“Rotten-Smelling Man” and “Voom” by Michael Bukowski

Margaret St. Clair seems poised on the edge of rediscovery. Certainly few writers in speculative fiction are more deserving of a revival—or more undeservedly neglected. I know I am not alone in thinking this way, as the VanderMeers included her work in both The Weird and the forthcoming The Big Book of Science Fiction. She receives cover billing on the latter, sixth in a list of eleven, above Philip K. Dick, Ted Chiang, and other brighter draws. Since she is hardly well enough known to serve as a draw, one might interpret their editorial intent as an effort to reestablish her name, half a century past her heyday. Perhaps the revival has already begun.

Who was Margaret St. Clair? The available details of her biography provide barely more than an outline. Feminist, Wiccan, she wrote and published freely in the postwar era, which was very much a man’s world. She employed two pseudonyms, Idris Seabright and Wilton Hazzard, but the first is obviously feminine and she rarely used the latter. She is most often remembered today for two stories: the oft-anthologized “The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles,” easily the best Dunsany pastiche ever, and “Brenda.”

“Brenda” is a story in the long lineage of muck men and swamp monsters, which runs back as far as H.R. Wakefield’s 1928 “The Red Lodge,” but explodes after Theodore Sturgeon’s “It” in 1940. “It” is the cousin of Joseph Payne Brennan’s “Slime” (Stories from the Borderland #1) and the immediate ancestor of “The Heap.” Heap in turn inspired Swamp Thing, Man-Thing, Bugs Bunny’s interesting nemesis Gossamer, and at least a dozen others. My personal favorite appeared in the fifth issue of the original MAD comic magazine in 1953, where the origin of Heap provides the parody within a parody of the old radio series Inner Sanctum.

“Brenda” focuses not so much on its muck man however, as on its titular character, a young girl nearly as singular and unpleasant as the foul-smelling creature she encounters in the woods. It’s a good story, one of St. Clair’s creepier works, and definitely weird, but the reason it is well remembered is it was adapted for Rod Serling’s Night Gallery in 1971. One of the weirder and more memorable episodes, in fact, if not up to the iconic status of “The Caterpillar.”

Michael Bukowski, my partner in this project, found so much inspiration in St. Clair’s work that he felt compelled to offer two illustrations with this installment, so you can see an image of Brenda’s rotten-smelling man at his blog, along with a creature from the story that is our actual subject this week. If you have seen the Night Gallery episode, you will see that Michael chose to present the creature as he appears in the original story, a humanoid muck man, rather than the TV version, an amorphous and leafy swamp monster that defaults back to The Heap…and looks suspiciously like the basis for Sid and Marty Krofft’s Sigmund and the Sea Monsters two years later. But “Brenda” is only a prelim. Let us move on to this week’s main attraction.

A scene from The Night Gallery episode of “Brenda.” The TV version, an amorphous and leafy swamp monster, defaults back to The Heap.

Michael and I recently discussed how much we enjoy all the unexpected connections we encounter while researching the stories for this series. We approach most of these stories as relatively simple, pulpy, and isolated tales, and before we are done, we find them embedded in webs of references and relations. This has been a surprise for us as well as a reward.

Allusion comes immediate and explicit in “Horrer Howce,” right in the opening paragraph, as Dickson-Hawes, one of only two speaking characters in the story, first mentions Yeats by name then loosely quotes—or rather misquotes—“The Second Coming,” referencing a “monstrous beast” rather than a “rough beast.” The investor’s inspiration for this poetic outburst came from what he saw beyond a small panel in the wall, a “monstrous womb, alone on the seashore, slowly swelling.” The womb and whatever he saw emerge from it comprised one of Freeman’s under-development attractions for a nationwide series of horror houses Dickson-Hawes is planning.

I am tempted to consider this peephole vision of a faceless feminine form as another allusion, to Marcel Duchamp’s final masterpiece, Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau / 2° le gaz d’éclairage (for which I was once ejected by security from the Philadelphia Museum of Art after sneaking in to view while the exhibit was closed), but Duchamp’s assemblage made no public appearance until 1969, while St. Clair’s story first appeared in the July 1956 issue of Galaxy. Any resemblance must be coincidence unless she had some personal relationship with Duchamp. Possible, but in so far as I know, undocumented. Synchronicity is all. We run into a lot of that here too.

Dickson-Hawes decides to pass on this potential feature however, despite its obviously powerful effect on him, forcing Freeman to extend the tour to other projects, less polished and more…dangerous. Safety railings in Freeman’s funhouse attractions seem as scant as those in the Star Wars universe, and he feels the need to admonish his client multiple times to keep his voice down so as not to disturb the delicate “machinery” of the attractions. Freeman implies there have been “incidents” in the past.

“What happens if I keep leaning over? Or if I drop pebbles down on it?”

“It’ll come out at you.”

Weird Tales, March 1954, which included “Brenda.”

As the two men advance from “The Well” to the “Horrer Howce” their conversation reveals more of the economic dynamics between them. Despite his almost otherworldly skill with electronics: “Particularly radio and signaling devices. Relays. Communication problems, you might say,” Freeman is up against a wall. He has a “political past,” and Dickson-Hawes is his last potential buyer. A political past suggests Freeman ran afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee and found himself blackballed. The McCarthy hearings were barely two years concluded when St. Clair first published “Horrer Howce,” and the witch hunts still reverberated through the American psyche (the HUAC itself continued as a standing committee until 1975). To complicate Freeman’s position further, Dickson-Hawes is his only remaining potential buyer.

Much of St. Clair’s best work—and her weirdest work—engages in a potent critique of postwar American society, with an emphasis on the rampant consumer culture that took off during that era and has dominated our society ever since. In stories such as “Gnoles,” “Horrer Howce,” and “An Egg a Month From All Over,” she satirized the same mercantile values as the cable series Mad Men, but it is “Horrer Howce” that most simply and elegantly demonstrates how the crosshairs of political oppression and cutthroat capitalism can drive a person to open strange doors. She uses The Weird as a tool for social criticism in much the same way, and with the same targets, that Philip K. Dick would do a decade later in his own weird masterpiece The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

St. Clair began the story with a long finger pointed directly at “The Second Coming.” Returning to Yeats’ poem after one has read all of “Horrer Howce,” this couplet inevitably leaps out:

Mere Anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed

Whether or not Freeman makes his sale, doors are now open that should have stayed closed. But an entrepreneur with his special skills at “communication” can find customers on either side.

Please keep as quiet as possible as you go through this next door, where Michael Bukowski is waiting to introduce you to the Voom: http://yog-blogsoth.blogspot.com/2016/04/voom.html. Say hello, shake hands. You pays your money, you takes your chance.

The post “Horrer Howce” by Margaret St. Clair appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

“Yet, I also began to have the sense, fostered in part by the cross-contamination of research, that around the world enclaves that never knew one another—writers who could not have read each other—still had communicated across decades and across vast distances, had stared up at the same shared unfamiliar constellations in the night sky, heard the same unearthly music: a gorgeous choir of unique yet interlocking imaginations and visions and phantoms. At such times, you wonder as both a writer and an editor if you are creating narrative or merely serving as a conduit for what was already there.”

So writes Jeff VanderMeer in a searching, enlightening recent article at The Atlantic. Happily, he and his wife the amazing editor Ann, co-founded this site, Weird Fiction Review, for this very purpose: to explore enclaves of Weirdness around the world, Weirdness that may have developed outside of other influences, or braided garbled versions of such influences into its own traditions, or responded to reigning forms of Weirdness but not been heard in return—putting all these in conversation with each other. WFR is a showcase for the Weird in all its international glory, adding far flung members to the “gorgeous choir.” Here the Weird—its ancient and evolving records of encounters with radical alterities—dovetails with the very contemporary project of exploring the earthly alterities of other cultures, at once refuting and embracing universality, or else fractally complicating its older, easier models with new particulars.

A brief index, then, of my selected contributions to WFR since its inception in 2011: authors translated or profiled in the rich field of the French and Belgian Weird, to point your way to some of the rich reading to be found on this site. After all, there’s something of a love affair between French and English literatures, especially where the fantastic is concerned. French Decadents were reflected in the dark mirror of their British brethren and in the American “weird tale,” somber hybrid of fantasy and horror. Even contemporary genrebending movements of literary fantasy like the New Weird (China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer) and New Wave Fabulism (Kelly Link, Jonathan Lethem) cite the contes cruels and fantastique as forerunners. But why should the last communiqués from French shores date more than a century back, or to the Surrealists at best? Consider this effort an overdue letter between two long-divided lovers once close, but fallen largely out of touch, a billet doux to rekindle the relationship between the French and English fantastic.

These traditions, twinned at birth, have as much to learn from their independent evolutions as from their history of mutual influence. Seeing where they vary and diverge can only fertilize, diversify the conversation, and seed the ground for future exchange. The postwar fantastique, steeped in decades of surrealism, drew new life from continental fabulism (Calvino, Kafka, Schulz), which married folklore with experimental form; the South American magic realism of cosmopolitan expatriates (Paz, Borges, Cortázar); and the frenetic inventiveness of a new field, genre fantasy. Contemporary French fantastical movements like La Nouvelle Fiction seek to rouse French writing from “the slumber of psychological realism,” and have much to offer recently renewed interest in the metafictions of Coover, Barth, and Barthelme. The Belgian School of the Strange is another domestically vibrant but internationally overlooked tradition on display here.

Francophonia features writers and styles, from classical to experimental, clever to vengeful, understated to outrageous, wistful to wicked. Here are Académie mandarins and contemporary hopefuls, one-hit wonders and the unjustly forgotten, bestsellers and writer’s writers, scholars and dabblers, outsiders and literati. Some are sui generis, some descended from long tradition; all are united in their use of the unreal. Together, they have won every major literary prize in France and Belgium, and many minor ones, several times over: the Goncourt (in the novel and short story categories), the Femina, the Renaudot, the Rossel, the Grand Prix de l’Académie française (for a single work and for lifetime achievement),  the Grand Prix National des Lettres. Six are Chevaliers of the Order of Arts and Letters (and four of the Legion of Honor). Most of these authors have never been translated into English, while translations of the others are outdated, out-of-print, or obscure to begin with (tiny print runs from tinier presses).

Given the breadth of historical span, the variety of theme and subject, the diversity of form, you’ll find: refashioned fairy tales, insinuating fables, absurdist prose poems, macabre parables, mocking twists, haunting ambiguities, austere mysteries, gory histories, cunning disappearances, unforgiving metamorphoses, unbidden malice, crippling rue, singular creatures, terrible decisions, vertiginous terrors, glorious paradox (cerebrally Borgesian and playfully Lewis-Carrolingian alike), lonely reverie, outlandish ribaldry, radical subjectivities, subtle slippage, sudden madness.

“We like to think that we understand our universe,” writes VanderMeer, “but I came away from these readings with a sense of weird fiction as a potentially powerful way in which to find the distance and the universality to grapple with the negation of that idea.” There are more things in heaven and earth, dear reader, than are dreamt of in our anthologies.

Some Belgians:

• Thomas Owen (1910 – 2002): with Jean Ray, regularly cited as a pillar of Belgian fantastical fiction, and the nom de plume of Gérald Bertot: criminal lawyer, art critic, mystery writer, and career manager of a flour plant. In more than 300 stories over the course of his lifetime, Owen refined the tale of supernatural horror to an almost anachronistic degree of economy and purity. His unsettling work has been compared to that of Poe and Buzzati. A consistency of worldview emanates from Owen’s oeuvre: an existential dread, one that Thomas Ligotti correctly identified (in a blurb where he name-checked Owen) as “the nightmare of being alive.” His story “Kavar the Rat”  and a nonfiction appreciation of Lovecraft are available here at Weird Fiction Review; his story “The Women Who Watch” is available at The Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review. Audio versions of both stories are at Pseudopod.
• The only child of writer parents, Jean Muno was born in a Brussels suburb in 1924 — the year André Breton published the first Surrealist Manifesto, as Muno is fond of pointing out. A schoolteacher for much of his early life, in 1955 he settled with his family in Malaise (Flemish: Maleizen), a hamlet of Walloon Brabant near Belgium’s linguistic border. For the rest of his life, Muno could not resist making jokes about where he lived, especially given the unsettling fantastical nature of his fiction. Consistent in these tales is a scorn for suburbia, its stagnant mores. Muno is adept at dissecting that morally bankrupt land of the averted gaze, and ventriloquizing the puffed-up bluster of its hypocritically indignant inhabitants. These days, the corruption of the suburbs has been done to death, but Muno was writing at the height of suburban social critique and expression of ennui. The plots kick off with some Cheeveresque trifle over stubbed pride, and yet beneath these one senses an abyss always yawning, of which sudden swerves of phrase or story make us abruptly aware. The good citizens — nosy neighbors in prudish provincial towns ruled by fear and vestigial Christianity — waver between ignorance and precarious comprehension. How paltry are things on which they stake their identity: front steps that “had the clean distinctness of a set of false teeth.” His tale “The Ghoul” is available at Weird Fiction Review.
• Anne Richter (1939 — ): anthologist, scholar, and formidable writer of fantastical short fiction, editor of the groundbreaking anthology Le fantastique féminin, named for her 1984 monograph on female contributions to the fantastical corpus, in which she asserted: “Women move at the heart of magic realism in a more spontaneous and concrete way than men; they do not reflect on it, they reflect it as though it were their natural and daily element… With neither argument nor pride, women enter easily into the supernatural, whose existence seems, a priori, indisputably obvious to them.” Her work has appeared online at The Collagist and is forthcoming in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s anthology of feminist speculative fiction, Sisters of the Revolution.
• Eugène Savitzkaya (1955 — ) is a creature of limens, spaces of detente, unlikely juxtapositions. Belgian by birth of Ukranian descent, long admired but little known, Savitzkaya is generally classed as a poet despite having penned plays, essays, and more than twelve novels. And these novels — plotless, impressionistic, glories of language and consciousness, brief unchaptered bursts all from France’s leading avant-garde publisher, Minuit — surely they partake more of poetry than prose? Savitzkaya stands at the consciousness-expanding intersection of Weird and experiment. His work is available online at Drunken Boat and Anomalous, and forthcoming in Gigantic.
• Bernard Quiriny (1978 — ): heir to the Belgian School of the Strange, contemporary critical darling Quiriny synthesizes disparate fantastical influences from Borges to Calvino, Robert Louis Stevenson to Enrique Vila-Matas in his playful, prizewinning, postmodern takes on classically fantastic themes. He has also written two novels: Les assoiffés (Seuil, 2010), a satirical dystopian alternate history of Belgium as a feminist totalitarian state, and most recently Le village évanoui (Flammarion, 2014). A profile of the author can be found at the NEA Writer’s Corner. His work has appeared in English at Subtropics (with author interviews in English and the French), The Coffin Factory, World Literature Today, here at Weird Fiction Review, and Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction 2012. New work is forthcoming in Bengal Lights and Subtropics.

Some French:

• The early work of Pierrette Fleutiaux (1941 — ) was exclusively fantastical, and drew the admiration of Julio Cortazar. Her 1984 collection Les Métamorphoses de la reine, contemporary subversions of Perrault, won the Prix Goncourt for short stories. The first story from this collection, “The Ogre’s Wife,” was published in Grand Street (trans. Leigh Hafrey), selected for inclusion in Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 1992 by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and also adapted into an opera.
• There’s something oddly joyous in the stories of Jehanne Jean-Charles, even at their most malicious. She’s been compared to Saki, Bradbury, and Matheson, but the wink of her trick endings is one not of smugness but of merry complicity — a wink from your stylish, daffy aunt, the absent-minded one who wears galoshes, knows magic, and has unmanageable hair. “Isn’t life grand?” she’s apt to exclaim, giddy in the face of blackest misfortune, as if the universe had in causing suffering merely proved its infinite variety and capacity for surprise. Which is not to say that tragedy in her tales lacks suitable solemnity, that moving moments don’t get their due gravity. But bad things do befall the bulk of her characters, without apology or redress, sometimes even without explanation. The famously taboo-breaking Jean-Jacques Pauvert, her editor, said of her, “If she were English, she’d be read the world over.”
• If Serge Brussolo (1951- ) is often called France’s answer to Stephen King, it is largely because of how consistently his countless titles (almost 200, sometimes at a pace of five or six a year) have become bestsellers. One of France’s most prolific authors, he has has worked with almost every major publisher in almost every genre: science fiction, fantasy, historical (WWII, Egypt, Middle Ages), suspense/thriller, horror, crime, and YA. Brussolo is most noted for his violent originality, the seemingly bottomless fecundity of his imagination, and the breathless sense of dread, a visceral fatalism, that pervades the worlds he creates. Brussolo’s protagonists, sometimes even entire communities, are often cut off from the larger world. Among his recurrent themes are the decay of social order, the illusory consolation of religion, imprisonment, and madness. His prose is marked by a density of playful neologisms, and an energy from feverish riffing on images and ideas that concretizes dreamscapes. His novel The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome, forthcoming in 2016, will mark his English-language debut.
• André Pieyre de Mandiargues (1909–1991) was a French writer of the fantastic whose prolific output included poems, plays, essays, novels, and short stories. He also translated works by Yeats, Mishima, and Paz. Initially affiliated with Surrealism, he went on to be known for his flamboyant style and fascination with the erotic and macabre. His 1967 Goncourt-winning novel La marge was translated as The Margin (Calder & Boyars, 1969) by Richard Howard, and his novel La motocyclette (Gallimard, 1963) made into the film The Girl on a Motorcyle (1968) by Jack Cardiff. His story “The Red Loaf” is available at Words Without Borders.
• Noël Devaulx (1905–1995) is the secret master of the 20th century French fantastique. His prose has the shimmer of Mérimée and the seemliness of Flaubert; clearly, he keeps Nerval by his bedside, the better to read it by the light of a Baudelairean lunacy. In his hands, the Kunstmärchen—nine collections’ worth, over nine decades—is reinvented as the vessel of a personal metaphysics; evident in every one is his mandarin mastery of narration. Jean Paulhan, an early champion, famously called his hermetic, exquisite tales, oft-featured in the Nouvelle Revue Française, “parables without keys”: spellbinding, even when perfectly obscure, for the secret to his prose is promise.
• Writer, poet, and painter Pierre Bettencourt (1917–2006) was, despite coming from a prominent family, a retiring figure and lifelong outsider artist. He self-published his first works on a family-owned press during the Nazi occupation. He later published Antonin Artaud, Francis Ponge, Henri Michaux, and Jean Dubuffet. In the 1950s and 60s he was a frequent contributor to the Nouvelle revue française, and Gallimard later put out a volume of his selected works. He can be read online at Weird Fiction Review, The Collagist, and Anomalous.
• Marcel Béalu (1908–1993) was best known for the delicacy with which he explored dreams and the unreal in poetry, prose, and painting. A retiring figure, he ran a Paris bookstore by the Jardin du Luxembourg named Le Pont Traversé after a novel by his friend, critic and editor Jean Paulhan. There he held readings for a small circle of surrealist and fantastical writers; it is said Lacan, among his first customers, purchased Shakespeare’s complete works and forgot to pay for them. His 1945 novel L’Expérience de la nuit was translated by Christine Donougher as The Experience of Night (Dedalus, 1997). My translations of his work have appeared in Joyland, Anomalous, Unstuck, and The Café Irreal.
• Jean Ferry (1906–1974) was primarily a screenwriter, best known for his collaborations with Clouzot, Buñuel, Louis Malle, and Georges Franju. A satrap of the College of ‘Pataphysics, he was known in his time as the greatest specialist in the works of Proust’s neighbor, Raymond Roussel. His only book of fantastical tales, The Conductor, was first published in 1953 and reprinted three times by various publishers, most recently in 2011 by Éditions Finitude.  Andre Breton called Ferry’s story “The Society Tiger” “the most sensationally new poetical text I have read in a long time.” I received a PEN America grant to translate his work, which has appeared in Subtropics, Weird Fiction Review, PEN America, Sentence, Anomalous, The Coffin Factory, Birkensnake, Gigantic, and The Café Irreal. In November 2013, Wakefield Press published my translation of The Conductor.

The post Weird France and Belgium: A Best Of 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.

They were just finishing up their second case of Bud when the Vampire King showed up. Hinckley’s wife wanted to get pregnant again, so he was putting away two for every one of Chad’s. Gerrold was pissed off because he’d gotten screwed by yet another investment opportunity. Also, his wife had left him, backing up over his dog as she tore out of the driveway. Gerry’d been planning on selling that dog to a fellow over in Aiken. He sat in his busted-out lawn chair flicking survival matches at a paint can full of gas.

“Come on, man,” Chad said. “Those cost fifty cents each.”

“This is how I relax,” Gerry said. “My wife left me, my dog’s dead, and I’m broke.”

“How much did you lose?” Chad asked.

“More than I got,” Gerry said. “They told me I could make a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year selling real estate. Goddamn LandTrayde.”

He flicked a survival match and it flew in a perfect arc, landing in the gas can.

“Gimme those,” Chad said, snatching the matches out of Gerry’s hands.

“Who the hell is that?” Hinckley asked, looking past the blazing can. The three of them watched the shiny Prius crawl up the mud track and pull into the big dirt yard in front of the Barn. The spookiest thing about the vampire was how clean his car was.

“Probably a child predator,” Chad said. “They’re always scrubbing their vehicles of evidence.”

“Goddamnit,” Gerry said. “We come out here to bang on shit with tools and forget how our lives are bad country western songs, and here comes some pedophile driving a battery-powered kiddie car asking directions.”

“Don’t stop on my account,” the vampire said, picking his way across the mud. He was beautiful, his clothes were Italian, and he had the diction of a movie star.

“You in a band?” Hinckley asked.

“No,” the vampire said. “My name is Karl and I require your assistance.”

“Fuck off back to Germany,” Gerry said.

“Allow me to demonstrate,” Karl said.

He picked up Gerry’s F‑150 by the back end. Gerrold cussed because it wasn’t even close to paid off yet. He reached into his fanny pack and pulled out his Glock.

“Put it down, you fucking meth-head,” he said, his two-handed stance swaying slightly.

“Gerry, you’re drunk,” Chad said. “David Bowie, put down the truck. Gerry put down the gun.”

Karl talked to them casually while holding the truck’s rear tires a foot off the ground.

“It is all right,” he reassured them. “Gerry? I would like you to shoot me.”

“Don’t do it, Gerry,” Chad said.

“I’d already’ve double-tapped your ass if it wouldn’t fuck up my paint job,” Gerry said.

“Come closer,” Karl said. “Shoot me right in the chest.”

“Gerry!” Chad said.

But Gerry was crab-walking towards Karl.

“Do not hesitate,” Karl said. “I will give you this.”

He reached into his expensive suit jacket. Gerry shot him twice.

“Dammit!” Chad yelled, he plucked the gun out of Gerry’s hand, dumped the clip, and popped the round out of the chamber.

Gunsmoke hung in the air.

“It is nothing,” Karl said, casually putting the F‑150 back on the ground. “See, I am unharmed.”

He walked towards them, pulling two stacks of cash out of his jacket.

“I am a vampire,” he said. “And I will pay you gentlemen $20,000 to kill me.”

Gerry looked at Chad. Chad looked at Hinckley. Hinckley looked at Gerry. They all looked at Karl.

“I’m gonna need to be a lot drunker for this shit,” Gerry said.

***

They started out slow. Gerry’d already broke the seal on the thing, but it was still hard to take the first shot.

“On three,” Chad said. “One…two…THREE!”

No one moved.

“I can’t shoot a man when he’s passed out,” Hinckley complained.

Lying in the mud at their feet, Karl looked like a baby. A big, beautiful baby wearing an expensive Italian suit who had just drunk four bottles of Jack and sixteen beers. He snored softly.

“He asked us to!” Gerry hissed.

“That don’t mean it’s easy,” Hinckley said.

“We all shoot at once,” Chad said. “Come on.”

“Why’re we whispering?” Hinckley asked.

“One…two…THREE!”

This time they each pulled the trigger. Gerry had his Glock, Hinckley had his .38, Chad had his Guide Gun, and when they fired it sounded like a single crack and looked like a single flash.

“We get him?” Hinckley asked.

Chad took a squat and fingered the bullet holes in Karl’s suit. The vampire stirred and mumbled something.

“Didn’t even break the skin,” Chad said.

They each unloaded full magazines into Karl, shredding his suit, ruining his tie, and reducing his shirt to scrap. The echoes rolled away and Karl gave a little wet snore.

“What the fuck is up with this fuck?” Gerry asked.

Chad went into the Barn and came back out with his shotgun. He put it right up to Karl’s face and peppered it with buckshot. Nothing.

“Shitfire,” he said. “We’re gonna have to earn that money.”

***

They all needed the money.

“$20,000, man,” Gerry begged. “I can double that in two months with my day trading system.”

Hinckley’s problems were more urgent.

“She bought some sexy panties,” he said. “I’m a weak man. She’s get a baby out of me before October. How’m I gonna send ‘em all to law school?”

Chad looked at the Barn and the collection of crapped out cars sitting on the oil-stained dirt lot. This was supposed to have been his moneymaker, instead it was sucking him dry. He didn’t even have enough money to put new tires on his truck. They were so old and bald they were going to blow out any minute and send him spinning off the highway. Might be doing him a favor, broke as he was.

They agreed on a three-way split. The vampire suggested they get him drunk before trying to kill him.

“If I am conscious, I might defend myself,” he purred. “It is better if I am incapacitated first.”

“You care what you drink?” Chad asked.

“It is difficult for me to taste anything that is not a part of my regular diet,” Karl said.

“You on Paleo?” Hinckley asked.

“He means blood, dumbass,” Chad said. “Who’s sober enough to drive? Hinckley?”

“You’re more sober than me,” Hinckley complained.

“I’m not leaving this son of a bitch on my property unattended,” Chad said. “Karl, give Hinckley $100 out of that vampire money. Hinckley, beer run.”

Hinckley came back an hour later with six cases of Bud and eight bottles of Jack Daniels, along with two packs of Pampers and a case of paper towel.

“Mei told me we’re all out at home,” he said, then turned to Karl. “Sorry, no change.”

They sat out front of the Barn and started drinking. No one said anything until Karl moved from Budweiser to whiskey.

“What’s it like to sparkle?” Gerry asked.

“I do not understand,” Karl said.

“Sparkle, glimmer, shine, whatever it is you vampires do,” Gerry said.

“Ah, like the book,” Karl said.

“Yeah, like the book,” Gerry said. “You may be immoral but you ain’t real swift on the uptake.”

“Unfortunately, it is nothing like that,” Karl said. “Being a vampire did not turn out to be what I thought it would be.”

“Thought you’d sparkle?” Gerry asked.

“Something like that,” Karl smiled. “Live forever, I challenge you. I cannot digest solid food. For more than 100 years I have smelled pizza, but not once have I tasted it. I am haunted by memories of investments I never made. IBM! I could have gotten in on the ground floor but instead my money was tied up in canals. It has been 30 years since I have had an interesting conversation. People have been talking about the weather for hundreds of years. It is always boring. Always! I have reached a point where I prefer the embrace of death to hearing once more person wonder whether it is cooler today than yesterday or if this rain will last.”

“Yeah,” Gerry observed. “Sucks to be immortal.”

“To find some purpose I have hunted down the others like me and torn them to shreds,” Karl said. “I am all that is left.”

“Okay, why don’t you get that second bottle of Jack down your piehole,” Gerry said. “It’s getting late and we need to kill your ass and get the hell home.”

***

It went on for so long that it stopped being serious and got funny, then got serious, then got funny again. They took turns hauling Karl up on top of the Barn and throwing him off while one of them stood in the yard shooting at him with Chad’s shotgun. Vampire Skeet. Chad finally called a halt because they’d gotten so drunk they were mostly hitting the Barn.

They lit him on fire, hit him with kitty litter napalm, dropped a ‘71 Chevy Malibu on him, and tried to take off his head with a cutting torch. They chained him up between their cars, and tried to pull him apart by driving in different directions, but Hinckley’s Caddy kept stalling out, and Gerry’s F‑150 just spun its wheels in the mud. Chainsaw blades dulled, radial saws wouldn’t bite, and when Chad clamped his head in the drill press, he couldn’t get the bit to bite into Karl’s eye even with all his weight on it.

“That is sick,” Gerry observed.

“You got any better ideas?” Chad asked.

By now, Karl was wearing a shop apron they’d tied around his waist because Gerry objected to seeing his vampiric junk flapping free. His body was scorched in places, red in others, dirty as hell, but otherwise it was unmarked.

“We’re never gonna get that money,” Hinckley whined.

“How do you even split $20,000 three ways?” Gerry asked. “It’s like he’s fucking with us.”

It was like he was fucking with them, Chad thought. He’d been divorced twice and audited three times and he knew what it was like when someone was fucking with you. He looked at the perpetually pissed-off Gerry and big dumb Hinckley arguing over whether you carry the one or what, and he realized what he needed to do.

$6,650 each,” Chad said. “Take that last $50, Hinckley. You’re going on another beer run. It’s time we got serious.”

***

“Why us?” Chad asked Karl.

The vampire was feeling the effects of alcohol poisoning. His eyes were sinking shut, his head kept nodding forward and snapping back.

“Your YouTube videos,” he mumbled.

Gerry, Chad, and Hinckley had been putting up YouTube videos of themselves blowing the shit out of shit for a while. Their best was a refrigerator they’d stuffed with home-made dynamite. They’d set it off with an incendiary round and it launched itself into the sky like God kicking a field goal, made a great big arc trailing fire, and punched through the roof of the Barn. They’d had to cover the hole with two sheets of plywood.

“If he can find us on Youtube so can other people,” Hinckley said. “We gonna get in trouble?”

“He’s out,” Chad said, lifting Karl’s arm and letting it fall back down. “Get the guns.”

***

Chad made sure they pounded so much beer while wiring the homemade C‑4 that Hinckley finally had to go inside the Barn and sleep it off. Gerry lasted about an hour longer. In that time, the two of them turned the field behind the Barn into a war zone. They strapped an explosive vest to Karl, they wired him with dynamite, they put him inside an old bank safe and set off a charge so big it puffed out the walls. By four AM, Karl was sporting some scorch marks and minor bruising but that was it.

“Get me another beer,” Chad said. “And get me the rubber tubing and some of the napalm. I’m gonna go deep.”

He turned around. Gerry was stretched out next to a steaming pile of half-digested chicken fingers, snoring softly.

“Finally,” Chad said.

It took him a while to drag Karl around front. The vampire was heavier than he looked.

***

The first rays of the rising sun were resting on Karl’s face when he cracked one eye open.

“Morning,” Chad said. “I was kind of hoping the sun would make you burst into flames or something.”

“No,” Karl said, standing up and stretching in the cool morning mist, joints popping. “I am very sore but it appears I am still alive.”

“Yeah,” Chad said. “Sorry about that. What happens now?”

“Now I am forced to kill you,” Karl said.

“I figured it’d be something like that,” Chad said. “Them other two are inside, I got ‘em drunk as lords when I realized what was gonna happen. No reason for ‘em to suffer.”

“How deeply moving,” Karl said. “Usually by the time I wake up you’ve all killed each other over the money. You’re so noble.”

“Your poker face ain’t as tight as you think it is,” Chad said. “You cocky-ass European bucket of fuck.”

“How are we breaking our fast?” Karl asked, adjusting his balls as he sat down on the broken lawn chair.

“Moonshine,” Chad said, kicking the wooden spindle between them and making the mason jars clink together. “My daddy’s recipe.”

He raised his jar in a toast and slammed back half of it, then exhaled kerosene vapor and pounded his chest. Karl smiled.

“You did your best,” the naked vampire said. “I’m sure.”

“You were just messing with us,” Chad said. “You knew you couldn’t be killed.”

“A little bit,” Karl admitted.

“Is that fun for you?” Chad asked. “Makes you feel like a big shot?”

“It passes the time.”

“Well, cheers to you, dickface,” Chad said.

The two men clinked mason jars and Karl knocked back his in one slug.

“Thirsty,” Chad observed.

“I have much to do,” Karl said. “You have left me a small mess to clean up and it will take some time.”

“You’ll find a way,” Chad said. “You gonna suck our blood?”

Karl smiled.

“Don’t bullshit me,” Chad said. “You don’t even got fangs.”

“I have fangs, I assure you,” Karl said.

He parted his lips, his jaw unhinging like a snake’s. Two long, sharp incisors unfolded from the roof of his mouth. He hissed, unable to help himself, which is when Chad struck three survival matches and flicked them in. Karl swallowed reflexively.

“I felt that,” he said, sternly. “I was going to make your passing relatively painless but that was not a pleasant sensation.”

He stood and advanced on Chad, who fell backwards out of his chair, then scooted away on his butt across the mud.

“Where are you running, little man?” Karl smiled.

Then he paused, hand on his stomach. Something inside of him twitched.

“Napalm,” Chad said. “My daddy’s recipe. I gave you a napalm enema, too. Only probelm was I couldn’t figure out how to get it lit.”

Karl screamed fire, and dropped to his knees.

“Your skin was tough as shit,” Chad said. “I figured your guts might not be.”

Black, greasy smoke poured out of Karl’s throat, a secondary explosion inside his cloaca jerked his body and a lava flow of molten innards oozed out onto the ground in an endless mudslide. He lay on one side, panting steam, guts boiling, convulsing painfully.      “Don’t thank me,” Chad said, prying the two bundles of cash out of Karl’s hands. “It was my pleasure.”

Karl snatched for Chad’s arm, hitting it hard enough to numb it from the elbow down. The two rolls of bills fell into his pile of flaming organs. They flared up as they caught fire.

“That’s okay,” Chad said. “I did it for love.”

He sat for a while, sipping warm Budweiser to get the shitty taste of moonshine out of his mouth, watching the vampire cook from the inside out. By the time Gerry stumbled outside, squinting in the sun, Karl was little more than a smoldering, deflated sack of indestructible skin propped up by his diamond-hard bones.

“You cooking bacon?” Gerry asked, sniffing the air.

“Killed that vampire,” Chad said.

“Smells good,” Gerry said, popping a Bud, and dropping into a lawn chair.

When Hinckley got up, he took his morning piss on Karl’s skin bag.

“That’s what you get for fucking with a bunch of good old boys,” he said. “So how’re we splitting up that money again?”

“There is no money,” Chad said. “It burnt up.”

He pointed at the two nuggests of charred paper immersed in the smoldering mess.

“You burnt our money?” Gerry asked, jumping to his feet, knocking the lawn chair over backwards. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“How the hell am I gonna pay for another baby now?” Hinckley yelled, on the brink of tears. “I was counting on that!”

“Your baby?” Gerry roared. “My retirement fund! I don’t have a safety net anymore thanks to LandTrayde! And you went and burned it all up.”

“You’d prefer I let him kill you?” Chad asked.

“You’re jealous because you knew I’d invest it and double my principal in six months,” Gerry said. “You’re a petty man, Chad Bowers.”

“You’re jealous,” Hinckley said. “You envy me the family love I’ve got in my life. You’re a sad, lonely man.”

He turned to go. Gerry followed.

“Wait just one minute, you assholes,” Chad said. “I saved your lives. That cash was collateral damage.”

“I’m sure it was, you jealous prick,” Gerry said. “Come on, Hink. Let’s get the fuck away from this little man before he drags us down to his level.”

“Yeah,” Hinckley said. “See you next Tuesday.”

“I’ll bring my hex wrenches,” Gerry said. “Yours suck shit.”

“Fine,” Chad said. “Get on out of here. Leave me to clean up.”

“Serves you right,” Gerry said. “You burnt up our futures.”

Chad watched their cars bounce up the mud track and vanish into the woods. Then he sat for a while, contemplating his situation. It took him another warm beer before he started seeing the silver lining. He hosed Hinckley’s piss off the vampire husk and picked it up. A few measurements and he felt like it was about right. If he could just find a way to cut it there was plenty here.

He might be getting those new tires after all.

The post When the Vampire King Went to South Carolina appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not very good feng shui,” Pete says.

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

We’ve never asked if it works for him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Or palm trees,” Bones says.

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

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

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

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

“I remember that house,” Alibi says.

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

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

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

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

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

“Long story,” Ed says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ed had been downstairs watching TV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We wonder what Susan did with the paintings of Andrew.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeff will probably be flattered.

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

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

Ed interrupts Jeff. “You got the number?”

“What?” Jeff says.

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

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

Jeff turns the stereo down—

Madam I’m Adam

Oh Madam my Adam

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

“Here,” Ed says. “Pass it over.”

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

“Starlight,” Ed says.

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

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

“Can I call you Susan?” Ed says.

Which we think is strange.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bones says, “So what’s she wearing?”

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

Jeff says, “Put something scary in it.”

Alibi says, “Sexy.”

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

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

The Devil and the Cheerleader

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cheerleader rubs her stomach. Are you in there?

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

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

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

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

She thinks she looks a bit like her mother.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Please don’t,” he says. He giggles.

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

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

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

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

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

“No!” the Devil says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What kind of story?” says the cheerleader.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Like what?” the cheerleader says.

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

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

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

“That’s scary?” the cheerleader says.

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

“Things are better now,” the cheerleader says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How am I doing so far?”

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

The cheerleader says, “It gets better.”

It Gets Better

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

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

Susan doesn’t expect Ed will be very helpful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This is beer?” Ed says.

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

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

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

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

“I don’t like green beer,” Ed says.

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

Susan tastes green. She always does.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Susan passes him a glass of Susan beer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The only thing he misses is poker nights.

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

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

Then she winks at Ed and runs down the hall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ed holds on tight to Susan’s hand.

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

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

Ed says, “What kind of story?”

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

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

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

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

“No,” Susan says. “But Susan has.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He says, “Susan.”

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

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

“I’ll stop,” Susan says. She stops.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ed says, “When can I call you?”

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

Ed says, “I love you.”

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

Susan hangs up the phone.

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

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

The post Lull appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

To Maurice Spronck

            Spadones! They were crouching on slabs of rock, with knees held together, and rubbing the toes of their slippers with silver handled canes. Their saffron colored robes spread out around them, and an odor of cinnamon wafted from their skin. They reclined like this, sweating among the sauna boys, men dressed in scarlet plush who came around the baths with nets full of green playing balls, young people in red tunics with cherry colored belts, high tights, and long hair, and collared runners bearing the palanquins, where matrons with twisted hair and pumiced skin returned the greetings of the passersby.

The top of the sky was warmly blue, curtained by streaks of pink, and melted by degrees at the horizon into a transparent yellow, a very pale turquoise blue, and a delicate and trembling green. There were still criers in the street, offering up their snow water: aqua nivata, nivata! Curly haired Ethiopians sprinkled water all about with tiny pierced goatskins, like the women who pound the arena’s red powder, in the amphitheater.

Now, in the buzzing air, the eunuchs began to dream of the country whence they had come, of burning Syria, and of Iberia in the silver mines. At fifteen, they had run through pastures high and sparse with the sheep and billy goats, churning the milk, and pressing the hard white cheeses through which they ran sprigs of broom shrubs. They had loved little girls in big straw hats. They would watch out for them between the bunches of golden flowers when they were supposed to come around, and carve them whistles of elderwood. Often they carried chickpeas, which they had stolen from the barns. In those days, one would dig a hole with his bare hands and toss in dry leaves and twigs. The little girl would go find a burning ember in the nearest hearth; she would place it in her flat clog, which she shook constantly while running, to keep the coal from going out. Then, sitting gravely across from each other, they would roast their chickpeas on the end of pointy sticks. Or they would play king and queen. They would make a throne by piling up stones, somewhere in the shade. The queen would sit herself down there, as the king went off on an expedition to oversee his sheep. The queen, after listening to the cicadas, would sleep upon her throne. Then, when he had returned, the king would make her a pillow of moss, and lay her gently down upon it.

In the evening, the shadows were growing long, and the sheep were being led back down the trails edged with blackberry bramble. The bats were taking flight from the bushes. From the grass came a rustling of a snake in search off its hole; the cricket sang in the last golden flames of the dying day; the rocks were turning gray and the first chill of the night was shaking the leaves in the trees. A cool wind puffed up the coat and grazed the sheep’s wool; the dog, with its nose in the air, sniffed at the fragrant breeze, and the broom shrubs, swinging their yellow heads, rolled like the waves of the sea. Further down, rabbits scurried into the scrub and darkness piled up around the old oak trees. It was not far to the hut, the mother in the doorway, with a wooden spoon in her hand.

Where were they, Lords of the sky, these Spanish shrubs and the mountain hut, and the loving herd? They had come, the hardened Italiotes, with their heads shaved and their lips closed tight; they had burned the hut and eaten the herd.

They had taken the children in the highlands, near Osca. Along the Cinca the soldiers had marched down and crossed the plain of Sordau to take them to Ilerda. And from Ilerda to Tarraco, through the black mountains of Iakketa and Ilercao. In Tarraco, merchants had them drink a poppy tea, to mutilate them without pain. They had been loaded into ships like livestock and sold in the ports of call in Populonia, Cosa or Alsium. Others had come to Rome, by way of Ostia.

Traders dealing in flesh had purchased them, powdered their feet with chalk, covered their heads in caps of white fleece. Someone had rubbed them with turpentine, epilated their bodies with lamp and tong, curled their hair with irons. Someone had put them on display upon scaffolds, with labels. They had white teeth and black eyes, spoke Latin with throaty accents and high-pitched voices. Their buyers exposed them to gagate smoke, before paying, to see if they would not collapse from epilepsy.

And now, among the sail raisers in the ports, the conservators of silver dish ware, the bathers, the perfumers, the cooks, the trainers, the waiters, the tasters, the cupbearers, the green vested gatekeepers, the muleteers in revealing tunics, the water bearers, the chair slaves, the fan and parasol bearers, all were eunuchs, subdued by pitchfork, whip, or public torture at the Porta Esquilina. Their mistresses made them puff up their cheeks to slap them, and the intendants jabbed their necks with needles.

And unavoidably they went down Vicus Tuscus, where the depraved walk, to purchase fabric and ask after amphorae of nard, sealed with gypsum, from the pigment chemists, who sell hemlock, monkshood, mandrake, and blister beetles. They sang in the atrium, during the first course, bits of the Iliad and Odyssey, and, for dessert, some verses from the Book of Elephantis. They gazed achingly at paintings where Atalanta could be seen with Meleager. Some guests would kiss them as they passed, and this brought them suffering. Despite their fringed laticlaves, their golden rings with stars of iron, their ivory bracelets inlaid with metals, they watched the thick-lipped Libyan men, naked and black, with envy. They played nonchalantly with painted crystal pebbles on tablets of terebinth wood. They scarcely ate the fatty ortolan in moats of peppered egg yolk. Nothing could take their minds off their feeble dejection, not the caprices of their masters, nor those of their mistresses.

Drunk on pink wine, they would run past than the butcher stalls with the bloody, myrtle-garnished sheep, beyond the “popinæ” of roasters who sell fried walnuts and honeyed beets, and the taverns where enchained bottles dangle, toward the central darkness of the vaulted rooms where, amidst the chambers labeled with signs, naked women wander darkly. But the patron of the vaulted stone rooms recognized their saffron colored robes; and the bed straps would remain without mattress, for these men, drunk on pink wine, crouching upon the slabs of rock, rubbing the toes of their slippers with silver handled canes, were madmen—spadones.

The post The Eunuchs appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Today and tomorrow, we’ll be featuring two stories from Marcel Schwob’s 1892 collection The King in the Golden Mask, forthcoming from Wakefield Press in a new translation by Kit Schluter: “The Plague” and “The Eunuchs.” The King in the Golden Mask has never been translated in its entirety, though a book of selected writings by Schwob was published by Carcanet Press in 1990 in a translation by Iain White, in which “The Plague” appeared. “The Eunuchs” has never before been translated into English.

Schwob, in his erudition, his taste for the exotic, his baroque prose style, may be considered something of a Weird precursor. We may be at the beginning of something of a Schwob renaissance in English, as his volume Mimes is currently the basis for an innovative translation project at the translation journal Asymptote. Schwob has long been something of a cult phenomenon in France; by way of an introduction for English readers, who may be less familiar with him, we present this peerless essay by Stephen Sparks, which previously appeared at 3:AM Magazine.

Marcel Schwob by Félix Vallotton, from Rémy de Gourmont’s Book of Masks

Historian and biographer Pierre Champion once characterized French writer Marcel Schwob (1867–1905) as “a man of the future.” It seems an odd assessment of a man who insistently looked to the past. Born into a family of rabbis and doctors, Schwob’s life was strongly marked by an obsessive fascination with bygone historical epochs: he studied Sanskrit; translated Catullus, Defoe, and Shakespeare; he spent his brief adult years studying, with the intention of publishing the definitive study of, fifteenth century outlaw poet Francois Villon. His stories, when not set in antiquity or the Middle Ages, are ripe with allusions to legends, lost customs, nearly forgotten mythologies and characters from the fringes of empire and art. Under the aegis of his uncle, Leon Cahun (great-uncle of the artist Claude Cahun), the curator and librarian of the famous Bibliothèque Mazarine, Marcel spent his formative years surrounded by a rich collection of books and manuscripts, including the Mazarine Bible, printed by Gutenberg himself. When he was sixteen, he wrote and abandoned a novel set in ancient Rome. It could be said that Schwob grew up at the end of the 19^th century, but came of age in antiquity.

Champion’s insight may have been less a characterization of Schwob’s gaze than his destiny. In the century following his premature death, Schwob appears to have been all but forgotten. This despite numbering among his admirers Jules Renard, Mallarmé, Paul Valéry and Alfred Jarry (who both dedicated books to Schwob), Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Borges, and Roberto Bolaño. Despite periodic dustings off—Solar Books published a translation, by “Lady Jane Orgasmo,” of his secretly influential Imaginary Lives a few years ago that is already out-of-print and difficult to find—there seems to be little reason to revise Roger Shattuck’s claim, made in 1955, that Schwob is a “singularly neglected figure.”

The history of literature is, of course, strewn with the neglected, the misunderstood, the forgotten, the never fully realized, and minor figures more influential than renowned. If one were to draw a Venn diagram comprised of each of these categories, Marcel Schwob, along with a handful of others, would be at the heart of their intersections. But how, one despairs, can a man praised so highly during his own life fall completely by the wayside posthumously, as if it was his vitality alone that kept him from obscurity? Unlike many forgotten writers, especially those aligned with movements, Schwob’s preoccupations were not too narrow in scope. He has not aged poorly or grown musty with time. Why, then, has it been his fate to suffer near total effacement?

Certainly, he died too young to cement his legacy. The last years of his brief life were marked by excruciating pain—the effects of debilitating stomach cancer—that made it difficult for him to work at any sustained level, and so he left behind a tantalizing list of incomplete or dreamt-of projects: the aforementioned biography of Francois Villon; a life of Saint Francis; a study of Angelique de Longueval; along with plays, translations, and tales. (Fleur Jaeggy, in a beautiful meditation on Schwob, lists a few evocative titles of his unwritten works: Océanide, Vaililoa, Captain Crabbe.) Like his friend and correspondent Robert Louis Stevenson, about whom he wrote a perceptive essay, Schwob was forced to seek a better climate due to poor health. Unlike Stevenson, he was unable to work under the conditions imposed upon him by 19^th century sea travel. After a disastrous trip to Samoa, he returned to France and eventually settled down no further from Paris than an island on the Seine, the Ile Saint-Louis, where during the last two years of his life he regaled visitors, as health permitted, with informal salons, where by all accounts his prodigious learning was fully on display.

The most tempting and recurrent argument about Schwob’s obsolescence has been put forward by several of his admirers: namely, that Schwob’s learning was too great or specialized and his interests too esoteric for the mythical common reader. Scholar John Green stated as much explicitly in an essay on Schwob’s Imaginary Lives, characterizing Schwob as “a man of versatile talents and extraordinary erudition… which almost immediately carried him beyond the reach of the general reading public.” William Brown Meloney V, an early and imperfect translator of The Book of Monelle, makes a similar assessment of one of the writer’s satires, characterizing it as a masterpiece, but “too rare a feast.”

Although I think this argument does disservice to Schwob and serious readers, it would be would be foolish to dismiss it out of hand; Schwob was by any standard a bookish man. In John Erskine’s phrasing, he was given to “think much about experience before he had it, and to approach it with heavy prepossessions built up from his reading,” and while his work is ripe with obscure allusions, the course of literature in the twentieth century has prepared modern readers for just this type of literature. Borges, whose indebtedness to Schwob may not be obvious but is profound, is a writer against whom similar charges could be leveled.

By condemning Schwob to the category of the myopic scholar tracing obscure references through a series of increasingly arcane books and manuscripts, we risk overshadowing his emotional sensitivity, which is as keen as his erudition and is the mark of an artist who deserves a better fate. This sensitivity manifests itself in his curiosity about the individual, which is apparent in the preface to Imaginary Lives, a book once described, in a quaint (and, to modern ears, damning) romantic manner, as the “lives of some poets, gods, assassins and pirates, and several princesses and gallant ladies.” In a passage lamenting the inadequacies of ancient biographers—“Misers all,” he sighs, “valuing only politics or grammar”—Schwob emphasizes his belief in the necessity of an art that unclassifies rather than classifies, one that cares less for the sweeping generalization than it does in uncovering each individual’s anomalies:

Contrary to history, art describes individuals, desires only the unique… consider a leaf with its intricate nerve system, its color variegated by shade and sun; the imprint of a raindrop; the tiny mark left by an insect; the silver trace of a snail; or the first mortal touch of autumn gold. Search all the forests of the earth for another leaf exactly like it. I defy you to find one.

The particulars fix Schwob’s attention and demand in turn to be fixed in art, as they have come likewise to fascinate us in this egalitarian age of memoir. His belief in the necessity of art to convey what is “bizarre” in each human being—which perhaps is partly responsible for his affinity with the macabre, where the telling detail is of utmost importance—seems to me to be of lasting value. When he writes that “To the eye of a painter a portrait of an unknown man, by Cranach, is as valuable as a portrait of the great Erasmus,” he speaks as our contemporary. History records the deeds of Great Men, but each of us, Schwob argues, is by virtue of being alive worthy of attention; our actions may be forgettable, they may be consigned even before their actualization to the abyss, but alight with our obsessions, we love, we despair, we mourn. How could any of these emotions be so trivial as to be undeserving of recognition?

*

Schwob’s sensitivity is also manifest in his ability to locate the universal in the individual. This is especially apparent in the strange and luminous Book of Monelle, which was recently published in a new translation by poet Kit Schluter (Wakefield Press, 2012).

The Book of Monelle is a book of the dead. On a rainy evening in early 1893, Marcel Schwob, the passive scholar whose childhood was spent in dimly lit rooms amidst dust and daydreams and, according to Meloney, who had until this fortuitous night “lived solely in the realm of ideas and abstractions” met Louise, a tubercular working class girl and prostitute living in the Parisian slums. Little beyond the oblique evidence in The Book of Monelle exists of Marcel and Louise’s life together: a handful of letters to friends in which Schwob pours out his grief after her death and a single letter in Louise’s childlike hand (she wrote using colored pencils) that Schwob pulled back from the flames in which he otherwise immolated his love. From these remains, however, one can piece together a picture of a relationship that has been characterized as a flight into “a fanciful realm of unreality where they reduced all the events of their world into the simplicity of a child’s understanding”.

Captivated by Louise, Schwob entered a second childhood—though it might be more appropriate to call it his first proper childhood. The two colored the world in broad, simple strokes. They played games with neighborhood children, spun stories out everyday objects: a mirror and candle, a broken doll and toy sailboats. They attempted to live, as we convince ourselves children do, in what Schwob would later call the “untruthful moment.” Given the grim state of Louise’s health, it’s not difficult to imagine the feverish intensity of their fantasies. By the end of 1893, she was dead and Schwob was lost in the depths of a grief unimaginable to those who knew him, especially since most of his friends were unaware of the existence of Louise or the fervor of Schwob’s attachment.

The dead become things. We associate those we’ve lost with objects they treasured or places that evoke them. For a time, Schwob clung to the outward remains of his life with Louise: it was said that he visited his publisher’s office with a gang of children in tow. It comes as no surprise that as he came to terms with his grief, Schwob, a creature of the library, conflated Louise with books. They were nearly all he knew. As he mourned, Schwob searched for her in their pages, finding pieces, but never enough to do more than tantalize. “And tonight I went looking for her in books; but I look for her in vain,” he writes. This cruel realization—that no matter how much we cherish or cling to literature, it is always given to us from afar and speaks to and of us imperfectly—led to the creation of Monelle and her sisters. Unable to locate his beloved in print, he undertook to place her there himself.

The Book of Monelle is the result. Its existence is a testament of the artist’s ability to salvage from the wreckage of life something worthy of the love that preceded it. “Throw no debris behind you; may each put his ruins to use,” Monelle instructs, and Schwob does just that, assembling from his ill-starred, mysterious love affair a mosaic of fairy story, parable, and manual on grief. It is an unsettling work, a triptych in which the singular is transformed into the universal.

In the first and last sections, Schwob gives voice to Monelle—the appellation, notes Schluter, designates something like My-her, an amalgam wisely retained in the original French. Her “sayings,” which constitute the first third, drip with fin-de-siècle nihilism, and seem, in their refinement and haunted detachment, unlikely to have been uttered by a barely literate prostitute. However refracted through the prism of Schwob’s learning and grief they may be, the sayings ring with hard-earned, Biblical acceptance of the sorrows of life. “All construction comes from destruction,” she says, which could serve as the writer’s credo, the slow-beating heart of mourning. Destroy, forget, burn, scatter:

Behold the word: Destroy, destroy, destroy. Destroy within yourself; destroy what surrounds you. Make space for your soul and all other souls.

Destroy all good and all evil. Their ruins are the same.

Destroy the old dwellings of man and the old dwellings of the soul; what is dead is a distorting mirror.

Destroy, for all creation comes from destruction.

And for higher benevolence you must annihilate lower benevolence. And thus new art seems a sort of iconoclasm.

For all construction is made of debris, and nothing is new in this world but forms.

But you must destroy the forms.

When a whole is lost, we find it scattered. The middle section of The Book of Monelle bears evidence of this. It concerns Monelle’s sisters, “who are myself,” she says. These girls, whose origins lie in stories Schwob dreamt up for Louise (which grew darker as her illness worsened), are representative of archetypes familiar to anyone who grew up with Cinderella and Bluebeard—the perverse, the innocent, the selfish, &c.—and stand in for Monelle in a series of beguiling fairytales. Schwob’s use of this form is not coincidental: fairytales, repositories of the universal, exist in a parallel realm, beyond the conditions of time. Yet with roots extending into a shared past, they connect us with our common humanity. In placing Monelle and her sisters there, Schwob establishes a haven from the merciless clutches of mortality. Monelle is here and not, in time—in the pages of a book—and not. The stories are effective precisely to the degree by which these paradoxes are retained. We can sense the living memory of Louise in its pages, even if she is obscured by veils of learning and sheltered by layers of mythology. It is Schwob’s struggle to find her through and in his own language that so haunts the modern reader.

This is not to say that Monelle and her sisters exist in an idyllic realm. It is a timeless place, but not a perfect one: one part fantasy, one part truth. The girls suffer and they cause suffering. Their world, like ours, is cruel and contingent, but importantly, placed within the confines of a book, they are beyond death’s reach. In what must have seemed a superhuman effort, Schwob marshaled everything he had—his erudition, his literary prowess, and his grief—to create a space where he could henceforth find his lost love. No more would he search in vain. The Book of Monelle exists.

And though it may be forgotten, though dust and mold will settle on its pages, Schwob was acutely aware of the fact that no book, once it exists, can be entirely lost. There always remains the possibility that someone will stumble upon it, or the memory of it, in that future alluded to by Pierre Champion.

Marcel Schwob by Emmanuel Guibert from Le Capitaine Écarlate, with David B.

The post Marcel Schwob: A Man of the Future appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Marcel Schwob (1867–1905) was a French symbolist author, remembered for his numerous and varied short stories, literary monographs, newspaper chronicles of fin-de-siècle Paris, and linguistic tracts on medieval slang, much of which sprang from his fabled devotion to archival research. While his work has fallen into relative obscurity, it was hailed in his day by writers as various as Colette, Remy de Gourmont, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and the personal influence of his writing has been noted and explored by a number of modern luminaries, including Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Fleur Jaeggy. Wakefield Press recently published his 1895 work, The Book of Monelle, in a new translation by Kit Schulter.

As a translator, Kit Schluter has brought into English works by Pierre Alferi, Amandine André, Ghérasim Luca, Jaime Saenz, Alice Sant’Anna, and Marcel Schwob, among others. Recent personal writing of his can be found in Boston Review, BOMB, and the forthcoming Incident Codex from Inpatient Press. The two stories presented here figure into his translation of Marcel Schwob’s 1892 collection, The King in the Golden Mask, forthcoming from Wakefield Press.

Never before translated in its entirety, The King in the Golden Mask (French edition pictured above) was Marcel Schwob’s second book of fiction, and offers a full display of his mastery of the short story and the depth of his erudition: twenty-one tales of murder and suicide, royal leprosy and medieval witchcraft, with eunuchs, Libyan embalming women, and Milesian virgins, all set in a variety of historical periods, from the Ice Age to the years of the Plague.

The author in his library, c. 1900.

To Auguste Bréal

CCCI e mille l’an corant

Nella città di Trento Rè Rupert

Volle lo scudo mio esser copert

De l’arme suo Lion d’oro rampant

CRONICA DEL PITTI

I, Bonacorso de Neri de Pitti, son of Bonacorso, gonfaloniere of justice in the commune of Florence, of which the coat of arms was dressed, in the year fourteen-hundred-and-one, by an order of King Rupert, in the city of Trento, with the golden rampant lion, I want to recount for my ennobled descendents what happened to me when I began to roam the land in search of adventure.

In the year MCCCLXXIV, being a young man without money, I ran from Florence on the great highways, with Matteo for companion. For the plague was devastating the city. The sickness was swift, and attacked in the streets. Your eyes would burn and grow red, your throat grew sore; your stomach distended. Then little pockets of irritating water covered your mouth and your tongue. Thirst possessed you. A dry cough would shake the sick for hours. Then your limbs would stiffen at the joints, your skin piebald with swollen red pocks that some have dubbed bubons. And the faces of the dead ended up swollen and white, with bloody contusions and mouths open like horns. The public fountains, almost dried up from the heat, were surrounded by men, hunched over and thin, trying to dunk their heads. Many dove right in, and those ones were pulled out by chain hooks, black with scum and with skulls cracked. The browning corpses littered the middle of the lanes down which stream, in season, the torrents of rain; the smell was intolerable, and the fear was terrible.

But Matteo loved to roll the dice, and we had quite a time right at the exit of the city, and we drank, at the first inn, some mixed wine for our health in mortality. There were merchants there from Genoa and Pavia; and we challenged them with dice cup in hand, and Matteo won twelve ducats. As for me, I invited them to a game of tables, and had the good fortune of walking away with a gain of twenty gold florins, and with these ducats we purchased mules and a load of wool, and Matteo, who had decided to go to Prussia, picked up a provision of saffron.

We roamed the paths from Padua to Verona, we came back to Verona to furnish ourselves more amply with wool, and we traveled to Venice. From there, passing the sea, we went into Sclavonia, and visited the good cities up to the Croatian border. In Buda, I fell sick with fever, and Matteo left me alone at the inn, with twelve ducats, returning to Florence, where certain business was calling him, and where I was supposed to join him again. I lay in a dry and dusty room, on a bag of straw, with no doctor, but a door that opened directly to the drinking room. On the night of Saint Martin, there came a company of fifers and flautists, with some fifteen or sixteen Venetian and Teuton soldiers. After draining many a flask, crushing the pewter mugs and breaking the jugs against the wall, they began to dance to the sound of the fife. They peeked their ugly red mugs through the door, and seeing me laid out on my back, started to pull me into the other room, crying, “You drink, or you sink!” then made a fool of me, and finished by dumping me in the straw in the bag, which they stitched shut around my neck.

I sweated copiously, and this no doubt lowered my temperature, whereas my anger soared. They had tangled up my arms and taken away my basilar, otherwise I would have made a break for it, thorny with straw, amid the soldiers. But I carried on my belt, under my stockings, a short and sheathed blade; I succeeded in slipping my hand to it, and with its help, I broke open the fabric of the sack.

Perhaps the fever was still causing my brain to swell; but the memory of the plague we had left behind in Florence, and which had since spread to Sclavonia, mixed in my mind with a sort of image I had formed of the face of Sulla, dictator of the Latins, of whom the great Cicero speaks. He resembled, the Athenians said, a blackberry powdered with flour. I decided to terrify the Venetian and Teuton gendarmes; and when I found myself in the nook where the innkeeper locked up his provisions and the conserved fruits, I quickly slashed a bag full of cornflour. I rubbed my face with this dust; and once I had taken on a complexion neither yellow nor white, I gave my arm a good scratch with my blade, from which I drew enough blood to unevenly blotch the coating. Then I got back into the sack, and I waited for the drunken reprobates. They came in, laughing and staggering: hardly had they seen my white and bloody face before they started to crash into each other, crying, “The plague! The plague!”

I hadn’t even picked up my weapons, before the inn had emptied out. Feeling recovered, from the sweat these goons had forced out of me, I set out on the road for Florence, to join back up with Matteo.

⁂

I found my companion Matteo wandering through the Florentine countryside, and quite under the weather. He hadn’t dared go into the city because of the plague that continued to rage there. We turned back and made our way, on a quest for wealth, toward the states of Pope Gregory. Heading up toward Avignon, we ran into bands of armed men, carrying lances, pikes, and voulges. For the citizens of Bologna had just risen up against the pope, by request of those of Florence (which we didn’t know). We played joyous games of this and that sort with the people there, as many games of tables as of dice, so well that we won upwards of three-hundred ducats and four-score gold florins.

The city of Bologna was almost entirely devoid of people, and we were received in the bath houses with cries of jubilation. The chambers there are not covered with straw as in many Lombard cities; the filthy beds are not lacking there, although the straps are for the most part broken. Matteo ran into a Florentine girl he knew, Monna Giovanna; as for me, who didn’t think of asking the name of my girl, I was happy with her.

We drank in abundance there; of chewy wine from the region and of bitter beer, and we ate jams and tartlets. Matteo, whom I had told of my adventure, feigning to step out, went down into the kitchens, and came back disguised as a plague victim. The sauna girls ran away on all sides, letting out high pitched squeals, then reassured themselves, and came to touch, still afraid, Matteo’s face. Monna Giovanna did not want to come back with him, and stayed, trembling in a corner, claiming his forehead was warm with fever. Nevertheless, Matteo, drunk, lay his head down among the pots, on the table, which his snores caused to shake, and he looked like one of those colorful wooden faces street performers use on the sidewalk stage.

At last we left Bologna, and after diverse adventures, we came near Avignon, where we learned that the pope was having all the Florentines put in prison, and burning them, them and their books, to avenge their rebellion. But we were alerted too late; for the sergeants of the pope’s marshals surprised us in the night, and threw us in the prison of Avignon.

Before our interrogation, we were examined by a judge and provisionally put in the oubliette, until information, with dry bread and water, as is customary in ecclesiastical justice. I nevertheless succeeded in hiding under my robe our burlap sack, which contained a bit of polenta and some olives.

The floor of the dungeon was swampy; and we had no air, save through a grilled window that opened out to the level of the courtyard’s ground. Our feet had been passed through the holes of very heavy wooden yokes, our hands bound with fairly loose chains, in such a way that our bodies touched from shoulder to knee. The bailiff of the dungeon did us the kindness of telling us that we were under suspicion of poison, for the pope had found out through certain ambassadors that the gonfalonieres of the commune of Florence were entertaining a plot for his death.

We were thus in the blackness of the prison, hearing no noise, not knowing the hour of day or night, in great danger of being burned alive. I remembered then our strategy; and the idea came to us that the papal justice, by fear of our illness, would have us thrown outside. I waited painfully with my polenta, and it was agreed that Matteo would smear his face with it and would blotch his face with blood, while I would cry out to draw in the lackeys. Matteo made up his mask, and the raspy howls began, as if his throat were constricted. I invoked Our Lady, rattling my chains. But the dungeon was deep, the door thick, and it was night. For several hours we pleaded uselessly. I stopped my cries: Matteo, however, continued to moan. I nudged him with my elbow, that he might rest until the morning: his moans only grew louder. I touched him in the darkness: my hands felt nothing but his belly, which seemed swollen to me like a goatskin. And as he cried in a hoarse voice, “A drink! A drink!” until I seemed to be hearing the desperate calls of an unleashed dog pack, the pale disc of the rising daylight fell in from the little window. And then a cold sweat streamed down my limbs; for, under his powdery mask, under the blotches of dried blood, I saw that he was deathly pale, and I recognized the white scabs and the red oozing of the plague of Florence.

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