’d descend the folding stairs to his vivarium.  Rattlers drowsed in their tanks, clustered mushrooms stacked their caps like totem poles, and candlelight caught the antique instruments and spidered across the murals and mannequins that, in conjunction with your painted mother, gave the Church of Good-Morrow its famous layer of illumination. And now (how the dead make stories of themselves!) a slivery specificity unpeels from one regurgitated composite. The scene runs thus:

Approach, Ridley DeLeure. Say the words like I taught thee.

“What in me is dark, illumine. What is low, raise and support, that to the height of this great argument I may assert eternal Providence and justify the ways of God to men.”

But no. You are not my good friend Ridley DeLeure.

But, sir, I am.

Slap yourself, boy! You can’t be by any regard. Ridley DeLeure would not suffer the vandals like Constantine, he would not come to see Chemosh when the windows of his temple have been violated by misbelievers.

“Ah, the hole ain’t big. One of the doves might could’ve froze to death in the belfry and tumbled out the roofbeams to let in God’s light.”

Imposter! Why do you pretend to be my handpicked paraclete and slanderize the name DeLeure? Sitting in my Heaven, I have seen the brick they tossed through the Lord Christ lying in the pews naked as a boiled chick, all done out of hate for His glory! Confess to me, boy.

You stammered that it must have been the work of the hellions that loitered in the parking lot of the Higgledy Piggledy Mart and whose infernal musics radiated from the woods, just one part of the pagan revelry said to unfold under cover of darkness, when the strayed youth gathered around bonfires that lit up the hills like an altar. But sin thickened your tongue. For how many nights had you laid awake listening to the songs, played on speakers and filtered through the eucalyptus to your bedroom window? Spellbound by notes pricked by briar until they seemed fixed to bleed across your sheets. And only last night hadn’t you reached for the record sleeves and glossy pictures you had begun to hoard beneath your mattress, and found them missing?

“I’ll fix the hole up.  Swear I will.”

Fix it up with souls!

And then your household effigy opened its hatchet-hewn grinner and stuck a pointed tongue in your direction. You reached in and took the weapon by its hilt but—what was that?—you seemed to graze a gnarled fingertip in the transfer of hollow to hand (and do you not, being dead, wonder at the child-mind’s acrobatic ability to suppress)? Terrified to confront your suspicions that your idol was only a Trojan parent speaking through one of the reedy woodwinds that rusted upon the shelf, that precocious thing, you were abjured to consider the question of what Chemosh did all day or why his godly knowledge so often resorted to the earthly evidence your father uncovered in his routine searches of your room? But twist too tightly the loosened doorknob and you lose your shortcut to God. What else, being marooned in a backwater, did you have to your name? And what do either of us have now that we’ve lost even that, but each other?

No, if ever you saw an aged eye flinch behind the sockets of the great jangling Elohim, you were sure to save your impressions for more stationary angels. Back on the hill, you knelt in the shadow of Good-Morrow and studied the tableaus of Michael treading the snake’s tail, Saint Anthony beset by papier-mâché demoniacs, without a prayer in your heart. Instead, you lifted a stained slice of the shattered window and marched to the treeline. The shard began to glow in your hand. Corresponding glints of blue and matching amber showed the proud path the vandals had beat into the dirt, trailing rainbows.

Go, Ridley DeLeure, follow that serrated map into the woody place, for I have caught my enemy’s scent amid the moss and the poisonous mushrooms. Those roots were hungry for water, shadows pricked the sides of solid trunks, the birds circled without stopping and every element was vague, unmodified without its opposite. When the glass teeth no longer nipped at your snapped-off prism, but were swallowed in blinding music from the forest heart, you became afraid and walked with your arms before you. Where else could you be, but lost and miraculously transformed—for this is truly how you saw it—into an errant mole on your mother’s back, menaced by illustrated tendrils?

The bearded throb of popular music found the hole inside you. The night had no wind to blow through it, so the song lodged there. Chorus and refrain covered the sound of your passage over ideal kindling, so that the black circle of leather you observed at the summit of a small crag never heard you approach.

From your nativity to the panegyrics of the present, you had preached against witches without having witnessed a sabbath firsthand, and if the gathering was less than the spectacle you anticipated, if the youth of the assembled warlocks struck you as undeserving of the knife which vibrated in your pocket, if the cigarette-stench and corn liquor seemed petty sacrileges, well, you were not the judge, but His vessel. Best to strike quickly, before you finished recognizing parishioners in the firelight. The county’s proud and motley sons, altar boys mixing with famous rovers. Paula Kayhill the grocer’s girl and Jarrett Sturdavent with the finger that had no nerves; but this flock was lost to you and, anyway, what use were your words against their speakers? Their lives were within your right. You stood in the parameter of God. Others outside of it.

As the profane flesh warmed against the burning firewood, one face alone merged with the flames: Cody Horn-Naquin, the sheriff’s son, a distinction that endowed a privilege commensurate with your own. This one also acted according to different laws. But his were arbitrary, cruel. Already famous owing to an amorous sweep of Belladonna Middle that—despite virtually unseating velvet paintings of Jesus as the dominant alter-dressing among teenage girls—only interested the community after he advanced to the deflowering of boys, Cody Horn-Naquin had, in his sixteenth year, traded local infamy for shorthand immortality after state police arrived to question him regarding a stolen Corolla found parked outside a Christmastime Village in Clarksville. Imagine having traveled so far! Reportedly, he had blamed the theft on “the red mist.” The sad, suffocated pastime of tagging trees with graffiti found sinister signature when CHN (bordered by a halo of swastikas, pentagrams and anarchy symbols) was the only human trace recoverable from a fire that claimed two unoccupied trailers last July. And no one sincerely doubted the identity of the fence-jumping gelder behind the recent wave of cow castrations. And that face. Air refused to be party to it. Sparks rippled round it.

“Hold him down! Blow the smoke in his face!”

“It’s God-boy. You like the way that tastes, God-boy?”

“Get that old time religion down in your heart!”

Oh, they were rough with you. But your defiance withstood the rebellion of your senses. You pronounced their damnation even as chemicals gummed your gears, certain that the angels would not allow you to be broken upon the wheel. They kicked, but you raged and cursed the stereophonic devil that all but drowned your voice.

“Actually, it’s Kenny Rogers. We take what we can get.”

Just as Cody Horn-Naquin was the only eyewitness who could speak to his acolytes on the behalf of an outside world, he was also the only arbiter capable of gauging the golden mean of violence—and lucky for you he was a bully honor-bound to pull you to your feet when you’d had enough. But you, nostrils freshly flattened by sneaker treads, suffered no such pangs and swung a heavy spoke of timber into the ringleader’s ribs so that he fell backward and bobslid downhill, splashing woodchips and tearing his jacket on upturned root. Reeling from newfound force and the smoke inside you, you raced in the same sloping direction and met at the bottom where Cody smiled with newcut lips and put his arm around your shoulder, saying “Ridley DeLeure, that was the first thing you did without being told your whole life,” and gave you back your knife, saying his life was forfeit and if you really wanted it you’d better take it quick.

“Life was never any concern of mine and I ain’t about to start with yours. I’m a born fisher of souls I done come for yours, Cody Horn-Naquin.”

And so he led you back to the tape deck and said “This is my soul,” so you plunged your knife in and twisted till the cassette spewed its black strip and the song rang backward through the forest. Then the empty spaces between the trees were occupied by watchers who blocked your way but you weren’t leaving, only yielding to the lips that brushed the back of your neck and said “Now I will take your soul in return,” and the boy with the red mist inside of him scraped the bronze off your cross forever.

A broken-nosed black priest were you. Your sermons kept their content, but altered their insinuation so that the fold, which now extended to Belladonna’s black sheep, perceived how you seemed to mean the opposite of what you enunciated, a recovered Saul doing lip service to Damascus and switching out the symbols that underpinned your prayers. Your parents had honed you, taught you the very words with which you held the city rapt every Sabbath with (as Cody put it) “the Saturday Night Fever” and you put the lesson to them that there was the church, there was the steeple, but it was your fingers and if you formed them into a fist, by God, Good-Morrow would be no more. When your father slunk like a deposed prophet into his vivarium by night, he found Chemosh thoroughly dismantled, the primitive circuits through which he used to utter his commandments turned to confetti, wooden face charred beyond recognition. Now, when the snakes darted out at you before the crowd, you crushed their crinkly heads under your heel and quoted Serpentes genimina viperarum quomodo fugietis a iudicio gehennae: You serpents. You race of vipers. How can you escape the condemnation of Gehenna?

Walking with Cody Horn-Naquin, the shadow boy who streamed from your side and laid you down in dark pastures, you cut a wandering line through the old mills, wild corncobs, country caverns and the husks of tractors; half-burnt factories in the hinterlands so only the birds heard your cries when the other boy slipped his leather belt into your mouth. There he told you that every person had a barn and it was only a matter of finding yours. You scanned the side of the mountain and found a portico of scratched red and See Rock City with the c‑i-t collapsed.

“That one’s mine.”

“Go to it.”

But you did more than storm the hayloft, you burned it down altogether. And when the beams bent and snapped and black air streamed from the boards, you said a prayer. Above you Cody Horn-Naquin, death’s spy, swiveled his head impossibly, turned it round and round until it protruded from the framework. And then the smoke turned red.

The post Backwater, Part I of III appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Nadine Monfils was born in Etterbeek, Belgium in 1953. A novelist, short story writer, film director and producer, for many years she taught screenwriting at the Université Européenne d’Ecriture in Brussels and in prisons throughout France. As a journalist and film critic, she has been a regular contributor to Père Ubu, Focus, and Tels Quels. Her first book of stories, Laura Colombe, Contes pour petites filles perverses, was published in 1981 with illustrations by Léonor Fini and a postface by Thomas Owen, who was a champion of her work. Since then, Monfils has written over thirty novels and directed several films. She lives in Montmartre.

Katie Assef studied French literature at Sarah Lawrence College and recently completed an M.F.A. in creative writing at Brooklyn College. Her prose and translations have appeared in journals such as Whole Beast Rag, PANK, Alchemy: a Journal of Translation, Cerise Press, and Three Percent. She lives in Berkeley and is currently an apprentice with Open Letter Books in Rochester, NY.

Venice was my last island. A dream outside of time. It was the only place where I felt the waters formed a barrier between me and the world, protecting me from human stupidity.

Something in me was broken. I’d lost my appetite for love, along with all the rest. Sometimes when you can’t change your life, you try to change your look: I swapped my black dresses for colorful clothes and hacked off my long dark curls.

I was another person on the outside–only on the outside. Walking past a mirror, I found my reflection strange, but on the inside I still wore black and would often smooth my phantom curls.

Life had made me more and more withdrawn.

I had come here to escape my demons.

My short hair, jeans and boyish suspenders stood out against the ancient, forbidding scenery like a keepsake box floating amid ominous waves. I had the insolent gaze of those with nothing left to lose; only my reflection in the water could still make me lower my eyes.

I strolled down the narrow passageways around Piazza San Marco, and it took a few days before I felt the effect of the strange atmosphere, like a shadow’s veil that falls gently upon you and never lifts.

To love Venice, you have to cast off your old self, to overcome your disgust of the filthy waters, dive in and let them wash away your dead skin.

Despite my horrible fear of rats, I was convinced the greyish water would help me recover the little girl I had once been. Her laugh and naïve gaze–what ingenious armor! I left my clothes on some pier and began to swim. I didn’t leave the water until I was exhausted, my mind empty.

Someone had stolen my goddamn pants. The thief must not have liked my blouse, for it pined away on the embankment, its heart torn to shreds. Instead of panicking, I took this as a sign and sat calmly beneath the Rialto bridge, waiting for an angel to come along…

A bum approached me. His sour breath made me want to vomit. I tried to fight him off, but he had that madness that gives rise to strength. He pinned me up against the cold, damp wall, gripping my wrists in his right hand, and dug his knee into my stomach to keep me still. With the other hand, he unbuttoned his pants and tried to take out his soft penis. He grumbled. Suddenly, he grabbed a bottle of red wine that lay on the ground and shoved the neck up into me. It was the only skill he had left…

I experienced a strange, repulsive pleasure, something violent rising in my throat. He crushed my breasts and tried to kiss me, but I bit him. He yelled and slapped me, and the taste of blood filled my mouth. After kicking me in the shins, he let me go. I felt a little piece of meat stuck between my teeth! I should have bit his tongue.

He walked off, cursing. The bottle rolled on the cobblestone and the sound echoed like an empty cry. If I had to have been raped by a bottle of wine, I would have preferred it to be a grand cru! But it had no label.

A hand came down on my shoulder. I turned and saw an old lady smiling at me. She motioned for me to follow her. Her hair was tied up in a black scarf, and she walked with a limp. Her coat was the color of water, a stormy grey. She took it off to cover me and brought me into her house, a gloomy old place isolated at the end of a blind alley. The rez-de-chaussee resembled a warehouse filled with useless objects. Mismatched chairs were piled on top of one another between moldy crates. A paradise for vermin. We climbed a wobbly staircase to the poorly lit first floor. On a bare table, an oil lamp burned. An old magazine crumbled into dust on the floor beside a broken doll.

That was when I saw her, a tiny figure crouching in the corner.

The old lady murmured a few words in Italian, and the little girl stood. She wore a red dress, a red so intense it seemed unreal. Oddly, when she walked, blood seemed to trickle from its hem. She took my hand and led me into a windowless room. A large candle was all that illuminated the rusty iron crib, half-hidden by dirty curtains. She asked me to sit on the bed. The sheets smelled of urine. And not only that—a strong scent of men, too.

Exhausted, I finally fell asleep despite my nausea. When I woke the next morning, I found the little girl seated at my feet. She was watching me with her little marten’s eyes. I felt as if she was searching through my mind like an old scrapbook, trying to unravel some mystery.  She wore the same red dress as the day before, and I was still wrapped in the old coat.

The old lady came in and gave me a night-blue silk dress. The little girl watched as I slipped it on. I hadn’t seen her smile yet, but maybe she didn’t know how.

“It’s my mother’s,” she said.

“What’s your name?”

“Camarde,” she answered, with a strange glimmer in her eyes.

“You have a pretty red dress.”

She jumped off the foot of the bed and twirled several times like a music-box ballerina. Blood splattered my face and the walls.

The child stopped twirling and began to laugh wildly.

“You’ve got your period?”

“No. It’s my dress that’s bleeding. It bleeds all the time. Ever since I killed the first man.”

“What are you talking about?”

Just then, the old woman called for her in a harsh voice. I heard the Moors of the clock-tower strike their hammers nine times on the bell.

“Come on. My grandmother is waiting for us with hot coffee. We can’t dawdle or she’ll beat my legs with her cane, and that’s the worst!”

“Why do you stay with that mean old hag?”

“And where else should I go, in your opinion? Come on, hurry up!”

The old lady drummed her slug-like fingers on the table. She had a fat nose and the shadow of a mustache. She smelled like rancid butter. A true marvel of nature.

She explained that I’d have to put on some makeup and walk the street to bring clients into her establishment.

“The child’s mother used to do it, but that whore took off overnight. Providence sent you to us!”

What luck! I’d walked right into a mouse trap—the old crone and her bleeding granddaughter ran a brothel worthy of Madame Claude herself.

Well, I needed food and a place to sleep. And anyway, it would be fun to try.

Swaying my round derriere, my mouth painted like a porcelain doll’s, I transformed into a baited hook for dumbfish.

The catch was not miraculous, but I did reel a little something in. Rather pudgy, sallow-eyed, in a clerk’s suit. Garden-variety. Never mind, his shirt pocket was stuffed with bills.

I didn’t want to have sex with this guy, but if I had to, I wouldn’t make myself sick over it. All I had to do was close my eyes to be somewhere else.

The fat fish followed me to the house of the witch and Little Red Riding Hood. The old lady made him pay before going any further. She took the bundle of bills and slid a few into my cleavage. Then she motioned for me to lead the wolf into the sheepfold.

The child sat huddled in the darkest corner of the room. I could tell she was there because of the broken doll on the floor beside her. The man didn’t even notice. He undressed, murmuring some dirty talk to rile himself up. He had the bulbous nose of a wino and a pink stomach the color of vacuum-packed ham. Real appetizing. Beneath this jumble of folds was a little rod to distract from the rest. I let my dress fall to the floor and lay down, obedient, eyes closed. I was already on the islands of the Rising Sun, there where flowers are blown apart by a gentle breeze. I spread my legs and waited like I did at the dentist’s.

The fat man collapsed on me with a gasp.

Did he like me that much?

When I opened my eyes, I saw a large knife planted in his back. The little girl in red stood behind him. This time, she was smiling.

“My mum and I always did that together.”

Afterwards, she helped me drag him to the trapdoor.

“Here it is!”

She pointed to a latch in the flooring. The john was heavy, but the girl was surprisingly strong and together we managed to throw him into the hole. I watched him sink into the waters of Venice.

“The canal passes underneath. No one will ever know. It’s black as hell,” said the child.

“You’ve killed many like this?”

“Only the first one counted. The others, we forget.”

“And the old lady – she knows?”

“We told her they left by the back alley. But I think she knows and doesn’t care. As long as it doesn’t mess with her life…”

She began to twirl, projecting tiny stars of blood onto the walls. Then she took me in her arms and led me in a wild dance.

She roared with laughter.

The post The Red Dress appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

I confess I know little, and almost all of it circumstantial, about this atmospheric sketch of a gutter-dwelling worm. It was written by André Bay (1916–2013), for more than four decades a senior editor at Éditions Stock. Among the diverse writers he championed there were Jorge Amado, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Wolfe, Anaïs Nin, and Virginia Woolf. His was the first French translation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night; he also translated Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, and Jonathan Swift. In 1948, along with Raymond Queneau, founded the Prix du Meilleur livre étranger, a literary prize for the best foreign novel. He was also an artist and art critic.

Born André Pierre Robert Dupont, Bay was given his pen name by his close friend, painter Mario Prassinos. Prassinos frequented Surrealist circles—his sister, poet and painter Gisèle, numbered among them—and it is likely that he introduced them to Bay. Among them was a writer named Lise Deharme (née Anne-Marie Hirtz, 1898–1980).

Deharme’s first encounter with the Surrealists is immortalized in Nadja by André Breton, who was so enchanted with her glove that he pinned it to the wall and dubbed her the Lady of the Glove. Deharme is remembered, in Marie-Claire Barnet’s words, as the “first impossible mad love dreamed of by André Breton,” but her reputation as an author in her own right has recently been recovered from oblivion by the vein of feminist scholarship that also restored the likes of Leonora Carrington and Gisèle Prassinos. According to Barnet, Deharme was a prolific organizer of Surrealist salons, and the founder of a subversive publication, Le Phare de Neuilly [The Neuilly Beacon],  which featured James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Jacques Lacan.

In 1937, José Corti published Le Cœur de Pic [Heart of Spades], a book of Deharme’s children’s poems paired with black-and-white photo-assemblages by Claude Cahun (brought back into print, after long years during which it was a collector’s item, by Éditions de MeMo).

The transgendered Cahun—artist photographer, poet, and writer—was the niece of fantastical symbolist Marcel Schwob, soon to appear in these pages. Cahun’s twenty illustrations, made from unusual juxtapositions of ordinary things, are compositions of miniature worlds that elevate ordinary objects—dolls, dollhouse furniture, flowers, leaves, seeds, forks, spoons, scissors—into the mysterious and extra-ordinary. Cahun herself was interested in objects domestic and Surrealist.

Man Ray once described Deharme’s house, where she held her salons, as “a rambling affair, filled with strange objects and rococo furniture.” After her book with Cahun, Deharme then became to be known in the Surrealist circle as “la Dame de Pique,” or the Queen of Spades, as in this photograph by Ray:

Deharme exhibited a wicked sense of humor in her supernatural writings, and Barnet claims the charm of her writing is that it is “more venomous than it first appears.”

But then Deharme in any of her Surrealist incarnations would bear as little resemblance as an incarnated card from Lewis Carroll (a favorite author of the Surrealists) to the terrifying creature André Bay describes in his mysterious and moody little fragment. If any readers out there have any more clues to the circumstances surrounding its composition, please do leave a comment!

The post About André Bay’s “The Queen of Spades” appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Night travelers step from the train. I’m freezing. Footsteps hammer the street, shaking white droplets loose. The gutters are streaming. Mice are nibbling on cobwebs. Cows moo in the mist. Everywhere, without speaking a word, they fear the Queen of Spades.

She is a woman, a monster, some claim; others maintain she is a gigantic insect; the truth is that all those who’ve ever come near her are dead.

I slip into a sewer, my shoulders smack the walls, I am a hunchback. I walk toward a light that is forever retreating. I seek the Queen of Spades; unlike the others, I have no wish to kill her, just to see her. The sewer widens and deepens, a hernia of rubber; soon I will no longer be able to exit the intestines of the Queen of Spades. Perhaps I am already dead, among those who vanish without a trace. The hernia swells, hardens, takes on a geometric shape, becomes an underground boulevard where I’m driving, borne toward a pale egress that keeps shrinking. Just before the fall, I brace myself and pull up short, barely making it. My limbs are icy. Everything is naked, strange, and lonely.

I sit down, feet dangling in the emptiness over a great misty plain, a vast yellow moonless sky. Not a sound. An empty space where distant forests trace the outlines of dark mountains. But from here I will see the Queen of Spades. I’m alone, I’m wearing shorts and clogs, I am ageless.

I see her—the Queen of Spades! She’s walking. Her black body lies somewhere in the valley, crushing the grass, but her shadow is slender as a tall mannequin’s—you can make out her spine, she has long stiff arms that toss mad hands about, hands that are hairs. For a head she has but a clump of bristling hair growing from a single root. This shadow grows, leans forward, stretches out, can suddenly turn out to be right overhead, and the terror of these substanceless limbs is paralyzing. Like all monsters, the Queen of Spades is alone. I feel almost friendly toward her, but at the same time, I’m afraid she’ll find me, follow me into the sewer. What would she do with me? I am with her, since I see her. But no—all I see is her living shadow, a shadow that no longer looks like her at all.

Peasants have told me that they thought they’d killed the creature by killing its great flaccid body, but their efforts were wasted. Now the villages are empty all around; those who remain have gone to ground in their houses. They hardly dare to go out in the daytime to gather food in the fields no one now owns. It is not certain that the Queen of Spades means its victims harm. They fear her like death, without knowing…

And yet I leaned forward to try and surprise her. But she seemed too far away, and I clung uselessly to the edge of the cliff. In the sewer behind me, I heard movement. When suddenly I turned around, my clog rang against the cast iron, and the vibrating sewer amplified the sound. The valleys made echo. I trembled, unable either to advance or retreat. Something hirsute, sticky, warm, took me by the shoulders, lifted me up before I had the strength to put up a fight. I fainted in the arms of the Queen of Spades.

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He stops.

Turns around.

A man of middle age, graying, in a hunting vest and fishing boots. Watchful, no doubt worried. He’s alone, and sees no one. No one behind him.

And yet there’d been a cry. A wail, a call, something human.

I have been following this man for a long time. Step by step, keeping my distance, as a hunter does its prey. Because I am wary. Whatever happens, I don’t want to be involved, just a witness, as a dreamer of his dream.

Sometimes the man stops, turns around, but because of the fog, ever denser as the tide rises, he sees less and less. Neither the dunes nor the sea, neither his destination nor his starting point. Perhaps he has crossed the border, perhaps not—how to tell? He is alone on a meager stretch of beach without landmarks. The cry could have come from anywhere at all.

Leapt from the ground, fallen from the sky, surged from the waves.

A cry from anywhere at all.

To his right, the ocean, to his left, the line of dunes. Between these barriers, however invisible, you can’t  completely lose your way. The beach tilts imperceptibly toward the great moist murmur. It is littered with debris, black tresses of seaweed, broken by fat violet jellyfish. Dead, undone, shipwrecked splatters, they smell of kelp. Pale and swollen, a lamb’s cadaver stiffens its long legs in desperation.

Where does it go, this invisible line that frees and confines? Never has the man crossed the border, not even a brief foray, without a feeling of something irreparable. The euphoria of borders, he thinks. Behind him, his patchwork life, worm-riddled, left to the scavengers’ feverish devouring. Behind him. As if, in an instant, everything had become possible once more, his dreams of a clean break, starting over! But today is enough to drive him to despair. The same gray everywhere. Gray the fog, gray the sand in which the lamb’s remains have softly burrowed, as if the beginning of a grave.

Gray the cry.

This time he’s sure of it—the cry is coming from the sea. Before him. The sea is slow, heavy. Reeling under the weight of the fog, it spreads out in short waves, leaving a thin, sinuous fringe of froth. A stupor, the edges of exhaustion, and suddenly that cry, that tearing—the brutal, awaited return of pain.

Help!

Save me!

He recognized the voice; it hadn’t changed in what would soon be twenty years. An ageless cry. The first time it was in Provence, in the depths of a narrow, almost impassable canyon. Help! Save me! Help! In the rocky wall opened a shadowy maw. The cold hardness of metal, the hand that greedily seized his own, for the first itme.

Wherever he had gone since then, that cry, the feel of metal barely colder than that hand. One day in Flanders, in a village empty as a necropolis; another time, at the edge of a pine wood, before a massive lightning-streaked sky. And that rainy night when, unable to find his way, he’d paced the strangely uneven pavement of a foreign city… It wasn’t tied to a single place, but a state of mind. A feeling of failure, loneliness, as if the call came from inner breach. He had answered each time, unable to resist. The idea of what had to follow held him terrified and spellbound, like an abyss.

He has stopped, facing the direction from which the wail came. It seems to be drawing nearer, making its way through the fog, eating it away like an acid, carving vague contours into it. And suddenly the image is there, ever clearer. He recognizes the shape of the back of the chair, the glint of its metallic frame, the underside of a half-submerged wheel. And the hand that reaches out, opens, calls.

How to tear his gaze from that lovely skeleton’s hand, elegantly gloved in flesh, that calls him, compels him?

He steps into the water. The tide rises, the crippled woman is a prisoner of the steel chair, he must rescue her from danger. Once more, she has been abandoned. But he feels strong, heroic, and pure, invincible in his dream as if in armor. His dream! To see her again, lift her up in his arms, carry her over the waves, experience once more the incomparable exhilaration of having saved her.

The water is up to his belly now. Like the lamb’s corpse, the wheelchair has burrowed into the sand. He seizes the woman’s hand, and she turns her unchanging face toward him—the face of a doll, with its great made-up eyes and strange gaze, intense and cold. Her pitiful legs have drowned. She puts an arm around his neck, and for a moment they stay that way, unmoving, as if embracing in a dream. Then he lifts her up and, tottering a bit, carries her toward shore. Jettisoned, the wheelchair lists, topples, slowly disappears.

Strange: she’s exactly same as she was in that village crouched at the foot of a cliff that rose, a gigantic mausoleum, in the middle of an unremittingly flat landscape. Seated before the doorstep of that stone house, just as well-dressed, hair as perfect, hands with their red nails resting on the sheepskin that hid her atrophied legs. With night nigh and the air full of crows’ panicked cawing, a small circle of youths, girls and boys, formed around her. Backed by the cliff, the voices took on a singular resonance, and the silence of the heights, where a few raptors wheeled, became unfamthomable. Then suddenly a tall sad woman appeared, her older sister. She pushed the wheelchair through the town square to the old church with the lowered parvis, and then, lifting the crippled woman to her chest, carries her inside, like an idol.

She pressed herself against her sister’s chest—so frail, so light. A bird, a loving child. What a joy to bring her back alive, maimed but alive, to cross that invisible threshold, to place her at the foot of the altar in a cradle of soft sand. He leans over her; he could stay here all his life, just looking at her. The curve of her shoulders, her breasts, the fine lawn cloth swelling like a sail…. Skin of incorporeal delicacy…. A face whose harmony no expression troubled, in contrast with the thick, living, wild tangle of her jet-black tresses…. Why did he never stop meeting the mysterious creature? Beautiful as a mummy’s golden mask, ambiguous as the perfect mortal coil of the departed. Perfect—unfinished.

You saved me, she utters. You saved me once more.

They are lying side by side somewhere, under the fog. She whispers right into his ear, repeating like an incantation You saved me… you saved me… and then, just as before in the shadow of the cliff in that sleepy town, in the gorges of Provence, the obscure story, the spectral story, in insistent snatches. She called her witch… melancholy witch…. She who pushed the wheelchair not out of love but interest, with the ignoble hope that one day…. For years, her suffering was hitched to hatred, hatred that would push her to the very edge of sheer cliffs and stop, ecstatic at her terror, standing silently behind her…. Hatred that would drag her with great strides, almost naked, through icy autumn rains…. Hatred that that for no other reason than to make its own omnipotence known, would abandon her in the middle of nowhere, laughing at her pleas and cries…

A madwoman, a demon. Her own death had taken her in hand, was now in charge. Every outing could be her last.

And now, right beside his ear: I am just like you. Each of us moves forward with our own death for a shadow. Each of us, sooner or later, abandoned…

How to tell her she was his child, saved once more, that he loved her more than anything in the world—how to tell her?

He carried her along the path she had traveled earlier, before being abandoned. The sea had not yet erased her tracks from before, the wheels’ parallel lines and, between them, the firm steps of the other woman, the Melancholy one, wide mannish soles marked by a kind of Maltese cross. At the end, the two tracks went their separate ways, toward the cliff and the fisherman’s hut, where the murderer had taken refuge, praying for the tragedy to come to an end at last.

The world is filled with incomplete crimes, begun over and over time and again, ghosts that know no rest and err in the recesses of loneliness, in the embittered memories of the aged, among ruins, the ghastly cawing of crows, deep in gorges where raptors wheel silently overhead. Stories clawed and fanged, stories that feed on blood. Some vague apprehension signals your presence, and I am careful to draw no closer. Woe be unto him who takes no heed, for he who seeks such tales shall find them.

You saved me. I owe you my life…. You saved me. I love you…. My beloved, I love you…

With each step she grows heavier, harder, crueler. Already he can feel the bite of her nails in his neck.

Once more, the terrible metamorphosis is underway. Ineluctable. The moment is nearing when she will be stronger, with all her claws, all her fangs, and she will never let go again. He will fall to his knees, torn to pieces, crawl his way through the sand, bleeding out. It will be the end. His death, begun time and again in the nightmare that feeds on him.

She is lying on the sand, eyes closed, and he is beside her, out of breath. Ever less human and ever more beautiful. That is the horrific part: seeing her draw away, grow ever stranger, and having to suffer this mystery.

Keep me warm, she utters, hold me… hold me tight.

He gets back on his feet. The border has been crossed, everything is possible now. She opens her eyes just a slit. A blue, icy stare. Different. Like a chrysalis accomplishing its fearsome birth. The child is no more, neither child nor woman—all that was a trap. When this strange icy blue unfurls its wings, it…. He steps back, retreating step by step. But no—it’s no trap, because he knew in advance. He never saved her, he will never be able to leave her: he is victim.

He hadn’t gone far, he never even took his eyes off her. Leaning on his arm, she thrusts out her chest and, for the first time, smiles. Hieratic and smiling in the serpentine waves of her hair. He kneels before her. Do ghouls, empuses, have such blue eyes?

He will never reach the fisherman’s hut now; his strength will leave him long before. He will collapse in sight of his goal, at the foot of the cliff, before the invincible fortress. The crime will remain unfinished, the sea will efface all evidence. Neither victim nor perpetrator. The tragedy without end will return to the limbo haunted by spectral stories.

Hours now he has been walking. Hours, days, following the tracks of wheels toward the nightmare’s source. He stoops, back bent, his feet sink ankle deep in the damp sand, each step demands effort from his entire being. Ever since, unable to stand it anymore, he took her astride his back, he has felt lost, demeaned, guilty. Hours, days… perhaps all his life. Who knows? What he carries has no face, is a mute embrace, lethal, from the depths of time—is the Creature, the Creature without a name that sits astride man.

Suddenly the fog is torn to pieces, and the cliff appears, chalk-white, dizzying. As if in a dream, bedazzled, enthralled, he recognizes its unchanging profile. It seems a gigantic altar cracked down the middle by a titan’s fist. There, in the depths of the fissure, lies the path that leads to inner lands, toward which the tracks now lead. But the two parallel lines deepen, grow farther apart, become ruts of sand and gravel, as if a wagon launched at a mad speed had riven the beach.

Here and there, perched at varying heights, still as statues, their great black wings folded, the Furies are waiting.

He will go no farther, for this is where it all ends. He has known it ever since the cry, the first cry, long ago, in a canyon in Provence. Now it is too late. Once more, he is in the middle of a fatal arena, in the blinding light.

Light like a blade. The Furies are waiting, draped in their jet-black tresses.

Slowly, with neither haste nor cruelty, with a kind of melancholy ardor, despairing, the talons shred his cheeks, the spurs pierce his sides, a beak tears open the nape of his neck, delves down to the very vertebrae…. His back buckles, his knees give…. He surrenders to the inexorable embrace, the sweet and monstrous devouring. To torture, to violation.

His face against the earth. He falls, falls again, several times, rushing, held back, as if something immense above him, with him, sought to take flight.

A sudden wind rises, a strange breath, panting, a dying breath. Everything darkens. The sky is no longer anything but a slow, profound beating of black wings.

Then once more the blinding, triumphant light, this time bursting into the very sky.

The eagle flew over the sea, straight toward the setting sun. Its wingspan was not of this world. Between claws stiff as crutches, it held an unmoving body that sowed the sand with a few drops of blood.

translated by Edward Gauvin

The post The Ghoul appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Gracie, 2005, 12.5″ x 21″, graphite, gesso, archival inket

We’ll begin with the series Ghost Stories, a series of drawings that Hosford’s states “explores humankind’s ongoing fascination with ghosts, spirits and the unknown. In many of these drawings, I researched and illustrated actual reported events that are surrounded by myth and legend, while other drawings became newly imagined scenarios” (34). This tension between the real and the unreal, the narratives reported and those that sprung out of reader reactions, begins to make us teeter on that grotesque seesaw. For instance, the setting of Gracie is a little girl’s grave—certainly not playful material by any stretch of the imagination. Yet Hosford is able to bring in the gothic and macabre in such a frenetic way, we feel a certain movement of joy and terror. We have skulls, bones, and a dejected looking Gollum-like creature in the right corner; however, behind that sad figure, two faces on the gravestone are either spewing out some form of liquid, or sucking it in. The young person half covered in this goo seems to be giving up the ghost, which exits from his/her mouth, waiting to be caught by a warty midwife. The coils that this midwife sits on connects with Cthulhu-esque tentacles to the monster bursting out of the little girl’s gravestone.

Already, we have the carnivalesque in play with the conflation of birth and death. Perhaps this is Gracie’s rebirth, for that strange being at the base of the gravestone sports beautiful doe eyes and a human arm. The statue of Gracie herself bears a halo in all this glorious chaos, which repeats the glow emanating from the midwife’s hands and the new spirit being born. Next to that ghostly form, a decapitated little girl sits beside her own head, watching the action; beside her, a potted plant. In fact,  plant life creeps here and there around the rather barren graveyard. In a culture that publicly mourns its dead via social media but shortens the time we are allowed to be sad before prescribing the Prozac and other wonder drugs, Hosford’s work asks us to see the vital connection between decay and rebirth.

Thrift Store Spirits, 2006, 12.5″ x 21″, graphite, gesso, archival inket

Of course, dealing with the ghostly does not have to always venture into the macabre. The little girl in Thrift Store Spirits reminds me of how I spent most of my nights after watching my first Dracula film. I forget who played the dashing vampire; all I remember is sleeping with the blankets tightly wrapped around my neck—adequate protection, I’m sure, from those sharp fangs. The girl here has similar fears to deal with, such as the devil making his stock appearance, complete with horns (although a bit on the short side). As in much of Hosford’s work, any kind of threshold or opening becomes a place where strange life bursts out. Notice the forked tongue slinking out of the teddy bear in the right hand corner (is there a serpent lurking within our favorite nighttime companion?), or the punctured hands lying in a pool of blood under the bed, which repeats the glowing hole carved into the person/spirit sitting on the bed. Out of all the characters in this narrative, the figure sitting on the bed most troubles me with his/her glowing hands. Is this a spirit the girl dreams of, or a dark memory she is trying to forget? The arms reaching out for her from the picture frame appear sinister at first, until I see that they’ve created a storm cloud over this ghostly creature. Are they then protectors, one hand to chase away the evil, the other hands to stroke her hair? Other monsters hide behind the bookshelf; in fact, this drawing is all about what is hidden beneath our waking world—all of those secret beliefs we don’t dare utter to our friends or family, or the fears we’re not conscious of, or have few, if any, names for.  The title Thrift Store Spirits also has an air of playfulness, implying that there is something well-worn about this world, or perhaps a little cheap.

Brown Recluse Boys, 2004, 12.5″ x 19.5″, graphite, gesso, archival inkjet

In the Trials of Mara series, Hosford creates a journey into the fantastic for a little boy to find his way back to reason. Lisa Rierson points out that Mara is the “symbol for distraction, disaster, delusion, and obstacles for Siddhartha Guatama” in the Tales of the Buddha. She also notes that the series was created by Hosford after “Two dead cats, a broken engagement, a flooded apartment, and a severe recluse spider infestation.” Given that context, Brown Recluse Boys could be seen as the most personal of narratives, and yet, haven’t we all felt, at one time or another, like the young boy trapped in the middle of utter disorder and attack? The boy and girl baby on either side (playmates of Gargantua, I’m sure) seem to be of little help. On the left, barely-there cleavage hints at the form being female, but, alas, from between her legs an army of spiders launches forth. They are perhaps the deadly brown-recluse variety, but the title creates an ambiguity there. On the right, the boy wears a bullseye, an erect phallic image to his left and another bursting through his head (with what seems like a vaginal slit in center). This may challenge the notion that all males are ruled by their genitalia, which becomes an easy target for most of us to volley a load of insults about men’s sexuality.  It’s not easy being either gender, apparently, but the worst threat is neither babies nor spiders, but the other creature on the bare mattress. This amphibious, alien monstrosity elicits the grotesque in its appearance because we’re robbed of our language in trying to describe it. It looks as if to have been stabbed, with the small trickle of blood gathering at the wound site. However, the spike must be sharp on both ends, for the other pointed end begins to cut through or puncture the bubble which protects the boy. There seems to be very little that he can do to escape or protect himself, which is perhaps why the guide, who accompanies him through this journey, merely puts his tentacles gently on the boy’s shoulders as if to say this too shall pass.

The Flood, 2004, 12.5″ x 19.5″, graphite, gesso, archival inkjet

Hosford’s work invokes the carnivalesque at every turn, with bodies erupting into other forms, always in the “act of becoming” as Bakhtin described it, and laughable images that turn transgressive and horrific. The purpose of the carnivalesque is not to shock one by vulgarity, but to allow the high and low to merge, to have us question unspoken and often subtle oppression that we live under. In an age of information overload, where we are literally being torn apart by multitasking and over-medicating just to sustain this pace, Hosford’s series helps us to reflect, question, and perhaps break through the “distraction, disaster, delusion” of the 21st Century.

To see more of Hosford’s work (especially his Rorschachs, which are beautiful and very strange), please visit his website. 

Works Cited

Hosford, Mark. Artist statement. Cute and Creepy Exhibition Catalogue. Tallahassee: Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts, 2011.

Rierson, Lisa. “The Rise of Reason.” Verbicide. 7 Nov. 2006. Web. 29 Apr. 2012.

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Monday’s Child (2007)

I was first introduced to Ray Caesar’s work when writing the catalogue essay for Carrie Ann Baade’s Cute and Creepy show, which was exhibited at Florida State University’s Fine Art Museum this past October. I haven’t been able to shake the images of his haunting, and haunted, beauties ever since. Trapped forever between woman and girl, human and creature, these lovelies radiate a strength and light amid the perils that threaten their very existence. Take Monday’s Child, whose innocence and purity radiate and fill the sphere in which she is encased. While she is “fair in face” just like the nursery rhyme promises, her hands—ruby red and branch like—surely belong to some other species. Is she kept within the sphere for our safety or to be protected? She is certainly child-like in her little baby doll dress, but look more closely, and we’ll see that she’s also sporting thigh-high stockings.  Is she girl, woman, plant, or alien? Might this be how many of our little girls feel, growing up in a strange consumerist world where they are taught often contradictory rules about what makes them special? The clock that sits on the top of the sphere might indicate that at a certain time the top half will open or that the legs will start moving–suggesting that the sphere  is alive on its own accord, a kind of mechanical nanny guarding the precious creature inside.

Asterion (2012)

Asterion plays off of the famous Minotaur, but this curious bull is still a little girl in size, despite the sexualization of her body. She glares at us with a force I’ve yet to really encounter in the gaze of Manet’s Olympia. Who is she waiting for in that barely furnished room, with no shade to cover the lamp’s naked bulb? I am frightened for her and by her, not knowing if she is victim or predator.

Fly Trap (2005)

The same might be said for the little one standing behind the curtains in Fly Trap. Residing somewhere between boy and girl, the young face looks up longingly, mouth open perhaps in song or siren call. I cannot tell if the mouth is bloodstained or if some sick adult got crazy with the lipstick. Her eyes, unlike Asterion’s, have little fight in them, only a sad kind of hunger. But this child’s body, rather than being gaunt, is wondrous in its monstrous form. Spanning three window frames, the delicate yet giant legs are probably the last thing one notices in the picture, yet they frame the entire story, for surely this creature is ready to escape.

Fly Trap (study)

And here, I believe, is the power of Caesar’s work—to infuse these children with a sense of unspoken power. He has personally seen the need for such a narrative, having worked for 17 years in the art & photography department of the Hospital For Sick Children in Toronto. There he documented “disturbing cases of child abuse, surgical reconstruction, psychology, and animal research” (Gallery House). I’m not sure how one survives seeing such havoc wreaked upon the bodies of the young, but I admire to no end the mythic power of art to help heal such wounds. Caesar is unrelenting in showing us the physical and psychological injuries that children suffer—his art has that visceral effect. At the same time, he opens a doorway into the unreal, a place where they might be safe. I often think of the gods who turned Daphne into a laurel tree so that Apollo could not assault her. But Caesar does not complete the act, keeping these little ones in frozen transformation, invoking the power of the grotesque as he does so.

Beloved (2011)

One might say that Caesar is transgressive in his very medium, using the 3D modeling software called Maya instead of brush, charcoal, or pen and ink (Gallery House). Perhaps this quality  is what also lends an otherworldliness to his work, a light that seems to emanate from his work despite its dark subject matter. Beloved and Ebb Tide fall more into the realm of the Weird, perhaps, rather than truly grotesque. I find myself entranced with the pieces that show us the softer side of Cthulhu. Both girls have a genuine serenity in their expressions, despite their obvious (and certainly inconvenient) relationship to the monstrous. In Beloved, the baby’s tentacles don’t seem threatening, but am I the only one who thinks the girl’s face is a tad too close to them? She shows no fear, but neither is it quite adoration. The light bathing her face casts her into the role of some Victorian Madonna, unsure, perhaps, of just what she has given birth to, but obviously intent on protecting it.

Ebb Tide, despite its peaceful scene, still has elements of subtle horror: the giant belt that imprisons her waist, heavy petticoats, and calico leggings with steel tips for her tentacles. She looks off into the distance, perhaps dreaming of the wild life she once lived in the sea. It doesn’t appear that she abhors this beached domesticity; in fact, the scene is one of rather stunning beauty.  Are these our choices for femininity—either dark creature of the abyss or paralyzed loveliness?

I’m not sure you can look at Ray Caesar’s work and remain undisturbed. I’m not sure he’d want you to. There can be a paradigm shift when art holds our attention for longer than a second, when we are so seduced by its contradictions that our minds truly begin to work at untangling them. Because, you see, when we engage with grotesque art, we’re not entering into the realm of logical analysis but into a liminal space where you meet doppelgangers, monsters, and children-creatures—all crying out for us to be more redemptive humans.

To see more of Caesar’s work, visit Gallery House or Ray Caesar’s website.

Image Credit: Gallery House/Ray Caesar. Used with permission.

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