Black Static Horror Magazine #2 Read online

  And she knew that she was capable, in her own fashion, of taming the void.

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  Throughout the following day, Faustine dozed on her school desk. The teacher gave her lines to copy by way of punishment, but she couldn't care less. While she blackened pages following the cadence of an imaginary drum kit in the lunch hour, her thoughts were wandering elsewhere. To her father's studio, to be precise, and that to which she had given birth the previous night. A dragon, whole but hybrid, in paint and Crayola, which mocked the others in their decrepitude. It was still intact when Faustine had quit the studio shortly before dawn. If it had not regressed while she was at school, then she would have won her victory, against oblivion and against the void.

  The two voices played hide-and-seek in the innermost recesses of her brain, in the background but just present enough to surprise her with the turn of a phrase that suddenly seemed to reveal them. She would gladly have blackened the pages of her exercise book with their words, if only she understood their language and its barbaric orthography. Faustine did not despair of mastering them one day; for the moment, it was still necessary to listen to them exchanging their dark secrets in an unknown code.

  It was Papa who opened the door of the house to her on her return. Faustine understood immediately, by his expression, that something was worrying him. If he had discovered the surprise, he did not exactly seem to be overjoyed by it. She had hoped so much that he would be glad.

  He waited for Faustine to take off her satchel and coat before seizing her by the shoulders to force her to look him in the eyes.

  "I'd be glad, Faustine, if you didn't go into my studio again."

  "But I've left my crayons there. Can I go back to look for them?"

  "I'll get them myself. I'm asking you not to cross that threshold again, understand?"

  His voice and expression assumed the hardness of a sharp blade, more appropriate to accompany a slap or a reprimand: the kind of pressure adults preferred to exert on those smaller than themselves, by virtue of which a simple prohibition took on the force of law. Grown-ups obtained their victories thus, simply by raising their voices.

  Faustine bit her lower lip, caught between resignation and deception. It would, however, be necessary for her to cross that threshold. How else would she know whether the graft had taken?

  Papa came back to find her at the kitchen table, where she was eating her tea. He set down in front of her the box of crayons she had forgotten the night before. In his other hand, he displayed the key to the studio, while holding it at a respectable distance from Faustine, as if tempting her to try to snatch it: the gesture that William used when he shook magazines bought with his pocket money under his little sister's nose, which he hid away to prevent her from reading them. “It's clearly understood, Faustine? You won't go into the studio again."

  "Tell me, Papa—has the dragon been erased?"

  He didn't reply, but she read in his eyes that it was not gone. That was exactly what had made him angry. The victory was Faustine's, not his. She knew then that he was capable of going into the studio to destroy every trace of the dragon. Who knew whether he had already burned it, while she was in class? Against the void, Faustine had been able to find weapons, but how could a dragon be defended against its own creator?

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  Everyone knows that once midnight has passed, apprehension never entirely vanishes no matter how safe the circumstances. What if someone should come along the corridor to discover her bedroom light on? Faustine kept the switch of her bedside lamp within arm's length, ready to extinguish it at the first warning sign. Fear lent a delightful electrical sensation to her epidermis; it was not, fundamentally, the most disagreeable of stimulants. Discretion was second nature to her.

  Papa had thrown in the towel? Well, in that case her turn had come to pick it up again. It was necessary that the music should find another foundation through which to express itself. It still had not given its all.

  A song belonged to everyone and no one at the same time, but there was doubtless only a handful of people in the world capable of hearing it properly. Should the fancy take hold of Papa to go into the studio to destroy the dragon, Faustine had decided not to get in the way—not now that she had understood the real nature of the music. She had other priorities now.

  In her father's territory, she had only been able to reproduce his own version of it. Another setting was required—her bedroom, her own point of anchorage—in order that it might finally dictate its true message ... and the flow of energy ran through her fingers, guided her hand with even greater facility than before. The time had come to give birth to a new work.

  Papa had not understood. This song did not have the shape of a dragon at all. It undulated like a serpent, and the piano notes that pierced the riff here and there, so discreet that one could scarcely make them out, shone like the moon reflected from jet-black scales. The two voices were declining a litany of sibilant hisses, according to a scheme known only to themselves.

  Not a dragon, to be sure, but a serpent. It would soon be embodied on the sheet of paper that Faustine was filling with broad strokes of Crayola. And this was one that Papa would not have: a serpent in the moonlight, united with the earth by some secret bond.

  Faustine had already completed four similar ones, which she kept hidden under her bed. She would not have allowed them to be taken away from her, for anything in the world.

  Copyright © 2007 Mélanie Fazi

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  JAPANS DARK LANTERN—John Paul Catton

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  Illuminated store

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  JP is a British freelance writer based in West Tokyo where he lives with his wife and cats. In the past he has been a teacher and a journalist, amongst other things. He is now an expatriate, who lives between two cultures and belongs to neither.

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  Jesus Was Here

  Every year, from the first few days of December, certain individuals begin loitering in certain parts of central Tokyo, lining up in the busy thoroughfares around the station exits. Dour-faced men and women holding long poles with loudspeakers on the top, broadcasting the same monotone, recorded message. Are they Emperor-worshipping right-wingers? Is it a political campaign? No—they're some of Japan's one-percent-of-the-population Christians, and the repeated words echoing through the streets are Iyesus Kuristo (Jesus Christ) and Kuristo Shuukyo (Christianity).

  Japan has had a long and troubled relationship with Christianity. First brought to these shores by Francis Xavier and other missionaries in the mid-16th Century, it was at first a tolerated curiosity, then outlawed by the military government under General Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The Japanese at that time were particularly creative in the ways they persecuted members of the foreign faith. Crucified, burned alive, tied in sacks and thrown into the sea, dunked in the boiling water of volcanic hot springs, or—as in the case of Saint Magdalene of Nagasaki—suffocated to death while suspended upside down in a pit of offal on a gibbet; the nation's warlords gave the Spanish Inquisition a serious run for their money.

  In some parts of the country, people suspected of being Christian were forced to trample over a painting of Christ placed on the floor, to prove or disprove their loyalty. Strangely enough, history repeated itself in the months after the March 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, when some members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult who'd been arrested were forced by police officers to trample over a photograph of their guru, Shoko Asahara.

  Thanks to this atmosphere of persecution, southern Japan's followers of Christ went underground, conducting secret rituals in hidden rooms and isolated open spaces. They became known as the Hidden Christians (Kakure Kirishitan), and over the centuries their worship continued but the meanings of the Latin prayers themselves were lost. Ceremonies known as Kerendo (credo), Sarube Jina (Salve Regina), and Konchirisan (Act of Contrition) were passed down fro
m generation to generation, until none of the acolytes knew what the prayers actually meant. The worship continued until the mid-1900s, and the death of the last surviving Kakure Kirishitan.

  Perhaps General Hideyoshi would have shown more respect if he'd known that when it came to Christ, Japan has a very odd claim to fame. Forget the intrigues of Holy Blood, Holy Grail and the The Da Vinci Code, Jesus actually escaped crucifixion and travelled across Siberia to Japan, changed his name, settled down, had three daughters, and lived until the ripe age of a hundred and six—or at least this is the legend in the remote northern village of Shingomura.

  The story goes that in the 1940s a Shinto priest named Kiyomaru Takeuchi visited the shrines of Shingomura and came across a document that purported to be Christ's last will and testament. It claimed that the Messiah had escaped crucifixion through his brother (known in Japanese as Isukiri) taking his place on the cross. Jesus had travelled incognito from the Middle East across Russia and Siberia, landing in Japan during the reign of the eleventh Emperor, Suinin. Settling in Herai village (now called Shingomura), Christ lived a long and apparently comfortable life tending crops under the name of Daitenku Taro Jurai. In the grounds of the Village of Christ Legend Museum, the Messiah's burial mound is marked by a plaque and a modest wooden cross, and beside it, an identical grave holding his Japanese wife, Miyuko.

  So if we haven't been living an enormous lie for the last two thousand years, whose grave is it? The museum remains frustratingly unhelpful on alternative theories, simply claiming that Jesus is buried here and leaving it at that. The evidence of middle eastern connections are local place names said to be derived from ancient Hebrew, families that have the Star of David as their crest, and a traditional dance called the Nanyado Yara, its lyrics neither Japanese or Hebrew but phonemes with meanings lost in the mist of time. The original documents found by Takeuchi were allegedly (and conveniently) destroyed in the war, and archeologists have confirmed that a crypt exists below the two graves, but applications to excavate have been denied. Whatever the truth, the grave site rests at the centre of a web of mysteries. Shingomura is in Aomori prefecture the northernmost prefecture of the Japanese mainland, a melancholy and sparsely populated area that's dotted with sacred sites, curious alignments of stone ‘pyramids’ and archeological anomalies.

  Yes, we've got Jesus, and don't tell Indiana Jones but we're also hiding the Lost Ark of the Covenant. Several years ago, a retired teacher turned writer named Masanori Takane published a book, examining ancient folk legends that Mount Tsurugi on the southern island of Shikoku is the resting place of the aforementioned Ark. The legends say that the Japanese are descended from one of the ten lost tribes that fled the Holy Land, bringing the Ark with them. What is certain is that Japanese town festivals (Matsuri) usually feature a palanquin called an Omikoshi being carried through the streets. This Omikoshi, with its four poles, gold plating and figurines of mythical creatures on top, does indeed resemble the Ark as described in the Bible. In a sequel written by Takane's son, Mitsunori, Alexander the Great also faked his own death and travelled to Japan, where he was responsible for recovering the Ark from Palestine and hiding it in a ceremonial chamber buried beneath Mount Tsurugi. Can we see a trend starting here? The grave of Elvis behind the local noodle shop? Was that lady in a kimono shuffling discreetly through the streets of Kyoto really Princess Diana with dyed black hair?

  The average Japanese lives in blissful ignorance of these curiosities buried in their homeland. For the majority their sole contact with Christianity will be putting on a wedding dress and having a blond, blue-eyed priest (often a moonlighting language teacher) administer a marriage service, a custom sandwiched between a Shinto christening and a Buddhist funeral.

  Christianity remains one of those quaint and peculiar ideas that gaikokujin (foreigners) get all worked up about. The Christmas period itself is just a cycle of cute but empty rituals, illuminated trees outside shopping malls the size of cathedrals, effigies of Colonel Sanders swapping their cream suits for Father Christmas costumes, young men taking their girlfriends out for a gourmet dinner, usually with a gift of expensive jewellery and a trip to the nearest Love Hotel thrown in.

  Now this might bring forth snorts of derisive laughter, but who's got it wrong? The nation's Shinto beliefs are close to the ideas of ancient paganism—and the year-end orgy of self-indulgence recalls the celebratory eating, drinking and gift-giving of the Babylonian Feast of the Son of Isis and the Roman Saturnalia. Who are the real hypocrites?

  Whatever the answer, one urban legend remains a constant source of amusement to us festive expatriates. At some unspecified year after World War Two, when Christmas was still a novel and mysterious concept, the story goes that one department store got rather confused on what it was all about. They put a fully dressed Santa Claus manikin in the window display—standing up, arms outstretched, and its back against a plain wooden cross.

  Copyright © 2007 John Paul Catton

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  ASH-MOUTH—Lynda E. Rucker

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  Lynda's fiction has appeared in The Third Alternative, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Supernatural Tales and other places.

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  In the long and terrible summer of Ivy's eleventh year, the summer she spent smiling with her mouth closed because she was still losing her baby teeth (she suffered from a socially lethal combination of being both too small and too smart for her age), the summer she itched and sweated through a cast on her arm acquired not a week after school ended (she broke it falling off the porch at her Nana's house), the summer her sister Holly went missing, the summer something called Ash-Mouth crept into Ivy's nightmares and crouched in the shadows of her waking life like one of the furies in her Children's Encyclopedia of Greek Myths, that same summer, a black and white kitten turned up in her backyard with a dead lizard in its mouth and a feral glint in its eyes. Ivy's mother pitched a fit when she caught her daughter feeding it dinner scraps, saying she could barely make ends meet as it was without worrying about paying for vet bills and cat food, but then Holly disappeared and nothing more was said about what Ivy was and wasn't allowed to do.

  Ivy's Nana suggested a name for it, Chiaroscuro, shortened to Kiki because no one could pronounce or remember it and anyway, Nana said, it was a special word: not ordinary, an artists’ word, which made it an enchanted word, a word about the contrast between black and white, light and dark. Nobody, Nana said, nobody was all one or all the other, even if they tried to tell you different, and the most magical place of all was the place where light met dark; but that was a great secret.

  Why? Why is that a secret? Ivy, ever-inquisitive, had to know.

  Nana said, I'll tell you when you're older, but she never did, and the years passed and Kiki turned into a cat, grew old and died, and Ash-Mouth faded into the epoch of childhood dread, and Holly never came home. Twenty-five years later, Ivy, easing her car to the curb in front of Nana's little white bungalow, boxing herself between a red pickup trick with a Jesus fish on the bumper and a bright yellow VW Beetle, found herself looking at her hands, looking at the Beetle in her rearview window, looking at everything she could think of to look at that was not Nana's house, and not knowing why.

  It was dusk, and the eaves did not seem to extend far enough to cast such long dark shadows, and yet they did; and why did the dark sit in squat dense patches round the shrubbery? Ivy hurried up the walkway and rapped on Nana's door, telling herself it was only the chill of late autumn that made her anxious to get inside. The door swung in and Nana peered round it, blinking. Her healthy color was gone, her face drawn and pale, her hair oily and yellow-looking.

  Ivy, she's saying someone is following her from room to room. I can't talk to her. Can you go see?

  "Oh!” said Nana. “Was it today you were coming?” and opened up the door a little more so Ivy could step past her into the gloom of the narrow hallway. It was just as cold inside as o
ut, and it smelled, though Ivy couldn't say what it reminded her of. The sounds of a cheering studio audience drifted down joylessly from the television in the living room. “Did you drive all the way here in one day? What about your job?"

  "I'm visiting Mom, remember?” Ivy leaned to kiss her grandmother on the cheek. “And I'm on sabbatical, anyway. I told you that.” She saw that the word meant nothing to her grandmother. “I'm not doing any teaching right now, just research."

  "That's right. I remember,” and Nana nodded, even though she didn't remember. “I know it's not good how things come and go. Your mother gets so angry at me when it happens! She's very irritable, isn't she?"

  "I don't know,” Ivy said. “She said you'd been having some trouble."

  "I saw you on that television program!” Nana exclaimed. “The one with all the scientists. I couldn't understand a thing you folks were talking about, except that it was something to do with outer space."

  She was dissembling. “I'm a scientist now, too, Nana. I'm glad you got to see it. I can get you a tape of it if you want. But let's talk about why I'm here."

  "You'll want some coffee,” Nana said.

  Ivy followed her into the kitchen, where an ancient percolator wheezed and hissed on the stove. The room itself was cheerless, the bare bulb in the ceiling inadequate to dispel the gloom. “It's awfully cold in here, Nana. You're not having trouble with the heating, are you?"