SEVEN DEADLY PLEASURES
HIPPOCAMPUS PRESS LIBRARY OF FICTION
W. H. Pugmire, The Fungal Stain and Other Dreams (2006)
Jonathan Thomas, Midnight Call and Other Stories (2008)
Ramsey Campbell, Inconsequential Tales (2008)
Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., Blood Will Have Its Season (2009)
Michael Aronovitz, Seven Deadly Pleasures (2009)
Donald R. Burleson, Wait for the Thunder: Stories for a Stormy Night (2010)
Jonathan Thomas, Tempting Providence and Other Stories (2010)
Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., SIN & ashes (2010)
W. H. Pugmire, Uncommon Places: A Collection of Exquisites (2012)
Michael Aronovitz
Seven Deadly Pleasures
Foreword by S. T. Joshi
Hippocampus Press
_________________
New York
Copyright © 2009 by Michael Aronovitz
"Passive Passenger" was published online in 2008 by Demonminds and Scars Publications.
"Quest for Sadness" was published in 2008 by Metal Scratches magazine in Studies in the Fantastic (Winter 2008/09).
"The Clever Mask" was published in 1993 by Midnight Zoo magazine.
Foreword copyright © 2009 by S. T. Joshi
Published by Hippocampus Press
P.O. Box 641, New York, NY 10156.
www.hippocampuspress.com
Cover art and interior illustrations by Thomas S. Brown. Cover design by Barbara Briggs Silbert. Hippocampus Press logo designed by Anastasia Damianakos.
All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher.
First Digital Edition May 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61498-032-2
Contents
Foreword by S. T. Joshi
How Bria Died
The Clever Mask
Quest for Sadness
The Legend of the Slither-Shifter
The Exterminator
Passive Passenger
Toll Booth
Foreword
In a prefatory note to Deathbird Stories (1975), Harlan Ellison wrote: "It is suggested that the reader not attempt to read this book at one sitting. The emotional content of these stories, taken without break, may be extremely upsetting." Without attempting to compare a relative novice to a living legend, I would repeat Ellison's caveat in regard to Michael Aronovitz's Seven Deadly Pleasures. In fact, I would go on to add that it might be advisable to read only one of the stories in this book at a sitting, perhaps one a day.
The emergence of a writer like Michael Aronovitz is a highly interesting literary phenomenon. As we come close to the end of this first decade of the twenty-first century, the horror "boom" that began, more or less, with the simultaneous appearance on the bestseller lists in 1971 of William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist and Thomas Tryon's The Other has been over for close to twenty years. Stephen King and Anne Rice still make the bestseller lists, but the former remains there for shorter and shorter periods and the latter scarcely seems to be writing horror at all. The best writers in the field appear to have retreated to the small press, for it is only those presses that can take a chance that a Thomas Ligotti, a Caitlín R. Kiernan, or a Jonathan Thomas will be able to find an audience without generating that blockbuster (usually a bloated and gore-filled novel) which commercial houses appear to require of their genre writers. And so, when Michael Aronovitz submitted these stories to me—first one or two, then the entire volume—I could see at once that here was a writer who deserved his audience but whose intense, gripping, and emotionally wrenching tales would be sure to scare off—in the wrong sense of the term—any commercial publisher he approached.
What is impressive about Aronovitz's tales is their range of tone, mood, and substance. To be sure, such stories as "How Bria Died," "The Legend of the Slither-Shifter," and "Toll Booth" shows the author to be unusually attuned to the angst of teenagers—as is fitting for a high school teacher. But to turn from the dramatic tensity of "How Bria Died"—one of the most terrifying supernatural tales I have read in many years—to the sardonic humour of "The Clever Mask" is to wonder how a single author could be responsible for such wildly diverse specimens. And the philosophical depth that Aronovitz shows in stories like "Quest for Sadness" and "The Exterminator" makes one realise that he is far more than a mere shudder-coiner; rather, he follows the best traditions of supernatural fiction in making us ponder our tenuous position in the universe by means of terror and wonder. And the story "Passive Passenger" confronts us with the quasi-science fictional horror of the computer and the Internet.
This collection's capstone is "Toll Booth," a 40,000-word novella that seamlessly accomplishes many things at once. It is simultaneously a poignant tale of teenagers' ability—or inability—to face a moral dilemma, an almost unbearable tale of physical gruesomeness that any splatterpunk writer would be proud of, and a subtle tale of supernatural haunting in the unlikeliest of places—a highway toll booth. From Le Fanu to Lovecraft to Ramsey Campbell to T. E. D. Klein, the novella has been the chosen venue of many masters of the supernatural to fuse the intensity of the short story with the character development usually possible only in the novel, and in "Toll Booth" Aronovitz has fully realised the aesthetic possibilities of this hybrid literary mode.
It would be unjust to consider Michael Aronovitz a novice, for some of his stories have appeared either in print on online more than fifteen years ago. His surehandedness in prose, in character portrayal, and in the pacing and development of the short story also mark him as a veteran. This may be his first book, but I venture to say that most readers will fervently hope it will not be his last.
—S. T. JOSHI
Seven Deadly Pleasures
How Bria Died
Bria jumped rope all alone
And now her eyes are made of stone
She calls for Mommie from the grave
And crawls out of the drain
She drags her jump rope on cement
And calls you from the heating vent
Turn a promise to a lie
And you will be the next to die
Ben Marcus didn't like it messy, but it was that time of the year. His feet hurt. A ninth-grade boy in the lunchroom had not liked the fact that the volunteer serving girl with the hairnet had given him only one taco off the cart, so he had chucked it on the floor. Ben had walked over, retrieved the plate, and stuck it back on the kid's portion of the long brown table. After a staredown, the young man had taken it, a bit too slowly, to a trash receptacle in the middle of the room by a white pillar with a picture of Frederick Douglass on it. Ben had followed. When the kid tossed in the garbage there was some up-splash that got on Ben's sleeve. He hated lunch duty.
It was wrap-around Thursday and Ben had his homeroom for the second time that day. His legs were crossed. He was sucking on one of the temple-tip earpieces of his wire-framed glasses, and he had one shoe off at the back heel. He was sort of dangling it on the end of his toe. It was the time of the year when the kids started jumping into their summer vacations a month early. Right around May 5th, the boys started untucking their dress shirts and removing their ties before the first bell. The girls somehow found ways to roll their blue skirts far above the knee and show off a bit of bra strap up top, even though the uniform requirement clearly stated that they were limited to bulky, formless, long-sleeved white blouses. Suddenly, they all wanted to follow each other consecutively to the bathrooms like a parade, and trick you into thinking you had the due dates wrong for their final papers. You had to keep up the game face all the way through June or they walked all over you.
&n
bsp; Marcus knew the deal, and his reputation as the most popular teacher at The People First Charter School in downtown Philadelphia usually carried him through these tough final weeks. All year, he was strict when he had to be and bitingly sarcastic. He was known for pushing the envelope and talking about controversial things in class, like sex and death. He made kids laugh and he cursed frequently. He was an expert at finding a student's one vulnerable moment and filling that moment with insight. The girls liked him because he could outdance the boys in verbal confrontation, and the boys liked him because he was so popular with the girls. The school was set up first grade through twelfth, and given that Ben was the head of tenth grade and the sole English teacher at that level, most kids at People First looked forward to high school. He always found a way to make it interesting, often taking rude interruptions and turning them into stories. Then he'd wrap it all back into the given lesson.
Last week Rahim Bethea had activated a talking SpongeBob key chain in the middle of a lecture about totalitarianism in Animal Farm. Ben had stopped, rode the laughter, and gone into a rant about how SpongeBob's friend Patrick, the pink starfish, was really a symbol for the penis. The class had roared, and many defended the character. Marcus walked the room, one side to the other. He started the kids chanting, "Patrick is a penis!" so loudly that Rollins, the security guard for the second floor, poked his head in. Ben immediately mouthed, "Johnson?" the name of the school's chief administrative officer. Rollins gave a quick shake of the head, "No, she ain't coming down the hall," and gave the thumbs up sign. Ben turned back to the kids and said that the human cock was the symbolic foundation of every story ever made, including Animal Farm. A conversation started, hands in the air. Half the class claimed that the story was clearly about money, and the other half argued that the story did, in fact, leave females to the side like a void. It became a discussion about which lens the story was better to build from, economics and exchange or feministic absence. Marcus wrote those headings on the board, and as a class they filled it in. Yes, he was that good.
His wife Kim was a paralegal and kept a nice garden behind their comfy twin in Havertown. She had long red hair with a streak of gray in it, and slight age parentheses at the corners of her mouth. She had crinkles at the edges of her eyes that Ben still liked to kiss softly. He knew she adored him, but it had become clear that she thought his style was far too risky and inappropriate for an educational system so quick to slap teachers with harsh consequences delivered by stern lawyers and passionate advocates. It wasn't an issue. Ben had stopped discussing his methods with her years ago.
He put his glasses back on and rolled up his sleeve. It had come undone down to the last fold at the cuff, and the taco stain was showing. Behind him were some compare-and-contrast papers pinned to the cork board, their edges curling. His desk had been moved to the side almost to the end of the whiteboard by the hall door, and he was trapped behind some desks that had been pushed all the way to the wooden cubbies, those overflowing with hoodies, sweaters, old papers, binders, and ratty textbooks that looked as if they had been run over by an army of sixteen wheelers.
The parts of speech and number tables competition was tomorrow. It was Mrs. Johnson's baby. People First was a back-to-basics school, and while the elementary grades were required to chant the parts of speech in English class every day, Mrs. Johnson had the upper school kids unveil complex dance routines based on those drills so as to showcase her method for guests at the end of the year. At the last staff meeting she had handed out an official memo that instructed teachers to set a week of class time aside for rehearsals. The mayor was there for the performance last May, along with a representative from the N.A.A.C.P. It was no joke, and neither was Mrs. Johnson.
The woman ran a tight ship and everyone was terrified of her. She was six foot three inches tall. She wore her hair back in a tight bun and had eyes that always looked wide and wrathful. She was handsome in the way statues were handsome, and walked the halls like a general. She believed in old-school discipline. So did Ben. His vision of how to administer that discipline, however, was a bit off-color at times, and he was thankful that what went on behind closed doors mostly stayed between himself and the kids.
Ben put up his hands and waved them.
"No!" he said. "Yo. Yo! Turn the music off for a minute."
The kids stopped their routine and shut off the boom box. Monique Hudson rolled her eyes. A few boys sat on desks off to the side and Joy Smith popped her gum. Ben worked his face to a mask of gentle concern. Actually he had the beginnings of a headache coming on and he looked forward to his prep coming up in thirteen minutes. On Thursdays he had two free periods in a row to end the day, and he planned on putting his head down in the lounge.
"Guys," he said, "this is the last day you have to practice before the competition, and you're bringing in new dance steps all of a sudden. It's asinine. First off, the girls coming down in rows and doing the shoulder shake thing was great. You trashed that for this puppet-puppeteer pop-lock thing, and it throws off the group. Everyone is just standing and watching Steve and Jerome. It's like a big donut with a hole in it. I also have to tell you that my 'B' class is doing the same kind of puppet thing and they have Rob and Tiny."
"They ain't shit," Steve said. His tie was off and his shirt was dirty. Marcus hoped Ms. Johnson didn't do a pop-in right now. Most of the kids were out of uniform code at the moment.
"The hell they're not," Ben said. "They've been doing that routine longer than you, and you know it. Also, Rob is so tall that Tiny really does look like a puppet when he stands in front and they mirror each other."
Jerome made his eyes go to half mast and curdled up an angry grin.
"That don't matter. They gay."
"If I wanted shit from you, Jerome, I would have squeezed your head," Ben answered.
Everyone laughed. Marcus looked over toward Malik Redson. He was in the far corner of the room listening to his iPod, juking his head a bit, shirt untucked, hiking boots up on the desk in front of him. Ben made the sign to take out the ear buds. Malik did so reluctantly.
"What?" he said.
"You're the show," Ben said. "Your routine comes in after the girls hop down in their rows. Once they are in position they make perfect backing for you with that cheerleader thing they do with the hand-claps. You have to dance."
Malik yawned, then licked his lips. The peach fuzz moustache he had going was an illusion. He was as grown as any man out on Broad Street. He had two kids already, and he worked nights at the BP gas station on Market Street. His solo routine was also the best in the school.
"The music sucks," he said. "And I also don't give a Goddamn."
"Fuck the music!" Ben snapped. All the little side whispers stopped. He stood up. He did not like losing. Not even a trivial moment like this one. "I am aware that you think this contest is retarded, I'm not fucking stupid. But when the whole upper school is watching and the other homerooms have a better show than you, it's going to matter."
"The fuck it is."
"The fuck it ain't!"
They stared at each other. Malik stood up. He paused. He took off the gold around his neck.
"All right, Mr. M. For you."
Laquanna Watford, a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound girl with the face of an angel and a reputation for street fighting, walked to the middle of the room. She smiled and her big caramel cheeks bunched up. There were huge sweat stains on her white blouse, under her arms, and at the love handles.
"Ready?" she said. "OK. Now make the square and let me see you bitches gallop."
The door opened. It was Mr. Rollins. Ben got himself out from behind the maze of chairs and approached. Rollins winked.
"Y'all got to sub next period," he said.
Ben sighed. Don't shoot the messenger.
"Where?"
"Sixth-grade science. First floor by the Cherry Street entrance, one room in."
Ben cursed softly. He hated middle school. They were too young to really un
derstand his humor, and too old for intimidating with the drill sergeant stuff. He thanked Rollins and went over to his black bag. He looked in the emergency pocket and got out a piece of paper that was a bit yellowed, almost falling apart at the fold lines. Writing prompts, slightly edgy. Usually kept kids in their seats for at least a half hour.
The bell rang and he hurried out to the hallway. The worst thing he could do was show up late. Impression was everything, and a teacher waiting behind a desk with an angry scowl on his face usually filled the chairs rather quickly. A harried guy with a soft leather briefcase coming in after the fact and pleading for order usually led to kids spouting off irrelevant questions, fighting over seats, sneaking out to the hall, chucking rolled up pieces of paper at the trash can, and pleading for constant trips to the bathroom, guidance, or the nurse's office.
He got down to sixth-grade science with about two minutes to spare. About half the students were standing by their seats in gossip circles. Other kids were still commuting through the space, shoving a bit, snaking through to get to the rear door leading to the social studies room. Three boys were back by the lab tables toying with dead frogs in jars. There were larger containers with what looked like pig fetuses on the shelves, and a skeleton hanging in front of an anatomy chart. Ben walked over to the boys. The tall one with the little crud rings at the edges of his nostrils started to exclaim that it was the other boys who had been messing with the frogs.
"I don't care about that," Ben said. "Look, I need a favor."
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