Black Static Horror Magazine #1 Page 5
Then the curtain came down.
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I acquiesced and let the crowds carry me away. I could hardly see for the tears in my eyes. I felt myself carried back up the steps, and away. Past the red velvet curtains, the ticket booth, and out onto the streets.
Some part of me had imagined that the darkness would be gone by the time I stumbled out of the Kishuf Theatre, that the sun would be shining and I'd feel the warmth of it on my face. But still, dark it remained. I saw the huge horsedrawn black carts in the alleyways beside the theatre, there in waiting for a cull that the Puritans knew would now not be granted. I lingered for while, dallying with the notion of going back inside for Jaromir, but as the crowds dispersed I quickly realised the folly of being left alone here. I took one last look at the theatre and then ran from it.
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I returned to Jaromir's loft. I stumbled there without thinking. The streets were silent, deserted. People had taken to their homes and bolted the doors. What would happen next? Surely now that Charousek was dead, and the magic with him, the Puritans could do nothing about us. For some of the journey back I imagined the Precisemen following me, but I saw no one, not even when I peered into the shadows.
I'd imagined that being in Jaromir's home would mollify my feelings somehow, but his meagre possessions made me only more sad at his loss. I sat at his table and tried to remember the touch of his hand when he'd taken me walking into his world. Our world. But I only felt cold inside. My wound had closed up; no more sawdust leaking out of it. I was once again more than, or less than, human.
In absence of anything else to divert my mind, I retrieved the article that I'd intended for Prokop, my editor. Sat there, shivering in the cold, I slowly re-read what I had written, then screwed up the pages and began again. I wrote about Charousek's magic, stolen from the Puritans; about his wooden first-born son, Jaromir; I wrote of the Puritans and the Precisemen's abduction of Charousek's wife. I wrote about all of his creations, and his final deal with the Puritans. Finally I wrote, at first haltingly, about myself, and my part in the proceedings, my wound, my self-discovery, and my feelings for Jaromir.
It took many hours, but I was so immersed that I didn't notice the change outside. The light. Slowly it crept through the shutters, and stole across the room, over the table and over the page I was writing on. I gasped at the sight of it, and set down my pen, my heart racing. I lifted up Jaromir's windows and threw open the shutters.
And the day came in. I could feel sunlight on my face, as warm as Jaromir's hands had once been. Out in the streets, the townsfolk had overcome their fears, and were walking in the sunlight, glancing up at the blue skies with a kind of awe. I stood there for a while, feeling Jaromir's absence inside me.
I gathered up the pages I had worked on and left his room, ventured out into the sun.
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Prokop greeted me with some indifference initially, dissatisfied with the lateness of my article. But word had reached him of Charousek's production, and he had fielded many outrageous claims already made by associates, who may or may not have been there. Initially he would doubtless greet my story as fiction too, but perhaps in time the facts as I saw them would be substantiated. I took his money and told him there would be no more articles. He seemed disappointed, a little deflated, but he did rise and gather me in his arms to say goodbye.
I returned, somewhat nervously, to the Kishuf Theatre, to see what remained of Charousek's production in the cold light of day. There was no one around, and after hesitating for a moment out on the cobbles, I ventured back inside.
It was chilly inside now that I had grown used to the warmth of the new day, but I hurried past the curtains and down the aisles to see what the Puritans had done with the remains. The stage had been cleared of scenery and props. The pump organ remained in the corner, with the albino's accordion at its base, already beginning to gather dust. I stepped up onto the stage and walked to where the spotlight had picked out Jaromir and Charousek's final act. All that remained was the stain where Charousek's blood had been spilt. But there was no sign of either of them. Surely the Precisemen had taken them; Charousek to an unmarked grave, and Jaromir to the furnaces. I wondered if Charousek's wife would really have been returned to him, unharmed. I could only imagine it being a deception.
I sighed, feeling the last of my hope for Jaromir disappearing, then glanced out at the rows of seats, at the litter in the aisles, at the rows of lights.
And then I saw it: my red scarf. The scarf I had given to Jaromir, when I had fussed over him in the street. I wrapped it around him and he'd smiled so hard his face had cracked a little. I reached over and tugged it away from the light, pressed it into my face to see if I could smell him on the fabric. As I did, I remembered that he had been wearing it when he struggled down the aisle and onto the stage. He hadn't unwrapped it and tossed it away. It had been still wrapped around his neck when he'd finally grown still. I was certain of it. So how had it come to be on the light?
It was the smallest flicker of possibility. And yet still I ran.
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He wasn't in his loft, but I had not expected him to be. Had he escaped, then that would be the first place the Precisemen would think to look. If he was alive, then I knew where he would go to take stock.
I returned home and filled a bag with possessions. I had little of value, so it didn't take long. In minutes I was back out on the street and in search of music. The celebrants, with their brightly painted masks and robes. I thought again of that first time I had seen them, while with Charousek. He had said then, “When we're faced with questions to which we have no readily available answers, then perhaps we have to dig at our own roots and go in search of ourselves."
I understood. I found the procession at the gates to the town. The bridge had been lowered and the townsfolk were venturing out of the town limits. Beyond the walls were lush rolling meadows, the tall grass curving in the warm breeze. I stepped out past the celebrants, who were dancing in the grass, near the perimeter of the forest. I glimpsed the pierrot and the dwarf, the woman with the cloak of tears ... Already, horsedrawn carts were advancing into its darkness of the trees, en route to other towns and ports for supplies.
I hefted my bag onto my back and apprehensively followed the carts into the forest. When I turned back for a final look at the town, no one was watching me go. I watched a wooden kite take to the air, and children running in the fields, trying to keep it aloft. I watched it until my eyelashes brimmed with sunlight and tears.
The forest was daunting. No sooner had I grown familiar with the feel of the sun on my bare arms than it was gone again. The trees towered above me, their canopy blocking out the sky. I listened to the sound of birdsong above me, and the sound of music from the town growing ever more distant. Soon, the carts were far out of sight, and I was alone in the forest. I walked for a long time, and slept when I was weary on the hard ground, my head resting on my bag of possessions. I followed the path, wary of straying, wary of the unidentifiable noises that rose and fell in the forest's depths. I had no idea which direction to go, so I continued on until I had no idea how long I'd been gone from the town. I almost believed I longed for it on occasions.
But then, some distance from the path, I glimpsed something in a clearing, and stopped. Holding my breath, I crept off the path and approached the house I had dreamed of, perfect in every detail.
There was smoke snaking out of the chimney and outside was a solitary figure chopping wood. I dropped my bag and ran to him to return his scarf, my little red wooden heart beating fast.
Copyright © 2007 Simon Avery
Read More Simon Avery in Crimewave 10
"You can and should subscribe to Crimewave ... But you absolutely cannot hope to find a better collection of razor-edged roses anywhere on the planet” Rick Kleffel, The Agony Column
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NIGHT'S PLUTONIA
N SHORE—Mike O'Driscoll
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Mike's first collection of stories, Unbecoming, was published last year by Elastic Press. His story ‘Sounds Like’ was filmed in 2006 by Brad Anderson as part of season two of the Masters of Horror series. His latest story, ‘13 O'Clock', will appear soon in Ellen Datlow's horror anthology Inferno.
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IN MEDIAS RES?
Since the last appearance of this column way back in Interzone 198 (May-June 2005), much has happened in the media of the fantastic, not least of which is the transmogrification of The Third Alternative into this strange new beast you're holding right now.
Whatever its eventual shape and design—and, more importantly, whatever reaction it elicits from you—let us wish it well.
In the interim we've seen the usual glut of SF and fantasy films, ranging from the hyper-budget franchise product—Pirates of the Caribbean, X-Men, Spider-Man, Star Wars—to the lower-end dross which struggles to make it even to my local rental store. Luckily, and sometimes surprisingly, there have been a number of genuine marvels born out of the relationship between film and the fantastic. While we might have anticipated that Christopher Nolan would do a remarkable job of adapting The Prestige, how many of us truly expected him to successfully revitalise the Batman franchise? Richard Linklater gave us a movie—A Scanner Darkly—which finally did justice to the ideas and vision of Philip K. Dick; Danny Boyle and Alex Garland gave us Sunshine, a dystopian vision which, while plundering elements from a variety of sources, also remembered that SF can and does have an adult audience. We also had the odd, disturbing Outback western The Proposition, scripted by Nick Cave and probably the closest thing we'll have to a gothic western until someone gets round to making a film of Cormac McCarthy's bleak masterpiece Blood Meridian. The latest from David Lynch finally appeared, causing the usual fury, bafflement, indignation and admiration we've come to expect—meaning that with Inland Empire, the director continues to explore the possibilities and contingencies of film as art, indifferent to the expectations or demands of audience or critics. Better even than all of these was Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, a beautifully scripted, designed and acted tale of a young girl's Alice-like retreat into an underworld which serves as a dangerous refuge from the horrors of Spanish Fascism.
There was also The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Jeff Feuerzeig's brutally honest documentary about the life and work of the singer/songwriter and artist. Johnston has attained cult status, partly as a result of his own self-mythologising, but more due to the beauty, oddness and truthfulness of his simply crafted songs. The film explores this self-mythologising—like Robert Johnson, Johnston claims to have made a pact with the devil, selling his soul in return for fame—without patronising its subject, or excusing his behaviour as entirely due to his bipolar disorder. Whatever demons haunt Johnston and his work (listen to his despairing lament for ‘King Kong’ or the allusions to devils and vampires that recur in many of his songs) the film offers a fascinating glimpse of an artist operating in the interstitial territory between external reality and the inner world of—and I'm groping for an apt phrase here—the lived unreal.
Which transition—from film as fiction to film as documenting an imagined reality—leads to the intrusion of a wider reality into this piece. I'm talking here about the News media, through which truth and the real world are re-presented to us. This intrusion, apropos, the reporting of and our reaction to, the coverage of the abduction of Madeleine McCann.
By the time this piece sees print we will probably know the outcome of this story. For now, the abduction and the not knowing constitute, for the parents and relatives of the little girl, an awful nightmare. Beyond the fact of her abduction, there have been, up to this point (10 May 2007) no new developments. Which leaves an awful lot of nothing for the press and TV news reporters to comment on. Most predictable was the disapprobation which the Portuguese police have received, and by extension the Portuguese people. The decision to conduct the investigation according to their own methods and to not kowtow to the British media's insatiable thirst for information, no matter how inconsequential, has resulted in a barrage of unjustified and even racist criticism. That Portugal doesn't have a paedophile register, that known British paedophiles might holiday there (as they might in any European country if, as the law requires, they have notified the British police of their travel intentions), and that particular pieces of evidence, including an E-Fit image of a possible suspect, have not been divulged to the UK press, have all been held up as evidence of Portuguese incompetence and inability to do the job.
Also predictable once the media had done kicking the Portuguese, was that the initially sympathetic response to the plight of Kate and Tom McCann would be superseded by a desire to point the finger of blame. Once the Mirror, by way of Madeleine's mother, had suggested that the McCanns were wrong to leave their three children alone in their rented apartment while they dined with friends, most other media outlets, along with the public, were unwilling to restrain themselves from participating in the feeding frenzy. Never mind that the children were in a locked room and that the parents, eating at a restaurant less than fifty yards away, checked on them at regular intervals—there could be no excuse: they should not have left the children alone. Soon, the BBC and Sky were providing reporters to comment on the Mirror's story and encouraging The Great British Public to phone in or email them with their views, and, afraid perhaps that they might miss the boat, other papers were offering their take on who was at fault while wringing their hands on the difficulty, no, the impossibility of bringing up a child in a completely secure environment. And how intolerable is that?
Many of us are parents, all of us have been children. Is it possible or even desirable that children should be raised in a world where they are subject to the ceaseless vigilance of parents? If all risk or potential threat is banished from a child's life, then what kind of adult will result?
Eight days after her abduction and god knows how many pages of self-righteous, fulminating prose, we, and perhaps the police, are none the wiser about what really happened. At best, many of us will have wised up to or had confirmed our suspicions about the extent to which the news media will cannibalise itself in order to fill the void left by the haunting unknown. We know now that the story is not about Madeleine or paedophiles or the methodology of a foreign police force. In truth, the story has become the story; the whole body of assumptions, speculations, allusions, accusations, falsehoods and evasions created and fuelled by the news media has become the fantasy which elides the fate of a little girl and the despair of her family.
I make no apologies for commenting on this story. Following the recent massacre at Virginia Tech I read one ‘opinion’ piece commenting on the possibility that Cho Seung-hui, the killer, may have been ‘inspired’ to kill thirty-two people by the ‘sick', ‘violent’ Korean film Oldboy.
The media speculates and calls it ‘truth'; it creates fantasy in order to fulfil our need to understand, to rationalise, compartmentalise and ultimately forget. News becomes entertainment. It is fantasy, of a kind, but less honest than that given us by Del Toro or Nolan. It is a fantastic beast at the centre of whose empty heart nothing can be seen or heard except black static.
Copyright © 2007 Mike O'Driscoll
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PALE SAINTS AND DARK MADONNAS—Jamie Barras
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In the past couple of years, Jamie has had three stories published in Black Static's sister magazine Interzone, one of which ('The Beekeeper') made it on to Locus Magazine's recommended reading list for 2006. ‘Pale Saints & Dark Madonnas’ was inspired by real events in a city with some dark, dark moods.
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COPACABANA, NEW YEAR'S EVE
I cast the shells onto the sand and called to Iemanjá, fishtailed orixá-mother of the sea, to protect me; but something dark and deathly cold cr
awling around inside my head whispered, “Stand up, run for the sea."
I stood up; I took a step forward, towards the edge of the circle that I had drawn in the sand. A second voice called out—but this from further off, somewhere behind me. I turned; someone was pushing through the crowds of revellers milling around the fringes of the beach: Sortudo.
Our eyes met. He called my name—"João!"—then he looked past me, searching for something. He came closer. Blood was streaming from his nose, flowing over his lips and into his mouth; blood sprayed the air in front of his face as he breathed.
His pupils were so large that his eye sockets looked empty in the gathering twilight.
He slid to a stop a few metres behind me and reached out his hand. He had a gun—a revolver, massive and ugly—gripped in his small fist. He brought up his other hand to support the gun's weight, fighting to steady it. A second passed, two, then he pulled the trigger, unleashing a thunderstorm.
Unleashing a thunderstorm.
A thunderstorm...
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TWO DAYS EARLIER
I touched down in Rio in the middle of a thunderstorm. Two in the afternoon and it was already as dark as the late twilight. The streets were awash. High winds had closed the Niterói Bridge; traffic was backed up from there right across the junction with Brazil Avenue, bringing the avenue to a standstill. The Red Line and the Furnas Road were both flooded. Most of the other routes out of the city were jammed.
The favelados, the people of the shantytowns, washed out of the mountains by the rain, were robbing stranded drivers from Tijuca to Gávea, from Santa Tereza to São Conrado.
Rio, cidade maravilhosa: city of wonders.
I had been away a long time; it felt good to be back.