BLACK STATIC #41

by Andy Cox

  This time Kumo-harai followed his lover, wiping away tears with his long sleeve until he collapsed against the heavy storehouse door.

  “Kumo-harai.” The voice was coming from inside. He pulled himself up and opened the door.

  It was dark inside, the morning sun lighting only a thin rectangle on the clay floor. The smell of earth and the sour odour of vinegared daikon filled Kumo-harai’s head. He squinted, trying to find Jin’s ghost in the dark corners of the room. But it had vanished again.

  “What are you doing there?”

  Kumo-harai jumped. He hadn’t heard anyone approaching.

  “I…”

  “Did you see him again?” The abbot opened up his arms and Kumo-harai went to him.

  It was there in that embrace, the abbot gently leading the young man from away, that Kumo-harai turned for one last glance into the storehouse and saw what he was meant to see.

  There, hastily shoved into a corner, was a bundle of clothes. Travelling clothes, a large cone-shaped hat ripped nearly in half, and a wooden staff. These were not the style of clothes the monks used, these were layman’s clothes, mendicant’s clothes. Kumo-harai pushed himself free of the abbot and ran over to the pile. He buried his face in them and knew. These were Jin’s belongings. And they were covered in blood.

  With the sun in his eyes he looked back up at the abbot. “How did you get these?”

  The abbot, a large black figure in the doorway, folded his arms across his chest and said nothing.

  “You did this?” Kumo-harai held the staff, the top splintered. Jin had put up a fight. But who knew how many were sent after him? “There were no bandits. It was you?”

  Still the abbot stood silent.

  “Why? He had nothing of value. He was a good man,” Kumo-harai said, his voice cracking with grief, realising now that this was never about riches. “He’d gone. He was already gone.”

  “He was a risk,” the older man said.

  “What do you—”

  “I had him followed into the city. Just to be sure,” the abbot said.

  Kumo-harai rubbed his thumb along the last carving in the staff, his name. He approached the abbot, stopped an arm’s length away. “Why?”

  “You were mine. You were always meant to be mine,” the abbot said, looking straight into the young man’s eyes. “Jin should have stayed gone.”

  “Stayed gone?” Kumo-harai thought he was going to be sick. “You mean he was coming back?” He tightened his grip on the staff.

  “Yes.”

  “For me?”

  “Yes.” The abbot spat on the floor, raised his nose in contempt.

  The edges of Kumo-harai’s vision blurred. He saw nothing but the monster in front of him. He raised the stick and screamed. The abbot backed out into the graveyard, tripping on his robes. Kumo-harai waited for him to stand before he advanced again.

  To his right the temple stood, doors pushed open. Lines of straight-backed monks droned sutras and sleepy prayers. The hollow wooden drum clacked a steady beat. A golden bell. The monks were used to the occasional day when the abbot slept in or had business elsewhere. They were single-minded in their meditations or resolute in their betrayal – either way, not a single man lifted his eyes to witness the crying out and pleading of their master going on below.

  The last vision Kumo-harai ever saw of Jin was over the abbot’s shoulder. He was standing under the persimmon tree, bare-chested and smiling.

  Kumo-harai knew exactly what he needed to do. Step by step, the jagged end of the staff thrust into the fat of the old man’s throat, he led the abbot through the graveyard and down to the tree line until his back was pressed up against the twisted trunk of the persimmon tree. The abbot tried to make excuses. He wept. But Kumo-harai wasn’t swayed. And for the first time in his life he wasn’t afraid.

  “If you kill me you’ll forever suffer in one of the Buddha’s hells, roasting over a sulphur fire, your belly split and boiling,” the abbot warned, shaking his fist, trying to look intimidating. “You’ll never be with Jin again.”

  “Oh, you will not die by my hand,” Kumo-harai said. “I have no desire to meet you in hell.”

  A brief expression of hope passed across the abbot’s face. He smiled an awful, sharp-toothed smile. He ran one hand over his shaven head and clucked his tongue. Such a shaming sound. Such a confident sound. Kumo-harai would enjoy putting an end to that.

  He raised Jin’s staff above his head and brought it down on the branches overhead. The tree trembled, raining down morning dew, dying leaves, and spiders. Hundreds and hundreds of spiders. Spiders in all shapes and sizes. Some dropped onto the abbot’s saffron robes, scuttling into folds or down his neckline, while others landed on the ground only to disappear under the man’s yellow hem, scurrying up the abbot’s fat legs. While the old man was busy yelping and slapping them away he didn’t notice the others, the ones that swung down on delicate threads. The ones that lowered themselves slowly, intentionally. He screamed, flailed. He stomped and howled.

  And Kumo-harai laughed and laughed as he beat the tree. For a few minutes anyway. Until something made him stop.

  Even the abbot ceased his thrashing when he saw Kumo-harai’s face, saw him gazing over his shoulder, beyond the persimmon tree, deeper into the forest. Eyes wide and mouth ajar.

  “Wha…what is it?” the abbot asked. But he didn’t turn. He watched as Kumo-harai dropped the staff and then clutched at the collar of his robe, kissing it and whispering a prayer. The young man stumbled backwards. He saw what was coming.

  But the abbot was frozen with fear, couldn’t move. Could probably not even guess what the younger man saw. He might have heard the sound of something horrible and hungry moving along the leafy forest floor, the snap and splinter of tree limbs as it approached. A heavy mouldy woof of breath. But he’d never been there to listen to Jin’s stories. His imagination couldn’t possibly allow the idea that the crack of a small tree being bent in half was some enormous beast coming to feed. A monster picking its way closer and closer on eight grotesque legs, dozens of eyes glassy and wild. No, the abbot couldn’t imagine that or even this: that a moment later – an instant after he felt the fiery heat of the beast – there might be another echoing crack to fill his ears. And this time it wouldn’t be a tree or a branch but the very peculiar and satisfying sound made by a jealous man’s head being opened and cleaned of the treasure inside.

  •••••

  Thersa Matsuura’s book, A Robe of Feathers and Other Stories (Counterpoint LLC, 2009), is a collection of dark pieces involving Japanese mythical creatures, curious superstitions, and little known Japanese folklore. She has lived in a small fishing town in Japan with her family for the past twenty-five years. When she’s not writing or researching she’s carving rocks into Buddhist statues or making devil masks. You can visit her online at thersamatsuura.com.

  CASE NOTES

  PETER TENNANT ON BOOKS

  CREATURES OF LIGHT AND SHADOW

  The Art of Ian Miller

  Dark Work

  Veins and Skulls

  MATHESON AND SON

  A Stir of Echoes

  The Ritual of Illusion

  GHOSTS AND MERMAIDS

  Home and Hearth

  The Elvis Room

  Water For Drowning

  REMEMBERING THE DARKNESS: A.K. BENEDICT

  The Beauty of Murder

  Q & A with A.K. Benedict

  THE BOOK(S) OF THE FILM

  Carrie

  The Thing

  The Silence of the Lambs

  Splice Vol7 #1

  The Sorcerers

  DARKFUSE NOVELLAS

  Red Cells

  Marrow’s Pit

  Deceiver

  Hell’s Door

  Messages From the Dead

  Shattered

  Ash and Bone

  Elderwood Manor

  Dead Five’s Pass

  Whom the Gods Would Destroy

  I Am the New G
od

  Love and Zombies

  Ceremony of Flies

  When We Fall

  Sow

  CREATURES OF LIGHT AND SHADOW

  Chances are if you’ve any sort of acquaintance with speculative fiction in its many forms, then you’ll have seen the work of Ian Miller. He’s been part of the genre’s visual landscape since the 1970s, with book covers, album covers, RPG and film work. A fitting showcase for his talent, THE ART OF IAN MILLER (Titan Books hc, 160pp, £24.99) contains a wealth of black and white illustrations and colour paintings that reveal the range and diversity of the artist’s oeuvre.

  In the pages of this book you will find Neuschwanstein style fairy tale castles crossed with skyscraper DNA and soaring impossibly upward with Babelesque hubris; vegetable creatures that mutate into hideous monsters, thrusting up from the ground or lurking in stygian caverns beneath the surface of the world; marine life forms that seem to breathe by means of an iron lung; fearsome warriors sealed into armour that bristles with wicked looking spikes and gnarled nodules, tumorous barbs and goitres of tormented metal.

  “Bristle” is a good word to describe the essence of what Miller is about. His work bristles with life. He appears to have an abhorrence of the flat surface and empty space, so that the paintings seem almost 3D, as if textured so that you can reach out your hand and stroke them, and they are all so very busy, with stuff going on in every area, things happening in a way to suggest a constant state of flux by means of the static image. Miller’s palette is primarily dark, with many of the paintings almost monochrome at first sight; only when you look closer do you realise the breadth of the artist’s paint scheme, the many ways in which he uses shadow to his advantage, with splashes of colour from the more vibrant end of the spectrum rare and all the more effective for that when they are put to use. Overarching all is a Gothic sensibility, so that even when portraying the future his work has a feel of the baroque and antique to it.

  My personal favourites in this volume are the artist’s black and white illustrations for Poe’s ‘Maelstrom’; a series of dragon paintings and drawings; work produced as a companion to various Tolkien projects; the striking covers he produced for the several Lovecraft collections released by Panther back in the 70s, which was where I first encountered his art. To complement the visuals, there is an introduction by Brian Sibley and comments on his ideas and techniques by the artist himself. The only thing missing is an appendix detailing when and where the paintings first appeared, but it’s a quibble on the part of a reviewer with the mentality of a bean counter, and doesn’t detract from what is, when all things are considered, a gorgeous production and extremely good value for money, a feast for the eyes and the imagination.

  Artist Keith Minnion sold his first illustration to Asimov’s SF Adventure Magazine in 1979, but all the art contained in DARK WORK (Short, Scary Tales Publications hc, 100pp, £23.95), as the title suggests, is horror based. With black and white as well as colour illustrations, the book is divided into three sections – Magazine Work, Book Work and Unpublished Work. Artist Steven C. Gilberts provides an introduction, and throughout the book there are quotes from publishers who have used Minnion’s work, but no text by the artist himself, though we do get a comprehensive appendix detailing where each work first appeared.

  Minnion uses the common visual language and imagery of horror illustration – dead and mutilated bodies, skeletons and splashes of blood, graveyards at night and cannibal ravens – but in a unique and distinctive way. The illustrations are uncluttered and each has a focal point to which the viewer’s eye is first drawn, only thereafter becoming aware of the rest. We see the vivid red of the rose, and then the ray of light rising from it into the night sky and the shadowy buildings that form a backdrop. We see the ghostly figures in the foreground, and then the houses stacked behind them with windows that stare like the eyes of the damned. We see and ponder the significance of the design carved into an open palm, only after registering the splash of blood and the nail through the wrist that pins it to a flat surface. Eyes are important to Minnion, something that he delights in – eyes that implore or accuse, eyes that twinkle with merriment or secret knowledge, eyes filled with rage or sorrow, dead eyes. There are the occasional moments of dark humour also, as with the view of a snow girt chimney, attached to which by a black leather belt is a pole topped with the skull of a reindeer, baubles dangling from the antlers. And with that last image in mind, we neatly segue into the suggestion that Dark Work, or any of the other books in this feature, might make a very welcome Christmas present for the horror lover in your life, or anyone who enjoys beautifully executed artwork.

  Daniele Serra is the new kid in the garret, but has already secured two distinctions that have eluded his compatriots, a British Fantasy Award and a Black Static credit in his back catalogue. As far as I know, VEINS AND SKULLS (Short, Scary Tales Publications hc, 64pp, £16.95) is the first book exclusively dedicated to Serra’s artwork. Jeff Mariotte provides an introduction, with back cover blurbs by Joe R. Lansdale and Ramsey Campbell, but no other text. No appendix either, but I believe that all of these artworks are previously unpublished so provenance is perhaps not an issue, even for bean counters.

  Each illustration is presented on a page by itself, with one word titles – ‘Upholstery’, ‘Nude’, ‘Water’ – on the opposite page, a presentation method about which I’m divided, in that while certainly allowing the art to shine it also feels a bit like padding when compared to the two other books here. There are three sections. The first contains thirteen paintings, each presenting an image of some scene of ruin or decay, many of them with a female face or figure in the foreground. Serra’s style is highly distinctive. He works with a muted palette, offering greys and browns, dirty white and pitch black, and each image appears almost as if smudged, with few clean lines, so that the effect is impressionistic, a blurred snapshot of the subject that invites the viewer to fill in the gaps, to concretise what we are actually seeing. That technique is taken yet further in the second section, in which we have four black and white drawings of a woman, where the figure seems to blend into the white background, as if the woman is growing out of the page, or perhaps being slowly erased by the course of time. A double page spread and three standalone paintings make up the third section, using the same palette as in the first section, each a scene of ruin, some urban centre that has fallen on hard times, with the prevailing mood one of sadness. More than the other artists whose work is reviewed here, Serra’s language is that of feelings, demanding an emotional response rather than some intellectual categorisation of what we are seeing.

  MATHESON AND SON

  The cover blurb from Stephen King declares that Richard Matheson was “The author who influenced me the most as a writer”, and yet there’s a moment of disconnect when you look at the slim volume that is A STIR OF ECHOES (Tor pb, 211pp, £7.99) and compare it with the doorstops that have become King’s prevailing modus operandi.

  Originally published in 1958 A Stir of Echoes is every bit as entertaining now as it must have felt then, though of course it brings with it a considerable cultural baggage, not least of which is the 1999 film of the book, in which a slightly histrionic Kevin Bacon attacked his cellar floor with a pick-axe and a vengeance. The plot is relatively straightforward, with family man and all round good guy Tom Wallace turned into a kind of psychic sponge after dabbling in hypnotism. He has premonitions and starts to pick up on the feelings of others, a window into their souls and all the dirty little secrets that they hide even from themselves, information that he really doesn’t want to know. There’s much worse to come though when Tom sees a woman in his house late at night, and starts to wonder if she is the spirit of somebody who was murdered there. The woman needs his help, but Tom really doesn’t know what to do or how to deal.

  Economically written and plotted, this is an elegant novel that touches on the supernatural, but uses it in a story that is all about human nature, and much of its effectiveness
lies in the characterisation. Tom is a fully rounded individual, the sceptic who gets his comeuppance when he somewhat unwisely challenges a true believer to prove his case. And yet what happens to him also seems undeserved, in that Tom is a decent guy placed in a near impossible position, gifted a power that places his relationship with his wife and child in peril as his visions grow more powerful. We can easily identify with his dilemma, in that so many of our relationships flourish and grow in the light of what we don’t know about the other person; Tom doesn’t want to know that his work colleague is a wife abuser or that the sexy neighbour has unwelcome designs on his body, and learning stuff like this handicaps his ability to function socially, eventually placing his marriage in jeopardy. Like Cassandra he finds that uncommon knowledge can be a terrible curse, with the line between sanity and madness approached. That it isn’t crossed is down to the fact that ultimately Tom finds a way to do the right thing, blunders into a solution for what ails him and enables a restless spirit to find peace. Human malice and folly are the reasons for what is happening and, whatever unnatural twists and turns the narrative may take, the story can only be resolved with a human, all too human denouement. There’s a timeless quality to much of what happens – we might not be so wary of hypnotism nowadays, but sadly things like misogyny and murder are still very much part of the plat du jour.

  Matheson died in 2013, a cruel year that also took from us James Herbert and Joel Lane, but his legacy will endure. He was truly one of the greats labouring in the field of speculative fiction, and this short novel provides an eloquent testimony to his genius.

  The point of departure for Richard Christian Matheson’s novella THE RITUAL OF ILLUSION (PS Publishing jhc/signed jhc, 118pp, £15/£28) is the disappearance of actress Sephanie Vamore after a car in which she is travelling crashes with the death of all the other passengers including her director boyfriend who was driving. And later, several people connected to the film industry are slaughtered at a party at a producer’s house in Malibu, with no explanation for what happened or how, the only suspect an extravagantly large man who disappears from the trunk of a police car en route to the station. At back of all this, hinted at in the text, is a book with instructions on how to perform the so called ritual of illusion, which will grant power and influence to whoever enacts it.