Michael Kelly's Blog, page 26

Excerpt: Night Porter

Excerpt from R. B. Russell’s ‘Night Porter,’ forthcoming in Shadows & Tall Trees.

It was three in the morning and, although it wasn’t snowing this time, it was bitterly cold outside. The man was even younger than the previous two, perhaps even younger than Marianne herself. She was uncomfortable when she realized that she actually felt something maternal or protective towards him, and Marianne asked herself if turning him away was the best thing for his safety. If she booked him in, then at least she would make sure that this time she kept a close eye on him. She would put him into a different room from where the only other way out would be though a window into an inner courtyard.

“Room 18,” she said. “I’ll have to come up with you.”

“There really is no need,” said Fisher. “I can take Mr. Evans up to his room.”

“I need to reset the lock on the door,” Marianne lied. “It will only take a second.”

All three of them went up to the room with Marianne leading the way. She opened the door with her master keycard and explained, as nonchalantly as she could, that it would now be reset. She then made sure that Fisher’s key worked and she handed it over to her. The woman took the young man inside and Marianne used her master key to go into the room opposite, which she knew to be empty.

She watched through the squint in the door, and when the Fisher left Marianne waited for her to walk down the corridor before she came out. She listened to the woman going down the stairs, and although she couldn’t hear the woman crossing the hall past the unmanned reception desk, she felt the slight change in pressure as the front door opened and closed.

Marianne risked getting into a great deal of trouble, but, nevertheless, she opened the door to room 18 with her master key and walked in.

“Please excuse me,” she said, immediately noticing how cold it was in the darkened room. “I do apologize, but I…”

Her first reaction had been to look towards the window again, to see if it was open, which it wasn’t. But her attention was immediately taken by the young man standing just inside the brightly-lit bathroom. He was wearing only a tee-shirt and his hands were tied to the door handle with what looked like a dirty strip of some white material. He was obviously distressed; he was gagged and the look in his eyes was at first wild, but then suddenly hopeful, pleading. Then he looked from Marianne to somebody else who was inside the bathroom with him.

Suddenly that person pushed past the terrified young man. The first thing that struck Marianne was that the man who appeared was really very, very old. He had a long face and his wrinkles were deep, like the cracks in dried earth. He was also completely bald. He was dressed in a brown suit that, even back-lit from the bathroom and almost entirely in silhouette, appeared dirty and stained. In one hand he carried a hotel towel, and in the other he had a huge hypodermic syringe that looked like it was made of corroded brass.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said with a low, quiet but insistent voice.

Excerpt: The Space Between

Excerpt from “The Space Between,” by Ralph Robert Moore and Ray Cluley, forthcoming in Shadows & Tall Trees.

It was easy to get lost behind the walls.

Each level had square openings in the crawlspace’s floor at one or two spots along their narrow lengths, presumably for maintenance, which he could use to squeeze up or down to the house’s next level. A bit like climbing up and down trees when he was a boy.

The narrow passages themselves were dimly lit by tiny holes sparkling along the inside wall. Abandoned nail holes from hung pictures and paintings that had since been moved. At first it was enough to just peer through these holes into the rooms he found. But over the long days of his explorations, it bothered him more and more that he was always on the outside. He wanted to know what it would be like to walk within those rooms.

An apartment on the bottom floor was almost always vacant during the day, both owners presumably at work, or looking for it. One morning, sitting in front of his computer with a cup of coffee, working down the list of companies he’d send his résumé to that day, he decided he’d go to the next step with that apartment. Standing half-up out of his chair to kiss Carolyn goodbye. Listening for the sound of their front door opening. Closing. As if, as soon as he was sure she’d be gone for the day, he was going to masturbate.

He waited a long half-hour, to be certain. Digits turning at a slow, slow, slow rate as he counted down.

At the half-hour, Don rose from his chair. Urinated, so he could stay inside the walls as long as possible.

Crawling the lengths of the spaces, going down through the square openings, he became a little disoriented, as he often did, but eventually he arrived at what he thought was the correct peep hole. Brought his right eye up to its ragged circle. Looked through.

This was it! The refrigerator with the snapshots pressed to its front by different cartoon magnets

.

Hunched over, he made his way to the small dwarf door of the apartment.

What if the door was locked?

Anxiety.

But his and Carolyn’s door didn’t have a lock. Why would you have a lock for a crawlspace door? Reached his hand out, turned the latch.

The latch tilted.

The door swung open.

Beyond, another couple’s kitchen.

Stooped over, like some invading troll, he emerged from their crawl space. Stood up.

The oddest feeling, doing something he knew was wrong. It reminded him of one evening when he was quite young, walking home from a friend’s birthday party. He cut across some backyards, happened to glance up at a silent house, to make sure he hadn’t been spotted, saw a lit second story window and, in its black frame, a woman removing her clothes. She wasn’t young, and she wasn’t slim, but he stayed rooted to that spot on the back lawn, staring. Fascinated. In the years to come he would see a number of women’s naked bodies, all of them more beautiful than this body, but the one he always recalled the most was hers. It was like looking into the future, to where women without clothes would be in his life. It was like solving—or at least, starting to solve—one of the world’s great mysteries.

He advanced across the kitchen’s vinyl floor, intensely aware the front door might open at any moment. He was a burglar. Stealing into someone else’s life. The thought thrilled him. And made him realize how dull his adult life had become.

The refrigerator with the cartoon magnets. He looked at the photographs on its white door. For the first time he could actually see what they showed. About a dozen pictures in all. A young man and woman. Early twenties. Together. Big smiles, happy eyes. Her showing some leg. Him, shirt off, flexing. One of those photo booth strips of four square pictures taken seconds apart, their distorted faces too close to the lens. He felt a pang of jealousy. They reminded him of himself and Carolyn, when they were first starting out. Deliriously happy. Dirt poor.

On an impulse, he opened the refrigerator door, the interior light automatically coming on. A package of twin steaks, probably being saved for Friday night, one of the cheaper cuts. Some beers. A tall bottle of inexpensive white wine. Three different kinds of lettuce. Fresh grapes. He realized he was crying.

Reached inside. Plucked from the cluster a single cold, green grape. Put it between his lips. Bit down, feeling within his mouth the mild burst, the sudden release of juice, sweetness. It had been a long, long time since he had eaten a grape. Maybe it just felt that way.

Don slammed the fridge shut when he realized he’d helped himself to several more of them. Opened it again, broke away the telltale stems that pointed at what was missing. Pocketed them.

One of the photos had been knocked askew on the fridge door. He straightened it, kept his fingers on its edges a moment wondering why he was so struck by the image of husband and wife cutting wedding cake.

In other rooms, more evidence of their happiness. A full vase of flowers, tall and fresh and colourful. One of the caricature portraits tourists buy, her all smiles and cheekbones, him squeezing her fit-to-pop with arms more muscular than any workout could produce. Don looked at the books they’d read, crammed on shelves, books they were reading, left on bedside tables. He went to the bathroom, checked the medicine cabinet. Sprayed her perfume because he loved the clean floral smell of her brand and knew he couldn’t afford it for Carolyn anymore.

Don walked a floor plan that was the same as his, only reversed. Opened cupboards. Looked in drawers. The delicious thrill of trespass faded, replaced by a sense of familiarity that went beyond the layout; he’d had this, once. Not the rooms, the walls, the floors—those he had now – but everything contained within the space between had once been his and Carolyn’s.

He peed in their toilet, flushed, washed his hands… and realized how long he’d lingered. A whole bladderful of time had passed. He said to his reflection, “What are you doing?” and had no answer.

He went to the dwarf door and climbed back home. Shrinking, diminishing, crawling away.

Full cover wraparound

Full cover wraparound for Shadows & Tall Trees 2014. Art by Santiago Caruso. Design by John Oakey.

Excerpt: The Golem of Leopoldstadt

Excerpt from Tara Isabella Burton’s story “The Golem of Leopoldstadt,” forthcoming in Shadows & Tall Trees.

Into the clay she pressed her loneliness. She made a man in the image of her father, whom she did not love, and used a needle to poke letters into his back. She hollowed out his cheeks so that they were as hard and wolf-like as her father’s; with her nails she made crosses in the eyes. Clara stretched the clay and pummeled it; she feasted on her tears and ignored Cornelius when he knocked.

“Papa’s awake.” He was dying.

She slipped the figure into her apron pocket and went downstairs.

They sat as they always sat: in silence. Papa, wheezing, up on the pillows. Cornelius in glory at their father’s right hand. Mama twisting her fingers in her lap, trembling. Clara in darkness at the other end of the room. The shutters were closed; the electricity flickered. Cobwebs trailed up and down the bedposts. Clara could not breathe.

Papa reared up; Mama flinched. Papa kissed Cornelius on both cheeks and whispered a blessing Clara could not hear as she hollowed out her father’s heart with her thumbs.

Cornelius was the anointed one; he was the hope of Leopoldstadt. He was the branch of David and he was the remnant. He was the child who had been born in darkness, and he was the boy who had survived. Women often stopped in the streets to gather him into their arms and weep, because he reminded him of the ones they had lost. In the brightness of his eyes he bore the promise of renewal. He was studying to be a rabbi. God had spared him. God had chosen him.

Papa had told them the story over and over again, the story of the childless officer’s wife over whom the toddler Cornelius had once tripped in the Prater, who had poured out the fervent instincts of her motherly heart, and when the calamity had started had used her influence to spare the whole family from those railway cars. It was a miracle of God in a time without miracles, for God had singled Cornelius out as the rod and as its flower, to feed on curds and honey, and to survive.

God had not chosen Clara, who had been born three years after it was all over, colicky and pale, and raised in silent, spinsterish seclusion in her father’s house. She was unfavoured; she polished the picture-frames. She turned away visitors at the door—Papa refused to face the ones who came to call. She cooked dinner; she helped Frau Moritz with the silver. She crept out at lunchtime, volumes of Papa’s Talmud hidden in her satchel, and sat alone among the roses of the Volksgarten to read them, ecstatic with the thrill of transgression. She received Papa’s curses with downcast eyes, and when he blessed Cornelius she turned away, swallowed, and reflected on the darkness outside God’s wings.

God’s hands had saved Cornelius, but Clara’s hands worked in her lap, kneading as they had kneaded for nineteen years. Clay was the only thing she was good at. Twenty or thirty copies of her father lined her bedroom wall. Forty or sixty crossed and unloving eyes stared down at her when she went to sleep at night. She did not complain. She did not make a fuss. She only kneaded the clay, and leavened it with her hate.

Excerpt: Vrangr

Excerpt from CM Muller’s story ‘Vrangr,’ forthcoming in Shadows & Tall Trees.

He slept soundly that night, experiencing a dream wherein he glimpsed himself, or at least a past version of himself. While the countenance of this past-Speth was uncannily similar, his manner of dress bespoke a much earlier century. The man even sported infinity-shaped spectacles, on which the modern-day Speth also prided himself. This individual sat in a rocking chair on the porch of a lavish farmhouse; reposing at his side was a stately woman encumbered in a frilly white dress. She read from a palm-sized leather book as her pipe-smoking companion gazed in Speth’s direction. While the man indicated no sign of recognition, it was nevertheless an eerie feeling to be stared at like that. In the front yard, a passel of children chased one another across the huge expanse. Speth longed to inch closer, in the hope of touring the interior of the house (or chatting with its owners), but he was locked to this one distant perspective.

The following morning he awoke with an impulse to flee. It was quarter to noon (this surprised Speth, for normally he was an early riser), so he frantically collected a few items and stuffed them into a small duffle bag. He then phoned the library to inform the director that he had taken ill and would therefore not be able to make his one o’clock shift. His voice was groggy, which only helped matters, and he managed to conclude the call in just under twenty seconds.

While spontaneity had never been his strong suit, Speth embraced it now like a newfound book of wonders, and in less than half an hour he was driving by rote through the streets of the city. Once he reached the interstate, he continued on a westerly route until he passed the dividing-line into North Dakota, where the landscape gradually levelled off to a vast and nearly featureless expanse. Speth’s only companion, due to the unreliability of his radio antenna, was an ‘80s cassette tape, the only one in his collection which had not been mangled by the player. While he had high hopes of making the journey in a single day, he decided not to push his luck. His arrival would coincide with nightfall, and he had little interest in experiencing Vrangr (and his inheritance) in the dark. Therefore, with less than 200 miles remaining, Speth began searching for a motel. The one he eventually decided upon was cheap and rundown, but it afforded him the rest and relaxation he required, even if the mattress was uncomfortable and the exterior vending machine expelled one flat soda after another. None of these inconveniences mattered in light of what awaited him.

The remainder of his evening was spent watching an old film on the outdated television in his room, which presented the fictional world not in its intended black and white but a grainy viridescence that pained his eyes and spirit. He left the set on, for the sound worked splendidly, and merely shifted his focus to the papered wall above, attempting to visualize his inheritance and to resurrect the details of his dream.

He awoke to the disorientation invariably encountered while sleeping in new environs, but this time the sensation never fully cleared. Surveying the unknown room, he was struck by its meticulousness and antiquity. There were framed portraits of various individuals on the walls, and he examined each before venturing to the far window. From the opposite side looking in, he felt certain he resembled the images he had just glimpsed; however, none of the children running about on the yard below took notice. He turned from the window to again peruse the portraits, discovering to his delight that they had completely changed—each now featured Speth standing proudly before his inheritance.

Call for Submissions: Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume 2

https://bestweirdfiction.submittable....

Excerpt: It Flows From the Mouth

Excerpt from Robert Shearman’s story “It Flows From the Mouth,” forthcoming in Shadows & Tall Trees.

The curtains were still open, but there was no light spilling into the room, it was just black and bleak out there. And from my position I couldn’t crane my head to see whether there was any light coming through the pane on the bottom left.

I didn’t want to wake Lisa. I got out of bed very gently. It was cold. My pyjama trousers had got lost somewhere. I’d have had to turn on the bedside lamp to find them. I wasn’t going to turn on the bedside lamp.

I went straight to the pane. I looked out.

As before, the pathway to the centre was lit by sparkling pebbles. But this time the snow was falling in droves, big clumps of it, and every flake seemed to catch the moon, and each one of them was like a little lamp lighting up the whole garden. The flowers were in bloom. It was ridiculous, but the flowers were in bloom – the blanket of red and white roses was thick and warm, and the snow fell upon it, and the roses didn’t care, the roses knew they could melt that snow, they had nothing to fear from it. I looked out at where Lisa had planted the hyacinths and the tulips – it was, as she’d said, like a wave of blue breaking upon a brightly coloured shore.

And at the fountain itself. Ian was throwing up all the water he had inside him, and he had so much water, he was never going to run out, was he? But I would have thought his face would have been distressed—it was not distressed. The worst you could say about the expression he wore was that it was resigned. Ian Wheeler had a job to do, and he was going to do it. It wasn’t a pleasant job, but he wasn’t one to complain, he’d just do the very best he could. And the flowers were growing around him too, and vines were twisting up his body and tightening around his neck.

Over the sound of the fountain I heard another noise now. Less regular. The sound of something dragging over loose stone. Something heavy, but determined – it seemed that every lurch across the stone was done with great weariness, but it wasn’t going to stop, it might be slow, but it wasn’t going to stop. And I can’t tell you why, but I suddenly felt a cold terror icing down my body, so cold that it froze my body still and I could do nothing but watch.

And into view at last shuffled Max. He was naked. And the snow was falling all around him, and I could see that it was falling fast and drenching him when it melted against his skin, but he didn’t notice, he was like the roses, he didn’t care, he didn’t stop. Forcing himself forward, but calmly, so deliberately, each step an effort but an effort he was equal to. Further up the path, following the trail of sparkling pebbles to the fountain. Following the yellow brick road.

I tried looking through the other panes. Nothing but darkness, and the snow falling so much more gently. I only wanted to look at that garden, at that reality. But I could hear the sound from the other garden so much more clearly, I couldn’t not hear it, the agonized heave of Max’s body up the path. The flow of running water, the way it gushed and spilled, all that noise, all of it, it was pulling him along. I had to look. I did.

Once in a while the bends of the path would turn Max around so that he was facing me. And I could see that dead face—no, not dead, not vacant even, it was filled with purpose, but it wasn’t a purpose I understood and it had nothing to do with the Max I had loved for so many years. I could see his skin turning blue with the cold. I could see his penis had shrunk away almost to nothing.

And now, too soon—he had reached the statue of his dead son. At last he stopped, as if to contemplate it. As if to study the workmanship!—his head tilted to one side. And maybe his son contemplated him in return, but if he did, he still never stopped spewing forth all that water, all the water there was in the world. Then—Max was moving again, he was using his last reserves of energy, he was stepping into the freezing pond, he was wading over to the stone angel, raising an arm, then both arms, he was reaching out to it. And I thought I could hear him howling. He was, he was howling.

Excerpt – To Assume the Writer’s Crown: Notes on the Craft

A short excerpt from Eric Schaller’s story “To Assume the Writer’s Crown: Notes on the Craft, coming soon in Shadows & Tall Trees.

Revision

The sad fact of writing is that nothing will match your initial vision. Our character Mary may seem perfection itself. But try this experiment—I certainly have—leave her alone in the cellar for a few days, a week, a month, and then return. Formerly an angel, she will now be dirty, rank as onions, a clawing creature of the pit. With revision, she may once again approach that original ideal. Below, I suggest several strategies for revision.

The Kingectomy: Even Stephen King, one of the most prolific writers of our age, in his book On Writing, describes how he excises 10% of a story to achieve final form. Perhaps your character could use a diet, her excess ten percent whittled away symmetrically. But don’t feel so constrained. How about amputating a leg just below the knee? A one-legged runner has narrative possibilities.

The Straubing: In Peter Straub’s short story, “Blue Rose,” there is a description of how the narrator inserts a thick needle into the arm of his hypnotized brother. This scene, running for pages, captures the obsession with which an author focuses on a particular scene in need of revision. The author might, for example, flay a finger tip, then deciding this is not sufficient, retract the skin to the second knuckle. Blood dribbles. Something is still not right. The author extracts strands of muscle with a pen point, exposing pink nubs of bone. The author licks and tastes the tainted calcium, then gnaws at it to reveal the divine white bone of memory.

The Flauberation: Gustave Flaubert is quoted as saying, “I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.” Do you remember Mary’s silvery blue eyes? She has only one now, having lost the other in a misguided attempt for freedom. But didn’t she function better with binocular vision? Editing is sometimes harder than even Flaubert could imagine.

Excerpt: Onanon

Excerpt from Michael Wehunt’s story “Onanon,” forthcoming in Shadows & Tall Trees.

You lay in the dark and heard the wet parting of my mouth. Warmth dripped onto your face from above the bed, where I clung in a corner of the room.

You closed your eyes against the scuttle of fingernails across the ceiling. When I was gone the room hung in quiet. You threw the sheets away from yourself and went to the window and twisted the blinds open. Below, figures on all fours skulked behind parked cars. Another watched you among the low bones of dogwood trees. The line of them stretching to the right, their petals gone.

In the fog of your breath you wrote MOTHER on the glass. You wrote DRONNING, and I had never filled your heart more.

#

He’d never thought Meli was the girl’s name, even when she murmured it against his neck the night they’d met at a reading in September. She was the earthy type he’d pick out of a room first, twenty-ish, hovering at the fringe of the bookstore. Milk skin with grease spot freckles, high rounded cheekbones and dense black hair. A girl who wore scarves in late summer, more like a Jennifer or a Karen, something that buried the truth of her under a soft screen.

Afterward she’d quoted one of Adam’s old stories and complimented the rhythm of his sentences. They both agreed he was better than the guy they’d listened to. Her praise and the way her body moved and he was half in love. In bed she asked a lot of questions about his childhood and he gave answers that even he thought were foggy. She was insatiable and let him do everything but stick his tongue in her mouth.

He’d woken alone in the early morning and found the sheets speckled with flowers of her blood.

Though Meli had softly demurred when he asked about her own work, she left a manuscript beside his laptop. A surreal story about a woman who believes she has become a great queen and explains her new status to her son. It was titled “Amanda,” the same as his mother and his stalled novel. From the first sentence the hours fell away and a vague despair built up around him.

Her prose read like it burned in her blood and spattered out of her. But she also wrote as if she had the time to pick up every seashell on some prehistoric beach, examine the sound inside each one until she found that inimitable tone.

He spent the day curled up staring at those twenty-nine pages, flipping back and forth to find so many passages beating with raw life. He felt sick with envy of a gift that was lifetimes beyond his own.

A few nights ago they’d run into each other—or she’d found him—at a release party for a poetry chapbook. Incestuous little circles of writers. They steeped themselves in drink and weed. Same as before, she wouldn’t talk about her work, and sometime in the night she left him. He woke tangled in sheets sprinkled with more bloodstains and heavy with her scent. A new manuscript lay on the floor beside the bed. It was titled “Dronning,” with the byline “from a novel by Adam Storen.”

His head throbbed at the seams. He wadded the bedding up into the trash chute. Dripped whiskey in his coffee and crawled back onto the stripped mattress with the story.

It was more scene than plot, twelve hundred words that cut off with a face in the window of a mountain cabin. The strange and singing prose was still there but had diminished over some dark threshold. The words felt ill, somehow, concerned as they were with some implied creature on the periphery of the page.

Yet something in the writing opened its jaws and he could almost hear them creak as he placed his head inside.

New Facebook page for Undertow Publications

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