American supernatural tales

by S. T. Joshi

  Blank Frank thinks about sequels. About how studios had once jerked their marionette strings, compelling them to come lurching back for more, again and again, adding monsters when the brew ran weak, until they had all been bled dry of revenue potential and dumped at a bus stop to commence the long deathwatch that had made them nostalgia.

  It was like living death, in its way.

  And these gatherings, year upon year, had become sequels in their own right.

  The realization is depressing. It sort of breaks the back of the evening for Blank Frank. He stands friendly and remains as chatty as he ever gets. But the emotion has soured.

  Larry chugs so much that he has grown a touch bombed. The Count’s chemicals intermix and buzz; he seems to sink into the depths of his coat, his chin ever-closer to the butt of the gun he carries. Larry drinks deep, then howls. The Count plugs one ear with a finger on his free hand. “I wish he wouldn’t do that,” he says in a proscenium-arch sotto voce that indicates his annoyance is mostly token.

  When Larry tries to hurdle the bar again, moving exaggeratedly as he almost always does, he manages to plant his big wrestler’s elbow right into the glass on Blank Frank’s framed movie poster. It dents inward with a sharp crack, cobwebbing into a snap puzzle of fracture curves. Larry swears, instantly chagrined. Then, lamely, he offers to pay for the damage.

  The Count, not unexpectedly, counter-offers to buy the poster, now that it’s damaged.

  Blank Frank shakes his massive square head at both of his friends. So many years, among them. “It’s just glass. I can replace it. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  The thought that he has done this before depresses him further. He sees the reflection of his face, divided into staggered components in the broken glass, and past that, the lurid illustration. Him then. Him now.

  Blank Frank touches his face as though it is someone else’s. His fingernails have always been black. Now they are merely fashionable.

  Larry remains embarrassed about the accidental damage and the Count begins spot-checking his Rolex every five minutes or so, as though he is pressing the envelope on an urgent appointment. Something has spoiled the whole mood of their reunion, and Blank Frank is angry that he can’t quite pinpoint the cause. When he is angry, his temper froths quickly.

  The Count is the first to rise. Decorum is all. Larry tries one more time to apologize. Blank Frank stays cordial, but is overpowered by the sudden strong need to get them the hell out of Un/Dead.

  The Count bows stiffly. His limo manifests precisely on schedule. Larry gives Blank Frank a hug. His arms can reach all the way ’round.

  “Au revoir,” says the Count.

  “Stay dangerous,” says Larry.

  Blank Frank closes and locks the service door. He monitors, via the tiny security window, the silent, gliding departure of the Count’s limousine, the fading of Larry’s spangles into the night.

  Still half an hour till opening. The action at Un/Dead doesn’t really crank until midnight anyway, so there’s very little chance that some bystander will get hurt.

  Blank Frank bumps up the volume and taps his club boot. A eulogy with a beat. He loves Larry and the Count in his massive, broad, uncompromisingly loyal way, and hopes they will understand his actions. He hopes that his two closest friends are perceptive enough, in the years to come, to know that he is not crazy.

  Not crazy, and certainly not a monster.

  While the music plays, he fetches two economy-sized plastic bottles of lantern kerosene, which he ploshes liberally around the bar, saturating the old wood trim. Arsonists call such flammable liquids “accelerator.”

  In the scripts, it was always an overturned lantern, or a flung torch from a mob of villagers, that touched off the conclusive inferno. Mansions, mad labs, even stone fortresses not only burned, but blew up, eliminating all phyla of menacing monsters until they were needed anew.

  Dark threads snake through the tiny warrior braid at the base of Blank Frank’s skull. All those Blind Hermits, don’t you know.

  The purple electricity arcs to meet his finger and trails after it loyally. He unplugs the plasma globe and cradles it beneath one giant forearm.

  The movie poster, he leaves hanging in its violated frame.

  He snaps the sulphur match with a black thumbnail. Ignition craters and blackens the head, eating it with a sharp hiss. Un/Dead’s PA throbs to the bass line of “D.O.A.” Phosphorus tinges the unmoving air. The match fires orange to yellow to steady blue-white. Its flamepoint reflects from Blank Frank’s large black pupils. He can see himself, as if by candlelight, fragmented by broken picture glass. The past. In his grasp is the plasma globe, unblemished, pristine, awaiting a new charge of energy. The future.

  He recalls his past experiences with fire, all of them. Burn down the monster. He drops the match into the thin pool of accelerator glistening on the bartop and the flame grows, quietly.

  By striking the match, he has just purchased a feeling, as the Count would no doubt observe.

  The Monster blunderingly topples a rack of beakers, a modern-day sorcerer’s brew of flammables and caustics . . .

  Never has he precipitated the end on purpose. Never, except in the first sequel. We belong dead. He was making a point.

  The movie poster stays behind, in its smashed frame. That will be the price paid. Sacrifice something valuable.

  More convincing, that way. He is staying dangerous.

  Good.

  And Blank Frank does, in fact, feel better.

  Light springs, hard reddish-white now, behind him as he makes his exit and locks the door of Un/Dead. The night is cool by contrast, near foggy. Condensation mists the plasma globe as he strolls away, pausing once beneath a streetlamp to appreciate the ring on his little finger. He doesn’t need to eat, to sleep.

  Uninjured by the cataclysm, the Monster stumbles, grunting, away from the village and into the forest . . .

  But this time, thinks Blank Frank, the old Monster knows where he’s going.

  He’ll miss Michelle and the rest of the club staff. But he must move on, because he is not like them. He has all the time he’ll ever need, and friends who will be around forever . . .

  Un/Dead blazes. The night swallows him.

  Blank Frank likes the power.

  JOYCE CAROL OATES

  Joyce Carol Oates was born in Millerport, New York, in 1938. She received a B.A. in English from Syracuse University and an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin. In 1962 she married Raymond J. Smith, settling in Detroit. There she wrote the novel them (1969), a searing study of the race riots plaguing the city. Between 1968 and 1978, Oates taught at the University of Windsor in Canada; from 1978 onward, she has taught creative writing at Princeton University, where she is now the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities. Oates, one of the most prolific of contemporary American writers, has received many awards for her work, including the National Book Award and the Commonwealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature.

  The supernatural has been a pervasive theme in much of Oates’s work as novelist and short story writer. A series of four novels, Bellefleur (1980), A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982), Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984), and My Heart Laid Bare (1998), applies the Gothic mode to American history and culture. Bellefleur features seven generations of grotesque characters, including a vampire, a mad scientist, and a mass murderer, dwelling in a haunted mansion. Much of Oates’s horror work is nonsupernatural, as in the novel Black Water (1992), the short novel Beasts (2001), and the novel The Tattooed Girl (2003).

  Oates has also utilized supernatural horror in many of her short stories. Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (1994) contains the highest proportion of horror tales, but several of her other collections include one or more specimens. Oates has compiled the anthology American Gothic Tales (1996), the introduction to which elucidates her theory of supernatural writing. She has also edited Tales of H. P. Lovecraft (1997).

  “Demon,” a short story fir
st published in the small-press chap-book Demon and Other Tales (1996), is a gripping and ambiguous horror tale in which the supernatural may or may not come into play.

  DEMON

  Demon-child. Kicked in the womb so his mother doubled over in pain. Nursing tugged and tore at her young breasts. Wailed through the night. Puked, shat. Refused to eat. No he was loving, mad with love. Of Mama. (Though fearful of Da.) Curling burrowing pushing his head into Mama’s arms, against Mama’s warm fleshy body. Starving for love, food. Starving for what he could not know yet to name: God’s grace, salvation.

  Sign of Satan: flamey-red ugly-pimply birthmark snake-shaped. On his underjaw, coiled below his ear. Almost you can’t see it. A little boy he’s teased by neighbor girls, hulking, big girls with titties and laughing-wet eyes. Demon! demon! Lookit, sign of the demon!

  Those years passing in a fever-dream. Or maybe never passed. Mama prayed over him, hugged and slapped. Shook his skinny shoulders so his head flew. The minister prayed over him Deliver us from evil and he was good, he was delivered from evil. Except at school his eyes misting over, couldn’t see the blackboard. Sullen and nasty-mouthed the teacher called him. Not like the other children.

  If not like the other children, then like who? what?

  Those years. As in a stalled city bus, exhaust pouring out the rear. The stink of it everywhere. Your hair, eyes. Clothes. Same view through the same fly-specked windows. Year after year the battered-tin diner, the vacant lot high with weeds and rubble and the path worn through it slantwise where children ran shouting above the river. Broken pavement littered like confetti from a parade long past.

  Or maybe it was the edge of something vast, infinite. You could never come to the end of. Wavering and blinding in blasts of light. Desert, maybe. Red Desert where demons dance, swirl in the hot winds. Never seen a desert except pictures, a name on a map. And in his head.

  Demon-child they whispered of him. But no, he was loving, mad with love. Too small, too short. Stunted legs. His head too big for his spindly shoulders. His strange waxy-pale moon-shaped face, almond eyes beautiful in shadowed sockets, small wet mouth perpetually sucking inward. As if to keep the bad words, words of filth and damnation, safely inside.

  The sign of Satan coiled on his underjaw began to fade. Like his adolescent skin eruptions. Blood drawn gradually back into tissue, capillaries.

  Not a demon-child but a pure good anxious loving child someone betrayed by squeezing him from her womb before he was ready.

  Not a demon-child but for years he rode wild thunderous razor-hooved black stallions by night and by day. Furious galloping on sidewalks, in asphalt playgrounds. Through the school corridors trampling all in his way. Furious tearing hooves, froth-flecked nostrils, bared teeth. God’s wrath, the black stallion rearing, whinnying. I destroy all in my path. Beware!

  Not a demon-child but he’d torched the school, rows of stores, woodframe houses in the neighborhood. How many times the smelly bed where Mama and Da hid from him. And no one knew.

  This January morning bright and windy and he’s staring at the face floating in a mirror. Dirty mirror in a public lavatory, Trailways Bus Station. Where at last the demon has been released. For it is the New Year. The shifting of the earth’s axis. For to be away from what is familiar, like walking on a sharp-slanted floor, allows something other in. Or the something other has been inside you all along and until now you do not know.

  In his right eyeball a speck of dirt? dust? blood?

  Scared, he knows right away. Knows even before he sees: sign of Satan. In the yellowish-white of his eyeball. Not the coiled little snake but the five-sided star: pentagram.

  He knows, he’s been warned. Five-sided star: pentagram.

  It’s there, in his eye. Tries to rub it out with his fist.

  Backs away terrified and gagging and he’s running out of the fluorescent-bright lavatory and through the bus station where eyes trail after him curious, bemused, pitying, annoyed. He’s a familiar sight here though no one knows his name. Runs home, about three miles. His mother knows there’s trouble, has he lied about taking his medicine? hiding the pill under his tongue? Yes but God knows you can’t oversee every minute with one like him. Yes but your love wears thin like the lead backing of a cheap mirror corroding the glass. Yes but you have prayed, you have prayed and prayed and cursed the words echoing not upward to God but downward as in an empty well.

  Twenty-six years old, shaved head glinting blue. Luminous shining eyes women in the street call beautiful. In the neighborhood he’s known by his first name. Sweet guy but strange, excitable. A habit of twitching his shoulders like he’s shrugging free of somebody’s grip.

  Fast as you run somebody runs faster!

  In the house that’s a semi-detached rowhouse on Mill Street he’s not listening to his angry mother asking why is he home so early, has a job in a building supply yard so why isn’t he there? Pushes past the old woman and into the bathroom, shuts the door and there in the mirror oh God it’s there: the five-sided star, pentagram. Sign of Satan. Embedded deep in his right eyeball, just below the dilated iris.

  No! no! God help!

  Goes wild rubs with both fists, pokes with fingers. He’s weeping, shouting. Beats at himself, fists and nails. His sister now pounding on the door what is it? what’s wrong? and Mama’s voice loud and frightened. It’s happened, he thinks. His first clear thought. Happened. Like a stone sinking so calm. Because hasn’t he always known the prayers did no good, on your knees bowing your head inviting Jesus into your heart does no good. The sign of the demon would return, absorbed into his blood but must one day re-emerge.

  Pushes past the women and in the kitchen paws through the drawer scattering cutlery that falls to the floor, bounces and clatters and there’s the big carving knife in his hand, his hand shuts about it like fate. Pushes past the women now in reverse where they’ve followed him into the kitchen knocks his one-hundred-eighty-pound older sister aside with his elbow as lightly as he lifts bags of gravel, armloads of bricks. Hasn’t he prayed Our Father to be a machine many times. A machine does not feel, a machine does not think. A machine does not hurt. A machine does not starve for love. A machine does not starve for what it does not know to name: salvation.

  Back then inside the bathroom, slamming the door against the screaming women, and locking it. Gibbering to himself, Away Satan! Away Satan! God help! With a hand strangely steely as if practiced wielding the point of the knife, boldly inserting and twisting into the accursed eyeball. And no pain—only a burning cleansing roaring sensation as of a blast of fire. Out pops the eyeball, and out the sign of Satan. But connected by tissue, nerves. It’s elastic so he’s pulling, fingers now slippery-excited with blood. He’s sawing with the sharp blade of the steak knife. Cuts the eyeball free, like Mama squeezing baby out of her belly into this pig trough of sin and filth, and no turning back till Jesus calls you home.

  He drops the eyeball into the toilet, flushes the toilet fast.

  Before Satan can intervene.

  One of those antiquated toilets where water swirls about the stained bowl, wheezes and yammers to itself, sighs, grumbles, finally swallows like it’s doing you a favor. And the sign of the demon is gone.

  One eyesocket empty and fresh-bleeding he’s on his knees praying Thank you God! thank you God! weeping as angels in radiant garments with faces of blinding brightness reach down to embrace him not minding his red-slippery mask of a face. Now he’s one of them himself, now he will float into the sky where, some wind-blustery January morning, you’ll see him, or a face like his, in a furious cloud.

  CAITLIN R. KIERNAN

  Caitlin Rebekah Kiernan was born in 1964 in Skerries, Ireland, but came to the United States as a child, shortly after the death of her father. Her family lived in several locales in the South before settling in Birmingham, Alabama; in spite of her birth in Ireland, Kiernan now identifies herself as a Southern author and draws upon the heritage of Southern culture in much of her work. After re
ceiving a degree in vertebrate paleontology from the University of Colorado, Kiernan returned to Birmingham to work at the Red Mountain Museum. She has published several scientific papers in such journals as the Journal of Paleontology and the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, and her scientific background is an essential component in several of her novels and tales.

  Kiernan began publishing short stories in the 1990s, and they have now been gathered into five volumes: Candles for Elizabeth (1998), Tales of Pain and Wonder (2000), Wrong Things (2001; with Poppy Z. Brite), From Weird and Distant Shores (2002), and To Charles Fort, with Love (2005). Her work came to the attention of Neil Gaiman, who commissioned her to do much of the writing for The Dreaming, a successor to Gaiman’s successful graphic novel The Sandman; Kiernan scripted The Dreaming from 1997 to 2001. Her first novel, Silk (1998), fuses supernatural and psychological horror in its account of the demons that emerge from a young woman’s memories of her father’s abusive treatment of her; it won the International Horror Guild award for best first novel. Threshold (2001), a cosmic novel that draws upon Beowulf, Algernon Blackwood, and others, won the IHG award for best novel. Low Red Moon (2003) is another cosmic novel; The Five of Cups (2003) is a vampire novel; Murder of Angels (2004) is a sequel to Silk, while The Dry Salvages (2004) is a dark science fiction novel. Alabaster (2006) is her latest story collection.

  “In the Water Works (Birmingham, Alabama 1888),” first published in Tales of Pain and Wonder, effectively utilizes both Kiernan’s knowledge of science and her sense of place in its evocative account of an ambiguous monster lurking in a tunnel in Birmingham.

  IN THE WATER WORKS (BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA 1888)

  Red Mountain, weathered tip end of Appalachia’s long and scabby spine, this last ambitious foothill before the land slumps finally down to black-belt prairies so flat they’ve never imagined even these humble altitudes. And as if Nature hasn’t done her best already, as if wind and rain and frost haven’t whittled aeons away to expose the limestone and iron-ore bones, Modern Industry has joined in the effort, scraping away the stingy soil and so whenever it rains, the falling sky turns the ground to sea slime again, primordial mire the color of a butchery to give this place its name, rustdark mud that sticks stubborn to Henry Matthews’ hobnailed boots as he wanders over and between the spoil piles heaped outside the opening to the Water Works tunnel.