Unseaming
Page 25
To you, I am a shriveled lump, but I speak with pride when I tell you that I’m a self-made monster, a Mandelbrot set, a Koch curve, a Menger sponge, and inside I have no boundaries. When I decide it’s time to teach you, you’ll have no more hope of unlearning the lesson than you do of finding these others whose pictures you’ve spread here on the table.
My good man. Your laugh inspires me. Let me give you more to laugh about. I have a shaggy dog story to tell. Let me explain how it unfolds.
When you turn to aim that look of disbelief at the mirror that your partner lurks behind, you’ll see me standing between you and the mirror, my shackles gone. I’ll bet you won’t take the time to study what my reflection looks like, what hints that will give you. Instead you’ll shout, and when I don’t move, you’ll shoot. Your brain isn’t equipped to accommodate what you’ll see next. Your eyes will tell you that the bullets never reached me. No burst of flesh, no impact, no reaction at all, no matter how many times you squeeze the trigger, no matter how close you hold the gun.
When you finally turn to run, there I’ll be, in the way. Wherever you look next, there I am, closer. Finally, you’ll charge at me, because there’s no other direction to move.
Were you as smart as your partner, you might glimpse for just an instant a chaotic lattice of wax-flow flesh, an interlacing weave of soft honeycomb forms that billows about you like a cast net. Most likely you’ll just find yourself in among them, these biomorphic vistas that open and open and open before you, repeating themselves in scales large and small, patterns that on close observation yield segments of the same half-formed face or slats of ribs or curls of hair or pillars of fingers, growing more and more complex and cavernous as you stumble and slide, as you scream like an junkie in the throes of withdrawal, piss down both legs of those tasteful flat-front slacks your detective status grants you the luxury of wearing.
I’ve seen it before, the way your partner will react when he follows you, pausing to inhale the fractal wonders even as knowledge of what it all means dawns in his more sophisticated cortex. You eventually regain your head, lean against one of a thousand identical strands of pulsing flesh thick as sequoia trees. You do what a good cop does, you draw a grid in your mind across your surroundings, methodically parse out the squares to deduce the logical way back, valiant in your failure to comprehend how space now flows one way.
You’re a practical man, not as brave as everyone who’s known you believes, but you apply assertiveness the way a carpenter wields a saw, and your sense of duty remains as fixed in its proportions as Planck’s constant. It takes a long time, doesn’t it, in the face of the latest endlessly repeated face in my Escher landscape, for your resolve to approach zero. You’re thinking about your wife, the look on her face at the table this morning when you snarled at her about the unpaid electric bill, and about your arthritic dog who you absently struck when he pressed his head under your hand at the height of the argument. I see down into that moment in the track of your life, and your simple little mind revisits it now. And you’re thinking about your father lying in his back room bed, the oxygen tube hissing under his nose, and how it always falls to your wife to bathe his sores and empty his bedpan because this job you so love and so hate keeps you out at all hours. You’re thinking about all of them, about how they’ll remember you, and what will happen to them now.
This is new, an experience I’ve not had before. You try your cell phone. Wonderful!
The connection’s faint, she can maybe understand one word in three as you tell her how sorry you are. Both parts of the conversation are clear to me, my strings of synapses stretch forever, my ears are without number. Odds are that somewhere within me, some semblance of a heart is moved to beat faster in a manner not unlike the breathless effect I sometimes feel when contemplating the perfection of numbers, or the efficiency of tissue breakdown in a starving human body, or the cosmological processes of decay mirrored in the moist disintegration of a corpse. I am stimulated in a new and delightful way until the battery in your device dies.
Screaming your partner’s name isn’t entirely futile—there is a chance, though astronomically small, that he will find you.
Yet your despair is based on illusion, my friend. Here, you will never be alone.
And no matter how long you wander you will never be lost. Not to me, my weeping friend. Never to me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
On weekdays, Mike Allen writes the arts column for the daily newspaper in Roanoke, Va. Most of the rest of his time he devotes to writing, editing, and publishing. His first novel, a dark fantasy called The Black Fire Concerto, appeared in 2013, and he’s written a sequel, The Ghoulmaker’s Aria, that’s in the revision stage.
He raised more than $10,000 through a Kickstarter campaign to revive his anthology series dedicated to boundary-blurring work, Clockwork Phoenix. That Kickstarter funded Clockwork Phoenix 4, released in 2013 to much critical acclaim. He also edits and publishes Mythic Delirium, which began in 1998 as a poetry journal; a second Kickstarter campaign in 2013 rebooted it as a digital publication for poetry and fiction. In other words, 2013 was a big year for him, and 2014 isn’t far behind, with the release of his sixth poetry collection, Hungry Constellations, and his first collection of short fiction, Unseaming. Somewhere in there he squeezes in time for an audio column, “Tour of the Abattoir,” which appears in mostly monthly intervals at Tales to Terrify.
He receives a ton of help with all this editing from his wife, artist and horticulturalist Anita Allen. Their pets, Loki (canine) and Persephone and Pandora (feline) provide distractions. You can follow Mike’s exploits as a writer at descentintolight.com, as an editor at mythicdelirium.com, and all at once on Twitter at @mythicdelirium.
Books by Mike Allen
Novels
THE BLACK FIRE CONCERTO
THE GHOULMAKER'S ARIA (forthcoming)
As Editor
MYTHIC DELIRIUM (with Anita Allen)
CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 4
CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 3
New Tales of Beauty and Strangeness
CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 2
More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness
CLOCKWORK PHOENIX
Tales of Beauty and Strangeness
MYTHIC 2
MYTHIC
THE ALCHEMY OF STARS:
Rhysling Award Winners Showcase (with Roger Dutcher)
NEW DOMINIONS:
Fantasy Stories by Virginia Writers
Short Fictions
SHE WHO RUNS
SLEEPLESS, BURNING LIFE
STOLEN SOULS
FOLLOW THE WOUNDED ONE
Poetry Collections
HUNGRY CONSTELLATIONS
THE JOURNEY TO KAILASH
STRANGE WISDOMS OF THE DEAD
DISTURBING MUSES
PETTING THE TIME SHARK
DEFACING THE MOON
PRAISE FOR
UNSEAMING
Throughout Unseaming, reality is usually in bad shape right from the start—and from there things proceed to go downhill. Such is the general background and trajectory of life in Mike Allen’s fictional world. More could be said, of course, but there’s one thing that I feel especially urged to say: these stories are fun. Not “good” fun, and certainly not “good clean” fun. They are too unnerving for those modifiers, too serious, like laughter in the dark—unnerving, serious laughter that leads you through Mr. Allen’s funhouse. The reality in there is also in bad shape, deliberately so, just for the seriously unnerving fun of it. The prose is poetic, except it’s nonsense poetry, the poetry of deteriorating realities, intermingling realities, realities without Reality. And all the while that unnerving, serious laughter keeps getting louder and louder. Are we having fun yet?
—Thomas Ligotti, author of Teatro Grottesco and The Spectral Link
Allen’s 14-story debut collection saturates alternate dimensions with literal horrific fleshiness. His unsettling Nebula-nominated “The Button Bin” is as disorienting as
it is disturbing; it neatly sets the stage for the blood-soaked dreamscape vision of an overstuffed sin-eater in “The Blessed Days,” as well as the more direct but no less chilling creature that crawls onto the Appalachian Trail in “The Hiker’s Tale.” In prose both lyrical and unvarnished, Allen depicts haunting regret in “Stone Flowers” and disembodied shrieking rage and grief in “Let There Be Darkness.” When he combines both emotions in “The Quiltmaker,” a continuation of “The Button Bin,” he transforms that original tale in ways that resonate throughout the collection. Never obvious, sometimes impenetrable, Allen’s stories deliver solid shivering terror tinged with melancholy sorrow over the fragility of humankind.
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
Mike Allen’s ability as a poet is evident throughout this fever dream of a book. Brutal, elegant, and shocking, the stories in Unseaming are snapshots of a beautiful Hell.
—Nathan Ballingrud, author of North American Lake Monsters: Stories
Unseaming is one of my highlights of 2014 … It is my belief that Mike Allen is about to grab a lot of attention with this book. The sporadic publishing of his fiction over nearly two decades has helped him fly under the fiction radar. This changes with his collection. This is where he crashes the party, strutting in like a rockstar, with the skills to back it up. I expect to hear his name a lot in the coming years.
—Arkham Digest
Mike Allen’s Unseaming is wonderfully, wickedly labyrinthine in nature—which is to say, where you start with each story is nowhere close to the destination he has in mind for you. Just when you think you have a handle on the journey he’s sending you on, Allen masterfully leads you down an entirely new path, just as wondrous and terrifying as the previous twist in the road. These are beautiful, complex, unsettling tales of love, loss, and pain that will stay in your head long after you put down the pages, stitching their way through all the dark corners of your soul.
—Livia Llewellyn, author of Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors
Mike Allen blends a poet’s attention to language with a crime reporter’s instinct for the darker precincts of human behavior. Lush, phantasmagorical, his stories match the monsters outside with the monsters inside, B-movie tropes opening into psychological and spiritual desolation. These stories glow with demonic energy, and what they illuminate are the faces of our secret selves, screaming back at us from the mirror’s depths.
—John Langan, author of The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies
Mike Allen’s Unseaming confirms his status as a poet who writes in dread and awe rather than ink. His most recurrent themes are those of wrenching loss and transformative retribution, with a liberal helping of the literal fear of God(s); sowing out a hundred different apocalypses, personal and otherwise, these stories reap an unforgettable crop of nightmares, sketching a chimeric universe in which shape-changing is less a rumour or an option than a sad, simple inevitability. Not to be missed.
—Gemma Files, author of We Will All Go Down Together
After you travel these often blistering and always fantastic poetic nightmares with Mike Allen, the darkness owns your soul … and you rejoice in it!
Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., author of Portraits of Ruin and editor of A Season in Carcosa and The Grimscribe’s Puppets
Mike Allen has put together a first class collection of horror and dark fantasy. Unseaming burns bright as hell among its peers.
—Laird Barron, author of The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All
Also from Antimatter Press
Bad Wizard
by James Maxey
In 1892, Oscar Zoroaster Diggs turned up in Topeka with a suitcase full of high quality emerald, instantly making him the richest man in Kansas. With his winning smile and keen mind, he launches a political career that leads to his appointment as Secretary of War under Teddy Roosevelt. Diggs persuades the president that the perfect tool for spreading democracy would be a fleet of new-fangled rigid airships.
Dorothy Gale, a reporter for the Kansas Ear, is dedicated to exposing Diggs’ plans for his fleet of Zeppelins. She’s the one person who knows the truth about Diggs, since she met him ten years previously in the Emerald City, where he called himself the Wizard. But explaining that one of the most powerful men in the world is planning to use his aerial navy to invade an invisible island in the sky ruled by witches is a difficult story to tell her editor. With power of her silver slippers and some help from old friends, can Dorothy stop Diggs from once more claiming the throne of Oz?