by Chris Kelso
PRAISE FOR CHRIS KELSO
‘Chris Kelso is a writer of almost intimidating intelligence, wit, and imagination. On every page there is evidence of a great mind at work. Just when you’re wondering if there are actually still writers out there who still feel and live their ideas out on the page, I come across a writer like Kelso, and suddenly the future feels a lot more optimistic. One calls to mind Burroughs, and Trocchi’s more verbose offerings—whilst remaining uniquely himself, in a writer as young as he is, is a very encouraging sign: one of maturity that belies his youth. I look forward to reading more from him in the near future.’
—Andrew Raymond Drennan, author of The Immaculate Heart
“Chris Kelso sets his photonic crystal gun on KILL and takes no prisoners. My favorite era of science fiction was the 60s “New Wave” when the British magazine NEW WORLDS took front and centre, and there’s a bit of NEW WORLDS here, kind of like Jerry Cornelius using the cut-up method in a bungalow in Glasgow, with a splash of Warren Ellis added for extra flavour. Kelso has a compelling voice. Somewhere Papa Burroughs is smiling.”
—L.L. Soares, author of LIFE RAGE and IN SICKNESS
‘Chris Kelso is an important satirist, I think it’s safe to say.’
—Anna Tambour, author of Crandolin
Someday soon people will be naming him as one of their own influences
—INTERZONE magazine
‘Come into the dusty deserted publishing house where mummified editors sit over moth-eaten manuscripts of books that were never written . . . anyone who enjoys the work of my late friend William Burroughs will feel welcome here with Chris Kelso.’
—Graham Masterton
‘Chris Kelso’s prose swaggers like blues and jitters like bebop. Dig.’
—Nate Southard, author of Down and Just Like Hell.
‘Sparky, modern, avant-garde but accessible, Chris Kelso’s book is reminiscent of the most successful literary experimentation of the 60s and 70s, the sort of work that was published in the later New Worlds, but it’s also thoroughly contemporary, intimately engaged with modern life as it is right now. Kelso steams with talent and dark wit and his blend of anarchy with precision is refreshing, inspiring and utterly entertaining . . . ’
—Rhys Hughes, author of Mister Gum
‘This emerging journeyman of the macabre has wormed his way into my grey-matter and continues to seep noxious ichor. I feel like I must devour him. Every little bit of him.’
—Adam Lowe
“Chris Kelso’s writing is like a punch to the gut that forces your face against the page. The way his gritty prose carries his imagination is like a bar fight between Bradbury and Bukowski, with the reader coming out on top. The worlds he drags us into are so damn ugly that you have to admire their beauty.”
—Chris Boyle of BizarroCast
‘Whether he’s writing about a fictionalized William Burroughs, Time Detectives, or Aliens Chris Kelso aims at the interstices or the Interzones because he understands that these are the people and spaces that define modern life—Kelso is also always funny and twisted.’
—Douglas Lain
‘Choke down a handful of magic mushrooms and hop inside a rocket ship trip to futuristic settings filled with pop culture, strange creatures and all manner of sexual deviance.’
—Richard Thomas, author of Transubstantiate
“Guaranteed to uplift the heart of today’s most discerningly jaded nihilist”
—Tom Bradley
‘Chris Kelso is the one your mother warned you about. He is a sick, sick man - bereft of cure and heaped with symptom. His words will taint you irrevocably. Your eyes will want to gargle after reading just one of his stories.’
—Steve Vernon, author of Nothing To Lose
Bizarro Pulp Press
an imprint of JournalStone Publishing
Detroit*San Fransisco
www.BIZARROPULPPRESS.com
Terence, Mephisto & Viscera Eyes
Copyright © 2014 Chris Kelso
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval systems, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
Printed in the USA.
Cover Design: Jim Agpalza
Interior illustrations: Chris Kelso
Photography: Blair Dingwall
Interior layout and e-conversion by Lori Michelle
www.theauthorsalley.com
OTHER WORKS BY CHRIS KELSO
Novellas
A Message from the Slave State
Moosejaw Frontier
Transmatic
Short story collections
Schadenfreude
Novels
The Dissolving Zinc Theatre
The Black Dog Eats the City
Anthologies
Caledonia Dreamin’—Strange Fiction of Scottish Descent (ed. With Hal Duncan)
Terror Scribes (ed. With Adam Lowe)
This is NOT an Anthology
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FAMILY MAN
TERENCE, MEPHISTO & VISCERA EYES
THE STATEMENT OF TOM TRYOUT
Another uninspired, poorly written metaphor for something no one cares about, okay . . .
A PAIR SO RAPED
BAPTIZM OF FIRE
BIRTH, SEX, DEATH, STIGMATA
HEART-ATTACK MAN
THE VERIDANT DREAM
Come on and die
In your viscera eyes
Cataracts close the blinds . . .
—The Mars Volta
FAMILY MAN
The gangplank was covered in slaves, their rags swathed in sand and surf. The waves—a constant stirring of jagged V’s boiled in hot foam—shook the vessel with all the mercilessness of the cosmos. Strange sunlight filled the top of the island with purple sand that glimmered across rows of elm and stretched the sage.
The Cherry Island marina was a clutter of ugly metal, scows in perpetual hither and thither, drifting landfills atop barges and freighters full of human cargo . . .
A child slave yelped and is punished just as the ship pulled into shore.
One slave, a woman—Amna—who was, one suspects, born into captivity, turned to her companion Gertrude and shared a terminal glance. When the slave masters were busy rounding up the men and bundling them into the water, Amna whispered into Gertrude’s ear
—Do you know what they’ll do to us?
Gertrude looked straight ahead at the wood-wreathed walls of their cabin, hopelessness her only permanent resident. She would not share another terminal glance with Amna.
A boy crawled around the deck, blood leaking from his anus. Slave masters stomped around him, kicked away any object the boy tried to grab onto to pull himself up. There was an ugly laughter, the kind only tormenters enjoy performing, and they were just that—tormentors. A meaty palm appeared and clutched the boy by the scruff of the neck. He pulled him to eye view. The meaty palmed man had a foul smirk, his words emitted in low-end murmurs of death breath that seized the nostril and spun the bag inside the belly.
—My own son—he repeated, again and again until the ugly laughter began once more.
TERENCE, MEPHISTO & VISCERA EYES
1.
—Wait here dog.
Phil latched Terence’s leash to the railing and went into the store for cigarettes. Terence sat there patiently, waiting for his owner to come back out. There was a dull but bearable throbbing in his groin from his recent castration, like the rend and tear of a rusty saw on a numb, gangrenous limb. He sniffed the air around him. It was a good day t
o be a dog in Shell County—in spite of his new eunuchdom. The sun rode triumphantly in a curling mantle and he knew it would be Frisbee-throwing weather soon enough.
Terence often thought about his indentured servility and wondered how comfortable he really was about being someone’s pet. No man or thing is born free, he supposed. A free man is dangerous, like a dog free of its leash. A free man is more likely to descend into entropy; the world around him would decline into chaos. A free man has no fear of God when he is his own god. Any man (or dog) who has been purchased may eat if he has been circumcised. The truth of the matter is that Terence had always been happy being a dog. It was all he’d ever known.
Phil came out of the store and primed up a cigarette. He huffed his first drag deeply, held the vapour in his lungs for as long as drawn breath would allow, before releasing a perfect cloud into the air and unhooking Terence from the rail. The sky became a tarp of plutonium orange.
—Come on dog—Phil instructed in a voice as deep as the Mariana Trench.
They walked through the park. Shell County didn’t really have a ‘park’ for dog-walkers, just a mound of balding grass that led into a carnivorous woodland where local children went missing. Phil pulled at his cigarette morosely while Terence ogled the gambolling bitches and tried to remember that pre-op desire that once lingered in his loins.
They made towards a bench. Terence’s owner was a depressing creature—a broken spirit trapped in an out-worn cage. His physical appearance suggested a raw deal of some kind. At 27 his hair had gone arsenic white; he was fat as a fool and his eyes were two limpid pools of insomniac anxiety—as if they’d actually penetrated the psycho-sphere and witnessed first-hand the coldness of the universe. He also smoked too much and hadn’t had a job in over a year.
They say that over a period of time a dog will start to resemble its owner. Terence had indeed started noticing his own living decay. This was a concern.
***
The bitches ran pell-mell through the park’s pathways. The air was perfumed with their thick scent, not that Terence harboured any carnal thoughts towards them, not since the humans severed him from the I-Ching. He took a shit on a well-flourished patch of grass and panted contently under the sun’s blaze by Phil’s side. He looked up at his owner. Phil was wearing an Irish sweater with cigarette burn-holes through it (from where he’d kept falling asleep watching TV with a half-smoked roll-up still smouldering away between his lips). He’d once been cool and mean; now he was just mean. Terence could see the change in his owner. Phil’s life had taken a nosedive when his girlfriend Patty left him over a year ago. Terence never liked her much anyway. She flitted about the place like a hyperactive squirrel and never took the time to pet or walk Terence.
Another man appeared and sat next to Phil. He was overweight too and had a dark smudge around his mouth from where he’d been plucking Herod’s worms from the soil all day long. When humans spoke, Terence only understood the occasional word, but his human-speak was getting better; more often than not their voices sounded like the rustle of barley fields or the echo of rills in a silent forest. He liked the noise of human-speak, as long they weren’t shouting.
—So I guess you heard Patty got brutally raped while passing through Wire City?
—Yeah I heard.
—So, how do you feel about that?
—Just another pervert with bad taste.
Shell County was a sunken drogue that somehow sustained its own atmosphere. Everything that lived here was on its way out real soon . . .
—How is the Stroboscope coming along? Anything we can put into practice yet?
—Come on Phil, you know once the prototype is perfected I’ll give you a cut of the action. Fuck, you’re the most miserable guy I know—if anyone needs this machine it’s you. Just be patient . . .
—I dunno man, I’m at the precipice right now . . .
—Don’t be so dramatic. So Patty isn’t coming back. At least you didn’t have to deal with her after she’d been raped. Two victims in a relationship is the most self-destructive thing imaginable—that’s one thing you don’t need.
—Okay, remind me again how the stroboscope works . . .
—Eugh, again? Come on man . . .
—Please? This is the only hope I got left . . .
—It brings about a hypnogogic state, brings about a phenomenon of perception called Transmatica.
—And it can help? You’re sure it’ll help me forget . . . even just for a few minutes?
—It’s just a lit cylinder with a rotating turntable inside . . .
—Don’t . . . don’t do that, please. Don’t devalue this thing, not this. You said it’ll help; don’t start back-tracking. Pulsing, rhythmic sounds to alter the frequency of my brainwaves or something, that’s what you said . . .
—I did say that, and I stick by what I said. When I hook you up to the 4D headset it’ll produce a visual stimuli, geometric patterns right before your eyes, you’ll be a slave to the eternal hum of the binaural beat. You’ll forget—for sure you’ll forget—just be patient till I figure out how to perfect my prototype . . .
—Good . . .
On the way home, Terence squinted at his own reflection in the storefront window. He was the same hot pink colour as Phil, had hair on his head just like Phil . . . the only difference was that he walked bowed on his feet and his hands. He noticed the smiling human-females reading their books and magazines on the knoll. Terence imagined that the people who wrote those books must be playboy millionaire geniuses.
—His prose is so crisp, so . . . what’s the word? Crisp, yes. You almost forget you’re a slave when you read his books.
—It’s amazing, uh, just, uh, just amazing.
—How does he know what I’m thinking? He seems to know what I’m thinking!
—I know!
—How does he do it?
—I don’t know!
—The way his words seem to effortlessly weave down the page and into my soul, into my fucking soul, gah . . .
It wasn’t just the women either—men wearing spectacles were immersed cross-legged on the bench opposite. They tended to read quietly and with less audible enthusiasm, like a spider in tonic mobility. Instead they took in the writing as if their lives depended on its absorption. One bespectacled man across the path had his book open, clutched in one hand, as if he knew everyone was staring. As if everyone knew he was smart and deserved respect.
Since the castration, Terence could feel himself changing. He thought about his position as a dog, about his position as a slave. This new state of mind had granted him a strange clarity. Priorities were shifting. Terence wasn’t satisfied with just chasing bitches all day long, he had to satisfy the hunger in his soul. He wanted to be respected; he’d never get it while some loser was dragging him around on a leash.
2.
The city hung in a haze of its own black stink, like visions of Carcosa.
Terence wrote and wrote until his clumsy scrawling started resembling letters and sentences and his characters started resembling real people, not just a canine’s caricature of a human being. All the while Phil recited the same mantra, going slowly insane with heartbreak and insomnia.
—First she hit me, then she bit me, then she threw me in the truck and said ‘you goin’ wit’ me!’
Of course, by this stage Phil had completely neglected Terence. Losing Patty was something he couldn’t get over and he didn’t have the constitution to kill himself.
—My feet stink and I don’t love Jesus. What fuckin’ hope have I got now? What a shitheel—Before returning to his mantra—First she hit me, then she bit me . . .
Terence finished 10 stories altogether and kept them hidden under his dog bed. He was pretty happy with them and before long became convinced he’d be a landmark author of some kind. His grammar and spelling weren’t perfect but he figured humans would appreciate the raw, authentic style—the fact he was a semi-literate dog would surely possess some novelty value!<
br />
He’d heard Phil having tantrums while trying to write letters to Patty, but hadn’t been able to produce a single thing for months. Terence figured he’d somehow managed to tap into Phil’s ailing creative spirit and steal all the good ideas from his head.
The only problem now was getting his work out THERE into the public sphere. He didn’t know how the writing went from words on a sheet of A4 paper to a full-fledged and bound book.
Terence waited until Phil was asleep and started scouring the internet for an answer. Phil stayed in bed most days. He’d lost a lot of weight, stopped bathing too. Terence figured this was the new medication he’d become reliant on—apparently, junkies hate the feeling of water on their skin. Terence remembered Phil on the phone with someone earlier that day, which seemed to put him in an even worse funk.
—WHAT’D YOU MEAN THE STROBOSCOPE CAN’T BE DONE?? WHAT . . . I MEAN . . . YOU SAID . . . YOU PROMISED I’D BE FREE OF THIS NIGHTMARE!!!
Phil hadn’t even noticed his newly literate, sexless Labrador plugging away on the computer, face lit up by the radiance from the monitor, the sporadic *click* *click* of the mouse under an eager paw. There was the castrato howl of stray cats outside—Terence’s interest in them was minimal.
He eventually found what he was looking for . . .
MEPHISTO—
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