Hair Side, Flesh Side
Page 1
PRAISE FOR HELEN MARSHALL
“Stories subtle and unsettling: Helen Marshall clothes the uncanny in new flesh and then makes it bleed.”
Kelly Link, author of Pretty Monsters
and Stranger Things Happen
“Masterful horror. In Marshall’s dark landscapes, the metaphors are feral and they’ll turn on you in a heartbeat.”
Mike Carey, author of The Unwritten
and co-author of The Steel Seraglio
“The stories in Helen Marshall’s Hair Side, Flesh Side occur in the interstices of our most fundamental relations. Brothers and sisters, parents and children, lovers find the space between them grown strange, shifting, as the familiar becomes the site and the source of startling transformation. Elegant, unsettling, these stories leave the reader no less changed than their characters. Highly recommended work.”
John Langan, author of House of Windows
and Technicolor and Other Revelations
“Helen Marshall’s Hair Side, Flesh Side is a revelation. Her collection of expertly drawn characters with their historical longings are depicted with a compelling intelligence and achingly soft touch, and their stories are as compassionate as they are disquieting. Hair Side, Flesh Side announces a major new talent in dark fiction. Indeed, these are stories that will be imprinted on the inside of your skin.”
Paul Tremblay, author of The Little Sleep
and Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye
“Darkness can be as beautiful as light, and rarely is that perfect diorama of light and shadow more lyrically and elegantly rendered than it is here, in Helen Marshall’s debut short fiction collection, Hair Side, Flesh Side. These stories are a literary storm sweeping in across the water, with lightning flickering at its heart and a promise of fury yet unleashed.”
Michael Rowe, author of Enter, Night
“Helen Marshall writes assured, accomplished prose that is as chilling as it is beautiful, and the stories she tells are as daring as they are unexpected. This superb first collection is set to make waves.”
Tim Lebbon, author of Echo City
and The Thief of Broken Toys
“Hair Side, Flesh Side is a quirky, kinky treat. We haven’t had a writer like this for a while—secure and erudite and sexy. I hope this book influences because we need more.”
Tony Burgess, author of Pontypool Changes Everything
and People Live Still in Cashtown Corners
BY HELEN MARSHALL
INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT SHEARMAN
ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHRIS ROBERTS
ChiZine Publications
COPYRIGHT
Hair Side, Flesh Side © 2012 by Helen Marshall
Interior illustrations © 2012 by Chris Roberts
Cover artwork © 2012 by Erik Mohr
Cover layout © 2012 by Samantha Beiko
Interior design and layout © 2012 by Danny Evarts
All rights reserved.
Published by ChiZine Publications
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
EPub Edition NOVEMBER 2012 ISBN: 978-1-92746-925-5
All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.
No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS
Toronto, Canada
www.chizinepub.com
info@chizinepub.com
Edited by Sandra Kasturi
Copyedited and proofread by Clare Marshall
Produced with the support of the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.
Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.
For my dad.
Love is memory enough.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
[ eyelid ]
BLESSED
[ veins ]
SANDITION
[ skin ]
A TEXTURE LIKE VELVET
[ teeth ]
THE OLD AND THE NEW
[ hand ]
NO GHOSTS IN LONDON
[ heart ]
PIECES OF BROKEN THINGS
[ stomach ]
THE MOUTH, OPEN
[ fingernail ]
LINES OF AFFECTION
[ wing ]
IN THE HIGH PLACES
OF THE WORLD
[ shoulder ]
HOLDING PATTERN
[ knuckle ]
THE BOOK OF JUDGEMENT
[ ribcage ]
THE ART OF DYING
[ thigh ]
DEAD WHITE MEN
[ breast ]
ETERNAL THINGS
[ tailbone ]
THIS FEELING OF FLYING
[ Ejorum gratia est hoc opusculum ]
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
[ about the ]
AUTHOR
[ about the ]
ARTIST
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS
To our bodies turn we then, that so
weak men on love reveal’d may look;
Love’s mysteries in souls do grow,
but yet the body is his book.
—John Donne, “The Ecstasy”
INTRODUCTION
Don’t go to a museum with Helen Marshall. And whilst you’re at it, don’t take her to an art gallery either, or anywhere there might be statues or quirky bits of architecture, nowhere you might come across pieces of old pottery. Because such things fire Helen’s imagination. They inspire her. And you might be showing genuine interest in a particular painting, or some pile of old rubble, and then she’ll open her mouth, and out will pour all these new story ideas. Crazy flights of unreality that are both macabre and deeply human, stories in which history and art collide with real people, people with ordinary problems and ordinary lives, and how the entire world is changed in the process. It leaves you exhilarated. It leaves you exhausted. And frankly, once in a while, all you wanted was to just look at the nice painting. And you realize that the painting has been wrecked forever, because the whirlings of Helen’s mind have overwhelmed it rather, and you’re never going to be able to look at it in the same way again. This can sometimes be rather annoying. This afternoon we’ve been out to the Natural History Museum in London. I thought I’d show her all the spiders. I thought that would keep her brain quiet. Helen doesn’t like spiders. And, for a while, I thought I’d got her. She just sort of stood there in front of the blow-up photographs and flinched. But then she turned around. She began to look at the school group that had trailed in after us. And she told me this story about what it would be like if she suddenly fell pregnant and gave birth to a whole flotilla of children on a day trip, all wearing uniforms and Day-Glo caps so they’d be recognized by their teachers. She grinned at me then, blinked so innocently behin
d those glasses that make her eyes look big and studious, and I admitted defeat, and off we went to another exhibit.
Helen is prim, and pretty, and puckishly sweet. She does not look like the vessel for fictions that push against the boundaries of sanity. In my mind’s eye she seems to sum up every nice teacher I had at junior school, all the ones I wanted to impress, all the ones I had a crush on. She looks so wholesome butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth; no, worse, I’d think her entire face has been specially constructed for the refrigeration of dairy products. I have known Helen a couple of years now, and we speak often, and I’ve read all her stuff, the wayward and the seriously wayward—and I still find it hard to contain my surprise at the dissonance between the Helen I see and the Helen I read, the Helen who’s a dear and cheeky friend and the Helen whose stories can frighten me so.
But I want to return to that image of Helen as a teacher. That there’s something professorial about Miss Marshall should be clear enough; when she’s not writing her weird fiction and poetry, she’s looking over fourteenth-century manuscripts as she completes her doctorate in medieval studies. Most people who write within this genre draw upon the usual sources of old creaky horror tales—Helen does it from an academic celebration of art. This is a book about books—and books as they used to be, as treasures, as handwritten labours of love and duty, as something otherworldly that came with their own rules and mysteries and must never be taken for granted. The ghosts of Jane Austen and Geoffrey Chaucer stalk these pages, both thematically and literally. Helen writes about art from a time when it truly mattered, when—as you shall see—it was genuinely stuff of life and death.
And I know that the academic influence might suggest stories that are dry and dusty. Not a bit of it. There is something fleshy about Helen’s writing—deliciously, disgustingly, of the skin and bone and messy organs. She writes of books made from the bodies of dead children. Peeking under flaps of skin on a modern-day editor there is found a missing nineteenth-century manuscript. A plague spreads around the world turning people into the pieces of art they cannot but help imitate. And with the same professorial instincts that allow Helen to analyze her medieval texts, so she turns upon her own wild fantasies and examines them from every angle, and makes them real and urgent and moving. Many is the time that Helen has told me one of her story ideas, and I’ve thought it was ridiculous, too clever, too bizarre to work. And a few weeks later she’ll show me how she’s found all the blood and beating heart of it, and there on the page will be something so very true, and touching, and funny, and wise.
I feel especially proud to be writing this introduction. I was in at the birth of most of these tales—in some instances I can honestly remember the statue or museum exhibit we were standing by when the idea first came to her. She has been the very closest of friends—the writer with whom I’ll share my first drafts, just as she shares hers with me, whose instincts are so much sharper than my own, who’ll tease at plotlines with me for all sorts of strange oddnesses over Skype at three in the morning. I think writing’s a bit of a sod, actually; Helen approaches it with a reckless enthusiasm I find inspiring. And over the time I’ve known her I’ve seen Helen change from someone who rather liked to dabble at her fictions when she could make the time, to a thrilling full-blooded writer bursting with an ambition to be the best bloody writer she can be. I know no other writer quite as sharp, odd, or as clever as Helen—I know of no one either who writes about everyday emotions of love and loss with such honesty. I’ve been rereading this, her first collection of short stories, over and over as she’s been writing it. It feels good that it’s being let out into the world so that everybody else can join in.
But, for all that. Don’t go with her to the museum. Seriously.
—Robert Shearman
London, June 2012
[ eyelid ]
BLESSED
It was three weeks to her birthday when the big box came—each of the moving men taking an end, grunting and sweating as they heaved drunkenly to the spot where Chloe used to park her new two-wheeler. She had been told to move it to the backyard where it now leaned up against the fence, exposed to the elements, shining ribbons soggy from last night’s rain. But that was okay, because she knew what this was, what it had to be, and she was so tingly with excitement that it didn’t matter if the gears of her bike rusted out.
Chloe’s parents took her by the hand, one on either side, her mum on her right, her dad on her left, and they walked her into the garage to see. “It’s for you, honey,” her mum—her other mum—said with her biggest smile, “it’s just for you.”
“It’s from Italy,” said her dad. “We brought it all this way to celebrate. We know your birthday’s not for another couple of weeks, but, well, sweetheart, we wanted you to have something early—”
“—something from us—” her mum cut in.
“—before you have to go back home.”
And they looked at each other encouragingly and they looked at her encouragingly, but Chloe was hardly listening because she was looking at the box. It was very big—as long as her bed, made of thick wooden slats with HIC JACET SEPVLTVS written in bold red letters.
“Go ahead, sweetheart,” said her mum. “Go on and open it. Henry, tell her to open it.”
“It’s okay,” said her dad. “Here, sweetie, fetch me the crowbar.”
And Chloe brought him the large hooked crowbar, and he fit it into the lid of the crate and, after some more grunting and heaving, off it came with a pop. A kind of horsey smell filled the air, a smell like dirt and old things that made Chloe feel all warm and tingly. “Is it—?” she asked, but her dad was lifting her up onto his shoulders.
“Shh, honey, see for yourself.”
At first, all she could make out was the layer of straw and the cloud of dust that leapt into the air as her dad began to root around. It glittered in the sunlight streaming through the garage door, but she still couldn’t see what was inside the thing, not through the settling dust and her dad’s rooting arms, and she had to hold tight around his neck so she didn’t fall off. But then, then there was something peeking through, brown and leathery, something that might have been a football, except it wasn’t a football because her dad was still clearing and Chloe saw it, a face and more than that, a face with pale, stringy hair tangled up in the straw and a brown, leathery neck and thin, twiggy arms and thinner, twiggier fingers.
Her dad bounced her on his shoulders and then heaved her off again so she landed gently on the ground, and she stood tip-toed until she could see over the top of the crate. Chloe fingered the straw shyly, not daring to touch it yet, not daring to stroke the soft leathery skin.
“For your birthday, kiddo,” he said in a warm, excited voice. “You’re almost seven, and we wanted you to have this—”
“Lucia of Syracuse,” her mum interrupted. He gave her a look, but it was an affectionate look, one that showed he didn’t mind much. “Died 304. A real, genuine martyr.”
Chloe’s mouth opened in a little “oh” of delight and then she reached out and let her index finger brush against the brown leather cheek. It was rough like a cat’s tongue in some places and smooth as fine-grained wood in others where the bone peeked through. “She was about your age, sweetheart, when they came for her. Wanted her to marry some rich governor who thought she had the most beautiful eyes in the world. But, oh no, she wasn’t having any of that. Do you know what she did?”
“She plucked out her eyes,” Chloe said, barely a whisper, as her finger traced the smooth curves of the eye sockets.
“That’s right,” her mum beamed. “That’s exactly right, sweetheart. Now there’s a real saint for you, a saint to be proud of. Not just any martyr had that kind of panache.”
Her dad nodded sagely, and Chloe nodded too because it was true, this was something, this wasn’t one of those knock-off relics that some of the other kids got: there were about five girls in her grade alone who claimed to have Catherine of Si
ena, and that was nonsense, there was only one Catherine of Siena and they couldn’t all have her. Melissa Johnstone admitted she only had a finger bone, and it was a hand-me-down from her older sister’s Theresa of Avila anyway—her parents couldn’t afford a whole new saint, not for their third kid.
But Chloe could tell just by looking that this was the real Lucia, that this little girl, a little girl her own age, had been good and kind and best beloved of all. And then, there, it happened. Chloe felt a warm rush of heat and all the hairs on her arm stood up. This was it, this was the moment! Out of the crate stepped a little girl the same age as Chloe, with long dark hair and olive skin and a beatific smile.
“You won’t be lonely now when you visit, sweetheart,” her dad said. “Lucia will be here waiting for you.”
And afterward they took Chloe inside and Lucia followed serenely, smiling at her with only the faintest stains of blood on her neck where the Roman had stabbed her, but she didn’t seem sad and so Chloe wasn’t either. There was birthday cake and it was her favourite—double-chocolate with thick brown icing that seemed to fizz on her tongue—and she was even allowed a second piece. At the end of the night, when she had had as much cake as she could fit inside her, and her eyes were starting to drift shut, they tucked her into bed. They stood, one on either side, her mum on the right, her dad on the left, and the third, Lucia, a faint ghostly little-girl shape by the window.
“Can she come home with me? Please, dad?” Chloe asked dreamily, but her parents shared a look, a special look, and her dad crouched down beside her.
“I need you to listen, sweetheart.” He looked up at her mum for support in the way he did sometimes. “You can’t tell Clare—well, your mother, your mum back home—about this. Okay, sweetie? It’s important. This is a special present. And because it’s a special present you need to keep it a secret.”