by Jon Padgett
The Secret of
Ventriloquism
Jon Padgett
DUNHAMS MANOR PRESS
East Brunswick, New Jersey
© 2016 Jon Padgett
Cover and interior art by Dave Felton
Cover design by Anna Trueman
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Published by
DUNHAMS MANOR PRESS
C/O
DYNATOX MINISTRIES
East Brunswick, New Jersey
USA
www.dunhamsmanor.com
www.dynatoxministries.com
for Carolyn, Mamie, and Tom
Contents
Introduction by Matt Cardin
The Mindfulness of Horror Practice
Murmurs of a Voice Foreknown
The Indoor Swamp
Origami Dreams
20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism
The Infusorium
Organ Void
The Secret of Ventriloquism
Escape to Thin Mountain
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction
S. T. Joshi has famously argued that the truly great authors of weird fiction have been great precisely because they use their stories as a vehicle for expressing a coherent worldview. I would here like to advance an alternative thesis. I would like to assert that one of the characteristics of great weird fiction, and most especially weird horror—not the sole characteristic, of course, since weird horror is a multifaceted jewel, but a characteristic that is crucial and irreducible in those works of the weird that lodge in the reader’s mind with unforgettable force and intensity—is a vivid and distinct authorial voice.
Can you imagine Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” without the sonorous narrative voice that speaks from the very first page in tones of absolute gloom and abject dread? Can you imagine Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zann” minus its voice of detached, dreamlike trepidation tinged with cosmic horror, as generated by the author’s distinctive deployment of diction and artistry of prose style? Or Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House without the striking establishment of voice in the classic opening paragraph (“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream…”), which then develops over the course of the novel into a sustained tone of mingled dread, loneliness, and melancholy? Or what about Ligotti’s “The Last Feast of Harlequin” without its measured tone of fearful discovery foregrounded against an emotional backdrop of desolate inner wintriness, as delivered in the narrative voice of an unnamed social anthropologist investigating a strange clown festival in an American Midwestern town? Each of these stories would be not just diminished but fundamentally altered—neutered, hamstrung, eviscerated—by the removal of its distinctive voice, which, vitally, is not just the narrative voice of the individual story but the voice of the author expressing itself through the environment of that particular work.
The point is not, of course, that these writers always maintain the very same voice in multiple works. Poe creates many different narrative voices across the span of his complete oeuvre. But he always, on some level, sounds like Poe. The same is true of Lovecraft, Jackson, Ligotti, and the other great masters of weird and supernatural horror. Their voice is vital to their authorial selves. They don’t write in the style-less monotone of much commercial horror fiction. In their works you can hear them talking in and through the multitude of voices that make up their respective fictional worlds. It’s a special kind of literary art, this creation of a distinctive voice that speaks to the reader in unmistakable tones with a manifest force and singularity of identity.
And it is an art that Jon Padgett possesses in spades. I learned this over a span of years as I was privileged to observe, intermittently and from a distance, the germination and gestation of Jon’s authorial self. Eventually he started sending stories that fairly stunned me with the force of their philosophical-emotional impact. I remember first being affected like this by “20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism,” in which—significantly—the narrative itself focuses directly on the nature and power of voice, and of one special, dreadful voice in particular, an “intangible, alien voice twisting through that throat and that mouth, telling us that you have only ever been one of its myriad, crimson arms... Feel that voice that is not a voice bubbling through that mouth that is not a mouth. Let it purge you of your static. Let it fill you with its own static.” Presented in the form of a step-by-step guide to learning “Greater Ventriloquism”—whose practitioners are “acolytes of the Ultimate Ventriloquist ... catatonics, emptied of illusions of selfhood and identity ... perfect receivers and transmitters of nothing with nothing to stifle the voice of our perfect suffering”—this is one of the most powerful, unsettling, disturbing, and impactful stories of its kind, or really of any kind, that I have read in the last ten years.
The same current of power winds its way through the other works gathered together here. In these nine striking stories—or, more accurately, seven stories plus a one-act play and a guided meditation on experiencing the horror of conscious existence—Jon modulates the voice of his author’s self into multiple tones depending on the needs of the piece at hand. In “Organ Void” and “The Infusorium,” for example, he calibrates it with galling effectiveness to generate a tone, mood, and worldview of visceral filthiness set in a fictional realm of mounting, horrifying darkness. In “Murmurs of a Voice Foreknown” he applies it successfully to the first-person depiction of the narrator’s personal nightmare of childhood persecution, and the inner transition that leads this young protagonist to realize his power to outdo his persecutor. In “The Mindfulness of Horror Practice” (the aforementioned guided meditation), he sounds almost like one of his non-horror influences, the contemporary spiritual writer and teacher Eckhart Tolle, who speaks unfailingly in a gentle voice of detached lucidity and focused self-inquiry—and yet Jon makes this so much his own that the voice guiding the reader toward a state of liberation from, or rather within, the horrors of body, mind, and being itself is recognizable as perhaps the quintessence of the other narrative voices in the book. In all of this, one can, I think, detect traces of his longtime practice of ventriloquism, as he projects his author’s voice into each work and makes it speak convincingly through them all, even as it remains, in essence, his own.
I hope and believe that this, the first full-length book by Jon Padgett, will be remembered as an authentically significant debut collection. Along with voice, it also has vision, as may be evident from the lines I have quoted, and Jon’s rich elaboration of this vision goes a considerable distance toward establishing a coherent worldview and thus fulfilling the Joshian criterion. “We Greater Ventriloquists are acolytes of the Ultimate Ventriloquist,” announces one of his narrators at the end of twenty transformative lessons. “We Greater Ventriloquists are catatonics, emptied of illusions of selfhood and identity... We are active as nature moves us to be: perfect receivers and transmitters of nothing with nothing to stifle the voice of our perfect suffering. Yes, we Greater Ventriloquists speak with the voice of nature making itself suffer.” I don’t know for sure if “the voice of nature making itself suffer” is actually, ultimately, Jon’s own voice. For his sake, I think I hope it isn’t. But I do know that it is a voice that lodges in the reader’s mind with col
ossal force and intensity, marking that story and this book as unforgettable.
Matt Cardin
Stephenville, Texas
September 2016
When forced to speak, matter suffers. The voice that is squeezed out through the dead materials of the mechanism becomes the voice of the mechanism’s protest against animation, the voice of its resistance to voice.
-Steven Connor,
Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism
The Mindfulness of Horror Practice
In this recording I’m going to be leading you through all four stages of the mindfulness of horror practice.
Closing your eyes. Now become aware of your environment—the air on your skin, the temperature in the room, any itches or irritations you might feel, any aches or pains within or without. And acknowledge the sounds around you—cars honking outside, the neighbor’s music playing, the screeches of birds or children. Any smells, perfumes or bodily odors. Just become open to these sensations and experiences—accept them, good or bad.
And then you can begin to take your attention inwards into your body. Becoming aware of your feet. Feeling the skin and veins, muscles and sinews, and finally the skeletal structure of your feet. The dead bones of your future self. Feel them becoming more solid than the transitory flesh-gore that covers them. And the more awareness you can take into your skeleton feet, the more you can let go. Now let that sensation spread from your skeleton feet up to your calf bones, thigh bones, pelvic bones, straight up through your spine (poised and balanced), shoulder blades, flexing ribs and collar bones, the bones growing heavy, heavy down your arms, elbows, straight through the tiniest finger bones. Letting the top of your spine grow long, long. Noticing that your skull is the only part of your skeleton that feels light—as if the rest of your head (hair, skin, eyes, cartilage, brain) has disintegrated, leaving a dome filled only with the gaseous remnants of your non-skeletal-self.
And then begin to experience your skeleton as a whole—scanning through it, upright and open. And in the midst of all these experiences, notice a deep aching within your skeleton-self—a throbbing hurt. Concentrate on that skeleton-ache; let it expand within its marrow. Become absorbed, become fascinated by the wellspring of discomfort you’ve discovered within yourself.
This is the horror of the Organism.
And in the midst of all these experiences, notice your breathing, the physical sensations of your breathing. And you can let your awareness become absorbed, become fascinated by those sensations. Letting your consciousness fill your breathing. And letting your breathing fill your consciousness.
And then moving into the second stage of the practice, noticing your breath—counting one, breathing in and out. Two, in and out. Three, in and out. And so on until you get to ten. And once you’ve reached ten, starting again at one. And whenever you realize that your mind has wandered, bring your awareness back into your breathing. Noticing the awareness becoming aware of itself and, with it, a growing panic traveling through your body all the way up into your skull every time you breathe in. So every time that you breathe in, your mind is becoming more and more at one with panic, until every counted number becomes a testament to self-suffocation.
This is the horror of the Mind.
And then moving into the third stage of the practice, you can let go of the counting and simply follow the flow of your panicked breathing. As you continue to breathe in and out, beginning to focus on your panicked thoughts. Notice how they flail against the growing agony of the becoming within you. Your panic helping you to stay in awareness, becoming that awareness. Now imagine your every inhaled breath drawing Black Fog in—a killing toxin that exterminates those stray, redundant cogitations that writhe and jerk within the emptying hull of your mind.
This is the horror of Being.
And now moving into the last stage of the practice, you can finally stop breathing altogether and begin focusing more and more on less and less. You may begin to imagine you hear something like static or even the roar of an airliner. You may feel lightheaded like you’re going to pass out. Ignore these feelings. They are normal. They indicate that you’re coming into perfect sync with your empty skeleton body and your empty skeleton head.
Giving yourself a few moments to assimilate the effects of the practice. And you can begin to take your awareness into the outside world. Becoming aware of the space around you. And of your experiences of that space. As hideous and alien without as within.
Accept as the days and nights go by that you are a walking skeleton, an ambulatory miracle of meat. New thoughts come, but they arrive from beyond the foam, beyond the foam, beyond the foamy sponge of your brain.
Now open your eyes.
Murmurs of a Voice Foreknown
I was seven years old the first time my brother tried to kill me.
“Sam wants you dead,” he whispered in my ear one day at our grandmother’s house. My brother had received a pellet gun—a Crosman 760 Powermaster—for his twelfth birthday. Soon after our arrival, I watched him fire the new weapon upon the rusted tin-roofed boat dock and wood pilings that lined our grandmother’s expansive backyard and the filthy canal beyond it.
“That was you,” he would say after each pellet hit its mark with a ping. My brother took aim from various positions around the yard as he fired the rifle. He sprinted and leaped over circles of crab grass and pine straw, ripping the bark off small trees as he wheeled around them.
Unlike my brother, I was neither athletic nor interested in athletics of any kind. Instead, I spent many of those summer days capturing honeybees. I’d trap them and a variety of other insects in an empty juice bottle—its thin, golden metal top riddled with air holes I fashioned with a long-handled ice pick.
When my brother became distracted enough by his target practice, I crept off and retrieved my insect jar and spent the rest of the day capturing bugs, gazing through warped glass at them. My thin-legged inmates—bee, spider and ant—encountered one another there, sometimes more or less peacefully, sometimes with brutal but mesmerizing results.
At the end of the visit, I followed my brother to the car. He was pumping his Crosman again and again, perhaps five feet in front of me. My brother stopped all at once and turned around, aiming his gun’s black proboscis at my head.
“Sam says shoot out your eye.”
Then he pulled the trigger.
If I hadn’t covered my face with my hands, the pellet would have found its mark, causing permanent eye damage or worse. At the time, I was sure it would’ve killed me on the spot. I'm sure my brother hoped it would. Instead, the miniature bullet struck my right hand’s middle fingernail, which exploded into bloody fragments. I looked down at the alien, red nub of my nail-less finger, my mouth open in a long howl of astonished disbelief.
Mother meted out big brother’s punishment in short order. He received a long spanking on the spot via The Brush (always on-hand), administered by my diminutive mother while the rest of the family—my father, my grandmother and I—watched on. As usual, my brother chortled through The Brush’s every whack, grinning at me as if imagining his pain transmuted into the many torments he would soon inflict upon my body and mind.
~
I was the younger of two children. Aside perhaps from my sullen father, no one wanted a new addition to the family less than my brother.
I received more injuries and humiliations from him than I can recall during my early childhood. Once he nudged me off the back of his speeding bicycle—which led to a chin full of stitches. Other times I remember him slamming my hand in the car door, hurling me into the sticker bushes in our front yard, even shoving me backwards into the wood piling-lined, rainbow-sheened canal behind our grandmother’s backyard. But until his twelfth birthday, he never mentioned anyone named Sam.
“Who’s Sam?” I asked my brother one night soon after the pellet gun incident. We were both almost ready for bed, and he had just entered my room.
He sidled up to me, smirki
ng, his breath stinking of hardboiled eggs. Then he put on “the spooky voice”—one to which I had grown accustomed. Each night my brother filled my head with stories, sometimes about the bodiless Hand that lived under my bed. The Hand, crawling about on thin but powerful fingers, waiting for the ideal time to strangle me in my sleep. And then there was the grinning, living Doll who lived in an old trunk up in the attic just down the hall from my bedroom door. The Doll, whose sharp teeth were coated with an incurable poison.
After I asked about Sam, my brother began his spooky-voiced story, as he often did, with one large knuckle jabbed hard into my shoulder. I withstood the pain and tried not to whimper, which I knew would only make the bedtime torment worse.
“Before you were born, pad-butt, mom and dad had another baby. His name was Sam. But little Sam died when he was just tiny. Mom and dad told me they were gonna have another baby, but it turned out to be a bad mistake. And that’s just what dad said to mom. A bad mistake. You were no Sam, and they knew it.”
My brother’s smirk twisted into a sneer and his voice became a whisper in my ear as he pinched the back of my neck... hard.
“Sam talks to me at night, twig. He tells me it’s almost time for you to be dead. And once you die, Sam’s gonna take over your body. You’ll be gone, but he’ll be back. I might just kill you for him just to speed things up. I haven’t made up my mind yet. You tell mom and dad anything about this, though, and you bet I will kill you. Dead.”
