Weird Tales, Volume 51

by Ann VanderMeer

  And now the Nailer was closing in on 24, and there was nothing 24 could do about it except die.

  Accordingly, the Nailer leapt into the air and turned like a bird on a swirling eddy. The club, spiked with a single nail, impacted almost with delicacy into 24's forehead. 24's body wilted with an instantaneous limpness like a piece of string.

  BleakWarrior wasted no time as the Nailer endeavoured to prise his weapon from the perforated skull of 24. He charged full on, ready to slam the Dirk into whatever part of the Nailer's body presented itself first. But Nailer of Souls turned to meet him with an unpredictable rippling of his form. He caught BleakWarrior's arm and stayed the Dirk, then span low and buried his head in BleakWarrior's abdomen. BleakWarrior felt himself being hoisted and twirled; and the Nailer dumped him onto the ground like a man offloading a heavy sack.

  BleakWarrior wanted to struggle to his knees, but a foot on his back pinned him to the cobblestones.

  He knew it, then, that he was going to die.

  Badly.

  It is written in The First Book of Absolutes that the soul is a derivation of the Fundamental Awe of Nechmeniah when first she developed an awareness of herself as the Over-Notion of Existence and Time.

  As practitioners of the Church of Nechmeniah, it is our belief that we are able to receive the same extreme of realisation whenever we encounter new things or experiences that appeal to the Fundamental Awe in all of us. Crucially, however, the arousing freshness of these encounters is brief because of their obfuscation by the degrading animal distractions that characterise our physical condition. Needless to say, a sustainable Awe is recoverable through death, whereupon our souls are re-absorbed by the primacy of the Life Before the Body.

  But my visitor tells me that this is wrong.

  Instead, he says, we are strictly bound to a material existence that has no root outside of itself. Anything that exists beyond the reach of our senses is but a part of the expansive interaction of all things operating as a contingent body of differential states. What cannot be seen can be felt, he says, which makes all things, mental or physical, equally real. Some substances are less palpable than others—that is all. And, to this extent, the body and soul are a single unit consisting of extremes of materiality which cannot exist in dualistic separation.

  The soul, he says, is a metaphysical extension of the physical order of the body which, in turn, is a physical extension of the metaphysical chaos of the soul: to segregate one from the other is to obliterate both, and to extinguish the flame of Life.

  Forever.

  —from The Private Testimony of Achlana Promff, Priestess of the Church of Nechmeniah

  The hand of the Nailer slipped into BleakWarrior's flesh as if through liquid. BleakWarrior's sense of selfhood seemed to fold in upon itself, to implode upon an internal core of gravity so strong that it must shrink to a material density.

  It did.

  And the Nailer wrapped his fingers around it and began to manipulate it from its home of flesh; and the feeling—not of pain—was akin to having the viscera removed through some powerful means of vacuum suction.

  BleakWarrior squirmed like a maggot on the end of a stick. He tried to scream, but his power of utterance was utterly lost. His eyes, too, were beginning to fail. The last thing he saw was the Nailer leaning over him with his mouth ajar and slavers dangling from his lips.

  BleakWarrior was being drawn out of himself, and the sensations were awful, like being sucked through a miniscule abyss, but in reverse, as if the abyss were being sucked through him.

  With an unusual lack of suddenness, however, the Nailer began to recoil from BleakWarrior's degenerated physique, as if someone or something were pulling him away. All at once, he released his supernal grip on the soul of BleakWarrior and, more suddenly now, keeled over as if struck on the face by a blunt object.

  BleakWarrior felt his inner vitality return to the entire compass of his being with renewed vigour. He had sampled aphrodisiacs that had given him a similar injection of desperate urgency.

  But not like this.

  The smoothness and speed of his movements were such that he didn't fumble for the Dirk where it had spilled from his hand during the course of his fall. He whipped it up nimbly and rolled to his feet. Nailer of Souls was sprawling before him, coughing and spewing and gasping like a man brought back from the brink of drowning. BleakWarrior grabbed the Nailer by the hair and drew his head back so that his throat was exposed to the ruminations of the Dirk.

  “Nailer of Souls,” he said, “how came you to abandon your efforts to devour me? It makes no sense in the eyes of the Dirk and me.”

  The Nailer's eyes rolled as he unloosed his tongue to speak:

  “Your soul to me is poison, BleakWarrior. It has reduced my thirst to a sickening repulsion. I am desolate, yes, and I feed on the desolation of others. But your madness is a toxin in the blood of my being I cannot endure.

  “You have me within range of the Dirk, BleakWarrior. I have a mind that the Dirk and you will satisfy my drooth, forever.”

  “Then since you are about to die,” said BleakWarrior, “tell me what you know of our uncommon purpose. What are we, Nailer? And why?”

  “We are what we are, BleakWarrior—no more, no less. I am the manifestation of the desolate mood that underpins me. You are the embodiment of the madness that empowers you to your probable doom. We are the physical expression of natural states that serve no purpose beyond their immediate function.”

  “But surely a strain of consequence must bind our absent purpose to some singular aim.”

  “Must the wind blow for a specific reason?”

  “I am stirred too much by wafts of madness to swallow this.”

  “The wind is free to swallow anything.”

  “None of this conveys an answer,” said BleakWarrior. He pressed the Dirk against the Nailer's throat.

  “It is all the answer I can give.”

  “Then the Dirk compels me to erase your life in bitter haste.”

  BleakWarrior drew the Dirk across the Nailer's throat with a swift incision that splashed blood across the cobbles freely as wine. He let go of the head and watched it fall to the stones with a delicate smack. He gazed upon the face of the Nailer. The expression he saw was more of relief than pain.

  Tears were seeping under the Warped Lenses of BleakWarrior when he sheathed the Dirk and stepped from the bloody pool that welled around his feet. The trail of gore he left behind him subsided by degrees as he departed from the scene of the melee. A sudden urge to rip the Lenses from his eyes—to immerse himself in the thralls of madness—rose up in his gorge like a volcanic spume. But it was quickly dispersed by the exultant thought that, by not knowing who he was, not knowing what he was, he would kill to find out.

  Or die trying.

  Alistair Rennie was born in the North of Scotland and now lives in Italy. He has published short fiction in The New Weird (Tachyon), Fabulous Whitby (Fabulous Albion), Electric Velocipede and Shadowed Realms.

  * * *

  THE WEIRD TALES INTERVIEW: BILL PLYMPTON

  by Bill Baker

  Bill Plympton has been making strange animated films for the better part of a generation now. His short-form stories, like the Oscar-nominated musical metamorphosis “The Face,” ranked among the highlights of MTV's 1990s anthology shows Cartoon Sushi and Liquid Television; his full-length 1997 feature I Married a Strange Person, about a man whose every daydream becomes reality, has become a bona fide cult classic. Quirky, other- worldly and idiosyncratic, yet always entertaining and accessible, his work has garnered both critical praise and a devoted fanbase—not to mention a place on Weird Tales's own list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years” [March/April 2008].

  November will see the release of a new book, Through the Wire, in which Plympton illustrates twelve songs by the hip-hop musician Kanye West. Weird Tales correspondent Bill Baker caught up with Plympton this summer during the release of his latest animated fea
ture, Idiots and Angels, to quiz him about his creative process, why he still draws every frame of his cartoons himself, and how a simple stroll around his neighborhood in the Big Apple often turns into a walk on the weird side.

  Your new animated film, Idiots and Angels, is out now. Where'd that come from? Well, I don't know where the original idea came from, and usually I do. But the first reference I can remember was three years ago at a [film] festival in France, in Lille. I was walking with this guy to my hotel, and he asked me what my next film project would be and, off the top of my head—I don't know where it came from, it just seemed appropriate—I said, “An asshole wakes up one morning with wings on his back.”

  And he said, “Yeah. Hey, that's a good idea.” So that night, as I laid in my hotel room, I actually started doing preliminary sketches, story ideas, character designs, possible plot devices, and it just felt like it was really something that would be fun to make, and could be popular with the audience.

  You said you normally do know where your ideas come from. Do they arise from striking images, or perhaps concepts, you've encountered?

  Usually, it's something that I observe. I live in New York City, and it's kind of a cartoon city, so I see a lot of bizarre events and people, and hear a lot of bizarre stories. For example, the Guard Dog series was inspired by an event I saw in the park right by where I live. It's called Madison Square Park, and I saw this dog barking at a little bird. And I wondered, why is a dog threatened by this tiny, little birdie? So I went inside the dog's brain and realized . . . well, I didn't realize, but made up this fantasy that the dog was afraid the bird would attack his master, and he would lose his meal ticket. So, that was the inspiration for Guard Dog, and that whole series has become very successful—and all simply because I looked at something that's an everyday occurrence, and I needed an explanation [for it]. There're so many things in life that are just mysteries. And oftentimes, by exploring these mysteries, I get a lot of good ideas.

  Also, a lot of my ideas come from seeing something that's confusing. You overhear a conversation, and you don't hear the whole conversation, you hear a clip of it. And so you sort of add words of your own to it, or misinterpret what they're saying, and it's so surreal, so absurd, and so bizarre that it works. It becomes a plot for your next short film. So it comes in many different ways.

  Also, sometimes I'll just lie in bed in the morning for an hour and just let my mind wander. I think daydreaming is very important part of my creative process, and often my mind will sort of take flight and touch on these bizarre ideas, and I write them down as I think of them. And, before you know it, I have a plot for a new film.

  So rather than being purposefully weird or quirky to be funny, these are expressions of your take on the world, and represent your own particular world view.

  Yeah, real life. These are the kinky side of life, the bizarre side of real life.

  When it comes to your animation work, you've always insisted on drawing every single frame yourself.

  Yeah, I do. There're three reasons for that. One is that it's quicker. If I had to hire somebody to do it, I would have to keep correcting them, and so I find it faster to do it myself. Number two, it's cheaper. Rather than hiring other animators . . . The good ones are very expensive. You know, like a thousand dollars a day, or whatever. I just don't have that kind of money. And number three, it's more fun. For me, the pleasure of making these films is to do the drawings myself. That's what I want to do. I don't want to be a big boss, or a bureaucrat, or a producer. That's boring. I want to be the guy doing the drawings, and making up these characters, and having them move around.

  Plus, you're investing a big part of yourself directly into the film.

  Yeah . . . You know, my films aren't hugely successful, I'm not like Pixar or anything like that, but they're fun for me to do, and they're quirky, like you say. They have their own sort of “Plympton look.” It's sort of a brand now. I have a kind of a cottage industry, making these animations, and I like it like that. For me, that's comfortable. I have no pressure. I have no deadlines. I have no marketing people, or toy companies pressuring me to finish it at a certain time. So, it's a very easy lifestyle for me, and I'm just blessed that I can make money on these films, and I just turn them out whenever I want.

  At any given time, while you might be working on something longer like Idiots and Angels, typically you're simultaneously working on one or two shorter films, as well. How do you manage to juggle all that—and why do it that way? Does it help keep you and the work fresh?

  Yeah, that's part of it. Although when I was making Idiots and Angels, I pretty much concentrated on the feature, unless I had a deal [come up]. For example, I was working on a music video for Kanye West, and that was a real rush job, so I had to sideline the feature for that. But the shorts that I do . . . Shuteye Hotel was done before production of Idiots and Angels, and then Hot Dog was done after production. So, when I'm drawing, that's pretty intense. That's ten, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. And I get in this real zone. It's almost like a high, and I'm so single-minded about finishing this film, about the characters in the film, and the storytelling in the film, that's it hard for me to get distracted by other projects. In fact, I refuse to be distracted, unless it's a big commercial or something.

  You know, I just remembered another little story. Shuteye Hotel . . . that was a real Edgar Allan Poe-ish kind of story, and it was interesting because that idea came from a visit to another hotel while I was at another foreign film festival. And I remember waking up in the morning, and this pillow, this very plush pillow that I'd been sleeping in was so deep and so plush that it had encompassed my head. And I thought, “Oh my god, this pillow is trying to eat my head!” And right there, I just knew that was a good idea for a film.

  So Shuteye Hotel is basically a murder mystery where this pillow is eating everybody's head that lays on it. And I thought that was such a fun idea. It's very Hitchcockian, you know? It's like there's this mysterious murderer, you don't know who it is, and then you realize that it's a very soft, comfortable pillow who's taking revenge on people for drooling on them, and fluffing them up and having pillow fights. I'd like to extend that idea, because I think pillows can be very scary creatures.

  How would you describe your general creative process?

  Well, for example, with Shuteye Hotel, I will do a lot of sketches of what the hotel looks like, what the pillow looks like. I will try and find a resolution, like the discovery that the killer is actually a pillow, and I save that for the last because that is the gag, that's the punch line. And I wanted this killer to be, in the imagination of the audience, some vicious strangler or rapist or psychopath or something like that. I build on that plot device of unmasking the killer. So, I'll write down possible story ideas, or gag ideas, or possible killers that could be false trails, that sort of thing. I just play with it, and think about it. I close my eyes and just imagine: what would be fun to put in there? What would really be cool? What would the audience really like to see in the film?

  Once I have a basic concept for the plot, I start storyboarding. The storyboarding process is a very important process for me, because that really defines so much of the film in terms of what the characters look like, the atmosphere, the pacing, the storytelling, the cutting, the camera work, the camera angles, the lighting, the shading. And once I have a good storyboard, then I start doing layouts—taking every shot and defining what action takes place in that shot. For example, if it's the woman fighting with the pillow, the cop fighting with the pillow, then I show the first sequence and the last sequence, so I know what takes place in that shot.

  Then I go ahead and start making the animation. And the animation is, obviously, the longest part, because each drawing has to be drawn by me. For a short film, that will take two or three weeks, something like that, to do all the animation. I'll do the backgrounds while I'm doing that. And then, I hand it over to my staff, and they will scan it, and clean the drawings, and compo
site the drawings, and sequence the drawings, and color the drawings. That's a very important part; that's basically putting it all together. And then, once we have all the shots assembled, and colored, and completed, we edit the film together. Generally, I don't use dialogue for my films . . . so we just put in sound effects and music, and that's it.

  You said the storyboards are very important to your overall process. How detailed are those? Because when one sees most film storyboards, you clearly can tell what's going on, but it isn't necessarily that detailed an image.

  For Idiots and Angels it was very detailed, simply because it's a big film. I did, I think, 220 pages of storyboards—six storyboards per page. So it's almost a drawing for every frame of the film. And [in the end] it will be published as a graphic novel.

  You really can't get a truer print vision of the film than that.

  Right. And it's good for young animators to see how the process works, how my storytelling works, the difference between storyboards and the finished film. It's very instructive. A lot of schools buy my books, my graphic novels, for that reason alone.

  Who's influenced you?

  Well, there are a lot of people. Of course, Disney was the first huge influence, as he almost influenced everybody, as were Tex Avery and Bob Clampett. Robert Crumb was a big influence. Saul Steinberg.

  Charles Addams, you know, the Addams Family guy? He was a big influence because his pictures were very dark and sick. He made fun of people dying, he made light of death, and I thought that was a real refreshing move. I mean, no one had ever done that so much before him, using people's pain and death as a source of humor.

  A.B. Frost, who was a turn-of-the-century cartoonist. A great artist from Buenos Aires called Carlos Nine. Roland Topor, from France. Of course, the Beatles. Quentin Tarantino. Frank Capra. Let's see, who else? Tommy Ungerer is a big influence. Richard Lester, the British filmmaker who did the early Beatles films. Miyazaki. John Lasseter. Another big one was Preston Blair, who wrote the book Animation. Milt Kahl. You know, it goes on and on.