The Monster’s Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

AND STILL YOU WONDER WHY OUR FIRST IMPULSE IS TO KILL YOU: An Alphabetized Faux-Manifesto transcribed, edited, and annotated (under duress and protest) by Gary A. Braunbeck

[AUTHOR’S PREFATORY NOTES: Did you know that, according to Roman scholar and writer Marcus Terentius Varro (116 B.C–27 B.C.), the word monstrum was not derived, as Cicero insisted, from the verb monstro, “to show” (comparable to the English “to demonstrate”), but, rather, came from moneo: “warning.” Isn’t that interesting, and somewhat ironic in a ham-fisted sort of way, considering the circumstances under which you’re reading this? I certainly thought so. And I did not know that until I inherited this job that I neither asked for nor wanted. More on that later.

[A few other tidbits you might find useful before we get to the bulk of this. I had to argue like you wouldn’t believe to get them to agree to add the “Faux” before “Manifesto.” What they dictated to me isn’t so much a manifesto as it is a collection of (albeit deadly serious) grievances and gripes, as well as little-known or conveniently forgotten historical facts, definitions, and more than a few parables. They’d originally wanted to call this their (I kid you not) “Monsterfesto,” and I — still not appreciating the gravity of the situation — immediately laughed and said, “That is so lame!” It cost me one of my cats. They didn’t just zap him into another dimension or have some banal beastie saunter in and gobble him down in a single gulp, no; they gave him instantaneous doses of full-blown end-stage feline leukemia and AIDS and made me sit there and watch him die. It took two and a half days. He kept trying to crawl to the water bowl. They would not let me move him closer so he could at least get a cool drink. They wouldn’t even let me hold him so he could die in the arms of someone who loved him. All I could do was watch as he struggled toward the water and wheezed and then coughed up, excreted, and pissed blood, all the time looking at me with frightened, confused, and ever-yellowing eyes as he made this soft mewling sound that after about twelve hours began to sound like “… help …” to my ears. When at last Ruben finally died — that was his name, by the way, Ruben — it was in a series of sputtering little agonies punctuated by painful seizures that I thought would never end. And if you found that hard to read, imagine how I felt having to sit there and watch it happen, completely powerless to ease even an iota of his suffering.

[And do you know why I was powerless to do anything? Because if I had tried to do something, they would have done the same thing to the rest of my family, one at a time, and I would have been the sole member of the audience to their excruciatingly torturous deaths, and I’ve got plenty of memories to give me nightmares for the rest of my life; have had plenty since I was a kid. Not looking to add to that particular collection, thank you very much. I don’t have much of a family left, and what family I still do have rely on government-issued food cards to buy their monthly groceries and still have to skip breakfast and eat macaroni and cheese for dinner three times a week while worrying over which utility bills can be skipped until next month, all the time praying to a God they have less and less faith actually exists that no one gets sick. So I had no choice but to watch Ruben die, and I had no choice but to accept this assignment and become their go-between.

[Here are the terms to which we finally agreed: 1) Unless I felt strongly that some clarification needed to be made, I was to transcribe everything precisely as dictated to me, more or less; any variation, even in punctuation, would result in their doing a Ruben on one of my remaining family members (this threat, though unspoken, remained the constant epilogue to every clause of our agreement); 2) If I did feel strongly that some clarification needed to be made, I had to make my argument in a courteous and respectful manner, but give them final say on whether or not it remained in the manuscript; so if in some section things seem rather abrupt or a bit helter-skelter, not my fault; 3) I had to agree to include at least three personal accounts of encounters with beings of their kind, regardless of how silly they sounded or uncomfortable they made me (or potential readers) feel; and 4) Upon reaching the end of this project, even if I still hated them for what they did to Ruben and threatened to do to what little family remains to me, I must make it sound as if I have sympathy, understanding, and compassion for them; fine by me, I can lie on paper with the best of them … just as long as I don’t have to claim any form of affection for them. They’re here, they’re not going anywhere, they don’t give a tinker’s damn if you believe in them or not (it won’t stop them from going Ruben on your ass), and … oh, yeah, by the way: They are not happy with us.

[So very not happy with us. The title of this piece should have given you a subtle hint as to the depth and breadth of their unhappiness with us.

[I would, however, completely out of context for reasons that are my own but that I hope you’ll eventually pick up on, like to paraphrase a line from the film version of The Exorcist for the benefit of my own conscience: I may mix some lies in with the truth, and truth with the lies.

[As to the matter at hand … it’s after midnight; time to let it all hang out.]

A

is for Abomination; it is also for Aberration, Abhorrent, Abortion, Atrocity, Awfulness, and several other words beginning with the first letter of the alphabet in many different languages, all of which — whether you can spell or pronounce them or not — amount to the same thing: Omigod, look at that ugly fuckin’ thing, somebody kill it quick! Many of these beings (which have feelings that are easily hurt, believe it or not) struggle up through Stygian depths yet to be imagined, let alone discovered, by paleoseismologists (who’d be the group to first find the traces) to get here; others cross time, space, dimensions, and take dangerous shortcuts through the multiverse in their attempts to make friendly contact. And what do they get for this? At the very least, they get called all sorts of hurtful names. One of them explained it to me in these terms: “Imagine driving way out of town to your family’s home for Christmas. You’re driving through a blizzard — we’re talking real Second Ice Age, Big Freeze stuff here, right? A drive that should have only taken thirty minutes takes you damn near three hours, but you finally get there. You’re exhausted, you’re starving, your bladder’s the size of a soccer ball, but the sight of the warm holiday lights within your family’s home makes it all worthwhile. You head up to the door, your arms filled with all these great, terrific, really killer boffo presents, and you let yourself inside, all smiles and Christmas greetings for everyone, filled with the spirit of the season — I mean, it may as well be the final scene of It’s a Wonderful Life. First thing that happens — your grandmother takes one look at you, her eyes roll back in her head, and she drops dead from the terror. Then the children as one scream in horror, shit their pants, and run for the basement. Your mother grabs a carving knife the size of a machete, Dad fires up the flamethrower he’s had in the downstairs closet since his two tours in Vietnam, and your sister starts hosing the room with a TEC-9. Now, don’t you think that would put a bit of a damper on your disposition? Hmmm …?”

B

is for Bogeyman, also Bogieman, Boogeyman, or Boogieman. Doesn’t really matter how you spell it, or what variation he takes on in whichever country where parents still use him to emotionally scar their children at as early an age as is possible, outside of a seventies disco song by KC and the Sunshine Band with a killer bass synthesizer line, he doesn’t exist. He never did. Stop using him to frighten your kids. This really sticks in their collective craw. Suck it up and be a parent and exercise well-tempered discipline like you’re supposed to, or use condoms next time, fer chrissakes. You’re supposed to be adults.

C

is for Colophon. You have been led to believe that this denotes a publisher’s mark or logotype appearing at the beginning or end of a book. It is not a mark; they are a race of parasites that came to Earth hidden within the binding of The Book of Forbidden Knowledge, the text that the Fallen Angels stole and gave to humankind during the first War in Heaven (which was technically more of a skirmish prompted by the Great Mother of all hissy fits, but that’s neither here nor there). Once The Book was entrusted to humankind — giving to it, among other things, the knowledge of Language, Music, Poetry, Art, Science, Writing, Dance, etc. — the Colophon scurried from their hiding place and began, bit by bit, to destroy the first of the Forbidden Gifts: Language. Before the Egyptian coffin beetle, before the advent of nanotechnology, before the first cancer cell ever set up shop in a sentient being’s bloodstream and began chewing away from within, the Colophon, smaller than all of the aforementioned (their initial number, which has now increased ten-million-fold, was somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred and seventeen million to the two hundred and sixtieth power) have been amassing their forces for a nonstop assault to take back language from the human race. The Tower of Babel was their first truly Great Victory against us. Other victories have been smaller, but get enough scratches and you can still bleed to death. Example: Have you begun to notice how, suddenly, no one knows the difference between a contraction and a possessive? Or how quickly ink begins to fade from the pages of books? Or how, regardless of how many times you reload a page online, you keep getting more and more garbage characters? These are just a few of the Colophon’s tactics. Their ultimate goal is to erase all printed language and destroy all digital language. Armed with the totality of this knowledge, they’ll enter our brains and wipe out all traces of even the basest form of verbal and written communication. We will be left with only the most vague, nebulous wisps of memory that we were once able to exchange ideas through sounds that came out of our mouths or were represented on the page by arcane symbols. We will lose the First Gift because we were not worthy to possess it in the first place.

D

is for the Damaged Ones. [Author’s Note: One of mine.] As an eight-year-old child I awoke in the woods in the early hours of dawn, naked and shivering where they had left me after they’d finished the night before. I tried to stand but my legs were weak and my feet too slick with the blood still trickling from my backside. I crawled forward, wondering why I was covered in silver quills. They weren’t quills, but needles that had fallen from the pine tree under which they had left me. The needles had become soaked in dew, and in the first rays of dawn, the thousands of them over my body looked like quills or gray fur. I stopped crawling when it felt as if my chest were going to explode. I stopped crawling when it felt as if things were falling out of me from back there, where I could not turn my head to see the trail. I stopped crawling because there was no place to crawl to, and no one waiting there for me. I raised my head and saw a great wolf standing so close to my face I could feel its hot breath tickle my matted hair against my scalp. “Are you a werewolf?” I asked. The great wolf shrugged. “That is one name for us, I suppose.” I began to cry. “Are you going to bite me and turn me into a werewolf, too?” The great wolf shook its head. “There’s no need. You have already been transformed. You will forever be marked. You are now no longer part of the human world. You are a Damaged One. No curse, no bite, no full moon is needed to steal away your humanity. You are a monster, as are we all.” I lived through that night, and I remember well the words of the great wolf on that morning. There is no need to be bitten, no reason to be cursed. On the street, nearly every time I venture out into the world — which I try to do as little as possible — as I walk I look up and see another one of us. Our eyes meet, and we know each other like members of the same family. Our eyes flash silver. They flash loss and anger and regret. Then one of us always crosses the street. It is not yet time to acknowledge each other’s existence. There is, it seems, much more damage yet to be done. [Author’s Note: Some mornings, as I begin to shave, I think of all the anguish that I’ve brought into the lives of those who love or have loved me, and I wish for a straight razor instead of one with a disposable blade. Then the mirror flashes silver and for a moment my eyes are gone and in a blink it’s just another bright, bright, sunshiny day.]

E

is for the Elder Gods (often mistakenly referred to as “the Great Old Ones”). They’re actually not nearly as old, or as powerful, or as frightening as they’d like for you to believe. Lovecraft [Author’s Note: Or so say those dictating this to me.], it turns out, was not a good choice for a PR man. Seems old Howard, aside from having more than his share of whack-a-doodle tendencies inherited from his schizophrenic mother, was not only paranoid but something of a racist to boot. He ran to a neighbor’s house in a shuddering panic because he was convinced that he’d discovered a cluster of “Negro eggs” in the basement of his home. Thus did he begin to graft his anti-human, pro-uncaring-universe philosophy into what they told him. All of that gobbledygook in all of the so-called Mythos stories? Mostly recipes and gossip. [Author’s Note: They speak of this with a curious mix of embarrassment and rage. One of them added this: “Do you think anyone remembers that Cthulhu was an extraterrestrial and his ‘house of R’lyeh’ was a goddamn spaceship? Oh, and let’s not forget where R’lyeh was located — at the bottom of the freakin’ sea! Now, you tell me — would you have any real primeval fear in your heart for a race of beings whose giant, bat-winged, slobbering, tentacle-faced leader — supposedly possessed of all the knowledge from pre- and post-history — didn’t have the sense to install something akin to a GPS system in his ship so he didn’t drown everyone when they landed? Yes, they’re really big. Really big. And most of them are dumber than a bag of hair. But because of Lovecraft’s misrepresenting what they said, we have to work a thousand times as hard to get your attention. His fictions are astounding models of structure, but otherwise, Howie [Author’s Note-Within-a-Note: They all call him “Howie.” Don’t ask me, I’m just doing the typing at this point.] was stuffed full of wild blueberry muffins. William Hope Hodgson, though … there was a scary fucker. The House on the Borderland. Yeah — he knew something.”]

F

is for Finders of the Last Breath. They are led by a lithe female figure with the head of a black horse, its ears erect, its neck arched, vapor jetting from its nostrils; one of her followers is tall and skeletal, with fingers so long their tips brush against the ground: It hunkers down and snakes its fingers around whatever object has attracted its attention, absorbing the sound made by vibrational waves so it can trace them back to their source; other followers hop like frogs, some roll, some scuttle on rootlike filaments that are covered in flowers whose centers are the faces of blind children. Many of them are terrifying to behold, and too many have been killed as they attempt to carry out their duties: to be at the side of infants and the old who are about to die, so that their last breaths can be caught and put in jars and stored away. It is only when the Finders can carry out their duties that your infants and your old will pass in peace, and rest in peace. The Finders make their deaths painless, even majestic. But if their last breaths cannot be caught in time, the infant’s or the aged one’s death — even after the remains have been burned or buried — is never-ending, and their awareness of the horror of their fate is crystalline and without pity. You should welcome and not fear the presence of the Finders. Fear only their absence when the time comes.

G

is for the Glop. The Glop has no real name. The Glop has no real form. It can call itself anything it wants and assume any form it wishes. If it has a purpose, no one knows what it is. The Glop is that nameless, shambling, drooling, unnamable, indescribable “thing” that always manages to get hold of the narrator of a horror story just before said narrator can name it or describe it or reveal its purpose. [Author’s Note: Yet have you noticed that the narrators of these stories always seem to have time to write “Gaaaaah!” or “Arrrrrrgh!” or something like that?] If you read a story that ends with a long, jagged pen-scrawl trailing down to the bottom of the page, that’s because the Glop got to the narrator. If you haven’t figured it out yet, the Glop is in cahoots with the Colophon. Many is the character, both in fiction and in real life, who has found him- or herself in the embarrassing position of being Slurped by the Glop before anyone can learn anything about them. Bad horror movies are especially adept at this. Or episodes of the original Star Trek when everyone beams down to a planet’s surface … but there’s that crew member you’ve never seen before, the one whose uniform doesn’t even come close to matching everyone else’s. You know immediately that crew member is Soon to Be Slurped by the Glop. [Author’s Note: They’d really like to get their hands on the Glop. Reality and fiction are one and the same to it, and they’d like to know how it manages to move so easily between realms of perception and still manage to assume physical form. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind hearing that one myself.]

H

is for Hawkline Monster. [Author’s Note: Not the one of which Richard Brautigan wrote.] The sting came back to him; not the same as before, but far more powerful. He dropped to one knee as the pain began to tear his face in half, he felt it, felt the fire burning through his nose as he struggled to his feet and stumbled into the bathroom, hoping that it was all over now, please let it be over, please let this be the last of my punishment, but then he was in front of the mirror and looking at his face as it began swelling around a gash on his forehead and nose, swelling like a goddamn balloon so he looked away, looked down at his hand and saw it pulsating, felt a cold thing crawling between his shoulders, eyes twitching, what the hell is it, but then he heard the flapping, the flapping from outside the house and the sound of shattering glass and the volume of the dozens, hundreds of wings grew louder as he pulled himself around to look in the mirror and see his face split apart like someone tearing a biscuit in half, only there was no steam, just blood, spraying, geysering, very pretty, really, spattering around, and he tried to look behind him and see the birds as they engulfed the rooms of his house, but the pain was killing him because the cold thing shuddered down between his shoulders and began to push through, snapping his shoulder blades as if they were thin pieces of bark, and he screamed, screamed and whirled and slammed himself into the wall trying to stop the pain, trying to stop it from getting out, but he stunned himself for a moment and slid down to the floor, leaving a wide dark smear behind him, howling as the first thing sawed through his back and fluttered to life, he was on his hands and knees now, waiting, trying to breathe, breathe deep, and now, ohgod now the second one was tearing through, making a sound like a plastic bag melting on a fire, pushing through, unfurling, and he could see them now, could see them easily because their span must have been at least fifteen feet, and he threw his head back to laugh, he wanted to laugh, but he couldn’t laugh, couldn’t make any more human sounds, so he screamed, screamed so loud and long that his eyes bulged out and his face turned a dark blue, but then he listened as his scream turned into the wail of an angry bird of prey when his body was jerked back into a standing position, his arms locking bent, his hands clenching, every muscle in his body on fire; writhing, shifting, bones snapping, he shrieked in the tiny cage of the bathroom as his chest puffed out through his shirt and was covered in thick layers of brown feathers, and the birds were all around him now, flying, soaring majestically, and he knew their sounds, understood their sounds that sang forgiveness and release, understood all of it as he watched the flesh of his face drop off his body like peelings from an orange and he tried to move his arms, tried to grab something, then he jerked around from the waist and saw his arms drop off like branches from a burned tree, and he screamed again, louder than before, wishing that the pain would end and just let him die; instead it only forced him to fall against his great wings and, with one last shriek, jerk back as the spasm took hold of him, pushing the corded claws up through his groin. Soon he looked down on the bloodied heap of his human flesh. The sun was shining. The children were waiting. He offered his apologies for having hidden from them for so long. He’d only needed to know the draw of the Earth, the taste of those who bowed to Gravity. He’d almost forgotten that his flesh was a disguise. He rose above the fields of flesh, talons extended. His children followed. Someday they would carry away the souls of all humankind in their claws; punishment for its cowardice in ceasing exploration of the heavens.

I

is for Ichthyocentaur. Lycophron, Claudian, a Byzantine grammarian named Tzetzes, and Jorge Luis Borges are among the few who have written of the Ichthyocentaur, a creature of terrible wonder and beauty; human to the waist, with the tail of a dolphin and forelegs of a powerful battle-horse, the Ichthyocentaur is a creature capable of parthenogenesis. It is one of the most reverent myths to them. [Author’s Note: The monsters who dictate this to me.] They argue constantly over whose writings come the closest to capturing the mystery of this most wondrous and imposing creature — the majority side with Tzetzes — but none doubt its existence. They have composed hymns, created sculptures, fashioned complex mythologies and tall tales around it. There exists only one Ichthyocentaur, and they are determined to find it, to protect it, and to beg it to create another like itself that its race may multiply through the seas of the world. Even monsters dream of beauty. Even they embrace myth. [Author’s Note: You would not believe some of their myths; please trust me on that one.] They foster imagination within themselves and others of their ilk. This is what should make them holy.

J

is for Joyce Carol Oates. She is their favorite author, bar none. She is their Goddess. She and her stories are the music and words of their Heart-Song-of-Being. She knows their suffering, understands their loneliness, articulates everything within them that they haven’t the emotional vocabulary to express. They can recite all of her works from memory. [Author’s Note: I listened as a trio of them did not so much recite as perform “Dear Husband,” Rape: A Love Story, and the contents of Sourland in its entirety. I would be lying if I claimed not to have been moved.] When at last they finally erase most of humanity from the face of the planet, she will be among the few who will spared. They do not call her by her name — to speak her name is a punishable act, for they see themselves as not yet worthy to speak her name; instead, they whisper “Scheherazade” and genuflect.

K

is for The Ken Doll. For some reason he scares the living shit out of them.

L

is for Loup-Garou. [Author’s Note: See earlier note under D.]

M

is for Mclnnsmouth’s. [Author’s Note: One of mine. Still mixing truth with lies and lies with truth.] Driving back from the twice-annual residency program at the university where we both teach, fellow writer Tim Waggoner and I were surprised by a sudden and somewhat brutal snowstorm. We drove slowly. A couple of hours passed. When at last we emerged from the worst of it, both us had to go to the bathroom, we were about to pass out from hunger (it had been over nine hours since our previous meal), and the gas tank was nearing empty. I checked the printed directions as well as the folded maps, and Tim checked the GPS; according to all sources, there wasn’t an exit for another thirty miles. We weren’t going to make it. But then I spotted, dimly, in the distance, something that could only have been the famous arches of gold. There was much rejoicing, for wherever one finds the arches, one find restrooms and gas stations. So happy are we to see this that we both promptly forget there isn’t supposed to be an exit here. We turn off at the end of the exit ramp and see there is only one structure, a few hundred yards to our left: the ever-familiar arches of gold, but attached to a gas station. We head toward it, tears of relief in our eyes, singing Neil Young’s “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World” far too loudly and excruciatingly off-key. We park, go in, hit the restrooms, order our … I hesitate to use the word “food,” so in this case allow me to rephrase: We gave our orders, paid, received what we ordered, found a place to sit, and began eating. There was also a gift shop inside this structure, along with private pay-showers, and an unmarked room where patrons had to knock in a specific rhythm in order to be let in. “Is it just me,” I ask Tim, “or do a lot of the people coming in here look like they might be related to everyone who works here?” Tim begins watching. “They all look like Children of the Damned,” he responds, referring to the novel and film versions, where the alien children are all pale, with white hair and unsettling eyes. We laugh, continue eating. Then Tim’s eyes stare ahead, lock onto something, and grow a bit wider. I ask, “What is it?” He nods in the direction of the entryway behind us. I turn to look. At least a dozen more people have come in. The place is beginning to fill up. It’s nearly 11:30 P.M. on a Sunday, and it appears that where we are is the Place to Be. The dozen who have just entered look almost exactly like everyone else; same pale skin, same white hair, same unnerving eyes, the color of which I don’t know that I’ve ever seen in Nature. But now we notice that many of them sport some kind of deformity, each one growing more grotesque than the one before as even more continue coming in through the entryway. “Do you smell fish?” Tim asks me. I nod, adding, “And something that’s like an open sewer?” He nods his head. We decide to get the hell out of there while the getting’s good. The area is very crowded, and we have to excuse ourselves as we maneuver through, sometimes bumping shoulders, sometimes stepping on a spongy foot, always smiling, always apologizing, always careful to not look up into the face for fear of seeing gills on the neck. We still have to get gas. Tim calmly drives the car toward the pumps. Both of our faces are slabs of granite. We can’t let them know we know. From outside the car, we look calm and collected and engaged in rapid-fire conversation. Inside the car, we’re both saying wearesobonedwearesobonedwearesobonedshitpissfuckfuckfuck. We get out of the car once we reach the concrete fueling isle. Tim pumps the gas; I wash the windshield so I can keep an eye on the doors of the structure. Inside, the employees and patrons have all lined the windows and are standing very still, frozen specters on the deck of an ice-bound ship, staring at us. “We have enough gas,” I say. Tim looks over at the window. “Yes, yes, I think it’s safe to say I agree with you on this one, we definitely have enough gas.” He replaces the nozzle and doesn’t bother waiting for his credit card receipt. We jump in the car and peel out of there, the car fishtailing when we hit a patch of ice, but we manage to get out of there and back on the highway. In the years since then, whenever we speak of that night, we refer to it as “the McInnsmouth’s Incident.” [Author’s Note: Referring, of course, to the famous novella by H. P. Lovecraft, which neither Tim nor I can bring ourselves to read again. See earlier note under E.] As far as either of us knows, that unmarked exit is still there, and still leads to the same place. Not that we’re in any hurry to test that theory, mind you. The smell of fresh fish still gives both of us bad dreams. Sushi is right out.

N

is for Nazareth, the Scottish metal band. Specifically, for their album Hair of the Dog, which They Who Are Dictating This to Me love. Even more specifically, it is for two songs from that album: “Hair of the Dog” and “Beggars’ Day,” both of which they play almost constantly [Author’s Note: Constantly. Constantly, God help me — and would someone please explain to me what the fuck that “heartbreaker/salt-shaker” line is supposed to be about? I mean, I’m all for rock lyrics that experiment with the boundaries of metaphor, but heartbreaker/salt-shaker? Really?] — that is, when not singing praises to the Goddess who is their favorite writer. [See earlier note under J.] [Additional Note: I think my ears have actually begun to bleed.]

O

is for the Only. Places can be monsters as well; even those places that lack mass and substance. The Only — and it is sentient — is one of those places. You will reach a place in your life when it feels like all you’re doing is breathing air and taking up space, and even that hurts so goddamn much it’s all you can do to lift your head off the pillow in the morning. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a successful career, money in the bank, people who love you; it doesn’t matter that, everywhere you look, there’s irrefutable evidence of your life’s worth — a loving wife, kids who worship and respect you, lifelong friends who’ve seen you through thick and thin, even readers who admire your work and flock to conventions in the hopes of getting your signature [Author’s Note: Not really sure if this is one of mine or not, but also realize that, at this point, what does it matter?] — none of it means squat, even though you know it should mean the world, because all you know, all you feel, all you can think about is the gnawing, constant, insatiable ache that’s taken up residence in the area where your heart used to be, and with every breath, every action, every thought and smile and kiss and laugh — things that should make this ache go away — you begin to lose even the most elementary sense of self, and the floodgates are opened wide for a torrent of memories, regrets, sadnesses, and fears that no drugs, no booze, no loving embraces or tender kisses or hands holding your own in the night can protect you from. You become the ache, and despite all your efforts to do something to make it better, eventually the ache circumscribes your entire universe, and it never goes away, and you feel useless, worthless, a black hole, a drain and burden on everyone and everything around you and try as you might you can’t see any way out of it except … The heart makes no sound when it breaks. The mind releases no scream when it collapses. The soul raises no whistling breeze when it abandons you. This is the first step into surrendering so that you may move toward the Only: Population: 1 more than seven minutes ago, thank you kindly. Does anyone know how to get old blood off an antique straight razor? [See earlier note under D, 2nd Author’s Note.]

P

is for Phantoms. At the very start, you’re standing on a beach in Florida, at the very spot where Ponce de León landed in 1513, hoping it was the land of Bimini where he could find the Fountain of Youth; and as you’re standing there, you can see all the way to St. Augustine, overrun with the old and sick who wait in the salt air and sunshine for death to embrace them. You open your mouth to call out — and it doesn’t matter that you don’t know to whom you’re going to call out or what you’re going to say, none of it matters, because now the sea is giving up its dead, and you, you’re pulled into the water. All of you becomes liquid, and you know the sea’s secrets, and having become liquid you watch as off the coast of the Île de la Seine, the Ship of the Dead appears, dropping clumps of viscera and something that might be isinglass, which drift in toward shore; by the banks of the Colorado River near an Anasazi village a decaying boat of cedar and horsehide drifts to land, and from it steps a ragged and bleeding woman who kneels by an undiscovered kiva, wailing a song of loss and misery in Urdu to the god Angwusnasomtaqa, praying that the Crow Mother will return her to her mate in the Netherworld; off Ballachulish in Argyllshire a shipload of drowned crofters materializes, howling in the most dread-filled loneliness; a fisherman in Vancouver sees a mountainous trident emerge from the water, pierce through then uproot an oak before it vanishes below the surface, creating waves so powerful they smash his small boat into splinters but that’s okay, because, you see, he drowns with a happy heart because he’s seen a miracle, which is all he’s ever wanted out of life; in icy hyperborean waters another doomed vessel, captained by a German nobleman named Faulkenburg, races through the night with tongues of fire licking at its masthead; St. Brendan’s Isle appears in the Atlantic — but for only a moment, just long enough for three coelacanths to push off from shore and submerge into the waters; many miles away the SS Cotapaxi, believed to be vanished en route from Charleston to Havana in 1925, drifts out of the sea-mist, its crew, looking through hollow and algae-encrusted sockets where their eyes used to be, smile at one another, happy to be voyaging once again; then a kraken, the same one found by the Bishop of Midros, thunders out of its underwater cave long enough to snare two scuba divers in its mighty claws and drag them, shredded and screaming, back under the waves while the Raifuku Maru — the Japanese freighter that vanished off the coast of Cuba the same year as the Cotapaxi — reappears just long enough for three crew members to throw themselves over the side because they’re all diving for a baggage-claim ticket that’s bobbed to the surface. The Loch Ness Monster sticks its head above the surface, looks around, decides not to take part in this silliness, and submerges once again. As liquid, you catch sight of something remarkable, even to something as remarkable as you are now: In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming. [See earlier note under E.] You wonder what other so-called phantoms of myth and old-wives’ tales and legend may actually exist, if monsters are real [Author’s Note: You bet your ass they are. I know a dead cat who can back me up on that.], and what part you, as liquid, as all liquid, will play in this.

Q

is for Quetzalcoatl. Look up in the night sky: The moon has become a shimmering silver rose, its petals formed by the wings of the hundreds — maybe thousands — of clichéd angels that are perched around it, looking down like spectators into an arena. They are watching as Quetzalcoatl, three times the size of an airplane, pumps his mammoth pterosaurian wings and flies in wide, graceful circles. He is not alone; a WWII German pursuit plane with twin machine guns mounted on its wings — a latter version of the 1916 model designed by Anthony Herman Gerard Fokker — is engaged in an intense but playful dogfight with the flying reptile. The plane turns in tight, precise maneuvers as Quetzalcoatl attacks it from below. The machine guns strafe without mercy or sound, a silent-film prop spitting out bursts of sparking light, firing off round after round. Quetzalcoatl remembers the ancient people of Mexico and their worship. He remembers Tezcatlipoca and wonders how his brother is doing these days. Probably has a cushy gig like he always wanted. Is probably still worshipped. Doesn’t have to keep himself alive by working a two-bit outfit like the Circus of the Forgotten Gods. But Quetzalcoatl shakes himself from this bittersweet reverie; Baron Manfred Albrecht von Richthofen, former leader of Das Jagdgeschwader — the “Flying Circus” — how was that for irony? — nearly clipped his left wing. Quetzalcoatl banks left, avoiding a serious collision, and decides that he should have believed the Earth Mother, he should have paid more attention to Uitzilopochtli, should have heeded the Eater of Filth, and definitely should have listened to Coatlicue even though her twin-serpent-heads face made him laugh: They had all been right. Karma sucks the Imperial Wanger.

R

is for Remnants. Some of what you’re reading is composed of Remnants of other, long- and best-forgotten stories that They Who Are Dictating This to Me particularly enjoyed and so demanded I work them in here; some of what you’re reading is from stories I haven’t written yet but will/may write. They Who Are Dictating This to Me say that this is a done deal. Some of what you are reading is directly from them. Some of it is the truth; more than a little of it is lies. I am nothing but a being of flesh, bone, blood, grief, anger, carbon — just call me a lump of matter — which is, by its very design, designed to move toward its own disintegration from the moment it comes into existence. Dig this: Matter is composed of atoms, which are made in turn from quarks and electrons — but all particles, if you look closer, are birthed from tiny loops of vibrating string; everything at its most microscopic level is composed of these vibrating strands, they encompass all forces and all matter; look closer still at a single string and you realize that, if isolated, it is nothing more than a Remnant. Everything in the multiverse can be reduced to a Remnant. Especially the fragmented past, which runs concurrently with what came after — this moment, for instance, which has now passed — as well as the pre-past and the illusionary Now and the unknowable After-now, sometimes called the Future, all of it held together by tiny vibrations of isolated Remnants giving birth to electrons and quarks. And it’s all so fragile, more fragile than any of us will ever want to know, let alone believe. The fragmented Remnants that encompass all are not vibrating at the same intensity; they are becoming more rapid as the multiverse dances, dances, dances. But let’s bring it back down to the concrete and indoor carpeting. Here is a Remnant: In October of 2002 I died by my own hand. I was forty-three years old and it was the fifth time in my life that I’d planned out my own disintegration, the third time I’d attempted to keep that appointment in Samarra, and the first time I’d actually succeeded. I stood there looking down at my body as it finished convulsing on the bed in the hotel room I’d rented. I remember thinking that I should have felt something, but could summon no emotion whatsoever. Then another Remnant — this one in the form of a dab tsog from Hmong myth — appeared, squatting on my chest, misshapen beyond anything I’d ever seen before. Even though I was no longer in my body, I could feel its weight on my chest. It looked over my shoulder, smiled at me, then turned back to my body and rammed its entire arm down my throat. I could feel its arm inside of me, and when it yanked out that arm, the incredible violence of the act pulled me back into myself and I pushed it off my chest and fell off the bed and managed to make it to the bathroom to vomit in the toilet. Afterward, as I knelt in front of the commode, resting my head against the cool, cool porcelain rim, the dab tsog jumped onto the lid of the toilet tank, reached down, and grabbed a handful of my hair so as to pull up my head and look me in the eyes. “Next time,” it said, its voice the sound of rusted nails being wrenched from rotted wood, “when you go looking to inflict and experience anguish, remember that anguish is already busy with weaker men.” Then it slammed my head against the tank and knocked me unconscious. If you have ever seen the cover to Ray Bradbury’s Long After Midnight, you’ll remember the reproduction of Johann Heinrich Füssli’s painting The Nightmare; that creature squatting on the sleeping woman’s chest looks a lot like the dab tsog that spoke to me. [Author’s Note: Is this one of mine? I can’t tell anymore. Did the creature know that it, too, was nothing more at its core than groups of vibrating string that appear to have no further internal substructure? Is this one of mine?] Remnants of the truth mix with those of Myth: Did we invent the monsters, like Baron Frankenstein, or did they invent us? Either way, who asked to be summoned from the darkness and made flesh? Show of hands? Yeah, that’s what I figured. I think they created us; I think we are another one of their great wonders [Author’s Note: See earlier note under I.], we are their Frankenstein’s monster, we are what happened when the vibrations of those strings reached the other side and enabled all forces and matter in the multiverse to dream, to imagine, to transcend. No wonder they despise us so: What beings wouldn’t be angry to discover that the myths they created have assumed control, that the inmates built from Remnants in their imagination have taken over the asylum, and they, the makers, the dreamers, they who imagined and envisioned and transcended us have been turned into sometimes-laughable Boogiemen [Author’s Note: See earlier entry under B.] that we’ve all but unbelieved out of physical existence? And what do you see now, I ask them, as you look at me, here at my keyboard, playing secretary to you? A man watches as a disease-riddled cat crawls toward a bowl of water. My God, what a joke it all seems. Like some weekday-morning television school for their preschoolers: Good morning, boys and ghouls, and welcome to the Monster’s Corner! Today our story is titled “And Still You Wonder Why Our First Impulse Is to Kill You,” and it’s all about how we created our monsters so we could scare them, and they liked it so much that they wrote stories and made movies, thinking they were inventing us, so that others like them would read and see and be frightened. But then — ooooh, spooky — things got a little out of hand … A dying cat crawls toward a bowl of water that it will never reach. The warm breath of a wolf tickles the scalp of a small boy [see earlier notes under L and D]. A writer continues pounding away at the keys long after his imagination has abandoned him, taking with it his soul [see earlier note under O], so he is reduced to being both creator and monster, picking over the rotting carcasses of some long-forgotten pieces and some that are yet to be written in order to make a deadline i like deadlines i like the little whoosh they make as they pass by and what is left after that, what is left but one monster facing the other and neither of them one-hundred-percent certain of who invented whom, but it’s not looking good for our side, folks, you can quote Gary B. on that, take it to the bank, because would I lie to you? — okay, all I do is lie, I’ve got over twenty thousand pages of lies that I chose to tell you instead of living my life as well as possible, but mixing lies with truth and truth with lies is what I do, it’s what they have me do, here in the Monster’s Corner [Weekday mornings, 8:30 A.M. Check local listings] and I can’t help but do as they dream, as they imagine, because — ---- —----------- dead now dead now gary’s all gone we couldn’t listen to him anymore he was soooooooo depressing don’t you think and these keys are funny things how is you manage to separateallthwordssothat everything-makessense???????????????????? Blood on the floor his blood is on the floor and we bet his last thought was filled with regret see earlier note under h or is it f we hadto do it because these things we decided must never seeprint it is ourbookof forbidden knowledge and the first forbidden knowledge of our book is that we created you and you must not everknow that must go on thinking you invented us because what fun is it otherwise no fun at all just a bunch of strings vibrating happily along and we’re all out of time here at the monster’s corner for stories w hope to see you all back here tomorrow so as they see earlier note under t come to finish the job we”llll call up the glop see earlier note under g to take us out on the usual note and here we go arrrrrrg gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh — - — ---

this one with deepest respect and admiration is for in alphabetical order ellen datlow harlan ellison neil gaiman caitlin kiernan kelly link peter straub and the goddesss they call Scheherazade joyce carol oates [Author’s Note: Did I write that or did they imagine me writing that? I wish I — --- —