Dark Tales from Elder Regions: New York
Illustrated by Luke Spooner
Edited by Jessica Burke & Anthony Burdge
Copyright Myth Ink Books, 2014
Staten Island, New York
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the expressed written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer.
To all the Lost souls in the dark corners
whose stories have yet to be told...
Dedication:
Anthony & Jessica would like to acknowledge the effort and dedication of Luke Spooner, without whose vision this volume would not have been complete.
We would also like to thank all the contributors for being a part of this volume & for your patience in this process. We would not have been able to do this without you
Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this collection are those of the authors, regardless of how disturbing. The New York portrayed herein is contagious: once seen, it cannot be unseen. The authors are not responsible for any consequences. Void where Prohibited. Watch the Gap. Your shadow will always follow. And, remember, maps never have true boundaries, cats were once worshipped as gods, and not every lock has a key. Trust no one. Especially, not us.
Contents
A Word from the Artist
An Introduction
Roebling’s Monster by Leanna Renee Hieber
The Hand of Bone by Wilum H. Pugmire
Beautiful Dreams by D.J. Tyrer
The Professor’s NY Adventure by Gordon Linzner
Now Departing by John Peel
Leaking by David Neilsen
The Sixth Borough by Gregory Norris
Retro Viral by Andrea Janes
Broken Glass by Jordan Mapes
Wallflowers by Lilah Wild
The None Percent by Warren Frey
The Vintner of Little Neck by Chris Tuthill
The Last Train to New Haven by Kevin Wetmore
E-Ville by Frank Collia
Rosebank NNL by Daniel Russo
The Mad Monk of St Augustines by Colleen Wanglund
Remembering Peter by Christopher Mancuso
Ghosting by Jessica Burke
The Lonely Boat by Anthony Burdge
Afterword by Brian J. Cano
About the Authors
A Word from the Artist
When working with the Myth Ink Books team, one of the first things to become apparent was that they were clearly very involved with the place they call home. It’s an age old adage that dictates “you should always write about what you know” and they, as well as the authors that they recruit, are a very literal embodiment of that sentiment. As a foreigner, born and bred in the U.K. who currently hasn’t been afforded the opportunity to visit Staten Island despite regular forays abroad, I can say hand on heart that it’s been an incredible introduction and exploration to the culture and various sub-cultures that can be developed around one tiny island. Through my collaborations with Myth Ink, I’ve seen one tiny island inspire so much interpretation, so much exploration of self and celebration of history —simply through the written word. Running counterpoint, I’ve seen the proclamation of personal hells, I’ve seen fears run rampant, dimensions be breached and lives play out their final motions with nobody watching but myself and the light I’m reading by. All of this is given to me in full disclosure and yet I’ve never set a single foot there.
So, if you should write about what you do know, then surely there is admiration and speculation cast over those brazen enough to write about what they don’t know in equal measure. There’s safety in writing about what you know, that much should be obvious. Therefore, if logic rings true, then in turn there should be unbounded danger in exploring what you don’t, but what gives Myth Ink and all under it’s roof the edge is the injecting of what you don’t know into that oh so familiar crèche of what you do. The disturbance of the everyday, that displacement of the established understanding... The man on the train that you don’t know despite having caught the same train to work regularly for the past two years... the apartment whose residents you don’t know but are always up when others are asleep and yet never leave their dwelling... that sound that you know scares you right down to your very core but at the same time couldn’t possibly be coming from that wardrobe that you use numerous times everyday, the wardrobe whose contents you can visualize simply by closing your eyes... But you’re not going to close your eyes, are you? It’s that installation of fear, that realization that perhaps the something that you’ve become accustomed to through your daily routine is housing or is used by something much larger, much darker than yourself. It’s essentially betrayal whilst at the same time being a revelation —and it’s all here.
Such vivid bastardization of a location beloved by so many could be misconstrued as an attack, a malicious attempt at besmirching an easy target for a cheap round of attention and shock value. However, you only have to pick any one of the stories contained here to see that this is nothing as contemptuous as all that. Every one of these tales are driven by a passion for the place in which the story is set, a desire to communicate a message that can only be told about this one place. You may well, as I did, come away from each narrative with a deeper sense of mounting loneliness, a belief that although each of these character’s stories are set mere miles apart from each other in places busy with life of all decrees —they are islands each in their own right. In situating on this island they may have separated themselves from the wider world in a literal sense but their stories are what separate them from the everyday. So read on, explore in the manner of those local and remember that whether you like it or not, you will shape your very own island from this book.
—Luke Spooner
Summer 2014
An Introduction...
Hey! You! You want to know a secret? I’ve never been to New York City.
Oh, I can vaguely remember an elementary school class trip. I have an image in my head of getting off a bus and looking up at the buildings that seemed to rise higher and higher and higher than anything I had ever seen before. I was from Philadelphia, and back then buildings didn’t get any taller than William Penn’s hat on City Hall. I can’t remember if we went to see the World Trade Center or the Empire State Building. I can’t even remember if we went inside. A decade later, I recall taking a college friend to her home in Brooklyn. I think we were in the city for a full hour.
Other than that, I’ve never been.
I’ve read about it, mostly in Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe books, and in a few Lovecraft stories, and I can’t pass on a Law and Order marathon to save my life. Add some movies to this list –Q, Rear Window, Ghostbusters, The Godfather, 84 Charring Cross Road– and you have the extent of my knowledge about New York City. This is why I didn’t write a story for this anthology. Don’t get me wrong, I thought about it. Even had a somewhat decent rationale for why Miami is often referred to as the Sixth Borough. In the end I decided against it, I don’t know enough about New York City to try and fake my way through a good h
orror story.
Imagine my surprise when the editors asked me to write the introduction. Imagine their surprise when they read these first few paragraphs. I didn’t tell them what I just told you, mostly because I wanted to read the book, hoping to gleam a few gems for my growing collection of Lovecraftiana and Weird fiction. Getting free review copies of books is after all one of the perks of the business (and the one I secretly relish the most . . . don’t tell my publishers but they could probably pay me in books). So one night while my wife was watching the annual QVC Breast Cancer Shoe event, I curled up with the book you are now holding in your hand (actually or maybe virtually). I didn’t put it down until she walked through my study door hours later, and then I shushed her so that I could finish.
One sitting, cover to cover, I was hooked, and I knew that I would have no choice but to write an introduction, even if they never would or could use it. I would write the introduction not despite the fact that I hadn’t really been to New York City, but precisely because I had never been to New York City. It wasn’t a requirement of the job.
I should probably explain, but I’m not going to. Well maybe, but not directly.
I’m writing the introduction because of Leanna Renee Hieber, a writer I’ve never met, never even heard of, but whose story “Roebling’s Monster,” the opening story to this anthology simply sucked me in and left me awestruck. Hieber has captured something here, I want to say Lovecraftian but that would be wrong; if anything this story harkens back to Fritz Leiber’s concept of megapolismancy, that cities themselves have their own magics. If that is so should they not also have their own gods and titans? “Roebling’s Monster” is a magnificent piece of prose poetry, of fantastic, almost theistic monologue, and sets the stage for every story that comes after it. In one incredible work we are transported away from the mundane New York City and into a dark phantasmagorical version where anything is possible, but there is always a price.
If Hieber’s story is big and bold, then the second piece by Wilum Pugmire is quiet, serene, almost sedate. “The Hand of Bone” isn’t overtly Lovecraftian, but the echoes of “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” and “The Hound” are clearly in the influences. Pugmire avoids name dropping, but he knows how to convey a sense of the surreal and outré without becoming ridiculous. Here he peddles his wares in a show of misdirection, and reminds us that not all horrors need to be shadowed in darkness and kept at a safe distance. Sometimes the horror comes from being just a little too intimate with the victim, or the perpetrator.
In “Beautiful Dreams,” D.J. Tyrer presents a tale of “The King in Yellow:” a convoluted story of a thief, the book he stole, and the lawyer who is charged with recovering it. As with most tales of this sort, there is an elevated sense of despair and ennui that tends to infect the characters that come in contact with the aforementioned book. In this case, hubris in serving the monstrous leads one man to forget his place in the order of things, with dire consequences. Similar things could be said of Doctor V in Gordon Linzner’s “The Professor’s New York Adventure.” When a famous vampire hunter sees an opportunity for an easy kill he accidentally incites one of the greatest tragedies in the history of New York City, sparking a debate between man and monster about who is worse, and if the ends really do justify the means.
John Peel lightens the load with a somewhat comic and irreverent look at the personification of death who comes to collect a woman on a train in “Now Departing. It’s a lighter piece, but well needed and placed, and serves as a counterpoint to the more serious and horrific “Leaking” by David Neilsen. The subway is the setting for this tale of a man who habitual falls asleep on a train and experiences the same nightmare over and over again. It’s only when he realizes the truth, and decides to do something about it, that the real terror begins.
Gregory L. Norris presents a little bit of urban fantasy touched dark with “The Sixth Borough,” in which a man who has grown disillusioned with the city, who has been pushed too far by his roommates and expenses, longs for an idealized New York City, one in which the creative and artistic is celebrated and welcomed. Is Bella Vista, the mythical sixth borough, a hidden utopia, or does that too come at a price that is simply too high?
Andrea Janes’ story “Retro Viral” also deals with the failure of the city to satisfy all of its citizens. Here a coterie of youths find a new place to rave, one that has been abandoned for a long time, and for good reason. The results are a clash between the present, the recent past, and long-forgotten tragedies and real-life horrors, that will scare and scar some partyers forever. Scars, at least the mental kind, are also the subject of Justin Mapes’ exercise in insanity and obsession “Broken Glass,” in which an obsessive compulsive tries desperately to keep up his routine, for a most logical albeit insane reason. Mapes’ story poses a simply question very bluntly, if your pain never ends, if you never recover, do you have to move on, or can you sustain yourself indefinitely in grief and suffering, and why would you want to?
“Wallflowers” by Lilah Wild is a tale of the horrors and banality that comes with neighborhood gentrification and the young vapid things that are hired to act as clerks for boutiques that don’t seem to ever sell anything. Wild achieves a sort of Rod Serlingness to her tale, one that I would have loved to seen brought to life on a darker, grittier version of The Twilight Zone, or perhaps even Night Gallery. If I were to pick a dark horse for best story in this anthology, it would be Wild’s “Wallflowers.”
“The None Percent” by Warren Frey is a well needed piece of light fare, touching on the comic side of being dead, of being a ghost, but not knowing any of the rules. Can those who are dead, who have no need for food, clothes, fast cars or women, can these shadows of movers and shakers of men who showed questionable morality when alive, who still can whisper to the living, can they play a part in shaping our economy? More importantly should they? And if they did, what catastrophes would ensue?
Wall Streeters aren’t the only horrible people in the city. We all have that one person in the family, the one brother-in-law that pushes us too far, says the wrong thing, criticizes too much, and we all know what we would like to do. In the tradition of Simon Brett’s A Shock to the System is Chris Tuthill’s “The Vintner of Little Neck,” a thoroughly enjoyable depiction of a common man driven just a little too far, and given just a bit too much opportunity.
Kevin Wetmore takes us back to the dangers of public transportation in “The Last Train to New Haven,” in which a Lovecraft aficionado who apparently despises the city eventually finds a place to call home, whether he likes it or not. The same could be said of the protagonist of Frank Collia’s “E-Ville,” a man obsessed and perhaps trapped by his past journeys through the city, or perhaps just one in particular, one in which he has a particular interest in seeing again, and again.
The theme of belonging, in a city known for its anonymity, takes center stage and both on Staten Island in Daniel Russo’s “Rosebank NNL,” and Christopher Mancuso’s “Remembering Peter,” but with wildly different results. Russo’s tale of the forgotten past and racism culminates in an epiphany of acceptance and friendship, which might qualify it as the most redemptive of all the stories in the anthology. In contrast, Mancuso’s exploration of the mind of a man who can never come to grips or terms with his adoptive parents, his friends and the younger brother he accidentally killed shows the depths of depravity and psychosis that one man can sink too when he can’t find a place to call his own.
The art and science of ghost hunting comes into focus when several young people decide to investigate the occurrences at Snug Harbor in Jessica Burke’s “Ghosting.” The author presents a clever twist to a trope that has exploded in recent years, telling the story from two distinct points of view, that of the investigators, and that of the ghosts themselves, who frankly would just rather be done with the whole matter, but can’t seem to figure out how to move on. It’s a roller coaster ride that leaves the reader and the protagonists asking the same thing m
y kids ask after they get off a thrill ride they spent the entire time screaming and hiding their eyes during, “Can we go again?”
The final story, and it is obvious why this is the final story, is Anthony S, Burdge’s “The Lonely Boat.” We’re back in “King in Yellow” country for this one, for a complex tale of a young man committed to an asylum who has a difficult time distinguishing fantasy from reality. His dream-world where the Yellow King lurks and calls him his son might be eerie, even horrific, but the real world is crumbling down around him and is hiding an even greater and more terrible nightmare. Burdge captures something here, the dreary day to day drudge of labor, the weird off balance conversations between the sane and those who aren’t, the willingness for the mentally challenged to accept any scrap of normalcy. Burdge has a way with imagery and conversation that draws you in and puts you right there.
That is what all these stories capably do. They draw the reader in, transport them to New York City and immerse you in that metropolitan sprawl and let you fend for yourself.
New York City....The Big Apple....The City that Never Sleeps.
I‘ve really never been there.
Thanks to these stories I don’t have to go, I don’t want to go.
Someday.
Maybe.
They say it’s one Hell of a town.
—Peter Rawlik
Hell Gate Point
Fall 2014
Roebling’s Monster
by Leanna Renee Hieber
Anything that is wants to be loved. In whatever way they know how. Even monsters.
New York, I have done so much for you. I will do so much for you, still. I can hold you up and keep you safe, but you must forgive me first. I am a murderer en masse and I am asking the city’s clemency before it’s too late for me to be redeemed. You are, each one of you, my judge and jury, and I need you to know me. I can no longer live so boldly in your sight if you remain blind to the truth of the whole of me. You think you see me, every day, but I can’t go on like this, pretending to be noble when you don’t know the whole story.
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