FSF, October-November 2009

by Spilogale Authors

  If his success had ended here, the very elderly writer—then merely middle-aged, of course—would have accounted himself lucky indeed. But there was so much more to come.

  The film version of Celadine was a middling hit, as was the video game. But it was the Broadway stage production of the little girl's fabulous story that really took off. Never since The Producers or Hairspray had such a film-to-stage transition been accompanied by so much money and acclaim. By the time of the thousandth performance, the very elderly writer was a millionaire many times over.

  Naturally, the author had to consider how next to market the icon for which so many people clamored. And with his large profits, flowing to him amidst generally depressed economic conditions, he found many investment opportunities presented cheaply.

  But the first move was to incorporate.

  And so Celadine, Ltd. was formed, in the author's native land.

  The first enterprise was a joint venture with Sanrio, the owners of Hello Kitty. Linking Celadine's image—the well-known animated interpretation of the little girl from the film, rather than the visage of the live actress who had defined the role on Broadway, but who would certainly have demanded a large percentage of the take—with the long-established feline icon assured instant global penetration of all markets.

  Celadine juice boxes, Celadine underwear, Celadine acne-cream, Celadine Saturday-morning cartoons, Celadine energy drinks, Celadine greeting cards, Celadine peanut butter, Celadine iPods, Celadine pizza, Celadine mouthwash—

  Before too long, the little girl who had sprung from the now-elderly writer's imagination was more widely recognized than the Wendy of hamburger fame, or the Little Debbie of snack-cake renown.

  Five years on from the partnership with Hello Kitty, Celadine, Ltd. owned Sanrio outright.

  And there was still so much more of the commercial world to conquer!

  To this point, Celadine had lent her cachet only to consumer products. But there were large corporations that were clamoring to brand their services with Celadine's face.

  The mass licensing land rush began.

  British Petroleum adopted Celadine as their spokesperson for alternative energy production. “Come into a different world of power,” she intoned sweetly.

  Seeking to relaunch Merrill Lynch as a viable brand, parent firm Bank of America linked the subsidiary firm to Celadine's winsome domesticity. “When I invested with Merrill Lynch, it was like I found a perfect family."

  A consortium of Ivy League universities pooled their resources to form Celadine Online Education. General Motors created a line of Celadine cars. The hapless New York Knicks renamed themselves the Celadines. The Celadine Channel, specializing in tween programming, became mandatory in even the most basic cable package.

  Long before all this activity, of course, direct control of the imaginary little girl had passed from the hands of the author to the generally capable hands of the large staff of Celadine, Ltd. There was simply no way he could personally supervise all the licensing.

  Which went a long way to explain the gaffe that almost brought down the whole enterprise.

  Celadine had been licensed to the Corrections Corporation of America, a firm that ran an extensive private-prison network in the U.S.A. The guards of CCA wore Celadine's image on their very chests. Their Tasers bore her smiling face on their grips.

  And so when the media was flooded with the smuggled cellphone-captured video of the infamous riot at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas, during which scores of illegal immigrants were savagely beaten by CCA guards and their truncheons bearing Celadine's face, an immense crisis faced Celadine, Ltd.

  But the very elderly writer (not that he actually wrote much anymore) met the controversy head-on. It was his shining moment. He brilliantly chose to cast the whole matter as a betrayal and insult to his own beloved child. In numerous public appearances, his wounded dignity, his sorrowful shame, utterly won over the public. Dismissals and reorganization saw Celadine, Ltd. emerge stronger and more popular than ever.

  The decades after the CCA kerfuffle—how fast they had passed in retrospect, how full they had been of even wider triumphs!

  And now it was all coming to an end.

  Yet he had no regrets.

  Suddenly, to the consternation of all the watchers in the room, the very elderly writer's eyes shot open. He raised a feeble hand toward the blank ceiling, called out, “Celadine! The door! I'm coming—"

  And then he expired.

  * * * *

  The Minister of Homeland Security pulled the Celadine-patterned sheets up over the peaceful face of the very elderly writer. The Minister adjusted his official armband bearing Celadine's image, and everyone else in the room instinctively did likewise. Then the Minister turned to the Praetorian Guard, each stalwart, rigid, burly, laser-armed man wearing the latex mask replicating Celadine's features, and addressed them.

  "Our Supreme Author, the light of the globe, is dead. In Celadine's name, may his soul find peace. He left us and the Celadine Empire during troubled times.

  "Now, let us prepare for war with the Moomins!"

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Novella: HALLOWEEN TOWN by Lucius Shepard

  My first story sale was to F&SF, though I almost didn't find out about it. I had sent in a story, “Solitario's Eyes,” and never received any response. Being busy with a new band, I just figured they had rejected it. Thus I was greatly surprised when I was called out of practice to answer the phone and heard, “This is Ed Ferman,” coming from the receiver. Turns out that Mr. Ferman had sent a check and a contract and the post office had not delivered it. “I hope you haven't sold it,” he said. “It's coming out next month and we have a very nice cover for it.” Needless to say, that made my day. Hell, it made my month ... now that I think about it, it was probably the best damn thing that happened to me that year.—Lucius Shepard

  This is the story of Clyde Ormoloo and the willow wan, but it's also the story of Halloween, the spindly, skinny town that lies along the bottom of the Shilkonic Gorge, a meandering crack in the earth so narrow that on a clear day the sky appears to those hundreds of feet below as a crooked seam of blue mineral running through dark stone. Spanning the gorge is a forest with a canopy so dense that a grown man, if he steps carefully, can walk across it; thus many who live in Halloween must travel for more than a mile along the river (the Mossbach) that divides their town should they wish to see daylight. The precipitous granite walls are concave, forming a great vaulted roof overhead, and this concavity becomes exaggerated near the apex of the gorge, where the serpentine roots of oak and hawthorn and elm burst through thin shelves of rock, braiding their undersides like enormous varicose veins.

  Though a young boy can toss a stone from one bank to the other, the Mossbach is held to be quite a broad river by the citizenry, and this is scarcely surprising, considering their narrow perspective. Space is at a premium and the houses of the town, lacking all foundation, must be bolted to the walls of the gorge. Their rooms, rarely more than ten feet deep, are stacked one atop another, like the uneven, teetering columns of blocks erected by a toddler, and are ascended to by means of external ladders or rickety stairs or platforms raised by pulleys (a situation that has proved a boon to fitness). A small house may reach a height of forty feet, and larger ones, double stacks topped off by ornamental peaked roofs, often tower more than eighty feet above the Mossbach. When families grow close, rooms may be added that connect two or more houses, thereby creating a pattern of square shapes across the granite redolent of an enormous crossword puzzle; when feuds occur, these connecting rooms may be demolished. Public venues like O'Malloy's Inn and the Downlow have expanded by carving out rooms from the rock, but for much of its length, with its purplish days and quirky architecture and night mists, Halloween seems a habitation suited for a society of intelligent pigeons ... though on occasion a purely human note is sounded. Sandy shingles notch the granite shore and piers of age-blackened wo
od extend out over the water, illumined by gas lamps or a single dangling bulb, assisting the passage of the flat-bottomed skiffs that constitute the river's sole traffic. Frequently you will see a moon-pale girl (or a dark-skinned girl with a peculiar pallor) sitting at the end of such a pier beneath a fan of radiance, watching elusive, luminous silver fish appearing and disappearing beneath the surface with the intermittency of fireflies, waiting for her lover to come poling his skiff out of the sempiternal gloom.

  * * * *

  At forty-one, Clyde Ormoloo had the lean, muscular body of a construction worker (which, in fact, he had been) and the bleak disposition of a French philosopher plagued by doubts concerning the substantive worth of existence (which, in essence, he had become). His seamed face, surmounted by a scalp upon which was raised a crop of black stubble, was surpassingly ugly, yet ugly in such a way that appealed to women who prize men for their brutishness and use them as a setting to show off the diamond of their beauty. These women did not stay for long, put off by Clyde's unrelenting and perhaps unnatural scrutiny. Three years previously, while working a construction site in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania (his home and the birthplace of Joe Namath, the former NFL quarterback), he had been struck a glancing blow to the head by a rivet dropped from the floor above and, as a result, he had begun to see too deeply into people. The injury was not a broken spine (he was in the hospital one night for observation), yet it paralyzed Clyde. Whereas before the accident he had been a beer guzzler, an ass-grabber, a blue-collar bon vivant, now when he looked into a woman's eyes (or a man's, for that matter), he saw a terrible incoherence, flashes of greed, lust, and fear exploding into a shrapnel of thought that somehow succeeded in contriving a human likeness. His friends seemed unfamiliar—he understood that he had not known them, merely recognized the shapes of their madness. He asked questions that made them uncomfortable and made comments that they failed to grasp and took for insults. Increasingly, women told their friends they didn't know him anymore and turned away when he drew near. Men rejected him less subtly and formed new friendships with those whose madnesses complemented their own.

  "Sooner or later,” said one of his doctors, “almost everyone arrives at the conclusion that people are chaotic skinbags driven by the basest of motives. You'll adjust."

  None of the doctors could explain Clyde's sudden increase in intelligence and they were bemused by his contention that this increase was a byproduct of improved vision. In Clyde's view, his new capacity to analyze and break down the images conveyed by light lay at the root of his problem—the rivet had struck his skull above the site of the visual cortex, had it not? At the movies, in rock clubs, in any poorly lit circumstance, he felt almost normal, though most movies—themselves creations of light—seemed designed to inspire Pavlovian responses in idiots, and thus Clyde began attending the local arthouse, hiding his face beneath a golf cap so as not to be recognized.

  "Try sunglasses,” suggested a specialist.

  Sunglasses helped, but Clyde felt like a pretentious ass wearing them day in, day out during the gray inclemency of a Beaver Falls winter. He considered moving to Florida, but knew this would be no more than a stopgap. The sole passion he clung to from his old, happy life (never mind that it had been an illusion) was his love of football, and for a while he thought football might save him. He spent hours each night watching ESPN Classic and the NFL Network. Football was the perfect metaphor, he thought, for contemporary man's frustration with the limitations of the social order, and therein rested its appeal. Whenever the officials (who in the main were professional men, lawyers, accountants, insurance executives, and the like, apt instruments of repression) threw their yellow flags and blew their silver whistles, preventing a three-hundred-pound mesomorph from ripping out a young quarterback's throat, they were in effect reminding the millions tuning in that they could expect no more than a partial fulfillment of their desires ... and yet they did this with the rabid participation of the masses, who dressed in appropriate colors, rooting for the home team or the visitors, but acknowledging by the sameness of their dress that there was only one side, the side that sold them jerseys and caps. Thus football had evolved into a training tool of the corporate oligarchy, posing a dreary object lesson that conditioned proles to accept their cancer-ridden, consumerist fates enthusiastically. Having thought these things, the game lost much of its appeal for Clyde. And so, plagued by light, alone in a world where solitude is frowned upon, if not perceived as the symptom of a deviant pathology, he petitioned the town of Halloween to grant him citizenship.

  * * * *

  The population of Halloween fluctuates between three thousand and thirty-eight hundred, and is sustained at those levels by the Town Council. At the time Clyde put in his application, the population hovered around thirty-two hundred, so breaching the upper limit would not be a problem. To his surprise, the decision to reject or approve him would not be rendered by the council in full session, but by a committee of three men named Brad, Carmine, and Spooz, and the meeting was held at the Sub-Cafe, an establishment that had been excavated out of the granite; a neon sign was bracketed to the rock above the entrance, indigo letters flashing on and off, producing eerie reflections in the water, and the interior looked a little like Brownie's back in Beaver Falls, with digital beer signs and some meager Christmas decorations and piped-in music (the Pogues were playing when he entered), TVs mounted here and there, maple paneling and subdued lighting, photographs of former patrons on the walls, tables, a horseshoe-shaped bar and waitresses wearing indigo Sub-Café T-shirts. A comforting mutter arose from the crowd at the bar, and two of the committee were seated at a back table.

  Carmine and Spooz, it turned out, were cousins who did not share a family resemblance. Spooz was a genial, round-cheeked man in his mid-thirties, already going bald, and Carmine was five or six years younger, lean and sallow, with a vulpine face, given to toothpick-chewing and lip-curling. Brad, who had to be called away from a group gathered around a punchboard, was a black guy with baby dreads, a real beanpole, maybe six-six or six-seven. He brought a beer over for Clyde and gave him a grin as he pulled a chair up to the table. They drank and talked small and Clyde, gesturing at the TVs, asked if they had cable.

  "Shit, no,” said Carmine, and Spooz said, “The cable and the satellite company are having a turf war, so nobody can get either one."

  "Cable wouldn't work down here, anyway,” said Carmine. “Satellite, neither."

  "How come?” Clyde asked.

  "We got a service that burns stuff for us,” Spooz said. “They send DVDs down the next day."

  "Ormoloo,” said Brad. “That's French, isn't it? Doesn't it have something to do with gilding?"

  "Beats me.” Clyde drained his glass and signaled the waitress to bring another round. “My dad was this big old guy who founded a hippie commune out in Oregon. He changed his name legally to Elephant Ormoloo. When my mom married him, she changed hers to Tijuana Ormoloo. When she divorced him, she changed it back to Marian Bleier. She told me I could choose between Bleier and Ormoloo. I was ten years old and pissed at her for leaving my dad, even though he'd been screwing around on her, so I chose Ormoloo. Anyway....” Clyde resettled in his chair. “I don't think my dad even realized it sounded French. He used to buy these Hindu posters from a head shop. You know, the ones with blue goddesses and guys with elephant heads and all that. He loved those damn posters. I think he was trying for a Hindu effect with the name."

  After a silence during which the PA system began piping in the Pretenders, Carmine shifted his toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other with his tongue and said, “Too much information, guy."

  Irritated, Clyde said, “I thought you wanted to know shit about me."

  "Take it easy, man,” said Brad, and Spooz, with an apologetic look, said, “We want to get to know you, okay? But we got a lot of ground to cover here."

  Clyde hadn't noticed any particular rush on the part of the committee, but kept his mouth shut.

/>   Spooz unfolded a wrinked sheet of paper and spread it on the table. To make it stay flat, he put empties on it top and bottom. The paper was Clyde's application.

  "So, Cliff,” Spooz said. “Seems like you've got a very excellent reason for wanting to move here."

  "That's Clyde, not Cliff,” said Clyde.

  Spooz peered at the paper. “Oh ... right."

  The waitress delivered their beers and plunked herself down in the chair next to Clyde. She was a big sexy girl, a strawberry blonde with a big butt, big thighs, big everything, kind of an R. Crumb woman, albeit with a less ferocious smile.

  "You going to sit in, Joanie?” Brad asked.

  "Might as well.” She winked at Clyde. “I ain't making no money."

  "I thought you guys were going to decide,” said Clyde, feeling that things were becoming a bit arbitrary. “Can just anybody get in on this?"

  "That's how democracy works,” said Carmine. “They do it different where you come from?"

  "Maybe he doesn't like girls.” Joanie did a movie star-quality pout.

  "I like girls fine. I ... It's...” Clyde drew a breath and let it run out. “This is important to me, and I don't think you're taking it seriously. You don't know my name, you're not asking questions. My application looks like it's been in the wastebasket. I'm getting the idea this is all a big joke to you people."

  "You want me to fuck off, I will,” Joanie said.

  "I don't want anybody to fuck off. Okay? All I want is for this to be a real interview."