Behind the Wainscot » Weird Fiction. Weirder writers.

DEATH

August 21, 2008

DEATH

MARK TEPPO

     The curtain falls, and the shade of your grandmother floats from stage left. She directs you to stage right where a pale-faced boy—your nephew, actually, the one who died in the lake—takes the tools of office from you. A nimble-fingered phantom lifts your crown. You try to look at its face, but it slips away, stealing the heavy earrings from your ears.
     The stage manager—isn’t that your wayward uncle, the drunk who always interrupted grace by rattling coins in his pocket?—holds up seven fingers. One of them is missing a digit.
     Your grandmother’s shade guides you to the warped red door of the costume room. Hurry now, she says, opening the door with the Old      Country magic, there isn’t much time.
     Off comes the heavy costume of the first act, dumped unceremoniously on the floor. The costume room is cold, colder still when you unzip the skinsuit and wriggle out. Once the flesh is off, the rest falls out of your body cavity like overripe fruit from withered trees.
     Don’t worry about the eye, your grandmother says. They always roll under the cabinet.
     Her whispery voice, a faint echo of the boisterous laughter you remember from childhood, tells you where the bin of new eyes is. After the eyes, everything else is easy, though the suit is harder to zip up than to take off. I’m not a contortionist, you complain, and your grandmother snorts a streamer of pale smoke, but she doesn’t speak of the faery-eyed boy, the one from that first year at school.
     In the backless wardrobe, new costumes swing their hangers. You push the red button and the endless track clatters forward—rat-ta-kak-a-rat-ta-kak-a—a rainbow of history in taffeta and fur, silk and leather, cotton and lace. Somewhat randomly—for the future is not yet set, is it?—you let go of the button and pick an outfit.
     This is your only choice.
     You put on the black pants, the white shirt with needlepoint starfish, and the purple vest inlaid with mother-of-pearl and coral. In the pale sack of accessories: silver dolphins for cufflinks, a leather belt inlaid with silver waves, black-rimmed glasses, a brown wig, and a long, brown mustache.
     The stage manager—your old drunk uncle—is speaking into his headset, and he gives you the once-over as you approach. When he presses his thumb in the space between your lip and your nose, making sure the mustache is firmly attached, you smell the memory of cinnamon on his hands. You can’t help but recall the last Christmas you saw him: standing next to the tree, half-turned toward the fireplace, pouring cheap whisky from a flask into his mug of eggnog.
     You miss him more than you knew.
     You can hear the orchestra reaching a crescendo. The curtain is about to rise on Act Two. Your grandmother busses your check with a spectral kiss, and your nephew waves as you hustle out to center stage. Your uncle is counting down with both hands—ten, nine, eight—and then, with a grimace, he stops.
     He retrieves a long-stemmed flower from the wings. With a quick snap of his hands, he breaks off the long stem of the lily, and threads the flower through the boutonniere on your vest. Always wear a lily, he says, so they will recognize you.
     The curtain rises, and he hesitates long enough to press his thumb over your lip again. This time, he’s marking you like the angels do. So everyone will know that you have been reborn.

Mark Teppo spent many years not sleeping. He grew fuzzy around the edges and colors ran in his presence. Now he’s quietly stabilizing. In another few decades, he may be caught up enough on his sleep to get a passing grade from his physician. When everyone else has their eyes closed, he slips off to continue his efforts at synthesizing Blackleaf 23.
Mark’s work can be found in Strange Horizons, Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy, MungBeing, Igloo, Opi8.com, Earplug, and Earpollution. His novel Lightbreaker is coming from Night Shade Books this September. He can be found online at www.markteppo.com.

THE EIGHT OF SWORDS

S. BOYD TAYLOR

     You walk alone in your father’s labyrinth. Through the craze of brambles and glossy-leafed hedges. At the center a circle of swords stands where the arbor should be. Eight scimitars stabbed deep into a pile of bright roses. You have seen this before somewhere. You circle the swords. Touch the cold and lonely steel. Then you step inside and kneel among the blooms.
     The twins find you there. Summer and Snow. They orbit you outside the swords. Summer is golden as daylight and the flowers turn toward him. Snow is pale with silver hair and around him colors fade like winter. They move in time around you. Your sun and moon.
     Show us your secrets, says Summer.
     Show us the hidden places, says Snow.
     You grab a sword and raise it above Summer. But Snow smashes into you and crushes you down. He shoves his tongue in your mouth. Alive and wriggling and cold.
     You bite the tip off. Spit out the meat. Taste the icy and sour blood in your throat. He rears back and slams his fist into your skull and the bones slip and grate together.
     Summer pulls down the brambles and grabs up the rosevines and they look greener and more beautiful in his golden hands. He winds them round your arms and breast and eyes and deep between your thighs. But you fight him and the vines slip and you kick him in the jaw.
     You have seen this before. This is the Eight of Swords. The gypsy woman showed it to you when you were little. When she saw the card, she cried. Dirty tears from wrinkled eyes.
     Snow’s molars crack through your wrists. His mouth open impossibly wide. All around him, his shining silver hair. You smash him with your shattered stumps until you have no blood or air left to fight.
     When you are still, Summer peels the skin from your ribs. A single red sheet. Veins and arteries in triangles against the sun. The stained glass of your soul.
     They stare at the pulsing labyrinth inside you. All the twisted hidden places. The corners no one has ever seen. With red tongues they both rasp your bones to pearls.
     You close your eyes. Your heart slows. Breathing feather-thin. Your memories fall away. Childhood first, then racing forward. The crumbling stones that make you. There is a flutter in the depths. Tender. Fragile. A bird rising.
     Snow stops chewing and looks up. No, he screams, come back. You are what we want!
     Summer jumps for you. Mouth stretched. Hair glowing. Jaws tear through the edge of you and snag. For a moment you think you will fall. But you let that part of yourself go as well. One last tiny bit of self, that is all they get. Then you soar higher.

S. Boyd Taylor lives in Dallas, TX, where he practices Internal Martial Arts, writes weird stories, and attempts to play guitar.
He is a Writers of the Future Semifinalist and his first publication was when he was thirteen in a ‘zine called “Longbow” (1988). There’s an autographed copy roaming around somewhere, but the signature unfortunately reduces its resale value.
You can find his blog here: http://nikwdhmos.livejournal.com/.

SINGLE CARD SPREAD

RACHEL SWIRSKY

     I’ll read if you wish, but you’ll draw the Moon.
     What did I tell you? Look at her: the complimentary beauty of yes and no, flee and stay, spring and winter. She is deception, a face that seems one way in the light but reveals another mien when it falls into shadow.
     That’s the trouble with the Moon. She’s an uncertain future. She’s a boon lined with serrated teeth. She’s an epiphany that tingles through you like a dream only to drain just as suddenly, leaving only a memory of inspiration.
     She reveals nothing.
     I could pretend otherwise. I’ve lied about these cards many times, to please a deep-pocketed customer, or save a doomed fellow some pain. But I won’t lie to you. Not about this. Not today.
     Listen. Most lives languish in the peasantry of numbered cards, their days pathetic handfuls of Cups and Wands. Fortunetellers spin the cards when they deal for such, titillating bored old men with impossible futures composed of Fools and Chariots and Hanged Men.
     A few men and women live out epic fates, whirling between Hierophants and Priestesses, Towers and Justice. They think themselves great schemers, great leaders, great adventurers—and yet, the cards penetrate their futures with ease. Kismet yanks such luminaries along their preordained paths whether they will it or no, just like any peasant with her Pentacles.
     Then there’s the Moon. Full of yes and no, trust and fear. Don’t you see? You and I, we draw the Moon because we have no fate.
     No, no, we’re not dying. The cards pierce the veil as easily as humans sweep aside cobwebs. The Moon’s gift isn’t death. It’s uncertainty. You and I will tread our way eternally across the tightrope of the present, our arms flung out to taunt gravity, our bellies filled with excitement and dread at each step.
     I don’t know what will happen after you give your answer. I don’t even know what your answer will be.
     I could tell you that the Moon predicts a future full of prosperity and joy, bright as polished silver. But I don’t want to coax a yes from your pretty lips with an even prettier falsehood. I want you to decide for yourself, uncertain and unencumbered, full of risk and joy.
     Our future is the Moon. It could be anything.
     I’ll ask again.
     Will you marry me?

Rachel Swirsky is a fiction MFA student at the Iowa Writers Workshop and a graduate of Clarion West 2005. To date, she has published fiction, poetry, and articles in a variety of nationally distributed publications including Odyssey Magazine, Interzone, the Konundrum Engine Literary Review, and Subterranean online. Rachel blogs about writing, politics, and daily musings at velourmane.livejournal.com. She also writes for the feminist site www.amptoons.com/blog and for the blog of L. Timmel Duchamp’s Aqueduct Press (aqueductpress.blogspot.com) which examines the intersections of feminism and science fiction.

TWO OF CUPS

EKATERINA SEDIA

     You still think in terms of collagen and molecules, and the breakdown of flesh, and you think, how soft her skin now that she is getting older—not elastic and taut but so soft instead, buttery. It’s just the aging and the breakdown of proteins, you think, the same thing that is happening to the rest of her—firmness gone, instead this softness, yielding, and you press your cheek to the soft and cool skin of her bare arm, and there are tiny creases and wrinkles you can see from the corner of your eye, the shape of them the subject of your auguries, just like the cards are of hers.
     Before you retired, you thought of things like that—you thought of the essential oils and plant secondary chemicals when you caught whiffs of wormwood, you thought of leaf senescence when you smelled autumn—smoke and treacle. You still think of them, but you try to use her words, and you bury your face in her scented shoulder and mouth words like “amber” and “peach” and “sunlight.” You breathe in the smells of summer fruit and warm skin.
     You have to wonder, how is that even possible, how can we smell of so many things, and—conversely—how can we distinguish so many, and the fact remains: it is all the biological complexity, the receptors and the signaling proteins, enzymes and substrates, all fitting together so smoothly, like the hollow of your cheek over the curve of her shoulder, like the fine hairs on her upper arm and the tangle of your eyelashes, blinking so close to skin that she sighs and shifts.
     There’s sizzling coming from the kitchen, the smells of cinnamon and cloves and cardamom, hot boiling cream. “Dinner’s ready,” she says, and puts away the cards. The top one, two people holding a cup, catches your eye. “What does it mean?” you ask and shift away, letting her stretch and stand up.
     ”A marriage or a union,” she says.
     Your auguries seem to be in agreement.

Ekaterina Sedia resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her new novel, The Alchemy of Stone, was published by Prime Books in June 2008. Her previous one, The Secret History of Moscow, received extensive praised for the LA Times and Neil Gaiman among others. Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen’s Universe, Fantasy Magazine, and Dark Wisdom, as well as the Japanese Dreams (Prime Books) and Magic in the Mirrorstone (Mirrorstone Books) anthologies. Visit her at www.ekaterinasedia.com.

THE MAGICIAN

CAT RAMBO

     The card is blank—white as chalk or snow or limestone plucked from the cliff’s heart. Angle it this way and that to catch impossible bas-relief details and it remains obdurate and meaningless. At first.
     Slow—fish fin flicker, overlapping gauze scarves—colors swim onto the card’s face, waver like heat mirages. A hand, outstretched, a flaming goblet held between thumb and forefinger; an eponymous face, eyebrows like soaring wings, a little cruel, a little haughty; a shoulder where a bird perches, its wings like oily sighs. A background of tapestries, peacock feathers, angels’ bare feet, kaleidoscopic embryos.
     If you look away, the card changes. If you look away, life changes. If you change, you may not know yourself when you look back.
     The Magician is control. You are never the Magician. You are never in control. The best you can do is know how the tricks are done and, admittedly, sometimes that is enough. The Magician is not-control. You are sometimes the Magician, but you are still never in control. It always helps to know the tricks, it always helps to have a pair of loaded dice, a talking pig on a golden leash, pockets full of distracting marvels and clockwork wonders. It always helps to be able to burnish yourself to shiny, to reflect the Universe, moving inexorable as the exhalations of mountains, watching you watching it watching you.

Cat Rambo lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest. A product of Notre Dame, the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and the relentless pursuit of popular culture, she writes stories that wander freely in the adjoining pastures of fantasy, horror, and science fiction, and occasionally jumps the fence to eat the cabbages of Literature. She is the co-editor of Fantasy Magazine.

QUEEN OF CUPS

MICHELLE MUENZLER

     She drinks too much, this queen. Wine spills between her lips, gushes from between her legs. At her feet, two carp gasp. A third strains for shore.
     When you are her, the stars drizzle overhead. Your shots of whiskey become a blur, and the youths gyrate against your thighs in a tangled clump of come-ons. Your little fish, you call them, your golden carp, and drown in shots until your throat is numb. Familiar, yes?
     But the gray light of morning is harsh unfiltered by the skim of algae. You know it is coming. I told you an hour before. One last song, you say, and suck the deejay’s lips. And another. And another. Until your skin dries out, turns to brittle gold, and the music dies in an accordion wail and the youths cry at that first fragile scale crusting your cheek. That clammy glint bulging in your eye.
     So here you are again, my little fish, all forgotten but the taste of man clinging to your flesh. It’s a horned moon suckling the stars tonight. A moon for sweat slipping on soft skin, for hungry mouths gnawing at the hollows of young necks. What say you then, my golden carp—legs again? Or will one of your sisters dance for me instead?

Michelle Muenzler has been caught sneaking behind the wainscot before, and the punishment is always the same. More stories! When not skulking, she is either writing or torturing herself about not writing, sometimes both. In addition to here, her work can be found in Renard’s Menagerie and soon in Shroud Magazine, Coyote Wild, and Electric Velocipede.

SEVEN OF PENTACLES

J. M. MCDERMOTT

     I was having trouble getting all the lemons picked at the time, since my leg had healed funny after I had fallen from a ladder. Gold coins seemed close enough to lemons, if you ask me. My wife was convinced I should stick to lemons.
     I was surprised how cheap the seed was. I bought only the one gold seed from a dealer, because I didn’t know if it would grow well on my land. He tried to sell me some lovely corn, instead. He tried to show me a new breed of lemon that had very small seeds. He insisted I think very hard about the corn and the lemons.
     I insisted, however, on the money tree.
     I put it in my back yard, because I didn’t want the neighbor’s kids stealing the money before it was ripe—or after, for that matter. I watered it every day. I put up a screen to keep the flies off the budding, golden roses.
     It grew like a weed. In just one season, I had quite a bush. The first flowers where fat and shiny and smelled acrid and metallic like gold. The petals leave little flecks of gold dust on your fingers, sticky with this sickly-sweet nectar that attracts lots of flies.
     My wife tried to burn my money tree while I was out in the lemon orchard. I was lucky I got home early. I had to fight her back into the house, and I wish I hadn’t had to hit her so hard.
     Then, I worried that if I stepped away from my money tree long enough to tend the lemons, my wife might destroy my money tree, and I’d have to go back to climbing ladders among the lemon trees, instead of sitting in the house and watching my money grow. Seven glorious golden roses curled into harder and harder metal balls after sunset.
     It wouldn’t be long, now. I could buy all the lemons and fruits and foods I wanted with just one golden coin. I could buy my wife a fine dress and all would be forgiven. I could plant more money trees and more money trees.
     My wife dug up her savings from beneath the kitchen door. She gave it all to the blacksmith’s second son, to keep the lemon orchard tended. I hit her for that. We hadn’t been getting on well since she started fighting my money tree. I’m not sorry I did it, either. Once the money left her hands, it was legally gone.
     I decided to let the boy do all that work. I’d have seven gold coins soon, and that was more than all those measly coppers under the kitchen door.
     I worried someone might steal the coins in the night. I set up a cot in the yard. I slept next to the little tree.
     My wife was fine with that.
     I don’t know why everyone seems to think this is such a bad idea.

J.M. McDermott graduated from the University of Houston in 2002 with a BA in Creative Writing. He resides in Arlington, Texas with an assortment of empty coffee cups, overflowing bookshelves, and crazy schemes. His first novel, Last Dragon, is available in all fine bookstores.

HIEROPHANT BRIDGE

JAY LAKE

     It is said that a brave woman may cross Hierophant Bridge in five long strides, if her course is true and she binds her eyes with the white silk of mourning. Which is ridiculous, as Hierophant Bridge is five spans long, and each span is fourteen steps for an Imperial Guardsman.
     It is said that a wise woman will never cross Hierophant Bridge at all, out of wariness of the judgment which depends from the red banners flowing on the gate at each end. They fade in sunlight, until dusk steals their color to gray, but each dawn are scarlet anew. Blood magic? Strange weavings? Or the penitence of strangers? In any case, this, too, is ridiculous, as Hierophant Bridge connects the Brass Quarter with Hangman’s Rest, and so carries thousands of people, carts, horses, mules, and stranger creatures each day.
     The western pier of Hierophant Bridge is known as the Law Gate. It opens onto the great plaza of Hangman’s Rest, where the high court buildings stand in glistening marble array. Cages for the exposure of the guilty overlook all the squabbling traffic of the plaza, where lives are bought and sold beneath the quiet, whimpering deaths of tax cheats and scofflaws.
     The eastern pier of Hierophant Bridge is known as the Liberty Gate. It lets out onto crowded, secretive streets of the Brass Quarter, where the murders are conducted in the traditional manner, but where also dwell those with Liberties within the city, immune from tax or prosecution so long as they do not pass the boundaries of the quarter.
     In every coffee house and bar from the tiny towns upriver all the way down to the roaring salt they will debate you over which is older, Law or Liberty. “Without freedom there can be no limits,” as the saying goes; always answered with “Absent the hand of order, freedom cannot be measured.” It is a pointless argument, conducted for amusement and the fleecing of strangers, for everyone born within sight of the dawn’s blood-red banners knows well that it is neither Law nor Liberty that matters, but the binding of the two together in the crossing between.
     Here lies the true secret of Hierophant Bridge, which makes it a temptation to the brave and an entrapment to the wise: only when you are in the middle of the spans are you balanced between the law and the liberties. One or the other always holds sway otherwise.
     Still, even the foolish know better than to loiter on the bridge in the evening watches. The wealthy who must cross by night are sculled in pale little cockleshells by blind beggars, while the poor simply never do.
     As for the wise woman and her brave friend, they are doubtless casting pasteboard fortunes in some tavern close by the Liberty Gate. If you hurry, you may catch them while the wine is still being poured.
     You might even learn something of the future, if you are sufficiently unlucky.

Jay Lake lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects. His 2008 novels are Escapement from Tor Books and Madness of Flowers from Night Shade Books, while his short fiction appears regularly in literary and genre markets worldwide. Jay is winner of the John W. Campbell for Best New Writer, and a multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards. His website is www.jlake.com.

THE TOWER

PAUL JESSUP

     There, in the distance. That is not your home. Look at it, on the card and on the horizon. They match, they are mirrors. The one in front of us rises high, pierces the lips of the skies. Mother Bone does not like this iron beast, with its crab people living inside of it, crowned with sunfire, crowned aether clouds.
     That one is not your home. This one, here, on paper, glued picture, this is your home. Ignore the number. Ignore the astrological signs. Look there, near the ground. Two children playing. You remember, yes? You and her, playing by the water, the lighthouse burning burning, warning boats from far away that here is land, land, land, deadly sharp dangerous land, crowded by crabs and the screams of birds.
     You played for hours, building, destroying, running along the beach. When the dusk settled and the lighthouse blared its warning fires you did not know she would disappear. Go there, go under the waves, crawl under. She went through the door in the ocean, the kingdom of stars below.
     There, there is your home. It is hard to see the future beyond this point. But she waits. She combs her hair. She sings to you. I take it you still have the key she gave you? You tried to unlock the tower with it, yes? No, it is not a key to the world of men.
     It is the key to the door in the ocean. Find it. Use it. She is waiting.

Paul Jessup doesn’t exist.

AUCUN IMBÉCILE JE

BERRIEN C. HENDERSON

     Cut your thumb on the card’s edge opening the new deck.
     The quick stings. You continue and find your first card.
     A line of blood becomes a crimson strikethrough: Temperance.

Smear of oblique vermillion—prickly heat dances along your neck and scalp.

The card’s paint bubbles and flakes at the tiniest of rips on the angel’s mouth; it gushes language in India ink spurts. Temperance vomits letters into the cups. The words jumble; you sweat to focus and strain at garbled phonemes.

Jabberwocky comes upon you, nary a vorpal blade near.
The cups pour into and out of themselves.

The fabulous beast! Marvelous angel! Hideous thing! Temperance busies itself with one wing and obsessively picks feathers from one wingtip and exposes naked bone it then slams earthward. Its face remains static, its mouth a ragged tear of esoterica, of arcana, of dark mystery.

     See the earth shudder. Watch the waters roil.
     XIII!
     XV!
     Judgment falling . . .

Focusfocusfocusfocusfocus.

Remember: The courier and the note.

”Mssr. P—– sends a gift,” says the messenger sent of late to your loft. A static line of mouth. Gloved hands, careful in tendering the package. A smallish thing: half a sandwich squarish and thick.

     Temperance guzzles the liquid—wine? water? the same?—and spits out viscous dribblets and giblets from a mouth of bloodstained teeth.
     Hot, the poison from the tainted deck. Simple, the cuckold’s sprung trap.
     Under your breath you craft equal invectives for the tasseomancer and his wife the minx.
     Nothing to do against branching agony along hand and arm—the heart soon clutched by something other than her.

     Temperance reaches out the card’s edge and spears letters with one sanguine wingtip, bereft of feathers, now sharpened bone dripping gobbets of marrow.
     Smiling, it arranges them, then drinks from one hovering cup—a pantomiming of tea time—then leaves you fevered at its wink and nod of lifeblood-tacky letters:
     Aucun imbécile je.

Berrien C. Henderson lives in the deepest, darkest wilds of southeast Georgia. Father, husband, educator, and journeyman writer, he prefers crafting stories of magical realism with a Southern flavor, but if it’s speculative, he’s generally so inclined.

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