by Todd Grimson
Additional Praise for STAINLESS…
“In many ways, Stainless could be called a post-modern vampire story, as Grimson tweaks our perceptions with the literary equivalent of a knowing wink… what sets Stainless apart is not so much its narrative structure as its character details, its moments of intimacy between human and vampire.”
—David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“If Raymond Chandler or Flannery O’Connor had written a vampire novel, it might read with the brutal and passionate clarity of Stainless. Layers of corruption are explored and peeled away from the core of a heart-crushing love story. The ultimate late night in L.A.”
—Katherine Dunn, author, Geek Love
“Grimson’s description of vampire seduction has a marvelous, hallucinatory glassiness to it, and the information he provides—garlic and crucifixes don’t bother vampires, but amnesia can be a problem when you’ve lived for centuries—is a source of considerable humor.”
—Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times
“Surreal, grim, and graphic, there’s a kind of ‘Sunset Boulevard’ atmosphere of seedy glamour with elements of retro decadence and contemporary grunge. Beneath the corruption and casual cruelty, however, lies the message that true love still triumphs..”
—Voya - Mary Arnold
And for BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR…
“When Lisa Nova seeks revenge, she discovers her own amazing powers, turns smoldering rage into a stunning creative force, and reveals herself as one of the great characters of literature. Brand New Cherry Flavor is a modern classic - brutal and funny, gorgeous and profound.”—Katherine Dunn, author, Geek Love
“Grimson has given us a true look at the dark side--sexy, preverse, twisted and so very entertaining!”
—A.M.Homes, author of The Safety of Objects
”Darkly magical. The pages fly!”—Patricia Briggs, NYT bestselling author of “the Casey Thomson” series.
“Droll without ever being boring, perfectly poised on the edge that separates humor from horror, this novel furthers Grimson’s reputation as one of the more inventive new writers probing the dark side of contemporary America.”—Publisher’s Weekly
“Cool and funny, visceral and paradoxically detached, Brand New Cherry Flavor seizes its subject matter and does it justice. With a vengeance. Lisa Nova’s the sexiest, most striking new heroine in dark fantasy since Sonja Blue. Or anti-heroine.”—Locus
“Thrilling, edgy, gritty, and above all, terrific!”
—Charlaine Harris, Bestselling author of Dead Reckoning and the “Sookie Stackhouse” series that inspired HBO’s True Blood.
“Witheringly funny in its satire against cinema, stardom and celebrity, Grimson’s novel performs a gleeful demolition job on the mindlessness of American ‘slasher’ movies..’”
—The Daily Telegraph, UK
“A hectic pursuit of narrative force by any means is allied to verbal wit and ingenious games in Brand New Cherry Flavor, Todd Grimson’s spectacular novel of Hollywood and the occult… a foul-mouthed, extravagant novel, combining a strong sense of the demonic with some snappy one-liners. Grimson…has produced a novel of vitality and promise.”
—The Times (of London) Literary Supplement
“Something that David Lynch, James Ellroy, Clive Barker, and Bret Easton Ellis might have collectively mind-birthed at the height of an epic mescaline trip… a thing unto itself, unlike any other (novel). A depraved masterpiece… that, out of anything I’ve ever read, most closely mirrors the rhythm and logic of nightmares.”
—Nick Antosca, author, of Midnight Picnic, and screenwriter, “The Cottage” (for the Paris Review online)
The author would like to extend special thanks to Ruth Witham and Jane Galen
Copyright © 1996 and 2012 by Todd Grimson
Published in the United States
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without the written permission of the publisher, Schaffner Press.
For Cataloguing-in-Publication Information contact the publisher:
Schaffner Press, Inc., POB 41567, Tucson, AZ 85717
ISBN: 978-1-936-18223-7
PART ONE
ONE
Sunlight is spliced into the afternoon. Soft dead unmoving air. Keith doesn’t know what time it is, what day. Shadows tremble, and he forgets for a moment—until reaching for a glass, he sees the bandage wrapped around. He forgets again, choosing to ignore the matter of his twisted hands.
There are flowers in this garden, red hibiscus, lavender and jasmine, and over there, several cacti amongst hard stones. A song goes through his mind. Something partially familiar, nothing that he ever played. He can’t get to the end of it. It slips away. Fades out and then picks up, with only a momentary glitch, back at the start.
What do deaf people hear? Not just silence, surely: no, they must hear all kinds of noise. Buzzes, murmurs, soft roars. Whispers, hissing, a humming, and maybe the ocean, the tides of the blood. A steady dreamy orchestra, warming up slowly, forever, in the distant wilderness of the nerves.
The wind starts up, touching him for an instant, a phantom hand, and Keith considers going inside. He wonders if Justine will go out tonight. Really, he doesn’t want to do anything, but if there’s some reason to go somewhere that’s okay too. He’ll live. That’s the stupid part.
TWO
Justine is a vampire, and Keith is the human she keeps around to take care of things during the day. It’s more complicated, but that’s the general outline. A little over a year ago, she bit him on the neck. At that time, he was a junkie. He had, before the “accident” to his hands, been in a band that had a successful album. They were called SMX. Keith’s girlfriend committed suicide, his hands were grievously injured, he dropped out of sight and became addicted to painkillers, ultimately to heroin.
When Justine put him into a trance, prior to biting him, he sensed what was happening and he was terrified, sure. But he was also somehow exhilarated—at least he would die knowing that there were wonders and surprises in this life on earth, even if he only had a few moments to marvel, it was all right, he accepted the surprise. But vampires possess a highly evolved faculty of taste, and Justine would never take more than a small sample of blood from a drug addict, or an alcoholic, or someone with a blood disease. So she spared him, but something in the telepathic bond moved her, interested her, and she kept him, injecting a small amount of “venom” to maintain the hypnotic tie. But she did not enslave him, as she might have, as she has done at other times.
Maybe because he loved a dead girl, or because he has known suffering, or perhaps simply because he was handsome, and she was lonely. She likes him. They spend many nights talking, sitting together on the couch. She has difficulty describing her past to him, for her memory is bad, she forgets a great deal. There are just these huge blanks, sometimes all she’ll be able to remember from what would have been a whole lifetime is a single scene, or a picture of a room.
She does not require human blood on anything like the scale of killing someone every night. Often, in fact, she puts a spell on someone, bites them on the wrist or behind the knee, on the foot … takes only a little, disguises the wound with an incision or two, induces amnesia in the victim … and the person is left with a “blackout” and a minor wound, no lasting damage at all. The spell wears off.
Now and then, however, she must kill. It is an imperative of her being, an imperative of the strange species she has been for so long. If such a creature exists in Nature, then does it not have a right to live? If she kills, then, she does not feel bad about this. She is both a manifestation of Death and, not dying herself, apart from Death, unaging, and thus she still holds in herself a freshness, perhaps even an immaturity. She lo
oks young, younger than Keith’s twenty-eight. Slender, pale, with dark hair and large hooded dark eyes. The fangs truly extend only when she is about to strike, but those teeth are always a bit prominent, lupine and sharp.
Tonight is humid and warm, and as they lie together on the couch Justine’s flesh is very cool against Keith’s. He says, “You’re so cold.”
“Do you mind? Does it bother you?”
“No, I like it. It feels good.”
The house is not air-conditioned. There are ceiling fans, but they make a faint whirring noise. When everything else is so quiet, why have something whir? Keith does not mind the heated air, the breathing of this room.
He has been telling Justine about his fateful affair with Renata Spengler. “Leggy supermodel, Renata Spengler.” Justine is especially curious, and he feels like telling her things he has never told anyone else.
“When I came back to the States, I kept thinking of this image, it had stuck in my mind, I was sure that somewhere along the way I had seen it. A photograph of Renata, naked, her pubic hair shaven, with a hand coming out of her vagina, or a hand there instead … and I imagined that it had been inside of her, it had grabbed hold of me and pulled me in, all the way in, like I had gone into another room … I don’t know, I probably haven’t looked hard enough, but I haven’t been able to locate this photograph, so I don’t know, I might have just made it up.”
“Go back,” Justine asks. “Why did you go with her to Venezuela?”
“She said she had to attend the funeral of a childhood friend. She went to school in Caracas when she was eight or nine. And she’d gone back a couple of times. She had a boyfriend whose father owned Maracaibo Oil. Gilberto.”
“And he’s the one who had your fingers broken.”
“I think so. As far as I can tell.”
“I’m sorry,” Justine says, lightly caressing his forehead, her hand then brushing back his short hair.
“I want to tell you about Renata. It’s okay. The funeral was for her. I mean the childhood friend was herself. I was only with her, off and on, for nine months. I didn’t really know her, and if I was in love with her, it was that kind of hot, ignorant love that doesn’t exactly give you time to think and figure things out. I knew she was fucked-up, that she had very poor, uh, self-esteem, that she was a liar and a masochist and all that. But it’s not like you give somebody a test to see if they’re worthy of your love. It’s just chemical, or electric, magic, and then you’re in too deep to know how to breathe.”
Keith hesitates, finding himself suddenly unwilling—much to his surprise—to revisit Renata’s self-hating adventures. They seem too sordid, too sensational. So he says nothing, for the moment. There’s no hurry. The cold fingers caress him absently. He doesn’t want to tell her about the time in Cannes when Renata went to bed with a famous French actress, and had herself peed on and tied up. Then spent the next night with a black rapper who was in some gangster movie.
Renata then flew to Amsterdam, to meet Keith there, on tour with SMX. In the hotel room, after they’d fucked, she told Keith what she’d been up to, using her body. She was trying to get him to hit her, he knew it, and Keith remembers the bottomless hopeless feeling as she watched him, her eyes waiting, in mad insolent pain, for his response. Jon Jon, she told him, wasn’t as good a fuck, but he did have a much bigger dick. Keith slapped her, hard, hoping she would cry and that would end it, but she wanted a bigger scene. She told him she hated him, he didn’t really love her, and on this occasion she fought him with all her strength, making his mouth bleed with a flailing elbow as he—feeling like a rapist—just sought to hold her thrashing body down. It can be harder to simply hold someone down, trying not to hurt them, than to use your strength freely and rough them up.
Abjectly, later, after all the tears were spent, she whimpered, begging for forgiveness, saying that if he didn’t love her she would have nothing left, no reason to live. She was ugly, she would say. I hate myself. I have demons. I want to die.
Keith says, “I wasn’t equipped to deal with her problems. I didn’t know how to save her. I didn’t really want to, in a way. I resented it, that she made her problems more dramatic than mine. After all, I’d suffered through my own unhappy childhood, which I’ve told you about. I had survived. But… in my relations with women, I was used to being the troubled artiste. That was what … oh, I don’t know, I was going to say that was what attracted Renata to me, but actually I think … I don’t think at this point I’m vain about it, or have any reason to be … but I think we connected on a much deeper level than that. Almost immediately. Like we had been children together. There was so much we never had to say. We just knew.”
He sees the dead girl again as he speaks, vividly, sees her eyes, Renata turning to look at him across a crowded room, that flash of one mind, just for a moment, evanescent but real. What did Renata look like? What does anyone look like who’s on the cover of Mademoiselle, Elle and Vogue? Cheekbones, full lips, perfect teeth, gray eyes like changing, moving, bluish clouds. A thousand expressions on her face. She was tall, brown-haired, with beautiful legs, augmented breasts above her ribcage, her belly … a hand coming out of the taut cleft. Whose hand? Is it feminine? Is it hers?
Yes, Keith tentatively assesses. The picture is in black and white and looks like an antique, like it was taken in some impossible 1913. The model’s faint, tantalizing smile. Wet, slicked-back hair. Her body is definitely modern, not pre-World War I.
His own hands. In the semi-darkness, he dares touch Justine, when she can’t look and see his hand. His left hand is worse, partially numb and clumsy. Neither has much strength, both give him a lot of pain after much use. He has difficulty buttoning his shirt.
How much does Justine know? It’s hard to tell. Sometimes she seems so sensitive and subtle, beyond anyone he’s ever known. Yet to some extent he’s guessing, because she’s mostly inarticulate, and sometimes, like an animal, she can even seem downright dumb. Uncomprehending. Shading from absentmindedness to a sort of frightening state in which she looks at you without seeing, if you speak you are sure she does not hear. Yet she may move about in this condition. When she is like this Keith feels that she will kill him. He has made up his mind not to fight it, not to resist.
“Why did Gilberto blame you for Renata’s suicide? He must have been aware of how she was.”
“Yes,” Keith answers. “She was a torment to him … I’m sure of it. She visited him, once, when she was with me in England. He was a student at the London School of Economics.”
“He was jealous of you,” Justine says. “She drove him mad.”
Keith listens. Justine yawns, and in the light her fangs shine white with a sparkle of green. It’s the yellow in the light. The entire room seems umber shadows and melted gold.
It is a large room, high-ceilinged. The coffee table is sandblasted glass. A large painting is off to the right, geometric, two hexagon radials seen not quite front on, with lots of black scuffs and lines on sort of a turquoise to green-blue, with brick-red and dirty cream.
Justine wears a black mini-dress, and as it rides up on her thighs the skin looks so vulnerable, so naked and white.
“What?” she says, suddenly looking at him, smiling, after they have been silent for a long time.
He shakes his head, shrugs. She reaches over to her glass of water, brings it back to her lips, and carefully takes a little sip.
”I have a memory,” she announces. “I just saw it. I was in a field, with my sister, Fleur. Our dresses are soiled. The sun is shining … yes, if I look up, there it is, I can’t believe it, the sun is a bright, white … star. The sky is blue. Ah, damn. I want to say more, but I’d just be making it up.”
The hexagon radials seem about to fall out of the metal frame.
THREE
The full creepiness of the situation is not lost on him. He is in the position of serving as Justine’s imp, her familiar, her “Igor,” assisting her as she preys upon the world. It’s lik
e she is a dominatrix, and he a slave. If anyone knew of his allegiance, they would despise him. Were the villagers to come up to the castle, torches ablaze, like in an old black-and-white movie, they would kill him without a second thought.
The question of what he ought to do absorbs all of his spiritual energies, in a way the heroin addiction never did. That was wholesome by comparison. Understandable, given his broken hands, the loss of his career. It was weakness, he was weak, but this is sick.
He sees now the radical uneasiness caused by the undead; how, being neither truly one thing nor the other, they make everyone very nervous. He fully comprehends the anxiety experienced as long as the vampire thrives nearby. It seems like it must be destroyed, if there is to be any peace.
But Keith does not expect to have any peace inside him, he has never been at peace unless he was kidding himself, or the peace, in the form of heroin, was artificially imposed. Then his inner kingdom was serene, green meadows with sheep and trees and blue sky and fluffy little clouds. This was a landscape he has only seen, in real life, from afar.
Some sort of boiled down vision of happiness, simple enough, not too different from that of anyone else. The heroin relieved physical pain, and mental distress, it simplified things. Everything seemed all right, he saw things in an optimistic, positive light. Of course, coming down from that, waking up the next day, on the edge of withdrawal, he was nervous about everything, he saw all the multifarious painful details that slipped by unnoticed in the high.
His life was simple then. It was maybe stupid, worthless, and contemptible, but he had his assigned task. He needed to get some more heroin, before he started falling apart. Everything would be ugliness as withdrawal took hold. Everything hurt, everything made him want to throw up.
Doing some smack in that circumstance was like coming back from the dead. That’s an exaggeration, but the euphoria was so sweet, so heavenly—Keith wonders if it’s like that for Justine. If, more than keeping her alive forever, the fresh blood makes her high.