The Collected Short Fiction, page 110
–Happened upon him? He’s never mentioned you, she said.
–Sure he has. You don’t listen so good.
–So well. But I do. And, shit, you’re right. He did. Why are you following him? Are you friends? Enemies? An inane question, but the best she could do under the circumstances. She was nervous. Her vision swam from the effects of pounding that damned drink a minute ago…
–It’s more of a parasite/host relationship.
–A what?
–Or, perhaps, you could call me his muse. Our pal is awfully productive for a man on the edge of a complete breakdown. As he spoke, the stranger flexed his bruised hand and that reminded her of how the author clenched his fist while asleep.
The editor glanced around. Though the bar was packed, it seemed the two of them occupied a tiny island illuminated by the spotlight of a dull shaded lamp hanging from a chain. She’d dressed in her shortest velvet skirt that usually garnered leers and a few wolf whistles, yet none of the crowd seemed to notice her existence. Even the music had receded to the faint roar of distant surf.
She reached into her purse and came up with the dainty canister of mace she’d kept rattling around since the last time somebody got mugged in her apartment building. –Let’s start over. Who are you?
He smiled. Evil twitched the muscles of his jaw and spread fast. –I’m not the only one who’s drained the life from him. His fans, his publishers, the critics…
–Who are you?
–Planning to zap me if you don’t like the answer?
–Yeah, like a cockroach. She leaned forward so that the nozzle was near his face, saw her shaking hand magnified and reflected in his sunglasses. Her finger caressed the trigger.
–As you say. I am the dreadful one whom Camilla saw.
–Camilla.
–Camilla. No mask. No mask! He hissed to imitate a crowd cheering and made jazz hands.
–Oh, that bitch again. She pressed the trigger, hard.
The stranger inhaled the mist and divided like an amoeba on a slide, his face slithering, sloshing side to side, bisecting, a red crack traveling vertically crown to navel, and the lights in the bar flared black, fist to the eye socket, and back again and he’d vanished.
Far away the bathroom door flew open and the author blundered forth. Blood poured from his right eye and all heads turned to watch him pass. The editor rushed to him and supported his enormous bulk with her slender shoulder. The music crashed and boomed and everyone else ignored them again.
She shouted over the din, entreating him to tell her what happened and to leave at once for the hospital.
–Bah, I’m fine. Woozy is all. He pawed at the blood and wagged his shaggy head in confusion. The gore gave him the appearance of having exploded through a windshield. –Some bastard sucker punched me. Didn’t see it coming. Don’t need no hospital. Take me home, E. My face hurts.
She took him back to his apartment in a taxi and washed his wounds with hydrogen peroxide. The apartment was a sty– boxes piled up in a maze, a cat box full of cat crap, a rusty radiator thumping beneath the lone window, and on the mildewed brick wall posters of Vonnegut and Einstein, and Vallejo nudes astride prehistoric beasts, overlooking a desk poached from some defunct high school upon which rested his circa 1970s electric typewriter and a mountain of manuscript paper, an overturned pickle bucket serving as office chair; the overwhelming odors of sweat, booze, smoke, and cat. Oh yeah, she instantly remembered why she loathed stepping across the threshold.
The author swigged from a bottle of Jameson and kneaded her ass with his free hand while rambling about his novel, the fucked state of the industry, and the fact he’d lost a step if some no good rat could flatten him with a single blow.
–Honey, I swear the shithead smacked me with a jack handle.
–Shut up and hold still. She dumped the last capful of peroxide into the vicious gash that split his brow and the sluice comingled blood and tears.
Those were the last words they ever exchanged. He fell into farting, snoring slumber punctuated by moans and cries of anguish. She crept away before dawn and collapsed into her own bed in her own flat. Sunday was the only day of the week she ever had to herself and often that simply meant catching up on the myriad clerical details involved in running a major magazine.
The cops found him three days later after a noise complaint – he’d left the radio volume blasting right before collapsing in the middle of the floor, stone dead. Cardiac arrest precipitated by a swollen liver, the ME said. Liquor and drugs were the main culprits, although some reports circulated that the suffered from Lyme disease.
So the editor attended two funerals in the course of a week. Alden the agent had also died alone and of heart failure. The editor dialed back on cigarettes and alcohol for several days, glimpsing her own future in the mirror of her colleagues’ fate. But the bleakness, the loneliness, proved inescapable, and so too the looming notion that her chosen life led to an ineluctable fate, and she wound up smoking and drinking more heavily than ever.
A vacation seemed in order, something to distract from her melancholy. She packed her camera, the author’s final manuscript (which she’d snagged from Alden’s office when she and a handful of mutual acquaintances carted his possessions into storage), rented a car and drove upstate into the Hudson Valley and took lodging at a quaint bed and breakfast near the hills where her lover often roamed. Her plan was to walk the trails and snap a few pics, shop in the boutiques, drink coffee at the corner café, and make a pass through the book if she could muster sufficient enthusiasm.
The proprietor handed her the keys to a cottage behind the main building and said to buzz if she needed anything. That first night she curled into a ball on the couch, sipped wine by candlelight, listened to a blues station on the radio, unpacked the novel from the travel case she’d stuffed it into, and read the first quarter. Working title D T, and damned if she could decipher from the increasingly esoteric text what that meant. The narrative was eerily disjointed, an amalgam of episodic descriptions of violence and sex and shadowy landscapes populated by alien figures whose inscrutable routines flashed homicidal every few pages. She nodded off and experienced dreams of the sphincter-clenching variety. The one she recalled was of fucking the author in a photo booth while the camera popped, except it was the author’s doppelganger and he gazed into her eyes and whispered, It was a warning. And the photo booth became something different–panels in the wall slid aside to reveal nozzle ports of flamethrowers, the teeth of buzz saws and augers–
She awoke with a scream for possibly the first time in her life. Following a dispirited breakfast in the main house dining room, she dressed in cargo shorts and hiking boots and spent the day wandering the wooded hills in a daze. Her legs were leaden, her skull ached, every crackling branch, every shifting leaf caused her to jump in fright, which in turn annoyed her enough to continue ever farther into the underbrush. There were no deer in evidence. She stubbornly photographed deer wallows and piles of deer scat, the meandering trails that bored like tunnels through the wood. In one respect her luck was better than the author’s: most of the bugs had died or gone into hibernation and after slathering herself in repellent she suffered few bites.
Dinner at the house, which she again had to herself except for the proprietor and a bored waiter. Then she stumbled to her cottage and fell onto the couch, foregoing the customary nightcap. All day her thoughts had inexorably cycled between last night’s nightmare and the nightmarish spell the novel had cast upon her.
Thus she sat by the flickering glow of a candle, the manuscript in her lap, her thumb poised to separate the pages to her previous mark. And thus she finally noticed the glossy black spot the diameter of a dime attached to her thigh, although several more seconds passed before she recognized this as the monstrously fattened body of a tick.
I fastened upon him one night…
Resisting the urge to shriek in terror and revulsion, she took a shuddering breath and snicked the wheel of her lighter and when it bloomed applied the flame to the insect. It retracted from her within moments and dropped onto the floor, leaking black fluid as it waddled for safety.
The editor snatched the block of a manuscript and walloped the tick, crushed it against the pine floorboards with an audible crunch. Blood trickled from the tiny hole in her thigh. More blood, black as an oil slick, oozed from beneath the book.
So much blood one would think… one might think…
Her head swam as it had that night at the bar and her bizarre encounter with the stranger and she covered her eyes to stop the room’s spinning. She was afraid to vomit because she was suddenly convinced blood would spray from her mouth instead of the salmon and curry she’d eaten for dinner.
The vertigo receded and she steadied herself, wiped away tears and snot, and lifted the manuscript, pried it, from the caved-in skull of the man at her feet, and the paper was heavy, sodden with all that blood and brain matter. Gore saturated the stack from the bottom; the paper sucked it up like a sponge until darkness blotched the title page, obliterated the title itself in a Rorschach pattern of Hell.
Someone knocked and the front door swung open and a figure stood silhouetted in the frame, behind it a purple twilight and the yellow moon cracked and gaping as it swooped toward the earth. The distant city should’ve glowed upon the horizon, but
The figure said in a voice that she recognized, –Where will we go?
–These pages are stuck together, she said. –I’ll never know how it ends.
there were no other lights
Frontier Death Song
First published in Nightmare Magazine, October 2012
Night descended on Interstate-90 as I crossed over into the Badlands. Real raw weather for October. Snow dusted the asphalt and picnic tables of the deserted rest area. The scene was virginal as death.
I parked the Chevy under one of the lamp posts that burned at either end of the lot. A metal building with a canted roof sat low and sleek in the center island, most of its windows dark. Against the black backdrop it reminded me of a crypt or monument to travelers and pioneers lost down through the years. Placards were obscured by shadows and could’ve pronounced warnings or curses, could’ve said anything in any language. Reality was pliable tonight. Periodically a semi chugged along the freeway, its running lights tiny and dim. Other than that, this was the Moon.
I loosed Minerva and watched her trot around the perimeter of the sodium glow. She raised her graying snout and growled softly at the void that surrounded us, poured from us. Her tracks and the infrequent firefly sparks on the road were the only signs of life for miles. Snow was falling thick, and those small signs wouldn’t last long. It was back to the previous ice age for us, the end for us. I kind-of, sort-of liked the idea that this might be the end, except for the fact sweet, loyal Minerva hadn’t asked for any of it, and my nature—my atavistic shadow—was, as usual, a belligerent sonofabitch. My shadow exhibited the type of nature that causes men to weigh themselves with stones before they jump into the midnight blue, causes them to mix the pills with antifreeze, trade the pistol bullet to the brain for a shotgun barrel in the mouth, just to be on the safe side. My shadow didn’t give a shit about odds, or eventualities, or pain, or certain death. It just wanted to keep shining.
So, Minerva pissed in the snow and I ticked off the seconds until the ultimate showdown.
My ear was killing tonight, crackling like a busted radio speaker and ringing with good old tinnitus. The sensation was that of an auger boring through membrane and meat. My back and knee ached. I lost the ear to a virus upon contracting pneumonia in Alaska during a long ago Iditarod. The spine and knee got ruined after I fell off a cliff into the Bering Sea and broke just about everything that was breakable. Resilience was my gift, and I’d recovered sufficiently to limp through the remainder of a wasted youth, to fake a hale and hearty demeanor. That shit was surely catching up now at the precipice of the miserable slide into middle age. All those forgotten or ignored wounds blooming in a chorus of ghostly pain, reminders of longstanding debts, reminders that a man can’t always outrun provenance. Sometimes it outruns him.
I checked my watch and the numbers blurred. I hadn’t slept in way too long, else I never would’ve pulled over between Bumfuck, Egypt and Timbuktu. Since suicide by passivity was off the table, this was an expression of stubbornness on my part, probably. Grim defiance, or the need to reassert my faith in the logical operations of the universe if but for a moment.
What a joke, faith. What a sham, logic.
A hunting horn sounded far out there in the darkness beyond the humps and swales and treeless drumlins that went on basically forever, past the vast hungry prairies that had swallowed so many wagon trains.
Oh, yes. The horn of the Hunt.
Not simply a horn, but one that could easily be imagined as the hollowed relic from a giant, perverted ram with blood-specked foam lathering its muzzle and hellfire beaming from its eyes. A ram that crunched the bones of Saxons for breakfast and brandished a cock the girth of a wagon axle; the kind of brute that tribes sacrificed babies to when crops were bad and mated unfortunate maidens to when the chief needed some special juju on the eve of a war. Its horn was the sort of artifact that stood on end in a petrified coil and would require a brawny Viking raider to lift. Or a demon.
That wail stood my hair on end, slapped me awake. It rolled toward the parking lot, swelling like some Medieval air raid klaxon. Snowflakes weren’t melting on my cheeks because all the heat—all the blood—went rushing inward. That erstwhile faith in the natural universe, the rational order of reality, wouldn’t be troubling me again anytime soon. Nope.
I whistled for Minerva and she leaped into the truck, riding shotgun. Her hackles were bunched. She barked her fury and terror at the night. Sleep, O blessed sleep, how I longed for thee. No time for that. We had to get gone. The Devil would be there soon.
Years ago, when I raced sled dogs for a living, I knew a fellow named Steven Graham, a disgraced lit professor from the University of Colorado. He’d gotten shitcanned for reasons opaque to my blue collar sensibilities—something to do with privileging contemporary zombie stories over the works of the Russian masters. His past was shrouded in mystery and, like a lot people, he’d fled to Alaska to reinvent himself.
Nobody on the racing circuit cared much about any of that. Graham was charming and charismatic in spades. He drank and swore with the best of us, but he’d also get three sheets to the wind and recite a bit of Beowulf in Olde English, and he knew the bloodlines of huskies from Balto onward. Strap a pair of snowshoes to that lanky greenhorn bastard and he’d leave even the most hardened back country trapper in the proverbial dust. All the girlies adored him, and so did the cameras. Like Cummings said, he was a hell of a handsome man.
Too good to be true.
Steven Graham got taken by the Hunt while he was running the 1992 Iditarod. That’s the big winter event where men and women hook a bunch of huskies to sleds and race twelve hundred miles across Alaska from Anchorage to Nome. There’s not much to say about it—it’s long and grueling and lonely. You’re always crossing a frozen swamp or mushing up an ice-jammed river or trudging over a mountain. It’s dark and cold and mostly devoid of sound or movement but for one’s own breath and the muted panting of the huskies, the jingle and clink of their traces.
Official records have it that Graham, young ex-professor and dilettante adventurer, took a wrong turn out on Norton Sound between Koyuk and Elim and went through the ice into the sea. Ka-sploosh. No trace of him or the dogs was found. The Lieutenant Governor attended the funeral. CNN covered it live.
The report was bullshit, of course; I saw what really happened. And because I saw what really happened—because I meddled in the Hunt—there would be hell to pay.
Broad daylight, maybe an hour prior to sunset, mid March of 1992.
All twelve dogs in harness trotted along nicely. The end of the trail in Nome was about two days away. Things hadn’t gone particularly well, and I was cruising for a middle of the pack finish and a long, destitute summer of begging corporate sponsors not to drop my underachieving ass. But damn, what a gorgeous day in the arctic: the snowpack curving around me to the horizon, the sky frozen between apple-green and steely blue, the orange ball of the sun dipping below the Earth. The effect was something out of Fantasia. After days of inadequate sleep I was lulled by the hiss of the sled runners, the rhythmic scrape and slap of dog paws. I dozed at the handlebars and dreamed of Sharon, the warmth of our home, a cup of real coffee, a hot shower, and the down comforter on our bed.
When my team passed through a gap in a mile-long pressure ridge that had heaved the Bering ice to an eight-foot tall parapet, the Hunt had taken down Graham on the other side, maybe twenty yards off the main drag. This I discovered when one of Graham’s huskies loped toward me, free of its traces yet still in harness. The poor critter’s head had been lopped at mid-neck and it zig-zagged several strides and then collapsed on the trail. You’d think my own dogs would’ve spooked. Instead, an atavistic switch was tripped in their doggy brains and they surged forward, yapping and howling.
Several yards to my right so much blood covered the snow I thought I was hallucinating a sunset dripped onto the ice. The scene confused me for a few seconds as my brain locked down and spun in place.
The killing ground was a fucking mess, like there’d been a mass walrus slaughter committed on the spot. Dead huskies were flung about, intestines looped over berms and piled in loose, steaming coils. Graham himself lay spread-eagled across a blue-white slab of ice repurposed as an impromptu sacrificial altar. He was split wide, eyes blank.
The Huntsman had most of the guy’s hide off and was tacking it alongside the carcass as one stretches the skin of a beaver or a bear. Clad in a deerstalker hat surmounted by antlers, a blood-drenched mackinaw coat, canvas breeches, and sealskin boots, the Huntsman stood taller than most men even as he hunched to slice Graham with a large knife of flint or obsidian—I wasn’t quite close enough to discern which.
