by Gemma Files
(me)
“—anything.”
(I LOVED you, Elder.)
But: No. I loved you. Once.
(Once.)
Elder gave Eudo what was meant to be a last direct glance, cool teal to milky blue. And replied—
“Eudo . . . you did me a disservice when we first met, as we both know, even if you’ll never be man enough to admit it.” Raising her voice, then, to drown out his automatic protestation: “But I’m reconciled to that, I truly am. I don’t even care enough to want to kill you over it anymore. So—do yourself a favor, monk—”
“—and don’t make her,” Ulrike chimed in.
Flynn: “Yeah, man.”
(What she said.)
Eudo paused, struck momentarily speechless, throat working like he still needed to gasp for air. Elder raised a brow at the spectacle, and asked the nearest Clave-member—she thought his name might be Eater Of Found Things, the one whose low forehead and facial scarring rumor branded him as a possible genuine Missing Link, turned mid-Ice Age by something still older, wiser and even more ruthless—
“I mean, Eudo didn’t tell you he just found out about this, did he? ’Cause I made sure to tell him first, the minute I got the idea.”
Old friends that we are, and all.
But: “Yes,” the gold-laden Yoruba matriarch seated across from the Eater said, dryly. “So we read, in your memo.”
“What?” Eudo blurted.
“The memo I sent ’em, magistere. One ‘Rike got that hacker-grrrl she Biblically knows to mass-mail, under your sigil.”
“Whah . . . ” A cough, not-so-neatly slurring from one word to another in mid-syllable. “ . . . when?”
The Eater, in his creaky, ice-burnt voice: “Last week.”
Long before you called this meeting to order, or ran your mouth about how I was gonna bring down a new Inquisition on each and every one of us by doing something whose most likely only casualty—if and when any one of a three-page long list of predicted SNAFUs occurs—would be me, and me alone. Long before the Clave just sat there and let you act like you had ’em all in your figurative back pocket, let you presume to speak for a coven of vampires whose youngest member (aside from yourself) was either personally present when that Jewish prophet of yours had his moment of doubt and shame, or heard about it first-hand from somebody who was.
My memo. The one that begins: Since you all like history so much, let’s take the real long view. Imagine the Earth rendered uninhabitable even for us, probably in only a few more hundred years—a dead body marking off millennia, waiting to be engulfed by the sun when it goes nova. Vampires with no alternate food-sources, forced to turn on each other; a Dark Age longer than all previous Dark Ages put together, with chaos and boredom reigning supreme, and the Red Death holding sway over all.
(Unless.)
Unless, unless, unless.
Because: I can offer them what you would never think to, magistere; tempt them with an easy way out, lie to them with the truth. I can buy their approval by tempting them with a reason—however improbable—
—to hope.
Elder risked yet another next-to-”last” peek at Eudo, who seemed caught between synapses—realizing, slowly but surely, how completely the tide of opinion had finally turned against him. He shook himself, half-pivoting her way; she showed him her back, decisively: Just another open insult in a long, long line of the same, nights without end, amen . . .
. . . which was how she—she!—somehow managed to miss the exact moment when Eudo’s vaunted composure snapped like tinsel, propelling him forward; claws out to knuckle-length, eye-teeth hooked almost double, like a cobra’s. Leaping for her with all the accumulated rage of a mentor scorned one too many times, only to find Flynn (of all people)—
—but who else, really? Not Ulrike, not LIKELY—
—instantly, automatically, idiotically in his way.
At which Eudo hissed, drove his right-hand index and ring-fingers through Flynn’s eyes, his thumb through Flynn’s nose—like a particularly gory bowling accident—and ripped Flynn’s shaggy head neatly off, with one curt upward motion.
Flynn’s ashes broke over Elder as she turned: A hot grey wave, burning her eyes, filling her mouth; she coughed them out again, plunging her cane straight through Eudo’s shoulder-joint. Eudo’s arm fell almost instantly severed, Flynn’s skull still stuck fast to his fist, both crumbling to mingled dust on contact with the floor.
“El—” Eudo began. Elder kicked him in the jaw, round-house, and jumped as he spun. Knee to the small of his back, fingers sliding fast down his spine to rip through on either side, grabbing for the floating ribs—
Raising him, hugging him, cracking him. Drawing his beating lungs out through the holes her hands had made, wet as embryonic wings, while the rest of the Clave just watched, impassive.
“You know what the Vikings called this, don’t you, my monk?” She whispered, in Eudo’s agonized ear. “The blood-eagle. Nasty way to die, last I heard; nasty way to live, ‘specially if you live forever.”
So I guess you better get one of your Familiars to push ’em back in for you, before you heal this way.
“I’ll still be here,” Eudo hacked, bow-bent in uncontrollable spasm—no air left, without his lungs, to generate a voice anyone but another vampire could hear. “When you come back. Here . . . to watch you crawl.”
“Doubt it,” Elder replied. And dropped him.
Somewhere in the shadows behind them, she heard Grandmother Yau clap her hidden hands just once—a gentle sound, yet more than enough to send her ghosts scurrying off en masse in search of a dustpan, a bucket, a mop. Good help being always hard to find, as the old mantra went, and thus better ruled with an iron hand than a kind word, whether alive or dead. Or undead.
Grit under her heels as she moved towards Ulrike, now: Part of Eudo’s detritus, grinding even finer beneath her shoes’ soles? Part of Flynn’s?
Not that it really mattered, Elder supposed.
Taking her dumbfounded “daughter’s” hands in hers, meanwhile. And assuring her, aloud: “I leave you in charge, after the launch.”
An open-mouthed kiss, flavored with their mutual “elder’s” blood; Ulrike received it eagerly, as Elder had always known she would. Sighing in anticipation: Oh, power, at last. At last.
Ambitious little toy, Elder thought. And smiled, to herself, at the observation’s very . . . familiarity.
“We’ll wait,” Ulrike promised her, lying badly. “Your name will live forever.”
Elder smiled again. “Just act according to your nature, ‘Rike,” she replied, mildly. “And I’ll be satisfied.”
Then she stepped through the ashes which had once been Flynn—part of him, at least—
—and was gone.
* * *
Plasma stores wouldn’t last long, and after that, sleep would be the best option—the least painful, in the long run.
Until then, though, she planned on keeping her eyes . . . open.
And now, looking down, what did she feel, exactly—seeing the long drop lengthen, then Earth pull away below her? That frail blue shell, dimming to a sliver; homesickness, a kind of nostalgia, coring her with a quick and intimate pain. And in her mind’s eye, superimposed, a barefoot girl slogging upward along the dirt track outside of New Amsterdam, hem-deep in mud, and a carriage stopping—a door opening. The gape on her own silly bumpkin face, half-remembered, half-imagined, heartbreakingly empty of experience.
And no, she wanted to cry out, through time’s veil: No, don’t trust, don’t take that man’s smooth, pale, clean hand. Go back, go back—live out your little life, breed and die. Do nothing. BE nothing. Go nowhere. Lie easy in the earth, until you ARE earth.
But Eudo was always so calm and comely, in his suit of lace. And she, in her innocence, always accepted his offer.
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Things were as they were. They couldn’t be otherwise. And Elder, knowing this, sat back on her heels in the ship’s pod; alone once more, without even her own long-gone ghost left to keep her company.
Up and out, and out, and out. Farther and farther, from star to shining star—manifest destiny made ever more manifest. She was the Tricentennial Woman . . .Quadricentennial? Not that such distinctions mattered much, either now or for much longer . . .
(Acceleration alone would see to that, in the end.)
America’s child. The Revolutionary. The one for whom there were no borders, no traditions—to whom no one, and nothing, applied anymore.
So catch me if you can, you effete techno-illiterates—you self-obsessed history-whores masturbating over your glyphs, your archives, your ruined, buried monuments.
I’m leaving, on a jet plane. Don’t know if I’ll be back again.
(Ever, ever, ever.)
Maybe she would go out into darkness and find nothing there at all—nothing but emptiness, endless starvation, an infinite sentence of unslaked hunger. Or freedom from the cycle, even at any cost—the tyranny of vulgar desire, of pleasure and pursuit: Wanting, having, consuming, wanting again. Slash and burn and waste.
Or maybe she would find herself sitting by the side of some different sea on some different world, under the potentially far less harsh light of some very different sun. Maybe she’d cut her palm on some alien rock, drop a few pulses of her own infected blood into the warm, saline tide . . . and stay there as long as it took, to see what might grow to sentience from the impetus.
If you only wait long enough, Elder thought, then whatever you can conceive of, no matter how improbable, must surely—eventually—become possible.
“Man,” Flynn had begun, once, while stoned on some fellow stoner’s blood—blissing out on the concept of space-travel, then glitching over its logical consequences, “you ever come back, the whole Earth could be gone, it could be just that long. We might not even be here anymore.”
“’As Venus dives into the sun . . . ’”
“Yeah. Yeah! That’s what I’m sayin’, man.”
And: But everything I knew already is gone, Flynn, she remembered almost replying. The whole structure of my universe, changed beyond comprehension. Cars, electricity, recorded music; fast food, open all night. I died damned, and live on in a world where science kicked the Holy Ghost’s sorry spectral ass too long ago to mention.
So what should I miss? What should I cry over leaving behind? I have—literally—nothing left to lose.
(Not even you.)
Good thing Flynn died when he did, she thought, with a sudden stab. HE would have missed me, after. He was just that dumb.
But—
Elder raised the filtering visor of her helmet, cautiously—for who knew what radiation lurked out there, what stray wandering portion of the ultraviolet spectrum? And space would be a particularly bad place to cook and drift in.
She looked out on the great wheel of constellations, the endless hub: Stars whose dead light washed over her, whose positions she was already beginning to watch alter. Whose hidden faces she would view from every angle, before the arc of her passage finally brought her home again.
A long trip, and a hungry one. Blood of every sort, on every sort of world. A universe of unmapped loneliness and potential prey. A forever-distant horizon—no borders to cross, no boundaries to push. Just on, on, on, on, on.
The stars, turning. The constellations, splitting and reforming into new animals, new myths. New monsters.
Rivers of gas and dust and heat. Cradles of light, already cooking up new worlds for her to drain.
Elder’s ship, like Elder’s corpse—a viral net, animated forever by its own disease. A universe of dead bodies . . .
. . . possessed by furious motion.
Q&A
DISCLAIMER:
Though framed as a (hopefully amusing) Q and A session with the disembodied voices inside my own head, the following afterword deals mainly with the ins and outs of my creative “process.” Those of you who like this sort of thing may find this the sort of thing that you like, while everyone else may well find it excruciating or disillusioning, or both. If you happen to fall into the latter category then thank you, goodnight, and please do keep an eye out for my next collection of short stories, The Worm in Every Heart (October, 2003), also from Prime Books.
And now, without further ado—
Q (grinning nervously): “So, like—where do you get your ideas?”
A (grinning evilly): Well, since you ask . . .
I first got the germ for “Kissing Carrion” back in 1993, when I was still in the most formative possible stages of what would eventually become my career: Writing stringer articles for eye Weekly magazine on every subject under the sun, dodging calls from the government about back taxes relating to my last year at Ryerson, placing stories here and there for copies, telling people I was a writer, feeling like the world’s biggest minimum wage-earning, unqualified, futureless loser. I’d just quit my job as Vibrator Room floor attendant at Lovecraft, Toronto’s most upscale sex shop, where the virulent combination of having an eighty-percent employee discount but no significant other to share the spoils with had already begun to screw with my ideas about “healthy” sexuality; I also spent a fair amount of time listening to early Nine Inch Nails while reading underground comics and ‘zines, simultaneously jealous and admiring of their creators’ capacity to self-publish material which seemed to come straight from the same vein of icky, suppurating, intensely private darkness I was becoming somewhat afraid to tap in myself.
I began developing “Kissing Carrion” for an editor who wanted stories that were genuinely vicious rather than darkly Romantic, which had been my stock in trade up ’till then. The turning point came when I discovered an article in one of said ‘zines about those wacky folks down at Survival Research Laboratories (whose self-destructive industrial antics would later inspire NIN’s “Happiness In Slavery” video), which lead me to rent their performance tapes from Suspect Video—I was particularly struck by the infamous “rabbot,” a rotting bunny corpse hooked up to a system of rods and pistons and technical what-have-you which puppetted it around, making it parade itself back and forth until it started to fall apart. Mix well with the Pixies, and Pat Calavera’s Bone Machine was born. Ray and his fixations, meanwhile, evolved from both the confessions of Scottish serial killer Dennis Nilssen and the real-life female necrophile who inspired Lynn Stopkewich’s film Kissed. But things soon slid to a halt, as they often do with me, and the story lay fallow for years . . . I had vague ideas of submitting it for a zombie anthology like John Skipp and Craig Spector’s The Book Of The Dead, which is how the whole “triangle between a man, a woman and a corpse splits apart when the corpse objects to the arrangement” theme came into play.
Still and all, it took ’til 2000 for me to finally realize that the narrative perspective should come from Mr. Stinky, rather than Pat or Ray. A deadline was proffered by Ellen Datlow, for which I’ll be eternally grateful, even though the story itself didn’t turn out to meet her needs for the anthology in question. And the rest is history.
Q: “That’s a long time between idea and product. Is this kind of extensive percolation normal for you?”
A: “Normal”—no, not probably. Is anything?
My mind is a mulch-heap, deep and sticky; things pile up and, once they’ve piled, often need time to ferment. Some times the result is more explosive than others. I’ve written stories at a white heat, in a matter of hypnogogically-charged hours, and ended up shaking and babbling to myself while watching the walls bend. The more likely version of the process, however, reads the way it does above . . . a gestation period of almost a decade, with lots and lots of intermediary drafts, rejigging and thematic side-steps before I finally hit my stride and push through those last precious p
ages. Like the hoary old standby of brain-as-nautilus, I spiral slowly, non-linearly outwards, or inwards. Or—usually—
—downwards.
“Keepsake” clocks in at the very bottom of said spiral. It was written during one of my (more) depressive periods, which—as my husband will attest—I’m still prone to; the details about lying in bed and marking off the day by “TV time” came out of that, while my descriptions of what it’s like to be on the sparkler-side of a PMS-induced migraine are also, unfortunately, ripped whole and beating from real life experience. Rohise and Renny Gault, meanwhile, evolved in equal part from a wonderful photo of Quentin Tarantino and Juliette Lewis eye-fucking each other for a Details magazine article about their performances in From Dusk ’Till Dawn and some musings I once wrote down about the innate oddity of having siblings, as a concept—I’m an only child, as are most of my friends, aside from the two who happen to be identical twins, and as the old truism states (truism because it’s true), what you find exotic is almost always what you’re personally unfamiliar with.
Plus, I’ve always been far more Near Dark than Interview With The Vampire in terms of my ideas on vampirism—less “predators’ predators, killing angels feeding on us from above, lie back and wait with a beating heart,” more “dead people too angry to lie down and rot.” So I wanted to riff on the basic trope in such a way as to make it both potentially plausible and utterly unglamorous. I’d like to believe I succeeded.
“Keepsake” went straight to Wayne Edwards, editor/publisher of the now-defunct Palace Corbie magazine, because he’d been bugging me for stuff that was “more extreme.” He put it in #7 (Merrimack Books, ed. Wayne Edwards), then eventually reprinted it in The Best Of Palace Corbie (Stone Dragon Press, ed. Wayne Edwards.) Finally, this story has the dubious honor of having apparently grossed out enough (male) Showtime execs to make sure that I did not end up with one more sale to The Hunger under my belt for 1998—they were right with it up to a certain scene, and then . . . well. I think you’ll probably be able to spot the point of exit, if you try hard enough.