by Shock Totem
And then the doorbell rings; to Miki it is two buzzing bells in a minor key.
Mama, still in the living room, says, “Who on Earth?” Her voice lifts up at the end. Aunt Sarah makes a noise in her throat. Mama walks toward the door, and her heels snick-snick-snick and stumble. She cries out with the sharp thumps of her elbows upon the floor, the brief chimes of her wineglass smashing.
A chair’s legs squeal against wood in the den. Each of Daddy’s words gets bigger as he says, “Lynn? Honey, you okay?”
“Someone at the door,” Mama says, and a sound comes from her, a thin wail that pulls at the skin around Miki’s eyes. It makes the down on the back of her neck lift with a chill.
In the den Uncle Easton begins to cry. Miki is confused by the sound. Chopin blares for a moment, a rill of keys climbing up the scale. Miki sits up in her bed. Daddy steps to the door; his shoe cracks a shard of glass. His hand turns the deadbolt with a snap then twists the knob and pulls the door toward him. The hinges give a sliver of a creak at the faintest edge of her ears.
For several heartbeats there are only the final, fading notes of the nocturne.
Daddy says, “Miki.”
Then his voice is gone. Everything is gone. The music, Daddy’s shoe on the glass, Uncle Easton’s sobs, the fading course of water through pipes. Gone. She strains her ears. The hum of Orion has vanished. There is not even the sound of her own body. A thing Miki has never heard is all that is left: true silence.
The roar of quiet distends into shapes and coarse textures. The blob of lesser darkness, the Hunter’s beacon, is still there. She opens her mouth to push out a sound, to call out for Daddy, but so alive are her senses that her breath will not come. She holds herself up, palms pressed into the pillow behind her, as a soft sound brings the house back to life. A sound like Christmas presents being carefully unwrapped. Then a sighing breath, and a pile of weight collapses to the floor. Miki hears the same sounds repeat, and something cold lodges in her chest.
The front door clicks shut. Slow footsteps rasp into the house. Another small exhalation, another heavy sack being dropped.
Miki realizes there are two new sets of footsteps in the house, and the first moves across the hall. Toward Uncle Easton in the den.
Are they being hurt? She tries to piece the sounds into an answer, but the thought of it only confuses her more.
She slips out of bed, squeezes the carpet between her toes. The taste of salt is on her lips. She walks twelve paces, reaches out a hand to touch the edge of the door, pulls it wider with one muttered creak that erupts like fireworks in her ears. The Hunter calls to her, and she turns and fumbles along the wall until her hand bumps the stars. She can almost feel Orion’s light gleam off the tears on her cheeks. She slides him out of the wall, steps out into the hallway, and pauses.
Fingers wrap around the banister at the bottom of the stairs and slide upward.
Miki pads lightly down the hallway to Jackson’s room. The footsteps on the stairs behind her mimic quiet, but they drag against the risers as though bearing a great weight. Once inside she closes Jackson’s door, easing the doorknob back to rest. She needs time enough to tell him something. There is no way around the springy click of the lock, so she pushes the button and runs to her brother, plunges her hands inside the crib and against his clean thriving warmth. He is asleep and she brushes her fingers across his face, the drool-slick corner of his mouth.
She swipes her hand on the wall, locating the wall socket by memory. Jackson’s balloon light is too faint for her to sense, but Mama told her it is there. She yanks it out and tosses it behind her, then plugs Orion in. She stands and turns in the direction of the door. In the darkness she waits. Hears herself at her most recent piano recital. Daddy cried when she finished the Shostakovich preludes. She puts her memory there, turned toward the rush of applause, waiting to touch Daddy’s wet eyelashes.
The doorknob rattles. Fingernails scratch the wood.
“Mono no aware,” she says. “Daddy told me that, but it really is for you. He meant that life has sadness in it. You’re too little to be afraid, Jackson.”
Something presses against the door. The knob rattles again. She hears the lock give way and the door opens toward her, expanding the room. She presses her back into the railing of the crib. The gauze of stars limns the right edge of her dark.
Heavy feet chafe the carpet across the room. A trunk of blackness looms over her. Twin stars resolve above her face, pinpricks that stab at her brain. The shadow separates from the greater dark into lines and curves. Slowly, she sees—with glistening, gazing eyes—what could be a mouth, a downturned furrow. The dull blade of a nose with broad nostrils. The flesh of its face sags as though it is merely borrowing it. She sees the seeking tip of its tongue, the wet clay texture of its white skin—a corona of blazing sun to her eyes, this first brightness.
It has no scent. The thought of smell is far, far away.
The other fills the doorway, obscured behind the first. Her eyes do not know how to look at them. She needs none of her old senses to know they are not human. Her hand reaches in its habit to touch the strange limbs, but falters. Something dark covers its body, but it does not seem like clothing. Its figure is all whorls and fuzz with patches of stark detail; its eyes glitter at her behind long curtains of hair the color of—she does not know. She can only think that it is not black. Its hands lift, fingers as long as her forearm curled up from open palms.
“You came,” Miki says. “I knew you would. I see you. I can see you.” She remembers—like a piling just breaking the surface of her emotional tide—the sounds from the living room. The ice beating in her chest. “My Daddy’s not hurt, is he?”
It opens its mouth. It is the entrance to a cave. Inside the cave is the word no, and a great urgency.
Miki turns and bends and lifts Jackson into her arms. “Jackson! I can see.” He stirs, the thin flower of his mouth pressed against her shoulder. The simple sight of him stops her heart for a moment, empties her lungs. His tiny hand curls in a loose grasp against the fabric of her shirt. Her eyes move from his face to the soft wrinkles of his fingers. He is more real than she ever thought. She hugs him to her chest, her cheek atop the soft beauty of his head, and whispers, “You’re too little to be afraid.”
And she places the baby in the thing’s hands.
It pulls out a slice of shadow and tucks Jackson into itself, as though it were wearing a coat. A final scrutiny from the sparking eyes set within deep sockets, and both of the figures leave the room in dim streaks. She stands and listens, her eyes fixed upon the stark lines of the doorframe. Her brother’s warmth begins to fade from her skin. The front door opens. Then silence.
Miki falls to her knees and drinks Orion with her eyes, a quivering smile on her lips. Each point in his figure is as clear to her eyes as the taste of salt is on her tongue. After a moment she looks to the ceiling. Her mouth widens and she leaps to her feet and runs into the hall. Photographs on the wall burst and gleam with colors and people she has known only through texture—many Miki herself—but she ignores them. She soars down the staircase, not seeing Mama and Aunt Sarah folded, dreaming, on the floor. Her eyes skim over the room like flat stones on a pond, not seeing Daddy sitting slumped by the door. She sprints into the wide empty yard. The grass is cold and fresh on her bare feet. In the sky brilliant winks of light arrive across eons.
Her arms reach out as far as they can go; she turns in circles and circles and circles. She laughs and looks for Orion, knowing he is alive and shining back at her.
Michael Wehunt’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Innsmouth Free Press, the anthology For When the Veil Drops, One Buck Horror, and Crowded Magazine. He lives in the lost city of Atlanta. Please visit him at www.michaelwehunt.com.
THE HARD WAY
A Conversation with Gary McMahon
by John Boden
Gary McMahon is one of the UK’s best up-and-comers. He first leapt onto my radar with his wond
erful Spectral Press chapbook, What They Hear in the Dark. He has put out consistently dark and vivid books full of rich and sometimes surreal horror that is not easily forgotten.
Gary was kind enough to sit down here at ST Manor and talk with me for a bit.
• • •
JB: I must be honest and tell you, I was unfamiliar with your work prior to Simon sending me your Spectral chapbook, What They Hear in the Dark—which I loved. I then went on to read your Thomas Usher novels, which I loved as well, and I am currently reading the third in the Concrete Grove series. I love the images you paint, so horrific and unsettling, but so vivid and real. Tim Lebbon said that your horror is heartfelt, and that is an apparent truth...it seeps through the language. What is the process like for you, from idea to completion?
GM: That’s a tough question. With a short story I usually start with an image or an idea that’s very personal to me—something taken from my life, or something from my life that I’ve tweaked a little—and try to find the story around that kernel. Novels are different. They usually come from big ideas, and I then have to dig inside those ideas to find the smaller stories hidden there. I find writing difficult, and often emotionally painful, but I suppose it’s essential to who I am, what I’m about. I enjoy having written much more than I enjoy the process of actually writing something.
JB: Does this feeling lead to procrastination? I sort of feel the same way about my own writing, a lot of the time it seems a chore and I just choose to fuck off rather than get to it. How do you do with deadlines?
GM: No, I’m very disciplined when I’m working on something. I believe in finishing whatever I start, and often set myself unreasonable deadlines so I can finish a project even quicker than I need to. When I was in my twenties I got heavily into running, and the guy I used to train with—my running guru—always used to say, “If there’s a hard way and an easy way, always choose the hard way.” The easy way would be to not write and go off and do something else, so I choose the hard way and I write. I’m kind of weird like that: I enjoy pushing myself.
JB: I have always been a bit of an Anglophile, my mother-in-law hails from Luton, I believe. My wife has endeared in me a love of British programming far beyond the required Monty Python, The Young Ones, or Ab Fab. I have watched hours of dramas and come away with the declaration that everything we do over here is wrong. The English sense of storytelling is so different, not as jarring and blatant as the pap we shovel to our populace. So much is left to the viewer/reader to put together, and I feel the same about your books. The plots are strong and the characters are incredible, yet you allow the reader to do some of the work on his or her own. Is it a measured and conscious thing, that type of delivery, or is it almost hereditary?
GM: I think we’re all products of our influences—the writers who’ve inspired us, the places where we live, the people we meet in our daily lives, the music we listen to, the traumas that we’ve experienced. There are a lot of great American genre writers and a lot of great English genre writers, and each brings something different to the table. The main difference, it seems, is in the approach to the subject matter. Perhaps English horror writers have more of a sense of atmosphere, or maybe that’s a myth. To be honest, I’m no longer really sure. Good writing is good writing. I think it’s as simple as that.
JB: Do you find the older you get that your voice changes, in regard to your writing? In tone or style, do you ever notice a shift or change in that area?
GM: I think the main change I’ve noticed in terms of my style is that I’m less wordy than I once was. I can say what I want to say using a lot less words these days, but this leads to me being afraid that every novel I write will be too short. Market considerations dictate that a novel should be around 90,000 words in length. All my novels seem to want to be 70,000 words long. It gives me the Fear. What if I can’t sustain this for 90,000 words? What publisher will buy a novel shorter than that? It’s very worrying, but on the other hand I’m sick of seeing bloated genre novels, and would love to see a return to short, compressed novels.
JB: What do you like to do when not committing your demons to paper? How important is music to what you do?
GM: I love to run, I practice Shotokan karate (I’m currently 7th Kyu), and I love spending time with my family. Reading is hugely important, but because of my own writing, day job and family commitments, I don’t get as much time as I’d like to read for pleasure. Music is certainly important to me. I think good prose, like music, has a certain rhythm, and I see a lot of creative parallels between writing and music.
JB: I only run if something is chasing me. What got you into writing and do you write much outside of the genre of horror?
GM: I can’t even remember why I started writing. It always just seemed like a natural thing to do. I’ve always written, even as a child. It makes my ideas more concrete. I think much of what I write dips in and out of, and between, genres. I just write what I write, my stories and my novels, and let other people worry about classifying it.
JB: Does classification bother you at all, the need we seem to have to label everything?
GM: Yeah, I’ve come to hate it. Genre classification is basically a marketing tool. I’m not a horror fan, or a genre fan; I’m a fan of good fiction. I don’t give a fuck about what genre it’s perceived to be part of.
JB: Sadly, classification is a part of what we do, what most people do. Most of what I have read from you is very visual. Have there been any attempts or offers made to adapt anything to film or television? Is that something you would be open to?
GM: I’m a huge film fan, so I’d love to see something of mine adapted for the big screen...or for the small screen, for that matter. Last year a Hollywood producer was sniffing around the Thomas Usher novels, but that seems to have led to nothing. I’ve also been talking to someone about the possibility of making a short independent film from one of my stories. I’m not sure if anything will come of any of this, but it would be nice. Personally, I think the Concrete Grove books are crying out to be adapted into films by a visionary director. But what do I know? I’m just a writer.
JB: I think the Usher novels would make great films, or maybe a miniseries. Who are some of your influences?
GM: Some of my main writing influences: Ramsey Campbell, Charles Bukowski, Dennis Etchison, Richard Matheson, Stephen King, and Peter Straub. I’m also influenced by the art of Francis Bacon, Edward Hopper, and Vincent Van Gogh. Radiohead’s music inspires me constantly—I’m always striving to write a prose equivalent of their sound.
JB: Ah! The old guard...well, not the old-old guard, but yeah, for our generation I guess that applies. Are you a fan of King’s more recent works? I’ll be honest and say the man was losing me all through the nineties with some of the stuff he put out, but his last few offerings have really swung back and made me proclaim, “Oh yeah, he is brilliant.” Are there any writers you love that you feel the public is not aware of?
GM: I’ve always been a fan of King’s writing, but I found myself less interested in his novels in the nineties. I’m not sure why. Recently, I think he’s produced some of the best work of his career. I never stopped thinking he was brilliant; I just read other stuff instead. There are loads of great writers the public seems unaware of. It would take all day to list them. It seems to me like the general public would rather read generic, poorly-written crap than well-crafted fiction.
JB: So what does the future hold for Gary McMahon, besides what I hope will be worldwide awareness of how brilliant a writer he is?
GM: Ha! You really need to keep off those drugs...I’m not sure what the future holds for me in terms of my writing. I’ve eased back a little, took my foot off the pedal. My frenetic output was having negative effects on my health, so I’m now writing at a less hectic pace. Currently, I’m working on two novels. One of them is a commission for an acclaimed US publisher; the other is for my agent to (hopefully) sell to one of the big publishers. Let’s just wait and see what comes of
that.
JB: Well, Gary, it has been quite a pleasure chatting with you. Maybe someday we can do it in person. From the rest of us here at Shock Totem, thanks for your time and we hope to hear more from you over here!
GM: Many thanks, John. It’s been a pleasure.
BALLAD OF THE MAN WITH THE SHARK TOOTH BRACELET
by Lucia Starkey
My father was a fish. That’s what my mother used to tell me. I don’t ask anymore. Walking the darkness of indifferent streets, flowers trampled in the gutters by the progress of time, I know he must have been a shark. Only such a sleekly cruel fish could have been my sire. I am the inky shadow on those streets, the thing that makes the dark draw back in fear.
I watch the bump and grind from a dark smoky corner, last holdout against the crisp-trousered sweater-set wave of morality. The dancers are as much a cancerous growth as the acrid weight of the air is, and I use my gills to suck in more of both.
The girls girls girls don’t take people home. That’s for the bone-thin eels hanging near the door; pretend customers who make their one drink last all night, until some Jack’s freer flowing alcohol and cash works glamour on a listless form. Suddenly he sees a beauty queen where before she was a waif, and by the time the magic fades, his better sense is drowned in sunlight agony. Pain drowned by pain, as we all are drowning every second, every day.
Who will judge me when all eyes avert themselves? When I take a skeleton by the hand, my eyes are not veiled in highball lenses. I revel in the despair counted as ribs along her side, the gentle swell of organs, softer than her laughable femininity. With no confusion of humanity, that limp deadness of my trousers can rise and do its weaponly duty. A hint of hope is anathema to me, leaving me with nothing but rage and a flopping fish, legacy of my like-gendered parent.
