Black Static Horror Magazine #2 Read online

  When they surfaced, Julia opened her eyes. She was still facing the shore, but now it was different. The shore was yards and yards away, and yet she saw with perfect clarity as if looking through a telescope whose lens encompassed the whole world. Hannah stood motionless at the water's edge while behind her the houses, the shops, the cobblestones, all melted away, leaving no trace, leaving only a field of white, an appalling empty whiteness before which Hannah stood frozen like a carving before a piece of blank paper.

  The serpent dove again. Julia closed her eyes and prepared to drown.

  But when the serpent brought her to the surface she still breathed, and when she opened her eyes Hannah was still there on the shore, and the buildings had returned. Some of them. There was Hannah's house, and others. But now the telescope lens had become a stereopticon, and she could see past the houses on the shore to buildings she had never seen before, and bizarrely-shaped carriages that moved by themselves, without horses, and men and women dressed in bright colors, with some of the women dressed like men and some in nothing but what appeared to be undergarments. Before it all stood Hannah, still, and Julia heard a voice that was Hannah's, and was something else altogether. Our victory will outlive us! It will outlive this century, and the next!

  The serpent was gone. Julia had never been particularly adept in the water, but she floated comfortably, without difficulty. She would not have noticed if fifty serpents had appeared. She did not know what she saw, but she knew that within this impossible scene was a cleanliness, a tolerance, a prosperity beyond anything she could ever have hoped, and at the same time a danger, an inexplicable poison that frightened her to the bone. There were options after all. It made no sense at all, and it made perfect sense.

  Julia shut her eyes against the salt and the sun and the knowledge, good and bad, which overwhelmed her. She felt a hundred miles from shore and wondered if Joshua lay somewhere beneath her. She thought how pleasant it would be to remain floating there, like a leaf, like a hatchet, away from women and men.

  When she opened her eyes again, the strange buildings and machines and people were gone, and so was Hannah, and her town as she knew it spilled down to the water's edge. She felt a gentle pressure on her back grow more insistent. She tried to keep floating, but soon her heels dragged the bottom, and she was returned to the shore.

  Julia looked back to the water. The serpent was gone. So she turned and made her way over the rocks and across the yard and went back to the options that awaited, to the triumph and the wreckage of her town.

  Copyright © 2007 F. Brett Cox

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  CASE NOTES—Peter Tennant

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  Mick Scully

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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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  MEAN STREETS: A MEET AND GREET WITH MICK SCULLY

  Mick Scully's work will be familiar to readers of our sister publication Crimewave and has appeared in a number of prestigious anthologies. June saw the release of Little Moscow (Tindal Street Press paperback, 269pp, 7.99 pounds), a collection of his best short work.

  While it's where his reputation currently resides, Birmingham based Scully doesn't think of himself as primarily a short story writer. “I have written a couple of novels, but they have not been taken up by publishers. I have continued to write short stories alongside these, and although I enjoy the restrictions—and in some cases the freedoms—of the form—because there are so many links between my stories, I feel there are some elements of the novel about them when put together. Similar themes, the same characters and locations."

  It's this interconnectedness that informs Little Moscow, with the main character in one story reappearing as a subsidiary in another, and nearly every story trailing back to the watering hole of the title, a Birmingham pub favoured by the underworld which Scully describes as “a composite of a couple I go in,” with even Marlene Dietrich popping in for a visit in the story ‘Performance'. And at times the stories turn back on themselves in the manner of Tarantino's Pulp Fiction ‘Abstract', the second story in the collection, opens with immigrant Hamid stumbling upon a dead body hanging from a lamp post, which as far as starters for ten goes is a real jaw dropper, but we have to wait until the story ‘Electric Pink’ before we discover how the body got there in the first place and to fully grasp the ending to ‘Abstract’ itself, while only with the final story, ‘A Tree for Andy Warhol', do we learn of the body's eventual fate.

  While many writers make a big deal about the perils of being pigeonholed, Scully is far from dismissive of genre categories. “I think they have important significance, to both the reader and the writer. If you are writing genre fiction, you are working your text through the prism of the conventions of the genre and—while you can certainly deviate from them in various ways—I find that exhilarating. Also once you have ‘come out’ to yourself as a crime writer you can focus on the big issues of good and evil, the human condition without feeling pompous. You are crawling in among the underbelly of society sniffing out what you can find—nice work when you get it."

  Nice work or not, and I'll allow a degree of irony in that remark, it's a task that Scully seems to relish and is especially good at, giving his criminals very human traits, strengths and weaknesses, so they appear as fully formed individuals, rather than formulaic hoodlums courtesy of Bad Guys R Us.

  Office, the protagonist of the title story, is a small time conman who got greedy and tried to double cross the big boys. Out of gaol after a long stretch for a crime he didn't commit, Office returns to the Little Moscow seeking a confrontation, some kind of closure and, although Scully leaves the ending open, you just know that things are going to end badly for him. The story's strength lies in the sense of place, the seediness of the Little Moscow as vivid on the page as the sweat stains festering in the armpits of barman Fat Alex, while you never doubt the character of Office, his blend of self-pity and bravado hitting just the right note, giving the narrative an edge. ‘Tattoo City', one of the few stories in which the line between plot driven and character driven action teeters towards the former, sees an ex-soldier opening a tattoo parlour and refusing to pay protection money, thinking that his army mates will keep him safe. It's an engaging, combative story of hard men in conflict, testosterone fuelled and firing on all cylinders, with a rich vein of scabrous humour running through the text. In ‘Restoration’ a young man turns up at the Little Moscow asking questions about a now deceased member of the pub's clientele, the story taking off in a direction that delves into themes of madness and obsession in a manner worthy of Poe, with the revelation of what the young man has in his duffel bag just the icing on a substantial cake.

  While his work falls squarely within the margins of the Crime genre, it is not detective fiction. Instead there is an almost mainstream sensibility about many of Scully's stories, with an emphasis not on the solving of cases as such, but rather on the circumstances that give rise to these events.

  "I find it infinitely more interesting,” Scully explains. “The variety of elements that lead a personality to criminal activity—and the large variety of criminal activity there now is—is fascinating. There are many reasons why a person may end up a criminal. They may be part of a criminal family, and in the story ‘The Causes of Crime’ I have looked at the difficulties of trying to break away from such a situation. Some people have a dark area in their character that they either can or can't keep under control, such as Matt Fuller in ‘Prague Blonde'. I have tried to look at the way poverty and the immigrant experience can contribute."

  In ‘Abstract', immigrant Hamid sees the body hanging from a lamp post not as an atrocity but as an opportunity. He steals the dead man's clothes, moves into his flat, takes on his identity, and f
inds within himself the will to commit murder rather than allow this treasure trove to slip from his grasp, but as ever with Scully things are not as they seem and a sacrifice of an entirely different nature is demanded of Hamid, the story asking us what the good life is worth, what compromises are we prepared to make to get and retain it, to walk not a mile in another man's shoes, but to go barefoot. ‘Ash’ is the tale of a young boy, who cannot face going into care when his father is to be sent to prison, and so embraces criminality in a series of desperate acts, but the story is told with sensitivity and compassion, so that the reader cannot help but sympathise with the child even as he becomes monstrous, takes steps that will prove irrevocable. The aforementioned story ‘The Causes of Crime', its title an ironic comment on Blair's sound bite politics, is set against the backdrop of Longbridge's closure and crippling unemployment, with a proud man tempted by the possibility of easy money when he finds himself unable to provide for his family. Bertrand Russell once said that if politics was ever to be a science then it would be necessary to discover the precise point of starvation at which a man prefers a bag of grain to the vote. Scully seems to be asking how many mortgage payments it's necessary to miss before honesty becomes negotiable, and while we may not condone Gary Lanahan's actions, condemning them doesn't come easy either. In a final, savage twist of fortune the one who suffers the most is an innocent.

  Eschewing the more familiar ethnic groups, such as the yakuza and so called Russian mafia, Scully is drawn to Chinese criminal factions.

  "There is a large and thriving Chinatown in Birmingham and some Chinese are very active in the criminal underground of the city. They have links mainly to property in the centre of the city, and various gambling activities, particularly casinos. While Triads in the old sense of that word probably aren't active in the city there are certainly formal groupings that operate as closed communities. Some of the mythology I have tried to create around them comes from my training as an acupuncturist."

  'Night of the Great Wind', which originally appeared in Crimewave, has the traitor Jimmy Slim fleeing the vengeance of Hsinshu, Emperor of the Seventh Dragon, and seeking refuge in a tower block apartment where an elderly woman lies on her death bed attended by her sister, the wife of a criminal fence. The worlds of orient and occident collide, two criminal traditions intertwined, the story exploring themes of honour and loyalty. The Chinese contingent aspire to higher ideals perhaps, while the westerners seem more pragmatic and self serving in comparison, but both parties share the common goal of survival and a will to prosper come what may. ‘Bonebinder and the Dogs’ is a sequel of sorts, with Hsinshu's trusted lieutenant easing his master's way into the profitable world of illegal dog fights and gambling, to achieve which he must deal with some rather unsavoury westerners. The story hits hard and the reader is left confused, unable to decide between the brutality of the one group and the emotionless amorality and aloof disdain of the other.

  'Primitive Stain’ has a police officer implicated in the series of murders he is investigating, having slept with one of the prostitute victims, and happy to settle for one of her other johns as the killer, though the actual truth is far stranger. The plot here is somewhat more complicated than most, delving into the murky waters of the sex trade, with the viewpoint shifting between Detective Dowd and the never named Sewer Boy, his story told in italics and with a detached and distant narrative voice, cleverly blurring the boundaries between innocence and guilt. There's a similar twin narrative strands device used in ‘Looking for Starkweather'. One strand in present time gives us a police officer looking at crime scene videotapes and the other fills in the back story of a young girl who becomes fascinated by killer Charlie Starkweather, the two strands moving tangentially to a collision that, if it occurs at all, happens beyond the story's end, with a moral that may only be evident to the reader—an absorption with the monstrous leads one to become a monster.

  It's a conclusion Scully himself refutes, at least for the majority of us. “I don't think most people want to be monsters, even for a night. We are fascinated by them because we know they are among us, they might pounce and then what would we do? They are in so many ways the same as us, they might even be us, but we don't actively want to be them, we just want to understand a bit more so we can protect ourselves."

  There are monsters in Little Moscow, but they are in the minority. Mostly what we get are fallible, suffering human beings and all that entails. Marlene Dietrich aside there's no glamour either, not the airbrushed criminality of the various CSI franchises or bestselling thrillers. Instead Scully invites us into a world populated by prostitutes and petty crooks, gangsters and fences, people who are, in the main, just trying to get by in a hard place where things are seldom black and white, and desperate measures may be called for.

  So step inside the Little Moscow, ask Fat Alex for a pint of your favourite tipple and sit back while Mick Scully tells you some of what he's learned in stories that come with their own reek of criminal authenticity and are told with an enviable skill. The heroes are off doing whatever it is that heroes do, and you can read about them tomorrow. For now let's find out what the bad guys have to say for themselves.

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  ANTHOLOGIES: ANCIENT & MODERN

  Two recent anthologies, The Black Book of Horror (Mortbury Press paperback, 298pp, 10 pounds) and Read by Dawn Volume 2 (Bloody Books paperback, 240pp, 9.99 pounds), represent slightly different approaches to the art of Horror.

  In his introduction editor Charles Black reminisces about the heyday of the anthology, recalling the macabre delights of the various Pan and Fontana series, and tagging The Black Book of Horror as a tribute to those volumes, ‘right down to the blood soaked quotations on the back cover'. While you can't judge a book by its cover, you can tell something about how it wishes to be perceived. On that score Black Book stands squarely in the great literary tradition of supernatural and horror fiction, with red on black text and the cover image of a sartorially elegant gentleman seated in a leather backed chair and staring intently at the large volume in his hands, against a backdrop of shelves lined with similar tomes.

  Edited by Adele Hartley, Read by Dawn Volume 2 has a more modern provenance, having first sprung to life as an offshoot of Dead by Dawn, Scotland's International Horror Film Festival, of which Hartley is the director. This too is conveyed by the packaging, with a clean white cover on which there are some fracture lines, the suggestion of a knife and a few splashes of red, making the reader think of a porcelain sink in which blood has been spilt or a Mondrian abstract left out in the rain until the colours run.

  Black Book gives us eighteen stories, most by writers whose names will be known to anyone familiar with the independent press, guys who have paid their dues (and yes, the complete absence of female contributors is a curious omission), who've honed their craft and know how to tell a story, who are aware of the history and traditions of the field in which they are working. The characters may be a bit more forthright and psychologically aware in certain areas, such as sexuality, and the gore may be laid on a bit thicker than in the past, but all the same what we get are stories the likes of Lovecraft and Poe, James and Benson would not have turned their noses up at and, even if new ground is seldom broken, in terms of entertainment most of these tales more than reward reading.

  'Regina vs. Zoskia’ is a typical Mark Samuels story, the account of a protracted court case, one which is never intended to be resolved, only to drain the vital energies of the lawyer involved, a subtle and Kafkaesque tale with sinister undertones, made all the more so by Samuels’ calm, restrained prose style in which words often seem to be used as a straitjacket to keep in check the madness that is always bubbling away just beneath the surface of the text. David Sutton's ‘Only In Your Dreams’ hedges its bets, allowing the reader to decide if the jelly man is simply the daughter's nightmare given a name and flesh or perhaps the outward manifestation of the tensions that are simmering in the family unit,
Sutton excellent in suggesting the dichotomy of the passive wife/mother and the bullying husband/father, and how these roles impinge on a child's awareness. ‘Size Matters’ by John Llewellyn Probert is a nasty little schlocker about a man hell bent on penis enlargement surgery with a vicious sting in the tail and descriptive passages guaranteed to make the strongest wince.

  Not everything works, with some stories retreads of stuff we've all seen before. ‘Spare Rib: A Romance’ by John Kenneth Dunham is the most obvious offender, a riff on The Monkey's Paw which offers irony in lieu of originality. ‘Cords’ by Roger B. Pile is another familiar tale, that of a young couple who fall through the cracks into another reality where they learn something of life's harshness, well written and holding the interest but with nothing to challenge the reader's expectations. The usually reliable Paul Finch tells us about ‘The Wolf at Jessie's Door', in which an ex-cop tries to rekindle an old romance by reporting the activities of a monster dog on the slum estate where he now lives, only this is much more than a mere dog, the story building beautifully, with some excellent characterisation and awareness of police esprit de corps, a sure sense of mounting menace and effective ambiguity as to the nature of the beast, only to then falter with an abrupt and left field ending. ‘Shalt Thou Know My Name?’ by Daniel McGachey is that old chestnut of the scholar who unleashes an ancient curse and finds himself the victim, but entertaining all the same, with some nice touches of macabre detail. There's a similar whiff of something nasty in academia in ‘To Summon a Flesh Eating Demon’ by Black himself, though the plot doesn't quite ring true (I had a hard time believing that the villain of the piece would be quite so blasé about sacrificing a female student) and it's too straight faced at times for its own good, might have worked better as out and out comedy.