This is the first episode of a projected 12-episode series that will run exclusively at Weirdfictionreview.com, usually on Monday. Later this week, we will feature an interview with the webcomic’s creator, Leah Thomas. Click on each image for a larger version of the page.

WFR Oddkin Note:

The stories referenced in this episode are by Alfred Kubin and F. Marion Crawford. Alfred Kubin (1877 – 1959) was a visionary Austrian writer and artist whose masterpiece was the novel Die Andere Seite (The Other Side), first published in 1909. The Other Side is a dystopic fantasy set in a strange and oppressive city. In the excerpt reprinted in The Weird, the narrator describes a strange sleeping sickness and the beginning of the ruination of the city. Meanwhile, F.(rancis) Marion Crawford (1854 – 1909) was an Italian-born American writer noted for his classic weird and fantastic stories, including “The Upper Berth” (1895), “For the Blood is the Life” (1905), and the story included in The Weird, the lively and horrific “The Screaming Skull” (1908).”

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“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.

He didn’t want her to know how physically taxing he’d found the long drive to the woods, how tedious the prospect of unpacking seemed, or how repugnantly primitive he found their accommodations to be upon their arrival. The holiday had the potential to be far too special an occasion for him to sour it by sulking.

The cabin had been in her family for decades, though the moment he spied it—an oblong box slumped between leprous-looking birch trees—he wondered why she didn’t regard the cabin as a skeleton from her family’s closet instead of a prideful heirloom.

After an anxious struggle to fit the copper key inside the ancient lock, the door gave, allowing the pair of them to be assaulted by the stench of long-trapped air. The dark had evidently grown so accustomed to the cabin’s interior that it stubbornly refused to part for the sunbeams that the man and woman ushered in.

Shutters were peeled back, windows were pried ajar. She stripped the ancient white sheets from the beds and took them outside and hung them from the birch limbs so that the breezes might push out their mustiness.

They cleaned and unpacked and traded off-colour wisecracks. The supper they cooked together was hearty and its aroma managed to mask a bit of the cabin’s cloying staleness.

After eating he delighted her by finding the detached footboard that had once braced the lower bunk bed she’d slept on as a girl. It had been wound in a shower drape of translucent plastic and stored behind her grandmother’s dormant sewing desk.

Her grandfather had carved (with visible skill and obvious love) an inscription into the footboard:

Here lies Donna Hammill
Each and every summer
Dreaming…

She cried and ran her fingers along the grooved words as though they were Braille.

—I have another gift for you, he told her in a voice whose shakiness surprised him.

He was almost fearful of producing the ring case from his pocket.

Ultimately he opened the case and he asked her.

She accepted and they both began to shed fresh tears, but ones of happiness.

He uncorked the bottle of pinot noir. She stole a sip from the brimming glass he handed her.

She set it on the windowsill and told him not to move a muscle. Her purring tone thrilled him.

Leaning against the deep washbasin with its antiquated hand pump, he watched with increasing anticipation as she pushed together a pair of slender cots, draped a quilt across their bare mattresses, and stripped the dusty clothing from her body.

She giggled at his suggestion that they shut the door and windows, assuring him that they were all alone, no one within earshot. In fact, no one within walking distance.

He went to her.

The ferocity of her climax proved to him just how isolated they were, for she had always been painfully aware of the neighbours. Birds actually rustled free from a nearby tree, startled by her passionate cries.

Buoyed by his petit mal, he lay back in the humidity and hoped that the encroaching dusk would cool him.

—Well, we’ve officially christened this place, she beamed.

She held up her left hand to admire the glinting star that now ringed her finger.

He asked her if she was happy.

—Very, she told him.

—When was the last time you were up here?

—Not since I was eleven, the summer before my grandma died.

—How come your family never sold it? If the cabin wasn’t being used, I mean.

She shrugged.

—It had been in the family for so long, no one ever thought of getting rid of it. My great-grandfather built this cabin with my great-grandmother. They actually lived here for a few years. Eventually they moved to Olympia where my great-grandfather had landed a job doing… something, I can’t remember what it was. They used to spend their summers up here with their kids. Then my grandparents vacationed here with their kids, then on to my parents with my sister and me. And now us.

She pecked his cheek and he smiled and tipped back the bottle of pinot noir.

—Did you like coming up here when you were a girl?

—I loved it.

Her tone was richly sincere, if a shade melancholic.

He placed his head against her breast and asked her to tell him about what it was like. He was city-born, city-bred. Nature was to him as it should be to all: utterly bewildering, daunting in its autonomy.

—My grandmother used to take my sister and me on these marathon hikes where she’d point out all the different plant types. Or she’d try to teach us how to identify a bird by its call, things like that.

She began to chew her plump lower lip and he asked her what was wrong.

—Nothing.

His bladder had been throbbing for several minutes. He rose and muttered some euphemism for relieving himself which she did not find as funny as he’d hoped. He excused himself from the cabin.

Without, the countless boughs were garlanded in fine shadows, ones that linked oak to ash to sycamore to yew as though it was some kind of dark ligament. Mosquitoes formed a buzzing fogbank and the temperature seemed to have jumped from humid to chilly with no temperate phase between.

He moved a respectable distance away and relieved himself on some spiky foliage. He experienced a sense of being not just isolated, but marooned.

Something skittered out from one thicket and was almost immediately subsumed by another. The cracking of twigs and the hushing spasms of leaves turned threatening.

He turned and ran back to the cabin, catching himself just before he came thundering through the front door. After regaining his composure, he crossed the threshold with artificial nonchalance.

She was cross-legged on the cots, her torso now covered in one of his loose t‑shirts.

—You sick?

She shook her head.

—You look pale.

He uncapped a bottle of water and handed it to her. She took it but did not drink.

He nudged her sardonically.

—What’s going on? I step out for a moment and when I come back inside it’s like you’re a million miles away.

—I’m sorry.

She entwined her fingers with his and kissed the back of his hand, then said:

—I guess this place has more memories than I realized.

—Bad ones? (Wisely, he was treading lightly.)

—I think seeing the night beginning to fall outside reminded me of this stupid game my older sister invented called Something Scary.

—Um… okay…

They both laughed a little bit.

—It sounds so stupid now, I know, but at the time that game really got to me.

—What’s the goal of Something Scary?

—To scare the piss out of whomever else you’re playing with, what else? I said it was stupid.

—No, don’t say that. Given that you were both kids at the time and stuck out in the boonies, I can see how a game like that would have worked.

—Oh it did, believe me. But… Something Scary wasn’t what got me upset just now. It was remembering something my grandmother introduced us to, another game.

—Oh?

—See, Something Scary was just a typical kids’ game. My sister and I would sit in the dark here and whisper little ghost stories to one another. Mine were never that good at all because I spooked really easily so I always played it timid. My sister, she was good at it though. I mean really good. The funny thing is, later on I learned that most of her stories were just retellings of Tales from the Darkside episodes that she used to watch after my parents had gone to bed. Sometimes they were just old urban legends. Still, she knew how to tell a story.

—That seems to run in your family.

She rolled her eyes.

—No, really! I’ve told you that your life sounds so much more interesting than mine. You’ve got storyteller’s instincts.

—Regardless, I remember one game of Something Scary where my sister said there was a decrepit hermit who lived in these woods. According to her story, the man’s wife had gone out to fetch water one night many years ago but she never came back again. So every night the man still went out searching for his lost love. But of course after so many years the man had lost his mind, so if he saw any woman in the woods he would make her his wife. He’d just drag her away into the trees and she’d never be seen again. Any female had to fear being in these woods after sunset. And I had to try and sleep with that in my head! God, I hated that story.

—That is pretty creepy. But what about the game your grandmother taught you?

She bit her lip.

—Almost every summer night we played Something Scary. My sister insisted on it. Until the summer I turned eleven.

—What happened that year? Did you outgrow being afraid?

—You can’t outgrow that. At least I know I can’t… but not because of Something Scary; because of The Old Pageant.

—The Old Pageant?

—That was the so-called game my grandmother introduced to my sister and me. We’d been playing Something Scary, whispering quietly, or what we believed was quietly, to ourselves. There was a rustling of cotton that terrified us, but it was only our grandmother rising out of her and grandfather’s bed at the other end of this room. She shuffled over to us. I remember how her white cotton nightgown and her long white hair both seemed to gleam in the dark. Without so much as a word she carefully unbolted the cabin door, pulled it open, then waved for my sister and me to come with her. We went out with her and I admit I was pretty excited at first. You know, being out at night, it was like an adventure. But the more we walked the more it soured. I asked my grandmother how far we were going to walk. I remember that none of us were wearing shoes and that my feet were freezing from all the dew we’d traipsed through. I kept asking my sister if she knew where we were going but she wouldn’t answer me. Finally my grandmother stopped us.

He’d forgotten to breathe for so long his lungs actually started to ache. After gasping he asked where they’d been led.

—It was a really thick part of the woods, well off any of the marked trails. My grandma gestured for us to be very quiet. I could hear crickets and bullfrogs. My grandma pointed above her head and told my sister and me to listen closely.

—What did you hear?

—Creaking, a very low creaking. At first I thought it was the thicker boughs of the trees being rubbed together by the wind. You hear that kind of noise all the time out here. But this was actually my grandmother. She was making this low creaking sound in her throat, but it was perfect. You’d swear it was the sound of wood grinding in the wind. My sister laughed, I remember that because it was the only time I ever saw my grandma get angry. She grabbed my sister’s face and told her to be very careful because the three of us were tempting fate being out there in the dead of night. She said that if we weren’t careful there would be things from the woods that would take our place in the world. When we came to learn The Old Pageant we had to treat it with respect. By then I couldn’t get that awful creaking sound out of my head. I put my hands against my ears. I probably started to cry. My grandma put her arm around my shoulder and took my sister and me back to the cabin.

He could feel his brow knitting in confusion, and quite possibly in anger.

—Why on earth would your grandmother have done that to you two?

She lifted her hand.

—I know, I know. But what amazes me is that I truly hadn’t even thought about that night until we got up here. But that night wasn’t what scared me earlier tonight. It was something that happened the next night, or a few nights later. Hell, I might have only dreamt it.

He gripped her hand and kissed the back of it, giving the engagement ring a playful twist to remind her that this was a happy occasion.

—We don’t have to talk about this anymore. I didn’t mean to upset you, he told her.

—No, I need to get this out. That other night… my grandma woke only me. When we got outside the cabin she told me that my sister didn’t understand. Only you felt it, my Donna, was how she put it. We went walking, the two of us, even further into the woods.

—And did you hear the creaking?

—I didn’t hear anything; no crickets, no wind, nothing. It was perfectly still. My grandma took my hand and led me down to this old tree. And she told me to watch while she imitated this tree. She started that horrible creaking sound again, only this time she began to twist her arms and her fingers until her shadow was exactly like that of the tree. And I mean exactly. She seemed to be getting taller too. I know that sounds insane, believe me, but I felt dwarfed by her…

—Shadow-play, he assured her.

—Sure, but….

—But what?

—Then a sound came from the tree beside my grandmother: it was a newborn baby crying.

He felt his skin constrict and go cold against his spine. His eyes were watering.

—A what?

—A newborn baby. I swear to Christ. It was coming from the tree and then when I turned around to face it, the tree’s bark was all swollen and pink. And then my grandmother stopped that creaking noise and all I could hear was that awful, shrill crying. It echoed through the trees. My grandmother whispered to me not to be afraid, that this was just the tree taking part in The Old Pageant. We mimic them, they mimic us. She went over to the tree and actually started singing to it… a lullaby… Oh fuck, why did I have to remember this tonight of all nights? After all these years…

—You were a kid! You were dreaming or sick. And I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but it sounds as though your grandmother might have been a little touched in the head.

He hated himself for prodding further but he needed to know what happened next, for he felt oddly cheated.

—Nothing, she told him. I don’t even remember our walk back to the cabin. The next day was just like any other as far as I can recall; swimming at the lake, colouring books, Go Fish, the usual. That autumn my grandfather got sick. My sister and I never came back to the cabin.

—Until now?

—Right.

***

They drank the rest of the wine and did everything they could to pretend Donna’s memory hadn’t driven a spike through the heart of their holiday. He wondered about being amorous again but it somehow felt improper.

She drifted off.

Though exhausted, sleep evaded him.

A grave moon illumed her old footboard. Its inscription, coupled with the way it was propped against the basin, made the slab of polished cedar look more like a headstone than a footboard.

Here lies Donna Hammill

He looked over at her. She was breathing shallowly. Not wishing to disturb her, he slipped out onto the porch.

The night was still but, mercifully, not as silent as the one she’d described to him. He could hear the crickets and bullfrogs.

He also heard the groan of wind-bullied wood.

Something stark flitted in his peripheral vision. Something scary.

He craned his head to the left, and for a beat all was right with the world again, for he was assured that what he’d glimpsed was merely the white sheets trembling upon the limbs of the birch tree with its equally spectral-looking bark.

But then he realized that the rest of the forest was motionless.

It was not wind that stirred the trunk, or the sheet that billowed like a crown of crone’s hair, like a bridal train.

He backed up until he hit the cabin wall. He turned to call Donna’s name, but the figure that he viewed through a pane sullied with moonlight and grime was not one that would have recognized him.

Fabric licked the side of his face. It was now near enough to touch him.

One of its limbs was brightened by a distinct and concentrated glint. Was it wearing the engagement ring to mock or punish him?

His eyes squinted shut instinctively. He raised his boneless arms and held them in mimicry of ancient boughs. He prayed his novice pageantry would fool it.

The post The Old Pageant appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

The beach.  The cove.  Children were playing a brutal game of king of the hill on the pillar I’d once claimed as mine.  Behind them, in the shadows of the cliff face, a temporary town, global nomads on the lam, their tents and sleeping rolls spiraling inward, three, four, five layers deep.

I clung to the rim where the rock floor met the sand, and I gawked at the addicts, wanting and not wanting to talk to them.  They’d migrated, since my last visit to Mazunte, from the center of town to the cove, but they were basically the same. Cracked, blackened teeth and half-lidded eyes.  A leaning-together, wary of others, wary of each other. It was inevitable, my returning here.  I wondered how long it would take for them to recognize me as one of their own, how long it would take me to settle back in.

Cords had been strung, nylon, hemp, petrified rags and towels and rugs hanging from them.  Lanes and alleys had been forged.

To move through the encampment was to trace a spiral, one foot slowly in front of the other, like walking one of those Tibetan labyrinths constructed out of brightly colored sand.  A single step in, and I’d be committed to making the long slow journey to the end.  If I succeeded, I’d break something in me.  I didn’t know exactly what this thing was, but it needed to be broken, of this I was sure.

Seeing these people and what they’d done to the cove had me reliving the sense memories of my last visit.

After leaving Ericka confused and bleating on the beach, I’d known just where to go, what to do next.  I would run up the sand toward the center of town where the fiesta never stopped and I’d party.  I’d bellow and dance.  I’d celebrate my liberation from her. Maybe I’d stumble on that Columbian asshole she’d fucked.  We could slap each other’s backs, down a few mescals, maybe trade crude self-congratulatory jokes about Ericka’s perfect little body.  We’d end up throwing fists and elbows, rolling in the sand, trying to get in the killer nut shot, but in the process we’d develop a cynical bond, deeper and more honest than anything either of us had had with Ericka.  A bullying power flowed through my bloodstream.  I could see myself, later—see the rest of my life, magnetic, charismatic, the chicks flocking to me for use and abuse.  I felt like a man with a destiny right then, no longer the boy I’d been just the day before, which meant, of course, that I was still very much a boy.

This elation has been unsustainable.  No matter how happy I imagined I’d be if I could just embrace the dickish parts of myself, the raping and pillaging imperatives of masculinity, I didn’t have the constitution to live like that.  Before I was even halfway down the beach, my cockiness had been overwhelmed by regret.  I was made for pining and melancholic wallowing.  It took all the effort I had not to spin around and race back to Ericka, beg her forgiveness, pledge my undying love.  This is what my mother had taught me to do.  Attach myself to the women close at hand.  Abase myself, if I must, to fulfill their needs. If this meant I had too little fight in me, at least it ensured I’d never become my father.

It had been too late, though, to go back.

When she was in an especially self-regarding mood, Ericka used to gloat about how charmed her life was, how lucky she was to have found someone like me to witness her outrageous adventures.

“You’re a mirror,” she’d say, “reflecting me back to me.”

She believed that the reality around her was malleable, a symptom of her mood, and that it had sprung whole from her consciousness.

“Where does that leave me?” I’d sometimes ask her.

“Ha!”

“Really, Ericka, how do you square that with the fact that I have reactions to what you do, and that I sometimes react in ways you don’t like?  That I’m a separate person with my own thoughts and feelings?”

“But you never do that.  You always react just the way I want you to.”

“One day, I might not.  One day you’ll do something so cruel to me that I’ll have no choice but to protect myself.”

“That’ll never happen,” she’d say then.  “I can’t be cruel to a thing that doesn’t exist.”

I’d shown her, that day, that I not only existed, but I even had a semblance of pride.  She’d hate me for this forever. I didn’t blame her.  She was who she was.  I blamed myself.  What upset me wasn’t her or what she’d done, it was what I’d learned about myself in the process: I was the kind of person who destroyed himself in order to stop himself from hurting others.  I turned my rage inward, bought a cheap bottle of rum from the one store in town, mixed it with some sickly sweet nectar and let the fog of self-pity blur the edges of my being.

But why go halfway when total escape was so easy to find?

All I had to do was follow the sound of the drums, let myself spin closer until they enveloped me.  This had been true last time I’d been in Mazunte, and it was just as true now. Where there were drums, there were sure to be drugs.  The ugly, the sick, the haters and the hated, they found each other in the bang bang bang cadence of the future primitive.

One step.  Another.  I ducked under a taut length of nylon line and passed a grease-stained blanket from which two grimy feet protruded.  Stepping over them, I entered the second ring of the labyrinth.

A spike went through me.  A dangerous want.

I’d spent the first ten years of my adult life obliterating the person I’d been as a child. I can’t tell you why.  Why doesn’t matter. Any reason I gave would be incomplete, a reduction of my mostly frivolous, often contradictory motivations into one dramatic and self-serving lie.  The void at the center of things terrified me, but in a thrilling way.  I wasn’t yet capable of understanding the consequences of courting meaninglessness.

Ten, twelve years ago, when I’d bottomed out, I swore I’d never let myself think like this again.

I’d followed the opium trail halfway around the world. I just sort of flew away. To wherever the other winged rats were headed. Places with cheap street food and loose security. Places where too much else was going on for the all-powerful Them to wash us off the beach, out of the park, to flush us from the abandoned buildings. The usual stops: San Francisco, Vancouver, the punked-out East Village, Amsterdam, Athens, the isle of Anafi, Istanbul, Tangiers, Beirut and Goa, I washed up for a while on the beaches of Phuket. I cultivated ultimate trust in the world’s prerogative to carry me, by chance or happenstance, to wherever it wanted me to be. I had no say, is what I told myself.

When, finally, I was so far gone that even the dreaded thieves and tinkers abandoned me, I hardly noticed. I was in Saigon, holed up in the cement and rust-proofed steel shell of a twenty-three-story office building, a raw abandoned place, barely more solid than a thought, that had been left to rot half-finished when the markets had crashed and the real estate speculators had run out of money. I hadn’t changed or washed my clothes in months, years maybe. My hair was knotted into long broad plaits, nests, like the gunk you pull out of the pipes beneath the tub. My beard, which has always been patchy, straggled out everywhere— my moustache curled over my lip into my mouth, a pleasant tickle; I could lose hours twirling it on the tip of my tongue. My experience of that time was relegated to that one soggy room, a dark and syrupy bunker. Though I must have come and gone—I must have travelled somewhere to keep myself in dope—I never seemed to move from the blotchy, rusty mattress. I’d lost the sensation of time. I don’t mean in a gauzy eternal-now way. What I mean is, I no longer felt time in my body. Or my mind either. I was stagnant, like the room. I had no destiny, and thus, I’d lost all sense of self. And this is the thing about that moment in my life: It felt more authentic than all the living that had come before it. I’d been reduced—I’d reduced myself—to the essential fact of my being. And that fact was nothing. I was nothing, or nearly nothing. There was no secret illuminating truth shining down like light to cleave me in half. There was just… I was dying, I guess, or living in death’s shadow. I’d traveled as far from life as my body would go. I was in the grip of some other force, entranced, numb and prostrate before it. There’s a lot of empty space in my memory of that time, a lot I don’t know. A different person might call this a religious experience.

The third ring of the labyrinth. A couple of guys sat in the lip of a tent squabbling over a forty-ounce bottle of Tecate.  One of the old guard, a tattoo snake curling around his eye, watched over a dirty child in a loincloth who was throwing pebbles at a rotting, sand-crusted fish.  Syringes and empty plastic vials littered the ground.  A topless woman with a scar where her left breast once had been picked at the grime between her toes, searching for a fresh spot in which to shoot up.

This time, I knew the price I’d eventually pay.  I couldn’t hide behind reckless curiosity.  The question was whether or not I cared.

Grotesque and horror-inducing as the scene might have been, there was a grace to it, and within the closed system of its logic, there was a beauty, too, though maybe I was one of the very few who could see this.

Once you let go of your pieties and accept that decay is a kind of growth, that entropy resents being reversed, and that no matter how strongly you wish it otherwise, your children will always be drawn to the undertow, you stop judging people like those assembled in the cove.  You no longer see them as something to turn away from.  You’re charmed by the way they’ve vanquished the fear from their lives.

Coming to all those years later, after I’d returned to Madison, I found myself in a charred landscape—embers without end, a desert wind blowing through my riddled brain.  I’d lived in that landscape ever since.  A world without color, tolerable, if only because of the sameness, because my desire for anything at all had been so dulled that I no longer knew how to want.  Nothing surprised me because nothing interested me.  And when I thought of re-birth, of new leaves and spring buds, foliage returning to color my world, I saw it entering through a needle stuck in my vein.  Early on, I’d yearned for that color back in my life.  Then, as time passed, color, the idea of color, became abstract.  It lost its meaning. I’d remember, sometimes, that I used to think about it, used to ache for it, and wonder how and when those hungers had faded.  The sense of waste and waiting, interminably, for nothing had become the limit of the real for me.  Any alternative to it was in the past and had ceased to exist.

But, oh, to get the want, the color, back into my life.

What I missed most was the ritual of it all.  The way everyday boredom was formalized and transformed into a sacred duty.  How the tedious became the transcendental.  Not a day went by that I didn’t ache to return to the altar and perform the rite one more time.  How it centered me.  How it cleared me of uncertainty.

I had cash in my pocket—not a lot, but enough.  And I’d made up my mind.

It’s a cowardly thing, hiding from yourself in derangement, and if there’s anything I can say with certainty about myself, it’s that I’m a coward.

As I made my way slowly through the fourth and fifth rings, the tents thinned out.  They were older now, ancient.  Their zippers were broken.  Their screens were ripped.  People lingered on ad hoc benches made of driftwood and cinderblocks. They sat on roosts they’d made for themselves on the ground.  There were maybe thirty of them, mostly kids flush with the zeal of the newly converted, hugging their backpacks, waiting for dark, for the dance around the fire.  Some old gurus too, androgynous in leather and steel, ageless and shrunken, tattooed from head to toe, both the men and the women marked with the unmistakable lizard look that said they knew how to kill and they needed no reason, that they were of the species that routinely ate its young.

They were reading tattered books, listening to iPods.  A young woman with dreads perched like a sculpture on top of her head was working her way through a Sudoku puzzle.

In the center of the maze, at the spot where all the energy of this tribe focused and converged and emanated back out onto itself, sat a teepee patched together from old US mailbags.  This teepee—it was otherworldly, sincere and kitschy all at once.  Thirty feet high at its apex, its hide was wrapped in a looping net of ropes from which hung ostrich and peacock feathers, eagle feathers, seagull feathers, feathers in synthetic shades of purple and green that looked like they’d been manufactured in some Chinese sweatshop for a Dollar Store Halloween costume.  Also, Christmas tree ornaments, those colored glass baubles, and what looked like birthday cards.  This teepee, a junkyard collage, an experiment in communal outsider art.  I inched around it, studying the things that had been posted to its walls—gold and silver stars like a third grade teacher would dole out, Obey Andre the Giant stickers, cartoony portraits of vacationing couples, polaroids of people with their faces scratched out.  I wondered how I’d missed this earlier, when I’d walked past the cove on my first day in town.  Maybe it hadn’t been there, or I hadn’t needed it yet.

Pulling aside the quilted flap at the teepee’s entrance, I ducked inside.  I don’t know how or why, but I understood that this was where I’d find what I’d come for, that this was where the secret exchanges took place.

A black dugout pit radiated in the center of the space, a few weak embers smoldering there, sending out a glow that faded quickly into near total darkness.  The atmospheric pressure seemed to have changed, too.  I was shielded here from the stickiness outside.  The air was cool and dry and scented lightly with patchouli—ah, patchouli, that musty toe-jam glaze that announced the rot while concealing it.

I thought at first that the teepee was empty.  There wasn’t much there.  A three-legged stool.  A tin cup partly filled with stagnant water.  A large pile of pressed-felt blankets in the shadows near the wall.  But then I heard something, a sound like a latch clicking open, and the blankets stirred and my eyes began to adjust to the dark and they weren’t blankets at all—or they weren’t many, but one, draped over shoulders.  The pile slid toward me.

A hunched figure, obese, on wheels.  An ancient woman in a squeaky wheelchair.  Her coarse gray hair covered her face.  I’d bought dope from sketchier, more surprising people than this before.

“Is this the right place?” I asked.  “I hope it’s okay.  I just figured I’d try…”

The wheelchair pivoted and came to a halt.  The woman’s head drooped almost to her knees.

“I’m not a cop,” I said.

The head shook, like a spasm, the warm-up to a seizure.

“So, I mean, what would it run me?  Just for a taste?”

She labored and wheezed with each breath, fighting her weight.  Then her breathing seemed to stop, and I thought for a moment that I was going to witness her dying.  She slid an arm out from under her blanket, dislodging it, sending it falling from her shoulders into a lump on the ground, and pulled her hair out of her face, ran her hand across the length of her skull, then let it rest there at the base of her neck.  I recognized this hand, the smoothness of the pale, near-olive skin, like it belonged to someone much younger than her, the creases at the joints where the fat buckled on itself, the way the tips of the fingers retained the elegance of the thin woman trapped inside this massive body.  It was my mother’s hand.

She raised her head to see me.

She said my name.  She said, “Be bold, be brave, don’t be afraid of anything, for I, the Lord, your God, am with you always.”  She was firm.  She was strong.  For once she wasn’t crying.

When I reached out to strangle her, my hands went right through her.

The post Labyrinth appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Art by J.K. Potter

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

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

Swim into my mouth, Ruth Blossom.

***

Part Three: The Lost Girl Ruth Blossom

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Does music make the flowers grow?”

“It brings things to the surface.”

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

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

“For what?”

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

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

“Sounds like a damn Church to me.”

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

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

“Like the convert in the Megillat.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so? saying, he fell upon you.

*          *          *

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Art by J.K. Potter

Part Two: The Gambler Luther “Doc” Santo Campo

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

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

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

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

“Alligator pattern Doc.”

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

“Skullfucker, Doc.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Close enough.”

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

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

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

“Where we at, preacher?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You de capon dat drives dat ugly chouchoot?”

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

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

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

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

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

“De bon coeur. And if ah win?”

“Don’t guess you will, Doc.”

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

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

“She didn’t make it.”

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

“She’s not here, Doc.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Alisa and André Breton at the Port-au-Prince airfield in December 1945. Paul Laraque (left of the Bretons), Mme. W. Lam, Dr. Pierre Mabille, le peintre Wilfredo Lam. On the right: René Bélance, Mme. Mabille, Regnor Bernard, Edris St. Armand and M. de Peillon, Ministre de France (photo from the Incomplete Works).

As Jacques-Stephen Alexis articulated in Paris, 1956 at the first International Conference of Black Writers and Artists, the Caribbean has always been a crossroads of civilizations, even before its multifarious encounters with Europe after Columbus. Published in the quarterly magazine Présence Africaine in the same year, Alexis’ piece “Du Réalisme Merveilleux des Haïtiens” covered a wide range of topics concerning Haiti, its history, politics, society, and culture, with the aim of bringing more international attention to Caribbean social realism and artistic expression. Through this discourse, he maintains that “primitive cultures” (as with Haitian art or “cousin” African art) possess a complex, visionary consciousness that profoundly engages the real world, inextricably bound to myth, symbolism, and the sacred.

While many are aware of the history of slavery and colonialism, until recently, relatively little recognition has been accorded to the study of post-colonial issues and the artistic expressionism stemming from it. In the case of the Antilles, it is crucial to understand how the merging of worlds led to a simultaneously collective and individualized consciousness of reality, which matured in the context of the surreal.

As Alexis discusses, the pre-Columbian Taìno peoples of the Caribbean integrated over a long period of time, gradually sharing and developing agricultural techniques, cultural traditions of art, music and dance, folklore, and religious beliefs. With the arrival of the French and the Spanish, an incredible diversity of African peoples were imported under slavery and exploited in the sugar cane fields to cultivate the major cash-crop of the region. The enslaved peoples of the islands and the imported African slaves reproduced an artificial version of the métissage that had occurred naturally before European interference: once again the Caribbean became a crossroads of cultural and linguistic exchange. With the “Code Noir,” the French empire established elaborate and strict rules to counterbalance the overwhelming ratio of slave populations to European colonists. Eventually this lead to increasingly violent conflicts, which lacked leadership until the Vaudou priest François Mackandal united a full resistance, whose legacy lived on long after being burnt at the stake, eventually culminating in the only salve rebellion to have succeeded in establishing independence – the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) – merely two years after the inspirational French Revolution.

While this seemed like an immense victory, the nascent “Black Republic” had its fair share of problems internally in addition to being denied recognition by any other nation for many decades. Isolated and alienated, Haiti struggled to consolidate power and revitalize its agricultural economy. By 1825, France had returned with a large fleet to seize the island once again, forcing the president at the time to pay a controversial indemnity of 150 million francs (later 90 million francs) in exchange for diplomatic recognition that finally came nearly a decade after signing the treaty. In the decades to come, Haitian politics and government remained incredibly turbulent during their independence. The two-caste system with a francophone Elite and a Creole peasantry had resounding effects across Haitian history and further impregnated the people’s consciousness with ideas of slavery, inferiority, and exploitation. This continued into the US occupation of Haiti lasting from 1915 until 1934. A major identity crisis reemerged among a French-educated generation of writers and artists, who equipped themselves with the means to confront the socio-cultural problems arising from the various forms of oppression by slavery, colonization, and occupation, engrained in the collective memory of these cultures.

Post-Negritude writers in Martinique and Haiti looked to Surrealism as a philosophical and psychological platform for reflecting on cultural identity, consciousness, and issues arising from post-colonialism in the Antilles. After a single edition of a publication called Légitime Défense, named after a short book by André Breton, the French state shut it down and more or less indirectly punished the Martiniquan students who took part in it. Their intentions were infused with Marxist dialectical materialism and surrealist ideas, which Breton himself is cited as having encouraged this group to engage with political and aesthetic ideas. While the publication and the group may seem inconsequential, it was the first time that colonial subjects used the language and medium of the oppressors to “talk back.” Almost contemporary to the Surrealists’ outrage at the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in Paris, the resounding message of Légitime Défense would extend far and wide.

The above history served as the fecundation of the soil where surrealism would plant its seeds in the 1930s and ‘40s. Surrealism offered a method for reconsidering cultural identity. While Surrealism developed in post-WWI Europe, an unexpected chain of encounters occurred in the 1940s between Surrealists escaping a second European war and Caribbean writers, whose interactions further developed a long-running inquiry into the issue of alterity and cultural identity in the Caribbean, once again transformed into a crossroads of consciousness and poetry.  Writers from the Caribbean were interested in Surrealism from Europe because of its potential for providing a medium for articulating and reflecting on black consciousness – not necessarily for anything else. In the same way, European surrealists were interested in Haitian Vaudou because they saw in it confirmation of their own ideas on the dream, trance states, and automatism.

Nevertheless, this exchange was very rich for literary and artistic expression. Pierre Mabille was a doctor at the main hospital in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1940. Mabille’s pursuits in psychoanalysis and the hermetic sciences greatly influenced his involvement in and contribution to the Surrealist movement, providing it from early on with a strong undercurrent of sociology and anthropology. One of his legacies that survives in Haiti today is a multidisciplinary review, Conjonctions, which he established in 1946 concerning various topics within Haitian culture. Before being appointed as the French cultural attaché, he helped found the Haitian Bureau d’Ethnologie, seeking to call attention to the dynamic intellectual value of Haitian folkloric and Vaudou traditions. The Catholic Church, in league with the state, pushed back with anti-Vaudou laws enforced against practitioners. Ironically, this anti-Vaudou position of the Church and state ended up legitimizing evidence of the complexity of their beliefs and practices and sparked a further interest from a more international community.

In 1945, Mabille invited surrealist André Breton to Haiti to give a series of lectures that would inspire a generation of writers, poets, and artists. On the very night of his arrival, Breton’s own definition of surrealism was quoted back to him by heart from the renegade poet Magloire St. Aude. This was the first of many encounters that formed a surrealist crossroads that would have far-reaching implications for the writers and artists of the Caribbean and the political scene with which they were engaged. A mutual self-recognition occurred during Breton’s time spent in the Caribbean, where he articulated what had only implicitly been represented before his arrival. Breton’s self-exile underlined surrealism’s sensitivity to the issues of otherness, displacement, and inter-cultural relations. The eventual fall of the Haitian government, who attended his infamous talk at the Rex Theater, is increasingly attributed to Breton’s catalytic speeches.

Years later, J.S. Alexis argued that because of an overly constructed social conscious and adherence to modernization, people on a whole have only served to alienate themselves from what “primitive thought” engages in everyday life: authentic and culturally relevant forms of expression. The separation of the sacred and the mundane is what constricts the expansive and transcendent ideas alluded to in surrealist thinking. Alexis’s term le réalisme merveilleux, commonly understood as magic realism (the same term used by Alejo Carpentier), described the way that Haitian writers and artists see the world around them and experience social reality, the world, and modern life. Haitian consciousness, largely influenced by local tradition and Vaudou, does not differentiate the sacred from the quotidian. Some things can be simple, but as Mabille strived to show, Vaudou religion and Haitian thought recognize their own concepts that deny that same simplicity in the way that it readily synthesizes diversity, naturally translates the marvelous into a vision of reality, and revels in notions that defy duality through multiple-aspect deities, sympathetic magic and the paradox of the undead.

These ideas would find their home in the works of writers such as Magloire St. Aude and René Dépestre in their respective works featuring zombies: Veillée (1956) and Hadriana dans tous mes rêves (1988). Over time, zombies become a metaphor for Hegelian slave dialectic that is so prominent in Surrealism and it embodies a paradox we now so commonly recognize as the undead: soulless, enslaved beings with no right to live on their own. At the level of abstraction, the implied zombification of mankind can be seen in popular media today, as we are unable to die (that is, be transformed), so we continue in a condemned state of not being able to live.[1] In 1938, Mabille published Egrégores ou la vie des civilisations in response to major philosophical influences on Surealist ideas on the individual and human civilization: “Life is a continuum in which all things interrelate. Death as finality is denied because everything is capable of transformation, everything exists in a state of latent potentiality, capable of being realized or activated by desire.” [2]

While many of these writers remain untranslated, the growing recognition of Caribbean authors over the years has rendered some of their works available in English. Jacques-Stephen Alexis’ first book is available under the English title General Sun, My Brother (originally published in French, 1955) as well as some of his short stories from his collection Romancéro aux étoiles. The novel portrays the troubled life story of a laborer and his wife living in the slums of Port-au-Prince and working in the cane fields. Alexis’ marvelous realism depicts how the supernatural was a part of enslaved peoples’ everyday experience of social reality, while his short stories showcase the orality of Haitian storytelling, infused with references to Creole culture, Vaudou, and folklore.

In 2012, England’s Nottingham Contemporary presented an extensive exhibit on Haitian art named after the deity of the crossroads, Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou. The publication coming out of the exhibit contains a beautiful collection, spanning more than seventy years of popular art and documenting the influence of the Vaudou religion on the visionary imaginations and ingenuity of some of Haiti’s most significant artists. The illustrated publication is accompanied by a combination of recent and republished texts in English from a wide array of artists and writers. In the (roughly translated) words of J.S. Alexis, “Haitian art is indeed a presentation of the real followed by a procession of the weird, of fantasies and waking dreams, of mysteries and the marvelous…”

Included in that anthology is an extract from Michael Richardson’s book Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean, which compiles a comprehensive history of the Caribbean, the development of Surrealism, and explores a number of writers, philosophers and intellectuals, many of which were yet to be translated.

Further Reading:

Pierre Mabille

André Breton

Alfred Metraux – Le vaudou haïtien (English translation available)

Caribbean Writers:

Dany LaFerriere

Edouard Glissant

Jacques Stephen Alexis

Aimé Césaire

Michel Leiris

René Depestre

René Ménil

Magloire St.Aude

Jacques Roumain
On the Caribbean and Caribbean Surrealism:

Refusal of the Shadow (by Krzysztof Fijalkowski Michael Richardson)

Kafou: Haiti, Art, and Vodou (Nottingham Contemporary, 2012)

Publications by Jean Michael Dash (Caribbean Scholar and Translator)

Bibliography:

Refusal of the Shadow (by Krzysztof Fijalkowski Michael Richardson)

Kafou: Haiti, Art, and Vodou (Nottingham Contemporary, 2012)

“Du réalisme merveilleux des Haïtiens” (Jacques-Stephen Alexis in Présence Africaine, 1956)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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