Time split.
In one branch, George’s hands dropped to his sides and he leapt halfway up the stairs before she saw his mouth open, the teeth piercing his gums horrifying, every last one sharp, the canines elongated, a wolf’s, his eyes bleeding darkness down his cheeks, a low moan trailing from his throat. Her hands were on their way up to defend herself but it was too late, his teeth were a shock of agony in her throat, her blood spraying hot into his mouth, the noise he was making thrumming against her skin, while she was still trying to understand what was happening.
In the other branch, George retreated (slid) back across the landing, becoming harder to see, less distinct, the blackness engulfing him, as if he was sinking into the black wall. The sound of feet descending the stairs filled the air.
Then time rejoined itself and Joyce was standing with her hand at her (unharmed) neck, head reeling from the shock of George savaging her with his monstrous teeth (fangs). With her other hand, she grasped the railing to keep from collapsing. Her heart, whose beats had paused as the two scenarios played out, started hammering against her chest with such force she feared she was having a heart attack and, using the railing to ensure she didn’t topple down the stairs, lowered herself to sitting, allowing her forehead to lean forward until it was resting against her knees. A vulnerable position, should George return, but she could neither hear him moving around downstairs, nor feel the diminished pressure thinning the air on the far side of whatever had just happened to her, which (maybe) meant that he had settled himself on one of the living room couches or (better) had left the house. What a thing to hope for: were her heart not continuing its mad pounding, her head its wobbling spin, she might have sobbed. As it was, she concentrated on not throwing up in her lap. She remained where she was while the house settled into quiet, until the place nestled within her brain told her she could leave her position and she rose to seek her bed and whatever comfort its mattress could offer a body whose every muscle felt bruised.
She wasn’t expecting to sleep, nor has she. She’s lain awake with her eyes on the ceiling, repeating to herself how absurd it is to be afraid of her husband, which she is, she most definitely is, the memory of his (unreasonable) teeth, of the thunderclap of pain when they plunged into her flesh, echoing in her mind, forming the final link in a chain of events that began with George bidding for that ring online and wound through the turtlenecks to her hallucination of him floating (which wasn’t a hallucination, was it?) to the discovery of him crouched over Lawrence’s throat (doing what, for Christ’s sake, what?). She lies there in the dark attempting to plan her next move, the escape she knows she has to make, grabbing the kids and leaving the house, and how hard can it be? She doesn’t have to bring anything else, they could go in their pajamas, the three of them, right now.
The problem is, there might be something standing in the corner of the bedroom where the shadows congregate to the left of the closet. If there is, then it’s as tall as her husband but thin, dreadfully thin, its neck wound with what appears to be a scarf, but a scarf fluttering as if caught by a strong wind. Despite everything, Joyce’s default reaction is to tell herself it’s a trick of her perception; although she does her best not to move, not to let the (maybe) figure see that she’s seen it. She wonders how long she can keep lying here. She wonders whether the footsteps she heard earlier, when George appeared to merge with the black wall, were walking down the stairs, or climbing up them.
from: Michael Harket
to: Gaetan Cornichon
date: January 1, 2019 2:00 PM
subject: Stop Making Sense
Happy New Year! Here’s hoping it’s a good one for you and the fam and that you (finally) see some improvement on the health front.
Had a quiet time here. Patty was feeling a bit run down, so made an early night of it. Eric and I sat up to suffer through the musical numbers and watch the ball drop. After he went off to Snapchat with his girlfriend, I stayed awake a while longer to read your latest. Jesus, you really went all in on this one, didn’t you? Seemed to me you were channeling a bit of Joyce Carol Oates this time, the semi-breathless style she adopts when she wants to take you inside the consciousness of a character in distress. (I mean, you did name the protagonist Joyce.) Although, and I imagine you’ll say I’m reaching here, the scene on the stairs reminded me of the part in The Turn of the Screw where the Governess confronts the ghost of Peter Quint on one of Bly House’s staircases. Needless to say, your version ended a bit more…messily. (Or did it? you ambiguous son of a bitch.) (It also occurs to me that Oates wrote a riff on the James—“Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly,” I’m pretty sure—can’t recall if there’s a similar moment on the stairs in it, but I don’t suppose it really matters.)
Gotta say, you’ve pushed the autobiographical aspect about as far as I’ve seen you go with it. Don’t take this the wrong way, but there were a couple of moments when I wondered if maybe you’d gone a little too far. I mean, I had a hard time imagining Leslie reading it, you know? On the other hand, it also put me in mind of a Byron passage about the vampire (I’m pretty sure I’ve quoted it in one story or another) where he describes the condition in this way:
Then ghastly haunt thy native place,
And suck the blood of all thy race;
There from thy daughter, sister, wife,
At midnight drain the stream of life;
(…) Thy victims ere they yet expire
Shall know the demon for their sire,
As cursing thee, thou cursing them,
Thy flowers are withered on the stem.
It’s from a poem called “The Giaour,” from a scene where the protagonist is being cursed to live out the rest of his days as a vampire. As far as I know, it’s the debut of the vampire in English literature. It also introduces the idea of the vampire preying first on those he’s known and loved during his lifetime. (Which derives from one of the central European traditions, I’m pretty sure.) This hasn’t been terribly important to most of the vampire narratives we know, but it’s there in the monster’s background.
All of which is to say, I suppose it would be possible to read your story as an updating of an older trope, if one that in this case I find particularly unsettling. Although as you present it here, the family member seems more distressed at what’s happening than the vampire does…I guess a vampire sliding from life to (un)life might choose to stay with those familiar to it in order to have a safe and ready source of nutrition while it’s navigating its new condition. I remember one writer or another (Lucius Shepard?) speculating about the period of becoming a vampire as one of great intoxication with all this newfound power—whose parameters would be mapped out on those same loved ones.
It appears the ring’s a pretty decent collaborator. Just be sure you hang on to the royalties.
But: the black wall makes its fiction debut!
Oh—and I’ve turned up some more info on the connection between Lugosi and the Dracula ring. It’s wild stuff. I have to go now—we’re having dinner at Josh and Carmen’s—but I’ll tell you about it in a day or two.
from: Gaetan Cornichon
to: Michael Harket
date: January 1, 2019 10:01 PM
subject: Re: Stop Making Sense
Happy New Year, and thanks for the good wishes. Health wise, nothing’s changed, but I’m continuing my attempt to embrace my condition, whatever it is. Yes to the Oates, at least partially. This piece feels like it might keep going; I suppose time will tell. And yes, the black wall has arrived in print. Can’t wait for you to see it when you visit for Boskone.
(Oh, and don’t worry about Leslie. Seriously. She’s…fine. *Insert sinister laugh here*)
Hope you enjoyed your dinner. Have to admit, you’ve piqued my interest. I’m actually curious to hear the next installment of the D
racula Ring saga.
from: Michael Harket
to: Gaetan Cornichon
date: January 3, 2019 8:30 AM
subject: Re: Stop Making Sense
Been a bit under the weather myself, since New Year’s—probably picked up something from one of the kids at Josh and Carmen’s. Trying to shake it off, but without much luck.
You know, I’ve been thinking about “Stop Making Sense”—well, as much about the question of what use we make of the experiences of our loved ones. I wouldn’t say writers are vampires—that’s a bit too glib, too pat—but there is something vampiric, and specifically in the sense of the Byron poem I quoted, about the way our art draws sustenance from the lives of those closest to us, isn’t there? It’s funny, years ago, I roomed with this guy in Albany. He knew I was a writer and always acted kind of cautious around me, guarded. I never connected his demeanor with my writing until one night he told me and my girlfriend at the time about this crazy thing that had happened to him. When he was finished, I said something to the effect of, “Oh man, I’m going to have to use that in a story,” at which point he practically leapt out of his chair and shouted, “I KNEW it!” as if I had just confessed to the crime he’d suspected me of all along. Freaked me out, enough so that I still remember it.
(And yes, I did incorporate the events he related into something I wrote years later. The guy turned out to be an asshole, which was how I justified it to myself. Even if he hadn’t been, though, it wouldn’t have stopped me.)
from: Gaetan Cornichon
to: Michael Harket
date: January 3, 2019 6:03 PM
subject: Re: Stop Making Sense
So we’re parasites? Leeches? What about everything we give our families, everything we do for them? Isn’t this part of the equation? Isn’t there some kind of, I don’t know, exchange?
from: Michael Harket
to: Gaetan Cornichon
date: January 4, 2019 8:01 AM
subject: Re: Stop Making Sense
Sorry, we’re leeches. Human leeches, if this makes it any better. (Which sounds like a great idea for an EC Comics–style story.)
from: Gaetan Cornichon
to: Michael Harket
date: January 4, 2019 7:15 PM
subject: Re: Stop Making Sense
Great. Maybe you could use it for one of those anthologies you’re supposed to be writing for.
from: Michael Harket
to: Gaetan Cornichon
date: January 5, 2019 7:08 AM
subject: Human Leeches and Ever-Looming Deadlines
To be perfectly frank, I’m so far behind, I’ll probably miss the next two deadlines, which is a shame, because one of them is for an EC-themed project the Human Leech thing would be a perfect fit for. The only silver lining is, by the time I finally finish the damned thing, another, similar (or similar-enough) anthology will have rolled around.
Continuing to complicate matters, I still feel like shit. Like you, I went to my doctor, and all he could come up with was an unspecified viral infection. Rest and fluids. How about you? Any change?
from: Gaetan Cornichon
to: Michael Harket
date: January 5, 2019 9:45 PM
subject: Human Leeches
Not really. Funny: I’m sick, then you are. A new kind of computer virus, right? I’d say it’s a story idea, except someone must have done it before. Hope you’re on the mend soon. Remember fluids. Fluids! I say. You might try some human blood.
Kidding!
(Or am I?)
(Heh.)
from: Michael Harket
to: Gaetan Cornichon
date: January 6, 2019 1:30 PM
subject: The Dracula Ring Part 2
Yeah, the virus-through-the-computer device was a cyberpunk thing, as I recall. I’ll pass on the blood, thanks.
Anyway, you wanted it, you got it, the latest fruits of what’s becoming a bit of an obsession with me. (Yes, I know, this is the reason I’m always late with everything. But what I found was interesting enough to be worth the delay, even if you stand to be the primary beneficiary of it.) The Lugosi connection turned out to be worth investigating, although initially the idea of the first actor to play the Count on film being the one to pass on (or invent?) the knowledge of the ring struck me as a little too much, a bit of narrative overkill, you know? Someone in a minor part would have been better, aesthetically speaking, but what can you do? I looked online, found a couple of promising biographies of Lugosi. One I was able to buy for my Kindle, the other I had to order through ILL at the college. It came pretty quickly. The Kindle one, The Immortal Count: the Life and Films of Bela Lugosi, was solid, but didn’t have anything to offer on the subject of the ring. Lugosi: His Life in Films, on Stage, and in the Hearts of Horror Lovers had more to say, although the bulk of it was contained in a couple of loooong footnotes (and this is coming from a guy who never met a footnote he didn’t like).
Gary Rhodes, the author of this second biography, discusses how, as a young man, Lugosi was a member of a traveling theater company performing all over the Austro-Hungarian empire. It was how he truly learned and refined his craft as an actor—I gather his early efforts did not exactly set the stage on fire. Anyway, there’s a five-year period in the theater company’s history, from 1904 to 1909, Rhodes can’t account for. Rhodes says it’s likely the players continued to perform along their established route, no big deal. This is where the footnotes come in, which turn the nothing-to-see-here into not-so-fast, maybe-there-is-something-worth-having-a-look-at.
Footnote number one makes reference to a narrative connected to Ed Wood. After Lugosi’s death, Wood related a story he claimed came straight from the old man. One of the nights Lugosi was over at the director’s for dinner, he talked about something from the beginning of his acting career. In the early years of the century, Lugosi said, the troupe of actors of which he was a part was contacted by a Spanish conde, a count, to journey to a remote location in the Pyrénées to perform a special play for the noble and his fellows. When he heard the word “count,” Wood assumed Lugosi was on the verge of offering a revelation connected to Dracula; I imagine he was already planning the film he would make from whatever Lugosi told him.
As it turned out, though, Lugosi’s story was too fragmentary, too strange, for Wood to figure out what to do with. (I know, which sounds too bizarre itself to be true.) Much of the actors’ time was spent journeying, mostly by rail, occasionally by wagon, to their destination, an old monastery of a particularly vile stamp. Much of it was in ruins, and there was in its design something that suggested a faith other than Christianity, a creed older and more sinister. With the exception of a single youth who met them at the gate, the place appeared deserted. Some of the troupe were afraid they had been tricked and urged the others to depart. But if this was a jest, it was an expensive one: their travel costs had been paid in advance, as had half of their considerable fee, by the Conde de Villanueva. They continued after their young guide to a spot in the midst of the monastery’s buildings, where a natural amphitheater sloped down to a wooden stage. The ground here was bare rock, discolored by generations of stains Lugosi said reminded him of the floor of a slaughterhouse. The edges of the stage had been set with a meal—a feast, serving dishes heaped with meat and vegetables, bottles of wine, trays of bread and cakes. The young man led the actors down into the declivity to the stage, where they found the food was still hot; although there was no trace of whoever had carried all of it into the amphitheater. This didn’t stop the actors from devouring the meal (not too different from writers, I suppose—or any artists). Despite the decades separating now from then, Lugosi said, he could still taste the delicate slices of roast beef, their centers tender and bloody.
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