Storytellersunplugged

By David Niall Wilson

The window looked out over mean streets and dirty dreams. Smudges of soot, wind-blown grit, and splatters of the last things to go through the minds of bugs and birds alike coated the multi-colored panes, creating subtle shifts in the original artist’s intent. What had once been a multi-hued peacock had taken on ghost-images of other creatures; what had begun as a leafy tree dripped with the streamers and ornaments of time.

On the windowsill, a goblet sat – iridescent blue with a peacock drinking at a fountain. A trinket of no worth grown precious with the years. His fingerprints stained the rim.

The interior of the attic chamber bore similar strokes from time’s brush. Spider’s webs had gone to cobwebs and, clotted with dust, dropped away to chase about the floor and lodge in the corners. More webs had grown to take their places; more spiders had joined their talents to the whole. The skeletal remnants of chairs, tables, and old cane-back rocking chair, and a dresser canted to one side where a leg had broken, or been removed for some arcane purpose, the rolled carcass of a heavy, Persian style rug, and a chest; all of these things cast shadows across the floor that congealed near the center in a colorless pool of gloom.

In the dust, his footprint remained, like a skeleton built of ash beneath a shroud layered years. The touch of a moth’s wing would brush it away, but it remained.

The chair seat was thick with dust. The dresser held nothing but torn and shredded bits of cloth and wood that had once been home to a family of mice, also dead and gone. Passed on. The rug was ruined. Mold had wormed its way in and out among the threads. Rot had set in; the once vibrant colors and patterns had grown into one another so that if someone gripped the end and unrolled it, the carpet would disintegrate, leaving nothing but a damp, foul-smelling mulch. Its only hope of survival was to be left alone, and even that was falling prey to entropy.

The knots on the twine that bound the rug held their own against time. They were careful knots, tied with care. He thought rolling the rug would protect it.

When the sun reached the proper angle, beams of colored light pierced the shadows and fell on the chest so that the raised image of a cross, surrounded by roses, could be seen. It was blackened with age and mold had grown into the deeper recesses of the carving, but the image managed to convey both beauty and mystery. The base of the cross came to a point that, if followed, led to a keyhole. The wooden frame was banded in hard iron, corroded and ancient, but with the sort of time-defiant strength born of careful craftsmanship.

His grandfather gave him the chest. It came from the war – the Old World – magic places far away. He left it in a special place when he, himself, was called to war, and he told no one about it.

Once the rug had covered the floor, carefully arranged to protect the polished hardwood from the monotonous motion of the rocker, and the compressed weight of a full dresser pressing down on four narrow legs. The table had held food, and wine, books and papers and notebooks with words sprawling across their surface. When the attic room was new, the window had been clear glass, winking at the daytime and midnight black skies in turn like a giant, all-seeing crystal eye.

The room came to him in a dream, and he kept it. It was built from bits and pieces of stories – stolen images from old movies – and fine words. It was woven of the sound of Cellos, deep and low, and the high, magnificent voice of a violin.

An ink bottle, dried and stained, sat on the table, though the way the shadows fell it was sometimes hard to see it. At times, in fact, it seemed not to be there at all. A broken pen lay beside it, exsanguinated dreams clotted on the nub. None of the paper remained. The books, the pads, the reams of sacrificed trees had been hauled away, rotted, fallen to dust or burned for meager, uncertain warmth in the “between” times. Between then, and now. Between sunlight, stained glass, ink and dust.

Sometimes the barrier between worlds is very thin. Sometimes…

Far below, the creak of a door shivered through the stagnant air. Cobweb animals shifted in their corners. Ink dust slid off the table like hourglass sand. A foot scraped on the stairs and echoed across years. The footsteps drew nearer, then nearer still and suddenly his hand was on the knob, turning back the hands of time. Or stopping them.

He stood in the doorway for a long time, surveying the ruin. Then, with a heavy sigh, he stepped through the door, closed it behind him with a snap that cut away the world, and glanced up at the window.

He couldn’t see through it. The soot and smudges had deepened the already dark colors of the glass. The peacock’s brilliant plumage fuzzed and faded, smeared with years. The sun hung motionless above the skyline. He stepped to the window and rubbed the elbow of his jacket on the glass. It came away dark and smudged, but did little to clear his view. The grime was mostly on the outside. Still, he glanced out and down, trying to fill in the odd gaps in the streets below from memory as the colored glass diffused the images.

He put his hand on the glass absently, as if he’d placed it there only moments before. When he turned away, he lifted it to his lips. The wine was rich and red and stained his lips. Colors erupted in slow motion from the center of the window and crackled outward, sloughing off grime and stains and years and painting the room in all the colors of the rainbow.

The sun inched up and speared floating dust motes as they floated across the room – tiny planets adrift in a momentary galaxy. He followed the light with his gaze. He saw the table, and for just a moment it held his gaze. The ghost-images of a bottle, a pen – but no. There was nothing there. The chest caught and reflected the dim light. The corners of his mouth twitched, and then actually curled upward, just for an instant. He crossed the room in two strides and dropped to his knees beside the box. In that instant, he was certain he smelled Camel cigarettes caught in old flannel; remembered from long lost nights stealing his grandfather’s oversized pajama shirts to sleep in, or riding in the battered Volkswagen that bore them to battle with bluegills and bass.

Other voices echoed in the back of his mind, but he ignored them. Horns sounded. Elevators rose and fell and the hum of a thousand fluorescent bulbs snapping to life in a thousand tiny cubicles hissed and whispered. A woman’s voice, too high and too shrill, pounded at him like waves on a beach, and closed his eyes. He reached out and traced the rose and cross on the box with his index finger.

“Abra Cadabra,” he said softly. The words were another gift from his grandfather, part of one of the stories that waited in the back of his mind. He snapped the fingers of his right hand and a key appeared. There was no audience, but he smiled and nodded, as if taking a bow. He slid the key into the lock on the chest, turned it, and gripped the lid. Offering a silent prayer to whoever listens, opened it.

He lifted free a small black bottle. The ink was thick and black. The label simply read…words. He set this aside and lifted out the pen. The nub glittered in the light from the window. That light was brighter, but he hardly noticed. The dust motes had disappeared, as well. He placed the pen on the floor beside the ink and reached into the box for the final item.

It was a sheaf of paper, white and empty, nothing but potential. He stood slowly, grabbing the pen, and the ink. He turned to the table. There was a soft glow of multi-hued light. He glanced at the window and smiled. The peacock winked back at him. The tree behind the plumage had come to life with greens and browns. The dresser stood on four good legs, and the rug covered the hardwood, nearly touching the walls on every side, it’s pattern complex and intriguing, glowing with captured light.

He sat at the table, opened the bottle, and dipped the pen. He tapped his lip thoughtfully with his index finger, caught just the right image from his dreams, and began to write. Beyond the window, the world hovered and fretted. Icy, numbing talons of reality raked at the walls and scraped the colored glass. Words dripped from the pen, and the hours passed. Until the light faded, and he could not see to follow one word with another.

He sat for a while in the darkness. The moon tried to cut through the colored glass, but it was pale and when he tried to write by that light, the words were washed out and gray. He capped the ink, lifted the paper and the pen, and carried them reverently to the chest. He carefully set aside the pages he’d filled, and placed the rest in the chest. Then he returned the bottle, and the pen, and closed the lid. The lock snapped tight, and he slid the key out of sight with a wistful flip of his wrist.

He stepped to the window and undid the hasp that locked it tight. It slid up easily, despite its age. Already a sheen of dust coated the table, and the dresser had canted to one side, but he paid no attention. He slid his hand out the window, high above the streets, and released the pages. The words floated on the evening breeze, larger motes in a larger universe, seeking other eyes. Seeking release. He took a last sip of the wine and placed the glass on the windowsill, where cobwebs already bound it to the wood.

He closed the window, flipped the latch closed, and stared through the grime encrusted glass into the pitch black of the night. Then, without a backward glance, he turned away, walked to the door, and pulled it open, stepping through to the stairs leading down. The door closed behind him as he descended. Already the traffic and the voices, the TV in the next room and the screaming laughter of the neighbors had begun to cut through his heart.

He looked up once, and thought of white birds, made of paper, soaring into the clouds.

31 October, 2006 © David Niall Wilson

by Dick Hill

Okay, it’s not jazz this time, though jazz did trigger this little riff, for what it’s worth. I’m not a trained singer, but I’ve always had iron pipes, and a pretty good musical sense. (Not a trained musician of any sort, but I’ve played one on tv. Well, on stage, anyway.) In years past I’ve had a fair number of roles in musicals. Some chorus work, but mostly character or even lead roles. It was easier for me to sing solo than to do chorus work, because of the freedom I had, well, the freedom I took, to tweak the song a bit so I could hit it with my vocal sweet spot so to speak. Capitalize on my strengths, such as they were, and avoid my weaknesses in front of an audience accepting of such practice.

Sometimes, though, I’ve found myself in a situation where “style” wasn’t an option, and I had to sing it as written. Some bit of an oratorio or a madrigal, some such hoary piece that was better known by the listeners than by me. In over my head, out of my depth. Either sing the piece as written and expose my inability to do so well, or rearrange it slightly to lie within reach of my strengths and do a good job handling a bad imitation of the original. Either way is bound to disappoint the knowledgeable, and unfortunately, there are knowledgeable folks out there. I attend a church, well, a Unitarian Universalist church, which is more like a debating society than a church, and find myself asked to sing such pieces occasionally. This is definitely a knowledgeable crowd, but I give it my best shot, comforting myself with thoughts of the humility I’m exercising. And hey, they’re Unitarians. Like that kid Mikey in the old commercial, they’ll eat anything, A not quite so accepting listener, however, would at the very least, pity my shortcomings, or if I tried to disguise them by rewriting, by making it up to suit myself, despise them, and walk out of the joint.

All this comes to mind because of a piece I recently recorded. In it, a rather stereotyped tough guy is speaking to the woman he eventually wins in the end. Part of the author’s rendering of this guy as a man’s man who can stand up to all villains and win the heart of the fair maiden is to make him an ex-Marine. Fairly widely accepted shorthand for tough, capable, manly man. As an ex-jarhead myself, I generally have no problem with that characterization. Fuckin’ A, straight shit, USMC, Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children. I’ll buy into that any day, and even do what I can to spread the legend. HOOrah. However, this author goes on to have the guy explaining the necessity of a tough decision to the heroine by relating a combat story. One where he and the other members of his squad of hard-bitten elites left wounded comrades crying out for help in the jungle because a platoon, or maybe it was a company, of NVA were closing in. Marines do not, I repeat, do not, leave their wounded behind. It’s an article of faith. Part of life. I imagine it has happened some time or other, but any Marine who acted that way would not pull the incident out and use it as an illustration of hard-headed realism, or whatever the hell it was the author was shooting for. It would have been a gnawing shameful secret that ate at the guy’s gut and colored his entire life in dark murky grays. (Which would have made for a far more interesting story) Any Marine who came across that passage would be likely to toss that book, the same way any classical music lover would likely walk out of the joint if I tried my bush-league Broadway-Vegas stylings on the bass-baritone solos from Handel’s Messiah. Hell, I’m not even sure if I spelled Handel right, (Haendel?). I sure as hell can’t sing his stuff.

Guess what I’m saying is, even fiction writers have to hew to a certain level of accepted truth. Fail to do so at your own peril. Even more appalling is failure to fact-check and edit carefully in non-fiction. (Funny how our brains work, mine leading me to this next story of non-factual facts, which I’d all but forgotten.) Tun’s Tavern, 10 November 1775, Philadelphia is a date any jarhead knows as well as his own birthday, and probably better than his or her spouses. It’s the birthday of the Marine Corps. Can you imagine my shock, some years back, to be recording a non-fiction history of the Corps that started off by getting that date wrong? By a fair number of years? I informed the publisher I could not and would not record the piece as it stood. It went back for fact checking and further editing, leaving me to wonder why in hell that hadn’t happened first, and what would have happened if the reader hadn’t known better. They held up the print edition too. Maybe there’s less effort to fact check and edit these days than there is to market. There’s certainly a world of difference between the bulk of what I see nowadays and the beautifully flowing, mistake free books I’ve taped by Faulkner, say, or Twain.

I’ve also come across numerous passages in the many outdoors books, or thrillers, or police procedurals, where authors have described simply impossible feats of marksmanship or physical prowess in a book that isn’t written in the style of an over the top, mythically gifted kind of thing, but seems instead to want to be taken as true life, gritty realism. You lose the grit and the realism when suddenly your anti-hero becomes super-hero.

So write about what you know, and check what you write for accuracy and feasibility. Then check it again. Don’t have much more to offer than that I’m afraid, and won’t have a chance to try to do better. Things have been incredibly busy in the studio, more work than I’ve ever had, and absolutely no time to do anything BUT work for weeks now. However, part of the work involves doing a little checking myself, a bit of research, not for facts, but for pronunciations. And that led me to a phone call today checking pronunciations of various wise-guy’s names with a source given me by the author of a soon-to-be-released non-fiction book. A very helpful, amiable fellow who, among a life full of other crimes, had happened to kill six people. Real life guy every bit as colorful as anything I’ve ever seen in a Scorcese flick or on HBO. Also bright and funny. Way cool.

So that’s all I’ve got this week, and even that may be of questionable value. I may be fulla’ shit. Often am.

–Dick Hill

I’m several hours late putting this up. Sorry ’bout that; Blogger has been giving me errors that haven’t allowed me to post.

I figured for this month’s Halloween treat, I’d post an excerpt from my mostest favoritest of my tales, “Fugue Devil,” written in 1991, based on the most terrifying nightmare I ever had a kid. The narrator is a kid from a dysfunctional family; the setting is the Appalachians of southern Virginia, circa 1974. The full tale may be found in my collection, The Last Trumpet.

Fugue Devil

Ronnie showed up at twenty minutes till midnight. I’d already put on my coat and gone outside to wait for him.

“This is it, man,” he said. “I think we’re crazy.”

“You scared?”

“Naw, man. Well…actually…how about you?”

“Kinda.”

“Yeah.” He lit a Winchester and gave me one.

We headed out of my yard, into the woods, and onto the trail that led to Mr. Miller’s field, about half a mile distant. Our footsteps crunched loudly in the dry leaves. Far in the distance, the cries of whippoorwills and ground owls echoed like mournful choirs.

“You got the stuff?”

“I got it.”

“You don’t suppose we’ll have a bad trip or anything, do you?”

“I don’t think so.”

I actually had no idea how the pot would affect me.

We made our way through the limbs that slapped at our faces and clothes. Every now and again, I’d peer up toward the mountain’s summit, trying to catch a glimpse of Sherry’s house, but here there were too many trees in the way.

“Talk to Sherry any more?”

“Not really,” I said. “I sure wish she was here now, though. Except that she probably wouldn’t go for the pot, huh?”

“I doubt it. But I wish Stephanie was here, too. We could double-date.”

“Be great, wouldn’t it?”

“God, yes. I’d let Stephanie shit on my face just to see where it comes from.”

“Man, you’re sick!”

“But it’s a good kind of sick.”

I laughed. The cool night air felt wonderful, revitalizing. Out here with Ronnie, I could almost forget everything that had happened. Even Mom’s leaving didn’t seem quite so bad. Tomorrow, things would work out. Tonight, I had me a demon to watch.

Ahead, I could see a break in the trees and a wide, misty gray space beyond. To our right, the small white shape of Mr. Miller’s farmhouse nestled in a shallow valley, pale smoke rolling from its chimney. All the lights were off.

We waded through the tall grass to a circular mound about twenty feet in diameter. We cleared a space at the top and sat down, facing northwest. Copper Peak rose above the ridge before us. To the left, out in the distance, a scant few lights twinkled in Beckham.

I reached into my pocket and withdrew the joint. I held it up for Ronnie to see.

“Ready to burn it?”

“Yeah,” he said. “What time is it?”

“A couple of minutes till midnight.”

“Do it.”

I placed the joint between my lips, flicked the lighter, and touched it to the tip. I sucked in a deep lungful of sweet-tasting smoke. I’d heard you were supposed to hold it in; but the smoke seemed to expand inside my chest, and, a second later, I coughed it out in a big gray cloudburst.

Ronnie took the joint from me and puffed it tentatively. Then he drew in a long breath. He also coughed it up immediately.

I tried again, and this time I was able to hold the smoke in longer. My throat burned, but the sensation was not unpleasant. When I blew the smoke out, a sudden dizziness nearly sent me reeling.

We passed the joint back and forth several times, each drag of smoke making me feel more lightheaded. I began to notice an almost subliminal humming sound around me. When I looked at my feet, they seemed to be a mile away. My body was anchored on the ground, but the rest of me-my spirit-floated freely, looking down.

“Jesus,” Ronnie whispered. “I feel weird.”

“Yeah. It’s kind of neat.”

“Look at the stars.”

I peered at the sky. A few thin clouds drifted past a brilliant starfield, and a three-quarter moon hovered above the ridge. Out toward Copper Peak, I glimpsed a flicker of light, but my eyes were slow to focus. Making my body obey my commands seemed a supreme act of will. The joint, almost gone now, came back for a final drag. I sucked the smoke in and tossed the roach into the tall grass.

“What the hell is that?” Ronnie asked, pointing to the northwest.

The light I had seen on Copper Peak was now rising into the sky, a tiny golden globe moving up into the heavens. As it ascended, it began to zoom back and forth in a zigzag pattern, traversing the sky from horizon to horizon. It moved quickly, soundlessly; within a matter of seconds, it reached a zenith directly over our heads.

“My God…that’s it!” Ronnie whispered.

“You’re full of shit.”

“LOOK AT IT!”

I had to struggle to keep my eyes on the ball of light. But now I could see that it was trailing sparks, and, in its heart, something dark was taking form. A pattern of limbs emerged, like a distorted fetus within a fiery amniotic sac. A distinct figure was beginning to take shape: something with arms and legs, and there was something else up there with it.

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

“Is it the grass, man? Is it making us see things?”

“You don’t hallucinate from grass. And we’re both seeing the same thing.”

“Christ. Do you know what this means?”

“It means it’s real. Man, it’s real!”

“It means we’re dead, Higgins. We’re fucking dead!”

The brilliant shape disappeared over the ridge behind us. I could see a wispy trail of black smoke, like the remnants of nonsensical skywriting. Within moments, the smoke had dissipated in the breeze. We had only our memories as evidence we’d seen anything at all.

“If you know about it, it knows about you,” Ronnie said. “And if you see it, it will come for you.”

Without a word, we simultaneously turned and galloped down the hill toward the woods. My feet kicked the earth, seemingly hundreds of feet below, my head swimming in a murky pool of unreality. As I ran, I forgot where I was, knowing only that I had to run, to hide, to escape. When we reached the woods, we tore through the tree limbs as if they were shadows, ignoring the cuts and lashes we received. I may have tripped and fallen, perhaps more than once, but I remembered nothing more until I reached the relative safety of my backyard.

We hurtled into the yard, gasping and panting. Our eyes scanned the sky, the woods, and our ears strained to catch the slightest hint of movement anywhere around us.

“It’s out there, Mike. What are we going to do?”

“How can we make it leave us alone?”

“There is no way.”

“What are we going to do?”

“I gotta get home.”

“We better stay together. You can’t take off alone.”

“You’ll let me stay here tonight?”

“Yeah, I guess so. I don’t want to be alone.”

“Let’s get the hell inside, then.”

We turned and trotted up to the back door. I was about to open it when I heard a rumble and saw lights coming up the driveway. It took a moment for me to realize it was a car.

It was Tammy coming home in Dad’s LTD. She parked beneath the back deck, switched off the engine, and opened the door to climb out.

It was then that I heard a heavy crunching sound in the woods on the other side of the driveway. A slow, deliberate tread, approaching the house, accompanied by a low snuffling sound. My heart slammed into overdrive.

Tammy shut off the headlights, submerging the driveway in almost total darkness. The crunching sounds drew nearer.

“Tammy, turn the lights back on!” I cried. “No…get up here! Hurry up, get the hell up here!”

“What are you yelling about?”

Ronnie joined in, “Just hurry! Come on!”

She began climbing the steps. I looked past her into the woods, toward the source of the heavy footsteps.

High above the ground, I saw what appeared to be a pair of glowing, golden eyes staring at me from the cover of the trees. They moved back and forth slowly, as if sizing me up.

I screamed. A moment later, Ronnie saw them. He screamed too.

“Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with you?” Tammy asked as she reached the top of the stairs. “Are you nuts?”

“It’s out there!” Ronnie cried. “It’s seen us!”

“What are you talking about?”

My tongue was frozen. I gaped stupidly at Tammy, unable to explain. The footsteps began to recede into the woods. She must have heard them because she turned to scan the darkness, a curious look on her face.

For now, the thing was gone.

But it would be back.

#

–Mark Rainey

By Chet Williamson

Politics creates many stupid and ugly things, but none more stupid and ugly that the latest contretemps in the Virginia Senate race between Republican Senator George Allen and his Democratic challenger Jim Webb. I’m not going to go into either Allen or Webb’s background or political beliefs. All you need to know as writers and readers is this – and it is everything:

Allen’s campaign has distributed a press release suggesting that Jim Webb is unfit to serve in public office because he has written fiction that contains unpleasant characters.

Yes, you read that right. The release is entitled “Webb’s Weird World,” with the lead: “The Author’s Disturbing Writings Show a Continued Pattern of Demeaning Women.” The Allen campaign sludge writer starts out with the following points, bulleted, if you please:

· Some of Webb’s writings are very disturbing for a candidate hoping to represent the families of Virginians in the U.S. Senate.

· Many excellent books about the United States military and wartime service accomplish their purposes, and even win awards, without systematically demeaning women, and without dehumanizing women, men and even children.

· Webb’s novels disturbingly and consistently – indeed, almost uniformly – portray women as servile, subordinate, inept, incompetent, promiscuous, perverted, or some combination of these. In novel after novel, Webb assigns his female characters base, negative characteristics. In thousands of pages of fiction penned by Webb, there are few if any strong, admirable women or positive female role models.

Now first of all, this means that some poor Allen staffer had to go through all those thousands and thousands of perverted pages penned by Webb, pulling out the most salacious passages he or she could find – pulling them out not only of the book, but out of context as well. The bullets continue to fly:

· Why does Jim Webb refuse to portray women in a respectful, positive light, whether in his non-fiction concerning their role in the military, or in his provocative novels? How can women trust him to represent their views in the Senate when chauvinistic attitudes and sexually exploitive references run throughout his fiction and non-fiction writings?

· Most Virginians and Americans would find passages such as those below shocking, especially coming from the pen of someone who seeks the privilege of serving in the United States Senate, one of the highest offices in the land.

Now it’s time to bring out the big guns, and the press release continues with ten passages from five of Webb’s novels of the Vietnam War published between 1978 and 2001 by such purveyors of filth as William Morrow, Prentice-Hall, Bantam Books, Doubleday, and the Naval Institute Press. The scenes are pretty typical of military adventure fiction, describing the activities of strippers, various infidelities, soldiers using coarse language to describe women, and men in prison turning to gay sex, as well as a few coy descriptions of young men losing their virginity.

There’s also a scene in which a character states: “We’re on our way to becoming the world’s recreational center, a nation not to be taken seriously. Where are we still the undisputed leader? Music. Movies. Fast food. Drugs. . . . the billboards fifty years from now as you come over the bridge and stop at the tollbooths outside Manhattan: A smiling beautiful naked woman, and the sign saying AMERICAN ASS IS OUR MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCT.”

But the passage that seems to be causing the biggest to-do among those kissing the asses of the “value voters” is a scene in which a South Asian father greets his toddler son by turning him upside down, “and put(ting) the boy’s penis in his mouth.” Webb actually saw this occur in a slum in Bangkok, and describes it as a local, non-sexual sign of affection from parent to child. Of course, there is no such context in the excerpted passage. If you want to read all of these excerpts carefully chosen for maximum titillation, slither on over to the slimy URL of the Drudge Report (and don’t pretend you don’t have it bookmarked).

Some Americans (those you can fool all of the time) might find the passages shocking; most Americans (those you can fool part of the time) might find them slightly shocking taken out of context as they are here; but people who are intelligent and literate (those you can hardly fool at all) will not be shocked at all, because they realize that a writer’s fictional characters are not the writer.

Let me say that again for the dim-witted among us: A writer’s fictional characters are not the writer.

Thomas Harris does not cut slices of brain from people’s skulls and sauté them.

Robert Bloch did not stab nude young women in showers.

Stephen King has never attacked his wife and child with an axe.

Joe Lansdale has never killed a woman and then had sex with her corpse in the back seat of a car at a drive-in movie.

I never assassinated Ronald Reagan or raped a woman with a knife or released a universally toxic disease upon the world or did any of the other things that certain people have done in my fiction.

And I’ll tell you something else: John Updike is not Rabbit Angstrom, Philip Roth is not Nathan Zuckerman, Fyodor Dostoevsky was not Raskolnikov, and Herman Melville was not Captain Ahab.

These were all literary characters created by their authors in order to tell a story and try and reveal something about the nature of humanity, good and evil and in-between. Writers create characters with flaws, with hatreds, with prejudices and bigotry. These characters might use the N-word for African-Americans or the F-word for gays or the C-word for women. These characters might beat up their wives or sexually abuse children or kill innocent people, but I’ll bet you that in the fiction of James Webb or any of the other writers that I’ve mentioned, myself included, that these things are not looked on as admirable qualities, though they may be looked on as the norm in some sub-sets of society.

This isn’t to say that writers aren’t to be judged and considered by their work. If writers are honest, they’ll admit that their world-view may be found in almost everything they write. But that view can’t be defined by a few sentences taken out of context. If it were, then the Bible would have to be considered one of the most bigoted, misogynistic, hateful, and perverse volumes ever written.

You cannot – you cannot – judge any writer, especially of fiction, by a few sentences carefully chosen to enrage and incite. That is unfair and dishonest and immoral.

And if you can’t understand that, then you are as dumb as a brick and deserve to have as your Senator somebody whose staff uses the kind of tactics that Allen’s staff does.

The odd thing is that this particular senatorial race is tight, but it’s not a blowout. It’s not like Allen is getting his ass tromped in Virginia the way that Santorum is in Pennsylvania. So why is the Allen campaign so desperate that they have to resort to this kind of non-issue?

And it is a non-issue. The inference that the personal character of a creative artist is equivalent to that of his most despicable creations shows that these idiots literally cannot tell fact from fiction. This isn’t an attack on Webb’s “character” – it’s an attack on his characters, and the better job that he’s done of purposefully creating unsavory ones, the more he’s damned. Using that twisted logic, the better he is at his job, the worse person he is.

In that kind of warped and, yes, perverted universe, every one of us who writes horror – or writes any fiction – is just as bad as his worst villain. Whether you’re Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, if you’re a writer or a reader of fiction, you should spring to Webb’s defense, at least on this issue. The Thought Police are just around the corner, folks. Time to throw up the barricades.

Webb said yesterday that ”The duty of a writer is to illuminate the surroundings.” Writers, like all artists, illuminate sometimes through light and sometimes through darkness. If it were up to the Allen purity brigade, torches raised high, ready to burn the filthy monster of fiction in its lair, there would be no darkness, nor even a simulacrum of the same. Every word we write would have to be censored inside our heads for fear that it might someday come back to haunt us, redefined as “Entartete Kunst,” as it was termed in 1930s Germany, degenerate art that is in itself proof of deviance or clinical mental illness in its creator.

And we know what happens to the deviant and the clinically mentally ill, don’t we?

I wish I lived in Virginia so I could vote for Jim Webb.

– Chet Williamson

I’m an October baby. My parents tell me I ran late just to make sure I landed close to Halloween, though I think it’s just a lifelong habit of moseying. Look up at the wall clock on my birthday and you’ll see that Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show has just rolled into town a few hours ago, just as it does every year. Every year, I’m sitting up at midnight, hoping a kid named Nightshade will wander by and waiting for that crumpled flyer to wrap around my shoe.

Maybe it was inevitable I’d write this sort of thing. There are a lot of October babies, a lot of kids blowing out candles in the shadow of the Halloween tree. Most of them pick a road with fewer cobwebs and shadows, and I wish them joy of it. Me, I’ve got something else in mind.

All that being said, my contribution to this month’s storytelling is a new story, chosen out of equal parts sympathy for the subject matter and season and the realization that I don’t think I’ve got anything available to reprint that’s less than 7000 words long. So, instead, here’s something fun-sized.

Take a bite.

********************

They huddled in the bathroom on the second floor, a family of three, afraid.

Tap. Tap tap. Tap.

The sounds came from all over the house. Everywhere glass faced the outside, they could hear the delicate impact of small branches tap tap tapping, trying to find their way in. That was why they had chosen the bathroom to flee to. It, of all the rooms, had no windows.

Tap. Thump. Tap tap.

The Millers had bought the house two months previously, twenty percent down and the rest financed at five and a quarter percent. Their daughter, wide-eyed and fey at six years old, hadn’t liked it much, but she hadn’t liked any of the thirty-odd houses they’d seen, and this one had much to recommend it. High ceilings, a spacious kitchen, a master bath suite with a garden tub – and all for a pleasantly low price. The yard was unkempt, but the Millers figured that the previous owner simply hadn’t had time to keep it up. Mrs. Miller asked the real estate agent, who talked about the benefits of the gas fireplace in the rumpus room instead.

Thump. Tappity thump. Crash.

“I don’t like this house,” the little girl had said, and tugged on the real estate agent’s sleeve. “Is it haunted?”

He laughed, nervously. “The house? Absolutely not. I can promise you this house is not haunted.”

Mr. Miller took his daughter’s hand. “See, honey? No ghosts here.”

“No ghosts in the house,” the agent echoed.

The little girl looked at him. “Not yet,” she said, and stared until he looked away.

“Kids,” Mrs. Miller said with a laugh. “Such imaginations.”

Thump. Crash tinkle tap tappity rustle.

The move had been swift and pleasant, and the installation of the Millers – father, mother, and recalcitrant daughter, too - had gone off without a hitch. Utilities were connected, services arranged, and neighbors nodded to, all in short order.

All that remained was the lawn, which Mr. Miller found himself curiously disinterested in working on.

Thump. Thump crash rustle tap. A different tap now, wood on wood, right outside the bathroom door.

“Dear, when are you going to mow the lawn?” Mrs. Miller had asked her husband on a cloudy and grim Sunday morning. “It’s not going to take care of itself.”

“Later,” he had answered, and even meant it.

Later came. Later went. And that night, the little girl complained of branches tapping on her window.

Tap. Tap tap. Crash rustle crash thump.

Days passed. The tapping got louder, and more frequent. Mrs. Miller heard it now, too, though Mr. Miller swore he never did, or blamed it on the wind. The lawn stayed unmowed. Walking to the mailbox became a trick. Weeds stretched themselves across the sidewalk to trip the unwary. Branches seemed to swing low in the breeze to take accidental pokes at eyes.

Tap. Tap creak creak.

Neighbors tsk-tsked at the state of the property. Weeds grew up, thick and tall. Mrs. Miller stopped waving to the neighbors, and started nagging Mr. Miller about how unpleasant the house had become, even with new carpet and fresh paint in the upstairs bedrooms. Her husband pooh-poohed her. It was all coincidence, or something seasonal, or something to that effect. Of this, he was sure. The little girl listened to them debate over dinner, and shook her head.

“The house isn’t haunted,” she said thoughtfully. “The rest of the place is. That’s why the lawn is acting funny. We should leave.”

“We’re not going to leave, honey,” Mr. Miller said. “That would be silly. It’s just the lawn. I’ll mow it tomorrow. Or I’ll hire someone to do it, and it will all be fine. You’ll see.”

“You do that, dear,” Mrs. Miller said. “That would be very nice.”

That had been yesterday.

Tap. Rustle rustle. Scratch, scratch, scratch, just outside in the hall.

Then, silence.

“How strong is the lock, honey?” Mrs. Miller asked, her arms around her daughter, her voice ever so slightly strained.

“I don’t think it matters, dear,” he replied, and held her as the first tendrils of green crept underneath the door.

by Janet Berliner

I thought this story would be appropriate for the season. Next month I’ll be back with that promised scoop on my work with Michael Crichton. I hope you enjoy. –J.

———-

Knit one, purl one.

Castoff.

The sweater was finished.

Stretching, Bethany rubbed the small of her back and stared at the empty street outside her window, her ears tuned for the crunch of his footsteps in the snow that had been falling all night. “Comeback to me, Nicholas,” she whispered, swearing that if he had not returned by morning she would unravel the last row of the right sleeve and go on knitting him, this time weaving one of her Cajun grandmother’s curses into each tiny woolen loop. She would punish him for the broken dreams and the worthless promises. He had been strong once, in body and spirit. That was before he had decided to come to New York; dragging her here from the bayou; telling her that if she did not come she would lose him. Now the bottle had claimed his soul and she had lost him any way. She had nothing left to cling to, nothing except the knitting and the waiting and the knowledge that her curses would reach out and touch him, no matter where he had gone.

Knit one, purl one.

Bethany watched the sleeve grow, counting one extra inch, then a second and third, pushing the stitches across the needle like rosary beads sending prayers to the ears of God. Only Bethany’s god was a different one; it was guided by her need for vengeance.

When her knitting was done, Bethany went out into the Bowery. From dawn until dusk and through the night, pausing neither for food nor rest, she haunted the alleys, searching for Nicholas in the unshaven faces of every broken down bum she could find. She did not give up until that moment of greatest darkness, that instant shortly before the dawn when the night seemed to take a deep breath and briefly renew its losing battle against the encroachment of daylight.

Tired and hungry and cold, her eyes raw from the debris being whipped up by the wind and her jacket gaping open over Nick’s bulky sweater, it’s right sleeve so long that it had to be doubled up into her armpit, she started for home.

But picturing the dingy room she had shared first with Nicholas then with her loneliness and her knitting, Bethany stood still. That wasn’t home. She couldn’t go back there, not now, not without even the knitting to sustain her. There was nothing in that room she could not live without and she had enough money in her pocket to take a bus to her real home. She was going back to the bayou where she belonged. Now, before she had time to change her mind.

“I’m leaving, Nicholas.”

She had not meant to say the words aloud, to yell them and let the echo against the buildings and flow into the sour-smelling doorways. She had meant only to weave the last of her curses into each syllable of his name.

Angrily she removed her jacket and drew Nick’s sweater over her head. Holding it with the tips of her fingers as if it were a dead roach, she headed for the nearest garbage can. Almost without breaking her stride, she lifted the lid and dropped the sweater inside. She would leave it for one of the unwashed creatures hovering in the shadows, a vulture whose only raison d’etre was the anticipation of disemboweling the Bowery’s refuse. She and her gods had done their work; that she would never see what she had rocked, she was going home.

Half listening for the rattle of aluminum behind her, Bethany walked on. The scavenger moved quickly; she had hardly taken a dozen steps before she heard the sounds of his rummaging in the trash. She hesitated; stopped; shivered in the damp chill.

Turning around, she watched the man who listed into the glare of the streetlight, his gait singular, lopsided, pushed askew by the disproportionate length of his right arm. Balancing himself with difficulty, he pushed his arms through the sleeves of the sweater and pulled it over his head. When it was on he stroked it, as if he could not quite believe his new good fortune.

Suddenly, he felt her there. Knew it was she who had done this to him. He raised his head and she saw his eyes. They were filled with questions and pleading with terror.

Slowly, lurching, Nicholas moved toward her.

Smiling, she let him advance. Allowed him to hope. Watched the long fingers of his right hand brush the wine-spattered sidewalk. When he was close enough to touch her, he lifted his elongated right arm and held it out to her in a gesture of supplication.

“You really should have come back to me, Nicholas,” she said, admiring the perfect fit of the sleeve and the stitches on the cuff that encircled his distended wrist. “You really should have come home.”

Stan Ridgley

Let me wax reasonably eloquent about a group of folks I shall call “young writers.”

And woven into my thoughts on Young Writers, I’d like to make a related point concerning what I believe to be the magic inherent in books, whether fiction or non-fiction.

To many people, books are magic things.

To me, as well. I grew up thinking they were magical.

Asimov and Heinlein, MacLean and Fleming.

These were the major literary influences on me as a young man enamored of science fiction and adventure. Not Hemingway or Fitzgerald. And I have a special place in my memory reserved for Fred Reinfeld, the chess-book author, who taught me more about logic and systems analysis than any professor ever did.

The one thing all of these books had in common in their effect on me was what I perceived as a magical effect of concentrated psychic power.

Bear with me.

I accept a good novel—and even some of the bad ones—as the concentrated psychic power of a writer and his coterie of editors and proofers, whomever they may be.

Yes, concentrated psychic power, for lack of a better terminology (or terminology that may be better, but with which I am unacquainted).
Concentrated psychic power.

Think of it this way. A writer spends a year or more mining the imagination for a story, teasing it out, then painstakingly day-by-day spinning it onto the pages. Tightening it, compressing it into the pages. Compressing it until all of this psychic energy strains for release.

Enter, the reader.

The reader releases this energy.

The reader absorbs this year’s worth of concentrated psychic energy in the space of, say, two or three days of steady reading.

Think of it. That is powerful.

What a heady experience!

Soaking up a year of psychic energy in a fraction of the time it took to expend it. That is truly the magical aspect of books, this compression of imagination and its sudden release. In the case of the masters, it can be the compression of genius.

And, of course there is much more that is magic about a good story, but I think that this compression and sudden release is one aspect that plays well for me.

Still, as wonderful as it is, this magical effect is often lost on young writers. They do not understand that stories—novels—are labors of labor. They constitute art and craft. The painstaking search for the exactly right word, the careful ordering of sequential things for nothing more than contrapuntal effect, the distillation of dialogue to its crystalline essence, the hurting process of cutting prose that one once thought was grand but now comes across as little more than empty posturing.

The fattening-up and the trimming away that constitutes much of published writing. The hard decisions of editors, this give-and-take between author and editor. Much of that is alien to young writers.

“Don’t touch my prose!”

Young writers oftentimes believe that the creative process must be pure. It must be pristine, the story springing from the muse, whole and in finished form. Spontaneity is confused with genius and, at its triumphant moment, must not be tampered with by halting, doubtful second thoughts.

The novel, they suppose, is written from start to finish . . . in a kind of one great swoosh. If the would-be author feels inspiration today. If the workspace is adequate. And if enough research has been done.

Forget the novel for a moment. Think, instead, of a basic analysis paper. A memo.

The young writer usually writes the analysis paper from start to finish. There is no such thing as a first “draft.” Well, there is, but it’s quite often the only draft.

And always, always, there is the sense that the words on the page are stilted enemies of the young person who wrote them. The discomfort of the author is palpable, and one can almost feel angst oozing from every ill-chosen phrase. You sense that the author knew what he or she was trying to say, was bursting to say.

But just did not say it.

And this is a shame, because young writers bring so much enthusiasm to the table, and so little discipline. They are capable of producing much that is magical, fresh, new. But the discipline of art is not there. I speak not of all young writers, of course, but many of them.

I have waded through volumes of student writing in the past 10 years, much of it from schools around the country, including St. John’s, Yale, Pennsylvania, Duke, Claremont McKenna, Wabash College, and Dartmouth.
Enthusiasm, yes.

Exuberance, doubtless.

But the overwhelming sense I get is that many college students do not understand what words are supposed to do on the page for them. They do not understand precise meanings, nuance, or how word order can affect the sound of a sentence on the page. They show no fascination with and love of words. They simply do not know how to use the tools of the writer’s trade.

Okay, I speak in generalities. There are exceptions, and it is in the nature of generalities for there to be exceptions.

In my experience, there are grand and overarching remedies for these vague criticisms I offer.

First, “young writers” would do well to write in simple declarative sentences. No adjectives, no adverbs. No crutches. Sentences fleeced bare. This strikes me as a tutorial sufficient to return meaning to the printed page. Then, they may return anon to add the necessary, to excise the unnecessary, to polish and maybe to add a finial or two to a skeletal first draft.

Good advice, I think, but in my experience, this rarely happens.

Granted, I am talking business writing here, but the principles are the same. We are, after all, talking about clear communication, whether the subject matter is a “coming of age” story or a memo to the company president recommending a switch from low-cost to a differentiation strategy.

Never one to resist swimming against a tide, I do my best to rectify this in my own small way. The ability to reason logically and express clearly thought-out conclusions in writing is essential in the business world, and I recommend the dictates of Strunk and White quite often.

“Who’s that?”

“You’ve never heard of Strunk and White?”

Maybe three people say they’ve heard of Strunk and White.

The Elements of Style.

Hmmm, what does this portend for the future of writing in America?

Maybe it portends nothing more than that quite soon I shall be alone in recommending this Strunk and White book, which may well be out of print in due course. Replaced by…. what?

The Easy-Does-It Writers Manual?

The Grammar-Free Guide to Good Writing?

No More Tears: A Writer’s Guide?

Words? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Words?

Ah, for the students to actually open themselves up to receipt of suggestions. Not criticism, mind you, because that cuts against the notion that esteem should not be eroded. But suggestions, one here, another there.

The point of this short essay, I suppose, is that the font of magical good writing is generated somewhere in the writing of drafts, in the care taken in the writing process, in the investment of imagination.

It is conjured in the expression of passion in written form, leavened with care for the medium. Enough care to make that medium invisible to the reader and subordinate to the message, rather than part of the message itself.

It is these things that render good writing invisible and allow the story to emerge. Without care and attention to punctilio, then the writing moves onto center stage in its muddy boots, intrusive and clunky, rough-edged and loud.

And whether it is a story or a business memo, the words should be invisible, the message itself conveyed in as straightforward a manner as possible.

I do not know if there is a “muse” out there, but I sometimes believe that the “muse” is a contrived excuse not to write . . . because the muse just ain’t there. Not for me. I confess that this little essay was written museless.

And surely this essay is bereft of any magic, save that which might be conjured in the mind of the reader, who might say to himself or herself: “Hmm, if nothing else, there was a minor point in this that made it worth my time.”

And that would truly be a magical result.

By
Richard Steinberg

It wasn’t a bad place.

But then places couldn’t be bad . . . or good for that matter. Places just were; and if bad things happened there, well, that was accident or equation as much as anything else. The coming together of opposing moments where the relative decent got momentarily swamped by the comparative coarse.

And like dye ruining a fabric when the nozzle comes off unexpectedly, the stain left was considered: “bad.”

But time and tide are the ultimate stain removers. Memories fade, the landscape changes, revisions replace fact, and evil places of loss and pain morph into daycare centers and multiplexes.

Everywhere but in the hearts of those who knew.

So places weren’t evil.

Only hearts were.

Are.

And in the heart of a place that wasn’t evil, three lives were; or were not depending on how honest they were going to be that day.

The tall woman – newest to this place – stood among the spread cotton spider webs, plastic skulls, candy spiders, candles that dripped wax through screaming eyes of contorted faces, and sighed. Next, the office would insist on costumes for Halloween Day itself . . . still several weeks off. And as she went along with anything that didn’t require too great an effort at moral aerobics, she began to think about what she would reluctantly wear.

A Queen or Fairy Princess?

A spirit?

Maybe a pirate lass?

No. This year, if required, she would be truly creative with costume and coverings and dress up as someone . . . happy.

She knew she was beautiful. More accurately, she knew that others thought her beautiful; so many others over so many years that she now, at years past peak but short of prime, had come to accept it intellectually. And each night she would carefully plan the next day’s outfit, hair and shoes, in hopes of living up to others’ expectations of her beauty. Living up to all of everyone’s expectations of her, in fact.

So for her parents she was a ”good girl.”

For her husband – who she loved more than she needed to breathe – she was an ardent yet gentle lover who always healed and forgave.

For her children – now grown and gone, if still cherished shadowy images on the periphery of her life – she was a rock of strength and patience and omnipotent knowledge on how to live life . . . even if she’d never really lived it herself.

And for her bosses, she played the dutiful, conscientious, hard worker who always smiled (or briefly looking confused before smiling out of reflex) was always on time, and always accomplished what was, well . . . expected of her. She filled out her forms careful never to make a mistake (although slightly rolling her handwriting in what she thought of as messy, but which others found charming and feminine) was always seemingly cheerful, and decidedly managed.

Because in that dark and gooey place so deep within her it might never be found, only felt, she was terrified of what might happen if she ever lived a moment free of expectations and pretense.

But the expectations were of her beauty, and with it her happiness; so she would be “happy” this Halloween; and see just how long afterwards she could successfully wear the costume.

Until truth wore it away to her basic naked nothingness.

As she gracefully retreated to her workspace, she smiled at her office mate. The younger woman was gleefully adding a three-foot papier-mâché witch to the decorations; strategically draping the right amount of spider web over the figure’s shoulders. She stood, took a few steps back, then crouched down again to make an adjustment; aware of how the skirt slid up her thighs but smiling because she knew she had GREAT thighs and didn’t mind showing them . . . “accidentally.”

If beauty defined or was defining of the first woman, then rose-colored energy was the dominant force in this one. When excited, it would express itself through chirps and squeaks and twitters in her voice, eyes impossibly wide, a bounce in her step and her aspect. When tired, she would sag like an air mattress 85% full, still filled with cheery tones but wanting you to hear the all-in just beneath it; and while the steps would remain crisp they would also hesitate, just a little, as if the distance she had to go was unfathomable. Or maybe it wasn’t the distance, but the destination.

A thing she’d never really had.

Each morning she’d rise, stretch, dress tastefully sexy on a whim (and a budget) and greet the day with the ferociousness of a lion a limping gazelle in hopes of identifying her life’s destination.

And each evening she’d return to the too loud music, almost combative love-making, and outrageous horror or thriller videos, slightly depleted from not having found it.

But as the first woman had the gift/curse to be able to meet expectations, this one had that rarest ability to be wholly and completely within whatever moment she chose.

Right now, that meant decorating for Halloween.

She liked the holiday, more than Christmas and certainly more than her birthdays (since she feared losing her youth, despite being immersed in it.) On Halloween, you could transform yourself from a perennially middle class, mesh-stockings and leather mini skirted Heavy Metal Chick (who artfully and completely disguised herself as a businesswoman by day) into a bad-ass (but well intentioned) witch who could make everything alright for everyone.

Or maybe into a dark seductress whose very presence reduced all who gazed upon her to an over-awed desiring silence.

She got up, moving to the office counter to reposition the plush spider closer to the plastic skull that hovered over the bowl of candy, smiling as she worked.

Because whether those who came in saw her as a competent professional or dark seductress or wannabe rock groupie, they would look at the gently horrifying decorations and know, beyond doubt, that she had put them there.

That she existed.

In the end, that was enough.

The final member of the building’s management office stood in the vast underground parking lot, looking through the office’s windows at the first woman pretending not to check the mirror she kept in the top drawer of her desk, and at the other one too happily manipulating spiders to notice a lock of hair fall out of place, and sighed. These women (whom she liked) she saw as completely foreign. By nationality, certainly; but also as if they were foreign species . . . creatures from a universe this third woman had never known.

This woman had grown up amid the rubble of beauty; in a place where peace and choices and possibilities to be fulfilled or ignored simply did not exist. Her childhood had been one of pain (while enwrapped in her mother’s love) and wandering. Her adulthood one of existence and lost purpose. And now that adulthood was inexorably slipping into her senior years, she mourned for the loss of the things she’d never had.

Most importantly sustained contentment.

She had been beautiful in her youth, and could be again if it didn’t take so damned much energy. She’d been a creature of light and dreams – briefly, on a Tuesday, in the late afternoon – until she’d caught herself and banished it forever in favor of a sterner, less likely to bruise persona. Well, not banished exactly as much as put away in a locked place deep inside her that she could peek at now and again.

When no one was looking.

Sighing again, because all things important required two or more sighs, she headed into the office. All the while hoping someone would see the beautiful, energized, living woman beneath her chosen, beaten down exterior.

It wasn’t a bad or evil place.

Places weren’t bad or evil.

Only hearts were.

Are.

But consider: the building these women ran had 126 apartments of one, two or three bedrooms each. Usually about 85% occupied, there were – at any given time – about 250 people living in it. Another seven maintenance people, and the three in the office.

260 souls . . . and none of them quite complete.

There was the doctor on seven who hadn’t performed at the height of his skills in years simply because it was too much work to make the effort.

The executive on nine who was in her office exactly at eight, out exactly at four; who did exactly what she was supposed to do with nothing more or less . . . because she knew she would never be recognized for the genius that she was, so why should she try?

The dominatrix on three who wanted to be gently held and softly loved . . .

The retired soldier on five who missed (and felt guilty for) the feeling of being alive when he killed things . . .

The terminally ill tenant on eight who wanted to die but fought against death out of fear that nobody would notice when they did pass . . .

The single mother on six whose only prayer was for her children not to grow up to be her.

For the thirty-three years of its existence, the building had stood there and been home (almost exclusively) to chipped souls, or souls much like them. For thirty-three years, it had kept out the external rain and natural winds that blew so harshly, but could never match that going on within each apartment.

But as cause or recipient?

Either way, the place was bad.

But then places couldn’t be bad . . . or good for that matter. Places just were; and if bad things happened there, well, that was accident or equation as much as anything else. The coming together of opposing moments where the relative decent got momentarily swamped by the comparative coarse.

And like dye ruining a fabric when the nozzle comes off unexpectedly, the stain left was considered: “bad.”

Yet, couldn’t over three decades of soul wrenching stains change a place; transmute it like a piece of iron becoming magnetized after constant exposure to magnetic fields? And if it could, would it not begin to draw to it those decaying (however slightly or slowly) lives which gave it its ability to sap lives?

In ancient Kabala, the number 18 equals life. The building’s 126 apartments added up 1+2+6 = 9 or half-life. The building’s street address, 850, similarly added together equaled 13; the ultimate symbol of bad luck.

Was this a coincidence or some kind of graphic cosmic jest?

In the end, it didn’t matter. The woman on fourteen (which was actually thirteen, but the building’s designers had thought it bad taste to admit it) who had spent her life looking for affirmations in the eyes of men who could never give it to her, had died. Her apartment cleared of all traces; cleaned, painted, recarpeted. Cleansed in all ways of all things that didn’t really matter.

And a prospective new occupant walked down the building’s long entryway; feeling as though he was being swallowed by some measureless, barely conscious being. He was a salesman; a good one too, who had come to this town to prove the corporate evaluators wrong. To show them that he was more Willie Mays than Willie Loman.

And as the security door to the interior was buzzed open from within, he paused before moving into the pretty, but lifeless, lobby. Pausing just long enough to take in a deep breath of the disappointments, personal failures, and dreams – lost, misguided, gained but shouldn’t have been – that filled the air with their slightly sickly sweet scent.

And as he moved into the office filled with spider webs, skulls, and papier-mâché witches, he smiled for the first time in weeks.

Because in this vast urban confusion, amid the crowds and noise and chaos of a life lived underachieved and wanting . . . he knew he had finally found a home.

Since many of my fellow Storytellers are posting fiction this month, in celebration of Halloween, I wanted to play along. But I mostly write novels, with very little short fiction. I set myself a goal one weekend, a couple of weeks ago, and wrote two shorts–not quite short-shorts, but close, I think.

They’re very different in tone and intent, but both conceived and written, in first draft, in the same 36-hour period. I posted Staking a Claim yesterday at my regular blog, and saved the darker of the two for here:

The Cloud
by Jeff Mariotte

A vortex of vultures. Hundreds of them, maybe with a few ravens mixed in. Black, winged carrion-eaters, scavengers, spiraling in loose formation against the blue, blue sky, as if the valley was a tub and someone had pulled the plug and all the water, full of jagged black specks, whirlpooled down the drain.

#

Bradley hadn’t intentionally killed anything larger than a cricket since his twelfth summer. That summer, he had felt plunged into horrifying darkness, and he had inhabited that darkness fully. He had tried to limit his killing to wild creatures, but a couple of neighborhood cats had found themselves buried in vacant lots and under the roots of trees, along with assorted raccoons, squirrels, rabbits and the like.

He had lived in suburbia in those days, his parents the very definition of white middle class life. He had thought he’d follow in his dad’s footprints, wearing a tie, working in an office. Then, that summer, he had figured he’d be in prison by the time he was eighteen. Maybe get life, maybe the chair. That was what they used in those days, at least in the stories Brad (never Bradley, not at that age) had heard. They strapped you into a chair and sent electricity through it and smoke came out your ears as your brain cooked.

It hadn’t happened that way. Whatever he had been going through that summer, he had moved past it. Instead of taking him over, killing had lost its appeal. He had still fired guns from time to time, on ranges and in the service, but not at living things. Nor had he stabbed anything or twisted a furry little neck between his hands.

These days he lived in a small rural town. Unlike most of his neighbors, he didn’t own a firearm. He had come a long, long way from that twelfth summer.

He had farther yet to go.

#

The night before the cloud came through, Bradley had been reading his son’s math book (Benjamin was—coincidence?—twelve this year), trying to stay far enough ahead to help with his homework. He had been sitting at the dining room table, head nestled in his hands, the book open in front of him, numbers swimming before his eyes, when Benjamin came out of his bedroom. He stood, blinking sleepily, barefoot in plaid pajamas. The pillow had sculpted his light blond hair into abstract forms. “I forgot to tell you,” he said. He stifled a yawn while Bradley waited for the rest. “Mom called this afternoon. She wants to have me on Sunday for a picnic with Jerry’s family.”

Bradley had hemmed for a moment but then agreed, unable to come up with a legitimate reason why he shouldn’t. It was because of Suzanne that he lived here, out in the boondocks, in a small mobile home because that was all he could afford. When he had announced that he would be telecommuting instead of working in the office—he had followed his father’s path, that way—he hadn’t been fired, but his salary had been slashed considerably. But Suzanne’s family had always lived in the high desert. After their divorce had been finalized, she hadn’t wasted much time moving out here. To keep seeing Benjamin, Bradley had followed. It was Suzanne’s place, not his, and he had never truly felt comfortable there. For Benjamin’s sake, he tried. He could think of nothing he wouldn’t do for the boy.

The next day, he dropped Benjamin off at school, where Suzanne picked him up in the afternoon. That night, the cloud passed through.

#

They weren’t hard to find. The tornado of birds gave away their location. He hiked toward them carrying two rifles, a shotgun, and a revolver he had found in neighbors’ abandoned homes. He had emptied boxes of ammunition into his pockets to avoid the hard corners; the bullets clanking like change when he walked, the shells poking almost as much as boxes would have. And he’d have to sort it on the spot, he realized. Boxes would have been awkward, but he could have used a bag of some kind.

He wasn’t thinking clearly, that was all. Who could blame him?

#

Bradley watched the news on TV. No one knew what it was or how it did what it did, and experts debated even what the effects really were. Nor did the experts agree on how best to deal with it—whatever it was. Tactical nuclear weapons, some said. Inside America’s borders? others countered. Boots on the ground, that was the way to go. Search and destroy. Our armies had plenty of experience with house-to-house combat, after all.

Bradley’s response was to stay indoors for several days after the cloud passed—trying to reach Suzanne by phone every twenty minutes, then every hour—with the doors and windows closed, sealed off with plastic kitchen wrap and Scotch tape. He didn’t know if it would work. When the next morning came and he hadn’t died and developed an intense desire to eat human flesh, he guessed that maybe it had.

But not knowing what had happened to Benjamin drove him mad. He tried to watch TV or listen to the radio but they just kept running the same meaningless drivel, possibly of interest to those outside the cloud’s area of impact but not to him. He cleaned his kitchen, his bathroom, scrubbing until his arms hurt, his fingers became red and chapped. With the radio and TV off he heard strange noises, his mobile home groaning in the buffeting wind that had accompanied the cloud and that hadn’t ended, even though the cloud had dissipated (or moved on, press reports differed on this point too), and it sounded like someone trying to speak to him from the other side of the grave.

That Saturday, he decided it was safe to go outside. He drove to the home where Suzanne lived with her new husband Jerry, on the town’s wealthier west side. Suzanne’s family had been upper middle class, and Jerry’s was downright rich by local standards. Between the two families there must have been a couple dozen relatives in town. Their family picnics were legendary, thirty people, forty, sometimes more, with buckets of food and organized sports and games. No wonder Benjamin hadn’t wanted to miss this one, even though Sunday should have been his day with Bradley.

No one answered his knock. Hardly anyone showed on the streets at all, and when Bradley saw anyone he veered away. They were soldiers or they were the dead, he figured. He had no interest in meeting either one. Traffic lights cycled through their colors at empty intersections. On every block, Bradley saw carrion birds, perched on power poles or street lamps or roofs.

He couldn’t find Suzanne. He couldn’t find Jerry. Benjamin was with them, no doubt. Dead, alive, or somewhere in between, he didn’t know.

#

He loaded all the guns. It had been years since he’d fired one, but the Army had drummed the basics into him even though he never saw combat. He knew how to load one, how to aim, how to adjust for wind and distance, how to squeeze the trigger.

He had staked out a position on a rocky slope overlooking the meadow. He had guessed this was their general vicinity, although there were plenty of wide-open spaces around where a large family and assorted friends could congregate. The vultures had confirmed his hunch, pinpointing them precisely. Vultures could smell death.

From his vantage point, he was able to pick them off, one by one. They didn’t run away when the bullets hit. He blew out one’s brains that one dropped right into the lap of the woman next to him. She pushed him away and went on with her meal. No fried chicken at this picnic, no potato salad or carrot sticks or freshly baked peanut butter cookies.

Bradley steadied the barrel on a rock, aimed and fired. Another one fell. The birds flew around and around, in a virtual panic, smelling death and yet seeing too much movement to risk dropping down. Bradley thought he could smell the birds now, even as they sniffed the death down below. He felt like one of