by Del Howison
Margaret walks slowly to the drop-off point, looking down. Flames illumine the darkness, and smoke swirls around her from the burning machine.
I didn’t have the guts, she tells herself. I wanted to die, just the way Terry did, to achieve what he achieved—the ultimate thrill—but I didn’t have the guts. Now I’ve lost the chance. And I’ll have to live with that … she continues to stare down at the flaming wreckage … for the rest of my life.
THE PYRE AND OTHERS
DAVID J. SCHOW
LEGEND, RUMOR, MYTH had it that the book could influence dreams. A reader could weather gruesome adventure, achieve a perverse sexual grail, or drown in a transport of raw dread. It was even possible that the book could set you free.
That was what got Franklin started—the elemental power of hearsay, left to gestate, tended almost as an afterthought, or lapsed hobby. The way it went was this: You put the book under your pillow (so it was said), and when you slept (if you slept), you would be transported into the dream realm of one of the stories inside the book. Some of the stories were odd and fanciful, the way you’d like a quirky dream to be. The catch was that you could not pick the story that invaded your sleeping mind—libidinous free-for-all, or a feverish nightmare that just might tip you over … into a padded cell, if you lived. This Russian roulette proposition, and its obscure proofs through years of vague documentation, was the central attraction. If more people had heard of the book, its story—its most important story, the one not part of its table of contents—might have assumed the status of modern urban legend. Nobody Franklin knew had ever heard of the book, which is how he grew to become a zealot about the whole thing.
Franklin Bryant was a faculty member of a midsized liberal arts curriculum, which is to say he earned a paycheck by instructing college students in high school English, while he hacked away at a dissertation objective that might lend him more credibility as a scholar. Academic brownie points. The new semester loomed seven weeks distant, and Franklin did not know whether he had the resolve to stare down another class-load of bright-eyed, entry-level nitwits. Room after room of collegiate-coddled warm bodies with empty heads and a predator’s sense of the easy fix. Learning, here, was a social activity, not an intellectual one, and Franklin had let his syllabus decay into rote. Trying to teach college students the finer pleasures of twentieth-century literature was akin to arguing grammar with a beagle. His Lit 106 cannon fodder came trained to memorize (without learning), pass tests (without extrapolating), and trade bored hours for paper validation (without thinking), and he honestly questioned his capacity to withstand another year of that treadmill. The janitors never quite got the dust out of the corners of the molding on the lecterns. Some of that dust was decades old and probably predated his contract. It had solidified into layers of gray permanence; strata you could not chip with a fingernail. It would be there when he resigned, and probably still be there when he died.
The book was called The Pyre and Others, by J. Arthur Aldridge. Subtitled Tales of Disturbance, it was the writer’s only published collection. The short stories comprising its contents were commonly available. Some were even posted online. Others had sifted down through “classic” anthologies and annuals. None were rare. Most were presented semiapologetically, as oddments. Franklin had reread them all many times, and amassed an Aldridge shelf of relevant works—earlier stories, published less significantly as the last gasp of the post–World War II pulps ceded market dominance to a burgeoning of “men’s magazines.” He scavenged biographical leftovers, including several brief encyclopedia entries, and a copy of the last-known printing of the complete collection, by Royal Ransom Press (London, 1981). Franklin found this last during one of his used-bookstore trolls, used-bookstores themselves teetering on the rim of extinction—a development that always felt ominous, giving Franklin an ever-present sense of impending loss, though he had no idea what to do with the feeling. None of his researches provided any relevant clues to the enigma of the The Pyre‘s infamy, although the legend itself (such as it was) bore a mention in passing, by the Brit who emceed the book’s final republication to date.
This fellow, a former partner in Royal Ransom and earnest champion of the obscure, was named Jonah Siritis, and his introduction to the 1981 reprint attempted to corral the scant scraps of information about J. Arthur Aldridge into one of those arguments why you should read an outdated writer, today. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Siritis argued, Aldridge’s work influenced many writers whose names you’d know (and laboriously did he list them), while Aldridge himself never brushed fame. He had once been married. He had once lived in New Orleans. Photographs were hard to come by since he had been published during a time when pictures of writers were more a luxury than a sales necessity, and worse, the man had no public persona to promote. Similarly, he never wrote editorial ephemera that might divulge something personal; papers, notes, and correspondence were rare, brief, and cryptic. He spoke through his stories, and wrote only short fiction—some thirty known stories in all, with The Pyre and Others as his crescendo. He died in 1965 at age thirty-two … or in 1963 at age thirty-four … or possibly as late as 1967, aged thirty. His career as a writer had basically died by 1961. That was the year he had handed the manuscript copy of The Pyre to a small press in Chicago—for free.
Black Rhododendron Press had specialized in the backwaters of “the Eerie and the Weird.” Their typesetting was arcane, but usually clean of errors. To the modern eye, the font they employed looked skeletal and basic; probably slugged by hand for whatever web-offset printing was the cheapest in those olden days. The first edition of The Pyre was hardbound in thick green cloth boards of an odd trim size—approximately 5¼ by 7½ inches—that made it look like a pocket hymnal. Its pages were rough and clunky; Siritis noted that the book “resisted riffling,” and tended “to fall open at unexpected places.” Its rudimentary dust jacket hinted at cut-rate deal for paper and the jacket illustration was black-and-white only. It depicted a graveyard, hooded figures, and the swirling flames of the eponymous pyre, all in an embarrassing, amateurish style that suggested a teenager’s grasp of Lovecraftian horror. According to Siritis, the book jacket was so unwieldy that it “traveled”—when you opened the book, the jacket fell off; when you shelved the book, the jacket always scooted up, even if you locked the damned thing into a Broadart sleeve.
This, then, was the edition that supposedly invaded your dreams, if you were foolish or curious enough. Black Rhododenron, 1961. Limited to an edition of 500 copies, 20 of which were given to J. Arthur Aldridge as compensation (and presumed destroyed—guess how—upon Aldridge’s death by, quote, “a close friend”). Fewer than 200 copies sold. When Black Rhododendron fell apart in 1962 (so said Jonah Siritis), at least another 150 stock copies vanished from whatever basement warehoused them … nearly half a century ago. Jonah Siritis actually owned one of these first editions, obtained after much travail in 1995. Based on some textural differences he had discovered between the original and the reprint, he was presently pushing for a new, revised edition.
As frustrating as the Internet could be for a seeker after Aldridge, the love/hate boon of e-mail permitted Franklin to ask Jonah Siritis the obvious question directly: So, did you try it?
Not me, sir, came the reply. No bravery in that direction, I’m afraid.
A former librarian, Siritis maintained a continuing interest in posting a definitive online bibliography of Aldridge—if denied a biography—and through contact with him, Franklin began to believe he held the bones of his own dissertation. That was what had kept him going through his previous year at the college. His own warm little niche in the Lit cave, provisioned with a quest, and yes, a mate. Every semester, out of several hundred students, there were always one or two who evinced a sparkle of hope, and if they were female, and not outright beasts, Franklin usually advantaged them so he could have what normal people called a sex life. It was an accepted perk of the educational ladder. He never had to leave them;
they always stopped calling when they moved on to other classes, other targets. It was all part of the learning experience.
Serenity—that was really her name—had hauled stakes at the conclusion of the previous term. Of Brazilian extraction, she had possessed a nearly insatiable curiosity coupled with a sexy shyness that could be devastating. Large, liquid brown eyes and a yard of lush dark hair. Cute little round glasses. The curves of classic sculpture, and an ass you could really grab hold of. Spiral notebooks filled with doodles and punishable girly poetry. She had been ripe and willing, a healthy divertissement, until she returned home to São Paulo. Usually it was easy for Franklin to write off his exes, but for some reason he could not codify, Serenity lingered in his memory, as though she had died tragically, instead of hanging around to posit uncomfortable questions about the abuses of love, or departing with no more drama than a sterile handshake. Franklin kept the picture he had taken of her naked, sleeping. Perhaps one day he would allow it to inspire him to write something.
Without Serenity to squander his off-hours, Franklin shifted sights to Aldridge, in a different kind of pursuit. His entree to Siritis—his introduction—had been a no-brainer. You could use genre geeks if you appealed to their vanity and massaged their basic addictions, the quirks that made them self-appointed keepers of the flame. Siritis proved personable and generous (he always answered e-mails within twenty-four hours, and Zeus only knew what he did for an actual living after quitting the library biz—if he had a life, at all). Siritis had subsequently provided Franklin with not only the lowdown on the first edition of The Pyre, but a front-to-back photocopy of the whole book, the original.
But photocopies didn’t work, where the preternatural was concerned, or the lure of forbidden insight.
Now Franklin could see for himself (as Siritis had claimed) that three of the stories in The Pyre and Others were substantially different—and longer—than the versions included in the 1981 reprint.
In “The Sacrifice,” a woman suffering an unspecified terminal malady speaks to the engagement ring of her dead betrothed, and the ring seems to answer, in intentionally ridiculous rhyming couplets, with “the voice of some jocular, speaking blossom from a fairy tale.” Laugh all you want—by the close of the story, ten people have died ghastly and point-specific deaths, before the woman’s own ticking clock tolls its last.
Aldridge’s only obvious rumination on suicide was called “Chekov’s Gun”—principally a long interior monologue by possibly the most depressed protagonist on the planet. When the gun finally does its job (with double-ought buckshot, administered orally, no less), the character discovers that the point-blank obliteration of his brain is not the end of his consciousness.
“The Sirens of Westcott,” in the original edition, was nearly a third longer. It dealt with the chemical dynamic of sexual attraction, but its theme was bad choices based on physical beauty. Its protagonist, Herman Banks, is a goatish man expert in what Aldridge termed “the highly unstable hobby of technically proficient intromission.” Hirsute and lumpen, he deludes himself that his goal is love, not lovemaking, but his true satisfaction comes from subjugating the comely women of Westcott Village to his ugliness. Once transported by the erotic rapture of his expertise in bed, the women are summarily discarded by Herman. When several of his victims start comparing notes about “their greatest sexual experience,” they band together to entrap him … but first, they have to convince the town’s most unattainable beauty to act as bait. As Siritis wrote in his summary, “If sex is Hell, then this is a downward plummet with a stop at each agonizing level and circle of damnation.”
All three stories had garnered letters of reader complaint to Esquire and Playboy, where they appeared originally. The first was a shameless manual for murdering your loved ones, it was claimed. The second was an equally bald handbook for suicide. And the third simply did not endorse a happy-go-lucky concept of sex, at all. The unexpurgated texts were fairly wince-inducing. Franklin could feel himself flinch at certain passages, and thrilled to the sensation.
He leafed through the unwieldy photocopies, which Siritis had scanned in two-page spreads and Velo-bound on the left side. He refreshed himself on the brooding puzzle-traps of “Shadows Within the Cage.” “Wash, Rinse, Repeat” was fairly famous, in that it had been optioned for adaptation by Alfred Hitchcock’s production company, Shamley, as an episode of the popular television series—only to remain unproduced. Aldridge did make it into the magazine that bore Hitchcock’s name, however, with “The Man Who Blew a Fuse,” “The Mortuary Student,” and “Box No. 262.” The latter fomented more letters of protest that most of the magazine’s readership considered long overdue.
An unpublished story, original to The Pyre, was “The Narrative of Dr. Shackle and Mr. Lye,” apparently an honest attempt at humor by Aldridge, although what the eponymous pair do to their victims was anything but a laff riot. It seesawed between elbow-jabbing one-liners and almost clinically detached slaughter and corpse disposal. It predated quippy slasher movies by two decades, but Franklin found its cumulative effect hard to shake. It was not a wallow in florid adjectives and forensic trivia, gushed off with lowbrow, adolescent glee. It was stately. Its impact was that of a literary writer tackling a subject normally deemed taboo for literary writers—well, a “literary writer” who also knew an awful lot about bondage and submission, at any rate. Weird.
Both “Her Idea of Beautiful” and “A Most Necessary Evil” had also been censored heavily. Already poisoned at the prestige magazines, Aldridge had trickled down through their imitators, the bargain-basement pretenders, the soon-to-be porn rags. Yet even they had “problems” and “suggestions.” It was easy to see why no mainstream publisher would touch Aldridge in the early 1960s. The sex was too honest, exceeding the de facto “frankness” of the time; the narratives were often sacrilegiously profane; the violence was better suited to a world that was—then—over a decade distant, half a war into the future.
You should have written a novel, Franklin thought. Then they’d be calling you the William S. Burroughs of horror, today.
Aldridge’s envelope pushing encountered no such obstacles at The Haunt, a micropress journal published irregularly by a gang of “devotees of the Dark” in Milwaukee. Most of the editorial column in that issue (#5) was subsumed in fawning gratitude that Mr. Aldridge would even consent to submit “Hugo’s Big Blunder.” The staff and the readership were familiar with Aldridge’s earlier work. When more was solicited eagerly, Aldridge never responded, and the magazine folded two issues later.
That was what writers did, thought Franklin: They pushed envelopes. They knew about submission.
Then there was “The Pyre” itself. Also original to the collection. According to Siritis, Aldridge had submitted two versions of the typescript to Black Rhododendron, and apparently—ridiculously—the version used in 1961 never made it into the later printing.
From one of Jonah Siritis’ e-mails:
Not much was known about J.A.A., but it doesn’t take a genius to conclude that he loved toying with anonymity, and misleading his readers. Maybe he did it to confuse future bibliographers—that whole Imp of the Perverse bent. As you can see from the various encyclopedia entries (cursory, at best), even his birth and death dates have question marks on them. It is a matter of parish record that he married Marie Topaz Severin in November 1953, although by mid-1955 she doesn’t seem to be in the picture anymore, and I can find no proof of separation, divorce, or her death. You should also know that shortly after his interment in St. Louis #1, his crypt was plundered by vandals and then knocked down in one of the flash floods common to that area. I checked personally, some ten years ago, during my first trip to the States. J.A.A. is listed in the plot registry, but no evidence of his grave can be seen. I don’t think he “went under,” or faked his death, however. I interviewed a number of people who attended his funeral, including Stoney Beauchamp, who burned J.A.A.’s personal library and files, per written instruct
ions (more’s the loss!). Stoney’s wife, Lillian, emphasized two things about J.A.A.: his deep love for his absent Marie Topaz, and his determined frustration at feeling creatively “hobbled,” as he put it.
Maybe he murdered her, Franklin wrote back.
I don’t think so, replied Siritis. He loved her too much.
That was another thing that was “known” about Aldridge: the sort of detail that would never make it into a reference book. It was obvious from rereading the guy’s fiction: Aldridge was very familiar with women. Cloistered creatives usually doled out hammer-thumbed erotica based solely on their bovine spouses. Neophytes excreted saccharine, or the sniggering jerk off of boys playing sex mo-chine. Aldridge wrote like an addict trying to master all he knew of a ceaselessly mesmerizing alien species. Their form, their shape, their palette of intimacies. The extrusion of male through female fascinated him. Women and men, utterly different, fit together just so, in limitless recombination of his gender with other humans who looked similar, but were not built the same. Their outsides could lie (one sex, with a bit of artifice, could pass for its opposite). But the insides told truer stories; the anatomical insides, followed by the emotional ones. Aldridge had continually sought some breakthrough frequency to make his communications more vital.
By some unsuspected agency, thought Franklin, perhaps the sheer tone of the book overwhelmed the susceptible, and gave rise to the legend about its ability to empower dreams.
Franklin was eager to run this theory past Siritis, who did not respond for over a week. When he did, it was with a one-liner, offering apologies and explaining that he had been a bit ill of late.
“The Pyre” was Aldridge’s most definitive effort, eschewing thematic embroidery to simply state that some people are driven to kill those they love because they love them. It was not about crazy people seeking vengeance, or lunatics nursing romantic fantasies. It was not about wet dreams or misplaced passion. It was about rational, thinking beings, and the palpable doom they generate by courting a magic they do not comprehend, almost as if love itself were a malign god whose notice it was imprudent to rouse. The climactic immolation consumed not only the lovers in the story, but everyone their love had ever touched.
