One of them pointed at us, and the group headed our way. They waved and kept on singing. I thought I recognized the song. Something from the 1960s. The kind of stuff my parents listened to.
Mark waved back. He said, “Hold on to your mallet. If things get rough, swing for the head and knee them in the crotch.”
They seemed harmless. Approximately as many men as women. Long hair. Handmade clothes. Artsy-crafty jewellery. A bunch of latter-day hippies. The song wound down when they reached the edge of the park. I noticed a few of them looked more like bikers. I tightened my grip.
Only one of them came up to us. The one who looked more Saturday Night Fever than Hair.
He said, “Peace.”
Mark said, “Hi. Where are you folks from?”
“I’m from New York City. But we’re from all over. Vermont. Ottawa. Maine. Sherbrooke.”
Mark asked, “So, it’s like this everywhere?”
“It’s like this everywhere we’ve been. The whole world has changed. So many tragic deaths.” But he made it sound almost cheerful, like a TV ad.
Mark grunted. Something about Saturday Night Fever — his calculating eyes, his used-car salesman voice — made me distrust him immediately.
“Are you two youngsters alone? It’s safer to stay in a large group. We’re gathering people to form a commune. To survive in this new age. To repopulate. We need children. Strong, healthy children.”
His eyes appraised me, lingering on my hips. I tensed my arms, ready to swing. Mark shifted, his body shielding me from Saturday Night Fever’s gaze.
“Well, I wish you folks the best. It sounds like a great project.”
“You and your friend should join us. We’d be happy to welcome you.” He addressed Mark, but his eyes kept straying to my body.
“Thanks, but we’re good here. This is home.”
Three of the men in the group were big. Wrestler big. No way Mark and I could stop them if they decided to add me to their baby factory by force.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. Anyway, we should be on our way. Good luck.” Mark took my hand, and we walked away. We held on to our mallets.
Mark slept. He didn’t know, but I’d stayed awake through the previous two nights.
His mouth was slightly open, and he was almost snoring. I loved all of his sounds, even the silly ones. I traced his lips with my index finger; it didn’t rouse him, but he moaned. It was a delicious noise.
I stared at him all night, scrutinizing every detail of him.
Dawn broke. As Mark stirred, I pretended to sleep.
The night Danny Quantum and his followers started sacrificing cats and dogs, I told Mark, “We have to leave.”
I was bundled under three layers of sweaters, but the cold still bit. Even the heat from the fires around the Quantum Cross couldn’t keep me warm. I was tempted to lean into Mark, for warmth, for comfort, but I needed to talk to him, and for that I had to stay focused.
“You tired?”
“No. I mean, go away. Off the island. Leave all this behind. Find somewhere else to live. Somewhere far. Somewhere safer.”
I wanted him to say, Yes, I’ll go anywhere with you.
He said, “Who’ll protect Daniel? If I go, he’ll just get worse. He’ll be lost forever.”
“Then talk to him. Make him stop this before . . .”
“It’s not that easy. Not that simple. He doesn’t hear what he doesn’t want to. This is his way of coping. We’ve all lost too much.”
“You know where this is heading. Soon, it’ll be people being shishkebabed to satisfy Danny Quantum’s megalomania. To feed the hungry bellies of his flock.”
I didn’t look at Mark. I didn’t want his dark eyes to sway me. I stared at the fires burning at the foot of the Quantum Cross. I looked at Daniel, prancing and shouting. Like the maniac that he was.
“I’m leaving tomorrow morning. Getting away from Daniel. Far away. Find somewhere to grow food. Somewhere with fresh water. Head south, maybe.”
Could I leave without Mark? I wanted to kiss him. Would I ever? Even after all we’d shared, the cold still held our hearts in its grip.
“Don’t, Martha. Don’t make me choose.” He turned his face away from mine and stared at his brother in the distance. When he continued, his voice was firm — firm enough to sting. “Besides, we’ve always lived in the city. What do you know about farming, or even about gathering food in the wild?”
“We can learn how to survive.” Despite myself, doubt had crept into my voice.
Was I willing to stay and let this drama play out, despite its inevitable horrors? Wherever I would end up away from here, there might be other Saturday Night Fevers or Danny Quantums. Or maybe even worse.
One of Danny’s people handed Mark a wooden stick. There was a roasted, skewered cat on it.
I said, “Are you going to eat that?”
He said, “I’ll go with you. Anywhere.”
The wind on my face, the smell of grass and trees tickling my nose, I race down the deserted road.
Mark is with me. Laughing. I laugh, too.
In the fields there are cows. Horses. Dogs. Sometimes people.
Some of them wave at us, smiling. Some of them shoot at us, warning us away.
We’re not ready to stop yet.
AFTERWORD: BEHIND THE SCENES WITH CLAUDE LALUMIÈRE
1. The Object of Worship
“The Object of Worship” is both a tribute and a response to Rachel Pollack’s magnum opus, Unquenchable Fire, one of my favourite novels. Unquenchable Fire had a tremendous impact on my imagination. Its use of primal mythic rituals in an urban setting and its particular manner of presenting the strange as commonplace spoke to me quite profoundly and proved to be very influential on my own writing. As a work of art it has never stopped growing within me since I first read it in 1989. The way Unquenchable Fire deals with pregnancy has always disturbed me — and not necessarily in a good way. Thus, this story — working out both the literary influence of and my queasiness with Pollack’s complex and alluring masterpiece.
2. The Ethical Treatment of Meat
It’s been said by others that writing fiction is an act of creative misreading. Certainly, that’s true of “The Object of Worship” as a misreading of Unquenchable Fire. In fact, many of my stories are partly a result of working through intentional misreadings. But no story of mine is more directly the result of a misreading than “The Ethical Treatment of Meat.” I began to glimpse this story when an ambiguity in the first paragraph of an early draft of Dora Knez’s zombie story “The Dead Park” led me to misunderstand which characters were zombies and which were alive. My confusion caused me to imagine an entirely different story than the one Dora hoped to convey. Soon after, I saw a call for submissions for The Book of More Flesh, asking for unusual zombie stories. Synchronicity is hard to resist: my zombie idea, already unusual to start with, continued to evolve, taking on elements from 1960s monster sitcoms The Munsters and The Addams Family and from Kyle Baker’s 1992 comics story “Lester Fenton and the Walking Dead,” until it became a story of its own — and even more unusual. My story was indeed published in The Book of More Flesh in 2002, while the final version of Dora Knez’s “The Dead Park” appeared in Island Dreams: Montreal Writers of the Fantastic, which I edited the following year. “The Ethical Treatment of Meat” has been taught in a number of high schools around Montreal. It’s always a blast to meet the students and discuss with them the various issues and themes raised in this story.
3. Hochelaga and Sons
I love superhero comics, as “Hochelaga and Sons” makes blatantly obvious. A lifetime of superhero comics reading fed into this story, but three sources are clearly foremost. First, Bernie Mireault’s The Jam — about an ordinary Montrealer who decides to put on a modified gym suit and pretend to be a superhero while hanging out on rooftops — is one of my favourite comics of the 1980s, and the spirit of that series is all over this story, especially in regards
to the personality of the father. Second, both the narrative point-of-view and the manner in which I play with superhero archetypes evokes Kurt Busiek’s Astro City. And, third, there’s Jack Kirby, the King of Comics and one of the greatest cartoonists of all time. Probably, he’s an influence in some way or other on most of what I write. But in this case I can trace back a direct influence, from a 1963 story: “The Hate-Monger!” (Fantastic Four #21) — one of the many times that Kirby explored the idea of fascism as the ultimate form of human evil and also where we can find the seeds of later, more ambitious explorations of that idea, for example in New Gods and OMAC: One Man Army Corps. But more on Kirby below, in the note on “Destroyer of Worlds.”
4. The Sea, at Bari
Ever since early childhood, I have had a deeply mythic and emotional connection to large bodies of water. During a 2006 trip to Europe, I found myself in Bari, Italy, barefoot in the waters of the Adriatic Sea. With the smells, sounds, and sights of the sea engulfing me, this story came to me, unbidden. I composed most of it in my head right there. That evening, I was boarding a boat for Greece. The final pieces came into place while I was standing on deck as the boat ventured out into the darkness of the nighttime sea. In my cabin, I furiously typed “The Sea, at Bari” on my laptop.
5. The Darkness at the Heart of the World
My Lost Pages sequence — a series of six urban fantasies focusing on a bookshop that serves as a nexus between realities — has all kinds of mythological shenanigans going on in the background. I wanted to explore that mythological backstory, but freed from the concerns, characters, themes, and overarching plot of the Lost Pages series itself. Thus this story, in which I pay tribute to both the mythological fantasies of Lord Dunsany and the Flat Earth stories of Tanith Lee.
6. Spiderkid
I’d just finished writing the first (of many!) drafts of the long-gestating “Destroyer of Worlds” (see below), and I was eager to tackle something else — something shorter and less difficult to wrestle into shape. “Destroyer of Worlds” owes a huge debt to Jack Kirby, but there was an outtake where I’d had some fun pastiching the work of Kirby’s 1960s Marvel Comics colleague Steve Ditko, co-creator of SpiderMan and Doctor Strange. Out of that unused snippet grew “Spiderkid” — a loving tribute to the work of Steve Ditko, although I’m sure the ultra-conservative Ditko would disapprove of many elements in this story. Another irony is that the snippet in question did not survive the final edit of “Spiderkid” either. I still have it lurking in my files . . . I’m hoping something else will come out of it at some point.
7. Njàbò
The lives and plight of nonhuman animals in our human-dominated world has been a concern of mine since early childhood. One of the most fascinating books I’ve read on the subject of the clash between human and animal societies is Natural Enemies: People-Wildlife Conflicts in Anthropological Perspective, edited by John Knight. It’s there that I found the inspiration for “Njàbò”: namely, in Alex Köhler’s essay “Half-Man, Half-Elephant: Shapeshifting among the Baka of Congo.” I should state that, for dramatic purposes, I took many liberties with Baka lore, and any discrepancies with reality should in no way be attributed to Köhler but entirely to me.
8. A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens
I’d been reading quite a lot of Paul Di Filippo’s short fiction, including his many goofball romantic comedies in sciencefictional settings, typically starring hapless and clueless male leads opposite utterly charming female costars. So I thought I’d try my hand at one such story (albeit in a more fantastical mode), at the same time turning on its head the Talking Heads’ notion that “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.”
9. A Visit to the Optometrist
The Fespers — the neighbours from “The Ethical Treatment of Meat” — were not part of my original conception of that earlier story. They emerged during the writing and took on a life of their own. By the end of that story I loved them so much that I knew I would one day write another zombie story with them as the focus. I didn’t want to force it, so I filed that notion away in the back of my mind until the right story presented itself. A few years later, “A Visit to the Optometrist” just popped out of my subconscious with no warning.
10. Roman Predator’s Chimeric Odyssey
“Roman Predator’s Chimeric Odyssey” is an example of a story eventually emerging from a long-gestating opening scene. I blundered through more than a few false starts, but I kept junking everything except for that opening and then letting it sit for a few months before tackling it again. Eventually, something stuck, and this story took shape. The inspiration for “Roman Predator’s Chimeric Odyssey” came from several totally unrelated short stories by Robert Reed, but heavily filtered through my own preoccupations and sensibilities.
11. Destroyer of Worlds
Any reader of Jack Kirby’s comics will easily find echoes here from, especially, Fantastic Four and New Gods. And, of course, Jake Kurtz, as an aspect of Brahma the Creator, is explicitly intended to be a doppelganger of Kirby himself, one of the people whose oeuvre has had the most impact on me. I just about worship Kirby’s work — it was inevitable that I would dip into that well for inspiration. The first thing that came to me was the opening scene — the original version of which predates by more than a decade the period I started writing seriously. Talk about a long gestation period! And that had nothing to do with Kirby at first; rather, it was a response to (i.e., a creative misreading of) the framing sequence in Theodore Sturgeon’s “A Saucer of Loneliness.” Over the years, I became increasingly obsessed with that scene, rewriting it over and over again into various stories that failed to go anywhere. Finally one of my many attempts bore fruit, and “Destroyer of Worlds” poured out of me. At one point it was twice as long as it ended up being; it went through more revisions than anything else I’ve written. Other stuff got thrown into the final mix, most notably Roger Zelazny (especially his early mythology/SF hybrids) and the 1960s British TV series The Champions.
12. This Is The Ice Age
Julie Czerneda and Genevieve Kierans invited me to contribute to their anthology Mythspring: From the Lyrics & Legends of Canada. The idea was to take inspiration from a Canadian song or legend and forge an entirely new story. Instead of the expected folkloric sources, I opted for Canadian New Wave band Martha & the Muffins and their haunting and hypnotic sciencefictional song “This Is the Ice Age.” In fact, many songs, and even the cover art and design, from the album of the same name fed into the tapestry of the story. Since I was clearly crafting a disaster story, I decided to also pay homage to the greatest disaster novelist of the twentieth century, and my favourite writer, J.G. Ballard, as Ballard readers will easily notice. One of the coolest things that happened as a result of this story was that I got to meet Mark Gane and Martha Johnson, the musicians at the heart of Martha & the Muffins.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
“The Object of Worship” first appeared in Tesseracts Eleven (Edge Publishing 2007), edited by Cory Doctorow & Holly Phillips.
“The Ethical Treatment of Meat” first appeared in The Book of More Flesh (Eden Studios 2002), edited by James Lowder.
“Hochelaga and Sons” first appeared in Electric Velocipede #13 (Fall 2007).
“The Sea, at Bari” first appeared in On Spec #72 (Spring 2008).
“The Darkness at the Heart of the World” is previously unpublished.
“Spiderkid” first appeared in Reflection’s Edge #22 (February 2007).
“Njàbò” previously appeared in On Spec #54 (Fall 2003), Kenoma (December 2004), and Expanded Horizons #1 (October 2008).
“A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens” first appeared in Interzone #182 (November 2002).
“A Visit to the Optometrist” previously appeared in SDO Fantasy (October 2004) and in The Best of SDO (Perplexed Puffin Press 2005), edited by Mark Anthony Brennan & David Bowlin.
“Roman Predator’s Chimeric Odyssey” is previously unpublished.
�
�Destroyer of Worlds” first appeared in Electric Velocipede #15/16 (Winter 2008).
“This Is the Ice Age” previously appeared in Mythspring (Red Deer Press 2006), edited by Julie Czerneda & Genevieve Kierans, and in Year’s Best SF 12 (Eos 2007), edited by David Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
C L A U D E L A L U M I È R E
Claude Lalumière (lostpages.net) is the editor of eight anthologies, including Island Dreams: Montreal Writers of the Fantastic and the Aurora Award-nominated Tesseracts Twelve: New Novellas of Canadian Fantastic Fiction. He writes the Fantastic Fiction column for The Montreal Gazette. Claude is the co-creator, with artist Rupert Bottenberg, of Lost Myths (lostmyths.net).
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Table of Contents
Introduction by James Morrow
THE OBJECT OF WORSHIP
THE ETHICAL TREATMENT OF MEAT
HOCHELAGA AND SONS
THE SEA, AT BARI
THE DARKNESS AT THE HEART OF THE WORLD
SPIDERKID
NJABO
A PLACE WHERE NOTHING EVER HAPPENS
A VISIT TO THE OPTOMETRIST
ROMAN PREDATOR'S CHIMERIC ODYSSEY
DESTROYER OF WORLDS
THIS IS THE ICE AGE
Afterword: Behind the Scenes with Claude Lalumiere
Acknowledgements
About The Author
Objects of Worship Page 19