by Brian Hodge
The Meat In The Machine
Extract
Liturgical Music For Nihilists
Endnotes: The Ticking Of An Unfriendly Clock
Introduction: From Out Of The Angry Ruins
by Philip Nutman
Okay. Sit down and listen.
No poetical introductory paragraphs waxing lyrical about what you’re about to read, just a simple statement:
The book you hold in your hands is the Real Deal.
If you’ve been searching for a collection of tales of dread to make your head spin, The Convulsion Factory is it.
What you hold in your hands, oh Lucky Reader, is the doorway to a universe I can only describe as “Hodgian.” Be prepared to enter a space where your worst suspicions about the world we live in, especially the Inner Cities, will be confirmed.
And then some.
You won’t want to live here, but I’m sure, once you complete your first vacation, you’ll want to come back, just like I know I will in the years to come.
This is one of those rare books that the moment you turn the last page, you’ll be deeply disappointed the experience is over. But The Convulsion Factory will, I’m sure, take pride of place on your shelf of favorite volumes, and it will always be there, waiting for you to plunge back into its dark, disturbing pages.
In short, I haven’t enjoyed a story collection so much since Clive Barker kept me up all night when I first got my hands on The Books of Blood, over ten years ago.
Yes, high praise indeed.
And sincere praise.
You see, I’m a very picky reader. Not a literary snob, but I’ve spent most of my life learning to be a storyteller, and I know one when I read one.
And Brian Hodge is a writer’s writer. No quarter given, none asked for. The man is a storyteller with a capital “S.”
There’s no greater pleasure than discovering a book which seduces you, and as you slip between those narrative sheets and start to indulge your passionate desires…
Well, then you discover your new literary lover could teach the legendary Linda Lovelace a thing or two … and you are lost, my friend.
And you keep wanting more…
Okay, okay, this metaphor’s getting out of hand.
Let’s put it this way: writing, for me, is a sexual act.
On those days when the words flow and you, The Writer, discover things about yourself you didn’t know or couldn’t admit to, the art of placing words on a page, of weaving a story out of thin air, becomes transcendental. Just like the best sex.
And reading a novel or collection which inspires those same feelings is a revelation.
At a time when major publishing houses have decided horror is dead, and wannabee writers swimming in the cesspool of the small presses think they are the next King, Koontz, or Barker, when most of them are simply talentless morons who don’t know the difference between a split infinitive and a slice of toast, and 99% of what I read in the “genre” proves unimaginative, derivative shit, a collection like this one serves as a beacon in the darkness.
To be honest, I hardly read anything labeled “horror” anymore. The market imploded not because of public disinterest, but due to greedy publishers strip-mining a field which was already polluted by too many bad writers. I’ve had my fill of killer plants, demonic clowns, psychopaths, cereal killers (sic), and books with evil children on the covers. These days, if I want to experience that delicious frisson which accompanies a book not afraid to explore the darkness, I turn to James Lee Burke (In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead, Dixie City Jam), or Andrew Vachss, or James Ellroy — especially Ellroy. For some reason I haven’t quite managed to figure out, the best “horror” fiction is being written by mystery writers these days.
So when a collection like this one comes along — one that wears its dark stripes with grim glee — and turns out to exceed my expectations in spades, I’m ready to swing from the rafters crying, “it’s alive! it’s alive!”
Whatever label publishers want to put on my own fiction, and whatever genre I work in, I am always going to be walking the darkest backroads of the human heart. Exploring the darkness so I can define the light. And every day I sit down to write I try to do so with honesty, commitment, and conviction. Sometimes, the truths we uncover, like scuttling insects which squirm away from the light when we lift the rock of denial, are ugly and deeply disturbing. But we must be honest, Lucky Reader, for without honesty — the painful process of staring into the Abyss, and having the Abyss hold up a mirror to our deepest, darkest secrets, and whispering in our ears, “this is you, my friend…” — there is no hope for us.
Read. Listen. And Learn, oh Lucky Reader.
I was going to tell you about what happened to me the day the manuscript for this treasure trove of dark delights arrived in my Post Office Box. How, hating to waste a minute of my day, I made the mistake of starting to read “Godflesh” — the wonderful, polymorphous-perverse ode to sexual tabooism which kick-starts this vacation in the October Country of Post-Industrial, Apocalyptic, Urban Decadence — on my way to the subway station (my car was ill that day). And how I walked into two lamp posts, tripped over a curb, and trod on a wino who was sleeping off a Mad Dog 20/20 kidney-rot dream — all because once I started reading I was lost…
And I was going to go into great detail about what then happened to me after I got off the train at King Memorial Station, and how I obliviously wandered into the middle of a drive-by shooting, somehow managing not to get my head blown off. And about my little encounter with the middle-aged, white trash alcoholic whore who offered me a $5 blow job outside the fallout shelter bar she frequents, situated a few blocks from Casa Nutman.
I’m too polite to repeat what I growled in response to her offer, but by this point I was suckling at the teats of the lead character of “Androgyny” and really didn’t want to be disturbed.
Hell, I was disturbed enough as it is.
But all what happened is another story. Or maybe a collection. Or tales best told in a good bar with a glass of full-bodied Cabernet in hand.
What happened to me that day could have happened to one of the characters in these stories — only under Brian’s deft penmanship, it would have been a whole lot worse.
I was lucky. Not just because only chance dictated that the guy with the gun had it pointed towards the other side of the street from me, but because I had stepped into the Hodgian Universe. Maybe it was Brian’s prose which kept me out of harm’s way. Hell, where I was, fictionally-speaking, a bullet would have been the least of my troubles.
Welcome to Brian’s nightmare.
My stint in the spotlight is over. It’s time for me to exit stage left.
All I want to say at this point, oh Lucky Reader, is I envy the journey you are about to undertake.
For in these pages grows a garden of dark delights.
But watch out — every festering rose has its thorns.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Best Blood,
Philip Nutman
Atlanta. June 5th, 1996
Godflesh
Being as she was a woman who prided herself on walking her own deliberate path, imagine, then, the irony: Her horizons were forever broadened by the ecstatic man with no legs.
She was Ellen by day, and knew the aisles of the bookstore as well as the creases in her palm, the smoky gray of her eyes, the finely-wrought lines that inscribed the corners of her mouth and lent it warmth and wisdom, as if etched by a loving sculptor. She walked the aisles with her modest skirt brushing against her knees and could smell every page along the gauntlets of spines. For the patient customer it was a trip well rewarded. Every book should be so matched to a loving home.
There had been nothing different about that day right up to the very moment they left the bookstore, she and Jude letting the evening clerks take over. With that taut facelift, Jude could have been an older sister, or so she thought. Thought she knew what made Ellen tick. A common mi
stake, but then Jude’s idea of a deep read was Danielle Steel over Jackie Collins. Jude already had the endings worked out for most anyone she could ever meet.
They left together for the parking lot down the street. The bookstore’s neighborhood was like much of the city itself: old and charmingly crumbled by day, not a place most would want to walk alone at night. The peeling doorways, the odd bricks set just out of step with the others, the derelict and sagging smokestacks and chimneys … they hooked strange shadows that worsened as day dwindled into evening, and the shadows gave birth to night people.
They joined the flow, Jude’s brisk footsteps clicking at her side. Urban minnows, that’s what they all were, and god forbid anyone should fall out of step. Were it not for nights, Ellen knew she would one day tear out her hair, an allergic reaction to this sunlight world and the pre-fab molds it demanded.
“…and then do you know what that little doofus asked me?” Jude was saying. “He asked, ‘Do you have The Old Man and the Sea in Cliff’s Notes?’ I told him the original was barely a hundred pages, so why didn’t he read that, and he just looked at me—”
They approached a break in the buildings, the mouth of an alley that gaped back like a dirty, leprous throat. Yet inviting, all the same, with mysteries lying just behind those crusty locked doors. Back rooms often tweaked her curiosity.
“—just looked at me, like I’d suggested, ‘Here, why don’t you bite this brick in half.’ So I said, ‘Listen, I can summarize it for you in fifteen words or less: Man catches fish, man battles fish, man loses dead fish to hungry shar—’” Jude froze, except for her arm, as she began to point along the alley. “Oh. My. God.” Her arm recoiled back to her side. “Don’t look, Ellen, just don’t look.”
It was the wrong thing to say, and too late anyway. Ellen wouldn’t have missed anything that got Jude to interrupt herself.
The man looked to be in his early forties, and she’d never have mistaken him for one of the street people, one of those who cruised around in their wheelchairs with sad stories of cause and effect: car wreck and loss of livelihood; war wounds and loss of stability. From this distance — say, twenty feet along that wall? — his clothing looked neat and new, his hair well-barbered. He might have been any reasonably attractive man who’d made the best of his life after losing both legs at the hip.
Then again, he was masturbating. In his wheelchair. It did not look as if he were merely adjusting his crotch. He was wholly absorbed in the act — heart, soul, and both hands.
“He’s — he’s right out in the open!” Jude said, adding her disgust to that of the less self-absorbed passersby. “I … I don’t think he’s even aware anybody’s watching!”
No. No, he wasn’t, was he? His exultant abandon — Ellen found this the most fascinating aspect of the display. His choice of locale and timing may have been awry, but she saw on his face more passion and ecstasy than she’d noticed on the faces of last week’s eight or ten lovers combined.
A Mona Lisa smile brushed her lips, unnoticed as Jude yanked at her arm.
“Come on, come on,” said Jude. “A nice proper thing like you, a sight like that can scar you for years. I had a neighbor? Liked to show himself to other neighbors? To this very day Sylvia Miller gets nauseated by the sight of knockwurst.” Jude shuddered. “If only I had a bucket of water, I’d douse that pervert’s fire. You shouldn’t have to see things like that.”
If you only knew, Ellen thought, and let Jude believe she was saving her from something she’d in fact watched maybe two thousand times before.
Ellen could be kind that way.
And the days took care of themselves.
By night, Elle. Just Elle. “What’s in a name?” Shakespeare had asked, and she’d decided plenty. With the lopping off of a single letter she had created an entirely different life.
She even felt different when that was what others called her, what she called herself. “Ellen” was safe and respectable, a fine name to endorse on the backs of paychecks. But “Elle” rang with mystery and resonance, conjured a slick wet alchemy of surrender and seduction.
For years now that name had been eagerly welcomed by the sort of clubs that are frequented only by those who knew where to find them; whose new members arrived only by invitation and discreet word of mouth; where no one was ejected to the streets for improper conduct, because everyone there knew precisely what everyone else had come for.
Her beauty and willingness to experiment were prized. She was almost tall, not quite. Her raven hair, when unbound, contrasted with her pale luminous skin and ripe lips in delicious nocturnal severity. She had a twenty-three-inch waist but could corset it down to eighteen. Men and women alike loved to wrap their hands around it, or nuzzle over the smooth tight curves on their way to the drenched heat between her thighs.
Tonight’s lovers were no exception, at times all six hands caressing her tiny middle, some lightly tender, others rough and groping with urgency. The club’s name was the Inner Circle and variety was everybody’s spice.
She’d spent the past couple hours as part of a foursome, one of her preferred configurations. Two men and two women — she found a perfect symmetry there, something intended by nature, along with the four winds and seasons, the cardinal points of a compass. The Inner Circle offered an orgiastic central room aglow with gauzy mood lighting, or more private quarters with plenty of cushions and sprawl, and they’d opted for the latter.
She filled her mouth with Daniel while Mitch filled her from behind; she cradled Jill, kissing her deeply, as the men traded off between the women’s legs; she and Jill tongued one another’s feverish clits while Daniel and Mitch were yet locked inside them; Jill straddled her mouth while holding her ankles wide … and in Elle’s broad experience you usually needed more men, because their glands betrayed them and they wore out so much sooner. Still, they gave their all, and she drank it with her mouth, cunt, anus. She cried out loudly, in cycles, pulled the others into her singly, as pairs, all three. She made a dinner of semen, a dessert of the musky dew on Jill’s swollen and petaled cleft.
And there was always so much silence when bodies fell still, unable to give or take any more. It always felt as if the world had just ended, and they all lay naked and wet in the ashes.
“You’re ravenous,” Daniel told her. Blond, well-toned, he lay in a sweaty half-curl near her side, reaching over with one finger to probe beneath the edge of the black corset. Jill and Mitch lay in their own raw exhausted tangle a few feet over. “I’d like to see you again.”
“You might,” she said. “I’m no stranger here.”
“So I understand.” Grinning, he elbowed closer, crawling like a soldier. “How long’ve you been coming here? Double entendre not intended.”
“Look, you don’t have to engage me in conversation, all right? I fucked you tonight, and I’ll probably fuck you again.”
He rolled onto his back, relaxed, unfazed. “I wish I was nineteen again,” he sighed. “I could come five times a night when I was nineteen. But the sad thing was, I was alone for most of it.” He peeked at her, hopeful. “Are you feeling pity for me yet?”
He was so obvious, and knew it, that Elle had to laugh in spite of herself. “You late bloomers, you’re so maudlin when you start dwelling on what you’ve missed.”
Daniel said he was valiantly fighting the pull of gravity, here on the downhill side of the sexual bell curve. Confessed he was thirty-five — coincidence, or karma? She was closing fast on thirty-five herself, but then weren’t they all, for the first or second or tenth time.
She let him talk, and he was pleasant enough without seeming possessive. A few of the guys in these places, in spite of their laissez-faire posturing, they nailed you once and it was as though they’d staked a claim. So she let Daniel talk, but already her thoughts were drifting ahead. Tomorrow night, or the night after … future nights at other clubs, wondering where she’d be, what she’d be doing, who she’d be doing it with.
Mayb
e at the Purgatorium, with the rings through her hardened nipples and chained to a leather belt while some hooded dominatrix violated her with a strap-on.
Or maybe with the Jezebel Society, where gangbangs were a specialty, and where, on knees and elbows, she could be triply penetrated while massaging a cock in each hand.
Or elsewhere, with company even more exotic, but always sure to wring more from the experience than her partners. It was a kind of challenge, something bone-deep and primal.
And she wondered if, wherever she’d be, after she was sated and lay breathing heavily, she’d once more start dreaming of the next time before the sticky fluids of that night had even dried.
Could you even completely look forward to that next time when you could so easily forecast your pose by its end? Even in private clubs like the Inner Circle, the Purgatorium, the rest, sex could get as routine and predictable as some fat suburban couple’s half-hearted hump scheduled for the second Tuesday of each month. It was only a matter of degree.
And she wondered if considering these things, in a room with three other nude people whose potent sexuality had just soaked the walls, meant that she was bored.
Figuring that, in the asking, she already had her answer.
A few days later Ellen came back from lunch, took one look behind the counter, and wondered if one of Jude’s facial nips and tucks had begun to unravel. The woman’s forehead appeared ready to burst veins.
“He’s … upstairs,” she said through clenched teeth.
Ellen frowned. “Who? Who is?”
“That … that creature.” Jude seemed to need the counter to remain vertical. “From the alley.”
“Ohhh,” she said, and frowned again, more thoughtfully. “Was everything in place when he came in?”
Jude’s eyes widened, horrified at the very notion she’d have glanced down to check. “You see, you see — it’s types like his that make me think Affirmative Action is a terrible imposition on the rest of us. No telling what he’s doing up there.”
