Other Aliens

by Bradford Morrow

  He waited for her to break for either the right or the left side of the metal table so that he could at last close the distance between them and finish the gesture he had begun at Lou’s Rendezvous, but she did not move. She kept on leaning forward and pushing back.

  “You remind me of something I can’t really remember. That FUBAR enough for you? Doozy of a story. About someone who won’t stay dead but doesn’t live.” He lifted his arms, palms up, and all but uttered an involuntary sigh. “People keep telling me this shit, like they want me to remember! My brother, that stupid Henry James story … It’s no good. It doesn’t actually mean anything … but shouldn’t it mean everything? A person who won’t stay dead? Plus … someone else, a boy? An old boy?”

  He shook his head as though to clear it. “Say something. Say anything. I love what happens when you talk.”

  “Oh?” Not enough to be measured: something about peanuts in a roaster … peanuts rolling in an oiled pan …

  “You know how words have these smells? Like ‘paycheck’ always smells like a dirty men’s room? You know what I’m talking about, yeah?”

  “You smell what I’m saying?” Without relaxing her attention, Lori leaned forward and narrowed her eyes. “How would you describe the smell of what I’m saying now?”

  “Like butter, salt, and caramel sauce. Honest to God. You’re amazing.”

  Lori exhaled and straightened her arms, pushing herself back. “You’re a crazy piece of shit.”

  The Ladykiller kept looking at her steadily, almost not blinking, waiting for her to move to the right or the left. He told himself: this resurrection stuff is all bullshit to lull her into breaking away from the autopsy table.

  Unless …

  Something dark, something unstable flickered in his mind and memory and vanished back into the purely dark and fathomless realm where so much of the Ladykiller was rooted. Once again he shook his head, this time to rid himself of the terror and misery that had so briefly shone forth, and after that briefest possible moment of disconnection saw that Lori had not after all been waiting to bolt from the table. Instead, she had jerked open the drawer and snatched out a knife with a curved blade and a fat leather handle wrapped in layers of sweat- and dirt-stained tape. He loved that knife. Looking at it, you would be so distracted by its ugliness that you’d never notice how sharp it was. You wouldn’t fear what it could do until it was already too late.

  “Oh, that old thing,” he said. “What are you going to do, open a beer can?”

  “I’ll open you right up, unless you toss me those keys.” (The worse it got, the better it smelled: a bank of tiger lilies, the open window of a country kitchen.)

  He pulled himself back into focus. “Jeez, you could have picked up one of the scalpels. Then I might be scared.”

  “You want me to swap it for a scalpel? It must be really lethal.”

  “You’ll never find out,” he said, and began slowly to move toward her again, holding out his hands as if in supplication.

  “No matter what happens, I’m glad I’m not you.” (Dishwashing liquid in a soapy sink, a wealth of lemon-scented bubbles: in his humble opinion, one of the world’s greatest odors.)

  Lori Terry moved back a single step and assumed a firmer grip on the ugly handle. She was holding it the right way, he noticed, sharp side up.

  “You’re a funny little thing.” He straightened up, laughed, and wagged an index finger at her. “You have to admit, that is pretty droll.”

  “You have the emptiest, ugliest life I can imagine. You look like you’d be so much fun, but really you’re as boring as a cockroach—the rest of your life is a disguise for what you do in this miserable room. Everything else is just a performance. Can’t you see how disgusting that is?” This whole statement emerged clothed in a slowly turning haze of perfumed girl neck gradually melting to a smellscape of haystacks drying in a sunstruck field. This was terrible, somehow shaming.

  “I thought I heard you trying to talk me into a blow job.”

  “That’s when I was scared. I’m not afraid of you anymore.” (Spinach, creamed, in a steakhouse.)

  “Oh, come on.” He moved across the room on a slanting line, trying to back her into a corner. “I know you’re scared.”

  “I was afraid when I thought I had a chance to get out of this cockroach parlor. But I really don’t, do I? I’m going to die here. At best, I’ll cut you up a little bit. Then you’ll kill me, and it’ll all be over. You, however, will have to go on being a miserable, fucked-up creep with a horrible, depressing life.” (Who knew what that was—horses? A rich man’s stables?)

  “At least I’ll have a life,” he said, and felt that he had yielded some obscure concession, or told her absolutely the wrong thing.

  “Sure. A terrible one, and you’ll still be incredibly creepy.” (Astonishingly, this came out in a sunny ripple of clean laundry drying on a line.)

  “I believe you might be starting to piss me off.”

  “Wouldn’t that be a fucking shame.” An idea of some kind moved into her eyes. “You thought I might change your life? I think you were right, I think I will change your life. Only right now you have no idea how that’ll happen. But it’ll be a surprise, that I can tell you.

  Amazed, he said, “You think you’re better than me?” (And you just said four or five sentences that smelled like cloves and vetiver.)

  “You’re a disgusting person, and I’m a good one.”

  She feinted and jabbed with the curved blade. It was enough to push him backward.

  “I see you’re afraid of this knife.”

  He licked his lips, wishing he were holding a baseball bat, or maybe a truncheon, a thing you could swing, hard, to knock in the side of someone’s head. Then, before he could think about what he was going to do, he ducked left and immediately swerved to his right. Having succeeded in faking her off-balance, the Ladykiller rushed forward, furious and exulting, eager to finish off this mouthy bitch.

  Before he could get a proper grip on her, Lori surprised him by jumping left and slashing at him. The blade, which had been fabricated by a long-dead craftsman in Arkansas and honed and honed again a thousand times on wet Arkansas stone, opened the sleeve of his nice tweed jacket and continued on to slice through the midriff of his blue broadcloth shirt. In the second and a half it took him to let go of her shoulder and anchor his hand on her wrist, blood soaked through the fine fabric of the shirt and began to ooze downward along a straight horizontal axis. As soon as he noticed that the growing bloodstain had immediately begun to spread and widen, he heard blood splashing steadily onto the floor, looked for the source, and witnessed a fat red stream gliding through the slashed fabric on his sleeve.

  “Damn you.” He jerked her forward and threw her to the ground. “What am I supposed to do now? Hell!”

  She looked up at him from the floor. Crimson stains and spatters blossomed on her opened skirt and splayed legs. “The sight of your own blood throws you into a panic,” she said. “Figures, I guess.” (Tomato soup, no surprise, with garlic. Was she actually controlling the smells she sent out?)

  “You hurt me!” He kicked her in the hip.

  “OK, you hurt me back. Now we’re even,” she said. “If you give me the keys, I’ll bandage you up. You could bleed to death, you know. I think you ought to be aware of—”

  Both her words and the renewed smell of laundry drying in sunshine on a backyard clothesline caused rage to flare through all the empty spaces in his head and body. He bent over, ripped the knife from her loose hand, and with a single sweep of his arm cut so deeply through her throat that he all but decapitated her. A jet of blood shot from the long wound, soaking his chest before he could dodge out of the way. Lori Terry jittered a moment and was dead.

  “Bitch, bitch, damn bitch,” he said, “fuck this shit—I’m bleeding to death here!”

  He trotted across the room to a pair of sinks, stripping off his jacket as he went and leaving bloody footprints in his wake. Though
his wounds bled freely, and when first exposed seemed life-threatening, a matter that made him feel queasy and light-headed, soon he was winding bands of tape around a fat pad of gauze on his arm. The long cut on his stomach proved less dangerous but harder to stanch. While simultaneously stretching toward his spine with one hand and groping with the other, he found himself wishing that Lori had not been such a colossal bitch as to make him kill her before she could help him wrap the long bandage around the middle of his body. Of course, had she not been such an unfeeling bitch, she would have obliged him by curling up in whimpering terror even before he explained in free-spending detail precisely what he was going to do to her. The tramp had escaped the punishment she had craved, down there at the dark center of her heart. She got to fulfill her goal, but she had cheated herself of most of the journey toward it! And cheated him of being her guide!

  While he was mopping the floor with a mixture of bleach and soapy water, the Ladykiller remembered his admiration of Lori Terry—the respect she had evoked in him by being uncowed. Instead of bursting into tears and falling down she had offered him a blow job! He had approved the tilt of her chin, the steadiness of her voice. Also, the resolute, undaunted look in her eyes. And the odors, the odors, the odors, in their unfathomable unhurried march. In farewell to her spirit, he dropped to his knees at the edge of her pooled blood, pursed his lips, and forcefully expelled air, but although he managed to create a row of sturdy little ripples, for only the second or at a stretch maybe third time in his life as the Ladykiller he failed to raise up even a single bubble. He nearly moaned in frustration, but held back: she had refused to speak in Cockney, she had held to her dignity.

  For the first time in his long career, the Ladykiller came close to regretting an obligatory murder, but this approach to remorse withered and died before the memory of her ugly dismissal of his life. Why, he wondered, should a sustained, lifelong performance be disgusting? Couldn’t the cow see how interesting, how clever, his whole splendid balancing act had been? After this consoling reflection, his pain, which had been quietly pulsing away, throbbed within his lower abdomen and left forearm. This was a sharp reminder of her treachery. When the floor shone like the surface of a pond, he rinsed and stowed the mop, reverently washed the curved knife in a sink, and approached the long, cold table where Lori Terry’s naked body, already cleansed and readied, awaited the final rites.

  Two hours later, with everything—tables, walls, floor, switches, the dismembered body—rescrubbed and doused yet again in bleach, he stacked Lori’s remains in a cardboard steamer trunk: feet and calves; thighs; pelvis; female organs from which his traces had been washed; liver, heart, lungs, stomach, and spleen in one bag, the long silver ropes of her intestines in another; hands and forearms; upper arms; rib cage; spine; shoulders; and as in life the open-eyed head atop all in a swirl of bleached hair. At the end, she had smelled of nothing but washed corpse. He locked the trunk, lugged it up the stairs, dragged it to his car, and with considerable effort wedged it into the car’s trunk.

  On his journey back into the city, he found that the care he had given her body, the thorough cleansing, the equally thorough separation of part from part, its arrangement within its conveyance, brought back to him now the respect he had learned to feel for her once the final key had turned in his serial locks. For respect it had been, greater and more valuable than admiration. Lori Terry had displayed none of the terror she, no less than his other victims, felt when she saw the pickle she was in: instead she had fought him from the beginning, with, he saw now, offers of sex that had actually promised something else altogether. She had wanted him exposed and vulnerable, she had wanted him open to pain, in grave pain—she had intended to put him in agony. It was true, he had to admire the bitch.

  A momentary vision of the dismembered body arrayed like an unfolding blossom in the cardboard trunk popped like a flashbulb in his mind. He heard words begin to flow through his throat before he realized that he was talking out loud—talking to Lori Terry.

  As he spoke, he had been removing the girl’s remains from the cardboard trunk and placing them this way and that on the cobblestones of backstreet downtown Milwaukee. It took a while to get them right. By the time he was satisfied, gray, early light had begun to wash across the cobbles and the garbage cans behind the clubs. Lori Terry’s porcelain face gazed up at him like a bust in a museum. Then he was gone, yessir, the Ladykiller was right straight outta there, clean as a you-know-what and on to pastures new.

  An Interview with Kelly Link

  Conducted by Elizabeth Hand

  It is rare that one sees a literary supernova explode upon the scene. Yet with the 1995 publication of Kelly Link’s first story, “Water off a Black Dog’s Back,” anyone who happened to be scanning the artistic horizon at the time witnessed just that: the debut of an astonishing writer who from her opening sentence—“Tell me which you could sooner do without, love or water”—compelled a reader’s attention, immersing her in the “vivid and continuous dream” that John Gardner believed was the achievement of great fiction.

  Connoisseurs of Fantastika might have been early adopters of Link’s work, which first appeared in small magazines such as Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (founded and edited by Link and her husband, Gavin Grant) and the short-lived 1990s reboot of Century Magazine, but her 2001 collection, Stranger Things Happen, exposed her work to a wider audience, winning the trifecta for fantastic literature (the Nebula, Tiptree, and World Fantasy Awards) even as it was chosen as one of the year’s best books in mainstream venues Salon and the Village Voice. Her later collections, Magic for Beginners and Pretty Monsters, received equally rapturous reviews, and her most recent collection, Get in Trouble, was one of two finalists for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize.

  At once oneiric and constructed from the brick-and-mortar details of ordinary life, Link’s fiction renders the mundane transcendent and often terrifying: the dissolution of a marriage and family in “Stone Animals”; the revenant as babysitter in the deeply disturbing, ambiguous “The Specialist’s Hat”; microparenting elevated to an absurd (and unnervingly plausible) degree in “Valley of the Girls.” Her stories often read like urban legends spun by a contemporary Scheherazade. Tales within tales, told forward or backward or sideways, they can feel like portents of what might actually happen to the reader once she finishes the story.

  We often speak of being changed by our experience with a book—one is kinder to orphaned children or learns never to venture alone into the woods after dark. The sublime unease that radiates from Kelly Link’s short fiction derives from the fact that the reader knows she’s been changed—but she doesn’t understand how. It’s literature as virus, mutating inside that part of the brain that processes language and memory. One never reads a Kelly Link story the same way twice, and one is never the same afterward. You’ve been warned.

  ELIZABETH HAND: A hallmark of your work is an exquisite, often terrifying, transfixing strangeness. Have you ever had a real-life encounter that resembles something out of one of your stories? Do you know anyone who has?

  KELLY LINK: I’ve always suspected that my antennae for recognizing strangeness and the uncanny in real life is poor, much like my ability to tell when someone I’m interacting with is drunk. So if I’ve had that sort of encounter, I didn’t know it (like the husband and wife in Edith Wharton’s ghost story “Afterward” but without the consequence). Wouldn’t that be the strangest ghost story of all? That there was a ghost but you never discovered that a ghost is what it was? The strangest things in my life have been only a little strange: meeting, falling in love with, and marrying a man who, as it turned out, had lived for a year in the same small Scottish town as me and attended the same university. We each wrote something for the same ghost-story competition. But never met during that year. I do love other people’s true stories about the inexplicable. I save them up and tell them when the situation is appropriate, and then other people will share their own stories, which means I have an
even bigger repository to trade and pass on. Surely you have a ghost story or the equivalent, Liz?

  HAND: I did experience something inexplicable when I was fourteen, with my two best friends in eighth grade. To this day I’m not sure what happened—I wrote about it in “Near Zennor.” So, what about aliens? Do you think they exist, and there’s any chance we might make first contact in your lifetime?

  LINK: This seems to suggest that it’s all up to me. If I say yes, then any terrible results are my fault, and if I say no, I exclude so many possibilities. Right now, my daughter, when you ask her to make a choice between any two things, will yell, “Both!” Anyway, luckily it isn’t up to me.

  HAND: Ha! She has the makings of an artist, being able to see both sides. Or a politician. What was your first encounter with an alien, real or imaginary?

  LINK: The ones that I remember most vividly are all movies or television. E.T., and the crew of the Nostromo encountering the eggs in the ruin of the spaceship, and before that, of course, Star Trek. I watched Star Trek with my dad. I was deeply in love with Spock for most of my childhood. Also I wanted to be him.

  I watched Alien for the first time the same summer that Lady Diana married Prince Charles. My sister and I had been at camp and my mother recorded both the wedding and Alien for us. It seemed as if we were supposed to watch the royal wedding, and so we did. Alien, on the other hand, was something that my mother made clear we weren’t supposed to watch, but it was such an extraordinarily good movie that we had special permission. She said that we might want to look away from the scene in which John Hurt begins to cough, because it was disturbing. And so, for years, I would cover my eyes whenever the alien burst out of his chest. In fact I didn’t watch that scene until I was maybe forty.

  Except for Alien, most aliens always felt a little disappointing. And even the alien in Alien I liked because the bones of the story were the bones of a ghost story. The malignant presence in a haunted house. Years ago, Slate.com had a contest to come up with titles in the same style as Snakes on a Plane. The best was “The Creature Lurks in the Structure.” Which describes most succinctly my favorite genre. Perhaps all of art. But aliens: the mashed potatoes were more interesting to me in Close Encounters than the aliens. If not the first, then near the first aliens I came across in books were the Martians in The War of the Worlds, or possibly in some of the short stories in Helen Hoke’s anthologies, or the Alfred Hitchcock anthologies that Robert Arthur edited.