Black Static Horror Magazine #2 Page 16

  Over the years, as Ivy's father had retreated from their lives (making a new life with a woman named Regina, whom Ivy loyally despised), her mother had increasingly turned to her as a confidante. It was a forced and uncomfortable intimacy, one-sided and painful.

  "I hated her for a long time after that,” Ivy's mother went on. “I wished she had died instead, and left him behind."

  Ivy watched the billboard and exit signs slipping past, counted license plates from faraway states, prepared to suggest that they stop at a Waffle House where perhaps over runny eggs and lukewarm hash browns her mother's emotional revelations would be inhibited.

  "She never even acted like she cared he was gone. What did she ever tell you about all that?"

  Ivy was startled, like she'd been caught daydreaming in class. “What?"

  "Ivy, you heard me."

  "That he burned up.” The words were out before she could stop them. She hoped that somehow her mother would mishear.

  "He burned up?"

  "Well..."

  "That he burned up? My God, just when I think she can't surprise me anymore she goes and does it again."

  "Don't tell her I said so,” Ivy pleaded, but her mother was too angry to listen.

  "She might as well have killed him.” Her mother was rummaging in her purse for cigarettes and weaving a little as she did so. “She destroyed him before he left. I'm surprised he was able to get away. You're old enough to hear this now,” but Ivy did not think she was, did not think she would ever be old enough to hear these sorrows and hatreds churned up like this. “She has no capacity for empathy. She's the most self-centered person I've ever met in my life.” She retrieved her cigarettes and righted the car. “I won't let her rot away and die, because she's my mother, but that's just duty. And God, she's so overbearing. Do you know she insisted on naming you two?” She glared at Ivy, as though suddenly blaming her. “Honestly, Holly and Ivy. Such a ridiculous name for a set of sisters. Would it have been better or worse if you'd been twins? I don't know why I let her do it. She said you needed special names. So manipulative. Just like the old witch she wants everyone to believe she is."

  Ivy thought about her friend Karen's mother, who was very sweet unless she was drunk. Sometimes, she thought, it would be easier to have a drunk for a mother, because then at least you could draw a definite line between the two states.

  "You could always call me by my middle name,” she suggested.

  "Don't be ridiculous,” her mother said, and they made the rest of the trip home in silence. That night Ivy heard her, for the first time in ages, moving about in Holly's room. For a few years after Holly's disappearance she spent a lot of time in there; sometimes she slept in Holly's bed. Ivy wondered how her mother would manage being all alone in the house once she moved a thousand miles away. The following day she announced that she really hadn't liked the campus at MIT, and even accounting for the tuition scholarship, she'd save money by living at home and commuting someplace local. Her mother agreed distantly, like Ivy was a long way off on the telephone, in a country far away.

  * * * *

  Nana said, “I told you what happened to him. He just went away."

  "You said he burned up."

  "What?"

  "When we were little. You said he had burned up. You showed us a picture."

  "Of him burning?"

  Ivy bit back an exasperated noise. “Not him. Someone else."

  "Now, why would I do something like that? I always did say he smoked too much. I don't know. Maybe he did leave, or maybe he did burn up. I can't remember anymore."

  Someone knocked at the front door. “That'll be Xerxes from my group, he's always early,” Nana said. “Come in, Xerxes!"

  "You shouldn't leave your front door unlocked like that."

  Nana said, “It's not what's outside that I'm worried about."

  * * * *

  That day in the culvert, when the neighbors had heard her screaming, this time louder and longer than the first so they realized it wasn't just kids playing games any longer, they thought at first that she had been attacked, because sometimes people did things like that, snatched little children and dragged them into places like the culvert and hurt them in the dark. When she was able to stop screaming she didn't mention Greg, because any way she tried to tell the story it came out wrong, and she was afraid he'd be blamed for whatever they imagined had happened to her—and to Holly—on that day.

  Because they wouldn't have believed anything she told them; when people came into the tunnel to find her there, they didn't get lost. They didn't find it winding and twisting, making forks where it ought not to be, leading them into the center of the earth. Things just didn't change like that. Greg was right.

  Some men from the sheriff's department, and her parents, had questioned her over and over again, and it always ended with her breaking down in tears; one of the deputies suggested that Holly had, in fact, run away, because there were no signs of what they called “foul play.” Ivy saw the deputies exchanging looks with one another when her mother started shouting at them, asking what kind of policeman thought a twelve-year-old girl just up and ran off like that? Ivy knew that sometimes they did; she had seen television shows where troubled young kids ran away to big cities and got taken in by people who turned them into drug addicts and worse, but she wanted to tell the deputies that Holly wasn't like that, she was just a normal kid who didn't have any reason to run off.

  Ivy told herself it had happened just like everyone said; her imagination had gotten the better of her, and if she thought about it too much she'd end up like her Nana, locked up somewhere with electricity shot into her brain. She would not tell anyone about the nightmares that did not dissipate at dawn but followed her throughout the day; that sometimes she had to shut her eyes to keep from seeing things lurking at the edge of her vision. It was a small price to pay for having escaped the madness that took Nana when she was young. Ivy threw herself into her schoolwork, and found that facts and figures anchored her to an earth that threatened to unbind her from its laws and logics.

  She went to Greg's house once, partway through the school year. She had heard a rumor from a kid at school that he'd run off, too, but nobody had ever connected his disappearance with Holly's that day; maybe his parents had never even reported him missing, and someone else said no, he'd gone to live with his grandparents in Calhoun Falls. Ivy rang the doorbell and Greg's mother answered, still wearing a bathrobe and slippers even though it was four o'clock in the afternoon. She looked like an old woman, and reeked of alcohol. Ivy had no idea why she had gone there; she had not prepared herself for what she would do or say (she did not even know what to say to her own mother), and so she whispered, “I'm sorry, I have the wrong house,” and ran away and told herself she would not think of it again.

  "Come in, Xerxes!” Nana said again.

  But there was no response, and no further knocking. Ivy went to the door herself. The front porch was empty, just dead leaves skittering across it in a gust of wind.

  Nana seemed agitated when Ivy returned to the living room. She suggested dinner, and asked Ivy to go to the kitchen with her to heat the soup.

  They ate in the living room, bowls on their laps, the television still flickering in the corner with the volume low. Nana was talking too much, about her group, about the past. “That summer,” she said. “I was so sick. I don't even think I knew what had happened to Holly until I got better in the fall."

  "What was wrong with you? Mama wouldn't tell us what you had."

  Nana shook her head. “They didn't know. The doctors found all kinds of things wrong with me, just like I told them, but they couldn't figure out what was causing any of it. And then I got better."

  "Holly was looking for Ash-Mouth,” Ivy said. “She said we could find her and make sure she didn't try to take you away with her. I don't even think she believed that. I sure did. I was scared to death that day. But Nana, Ash-Mouth was just a story. You know that. I bet a hou
se this old makes a lot of settling noises at night. That's what you're hearing."

  Nana said, “Remember when I told you when you were older, I'd explain what was secret about the place where light met dark?"

  "I think so."

  "Here it is,” Nana said. “Angels live in the light and demons in the dark. But what about the in-between, the places that are neither, or the space between the end of the light and the beginning of the dark?"

  In the long silence that followed Ivy thought she heard, ever so faintly, the sound of someone whispering: then she realized it was only voices from the television.

  Nana said, “The world's full of places like that. You can't hide from them forever. Even I can't. You should go now. You can't do anything for me. My group will be here soon and they'll sit with me and I promise I won't try to talk to your mother about it anymore."

  * * * *

  Nana died the following year—presumably in peace, though Ivy could not shake the image of Ash-Mouth leaning over her frightened grandmother to suck the breath from her lungs, like the old wives’ tales about cats and babies. She had not seen her Nana again since the night she'd tried to persuade her that Ash-Mouth did not exist, but Nana had stopped calling her mother and frightening her, and that was the important thing. Nana's ‘group’ came for her funeral but kept to themselves; it had been Xerxes, the young man in the old suit, who found her.

  Nana's funeral fell on a flawless spring day, with a sky so blue it broke Ivy's heart. Afterwards they all retired to Nana's house, her group included, where they ate and reminisced and Ivy and her mother began making plans to meet back in a few weeks to sort through Nana's things. Everyone remarked on how sunny and light the house seemed, and the funeral had been as nice a one as anybody could remember. Ivy left them to wander from room to room, but nowhere in evidence was the odor that had suffused Nana's house the previous year; it had come to her that night only as she was leaving, rising up like nausea, the source of the smell that she had not been able, until that moment, to name: it was the redolence of cold damp ashes.

  Copyright © 2007 Lynda E. Rucker

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  ELECTRIC DARKNESS—Stephen Volk

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  David Cronenberg

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  Steve's credits are on IMDb. His story ‘31/10’ was nominated for a Bram Stoker and BFS Award, and appears in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2007.

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  SHAMANS AND SHITMEISTERS

  I had a bit of a run-in recently with my friend Jonathan Romney, the film critic, about his review of Eastern Promises in Screen International: “David Cronenberg once again displays the sign of a true auteur—someone who can take seemingly uncharacteristic material and make it entirely his own.” However, later he also writes: “The film can be seen as a follow-up of sorts to screenwriter Steve Knight's Dirty Pretty Things.” In that case, I asked, isn't Steve Knight the true author? Or, if not, doesn't the latter quote contradict, or at least seriously inhibit, the auteur theory, at least in this case?

  Jonathan replied by saying his point was that Cronenberg's sensibility, approach, touch, however you define it, makes Eastern Promises look very much of a piece with his last film, and with many of those before that ... and ultimately it's the director who decides what ends up on the screen.

  Which is exactly what I have thought for many a long year now: that the auteur theory (or ‘Un Film de Michael Bay', if you will) is essentially nothing to do with talent, but everything to do with who is in control.

  How can the ‘possessory’ title be otherwise, if the director continues to have the power to fire and replace the writer, tell them what to write, reinterpret and rewrite their work, and, often, resist even their creative presence in the process?

  What irks me even more is the way our cultural pundits regularly and pathetically reinforce this obvious injustice, following the studio-created lie like so many sheep. Empire, SFX, Newsnight Review, tabloids and broadsheets alike, all discuss a film invariably as if it is the megaphone-wielder's brainchild, completely ignoring the contribution of the poor writer who might have sweated over it literally for decades (or sometimes back-slapping the wrong writer; Tom Stoppard after all was only the hack re-writer of Shakespeare in Love, but the only one the twerps had heard of).

  So what gives? What's behind the histrionic hagiography of The Director? Where does the mystique come from? Is it because they hobnob with actors? Because they're there on a low loader in sandstorms and sometimes shag the leading lady? Granted, it's a more romantic life than being hunched goggle-eyed at your laptop at 4am tearing your hair out to answer impossible notes, but does a director work harder? No way. Do they have more talent than screenwriters? Don't make me shit myself laughing.

  If I'm less than besotted by the cult of celebrity directors (nowadays meaning all directors), let me at least point out my reasons. I've worked with a few. Not one of them gave me a Road to Damascus moment, and not one of them had a gift which made me shield my eyes or fall on my knees in amazement. Most, to their credit, approached the job without waiting for the clouds to part and give them the lightning bolt of inspiration. To them, like most of us grunts, work is work (that's why they call it Work).

  When I had a script with Penny Marshall (Awakenings, A League of Their Own, Big) she was at the pinnacle of her game and had made the transition from top sitcom actress (Laverne and Shirley) to top female director. Unfortunately being Hollywood Royalty meant she was inevitably surrounded by sycophants who hung on her every word. (I had to hang on her every word: that Brooklyn accent was impenetrable and I had to have a de-brief with her script people afterwards, hoping one of us had understood what she meant.) I liked her, she was very funny and razor-sharp, but occasionally she let her assistant cut up her food for her. Literally. Finally, after six or seven drafts all you want is for your director to be decisive, and that's often the one thing big directors are not. Because they don't need to be. They're at the top of their tree: why make that decision if the decision might be wrong? Once, Sony was so desperate for her to direct Sondheim's musical Into the Woods they organised a reading with Steve Martin, Danny De Vito and Robin Williams at her house. Still she didn't do it, and didn't do my script either. Indecision prevailed.

  By contrast, I worked on a book adaptation project with William (The Exorcist) Friedkin, who is a force to be reckoned with, to put it mildly. A Touretter in draw-string pants, he's not above extending a script meeting all the way to the urinals and back, and did, often. Hurricane Billy put me through the wringer, turning me into Barton Fink in a LA hotel room for three months, and I'd like to say the finished film (The Guardian) was worth it, but it wasn't. Every day I'd deliver fifteen pages to this genius/madman and every day there'd be a million reasons they were wrong. I had some kind of nervous breakdown, feeling I never wanted to touch a computer keyboard again. For real. No joke.

  There again Ken Russell, contrary to expectations perhaps, was an utter sweetie. He was perhaps past his bête noir days when he directed Gothic in 1986, but he was effusively excited about the script and certainly didn't butcher it (many might say better if he had). The one thing he did was delete my opening and closing scenes featuring Mary Shelley as an old woman on her deathbed. My idea was to put the film in a kind of parenthesis, saying the story was the subjective (and therefore unreliable) memory of Mary reliving the birth of Frankenstein and the events of 1816. Ken didn't want that, I think because he wanted it to be Ken Russell's fantasy, not Mary Shelley's. And so it was. I'd written it on spec in a dingy flat in Stoke Newington all on my ownsome, but finally it became ‘A Ken Russell Film’ forever.

  Bright young turk Marcus Adams (Long Time Dead) directed my British horror film Octane, which, inevitably, became another ‘film by'. The concept was a woman with her twelve-year-old daughter stuck on the eternal loop of the m4, discovering that a tribe of vampires are posing as the emer
gency services, living off car crash victims. Marcus took it on. Then we heard he had problems. Does the daughter have to be twelve? Does it have to be the m4? And finally, does it have to be vampires?

  As you might glean from the above, often when you work with directors it is change for change's sake, or, as my writer friends and I call it: “Pissing on the Post.” The purpose here is not a quest for deeper meaning, it is for the director to make the film theirs. Not better—just theirs.

  For example, I have a feature in development at BBC Films. The producer recently attracted the attention of an up-and-coming European director who's had one or two art-house hits. I was excited to come to meet this wunderkind, but at the meeting it became increasingly clear to me he wanted to make a totally different film than the one I'd written. Mine was a subtle Henry James-style English psychological ghost story. He talked about magic mushrooms and Aleister Crowley, kept getting my character's name wrong, and never even took my script out of his rucksack. After a few days’ troubled sleep I bit the bullet, had to tell the truth, picked up the phone to the producer and said “I'm really sorry but I can't work with this guy, his ideas are incompatible to mine, and they take the project in completely the wrong direction.” The producer, to his credit, said: “Well, we commissioned this because we wanted to work with you.” As a result, hot young European was out of the picture, on his way home. We don't have a director yet, but at least we don't have the wrong director.

  Maybe I'm learning something in my old age. Maybe, more to the point—and not before time—so are producers.

  Copyright © 2007 Stephen Volk