by C M Muller
Nightscript II
Edited by C.M. Muller
Tales © 2016 by individual authors. All rights reserved.
First e-Edition
Cover: “The Lonely Ones” (1899) by Edvard Munch
Additional proofreading by Chris Mashak
This anthology is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Nightscript is published annually, during grand October.
Chthonic Matter | St. Paul, Minnesota
www.chthonicmatter.wordpress.com
Contents
The Carnival Arrives in Darkness | Michael Griffin
In the Dark, Quiet Places | Kristi DeMeester
Phantom Airfields | Christopher Slatsky
En Plein Air | J.T. Glover
The Inveterate Establishment of Daddano & Co. | Eric J. Guignard
White Elephants | Malcolm Devlin
Reasons I Hate My Big Sister | Gwendolyn Kiste
Nearness | Ralph Robert Moore
This Lonely Hecatomb | Christopher Ropes
Apartment B | Steve Rasnic Tem
Understairs | Jason A. Wyckoff
As Summer’s Mask Slips | Gordon White
And Elm Do Hate | Nina Shepardson
A Silence of Starlings | Kurt Fawver
Aycayia | Rowley Amato
The White Kisses | Charles Wilkinson
Down by the River | H.V. Chao
Arena | Daniel Mills
From the Fertile Dark | Rebecca J. Allred
No Abiding Place on Earth | Matthew M. Bartlett
Pause for Laughter | José Cruz
About the Contributors
New Strange
First things first: Whether you are new to Nightscript, or a devoted returnee, thank you to the Nth degree for giving this little journal of “strange and darksome” tales a try. Volume One was a resounding success, exceeding all my expectations and earning a score of positive reviews. I can only hope that the edition you now hold continues to charm. Herein you will encounter stories by both established authors as well as two newcomers whose bylines I suspect you’ll be seeing a lot more of in the years to come. I could go on and on, I suppose, expounding on the spectacular nature of the twenty-one tales which follow, analyzing each, telling you what makes them tick, but I’d much rather issue a gentle directive and return to my curtain of night.
To wit: Turn the page, good reader. The carnival awaits.
C.M. Muller
The Carnival Arrives in Darkness
Michael Griffin
1. Subject in search of a beginning
Subject waits disused, days beyond count, lonely endless nights in the unlit soundstage which was once, long ago, a textile factory in some Eastern European country. Subject can’t remember the name of the country, or what the factory used to make. He barely recalls his arrival. It’s been so long.
He wishes The Storyteller would stop waiting on his muse and do something. The very subject of inspiration bothers him. He grows impatient, sometimes frustrated, even angry. He allows himself to blame The Storyteller, at least until he remembers The Storyteller is waiting too, far away, in another country where the light is different, the skies are dry, and people speak a language that Subject barely remembers. The problem is, The Storyteller has a life of his own to live while he waits. Subject has nothing like that. Waiting is all he has, hoping for another opportunity. For The Storyteller to find the story, or for the story to find him.
Before this, Subject had something important to do. The Storyteller used Subject as a stand in for himself in many films. These took place in other locations, less exotic, more comfortable for Subject to remain throughout the gaps in between. Then The Storyteller purchased this place and brought Subject here to wait, with this promise: “This is where the next story will be.”
Subject might like to pass the time with the Girl Who is Love, but she stays out of sight, content in solitude. They’ve been intimate before, though always in front of a camera, surrounded by crew. Subject dwells in his mind upon those instances, visualizes scenarios. Some of the pictures he replays in his mind really happened, some are imagination. In this sense, Subject invents a story of his own. When he thinks of the Girl Who is Love, Subject tries to approach the puzzle from all different angles, to imagine other possibilities for what it might mean.
His efforts always come back around to the same thing. It’s pretty clear she only loves him in movies.
2. This place, the way it looks and sounds
The concrete floor is gouged as if heavy metal constructs have collapsed and sharp broken pieces dragged across the vast rooms. The windows are smudged with dust and grease aged to waxiness, so the light within is always diffuse, cinematic. In the corners and stairwells accumulate curling flakes of paint which look picturesque and textural so this mess is allowed to remain, though technically it is a kind of decay and brokenness which certainly someone should repair. Some of the spaces are littered with shattered asbestos tiles fallen from the ceilings and ventilation ducts. In winter the light goes gray but the temperature does not become cold. In summer the spaces are illuminated blue in morning, gold in evening, but the factory never warms.
In the big room, columns stand in rows a few meters apart. So many columns, hundreds of them in white stone, points on a grid. This place was crafted many years ago by masters, trained artisans of a high culture. The adornments are elegant, almost like an otherworldly museum, yet the lights buzz like a vibrator and the water stinks of sulfur and the ceilings drip even when there’s been no rain for weeks.
Outside is a world of breathtaking old world opulence gone utterly to seed. Derelicts lie dead in alleys, junkies tremble delirious in gutters, the fallen stepped over by hollow-brained smiling decadents wobbling on cancer-weakened bones, outfitted in suits and dresses handed down six generations.
Inside, every day is grainy black and white, more filmic than cinematic. Nothing movie-worthy is happening, at least not yet. Maybe it never will. Life looks exactly like film, though, flickering with profundity and heartache even when it’s just life, waiting for meaning to arrive.
The way things sound here took Subject quite a while to perceive. The sonic atmosphere only rose to the level of his conscious awareness after he’d remained a long time alone. Suddenly it was there, or he realized it had always been. Underlying everything, even in the perfect absence of movement, is a soundtrack of persistent industrial noise. The mechanistic grind of the factory, though all the old iron machines have vacated and in their place only drop-cloth-covered modern tools of art remain. Clattering trains pass at distance, their enormous weight shaking loose a cloud which covers the city. A deep ambient substrate, a dark rumble of the ordinary sounds of life slowed and pitch-shifted, imbued with mystery and threat.
Was it always like this, or did Subject himself change it by coming here? Could he shift the world somehow, just by waiting and listening?
3. Problems arise, just like in a story
Subject wakes to find the animals have gotten loose again and run wild throughout the factory. One by one they’re running into concrete walls and dying. He catches some, restores them one at a time to their pens. If this is all this place offers to keep him occupied today, he doesn’t like it. Subject keeps chasing until he’s exhausted, so sweat-drenched and depleted finally he drops to the concrete floor amid the several bodies of the dead things, and drops effortless into the sleep from which the run-amok animals awakened him.
He wakes again later, shaken by a wild party full of music and danger and aggression in another part of the factory. Many arrivals, of course including The Storyteller. It looks like finally a story might be about to happen, but Subject has
heard no hint, seen no script. Not even an outline or storyboards.
Everyone is celebrating, he learns, because The Storyteller has gotten married. This is something nobody expects. The stories are never about things like this. Sudden marriage, new wives appearing out of nowhere.
The Girl Who is Love emerges from her corner of the factory to join the party. It’s always interesting, seeing The Storyteller alongside the Girl Who is Love. In stories where Subject stands for The Storyteller, the Girl Who is Love stands for some real girl The Storyteller must have fallen for in the real world, long ago. Nobody knows who. All of them presume that whoever the girl is, she must be similar to the Girl Who is Love, just like Subject is to The Storyteller.
The Storyteller’s new wife is nothing like the Girl Who is Love.
4. Shedding demons and the cause of delay
The only activity Subject has to occupy his waiting time is to mind the animals in their pens. He waters them, feeds them, trying never to look at them directly. The animals give him an anxious, unsettled feeling. It’s unclear what they are exactly, maybe some halfway thing between cat and pig.
The Storyteller has banished his own demons one by one and placed the demons into the animals so they don’t get loose and fly back into him. Each of the animals contains one demon in a living, squirming sort of prison. A few spare animals empty of demons are kept on hand in case another animal dies and something has to be done with his demon, or in the rare event of The Storyteller happening to show up unannounced on the verge of shedding yet another of these horrible squalling things. The Storyteller hasn’t emptied himself of a demon in quite some time.
The animals remain important to The Storyteller as reminders, repositories of all his old problems. Sometimes he looks at them with a queasy sort of fondness, the way Subject might revisit old letters from neurotic college girlfriends. Subject doesn’t understand why The Storyteller doesn’t just send the demons away. Put them in the animals and get rid of them. Stow them in a place out of sight. Get rid of the reminder. Maybe all these demons around, maybe they’re the reason the story ideas have stopped.
The Storyteller used to make stories all the time. Then after that, he told stories less often, but still worked on storymaking more than he did anything else. Gradually he trailed off. Now every day The Storyteller gets closer to the glowing light of the absolute. With the passing of time, greater and greater meaning is carried in his every word. Now he hesitates before he speaks. Each utterance, so important.
Once he was good natured, full of quirky fun. Now he seems half monk, half alien. Sour and beatific, profane and profound, he radiates enlightenment gleaned from a million flickering tea lights left burning on a Himalayan monastery courtyard in a land and in a time very remote.
He’s changing so much, leaving this world behind so fast, he might only have one story left. At most two, before he transcends this mortal plane and rises into clouds, soul hissing out of him like a balloon propelled by the force of escaping life-essence.
5. The Storyteller comes around to his Subject
Sometimes The Storyteller comes to visit, starts pacing the rooms and talking to Subject about things as if he needs help figuring out some part of a story that has come to him. Because Subject stands in for him when the stories are filmed, The Storyteller seems to equate such discussions with the sort of brainstorming a creative artist might usually perform alone. Subject is glad to help. Anything to bring about the next thing.
At these times Subject often grows excited, certain the story’s about to start. The Storyteller’s life is so much like fantasy, he increasingly gives the impression he’s coming up with some kind of strange surreal ecstasy, full of symbolism and the disconnection of dreams when really all he’s doing is planning a party or a road trip.
Because his life has become like this, The Storyteller has less and less use for real stories. Everyone ends up painting pictures with this thick tarry paint all over their fingers. Everyone’s topless in tuxedo pants painting faces on each other’s chests then acting out the voices of what those faces might say. Everyone’s making screaming rackets in the recording studio and deciding, Let’s put out a record.
A wild scene breaks out. Threatened violence, unrequited love. A carnival of dwarves and limbless Asian acrobats held in an abandoned lot. Sudden eroticism bursts in the room around a drum fire spitting sparks like fireworks. The whole city whooshes with the escape of all the air at ground level, like consensus reality is about to be sucked up into the sky. A dream as big as the universe. Another big bang, another starting over. Then after all that, it turns out to be just another music video.
6. Creation of a different end
Subject is exhausted, so tired of waiting. Yes, there’s accomplishment in standing for a great man in the telling of his stories. The Storyteller is certainly a great man. The stories, though, have apparently stopped. Where does that leave Subject? He’s so depleted now, so demoralized. He forgets about the demons, the animals, forgets even to listen for footsteps beyond the door. For the first time he stops straining for any hint The Storyteller might be arriving to make things happen.
Something has to change. No more waiting, passively hoping for the universe to be clarified, explained by someone else. Time to remake things. Remake himself.
At the window, Subject gestures tenuously at smudged glass. Clear light streams through the mark left by his fingertip. He looks around, takes inventory of all he has at his disposal. Raw materials for art, for life.
It’s so easy to modify surroundings, change details. The dilated mind perceives vast potential, an infinite array of possibilities, like rearranging zeroes and ones in the program of the world. He strips objects of their old names and bestows new ones. Knocks down walls, slathers paint. Everything changes, conceived at the speed of thought. It looks different in the new light, this old factory, changed from the way The Storyteller made it.
Not different enough. Not a new start.
Where walls stood before, he places doors, and makes doors where walls have always been. The floor shakes, the ceiling trembles. A great atmospheric rush, an interior cyclone, the inexorable whooshing escape of all air from the soundstage. In its place, when he dares inhale, he finds a new atmosphere. Smells of oil paint and turpentine, of whiskey and typewriter ribbons, these remind him of the past. Memory aches, like a severed limb regrowing. In the telling of Subject’s unfolding story, he remembers himself. Life events unspool, recycling scenes of passion and regret. He relearns long-forgotten truths.
When the first part of his work is finished, when the place has been entirely remade, he blackens the windows with tar in rejection of the distracting light. The mystery deepens. Darkness is no longer a threat, but a soothing and encompassing warm bath. An inducement to dreams.
Now everything’s quiet.
While Subject contemplates what to create next, The Girl Who is Love approaches, the only sound her footsteps echoing off new walls. She reaches out, uncertain. The way she looks at him, barely visible in the near-black room, he knows. Something is different. Can she have any idea how deeply she lives in his thoughts? Unsure what she intends, part of him wants to break away, to avoid risk.
Some clenched, desperately fearful part of himself slowly unwinds. Not everything has to be clear. Some matters can remain unknown, shrouded. This obscurity vibrates with a kind of poetic beauty.
He reaches out, touches her hand.
She speaks her real name. Subject speaks his own.
Should he open up his story, let her join? No, better to show her the way to destroy. Help her tear down all she knows and rebuild from scratch. Observe as she renders each new detail, molds and shapes a world entirely her own. Then so acquainted, only when each grasps a perfect counterpart to what the other holds, open up. Offer to intertwine.
These new rooms come alive with sound, movement. Ideas arrive unsought, barely visible at first. They flutter and spin, wild fish twisti
ng in the air until too tired they fall, like chips of paint cracked loose, like asbestos tiles fallen from high ceilings. A rhythmic churn of industrial machines in motion drowns out the old subliminal hum. The laughter of new arrivals. A party, a multitude. A carnival underway.
Eyes open, alert in the familiar dark, aware of each other and the infinite potential of things, they wait only for the next act.
In the Dark, Quiet Places
Kristi DeMeester
My sister is the first to find the buried things. The things no one is supposed to find.
“Tessa,” she says and offers up her dirt-stained fingers. “Come and look.”
Cupped in her palm, a tiny jewel the color of blood glitters. Around it, a thin gold band encrusted with red clay hints at something that had once been beautiful. Like my sister. Before Henry found her. Before he put the baby inside of her and then took it away. He didn’t even let us have a funeral.
“Might be worth something. Could probably sell it down at Lucky’s Pawn. Pay the gas bill,” I say, but her eyes are bright, more blue under this December sky than the green they are in April, and I know she won’t sell it.
The dirt flakes off the band, and she sticks the entire ring in her mouth to suck off the grit before she spits it into her palm.
“Somebody may have lost it. Could pay a reward for a return. It’d be stupid not to try and get something for it, Lou.”
“Don’t call me that.” She whips back to face me, and her face is pulled back so her teeth are exposed, and it’s hard not to stare at the long, vertical scar that runs down her cheek and neck.
I whisper that I’m sorry, but she’s already turned away. It’s hard not to call her Lou. I’ve been calling her that since I was little, and then Henry came and stole it away, and she giggled every time she heard him say it.
Louisa, I wrap my tongue around her birth name, and the taste of something sour floods my mouth—hot and thick—and I resist the urge to spit.