Kissing Carrion (24 page)

—and was gone.

* * *

Plasma stores wouldn't last long, and after that, sleep would be the best option—the least painful, in the long run.

Until then, though, she planned on keeping her eyes . . . open.

And now, looking down, what did she feel, exactly—seeing the long drop lengthen, then Earth pull away below her? That frail blue shell, dimming to a sliver; homesickness, a kind of nostalgia, coring her with a quick and intimate pain. And in her mind's eye, superimposed, a barefoot girl slogging upward along the dirt track outside of New Amsterdam, hem-deep in mud, and a carriage stopping—a door opening. The gape on her own silly bumpkin face, half-remembered, half-imagined, heartbreakingly empty of experience.

And no
, she wanted to cry out, through time's veil:
No, don't trust, don't take that man's smooth, pale, clean hand. Go back, go back—live out your little life, breed and die. Do nothing. BE nothing. Go nowhere. Lie easy in the earth, until you ARE earth.

But Eudo was always so calm and comely, in his suit of lace. And she, in her innocence, always accepted his offer.

Things were as they were. They couldn't be otherwise. And Elder, knowing this, sat back on her heels in the ship's pod; alone once more, without even her own long-gone ghost left to keep her company.

Up and out, and out, and out. Farther and farther, from star to shining star—manifest destiny made ever more manifest. She was the Tricentennial Woman . . .
Quad
ricentennial? Not that such distinctions mattered much, either now or for much longer . . .

(Acceleration alone would see to that, in the end.)

America's child. The Revolutionary. The one for whom there were no borders, no traditions—to whom no one, and nothing, applied anymore.

So catch me if you can, you effete techno-illiterates—you self-obsessed history-whores masturbating over your glyphs, your archives, your ruined, buried monuments.

I'm leaving, on a jet plane. Don't know if I'll be back again.

(Ever, ever, ever.)

Maybe she would go out into darkness and find nothing there at all—nothing but emptiness, endless starvation, an infinite sentence of unslaked hunger. Or freedom from the cycle, even at any cost—the tyranny of vulgar desire, of pleasure and pursuit: Wanting, having, consuming, wanting again. Slash and burn and waste.

Or maybe she would find herself sitting by the side of some different sea on some different world, under the potentially far less harsh light of some very different sun. Maybe she'd cut her palm on some alien rock, drop a few pulses of her own infected blood into the warm, saline tide . . . and stay there as long as it took, to see what might grow to sentience from the impetus.

If you only wait long enough
, Elder thought,
then whatever you can conceive of, no matter how improbable, must surely—eventually—become possible.

“Man,” Flynn had begun, once, while stoned on some fellow stoner's blood—blissing out on the concept of space-travel, then glitching over its logical consequences, “you ever come back, the whole Earth could be gone, it could be just that long. We might not even
be
here anymore.”

“'As Venus dives into the sun . . . '”

“Yeah. Yeah! That's what I'm sayin', man.”

And: But everything I knew already is gone, Flynn, she remembered almost replying. The whole structure of my universe, changed beyond comprehension. Cars, electricity, recorded music; fast food, open all night. I died damned, and live on in a world where science kicked the Holy Ghost's sorry spectral ass too long ago to mention.

So what should I miss? What should I cry over leaving behind? I have—literally—nothing left to lose.

(Not even you.)

Good thing Flynn died when he did
, she thought, with a sudden stab.
HE would have missed me, after. He was just that dumb.

But—

Elder raised the filtering visor of her helmet, cautiously—for who knew what radiation lurked out there, what stray wandering portion of the ultraviolet spectrum? And space would be a particularly bad place to cook and drift in.

She looked out on the great wheel of constellations, the endless hub: Stars whose dead light washed over her, whose positions she was already beginning to watch alter. Whose hidden faces she would view from every angle, before the arc of her passage finally brought her home again.

A long trip, and a hungry one. Blood of every sort, on every sort of world. A universe of unmapped loneliness and potential prey. A forever-distant horizon—no borders to cross, no boundaries to push. Just on, on, on, on, on.

The stars, turning. The constellations, splitting and reforming into new animals, new myths. New monsters.

Rivers of gas and dust and heat. Cradles of light, already cooking up new worlds for her to drain.

Elder's ship, like Elder's corpse—a viral net, animated forever by its own disease. A universe of dead bodies . . .

. . . possessed by furious motion.

DISCLAIMER:

Though framed as a (hopefully amusing) Q and A session with the disembodied voices inside my own head, the following afterword deals mainly with the ins and outs of my creative “process.” Those of you who like this sort of thing may find this the sort of thing that you like, while everyone else may well find it excruciating or disillusioning, or both. If you happen to fall into the latter category then thank you, goodnight, and please do keep an eye out for my next collection of short stories,
The Worm in Every Heart
(October, 2003), also from Prime Books.

And now, without further ado—

Q (grinning nervously): “So, like—where do you get your ideas?”

A (grinning evilly): Well, since you ask . . .

I first got the germ for “Kissing Carrion” back in 1993, when I was still in the most formative possible stages of what would eventually become my career: Writing stringer articles for
eye Weekly
magazine on every subject under the sun, dodging calls from the government about back taxes relating to my last year at Ryerson, placing stories here and there for copies, telling people I was a writer, feeling like the world's biggest minimum wage-earning, unqualified, futureless loser. I'd just quit my job as Vibrator Room floor attendant at Lovecraft, Toronto's most upscale sex shop, where the virulent combination of having an eighty-percent employee discount but no significant other to share the spoils with had already begun to screw with my ideas about “healthy” sexuality; I also spent a fair amount of time listening to early Nine Inch Nails while reading underground comics and ‘zines, simultaneously jealous and admiring of their creators' capacity to self-publish material which seemed to come straight from the same vein of icky, suppurating, intensely private darkness I was becoming somewhat afraid to tap in myself.

I began developing “Kissing Carrion” for an editor who wanted stories that were genuinely vicious rather than darkly Romantic, which had been my stock in trade up 'till then. The turning point came when I discovered an article in one of said ‘zines about those wacky folks down at Survival Research Laboratories (whose self-destructive industrial antics would later inspire NIN's “Happiness In Slavery” video), which lead me to rent their performance tapes from Suspect Video—I was particularly struck by the infamous “rabbot,” a rotting bunny corpse hooked up to a system of rods and pistons and technical what-have-you which puppetted it around, making it parade itself back and forth until it started to fall apart. Mix well with the Pixies, and Pat Calavera's Bone Machine was born. Ray and his fixations, meanwhile, evolved from both the confessions of Scottish serial killer Dennis Nilssen and the real-life female necrophile who inspired Lynn Stopkewich's film
Kissed
. But things soon slid to a halt, as they often do with me, and the story lay fallow for years . . . I had vague ideas of submitting it for a zombie anthology like John Skipp and Craig Spector's
The Book Of The Dead,
which is how the whole “triangle between a man, a woman and a corpse splits apart when the corpse objects to the arrangement” theme came into play.

Still and all, it took 'til 2000 for me to finally realize that the narrative perspective should come from Mr. Stinky, rather than Pat or Ray. A deadline was proffered by Ellen Datlow, for which I'll be eternally grateful, even though the story itself didn't turn out to meet her needs for the anthology in question. And the rest is history.

Q: “That's a long time between idea and product. Is this kind of extensive percolation
normal
for you?”

A: “Normal”—no, not probably. Is anything?

My mind is a mulch-heap, deep and sticky; things pile up and, once they've piled, often need time to ferment. Some times the result is more explosive than others. I've written stories at a white heat, in a matter of hypnogogically-charged hours, and ended up shaking and babbling to myself while watching the walls bend. The more
likely
version of the process, however, reads the way it does above . . . a gestation period of almost a decade, with lots and lots of intermediary drafts, rejigging and thematic side-steps before I finally hit my stride and push through those last precious pages. Like the hoary old standby of brain-as-nautilus, I spiral slowly, non-linearly outwards, or inwards. Or—usually—

—downwards.

“Keepsake” clocks in at the very bottom of said spiral. It was written during one of my (more) depressive periods, which—as my husband will attest—I'm still prone to; the details about lying in bed and marking off the day by “TV time” came out of that, while my descriptions of what it's like to be on the sparkler-side of a PMS-induced migraine are also, unfortunately, ripped whole and beating from real life experience. Rohise and Renny Gault, meanwhile, evolved in equal part from a wonderful photo of Quentin Tarantino and Juliette Lewis eye-fucking each other for a
Details
magazine article about their performances in
From Dusk 'Till Dawn
and some musings I once wrote down about the innate oddity of having siblings, as a concept—I'm an only child, as are most of my friends, aside from the two who happen to be identical twins, and as the old truism states (truism because it's
true
), what you find exotic is almost always what you're personally unfamiliar with.

Plus, I've always been far more
Near Dark
than
Interview With The Vampire
in terms of my ideas on vampirism—less “predators' predators, killing angels feeding on us from above, lie back and wait with a beating heart,” more “dead people too angry to lie down and rot.” So I wanted to riff on the basic trope in such a way as to make it both potentially plausible and utterly unglamorous. I'd like to believe I succeeded.

“Keepsake” went straight to Wayne Edwards, editor/publisher of the now-defunct
Palace Corbie
magazine, because he'd been bugging me for stuff that was “more extreme.” He put it in
#7
(Merrimack Books, ed. Wayne Edwards), then eventually reprinted it in
The Best Of Palace Corbie
(Stone Dragon Press, ed. Wayne Edwards.) Finally, this story has the dubious honor of having apparently grossed out enough (male) Showtime execs to make sure that I did
not
end up with one more sale to
The Hunger
under my belt for 1998—they were
right with it
up to a certain scene, and then . . . well. I think you'll probably be able to spot the point of exit, if you try hard enough.

Q: “Were you always like this?”

A: Oh, baby: Bet your ass.

I started writing when I was maybe eight or so. My first love was science fiction, but that died pretty quickly after I realized that (aside from certain types of biology) I had little or no interest in science per se. By twelve I was reading Stephen King and writing monster stories to match—pastiches that definitely lent “No Darkness But Ours” (first published for no money down in City Alternative High School's 1987 yearbook), which now frankly reads like the teaser to some King-esque novel, more than a little of its overall inspiration. But the rot started earlier on, I suspect; back when I was ten, I was already writing stuff like the wonderfully-titled “Gore In The Woods,” a sad tale of gratuitous supernatural torture which contains these immortal lines:

It hurt more as the
[eerie, glowing green]
worms began eating through the muscle wall and burrowed into his stomach. Then he could feel them slipping into his intestines and up his esophagus towards his mouth. Others burrowed into his veins and began drinking his blood as they slithered towards his brains.
”
This is it,” he thought
. “
This is the end,” as one of the worms finally reached his heart. And it was.

This collection contains three of the oldest stories I still have floating around: “No Darkness . . . ” “Mouthful Of Pins”—my first true fiction sale (to
Northern Frights 2
, Mosaic Press, ed. Don Hutchison)—and “Skin City,” published initially in
Grue #16
(Hell's Kitchen Productions, Inc., ed. Peggy Nadramia) before being reprinted in
A Crimson Kind Of Evil
(Obelesk Press, ed. S.G. Johnson.) And while I think they've held up fairly well, I've certainly already spent a fair amount of the time since I wrote them trying to figure out why I'm so apparently compelled to revisit the themes of emotional isolation, sexual obsession, supernatural transcendence, repetitive patterns of loss and violence . . . the death of love, the love of death, the darkness which comes just before—and after—every night's dreaming.

The only vague sort of conclusion I've reached, however, is that when it comes right down to it, the reason I've come to respect horror above almost every other form of literature is that its considerations simply seem more
honest
than those of any other genre. Through horror, we force ourselves to explore the things too much fantasy tries its best to avoid, to escape, to deny: The skull beneath the skin, the inescapable and unsettling knowledge that while some of us may indeed die sooner and in more inventive or spectacular ways, all of us will—eventually—travel the exact same ghost-road on our way to whatever lies beyond the undeniable fact of physical dissolution.

Seed becomes matter, matter becomes decay, energy moves unquantifiably forward; entropy in action, or maybe something more. But all we have to go on, or can create in the interim, is a shadow-puppet theater version of our own fears, our own desires . . . our own slim, yet unextinguishable, hopes in the face of apparent hopelessness.

Oh yeah: That, and the eerie, glowing green, blood-drinking worms. 'Cause they're just
cool
.

Q: “A lot of these stories are pretty explicit, like boobie/penis-type explicit. Do you just think about sex all the time?”

A: Thankfully not, especially the way that sex usually turns up in this particular context. There was a period during the mid-1990's when “erotic horror” was momentarily all the rage, though, which happened to neatly coincide with my first few invitations to participate in genuine
paying
anthologies—the
Hot Blood
era, as I like to call it, when body-parts and blood were juggled to produce an effect which was supposed to be equal parts titillation and terrification. This was a good market . . . indeed, it occasionally seemed, the only market. I wanted in. ‘Nuff said.

Of course, the urge which lay behind this trend has never really gone away, since sex and death still form a primal, if subliminal, link in most people's minds. Nevetheless, because such stories' potential content tends to be somewhat limited, the plain fact is that these pieces often end up with a kind of “porno pacing” first popularized by books like John Clelland's
Fanny Hill
; you slow time to a crawl, poring over every possible detail, to disguise the fact that nothing really
happens
for pages and pages except what, in your average screenplay, would probably just read like this: “They have wild, passionate sex.”

“Rose-Sick” (c. 1996) was written for one such anthology,
Seductive Specters
(Masquerade Books, ed. Amarantha Knight.) I vaguely remember deciding on erotic asphyxiation as the motor of choice behind my plot mainly because of a slightly disturbing encounter I'd had—while taking part in one of those inevitable midnight panels on Sex & Death for some convention the year before—with a fan who seemed to be totally obsessed by the subject. I also seem to recall soon becoming really, really bored by the literal mechanics of making sure the horror-to-”erotic” quotient stayed balanced; at least one draft I initially submitted came back with the comment that it needed “about a hundred more words of sex,” prompting me to fantasize about just adding the words “hot” and “wet” to every other sentence. I.e.:
You walk down the hot, wet corridor into the hot, wet room. It's hot in there—hot, and wet.

(
And DARK.
)

Still, it's not like this didn't pay off, eventually. Doing “Rose-Sick” for Amarantha led to her asking me to submit to another, similar anthology, which meant I got very familiar with the subgenre's specifications, very fast . . . and since erotic horror was the stock in trade of
The Hunger
, it all worked out. “Skeleton Bitch” (first published in
Palace Corbie #5
, Merrimack Books, ed. Wayne Edwards), written around the same time, definitely seemed to benefit from my having already had a bit of practice at being exactly as explicit as I needed to be; I'm also kind of proud of having been able to slip my real-life, Lovecraft-gained sex toy expertise in there, right near the end.

Q: “In some of these more explicit stories, you're writing from the perspective of being a man—a
gay
man. What's that about?”

A: Aside from it supposedly being part and parcel of being a writer that you get to pretend you're anybody you want to, as long as you do it convincingly . . . ?

I'll readily admit that I've always been fascinated with man-to-man sexual tension, so much so that it counts as (one of) my personal kink(s), along with those nasty little recurrent consent, power disparity and moral ambiguity issues. Maybe it comes out of having gotten most of your childhood sex ed from
Penthouse Letters
rather than
Yellow Silk
, and thus not recognizing a lot of yourself in those giggly, garter belt-wearing female meat puppets with the always-available array of holes which populate most popuLAR porn—an innate impulse to identify with the do-er rather than the do-ee.

Or maybe it's just that lure of the alien again, the spectacle of watching guys interact with each other on a supremely violent or oddly vulnerable level. My favorite TV show IS
OZ
, after all—
Homicide: Life On The Street
creator Tom Fontana's operatic/realistic six-season pay-TV evisceration of the prison system—just like my favorite characters
on
OZ
are Tobias Beecher (the upper-middle-class rage addict with bad to no impulse control) on the one hand, and Vern Schillinger (the White Supremacist rapist with serious family issues) on the other. Which—along with Edward Norton's performance in
American History X
, plus some re-reading of various texts on Viking culture and berserker shamanism—certainly did feed into the writing of “Bear-Shirt,” first published in
Queer Fear
(Arsenal Pulp Press, ed. Michael Rowe); I wanted to take a good, hard look at a particularly icky yet attractive subset of my own fetishes, a lingering Anglo-Saxon pull towards those who share my propensity for “blood in the face.”