He was still trying to think what to do next when a low, almost mechanical humming brought his head around a second time.
Except it wasn't really a humming. Heavy, steady breathing, rather. And it wasn't caused by a machine.
A pair of huge green eyes, suspended just above his own waist height, were staring at him unblinkingly from the shadow of the cacti. He couldn't really make out the body behind them, just the vague impression of a shape. But thought that he could see, in the moonlight, a chink of white for a moment. A gleam. A fang.
Rick ... held himself completely still. On the outside at least. His inside was in frantic turmoil, the stomach churning, the heart pounding like a drum, the blood thrumming in his veins and every nerve vibrating like a fine stiff wire. Could the puma, with its fine senses, detect any of that?
It had walked right in through the saguaros. They hadn't protected him at all. And what should he do now?
Stay entirely still, the way he was. There was nothing else.
In spite of which, he seemed to be moving very gently by this time. Was he backing away, now, without even realising it? He had to stop!
He couldn't pull his gaze from those green staring eyes, but he remained aware of all the taller shadows clustered nearby. Sentinels indeed. They were immobile and uncaring. He could be torn to pieces now, screaming his head off, and it wouldn't affect them in the slightest.
The same thought came to him a second time ... why couldn't he be like them, for a few minutes at least?
He still appeared to be shifting slowly backwards. And the puma? It had started to edge almost casually towards him.
Rick drew himself up very straight. Yes, be like them. It was his only hope.
I have spikes, he thought, aware of how insane that was. I have spikes and dense solid skin, and nothing can harm me.
If he kept on thinking that, then might the lion pick up on it somehow and leave him alone?
I am like the saguaros, the sentinels, and only God can touch me.
It just wasn't working. The lion was still moving in, gathering speed by this time.
He actually did lurch at that point, taking several backward steps. Felt an acid flare of pain rise through his leg. He had backed right into one of the huge cacti. There was now one of its long spikes impaled in the flesh of his right thigh. And under normal circumstances, he'd have jumped away immediately. That would only take him closer to the puma, though.
And besides, We are joined now, was the strange thought running through his head.
And then ... he did the craziest thing of all.
He just knew he should stop moving altogether. That was a given absolute. And yet...
Between one moment and the next one, he had raised his arms above his head, into the same position exactly as the cacti which had such a painful hold of him.
We are joined. One and the same. We gather strength simply by being, and cannot be injured.
The pain in his leg grew even worse. Was there some kind of poison leaking into him?
Something very bright exploded suddenly, inside the far depths of his own head.
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...a thousand sunrises across the desert ... and a thousand sunsets ... the hot wind rushing sometimes ... other times, the air completely still ... the scuttling of innumerable legs, some furry, some hard-shelled ... buzzards whirling overhead...
He was knowing what the saguaro knew. He understood that without even having to think about it.
...a thousand moonlit nights ... the hot breath of the mountain lion and its gentle padding ... the snarl of the coyote pack ... the sun rises for the one thousand and first time, right inside his head ... and burns something away ... and casts its light on something new ... which he never has seen before...
Rick came back to the present, blinking several times.
The mountain lion ... had stopped completely.
Almost within arm's reach now, it stared at him closely as though trying to reappraise him. And then, for the first time since it had appeared, its huge eyes slid shut a moment.
When they opened, all the hunger was gone from its gaze.
It had turned away and vanished silently in the very next instant.
Rick—the old Rick—would have let out a pent-up breath at least.
But the new Rick didn't even do that, since he was breathing quite evenly by this time, in spite of the fact that he was still impaled. All the tension had melted from his body. He was perfectly relaxed.
Wasn't bothered by the pain, the lion. Nor afraid it might come back. Nothing seemed to trouble him now. Scorpions? Rattlesnakes? Lucys? He just smiled.
Was it some force from the desert that had by now filled him up, the same force that made the saguaros so invulnerable? Or had it simply, as he'd first suspected, been there inside him the entire time?
He realised that he didn't really care. It made no difference to him what the answer was.
Grinning fiercely by now, he stepped off the spike. Ought to have felt a warm trickle of blood run down his leg, and yet there seemed to be nothing like that. He walked back to the car and brushed one hand across its hood.
Felt a hot sparking sensation at the centre of his palm a moment. The engine turned over, then started thrumming steadily, despite the fact its radiator was now empty. What of it? He needed nothing.
When he crossed to the passenger door and shoved at it, it slammed shut easily this time. His own door swung shut just as effortlessly when he clambered back into the driving seat. The lights came on. He didn't even use the switch. He needed nothing.
Just before he put the car in drive, Rick looked at himself again in the mirror, his narrow reflection in the cool, pale moonlight. His eyes were no longer the same. There was no pain in them any more. No hurt and no betrayal.
There was nothing but an inner, wholly self-sufficient smile. He was like the saguaros now. He needed nothing and could not be harmed.
He put the Toyota in drive and swung the steering wheel around. And went easily back up the slope. And went easily along the track. And quickly reached the blacktopped road which took him to the freeway. Which would lead him all the way back to that endless procession of massive ruts and pot-holes that laughingly gets called ‘civilisation'.
For which he was now far better equipped than any human ever had been.
Copyright © 2008 Tony Richards
[Back to Table of Contents]
INTERFERENCE—Christopher Fowler
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I Am Legend
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When Brains Fall Out
New readers start here: In the last two columns I set out my stall for creativity, originality and ideas. Which brings us, it seems, to The Incredible Shrinking Brain.
It's evident all over the place right now, starting with I Am Legend, which had the best first half of any popular film I've seen in ages, and the worst remainder. The reason? A triumph of style over ingenuity. Post-apocalyptic New York's return to nature, all buzzing insects and grass thrusting through cracked concrete, was rendered in impeccable detail. But then the CGI zombies arrived and everything went to cheaply-rendered hell. In The Omega Man, the second film version of Richard Matheson's story, you may recall that the war between scientist Robert Neville and the infected is one of conflicting ideologies; Neville's technological determinism is the cause of the world's end. The infected now shun technology and have turned back to faith in order to save the planet. Once the relationship between Neville and his infected opposite number, the intellectually conservative Matthius, has been established, we know the conflict cannot be resolved without Neville's death because he is the last representative of the old guard, the true Omega Man who must be superseded by religious zealots as the clock of civilisation is reset. So the virus may be halted—it can't eradicate the new ideology—and to that extent Neville is as extinct as a dinosaur. This is the idea that drives the story and gives it so much pow
er. So in the new version, it is of course the first thing to go.
Now the infected aren't real people, but have been replaced by superhuman computer animations. They can't even speak, so there's no real conflict at all, except the bog-standard Zombies vs Survivors tropes we've all seen a million times before. When Charlton Heston sat in a cinema and mouthed dialogue from Woodstock, he was making a point about free will. Will Smith gets to duplicate the scene by mouthing dialogue from ... Shrek. Is this how far down the brain-stem we've dropped in popular entertainment, that a simple idea can't be communicated to a mass audience anymore for fear of alienating them?
More pernicious is the creepy use of the escape to Eden that I Am Legend offers. Instead of a white Neville having sex with an independent black woman, we have a black man chastely hanging out with a God-fearing and safely mixed-race Brazilian girl. Instead of heading off to live in a flawed, argumentative commune built around new alternative families, something that will replace the traditional failing model of family life, we have the survivors arriving in a heavily guarded fortress town that looks like an isolationist Mormon Disneyland sponsored by the National Rifle Association.
SF is required to reflect the era of its creation, which is why I Am Legend rankles. The Invasion, the fourth version of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, also disturbs, with its suggestion that it might not be so bad to be a pod-person after all; at least you do what you're told.
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From Guts To Garters
The dumbing down continues over here too, even as far as St Trinian's. In the beginning, artist Ronald Searle sketched cartoons of badly behaved schoolgirls to amuse himself and his family during wartime. His cartoons were collected into books, then became novels and finally films. Searle enlisted a surprisingly highbrow group of people to help him, including the author D.B. Wyndham-Lewis, the composer Sir Malcolm Arnold, Johnny Dankworth, the Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, Bertolt Brecht, Flanders & Swann, Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder.
In the original 1950s film series, cynicism at the inefficiency of bureaucratic England seeped through the stories like damp. The men from the Ministry of Education sang ‘The Red Flag’ on election night, praying that Labour would win and abolish private schools because they were too ineffectual to act, and had to be reminded by a passing charlady that, as civil servants, they were not expected to have political affiliations. Shiftless workmen repairing a hole in the ministry floor became long-term fixtures accepted by everyone. Seduced civil servants seduced by the promise of sex and sloth hid in the school greenhouse for months on end rather than return to work. Councillors took their lift-man along on a money-wasting European fact-finding mission. Ultimately, the school—financed on stolen money and immoral earnings—was seen as a far more decent institution than the inert, corrupt and powerless state, because at least it was honest about the way it earned its money.
Not in the new version. Now it's about tough-girl attitude, posing, pouting and pissing about to pop. How hard would it have been to insert just a few lines of sharp dialogue, something to show there was a sentient brain at work behind the scenes, to prove that the girls were truly the embodiment of modern market forces, as they were in the originals? Instead, excepting the subversive presence of Rupert Everett, nobody has a clue about what they're meant to be doing.
Does all of this really matter? Who cares if The Golden Compass has had its heretical (not blasphemous, mark you, this is about the corrupting influence of the church, not religion itself) balls neutered so long as it makes for a good story?
Well, ‘good stories’ don't linger in the brain long enough to leave their mark. If Lord Of The Flies was just about some cool kids behaving badly on an island, it would not still be in print so many years later. And a good story can be combined with something deeper. Life On Mars showed us that.
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The Potency Of Cheap Music
I have no cut-off point when it comes to finding gems in trash. You're as likely to find food for thought in an old episode of The League Of Gentlemen as you are in Shakespeare. When the BBC elected to keep their historical productions on tape and wipe episodes of say, Hancock, they revealed a fundamental error of judgment; that a classic must automatically tell us more about ourselves than a cheap sitcom. In the sixties, an execrable documentary film series called Look At Life used to clutter up our cinemas. You had to sit through this piece of tat before reaching the main picture nearly every week. Now, watching a number of them collected on a single DVD, the experience is revelatory. Here are more than just the lurid fashions of the past—here is our entire race-memory dissected on film. Opinionated, self-deluding, naïve, wholly charming. The BBC would have erased them in favour of Olivier declaiming Richard III.
It's often the same with pulp novels and low budget movies. Remove the silly CGI end-shots from The Last Winter and you have a story with real staying power. I have faith in the future, though, and one of the best things to happen in the last couple of years is that Hollywood is running out of ideas. By the time you get films made from old Chipmunks’ singles and kids’ games it's clear the well has run dry—which leaves the way open for genuine experimentation. It happened before, when Easy Rider opened opposite Hello Dolly, and it may just be happening again thanks to Tim Burton leading the way with Sweeney Todd. How he convinced Warners to back this is a mystery. The film is wonderful, but by all that's holy it should never have worked as well as it does. The recent Saturday night audience with whom I shared the experience of watching the film nearly collectively puked when the characters started singing. Ten minutes further in, they were entranced, and the haunting music showed that it was a natural method of heightening emotional response to tense situations.
All ideas are built on interpretations and permutations of existing concepts. It is virtually impossible to produce something that is wholly original, with no reference to anything else that has gone before. Perhaps we need to increase our efforts at hybridisation, and create more mutant ideas in our books, films, music and art. It would certainly give our brains something to work with again. After all, Rocky Horror was a science fiction musical, wasn't it?
Copyright © 2008 Christopher Fowler
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[Back to Table of Contents]
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN—Ian R. Faulkner
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Ian R. Faulkner was born in the West Midlands in 1966 and he has yet to escape, although he hopes one day they will let him out on day release, as writing with crayons is really very difficult. His hobbies include obsessively collecting books, comics, CDs and films on DVD, and, if he's not watched closely, anything else he can lay his hands on. Ian has been writing since the dinosaurs ruled the Earth. As a young mammal he produced a multitude of novels and stories, all of which are best left buried with the bodies in the basement. His first published work appeared in Crimewave 8: Cold Harbours and he has another story—'A Mother's Love'—in the forthcoming Crimewave 10.
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The Guns had stopped. The absence of the ever present roar woke Arthur Watts from a sleep disturbed by dreams and nightmares. He opened his eyes and rubbed away the crust of sleep. The early morning sun felt warm after the chill of the night and an easterly wind pushed fleecy, cotton wool clouds through the immense blue vault of the summer sky. Under different circumstances, Arthur thought as he accepted a tot of rum from Malcolm Hubbard, it would have been a perfect day to spend with his wife Lillian.
It had been an uncomfortable, miserable night and, like all the men around him, Arthur had spent it waiting and praying. He had listened to the enemy's shells as they left their guns and shrieked like demons towards the trench. Each shell, he knew in his heart, aimed for his particular bit of safety and, like a ravening beast, craved his blood. Arthur had held his breath as the wait for the crash and crump of the exploding shell stretched out into an eternity that burned, bef
ore the relief and breath of the blast: the menace and terror lessened for a fleeting, ephemeral moment, as he knew he was still alive.
Eventually, despite the noise and danger, Arthur had fallen asleep, his body propped up against Malcolm Hubbard's broad shoulder. The platoons of men were wedged so tightly into the blown-down trenches they were just like sardines in a tin. No one had room to move left or right. Not an inch of space was spared or wasted. Arthur had slept and spent the night seated upon a dented and rusty petrol can with Malcolm on his left and his sergeant on his right, each supporting the other.
Arthur passed the battered mess-tin of rum on to Sergeant Boyd and glanced at his watch. The muddy, cracked dial showed him it was a minute or two before 6:25am. Apart from the singing of an occasional far off shell, the morning was quiet; beautiful in a way he had seldom seen since leaving England. All around him Arthur could hear the men stirring, and for the first time in an age he felt the fires of hell recede. A sense of release swept through him, like a weight had lifted from his chest, and he found he could breathe again without the feeling that his clothes were too tight.
"Top o’ the mornin’ lads,” Sergeant Boyd said, passing the rum on down the line to a young captain named Floyd. “We'll be up and at ‘em any time now, so—” The rest of his words were lost in the sudden swell of noise.
They'd been told that the final bombardment would be intense, but the giant cacophonous roar was so far beyond anything Arthur had ever experienced, or even imagined, it humbled his soul.
Shell after shell flew overhead. The smaller shells from the French .75 and the English 18-pounders streaked across the sky so close to the lip of the trench Arthur felt the wind of their passing upon his skin. Chalk and flint from the parapets filled the air like hail as the ground shook. Higher up, the larger shells shrieked through the blue, full of violence and fury, to fall upon the enemy lines in a continuous, unrelenting barrage of death, destruction, agony and fire.
Black Static Horror Magazine #3 Page 8