Black Static Horror Magazine #1 Page 11

  A: Wouldn't it be better to break with the past and use a new flag and anthem?

  S: Your words are truly the farting of a cicada in the long summer night, my son! What about the beauty of tradition? Listen to the first lines of the Kimigayo, based on a poem written in the Heian Period 900 years ago: May the Emperor reign for thousands of years,/Until the pebble by age becomes a mighty rock/And moss forms on its surface. Is that not beautiful?

  A: Oh yes, master, I think that would prepare any teenager for life in the 21st Century.

  S: Exactly.

  A: Well, what about some of the role models who have tried to inspire today's youth? What has become of the entrepreneurs, Takafumi Horie of Livedoor and Yoshiaki Murakami of MAC?

  S: They have received their just rewards for their contributions to society, my young fruit pastille. Each received about two years in prison.

  A: On what grounds?

  S: Insider trading and abusing their positions of authority.

  A: But when politicians and the heads of large corporations are tried for the same offence, they always receive suspended sentences.

  S: The crimes of those two youngsters were much more heinous; they upset the established order of business. The stability of Japanese society depends on social conformity. It is best if all Japanese fit in and work in harmony with each other—and if they don't, we have another traditional saying: the nail that sticks up will be hammered down. Why be a pushy and troublesome entrepreneur, when you can work at a giant faceless corporation for fifty years and retire on a comfortable pension?

  A: That reminds me, Sensei. About this scandal over pension payment records...

  S: Don't even think about mentioning it, you snotty little punk.

  A: Sorry. Well, how about international relations? The Japanese are notorious for treating all foreigners with suspicion and mistrust, and naming them gaijin [literally, outsiders]?

  S: But we welcome foreigners and their funny ways!

  A: Then what about the furor surrounding this magazine published in February 2007—Kyogaku no Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu [Shocking Foreigner Crimes: the Underground Files]?

  S: Not all foreigners are Johnny Depp, my son. That magazine was purely presenting the facts: that if more foreigners come to Japan, then we should have more information concerning what they are doing here and how to relate with them. Such publications are highly educational.

  A: Educational? Articles like ‘You can identify Korean prostitutes because their cunts smell of Kimchi'?

  S: We are only trying to learn more about the outside world! Anyway, my young jolly roger, that magazine was withdrawn from sale after six weeks, because of complaints from trouble-making foreigners—that is, I mean, human rights bureaus.

  A: That one's gone, but what about the others such as the Joshi Gakusei Daraku Manual, which advises young girls on foreign penis sizes and shapes, and offers editorials saying foreigners are ‘junkies who have no money and demand a lot of sex'?

  S: You are missing the point. Did not the Education Minister warn against focusing upon human rights, saying it was like ‘eating too much butter'? But you are young, grasshopper, leave these things to your elders. Go back to that Western rock music on your ipop device thing. What modern rubbish are you listening to? The Beatles? The Carpenters?

  A: No, master. I think the band is called Status Quo.

  S: Ah, yes. I like the sound of that. You are indeed learning.

  Copyright © 2007 John Paul Catton

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  MY STONE DESIRE—Joel Lane

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  Joel has written two collections of weird fiction, The Earth Wire (Egerton Press) and The Lost District and Other Stories (Night Shade Books), as well as two novels, From Blue To Black and The Blue Mask (Serpent's Tail) and two collections of poems, The Edge of the Screen and Trouble in the Heartland (Arc). He has edited an anthology of subterranean horror stories, Beneath the Ground (Alchemy Press), and (with Steve Bishop) co-edited an anthology of crime and suspense stories, Birmingham Noir (Tindal Street Press). He is currently completing his third novel, Midnight Blue.

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  Some people join the police force to try and make a difference to society. Some do it to try and keep things the same. Some do it because they like beating people up—and they're the only ones who don't end up disappointed. I'm still not sure why I joined the force, or why I stayed in it for thirty years. But I think it had to do with needing to understand. Police work was about finding evidence and explaining. There was no room for the unknown, or for the complications that lead from one thing to all kinds of other things. I was young then, of course.

  When I started training for police work in Wolverhampton, I left home for the first time and rented a truly dreadful flat in Coseley, a few miles outside the city. It was part of a converted house that had once belonged to a fairly wealthy family. The exterior was still quite impressive, but the interior was largely plasterboard held in place by wood-chip wallpaper. The water-pipes had the ghost of a murdered child trapped inside them. The fuses regularly blew if two people in the house were cooking at the same time. Not that you could cook much on the tiny, sluggish Baby Belling cooker in the corner of my living-room.

  In the early days, I spent as much of my off-duty time in Wolverhampton as possible. There was a lot of good live music around at that time, blues and folk as well as the grinding industrial rock that would eventually be called heavy metal. I was on my way home from some gig or other, waiting in a frost-coated bus shelter for the last bus out, when I met a dark-haired girl called Kath. The next weekend, we met again for a drink. Kath lived with her parents in Tipton, a few miles south of Coseley, deep in the estranged heart of the Black Country. She could speak the Tipton dialect, which no one outside the town understands.

  By early spring, Kath was spending the weekends at my place. We'd sit up late, smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap vodka, sleep into the afternoon and make love until nightfall. It was my first experience of intimacy—whether physical or emotional—and I couldn't seem to get enough of her. The bed stank of tobacco smoke and flesh. What I liked best was the dreamlike recovery from the climax, when we held each other and slowly got our breath back while the shock of joy went on echoing in our veins. At those times Kath seemed like a recently fallen angel, her skin glowing, her eyes filled with a mysterious bitter light.

  When we met during the week, there was rarely time for us to go back to Coseley together. We'd see a gig or a film in Wolverhampton, then walk out together along the bus route heading south. Just where the factories gave way to fields and woodland, there was a low railway bridge of blackened stone and criss-crossed iron girders. At night, the underside of the bridge was murky and cold. Young couples went there to smoke dope, drink bottled beer and screw. Sometimes there were people hanging around, and we wouldn't stay. But often we were alone, holding each other in the blurred half-light and kissing desperately as the cars sped past. Or looking up at the intricate, barely visible iron lattice as if it was a stained-glass window, some kind of design we needed to interpret.

  One night when it was raining, we sheltered under the dripping bridge to warm our hands on each other's skin. Droplets of rain flickered in Kath's hair. I kissed her closed eyelids, and her mouth twisted with some emotion she didn't have words for. Her nipples were rigid under her thin shirt. Being quite small-breasted, she often didn't wear a bra. Our mouths locked together, sharing breath. I felt the distant pulse of an approaching train. Then its passing shuddered through us, and the quiet was torn apart like a tarpaulin over a nail-bomb. Kath pressed against me, breathing hard. My fingers found her open.

  Kath bit my lips as I shared her with the lime-smeared wall, fumbling to remove the barriers of fabric between us. The air was cold, too cold for this. Kath's muscles locked me inside her. It felt unreal, or perhaps more real than I was. We struggled, cried out, froze together. The night was suddenly very stil
l. Kath found a tissue and wiped her thigh. I felt as though I had violated her, or something had violated both of us. We walked to the bus stop in silence, holding hands, a little shaky from the violence of it. Thirty years on, I still remember how that felt.

  A few weeks after that, Kath told me she was late. “I must have forgotten to take the pill,” she said. We were sitting in a café near the bookshop where she worked. In those days, there were several bookshops in Wolverhampton. She lit a cigarette, but stubbed it out after one draw. I noticed that her make-up was clumsily applied, the eye-shadow not quite masking the effects of a sleepless night. Her fingernails pierced the back of my hand. “Can I move in with you?” she said.

  I felt my head shaking before I'd even thought about it. Panic gripped me. “You did it on purpose,” I said. “Getting pregnant so you could leave home.” I apologised almost at once, but the damage was done. Things unravelled quickly after that. A few awkward phone conversations; one more shared night, bitter and restless; then nothing.

  As a child, I had a recurrent dream of a hidden place. It was part of a wasteground, not far from my school. No such location existed in my waking life, but each time I dreamed of it the memory was clear. I wandered through brittle ferns and the grey fringes of willow trees, towards a ruined wall on the far side of which someone was waiting for me. When I reached the wall, I could hear traffic going past rapidly on the other side. I remembered that only the road was there.

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  Kath got another job and didn't come into Wolverhampton any more. I think she had the baby, but I don't know if she kept it. More than anything, I felt tired—as if the sleep debt from the past four months needed to be paid off all at once. The rainy spring dried out into a stale, metallic summer. I concentrated on passing the police entrance exams.

  By the end of the year, I was a constable in the Missing Persons team. Off duty, I kept to myself for the most part. They built a new expressway going south out of Wolverhampton, and closed down the road that passed under the railway bridge. I walked out there one freezing afternoon and saw the bridge had already deteriorated: a dense black mould was spreading on the walls and blurring the overhead girders. There was a smell of decaying stone, if stone could decay. I never took another girl there.

  The Missing Persons work was fairly demanding, though I soon became frustrated by the lack of answers. Almost every week, someone in the region would disappear—and not only loners but young couples, pregnant women, even people with families. My more experienced colleagues seemed to take it for granted that no one much would ever turn up. “Either they're alive and hiding or dead and someone has buried them,” my supervisor commented.

  The local paper ran a few stories about the missing people, but it made no difference. I began to realise how fragile the links between people really were. Like a necklace that broke at the least strain, scattering beads everywhere. I tried not to think about Kath and the baby. Eventually they became unreal to me. Muddy Waters seemed to have the relationship thing sussed.

  One night in early spring, I took a girl back to my flat. She complained about the smell in the bedroom—"It's like there's something dead in the wall.” I hadn't even noticed, but when Susan pulled the mattress back I could see a black skin forming over the wood-chip wallpaper. It had crept up from a discoloured piece of skirting-board. I touched the mould with a fingertip. It was smooth and yielding, like a bruise.

  We took the mattress and blankets into the living-room that night and slept with the gas fire on. I dreamt the house was burning down, and woke up sweaty and confused. The orange light glowed through crumpled tissues on the floor. There was a dark shape huddled in the blankets beside me, smelling of blood and perfume. I didn't want her to wake up.

  The next day, I scraped all the mould off the wall and dabbed bleach onto the raw plaster. Then I dried the surface with an electric fan heater. The next morning, it was already growing back. I scraped it off again. Once separated from the wall it became flaky and brittle, like ashes. I moved the bed into the middle of the room. In the morning, the wallpaper in the corner was grey and puffy. By the next evening, the mould was back again. I stuck a poster over it and went out to phone the landlord, then stopped at the pub on the way back. By the weekend, the poster had split down the middle. I could see the blackened plaster behind it.

  I'm not sure what made me go back to the railway bridge that weekend. Perhaps I wanted to be forgiven, allowed back into the past. And I was naïve enough to imagine I could reach it on my own.

  As I walked along the disused road in the moonlight, the bridge looked different even from a distance. I thought it was because the streetlights weren't working any more. But as I reached the bridge and stood just outside its shadow, I could see that the stone and brick of its exterior were entirely covered with uneven black mould. The pale streaks of lime that the rain had leached from the brickwork were no longer visible.

  The moonlight revealed another difference too: something the mould had hidden from me before. The structure of the bridge was made up of tightly packed, naked human bodies, twisted together in the warmth of slow decay. They looked as if they were about to move, but they were still. I was close enough to smell them.

  My hand reached out, but I was afraid to touch the wall. Afraid that I might not be able to leave. In that moment, I realised they hadn't been killed and left there. They'd gone there of their own accord. A train ran over the bridge then, and the vibration made me start to shake.

  Copyright © 2007 Joel Lane

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  CASE NOTES—Peter Tennant

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  Pete is proof reader for Interzone and non-fiction editor for Whispers of Wickedness (ookami.co.uk). He is the author of nearly 200 published stories, approximately 500 published reviews and exactly 439 unfinished novels.

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  HERDING CATS: A MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH FEATURETTE

  Michael Marshall Smith is back, with his first new novel in nine years, only don't go expecting the genre mix ‘n’ match fireworks of Only Forward or Spares. The Servants (Earthling hardback, 224pp, $30) is a quieter work than either of those, and if you need to fit it in any lineage then it's the precocious child grown to novel length of the MMS who produced all those elegant supernatural and horror stories that sent shivers down our backs.

  Precocious child would be an apt description for Mark, the eleven year old protagonist of The Servants, newly moved to Brighton with his mother and stepfather David. Mark is resentful, hurt by his parents’ marriage break up and enforced move away from his old haunts, blaming everything on David. He believes David is trying to keep him from his mother, who is dying of cancer and refuses all treatment (something else Mark blames David for). His only friend is the old lady who lives in the basement flat of David's house, and it is she who introduces him to its secret, a locked door behind which are the servants’ quarters, a hangover from Victorian days when the house was far more grand than now. To his amazement, Mark is able to see and interact with the servants, soon realising that something has gone very wrong below the stairs, with repercussions in the present day, and that he is the only one who can fix the problem.

  This is a short novel that does many things well, with Smith playing his cards close to his chest, so that you are never quite sure if we are dealing with a ghost story or time slip fantasy, or simply Mark's externalisation of his emotional problems, not that it matters much anyway. The bleak atmosphere of a seaside town in the winter months is vividly portrayed, giving Mark a landscape through which to roam that is both pregnant with possibility and tainted with the echo of broken promises. Also handled superbly well is the depiction of life below stairs, each of the servants with his or her allotted role, while the blight that has entered this supposedly idyllic scenario is powerfully delineated, black ash falling ceaselessly from the air and dirt piling up o
n every side, a malaise that effects them all and curses the life of the house, the ideal metaphor for the cancer that infects Mark's mother.

  The scenes of conflict in the family are seen from Mark's perspective, each event filtered through his resentment and boredom, so the reader is left to fill in the gaps, to conjecture what is not being said, to grapple with the import of the heavy silences and moments of tenderness that punctuate this ongoing war. For Mark these events are a rite of passage, each a milestone on his road to maturity, as he slowly reaches the conclusion that things are not how he believed and the realisation that there are two sides to every story. In solving the problem of the servants and bringing harmony below stairs he is also reassessing and redefining his own role in the family unit. And lurking back of all this is the concept that the house itself is an entity, which all the people who dwell within its walls, both the living and the dead, must serve in their own way, each part of some great design and only when the parts get out of alignment do things go awry. It's an intriguing conclusion to a fine short novel by a writer of considerable range and talent.

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  That range and talent are seen to full advantage in The Intruders (HarperCollins hardback, 404pp, 12.99 pounds), the latest book released under Smith's bestselling Michael Marshall byline, which is separate from The Straw Men trilogy, but addresses many of the same concerns, and with clues in the text that suggest it is set in the same world as those novels, so the future possibility of a crossover cannot be ruled out.

  For former LA cop turned author Jack Whalen (perhaps a nod in the direction of Joseph Wambaugh), the mystery starts with a visit from a schoolmate he hasn't seen in years, Gary Fisher, now a lawyer and seeking his opinion on a double homicide, and then he gets a phone call from a taxi driver who has found his wife's mobile phone. Amy is supposed to be in Seattle on a business trip, but Jack can't find her and there are questionable text messages on her phone. Amy has been acting strangely of late and this disappearance brings matters to a head, is something Jack can't let go of even though she turns up safe and sound, and with an explanation that would sound entirely plausible to a trusting husband, but not to one who fears she is having an affair. As Jack digs deeper he finds the trail leading back to Gary Fisher and the double homicide, but Fisher is not a reliable witness, holding back many things for reasons of his own, while the actual truth of what is going on is far more fantastic than Jack could have suspected. Jack's book was called The Intruders and consisted of photos of crime scenes, places where intruders have forced their way in, but now he must recognise that there are other kinds of intruders and, as the novel's tag line has it, they're already inside.