Fen turned back to the pond, saw all the little flames bobbing and weaving like a great ocean of fire spread before him.
They seemed to be nodding at him.
All that fire, and all I feel is cold.
“If the secret Abram’s people keep is divulged, I fear that they might be turned on, destroyed.”
“These secrets are too big, too big for me to carry, Katmin.”
“All secrets are big and all are hard to carry, and it’s unfair, love, to make you carry these. Nevertheless, you have a choice. One the Malacchi and Abram’s people will neither influence nor punish.”
He stared out over the mass of Malacchi souls, verdant as a pasture, quiet as a tomb. A hush had fallen over them, expectant, waiting.
Waiting for him.
Waiting for their fate, even in death.
These questions, these things she told him, asked of him, suddenly made so little difference beside the fact that she stood there, his dead wife here on this alien planet.
“I will keep these secrets, for you, Katmin, for Abram…for the Malacchi, too.”
She smiled at him, and a sense of relief filled the air, like a summer storm that has broken.
“Will I see you on Aquilla?” he said.
“The truth of this planet is that its energies allow the dead to come through much more easily. The same is not true for Aquilla, nor any other planet.”
“I will never see you again?”
“Never is a long time, love,” she said, her eyes sad. “But I will be with you, everywhere. Go home now. Go home and live again. Love again. And remember me. In that way, I will be there for you. Always.”
Fen wept now, sunk to his knees before her, his tears spilling to the ground, unchecked by his hands.
Katmin’s ghost faded, her soft blue light flickering, then gone.
Within the clearing, the glow of the Malacchi dead, their phantom city, also faded slowly, like a great weight lifting from the air. It evaporated until there was nothing left but the night sky of Visitation, cloudy and dour once again.
Abram helped him to his feet, back inside the house.
Outside, the skies gathered and the rain fell.
* * *
Onboard the Eidolon, Fen spent little time in his room. He felt changed, energized. He wanted to be around people again, wanted to talk, to learn.
Fenlan Daulk wanted to live again.
He was having lunch in the dining room on the fourteenth day outbound from Visitation, when someone familiar strolled in.
Sern Thyralt, the old bullet-faced man from Ankara.
He, too, saw Fen and turned, ready to leave.
“Sern!” Fen shouted. “Sern Thyralt!”
The man stiffened slightly, turned back to Fen. “From Aquilla, right?”
Fen stood, offered his hand. “Yes, Fen Daulk. So good to see you. Please, have a seat, join me for lunch.”
The man seemed much more subdued than when they had first met. He took a seat across from Fen, barked a lunch order at the servitor.
Fen smiled at the servitor, Eric, who smiled back. He was reminded strongly of Abram.
The dead have granted life to him and his people.
By keeping their secret, I grant life to the dead.
For a while, at least.
* * *
As their meals were served, Fen asked Sern about his experience on Visitation. The old man was quiet for a while, then told him in small sentences of short words that he was overwhelmed by it.
“I wonder if it was real, how it could be real. Talking to the dead,” Sern mused.
“Of course it was real,” Fen replied. “It’s obviously affected you deeply. Could something unreal do that?”
Sern considered this thoughtfully; more thoughtfully than Fen supposed the man was capable of just a few weeks before.
“But I mean, she’s dead. Dead. As in not alive. How could she come back?”
“Death. Life. What do we really know about either one?”
“But the ghost of my dead wife…our dead wives…on an alien planet they’ve never visited. I don’t know.”
“Seems strange, I know. But someone once told me that ghosts are memories, and so we carry our ghosts with us wherever we go,” Fen said. “Perhaps Visitation just allows our memories an opportunity to take form.”
Sern considered this carefully. Then, he looked at his empty glass.
“Josh or Elvin or whatever your name is,” he shouted at the servitor. “My glass is empty.”
The servitor came across the room hurriedly with another glass, this one filled with whatever Sern had been drinking.
“It’s Eric, sir. Sorry.”
Fen watched him set the glass down. Fen noticed that, as Sern raised it to his lips to drink, the glass was dirty. Specks dotted the outside and a clear imprint of lipstick showed on the rim.
Eric turned to face Fen, winked conspiratorially, went back to his station.
“As I said, death, life. Who knows? We know as little of one as we do of the other,” Fen laughed.
Sern regarded him over the lip of his glass. “Hmmph. Well, I suppose you’re right.”
“Of course I am. And, you might want to be nicer to the servitors,” Fen suggested. “Because you never know.”
Lots of people like to read the author’s notes about the stories they’ve just read. I get that, because I like to read the notes from my favorite authors. I like to write these kind of notes, too. I’d like to think they give the reader some insight into how the stories came about and where my mind was while I wrote them. That being said, there’s also, I guess, a whiff of self-indulgence on my part, because it sometimes seems these kind of notes allow me to wax eloquent about how I waxed eloquent. Oh well…enjoy or skip, I’ll never know.
“What Becomes God”
I am not a religious person, though I have a fairly well-developed interest in religions of all kinds. I was raised Catholic, in a pretty much entirely Catholic family in an extremely Catholic city. But due to various reasons too profound to be dealt with in the notes of a novella collection, I am no longer Catholic and no longer particularly religious. I am not an atheist or even an agnostic, though. I believe there’s some kind of prime mover, I just don’t know who or what. And I’m not really sure we’re meant to know. I’m comfortable with that.
Anyway, at some misguided point in my misguided life, I thought it a splendid idea to write a collection of Literary (yes, sigh, with all that capital “L” implies) short stories to stake my claim as a Great American Writer (again, with the caps). Whatever. This story was going to be the linchpin of the collection, and I’d gotten halfway through it easily. It was meant to be a meditation on religion and sacrifice and how the one has always seemed to demand the other of us. But it stalled, and I put it aside. When I came to my senses years later and realized that I don’t have to be (and indeed am most certainly not) The Great American Writer, I decided that what this story needed was a good, hot injection of darkness.
Much to my fiancée’s dismay (she loved the original story and the direction it was going and frankly loathes horror), I picked up the story again, radically changing its direction. With the new course I saw, it came easily, smoothly, and it assumed the form it wears today.
What makes this story work, for me, at least, is that it’s a distillation of most of my childhood. My parents weren’t divorced (still aren’t!), but I lived in Brian’s neighborhood, in his house. The great, dark woods bordered our subdivision, stretching for miles and miles. We spent nearly every waking minute under its darkened canopy. The pond with the frogs was there. The log with the skink actually existed. I did, I’m sorry to admit, accidentally kill it trying to catch it and bring it home. My friends and I did have a frog astronaut training program. I was an inveterate fan of comic books (Marvel!), and though I didn’t have a sick friend, I did have plenty of close ones.
As an adult, your group of friends diminishes somewhat, at least that’s bee
n my experience. Friends drift away for whatever reasons, and you’re eventually left with a core group of intensely close friends. I am a firm believer that friends are as an important part of my life as is my spouse, just in different ways. And as an adult, I think about what I’d do to help or even save one of my friends. What I’d sacrifice if I had to. Then, I projected this back onto my childhood self, and “What Becomes God” took definite shape.
As in the story, I believe that life is a continual struggle between holding on and letting go, and knowing when it’s best to do one or the other. Sometimes, though, as in this story, they’re the same thing.
“Object Permanence”
This is the oldest story in the collection, exceeding 20 years in age. It was originally two separate short stories, but almost immediately after writing them, I realized that they somehow were part of a whole. So I stitched them together and was satisfied with the longer piece.
And there it sat for two decades. At the time I wrote them, novellas were fairly unsaleable--they pretty much still are. Anything beyond 5,000 words put you in the No Man’s Land of too long for most print magazines (remember those?), and too many words for these small publications to be able to pay on.
When I hit upon the idea of doing a novella collection, spurred on by the indomitable Mr. R.J. Cavender, I hauled this one out, dusted it off, gave it a rewrite and was still pretty pleased with it. I like the idea that memory can be used in a negative way, to hold people in a kind of eternal thrall. I mean, come on, isn’t that what we do with our memories every day? We want people and places to remain forever as we remember them, don’t we? We want that sepia-toned nostalgic view of life to continue on and on and on. It’s that same kind of selfish desire that wants our kids to remain kids, the puppy or kitten to remain its small, cute self forever.
But what if things did remain the same forever? What if someone really could hold everything together, keep it the same for eternity? On the surface, that idea doesn’t sound so bad, but as the story unfolds, you hopefully see what a horrible idea this is.
“Object Permanence,” by the way, is the technical term for what babies experience with objects. Show a baby a thing, a stuffed bear or a rattle, and the object is real for the baby. Move the object out of the baby’s view, and, for the baby at least, the object isn’t just gone, it no longer exists. Object permanence comes about when the baby realizes that, even though the object is no longer in sight, it still exists. Cool, huh? That’s what got me thinking about the underpinnings of this story.
“Love in the Time of Zombies”
The idea for this story came to me in a dream. I’m not the biggest fan of zombie movies or zombie literature. And here’s why... I am the horror writer with the world’s weakest stomach, especially for blood. I am a true pussy when it comes to blood. I don’t like watching movies with a lot of it, and don’t even like reading books with a lot of it. Makes me queasy.
Want an example of how truly wimpy I am about it? When Interview with the Vampire came out in its abhorrent movie form, I was on a business trip. Had an afternoon off, so I decided to go see it and waste some time. Remember the scene, pretty early on, when Mr. Cruise turns Mr. Pitt into a vampire by biting his wrist? OK, remember the sound like crunching celery when Cruise bit, the small runnel of blood that snaked down Pitt’s arm? Yeah, I nearly fainted. It was all I could do to pull myself out of the theater seat and stagger out into the parking lot.
So believe me when I say that zombie tales don’t come naturally to me. But this one did. And the idea to base the story on the first few lines of Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera was what came in the dream. I hadn’t, at the time, read the book (I have since corrected that), but for this exercise I didn’t need to. I just needed the title and the first few lines to spin them off in my new direction.
Then I let my inner pussy go and unleashed the zombies to do what zombies do—decompose, trail various dripping body parts and consume human flesh. Along the way, I think (hope) that I also managed to tell a poignant, funny horror story.
And here, let’s digress and talk about me and horror. Almost all of what I write is categorized within the broad realm of “horror,” and I’m generally fine with that. I know that horror, as a defined genre, has struggled over the years to retain both its dignity and its identity. A lot of authors these days see horror as the ghetto of genres and strive to have their works defined as anything but. Thus, we have “dark fiction” and “dark fantasy” and “dark speculative fiction” and whatnot.
Now, I don’t shy away from horror, but I know that much of what I write is not truly horror. It’s just kind of…weird; dark, but weird. Having some of my work labelled as “horror” has come back to bite me. My stories get a lot of comparisons to The Twilight Zone, but they also strike some readers as not horrific enough. They see the “horror” label attached, and they have expectations about what that means. And they don’t get it from my stories.
My reaction to this is…meh. Who cares? Obviously, then, I’m not writing for these people. S’okay. As I say a lot, not everyone likes everything I write, even my wonderful Deb. But for those who don’t think I write horror—or at least their type of horror—all I can say is that the type of horror they like doesn’t interest me. I think endless, pointless bloodletting or scares without a point are boring. I don’t have any desire to tell those kinds of stories. To me, horror works best when bonded with another emotion—love, loss, lust. Add a little poignancy to the mix, and the horror is accentuated, just as salt somehow makes sweet food taste even sweeter.
So, am I a horror writer or what? Sigh. I believe I am. I believe that any genre has within it the capacity for a whole spectrum of flavors. Horror has space within it for monster tales, psychological horror, ghost stories, splatter fiction, and my dark weirdness. But I guess the label that fits my writing most is dark speculative fiction. Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, however, does it? Think I’ll just stay a horror writer.
And back full circle. Of all the stories in this collection, I guess I’d say this one is more horror than the rest. What do I have to back this up? My mom, who reads most of my stuff, read this one. Now, let me tell you that my mother enjoys horror movies from way back. But she read this story and threw up. Yes, I wrote a story that made my mother throw up. If that’s not horror, I don’t know what is.
“The Long, Long Breakdown”
Water figures in a lot of my writing. I find water—oceans, seas, etc.—to be scary. The vastness of them, the incomprehensible depths, the darkness, the mysteries they cover. There’s also, to me, an inherent loneliness to the oceans, a sort of profound isolation. And then there’s all the meanings and metaphors associated with water.
Years ago, I asked my closest friends to tell me what their fears were. The intent was to write a story for each of them encompassing these fears, or as close as I could get to them. Only three actually got back to me, and I ended up writing “The Depravity of Inanimate Things,” available in Horror for Good, for one. I wrote “Darkness Upon the Void,” available in my collection Little Deaths, for another. My close friend Chris came back to me with his fear of being swept away from his daughter in a tidal wave or a flood. Living in the eroding peninsula that is Florida, this isn’t a baseless concern, and I was able to construct this story from Chris’ fear.
Being a father, I also wanted to meditate on what it means to have children…and then let them go. Oh yeah, there’s plenty of fear in that. As the story says, not just to give the world to our children, but eventually, as we all must do, to give our children to the world.
But there’s hope in this story. Does that make it any less horrifying? I dunno.
“Visitation”
My original intent for this collection was just the preceding four pieces. “Visitation” was a story that I’d originally shared with Tony Rivera at Grey Matter Press, but in discussions with R.J., we decided it didn’t rea
lly fit with the other stories.
Tony, though, smarter than both of us, decided that he not only liked “Visitation,” but that it definitely fit into the admittedly loose narrative structure of this collection. His take, and I still think it’s an immensely smart one, is that each story herein represents a sort of “age-of-man” motif, starting with childhood in “What Becomes God” and leading up to adulthood in “The Long, Long Breakdown.”
In Tony’s breakdown, “Visitation” became the final piece of that structure, something dealing with loss and desire; something that also not only brought the collection to its logical conclusion, but also carried it out on an ethereal, sci-fi note. I hadn’t thought of that, but I saw it clearly when Tony pointed it out and still think it was a fantastic insight.
I love science fiction, though I write very little of it. And I love a good ghost story. I thought combining the two might work, but wanted to retain the essence of each. I didn’t want the technology to overwhelm the paranormal aspects, nor the paranormal to undercut the technology. Rather, I wanted them both to exist comfortably in one world, each acknowledging the other. It’s a razor’s edge kind of thing, but I’m satisfied with what I accomplished here.
And so, that’s it. You’ve read the instruction manual. Congratulations. Hopefully you got a small peek behind the curtain at the person typing at the keyboard. Hope you enjoyed the stories. I’ve got a lot more of them, so look around and read some more. I think, after this, you might find a novel of mine somewhere, a new one, at least partially a horror novel. At least I think so.
John F.D. Taff
April 2014
Here’s where I get to say thanks to everyone who helped me put this together.
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