There you go: make of it what you will.
from: Gaetan Cornichon
to: Michael Harket
date: November 15, 2018 8:35 PM
subject: Odd Dream
Um, thanks. I think?
from: Gaetan Cornichon
to: Michael Harket
date: November 19, 2018 9:01 PM
subject: New Story
Well, the worst of the storm is past. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but we still lost power for a day and half. Tried the Siodmak, but couldn’t get into it. There wasn’t much else to do, so I spent the time working on the beginning to something new. (Although since I couldn’t use my laptop, I had to write by hand, like some kind of peasant! A peasant, I tells ya!) Thought you might like a look.
SOMEWHERE BEYOND THE SEA
The Weather Channel has given the storm a name, Elizabeth, which Cynthia thinks is stupid, because (a) TV channels don’t get to name storms, it’s a privilege reserved for NOAA, one they reserve for hurricanes, not every disturbance blowing up the coast, and (b) Elizabeth is hardly an appropriate name for any kind of weather event, let alone one that’s already dumped ten inches of snow in the front yard and is on track to double this amount by morning. Elizabeth makes you think of afternoon tea in china cups, with little cakes served in those trays with all the different levels. If you absolutely have to have a name for the snow sweeping down in slanted lines, the wind roaring high overhead, the cold that numbs your face when you rush Petal out for her walk, then you should choose something fitting, a name with weight, with gravitas (or gravy-ty, as her dad likes to say when he thinks he’s being funny): Boreas, or Donner, or Vlad. (Well, maybe not Donner, because people would think of Santa’s reindeer, or the Donner Party, not thunder, and Vlad’s kind of over-the-top, too, but you still have Boreas, as well as the general principle that a serious storm deserves a serious name.)
Cynthia’s dad, Guillaume, loves Elizabeth. Usually, he’s pretty nervous in the hours leading up to a storm of this magnitude, with its potential for an extended power outage, for branches and trees down in the yard, for the driveway full of enough snow to challenge their diminutive snowblower. He wanders the house checking the kitchen drawers where they keep the flashlights, batteries, candles, and matches. He counts the cans of tuna and fruit salad stacked in the pantry, removes plastic milk jugs and soda bottles from the recycling and fills them with water, expresses his regret at not having bought a propane camp stove when the Bass Pro at Foxborough had them on sale. Once the storm is underway, he switches the TV in the living room to the Weather Channel, where it must remain for the duration of the event. Should they lose power, Guillaume has a battery-operated transistor radio the size of a pack of playing cards tucked in with whatever fruit is in the ceramic bowl on the kitchen counter. Once the house is dark, he’ll remove the radio, extend its antenna, and switch it on. Its surprisingly loud speaker is set to one of the news stations out of Boston, which will deliver essentially the same information in ten-minute blocks.
Cynthia used to try to distract her father, to take him by one of his long arms and draw him away from the TV to the spot on the throw rug in front of the couches where Kevin, her older brother, and their mom would be setting up a board game, Monopoly or Clue, or a card game, gin rummy or twenty-one. But no matter how much he might attempt to join in, his attention would inevitably drift to whatever was happening on the TV, whatever new way the reporters had come up with to convey information unchanged in the last hour or two, until Mom told Cynthia to let him go, the rest of them would play his piece or his cards for him.
This storm, though—Elizabeth—is different. Dad has been giddy. It’s the only word for the state he’s been in. He’s wearing a pair of charcoal slacks and a black turtleneck, which almost gives the impression he’s dressed up to greet the one or two feet of snow and forty-to-fifty-mile-an-hour winds steaming up the coast at them. He’s in his stockinged feet, black dress socks, and he’s been sliding along the hallway from the kitchen to the living room and back again like a kid pretending to ice-skate. He’s linked his phone to the speaker Cynthia got him for his birthday, and his Spotify app is making its way through a playlist she’s never heard before. Her dad’s tastes lie in that part of the musical map she calls aging-punk: loud, guitar-driven songs whose lyrics insist on the singer’s integrity. Some of the bands can be a little one-note, but Cynthia doesn’t mind them, not really. At least they aren’t the bubblegum pop most of her friends’ parents listen to.
What booms from the speaker now is something other than self-righteous rock or empty pop. This is old music, as in, stuff her grandparents would play. Scratch that: her grandparents are reasonably cool. The piano accentuating the singer’s broad voice, the horns punctuating the melody in brass blats and shouts, the whisper of brushes on the drums belong to another time altogether. This is the stuff they played in the factory where Rosie the Riveter attached the wings to the planes waiting to bomb the Nazis.
And her dad is dancing to it, turning his glide on the hardwood floor into the start of an exaggerated shuffle from one side to the next, his hands out in front of him and then retracting to his hips as he advances, as if he’s pulling himself forward on invisible ropes. He might be an actor from one of those classic films where everybody breaks into song and dance at the drop of a hat, scissored from that movie and dropped into this one, a contemporary drama about a middle-class family living outside Boston. She can almost see where the edges of his figure don’t fit exactly with his new surroundings. The strange way he’s holding his hands, fingers down and close together, calls attention to his new piece of jewelry, his ring. (“My bling,” he said, to which Cynthia immediately responded, “Please don’t.”) It’s large, oval, its top silver set in dark wood (cherry? mahogany? Cynthia isn’t sure). Dad bought it a couple of months ago, after a local wax museum went out of business and sold off a bunch of stuff from its exhibits. At first, Guillaume kept the ring inside the box it had been shipped in. To protect it, he said; although Cynthia had the sense the reason had more to do with embarrassment, as if he couldn’t believe he’d spent whatever amount had been required to purchase it. From the beginning, he said he was going to wear the ring in his next author photo, which, given the kinds of books he writes, struck Cynthia as smart marketing, clever and self-aware. After the picture, however, which did something weird to his editor’s computer, her father has sported the ring more and more, on the middle finger of his right hand. He says the ring fits fine, it didn’t have to be resized or anything, but Cynthia thinks it looks too large, an adult’s decoration on a child’s hand. She asked Mom what her opinion of Dad’s new ring was, but she just rolled her eyes and said at least it wasn’t a sports car.
Dad approaches the breakfast bar where Cynthia is sitting with her ELA homework spread out on the gray-and-white-flecked stone surface. He’s singing along with the latest track in his playlist, except he doesn’t really know the lyrics, so he’s mostly repeating the same words, “Somewhere beyond the sea,” adapting them to the changing tune. She’s doing her best not to look at him, to focus on her assignment while the lights are still on, but it’s difficult. He’s doing his best to distract her, to stir her to laughter, which he’s always had a (sometimes infuriating) knack for. Enunciating each syllable of his song—“Some-where-be-yond-the-sea”—he slides to a stop on the other side of the counter. In the instant before she looks up from the picture of Lord Byron, out of the tops of her eyes she thinks she sees Guillaume wearing a black scarf, a ragged length of cloth wound around his neck several times, one tattered end hovering over his heart. It’s an illusion, a trick of the light, because when she raises her head, there’s nothing surrounding his neck but the turtleneck’s snug collar.
“Hey, Cyn,” he says.
“Hey, Dad.”
&
nbsp; “Whatcha doin’?”
“Homework.”
“What kind of homework?”
“ELA.”
“When I was a kid, we called that English.”
“Fascinating.”
“What’s your ELA homework about?”
“Vampires.”
“Really?” He leans on his elbows, raising his eyebrows.
“Yeah. Ms. Quinn’s building up to having us read Dracula, so she gave us a packet full of information about the history of vampires in English literature.”
“Dracula, eh? Pretty dense for ninth grade, wouldn’t you say?”
“For some kids.” She doesn’t add “not me,” because it’s obvious. “That’s why we have the packet. There’s a lot of summary and some excerpts from different poems and stories.”
“Does it mention Elizabeth Bathory?”
“I think so.” Cynthia scans the pages arranged in front of her. “Here,” she says, pointing at one. “The Blood Countess, right? 1560 to 1614. She was Hungarian, lived pretty close to Transylvania. She was accused of bathing in the blood of virgins. Supposedly, she killed over six hundred women and girls. Some historians think she was set up, by men who were jealous of her. She was pretty powerful—Matthias II, who was the king of Hungary and Croatia, owed her money. Of course, both things could be true. The men could have envied her, and she could have been taking regular blood baths. Once her crimes were discovered, she was sentenced to solitary confinement, walled up inside a couple of rooms in one of her castles.”
“That she was. Does it say what happened to her after she died?”
“Well, her body was moved from the first place they buried it, and now no one’s sure where it is.”
“So it doesn’t mention anything about her heart?”
“No. What about her heart?”
“It was removed from her body and taken to a monastery in France, Saint-Matthieu-des-Pyrénées-Orientales.”
“Why?”
“It was a way of making a pilgrimage even if you were dead.”
“That’s…odd. What was so special about this monastery?”
“There was a library of esoteric books there. Vlad III had visited the place—it must have been a hundred, a hundred and fifty years before.”
“Vlad—you mean Dracula?”
“The very one.”
“He wanted to look at the esoteric books, too?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I hope he found what he was looking for.”
Her dad shrugs. “He started a minor trend. For centuries after he journeyed to Saint-Matthieu, men and women—usually nobility, but not always—who were after certain kinds of rare knowledge followed in his footsteps.”
“Wow,” Cynthia says, “really?” A surge of suspicion draws her face into a frown. “Wait. Is this true? Are you making this up?” Her father is a horror writer: this is exactly the kind of story he would invent.
In reply, Guillaume grins.
“Dammit, Dad,” Cynthia says, “I’m trying to study. Now I’m going to have to try not to remember Saint-Matthew-whatever-the-rest-of-his-name-was and the sinister books.”
“Don’t worry about it,” her father says. He cocks his head to one side, almost the way Petal does if she hears a sound outside the range of your ears. “Listen,” he says.
“Dad,” Cynthia says, the tone of her voice a warning.
“Listen.” He pushes off from the breakfast bar and slides over to the counter next to the sink, where the speaker is playing what Cynthia recognizes as a Frank Sinatra song. Guillaume zeroes the volume on “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and despite herself, she listens to the space this opens. From the living room, she hears the murmurs of her mother and Kevin playing whatever board game they’ve selected. Behind her, Petal adjusts herself in her bed and grumbles. “What?” she says.
“Don’t you hear it?” he says, and she does, as if his question has tuned her ears to its answer, the storm, Elizabeth, whose raging Cynthia has registered for the last several hours and ignored for almost as long. Now she hears the steady roar overhead. It’s a vast, hollow sound that makes her think of a train full of empty boxcars speeding past, much too close. She hears the snow rattling against the house, and envisions the tiny frozen pellets bouncing off the siding. The wind changes pitch, and the house is in the middle of it, surrounded by the rushing river of air, which whistles around the corners, makes the walls creak ominously, as if the structure so much more solid, more massive than their old home, is in fact more fragile, a collection of plywood hastily nailed together into rooms and painted off-white. Somewhere nearby, a tree moans; she thinks it’s the big evergreen just outside the back door.
“That’s her,” Guillaume says, “Elizabeth, Erzsébet, and she’s come from very far away, from so far none of us can name it. She’s come to blow everything away.”
“What are you talking about?” Cynthia says as the wind continues to push against the house, and she wishes her question had less of a quaver in it.
“She’s a ship with black sails,” her dad says, his eyes alight. “She’s come from a place you can’t guess to take us somewhere new. She’s the end, Cyn, the end of”—he waves his hands, and she would swear the ring is larger, as if engorged on his blood—“of all of it. After her, the world is going to be different. Except for us, it’s going to be empty. Tonight, life as we know it finishes. What comes next—”
In the second before the lights wink out, Cynthia is positive her father is wearing the black scarf she thought she glimpsed before. When darkness overtakes the house, he shouts, “Perfect!”
from: Michael Harket
to: Gaetan Cornichon
date: December 1, 2018 11:00 AM
subject: Somewhere Beyond the Sea
My apologies for not having gotten back to you sooner. (God, it sometimes seems to me I could start just about every email I send with those words. If anyone ever writes my biography, there’s the title.) As usual, I’m running late on a story and before I knew it, Thanksgiving was upon us in all its cranberried glory. Then one of the dogs ate something horrible, and we had to rush her to the vet…On top of which, at first I couldn’t open the file. I know: again? My desktop started acting really weird, to the extent I was afraid it was on the verge of giving up the ghost, a catastrophe I could not afford. Took almost an hour of de-fragging and some additional tweaks, but I was (finally) able to access the story.
Anyway, thanks for letting me have a look at it. It’s very cool. (I hope you appreciate how much I’m resisting the impulse to say, “I told you you should write about vampires.”) I liked the daughter’s perspective on her father (which I’m sure has absolutely nothing in common with Rosemary’s view of you, right?). (But didn’t you say you were going to stop using your family in your work? Or did you mean only Porter?) If I’m not mistaken, there’s a bit of The Sundial going on here, with the whole world-ending-storm thing. (I’m a big fan of The Sundial—I think it’s one of Jackson’s best books.) The difference is, the storm ends Jackson’s novel, whereas here it’s the beginning of…something. I love the idea of linking the storm from The Sundial with the arrival of the Demeter in Dracula, as if the storm is a vessel. (You even managed to work in references to both Vlad and Elizabeth Bathory—not bad!) The scarf was a nice creepy touch, too—like a miniature cape (or a parasite).
Oh, and the reference to the monastery of Saint-Matthieu: I assume you’re nodding to Kostova’s The Historian. Have we ever talked about the novel? It’s about my favorite post-Dracula Dracula narrative.
I’m curious to see where you take this next.
from: Gaetan Cornichon
to: Michael Harket
date: December 10, 2018 12:30 AM
subject: Re: Somewh
ere Beyond the Sea
Glad the story worked for you. I kind of stalled on it after I sent it; I’m not sure when/if I’ll get back to it. I mean, I probably will. I don’t know. Sorry—I’m kind of under the weather. Honestly, I’ve been feeling pretty bad for a few weeks—longer, really. Almost like a low-level flu. I’m freezing, then I’m burning up, then I’m freezing again, but the thermometer doesn’t show any change in my temperature. My muscles ache like I’ve been beaten by a bunch of pissed-off critics with baseball bats. I thought I could ride out whatever it is, but haven’t, so I finally gave in and scheduled a doctor’s appointment for tomorrow (later today, now that I look at the clock). Hopefully, she’ll be able to tell me what’s wrong.
Oh, and as far as the Kostova goes, yes, like the book a lot. I enjoyed the idea of Dracula having this private archive related to himself.
from: Michael Harket
to: Gaetan Cornichon
date: December 10, 2018 7:01 AM
subject: Sick
Sorry to hear you’ve been under the weather; hope the doc fixes you up quickly.
Final Cuts Page 36