Nocturnes and Other Nocturnes

by Claude Lalumiere

  Nocturnes

  and Other Nocturnes

  Claude Lalumière

  infinity plus

  Nocturnes and Other Nocturnes

  Claude Lalumière

  Twenty-five dark stories that span a daring breadth of genres. In these noir tales that unfold at the edge of realism, mythic nocturnes from impossible pasts, and disquietingly intimate stories of speculative fiction, Claude Lalumière explores our collective and intertwined obsessions with sex and death.

  Published by infinity plus

  www.infinityplus.co.uk

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  © Claude Lalumière 2013

  introduction © Garry Kilworth

  Cover © Marc Tessier

  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  The moral right of Claude Lalumière to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  ISBN: 9781311502179

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  By the same author

  Objects of Worship

  The Door to Lost Pages

  Chapbooks:

  The World's Forgotten Boy and the Scorpions from Hell

  Agents of M.Y.T.H. (with Rupert Bottenberg)

  Manit and the Nightmares (with Rupert Bottenberg)

  As editor:

  Telling Stories: New English Fiction from Québec

  Witpunk (with Marty Halpern)

  Island Dreams: Montreal Writers of the Fantastic

  Open Space: New Canadian Fantastic Fiction

  Short Stuff: New English Stories from Québec

  Lust for Life: Tales of Sex & Love (with Elise Moser)

  In Other Words: New English Writing from Québec

  Tesseracts Twelve: New Novellas of Canadian Fantastic Fiction

  Minority Reports: New English Writing from Québec (with Elise Moser)

  Masked Mosaic: Canadian Super Stories (with Camille Alexa)

  Bibliotheca Fantastica (with Don Pizarro)

  Super Stories of Heroes & Villains

  introduction by Garry Kilworth

  It’s always difficult writing an introduction to a collection of short stories that have excited your reading buds and satisfied your taste for good literature. You want to pass on the enthusiasm you feel for the tales, yet are aware that you mustn’t give too much away or readers will curse your name for destroying the dénouement. Two aspects were clear to me at the end of my reading: one, the writing is of the highest excellence and two, the stories are original. The writer has mastered his own voice and he uses it to tell tales – almost always sinister and soul-scouring tales – that unfold smoothly and menacingly.

  The first two stories in the section entitled ‘Shades of Noir’ are about obsession. In ‘Ted’s Collection’ that obsession spirals downwards into madness and it is the madness of two people. Stories of this nature need both positive and negative terminals to make them work and ‘Ted’s Collection’ has these essentials and indeed some dark electricity flows. In ‘Secretly Wishing for Rain’ (what a beautiful title!) the obsession is as old as the human race itself: love. Love that is lacerated by both acceptance and rejection. A tale with crossed and tangled lines that are impossible to unravel. This is my favourite story in the volume and though the plot has nothing in common with Carson McCullers’ ‘Ballad of the Sad Café’ it raised the same dark liquid emotions in me which I felt when I read the latter. ‘Secretly Wishing for Rain’ is truly a story of the highest quality and as a writer myself I admire it greatly.

  The third tale in the collection is almost the opposite of a story about obsession, the latter requiring at least one proactive character to make it work. ‘She Watches Him Swim’ is about sitting on a stool and knitting while the guillotine drops and slices through the victim’s neck. It is about waiting for someone or something else to make your decisions for you. If I say any more I will indeed be cursed by future readers. Suffice to add that it is the smoothness of the story, if not a stream of consciousness a flow of uninterrupted thoughts, which carries you along. It is a dream-like tale that drifts gently towards its disturbing end. ‘Diptych’ is a beautiful little cameo, after which comes ‘Dead’, the strangest and probably the deepest of the stories that remain within the blurred boundaries of reality in this collection. Again it is a story of love, but this time of a family love scarred by anguish.

  From this point onwards there is a pleasure-jolting shift into the ‘Nocturnes’: short mythical histories heavily loaded with metaphor. They are well crafted and to my knowledge completely original tales. I loved them – and here comes one of the highest pieces of praise from a fellow author, I wish I had written them. These are magical vignettes which are impossible for me to foreshadow in this Introduction. They must be left to the reader to absorb with all the wonder of coming to a set of stories splashed with colour and light which lead the reader down marvellous and unfamiliar tracks. If I am reminded of anything, it is the Oceanian folk lore myths of the Polynesians, but only in the method of telling and the width and depth of the language.

  With the final sub-collection ‘Strange Tales of Sex and Death’ as a reader and writer of science fiction and fantasy I am in more familiar territory, though the stories here by no means fit comfortably into either of those genres. These are uncanny entities: Kafka-esque tales which, like many others in this book, focus mainly on the turbulent problems and raw emotions of individuals rather than scanning any wider world. ‘Being Here’ stands out amongst them, a nightmare tale where the victim has lost all control over himself and his destiny. There is, as the title of this section suggests, a great deal of sex and death in the stories. Indeed, the whole volume is inhabited by protagonists who struggle emotionally and physically with these two basic experiences. In Nocturnes and Other Nocturnes Claude Lalumière plumbs the deep trenches of yearning, fear and the agonies of unfulfilled needs with the accomplishment of a talented writer.

  Garry Kilworth, 2013

  SHADES OF NOIR

  I tend to write what my favourite author, J.G. Ballard, summed up us as “imaginative fiction”; most of the time that means that I play with the tropes of fantasy and science fiction. But imaginative fiction, as Ballard meant it, encompasses a greater swathe of storytelling modes.

  The five stories in this section contain no fantastical or speculative elements, and yet they still (to me, at least) feel like imaginative fiction. Much like, say, Ballard’s Crash, Concrete Island, Cocaine Nights, and Super-Cannes remain imaginative novels in the Ballardian mode even without the more overt sciencefictional elements of his earlier works, such as The Drowned World, The Crystal World, Vermilion Sands, and Hello America, these stories feel like they belong in the same imaginative multiverse as my more explicitly fantastic fiction. In fact, I end this section with my personal favourite among all my stories: “Dead.”

  I greatly admire the work of American novelist Jim Thompson, with his unforgiving and lyrical noir portraits of the mid-twentieth-century postwar United States. I can see his influence all over this particular set of stories. The neogothic crime stories of Joyce Carol Oates also informed how I approached composing these quasi-crime stories.

  Quasi-crime? These stories flirt with noir and crime (and also with erotica): there are within them murders, femmes fatales, amoral predators, missing persons, desperate lust, and con games. But I’m not quite sure if they’re actually crime fiction. Then again, maybe they are.

  Ted’s Collection

  The room that housed Doc Aust
in’s collection was kept cool throughout the year, the air-conditioning maintaining a steady ten degrees centigrade at all times. Ted tried to count the cats, but he was never in the room alone, and it was hard to concentrate while chatting with Doc. Once he’d reached 86 or 87, but then he was interrupted. He recognized a few of the animals from when they were alive and wandering through the neighbourhood, although he didn’t know their names. Doc didn’t bother with plaques or anything like that.

  “The domesticated ones were supposed to be incinerated, but once their people leave them at the clinic who’s to know?”

  Doc poured white wine into both their glasses. The vintage was from Argentina, and the bottle was golden with a hint of olive to it.

  “I know, Doc.”

  “Of course, Ted. But you won’t tell anyone, because you’re my friend.” That was true. Ted and Doc were friends, even though Ted was only a gangly fourteen-year-old too aware of his lack of grace and his poor sense of style and fashion, while Doc was a tall, sophisticated man approaching sixty.

  Doc held his glass up to his nose and sniffed the wine. He sighed contentedly and gestured for Ted to pick up his drink. The two friends gently knocked their glasses together. Doc said, “To friendship,” and Ted grinned. A flush of warmth spread through the boy as the cool liquid slid down his throat.

  ~

  Ted earned his spending money by doing odd jobs for Doc: mowing the lawn, painting the porch, washing windows. Doc lived next door, and Ted’s mother was always trying to impress the older man, dressing up and painting her face and sitting on the porch when she knew he’d be coming home from work – that kind of thing. She was the one who’d volunteered Ted’s services – without consulting him. At first, Ted had been embarrassed and angered by his mom’s behaviour, but Doc had explained about loneliness and said that he was flattered by the attentions of Ted’s mother, even if he didn’t reciprocate her feelings.

  To be neighbourly and to sustain his friendship with Ted, Doc consented to sharing a home-cooked dinner with Ted and his mother every Sunday. Soon, Doc turned these events into potlucks, despite Justine’s protests, because, as he confided in Ted, her cooking was hopelessly bland.

  Ted, who didn’t make friends in school, enjoyed his solitude. Nevertheless, he was happy to have Doc as a friend. He’d never really known what it was like to have that kind of companionship, and he liked it. It gave him pleasure and satisfaction, a sense of belonging he had never known could be possible.

  For example, he liked it when Doc invited him to watch while he prepared a new cat for his collection. Sometimes, Doc would take in sick or wounded strays. He taught Ted how to kill them so they’d feel no pain. Some of them were too damaged for Doc’s collection – Doc liked the cats to look beautiful. Ted learned how to take apart the damaged ones.

  “In my biology textbook, there are pictures of people’s insides. Cats aren’t that different from people.” Ted’s gloved hands were covered in blood. He wore one of those surgeon’s cloth masks to cover his mouth and nose, but he had come to love the stink of dying flesh, of the insides of bodies, and if Doc weren’t watching he’d take off the mask so he could better smell those odours.

  “That’s right, Ted. Most mammals are very much alike. Same organs. Same number of limbs. Similar nervous systems. Similar proportions.”

  While Doc spoke, Ted scrutinized the dead, dissected cat. Amid all the blood and gore, the animal’s left front paw retained the elegance the stray cat had no doubt possessed in life. Almost by reflex, Ted cut off the appendage with the surgical saw.

  Ted took off his gloves and held the severed paw in the palms of his hands. In that moment, it became the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. His hands trembled slightly.

  Ted suddenly remembered that Doc was in the basement with him, and he blushed, embarrassed. He stammered but finally asked, “Can I keep this?”

  ~

  It was decided that Ted would keep his collection at Doc’s house. Neither of them wanted Ted’s mother to discover Ted’s new passion.

  Although at first Doc betrayed a hint of disappointment that his young friend’s interests focused on something other than taxidermy per se, he patiently taught Ted how to preserve the items Ted harvested for his collection. Ted’s collection was more modest than the veterinarian’s. So far, he’d accumulated two front paws (left and right), a liver, a heart, a right ear, and a tail.

  Ted discovered that he never coveted the same body part twice. Or almost never. He’d replaced the first tail that he’d collected with a better one – the correct one. He learned an important lesson then.

  He hadn’t really wanted the first tail. That time, there was no part of the dissected cat that he’d truly desired, but he’d felt it would be a waste not to take something. Never again, he decided. He must trust his instincts, his desires. If a cat had nothing he yearned for, so be it.

  ~

  On his way home from school, Ted noticed the ambulance that turned off his street, heading toward downtown. A police car was parked in Doc Austin’s driveway.

  Ted’s mother was on their porch, looking even more nervous than usual. Ted didn’t like what was happening. His imagination raced too quickly, thinking up macabre and lurid scenarios, most of which ended with him in jail. He would be blamed for whatever had happened. He felt it in his bones.

  He’d barely started up the wooden steps to their house before his mother lunged at him and wrapped her arms around his back.

  “Mom, let go. What is it? What happened? Is Doc okay?”

  Justine tried to speak, but she collapsed in a fit of tears and sobs instead. Ted rolled his eyes, raced up to his room, locked the door, and looked out the window at Doc’s house, waiting for something to happen.

  ~

  Doc died of a heart attack, his mother finally told Ted when he emerged from his bedroom after the police had gone.

  That night, after he was certain his mother was asleep, Ted snuck out and slipped into Doc’s house using the spare key in the flowerpot next to the back door.

  Ted found his collection intact. He had amassed nineteen items, including a spine, a face, one eye, and a stomach. He still hadn’t found the right skull or rib cage or tongue. Other parts were missing, too. He briefly considered moving the still incomplete collection into his room, but his mom would be sure to discover it. Also, with Doc gone, Ted realized he no longer cared to continue or maintain it.

  For the first time, Ted wandered through Doc’s collection without Doc in the room. He finally counted the cats. There were 239 of them.

  When he finished counting, Ted discovered tears running down his cheeks. He didn’t remember beginning to cry. He would miss his friend. His best friend. But everything came to an end. Friendships. Life. Everything. He understood that.

  Ted’s hand was closing on the handle to his own back door when he decided to return one last time to Doc’s house. He went down to the basement and found the kit of surgical tools Doc had taught him to work with. He located the bottles with the chemicals he had used. Doc would have wanted him to keep all that. He would find a way to hide his friend’s legacy.

  ~

  Ted didn’t have to worry about money for his education: Doc had left a trust managed by a lawyer who was instructed to defray all of Ted’s school and basic living expenses for up to ten years, as of the date Ted enrolled in college. Upon graduation, or after a decade had passed, whichever came first, whatever was left of the fund would be bequeathed to a local cat shelter.

  In college, for Introduction to Anthropology, the students were asked to pair up to research and write a paper on any contemporary subculture, using the terms and theories they’d been learning in class. Ted didn’t know anyone, but a girl called Nicole approached him and asked if he’d be her partner. Nicole looked like an average girl: conservative clothing, trendy leather sneakers with matching purse, medium-length auburn hair with a slight bounce, only a hint of makeup.

  She already had an
idea for a topic. In her dorm room she asked him, “Have you ever heard of devotees?”

  Ted just shrugged, and Nicole began explaining about people who were sexually attracted to amputees. They had websites, newsgroups – there was even a small club downtown, although it didn’t advertise and it didn’t have a sign or anything. You had to know.

  “How did you find out about it?”

  Nicole’s expression changed. She smiled coquettishly, which made Ted uncomfortable. “You have to promise you won’t tell anyone.”

  Ted nodded.

  “I picked you because I felt you might understand. I can tell you’re not like all the others in class. There’s a darkness about you. I can trust that.” While she spoke, Nicole untied the shoelace of her right foot.

  She hesitated. “I can trust you, right?”

  Now that Nicole was nervous, Ted relaxed. “Yes. I’m good with secrets.”

  Nicole slipped off her sneaker and peeled off the white sock beneath.

  She extended her naked foot toward him.

  “You can touch, if you want.” She averted her gaze.

  There were only four toes on her right foot. The big toe was missing.

  “When I was twelve, I cut it off with a big steak knife. I hated the way it looked. It made my foot ugly. I looted my mom’s liquor cabinet and drank myself silly to dull the pain. But I’ve blocked it out – the pain. I can’t remember it. I wish I could.” Nicole bit her lip. “We had a dog, this really powerful boxer with jaws of steel, and I fed him the toe after I severed it – before I passed out. My mom tells me that when she came home the dog was licking my wound. At first she thought he’d eaten my toe, but then she saw the bloody knife.”

  Ted touched the spot with the missing toe. It was so smooth, despite the scar.