A Pretty Mouth
Page 1
praise for
A Pretty Mouth
“A Pretty Mouth is a fine and stylish collection that pays homage to the tradition of the weird while blazing its own sinister mark. Tanzer’s debut is as sharp and polished as any I’ve seen.”
—LAIRD BARRON, author of The Croning
“If Hieronymus Bosch and William Hogarth had together designed a Fabergé egg, the final result could not be more beautifully and deliciously perverse than what awaits the readers in A Pretty Mouth. Molly Tanzer’s first novel is a witty history of the centuries-long exploits of one joyfully corrupt (and somewhat moist) Calipash dynasty, a family both cursed and elevated by darkness of the most squamous sort. This is a sly and sparkling jewel of a book, and I can’t recommend it enough—get A Pretty Mouth in your hands or tentacles, post-haste, and prepare to be shocked, charmed, and (somewhat moistly) entertained!”
—LIVIA LLEWELLYN, author of Engines of Desire
“Molly Tanzer is a prose Edward Gorey, decadent, delicious, and ever so slightly mad.”
—NATHAN LONG, author of Jane Carver of Waar
“This is form and content and diction and tone and imagination all looking up at the exact same moment: when Molly Tanzer claps once at the front of the classroom.”
—STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES, author of The Last Final Girl
“Had the nineteenth century really been like this—with the flounces and corsets and blood and tentacles and whatnot—we’d all be dead by now. Unlucky us, but lucky you, Dear Reader, as you are alive to read this book.”
—NICK MAMATAS, author of Bullettime
“The stories and short novel in Molly Tanzer’s impressive debut collection move steadily backwards through English history, from an Edwardian resort to a Roman encampment, stopping on the way for the nineteenth, eighteenth, and seventeenth centuries, all in the interest of tracing the main trunk of the notorious Calipash family tree all the way to its roots. It’s a line marked by its excesses of sensuality, cruelty, and sorcery, and in excerpting the exploits of its storied members, Tanzer demonstrates her facility with a variety of voices and styles, from Wodehousian farce to Victorian erotica to Restoration class comedy. Each of the narratives collected here stands and succeeds on its own terms, but taken together, they add to a whole greater than the sum of its parts, in which the recurrence of key motifs in a diversity of settings creates the sense of a family living out its doom generation after generation. Tanzer is an ambitious writer, and she is talented enough for her ambition to matter.”
—JOHN LANGAN, author of The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies
“A Pretty Mouth is many things; erudite, hilarious, profane, moving, learned, engaging, horrific, terrifying, and profound. Molly moves through the multi-forms of prose like a shark in wine-dark seas, rife with allusion, deep in emotion, and sometimes giving you a little salty-mouth. A fantastic collection and not one to be missed.”
—JOHN HORNOR JACOBS, author of This Dark Earth
“Molly Tanzer’s A Pretty Mouth is a spectacular book, rad and weird and fun. With winks to P. G. Wodehouse, Robert E. Howard and the Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft, it showcases the work of a woman who delights in writing. She writes very well indeed! This is a book I will return to, for to read it is such a naughty pleasure.”
—W. H. PUGMIRE, author of The Twisted Muse
“I am a bit bashful about being titillated by Molly Tanzer’s naughty debut, A PRETTY MOUTH, but I must admit it in order to write this blurb. While having segments that are hot and sexy, it is also a dark and disturbing tale with a wicked sense of humor and compelling chracaters. I blush just thinking about it and might have to go read it again!”
—ALAN M. CLARK, author of A Parliament of Crows and Of Thimble and Threat: The Life of a Ripper Victim
“It’s been repeatedly said we’re enjoying in a new golden age of weird and fantastic fiction. We are, and this lady is one the gifted magicians whose literary creations are keeping the bonfire burning brightly!”
—JOSEPH S. PULVER, SR., author of The Orphan Palace
“Tanzer lifts the skirts of Victorian hypocrisy for a full Monty view of perverted hijinks and fun.”
—MARIO ACEVEDO, author of Werewolf Smackdown
A PRETTY MOUTH
Molly Tanzer
Lazy Fascist Press
Portland, Oregon
A LAZY FASCIST ORIGINAL
Lazy Fascist Press
an imprint of Eraserhead Press
205 NE Bryant Street
Portland, Oregon 97211
www.lazyfascistpress.com
www.bizarrocentral.com
ISBN: 978-1-62105-050-6
A Pretty Mouth copyright ©2012 by Molly Tanzer
Cover art copyright ©2012 by Matthew Revert
www.matthewrevert.com
“The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins” first appeared in Historical Lovecraft and The Book of Cthulhu, “The Hour of the Tortoise” first appeared in The Book of Cthulhu 2.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.All persons in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance that may seem to exist to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental or for purposes of satire or parody. This is a work of fiction.
“The provision, then, which we have here made is no other than Human Nature. Nor do I fear that my sensible reader, though most luxurious in his taste, will start, cavil, or be offended, because I have named but one article. The tortoise—as the alderman of Bristol, well learned in eating, knows by much experience—besides the delicious calipash and calipee, contains many different kinds of food; nor can the learned reader be ignorant, that in human nature, though here collected under one general name, is such prodigious variety, that a cook will have sooner gone through all the several species of animal and vegetable food in the world, than an author will be able to exhaust so extensive a subject …”
—Henry Fielding, from Tom Jones
A Spotted Trouble At Dolor-on-the-Downs
Though I am certain my fellow members of the Junior Ganymede Club for Gentlemen’s Personal Gentlemen are well aware of the pleasures concomitant with our profession, it is, I believe, still worth noting that there are several substantial risks when one’s chosen profession is that of valet, especially when contrasted with butling. Butlers serve households, and households, being inanimate entities, are therefore neither whimsical nor capricious; nor, as is perhaps more relevant to my point, are they able to lose wagers so spectacularly that it necessitates the loaning out of their employees to settle their debts.
Perhaps I stretch my metaphor too far; then again, perhaps not. I would do well at this juncture to cease speaking in generalities, and note that I am in fact referring to a recent, and specific incident.
Since the Junior Ganymede’s rules specify that “every member must promptly, accurately, and unflinchingly record any compromising or embarrassing information about his employer in the Club Book,” I should confess straightaway that the antecedent to my taking up the pen this afternoon was another instance of my employer’s regrettable inability to successfully win a bet. One might think that a gentleman so well-known to himself and to others as particularly possessed of poor luck—or, if I might be forgiven for saying it, insight—would cease to gamble, but then again, one of Mr. Wooster’s most endearing characteristics is his eternal optimism, and, it must be said, perpetual unwillingness to heed the Socratic advice “gnothi seauton.”
This particular loss was keenly felt by him I am sure, but, unusu
ally, it affected me, as his failure brought about my temporarily leaving his service and remaining at a seedy seaside resort at Dolor-on-the-Downs in the service of a frightful heiress and her notorious brother, and participating in certain events so scandalous an account of them could, for a considerable time after the conclusion of the affair, be found in all the major papers, though those accounts were not at all complete. Therefore, perhaps my earlier analogy is an apt one.
***
The troubling incident to which I refer happened some weeks back, during Mr. Wooster’s annual mid-summer seaside holidaying. This year was unusually vexing during the planning portions of the sojourn, for Mr. Wooster’s formidable aunt, Mrs. Agatha Gregson, requested—which in her case means required of him—that he join her at Dolor-on-the-Downs, in the south.
Truth be told, my employer did not much want to attend Mrs. Gregson during his seaside holidaying, Dolor-on-the-Downs not being his usual haunt and Mrs. Gregson being the sort of lady who enjoys match-making and whist more than bracing sea air, but she impressed upon him that it was important to her. After the fifteenth telegram in three days demanding his presence, and the nigh-constant arrivals of mail-order holidaying necessities such as umbrellas, bathing costumes, and straw hats in both his and my sizes, he realized that to go down for a week or so would be far less of an inconvenience than continuing to refuse.
Dolor-on-the-Downs is, like so many seaside towns, a place of distinct seediness. There was one street of hotels acceptable for human habitation, and the rest of the place was a hotch-potch of inferior lodgings, taffy shops, ice cream parlors, boardwalks, performers busking on streetcorners, teashops where the very windows bore a light sheen of grease, and, of course, public houses. During the season, children with sticky faces and sunburns run hither and yon without heed for the eardrums of others, and the beaches are clogged with their adoring parents, also sunburned, but less often sticky-faced.
The hotel where we were to attend Mrs. Gregson was one of the acceptable ones, though barely. The Marine Vivarium, as the place was called, tended toward the ostentatious rather than the tastefully luxurious. It was once owned and managed by a man of Continental extraction, Mr. Gabriel Prideaux, who had a passion for aquariums; after he died, his daughter, a Miss Cirrina Prideaux, took over management—as well as her father’s life’s work: Collecting rare and unusual aquatic specimens for the greater glory of the hotel. Thus, everywhere one looked there were aquaria—some large, some small, some salt, some fresh, all lined with stones and filled with colorful, ornamental creatures and underwater plants. There were big square aquaria full of native sea-beasts (as Milton might call them) set about on pedestal tables and sideboards, there were vase-shaped ones containing Asian specimens that adorned shelves and sinks; in the hotel’s restaurant there was even one entire wall that was an aquarium, full of fish one could, if one so chose, select and then consume. The memory of such a frightful gimmick in an establishment of alleged good reputation still troubles me.
At the time, I thought the garishness must be the reason there were so few other patrons, and also the strange lassitude of those who were out and about. Now I know it simply contributed to that situation, but I do not like to get ahead of myself.
One of the reasons Mr. Wooster was so reluctant to join his aunt at Dolor-on-the-Downs is that, as I previously noted, Mrs. Gregson has often attempted to marry him to this girl or that. ‘Often’ is, perhaps, an understatement. She has for several years pursued this aim with as much vigor as a Continental monarch eager to expand his nation’s borders through wedding his son to an adjacent king’s daughter. It frustrates Mrs. Gregson to no end when Mr. Wooster refuses her help, however, so after her third unsuccessful attempt to lure my employer into a matrimonial state with the young ladies she had discovered among the local families of good breeding—including, unsurprisingly, Miss Cirrina Prideaux—Mrs. Gregson took her leave of us, and in rather high dudgeon. I am sorry to report that it was then that my troubles began.
Here I should mention that also staying at the Vivarium at that time was an old school acquaintance of Mr. Wooster’s (“chum” being perhaps too strong a word to use here), Alastair Fitzroy, the twenty-seventh Lord Calipash. I had never met the man before, but knew something of the Calipash family, of course—it is not for nothing that the good people at Burke’s contacted me when compiling their most recent edition of the Peerage—and suffice it to say I possessed less enthusiasm about this turn of events than my employer. The Calipash line, as I am sure all the other members of this club well know, is … tainted. Members of that family tend to be eccentric if not totally insane, and from their origins to the present day there have been reports of Calipashes engaging in such behaviors as voluntary demonic possession, murder, necromancy in the classical and modern sense of the word, black magics of all kinds, sexual perversion, cannibalism, and, perhaps counterintuitively, militant vegetarianism. I was therefore grateful we had not seen much of the Lord Calipash; only when he was eating alone in the dining room or drinking alone at the bar. He spoke to no one and looked, if I may be so bold, rather moth-eaten and out of spirits for someone of his rank. But as the rest of the noblesse who were staying at the Vivarium also appeared somewhat depressed, at the time I attributed it, as I said, to the décor.
Prior to Mrs. Gregson’s departure Mr. Wooster had not much time to idle at the bar; once she departed he headed there directly. As a courtesy he invited me to come along, which is how I came to make the observations that began this account.
“What-ho, Fizzy,” said Mr. Wooster, as I took a seat at the furthest end of the countertop, where I could observe both a tank full of exotic Caribbean fishes, and how my employer got on with the famously waspish Lord Calipash. “Care for some company? You look about as happy as a fox who’s eaten the last chicken. Which is to say, not at all.”
The Lord Calipash looked at my employer with some coolness.
“What?” he asked.
“You know,” said Mr. Wooster, undaunted, “because foxes are hungry little coves, aren’t they, and thus it seems likely they’d be prone to despondency when the bouillon’s been slurped. Let me buy you a drink?”
“What about a Corpse Reviver #2?” suggested the bartender. He was polishing a glass at the time, of course. “Just learned that one. My friend just came back from London with the recipe. Learned it from Mr. Harry Craddock himself.”
“Just the thing! Young Fizzy over here does have a rather mortuary look about him, what?”
As I idled over my glass of porter, the bartender mixed together Lillet, lemon juice, gin, and a few other ingredients, and the libation was consumed quickly by the two gentlemen. The drink did seem to revive the Lord Calipash, and he and Mr. Wooster consumed several more over the next hour.
“Well, Bertie. You certainly seem to be doing well for yourself,” said the Lord Calipash. “Natty suit, smile on your face. Plenty of cash to throw around as you like.”
“Can’t complain,” said my employer jovially. “Lots of days in a year and I live all of them more or less happily. But what about you, Fizzy? What’s got you all long in the face? Everyone staying here seems down in the mouth, but you—you look, if I may say so, awful.”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” said the Lord Calipash, running his finger around the rim of his glass. “Rum bit of business. Too bally complicated to bother you with.”
Mr. Wooster smiled, and ordered another round from the bartender. “I forgive your coyness as we haven’t had a wheeze since Oxford, but you should know I’m a bit of a whiz-bang with rum businesses, Fizzy. Tell me of your troubles, and if I can’t aid you, then my valet will—the dark, tall fellow over there in the corner: Jeeves. He’s the brainiest man I’ve ever met! Solves five unsolvable quandaries before breakfast, you know, just to keep in practice.” Mr. Wooster, after relaying these flattering sentiments, leaned in to the Lord Calipash conspiratorially. “It’s the fish. Eats it all the time—were I that French Fancy who runs this flophous
e, I’d be watching the tanks!”
“Really,” said the Lord Calipash, and though I am neither a whimsical man by nature, nor the heroine of a Gothic romance, I felt a chill as his eyes raked over me. “You know, come to think of it I’ve heard of this Jeeves of yours. Ran into young Tuppy Glossop last Christmas. Said Jeeves was the only reason he was still engaged to your cousin Angela.”
“Very likely the case.”
The Lord Calipash tipped the last of his drink down his throat. “Not a bad plan of yours, this. The drinks, I mean.”
“We Woosters have a knack for bucking up comrades in need,” agreed Mr. Wooster, who was listing slightly by then, his constitution having been depleted by several days of aunt-induced abstinence. “Pity you didn’t come and see me in London about your woes. I’m a dashed good mixer of cocktails myself.”
“Are you?”
“I am.”
An unpleasant light came into the Lord Calipash’s eye.
“If I recall correctly, when we were at Oxford you were always just the bloke for a little sport, weren’t you, Bertie?” he said. “How’s about it? Think you’re a better barman than our fine mister—what’s your name again?”
“My name is Marincola, m’lord.”
“So you think you’re better at drink-making than Mr. Marincola here?”
My spirits sank as I saw Mr. Wooster perk up.
“Indeed,” said he, slapping his hand on the countertop. “This Mr. Marincola’s as good as they come for the old what-and-mixer—really Mr. Marincola, you are to be commended—but me? I’m the real Tabasco.”