Perhaps I intended it as a companion piece to the story above, but as I worked on The Wound So Deep — as its troubling premise invaded me as the story's hero had been invaded — I felt a stirring, the painful movement of something trying to be born. I must admit by this point I thought myself so smart, laying out in fiction the secret truths glimpsed in my nightmarish dreams so that others might share them. It was for this reason my discovery at the tale's end shook my confidence utterly, and I realized that all I'd thus far done was meaningless. If it were true that we were but vessels for the darkness then that truth itself was like the narrator of the tale: an empty husk. I knew then there would be — could be — no interest in a tale of hopelessness and revenge, despite the revelation of so many inescapable truths. I had thought exposing them would turn all eyes toward me, but as I discovered it merely turned them away. No one wanted to see the strings that lay behind it all.
I found myself suffering from a crisis of faith, utterly convinced I'd been wrong since the beginning — that fiction was not the key to understanding existence or that darkness that pushed against my mind from beyond. After the tale was complete, I felt the full impotence of my fiction, and with my will at its lowest ebb I ventured a walk into the storming elements of a particularly bad winter's day. I should have found the rush of blowing snow against my face invigorating, but instead it was all I could do to wrap the scarf tighter around my pale throat so the howling wind would not chill me. The gale sounded like laughter, like sardonic laughter, and as I looked at the dark grey clouds roiling overhead I realized where the blame truly lay for all that had happened. It was not my fault that the words I wrote failed to be spread as gospel, that the truths I revealed weren't being acknowledged. Nor was it chance. I had been singled out by a power greater than any I had hitherto imagined, marked for retribution by something so vast I could not combat it. The universe was at fault. It had understood that the truth and secrets revealed by my words threatened the very order of things and, scorned, it had begun to conspire against me.
So, naïvely, I produced Leather, Dark and Cold. Why I struggled against the mocking sky I cannot clearly explain, other than to say that there were secrets hidden from man for too long, and that despite the hardships it would bring I knew I was the one to reveal them to the world. Who else would? For the truth was that we all harbor something deep and vast beneath, some leviathan waiting to surface and destroy all we know. The origins of the tale were the earliest in my notebook, perhaps the first ideas my muse revealed to me: a small paragraph about a shroud and what terrors might lie beneath. As I wrote and without fully realizing it I again slipped into a horrible dream, the same dream that overcomes the protagonist of the tale. Haunting vistas were laid out coldly before me and beneath my feet cracking ice, though what shadow rose to greet me I could not say with any certainty. In the tale they were things, in my dreams they were more. So much more. They were a gateway across worlds, portals built from my words. Those dark shapes formed the path into the absolute darkness, into that place so few dared travel, yet from which so many nightly drew their strength. What I saw beyond I could not remember upon waking, but at the end of my arms lay a manuscript finished, the last page merely the impressions of words on paper, my pen having long before run dry.
The year of 2006 was most troubling for me. I'd spent the turn of the coldest season inside, nursing an illness that would not dissipate, my muddled mind working itself into a fever with all I'd discovered. I had delirious dreams of great oceans of black ice beneath which moved leviathans I sensed but could not see. There was something more there, something that continued to seep into this world and fill my mind with waves of horrible truths. Once my health was regained, I renewed my determination to find a way across — a permanent way across — so I might discover that dark place's secret, but I was foiled at every turn. If I had learned anything over my years, it was that writing was in many ways a form of mathematics. All I needed was the right equation — words instead of numerals, themes instead of divisors — and the gateway across I had once imagined would be made real. Or perhaps it is easier to imagine the words as a spell, or as the writing of a song — the right combination promised to open a connection between me and that realm beyond from which all my ideas flowed. All its secrets would be mine.
The Constant Encroaching of a Tumultuous Sea was an exercise in trying to harness my dreams to decipher the combination. The first two thirds of the tale came straight from a nightmare in which I lay trapped within a dam of mummified corpses, awaiting the slow approach of an ancient crone. I woke at that moment, but even in my fleeting memory I could see that dark unforgiving sea rolling with foulness, my dream-self — again, that other Strantzas — soon to be its victim. I did my best to scribble down all the sights my dark distant muse let slip, but when I reviewed what I had written in harsh reality of morning I knew vital information was missing, information key to solving the riddle. What frustrated me most was the nagging sensation that I had written more down during the night than I saw on the page. Had the text been removed, or had I been in such a state of delirium I merely believed I had written more? What I did have was so very close that I foolishly hoped I might be able to puzzle the rest out through intuition and whatever images of that other side that remained in my untrustworthy memory. It took work, but I finally devised an ending for the fragment that solved its inherent flaws, but it was also clear that the ending was comprised of empty words. The darkness did not flow as before — if anything, it merely dissipated, the key to forging the bridge gone. Perhaps the universe knew that I was onto the game and was trying to change the rules. I continued to struggle and search for a way across in different manners, arranging the words in different permutations, looking for that equation that would open the door for me. But the only pattern clear was the pattern of the universe working against me.
It was on writing the tale Drowned Deep Inside of Me that it occurred to me that my true failure might be one of perspective. Perhaps I was so used to seeing the world through eyes of reality that I could not see it through the eyes of my dreams. I became obsessed with the idea, and in my fevers I saw a sea of nightmares washing over the world, and then a large vessel that rode upon it. It seemed a prescient piece, one that spoke to the nature of my dark muse, the ichor of which flowed through my pen. I wondered if in some way I was piercing the membrane between worlds and seeing the truth that lay beyond. It felt as though that were the case, for the story seemed to penetrate my very psyche and leave me feeling as cold and empty as those around me. For it was clear I was merely a puppet, a conduit — one unable to deny those base impulses that made me hurt.
I expanded that knowledge with In the Air, a tale of Aickmanesque suffering at the hands of the world, combined with the nightmares of the cosmos. I wanted to make it clear that I finally understood those secrets and manipulations that were laid out before me. The truth was in the horrible ticking I'd been hearing for months; it was the sound of my mind winding down. The universe was a giant clock, a mighty Goldbergian mechanism designed to keep everyone trapped. Even if one escaped, he or she would never survive the journey across intact to see the truth behind reality. I wept when I realized this, and while I wrote my tale of a god spread across the world, a tale born from a simple scientific footnote, I was terrified of what it all meant. I was cracking, and all of reality was intent on shattering my vacant shell.
Was I truly empty as so many of the ignorants that wandered through reality? Was I like the protagonist of Thoughtless, my ode to the work of David Cronenberg and his sterile world-view? It was a piece designed without internal dialogue because that was how I felt — as though I was nothing in the face of what lay beyond, my only purpose a vessel for my muse's dark foulness. I was a puppet; it flowed through my arm, making my appendage come alive so it might scribble out truths no one wanted or was willing to hear. Was there a lesson to me in my own work? Was it better to not know, to not understand the very truths I was espousing?
Already that reality conspired against me, but did I not realize the stakes until writing those final crushing words.
I finished out the year in a daze, desperate too late to forget what knowledge I'd divined. I tried to focus my writing on happier matters, on a tale of sweet all-consuming love, but instead what fetid thing should be birthed from my pen but More to Learn, a sickened effluence that gained no love itself in the world it mocked. I'd hoped to write quickly and intuitively, bypassing the agonizing months I'd normally spend crafting a piece, but in the end what I wrote was far worse than anything I'd ever conceived. Unhindered by a sense of propriety in my troubled times, I let my infected Id run rampant on the page, and what spewed forth was a creature bent on destruction. It had crawled from the shadow within my brain, and with overwhelming horror and joy I realized from where that shadow originated. I'd succeeded in doing what I had always wanted — I had established a portal to that dark world beyond, a tiny crack through which I felt the horrible coldness of an arctic wind over vistas of deep black ice.
But the question remained: how might I now travel that bridge? The darkness flowed from there into our world, but how might I move back along the channel from here to there? The truth of things lay beyond, and in order to reveal it I had to give myself over to the fiction. What was fiction after all but a dream? One made physical by the casting of words on a page, words that in turn evoked the same dream in readers, in all readers? The transference from one to many — it would be through this method, this shared state, that the truth from which the world had long tried to hide would be revealed. It would seep through their dreams one at a time, filling them as liquid does a cup, until they all saw but one sight: the walls becoming blurred then disappearing altogether, the depths of truth revealed for all to witness.
I paused at this time with a clarity I'd not had in five years to reflect on what I was doing and worse on what I had become. My muse had hijacked my fiction and turned it into something I could barely control, and in my worst hours I feared what might become of us all should I continue my investigations. But, at the end of the day, the truth was all I had left. My personal relationships had withered as my obsession grew, and at times nothing made sense but the words on the page. My life had become my quest for the truth, and as I sank deeper in my dream state I realized it wasn't some sub-reality I was trying to penetrate but in fact the true reality — the world from which everything was born. I mediated, consulted tomes, pieced together writing from various obscure sources all in an attempt to lay out a clear road map that would allow me to cross the barrier and travel farther than anyone had previously thought possible, farther into that dimension of lucid dream from which everything began in order to record all that transpired there.
Interestingly, one by-product of these journeys was the loss of my ability to sleep. It seems strange to think that dream and sleep are not irrevocably linked, but I found it to be true. I no longer needed sleep; it had nothing to offer me. I was spending so many days dreaming onto the page, the darkness beyond flowing through me, its channel, that I found I could go without for an indeterminate amount of time and remain sane. Absolutely and unquestioningly sane.
It was during this time of sleepless obsession (somewhere in the dark winter of 2007) that I managed to cohere my thoughts into form enough to write A Shadow in God's Eye, my own treatise on the duality I was experiencing, and the loss of faith I had suffered before the bridge to the yawning tundra was built within me. Portions of the tale sprang from my research on daimons but were given form by the darkness that had by then so engulfed me that I could no longer leave my home, let alone recall when I'd last seen the sun. My days were consumed with writing, with searching for the right words, the correct syllables in the proper sequence, so I might open the passage wide enough to permit travel, and I knew once I made the journey everything would be revealed. But I had to work fast; the forces against me had already redoubled their efforts. Stories I'd written for magazines were being rejected for no reason; telephones were ringing but no one was on the other end — all these and more were proof I was being targeted by a malevolent presence determined to keep me away from the key. I should have deferred to it, abandoned my investigation, tightened my lips and put down my pen to let what had been hidden for millennia remain so, but naïvety makes one blind, the power of the word one drunk with stupidity, and I disregarded the notion, somehow sure that like a newly blind man only I could see the truth, and like him I had no choice but to proselytize it to the world. I opened my figurative mouth to scream, and from it spilled forth darkness.
I became consumed by the dreaming state, no longer able to differentiate between what was real and what was not. And worse what was not soon began to seem real. My lucid dreams took on a horrible aspect, and through them I saw more of that world beyond than ever before. The arctic landscape yawned as far as my dreaming eye could see, and along with the deathful cold I felt the wash of the black surf grinding against me, as though I were truly there to witness it all. I was close, so very close to prying open the crack that each move became treacherous; I knew that if I were to succeed in my efforts to cross over I might not return in one piece, either physically or mentally.
I was then confronted with a sight across that barren landscape that was so horrifying my body reacted before my dreaming mind could fully comprehend what it witnessed. I beheld there in the dark a giant eye, countless times larger than my own corporeal body, that stared out of the void with a deep palpable hunger. The image was too big for my mind, regardless of how many stories I'd written about the same. But where my tales were quaint reflections of the aspect, what lay before my dream-self was only too real. It looked upon our world through the tiny portal I'd managed to rip in the barrier between there and here and it desired everything it saw. Then, that giant eye turned its attention on me and its stare drove into my being. I felt something then, some shift in my mind that could almost be described as a cracking — like the deep black ice cracked, the noise like the tick tick ticking of a giant clockwork mechanism — but I knew that sensation was more. So much more. I knew then what that thing from beyond wanted; that creature of the dark, that creature of foulness, that creature that was my muse: recompense for everything it had given me, but with steep and unfathomable interest. It wanted to fill us all, fill us like the empty vessels we were with that midnight surf so it might spread further from that world beyond. It wanted everything, and before I could react I was pushed away, out of my deepest lucid dreams into the world I'd left behind in my explorations, back to the meat and sinew and gristle and weight of my perceived reality. I awoke changed, and when I finally gathered my wits about me once more I knew what had to be done.
You see, this is why the book you hold in your hands, and more importantly this afterword, is so indebted. Now, please, lay back, close your eyes, and dream my dream into the world.
Simon Strantzas
Toronto, Canada
April, 2010
SIMON STRANTZAS is the author of Burnt Black Suns (Hippocampus Press, 2014), Nightingale Songs (Dark Regions Press, 2011), Cold to the Touch (Tartarus Press, 2009), and Beneath the Surface (Humdrumming, 2008), as well as the editor of Aickman’s Heirs (Undertow Publications, 2015), Shadows Edge (Gray Friar Press, 2013), and guest editor of The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 3 (Undertow Publications, 2016). His writing has been reprinted in Best New Horror, The Best Horror of the Year, The Year’s Best Weird Fiction and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, and published in venues such as Cemetery Dance, Postscripts, and the Black Wings series. His short story, “Pinholes in Black Muslin”, was a finalist for the British Fantasy Award, and his collection, Burnt Black Suns, a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives with his wife in Toronto, Canada.
Beneath The Surface Page 21
