The can in the middle of the back yard still exuded heat; Jason could feel it from three feet away. He groped for the steel lip and tentatively snaked both hands inside until they collided with the topmost mound of cinereous residue. It fell away at his touch.
Tears were sluiced saltless on his face by the rain as he felt the bones of his magazine stack crumble and puff into soot beneath his fingers. This time he was not crying, merely running off at the eyeballs - internal emotional pressure seeking the easiest vent. He was in control now and okay. He was not so successful keeping his teeth from doing a castanet dance in the wet, windy chill.
Logic demanded remains; even cremation left something. Dust was enough to recorporate Dracula. Fire could never totally obliterate the good Doktor's namesake monster ... could it?
The magazine had landed, bent double, on the very bottom of the can. The glossy cover and front and back pages had peeled away a sheet at a time as they had browned and shriveled, heat pounding paper back toward basic carbon. From the edges inward it had tasted flame and succumbed to crawling buglike embers, neon orange, burrowing their feed paths in the darkness. They spat and hissed as the rain killed them. A finger-length of binding glue, still hot enough to sting, clung to a smatter of barbecued pages the size and shape of a round-shouldered paperback. Jason's questing grasp had stumbled across the prize.
One Famous Monsters had pulled through. Some of it, at any rate. About a third.
Back inside, he sank his hands into a basin of warm water to shock back feeling. He washed his blackened feet, listening to Marcus snore obliviously in the next bedroom. How could Monica McMillan bear the noise? It sounded like a foghorn with a crawfull of snot. Maybe she hadn't actually slept with Marcus yet. Yeesh.
The magazine remnant, Jason decided, was fragile as mummy dust itself, and dead. Best not to attempt life support. He unlocked his tea-stash chest, scared up a candle, and struck a Blue Diamond match. The tang of ignition stung his nostrils and caused the bite of pages in his hand to expel a postmortem smell like dirty ashtrays. It weighed nothing. By candlelight he parted the page fragments.
A single picture of the Mummy had survived the inferno. The entire photo had been magical - Kharis hoisting Elyse Knox's (fainted) form onto a crypt slab while an oil slicked Turhan Bey watched, from The Mummy's Tomb. The center had pulled through: half of Kharis' profile, truncated by a binder gutter where the magazine had been stapled.
The corona of char made it resemble phonied parchment. Jason flaked it away and used scissors to trim it to a tight shot. He taped it safely inside the lid of his treasure chest. Other salvaged portions followed.
The pressure of Kris' lips on his had blessed him with a spontaneous erection.
She tilted her head, cradling the nape of his neck with one slim hand, gracile fingers tickling the fine, rising hairs there. Her eyes were slitted to black and wet with the sight of him. He saw them close. The best stuff happened in the head. He heard her inhale nasally, as he had, neither of them daring to break the seal.
His brain got full up, outdistancing him.
Her teeth caught and caressed his lip with the slightest excruciating pressure, and her own mouth proved as generous as his imagination. So commenced the tango of brushing and sampling, tempo accelerating, that divorces adults from all reason.
The pit of his stomach slid giddily into zero-gee. Alone in the foyer of her building, she had beckoned and he had RSVPed in kind, both of them in a hurry, hearts like cheetahs wildly battering their cages of ribs, the anticipation of tasting her nearly boiling forth and blowing off his scalp. Their mouth work grew hotter, more fervent, starving strangers taking what they needed, then waned to a gentle softness, friends now, with time, a calm eddy of passion. So much could be said just with lips, without words.
Their embrace slid and wound and wrapped tight. They fit. In that instant he realized how it would feel to be sheathed inside of her, shed of their workaday business armor, caught in the grip of cunning musculature. This time he could hear her stockings whisper past each other, and the sound flinted sparks behind his eyelids.
She offered her throat, and he began in the delicious hollow where jaw and ear and neck cojoin. By the time he had chewed his way to her shoulder and the arch of trapezius, she was berserk and trembling. She returned a nibble of her own and he felt gooseflesh shoot all the way down to his heels.
He had not been kissed this way nearly enough in his life. Nor could anyone ever be. No matter how fast you ran, some things never stopped stalking you.
The following Friday night was historic, damned near a religious experience.
At Kris' behest, via intercom, the foyer sentry permitted Jason to elevator up. She awaited him, arms folded, chiding stylish tardiness, leaning against the threshold of her open door, just barely inside of a deep-cut evening number that swiped his first few breaths and made promises that knocked his train of snappy patter right off the rails.
"Hi, stranger," she said, and kissed him again.
He had been a skinny kid who had turned out a thin adult; something metabolic. No swap of hair on top for gut on bottom. He remained symmetrical. His eyes were brown, almost generic, behind long, almost feminine lashes. These eyes caught and held, their gaze frank, frequently challenging, but open and friendly for those who had the backbone. Right before bidding adieu to his 20s forever, he had asked why some people found his facial package a threat and was told "It's the 'stache." He lost the goatee but kept the 'stache as his first line of defense. And now he stood awash in mellow amber light, Kris embracing him full length, and wondered like a fool what had attracted her, thinking that the sum of his outward masque made a difference. Fooled, even in honest romance, by surfaces. His marriage had been a surface thing. Snapshots had boasted the perfection of the union; pictures constituted hard proof of happiness. Photos were important, especially to parents, but he had never cared to prove anything to parents past the age of eleven. Judging from what Kris had mentioned about her first husband, some samaritan ought to introduce their two exes; united they could live the illusions fostered by their mommies and daddies and shoot lots of keen pictures to prove what fun their programmed, dead lives were. Hi, Mom!
"Hi, stranger" he returned, unable to stop the grin. Too boyish.
Dinner was catered, and throughout Kris reserved some secret amusement, extra baggage to her usual smile which she declined to illuminate until dessert and digestifs. Crystal and wine and tapers did unforgettable things to her eyes.
"Okay." She cocked a thumb toward the living room, where a sparkling panorama of cityscape waited beyond floor-to-ceiling glass. "Here goes almost nothin?'
She led him toward the sofa group and he made a joke about heeltap. When you tried to get the last drop out a glass, it coated the glass on the way out and never emerged. Her solution was to refill the glass. Things were at that precise stratum of silliness.
She sat him down and, with very obvious pride, enumerated the items ranked before him on the low coffee table. The arrangement was shrinelike.
"From your left," she said, "Lipton's Instant. Your own personal Tana-leaf high-octane liquid-fuel input." Next to the jar was a carafe of icewater. "For completeness' sake. I'd prefer you didn't actually switch to this stuff right now because this Moet is bloody good."
He nodded gravely.
She lifted a flat; opaque plastic bag by one corner, holding it gingerly, like undusted murder evidence. "Do you have any conception of what this thing costs in real money?"
"Jesus Christ -Famous Monsters!"
"In what they call fair-to-good condition. I call it criminal. Have you ever been to one of those grotty little shops? They're full of people who -"
He dropped the foxed magazine open on the table, as though afraid to mangle it. "There's the photo. Almost exactly as I recalled it."
"- Yeeucch. I don't want to guess when they bathed last. Anyway, attendez-vous. I presume your lightning intellect has by now divined the intent of tha
t stack of videotapes, there. Now hold out your hand and close your eyes."
"Sure you're not going to put a snake in my hand, Sherlock?" He shut up when he heard the rosary-bead click of his palm filling with candy.
"They've been putting the red ones back in for some time now," she said. "Remember you told me they'd banned them way back when because they thought the red dye was carcinogenic? Turns out it was guilt by association; there was never anything bad about the red dye used in M&Ms. But a different red dye cursed all red dyes. It took all this time for the dust to settle."
"God." He deposited most into a dish on the table, then popped a single M&M - bright red - thoughtfully, as if sensitized to the possibility they might vanish again at any moment. "This is truly weird, Kris. Incredible. I think I'm nervous."
The Martians had landed, too. He ate one.
She scooted closer and soon her hand was on his neck again. Soothing. He likes to be petted.
"I thought I oughta check out these here Mummy movies in case I was missing something fundamental in life. Backstory from a lost age. Here, I need your help."
They denuded her corner group of cushions and set up for a triple bill.
"I'm notorious for dozing off midway through. I think I mentioned that."
"I guarantee you will not fall asleep."
"Ever think of putting a white streak in your hair?"
She raspberried him.
"Guess not." He toed off his shoes before her big-beam TV screen. Her sofa had offered more building blocks. The fortress was an improvement over the old version. Only the bad stuff had been left behind. Until now the good stuff had not been for sharing.
They had been putting the red ones back for some time now. He had simply failed to notice.
"Peelers," she said. It was what she had called pillows as a child. She settled in, barefoot, legs tucked, achingly attractive there in the semi-dark, a champagne flute to her lips. She had fathomed him well and knew just how much anticipation was good for him.
On the screen, Kharis lurched again, pinching shut the necks of the Banning descendants one by one, shuffling ever onward, for love, the vigilant caretaker of a hopeless and unconsummatable devotion.
"A toast," Kris said. "Here's to dark rooms, things that go bump in the night, staying up past bedtime, and magic shadow shows."
"And being grownup enough to know what to appreciate."
"Humph. So practical." She frowned.
"Cheers." They clinked. It was good old crystal, thin and musical.
"Cheers."
The concrete canyons surrounding Kris' highrise worked acoustically, like cathedral archways, bringing to them from an unknowable distance the sound of a dog barking, shortly past the witching hour. It stopped abruptly. Somewhere, in some other dark bedroom, a child might remain wide-eyed until the predawn, in fear of barking dogs. But not Jason. Not tonight.
MISSING,
PRESUMED LOST
The rarest form of the perpetually endangered species known as the short story collection is the book of novellas. Neither "short" fiction nor "long" - ie., novel-length - such mutant books enter the world with more handicaps than Jerry's Kids and about as much chance of surviving as Los Angeles' MetroRail project (our 50-years-too-late subway) has of dying. Novellas are not something to make the sales force smile; they are the least conventional form of popular fiction and maybe that's why writers indulge in them, despite all the danger flags and the dearth of practical markets.
Dictionaries won't help you, defining novellas as anything shorter than a novel but longer than a short story. Specifying what is or is not a novel by length alone is a conceit of fairly recent vintage; ditto subcategories such as the "novelette" - which, if you look it up, is basically another way of saying "novella?'
Thanks, scholars.
Why Lost Angels exists: Editor John Silbersack approached me about assembling a paperback original for the Onyx imprint of New American Library because my short story "Red Light" had won a World Fantasy Award in 1987. For the sake of cover ballyhoo, the book had to include "Red Light" which had already been incorporated into a collection just turned in to Tor Books - Seeing Red. The solution? Include it in both books, what the hell.
"Red Light" was not a novella and it disrupted the four-quarters symmetry I wanted for a book like Lost Angels, but it did speak to what critics later perceived as the theme of the book - explorations of love sought, lost or squandered, in a somewhat gentler tone than the splatterpunkiness of "Jerry's Kids Meet Wormboy" or Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III.
Not to bash the nail in too hard, but it's fairly easy to perceive Lost Angels and Seeing Red as one big collection representing all my short fiction work up to 1990, with "Red Light" as the hinge. The two collections came out within two months of each other.
Since Babbage Press has sanctioned new editions of both Seeing Red and Lost Angels, and since my editor, the fairly unique Arthur Byron Cover, has specified he doesn't want the repetition that seemed so critical a decade ago, it is with an odd grin on my face that I hereby get what I originally wanted - the four-quarters symmetery - and proceed to screw it up again by adding a completely new story in the same vein (I hope) as the aforementioned "theme." This will:
Provide a brand-new story, for those who care,
Make newcomers to Lost Angels feel less boned by the omission of "Red Light' and/or
Drive collectors and bibliographers straight up the padded wall.
The original cover for Lost Angels was a kind of masterpiece of wrong-headedness. Black cover, okay. No drippy lettering, that was a plus. The art was a kind of hood ornament composed around a horned skull with bat wings, the sort of thing still found on T-shirts worn by satanic teenage serial murderers, graying bikers or big-hair metal bands with names like Psychotic Brainfry. I was sent a cover flat which featured the hood ornament embossed and foiled in a variety of metallic shades, mostly bronze and gold. It wasn't great but it didn't redefine stupid; at least it might catch an eye. Naturally, budget considerations dropped the axe on the foil and embossing, and the flat cover as printed tried to approximate the 3D effect by rendering the hood ornament in the most hideous shades of DayGlo orange, green and pink ever to offend human sight. At last it redefined stupid.
But what was really horrifying was the sell copy littering this masterwork of the coverly arts. My anti-favorite is the line blurbing "The Falling Man" as "a drama of lust and death scripted by Satan!" I mean, you've got to read the story to appreciate just how goofy that is. The "father of splatterpunk" tag I'll accept; I brought that on myself. But the rest was the brand of delirious badness you win from harried publicists burdened with too many projects, scribbled in haste to meet a crushing deadline by people with much better things to do, too much access to derogatory stimulants, and not enough talent to make a difference.
(And I have always wondered: If I'm the father of splatterpunk, then who was the mother?)
The inclusion of "Red Light" was also another way of cheating the wordage of the book up to code, since only "Brass" and "The Falling Man" were actually novellae. It's also worth noting here that while the sheer length of "Brass" and "The Falling Man" prevented their reprint in many anthologies, both stories were optioned and produced for the TV series The Hunger, which had also rendered "Red Light" and "Night Bloomer:' from Seeing Red.
PAMELA'S GET
…is a good example of an early story that got incarcerated in a file until it could grow up. It matured the way good stories are supposed to when you leave them alone for a while, to ferment. Later I went back and, for my own amusement, charted some of the arcs of symbology, particularly the ostinato of eyes, tears, and heart that governs the gradual decline of Jaime, who goes from crying buckets at the funeral in the beginning, to an inability to generate tears in mid-story, to her final tear at the end as she draws the tiniest bit of renewal from the postcard.
The story made the ballots for both the 1988 World Fantasy Award and the Nebula,
and gracefully lost.
The Kipling poem is real. The evocation of "Funeral for a Friend" from an Elton John album now strikes me as overly facile, even cute, but I won't omit it at this late date, because I respect you.
BRASS
The first draft of "Brass" was completed seven years before the much-revised version saw its debut publication as a two-part serial in Night Cry, a digest-sized magazine produced by Montcalm Publications as a little sister to Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine (Tz).
At one point in the late 1980s it looked like "Brass" might constitute the bones of a novel, with something like five chapters leading up to where the story version began. The prologue went like this:
SUMMER 1957
The tapping at the patio doors was a cadenced knock. It was not a sound stirred up by the storm outside.
Annabelle cursed the behemoth-sized houses surrounding her own modest home. The damned castles sucked power straight out of the lines, hogging more than their share, prompting an overload somewhere. Any time the atmosphere grew fierce in this neighborhood, the power went out, and she was reduced to groping around for candles while her furniture gleefully abused her shins in the darkness.
The translucent curtains on the east door were drawn back to allow her plants some morning sunlight - provided the sun could batter back some of the overcast. Each oblong, faceted pane of the glass now gave back her candlelight in a fan of staggered angles. Outside the door, the silhouette of a man tap-tap-tapped.
Stormwinds pushed his dark hair about. She could see the strength of the breeze was forcing the rosebushes to curtsey. Then she could actually see him, as a zig-zag of lightning opened up the night sky, providing its own electricity.
It was her husband. He was pallid, naked, and smiling at her.
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