Grave Markings: 20th Anniversary Edition

by Arnzen, Michael A.

  Grave

  Markings

  The Twentieth Anniversary Edition

  Michael A. Arnzen

  Grave Markings. Copyright © 2014 (originally 1994) by Michael A. Arnzen

  Published by Raw Dog Screaming Press

  Bowie, MD

  Cover Design: Nathan Rosen

  Front Cover Illustration: Ethan A. Fuhrer

  Book Design: Jennifer Barnes

  www.RawDogScreaming.com

  TO MY DAD & MY MOM

  and all the other artists

  in my family

  &

  FOR OBADIAH ELIHUE PARKER

  Also by Michael A. Arnzen From Raw Dog Screaming Press

  100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories

  Play Dead

  The Gorelets Omnibus

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I have to thank all the editors who have helped bring this book to life, resurrect it over and again, and made me a better writer in the process, over the past two decades. Chief among them is Jeanne Cavelos, the editor at Dell/Abyss who bought the book and pretty much catapulted my career to the next level. She gave me fourteen pages of notes on the first draft, and I know her feedback took a raw manuscript and transformed it into a good book. There are many other editors along the way who touched it (or parts of it) here and there in different incarnations, too: Tony Gangi, Joe Morey, Michelle Delio, Davi Dee, Shane Ryan Staley, John Edward Lawson, Jennifer Barnes…and the late Karl Edward Wagner, who I consider one of “the greats” of the horror genre, and who I was fortunate to befriend through a short story told within these pages.

  This is the third incarnation of a novel written a generation ago, so, I could go on and on and I won’t. To all the folks mentioned on the acknowledgment pages of those other editions, I echo my gratitude here and sound out a genuine “DITTO!” To all my friends and anyone who has ever read and responded to my books, know I appreciate you. A writer can’t stay in this business for so long without the support of readers and friends who understand what it’s like, so I’m glad you’ve stuck with me. And on that note, I have to extend continued love to Renate, who has remained by my side, despite it being a very dark one, all these many years. If I am obsessed with art, it is mostly because of her artistry. Many of the memories I have of the experience this book has given me are attached to her. Danke, Frau, for alles.

  CREDITS

  Grave Markings was first published as a mass market paperback original by Dell/Abyss Books in November 1994. A German translation appeared as Tattoo by Bastei Verlag, 1995. A tenth anniversary edition was published in a limited hardcover and leatherbound edition by Delirium Books in 2004. This current edition from Raw Dog Screaming Press—the first appearance of the novel in ebook and trade paperback formats—reprints the original story in its entirety, with minor edits.

  “Skin” by Steve Rasnic Tem, first appeared in Psychos: An Anthology of Psychological Horror in Verse, Mastication Publications, 1992. Reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror VI, St. Martin’s Press, 1993, and The Hydrocephalic Ward, Dark Regions, 2003.

  Corky’s tall tale in Chapter Four originally appeared in Outlaw Biker’s Tattoo Review, December 1991, under the title, “An Eye for an Eye.” The story went on to be reprinted in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XX, The Best of Tattoo Review, Needles and Sins, and Proverbs for Monsters.

  Credits for the material in the bonus section are listed in the appendix at the back of the book.

  Preface: My Tattoo

  This is it. The book I made my bones on. The one that lifted me up from the underground and splashed buckets of my sick ink across the minks of the mass market.

  Grave Markings is now twenty years old, and I’m lucky to see it return to print (and enter the ether in e-book form) after all this time, keeping it out of the grave. This is the third release of the novel (a 10th Anniversary edition was published in a limited hardcover run by Delirium Books in 2004), so I don’t know if that means the book has stood the test of time or not—but the story certainly still carries all the markings of its time.

  Re-reading it now, I feel the story still has all the bizarre energy and frenetic weirdness that made it a fun read—but I also think it’s kind of sad that you can’t find books as crazy as this one in the airport or supermarket anymore. I also can’t help but reflect on how much I have grown as a writer since I wrote this. But more fascinating, I think, is the way it reveals how much the times have changed since its original publication.

  We are now living in a culture where skin art is commonplace. You know this because not only do celebrities bear their skin art proudly (an extreme example would be Mike Tyson, whose face looks like the original cover art of this novel), and that there are more tattoo parlors than ice cream parlors in most cities anymore, but also because there are reality TV shows entirely dedicated to the art of tattoo (Ink Master, Miami Ink, and—my personal favorites—Bad Ink and Tattoo Nightmares). When I wrote this book back in the early 1990s, movies like Cape Fear, featuring the tattoo-laden Robert DeNiro as an insane ex-con seeking revenge through murders of biblical proportion—embodied the “tattoo nightmares” of our culture, a society that “didn’t know whether to look at him or read him” out of fear of what they might discover if they looked too close.

  Nowadays, we can’t look closely enough. The current mainstreaming of skin art was nowhere more visible to me than while I was recently watching the 2014 World Cup on television, marveling over all the fabulous skin art on players from around the globe. America’s star goalie, Tim Howard, rose to infamy partially because of his fascinating array of tattoos, and subsequently headlined a new campaign by PETA, called “Ink not Mink,” with the slogan, “Be comfortable in your own skin and let animals keep theirs.” Perhaps a day will come in the future where people wear the decorticated flesh of famous athletes when they go out to the opera, who knows, but for now, it seems, creating your own coat of many colors is a fashion statement.

  It seems everyone’s got a tattoo, but this long-standing tradition of artfully rending and repurposing flesh has not lost its fascination. The reasons remain the same as always: because they reflect their owner’s character, if not their tribal affiliation as well. We are living in a time when we long for people to recognize us for who we are, when we long for the connections of the tribe, perhaps more than ever. But prior to the time when this book came out, tattooed characters were still suspicious ones, as skin art was still being associated with sinners and sailors, convicts and creeps, and the fashion world still feared it.

  The 80s and 90s were a time when excesses were being met by the constraints of censorship. I wanted to write as a way of resisting these impulses to cover our eyes. I wrote this novel when I began selling my short stories to motorcycle magazines like Outlaw Biker. These were amazing publications, brimming with colorful, glossy pages and amazing photos and artwork like any other national magazine—but they were still on the margins, stacked up on the top shelf at the newsstand right beside the porno mags, and often hidden behind cardboard placards or wrapped in plastic so that you couldn’t see their contents unless you were old enough to buy them. They always pushed flesh on their covers—beautiful, colorful flesh—and they appealed mostly to men, so it was no wonder they were associated with skin mags. Hell, even some of their titles had the word “skin” in them, which no doubt boosted sales. But for all their taboo promise of eroticism, they were cool because they weren’t really skin mags so much as they were, essentially, alternative ART magazines.

&n
bsp; They fascinated me because I felt they were free to do more artful things than any of the other mainstream magazines on the shelves. They had courage—and featured some amazing raw talent. It was like there was this secret world, on the fringes, but accessible if you had the courage to look, and they were having a blast by going places where others never dared, out of fear of judgment. I have long felt that horror fiction, too, has been doing something similar. So it was natural, I think, for me to bring the two together and see what happened.

  It turned out that a lot happened. It started with short stories and led to a novel. I immersed myself in tattoo culture when I was working on these tall tales, but I have a confession to make.

  When people who have read this novel ask me to roll up my sleeves so they can see my tattoos, I always disappoint them when I confess that I remain a virgin to the needle and do not have any ink to show.

  It’s not that I haven’t imagined getting tattoos. And in my mind, I’ve got them everywhere.

  Like, across my back, I like to imagine I have a giant tattoo version of a hippie poster I saw as a kid growing up in the 1970s and 80s. It features a mouse with droopy bloodshot-eyes giving a stiff middle finger to a humongous and stern eagle that is swooping down to catch it in its evil talons. Underneath, the broad title runs in bold letters: DEFIANCE.

  That would make a great tattoo. Hell, that IS the archetypal tattoo, is it not?

  For another, I’ve always thought it would be cool to get a great artist (like Robert Williams) to try his hand at Roberts’ tattoo of the typewriter monkey monster described in this book. But I’ve never had the courage to get it done. And it’s not because I am some Old Testament purist who refuses to desecrate the temple of my flesh. Skin art is so mainstream, that no one would blink if I walked into my job, let alone a church, sporting a skull tattoo on my sleeve. Nor am I afraid of needles. (Oh, okay, maybe a little bit, but not the pain of a tattoo gun—I’m only afraid of those needles where there is a giant tube attached to them, intended to siphon off gallons of my blood). Reading this book you will know for a fact that I am fascinated by body art. I adore the artistry of ink-dappled skin. And I admire those who bear it. I couldn’t write a book like this without being compulsively curious about them, and in awe of a really good piece of art.

  But I have always been wimpy about one thing. Commitment. I know that a tattoo can be a way to say “this symbol carries a meaning for me that transcends a lifetime!” or simply, “never forget!” or even more simply, “fuck you!”—and all of these are mottos and meanings I can get behind. But I have resisted the lure of the needle for two reasons. One, I know myself, and once I started, I would never stop. I would keep thinking about all the bits of my body that were naked and keep going, until I ended up one big sloppy (and impoverished) mess, like a melted 64 Box of Crayolas left out in the sun too long. But secondly, despite all I intellectually understand about cover-ups and laser removal science, I also know that it is virtually impossible to “revise” a tattoo.

  Wimpy? Stupid rationalizations? Okay. But I’m a writer first, and this is a writer’s fear. It’s the fear of being permanently fixed in ink before the story is “done.” So let my tombstone bear my life story’s symbols and let my bones tattoo the coffin floor with my carbon.

  But in re-reading this novel, which I struggled not to revise out of fear of “ruining” a multi-award-winning title (here gloriously reprinted after two decades since its original appearance in mass market paperback) by covering up the original, I realized something.

  This book already is my tattoo—fading, flawed—but indelibly me. It’s been with me for a lifetime. And its meaning transcends the words on the page. I find something new in it every time I’ve read it.

  So thanks for taking a gander. It’s pretty sick, isn’t it?

  I wrote it and I got the bug and I’m still inking away, twenty years later.

  Before I get out of your way, let me say a few more words. I am grateful to Raw Dog Screaming Press for their generosity in bringing this book out to a new generation, in e-book and trade paperback editions for the very first time. I see this edition of Grave Markings as a historical event as much as just another reprint, so I’ve included a lot of bonus features in the very back of the book. It includes articles I wrote about this book and its impact on my career, as well as all the short stories I wrote for biker and tattoo magazines when I was getting started—many of which you’d be hard pressed to find today, and several of which appear here for the very first time. I do not vouch for their merit—as I am Corky now, and I was Roy way back then, and I am always a little MMK crazy, too—but I think that by compiling all these documents together, the book becomes all the more interesting all over again. For those coming at this for the first time, my hope is that it gives you more context about what kind of writer I was back then, and what kind of culture the 90s was.

  And hey, for the sake of realism, let’s imagine this novel is actually SET in the 1990s, when there were no cell phones or digital cameras and when tattoos were still an edgy lifestyle choice.

  Now let’s forget all about realism.

  Because anything I say in this novel related to tattooing, while truthful, is not always factual. Most of it is made-up for the sake of fantasy fiction—like the special tattoo gun that the King of Inkland makes and the conceits I myself make about various types and colors of ink. I also don’t know if flesh can do what I’ve made it do here, like in the scene at the tattoo convention. I have to confess that everything I know about tattoos is from research and conversation—intellectual curiosity and imaginative envy—not direct experience. It’s probably for the best that horror authors don’t “write what they know,” actually. But remember: fiction is a lie that tells the truth, and that’s all that’s important.

  I’ll shut up already. Welcome to the dark doorway of this book’s twentieth anniversary party. Join me and Mark Michael Kilpatrick in a toast to never-ending terror! Skin ages and ink fades, but stories are forever.

  Long live the stain!

  And for anyone who reads this and thinks that this story is garbage and should have been banned or burned and forgotten about long ago—or that the reason you don’t see stories like these on the paperback shelves anymore is because horror is a dead genre and good riddance—well, I have one word for you.

  DEFIANCE.

  —Michael Arnzen, Pittsburgh

  November 2014

  “The moral life of man forms part of the subject matter for the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.”

  —Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

  “The feelings excited by improper art are…desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go on to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something.”

  —James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

  SKIN

  This costume is what

  they know you by,

  this disguise

  in which you’ve been upholstered.

  Under the skin

  the springs are bending

  into a pose of comfort

  but the stuffing goes rotten

  whatever you do. This shroud

  keeps the air out

  but does not stop the voices

  calling your secret name

  asking where you’ve gone

  as you in your hiding place

  gaze from two rigid holes.

  —Steve Rasnic Tem

  IN-SIGHT

  No one fucking understands art anymore.

  The thought wavered, each syllable taking liquid form and substance, a volcanic, pulsing anger of language that seethed and writhed and boiled inside his skull until the brittle bones shattered as his cranium exploded.

  His mind began t
o ooze out and trail down his flesh, etching pain down his arms, his legs, pooling at his feet, filling the room till he was drowning—suffocating on his own thoughts and feelings—all lava in his lungs. He manically tried to swim out, but the floor held him down as the liquid bubbled and hardened, melting him into it. He was it and it was him. And he—it—was…what?

  Mark Michael Kilpatrick thought he was dead. A blinding flash of light filled his eyes, stars in his sockets, fire in his brain, no breathing room, no blood…and as fast as it started it ended, like the momentary darkness in a blink of the eyes.

  Kilpatrick was standing inside of his head, which had been turned inside out to accompany him. His skull had expanded to fill the entire room, wallpapering its walls with creviced, ivory bone. The wormy curls of his yellow brain had engulfed his entire body, becoming a maze of gray matter that he could step through, dark thresholds of ideas and experiences he could visit and toy with, change and transfer.

  He looked down at his body—completely naked and hairless, but the tattoos he had gathered over the years remained inked deeply and darkly into his skin. A large rod of pink flesh trailed down from where his belly button should have been, a hard bony umbilicus that scraped the floor beneath him like a bumper car electrode. It was electric, all of it, electric and alive. A carnival of the mind.