
Inkless Media www.somethingwicked.co.za
Copyright ©2007 by Something Wicked and Contributing Authors
First published in August, 2007
NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.
Editor: Joe Vaz
Managing Editor: Vianne Venter
Contributing Non-Fiction Writers: Paul Blom, Fayyaad Hendricks, Dominic Lee, Sarah Lotz, Joe Vaz, Vianne Venter
Marginals & Additional Art: Genevieve Terblanche
Design & Layout: Joe Vaz
Cover Art By: Jesca Marisa
Advertising: Joe or Vianne on +27 74 197 6456
FICTION
Subtle Thief by C Hellisen, art by Vianne Venter
Liberation by Kevin Anderson, art by Vincent Sammy
An Eye For An Eye by Sarah Lotz, art by Pierre Smit
Half A Bottle of Rum by Nicole Strickland, art by Joe Doe
Justice by Bernadine Rogers, art by Jesca Marisa
Child by Gareth Robertson, art by Hendrik Gericke
Night Time is a-Coming by Werner Pretorius, art by Pierre Smit
Dreaming My Life Away by Brett Venter, art by Hendrik Gericke
Burnt by Caitlin Leigh, art by Kobus Faber
The Destination by Malcolm Cumming, art by Kobus Faber
FEATURES
Editor's Note
Interview with Ed Neumeier, by Joe Vaz
Writers Cornered by Vianne Venter
Film Fest to Die For by Paul Blom
The Crypt of Literary Treasures by Sarah Lotz
Disturbo 10 by Dominic Lee
Out & About
Games Reviews
Featured Artists' Gallery
THE SUBTLE THIEF by C Hellisen
WRITERS CORNERED: SOUTH AFRICAN FANTASY by Vianne Venter
A FILM FEST TO DIE FOR by Paul Blom
AN EYE FOR AN EYE by Sarah Lotz
HALF A BOTTLE OF RUM by Nicole Strickland
THE CRYPT OF LITERARY TREASURES by Sarah Lotz
NIGHT TIME IS A-COMING by Werner Pretorius
10 MOST DISTURBING MOVIES EVER MADE by Dominic Lee
DREAMING MY LIFE AWAY by Brett Venter
BOOK REVIEW---The Riddler's Gift by Greg Hamerton
BOOK REVIEW---Demon Lord by TC Southwell
BOOK REVIEW---Blaze by Richard Bachman
GAMES REVIEWS by Fayyaad Hendricks
THE DESTINATION by Malcolm Cumming
Now is the winter of our content---and boy do we have tons of it.
For those of you who have just tuned in, or can't count, this is Issue 4---Winter 2007. That's right, we've been around for four full issues and we're still clawing onto the parapet above the long steel spiky things.
For a lot of you, and us, this comes as a huge surprise, indeed I wrote my obituary about four months ago, but hey we're here and we've got a great magazine for you.
Some of the more attentive of you out there may have realised that you paid a full five Rand more for this issue than you did for the last. The reason for this is a cunning plan to see if we can make it to our one-year anniversary. We figured our loyal readers would want in on that project, and could spare the extra fiver so that we could eat---oh and keep Something Wicked alive, of course.
But enough with the doom and gloom and let's get on with the show.
The big news is that next issue is our one-year anniversary and to commemorate the occasion we'll be back at the HorrorFest (check page 15 for details) launching Issue 5. We'll be there selling back-issues and our newly designed T-Shirts, not to mention watching horror movies, of course. We're also gearing up for another short-story competition and this time we're hoping to stretch into sci-fi territory with some scary spaceman stories. Check out page 35 for more info.
If you were out and about these last few months you might have bumped into us at the Cape Town Book Fair or perhaps Icon in Jo'burg, where we spent some time promoting the mag, selling signed copies and T-shirts to the fans. Thank you to all of the writers, artists and fans that popped over to say hi, we loved hanging out with you guys and always appreciate your feedback and kind words.
In the last month I was also fortunate enough to be sent to London on some (paying) work and I used the opportunity to meet up with some International distributors in the hope of getting Something Wicked and all the brilliant South African writers and artists we feature out into the global market.
We'll keep you posted on that one.
Meanwhile, in this issue we have ten brand-new stories---some disturbing, some funny, and some downright blood-curdling, and all of them awesome. We welcome back Brett Venter, Werner Pretorius, and the lovely Sarah Lotz, winner of Issue 1's Short-Story competition. SW first-timers include Gareth Robertson, C Hellisen, Bernadine Rogers, Nicole Strickland, Caitlin Leigh, Malcolm Cumming and our first-ever American writer---Kevin Anderson. Welcome to the asylum, we hope you stick around.
I think you'll agree that the art for Issue 4 is truly gorgeous. Some of your old favourites are back---see Vincent's work on Liberation, and Jesca's fairytale illustrations for Justice. (Incidentally, Jesca is also responsible for the leather-winged babe on our cover.) Our phenomenal regular contributors, Hendrik, Pierre, Joe, and Kobus have stepped up to the plate once again, along with brand new artist Vianne, (though she is not really brand new as she has been drawing bits and bobs for the mag for the last 3 issues, she just hasn't been credited for it).
Our interview for this quarter is with creator and scriptwriter of Robocop and Starship Troopers, Ed Neumeier, who was recently in SA directing Starship Troopers: Marauder.
So sit back and enjoy this jam-packed issue. Great articles, great stories and great art for your late night pleasures.
You ready? Take a deep breath---now jump.
Joe
Got something to say? Go on, byte me: Send your letters, compliments, complaints & suggestions to: editor@somethingwicked.co.za or P.O. Box 15074, Vlaeberg, Cape Town, 8018, South Africa or register on our forum at forum.somethingwicked.co.za/
At first you may not recognise his name, but Ed Neumeier has created two of the greatest Sci-Fi franchises ever, Robocop & Starship Troopers.
He was recently in South Africa shooting his directorial debut, the third instalment in the Starship franchise, Starship Troopers: Marauder, which he also wrote.
Having had a small role in the film I was lucky enough to get on to set and given the opportunity to interview him.
How did you get into scriptwriting?
Well, I've always been interested in writing, my father was a journalist, so writing and reading were pretty important in the house I grew up in, and I always liked movies, but the two didn't come together until I went off to the University of California. I also knew I didn't have enough money to go out and make a film so then I had to be a writer.
What was your first gig?
At first I did some journalism and stuff. I learned how to do paste-up, in the old days before computers. As a result of that I learned a trade, which allowed me to work my way through college.
Then I decided I'd go to UCLA film-school and I took some writing classes. After that I wanted to get a job on a studio so first I got a job as a runner on a TV show called Taxi, and then, almost on the same day, I got another job, on the other side of the Paramount lot, as a story-analyst. I couldn't decide which one to take, so I took them both.
So for about two months, I was riding my bike from job to job. It was very stressful. But that got me into reading a lot of scripts.
As a story-analyst you basically do all the reading for the executives, who don't have the time to read all the scripts that come in, and that was probably how I learned to write scripts, by just reading, I don't know, about 4000 or something like that, most of them bad.
So how did Robocop come about?
Well, I was reading at a studio, which is now Warner Bros, but at that time it was a little more complicated because it was half Columbia and half Warner Bros---but that's another story. But I was working on the Columbia side and right near my office was the dividing line between the Columbia side of the lot and the Warner Bros back-lot and they were making this enormous sci-fi movie, and it was the coolest thing ever.
I'd come into the business at a time when budgets were very low and this movie was the biggest sci-fi movie I had ever seen, it had taken over the whole back-lot, I remember this incredible looking car, a blue car. I started going there at night and working in the Art Department---it was so big that nobody even knew who worked on it, so I would just show up and they put me to work---doing something, making garbage mash and throwing it on the street. Harrison Ford was in it and I finally I asked somebody, "What is this movie about?" And they said, "It's about robots".
It was Blade Runner. They pointed out Sean Young to me and said, "she's a robot" and I immediately thought, "that's not what a robot looks like".
About two nights later I was looking at that blue car and it was there on the street or on a crane and I really had, and it's never happened to me before or since, but I had this image of this character, Robocop---the title just came into my mind. I had been thinking about doing a kind of sci-fi action piece that made fun of business and was sort of half social-satire and half something else and it was there that it sort-of went whoosh and I had this image of this robot guy, who was looking at all the chaos on the street. And the first notion of him was somebody who couldn't understand why human beings acted the way they do.
So that is where it started, and then about a year later as I working on it the notion that he was a guy that got turned into a robot was the next big break-through, and then it was a matter of writing it.
I met a guy named Mike Miner and I told him the story I had worked out and he said, "that's really cool, why don't we write it together. I'll direct it", and I said, "okay".
So we wrote it and gave it to a couple of people we knew and actually two people wanted to buy it immediately. One of them was a guy named Jon Davidson, who was a producer who had worked with Roger Corman, and was best friends with Joe Dante and Jonathan Kaplan and they were a whole group who had come from the NYU film-school that had Scorsese as their professor.
So Davidson read the script and said, "let's do it" it never was so easy as that one.
He had a deal at the time with a company called Orion and right around that time they were making Terminator, which they thought was a stupid movie but it had made money for them and so they thought, "let's make Robocop, which is another stupid movie that might make money". Which was very lucky in a way, because they didn't really take it too seriously because they were making Bounty at the time, which was their 'important' picture, so they weren't really paying much attention. And then they got Paul Verhoeven and he read it and that changed things a little bit. Suddenly it got serious. Meeting Paul was obviously very good for the movie but also we became very good friends on that movie and worked together quite a lot after that, but Robocop turned out to be pretty much exactly how I had written it and even a little better, which is a pretty unusual experience, it also spoiled me.
I got to produce it which meant that I got to be on set and be a part of the decisions, so I had a sense of really having had a hand in the making of the picture from beginning to end, and it turned out better than I could have hoped, in terms of the way it played, and the tone and the jokes.
How important was the collaboration with Verhoeven?
It's everything, I think. You know Paul comes from Europe where the writer was considered an important part of the equation, whereas in the US it seems that isn't always the case you know, they can always just get another writer. In some cases when you see movies that are made in the US that have four writers, that's usually a bad sign, the story is going to get pretty mushy.
Paul always felt writers had a role and that their voice was important in making it thematically strong.
Clarence Boddicker is definitely one of the great on-screen villains, how did he come about?
Kurtwood Smith was one of those great pieces of luck, again, and a great stroke of luck for me, as a writer dealing with actors. I remember sitting in on the casting and when he came in it was just one of those, "oh---that's the guy!"
Kurtwood and I actually sat down and went through all the scenes and I'd say a good third of the lines you remember came out of those collaborations.
"Guns, guns, guns!"
He just showed up on set with that one. "Can you fly, Bobby?" was another one he just did on the set, he's a good guy. I really learned from Kurtwood that a good actor is the best luck a writer has.
Moving onto Starship Troopers, how different is your adaptation from Robert Heinlein's original novel?
When I started writing Starship I hadn't read the book in about 13 years. When you read the book now, you realise, there's not really a story there, there's a character who goes through this experience of joining the military and training and meeting some people and forming certain bonds with people, but it's really more of a kind of treatise, which is cool. I think that the real departure isn't even in the story, although there are departures, it's more that I have taken Heinlein's almost right-wing thing and turned it on it's head. It's funny because if you want to you can think it's that, but I think some of his fans have gotten kind of pissed off about it because they think maybe I'm making fun of them, and I'm not really, I'm just telling it both ways.
Starship was really about saying that war movies are about fascism. War turns us into fascists. And the interesting thing about war is to explore the media's perspective on war. And that was what was fun to me. And the trick is to never tell anybody about it.
One of the things that Paul and I decided to do with Starship was to not tell anybody what we were doing, to really play it down the middle. To play it on the one side as "this is just a big fun, stupid movie" and on the other hand have all these other themes in it, which if you look at it are there in every scene, they're just not underlined or pushed.
How much of the idea to use television broadcasts to tell part of the story in both Robocop and Starship was yours?
That was always part of the script, in fact one of the few arguments Paul and I had on Robocop was that he wasn't certain how to do that and I insisted on shooting it the way it is, which is apparently a very Brechtian thing to do, to break the story completely. The media broadcasts just flash on screen, they're not viewed in the background, or on someone's TV, which is the problem Paul was having with it. He got into it later because we used it again in Starship.
In Starship 3 I've done more of them, I mean your character Elmo Goniff lives entirely on the Fed-Net news broadcasts.
As did your character in Starship 1
Yes, the murderer, that was at the time a little joke about my feelings about being a writer on set, I think.
Kill the writer.
Yes, kill the writer. But also my only little brush with acting. I really kind of thought "this might be kind of fun", but it was a weird feeling to step on the other side of the camera. I felt it was a very warm place. I wonder if it's always a warm place. It felt like every thing was focused on you, and every body wanted you to do well.
How important were the casting choices for Starship?
Well Paul and I knew we were doing, essentially, a movie in terms of Triumph of The Will [The infamous propaganda film of the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg by Leni Riefenstahl] so we started to see a lot of really young handsome kids who were in shows like Beverly Hills 90210, and Melrose Place and I just thought if we were going to make Triumph of the Will we should really cast body-beautiful and Paul instantly saw it that way. Some people thought it was a mistake, and I've thought about it, but I don't know that it was. It was a very interesting decision ultimately to go that way. It's an aesthetic decision; it's like using a certain colour of paint. I think it's pretty brave that Paul did it.
Even down to the colour saturation it seems to be all about shiny-happy-people.
Yeah it's happy people and bright colours belying the weight of it.
Was it difficult doing such an effects heavy film?
Well we had about 500 shots, which if you compare it to Phantom Menace, which had over 2400, it's not that much, but if you compare it to Jurassic Park which only had about 60 actual CG shots it is quite a lot. But I love the little tricks of filmmaking---nothing counts but what the camera is seeing. Every thing can be awful or squalor behind the camera. I think that really defines what we do.
There was a great deal of nervousness about working with so much CG stuff and I had worked with Robert Zemeckis on a script at some point and Paul said, "Why don't you call Zemeckis up and ask him how he did Roger Rabbit. Did he have some sort of laser that they used for actors eyelines or something like that?"
So I called up Robert and asked him, "Paul is really wondering what was the trick" and Robert says, "Well I'll tell you the trick, the trick is you get a stick and you put a piece of tape on it and then, the most important part of the trick is you get a really good actor."
The effects in Starship still stand up today, especially the handheld.
Well Twister was the film to bring in that technology of matching camera moves with the effects and we had that available to us, but it was expensive, so we only had a little bit of that going on there.
What was it like sitting in the director's chair for the first time?
The one thing I felt I didn't do enough was shoot enough takes. Whenever somebody said, "we've got to move on" I should've said "no, one more".
One of the things that I found about directing that was really lucky was that I had a lot of really good people around me. Like the guy who was in charge of special effects, not visual effects but the floor effects, a guy named Anton Voster. Anton was somebody that I learnt very quickly that if you just wanted to spice up an action scene he would just go, "well I'll put an explosion over here and we'll blow something and have it flying through the air," But he was also really good at creating scenes of carnage, if we needed bodies lying around and splatter and blood and arms and legs.
Why shoot in South Africa?
Honestly, for financial reasons. It's cheaper down here; we get more for our dollar.
And what was it like?
I had a tremendous experience; I found the cast and crew so enthusiastic. Hollywood crews are great but they seem jaded. You guys are hungry and incredibly keen to do the best you can.
And Cape Town's not bad either.
Cape Town's great.
Jolene Blalock (who plays Lola Beck in Starship 3) said it reminds her of San Diego.
Cape Town reminds you of wherever you grew up. It reminds me a lot of San Francisco. I like it here.
It's the word that stops the world.
I was thirteen.
Now I'm sitting in a bar in New-Town, watching for the flicker. The Jump.
I was thirteen, and the world was a strange and wonderful place; a cup filled with fascination, overflowing to spill at my feet. Even the Fallen cities with their thorn barriers of barbed wire---even they beckoned. We weren't allowed there, of course, but the wires with their wrappings of flapping red ribbons called us closer.
There were tales told late at night about the Fallen cities, and we listened to them, our eyes big as ostrich eggs. Magic, our parents would whisper. There are things no man should do. Magic destroyed them. Incantations. Time after time. The dead cities stood as reminders of the power of words.
Come see, the ribbons said. Come see.
It was Jerry who followed them first, succumbed to the siren of rags flapping limply in the dry wind. It was always Jerry. Jerry and Mark and me. There go we three. We skipped school, leaving the dry rustle of paper and the bark of teachers for the sound of leaves and the feel of trees.
"We could go in," Jerry had said, pale under the innocence of little-boy freckles, so deceptive. "They'll never know."
"Of course they will." Sad fat Mark with his runny nose, the smears always silvery-fresh on his sleeve. So practical in his subservience and fear of the law, it was amazing that he followed Jerry around. Jerry seemed to tolerate him only for the unconscious amusement he provided. "There's alarms," he said. "If the metros get you, they'll lock you up forever---I've heard that they pull out all your fingernails and toenails, before they feed bits of you to their dogs."
We contemplated this information, comparing this potentiality of pain with the reality of our limited childish experiences. I had ripped my toenail just the week before, and my little toe was a dark purple thing, bereft, and still tender.
"They do not." Even as Jerry spoke we peered about us, wary as cranes, looking for the flash of sun against visor, ears open for the sound of barking. Only the constant shriek of the midday insects could be heard. Jerry shrugged, and beckoned toward the fluttering rags. "Besides, even if there was alarms once, there's nothing now. Right, Gaz?" He turned to me.
I was his lieutenant. I had to nod. "Yeah. It's all just stories."
"Right." Satisfied, Jerry was already propping up the tangled wires with a rusty length of steel. Mark sighed, wiped the back of his pudgy hand across his face, and lumbered toward Jerry. I joined him.
Inside, the city wasn't asleep---but a dead thing, grey and leached. The bones of spires scraped the belly of the sky, but even they held no power. Drifts of rubbish had built up in the narrow alleys to create a thick and stinking compost. We wrinkled our noses.
Trees enclosed in neat little cages of square chain-link stood sentinel along the roads. Most were dead, so unlike the ones outside. A few held limp leaves up to the sky, little curled offerings. One fell at my feet, and I crunched it under my rubber sole.
"D'ya think anything still lives here?" Mark's voice wavered. Something scuttling in a tangle of plastic answered his question.
"Not people, really," said Jerry. "Just rats and things." I glanced down into the dark maw of a blocked alley. Shapes moved, hump-backed, through the rusted girders and blasted corpses of old-fashioned cars. We shifted back, as a unit, toward the open space of the road.
"Big rats," said Mark.
"You scared?" Jerry was all sneer and bluster, and of course, he got Mark every time. Before he could answer, Jerry had already taken off down the street, the heels of his trainers flashing white.
"Shit," I said, and ran after him, leaving Mark behind.
I lost them both that day.
Instead I found the word.
It was seven feet high, written on the side of a redbrick building with crumbling edges. It looked like it had been burnt in to the wall. A beautiful word, with soft shapes that shifted as I looked at them, with hard angles that clacked against one another.
I said it aloud.
And the world stopped.
I found Jerry up ahead, frozen in place, grinning and maniacal, one foot poised to the ground like a dancer.
"Stop kidding around, Jer-boy," I said, and prodded at his shoulder. Immobile, he stood solid, balanced on the bent toe of his dusty trainer, the laces frayed and forlorn, trailing on the ground.
"Come on, Jerry, this isn't funny."
Still he stayed, and my heart beat as tightly against my ribs as a child's hand on a djembe. I backed away from him and looked slowly around, shivering under the summer sun. I could hear nothing in the distance---not the rasping shriek of locusts, or the dim and faraway buzz of New-Town and her open-air spice markets.
All was still, and in the stillness, I ran back to where Mark waited like a pudgy beacon. Sweat and bewilderment were frozen onto his red face. That the two were playing some incomprehensible practical joke on me seemed to be the most logical answer, but even all my shaking couldn't make Mark break from his pose.
Even the hunched rats were silent.
I panicked.
Finally, exhausted, and frightened, I resorted to running between my two friends, trying not to think. They were only a few blocks apart and I travelled up and down, maybe four times, before the stasis released them, and the world went on as it always had. I said nothing to my friends, trapped as I was between my own disbelief that I had just managed to work some kind of ancient and forbidden magic, and the faint glimmer of my pride.
"I want to go home," Mark said.
For once Jerry didn't argue, as if he too felt the after-effects of his peculiar adventure, and we crept back under the wires to the crumpled little town that lived in the shadow of the Fallen city.
We went home, and lived a little longer.
My word, my beautiful shining word, was to come in very handy over the next few years. To stop time, and to be free within it, is such a power. Even now, it swells my chest to think of it. Although I can feel another pain under that one. A sharp ache of fear.
I used it when I needed time---an exam, an avoidance of reality, a morning after the night before. When I said my word, the world would freeze, and I would flit, a creature unfettered. And each time, the frozen moment drew out a little longer, giving me more. King of a silent world, where I, and only I, had the liberty of freedom.
I walked between people stopped in the ignominy of their trivial lives.
I stroked the faces of pretty girls.
Kicks for those I hated. My boss. Jerry---the only moments where I seemed to be free of his shadow. Mark, who invoked in me only a weak pity, soured with years. My friends that were not. I am a pathetic person, I know this. And still I did it.
There were times I went to the sanctuary of the Fallen city, and let her silence wrap around me. I pretended not to search, although my gaze would sweep upward, and linger on the sides of redbrick buildings.
I never found the word again.
"You still go there, Gareth. I know you do," Mark said, while we waited for Jerry at our post-work wine bar. He picked carefully at his Cajun chicken salad, and speared one scrap of flesh with the practised movement of a terminal dieter. Mark stared at me over the silver tines, the meat hovering between us. His brow was furrowed, and I did not deserve his genuine concern.
"No," I said, and rolled the word in my head. "Of course not." Jerry would bring his own penetrating questions to the conversation, I knew, and let the word slide from my head toward my waiting tongue.
I said it before Jerry joined us, and I walked off through the immobile crowd.
It took several years for me to start noticing the other effect---the slowing of time. Between the frozen moments, the seconds were stretched. A change so fractional that at first I thought it was my own imagination.
The flickers changed my mind.
They're---well, truly, I don't know what they are. Sometimes I think the flickers are time's way of trying to right itself, to catch up. Little capsules of speed, they catch me by surprise every time. One moment I'm wading through a honey-slow dribble of minutes, and the next, the world goes sharp and fast around me, and hours have passed in a handful of heartbeats. The world is slowing down, and I'm frightened. I'm frightened that I'll be trapped here when it stops, awake to the horror of being in a living body bound still as a corpse.
The jumps are few. And faster every time.
Right now, they are my window, my flash of hope.
I don't even know how long ago the last jump came. I was still at this dingy bar, I remember that, so perhaps days ago. The girl across from me is talking, her lips meet, like purple slugs, and then pull away from each other in slow-motion disgust. I flick my gaze down---as much as I am able---I'm so tired of her face, of the crust that has been sitting at the corner of her mouth now for what seems like forever.
The counter is no better. I make pictures from the scars in the wood. Use the stains to tell myself stories, but there are no new words.
I can think of only one.
I'm waiting for the jump.
If I can keep myself focused, I can use it. I can say the word. I can end this limbo. Give myself a little freedom. A lifetime of loneliness seems so small a price against this stew of waiting.
I watch where my hand sits halfway to my mouth, my fingers white against the frosted brown glass of my bottle.
And I concentrate.
C Hellisen is a writer of dark fantasy and a devourer of books of any type. Her short story, Taking Back The Castle---(When The World Runs Thin Anthology) is due out from Carnifex. Another short, This Reflection Of Me, will feature in Issue 3 of Jabberwocky magazine.
This is Hellisen's first story for Something Wicked.
The average South African 'bestseller' comes in at just 4000 copies, and with writers typically seeing less than 10% of the returns, it's anything but a get-rich-quick profession. In a market of 'serious' and 'worthy' novels, fantasy fiction is an even tougher nut to crack, but there are some hungry young newcomers who plan to do just that.
Something Wicked cornered three South African fantasy authors on the practical magic of writing.
Greg Hamerton---The Riddler's Gift
Greg Hammerton is the author of Beyond the Invisible and The Fresh Air Site Guide---Paragliding SA. 2007 sees Greg's fantasy debut with the release of the first tale in the Lifesong series, The Riddler's Gift.
How did you become a writer?
Writing didn't even feature on the radar when I was at school. It was never presented as a possible occupation. I did a BCOM to do the whole 'go out and get a sensible job' thing, which helped quite a lot in fact. It hadn't entered my consciousness to become a novelist. I eased into writing with magazine articles on extreme sports and once published, I started enjoying seeing my own words in print. I progressed to Beyond the Invisible, which is half autobiography and half fiction. It was a natural first step to draw on my own experience. Writing is a merciless profession to go into though---that's probably why they didn't tell me about it at school, and writing non-fiction now seems like a school project by comparison to a novel. It's also a lot easier to sell because it's specialist information that people attach a value to. Fiction is a really tough market to crack until you move into the tens of thousands.
So why write?
Writers are prone to wondering why they do it at all---at times it seems pointless. For me it's a very personal joy. I really enjoy being in the mental state one reaches when writing creatively. It's a kind of meditation, and one I find invigorating. It feels that I'm wiser when writing than in the normal everyday world. I can follow my muse and write what I see. That does create havoc with plots though. I often lose long sections that just can't be incorporated.
How do you write?
I do very little editing on the first draft. In fact, I often switch the monitor off. If I'm looking at the words as they come onto the page I can't help but spot mistakes and I start thinking with an editor's mind instead of a writer's. To maintain the magic or vision of that altered world I try to reduce distractions at the time and come back after I've got the flow out, in spite of which I still find the process desperately slow. I wish I could plug into the matrix and just download the thoughts.
My target is 2000 words per day and it's a nine-to-five job. I started off trying to write whenever the inspiration hit, but without the regimen of sitting down and doing it every day it didn't work. I did six drafts on The Riddler's Gift. That's 650 pages times six edits, and every time I re-read it I'm reminded of why fantasy books are often short. I seem to be cursed with long books and long edits.
Is there a market for fantasy in SA?
I'm in the process of finding that out. I've taken a gamble and printed 5000 books in the first run. You have to tell yourself you have a bestseller before you go to print, because it's simply uneconomical to print less than 4000 copies. And then it either works or it doesn't. I'm prepared to invest that in my own writing. The trick now is to do the marketing. It got a good response at Cape Town Book Fair launch earlier this year, and a broad segment of test readers enjoyed it. Now we wait for the trade reviews. I'm aiming for the US market as well, but overseas publishing only works if you're printing 10 000 copies or more.
You published the book yourself?
Yes. The writing itself is only half the job, it's crucial to do the follow up and market the book. It's tough when you're so invested in the product, but it's a necessary evil that you just have to do. It's also a complete shift from the right brain to left. As a creative, I find it impossible to do the two at the same time. There's a lot of cold-calling till it gains momentum. The hidden cost is that I don't write while I'm being the publisher. It's worth it to try everything to find a publisher, but if you do publish yourself, it's important to remember to pay yourself as an author first and make sure you secure your royalty, then try to make money as a publisher. As a writer you do your work writing the book and then walk away. The publisher's job is relentless and ongoing, you're always pushing against the mountain.
So, you're a writer---what do you do for money?
[Laughing and glancing nervously at his peanut-butter sandwich] I worked before the time, saved up and then went on a long financial glide downhill. I tried doing odd jobs and had a sideline in photography to support my writing lifestyle, but I realised writing had to be a full-time.
What's next?
The sequel to The Riddler's Gift is sitting at p550 of about 750, so it's almost there. It's ready and waiting and I'm looking to start writing again soon, perhaps in August or September. I estimate it'll take about a year from that point before it's ready for publication. A lot depends on how the first book performs.
The Riddler's Gift---is it any good?
[Laughs] Of course it is! Seriously though, it's impossible for an author to be objective about their own work. You have a relationship with the work. You're inside the book, as opposed to the reader who approaches it from the outside. If I've passed on that creative world I can undoubtedly say it's fantastic, but it's up to the reader to discover if that comes through.
For more information or to order the book, visit www.eternitypress.co.za. The Riddler's Gift is also available from bookshops nationwide.
TC Southwell---Demon Lord
Tamsin Southwell has penned numerous fantasy novels. The first to be published is Demon Lord, which was released in February of this year with the cover designed by the author herself.
How did you become a writer?
I've always loved writing. It started at school. I was a terrible daydreamer. I started writing my stories down and found that I enjoyed reading them afterwards. I was always attracted to magic and fantasy. When I was ten I read CS Lewis's The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. That got me started and I took it from there. I love discovering amazing worlds and magic.
What do you do for money?
I'm in search engine optimisation---IT essentially. It keeps the wolf from the door. Demon Lord was written in '96 though. At the time I was unemployed and living with my mom. I didn't write to publish. I just went through this six-year phase of writing stories. When I moved to Cape Town in 2003 I found an agent here and she took it to Stephan Phillips, who published a run of 1000 copies.
Is there a market for fantasy in SA?
There is a small market for fantasy here, but it's not as big as overseas. I don't think readers care whether it's local or not, at least I hope it won't make a difference. I think if they like the story they'll buy it. It is a niche market though.
Who are your readers?
Demon Lord will appeal mostly to young adults aged 16 and over. I wouldn't recommend the novel for anyone younger as it contains a fair bit of violence, though what they see on TV is probably worse, but it's definitely not a children's book.
How do you write?
I don't plan the story and don't fundamentally change it once it's written. I start with an idea, an image in my head, and I just keep writing. I follow the story and it almost writes itself. Once it's done I go back and read through from beginning to end, make my changes, add descriptions here and there and make corrections. Then I go through it again to proof read. I generally do three or four drafts.
What's next?
Demon Lord is the first of a series. The second instalment, Dark God, concludes that story, and is due later this year. I'm hoping to give them quite a hard edit and then look for an international publisher. Grey God should be published next year, and then I'll look at releasing the others.
Demon Lord---Is it any good?
I think it is yes. I've read it quite a few times myself in the editing process and I've found that once I pick it up I can't stop reading. It's very difficult to put down, which can be terrible---it keeps me awake nights.
Demon Lord will have its official launch at The Booke Shoppe in Tokai, Cape Town on 22 August 2007, but is already available at Exclusive Books and Wordsworths.
For sample chapters and more, visit www.angelfire.com/realm2/booksonline1/index.htm.
Shaun Michael Jooste---Shadowolf
Shaun Jooste's first book in The Celenic Earth Chronicles, Shadowolf Volume One---The Windfarer, traces Shadowolf's quest to protect those he loves and stop the windfarer, Mercius, as the Masaran Phenomenon approaches, and a shadow falls across the Celenic Earth.
How did you become a writer?
I grew up reading fantasy. I loved the worlds, the characters, and the adventures. I've had the urge to create all that myself my whole life, and the urge eventually becomes a passion. It's both a gift and a curse though, because sometimes you can't sleep till you finish that chapter.
What do you do for money?
I'm a project administrator for the City of Cape Town Local Government.
How do you find the time to write?
Believe me, when you've got the story stuck in your head, haunting you, you find the time.
Is there a market for fantasy in SA?
Yes, I do believe there's a market. That said, when the book was finished I did a lot of research to find publishers. The local publishers liked it but felt there wasn't a market for fantasy here. I eventually found Raider Publishing [New York] in my online research late last year and in November they looked at a sample of three chapters and liked it. It was released in the UK and US in February, and we've spent the past two months marketing it in SA. I'm keen to get the book home and get some feedback from local readers.
How do you write?
I've been working on Shadowolf since 2002. I found it difficult to begin with, so I took a book out of the library on how to get published. I then sat and outlined the plots of the three books in the series before focussing on the first book. I used spider-diagrams and maps of the world of the story to help with the journeys. I edited the book myself, but when the publishers came back to me I realised there were still holes. I work during the day so I grab the chance to write and work on key points whenever I can, but I do have to force myself to go back and edit sometimes. I do most of the editing once I'm finished though. Shadowolf had three drafts including a reformatting and proof-reading.
Shadowolf---is it any good?
That's what I'm hoping readers and critics will tell me. People have told me that they can see the movie in their heads when they're reading it, which is great, although my girlfriend says it sounds gruesome in places. [Laughs]
Shadowolf launched at the Fantasy Feast in August. The novel is also available through www.Kalahari.net and is soon to be distributed to bookstores across the country. Visit www.raiderbookshop.com for a detailed synopsis.
To most people it was just an ordinary Thursday, but to Caroline, today was the day she had decided to rid herself of the spiders living in her brain. She figured that there had to be more than one, even though they only pulled a single spider from that woman in Brazil---living just under the skullcap like a lizard burrowed beneath the floorboards.
It had to be more than one. She'd had so much passion and determination when she was young, it would take several brain-dwelling parasites to eat it all. The spiders lived off of the brain impulses of her desire, feeding on her resolve to do the things she really wanted to do. "That's what the spiders live on," she had said to her roommate exactly one week ago.
Wendy, her roommate, stared back wide-eyed. "Please tell me you're joking, Caroline."
Caroline stepped toward Wendy, excitement and revelation growing in her eyes. "It's all right here." She held out the medical journal, dated July 1986. She pointed to the picture of a woman lying unconscious in an archaic-looking operating room. Then, sliding her finger across to the opposite page, she pointed to a murky photo of something whitish and puffy. The picture was just slightly out of focus like all the images ever captured of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, but a multi-legged form was clearly discernable.
It had the characteristics of a spider but looked more like some underwater creature---a mutated octopus or alien squid. The arachnid's legs were thick like tentacles, splayed out on a chalky porcelain table. Pools of blood spotted the off-white surface and a pair of forceps lay next to the spider, providing a sense of scale. The creature's creamy white frame seemed about four inches in length. Its color reminded Caroline of the salamanders discovered in subterranean caves. Living their whole lives in darkness, the lizards looked pasty---sickly.
Leaning in, Wendy traced a finger along the picture's caption. "It says, it didn't have any eyes."
"It doesn't need them," Caroline said, grinning. "It lives in darkness, just feeling its way around." Just like the salamanders.
Wendy stood up. "This doesn't prove anything, Caroline. You don't have spiders living in your brain for god-sakes." She put a hand on her hip, sighing deeply. "Okay, let's just be logical about this for a second. That woman, whoever the hell she is, lives in Brazil. And hey, I'll admit there is all kinds of freaky shit living in the rainforest that we don't know about yet, but spiders that eat your determination, turning women into breeder cows? Come on! And even if there were, how did they get to Seattle? I don't remember you vacationing in Brazil recently."
Caroline had anticipated this question, the problem having occurred to her as well. She had never been out of the state of Washington in her life, let alone south of the equator. She had always wanted to travel. Paris, Rome, Vienna. But when it came down to it, her resolve to make the arrangements seemed to evaporate. Damn spiders!
Caroline stepped toward Wendy, slapping the book closed. "I didn't need to go to Brazil. The spiders were brought to me."
Wendy raised a brow, taking a half step back. "What?"
"Since the fifties the rainforest has been heavily harvested and exported to us for our consumption."
"What are you talking about?"
"Where do you think most of our medicines come from? Our birth control, Prozac, Valium? Hell even our makeup---moisturizers, eyeliner, lipstick. You name it. It all comes from the rainforest. Women have been inundated with this stuff for more than fifty years."
"Jeez, you've given this a lot of thought."
"Is it so hard to believe that these parasites have been able to hitch a ride in our birth control pills or some hair product packaged by men for women?"
Wendy sighed, looking at the ground. She took a deep breath and held out a hand. "Look, I know you've gone through some rough shit. That asshole husband of yours getting custody of your kids---god, I don't know how I could live with that. But it doesn't mean there is anything wrong with you." Wendy stepped forward, her green eyes empathetic. "You've got your life on track now. In a few months we'll both pass our exams and be certified RNs. It's gonna be---"
"I don't even want to be a nurse," Caroline barked. "That's what I'm talking about. It was my husband's decision. He made all the arrangements. Where we would live. When we would have kids. What kind of career I needed to have. Why I needed to get a second job to pay for his education. Who he would fuck behind my back."
Caroline looked down, picturing the unwanted events in her life. "Through everything, I never even raised an objection. Didn't complain, not even once. My existence is like a movie I'm just watching. I didn't want to have kids. I don't think I even wanted to get married. All my life I've wanted to do things. But I've never done them. Not one."
When Caroline looked up again, she noticed that Wendy had taken several steps back. Her hands were outstretched covering her retreat.
"Don't you see?" Caroline gestured to herself. "It's not just me. Why do you think women are second-class citizens? Why do we accept less pay for the same goddamn job done by a man?" Caroline pointed a finger at Wendy. "Why do you sleep with all those guys when you've said you really didn't want to?"
Wendy dropped her hands, eyes flashing with anger. "There are no spiders living in our brains, goddamn it. I can't believe I'm even having this conversion."
"That's what they want you to believe."
Wendy cocked her head. "The spiders?"
Caroline nodded. "And men."
Wendy quieted for a moment, seeming deep in thought. She blinked her eyes slowly then aimed them at Caroline. "I've put up with all your craziness, but this ... I can't be here right now." She hurried toward the front door of their small high-rise apartment. "Being your friend is just too hard. I'm gonna ... I'm gonna just go."
Caroline rushed to the door catching it in her hand as Wendy opened it. "You don't really want to go. It's the spid---"
"Let go of the fucking door," Wendy screamed.
The harsh words soaked in fear assaulted Caroline like a bucket of cold water. She let go of the door, stepping back.
Wendy moved through the opening, and without looking back said, "Get some help, Caroline. For god-sakes."
The door slammed shut.
That was a week ago and Caroline hadn't seen her since. A day or two later Wendy had come back when Caroline was on duty at the hospital, clearing out all her stuff. She must have been in a hurry because she left a couple of things. Knick-knacks mostly, some dishes. Even the note she had left seemed rushed---echoing her final words to Caroline. Get some help. Please.
Placing the stainless steel bit of the cranial drill on the bathroom counter, Caroline surveyed the instruments of her liberation. Scalpel, forceps, sutures and gauze laid out according to size on a seashell-colored countertop. She hadn't noticed before, but she smiled when she saw the resemblance in color of the countertop to the chalky porcelain table the Brazilian brain spider had been photographed on.
She felt a laugh coming but she swallowed it---the sutures above her hipbone were very tender. She had performed that procedure this morning, removing the few ounces of fat she would need later to plug the hole.
Picking up the forceps, she turned them over in her hand. If she used too much pressure the spider's legs might tear off, allowing the arachnid to scurry to the safety and darkness of her gray matter. Need a soft touch, she reminded herself. Her surgical instructor had said the same thing just moments before she assisted in her first brain surgery. The patient, some man, died on the table, but not before Caroline got an excellent crash course in poking around the human brain.
She set the forceps down next to the Tupperware container holding her body fat. She pinned back her auburn hair, exposing the creamy white patch of scalp she had shaved clean, just an inch above her ear. It glistened with a single bead of sweat in the soft glow of the bathroom light. She tapped the shaved area with her finger.
Numb.
The anesthetic had taken effect. She had only injected herself with a third of the recommended dose of anesthetic for such a procedure---one requiring the patient to remain conscious. A full dose may have made it difficult to stand or keep a clear head. In any case, her partial dose meant there would be some pain. How much?
Putting her hands on the counter she stared at her small frame in the mirror. She wore only underwear and an Alanis Morissette concert T-shirt. She hadn't actually gone to the concert. She'd wanted to. But hadn't.
In the mirror she could see the reflection of the bathroom window. The curtain was open and the Seattle skyline bled through. The Space Needle was as erect as ever, jutting up from a pubic-layer of fog, reminding Caroline who really ran the world.
Feeling the need for privacy, she turned, drawing the curtain. Liberation was often a lone pursuit.
Days before she'd begun picturing how she would do this. Do it quickly. Do it fast. Don't think about it. Thinking might let the spiders know you're coming.
Picking up the scalpel, she brought it up to her numb flesh. She had planned to cut a fast x-shaped incision, but when she pulled the blade back the wound looked more like a bleeding cross.
She dabbed with the gauze until the flow of blood subsided, then she wiped away the sweat on her brow. Using the scalpel she severed membranes, peeling back the folds of flesh exposing her skull. Not much, just enough to ease the bit of the drill against bone.
No pain yet.
Lifting the drill she placed the bit in the small breach of her scalp. When the stainless-steel instrument tapped against her skull she felt the contact all the way down her spine. The sensation reverberated through her limbs, tapering off like outward-moving ripples on a liquid surface.
She breathed fast, forcing the air in and out. Her heart raced. She pressed her lips together hard, gritting her teeth. Liberation.
The sound of the drill coming to life startled her, but not enough to lose focus. She gently pushed the drill inward, keeping her hand steady. Thin bands of smoke laced with ground bone fragments drifted up from the point of contact. Perfectly normal, she told herself. Doing fine.
She could see the drill going deeper and knew she would have to just eyeball the depth, trying to avoid completely piercing the meninges---the three layers of membranes protecting the brain. She was amazed at the lack of pain but as the familiar burning smell filtered up her nostrils, a blinding white light exploded in her skull.
Agony pulsed like a flash bulb from a camera going off in her brain. Each flash caused her knees to buckle a little more. She closed her eyes and screamed, reaching out for the mirror. Open your eyes god damn it, open your eyes. Fight through this.
She pushed away from the reflective glass, opening one eye. Then slowly opening the other. The drill bit wasn't moving. Her finger had come off the button. Damn it. But as she pushed the bit forward she realized nothing solid was pushing back. She had broken through. She backed the drill out and unfolded the surgical mirror rigged to the medicine cabinet.
A clear yellow-tinted liquid was dripping from the hole. Oh, shit. Cerebrospinal fluid. She had broken through the mid-meninge layer---the arachnoid. Images from her textbooks, depicting this area as a cobweb of thread-like strands attaching to the innermost region, filled her mind's eye. It was where she felt the spiders lived. But the appearance of cerebrospinal fluid meant she had gone below this into the subarachnoid layer. Caroline knew there was only a finite measure of the precious fluid protecting her brain. Losing a little was okay, most people did throughout their lifetime. But losing a lot was deadly.
She tilted the hole in her skull up, attempting to use gravity to quell the leak. She picked up a penlight and clicked it on, aiming the light into her exposed brain. The fluid seemed to be stabilizing. Thank god.
Her pain had tapered off dramatically, except in regions completely foreign to where all the action was. The muscles around her ribs ached enormously and pulsing pains seemed to anchor themselves in the bottom of her feet.
She took a deep breath and began to flick the penlight on and off, aiming the flickering beam into the hole in her skull. Up until this point her plan contained elements of familiar territory. As a surgical RN intern she had performed and assisted like procedures on dozens of people. But the next part was sheer guesswork.
She hoped that the brain spiders had evolved like other darkness-dwelling creatures on the planet. From the bottom-dwelling enigmas living in the deepest ocean trenches to the eyeless subterranean salamanders, they all shared a phototropic quality. Although none needed light to survive, they would be drawn to it by some instinctual curiosity. Even the creatures without eyes managed to turn toward the light, like a blind man knowing the exact moment someone else enters the room.
Caroline's thumb began to ache as she continued to flick the light on and off. Rotating the penlight in her hand she tried using her index finger to press the button, but found it difficult to aim the light that way. Then it occurred to Caroline that she could just leave the light on, waving in back and forth over the hole. From the spider's point of view it would look the same. Jeez, she scolded herself. Why don't these things occur to me sooner? Maybe the spiders feed on common sense as well. That would explain a lot.
Minutes went by. She was starting to feel dizzy. I can't do this much longer. "Come out, come out, wherever you are."
Then something moved. Just a tip at first. A white needle-like leg appeared.
Caroline stopped moving the penlight, holding her breath.
The thin pasty leg probed the lit area like a blind person's cane. It moved back and forth. Then suddenly it stopped. Motionless. It was as if it had suddenly become aware it was being watched.
Caroline reached down for the forceps. Her hand fell on empty counter. She wanted to look down at the countertop for the instrument but was afraid to take her eyes off the tiny leg's reflection in the mirror. It was irrational, she knew, but she felt that if she looked away it would disappear. So she locked her gaze on the arachnid, willing it to stay.
Her hand felt along the counter as the spider's leg began feeling the jagged edges of freshly cut bone. Another joined the lone leg. Then another.
Caroline's fingers grazed the forceps's handle. Thank god. She raised it up opening the needle-nose end. She eased the instrument forward, watching her movements in the surgical mirror.
Three legs, almost a half-inch long, protruded from her skull. Each one seemed determined to explore a different area of her scalp.
The open forceps hovered over the thickest point of two legs, and Caroline swallowed hard. She felt six years old again, playing that silly game, Operation. The similarities were uncanny. Use your tweezers to remove the ghost white plastic bones without touching the metal edge. A steady hand wins the game, but graze the edge and you lose your turn.
Caroline held her breath knowing that more was at stake than losing her turn. If the spider broke free or she just managed to tear its legs off, she would lose her only chance to get back her will.
Clamping the forceps around the spidery appendages with a touch so soft and accurate she could have picked up a grain of white rice with a pair of chopsticks, she began to pull.
The spider didn't come at first. Several other legs appeared and it looked as if they were searching for a way to anchor themselves. Then it began to slide. It slid quickly through the hole like a newborn calf descending toward the ground. Caroline flicked it into the sink, unclamping the forceps. She tried glancing down at it, but there was new movement in the mirror.
A second spider had found its way to the hole, its legs probing at the light. How many, she wondered. How many?
Less than ten minutes later she had her answer. There were three in all. The third seemed to almost climb through the hole of its own volition, needing very little encouragement from the forceps. Maybe the spiders sought a kind of liberation of their own.
She repaired the meninges and packed the hole in her skull with her body fat. This should have been surprisingly painful, but it wasn't. She knew that the body's pain receptors could turn themselves off in extreme conditions, but she didn't think that's what it was. As she began to suture her scalp, she glanced at her frame in the mirror. She remembered it being so small before, dwarfed in the ceiling-to-countertop glass. But now it looked as if the mirror could barely contain her frame. She was different. She felt different.
Liberated.
The last suture in, she clipped the excess stitching away. As she laid the scissors down, exhaustion hit her. She bent forward, bracing herself on the counter. Her head hung over the sink, hair dangling above the porcelain. She took slow, deep breaths and had her first opportunity to examine the parasites. Her eyes blinked a few times, not immediately registering what was wrong.
Gone.
The sink was empty.
She smiled as she pictured the watery arachnids scurrying down the drain, traversing the miles of plumbing under the city. Liberation, my friends. Liberation.
The air in the bathroom smelled foul so she staggered to the window. She wanted to draw the curtain open but she ended up pulling it off the rod. Pressing her forehead to the glass, she looked down at the women scurrying on the streets that spun out like a web from downtown. So many women, she told herself. There are more of us than there are men. She smiled as she saw women scurrying to jobs they didn't want, raising families they didn't want, hell even wearing shoes they didn't want.
There're so many of us. So many women needing liberation. I'm gonna' need a lot more drill bits.
There was a tapping at the bathroom door. "Hey Caroline, it's me Wendy. I know I should have called before coming over like this."
Caroline pushed away from the window.
"Especially after how I left and all. I'm sorry about that. Anyway I just wanted to come by and pick up my pots and pans. I met this guy and he wants me to cook my famous Italian Casserole for him tonight. I know, I know I hate to cook, but I really like this guy."
Caroline moved over to the counter.
"Are you in there?" Wendy tapped on the door again.
Caroline grinned at her tall and free image in the mirror. She picked up the drill. Time to start the liberation.
Kevin Anderson has worked as a marketing professional for fifteen years, writing award-winning copy for TV and radio. His fiction has appeared in speculative anthologies and publications such as Dark Wisdom #10, Surreal Magazine, Deathgrip: Exit Laughing (Hellbound Press) and Darkness Rising 2005 (Prime Books). He lives and writes in Menifee California, with his wife Hope, daughter Avalon and new son Ronin.
This is Kevin's first story for Something Wicked.
The South African HORRORFEST Bleeds Onto The Screen
(26---31 October 2007)
Shadow Realm inc. & Flamedrop Production's brings you the third annual S.A. HORROR FESTACULAR and once again they are set to thrill local audiences with a range of scary, thrilling and grisly cinematic morsels. Even more so than before, the HORRORFEST will take the viewer on a world tour of chills.
From older classics and favourites like White Zombie (with Bela Lugosi), and Dario Argento's Tenebrae aka Unsane (Italy), to new independent productions you're unlikely to see anywhere else---including Witches Hammer (UK), Tales From Beyond (USA), Zibahkhana: Hell's Ground (the first gore movie from Pakistan!) and several more unconfirmed at the time of going to press (for the full line-up and details, head down to www.HORRORFEST.info and www.MySpace.com/SAhorrorfest ).
This year also sees the screening of exciting horror-related documentaries.
The American made Horror Business takes the viewer through the grueling, exciting, funny and tragic process of making horror movies, while Hanging Shadows from Italy takes a look at the history of that country's lead players in the genre, past and present.
From Switzerland comes the documentary HR Giger's Sanctuary, looking at the renowned biomechanics artist (who won an Oscar for his original design for Ridley Scott's Alien).
Another pending title at time of press is the epic real-life horror/factual war drama/documentary by Russian Andrey Iskanov, dealing with WWII atrocities of Unit 731 (Japan's brutal secret chemical warfare research programme), and the subsequent Khabarosk war crimes trials. The main dilemma with this shocker is the practicality of screening this intense 4-hour movie! See website for details.
The HORRORFEST short-film competition is again in full swing with both foreign and local entries compiled into one hell of a collection, Shadow Realm Vol. III, veering from the beaten path into darker territory.
One locally produced short will walk off with a R10 000---R15 000 prize from Visual Impact and the HDhub, which consists of a five-day High Definition camera & lighting rental package, as well as a 5-day session with a Macbook to cut your new project on Final Cut Pro.
As is customary, the festival will close off with a live, original soundtrack performance to the screening of a silent classic---this year, the incredible Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari. The musical collaboration will include among others, members of Terminatryx and Lark.
There will be audience prizes and give-aways, a PlayStation presence, Halloween dress-up (sponsored by Party Tricks), horror clothing and DVDs on sale, a few surprises, and of course, Something Wicked will be there.
Pre-events are also being planned.
The S.A. HORRORFEST: 26---31 October 2007 at The Labia Theatre, Orange Street, Gardens, Cape Town, South Africa.
www.HORRORFEST.info www.MySpace.com/SAhorrorfest
By lunchtime we still haven't decided what to do. We're sitting round the kitchen table, watching our coffee get colder.
"I still think we should phone the cops," I say.
Kevin peers up at me blearily. He looks worse than usual. His face is sweaty and haggard; his eyes red-rimmed. The fag he's trying to smoke jitters in his trembling fingers. Since we made our grisly discovery this morning, he's puffed his way through at least half a pack of Camels.
"Did you hear me, Kev?"
"Sam, you can't be fucking serious," he groans. "You know we can't call the cops."
"Yeah, but Kev---"
"I can just see you now," he purses his lips, which he always does when he's imitating me. "Hello officer," he says in a falsetto voice, "Thanks for coming so soon, officer. Oh, and by the way, please ignore the six hundred dope plants in the spare room while you're here." He stubs his cigarette out on the top of a discarded can of Black Label.
"Okay, okay. Very funny." I pause for a second. I lick my finger and smear one of his tubes of dropped ash into an 'X'. "But where could it have come from, Kev? How could it have got here?"
"God knows." He burps, and I'm hit with a sickening blast of last night's alcohol.
"Nice, Kev," I snap.
"Sorry, man."
"Look. There're only two of us in the flat," I say, picking up his Zippo and flicking it into action. "One of us must've put it there. How could it have got there otherwise?"
"Well don't look at me," he says. "I was completely wasted last night. Hey ... maybe the flat's haunted, Sam. That would be cool, eh?"
"Kev, this is serious. I swear to God, sometimes I can't believe we're actually related."
He flicks his fingers in front of his face like a talk show diva and says, "Whatever!"
I look at him in disbelief. I can't believe he's not freaked out by this.
"Maybe you should go back in there and make sure it's real," I say abruptly.
"You what? My head's killing me!"
"Think about it, Kev. Maybe it was a whatdoyoucallit---a hallucination!"
"Why should I go?" he says. "Why not you?"
"You're the eldest, that's why. And you're a boy." Albeit a thirty-year-old boy who reeks of whiskey sweat and stale dope.
"Sexist!"
"Yeah, well---It was you that got us mixed up with VeeJay and the dope, so it's your fault we can't call the cops."
I sit back. Kevin snatches his lighter back and automatically fires up another cigarette.
"Jislaik, Sam. Do I have to?" he whines. "I'm not well."
"Go and check, Kev. Don't be such a pussy." I fold my arms across my chest and give him one of my stares.
He sighs, chucks his fag in the full coffee cup and hauls himself to his feet.
I follow him at a safe distance. As we head down the corridor towards the tiny bathroom there's a click as the timer switches on and the hydroponics flare into action. The too-bright light seeps from under the spare room door, and the corridor is bathed in an eerie, unnatural glow. In contrast, the entrance to the bathroom seems densely dark and creepy, and I'm glad it's not me who's going in there. I shudder. This doesn't seem to bother Kevin, though. He switches on the light and staggers into the tiny toilet cubicle. Leaning a grubby hand on the wall, he peers into the toilet bowl.
"Man, that is seriously gross," he says.
"Well?" I say, still keeping my distance. "Is it still there?"
"'Course it fucking is."
"And is it what I think it is?"
"Yes, Sam," he sighs dramatically. "It's an eye all right."
"Is it real, though? I mean---could it be one of those trick ones or something?"
He picks up the toilet brush and gingerly pokes it into the toilet bowl.
"Looks real to me," he says.
"But it could be like from an animal or something, couldn't it?"
"Not really, Sam, no."
"Why's that then?"
He turns to face me, still holding the dripping toilet brush.
"Because it's blue," he says.
We head back to the safety of the kitchen table. I sit back down, but I can't help squirming and fidgeting in my chair. Thank God I couldn't stomach the coffee---that would only have made matters worse. I watch as Kevin adds to the hazy fog of fag smoke that's curling and dancing above our heads.
"Oh for fuck sakes!" he groans, breaking the silence. "This is a nightmare!"
"I know, Kev. It's totally freaky---it's making me sick just thinking about it."
"It's not that." He holds up his crumpled cigarette packet and waves it mournfully. "I've only got one fag left."
"I can't believe you!" I clench my teeth to stop myself screaming in frustration. I think about storming out of the kitchen, but I don't want to be on my own. I stand up and switch on the kettle for something to do. "How can you not take this seriously?"
"Okay, okay. Chill out." He lights his last cigarette with the butt of the one he's just smoked. "Hey, Sis," he says brightly. "Maybe one of us is a serial killer who has blackouts or something." This is Kevin's attempt at a constructive suggestion.
I pretend to consider this. "Sure, Kev," I say, sarcastically. "But where the fuck's the rest of the body?"
"Ah. Good point---Gaaah. I feel like shite." He drops his head on his arms, and I quickly snatch his cigarette out of his hand before he singes his hair. "What the hell did I get up to last night, anyway?"
"Don't ask me."
He sits up again. "Hey---maybe I brought it in with me when I got back in last night without knowing it. On my shoe or something."
"Are you off your head? On your shoe?"
"I was just saying---"
"The bloody thing's---intact! How the hell could you have brought it in on your shoe?"
He shrugs, takes a sip of coffee and spits it straight back into the mug in disgust. "Gaaah. Cold. Gimme my fag back." He snatches it out of my hand.
"And even if, for argument's sake, you did bring it in on your shoe, how the hell did it get in the toilet? Answer me that, Mr CSI. I know you're a weirdo freak but I'm pretty sure you'd remember dropping a body part in the sodding lavatory."
"Well, I was very wasted---"
"And it's hardly like stepping in dog shit is it? Where the hell were you last night that you could accidentally step on an eye? The fucking morgue? The opticians? What?"
"Chill out, Sis. Jeez. It's no biggy."
"No biggy? Kevin, there's a human eye in our toilet. Plus---I need to pee."
"So just go in the bath or the sink like I did."
"That's disgusting!"
He shrugs. "Go outside, then."
"Duh, hello? I'm a girl, remember. We can't just ... go anywhere. And besides---"
"So you want me to flush it away?"
"We can't do that! It could belong to someone!"
"Yeah, I can just see the advertisements now: Reward---has anyone seen my eye? Last seen on my fucking face!" He starts giggling. "I'll keep my eyes peeled for people wearing eye patches shall I?"
"Kevin!"
"So what you want me to do, Sam? Fetch a fucking body bag?" he's beside himself now, rolling around on his chair and clutching his stomach. He inhales a lungful of smoke that goes down the wrong way and I wait for his phlegmy laughing-coughing fit to subside.
"Kevin! This is an emergency! I really really need to go to the toilet and I can't with it---staring up at me." I glare at him until he stops giggling.
"Christ! All right, all right. Leave it to me."
He gets up, pulls open the kitchen drawer and takes out the spaghetti server. He fishes amongst the graveyard of wine bottles under the sink and emerges with an empty jumbo-sized Nescafe jar.
"I may be some time." He winks at me. "Keep an eye out for me."
"Oh, fuck off, Kevin." I say.
The doorbell rings sharply, making me jump: three long rings followed by two short ones. It's VeeJay's special 'code'. I ignore it. The last thing I need right now is the dealer's sleazy presence. The doorbell 'brings' again, but this time the last ring is insistently held down for a few seconds.
"Let him in, will you, Sam?" Kevin's muffled voice yells from the bathroom. "He said he'd be here about now to check up on the merchandise."
"What, again, Kev? Shouldn't I just tell him to come back later when we've sorted out our little problem?"
"Nah. Veej is all right. He might be able to help."
With a sigh I let VeeJay in, deliberately manoeuvring my body away from him so that I don't have to endure one of his slobbery hellos.
"All right, Samantha?" he says, sing-songing my name and looking me up and down. "Looking good. How's the merchandise? Growing nicely, is it?"
"Same as yesterday, VeeJay," I snap. I usher him into the kitchen
"Cool, cool. Where's that gorgeous brother of yours, then?"
Kevin enters, holding the jar as far from his body as he can. My stomach flips. The eye is horribly coated with melted coffee granules and to make matters worse, the brown liquid at the base of the jar looks exactly like watery blood. Now that I can see it up close it's perfectly obvious that it's a real eye. It would be impossible to fake its tiny red veins and the vermicelli tendrils that droop off its slippery whitish bits.
VeeJay stares at it. He looks from me to Kevin. I wait for him to react.
"Jislaik, Kev," he says, finally. "That's quite an eyeful you got there."
I can't believe what I'm hearing. I know VeeJay's a hard-hearted bastard, but he doesn't look even slightly surprised or shocked. I mean, it's not as if a disembodied eye in a dusty coffee jar is an everyday sight, is it? Even Kevin looks taken aback at VeeJay's reaction.
"Glad to see you found it, though," VeeJay says.
There's a short, painful pause while Kevin and I take this in.
"Hang on---you did this?" I'm gobsmacked. "It was you?"
"Ja. Little message: 'I is watching you.' Just in case you guys decided to crook me. Snuck it in last night when I dropped Kev off."
He throws his head back and roars with laughter, gold teeth flashing.
"You bastard!" I yell. "Have you any idea what we've been through?"
"Man, where's your sense of tumour?" VeeJay says through his almost hysterical giggling.
"Christ, Veej. Where'd you get it?" Kevin asks. There's a note of admiration in his voice. Typical.
"Little sideline I got." VeeJay winks and taps the side of his nose.
"Cool joke, bru," Kevin says. "Nice one. You totally freaked my sister out!"
I'm so furious I no longer care about my aching bladder. All I can think about is wiping that self-satisfied grin off VeeJay's smug face. I go to grab the jar out of Kevin's hands.
"Well, you can stick it up your---" I yell, but the jar's slick and slimy with toilet water and I miss my grip. It crashes heavily to the floor. The eye miraculously bounces clear of the ragged shards of glass and rolls sickeningly across the kitchen linoleum, leaving a brown trail in its wake.
"Gross out!" Kevin says. He backs off with his hands up. "There's no way I'm cleaning that up!"
"Whoops!" VeeJay shrugs. "Well, ladies, it's been delightful, but I'd better pop in and check up on the merchandise. Be seeing you." He winks at me and breaks into his horrible high-pitched giggle again.
He heads out to the corridor, but he's too busy laughing to look where he's going. The eye splatters with a stomach-turning 'pop' as he steps on it, skids on the floor and falls back awkwardly. There's a harsh unnatural cracking sound as the back of his neck is impaled on jagged pieces of jar. His body break-dances crazily for a few seconds, then is still. Hardly able to believe what I'm seeing, I watch, paralyzed, as a pool of thick brown liquid spreads lazily around his body, lapping over the squished pieces of eye and triangles of broken glass.
I drop to my knees and desperately fight to swallow the bubble of bile that's shot into my throat. My heart's jabbering in my chest, and the whole ghastly picture seems to swim before my eyes. Is this how it feels when you go into shock?
Gasping for air I shakily stand up and look over at my brother. Doing his best to avoid the bloody pool, Kevin is reaching down towards VeeJay's body. At first I think he's going to try and give him the kiss of life, but of course he's not. He's busy grabbing a packet of Marlboros from the dealer's front pocket. I watch in horrified disbelief as he lights up.
As he takes the first drag, he looks straight at me. Suddenly I know what's coming next. I will him not to say it, but I know he won't be able to resist.
"An eye for an eye?" he says. "Get it? Cool or what?"
Sometimes I really hate my brother.
Sarah Lotz is currently working as a scriptwriter on the kids' sci-fi animated series, URBO: The Adventures of Pax Afrika, and with Lauren Beukes and Sam Wilson has developed an adult cartoon about her favourite subject (the living dead) which is currently in pre-production for the international market.
When she's not writing jokes about dead people, she writes gruesome stories that similarly sick-minded people seem to like.
She won the Something Wicked 'classic monsters' competition, and her story about a dead grandmother (what else?) won the SAFM short story competition.
She has an MA in Creative Writing from UCT, and her first novel has just been accepted by Penguin South Africa for publication.
This is Sarah's second story for Something Wicked.
Her first story, Perfect Man, was published in Issue 1---Spring 2006
Its soothing sharpness caresses her skin in an insufferable comfort. Thin trails on her thigh create alleyways to nowhere, to the bare bathroom floor. The mirror in her hand doesn't lie; it uncovers the smudgy mascara to reveal the dark circles that gawk back at her. She shifts. The pain subsides as the crimson trails infuse the tub. The steamy water makes her woozy and she's trembling. She opens her hand to release the shiny glass. Blood follows; a large laceration in her palm satisfies her with a sting as she drops her hand.
The strong smell of alcohol hovers in the room. His arm dangles lifelessly from the side of the bed where dry blood has wrapped his slim fingers. A grin of sheer satisfaction creeps along his face. The smashed photo frame gives substance to his broken fist and illustrates his implicit anger. Eyes closed, his head rests still on the whiskey-soaked pillow and he tries to remember why, before he passes out. Into a rage-enforced sleep he descends as the people in the downstairs blues-bar cheer the night away.
He would rather be with her right now to replace his loneliness. Not that there's any distinction between his preferences. They bring out the worst in each other. She killed him. The very day it started was the very day he died.
She doesn't feel tempted by the champagne glass she just dropped. The bathroom mirror was replaced months ago and nearly all her wounds have healed. She hasn't felt a must to bleed since the departure. Never has she been more free, more alive, more---happy. A sudden thought of uncertainty creates a crack in her optimism. What is happiness? Am I happy? Her fingers wrap tighter around the bottleneck and release as she reassures herself of her good fortune. Her fingers reach for another glass in an attempt of champagne for breakfast; this time with success. She slowly lifts the bottle and pours with an unsteady hand. The dark grey-blue chambers that encircled her eyes are gone. She still craves, almost every day, but she handles it well.
Rehab did him good. Like the lucky few he is able to enjoy a glass of his favourite wine without falling back into old habits. He draws closer the empty sheet of white, just to add a few grey lines---he never did have an eye for colour. He's in real estate now, but he still loves to draw. It's his way of escaping his nine-to-five suck-my-balls job; his 'Copperfield' he calls it. His work has become more radiant though, but he likes it better, says it's more congenial and proper. She would've taken one look at it and said "who are you, what have you done to my Jake?!" but it doesn't matter, he's happy like this. He lays the pencil down to take a critical look at his new creation. Children gaze back at him, joyful and round faced, with strange empty eyes. He feels sick to his stomach when realisation kicks in as to the reason he hasn't kept any of the drawings he made after that day.
He grabs his coat and heads out. The gloomy sky is packed with clouds, desperate to break free from the heavens to release some grimly apprehended truths. He doesn't look up. He is afraid of the clouds that used to occupy their imaginative eyes. Two, four, six ... he counts the pavement blocks as he walks---it keeps his mind busy---eight, ten, twelve-. in his minds eye, he creates a composition, something he really wants to sketch, an animated girl with dark hair and shadowy eyes presenting an expression of mystery, crouching in a corner and hugging her legs; alone, with no one to help her out of her desolation. Abruptly he stops on block forty-four---heaven only knows why he does---and he lifts his head to the side to fix his eyes on the coffee shop window.
In a faraway corner of the café with The World According To Garp in one hand and an espresso in the other, she gently balances a cigarette between two fingers. The ash on the tip of the nicotine killer grows and she doesn't take a drag or nip it off. She doesn't smoke, just always loved the image of it. He stalls, for in that moment he feels as if he has never seen anything more beautiful or attractive. Her attention is pulled towards the reflecting window, for no apparent reason. A barely visible but recognizable silhouette catches her eye. Her heart stops momentarily and she has to force herself to start breathing again. The sky falls. Her sudden movement has caught him off guard but he can't seem to move away from her flawless image as she sits in perfect posture, exactly like the girl he fell in love with. With a trembling hand, he reaches for the café window; he reaches for her. Her breathing is heavy with anticipation. She feels like losing it all over again. The simple proposal of his face makes adrenalin race through her veins. Every bit of sense in her confused mind suggests that she run away, to save herself from hateful love and mutilation.But she stays. His fingertips graze against the window; then form a fist. The composition of absolute beauty in his mind is the same thing he despises, the same thing he desires, the thing he can't live with and can't live without.
He turns and dashes. The awful truth the sky was keeping is let loose. Disbelief in his inner controversy is opening doors he shut for good some time ago. Wards and wards of hallways and doors that made him sacrifice the very truth he's running from.
Her body is shaking, she can barely move. She leaves money for the bill on the table and makes herself disappear. When she reaches the apartment she has calmed. She swings the door open and slams it shut in relief. A tear emerges from her eye. No, I'm not going to cry she tells herself. No way am I going to cry over him.
Without faltering he runs half a mile back to the blues bar before, finally, coming to an abrupt stop in the doorway. He can't procrastinate any longer. She clearly is much stronger than he is. When he walks out, revolted by this weakness that he can't control, the sudden rush of fresh air makes him unsteady. Chance is not something to be left to its own compassion; that would be ignorant he decides.
Soaking, he climbs the stairs. It's been months and the elevator's still not fixed. His clothes cling to his body, exposing the naked truth of his being. A trail of damp conceded footprints follows him to her door where he stands for moments like forever. He means to knock but doesn't, he hesitates. She'll notice if he's slightly intoxicated. She knows him. The sound of breaking glass pierces through him and for a brief minute he becomes frightened, not of the situation, but for her. He forgets about knocking and heads inside, urgent to reach her. There she sits, once more, on the side of the tub, with a stocking still tied around her upper arm and blood dripping from her wrist. A syringe peers at him from the dustbin. He grabs her shoulder and pulls her up, close to him.
There are few things in life that these two do understand, but one of them is the fact that they can live neither with, nor without each other. Their compulsions cover the flaws in their relationship and make it durable, yet it's these same compulsions that kill their souls. Old habits die hard. She has become his drinks and he her needles and cuts. It's murder. Starting again would be cold-blooded murder. These things make them happy. How could love be such a dreadful sin?
"I hate you," he murmurs near her ear. Her fingers clutch his shoulders tighter, she is disgusted by the fact that she enjoys him so close to her. "Why do you do this? What did I do?" Silently, she holds him tighter. A tear runs down her cheek. You're weak she tells herself, still fighting her intuition. Her eyes meet those of a dark, shadowy girl in the picture on the wall, where the mirror used to be. She never could get rid of it. She can smell the whiskey in his breath. He does care.
There they stand; thin crimson trails create alleyways to nowhere, to the bare bathroom floor.
Nicole has always enjoyed writing but only started it seriously a little over a year ago. She is an average Jane from an ordinary town who grew up in an ordinary home, though she likes to consider herself not quite ordinary.
When not with her friends, Nicole writes, sketches and is a head-banger.
This is Nicole's first story for Something Wicked.
Justice was a pig.
Shelly fed him well. He was big and strong and loved to pull the washing off the line. Shelly's mother hated Justice. She only allowed the little girl to keep him because she would scream if Justice wasn't around.
Shelly loved Justice. Justice ate everything she gave him. She would drag him into the garden and hold out handfuls of daffodils. And he would eat. She would stuff the heather into his jaws. And he would eat. She would drag him back into the house and feed him the things under the sink. And he would open his mouth and chomp up the dishcloths and the washing powder.
Justice ate everything.
Shelly loved taking Justice into the woods surrounding her house. Shelly liked playing with the little mice and squirrels.
Shelly had found the key in her father's desk drawer. She had slipped it into her little pocket and used it when Justice became insatiable. Her father never used the door under the stairs any more.
Not after The Accident. He couldn't get down the stairs. Now Mama went down for him, when the supplies ran low.
Justice was getting bigger. His hide was becoming thicker and softer. Shelly loved to put her head to the hair, and bury her face in the thick pelt. It smelled of roses, she would tell her mother as she did the washing up. Shelly's mother was unimpressed, and this saddened the little girl. All she wanted was for her mother to love Justice like she did. She wanted her to pat the pig and take him on walks. But her mother was a little frightened by the pig's beady eyes staring at her.
They had a hunger in them.
Shelly heard her mother leave the house, and she was alone with the new babysitter. Kimberly was new to the area, and did not see the holes in the garden as she would ring the doorbell. This secluded ranch was the perfect place to spend a few hours looking after a small girl. She would spend the evening watching the television and eating meatloaf from the fridge. The girl was usually no trouble. It was just ... there was something strange about that pig.
Shelly dragged Justice by his red collar and used the key to open the door under the stairs. The old wooden stairs had been rotten for many years, but still managed to hold the weight of the little girl and her pig.
Shelly didn't mind the smell down here. It smelled earthy. It reminded her of long afternoons digging holes in the back garden, burying the little animals she found in the woods. Justice followed the little girl down the staircase, his cloven hooves clip-clopping along after the pinafored body. Shelly stopped for a minute, surveying the scene her father had created. Justice had been ravenous last week. There was hardly any left.
The door banged shut behind them.
Later, Kimberly started to call for the girl. She had been distracted by the old woman's bedside table and the things in it, and had forgotten the time.
Kimberly called for the little blonde thing for half an hour. She was becoming distressed, and was about to call for the police when she saw the girl and her pig come out from under the stairs.
Kimberly was livid. Her entire reputation was on the line thanks to a smelly child and her grunting pig. She hated that pig. It used to follow her around the house, nipping at her ankles. Justice had drawn blood once, and the bite had still not healed. The pig seemed to like the taste of her flesh.
Kimberly marched closer to Shelly, wanting to strangle the girl. Then she saw the little girl's necklace. Then she saw the teeth and bone. Then she saw what the dirt on Shelly's pinafore was really made of. Shelly smiled sweetly at the babysitter, and the pig lunged towards her. Shelly tried to stop Justice, but he was just too strong now. The pig head-butted the babysitter, knocking her off balance. Kimberly started to scream.
The pig leaned over her. He opened his mouth, nipping at her arms.
Shelly yelled at the pig, commanding him to come by, to stop hurting the woman. It wasn't right, she wasn't Down Stairs.
Kimberly kicked the stained pig away from her, and ran into the only hiding place she could find. She scrambled through the small wooden door, and came down heavily on the stairs. The years of wet rot finally gave way under her, and she fell to the soft earth in the basement.
She came to rest below the rotten wood, in amongst something soft and wet. Kimberly reached up, and daubed at her temple. Her hand came away soaked in blood.
She focused on the ground around her. The smell of blood and urine was overpowering, blood from the cut seeped into her eyes.
And she started to scream. She saw she had landed in the supplies for the family. Three young girls, their faces half eaten and twisted in terror, dangling on meat hooks a few feet away from her. Maggots crawled out of the space where another blue eye should have been. Their supple bodies had been salted and smoked.
Kimberly turned her head away, trying to sit up. The holed-out face of the man she had landed on greeted her. There were bite marks in his neck and on his arms. He was naked, save for his shoes and a small scrap of a tee shirt. The acrid smell became overpowering, and Kimberly felt herself drifting out of consciousness. She tried to reach up above her, grabbing onto a shelf. The twisted bodies of mice and squirrels nailed to the wall stared down at her with lifeless eyes.
She retched and threw up white liquid, her hair dripping with entrails and blood.
The light changed. A second person had joined the girl and the pig.
It was Shelly's Mama. Kimberly screamed for her to help her up, that she would forget all about this and never tell a soul, but please, could she help her out of here.
Shelly's mother looked down at the girl and the pig. She wiped a stray smudge of blood from the girl's mouth.
Kimberly screamed for help again, but the girl and her mother only smiled.
Justice jumped down into the basement, landing on all four feet. The pig squealed, grunting and snorting as it made its way towards her. Kimberly kicked and screamed, but it aided nothing.
Justice was strong now.
Justice was ravenous.
And Justice ate everything.
Bernadine Rogers fills her time vomiting up words onto her recently-purchased laptop. Sometimes, she eats. Sometimes, she loves her fiancé. Sometimes, she races her car along the quiet Jo'burg suburban roads.
All she ever wanted to be was a truck driver. But instead she has a muse that shits on her head at inconvenient times. And there is nothing she can do about it. Bernadine loves her family, and she loves her imaginary pets and friends, but there will always be a passion for dressing up and pretending to be something she isn't.
This is Bernadine's first story for Something Wicked
University of Cape Town's (UCT) best-kept secret is a bibliophile's dream.
Situated in the bowels of the layered UCT library is a horror fanatic and sci-fi enthusiast's dream. In the Rare Books section you'll find Stephen King, Terry Prachett and Philip K Dick comfortably ensconced next to reams of Tolkien criticism, stacks of feminist sci-fi and other texts in the categories of the weird, the wonderful and the rare. But few people, even students of the university, seem to know of its existence, let alone enjoy the privilege of exploring its shelves.
As I reach what appears to be the lowest level of the library itself, I'm met by the custodian of the Rare Books and Special Collections, the irrepressible Tanya Barben. A tiny firecracker of a woman, Tanya exudes a passion for the books she tirelessly collects from every pore, and is as fascinating as the unique tomes she oversees. She buzzes me in through a Gringott's-style security gate, and we head even lower to where the real treasures live. Display cases stuffed full of the latest speculative fiction Tanya's secured for the library line the entrance corridor. Behind the glass are delights such as The Blood is the Life: Vampires in Literature; Mirror Shades: The Cyberpunk Anthology and a 2006 biography on James Tiptree Jnr (real name Alice Sheldon, who, after an illustrious career writing sci-fi, killed herself and her husband in 1987).
In the special collections library itself, books and manuscripts are piled high, some leaning on shelves, others seemingly randomly scattered on tables, others still nestling in boxes. I've been here before, but every time I expect it to be wood-carved and dusty, a place where Poe or Lovecraft would happily hang out. But it's only my imagination. It's surprisingly well-lit and has the air of organised chaos. It's the smell of the ancient books that formulate the impression, some of which date back centuries (among the collection is an original dispatch from Dickens's Pickwick Papers). Tall windows provide a peek of life outside, but I don't even glance at the students hurrying past. It's far more interesting down here.
I'm here to check out the Tolkien collection; a collection of books bought by former UCT students who decided to spend their excess cash on kick-ass sci-fi and fantasy instead of booze and drugs. Who says you have to get wasted to have a good time? The collection is also bolstered by donations, private collections and Tanya's tireless trawling for little known texts, novels and criticism.
While we chat, Tanya nonchalantly shows me one of her latest acquisitions, a text written by Michel Houellebecq (author of Atomised and Platform) writing on H P Lovecraft, with a foreword by Stephen King. I haven't even heard of it and I itch to flip through it. Tanya's enthusiasm and boundless knowledge is infectious and she shoots titles at me, insisting that I read The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova ("better than Dracula"), that Julian May is one of science fiction's most under-admired writers and then she segues immediately into one of her most enduring passions: to collate an exhaustive collection of South African science fiction. Two rare and beautiful examples of early South African speculative fiction take pride of place in this collection. I remove an original copy of The Ship that Sailed to Mars from its paper-lined box, a beautifully illustrated fantastical tale written in 1923 by William M Timlin, a Kimberley architect. Then there's Louis Herrman's The Sealed Cave, which was written in 1935 and details the 'last and most remarkable of Gulliver's Travels'. From the blurb, it sounds like an early version of The Descent. A recent donation unearthed a science fiction novel by South African Werner Heyns, another author I've never heard of. More contemporary South African genre writers take pride of place, such as Dave Freer (who collaborates with Mercedes Lackey), and Michael Cope. Something Wicked has recently been acquired by Tanya, and will no doubt feel at home with the rare copies of a South African science fiction magazine that came out in the eighties.
While Tanya skits back to her computer to search out Jane Rosenthal's Souvenir for me (a future history novel set in 21st century South Africa), I glance at the shelves heaving with the Tolkien collection itself. I'd need to spend hours to do it justice, but several titles jump out at me. A first edition of King's Danse Macabre; an old friend---Brunner's The Sheep Look Up; shelves brimming over with Philip K Dick, Terry Prachett, Brian Aldiss and Michael Moorcock. There are of course rarities here: such as an almost impossible to get hold of Strugatsky brothers novel which is hidden on the bottom shelf. Other titles flit across my consciousness, each one sounding more fascinating than the last: Lost in Space; Probing Feminist Fiction and Beyond; The Science in Science Fiction; Hell's Cartographers; Frankenstein's Daughters, and enough science fiction encyclopaedias and criticism to make any reader of the genre salivate. Feminist sci-fi, horror and fantasy all snuggle together down here. As do texts on Star Trek, the occult, vampires, witches and weirdoes. And, doing the name of the collection justice, there are more books on Tolkien than you could shake an orc at. Further on in the department are piles of ancient musty-looking books on shipping, battered children's books full of brightly coloured illustrations; it's overwhelming.
Fascinated by SA history and how it was represented as fact, Tanya's book collating instincts aren't only concentrated on the library. She collects children's books, is a freelance editor and wants to map the speculative fiction genre from a South African perspective. I can't think of anyone more qualified to do that.
Tanya tells me that she'll be retiring in six-and-a-half years and I can't help but feel sorry for the books, not sure how they'll ever find such an enthusiastic guardian. She tells me that she hasn't left the library in her thirty-six years here (sixteen spent in special collections), because of cowardice and fear of what could be out there for her in the real world. But I don't think it's cowardice. I'm jealous.
If you're interested in visiting the UCT Rare Books and Special Collections department, Tanya can be contacted to arrange an appointment at tanya.barben@uct.ac.za
Jenny was standing at the kitchen sink, her forearms all but coated in a frosting of soapsuds, when the van rolled down Madson Avenue and pulled into the driveway of the old Harris place.
She paused, flicking soap from one hand to swipe an errant lock of hair from in front of her eyes and deposit it behind her ear. Her face felt slick and greasy in the small, hot kitchen. Even with the window open and the back door ajar, that room never seemed to lose the balmy, humid atmosphere which was a trademark of Durban summers lately. She remembered summers from her childhood in Pietermaritzburg, days Ma and Pa would claim to be just about hotter than the old pottery kiln that Ma kept behind the kitchen for casting her 'projects'. Surely even those days had never been as hot as this.
"Hotter than the devil's butt hole," she muttered, snatching a disheveled handkerchief from the counter top and quickly mopping her face. As she did, she caught sight of herself in the side of the stainless steel KIG kettle Meredith had given her for Christmas. With her loose-fitting housedress and sweat stains the size of saucers beneath each arm, the red-faced woman that looked back at her might have come straight out of the slums of a Charles Dickens novel.
Jenny looked away quickly before her mother could start ranting in her head. If Mrs Derringer decided to stop by now for a cup of tea, she'd have to hide in her bedroom until the woman went away. It would never do to be seen like this.
The van stopped in front of the garage, one of its front windows catching the afternoon sun for an instant, making her blink. Meredith had mentioned something over the back fence that morning about the Harris place having been sold, but Jenny hadn't really believed her. Merry was what Jenny's mother would have called a 'waste of salt'---the implication being that you had to take everything she said with a little more than just a pinch of the stuff. Like Jenny, Merry was a novice widow (a car accident on Umbilo Road the year before had claimed Bruce, two weeks before Christmas, poor thing). However, where Jenny had sought to fill the void left by the sudden absence of the man she'd loved with flower-arranging classes and aerobics sessions at the local gym (how Ma would have balked at that!), Meredith had taken it upon herself to swallow and regurgitate every piece of local gossip that she could get her hands on. Her favourite target for said regurgitation seemed to be Jenny herself. Long were the hours that Jenny had spent under the jacaranda tree in her back yard, empty wash basket tucked beneath her arm, watching her neighbour's small, pinched face as it spoke through a gap in the tall wooden fence. She wondered whether, if she covered that gap up, Meredith would take to hauling the ladder out of her garage so that she could perch atop the fence to deliver her morning sermons.
Jenny peered out of the kitchen window, the small pot in which she'd brewed the cream of broccoli soup she'd had for lunch momentarily forgotten in the white drifts of the sink. The occupants of the van had emerged and were presently standing in the driveway of number 31, apparently looking the house over before they got to work. The driver was a large, balding man with a drunkard's blotchy skin and a cigarette smoking between his lips, his assistant a kid with biceps the size of rugby balls and the sort of doe-eyed, farm-boy good looks that made the girls giggle and blush (what Ma would've called 'a regular thigh popper'). Although there was probably only a decade between them, looking at him made Jenny feel very, very old.
Turning her attention from the boy, she peered up at the second-storey window of the house that would probably always be known as 'the old Harris place' by those who had spent most of their lives on The Avenue. You had to look carefully for the stains on the wall outside that window, but they were still there---the faintest of black smudges reaching up and away toward the eaves, like the fingers of some insidious monster curled about the frame, marking the place as its own. For two weeks she'd watched from her kitchen window as the people came past in drips and drabs---the Jackson's from down the road, driving slowly by in their battered Corolla; Julie Crass and her boyfriend (he of the white dreadlocks and the loud Yamaha motorcycle), out for a 'stroll'; little Rory King and his skateboard buddies, stopping at the bottom of the driveway to peer up at the empty window frame and the black smoke stains.
Jenny sighed, returning half-heartedly to the pot in the sink, scrubbing and rinsing it before letting the cloudy water out. Out-of-towners, most likely. She doubted there was anyone within a five-mile radius who hadn't heard about what happened to Paul and Alison Harris. Horror stories had a way of spreading like wildfire in the suburbs, especially when the community was so tight-knit. Jenny herself had been a regular visitor to 31 Madson Avenue in the months after Jonathan died, usually at the invite of Mrs Harris, who had been a patient of Jonathan's for years. It was the older woman who had suggested finding something to keep herself busy and take her mind off her loss, and had put Jenny in touch with Jane McGregor, who ran flower-arranging and pottery classes out of her beautiful house on Nicholson Road.
She tried not to think about all that, though. The story was horrible enough without taking into consideration the human factor. The happy memories. The laughter on the back porch of the Harris place while Jackie, Alison's toy poodle, lay snoozing on her pillow by the door and the hadedas cawed and fluttered in the Harris' own gigantic jacaranda tree. When she was reminded of those days she inevitably got all teary, and had to switch on the television or open a magazine to take her mind away from it. Why did it seem that just when you thought life couldn't get any more unfair, it pulled out the sewing needle and shoved a friggin' sword in its place?
Jenny eyed herself in the kettle again as she worked her hands through a dish cloth, absently threading those stray hairs she could get hold of back into the general mess atop her head. She knew all about unfair. Oh, yes sir, Mister Spencer, she knew unfair like she knew the way to the Workshop in town. Unfair was a road where the signs all read DEAD END, and the bends seemed to go on for miles with no straight in sight. Take a father who died in a bar with a blade between his ribs when you were ten, leaving a mother who could barely afford to feed you, never mind send you to school or worry that all the other girls on the block pointed and laughed at you because your dresses started life as Blue Ribbon flour sacks. Watch that same mother develop cancer when you were eighteen and just starting your first job, forcing you to move into a tiny roach-infested apartment by the Durban docks just so you could afford the medicine that almost kept the pain in check while she withered and died beside you. Take your first boyfriend (who wined and dined you, then raped you at the drive-in on your third date), add the second one (who you caught packing the fudge with your cousin Brett at your Aunt Caterina's wedding), and then multiply by the death of the man you loved, the man you married, in a horrific car wreck on the N3 freeway. And then---just for the hell of it---see what happens when you add the brutal murder of the kindly old couple across the street.
Life could be pretty damn unfair, but it seemed to have a personal vendetta against Jenny Bask. And each time it felt like she was just getting over the last jab from that sword, it would strike again somewhere else, cutting for the bone.
She glanced out the window one more time, absently grabbing the crumpled handkerchief from the counter and sending it on what amounted to its fifth or sixth tour of her face. The pair had the back of the van open now, and Jenny watched as the boy she'd begun to think of as 'young, strong and handsome' bent over inside it to get his hands under a box; the fabric of his faded blue denims stretching tight over his muscular rear end.
"Probably gay, anyway," she sighed dismally, draping the dishcloth over the edge of the sink as she turned to leave.
She heard the crying for the first time that night.
The digital readout on the clock beside her bed seemed to mock her weariness---seemed to be in cahoots with the heat and the mosquitoes and the mysterious ache in her right shoulder to make her passage into dreamland as trying as possible. It'd been nearly a year and a half since Jonathan's death, but she still found it hard to fall asleep in the big double bed they'd shared for nine years. Logic told her that she ought to throw it out and get a new one, maybe a single (God knows she had no intention of letting another man into her disastrous life, let alone her bed), except that whenever she so much as glanced in the direction of one of the furniture shops in town she came over with such a feeling of guilt that it felt like everyone driving past must be able to see it burning on her face. Selling that big old bed would be like severing the last tie she had to Jonathan. It sounded silly, (maiden's fancy, Ma would've said), but after nine years of fevers and dreams and love, nine years of humid summers and cold winters, it was as if that bed were part of the family.
The faintest of breezes touched the lace curtains, making them ripple and dance, but apparently made it no further than the bureau beside the window. The Avenue was silent, light from the lamp just outside her window casting an interwoven silhouette of still black branches across the wall opposite her bed, illuminating the charcoal sketch of a street musician with a guitar that Jonathan had bought for her in Grahamstown. There were nights when she was able to make the leap into rest by watching those shadows play across the picture, finding shapes and faces and even long forgotten memories in their weaving movement, at times almost able to believe that he was still there with her, laying beside her on the lumpy mattress of their old bed. The two of them, watching the play as they used to when the night was too warm for love or sleep---talking, mostly, often just sitting there, watching.
At first she wasn't sure what she was hearing, it was so soft. It sounded almost like an animal whining, like a puppy put outside for the first time, crying to be let back in. It was only when the low, steady sound broke into a series of sobs that she realised it was a child she was hearing. A small child, crying in the night.
Jenny sat up in bed, scooting over to the edge and fumbling around for her slippers under the base. The crying continued, low, stifled, dissolving into a series of hiccupping whimpers before resuming again. It sounded closer, now that she was sitting up, as close as next door, or just across the street. There was a helplessness in it that tugged at her heart and made her suddenly and painfully aware of the two other rooms in the house, rooms they'd planned on filling with children of their own before Doctor Vincent gave them the news that Jenny would never bear, (viral infection when you were eight, damaged fallopian tubes, blah, blah, blah). Just another swipe from that faithful ol' bitch, that sucker of souls, life herself!
She was halfway to the open window, when it stopped.
For a moment she found she could only stand there, paused between her bed and the shimmering lace, while the silence spun itself over her small corner of the world again. She could feel the breeze now, cool against those parts of her body which her nightdress left exposed, her arms, her legs, her throat. Somewhere a door opened, then closed, while elsewhere, off toward the high school, a car roared through the night with no regard for the waking or the asleep.
When she finally stepped to the window, the Avenue was empty, the only lights burning those mounted along the sidewalk atop poles. Nothing moved in the scene below. At least, nothing appeared to move through the veil of the lace curtains.
It was only thirty-five minutes later, back in bed and in the process of finally nodding off, that Jenny thought to wonder what had happened to the lights on Mrs Derringer's property. The older woman had become almost fanatical about security since what had happened to the Harrises, installing electrified wire, remote sensors, four powerful white lights on the front porch and three in her back yard. On any given night, the property across the road was lit up like a military compound, almost every nook and cranny visible to Jenny from her second floor bedroom across the street.
But tonight, it was all dark.
The sun showed it's face early the following morning as, hair tied up in a scarf and handkerchief in pocket, Jenny set about preparing to wash the downstairs floors. She'd been forced to let the maid go last month (a tearful affair---Jane had been with them for five years, and the sight of the little woman leaving down the driveway for the last time had left Jenny depressed and miserable all day), and had since learned that housework was definitely not for the fainthearted. There was scrubbing and mopping and dusting and vacuuming and polishing---things she'd previously taken for granted which now required actual work on her part to maintain.
She was just starting on the kitchen floor when the doorbell rang. Sticking the mop into the bucket of grey water, Jenny crept up to the kitchen window, peering cautiously around the frame. When she saw that it was only Meredith, she sighed, fishing the handkerchief from her pocket as she marched through to the entrance hall. Meredith had seen her at her best, and at her bedraggled worst. One didn't dress for the President when going out to hang the washing, after all.
Meredith wasn't exactly the picture of elegance herself today, Jenny saw as she opened the door. In fact, in faded blue jean-shorts, a grey halter top with the word Smile emblazoned in pink across her meagre bosom, and a pair of black Pep-special flip-flops, she came closer to American trailer-trash than Euro sophistication.
"Heya, Jen," the woman on the doorstep grinned, then, lowering her voice to a whisper, "Is Liz here?"
Jenny snorted, gesturing at her faded housedress. "What do you think?"
"Oh, of course," Meredith replied absently, craning to throw a glance over Jenny's shoulder anyway. Apparently satisfied that Jenny was not lying, and that their neighbour from across the street was indeed not hiding in the living room or crouched atop the stairs watching them, she turned her perplexed glaze back to the house on the other side of the Avenue.
"Something the matter?" Jenny asked, glancing nervously up and down the sidewalk for approaching traffic. Meredith might be happy to go about looking like she was from the lower end of Umbilo, but if anyone came by now she planned on having the door shut before they glanced up at number 28.
"What?" Meredith turned back to her, looking confused to find Jenny still standing in the doorway. "Oh, sorry. Nothing the matter, Jen. Well, probably nothing, anyway. Just that I went over to find out if Liz had any pot scourers lying around the place, but it doesn't look like she's at home."
The idea that Meredith had not only dared to cross the street to visit one of Durban's most renowned jewellery designers in cut-off jeans and flip-flops, but had done so with the intention of borrowing a frigging pot scourer, left Jenny speechless for a moment.
While Elizabeth Derringer was famous for her sought-after necklaces, rings, and diamond earrings, Arthur had been directing internationally acclaimed short-films since before the abolishment of apartheid. The man was reported to be rolling in enough of the rich stuff to finance a small country.
"She's probably at the shops, Merry. Or on a plane to Joburg to have lunch with the President. If you want a scourer, I think I've got one in the cupboard still."
"Yes, but---" Meredith leaned in closer as if imparting some terrible secret, and Jenny could smell her neighbour's sweat beneath the thin trace of You're The Fire she'd applied to her skinny armpits that morning. "She left her gate open."
Jenny shook her head. "Well, didn't you close it?"
"I couldn't! It's one of those electric locks, and the little flappy thing won't go in when I try pull it shut."
It was Jenny's turn to look across the street. The fancy wrought-iron gate of number 25 looked closed from where she stood, but it was possible that the electronic latch had locked with the small metal tongue (what Meredith called the little flappy thing) resting outside its home rather than in it, which would make it appear closed when it was in fact not.
"You see what I mean?" Meredith hissed. Jenny wasn't sure whether this meant she should take the open gate as a sure sign of marital problems at number 25, or that she should be able to make out the tiny latch from across the street and offer an immediate solution to the problem.
"I don't think it matters much, Merry," she said. She was becoming increasingly more nervous that somebody would drive past and see her standing there in her old housedress and scarf. "It looks latched from the outside, doesn't it? I'll just keep a look out until I see somebody come back."
"But what if somebody doesn't come back?" Meredith asked.
"Then I'll call Mrs Derringer later and let her know about it. I'm sure I've got her cell number written down in my book."
Meredith eyed her doubtfully, turning to glance across the street again. Jenny wondered briefly what her real reason for visiting the Derringers had been. She didn't seem terribly interested in locating a scourer all of the sudden.
"Look, Merry, if that's all, I was just busy---" she began.
"Oh, yes, of course," Meredith exclaimed, shaking her head in a 'how could I be so stupid?' gesture. "I'll let you get back to your cleaning. Give me a ring later, won't you? Let me know what happens."
Jenny agreed that she would fill her in on any developments, and the women said their goodbyes with Meredith headed off across the lawn in the direction of her own front door, her flip-flops sending up a steady slip-slap-slip-slap as she went.
Jenny stood a moment longer in the doorway, ears tuned for approaching traffic as she stared across at the gate to number 25. She hadn't wanted to admit it to Meredith, but the matter did bug her. The Derringers rarely used their pedestrian gate. If they went anywhere, it was usually in one of their BMW's, through the large electric gate with 25 worked into the fancy ironwork. On the odd occasion that Jenny had visited the house across the street, Mrs Derringer had walked her to the smaller gate, giving it a short tug once Jenny was outside on the sidewalk to ensure that it had latched properly before waving goodbye. The events at number 31 had put everyone on edge. If something of that savagery could take place right next door to where you lived, it could just as easily happen to you.
Half an hour later, dressed in a loose-fitting summer-dress that hid the weight she'd put on since the accident, Jenny left her house and crossed the Avenue to the Derringer place. The sun glared at her from a sky so breathless and empty that just looking at it was enough to make you feel thirsty, disoriented, and a little forgetful. She'd been sure to rub enough cream into her hands before leaving to soften the calluses that an hour of mopping floors had only served to aggravate, but they still felt hard and rough somehow. She hoped that if Mrs Derringer was home, she wouldn't want to shake her hand when she saw her.
Meredith had been right. The latch on the pedestrian gate of number 25 had locked before it was fully shut, leaving the metal tongue resting uselessly outside the flap that usually held it in place. Jenny rang the intercom, waited a full minute according to her wristwatch, then rang it again. When this solicited no response, she tentatively pushed the gate open and stepped inside, stopping to peer about the large front yard in case Mrs Derringer should happen to be outside pottering with her flowers. Finding the older woman nowhere in sight, she let the gate fall shut behind her and started up the front path, glancing frequently over her shoulder as if she expected her to materialise and ask what she thought she was doing just barging into her home.
The garbage men had been that morning. A couple of fresh bin-liners lay knotted where they'd been tossed beside a bougainvillea bush, limp and looking half melted in the morning sun.
No one here since last night, at least, Jenny thought as she approached the front porch. She suddenly remembered the crying she'd heard the previous night, remembered wondering why the lights on the Derringers' porch were off. Had that been a child's cries she heard? Or could they have been a woman's?
Don't be stupid. If anything happened to Mrs Derringer, you would have heard something. Gunshots. Screams.
That was true enough ... except that nobody had heard anything at number 31 on that dreadful day two months ago, either. The first clue anyone had that something was wrong at the Harris's was when the black smoke started pouring out of the second-floor window, and by then it had been too late.
She stepped onto the porch, crossing to the big mahogany door and reaching for the brass knocker, before stopping. If one of the Derringers was home, they might get a fright at hearing someone knocking on the front door when they hadn't opened the gate.
"Hello?" she called instead. "Mrs Derringer? Mr Derringer? It's Jenny. From across the street."
She listened. Nothing from inside.
"Your front gate's not locked," she tried again, starting to feel stupid. It was clear they weren't home.
She turned back toward the gate, thinking that she'd give Mrs Derringer a call on her cell when she got home (provided that she was still in the country), when an idea occurred to her, and she veered left, cutting across the lawn toward the giant double-garage at the end of the driveway. When she reached the small window that looked out from between a couple of tall evergreen shrubs, she glanced about to make sure no one was watching, then stood on tiptoes to peep inside.
There was only one car in the spacious garage---Mrs Derringer's sapphire BMW.
Jenny glanced back at the house, half hoping to find the car's owner watching her curiously from one of the front windows. But the house remained still.
Just leave it, she thought to herself. They've gone somewhere. Maybe to visit her parents. Heck, maybe they are on their way to have lunch with the President. Go home. Call Liz. Then stop worrying about it.
Yes. She could do that. She would call Li ... Mrs Derringer, let her know that she'd left her front gate open, and then she'd forget about it. Maybe just keep an eye out to make sure that nobody decided to go walkabout and do a little bit of 'window shopping' at number 25 before the Derringers returned. This was, after all, South Africa.
Except, she had this terrible feeling in the pit of her stomach (what Ma would've called 'the worry willies'). A feeling that when she got home, and called Mrs Derringer's number from her little black book, it would be busy. Or else it would just ring and ring until the voice mail kicked in, and she would be forced to leave a message.
Stop it now! You hear me! Just stop all this silliness! What happened to the Harrises happened only two months ago! Two months! You don't think those animals would be stupid enough to strike twice in the same street within a matter of only two months, do you?
No. She didn't think they'd be that stupid. But you never knew...
She was almost at the front gate again when she spotted something yellow in one of the bougainvillea bushes close to the path. At first she thought it was a bird---probably one of the finches that came to drink from her birdbath every morning. But as she got closer, she saw that it was too big to be a finch, too big for a bird of any kind, save a hawk or an eagle.
A scarf. Jenny disentangled it from the branches, turning it over in her hands. It was a leopard skin print, expensive looking. Mrs Derringer liked to wear scarves, although she couldn't recall ever seeing her wearing this one.
Suddenly the house behind her was too quiet, the day itself too still. Jenny dropped the scarf and hurried to the gate, certain that at any moment she would feel a hand grab her by the shoulder and spin her around to face ... who?
One of the savages. One of the animals.
She didn't stop until she was safely behind her own front door. Even then, she had to lock the back door and close all the downstairs windows before she could breathe easily again.
Come nightfall, there was still no sign of movement across the street. Jenny had stationed herself at the living room window with a book, doing her best to read yet finding herself staring out across the street most of the time. She'd been unable to pluck up the courage to call Mrs Derringer. Part of it was her fear that she'd find the phone turned off, or that it would just ring and ring before switching to voicemail. If that happened, she thought she might be forced to pick up the phone and call the police, or risk going mad with the fear of what might be lying in that house across the street.
By eight o'clock, she had given up pretending to read altogether. She'd forgone both lunch and supper for her place on the couch, the tension in the pit of her stomach not doing anything to whet her appetite and the very thought of food a far and distant thing anyway. She didn't even stir to draw the drapes when darkness fell and the lamps blinked on all along the Avenue outside, setting the stage for another sticky, humid night. With the living room light off, it wasn't like you could make out anything from the street, anyway.
You need to stop this, you know, she thought to herself. You've been staring at an empty house for most of the day. Some people would call that the first sign of madness.
Sure. There were people who might call her mad. People who might called her obsessive, paranoid, delusional. But she doubted that any of those people lived on Madson Avenue. Mrs Derringer wasn't one of them. Julie Crass wasn't one of them either, or little Rory King. Meredith definitely wasn't one of them. Because they knew. They knew what could happen if you left the door unlocked, or an open window unwatched. Or a front gate unlatched. They knew about the animals. The savages. They'd been there. They'd all been there.
They came in through the back door. That's what the papers said. Allison was in the kitchen by the looks of things, and Paul was in the lounge---just a retired couple going through the motions of the life they'd grown accustomed to in their private little corner of the world. They tied them up first, fishing gut, wrists and ankles, before dragging them into the upstairs bedroom and ransacking the drawers and closets, getting away with all the good stuff, the---
There was a child crying in the bushes under her window.
Jenny started, drawing away from the pane on legs that weren't ready for her and subsequently sprawling across the lounge, avoiding denting the coffee table with her skull by the barest of inches. The fall sent the air whooshing out of her, and for a long moment all she could do was lie there on the paisley patterned rug while constellations drifted across her vision, trying to get enough oxygen into her bruised lungs to keep from passing out.
They raped her, she thought, and that was all it took to get her up on her feet and staggering over to the settee, that dull ache in her right shoulder which no doctor had yet been able to diagnose bawling like an opera singer with her tits caught in a wringer.
I didn't hear that. Just my imagination. Need to stop staring at that house.
But when her head cleared, the sound was still there, low but insistent, and still very much in the vicinity of her living room window.
She rose carefully, testing her legs this time before moving slowly across to the window and attempting too peer out into the laurel bushes below. The angle was too steep, though, the glass in her way---besides which it was so dark outside without the living room light on that the bushes were a depthless black cloud beneath the sill.
Jenny hesitated with her hand on the latch of the window. What if it was a trick? Hadn't there been something like this a couple of years back? Thieves using a cassette recording of a crying baby to lure their victims outside, before attacking them and looting the house. She couldn't remember whether she'd actually seen the story on the news, or whether it had been an urban legend, one of those stories used to frighten young single mothers into safety awareness in a country where the criminals were always one step ahead of the police.
Instead of opening the window, she turned and hurried through to the kitchen, dragging open the drawer beneath the microwave and rummaging around inside until she found the carving knife with the heavy wooden handle that had belonged to Jonathan's mother. She didn't know how sharp the blade was (they'd used it to carve the Christmas lamb each year, but since Jonathan's death it had lain in the drawer untouched), but the point was still pointy, and that was all she needed.
If push comes to shove, I can always turn it around and bludgeon them with the handle, she thought, and was shocked at the giggles that tried to surface from her throat.
She flipped on the living room light when she returned, blinking in the sudden glare. The sobbing continued, seeming louder now with the light on, and Jenny tightened her grip on the knife as she crossed to the window again, barely registering her own shabby reflection on the pane glass.
Even with the light on, she could make out no shape among the branches of the laurel bushes. She started to reach for the latch again, then had an idea, and rapped on the glass instead.
The crying stopped immediately. Jenny leaned close to the pane, her nose almost touching the glass. For a long moment there was nothing, and she felt the skin between her shoulder blades prickle as her imagination conjured up an image of masked men crouched in the bushes bare centimetres from where she stood, staring upward at the square of light overhead, waiting for the window to open so that one of them could snake an arm up and grab her wrist---
A face crept over the sill outside. Wet brown eyes peered up at her from beneath a mop of long black hair, hollow cheeks that glistened with moisture. She felt tears well in her own eyes at the sight of the small face, her fingers relaxed around the handle of the knife, and she leaned over to open the window, setting the knife down on the couch.
The face pulled quickly back into the bushes as she leaned out, and Jenny raised both hands to show they were empty.
"No, no, no! It's alright," she whispered. She smiled sadly. "I'm not going to hurt you."
The boy was surely no older than five, a thin, pitiful little figure huddled amongst the branches, bare to the waist, miserably thin arms clutched about bony knees as he peered tearfully up at her from under that hair. Jenny found she could make out the ribs beneath the pale skin of his sides, and felt her heart swell and ache that anything so small and so innocent should be left outside in the night.
"I'm not going to hurt you," she repeated, swallowing when emotion tried to choke her voice. She held her arms out to the small figure, returning them quickly to the windowsill when the boy started to draw away again. "Okay, okay. I'll just stay here for now. Okay?"
The child peered mistrustfully at her, and said nothing.
"Do you know where your mommy is, sweetheart?" Jenny asked. Generally, the street kids kept to the city and the crowded intersections thereabout, appearing at car windows with hands cupped and a well-practiced plea on their lips. Still, this one might have only recently run away from home, unpractised in the way of the streets as yet. If that was the case, Jenny intended to give him a decent meal and a comfy bed for tonight. Child services could wait for tomorrow.
The boy's face creased as he started to cry again. Jenny bit down on the inside of her cheek, struggling to hold her own emotions in check, yet a single tear managed to escape her and fall to the window sill.
"Mama," he croaked between the sobs, sniffling, swiping at his eyes with the back of his hands. The word seemed to open fresh floodgates, and Jenny watched helplessly as he leaned forward to bury his face between his knees, large, hoarse sobs wracking his small body.
She leaned forward, hesitating for a second, before laying a hand gently on his shoulder. When he didn't pull away, Jenny reached for his other shoulder, drawing him toward her until she could hug him awkwardly over the sill.
She held him as he cried, murmuring softly in his ear, stroking his thin, feather-soft hair. It seemed in an instant that the mothering instinct fate had forced her to hold in check for so long came pouring out all at once, that fierce, desperate love that a mother can have only for her offspring flooding from her until it felt as if her heart would burst with the need to extinguish the pain torturing the small person in her arms.
"Mama," he sobbed against her breast, his tears soaking through the dress she'd put on to cross the street earlier that day. "Hurt mama---"
Jenny froze. The boy must have felt her tense up, because he drew away from her, allowing her to keep her hands on his shoulders as he peered questioningly up into her face with large, wet eyes.
"Hurt ... Mama?" Jenny asked, distant alarm bells starting to ring at the back of her mind. "Who hurt Mama, baby?"
The boy peered up at her, the occasional hiccupping sob jerking his body as he turned to point solemnly across the street.
Jenny followed his small finger, and felt her entire body break out in goose bumps.
"Hurt Mama," he repeated, the grief slowly creeping up on him again, his chest starting to hitch. Absently, she drew him back to her, barely noticing when he hid his face against her breast again and slipped one thin arm around her. The alarm bells were clanging loud and fast in her head now, drawing out the fear that the boy's appearance had momentarily banished from her mind, and she had to fight an insane urge to drag him in through the window, latch it, take him upstairs to her bedroom and lock them both inside until morning.
There were no lights on at number 31 tonight. The old Harris place was a blocky black silhouette against the night sky, its dark windows and white gutters just visible in the glow of the lamp in front of the Jameson's property.
Not so soon. Surely not so soon after the Harrises. They'd have to be mad...
But wasn't that exactly what they were? Didn't you have to be at least a little mad to do what was done to Allison and Paul? At least a little sick in the head?
Jenny forced herself to breathe as she drew the boy gently away from her, holding him at arms length until he looked up at her.
"Who hurt Mama, honey?" she asked, holding his gaze. "Was it the bad men? Did the bad men hurt your Mama?"
"Hurt Mama," the boy cried, wriggling in her hands, struggling to return to his nest in her bosom. "Don't wanna ... Don't..."
"What, hon? What?"
"Don't wanna ... go!" he finished, worming from her grasp. In an instant he was outside on the front lawn, thin legs pumping as he fled through the shadows in the direction of the house across the street.
"No!" she shouted, and was halfway out the window herself before she realized what she was doing and quickly drew her leg back into the living room, slamming the window shut hard enough to rattle the glass in its casement before turning to dash into the entrance hall. She had the telephone receiver at her ear and her fingers poised above the numbers before it occurred to her that she didn't know the number of the local police station.
What, are you kidding me?! Little Miss Safety Conscious doesn't know the phone number of her nearest cop shop? Oh, that's rich!
She stood, started back toward the living room. Stopped. Turned back to the telephone stand. Stopped again. Sank to her haunches at the bottom of the stairs. She had to get help. She had to call the cops. The savages had come back again. They'd come back again. She had to do something!
The child. If they're still in the house, and they find the boy...
Jenny let out a low moan. If they found the boy, there was no knowing what they'd do to him.
She stood, striding through to the living room again. Her hands shook and her heart felt light and fluttery as she grabbed the carving knife from the couch where she'd laid it, not even noticing that the window hadn't latched properly when she slammed it shut. She had to grit her teeth to stop herself from casting a quick glance out. Part of her knew that if she thought about what she was about to do, she'd never be able to go through with it. She'd heard somewhere that heroes were just regular people who acted without thinking, who jumped in without any thought for their own personal safety. The idea that what she was about to do might be considered heroic didn't enter her thoughts, though. Not because she wouldn't allow it to, but because she would never in a million years have seen herself, timid little Jenny Bask who was incapable even of calling her famous neighbours from across the street by their first names, as a hero.
She stopped at the telephone, lifting the receiver again and dialing 10111, the number of the Flying Squad. When one of the operators answered, she calmly stated her name, address, informed the man that she believed her neighbour from across the street had been attacked and robbed and that the assailants might still be in the house, then hung up before he could respond. They taped all of their calls. If there was something he didn't get, he could play the tape back.
Jenny stepped out of her front door and crossed the lawn, the heavy handle of the knife offering little reassurance in her clammy fist, her heart still fluttering in her chest like a caged bird battering uselessly against the bars of its prison. A canopy of clouds lay across the night sky, a dark, lumpy grey blanket that stretched from horizon to horizon, permitting no hint of moonlight or sparkle of star to pass through to the sleeping world below.
Black. Too black. It suddenly felt like the dark itself was a living thing. It was stupid, she knew---the sort of thing a five-year old might dream up---but she couldn't shake the sensation of being watched from all around, the feeling that all that blackness was against her somehow, that it was intentionally hiding the familiar details of the Avenue from her half crazed imagination so that it could lick at her fear.
The house sat back in the total blackness, still and silent, waiting for her. Jenny paused at the foot of the driveway, head down, eyes fixed on a flowering weed which had pushed its way up through the otherwise pristine lawn.
What are you doing?! The police should be here soon! Just leave it for them!
Sound advice. She was willing to take it, too, more willing than she'd ever been to do anything in her life. Except for the child. If the savages were still inside the house, she had no doubt that they would kill the boy. Animals who were willing to rape an old woman while her husband watched, then slit their throats and set them alight, wouldn't think twice about slaughtering one small, defenceless boy.
Struggling against the force that seemed to drag at her from the lighted window of her own living room, Jenny moved up the path to the front porch, tossing a quick glance left and right as she climbed the four steps to it. The porch was empty, the bougainvillea bush that grew on its east side poking fingers between the railing slats at that end. The front door hung ajar just enough for a strip of the house's interior to be visible through the gap. It was black. Featureless.
She placed her hand on the knob to stop the door from swinging inward as she leaned her head in, straining her ears for any sound. The house was silent. The Avenue was silent. She tried to dispel the feeling that the world was holding its breath, waiting for something to leap out at her, and succeeded only in realising that she hadn't heard the Jameson's dog barking once tonight.
So what? The damn mutt doesn't bark every night.
Taking what little comfort she could from that thought, Jenny pushed lightly at the door and slipped into the house, flattening herself against the wall inside as her eyes did a quick sweep of the living room. The sparse furnishings looked alien in the almost utter lack of light, amorphous shadows that covered the area between the front door and the big old fireplace creating a maze in which a barked shin or stubbed toe seemed the most likely outcome of any adventure. A ghostly strip of light that poked through the gap in the curtains fell upon what looked like unopened boxes stacked against the wall beside the hearth. The place felt so different from the last time that she'd been there---so empty with all evidence of her old friends' personalities wiped from it---that for a second she found herself on the verge of giving vent to the tears which had been hovering just behind her eyes since she'd found the boy crying in the bushes beneath her window.
The boy!
She stepped away from the wall, moving toward the doorway on the other side of the room, her free hand leading the way through the dark terrain. She'd just encountered the coffee table (had in fact encountered it with her shin---what was it with her and coffee tables tonight?), when she heard the familiar sound of sobbing coming from just beyond the doorway, and quickly redoubled her efforts.
The doorway led through to the open-plan kitchen and dining room. To the right, a narrow stairwell ran up to the second floor, so dark tonight that had she not already known that the stairs were there, it would have been easy to believe that she was standing before a doorway to oblivion.
The boy was close, near the bottom of the stairs. Jenny took the first step, feeling blindly in the dark before her.
"Honey?" she whispered softly, her fingers brushing against skin. She felt the boy jump, and drew her hand back. "Hey, it's okay. It's only me."
"Mama," he croaked in a weary voice. It was Jenny's turn to start when a small, warm hand wrapped around her own. She heard movement on the stairs, and a moment later the hand started to pull her forward, urging her to upward. "Hurt Mama. Come, come see."
"Honey, we need to get out of here," she whispered, using his grasp to try and draw him to her. The silence was beginning to unnerve her. Badly. It was possible that the savages had already made off with their takings, but a new and frightening possibility had occurred to her. That one of them had seen her coming up the front path. That they were now crouched upstairs, somewhere in all those shadows, waiting for her.
The boy had begun to cry again, still struggling to pull her up the stairs.
"Please, help Mama. Please. Mama hurt. Please! Please!"
"It's alright, we'll come back for Mama, baby, we just need to---"
She saw it coming an instant before it happened, but reacted too late to stop him from wrenching free of her grasp and taking off up the stairs, the quick thud-thud-thud of his bare feet on the steps echoing loudly through the house. And once again, Jenny reacted without thinking, stumbling up the stairs after him, forgetting how small the steps in the old Harris place were and almost tripping over them twice before she reached the top, catching a glimpse of the boy as he vanished into the master bedroom at the end of the passage.
Jenny hurried toward the room, the carpet muffling her footfalls, her heart beating a mile a minute in her head. The other three doors on the second floor were shut, black rectangles against storm grey walls, dark mirrors in an insane funhouse from behind which anything might leap out to maul and bite. Her stomach twitched and convulsed in her midsection, sweating nausea, and she could taste bile at the back of her throat as the doorway ahead loomed, her body acting reflexively now, carrying her forward against the screams and protests of her mind, carrying her to the boy.
The curtains hadn't yet been put up in the master bedroom. Light from the lamp outside cast a vague luminescence over the room, softening the shadows, allowing her eyes to make out the double bed against the far wall, the tossed sheets, the bureau forced into the space beside the entrance to the en-suite bathroom so that part of it stuck out across the doorway itself. More boxes covered the walls on either side of the window, some of them open on the floor, dresses and shoes and underwear forming a shallow dune on the carpet in front of them. As if their owner had been in a rush to get dressed and had merely tossed what she didn't want back in the general direction of the boxes.
Jenny turned in a circle, glancing hastily about the room, panting, every nerve in her body stretched and thrumming like a network of overwrought guitar strings. Her fist seemed to be locked around the handle of the carving knife, the tendons throbbing with the pressure, that ache in her shoulder pounding in sync with her pulse so that it felt as if her entire right arm might explode from her shoulder at any second.
The boy was nowhere to be seen.
"Hon?" she called softly, not liking the weariness she heard in her voice at all. She knew that she was on the verge of some sort of breakdown if she didn't get out of that place soon. It felt wrong. Not only the dark, and the unfamiliar furniture. There was something fundamentally wrong with the old Harris place, something to do with the atmosphere inside the house, a smell, the silence ... something. If she didn't get out soon, she thought that the police might show up to find her crouched in a corner of one of the rooms, cackling to herself while she cheerfully ripped her hair out by the handful.
A shuffling from the en-suite. Jenny started in that direction, when the bedroom door slammed shut behind her, forcing a small shriek from her lungs. She turned, scurrying back to it, having to try the handle twice before it twisted in her sweaty palm.
Locked.
"I brung her!" called the boy's voice from the other side of the barrier. "Lady, I brung her! Where my Mama? I brung her!"
"Honey, open the door!" Jenny called, trying the handle again. She could feel herself starting to hyperventilate. The shadows seemed to move at the edge of her vision, creeping closer, closer, slowly closing in.
Another shuffling from the en-suite. Jenny glanced back over her shoulder, her heart performing a nimble flip that landed it somewhere in her upper throat, eyes widening as realization wormed its way through her panic.
Lady! Lady, I brung her...
There was somebody in the bathroom. Somebody standing just beyond the doorway, beyond the reach of the light from outside. She heard breathing, low and heavy, each intake ending in a wet, phlegmy rattle---the sound seeming to infiltrate the silence and make it crawl and slither all around her.
Warmth trickled down her leg, and in some distant corner of her mind she realized that her bladder had just let go all over her good underwear.
"Where Mama?" the boy called through the keyhole. To Jenny, his voice seemed to come from another universe. "I brung her. I brung her! Where my Mama? Where my Mama, Lady?"
"What have we here?" cawed the thing in the shadows, and Jenny screamed, stumbling away from the door, tripping over one of the boxes and landing on her ass amid the thrown clothes. The voice that spoke from the dark was female; warped into a high, lunatic squall by some quivering blend of emotions that Jenny didn't want to identify. It triggered a fleeting memory of herself at the age of six, her mother sitting cross-legged under the tinsel-laden tree with her on Christmas morning, feigning astonishment over the gifts that 'Santa' had brought her in the night.
Initially the fact that there was something beneath the clothes didn't register through her panic. Until she felt it shift under her weight. Something long, and lumpy. Something cold.
"Where my Mama, Lady?" screamed the voice through the keyhole. "Where Mama?"
She jerked away, scrambling backwards into the corner, her elbow catching one of the boxes. It tumbled forward to scatter brushes and compacts and hair curlers across the carpet, freeing the lower half of the window. Light leaped in to fill the new opening, skating across a crumpled black blouse, the grey strap of a bra, coming to rest on the dark, sticky mess that protruded from it all.
Her heart hammered in her chest. Her eyes felt too wide in her face. Too perceptive, letting too much in as her mind struggled to make sense out of the shattered ridges, shreds of pale material, the trails and clots of black that seemed to hold it all together like a childish collage of tar and feathers. Then her eyes wandered across the blond hairs. Long, wavy, strangely untouched by that viscid black. Following them slowly upward, into the shadows. Not wanting to believe, until she found the single glazed eye peering out from beneath the frayed hem of a jacket. Peering at her.
Hurt mama, hurt mama, oh Jesus hurt mama! shrieked a voice in the centre of her head as she began pushing backwards into the corner, unaware of the high keening noises that issued from her throat as she forced herself further and further into the junction of cardboard and concrete. That voice shrieked in her mind, drilling through all reason, killing even the commotion of the child's wailing---the single eye and ragged remnant of a throat holding her gaze unwaveringly locked until her vision began to shimmer from the strain.
The woman stalked from the dark of the en-suite, appearing to balance on the balls of her feet and sway at the waist as if arthritis had locked the joints in her knees and ankles, claws clasped stiffly together before her breast, her shadow leaping and contorting on the wall behind her as she came. Jenny hardly registered the large hands, the too long fingers, the skin-and-bone wrists that were barely there. The room seemed to have become insubstantial, a mirage, those few items of furniture airy and ghostly, her fist empty, closed on nothing. The woman's eyes were featureless. The colour of boiled eggs, bloated maggots. Gaping, insane, lidless sacs of jelly that bulged out of her face as if some liquid inside her skull were on fire and the steam pressure was becoming too much for the cranium to handle.
It wasn't those eyes that immobilized her brain and wiped her mind clear, though, leaving her body numb and useless under her. It was the grin beneath them. The grin that stretched from ear to ear, like it was slashed across her face by the same careless puppeteer that had poured concrete into her leg joints. The grin that was all straining flesh and black gums and teeth, teeth like white sewing needles, row upon row of teeth that seemed to go back forever in that rictus maw.
"Such a pretty one he's brought for Mommy!" it thrilled, stopping less than a foot from where Jenny lay sprawled on the carpet. The dress looked as if it might have come from those strewn across the floor, a strappy red number that hung off the starved frame beneath. The right strap dangled about a swollen elbow, revealing a protruding collar bone and most of a saggy, deflated breast.
"Want my Mama! WANT MY MAMA! WANT MY MAMA!"
It leaned forward, bending at the waist. Filthy locks of knotted black hair tumbled about its face, sending a rain of sand trickling over Jenny's exposed legs. Outside in the passage, the child screamed and wailed for his Mama, the noise slipping under the door like a stormy breeze. Crouched in a black corner at the back of her mind, she saw the small brooch that hung from the front of its dress---oval topaz set amid twisting gold vines. One of Liz's designs.
People who go sticking their noses into others' business deserve any hell they get for it, her mother's voice commented from elsewhere in her head. And then some...
"So pretty," murmured the beast as it's face filled her vision completely and a cold, hard hand wrenched her head back. Jenny had a second to realize that she hadn't brushed her hair before leaving the house.
What will the neighbours say?, she thought, before she felt the warm breath on her throat, the stinging prickle of hundreds of needle sharp teeth, and Jenny Bask learned that there were far worse things in the world than savages.
Chris Stein parked his cruiser in the driveway of 31 Madson Avenue and climbed out, turning to glance toward the open door of the house across the street as his partner, David Way, stepped out of it. David shook his head as he approached.
"Empty," he said, stopping behind the cruiser to scratch beneath the collar of his shirt. David was always scratching. Chris didn't know whether it was because the boy didn't bath, or just a bad case of heat rash.
He turned toward the house behind him, looking it over. Everything was dark inside. Silent. Already, he didn't like the feel of this place. The feel of this street for that matter. It reminded him too much of the scene they'd just come from.
"We going in?" David asked. He didn't sound happy about the prospect. He hadn't sounded happy since they left the house on Musgrave Road, actually. Chris didn't blame him. David had only been part of the force for a little over a month now, long enough for him to have witnessed a couple of rapes and robberies, a suicide in West Street, but not long enough for him to have actually seen any of the really bad stuff. Tonight had been his first run in with the sort of shit that made you wonder whether it was all worth it.
He'd have to keep an eye on him. If he was still acting weird by the time they got back to the station, Chris would have a word with Chapman, organize him some counselling. Better to be safe than sorry.
"That's our job," he replied, reaching back to close his door. He was thankful that David hadn't gotten close enough to the boy to see the look on his face. Chris knew that he'd be seeing those wide blue eyes himself as he lay next to Jean later, trying his best to convince himself that the disbelief he'd found in them had nothing to do with the gaping black horror that lay beneath the boy's fragile little jawline. Fighting to convince himself that somehow the child had been dead already when the animal that attacked him and his father went to work on his throat.
Yes. He'd have to get David in to see the shrink. While he was at it, he thought he might just have a word with the woman himself. Some things were too terrible for even the strongest mind to cope with.
His eyes caught movement at one of the upper windows, and he looked up in time to catch a small face draw back from the pane.
"Come on," he said to his partner, starting across the lawn to the front porch, unsnapping the button on his holster as he went. He always went in with that button undone. Having the gun free and ready for action from the get-go helped to steady his nerves and let him concentrate on the job at hand.
You never knew what might be waiting for you inside one of these places.
Gareth Robertson has been writing for as long as he can remember. A fan of such masters as Stephen King and Graham Masterton, he has had no formal training in the art, subscribing instead to the old adage: read a lot, write a lot. When not engaged in the craft, he can be found in some of Durban's darker corners, feeding the warped engine in his head.
This is Gareth's first story for Something Wicked.
Damon sits down next to me. He is on his sixth pint, I am on my third. We are at the Long Street Café. It is six o' clock and a typically chill August wind is gusting outside. We sit next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, our noses almost touching the pane of glass before us. There are spots on it. It could do with a wash. Damon beats out a rhythm on the wooden counter before him, then swears as some of his beer spills, then he is quiet. We watch passers-by passing by in silence for a while, happy to be in the cosy warmth inside the bar rather than in transit, on our way somewhere, out there in the harsh weather. But then, we will be on our way, before long, but for now we are delaying, biding, as time slips out there, as dusk slowly settles, as the hours of the sun go by.
"You might wanna go easy on those," I say, nodding towards his beer.
"Hmmph," to himself.
Damon's nerves are still a little shaken, his speech a little slurred as he thrums his fingers on the counter again and says, "What do you think this is? Oak, mahogany?"
"Varnished pine," I guess.
"Can't be pine. It's sturdy. Good wood. Can't be pine." He thumps his fist on it to prove the point.
The whole counter wobbles, the wood she is not sturdy, she is not good, but I let it go. It's a rattled voice washing around in the current of the alcohol and I'm not going to get into an argument about what the bar's made of. So, conversation dries up again. People pass, we sit. Damon taps a cigarette from his packet and rolls it around in his fingers for a while.
"He looked a bit like Arno Carstens," Damon says.
"Jesus, man. Don't say shit like that."
I had thought I was done, but now I need another mouthful of beer. I end up draining most of what's left.
"No, I'm serious. Angular chin, blond hair. If I'd met him in the street, instead of---"
"Drink up," I say. "We're getting out of here."
"Relax, Shane." Damon puts his hand on my leg, stays me. "There's still time."
He turns his face to me, cocks his head sideways. The cigarette dangles between his lips. I reach into the breast pocket of my shirt, produce my zippo and hold out a flame for him.
"Thanks, light of my life."
Great, Damon is pissed, out of his mind. "Last night was the night of your life." I flick the zippo closed, put it away.
"That was something, wasn't it? I've been doing this a while, but I have never seen that."
I give up trying to change the subject, it seems it will find its way there regardless of any intervention on my part. Damon burps, a horrid sound that reminds of heartburn.
The sky outside, the bit visible behind Table Mountain, is turning purple. The orange of half an hour ago is no more. A nervous crab of fear tickles down my spine. I finish what is left of my drink. It seems no matter how long you've been doing this, how good you get at it, however confident you become, there is always once, always that one time that will remind you that child's play is not exactly the par for the course. It is for the most part, to be honest. The last couple of months have been good to Damon and me, and therefore the last couple of months have been bad for us. Complacency sets in and you subconsciously begin to suspect that you have got the hang of this, that you've damn-well cracked the code. "We have this shit down, man," I remember Damon saying only a couple of days ago.
Coming from London I've always imagined Cape Town must seem rather run-of-the-mill to Damon. It had begun to seem that way to me too, of late. Damon had come here all jockstraps and brawn, introduced himself to me over a pint of Guinness in the Dubliner next door from where we now sit and said: "The foocking Irish." Like I was supposed to know what he meant. The UK, for me, was an island, a dot on a map where they sold fish and chips, implored God to save their queen and could lay claim to having spawned the majority of the members of Monty Python. Double-decker buses and red phone booths I had seen on postcards and on the covers of Travel Guides.
And then, into my life, thanks to a mutual acquaintance, stepped this guy Damon Swift. Leather pants, leather jacket adourned with silver chains, thick-soled biker-boots, Union Jack T-shirts-wearing skinhead Damon fucking Swift. And this guy made my eyebrows stand on end with the stories he told of that city which hugged the Thames. Said he needed a change of scene, said he decided on the top British tourist destination, like he came for a holiday, snap some pictures to take home to Brighton. He wanted a partner, someone who knew the local scene, the ins-an'-outs, the where-they-goes, the flavours of the month. And that, naturally, meant me: Shane Everts. We went around together. He moved into my flat on Kloof Street, we went to the Waterfront, ate at the Fisherman's Pride, we even went up the goddamn mountain.
In my car, on our first night, he leafed through my CD carry pack.
"So which of these are any good?" he had asked.
"'Most all of 'em," I'd said, it being my music and all.
"I mean for hunting," he'd laughed.
"On earth should I know?" my answer to that.
He eventually decided on Springbok Nude Girls, the local flavour was what he was after. "These wankers aren't half bad," he'd said. "We should go see them when they have a gig."
Only, that was never going to happen since the Nudies had broken up. Only then, Arno Carstens brings out a new album and suddenly he is on tour and coming to Cape Town and I make the mistake of pointing that out and we end up going to watch him.
It's a sad day when you get sick of your favourites, but that's what Damon did for me. Night after night, time upon time: Nude Girls. Like it was our soundtrack. I started hiding the CD's but he forced me to turn back, drive home and get them. Said it put him off not having it, now he'd got used to it. So Nude Girls it was, every time.
But Cape Town, with the sea and the mountain, was a holiday. Until last night, that is. Last night, on two separate occasions Damon and I had come within an inch of our lives and suddenly Cape Town did not seem demure to me anymore. Now his stories of London, which I had come to doubt, sounded meagre, British tanless pale in comparison. And the thing is he did look like Arno Carstens, that was the unsettling thing that lingered today. He looked every bit like our quasi-famous, turning-sentimental rock star.
"So what do we do now?" I ask.
"What do you think?"
"I think we take a lie down, we think things through, collect ourselves."
"Collect ourselves?" Damon blows smoke straight in my face. "Are there some ball-bearings rattlin' around up there?" He points his smoke at my head.
"Are you out of your brackets," I supply the local equivalent.
"We don't lie low, this bastard's vicious. Would you like to hand to him the element of surprise, probably the only thing we got counting in our favour with the likes of him?"
"I'd like to be prepared."
"You'll never be more prepared than you are now. All that shit happens in the moment. A most appropriate response to that specific, and might I add unique encounter is all you can hope for. It's not like there's a training school for guys like us."
"All right, all right," I'm trying to keep the agitation out of my voice, succeeding admirably, too. "So what do you suggest we do?"
"Sea Point," Damon says, suddenly all in the know.
"Why Sea Point?"
"He's not goin' to come back here two nights in a row, is he? He knows we're onto him, and however vicious he might be, his pock-marked fucking ass was close to fried last night."
"I appreciate the bravado, Damon, but this one's cunning. Storming around with our pants round our ankles is only going to get our dicks chopped off."
"You think that's what I'm doing? It sounds to you like, after what you saw, like that's what I'm doin'?"
I keep quiet, somehow this has all turned upside down, and I'm the one considering going for another pint.
"Let's get movin'." Damon gets up, he drains his beer, his adam's apple bobbing, accepting the liquid. Then he slams the empty glass down on the table, crosses his eyes comically and says: "Let's go make it known to Daddy's little blue eyes that we're comin' for his ass."
He storms out, with purpose, all his British machismo evident in his stride, his long leather coat flapping in the cold wind. I get up more gingerly, nursing the gash in my side that still dribbles red through the clinic's bandage now and again.
We reach the Corolla that's parked on Upper Long. I open the boot. We strap on the samurai blades, and I'm aware while we do this, as I so often am, that passers-by must think we're taking the whole Kill Bill thing a little too far. If they only knew. We each take out a wooden stake, solid ones, made from good wood. We get in and I light another cigarette for Damon. He drags on it, and our drive to Sea Point is a quiet one.
We park along the promenade, watch the final bit of the sun's curve slip behind the Atlantic. We both smoke and we don't talk. We're lost in our own thoughts. The alcohol in our veins is now a distant memory, our heads are clear.
Night time is a-coming.
Born in Pretoria in 1979, Werner holds degrees in Publishing and English from the University of Pretoria and is completing his Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Cape Town. He is a part-time scriptwriter and crack addict, and has been to the moon, four times. Most of this is true.
You can download the podcast of Night Time is a-Coming for free from iTunes or from www.SomethingWicked.co.za.
This is Werner's second story for Something Wicked.
His first story, The Book of Monkeys, was published in Issue 3---Autumn 2007
As horror aficionados, we each have, no doubt, an idea of what we would consider the most terrifying movies of all time---The Exorcist, Alien, Psycho et al---but what if the primary motive of the movie is not to scare, but to make our skin crawl? In 1992, ex-Fangoria editor Stanley Wiater decided to make a list of the world's 13 most disturbing movies for the anthology Cut: Horror Writers on Horror Film. Not scary, not unsettling, but downright disturbing---the kind of movies you either can't sit through, or make you want to have a hot shower afterwards. To celebrate fifteen years of the Disturbo 13, we asked our resident psycho to revisit the list as a top 10, remove those that have since lost their power to shock, and add some grisly newcomers that are simply balls-to-the-wall disturbing. A friendly warning though, this article is seriously fucking disturbing, so proceed with caution.
10. Audition aka Ôdishon (1999)
Not surprisingly, Japanese director Takashi Miike has a film in our top 10 Disturbo list. While he certainly does have more overtly violent or depraved movies to his credit (Ichi the Killer, Visitor Q), there's something about Audition that sticks in your head long after you've finished watching it. The plot concerns a widower who sets up a bogus film-casting audition in order to meet a potential new bride. He becomes fatally attracted to a young woman whom he romances despite there being something unsettling about her. While some of the movies in this list rely largely on blood or depravity to make them Disturbo, Audition succeeds with nothing more than atmosphere and suggestion. It's an oppressive, off-kilter style that only really culminates in the final reel, when his young lover reveals her true, decidedly nasty, nature. Partly due to its claustrophobic tone, partly due to good filmmaking and partly due to excellent performances by Ryo Ishibashi and Eihi Shiina, Audition is disturbing enough to find itself at number 10 on our list.
9. Cannibal Holocaust (1980)
One of the most infamous of last century's Italian cannibal movies, Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust remains one of the most influential and notorious films of its time. The much-imitated plot involves a group of documentary filmmakers who journey into the Amazon jungle to film the local cannibalistic inhabitants. When they don't return, an anthropology professor is sent to find and return the footage they shot. The shocking footage of the now-dead film crew and the cannibal tribes they encountered is shown to the television studio that financed the trip as they deliberate whether or not to screen it. Descending into animalistic behaviour themselves, two of the film crew are shown raping a native girl, who is later killed by having a wooden stake driven through her. Whether it be watching the numerous and brutal animal killings (most definitely real, and the source of much of the film's vituperation) or witnessing the atrocious acts of rape and cannibalism presented in a distressingly realistic way, Cannibal Holocaust is a Disturbo on so many levels. Despite this it has, beyond its obviously shocking castrations and impalings, a very real message about the creation of truth and the role that a so-called documentary plays in this process.
8. Man Bites Dog aka C'est arrivé près de chez vous (1992)
Shot exclusively in black-and-white cinema verité style, Man Bites Dog is a shocking black comedy which flirts with a reality/documentary opposition and 'embedded journalism' in much the same way as Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust. Its anti-hero is Benoit, an ubiquitous Belgian small-towner opinionated to the point of pretension. The film is cut together from footage shot by a camera crew doing a documentary on Benoit's occupation: killing for fun and profit. They film him as he goes about his daily business, snuffing postmen, old ladies and small children, while he explains the details of submerging corpses, criticises attempts at urban renewal and goes to art gallery openings. The documentary crew however, become increasingly complicit in his actions, holding down a boy as Benoit kills him, and later joining in on a drunken Christmas-time gang rape of a young couple. The truly disturbing aspect of Man Bites Dog lies in the very realistic portrayal of its protagonist and his victims: at no point do we believe we are seeing anything other than documentary footage of some very real and very graphic murders.
7. Irreversible (2002)
Not a Disturbo movie in the strict sense, but this "artfully" shot French cult film manages to pack such a punch that it cannot be left off the list. The subject matter is far from the worst on this list: a woman is raped, and her boyfriend tracks down the killer and smashes his face in with a fire extinguisher. What makes the film so distasteful is its protracted and highly realistic rape scene that makes I Spit On Your Grave seem like a sexual sensitivity video. Taking place in one 10-minute shot, a woman is attacked by an anonymous assailant. What makes it particularly disturbing is the viewer's implied complicity: because there are no cuts, we literally feel like we are witnessing the event. Even more unsettling is the rest of the film's handheld, dizzying cinematography, long single-takes and reverse-order sequencing. Irreversible is a profoundly disturbing cinema experience, raw and frighteningly realistic.
6. In a Glass Cage aka Tras el Cristal (1987)
This little-known Spanish film is a true gem for any true Disturbo fan. It proves, at least, that what elevates movies like Salò or In a Glass Cage above the more exploitative offerings on this list is production value and craftsmanship: because it feels more real, the feeling of revulsion is genuinely allowed to blossom. A retired Nazi commandant can no longer bare the memories of the sexual, medical and physical atrocities he committed upon a group of young boys, and attempts suicide. He is unsuccessful and is forced to exist in a giant iron lung, dependent on others for his continued survival. A male nurse that is hired to care for him turns out to be one of his former victims. A perverse homosexual love/hate relationship develops between the two, even to the point that the young man starts to lure boys home to perpetuate the cycle of abuse in front of his erstwhile torturer. In one particular scene, the nurse switches off the iron lung in an act of asphyxiophilia. Beautifully shot and well-acted, In a Glass Cage is a compelling examination of the brutal perversions of the human condition.
5. Guinea Pig 2: Flowers of Flesh and Blood aka Za ginipiggu 2: Chiniku no hana (1985)
While most Disturbo movies do at least attempt to have a story behind their vileness, Guinea Pig 2 has no such pretensions. The story is literally non-existent: a woman is kidnapped and drugged by a strange, Samurai-clad man, who then proceeds to dismember her over 40 minutes of film. Every effort is made to convince the viewer that what you're watching is, indeed, an actual snuff film. (In fact, legend has it that Charlie Sheen reported this movie to the FBI for being just that.) The only dialogue comes from the Samurai, directed straight at the viewer, and concerns the absolute beauty of the woman's "flesh blooming in a sea of red". Slowly but surely she is dismembered, and we witness it all. Beyond being supremely gory, Guinea Pig 2 has a strange beauty to it, and a twisted, Sadeian philosophy that makes it one of the most disturbing things to ever be committed to celluloid.
4. Nekromantik (1988)
This classic Disturbo by Jorg Buttgereit concerns a young ambulance driver named Rob who becomes obsessed with various unclaimed body parts he collects whilst on the job. At first, he simply keeps them in glass jars to show off to his wife, but things start to unravel---as they tend to do in Disturbo movies---and the couple decides to find a whole corpse for their collection. Just looking at it, however, is not sufficient and soon enough they're taking the rotting body to bed with them for a little ménage-a-trois (complete with phallic broom handle for the deceased). After Rob's wife leaves him, he finds that he cannot have sexual release with anything other than a dead body, and has to kill all his lovers before he can conclude the act. Nekromantik is exactly what it claims to be: an unflinching ode to necrophilia which, if it weren't for the second-rate special effects, would probably be impossible to sit through. Corpse-fucking art indeed.
3. All Night Long 3: The Final Chapter aka All Night Long 3: Saishshô (1996)
It's difficult to choose one instalment from the All Night Long series, as all of them would be worthwhile adding to our Disturbo 10 list. Sadistic and exploitative to a fault, this chapter tells the story of a teenage boy who becomes obsessed with a beautiful woman and starts to steal her garbage to find out more about her. But soon, as he slides down the slippery slope of depravity, her tampons and lipstick-stained tissues (which he meticulously catalogues) aren't enough for our protagonist. When a local gang rapes and leaves his lady friend for dead, he decides to kidnap her and takes her back to his apartment, where he first measures and catalogues her entire body before torturing her. Finally, coming to the conclusion that "human beings are just garbage", he kills and dismembers her in a bathtub. All Night Long 3 is unflinching in its portrayal of an insular psychosis and might just make you look twice at that nerdy botanist next door. There are no redeeming characters in this movie, everyone is twisted and evil in their own way, and that is what gives All Night Long 3 a place on the Disturbo 10 list.
2. Men Behind the Sun aka Manchu 731 Squadron aka Hak Taai Yeung 731 (1988)
Another WWII film, Men Behind the Sun details the horrific exploits of Japanese scientists experimenting on prisoners of war in occupied China. As defeat drew near, the Japanese began to use human Petri dishes in an attempt to create the ultimate biological weapon that would turn the course of the War in their favour, similar to the experiments carried out in Nazi death camps. What makes Men Behind the Sun almost unwatchably disturbing is its unflinching documentary style of filmmaking: there are no polite cut-aways from the scenes of surgical dismemberment and other atrocities carried out on living human beings. Director Mou Tun Fei's motivation is clear---to graphically depict and bring to the world's attention the horrific experiments carried out on the residents of Manchu---but it does make the film difficult to watch. Again, like Salò, there is no escape and no reprieve for the prisoners, who we see being injected with plague, tortured and dissected with apparently no feelings of remorse by Japanese scientists. While subsequent Oriental films have been more graphic and violent, it is the grim and sterile tone of Men Behind the Sun that puts it at the top of Asia's Disturbo list.
1. Salò: The 120 Days of Sodom (1977)
Set in the last days of the Fascist regime in Northern Italy, Pier Paolo Passolini's final movie still has the power to shock and outrage even the most jaded cinemagoer thirty years after its initial release. Adapted from the infamous book by the Marquis de Sade and set in Second World War Italy, Salò is a beautifully-filmed exploration of a total lack of morality. The plot concerns three Fascist leaders who flee the advancing Allies to the Nazi client state of Salò, taking with them two dozen male and female adolescents, whom they plan to sadistically torture and murder. Exempt from any bounds of morality or law, the torturers subject their prisoners to all manner of unspeakable sexual acts, spurred on by the lascivious spoken memoirs of several aged prostitutes. In one particularly distasteful sequence, the prisoners are forced to eat their own faeces, while another has them choking on nails hidden in apparently edible food. What makes Salò such a disturbing film---head and shoulders above any other movie ever made---is Passolini's expert craftsmanship and dedication to realism. In addition, the teenagers who suffer throughout are never given even a glimpse of freedom, their fates are as sealed as that of the Fascist Republic they find themselves in, a tone of tortured desperation that the viewer cannot help but be profoundly affected by. No film before or since has captured the dark and psychotic depravity of those who are totally amoral quite like Salò does, and it remains without a doubt the most disturbing movie ever made.
Have you ever had a dream while you were awake?
I have. I have them all the time. But my dreams are not nice dreams, daydreams. No, my dreams are dreams that should come to me in the armpit of the night, at three in the morning, when I can wake up sweating, stifling a scream into my pillow.
But these dreams, they come in the day.
I can't wake up from them, because I am not asleep. And they are always of the same thing. Or so near to it that it makes no difference at all. They happen at work, when I am out, when I am talking to friends and family. There is no way to stop them, none that I have found yet anyway. There could be a way, though I won't consider it until I have exhausted every other option.
The dreams, the fevered daytime terrors that haunt me, are dreams of me. My hands, covered in blood and brains and flecks of bone. The feeling of still warm flesh spattering my torso. Sometimes I am holding a gun, sometimes ... a knife. People always die in those dreams. Sometimes I do too, but that doesn't happen often. When I die, I know it is a dream. I jerk awake, screaming. Usually it is everyone else. Once I step in front of, or behind or to the side of them, it makes no difference, they always die.
These dreams scare me. I can feel the sensation of pulling a knife through muscle, feel the blade glide through fat and slice through sinew, even the hard stop when the edge binds as it bites into bone. I can feel the warm rush of life leaving a body (they never have names), feel the stickiness as it coats my wrists, staining me red.
These dreams scare me. I don't feel, not in the way I do when I deal with people in everyday life. I feel nothing, none of the abstract emotions. No joy, no passion, no love, no hate, no disgust, I feel nothing! Nothing beyond the urge to plunge the blade in again and again, to pull the trigger and shatter the soft grey tissue behind it's fortress of bone.
These dreams scare me. I can follow the path of the bullet; feel the heat the metal slug takes on from its explosive departure from the barrel, the heat it gains from air friction as it flies. I can feel the thud as it connects with whatever I have unleashed it on. I can feel the bone, flesh, matter eject out the back of whomever I have just shot when the bullet passes through.
And I always do it again.
These dreams scare me. They scare me in a way I cannot explain. They scare me because I like them.
[Later]
I had another one. Lord, I just wish they would go away! I cannot stand it! If they keep up, I will lose my mind. I know it. I know it the same way I know how my body breathes. Something inside, some part of me can feel my hold slipping away.
I always see my dreams through a haze, a mist on the edges of vision. The mist is always one of three colors. Either red or black or grey. The red ones are the worst, the most violent. The grey ... well they are bad but the least of the lot. At least in terms of their content. However, the grey ones are the ones I seem to be able to control most, the most dreamlike, the least real. I can sometimes turn aside, change them. I also die often in the grey dreams. The black dreams are the coldest, the ones where I can really feel nothing for the people I kill. And they are the ones that I enjoy most. Not in the dream, I feel nothing there. But in the real world, while I am watching, I enjoy them.
This can't be happening to me!
[Later]
Another! Oh sweet Lord, another one! Fuck me, I can't take it anymore! Will someone please come and put me out of my misery? Before I act on these dreams, before I make them real? It is another case of just knowing. If I act on them, I'll make them stop. But will that be better? Will exchanging an illusion of madness for the reality of utter insanity really help me at all? I don't know. Ah Christ, I have no fucking idea! All I know for sure is that if these dreams; these visions carry on, it'll kill me in the end. And I can see the end so close to me now...
[Later]
Ah fucking God, fucking hell!! What have I done?! What the fuck have I done?!
Shit, I can't breathe....
[Later]
Thank heaven, it was just a vision. I'm sure of it. It has to be a vision, one of those fucked up dreams. There is no blood on me, none anywhere in the house. I can't feel any pain in my muscles at all. I've never been so happy to say that in my life....
Shit, if that one was real, I would be limping and staggering from the muscle exertion alone. One of the red ones this time. But it's getting worse. It felt so real! Thank God it's over. A few more of those and I'm done for good.
I've never thought or felt anything like that. Certainly not on purpose in any event. So ... so damned sick. That stupid red mist again. Things looking like I've been plastered with a strobe light, disconnected connected actions. Shuttered pictures of horrific brutality, somehow beautiful to me.
No! No, no, no! What am I saying?
I was sneaking up on someone. Just a man. I know that I know him but it doesn't matter to me. He can't hear me at all. He should be able to. I'm making no secret of my approach. It wouldn't matter if he did hear me anyway. The second I saw him, his end was written. Nothing short of a landmine could have stopped me from killing him.
I noticed my hands. It is like I had never seen them before. I feel a little like Macbeth. Ha-ha, is this a dagger I see before me? No you fuckwad, its two of the damned things. And they look considerably bigger than daggers, old son...
Ah Jesus I'm losing it...
I stepped up behind him and in a blur of movement I had slammed both of those blades into his back. No hesitation, no remorse, just plunged them into his kidneys and lifted. They penetrated clean through him. I know because as I lifted him I arched backward and slung his entire body, his full weight over my head and behind me into the darkness. I saw the blades poking through his stomach, severed coils of intestine clinging to the edges. I kept my balance and heaved, feeling his rigid body slide off the blades. I must have nailed both of his kidneys, he didn't make a sound. Just a noise like the air rushing from a slashed inner tube, like a breathless whooshing.
I pivoted and followed him into the darkness. I was on him before he even registered what had just happened. He never knew what had hit him in those first few seconds. Oh but later he knew all right. I made sure of that...
Ah damn I'm going to be sick.
[Later]
That feels better. I don't think I'll be able to keep anything down for a while. Every time my mind wanders that way, my gorge rises again. I'm too scared to leave the house. What if one of those dreams hits me at work? How would I explain going stiff wherever I am and then collapsing screaming my lungs out? Taking an extended leave of absence is less risky than being fired on grounds of mental instability. I'll run out of food eventually though, then I'm going to have to risk going outside and facing the world. Fuck it, maybe it would be better if I just stayed here and starved to death. At least the dreams would end.
[Later]
It was all a dream, it had to be all a dream, only a dream only a dream only a dream only a dream only a dream only a dream only a dream only a dream only a dream only a dream onlyadreamonlyadreamonlyadreamonlyadreamonlyadreamONLYADREAM!!!!
[Later]
Ohsweetfuckinggodinheavenijustfoundthefuckingknives....
[Later]
Christ ... what have I done? How the hell could ... where ... is...? Please tell me I'm imagining this all ... it doesn't seem possible. None of ... why? Why has this happened? Why is it still happening? This isn't me! This isn't me! Can't you understand that! This isn't who I fucking am!
I didn't do any of this. I couldn't have. I can't find the knives. It is just possible that I was dreaming them ... yes that has to be it. The knives were a part of the vision. Ah shit, who am I kidding? If they weren't real this time, they will be, the next time or the time after. Or the time after that.
I cannot be sure that I am not actually doing these things. I need to know, I must know if it's happening in my mind or if it is real. Am I a killer? There is a way to be sure. It will take some timing but I think I can manage it.
[Later]
I've found the cuffs. I'm so happy I've never thrown her things out. Damned kinky bitch, I'll always have a soft spot for her. Right where she hit me with the car door when I tried to talk her out of leaving. And the keys. I found those as well. The next time I feel the ... whatever those things actually are, those fugues coming on, I'll cuff myself to the bed frame. I'll swallow the key. And once it's over, I'll just wait for nature to take its course and let myself out. It seems a touch extreme, having to sift through my own shit to let myself out of a self imposed imprisonment but in light of the circumstances ... who would blame me.
I've got everything ready next to the bed. Food, water, everything I'll need for a day or two. Even a bucket ... for later. The cuff is fixed to the bed. I've tested it. There will be no way for me to release myself until I get the key back. Goddammit I really hope that this works.
[Later]
...it's coming fast now ... I've secured myself to the bed; the key is en route to my stomach. I'll just have to ride this one out...
[Later]
Save me ... that was the worst one yet ... sweetmarymotherofchristsavemefrommyself ... I'm still cuffed to the bed at least. So I know that I didn't manage to actually follow through with it. Still so real though. Like I was there, doing those terrible things. My wrist aches. There are dried streamers of blood circling my arm. Like I was straining to release myself. Does this mean that I was really going through with it before? I'll have to consider chaining myself up every time I feel one coming.
[Later]
The key has not come out yet. I hope that it hasn't become lodged somewhere inside me.
[Later]
Seems like I have been here for a week, maybe longer. The dates are all wrong. I'm avoiding the news broadcasts. I'm scared of what I might find.
[Later]
I'm almost out of water...
[Later]
Must have blacked out. Can't remember anything.. Still no key. I'm going to try and move the bed, maybe I can reach a tap if I stretch myself. Must do it before I get any weaker or I won't be able to move the bed at all.
I have to do something or I will just pass out here and never get up again. As attractive as the idea sounds, I still want to live.
Seems like I'm severely dehydrated. How long have I been lying here?
[Later]
I've made it to the doorway. There is no way for me to reach the sink. I could just cry. All I get are dry sobs. Dammit but they hurt like a mad bastard, my throat is raw as hell.
The room has gone all fuzzy. I'm hallucinating. Actual hallucinations this time, not those godforsaken visions
[Later]
Sonofabitch! Blacked out again! I'm really scared that I'm going to die here....
Wait! What the hell is that? Just what the fuck is going on? The goddamn handcuff key is sitting on the counter by the back door! I can see it from here, if I stand on the bed, that dull metallic glint ... yes, that's the fucking key! But how...? Oh no. No, no, no!
How did I manage that?
I swallowed it! I SWALLOWED IT!
How did it get over there?!
Unless ... no, don't even think that way, that's not a possibility.
Fuck! Fuck! FUCK!
What now? Throw something through the window? Looks like my only option. I don't have much to throw in here with me though; I'll have to make them count.
[Later]
It didn't work. False alarm, I'll bet that damn neighbor of mine shouted at some kids for smashing the window while they were playing. It was me, idiot!
Looks like I'm stuck here. I've saved the heaviest object for last. It's not going out the window though. Oh no, you are staying right here with me, pretty one. You are my ticket out of this little nightmare. I can't tell which is worse, the visions or being stuck here, dying by inches.
Right, here goes. I hope this works.
[Later]
I'm out! Freeeee!! I'm in a load of pain but at least I have some water in me. Well, whatever stayed down.
Mental note: If dehydrated after chaining self to bed, once liberated, drink water in very small amounts.
My right hand is screwed. I had to break almost every bone in it to worm it out of the cuff. Thank God for that ebony ashtray. Hitting my hand the first time was hard. Doing it again and again was even harder. No one heard me of course. Yelling my head off should have been my first option. Too bad this place absorbs sound so well. Too damn well. Have I been bringing victims here?
[Later]
I've managed to bind my hand as best I could. For the first time in my life I'm really happy that I'm left handed. Sure I can't write legibly if my life depended on it but at least I was able to splint the broken bones in my fucked right hand. To a degree. There are going to be some questions asked if I make it out of this.
I can't think of anything that can prevent me from making another try at acting out these sadistic acts. Not a single thing. My one consolation is that I will know when the next one comes. I can feel them coming now. Maybe my broken hand, the pain, will keep me from slipping deeper into the chaos.
[Later]
I felt it coming. Then I swung my right hand against the doorframe and the feeling eased off. I think I have found a way to control it. I might just have a chance at returning to my old life.
[Later]
[Later]
I hope this is the last I have to say on this subject. I'm back at work. I'm living life again. A vast improvement on before. The cast on my hand doesn't stop me from jarring the cracked bones from time to time (my doctor is getting suspicious though, it's taking too long to heal) but it keeps me from going out to kill.
It will heal eventually though. I'm going to have to break something else. Soon.
[Later]
I've snapped my forearm! Just in fucking time too, I could feel it so close, it was breathing right down my neck when I managed to slam the car door hard enough to crush the bone in 32 places. The doc says he has never seen a compound fracture that severe. About two thirds of the way up my forearm is a three centimeter area of bone that has basically been reduced to powder. I guess the old adage about fear lending men wings is true after all.
What worries me is that the feelings are getting stronger. The pain from my arm is not stopping it as fast as it used to. It is just possible that I will have to take more extreme measures in the near future.
[Later]
[Later]
[Later]
Nothing else is helping. Femur, pelvis, even my spine. I have cracked or broken each in the last two years and all they can offer is a slight delay in the urges I'm getting. And the urges, the compulsion are getting stronger all the time. I am slowing it but I'm also building it. I can never stop injuring myself. I have no choice now.
[Later]
The bus is coming. From where I am standing, the bus should be traveling at enough speed to kill me or cripple me for life. I've chosen my place well too; the driver will have no chance to even touch the brake before he mows me down.
Suck it in, here it comes.
[Later]
[Later]
[Later]
[Later]
I'm alive! In a full body cast but I'm alive! I've been having the dreams again but I can't scream. I don't think I can even speak. My eyes refuse to open but I can hear perfectly well. The nurses think I am in a coma.
It is not much of a life and I'm sure that the dreams will drive me insane before long but I can't hurt anyone like this. They have broken through the pain barrier at last but I beat them. Without the ability to move it cannot happen. I cannot kill anything, not even myself.
[Later]
I felt them take the cast off a week ago. It has been almost a year since the bus. Something doesn't feel quite right though. They still all think I am in a coma and I heard them say I'll probably never recover. I also heard that a baby in the nursery two floors down was killed last night. Spread around the room like so much mince. I felt a thrill through my body when I heard that last bit. My legs hurt. Like I was using muscles I'm not accustomed to. It could not have been me though. I can't even will myself to open my mouth; they feed me through a tube for fucks sake! I think it was another psycho; I can't be the only psychotic in this city.
[Later]
It feels like I have been split in two. My normal mind is here inside the dream but I am powerless. It's like this part of me is still in the coma. But the dreams are not. I can feel my body moving in a detached kind of way. I've already worked my way through the night-shift nurses and almost every patient in my ward. The scalpel felt particularly good to the dream side of me. Just one slice and the wet insides of a coma patient tumble to the floor. I left a nurse on the floor with a catheter in each eyeball, the full bags draining into her skull.
Respiration tubes have allowed some tasteless garroting for my dream side. They have also let me bind up a few of the doctors. I've lined them up on the floor on their stomachs. The way I've bound them will make them tired and soon their legs will drop. When that happens, the necklaces of IV needles I forced into the respiration tubes around their necks will pull tight and slowly slide into their throats. My dream half has decided to watch who dies first and how.
I'm almost willing to bet that they will all die of strangulation ... oh wait; the needles are all open-ended. They will be drained of blood at an alarming rate. Almost before their hearts stop beating. I can almost feel their hearts sucking at nothing, like a kid trying to get the last bit of milkshake out of his glass, before their brain functions cease.
The fugue will be over before anyone can catch me in the act. And as a long-term coma patient who will still be in a coma when the authorities arrive; I will not fall under suspicion. I'll be marked as one of the few survivors of this unholy carnival of violence I have created. Since the hospital has so many ways to remain sterile, they won't even find any sign it was me. I'll probably be moved to another hospital.
I wonder what I will do next.
Brett has been writing (tentatively) since the age of ten.
Never having found a market in South Africa for the genres he prefers to write in, the discovery of Something Wicked was a pleasant surprise.
For inspiration he draws on the works of Philip K. Dick, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, as well as Cyberpunk-themed movies and anime series.
Brett's reading interests range from Cyberpunk, Fantasy, Horror and Sci-Fi to Non-Fiction. His favourite authors are Stephen King, Frank Herbert, Ray Bradbury, Terry Pratchett and Clive Barker.
This is Brett's second story for Something Wicked.
His first story, &arial, was published in Issue 3---Autumn 2007, &arial:Overload will be published in SW06.
Published by: Eternity Press
RRP: R130.00, 650p SC
"Too late they considered what might develop on the opposite pole of their third axis, too late they noticed the one who had mastered
Chaos..."
Greg Hamerton is a local author, but The Riddler's Gift is determinedly not local. It's written firmly in the post-Tolkein fantasy tradition; the most local thing in the book is the mention of butternut soup half way through.
But this makes sense. With this, his first full-on fantasy novel, Greg Hamerton has set out to hook as wide a readership as possible. In order to do this, he created a fantasy set-up that's about as generic as can be. The pseudo-Medieval European world, the semi-religious magical orders, the innocent girl with a Destiny with a capital D, the noble swordsman, the dark overlord ... none of this is going to scare anyone with its originality.
But Hamerton knows how to tell a good story, and how to build and maintain tension. He also knows that the key to successful fantasy writing is to create a world with evocative descriptions, good versus evil and a carefully imagined system of magic.
The story takes place in Eyri, a small hermetically-sealed kingdom under a magical dome which protects it from the growing chaos outside. Tabitha Serannon, the heroine, lives a relatively pastoral existence until the discovery of an invisible ring that can greatly enhance the wearer's magical ability. She is pursued for it by the Shadowcasters, an evil magical order that can manipulate motes of darkness, and is aided by the Swordmaster Gavenor and the jocular, ambiguous figure of the Riddler.
It's a solidly written tale, but it works better the further it strays from the fantasy template. The principal characters start out very predictably: the innocent characters are very innocent, the noble characters are very noble, the evil characters are very evil and you can spot the traitors a mile off. Fortunately, Hamerton puts his characters through enough crises to beat the stereotype out of them, and by the end of the novel they're all a lot more interesting than when they started. Likewise, the overall plot is spelled out carefully, which under-cuts the mystery of the novel; the characters might puzzle at each-others motivations, but the readers are never left in doubt, and this is mildly frustrating when one of the major characters is a trickster figure who is meant to be trading in ambiguities. But what the story loses in mystery it gains in tension, and during the slow, creeping movements as the good characters progress unwittingly towards a collision with the evil, the book becomes gripping.
The descriptive passages are also well-polished, and Hamerton is wise enough to leave some details, such as those of the demonic Morgloths, to be filled in by the readers' imaginations. But again, the descriptions work best when the novel is describing something new, such as a portrayal of a city being ravaged by silver threads of physically manifested chaos.
There is no doubt that Greg Hamerton is a highly capable writer, and The Riddler's Gift is classic fantasy of the kind consumed in vast quantities by lovers of the genre. But every aspect of his work is better when he strays from the beaten path. Considering the direction the story is taking, and the wider, more complex universe that Hamerton has begun to reveal outside the boundaries of the snow-globe land of Eyri, the next books in the continuing Lifesong saga should, hopefully, expand into something remarkable.
---Sam Wilson
Published by: Wizard Press
R115.00, 300p SC
"...the healers laid their hands upon her belly and poured their power into the child. Prayers were chanted in every chapel, candles lit for the unborn girl, the saviour of the land."
A stirring tale filled with dark twists, revenge and deceit, TC Southwell's debut novel is the first installment in the story of the demon lord Bane and Mirra, a child of light.
Mirra is a young healer schooled in the ways of love and peace. Bane is her antithesis---raised by the god Arkonen, trained to harness the power of darkness, knowing only cruelty and chaos. Barely past her 16th birthday, Mirra is placed in the path of Bane's army, ignorant of her true purpose. Innocent and trusting, she can not understand why Bane treats her so cruelly, nor why he kills all he meets. Although Mirra's magic protects her from harm, Bane drags her with him on his path of destruction. Bane rebuffs Mirra's efforts to ease the pain brought on by his dark power, believing that she is trying to kill him. But the Overworld is doomed if she cannot win his trust. Neither Mirra nor Bane know of the catastrophic task he is destined to undertake, a task that will bring him into direct conflict with purest innocence and herald the coming of absolute evil.
Demon Lord will appeal to fantasy lovers of all ages. A readily accessible plot and the potential for romance will draw young adult readers, and there's even more to discover beneath the surface for mature aficionados of the genre. Although I felt that the author gave away a little too much too soon (not to mention on the back of the cover), I was enthralled by the story and Southwell's descriptive powers. Here is a writer who has a way with words and draws us into her world with ease. It's a world I'm eager to visit again, and I'll definitely be reading the next book, Dark God, which is due out in the second half of 2007.
+ Vanessa Finaughty
Published by: Hodder & Stoughton
R220.00, 321p HC
'The hate grew slowly. For him it was the only way. It grew at its own pace, and it grew completely, and put forth red flowers. It was the sort of hate no intelligent person ever knows. It was its own thing.'
Stephen King wasn't sure that this book should ever have emerged from the drawer in which it had lain hidden since 1973, but I, for one, am glad that it did ... Blaze is a clean, stark, surprisingly sweet tale of a simple man whose life is never quite under his control. The character of Blaze is one we've glimpsed elsewhere in King's works: the slow-minded brute with a marshmallow heart, but is so lovingly crafted, and given such a riveting storyline to wander through, that I instantly forgave the author for so obviously tugging at my heartstrings.
Damaged as a boy, and consequently never quite capable of grasping the intricate social cruelties of growing up, Blaze is motivated entirely by loyalty and feeling, and is easily won over by a little kindness. His only friend is George, an opportunistic con artist, who manipulates and intimidates the hulking Blaze into an ideal accomplice. George schemes and oversees all of their petty crimes and cons and the unlikely duo become a successful, inseparable team. When George is no longer around, though, Blaze's need for him is so great that he continues their relationship inside his own mind, and with this mental 'George' berating and egging him along, Blaze plunges headlong into a crime that is too far over his head.
Told with trademark colourful dialogue, and a visceral understanding of emotion, Blaze engages you quickly, whips you along a riveting chain of events, and deposits you on the other side, slightly breathless, but unashamedly moved. This once again proves that, previous rambling horror tales with feeble endings aside, King is a master of his craft.
As the story is told largely from the viewpoint of the big, self deprecating Blaze, the language of the tale is quirky, simple, and unsentimental, which saves the work from being just too damn tragic for words.
---Miranda Sherry
DIMMU BORGIR---In Sorte Diaboli
(Nuclear Blast)
Dimmu Borgir have perfectly executed their style of playing; Truly claiming the throne as one of the world's biggest black metal bands. They are also responsible for what is probably the best-marketed merchandise worldwide.
This, their eighth album, was released in two formats, a standard CD release and a limited edition CD & DVD combo. The 47-minute DVD combo features the amazing music video for The Serpentine Offering, a making-of the video and album, photo galleries and a Dimmu Borgir media player.
To read the lyrics on the sleeve notes you have to use a mirror as they are all inverted.
---The Alwynator
PSYCHE---Club Salvation
(Rivetting Promotions)
Pronounced "Sigh-kee", this 16 track remix album will keep your body moving. Originally from Canada they now reside in Germany, and have played with greats like Alien Sex Fiend, Diary of Dreams, Young Gods, Assemblage 23, The Human League, Visage among others.
Club Salvation was recorded for their Australian tour and all those who have just discovered Psyche on their international tour.
The album includes classics like Goodbye Horses and Sanctuary as well as dance mixes of Unveiling the Secret, 15 Minutes and Snow Garden. Psyche is visiting SA soil to play three shows including the legendary Goth Industrial Gathering on 28 September.
---Uncle Dave
VNV NATION---Judgement
(Metropolis)
VNV Nation return to form with this amazing album, revisiting the days of the classic Empires but adding more of an industrial sound.
Judgement kicks into gear with The Farthest Star and Testament. The classic track, Genesis has been renewed, updated and turned into Nemesis.
Other faves are Illusion and Carry You. Personally, I found the last album, Matter and Form, extremely boring and too experimental. Thank heavens for this gem. We have been saved.
For those curious, VNV stands for Victory Not Vengeance. Expect a VNV Nation tour later this year.
Watch this space...
---Uncle Dave
Lark---Razbliuto!
(Just Music)
Lark's first full-length album was released in September last year, but we thought we'd give it another plug because, well---it's a masterpiece.
Building on the unique theatrical-industrial-electro-pop sound of their Mouth of Me EP, Razbliuto! draws us lovingly toward even more innovative and mind-numbingly beautiful sounds.
Lead vocalist Inge Beckman wields her voice like a finely-tuned instrument, making a mockery of the laws of physics as she weaves a multi-layered soundscape expertly supported by the rest of the band.
Songs such as Yuralastine, Spider's Eye and Clown Mayonaise will leave you in awe. Also check out Heroin Mary on the re-issued Mouth of Me, which comes with six new tracks.
---Joe Vaz
Name: Rogue Galaxy™
Developer: Level5
Platform: Playstation[®]2
Genre: RPG
Release: 28 September 07
Rating: Teen
Price: TBA
Rogue Galaxy is an action RPG and Level5's final offering for the PS2 fills the role admirably. Rogue Galaxy is a definite example of a game breathing new life into the console.
You play Jaster Rogue through over 100 hours of story, complete with side-quests and mini-games galore. Rogue Galaxy is not as free-roaming as next-gen games such as Oblivion, but it's about as free as you'll see on the PS2, and it's a fun bit of exploration. Through the control of one character, battles are done in real-time while the remaining characters continue to do their own thing. You can change the way your companions react to battles (guns blazing, or treading lightly), and this can often have a major effect on the battle's outcome. However, the battles can get overbearingly repetitive and border on boring if you stay in a section where monster variety is scarce for too long.
The graphics of Rogue Galaxy are cel-shaded, and not as lifelike and detailed as the Square-Enix graphics. On the other hand one of the more surprising aspects of this game is the voice work. Often RPGs have horrendous voice work, especially when translated from Japanese to English, but in Rogue Galaxy every accent, every vocal nuance seems to have been lovingly done, and you'll certainly hear the difference.
It has its flaws, but they pale when pitted against the game as a whole. Overall, it's a wonderful experience, with a great storyline, but this game will require time of you, and plenty of it.
Graphics: 8/10---Nothing as spectacular as anything next-gen, but the graphics are charming, and the backdrops are jaw-dropping
Sound: 9/10---The game's voice-acting serves it well, and the music is catchy enough to warrant repeat listening
Game play: 8/10---Some of the battles become repetitive, but overall, the game provides a great gaming experience
Longevity: 9/10---You'll be playing this game for a long time. The complete story is well over 100 hours. Expect to be at this game for at least that long.
Overall score: 8/10
Game: Project Sylpheed
Platform: Xbox360
Genre: Space shooter
Developer: Square-Enix
Players: 1
Live support: None
Release date: 29 July 2007
Anyone who grew up in the 80s should remember an awesome TV series called Robotech. Many a kid, I'm sure, used to think to themselves, "Wow ... I'd love to pilot a ship like that!" Project Sylpheed is a little like that, which is why I personally found it a wonderful throwback to those days.
Project Sylpheed is a sequel to an older SegaCD game, Silpheed, which was remade into an early PS2 game, Silpheed: The Lost Planet. Though it doesn't have any RPG elements, Project Sylpheed still functions as a great space-battle game. The controls take some getting used-to, but they become second nature very quickly. During battles you are almost overwhelmed by the sheer detail and number of things happening at once. Make no mistake: you'll need to go through the tutorial missions to learn the controls, but once you get into the game, it presents a surprisingly deep storyline.
Project Sylpheed's graphics are beautifully rendered, if a little on the animé side. Typical of Square-Enix fare, the cut-scenes are displayed in awesome detail, and it's the little touches that make you appreciate the work that went into this game.
The game's biggest drawbacks are that there is no multiplayer or live support, two add-ons that would've increased the lifespan of a game that has a lot else going for it. Though the battles do get repetitive, (defend, destroy, accompany, repeat), if you manage to get through it, you'll find a rewarding story and perhaps a new-found respect for the Robotech pilots of old.
Graphics: 9/10---Aside from a few insignificant graphic problems, this game is beautiful
Sound: 7/10---Sound effects are pretty standard for a space shooter---nothing spectacular here
Game play: 6/10---The game is difficult to learn to play, make no mistake, but it's rewarding
Longevity: 4/10---Unless you're up to flying the same missions over again to improve your ratings, there's nothing to bring you back, especially with the lack of multiplayer or live support
Overall score: 6.5/10
The sun was melting down into someone else's tomorrow. Aching buildings stood tall amongst the last few strands of light and night began creeping up from the other horizon. Dust dampened windows of cars and trains reflected pieces of sky as shards of the burning sunset.
A block of flats had framed, within one of its tear-stained windows, the face of a young boy. One of Hitler's lost Aryan children. Or so it seemed. White-blonde hair encircled a gaunt face and above each raised cheekbone lay an ice crystal encased by dark lashes. Wide-eyed he stared over the edges of the city as he had done every night since he was old enough to stand. His tiny fingers scratched paint off the peeling windowsill as he waited in taut anticipation for the sun to disappear completely and for the dark of the night to reveal his beauty.
Behind him, his small room, with its bedraggled and sordid possessions, was slowly welcoming the night's cold into its cement skin. A mattress and a blanket lay in one corner next to a rotting wooden chest. A bookshelf opposed the mattress and stood on the other side of the room beside the doorway. Upon it lay odds and ends that had seen the darker side of seven long years. A bare and lifeless light bulb swung like a dead man from a noose in the breeze that found entrance by the window. Far down below the workers of the city were beginning to make their ways home to aching families while Kay stood still at his window.
At last, the final streamers of light were sucked into darkness and the city's lights burst into neon life. Orange and white globes shimmered along the streets while below them frost began creeping along the ground. The last few people of the day were heading off into slumber land but Kay's bed would be empty for several hours yet. Just a few more minutes lay between him and his love. A few more minutes he waited before the last person, as they left the refinery, flicked the switch and his love was there before him. A flame of more brilliant beauty could not be held in the eyes of a human. She was metres high as she seductively danced in the rhythm of the night's breeze. His flame. His love. His only love.
The next morning was bleak. Sluggish clouds rolled amongst the soot and smoke of the city's air. A few fat, grey raindrops smashed into Kay's window. Sleepy eyelids opened and then shut again as a small yawn took over. He clambered up from his bed, crawled into his clothes and stumbled out to the kitchen.
The tiny kitchen was cold and clammy under his feet. The smell of fermented jam mingled with the cigarette smoke that he traced back to Vanessa, a friend of his mother's.
"Mornin' love. Sleep well? That's good."
She cooed away to herself, oblivious of the ashes falling onto the linoleum.
"Listen dear, your mother's still out. She said to come get myself some food here. Oh, and for you as well. Of course."
Her sharp heels clipped over the ground toward the stove where she was making breakfast. Her faded purple dress shifted itself further up her hips causing her to stop and tug it down over her lacy underwear. Mascara had wound large black rings under her tired eyes. She emptied the contents of the jar onto her piece of bread and gave the last mouldy piece of crust to Kay.
"Thanks," he murmured.
She seated herself down opposite him at the table but the distance was not enough to conceal the cacophony of male cologne from him. Nor the blushing scratch mark beneath her jawbone. Rain chattered gently to itself outside, sliding idly down the dirt-frosted kitchen window. Silently he ate what he could of the bread. His mother hadn't brought home any food for about a week. He'd just have to wait until supper and hope that his mother came back before then.
Bread eaten; Vanessa got up; exposed a few more pieces of lace and started to leave, stumbling over the chipped concrete in the passage.
"Bye love!"
"Goodbye Vanessa."
Kay licked the last few crumbs off his fingers and went over to put out the smouldering cigarette properly.
Back in his room Kay made his bed; gently folding the scarred blanket back into its place. He put away his pyjama top in his wooden chest and took out a scratchy red woollen jersey, which he pulled down over his head. He fetched the front-door keys that his mother had left for him and made his way out of the apartment.
The keys jumped and jangled inside his worn pocket as he made his way down the reeking stairwell. He strode on down the corridors, past babies crying, through air thick with unsettled arguments. The walls had shed their paint and wore now a dress of graffiti. Profound statements of self-worthlessness and calf love stitched and patterned themselves into the hallways. Down to the basement he went and over to the darkest corner. Silently a trapdoor was flipped open and Kay slid into its secret chambers.
A match bit into the darkness, hissing and spitting to life. Two old candles were lit and his small corner of the underworld was soaked in amber light. Kay made his way over to the other side and lit another three candles. Together they made visible a small, square room layered in dust and broken cobwebs. Initially it had been a private storeroom but years of neglect had turned it into Kay's room. He was the only one who knew where it was and who ever came down into it. Pieces of paper littered the walls. On each page was a picture of furious orange swirls and streaks. Some of them flicked upward towards the tattered edge of the page while others did crazy dances round and round themselves. The candles stood in pools of old wax on elfin tables. A small area on the floor had been crudely swept to form a tight circle. Inside the circle lay a few pieces of battered paper, orange, yellow and red crayons and an old book.
Kay sat down on the edge of the circle with one knee under his chin. He pulled towards him the heavy book and opened it to a page entitled Banishment. He couldn't read, but he loved the way the letters curved and dipped into patterns on the page. Carefully, using one of the crayons, he copied out the words.
"O deathly darkness come once more,"
His crayon glided over the shapes and dots.
"To let this spirit roam no more."
He swapped around his legs and continued to write.
"As sure as dust is dust to death,
Then let this last be its last breath."
A week had gone by before another Monday lazed on towards dusk. Kay's mother still had not come back and hunger pains were digging through his thin flesh. He wandered through the lonely rooms aimlessly, brushing his skeletal fingers along the mummified chairs. They'd been there too long and now stood with their guts falling out across the floor. He dragged his feet over to the gaping window and realised that it was quickly becoming night. He'd run out of matches and so the candles in his bedroom stood unlit. The refinery workers would be leaving soon and then she would dance again.
Dust and debris swirled around his ankles as he hurried down the stairs. The ground outside was slippery with oil and the rain had put a metallic dampener on everything. He walked in rhythm with the highway towards the fraying edges of the city. A trail of brittle and empty bones led the way to an opening in the fence of the refinery. Through the fence and towards the tower. As a pilgrim he walked on through the sticky darkness. In the far-off distance Kay heard the worker-filled train depart from the station and he hurried his footsteps. Eventually he reached the calloused wall of the tower and slid his hands across it until they could feel the rusty iron ladder beneath them. Up he climbed. Each rung lamented quietly under his hollow weight as with each step the stench of burnt gas saturated his translucent skin. Not so far above him the clouds lay thick and heavy across the sky. The ladder ended more quickly than Kay had expected and he found himself standing on a wide rim enclosing a huge circle of nefarious blackness. A slow shiver trickled through him. He lifted his head and gazed around with desolate eyes. The city lay with its legs spread beneath him in its unnatural, orange-lit glory. It welcomed every person and their advances into its secret cavities, charging them only their life. The sun had set and was dragging with it its flailing strands of light as his anticipation burned fiercely in the destitute atmosphere. The last second tore by and all at once Kay could hear a moan echoing up from the belly of the refinery. She was coming. He could feel scorching heat welling up below him. Kay closed his eyes with long sought-after relief. Up she flew, spinning, twisting and roaring. Up she flew to catch him in her arms as he fell.
At a young age Caitlin Leigh was hauled down from the rooftop during one of her attempts to get her fairy wings to work. Now19, she still has not managed to get a secure grip on reality.
She's studying English and Psychology at UCT and has yet to learn not to play with fire.
This is Caitlin's first story for Something Wicked.
My name is not important. None really are. You will soon come to terms with the validity of the notion that all names lead to one, and from that name alone you may reach God. Nevertheless, to avoid confusion, I shall tell you my name. It is Trevor Mitchell. In my tale, as with all things in life, the choice of what to believe is yours, and I have no doubt many would label me a liar, even with the evidence I am able to offer. It was for this reason that until now this anecdote has gone untold. It is true that in this respect I am a coward, and am disinclined to the mockery of other cowards. Some time ago, several months now, an incident occurred which I somehow had the misfortune, or fortune, to be a part of, and which, to this day, perturbs my own powers of belief.
I live in a little known part of the world, a small suburb in Cape Town, South Africa. The suburb is named Observatory, a nod toward the astronomical observatory that the area quietly boasts. This star-gazing centre is present more strongly as the suburb's title than as a presence of its own. Most people, even those that reside here, have not even seen the building---it rests obscurely on the far side of the river where few have any reason to venture, and the significance of the suburb's title is blurred in the affectionate vernacularism 'Obz.'
It is a quaint suburb, not quaint in the way of a charming old English village, but more in the manner of the tang of a New Orleans. It is unusual, distinct, colourful in every way. The suburb is gently illumed by the magic lamp of free-thinking, and through that oleaginous light filters the innocuous anti-authoritarianism characteristic to all the various pockets of comradeship found here. Apothecaries advertise their wares on small hand-painted signs outside their houses, Immigrants, legal and illegal, babble away in all the European tongues of West Africa and all the Bantu sounds of East Africa in their search for a better life, Rastafarians peddle their wares, students find an affordable (and suitably bohemian) haven, artists of all mediums and occupations eke out livings and careers, and in the centre of it all restaurateurs provide the heart that pulses in the nights, and ticks evenly during the day, but never hurries.
The house I stay in is on the North Westerly side, tucked away from the busier byways. At this time I am the only resident. Of my two previous house fellows the one graduated and shipped off, and the other just shipped off, once his parents concluded that his graduation would not be merely tardy, but non-existent, and so drew him home on a leash of financial dependency. I'm expecting new tenants, friends of mine, in a few weeks, once the university term begins, but in the meantime I am enjoying my solitude. I have time to read, and to write, and to indulge in other idle pastimes. The only thing that disturbs this peace is the nag of my memory, which wants me to consolidate an opinion of the incident I wish to tell you about. The proof of its happening is right before my eyes: two pieces of paper. The much larger piece of paper, a letter, I shall get to shortly. The other, a mere snippet, is an obituary:
It is this day that chases me. Omar Abrahams was a friend of mine. I may only be a young student who knows little of the world beyond my own, but Omar Abrahams and I struck a sort of rapport in spite of our difference in age, (though I never knew his exact age).
On the morning of the day he died I returned home from early lectures at the nearby University of Cape Town. Travis, my then house mate, before his parents drew on the purse strings funding his eternal holiday, was at home as he usually was during the mornings. He was lying on the couch in front of the television when I walked into the living room. He told me that "that freaky old guy called" asking me to stop in at his house as soon as I could.
'Maybe he's finally going to come out the closet to you man,' Travis had added with sly malice.
I had about two and a half hours to spare before I was due back on campus, so I left immediately. The call itself did not leave me with any unease. Omar had a bizarre dislike of cellphones, commenting that we'd soon wish they were never invented, and only ever communicated over landline telephones. He had also called to invite me over to his house on several occasions without notice, as if on a whim, as if he had just rediscovered my existence and wished to be a friend once more. He had not always been so capricious, but had become increasingly absorbed in his work in the preceding months, and so I put his inattentiveness down to other engagements. He never gave me reason to believe that he was uncaring.
Omar lived almost on the opposite side of Observatory to me, on the North Easterly side, down by the hockey stadium. For him, it was conveniently close to the Observatory building. If I walked it would take me only about fifteen minutes to get to him. So I left my car on the pavement outside where it was parked, and set out on foot. It was a bright summer's day with the oppressive heat that Cape Town can cook up in the sunny season. I walked to and then along Lower Main Road, past Cool Runnings, the irie, self proclaimed 'Rastaraunt', and turned into station road. Along the way I remember thinking how faded everything looked. At night the colours seem so much more vibrant, but under the stare of sunlight they were exposed as a muted, dusty, and tired sophism.
I was still thinking about night's flattering potencies when I walked past the sign-less signpost of Nuttall road, just before the station bridge. I looked down that side road, cramped with parked cars, and saw a little way down the façade of the quirky bar and restaurant 'A Touch of Madness'. It was there that I had met Omar, about a year ago. I'd been back from my holidays for about a week. I'd spent most of it up the east coast with my family, who had returned to Johannesburg, and I was revelling in my emancipation. Although I had enjoyed the holiday it was good to be back in Cape Town, amongst my kith and back to a life of my own.
A Touch Of Madness was hosting one of its sporadic poetry evenings, and I had gone along accompanied by Travis. I'd arrived feeling a little nervous. I had never read any of my poems to an audience, any audience at all, and I was worried that I would be revealed as an incompetent or a fraud. As the evening matured I sat a little easier, soothed somewhat by my comparisons of my own rhymes with the rhymes of others, but when my turn came I realised I had not achieved calm. I stood and walked to the microphone, inhaling the heady voodoo airs of wood and wine and candle wax. I glanced over the lines that I held between agitated fingers, and was about to start when I noticed a man staring at me. This may seem a strange thing for someone who was at the time standing as a focal point to remark, but while others sipped their drinks and bantered privately with their companions, this one man had his eyes intently on me. He looked like he had seen a ghost. It unnerved me greatly, but when I looked back at him he looked no different from the others who waited, encouraging me to speak with their settling silence. At the time I wondered if I had imagined the man's startled expression. To save myself from mounting embarrassment I composed myself and read aloud my poems.
They were received without fanfare or jeers, and as I returned to my seat I was dispatched with the same polite applause the others before me had received.
'Nice one,' remarked Travis, 'You want to get another drink?'
The reason Travis did not like Omar was that he hated to feel like he was being shown up as a fool. As I was returning from the bar with two glasses of red wine I noticed the old man regarding me again, but his eyes had softened considerably. I sat down, and said to Travis: 'See that old guy sitting at the back there? He keeps on staring at me.'
'Maybe he's queer,' volunteered Travis.
The man seemed to take our attention as an invitation. He smiled back at us and came over to our table.
'Good evening gentlemen,' he said, leaning over the table and speaking in hushed tones so as not to disturb the poetess that had replaced me at the microphone. 'I apologize if I alarmed you just now,' he said to me, 'I thought I remembered you from somewhere.'
I saw Travis roll his eyes at that.
'May I have a seat?' the man continued.
'Sure,' I said, and introduced Travis and myself.
'Yes, as I thought,' said the old man, smiling wolfishly, 'My name is Omar Abrahams.'
Omar Abrahams was a small man, a coloured whose mixed descent hinted at Malaysian ancestry. He had a neatly clipped, ash-white goatee, close cropped hair of the same colour, and dark, expansive eyes, almost black and near to infinite. His clothes were casually formal. He wore trousers and a collared shirt that covered a small belly. We sat in silence, waiting for the poetess to finish.
'Your poetry shows a lot of promise,' he said to me once she was done, 'I'm sure if you stick at it, it will develop nicely.'
'So what is it that you do Mr Abrahams?' Travis asked, leaning back and lighting a cigarette.
'Well, mostly I work at the observatory, the one down the road. But I also lecture a few modules at the university. You two are students there?'
'Yes,' I answered, 'we are. I'm studying literature, and Travis is doing economics. So you're an astronomer then?'
The little old man nodded solemnly.
'I'm supposed to be a cancer, but I don't know if I really believe in that stuff,' said Travis.
Omar chuckled.
'Most astronomers would agree with you Travis,' he said, 'We are in the business of science. We leave clairvoyance up to the astrologers.'
I knew this had annoyed Travis, but he did a good enough job of hiding it for long enough that he would not be blatant in excusing himself. He spent the few minutes finishing his cigarette, barely partaking in the conversation, until he went off to go and speak to the poetess.
I had never met an astronomer before, and so stayed for quite a while at that little table with Omar. When I confessed to him that I had "never been good with the stars", his smile merely got a little broader, his eyes twinkled merrily, and he replied, "Yes, but you will get better," and he offered to teach me some of what he knew. When I asked him why he had chosen such a vocation he replied, "Sometimes I think it chose me," and then went on to explain that no matter where he went his eyes had always been drawn to the celestial unknown. 'Since I was a child I've been curious about up there' he said, pointing with his index finger. We talked about my poetry, and about his fascination with the cosmos. When I got home that night, before I walked through the door, I looked up at the dark skies and did not take that deepened dome for granted. I may have been a bit tipsy from the wine, but I was certain the happy awe I felt had something to do with a beginning rather than wine warmth and an insouciance at the tautology of an impending hangover.
That awe has never completely left me. I still struggle to comprehend how the serenity of the night sky can be the titanic swirl of an unfathomable sum of bodies and forces that it is. But I look up and am stilled.
By the time I had reached the apex of the bridge I was beginning to feel a light sweat blooming on my forearms and neck. There was hardly a breath of air, and so I had to be content with my own movements to fan myself. From the top of the bridge you can make out the guarded gate and roof of the observatory building. The rest is obscured by trees.
That historic building was one of the places where Omar cultivated my awe. Many nights we had sat there until the birds announced daybreak, watching the sky through outmoded telescopes, or thumbing through collections of the earliest photography of the heavens, or watching computer simulations of supernal dynamics. There was a lot of silence on those long, adventurous nights, but also a lot of Omar's soft, patient voice, unfurling the universe for me.
We spent evenings in fields and on hilltops, looking up at the constellations, and making up our own. We spent time at his small home, neat on the outside, neat on the inside, except for his study, which was always a flurry of papers. I brought my poetry and other writing for him to read, and we would speak of great writers and their works. Although our favourite subjects were always astronomy and literature I found Omar to be inexhaustible in the range of subjects of which he always seemed to have intimate knowledge.
By the time I reached the hockey stadium my clothing was starting to stick to me. I was beginning to wish I'd taken my car instead of choosing to walk to Omar's. I turned right into Ossian road, and walked along the stadium's length. Discarded packets had collected against the foot of the fence, and beyond the Astroturf fields I could see the equipment yard of the circus school. I usually enjoy walking. I develop a rhythmic stride that is both economical and comfortable. But that day was very hot. Noonday heat had arrived hours early.
Over the months Omar and I had watched an inverted Orion stalk across the inky night, followed by his ever-faithful hounds. In that time I learned of the discrepancies between our clocks and calendars, and the sidereal regularities on which they were based. About the stars I discovered, trivially, that Cape Town's proudest landmark is also found in the Southern skies as Mons Mensa, with the large malleganic cloud spilling from its tabletop as terrestrial clouds do from Table Mountain. I also found out, significantly, how a star dies, and how it gives rise to new stars, and planets and systems, that the universe is constantly evolving, and that just as our sun will cease, so will the cosmos. Slowly I came to understand that Omar's curiosity was not just about 'up there', but also about what 'up there' means to us 'down here.' His specialities were cosmology and stellar astronomy, interpreting the known universe to discover the unknown, and investigating our cosmic origins.
Scorpio was taking his season in the sky when I began to see less and less of Omar. His work had seemed to gain fresh significance. He spent quite a lot of time away at the observatory's Sutherland site in the clean skies of the Karoo desert. On the occasions I did see him he would often speak of 'the structures of the universe', how nuclear microcosms mirror astronomical ones, but how, in between, life on earth had reorganised those structures. I won't pretend I understood it all. He often lost me, but would laugh at his fervour once he realised my discomfort, and tell me that it didn't make sense to him either.
I had rounded the dogleg in the road at the foot of the stadium, and turned into the street that Omar's house was in. His house was just past halfway down. It was close to the railway tracks, but the trains were infrequent enough not to be a huge bother, and in any case you soon grew accustomed enough not to even notice their passing. I strode down the short street and came to Omar's house, looking forward to some shade and a cool glass of water. I reached over the fence and unlatched the wooden gate. It opened noiselessly and closed with a slight shudder. I went up and knocked at the door, and waited for it to be answered.
Once when I met up with Omar on the university campus for some coffee, I found him in exceptional spirits. With a merry glow he informed me that he had just been asked to be best man at a wedding of two of his colleagues. It seems that months earlier Omar had invited one of them over for dinner, but instead of his own address he had given the address of a female colleague that had caught the eye of his friend. So when this man arrived at her house that evening, complemented with a bottle of wine, they both had a nervous laugh over Omar's deception, and subsequently decided not to let the bottle of wine go wanting. It was the bride of this union that took the trouble to write Omar's obituary.
Omar had this effect on people. His mischief was never mean-spirited or cynical. He'd told me once, with smiling face, of the time he agreed to take a Cub Scout troop on a weekend outing. He told them that he'd been given the wrong key to the cabins and made them sleep in the field outside under the stars. He spent the evening showing them how to find the south celestial pole, and named the brightest of the stars. On the second night, after he'd 'found' the correct key, at least half of the troop had asked if they could sleep outdoors again.
So when I had waited at Omar's door for over a minute without any kind of an answer, I wondered if he was up to his tricks once more. I tried the handle and found that the door opened. The inside of the house was perfectly still. I called his name out, and still got no answer. I wasn't sure whether I should go in or not, but reasoned that he had invited me over, and that perhaps he had left the door open especially for me.
I went into the house. It was so quiet that I felt like I should have been holding my breath. I creaked past the little kitchen and walked through the open doorway inviting me into the living room. And there was Omar, sitting in his favourite chair, legs outstretched and arms on the rests, without a breath in his body. Sunlight, filtering through the closed curtains, lit his tranquil body.
I crept up to him and touched his cold face. His eyes were closed, and he was definitely dead. I remember feeling immense loss and disturbance, but somehow at the same time the atmosphere of supreme serenity kept me from succumbing to confusion. To Omar's side there was a small table, and on the table there was a letter, weighted down with a pen. I leaned over, so as not to touch anything, and read the first line:
Dear Trevor,
This is the letter I mentioned earlier. It was Omar's last communication with me, and with the world. The rest of it goes as follows:
Do not be alarmed at my death. I saw it coming many months ago. You see, when I first saw you that evening that you introduced me to your poetry, I recalled my own death seen through your eyes. I remembered your irritation, minutes ago, at the door, when I did not answer, and you thought you were being subjected to some connivance of mine. I remembered your injury when I chose work over time spent with you. I remembered you reading this letter and the consternation it brought.
There is something I never told you which I now feel permitted to do. Mankind is not just the sum of many individuals, and generations of knowledge. Mankind is a chain of lives, a particular sequence of reincarnations. There are a finite number of lives upon this earth, although the number tends so obscurely towards infinity that it may well be that. I have been every one. Every man, woman, and child that has ever lived, and that is still to live, I have been. You may ask how this is possible, but you know enough by now of Einstein's relativity to know that time is not the constant dependable dimension we once thought it was. In the concatenation of rebirth a new body and personality need not follow the death of the last, but may come at any time in the entire existence of man, centuries before or after, or even simultaneous to the last life. I am the last of the chain.
Each one of us is ineluctably linked. The uncountable number of personalities that make up mankind share one soul. The further down the chain the soul travels the more mature and aware it becomes, and it learns empathy. We learn empathy, the empathy of the experiences and emotions of others, and the empathy that comes of the infinitesimally gradual dawning that we are all one.
How do I know all this? Well, mostly it is a faith. But added to that faith are memories. I catch glimpses of my other lives. I have recalled countless other lives. But memory of past lives is similar to the memory we have of our own current lives. We remember bits and pieces, usually the happenstances that hold the most significance for us, or we can recall as an act of will or accident. The rest of our memory is not so vivid, but rather more of a sense of having lived and experienced events and periods. This is how it is with the memory of reincarnation. I suspect that I have even lived the lives of plants and animals, but that their memories, or lack of, are so unfamiliar to humans that I do not distinctly recognise them.
I have no doubt that when I die the final life in the sequence of mankind will have been completed, and our one soul, fulfilled in the experience, will ascend, and reach the next level of cosmic being, and this will continue until unity is complete, and time as we know it will be defeated and the cycle of creation will begin anew.
I don't wish to speak of the future, or anything that I remember from it. It would upset the chain and I do not even know if I would be able. In the past, on the one or two occasions when I have attempted to reveal something of this nature, the impulse would not move my lips or my pen, and so I have made my peace with future knowledge, and use only what I have at my disposal now. It is exciting enough as a scientist to do the work of discovery.
I wish I could stay longer for I like this self, and I love this world, but the time has come for this life to end. I knew it that night we met, and I have left fear long behind. Remember that the end of this life is not a departing, but a strengthening in the interconnectivity of the universe.
My friend, we are indeed something special: confused, pained, but also aware of the exquisite glory of being. Enjoy that being. Live your loves. For you I know that means to write. I know you enjoy it, and it makes you happy. Do not become daunted or despondent. You will write things worth writing, and many things too that are worth reading.
One day the sun will swell into a red giant and envelop the earth, and all that will matter will be that it once existed, and that the energy and life of the planet have joined with the soul of the universe, which is God. That is our destination.
Goodbye my friend. I wish you happiness.
Omar.
Malcolm Cumming is lost in the paradise of literature. He enjoys it there. Unfortunately the tug of the expedients of life sometimes interferes, but along the way he's accidentally gotten a first-class education, and probably needs more. Now he's travelling the world as a male model, knocking out the odd magazine feature on a freelance basis, and composing and compiling a collection of short stories for publication, two of which have featured in an anthology of southern African writers.
This is Malcolm's first story for Something Wicked
New Blood
Vianne
Illustrations for Subtle Thief
Vianne's visual muse stepped out for a stiff drink a while ago and is suspected to have run off with the postman. Having dealt with her abandonment issues, she was cajoled from her present word phase by a tricksy editor who got her to illustrate her first story for Something Wicked.
When not ducking editorial whip-cracks, Vianne is a compulsive doodler whose fascination with the female figure and winged things sometimes provokes her to corrupt random virgin surfaces with inks, pen, acrylics, pencil, mousies and anything else that can't be smoked, imbibed or detonated.
Repeat Offenders
Cover Artist---Jesca Marisa:
Illustrations for Justice
Jesca Marisa is an animator and graphic novelist. The commonly held belief that she's an AI or a fiction of the subconscious mind has been proven to be untrue. There may be some substance to the rumour that she's currently possessed by the departed spirit of a Victorian countess, which makes her excessively fond of fine tea, lacy gloves and gin and tonic. What is true though is the fact that she has scribbled her way through her first ever comic book, Awakenings, which saw the light of day in October 2006. She is currently writing a heavily illustrated fantasy novel in which the characters tend to wear (surprise!) corsets and parasols.
To see more of her work visit. aingealliath.deviantart.com/
Sir Vincent Sammy:
Illustrations for Liberation
Cape Town-based graphic designer Vincent Sammy is a member of Dark Kontinent Productions (www.dkp.co.za), a group of people that work on producing and self-publishing horror/sci-fi and fantasy comics.
He also contributes to various other comic related groups such as Insurrection Studios.
Joe Doe:
Illustrations for Half a Bottle of Rum
Full time artist and illustrator, Joe Doe, has a BA degree in fine art and resides in the northern suburbs of Jo'burg with her cats, coffee and cigarettes. Armed with her oils and canvas, and inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, Sandman comics, Vampire movies and rainy days, Joe regularly burns the midnight oil, churning out commissions of all shapes and sizes. Her work ranges from subliminal fantasy to the extreme bizarre.
She also has an alter ego---painting world-class wild life for the yuppy market so that she can pay her bills and fund her figurine collection.
More of her work can be seen at www.afriqimage.co.za
Pierre Smit:
Illustrations for An Eye For An Eye & Night Time is a-Coming
Pierre did art at school and is pretty much self-taught. He studied graphic design for two years at Cape Tech, but wasn't that into it. In addition to working as a scenic artist on film and TV sets, Pierre draws and paints for himself and anyone else who asks or pays for it.
Hendrik Gericke:
Illustrations for Child & Dreaming My Life Away
Hendrik is a happily-struggling artist living a hermetic existence in the southern Boland.
He suffered no great tragedy and overcame no real evil growing up (no more than you anyway). Of course this ruined him and he is now a closet neurotic, which happens to be a brilliant catalyst for productivity in the creative soul. Upon date of publication no plans to film his life story are being discussed.
Visit www.myspace.com/hendrikgericke to see more of his work.
Kobus Faber:
Illustrations for Burnt & Destination
Kobus is an illustrator in Bloemfontein. He studied at a tertiary institution for two years before deciding to quit in favour of a job at a small local graphic design agency. A year later, Kobus joined a school book material company as an illustrator, and began amassing contacts in advertising circles doing illustration work. He is a huge fan of anime, comic books and video games, and would one day like to work on one.
Genevieve Terblanche:
Additional Illustrations
Genevieve was born in captivity and despite several attempts at rehabilitation has been deemed unsuitable for release into the wild because it has bugs in it
When uncomfortable, she writes about herself in the third person. The third person is located inside a second person, who is concealed inside a (much larger) first person.
This saves space.
Visit www.somethingwicked.co.za for information on additional titles by this and other authors.

