When I did look around I found the ship’s pale light had travelled further, and I saw vague shadows gathered on other rooftops or hanging from windows, trying to better see what was above them. And yet I felt as though I alone was witnessing it — or just me and the wailing child beside me.
The ship moved further, allowing me a glimpse into the portholes that lined the wooden hull. They were murky and smeared, and through the windows I could see only indiscriminate shapes — or, perhaps, merely the shadow of shapes — sliding against each other in the dark. The confined Stacey screamed wildly and she pounded her fists in a struggle for freedom. Her mother paid her little attention; she was still mesmerized by the circular windows of light, eyes wide and a look on her face I could not describe. I did not recognize it, but it was shared by all those I saw surrounding her.
Then, without warning, Stacey dropped from her mother’s arms. She struck the rooftop hard, and the impact stunned her for a moment. I started towards her and then hesitated. It seemed as though Stacey and I were the last two people in a world of statues. She raised her tiny face towards me, looked at me through her tears, as though about to speak. Her bottom lip quivered, and as I leaned closer in anticipation of the words, she struggled to her feet and ran sobbing into the shadows.
And still, no one around me moved. All their eyes were fixed on the impossible event happening above them, yet it was clear they saw something in the great ship’s passing I did not. I could hear Stacey’s whimpers calling to me from the darkness, and I reached inside my jacket pocket for the small flask I carried. I unscrewed the cap and put the bottle to my lips, but then did not drink.
Instead, I tossed the flask aside, and ran looking for Stacey.
The light above did not reach everywhere on the rooftop, and the young girl was hidden within the shadowed recesses. I had followed her cries like that of a siren, and when I found her she was curled in a quaking ball, her tiny clothes soiled by the darkness, and she cried in fear. I knelt down beside her and stroked her hair, trying to console her. She quieted, sniffling away the tears, but still her face was full of fear of all that she had seen. I picked her up gently and held her tight in my arms. I did not want to let her go again.
“I love you,” I said, rubbing her soft skin as I whispered in her ear. She felt so good in my arms.
She made noises then, but thankfully no one could hear them. No one was listening.
Everyone stood only a few feet from us, watching the giant ship passing beyond their reach, but while they were bathed in light, they remained oblivious to those of us embraced by the darkness.
• • •
And by the next morning there was sun.
It started slowly, almost imperceptibly, after the ship had disappeared. The thick dark fog that covered the city began to let shadows move on the street, on the roofs of the other buildings, as I watched from my apartment window. Unable to see what so many others saw in those glowing portholes, I left, returned to the safety of my own world.
Inside my room, the solitary lamp seemed over-bright, shining upon the plush toy left discarded on the floor and revealing its taint. The thing revolted me, and I used the cover of darkness to throw it and the mocking lamp from my window. There was a pounding in my head, my heart beating like fists upon my apartment door, but I kept throwing all that disgusted me from that window, kept throwing until my chest was heaving and I was desperate for breath. Then, I opened every cupboard and emptied every bottle I had into my throat, but still I could not wash the sickness away. I managed only a few footsteps towards my bed in the dissipating darkness before I fell unconscious to the floor.
The world I awoke to was a different one. Everything was bright, far too bright for my blurred eyes, and the persistent sound of sobbing echoed in my ears. I looked at the ruins I had made the night before, at what I’d done, and shook my pained head in confusion.
It took some time before I was able to look through my apartment window at the street below. I expected to see my belongings broken and scattered, but there was nothing, as though the passing darkness had swept the streets clean of everything. There were no ragged youths playing their games, no forgotten elderly wandering the sidewalks; the world was dead in the ship’s wake, and its odor filled the brightening air.
My head continued to pound, the screaming and wailing from the building drilling into it, and no matter what I tried I could not dull the pain. I banged on the paper-thin wall that separated me from my neighbor, pleading for some relief, but there was no answer. Desperate, I staggered out into the hallway and rammed my fists into her door.
My knuckles were raw by the time it opened. There stood my neighbor, her red swollen eyes staring out at me. I was stunned, and neither of us spoke a word. Then, a wail rose from somewhere behind her, a wail so loud and piercing I could not comprehend what could have possibly made it. It did not seem of this world. I opened my mouth to speak, but the door was closed before I managed to get the words out.
It was perhaps mid-afternoon when I saw the first people on the street. They walked slowly, looking up from the ground at the setting sun with unhappiness or unease. I could not see them clearly as they stared past my window, but I found it unnerving, and pulled back until I was far enough to avoid their accusing eyes.
Across the street, long shadows stretched out from behind an abandoned car, and I saw my neighbor emerge with one of the teenagers beside her. He looked down the street casually before removing something from his pocket and slipping it to her. Then, he looked directly at me, and my stomach knotted.
My entire body felt dry, but I could not find any bottle in the apartment that hadn’t been drained and smashed. There was nothing to help me stop the wailing, stop the words that made no sense to me yet hurt my head just the same. I covered my ears, trying to keep my sanity from draining away, but I could still hear everything.
I heard my neighbor return. I heard her footsteps, heavy and slow, climbing the stairs — heard her move down the hall towards my apartment, each step coming closer, mimicking the pounding in my head.
Then, I heard her pass me by, heard her open the door to her own apartment, the sound of crying louder for only a moment — heard her emotionless voice as she tried to soothe her daughter. I heard a wave of sorrow that rattled my windows, then, finally, I heard nothing.
I heard nothing.
I could not follow what happened next, not from within my locked room. There was more banging, then voices raised, but it all started to fade from my notice as I watched the sun through my window. It was slowly descending towards the horizon, and the sky around it had become the color of a bruise. When the sirens began screaming in the distance I knew they would only get louder, but I waited until I heard the boots on my stairs before I opened my door to the inevitable.
It was as if every tenant in the building stood in the hallway, and all heads were turned towards me. It was from the door beside me though that the two police officers appeared, and between them they carried my neighbor. She wore very little but her eyes were black and sunken and she still had a piece of rubber tubing around her arm. She fought against the officers with flailing arms until she caught sight of me. Then she stopped still and looked at me.
I saw nothing in those eyes.
She raised her bloodied hands then and lunged forwards, but I was able to step back in time. The officers wrestled her back under control, but even as they did so, they looked at me strangely, and I realized then everyone else in the hallway was doing the same.
I stepped back into my apartment and closed the door. Night had finally fallen, and without my lamp I had no choice but to wait in the darkness alone.
AFTERWORD
EXCERPTS FROM A WRITER’S JOURNAL
I HAVE NEVER been one for pulling back the veil when it comes to the creation of my fiction. Nevertheless, since the death of Beneath the Surface's previous incarnation I have learned one unassailable fact: the reader demands knowledge, demands it at any cost
. It is for you then, dear inquisitive one, that I have penned the following pages, all in an effort to help you make sense of the nightmares you have recently subjected yourself to. Without my help, I fear you may go mad from the experience. And, yet, it is paramount that you have read every word of the preceding tales before arriving at this point, for what follows are secrets that could be devastating if revealed too soon. Better to turn the pages back to the first and begin anew than to hop through the contents, or worse skip back and forth from excerpt to tale, for true mysteries cannot be revealed in piecemeal. No, they must be subtly laid out over time as this book aims to do, and only those individuals that have read the rites in their proper sequence shall be ready for the knowledge that will too soon be revealed. I can only hope you resist the urge to look away.
In the year 2003 I had only just begun to write, and was more often than not flailing blindly in the darkness. I'd authored a few pieces in the year previous, but only one had sold for publication, and none were very good. It was in this state of ignorance I began Off the Hook. The seeds of the tale had been in my notebook for a few years by then — the image of a solitary phone booth lit, its telephone ringing into the rainy night. I had many plans for the piece, some elaborate, some not so, and it took a long time to tease out a version that worked. Even then, after a few drafts, I realized things were not as I'd thought. Somehow, the tale had changed beneath my pen — the sentences and their order no longer making sense — and rather than fight against it I decided I must swallow all the work I'd thus far completed and tear the story apart, raze it so I might rewrite again from the beginning. It was only through this method — destroying everything to find the truth from which to rebuild — that I was finally able to realize the true story from the idea. It helped that I had a small vignette in that same notebook that acted as a key, one that would fit easily into the tale, unlocking and enhancing its philosophical sub-narrative. I was quite proud of myself upon the piece's completion — not just for what I'd created, but also for my willingness to sacrifice everything in the quest for something more.
Immediately afterward came The Autumnal City, a tale inspired by spoken words of Thomas Ligotti. I had recently acquired a copy of "This Degenerate Little Town" and I found on the accompanying compact disc a dark sardonic voice that burrowed into my mind and remained there. It echoed in my thoughts long after the disc had stopped spinning, and soon I knew that voice as well as I knew my own, listening while it narrated the emptiness of my existence. As it spun in my thoughts I realized how I might harness its power for my own purposes. I sat with pen to paper and let Ligotti's voice guide me, hoping it might dictate a tale from that place where his mind and my own converged. But that was not what transpired. Instead, strange thoughts spilled forth from someplace beyond my dreams, and as they flowed down my arm and onto the page I saw the ink from my pen had turned the darkest shade of black. When the piece was complete I took a moment to marvel at it and at the strange words I had birthed. Immediately I placed the work into an envelope and sent it away so it might find a home in the pages of some sticky little magazine. I was thus disappointed to find the tale returned unwanted time and time again, and it wasn't until more than a year later that the cycle was broken. So much time had passed, however, that though the nightmare remained in my mind, the rest of the story did not. Imagine my distress when that editor (nameless here) asked for the slightest revisions and I found myself unable to provide them. I no longer understood the piece. The thing was a mystery to me, impenetrable, its secret locked away so deftly that I could no longer makes sense of it. I was forced to reinvent the fiction with my waking mind, re-plot its course so it might reveal another truth, albeit one only half as pure.
Early in 2004, I found myself for the first time reflecting on the strangeness of writing fiction, on how the mere act is akin to falling into a lucid dream where one becomes a divining instrument, a medium whose job it is to transcribe the work from the ether onto the page. I was experiencing the sensation more and more often: the feeling of losing control to the flow of words that sprang from something beyond, something for which dreams were merely a conduit.
You Are Here. Ah, the story that has turned out to be a surprise favorite amongst its readers. I wrote the tale in a fever dream just after the year turned and promptly sent it on its way. Just as promptly, it was accepted for publication, and I found myself happy to be rid of it. When the time came to republish the tale in the first imperfect incarnation of the book you now hold, I returned to it to see if I could determine just why it had had such a troubling effect on me. Initially I attempted to rewrite it, interweaving techniques I'd learned over the years from my own studies of the occult and of weird fiction's greatest masters, but I found my discomfort with the thing was not eased. There was something else, something far more disturbing to me. You see, I realized one night while on the verge of slumber that I held no clear recollection of writing the piece in the first place. For all I knew it had appeared on its own in my notebook one morning after my dark dream. Even when I looked back I could see the handwriting shared only the vaguest of similarity to my own. I had always assumed the work was mine and had not questioned the tale's appearance. At least, not then. But if I didn't dream up the story, I wondered where had it come from?
I strode next into It Runs Beneath the Surface, my head still full of these dizzying thoughts, looking for answers. I had been inside the world of my fiction for two years by then and still I was no closer to determining its source. Yet it would be a lie to say I hadn't seen my own powers improve during that time. I was better able to express complexity with my work, and nothing seemed grander than the city — the glorious city of Toronto in which I lived; a city like every city, full of filth and foulness. As Leiber before me, I wanted to explore that dark misery intimately. Perhaps I thought it might reveal the cause of the nightmares I'd been having, dreams of another Strantzas — one with long gnarled fingers that scratched at a heavy beard; a Strantzas that spoke with a voice too deep, too slow. His words were meaningless riddles yet they seemed to aggregate, and they formed a nonsensical pattern, one that I knew would be infinitely clearer the farther I stood from it. He spoke of a darkness that washed upon the shore of the city and transformed its inhabitants. They had become vectors, little more than walking pools of tar, both vile and repugnant, and the image the nightmares left in my memory were so horrifying I knew I had no choice but to make their truth concrete with words, if only so I might relieve myself of the burden. But how was the question, one answered accidentally by a song on the radio. A simple choice phrase threw a mental switch and for a moment the darkness inside me recoiled. The tale and its ending revealed themselves to me then in some near-cosmic epiphany as I realized that I, and not my thinly-veiled characters, was the first true victim of the story, for the darkness I described had initially washed over me, spewed forth from my mind via my waking dreams, and would soon no longer be confined to the page. The sheer idea was lunacy; I knew, rationally, that I was merely writing stories and that there was no danger in that. At least, those were the words I kept repeating to myself like a mantra while I kept my eyelids squeezed tight in ignorance.
Things changed when I wrote Behind Glass. Until then, if I'd been criticized for anything in my work, it was for a tendency to put secrets at the forefront and forget that fiction was about people, characters. In many ways I think this tale was my first step toward rehabilitation, the first where I was able to synthesize both my ontological and psychological views into one narrative. It has proven popular with readers, no doubt for its overt Lovecraftiana, but I never saw it as that. Instead, for me, it was perhaps the clearest treatise on the themes that ran through my fiction, those same themes that unite the tales in this book: namely that beneath the surface of everyone lurks something more. The darkness in the tale was more physical, of course, than it had been previously in my fiction, but many elements returned — that tactile sensation of foulness seeping out in the world, our
hollowed-out shells unable to contain it. I'd felt that sickness in myself many times hovering just over the event horizon of my dreams, the eternal darkness that awaited passage into this world. Perhaps it was from there, from those forbidden vistas, that all fiction was born. Could that be true I wondered during the twilight hour in which the idea first struck? Was there a plane of darkness that united all fiction, one we tapped into each night? A communal landscape of dread? It was something to meditate upon, and in what better way than through my fiction?
The year turned as years do, taking the world into the nightmare of 2005. It was the year the natural world rebelled, killing almost 100,000 with tsunamis and earthquakes, windstorms and floods. Everywhere one looked there were more reports of death by nature's hand, and it began to feel as though there were something guiding it, turning the world against us. It was early in that year that the words for A Thing of Love first flowed from my pen and onto the page. I had wanted to further explore the darkness in my dreams, and chose to do so via a small idea I had floating in my files about a mysterious package arriving at the apartment of a desperate writer. Little did I expect the weird alleyways the darkness would take me down. It was as though that realm of nightmares had seeped quicker into the world, coloring my story in all sorts of marvelous and discomforting ways. The thing took on a life of its own, the words rewriting themselves as I watched dumbfounded, my pen scrawling both dark and strange across the page. I am not afraid to admit that I was both revulsed and frightened by the experience, although the final result was something of which I ended up being very proud. That darkness from beyond had shaped my words into something more, and I began to wonder if for me it was not conversely a light. The story it crafted is not to everyone's taste to be sure, but power rarely is. Nevertheless, on the evening the piece was finished, I celebrated by uncorking a bottle of wine too many in toast to my dark muse, all the while hopeful I might forsake the dreams it brought for a single night's slumber.
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