The Worm in Every Heart

by Gemma Files

  I nodded, suddenly possessed by a weird spurt of glee. Replying, off-hand: “Mei shi, big sister; not to worry, never mind. Do you think I don’t know enough to be careful?”

  To which she merely bowed her head, slightly. Asking—

  “What will you do, then?”

  And I—couldn’t stop myself from smiling, as the answer came sliding synapse-fast to the very tip of my tongue, kept restrained only by a lifetime’s residual weight of “social graces.” Thinking: Oh, I? Go home, naturally. Go home, dim the lights, light some incense—

  —and fuck myself.

  * * *

  So soft in my arms, not that I’d ever thought of myself as soft. I pushed it back against the apartment door with its wrists pinned above its head, nuzzling and nipping, quizzing it in Cantonese, Mandarin, ineffectual Vietnamese—only to have it offer exactly nothing in reply, while simultaneously maintaining an unbroken stare of pure, dumb adoration from beneath its artfully lowered lashes.

  Which was okay by me; more than okay, really. Seeing I’d already had it pretty much up to here with guys who talked.

  Feeling the shadow’s proximity, its very presence, prickle the hairs on the back of my neck like a presentiment of oncoming sheet-lightning against empty black sky: All plus to my mostly minus, yang to my yin, nice guy to my toxic shit. And wanting it back, right here and now; feeling the core-deep urge to penetrate, to own, to repossess those long-missing parts of me in one hard push, come what fucking might.

  Groin to groin and breath to breath, two half-hearts beating as one, two severances sealing fast. Unbreakable.

  Down on the bed, then, with its heels on my shoulders: Key sliding home, lock springing open. Rearing erect, burning bright with flickering purple flame, allll over. And seeing myself abruptly outlined in black against the wall above my headboard at that ecstatic moment of (re)joining, like some Polaroid flash’s bruisy after-image: My inverse reflection. My missing shadow, slipping inside me as I slipped inside it, enshadowing me once more.

  Ten years’ worth of trauma deferred, all crashing down on me at once. Showing me first-hand, explicitly, how nature abhors a—moral, human, walking—vacuum.

  * * *

  And now it’s later, oh so much, with rain all over my bedroom floor and beads of wood already rising like sodden cicatrices everywhere I dare to look. Rain on my hair, rain in my eyes—only natural, given that the window’s still open. But I can’t stand up, can’t force a step, not even to shut it. I just squat here and listen to my heart, eyes glued to that ectoplasmic husk the shadow left devolving on my bed: A shed skinfull of musk and lies, rotting. All that’s left of my lovely double, my literal self-infatuation.

  I’ve done the protective circle around myself five times now, at least—in magic marker, in chalk, in my own shit. Tomorrow I think I’ll re-do it in blood, just to get it over with; can’t keep on picking at these ideas forever, without something starting to fester. And we don’t want that, do we?

  (Really.)

  Because the sad truth is this: My wards hold, like they always hold; the circle works, like all my magic works. But what it doesn’t do, even after all my years of sheer, hard, devoted work—all my Craft and study, not to mention practice—

  —is help.

  Once upon a time—when I was drunk, and young, and stupid beyond belief—I cut my shadow, my *soul*, away from me in some desperate, adolescent bid to separate myself from my own mortality. And since then, I guess I haven’t really been much good for anybody but myself. I bound up my weakness and threw it away, not realizing that weakness is what lets you bend under unbearable pressure.

  And if you can’t bend . . . you break.

  My evil twin, I hear my own arrogant voice suggest to Carra, mockingly—and with a sudden, stunning surge of self-hatred, I find I want to hunt that voice down and slap it silly. To roll and roar on the floor at my own willfully deluded stupidity.

  Half a person, Franz chimes in, meanwhile, from deeper in my memory’s ugly little gift-box. And not even the GOOD half.

  No. Because it was the good half. And me, I, I’m—just—

  —all that’s left.

  My shadow. The part of me that might have been, if only I’d let it stay. My curdled conscience. Until it touched me, I didn’t remember what it was I’d been so afraid of. But now I can’t think about anything else.

  Except . . . how very, very badly, no matter what the cost . . .

  . . . I want for it to touch me again.

  Thinking: Is this me? Can this possibly be me, Jude Hark Chiu-Wai? Me?

  Me.

  Me, and no fucking body else.

  Thinking, finally: But this won’t kill me. Not even this. Much as I might like it to.

  And maybe I’ll be a better person for it, a better magician, if I can just make it through the next few nights without killing myself like Jen, or going crazy as Carra. But that’s pretty cold comfort, at best.

  Sobbing, retching. All one big weakness—one open, weeping sore. And thinking, helpless: Carra, oh Carra. Grandmother Yau. Franz. Ed. Someone.

  ANYone.

  But I’ve burnt all my boats, funeral-style. And I can’t remember—exactly, yet—how to swim.

  The Wide World converges on me now, dark and sparkling, and I just crouch here beneath it with my hands over my face: Weeping, moaning, too paralytic-terrified even to shield myself from its glory. Left all alone at last with the vision and the void—crushed flat, without a hope of reprieve, under the endless weight of a dark and whirling universe.

  Ripe and riven. Unforgiven. Caught forever, non-citizen that I am, in that typically Canadian moment just before you start to freeze.

  Keeping my sanity, my balance.

  Keeping to the straight and Narrow.

  Disclaimer

  THOSE OF YOU WHO read the afterword to my last collection, Kissing Carrion, will remember the drill. For those of you who haven’t, meanwhile—

  What follows is far less a classic post-manuscript analysis of the ins and outs of my particular creative process than a (hopefully) amusing “interview,” done tapeworm-style—myself with myself, by myself. Those of you truly intrigued by the contortions my mind goes through while intermittently birthing 7,000 to 15,000 words onto the computer’s screen may find this informative, if potentially disillusioning.

  To the rest, meanwhile, I say thank you and goodnight, pausing only to bow deeply; you’ve just read half my entire literary output, a good fifteen years’ worth of metaphorical blood, sweat and unfulfilled spiritual longing—I’ll make sure to search the crowd for your face sometime soon, at the launch-party for my first novel. (And if you’re interested in reading the other half of my oeuvre, meanwhile, please do remember that copies of Kissing Carrion are still available for order through the Prime Books website, amongst other places.)

  So. Now that that’s done, on to the really hard part . . .

  Q: This stuff seems far more on the dark fantastic side of the literary blanket than the gritty, urban stuff in Kissing Carrion.

  A: Is that a question? But yes. This is where I started. You can see it best in stuff like “The Land Beyond The Forest” (first published in The Vampire’s Crypt #10, ed. Margaret L. Carter) and “A Single Shadow Make” (first published in Techno Myths, Obelesk Press, ed. S.G. Johnson), the first story I ever had accepted for (unpaid) publication; as you might expect for initial efforts, they’re both variants on familiar templates—Dracula (albeit the chick version, with a fair debt probably owed to the romantic fantasy writings of Tanith Lee and the historical fantasy writings of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro) vs. Frankenstein (the big gay version, with an equally fair debt owed to my shaky memories of Sting in The Bride and Keanu Reeves in Dangerous Liasons.)

  “Flare” (first published in Dangerous Women, Obelesk Press, ed. S.G. Johnson) also goes in there, as a sort of Vertigo g
raphic novel-style revisionist super(anti)hero(ine) piece; it certainly uses a lot of the imagistic/internal narrative tropes I’ve since brazenly continued to plunder the collective works of Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Garth Ennis for, over the years. I also wrote the earliest version of it back in high school, where it later won me an honorable mention in some sort of pan-Toronto Board of Education competition—it came with the chance to go to dinner at the top of the Sutton Place hotel, where I also unwittingly insulted Australian novelist Janette Turner Hospital by calling her native province, Queensland, “South Africa with a CROCODILE DUNDEE accent.”

  It’s funny: In the Kissing Carrion Afterword, I briefly touched on the fact that while I started out writing science fiction, I quickly threw it over for horror, where my shaky grasp of science wouldn’t get quite so much of a spotlight. But there was another reason, too: Horror seemed more “real” to me, more rooted in a world I could understand, emotions I could share, etc. This may have been due to the fact that the most popular type horror I read while growing up was the type of “name-brand horror” pioneered by Stephen King and Peter Straub, set in specific, almost journalistically-detailed North American neighborhoods where fact and fiction lay cheek-by-jowl—vide the fact that ‘Salem’s Lot, even though you couldn’t locate it on a map of Maine, was always referenced as being just a little ways off from Bangor, which you could. This juxtaposition rendered scariness inevitable, because it removed the audience’s automatic defense reflexes: The fake made the real seem “real-er,” just as the real made the fake seem not only possible, but plausible. Everybody won.

  Unfortunately, however, there was a side-effect: Horror stories not squarely located in the here and now began to be seen as making their potential audience work far too hard for its entertainment value. You could sort of get away with it in books like IT or Floating Dragon, which went slippy-sliding back and forth through different time-periods but kept to the same area—but something like The Talisman (Straub and King, two shots of scare for the price of one!) or King’s The Eyes of the Dragon and the Gunslinger series were considerably dicier. Which is why, to my mind, the dorks who are passionate about Lord of the Rings and the dorks who are passionate about Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead movies haven’t tended to hang out at exactly the same conventions, up ‘till recently.

  What changed? Well, in fact, horror and fantasy have always had deep fingers in each other’s chocolate and peanut butter, from Drac and Frank on: Part of Bram Stoker’s “masterwork”’s eternal appeal is not just that he casually rifled Romanian history for a freak with an evocative name to defame and boiled the myriad conflicting vampire myths gathered from across Europe down into one set of rough guidelines (which other people almost immediately started to break—“catches fire in sunlight,” anyone?—but lay that by), but that he also used all that state-of-the-art Victorian technology, social and sociological minutiae to back his story up. Reading an epistolary novel like Dracula, with its mildly voyeuristic/boring mishmash of diary entries, letters, railroad timetables, book excerpts and newspaper article fragments, gives you the same slightly ill frisson as rifling through somebody else’s desk-drawers, or (the way I often used to, during my babysitting years) looking under somebody’s bed to find out not only where they keep their porn, but exactly what kind of porn they keep. It’s the literary equivilant of “reality” TV, and even the earliest version of this docudramatic collage—Frankenstein, or the short stories of Edgar Allen Poe, with their breathless first-person confessional vibe—have the same vague intimations of automatic validity: Hey, buddy wouldn’t say this shit if it wasn’t true, on some level, right? Would he?

  Here at the century’s beginning, however, the pattern seems to have come full circle; “truth”-based fear is now the provenance of visual storytelling media, taking off from/leading into the wonderfully incestuous real-vs.-fake debates surrounding films like The Blair Witch Project or Ringu. Is one medium inherently “realer” than another? Is something more likely to be “true” simply because it doesn’t seem artificially husbanded? See Joe Berlinger’s much/unfairly-maligned Book of Shadows: Blair Witch II for a sly take-down of that particular fallacy: “Video doesn’t lie, man!” Oh yeah? How so, and why not? Like one Cinema Verite pioneer says, in Peter Wintonick’s wonderful documentary Defining the Moment, “it’s only a lie if you don’t like it”—ie, if the story being told isn’t one you’re interested in believing. And supposed raw authenticity vs. all-too-obvious artificiality ain’t gonna help you with that one bit.

  And wow, but we’ve come a fair old ways away from just discussing my fantastic juvenillia now, haven’t we? Still, I’ll end by asserting my belief that we’re well due for a new epistolary horror novel soon, since the dark fantastic on paper has apparently become firmly reserved for all the poetic layering of internal and external voice, sensual input et al which movie scripts must regularly pare away in order to preserve their faithfulness to the stark onscreen image—a tabloid scare for a tabloid generation. Hell, I might even step in and fill that breach myself, one of these days . . .

  Q: God also seems to show up in a lot of these stories.

  A: Yes, surprisingly—God, or the lack thereof.

  In a review of my first collection, Kissing Carrion, Paula Guran of DarkEcho said that my characters inhabit a Godless universe, which I don’t think is entirely true. On the one hand, I certainly wasn’t raised with any religion to speak of; my Mom introduced me to the Bible via a book of Old Testament stories for kids, the same way she gave me Greek and Norse mythology by way of the D’Aullaires. No special emphasis was ever placed on Christianity as a system of belief—I knew about as much about Joseph and Jezebel as I did about Zeus, Thor, or various other deities, heroes and monsters from around the rest of the world. So as a result, I grew up with heart that loves the mystic, vs. a brain which distrusts it on empirical principle—I feel the yearning, just like everybody else, but I’m from the (metaphorical) show-me state. And one day, I guess, I’ll get either a nice or a very nasty surprise, on that front . . . again, just like everybody else.

  Heh heh heh heh.

  But more than anything, what my lack of grounding faith has left me with is the conviction that it’s just as foolish to take ideas on faith as it is to reject them out of hand: Even science breaks down, the further away from palpable measurement things become. What’s at the centre of a gluon? Will, or can, anybody ever know for sure? Far from being Godless, I see my universe as full of an endless, unproven possibility which might be as easily seen as despairing or hopeful, or both at once: A place in which no one is assured of the existence, presence or approval of God, yet no one is actively denied that, either.

  Except, perhaps, by themselves.

  Q: And history, too. Why do you find the challenge of writing period pieces so inspirational?

  A: The simple answer to a complex query: I study history for its patterns, for the way things fit together, because part of what I tend to focus on about anything inevitably seems to concentrate on its interconnective qualities—the forest vs. the trees, leaves vs. roots, words vs. meanings, and so on. On top of that, though, there’s also the inherent exoticism factor—the attraction of the alien, whether you’re talking about mere sensual conundrums like what things must have felt like or smelled like during a different time, or something a little more difficult to get across: What people believed and why, the limitations of human knowledge and understanding, the rationalizations they made for their own actions, let alone for the universe’s. ‘Cause I’m all about the motivations, yo.

  And then, not so surprisingly, there’s the sheer grue of it all. Human beings really have done some amazingly dreadful stuff to each other, over the years—which certainly isn’t news, I know, but bear with me; this is, horribly enough, often where my interests in anything tend to concentrate. Yet it’s not all just mere voyeurism: I truly do believe that writing about what hasn’t happened to me—and, hopefully,
never will—helps me understand how it could have happened, in the first place. In other words, it makes me think . . . which, to my mind, is always useful.

  Thus, pieces like “Nigredo” (previously unpublished), “Ring Of Fire” (first Published in Palace Corbie #6, Merrimack Books, ed. Wayne Edwards), “Year Zero” (first published in The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women, Robinson, ed. Stephen Jones), “Sent Down” (previously unpublished) and “The Emperor’s Old Bones” (winner of International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Fiction of 1999, first published in Northern Frights #5, Mosaic Press, ed. Don Hutchison.) They’ve all got little kernels of steal-what-you-can-and-make-it-yours at the heart of them, like everything else I (or any other writer, to be really, really sollipsisticly inclusive) tend to write: For “Nigredo” it’s the TV miniseries Uprising, the first film about the Warsaw Ghetto that—to my mind—outfitted its freedom-fighters with genuine human faces rather than martyrs’ masks, which is also why Kotzeleh always looks like Leelee Sobieski whenever I picture her stalking through the rest of her endless night. For “Ring of Fire,” meanwhile, it’s Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet and The Jewel in the Crown, cut with bits of Peter Brook’s adaptation of The Mahabharata and the seductive vocal rhythms of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book stories; “British people go crazy in such interesting ways,” I remember telling a friend once, after a screening of Lawrence of Arabia, and this story neatly encapsulates many of my (no doubt biased) ideas about why that craziness always seems to involve going to another country and telling the people there how best to run their own shit.

  “Year Zero”? That evolved from a longstanding double obsession with Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel and Dangerous Liasons once more, with ten years’ research on the French revolution chucked in for good measure. “Sent Down” is another side of the “British as crazy white folks” coin, here the colonized rather than the colonizers, a blatant Heart of Darkness riff pitting civilized Romans against savage pseudo-Picts; all hail to Pauline Gedge for planting the seed with her novel The Eagle and the Raven, long long ago.