When Darkness Loves Us

by Elizabeth Engstrom

  WHEN DARKNESS LOVES US

  ELIZABETH ENGSTROM

  With a new introduction by

  GRADY HENDRIX

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  Dedication: To Michael and Bill. And Evan.

  When Darkness Loves Us by Elizabeth Engstrom

  Originally published in hardcover by William Morrow in 1985

  Reprinted as a Tor paperback in 1986

  First Valancourt Books edition 2019

  Copyright © 1985 by Elizabeth Engstrom

  Cover painting copyright © 1986 by Jill Bauman

  Introduction copyright © 2019 by Grady Hendrix

  “Paperbacks from Hell” logo designed by Timothy O’Donnell. © 2017 Quirk Books. Used under license. All rights reserved.

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

  Cover text design by M. S. Corley

  INTRODUCTION

  A twelve year old girl in a one-piece swimsuit lies on her bed in a suburban bedroom. She’s reading Robert Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, and Tanar of Pellucidar by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Tarzan and the Ant Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and everything by Shirley Jackson, and Edgar Allan Poe, and Octavia Butler, and Ray Bradbury, and Alfred Hitchcock’s horror anthologies, and romance novels, and all of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, and anything she can get her hands on, she’s shoving them all into her eyes, one after the other, all summer long.

  “The only time I put on clothes,” Elizabeth Engstrom says, “was to ride my bike to the library to get more books.”

  After that summer, “My head was bulging with fiction, and my soul and my heart were aching to spit out my own fiction, but I was too young. I didn’t have anything to say.”

  Splitting her time between her divorced parents’ homes in Chicago and Utah, the minute she turned 18, Engstrom, then named Betsy Lynn Gutzmer, ditched the mainland and moved to Honolulu, “searching for better weather.” After eight years on Oahu, she moved to Maui, working for a radio station, and then for the only advertising agency on the island until she and the art director decided they could do it better on their own. The two of them teamed up and founded Baney, Gutzmer Inc. where they had their own clients and eventually did well enough to open a branch on the Big Island. Gutzmer wrote advertising copy, and pitched jobs, and she drank.

  “I hung with the underbelly of society,” she says. “And the worse they were, the better I felt about myself. I had friends in really low places, and they were the people I was comfortable with. No real identity, living in the shadows, only coming out at night.”

  For ten years, Gutzmer was a drunk. And then in 1980, she stopped. Full of pent-up, raw emotions that had no outlet, she found a writers’ group consisting of four other women. They based their process on Peter Elbow’s “teacherless writing class” in which everyone reads each other’s work and then tries to give the writer some sense of how their story was experienced by each reader. For five years, these five women met every single week, during which time Gutzmer published a few short stories here and there—in Crispin Burnham’s Eldritch Tales zine, in one of Maui’s community college’s literary journals. But until she went to Disneyland, nothing clicked.

  By now, Gutzmer was sober, married and had adopted her husband’s two children, and when the family went on vacation to Disneyland she rode the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea attraction and had a full-blown panic attack.

  “You can see from the top that nobody’s even submerged,” she says. “It just goes around a track in the pool. But I was inside and suddenly there wasn’t enough air for me and everyone else, and I wanted to claw my way out.”

  The idea hit her almost fully formed: what if she was trapped underground and pregnant? The novella poured out of her and she submitted “When Darkness Loves Us” to Theodore Sturgeon’s writing workshop. You can read his reaction in the other foreword to this edition, but he did more than admit her to the workshop, he found her an agent. Sandra Dijkstra signed Betsy Lynn Gutzmer, now writing under the name Elizabeth Engstrom (her married name combined with her daughter’s middle name, Elizabeth), and Dijkstra told her that if they had another novella they could submit the two together as a book.

  Engstrom had already written “Beauty Is . . .” which was based on a real-life incident. On Maui, a developmentally disabled woman had gotten a job at Kentucky Fried Chicken, a relatively progressive employer at the time. A group of guys started harassing her on her daily walk to work and she didn’t know how to make them stop. They started inviting her to a bar. And getting her drunk. And taking advantage of her.

  “I was horrified,” Engstrom remembers. “I thought, did I want to live in a world where things like that happened?”

  Together, the two novellas were sold at auction to William Morrow. They wanted a third story to round out the volume, but Engstrom didn’t have anything she liked enough. Didn’t matter. There were hardcover sales, book club sales, European rights sales, and a sale to Tor for the paperback edition (with a now-classic cover by artist Jill Bauman). “Beauty Is . . .” would go on to be optioned twice for film.

  But on Hawaii, Engstrom felt like an outcast. Racially she was haole, a non-Hawaiian, and on top of that she was from the Mainland, and to her the chasm that separated her from other Hawaiians seemed unbridgeable. So in 1986, she moved to Eugene, Oregon and two years later she delivered Black Ambrosia, her first novel, and her agent dropped her.

  Told from the point of view of Angelina, a teenaged girl who decides she’s a vampire, Black Ambrosia is set in a rundown America where everyone’s clinging to the last rung on the economic ladder. Angelina walks the cold shoulders of filthy highways looking for warm blood in fleabag motels and soulless suburbs. She’s a classical vampire who hates crucifixes, turns into fog, sleeps in a coffin, and controls men’s minds. But she might also just be a teenaged girl who’s losing her mind.

  “Sometimes teenaged girls can talk themselves into doing things and being things by the sheer force of their personalities,” Engstrom says. “What if a girl talked herself into becoming a vampire? She discovers she has power over men and she wants to become this thing, and so she does.”

  After all, Angelina discovers (or, rather, decides) she’s a vampire after a harrowing attempted rape, and every chapter is anchored by a closing, italicized portion of the text told from a different character’s point of view, retelling the events of the previous chapter with all reference to the supernatural removed, offering up a mundane counter-narrative where Angelina is just a psychopathic serial killer.

  Dijkstra told Engstrom that if this was her idea of fiction, she wasn’t the agent for her. But Tor editor Melissa Ann Singer had loved When Darkness Loves Us and she bought Black Ambrosia (and commissioned a cover by Bob Eggleton). Tor would remain Engstrom’s publisher for her 1991 Lizzie Borden novel and her 1992 collection of tiny, almost fable-sized short stories, Nightmare Flower.

  Engstrom is still writing, but with When Darkness Loves Us and Black Ambrosia she delivered three of the best monster stories ever written. Weirdly enough, they were written around the same time that Clive Barker was busy writing his Books of Blood which are largely based on the notion that monsters didn’t have to be scary, but could also be figures of pity, romance, or awe. Monsters had their own point-of-view, one which Engstrom embraced hard, making her creatures simult
aneously predatory and pathetic.

  Barely out of their teens, Sally Ann Hixson in “When Darkness Loves Us” and Angelina in Black Ambrosia exist in the margins, one of them trapped in a series of underground tunnels, the other trapped outside humanity by her blood lust. Circumstances push them far beyond their capabilities, and their humanity, and they find themselves doing things they never could have imagined to survive. But these harrowing ordeals don’t break them, they imbue them with a monstrous strength. Finding their power in the margins, being outsiders suits them.

  “Somebody told me writers only have one story to tell,” Engstrom says. “And that’s our story. And we dress it up in different clothes and different times and places, but it’s still our story.”

  When she moved to Hawaii, Engstrom had become an outsider, and also a monster.

  “You think you’re cool when you can drink more than anyone else,” she says. “And you start to become the monster a little bit. You start to do terrible things to people and you justify that in your mind saying, ‘I was drunk at the time.’ You become the monster, then you justify the monster, then you glorify the monster.”

  Both Black Ambrosia and “When Darkness Loves Us” reflect the monster as a creature of both incredible strength and grotesque weakness, but “Beauty Is . . .” goes further. Its main character, Martha, is developmentally disabled and was born without a nose. Her stunted mental capacity and her facial deformity brand her as a monster, but then some local gutterpunks start getting her drunk and it feels like the story is about to crow, “Who’s the real monster now?”

  But Engstrom isn’t interested in a simple switcheroo. Instead, Martha is saved from humiliation and finds friends, and a lover, and the more she’s loved, the more her mind begins to heal itself, until she’s reading, and handling her own finances. As she’s welcomed into the community, she sheds her monstrosity and becomes just another citizen. When she’s treated with love and compassion, Martha is a person, when she’s treated with hatred and contempt, she’s a monster. And, like all monsters, she’s a mirror.

  Engstrom’s first three stories are full of monsters, not just Angelina, but the man who hunts her until murdering Angelina becomes a cancer that consumes his life. Not just Sally Ann Hixson but her husband who patronizes her, and her son who takes advantage of her inability to say “no” to him. Not just Martha, but her father who rejects her cruelly, and the people who exploit her. If a monster is merely something that goes further than we dared dream possible—stronger, crueler, uglier, more obsessed—then Engstrom’s stories crawl with them. Because in this world there is always a monster. And often, the monster is you.

  Grady Hendrix

  February 2019

  Grady Hendrix is a novelist and screenwriter whose books include Horrorstör, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, and We Sold Our Souls. His history of the paperback horror boom of the Seventies and Eighties, Paperbacks from Hell, won the Stoker Award. You can stalk him at www.gradyhendrix.com.

  FOREWORD

  I wish you could have been there. Yes, I mean you. Let me tell you where, and why.

  My wife, whom you’ll call Lady Jayne as soon as you see her—as I did—my wife and I had come to an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean to teach writing. We entered a huge room in a house that overlooks macadamia and cane fields, and is surrounded by papaya and banana trees and a symphonic riot of flowers; and there we met our class.

  And Betsy.

  Pretty exotic. Oh sure—Maui with its puffs of rain cloud and the dark flanks of its sleeping volcanoes wearing their rumpled capes of pool-table felt, its long-tailed firebirds and impudent mynas, its kaleidoscopic ethnics and accents, and its unfailing—what—smilingness: It’s exotic all right.

  Except Betsy.

  Elizabeth Engstrom is not exotic. She is a married woman with a nice husband and two great kids and a tidy home and a quiet voice with which she would no more shout than she would ride a motorcycle into one’s living room. She spoke seldom during the course we taught; when she did, it was to the point and rather noticeably her own opinion and none other, prevailing or not. Her greatest eloquence, which we both noticed from that first entrance, was a pair of eyes two clicks brighter than the brightest you have ever seen. These transmitted something quite beyond words—an intensity to learn and to understand and to do. This woman meant to get into print. Revise that. I shouldn’t have said “intensity”; I should have said “ferocity.”

  This class was extraordinary. None had seen print: At this writing six of them are writing and selling, and much as we’d like to take credit, we must assert that all we had to do was scratch lightly and the talent exploded all over the place.

  We workshopped manuscripts. (Workshop has become a verb.) Betsy’s twenty-odd-thousand-word story had to be put off while we went through the maze of story architecture, mood, crisis/climax/denouement, the “sound” of punctuation and all that machine-shop stuff, until the last meeting, when we had Betsy read her story aloud.

  It was When Darkness Loves Us.

  It was for this moment that I wish you had been there. . . . There is a thing that happens in theater when one or another of the cast is having “his” or “her” night—a very special spell that overtakes a performer; you can tell when it’s happening by two things. One, you become aware that everyone else in the cast is playing to and for the magicked one. And two, when the final curtain falls, instead of the appreciative crash of applause, there is an instant of hush before anyone moves. It’s the possibility of that hush that keeps actors—actors.

  Well, that’s what happened at that reading.

  Later, on the mainland, we got a look at Beauty Is . . . Our immediate reaction was to get it launched. The two stories together made a generous-enough bookful but they were not connected in any way. Betsy said I was crazy but I said, “Do it.” Her able agent said I was crazy but I said, “Do it.” Her publisher probably thought the same . . . but the publisher did it.

  And now I envy you, and anyone else who has not, but who is about to, meet Elizabeth Engstrom. Behind that soft-voiced style is power, is surprise, is—well, that ferocity I mentioned. You are now introduced.

  Theodore Sturgeon

  Oregon, 1984

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A writer needs sustenance in many ways during differing phases of a work. Of these, I believe, dialogue is the most nourishing. I have been fortunate.

  Lifeblood was contributed by Clarice Cox, Ted and Jayne Sturgeon, Maggie Doran, Madge Walls, Marie Johnson, Tonia Baney, and Shelley Nalepa, to name only a few.

  Thanks to John Briley for accuracy, Sandra Dijkstra for direction, and to Ted Sturgeon for the right hug at the right time.

  And a note of specific gratitude to my folks, for teaching me that molds are for plastic.

  WHEN DARKNESS LOVES US

  PART ONE

  1

  Sally Ann Hixson, full with the blush of spring and gleeful playfulness as only sixteen-year-olds know it, hid around the side of the huge tree at the edge of the woods as the great tractor drove past her. She saw her husband, torso bare, riding the roaring monster, his smooth muscles gliding under sweat-slick skin tanned a deep brown. She didn’t want him to see her . . . not yet.

  She plopped down into the long grass, feeling the rough bark of the big tree against her back as she gazed into the woods. This had been her favorite place to play when she was little. She could just barely see her parents’ house on the hill about a mile off. Her mother had noticed her restlessness as soon as the major canning was done and sent her away to run, to play, to spy on her new husband as he worked with her father in the fields.

  This summer, they would build their house on the other hill, and they could raise their family to be good country folk, just like their fathers and their fathers before them. She stretched her legs into a sunbeam, feeling them warm under her new jeans. She had a wild impulse to cast off her clothes and run naked through the grass. She thought of Michael then, and the
ir delicious lovemaking the night before. She was not able to give of herself very freely while in her parents’ house, but some nights Michael took her by the hand and led her out to the hill where their house would soon be built, high up on the knoll, and with the moon watching and the cicadas playing the romantic background music, they would make love, uninhibited, wonderful love. They explored each other’s bodies and released sensations unfamiliar to either of them, with joy and togetherness in discovering the full potentials of their sexuality.

  The idea made her tingle, then blush, and she crossed her legs, thinking of the times her thoughts strayed to such matters when she was with her mother. It was worse then, because she was sure lovemaking was not like that for her parents, and sometimes she had to excuse herself and go into the bathroom until she could stop grinning.

  She picked up a long strand of grass and put it between her teeth as she peeked around the tree and watched her man, handsome and tousled, drive the machine over the next hill. She glanced around one more time to make sure her pest of a little sister wasn’t lurking somewhere in the shadows. She jumped up and followed the edge of the woods until she could see the flatbed truck where her father waited. Michael would stop there and have a glass of iced water that she had put in a thermos jug for him that morning. She saw him turn to look behind him, so she dodged back into the woods . . . and saw the stone steps that led down into the ground.

  It was so familiar. She used to play here when she was small, but she hadn’t come here in years. There were two brand-new doors with shiny hinges mounted to the concrete, and she knew that it was going to be sealed against children and mishaps forever. What used to be the attraction here so long ago? She remembered the darkness and a tunnel, and she stepped down to the first step, then the second one, looking into a black hole that had no end.