“Helen. My wife. I was going to show her to you. I’m not going to touch you. I just need someone to know. Someone who’d understand.”
An unspoken knowledge leapt between them. JaQuon nodded. The old man led the way up the stairs without any tiresome soliloquies about the state of his bones or kidneys.
The first time he saw her, she captivated him from the stage of the vaudeville show. She had yellow hair straight out of a fairy tale and eyes the color of a frost-covered pond. Her smile, a melancholy upturn of her lips. She wasn’t the strongest dancer, her steps too pensive and calculated—clunky prose that flowed from the head, not from the heart.
He wanted a chance to be near her, to watch her up close. Every time you see a beautiful woman alone, someone was tired of being with her. That was the secret men told themselves. He dared asking her for a dance. Hers was an inexhaustible beauty. He feared touching her. She might have consumed him. The difference in their age was nothing, he told himself.
She loved to swim and spent hours picking out her bathing suit from J.C. Penny’s. He would build the largest pool in Indianapolis. Large enough for a hotel, but just for them. Far away from ogling eyes. The inside painted blue and lit from underneath, its glow leant a bilious tinge to the hillside. They swam in the summer months, often sharing too many glasses of wine. Lost in their moment, an eternity in routine.
They stopped in front of a set of double doors.
“Is this your bedroom?” JaQuon asked without any nervousness.
“It was her favorite room in the house.” He rested his hand on the door handle attempting to gather the strength to open it again so soon. “When we got married, her father stood up during the reception. He wanted me to take care of his little girl. All of her. They had a tradition of saving everything. He handed me a box. It had all of her baby teeth.”
“That shit is weird.”
“I remembered thinking thank God I didn’t marry their son. I’d have his bronzed foreskin or something in here.”
JaQuon stared at him for a heartbeat then stifled a chuckle.
“Do you know how the Egyptians preserved the dead?”
“They were into mummies and stuff. My mom took us to the Children’s Museum back when…” JaQuon trailed off.
“Their funeral rites were the ritual re-enactment of the acts that raised their god Osiris from the dead. Life, even death, boiled down to ritual. The act of remembrance, more than the process. They took a long hook, shoved it up the nose, and took out the brain. They cut open the side and emptied the abdomen then washed out the cavity with wine then stuffed it with myrrh and frankincense.”
“Ain’t that the stuff they brought baby Jesus?”
“Yes. Then they sewed the body back up and wrapped it with bandages of fine linen cloth smeared with gum to glue it to the body.”
“Like a cloth coffin? Sounds like they were cheap. Wrap someone in a sheet and call it a day.”
“Except that they then put them in coffins. They wrapped each of the organs and put them in Canopic jars. Each one shaped into the form of a head of the four sons of Horus, who was charged to protect them.”
“That sounds cool.”
“You young lot want the scares and blood of it all. Always with the blood—never enough evisceration for your prurient minds. But for us, the old folks, we cling to the hope of contact with the other side. We want some…consolation. Consideration. Something from that place. To let us know it’s okay. That it’s all worth it. But the dead keep their secrets to themselves.”
Their first Christmas together, he spent three weeks in the woods hanging lights. Cobalt lights, purchased from all the stores in the city, strung in the trees surrounding the house. When he turned them on, the shimmer haloed the tree tops for miles around.
The lights bathed them in sapphire luminescence when they stepped in. JaQuon twirled, wide-eyed, as he took in the room. A bank of shelves lined the wall. Jars, like soldiers at parade rest, awaited inspection. Dark shapes bobbed in clear liquid, like raw meat drained of their color. The serpentine coil of intestines piled in one jar. Kidneys floated in another. Liver. Stomach. Lungs. On and on, a collection of viscera cleaned and preserved. Attending their distant mistress. On a stand next to her glass coffin was her heart.
“They couldn’t get her eyes right. They were the most delicate shade of blue, but they lost something in the process.”
The old man ran his hand along the glass surface, the reliquary of memories, wanting all the things he had left behind. A forgotten pair of glasses here, her favorite pen there. He was afraid to disturb anything. Hoping in vain that it wouldn’t hurt as much tomorrow.
“I never want to know who I am without her.” He left one hand on the glass sarcophagus, a final lingering touch before turning back to JaQuon. “I think I’ll purchase your skateboard, after all. It’s all right to let him go. Five hundred dollars suffice?”
JaQuon nodded absently, his revulsion rooting him to the spot.
“I thought I knew what I was looking for. You know how there’s a word on the tip of your tongue, just out of reach. I’ll know when my collection is complete.” He pressed the bills into JaQuon’s hand then checked the time on his pocket watch which no longer told time, knowing that the time was always theirs. His and Helen’s. “I suppose it’s time for you to go.”
The first time he told her he loved her, she said she didn’t believe him. Trust was a razor, she said, and belief had to be earned. The threat of competition, the possibility of her absence reduced his breath to hollow gasps.
He couldn’t keep her forever; she had never been his. However, he could watch her sleep, stroke her cool cheek, brush her hair from her face. She would lie, silent and cold, the only time she would let him dote on her. A memory preserved. Her eyes were blue.
He had words to describe his love.
[ But it was the love written in the margins of journals. His alone.]
© 2013 by Maurice Broaddus Originally published in The Book of the Dead. Reprinted by permission of the author.
A community organizer and teacher, his work has appeared in magazines like Lightspeed Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Asimov’s, and Uncanny Magazine, with some of his stories having been collected in The Voices of Martyrs. His books include the urban fantasy trilogy, The Knights of Breton Court, the steampunk works, Buffalo Soldier and Pimp My Airship, and the middle grade detective novel, The Usual Suspects. His project, Sorcerers, is being adapted as a television show for AMC. As an editor, he’s worked on Dark Faith, Streets of Shadows, and Apex Magazine. Learn more at MauriceBroaddus.com.
Evoking the Gothic: The House That Anxiety Built
by Meghan Ball
I’ve always had trouble going outside. Depression, anxiety, and slight agoraphobia have crafted me into a creature content to stay at home. Trips away from my hearth are for necessities like work or errands. Vacations are rather unheard of. Sometimes I will travel farther afield, to a bigger city nearby, and I usually spend the trip nauseous with worry. Visiting dear friends is an effort in willpower, and going to concerts, my favorite thing in the world, is usually only accomplished through sacrificing a day to throwing up and panic attacks. It was worth it every time, but it always took a lot out of me. You’d think being told to stay home for quarantine would be the easiest thing in the world. At first I was even relieved that the expectation to Go Out and Do Things had been removed from my calendar through no fault of my own.
Being a homebody was my default state of being, but it slowly began to feel wrong and strange. Home may be where the heart is but lately it feels like that heart is under my floorboards and slowly driving me mad. It’s like I’ve been trapped in a gothic horror story right in my very own house. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.
I spent my childhood and adolescence gobbling up gothic horror stories. Stories of beautiful women locked away in grand, crumbling mansions on rough, rainy moors. Homes with lofty, fantastical names like Wuthering Heights, Wylding Hall, and
Baskerville Hall. Each chock full of ghosts and monsters as well as a dose of healthy horrific history. There was a sad, poetic beauty to each terrible place. Happy homes which became twisted through tragedy and grief, lived in by young ingenues in over their heads and the monstrous families circling them like sharks. Even modern-day stories like Crimson Peak left me riveted. Never once did I think I would be living in my own version of a gothic tale.
Friends have told me how quarantine feels to them, draped in the language of their favorite stories. One told me it felt like being trapped alone on a dead ship adrift in space. Another said it felt like driving through an empty desert at night, the feeling of being alone like a physical presence they were trying to outrun. I heard that it felt like being boxed into a cave, orcs waiting outside to smash them to pieces. Everyone focused these feelings of uncertainty, loss, and anger through the prism of their own personal tropes and genres. I landed on the language of the gothic.
Quarantine happened in the slow-fast way of all disasters. A snippet about a virus overheard on a news report played in a coworkers office, the quiet gossip of what a neighbor’s school was doing, or a cancelled trip. Then, suddenly, people stopped coming into work. My office stayed open until it was finally untenable and I was sent home, standing alone on a train usually packed to the gills with commuters, shivering with anxiety like a sick chihuahua. Being outside felt like I was being hunted by an unseen enemy. I felt like my years of worry about being away from home were being oddly rewarded. Isn’t this what my overactive imagination had been preparing me for?
There is a video game I love called Bloodborne, where you are an intrepid monster-hunter in a Victorian city befallen with blight and beasts. There are a few doors you can interact with, the people inside yelling at you to go away, to keep the sickness at bay, to find your own bolthole to hide in. I increasingly felt like one of these poor souls, hiding behind a locked door as news of sickness spread. My house, small already, began to feel even smaller as the days passed. It began to feel like an isolated island in an untouchable sea, like an Agatha Christie murder mystery starring me and my family. The rooms began to feel haunted somehow. The quiet was weighty, loud noises unbearable. Depression began to stalk like a feral hound, anxiety a banshee clawing at my window. My nerves were shot. Outside was bad but inside was now bad too.
Quarantine had become a neverending M.R. James story. It had turned me into Jimmy Stewart keeping an eye on his neighbors and passing judgements on their lack of safety precautions. My mind kept cycling around stories I knew of gothic house terror, of Jane Eyre and Eleanor Vance and Jack Torrance. As the stress of a global pandemic wore on I became unable to finish a book, work on my writing, or focus long enough to get a decent note out of my guitar. I ripped reams of thread out of embroidery projects, even my ability to count properly lost to me. I felt increasingly like the gothic horror heroines I had loved so much in my youth, staring out the window and wondering when my serotonin would return from the war.
It began to feel like I would never be able to leave the house again. If I could barely leave before this then how could I bear to do so after? The world felt like a blizzard that had never actually come and despite the growing summer heat I couldn’t shake the feeling I should be wrapped up in blankets, cradling cups of hot tea. The house felt off-kilter and wrong. I would hear voices calling my name, especially at night. More than once I woke up from a dead sleep with my heart pounding, thinking a family member was shouting for help—only to run out into a dark, completely quiet hallway. I would hear conversations happening under the music in my headphones but the room would be silent once I took them off. Things began to go missing, small things at first. My grandmother’s Tara Brooch, left on my nightstand after I wore it to work, was suddenly nowhere to be seen. There is a serving bowl in my house that no one can find. The front door creaks as if someone is knocking, but no one is ever there. It feels like the house is playing tricks on me.
Outside was even worse, though, and every trip for necessities was a frantic, panicked event. The spectre of the pandemic loomed over me every time I went further than my mailbox. I tried to armor myself in the ways I used to, in the Before Times. I wore my pin-studded leather jacket and heavy combat boots, as if I could simply intimidate the virus away like a creeper on the train. I watched people act as if nothing was happening and try to go on with their lives and felt a sick, useless fury that this was an Edgar Allan Poe story come to life. I wanted to scream “Haven’t you read ‘The Masque of the Red Death,’ you assholes?”
Ol’ Edgar was ahead of his time, really. A story about the rich cavorting without a care in the world as a plague stalks through the town, gruesomely killing any unlucky enough to cross its path? It’s almost eerie how it mirrors so much of the inequality present in our current situation. It’s an allegory of what happens when proper measures aren’t taken, when fear and ignorance are the loudest voices, and when arrogance and wealth insulate against feeling empathy for your fellow man. I can think of no better tale that represents everything we are going through right now and it’s truly demoralizing.
I tried to flip the script on the malaise setting in. I tried to imagine myself standing in the beautiful, overwrought foyer of a crumbling Victorian mansion, staring out at the rainy moors while wearing a beautiful gown and a delicate lace shawl, the chill breeze blowing my raven locks like the cover of a fifty-cent penny dreadful. The reality is way more pathetic. Raven locks, yes, with four inches of mousey gray roots tied up into a messy bun, ancient pajamas and faded band shirts instead of a gown, topped with a threadbare hoodie. Fuzzy socks instead of satin slippers. Worst gothic novel heroine ever. If my depression was casting me into the role of harried and haunted then I would use the tropes I knew so well to subvert and survive whatever my foolish brain threw at me.
I am well armed in this respect. I know how gothic horror works. I know the tricks those houses play. It was the work of an afternoon to pull some of my favorite tomes out and see what lessons I could learn from them. To lean into the horror and the fantasy and make it work for me and not against me. They are a way to confront and overcome your fear, to look those ghosts dead in the eye and learn to not be afraid. They are tales of resilience and caution, of finding untapped pools of bravery in yourself, of discovering new ways to look at a world that makes increasingly less sense day after day.
I dug into the piles of books that overflow from my shelves and pulled out every story that fit that bill I could think of, searching for something to give me clarity or hope. Anything that could be a guiding light in this weird, dark place I had found myself. I stacked the books high besides me like an altar. Everything from Interview With The Vampire to Dracula to We Have Always Lived In the Castle. Well-loved, well-worn classics. Each a gothic fantasy of people trapped in homes and situations beyond their control, how they survived, and ultimately how they made the best of things. I dug deeper still until I found one of the oldest books I own, a beautifully illustrated copy of The Secret Garden I had been given as a young girl.
I received the book as a gift, though I don’t remember who from. I do, however, remember pouring over each painting inside for hours, imagining myself as little Mary Lennox. It’s such a quintessentially Edwardian novel. Recently orphaned, Mary is sent to live with her Uncle in an isolated tomb of a mansion in Yorkshire. He’s distant and angry and Mary, headstrong and fearless, seeks to find answers to the mystery of the house and a garden that has been locked away. Through her inquisitiveness and sheer bloody-mindedness, she brings warmth and happiness back to a cold house and the people that live there. It’s a beautiful story and it’s one of the first books I can remember being obsessed with. I’m so much older now but sitting there on the floor of my room, turning through old but beloved pages, I started to think that perhaps, like the characters in The Secret Garden, the problem wasn’t the house. Perhaps the problem was me.
I came to understand that it wasn’t my house that had begun to turn on me.
Instead, depression and anxiety had snared me in a ghostly, unrecognizable house in my own mind. Its walls had grown closer, not the ones in my bedroom. They had stolen the light from the windows and made the shadows seem larger and darker. My house was not haunted, I was the haunted house. But I have seen the craftsmanship of this mental house I find myself in and it is shoddy as hell. I can kick in the door and bust out the windows. I can blow this house down.
I don’t know when things will get better or what that will look like. I know I will always have my anxiety and my depression to battle against, and that leaving the house will still be hard when I can safely do so again. But I also know that, ultimately, I think I will be okay. Many protagonists before me have worn ruts into their floorboards and successfully escaped the haunted houses holding them hostage. I may still find myself sick to my stomach as I travel to a show and feel anxiety stab me like an insect on a pin in the moments between ringing a doorbell and my friend answering with a hug, but like any gothic heroine worth her diaphanous white nightgown, I also know I am going to get out of this house one day and I am going to be free.
© 2020 Meghan Ball
Meghan Ball is a writer, editor, and musician. Her work has appeared in Tor.com, Tor Nightfire, the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog, io9.com, and Fireside Fiction. She has also appeared on several podcasts including Caring Into The Void and Black Mass Appeal. When not writing, she listens to an unhealthy amount of music, plays guitar, and does cross stitch. You can find her on twitter @eldritchgirl and discover more of her work at her website eldritchwrites.com. She lives in a weird part of New Jersey.
Black and White and Red All Over: On the Semiotic Effect of Color Printing in Genre Fiction
by Meg Elison
Nowhere is color psychology, the theory that colors affect mood and attract or repel us, more recklessly applied than in marketing and branding. Brands signal to your subconscious, using long-established codes and associations. When they’re working to build trust, they show you that in white and blue. Green means health. Red means blood as in danger; as in first aid; as in sex. Bringing colors into the printing of genre books is marketing; books that stand out visually can signal their uniqueness or their difference to a potential buyer. However, in an age when many buy books they’ve never held in hand, it’s not just that. Color informs us about what fruits are sweet and what animals may eat us; it can tell us which books are juicy or predatory, too. These choices in color printing are also an attempt to engage parts of the human subconscious that might not otherwise be reached. We weigh the seriousness of a text on whether it includes color or pictures; the most serious texts will include neither. We perceive gender, value, and associate resonance in these colors, even when there’s just a little that deviates from what we expect. Books printed in more than just black ink on white paper are vanishingly rare, and the application of color often has a great deal of meaning beyond aesthetics. Color is a tool, a semiotic induction bound to engage the subconscious parts of the mind that arise to do the labor of imagining and providing substance to a work of fiction.
Uncanny Magazine Issue 37 Page 12