by Chris Kelso
Table of Contents
Title page
We eat in front of the fireplace. Janice is passed out in the corner of the room, hog-tied limbs resting limply at her knees. Our meal consists of a noodle salad with chicken and cilantro that we picked up in Baton Rouge. It’s easy to prepare, especiallyI guess no one could ever comprehend that mind and its inner collusions. But I want to understand it. I want him to share his darkest fantasies with me. Perhaps he thinks I’ve already been privy to a lot of sensitive information about him. I suppose most serial killing starts as a consequence of a fantasy, refined over time. I was part of his fantasy. Isn’t that enough? I’m sorry to say, but no. I want more. I want everything Brandon has to offer. I want it all.
- Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent - Spengler smiles widely.
UNGER HOUSE RADICALS
Chris Kelso has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including (among many others) - Interzone, SF Signal, Lovecraft e-zine, Evergreen Review, Beatdom, Verbicide, The Cadaverine and Ginger Nuts of Horror.
'Kelso is a fearless and accomplished prose stylist’
– Ray Nessly, Literary Orphans
‘Chris Kelso writes in a style of broken glass and razor blades, barbed wire and gasoline. Stitching together prose, poetry, drama, and graphic novel in a Frankenstein aesthetic...'
– John Langan, author of The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies
'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
Also by Chris Kelso
Novellas
A Message from the Slave State
Moosejaw Frontier
Transmatic
Rattled by the Rush
The Folger Variation
Short story collections
Schadenfreude
Terence, Mephisto & Viscera Eyes
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 AnthologySlave Stories – Scenes from the Slave State
UNGER HOUSE RADICALS
CHRIS KELSO
Illustrated by Shane Swank
Copyright © 2015 Chris Kelso
This Edition Published 2016 by Crowded
Quarantine Publications
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All characters in this publication are fictitious
and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead,
is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means without the prior
permission in writing of the publisher, nor be
otherwise circulated in any form of binding or
cover other than that in which it is published
and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchase.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-9954537-0-8
Crowded Quarantine Publications
34 Cheviot Road
Wolverhampton
West Midlands
WV2 2HD
This is for Gillian.
PART I
“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” Andy Warhol
The two men drag Janice’s half-dissected body out to the front porch and drop her on the wild lawn. She disappears beneath a sea of unploughed yellow strands and broom straw. The sky has a milky hue, Vince realises that he can no longer appreciate the beauty in anything except violence…
Today’s feature is the 1963 movie SLEEP. It’s five hours long—bear in mind, I’ve already sat through EMPIRE, all 8 hours 5 minutes of it, which makes everything e
lse seem like a stroll in the fucking park. Warhol initially wanted to stretch the footage out to eight hours to approximate the actual length of time taken during a normal human sleep. I’m glad he didn’t do that.
Why do I do this to myself?
I enter the screening room. Every seat is empty save for the few students in the middle to back rows who’re making out. The wall-pillars in the screening room form a theatrical setting for the aisles. The opening credits flow from the screen and wash over the audience in divine smears of light. It screams Gothic Germany. The theatre has an odd reliance on
massed columns and Baroque statuary. I cannot remember what the outside structure looks like. I cannot remember ever existing in the outside world. All I know is this cinema. This screen room. I imagine the outside is a vision of bud and pear-shaped domes. I much prefer the inner architecture of my own skull.
Then a man enters, a face I recognise. Is that Kevin Bacon?
The first image on the screen is a worms-eye view of a man in bed, single shot continuing over a full-length camera roll. The man’s name is John Giorno, a poet by trade. Giorno had been fucking Warhol at this time. Not that this detail has any use beyond your own racy fascination with celebrities and what they get up to in their private lives. We can see up his nostrils, see the triangular mound of philtrum and septum. His belly is pricked with dark hairs, the sheet of internal skeletal muscle expands and deflates with each peaceful breath. Is he really asleep? I hate this movie. I hate all Warhol’s movies. Why do I do this to myself? Because anywhere is better than home? Because there is mandatory silence in the theatre?
John Giorno usually has deep nasolabial folds which suggests he smiles a lot. But when he’s sleeping the mask has slipped. He looks like a miserable goblin, Warhol at the foot of the bed with his 16mm Bolex, taping every second of his lover’s transformation. Sleep is when all our masks seem to slip and we are vulnerable and completely ourselves in catatonic truth. Everything else is a performance. The Ecstasy of Gold by Ennio Morricone is playing in the background. It really does look like Kevin Bacon. There’s a man next to him. It looks like…Bill Murray?
Why do I do this to myself?
BURNING IN HELL
(Extracted from a voice message left by Mildred Bittacker, sent to her nephew Vincent Bittacker’s mobile phone which was discovered in Louisiana)
Vincent, it’s yer auntie here—
Ya want’d to leave the city behind. No one blam’d ya for that—the gurgling ruts, the rain raked asphalt. A boy of your un-whole-some proclivities needs to cast his net far and wide. No one blam’d ya for sneaking off through the back aisles, suitcase underarm, without telling a soul ya were even plannin’ on going any place. But ta run away and go there—I think that’s what upset us most of all. To just consign all reason to the flames like that… I mean, you didn’t seriously think that there was better than here, did you? Did you? Heck, maybe ya did, but now ye know—now ye know there are places worse than here. I hope ye rot in hell for being so stupid Vincent, I hope ya burn in hell.
… I don’t mean that.
But ye have to understand that even from the very beginning, back when you were two people, sharin’ the same body, the same interior space and vital organs as yer mother, you were a selfish ‘un. You sucked her essential fluids dry from the inside like a gosh darned parasite, and she died shortly after ye were born because of it. Ya killed your own mother so that you could go on living. Couldn’t ya have shared instead of taking it all for yourself like a starvin’ mosquito on a boil?
‘The instinct to survive was strong in the boy’ - that’s what yer paw told people. Ye know yourself he was always quick to defend his only son, although most of us saw it as him plain defending the murderer of his be-a-u-tiful wife Eva. Poor Eva. If she could see you now she’d be ashamed.
I know where ye are too. I can sense it. Of course, ye must have remembered the Unger House from yer childhood vacationing out in the Dixie sticks with your grandparents (how they managed to go on lovin’ ye after ya killed their daughter I’ll never know). It was abandoned even then. Ah remember it myself, a wood-fram’d single-story place, rotting panels hanging off, shingles buckl’d all along the roof. If I’m not rightly mistaken Unger House was ta blame for that foul wet-rot that hung in the air and made the townsfolk who lived miles up the road ill with misery. For the life of me I can’t figure out what the allure was and, believe me, I’ve thought bout it plenty—we all have. Yer grandpa told ya, didn’t he, he told ya about the butcher who hid out in that old place and who kidnapp’d kids from the other towns? I knew it. I bet he told ya what the butcher did to ‘em too, right? It doesn’t even bare thinking about. So, you made a B-line to this house of torture and ah don’t know why. I wish I could understand it. Was it to hurt us? To hurt yer family? It must’ve been, mustn’t it? It’s the only explanation.
Now… I’m sure it’s not as malicious or premediated as all that, but you’ve always had a personality like fibreglass boy, you know that don’t ye? Any old ragtag and bobtail with a charismatic character who came along could break and change you instantly. Ya were always hanging about with blasphemes and sodomites. It musta been that university you went to, encouraging you to extoll the virtues of homosexual activity most likely. Maybe ye were just retreating to yer natural environment when you disappeared to Unger House? I know what I’d do with ya. We used ta kill bobby calves on yer grandpa’s farm by snappin’ their necks. A quick jerk, audible snap and instantaneous death. That shoulda been your fate boy.
There’s no doubt in ma mind that you have been influenced by another one oh these dark individuals and, true ta form, you’ve let them brain wash you with heretical thinking. Dropped everything and gone off on yer own without a second’s consideration for anyone but yourself.
Crows are perching on the limbs of crooked, ugly trees every day. Crows know.
I hope you burn in hell Vincent… I mean it.
Auntie Mildred
*
Yes, my name is Vincent Bittacker.
No doubt you will have heard a lot about me, most of which will have almost certainly emerged from unreliable sources. I bet my Auntie Mildred, the religious fanatic and self-declared ‘psychic’, already told you, without any threat of preamble, the cockamamie story of how I intentionally killed my own mother before I was even out of her womb and that I am an intrinsically selfish person—well, she is only half right.
I am probably self-serving, but this is a bi-product of my ambition to become a respected artist and film-maker. I had to get out of New York. Had to get out of that cold-water loft without heat. Rampant inequality has squeezed every last ounce out of the New York’s art scene, the 1% truly have ruined it for everyone else. So I got out. For the sake of my artistic career. I’m a product of the Nietzschean criterion of thought in this respect. My auntie is too hung up on the afterlife to ever comprehend the notion that someone might want to make something of themselves while they’re alive, here, during their limited time on this planet. For people like her, there is no value to life in a world without religious meaning. I feel sorry for her.
My auntie Mildred will also no doubt have told you, in her own remarkable turn of theatre, that Unger House, where I absconded to and had act as my principle location while filming, was home to a fabled dynasty of pure, unadulterated evil—and that it’d always been that way. This is flatly untrue as well. For generations, the house belonged to a family of tallow chandlers and soap boilers before it fell into the state of disrepair you see before you. Granted there was once a child killer who sought shelter in here during an awful storm one night around 20 years ago. But the man (who was called Otto Spengler by the way) was known to have left immediately the next day to avoid being caught by the authorities. Unger House was not his house nor was he drawn to it because he recognised in it the same evil lurking within himself. The house is just a fucking house, and not much of a fucking house either let me tell you—not until we came along.
The first supposedly ‘evil’ person to’ve set foot in this place in 20 years was Brandon Swarthy—and it was yours truly who brought him here. Swarthy is a middle-aged, ruggedly handsome man with wideflung shoulders and a voice like crushed gravel. He is also a prolific serial killer.
I first met him one night in the city when I was on my way back to my apartment from the grocers on 8th avenue. Serendipitous encounters aren’t usually my style.
The time was around midnight. Instead of heading home I ventured up the alleyways and awnings of the city, they were calling me somehow, I can’t explain it. The search for something truly authentic was my primary motivating impulse. And as if by pure kismet, Swarthy was there, knife-deep into some homeless junkie at the time—not very inconspicuous, but I soon learned that he could do whatever he wanted and no one was ever likely to catch him in the act. He was a ghost to most folks, a poltergeist gone long undetected, But I had detected him. I could truly see him.
At first I thought he was just laying into the junkie’s belly with his big balled fists, exacting some kind of old-fashioned retribution on a no good addict who was spoiling the landscape. But upon closer inspection I could see the intermittent twinkling of the blade engage then disengage, each time the metal sheathed in a fresh deposit of blood.
I happened to have my Nikon D90 camera with me at the time, so I started filming him gutting this junkie. For whatever reason he didn’t stop, he didn’t try to kill me or run off.