Don't Clean the Aquarium!
Page 1
DON'T CLEAN THE AQUARIUM
& Other Tales of Horror
The Complete Jeffrey Osier – Volume 1
First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital
Copyright 2011 by Jeffrey Osier
Cover Design by David Dodd
Cover image provided by Chan Tuck Lueng (http://delun.deviantart.com)
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CONTENTS
Don't Clean The Aquarium!
The Shabbie People
The Big Ol' Clown Lady
The Hive
Radio Glossolalia
Snowlight
Tiny Islands
Horizon Line
Author's Introduction
I spent most of the eighties working as an animator, fathering two adorable children, and in general just trying not to be such a teenager as I entered my thirties. During this time, I was an extremely failed science-fiction writer, in that I was a prolific short story writer who read widely in the field but never sold anything and really considered it a victory just to get a personal rejection from any editor who went so far as to read the story. Truth is, I was not very good. From the years 1980 to 1986, I went from weak Michael Bishop-like pastiches to weak Lucius Shepard pastiches with occasional clueless diversions into cyberpunk (which felt kind of funny in that I didn’t even own a computer yet).
In November 1986, one of my animation cohorts asked me if I’d ever written a horror story. A good friend of his was launching a small press horror fiction magazine. I was only vaguely aware that such things existed, and I had never so much as held one in my hand.
The last thing I could remember writing that qualified as a horror story was a surreal little lump of poison called Catalog, from the spring of ’78, dreamt up after too much Ballard, too many acid flashbacks, and way too impressionable a first viewing of Eraserhead. It was still lodged firmly in a spiral notebook, in a box, in the basement. I fished it out, read it, decided it was too off the wall for what I thought this editor would be looking for, went upstairs, opened the spiral notebook I was currently filling, and started writing what would turn out to be my first published short story. It was actually quite easy. The story was something that anybody who’d ever known me would have recognized as my work immediately. It was me, through and through, in a way no science fiction I’d ever written could even compare. I was very proud of that story. I typed it up and handed it off to my friend at work who handed it off to his friend the fledgling magazine editor. That story was "Enclyclopedia for Boys" and the editor was Mark Rainey, who was putting together the first issue of his magazine Deathrealm.
Not really sure whether he would accept it or not, I immediately leaped into another project that had occurred to me while writing that first story. While I was writing it, I was having a lot of dreams, some of them veering into nightmare, about fish and aquariums. I was, at that time, having some issues with my own aquarium, and the dreams were spectacular, wide-screen magnifications of what, in truth, were just some laziness-caused maintenance issues. Often, I was wandering a labyrinth where all the walls were aquarium glass, so that I was surrounded by gigantic masses of water and huge, unfamiliar fish. Somehow, my aquarium issues and the dreams they inspired, led me to the idea that ended up as my second published story, “Don’t Clean the Aquarium.”
At this point, my lifetime’s reading of horror fiction consisted of the following: Poe and Matheson in junior high, Lovecraft in high school, and just a few months previously, one of the Clive Barker Books of Blood (the one with "Rawhead Rex"). I had yet to read Stephen King or Peter Straub or Ramsey Campbell or Robert McCammon, let alone anyone from that entire subculture of small press horror writers, into whose midst I was about to be pooted.
Reading “Don’t Clean the Aquarium” today, it’s obvious that what I was really trying to evoke was some kind of Roger Corman movie from 1958, with Dick Miller as the protagonist and an amazing, on-the-cheap Paul Blaisdell monster in the aquarium. Wouldn’t that have been great? Anyway, my point is that “Don’t Clean the Aquarium” is the last un-self-conscious horror story I ever wrote. I didn’t write it for an audience. I wasn’t even sure I was going to type it up once I was finished with the longhand version. It was just me and my influences and my dreams poured into the claustrophobic corridors of those damned, fine-line, green-tinted spiral notebooks. Luckily, my first story had been fairly well-received in that first issue of Deathrealm, so Mark was expressing interest in my next story. So I typed it up and it appeared in Deathrealm #2, complete with my illustration of the aquarium beast, which, true to the times, was more Giger than Blaisdell.
But the thing you people will never appreciate about “Don’t Clean the Aquarium” is just how lovely and magnificent an example of penmanship the original version was.
Rereading “The Shabbie People” now, I wish I could take one last walk down Lower Wacker Drive the way it once was… the way it still was when I wrote the story in the fall of 1990. Here were the underbellies of the skyscrapers along Wacker Drive proper, full of decay and recesses so dark and dank that they sometimes seemed almost otherworldly, or at least, a portal to an underworld. Or so my warped imagination used to tell me as I walked from the train to work along Lower Wacker nearly every morning for about five years. It wasn’t a true underground: the lower drive had its share of traffic, and in most places you could clearly see the tour boats on the Chicago River. Especially in winter, homeless people built shelters near the heating vents of the skyscrapers. By the time I wrote this story in October of 1990, Lower Wacker was no longer anywhere near my train or office. I was going through a divorce, grappling with the complexities of a new relationship, living in a cold, sterile apartment that I could not adjust to, when I sat down to write this story whose idea had occurred to me a couple of years before, when my circumstances – and reasons for wanting to write the story – had been far different. “The Shabbie People” was supposed to be about something other than isloation and loneliness and the choking inability to make meaningful human connection, The story I actually wrote was ultimately overwhelmed by my unhappiness and fear of the future, so it ended up being about the state of the author writing it and not about what it was supposed to be about, which was something to do with shy sentinels from some other realm and the strange, tentative interactions they have with their near-relatives (or near-analogs, at any rate), human beings. This story first appeared in a fine anthology edited by George Hatch, Souls in Pawn.
Much as I like this story, it has always bothered me because, as you may have already figured out, I can’t read it without being overwhelmed by the circumstances under which I wrote it. But George liked it, and it was subsequently reprinted in Karl Edward Wagner’s Years Best Horror XXI, one of two stories I placed in that year’s anthology.
Of course, if you drive or walk Lower Wacker today, you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about. Sealed up in concrete and reassuringly well-lit, it is as cold and lifeless a place as that apartment I wrote the
story in. It’s probably safer in every practical way imaginable, but I prefer to think of it as I remember it in my damaged, desperate early thirties: a decaying underground neighborhood, festering under a soft green glow, a world of recesses and portals, of car exhaust and the vented breaths of the office buildings atop it. It was a calming place to take a walk in those days. And you always had good company in your solitude.
One weekend in 1987, while I was driving through rural Wisconsin with my wife and three-year-old daughter, we passed something that I can still picture vividly to this day. Or at least, can pretend to remember vividly. Truth is, we passed it very quickly and my impression of the place had to be pieced together afterwards from the blurring scraps I actually saw. It was a black tanker, like from a truck or maybe a train (I had only a second or two to process this, remember). It had a door, cheerfully trimmed with something colorful, and it was fronted by a lush, beautiful garden. What the hell? I never saw it again (at the time we were lost and trying to find our way back to our intended route).
Meanwhile, my office-mate and I, animators both, had taken to bestowing names to people around the office we didn’t actually know. Since we were freelancers, not actual employees, and had low status around the office, these names were very important to us. There was Squeaks, the Real Norman Bates, the Little Skull Girl, and the Big Ol’ Clown Lady. The latter was a cranky older woman who worked a register at the pharmacy where we sometimes bought our afternoon sustenance. She was large, unkempt, had big, suspicious eyes she surrounded in a forbidding mascarascape, and wore bright, violently applied red makeup on not-quite random sections of her face. We only ever saw her two or three times, but she was memorable enough to get a name, and memorable enough to miss once she disappeared. The name, too good to let go to waste, had to be good for something.
Also very important was the fact that for the past few years I’d been working on a series of educational films about body systems: the digestive system, the nervous system, the heart, the respiratory system, the kidneys, the immune system, etc, etc. I was now writing the films, working on the animation during film production, and editing the film and sound afterwards. I’d had it up to here with the human body and all it’s organy, easily malfunctioning machinery. Particularly important to "The Big Ol’ Clown Lady" were the medical paintings of F. Netter, to which we referred frequently while designing animation of the human interior. No one could paint a diseased organ like F. Netter. And no matter what we were researching, it was always the pictures of diseased organs that we came to rest on. In fact, the single most common reprimand around our office was “Stop looking at pictures of diseased organs!”
So there you have it: Barely glimpsed oil tank with a door and a lush garden PLUS scary lady who’s mean to us when we buy our afternoon candy PLUS painting of diseased organs from anatomy texts EQUALS The Big Ol’ Clown Lady. That’s how easy it is to be me.
Even while I was writing this story, I knew that I wanted to sell it to Peggy Nadramia’s Grue Magazine, which I was very enthusiastic about at the time. It ended up being my only appearance in Grue. It’s appearance there was significant in another way: the illustration for my story was by one H. E. Fassl, who would later surface in my actual real life as Harry Fassl, a great friend who passed away in 2008.
“The Hive” was a stand-alone story I wrote as a ‘proof of concept’ for a novel idea I had in the mid-90s. I was newly remarried, working a much more high pressure job than I’d ever had before, and I had stopped writing and submitting horror stories a couple of years previously. I was now in my early forties and it seemed to me that I was going through great changes, the kind of changes that cast fresh light and scrutiny on the priorities of the past. I was trying to write a novel while grappling with the feeling that I might not want to be a novelist as much as I had once believed I did. As a result, I never even finished a first draft of the novel, but in the meantime I worked on the freestanding version of “The Hive,” which in its imagery, its ridiculous setting, and its bitter, anti-family subtext, seemed a reasonably saleable horror story in the vein I was now known for.
Reading it now, I’m drawn back in to that gigantic, grotesque, and impossible wooden structure and the family that may or may not have built it, but who protected it and many of whom lived and died in it. The novel was supposed to be the unraveling of all the secrets that explained why it was there and why the people in it behaved as they did. I can still remember what the place looked and smelled like, as well as the subtleties of feature that were visible in one form or another on the faces of every member of that bloodline. And of course I know the entire secret behind the family and their Hive. But when I read the story now, and recollect the backstory I had conjured up, it all seems so mundane and trite. Hardly implausible by the standards of the modern horror novel (I can’t believe I just wrote that), but vastly inferior to the mystery it was explaining. It points out one of my key weaknesses as a proto-horror-novelist: my ideas were best presented in short-story or (especially) novella form, and every time I tried to write a horror novel, my ideas got rammed and scraped and gouged into things I did not intend, and did not like. I wasn’t actually a big enough fan of the horror novels I’d read to have any desirable models to aspire to, and I wasn’t stubborn enough to write a novel that was wholly as weird as one of my stories. I never salvaged much from the two unpublished horror novels I finished in 1992 and 1993, but I’m glad I salvaged “The Hive” from my unfinished one, and especially glad that Mark Rainey picked it up for Deathrealm, my last appearance in that magazine.
In 1988, during the period when I was producing my greatest number of horror stories, I once either heard or read the word glossolalia somewhere. It was such a mellifluous-sounding word, yet even in context I had no idea what it meant. However, the moment I looked it up (it means speaking in tongues), I got the idea for “Radio Glossolalia,” about a station that only broadcasts a single voice speaking in tongues. It is only on late at night, and never at the same frequency. At the time I was writing stories that could easily be interpreted as descent into madness but which were told literally and bluntly enough that they were presented as slightly overheated reportage. Eddie may doubt his own sanity, but the narrator never has any doubts. Eddie is sane and alert, and this is all really happening. In this and also in the way it plays out plot-wise, this story is very similar to another story of mine, “The Little Skull Girl,” although I believe “Radio Glossolalia” to be the more effective of the two. Most of my best stories were actually novellas, and few of my shorter works compared with the best of my novellas. This one did. It appeared in Noctulpa #4, edited by George Hatch. George was a great hands-on editor for this and for “The Shabbie People,” asking a lot of good questions and helping me to focus on a couple of notable improvements.
I wrote “Snowlight” in March of 1987, in the month before my son Greg was born and a little more than 20 years after the events described in that story. I was about to become a father and at the same time grappling yet again, and as awkwardly as ever, with my memories of the death of my own father, when I was 12 years old and living in Hillside, Illinois. I had been a small, dreamy, and defenseless little kid who did nothing but draw pictures, watch movies, and read monster magazines, and the transition to adolescence was already explosive enough. The chain reaction of anger, disillusionment, and depression my father’s death set off in my family engulfed me completely, and I was to spend the next three-and-a-half years in a kind of stupor, all the while desperately and ineptly trying to disguise myself as a normal kid. “Snowlight” takes place during those weeks when I first fell into that stupor over my last few months of seventh grade. The story is probably about 90 percent true. The skitching, the house that burned down, the snowball attack, the angry driver who chased me through a field – all that is true. The other ten percent should be pretty easy to spot. It seemed to me at the time that writing this story was a major catharsis in my life, and a great symbolic gesture at the birth of m
y son and the twentieth anniversary of my father’s death. A nice sentiment, I’m sure, but I remember the intent more than any catharsis it might have caused me. I did draw a smashing cover piece for Deathrealm #4, the issue in which “Snowlight” appeared: a portrait of the irate driver in a much happier mood.
If “Snowlight” represented the beginning of my descent into the stupor, “Tiny Islands,” which takes place in the summer of my sixteenth birthday, 1970, represents my reawakening. I fell in love for the first time (with not even a hint of success the whole while), started writing and drawing again, started playing guitar, completely altered my reading habits. I now wanted to write a sequel to “Snowlight,” something that showed Danny Pickett, my alter ego, going through a similar reawakening. This story takes place in a town vaguely similar to the town I went to high school in, Naperville, IL, where we all swam at an old quarry that had been converted into a large, algae-friendly swimming pool and poked around on a couple of nearby tiny islands in the the DuPage River. I wrote this story during the turbulent spring of 1990, as my first marriage collapsed. It seemed strangely sweet and wholesome to me at the time, and it was not until years later that I read this story and realized... I hate all these kids. Especially Danny Pickett. I hope to hell I was never actually like this, though I suspect that, being so much closer to those ages when I wrote those stories, I knew what I was talking about.
There was to be a third story about Danny Pickett, about the events leading up to his dropping out of college. I may have even started it, but I never got very far and I suspect the manuscript is lost forever. In thinking back on it now, I fear that what I was really trying to do in that story was explain what was really going on in the first two Danny Pickett stories. Whatever kind of rationalization I may have come up with to tie “Snowlight” and “Tiny Islands” together, not even I can remember now. Luckily.