Carrion Comfort

by Dan Simmons

  I wrote two more stories for OMNI and four stories for a three-writer anthology from Dark Harvest Press called Night Visions 5— an anthology I shared with two guys named George R. R. Martin and Stephen King.

  And while I was writing, both Hyperion and Phases of Gravity sold to Bantam, the former as an SF novel and the latter as a mainstream novel, the first in a new series of “near-SF-mainstream” books under an imprint they were calling Spectra. (They later rebadged Phases of Gravity, perhaps the favorite novel I’ve written, as SF, but it isn’t.)

  And then . . . Carrion Comfort sold.

  The advance was low, not enough to pay back the publisher I’d taken the book away from, but I could make up the difference now with money from the other advances. The new publisher was a specialty, limited-edition publisher— Dark Harvest Press, the guys who’d sandwiched my three stories in between George Martin’s and Steve King’s— and the press run for Carrion Comfort would be small, only about three thousand hardcovers total.

  I didn’t care. It would be published. Finally.

  Again, there was no real editing or copyediting. I remember the total copyediting suggestions of the two guy-publishers: change “mantle” to “mantel,” and drop the “e” in “adrenaline.” (Actually, “adrenalin” would have worked.)

  They sent me proof pages with three days to copyedit Carrion Comfort myself when I was writing the final pages of Hyperion. It was a mess.

  Then they showed me the only artist they could afford— for cover, color frontispiece, and about ten interior illustrations. (Illustrations for Carrion Comfort? The idea struck me as odd, but it was a limited-edition volume and I knew nothing about such things.) But I did know that I didn’t like the artist’s work.

  So with about five weeks to go before the art deadline, I got a local artist friend Kathy— Kathleen McNeil Sherman— to do the cover, frontispiece, and ten interior pieces with me.

  For some reason, Kathy and I decided on scratchboard as our common technique. Now, scratchboard is fun— it’s working on a large, inked panel with a razor blade, simply scratching away the highlights and crosshatchings and stuff to expose the white beneath the black ink. But it’s a tricky technique working in reverse like that, rather like backing a car and trailer down a curved alley, and neither Kathy nor I had worked in it for many years. It made it more fun.

  And it was fun. After fifteen hours a day of working on my new novel upstairs, I’d go down into our little basement to the jury-rigged drawing board I’d cobbled together and scratch away on the interior illustrations for Carrion Comfort.

  For the cover, I did the drawing and Kathy laid down the oil paint. I did the frontispiece with scatchboard and colored ink.

  The illustrations— at least my contributions— were crude, but strangely powerful. Or at least satisfying. (For those readers who might want to see this original Carrion Comfort cover and some of these scratchboard illustrations, please feel free to visit my Website at dansimmons.com and specifically this URL for the artwork—http://dansimmons.com/art/dan_art3.htm.)

  When Carrion Comfort finally came out, we invited the two publishers, Paul and Scott, to our publication party. Since Paul and Scott refused to fly, they drove from Chicago to Colorado to help us celebrate. Our tiny little house had about sixty guests in it and it was crowded. Karen arranged to have a cake made with the Carrion Comfort cover replicated perfectly in colored frosting. I’d just invested in a small black-and-white photocopy machine (to save in copying the final MSS, even though it took me many hours to copy my long manuscripts one page at a time) and I remember we had a party game where the writers, artists, friends, publishers, and other guests went alone into my little study and came out with a work of photocopy “art” to be judged later, after we’d had a few more drinks.

  And I remember that our seven-year-old daughter Jane, who’d been watching the party from the staircase until then, won the voting by popular acclaim with her photocopy of “Teddy,” her teddy bear.

  It was a good day. It was a good year.

  As the years passed, I watched a strange thing happen to my early chosen field of horror. My former editor lived up to her goal of creating an “empire” of horror fiction. She and other editors working for other publishers simply published so much of the stuff, under the assumption that readers couldn’t get enough of it (since they seemed not to be able to get enough of Stephen King’s work, was the reasoning, or Dean Koontz’s) that after a few years Gresham’s Law kicked. The bad drove out the good. The market was oversaturated. The readers were first satiated and then wary as they realized the low quality that was being sold in such vast quantities.

  I watched horror all but die as a genre for a while. Some chains eliminated the “Horror” section of their bookstores. Many writers of horror in the late 1980s and early 1990s— myself included— moved on to other things.

  When horror finally returned as a viable category, it did so through the work of a few excellent writers who helped redefine the genre yet again.

  Thanks to the friendship of Herb Yellin, the publisher of the private Lord John Press (beautiful books, beautifully made, for collectors, featuring authors of personal interest to Herb), I once spent an evening in L.A. with Herb and his old friends Robert (Psycho) Bloch, the comedian/radio star Stan Freberg (author and voice of the hit 1960s comedy LP The United States of America), and Ray Bradbury. Yellin and Bloch and Freberg and Bradbury were old friends and had been meeting one night a month to chew the fat for decades.

  It was a totally unforgettable night.

  Robert Bloch warned me before the talking started that once it started I wouldn’t be hearing from him again, and he was correct. (I loved Robert Bloch.) Freberg and Bradbury held the floor all night, late into the night, and the topic they stumbled across that night was “Mentors in Our Lives Who Were Also the Monsters in Our Lives.”

  For Freberg, it was his boss Bob Clampett when he wrote and puppeteered for the Emmy Award–winning TV show puppet show Time for Beany in the early 1950s. Clampett was so cheap that he’d put his writers to work in “a friend’s car” along the curb in L.A. only for Freberg and the other writer to discover that it had been a stranger’s car. Once Clampett set them up in their new “writing office” in an empty house up on blocks and Stan Freberg and his equally underpaid writing partner Daws Butler, to save money, moved into the house to live there, despite the fact that it had no electricity or running water.

  And then one morning they woke up to find their “office” and home being moved down the street to its new location.

  But Freberg’s ultimate mentor/monster was the Broadway impresario David Merrick, and the tales of that love/hate relationship made me cry with laughter one minute and simply cry the next.

  Then Ray Bradbury joined in to discuss his ultimate mentor/monster, John Huston.

  In 1953, the young and rather innocent SF writer had been in Long Beach looking for dinosaur books with his friend Ray Harryhausen when he got word that Huston wanted to talk to him. The next day Ray went to the hotel in L.A. where Huston was staying and was flabbergasted to learn that the director had chosen young Bradbury— who’d never done a screenplay— to write Huston’s screen adaptation of Moby Dick. And John Huston insisted that Bradbury and his wife come to Huston’s estate in Ireland to write the script.

  Bradbury admitted to Mr. Huston that he’d never been able to read the whole book. “Well, go home to night and read it and come back tomorrow and tell me you’ll help me kill that goddamned whale,” boomed John Huston as only John Huston could boom.

  The next hour or two of Bradbury’s tale, liberally added to and heckled by Stan Freberg, was one of the funniest/saddest things I’d ever heard, perhaps equaled only by Freberg’s tales of his relationship with David Merrick.

  Bradbury described how Huston would bait and parody the innocent young writer, embarrassing him in front of the famous people who trooped through Huston’s Irish estate. One night it would be famous writers and
directors at the long table, the next night Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, but when Huston drank, he got mean.

  “I had a habit of blessing people when we part,” said Bradbury that night in L.A. “I still do, I guess. But one night outside an Irish pub, I gave the blessing sign to friends that were leaving and Huston just rounded on me and screamed, ‘Who do you think you are, the fucking bloody pope? STOP IT!’ ”

  When the torment reached its climax, Bradbury and his wife would secretly phone for a taxi, order it to meet them at the end of the estate’s long driveway after dark, and reserve tickets home on the next flight back to America. To hell with “Moby Dick.” No one deserved this kind of abuse.

  But, as mentor/monsters tend to do, Huston always sensed young Bradbury’s breaking point.

  That night in L.A. I watched Bradbury act out that night almost more than forty years earlier when Ray and his wife tried to rush through dinner, despite the famous faces at the table, so they could sneak their luggage out to the taxi and escape. But then— and Bradbury could perform a perfect John Houston booming voice— Huston hushed the table and announced, “There’s much talent here to night, but only one genius at our table. I want to introduce you to that genius. This young man wrote an incredible storrrrreee about a light house and a foghorn and a DINE-OHSAURRRR.”

  And then John Huston acted out the entire tale of Bradbury’s story “The Foghorn,” becoming the light house keepers, the bellowing foghorn, and the bellowing DINE-OH-SAURRRR. At the end, Huston made young Bradbury stand for the applause of all the people at the table.

  And then Ray Bradbury and his wife Maggie (Marguerite) went back upstairs and unpacked their bags and cancelled the taxi and cancelled the flight back to America.

  This mentor/monster dance went on for eight months.

  I had a mentor after all, although he was invisible to me at the time.

  It turns out, I discovered later, that a certain Dean Koontz had been one of the five judges for the 1986 World Fantasy Award. (Ellen Datlow had been another.) Koontz had seen something in Song of Kali and had bent the arms of a few of the other judges to read the huge tome and take it seriously, even though some were reluctant to give the prestigious award to a first-time novelist.

  Then, even as Carrion Comfort was appearing in its brief hardcover stint as a special edition from Dark Harvest . . . (one young speculator in California sold his mother’s insurance so that he could buy up one thousand copies of the book— a full one third of the print run, but I got him back for it. Besides throwing him and his lackeys out of an Orange County bookstore when he dragged in all one thousand copies for me to sign, I later learned from a friend that the fellow had fallen behind on his payments on the California storage shed where he stored the one thousand volumes, waiting for them to reach a certain high collector’s price before selling, and the storage owner seized them . . . and sold them at cover price. I bought as many as I could. But I digress.) . . . even as the Dark Harvest hardcover of Carrion Comfort was quickly appearing and disappearing, Dean Koontz, totally without my knowledge (I’d never met him), was convincing Warner Books to publish it as a nine-hundred-plus-page, small-print paperback.

  The paperback came out in 1990, the same year as my Bantam Doubleday Dell novel The Fall of Hyperion, my long novella Entropy’s Bed at Midnight from Lord John’s Press, and my first collection of short fiction, Prayers to Broken Stones. (I told you I was keeping busy.)

  Finally, thanks to the efforts of a bestselling writer I hadn’t yet met and had never spoken to, simply because he thought it was a book worth reading, readers could find and read Carrion Comfort . . . in its complete form.

  When shall we three meet again?

  In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

  When the hurlyburly’s done,

  When the battle’s lost and won.

  That will be ere the set of sun.

  Reader, I hope you enjoy this Twentieth Anniversary Edition of Carrion Comfort. I wish you good luck in avoiding the real mind vampires in this life who wish to play with you as if they were the cat and you a ball of yarn. And, finally, Reader, I wish you luck in vanquishing the monsters you do have to meet . . . and in celebrating the mentors who have and will again fill your life with unanticipated joy.

  —DAN SIMMONS

  Colorado, July 2009

  “Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist— slack they may be— these last strands of man In me or, most weary, cry I can no more . . .”

  —GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

  PROLOGUE

  Chelmno, 1942

  Saul Laski lay among the soon-to-die in a camp of death and thought about life. Saul shivered in the cold and dark and forced himself to remember details of a spring morning— golden light touching the heavy limbs of willows by the stream, a field of white daisies beyond the stone buildings of his uncle’s farm.

  The barracks was silent except for an occasional rasping cough and the furtive burrowings of Musselmänner, the living dead, vainly seeking warmth in the cold straw. Somewhere an old man coughed in a wracking spasm which signaled the end of a long and hopeless struggle. The old one would be dead by morning. Or even if he survived the night, he would miss the morning roll call in the snow, which meant that he would be dead before morning ended.

  Saul curled away from the glare of the searchlight pouring in through frosted panes and pressed his back against the wooden mortises of his bunk. Splinters scraped at his spine and ribs through the thin cloth he wore. His legs began to shake uncontrollably as the cold and fatigue worked at him. Saul clutched at his thin thighs and squeezed until the shaking stopped.

  I will live. The thought was a command, an imperative he drove so deep into his consciousness that not even his starved and sore-ridden body could defy his will.

  When Saul had been a boy a few years earlier, an eternity earlier, and his Uncle Moshe had promised to take him fishing at his farm near Cracow, Saul had taught himself the trick of imagining, just before he fell asleep, a smooth, oval rock upon which he wrote the hour and minute at which he wished to awake. Then, in his mind’s eye, he would drop the rock into a clear pond and watch it settle into the depths. Invariably, he would awake the next morning at the precise moment, alert, alive, breathing in the cool morning air and savoring the predawn silence in that fragile interval before his brother and sisters woke to break the perfection.

  I will live. Saul squeezed his eyes shut and watched the rock sink into clear water. His body began to shake again and he pressed his back more firmly against the rough angle of boards. For the thousandth time he tried to nestle more deeply in his depression of straw. It had been better when old Mr. Shistruk and young Ibrahim had shared the bunk with him but Ibrahim had been shot at the mine works and Mr. Shistruk had sat down two days before at the quarry and refused to rise even when Gluecks, the head of the SS guards, had released his dog. The old man had waved his bony arm almost merrily, a weak farewell to the staring prisoners, in the five seconds before the German shepherd ripped his throat out.

  I will live. The thought had a rhythm to it that went beyond the words, beyond language. The thought set a counterpoint to everything Saul had seen and experienced during his five months in the camp. I will live. The thought pulsed with a light and warmth which partially offset the chill, vertiginous pit which threatened to open wider inside him and consume him. The Pit. Saul had seen the Pit. With the others he had shoveled cold clods of black soil over the warm bodies, some still writhing, a child feebly moving its arm as if waving to a welcoming relative in a train station or stirring in its sleep, shoveled the dirt and spread the lime from bags too heavy to lift while the SS guard sat dangling his legs over the edge of the Pit, his hands soft and white on the black steel barrel of the machine-pistol, a piece of plaster on his rough cheek where he had cut himself shaving, the cut already healing while naked white forms stirred feebly as Saul poured dirt into the Pit, his eyes red-rimmed from the cloud of lime hanging
like a chalky fog in the winter air.

  I will live. Saul concentrated on the strength of that cadence and ignored his shaking limbs. Two levels above him, a man sobbed in the night. Saul could feel the lice crawling up his arms and legs as they sought the center of his fading warmth. He curled into a tighter ball, understanding the imperative which drove the vermin, responding to the same mindless, illogical, incontestable command to continue.

  The stone dropped deeper into the azure depths. Saul could make out the rough letters as he balanced on the edge of sleep. I will live.

  Saul’s eyes snapped open as a thought chilled him more deeply than did the wind whistling through ill-fitted window frames. It was the third Thursday of the month. Saul was almost sure it was the third Thursday. They came on the third Thursday. But not always. Perhaps not this Thursday. Saul pulled his forearms in front of his face and curled into an even tighter fetal position.

  He was almost asleep when the barracks door crashed open. There were five of them— two Waffen-SS guards with submachine guns, a regular army noncom, Lieutenant Schaffner, and a young Oberst whom Saul had never seen before. The Oberst had a pale, Aryan face with a strand of blond hair falling across his brow. Their hand torches played over the rows of shelflike bunks. Not a man stirred. Saul could feel the silence as eighty-five skeletons held their breath in the night. He held his breath.

  The Germans took five strides into the barracks, the cold air billowing ahead of them, their massive forms silhouetted against the open door while their breath hung in icy clouds around them. Saul pulled himself even deeper into the brittle straw.

  “Du!” came the voice. The torch beam had fallen on a capped and striped figure crouched in the depths of a lower bunk six rows from Saul.