Kissing Carrion Read online

  Kissing Carrion

  Gemma Files

  Kissing Carrion © 2003, 2015 by Gemma Files

  Introduction © 2003 by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Cover art © 2015 by Melanie Luther

  Cover design © 2015 by Samantha Beiko

  Afterword © 2015 by Michael Rowe

  All Rights Reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2003

  Originally published in Trade Paperback the United States by Prime Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 36503, Canton, OH 44735

  www.primebooks.net

  ISBN: 978-1-894815-63-7

  2015

  CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS

  Toronto, Canada

  www.chizinepub.com

  [email protected]

  eISBN: 978-1-77148-340-7

  Distributed by Trajectory, Inc.

  50 Doaks Lane

  Marblehead, MA 01945

  [email protected]

  Proofread by Ben Kinzett

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council

  Coded in Canada

  Contents

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Kissing Carrion

  Keepsake

  Rose-Sick

  Blood Makes Noise

  Skeleton Bitch

  Folly

  Mouthful of Pins

  Pretend That We’re Dead

  No Darkness But Ours

  Job 37

  Bear-Shirt

  Hidebound

  Skin City

  Seen

  Torch Song

  The Diarist

  Dead Bodies Possessed By Furious Motion

  Q&A

  The Night the Comet Hit the Library: An Afterword to Kissing Carrion and The Worm In Every Heart.

  About the Author

  Permission and Acknowledgments

  Landmarks

  Cover

  Contents

  Start Reading

  Back Matter

  Introduction

  By Caitlin R. Kiernan

  PEOPLE ASK ME all the time, but the truth is, I don’t know why I write dark fiction. The best reply I’ve ever been able to muster is that it’s all I have to say, or all I have to say that’s worth saying. It’s the way I see and, sooner or later, all clouds become demons in my view. Once upon a time, I kept it all to myself, tangled up inside my soul like loops of thorns and razor wire and blind, squirming things. The images, which always came without my having to call for them, were mine and they were mine alone. And then, at some point, I began to put them down on paper.

  I was a slow starter.

  I took ages to break down the high, white barriers that I’d erected, or that others had taken the liberty of erecting for me. Years to work through the layers of inhibition, the solidifying strata of guilt arising from my own visions.

  And in the beginning, there was a terrible, electric thrill in the simple speaking of the unspeakable. Something more immediate than sex, because it was more than flesh could ever be. Something more honest than confession, because it would never compromise itself in apology. Something as alive as alive can ever be, because it never tried to look away from death. But as the years came and went, and the stories and novels piled up about me, I began to realize that some of that thrill had begun to diminish. Or, rather, that first hot rush of words and raw, dizzying imagery had been spent and something else was growing in its place, something with virtues all its own, sure, but something that lacked the undeniable urgency I’d felt back at the start. A sort of psychic scar tissue, perhaps, and all the endless conceits of art, filtering what had once escaped me unfiltered, pure and untainted by second-guessing games.

  Which brings me, finally, in my own rambling, self-absorbed way, to the matter at hand, which isn’t my writing at all, but the writing of Gemma Files, collected here in this volume entitled Kissing Carrion. I don’t write many introductions, because, truthfully, I don’t read very much contemporary dark fiction. Most of it bores me silly. So, when I was asked to introduce this book, I almost said no, because I almost always say no (the particular questions are immaterial.) After all, I’d never even read anything by Gemma Files, though I did recognize her name from Dark Terrors 6, The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women, and Queer Fear, because I’d also had stories printed in those books. I rarely get around to reading the anthologies that I’m published in, though sometimes I do take time to browse through their tables of contents, noting the names of the other authors. Oh, and I also recalled that Gemma Files had won an International Horror Guild award for best short fiction.

  Moreover, there’s always the imminent danger of misinterpreting the author in an attempt to flatter. I can think of few things more embarrassing, and more annoying to the author being flatteringly misunderstood. Of course, some would say that all interpretations of a given work are valid, in some sense, and therefore such a danger is actually a paper tiger. But those people are fools.

  Anyway, I agreed to have a look at the manuscript, but didn’t commit to writing the introduction. At the time, I was in the middle of a move from Birmingham to Atlanta and trying to deal with all the chaos that invariably attends a move, and also trying to meet a number of deadlines. One morning early in January, the manuscript for Kissing Carrion arrived at my door and a few days later I read the first piece, from which the collection takes its title. I was at once surprised, because the story didn’t bore me silly and because I liked it even though it was written in first person (a practice that annoys me no end and which I’ve spent years condemning) and so, the next day, I read “Keepsake,” and then “Rose-Sick,” and, finally, “Blood Makes Noise.” Two of these were also written in first person, and, worse yet, one—“Rose-Sick”— was written in second-person, which, if you ask me, is as deadly a sin as any to which an author can ever aspire. Even so, I began to feel that old familiar charge again. The electric-bright sizzle in a very dark place. The fleeting spark in an Antarctic night. White fire from abyssal blackness, like the gleaming, ancient creature aboard the doomed submarine from “Blood Makes Noise;” something whispering in the gloom, whispering with a voice that made me want to listen.

  This happens so infrequently that I stopped expecting it a long time back. Very few living authors can find that particular chord in me and still fewer can ever strike it more than once or twice. Fewer still write dark fiction. Kathe Koja. Thomas Ligotti. Ramsey Campbell. Peter Straub. Perhaps one or two others. It’s a short list. But, first- and second-person narratives aside, I discovered that Gemma Files was doing it, again and again and again. Whatever doubts I might still have had about doing the introduction were dismissed by the next story, “Skeleton Bitch,” which left me breathless and wanting more and angry that I hadn’t written it myself. That’s the highest compliment any author can ever pay another, I think, that envy, that wish that you could make another’s words your own.

  And I kept reading.

  And I kept finding that electric sizzle, those white-out sparks, the fire and whispering fossil voices.

  Having done so, I will say this, by way of introduction:

  Boldly, brazenly, Gemma Files pushes her hands deep into the red and seeping unconscious plac
es and finds the bits of treasure worth pulling back out into the light. The damned things, forbidden, forgotten, unwanted, feared and loathed, and “Here,” these stories say to us. “Look what I found. But look quick, before it’s gone again.”

  Unlike the “splatterpunks” of the eighties and early nineties, and unlike the current self-proclaimed authors of “extreme horror,” who were and are rarely more than tiresome and never more than idiot jesters of excess and gore and exploitation, Gemma Files seems to grasp the weight and consequence, the inherent severity, of her fictive transgressions. And so her stories do not disintegrate, do not dissolve into accidental comedies of the grotesque. They do not degrade her characters, who are what characters must be, inhabitants of an imagination we’re being allowed to share, however indirectly, inhabitants gifted with souls and hearts, strength and failure, hope and hopelessness. Horrible things befall them, time and again, but never merely for our amusement.

  This is no Roman circus, no peepshow.

  I think Gemma Files has grasped the fine and crucial line between pornography and a true literature of the extreme. At least, I hope that she has. Something is keeping her voice hung just high enough above the pit that we can hear it clearly without tumbling in and drowning. In the end, if we are wise enough to pay attention, we find she’s made us look away from the pit, up, towards the stars overhead and probably out of reach.

  At her best, in pieces like “Skeleton Bitch,” “Keepsake,” “Skin City” and “Mouthful of Pins,” Gemma Files transcends mere storytelling and her prose approaches the poetic, a prose poetry of terror and awe, ruin and pain and horror and constant sorrow. Here are words placed just so, precisely employed in an artistic economy that few writers ever bother to learn.

  Here is passion, which must be more sacred to an author than her own life, and here is mystery, which must always obscure the path before us.

  It’s not about a good, clean scare, a dark theatre you can leave behind after the credits roll, a carnival ride or a Halloween spookhouse. There are plenty of writers of dark fiction who aim for nothing more than such playful, ephemeral frights, and readers beyond counting who want nothing more. I suspect both groups would be unhappy with the seventeen stories that comprise Kissing Carrion.

  Because these aren’t casual undertakings.

  These are the things that make us who we would not be, and what we can’t help but become.

  Sex. Blood. Death.

  Secrets and transformations.

  Appetite, and loss, and love beyond any explanation.

  But I’ve said enough, surely. More than enough. These stories, and their author, speak for themselves and have no need of anyone else to speak for them. They know themselves well enough without me.

  Now, turn the page . . .

  CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

  Atlanta, Georgia

  17 January 2003

  Kissing Carrion

  Q: Are we living in a land where sex and horror are the new Gods?

  A: Yeah.

  —Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

  I AM PERSECUTED by angels, huge and silent—marble-white, rigid-winged, one in every corner. Only their vast eyes speak, staring mildly at me from under their painful halos, arc-weld white crowns of blank. They say: Lie down. They say: Forgive, forget. Sleep.

  Forget, lie down. Drift away into death’s dream. Make your . . . final . . . peace.

  But being dead is nothing peaceful—as they must know, those God-splinter-sized liars. It’s more like a temporal haematoma, time pooling under the skin of reality like sequestered blood. Memory looping inward, turning black, starting to stink.

  A lidless eye, still struggling to close. An intense and burning contempt for everything you have, mixed up tight with an absolute—and absolutely justified—terror of losing it all.

  Yet here I am, still. Watching the angels hover in the ill-set corners of Pat Calavera’s Annex basement apartment, watching me watch her wash her green-streaked hair under the kitchen sink’s lime-crusted tap. And thinking one more time how funny it is I can see them, when she can’t: They’re far more “here” than I am, one way or another, especially in my current discorporant state—an eddying tide of discontent adding one more vague chill to the moldy air around her, stirring the fly-strips as I pass. Pat’s roommate hoards trash, breeding a durable sub-race of insects who endure through hot, cold and humid weather alike; he keeps the bathtub full of dirty dishes and the air full of stink, reducing Pat’s supposed bedroom to a mere way-stop between gigs, an (in)convenient place to park her equipment ’till the next time she needs to use it.

  Days, she teaches socks to talk cute as a trainee intern on Ding Dong The Derry-O, the world-famous Hendricks Family Conglomerate’s longest-running preschool puppet-show. Nights, she spins extra cash and underground performance art out of playing with her Bone Machine, getting black market-fresh cadavers to parade back and forth on strings for the edification of bored ultra-fetishists. “Carrionettes,” that’s what she usually calls them whenever she’s making them dance, play cards or screw some guy named Ray, a volunteer post-mortem porn-star whose general necrophiliac bent seems to be fast narrowing to one particular corpse, and one alone . . . mine, to be exact.

  Pat can’t see the angels, though—can’t even sense their presence like an oblique, falling touch, a Seraph’s pinion-feather trailed quick and light along the back of my dead soul. And really, when you think about it, that’s probably just as well.

  I mean, they’re not here for her.

  Outside, life continues, just like always: Jobs, traffic, weather. It’s February. To the south of Toronto there’s a general occlusion forming, a pale and misty bee-swarm wall vorticing aimlessly back and forth across the city while a pearly, semi-permeable lace of nothingness hangs above. Soft snow to the ankles, and rising. Snow falling all night, muffling the world’s dim lines, half-choking the city’s constant hum.

  Inside, Pat turns the tap off, rubs her head hard with a towel and leans forward, frowning at her own reflection in the sink’s chipped back-mirror. Her breath mists the glass. Behind her, I float unseen over her left shoulder, not breathing at all.

  But not leaving, either. Not as yet.

  And: Sleep, the angels tell me, silently. And: Make me, I reply. Equally silent.

  To which they say nothing.

  I know a lot about this woman, Pat Calavera—more than she’d want me to, if she only knew I knew. How there are days she hates every person she meets for not being part of her own restless consciousness, for making her feel small and useless, inappropriate and frightened. How, since she makes it a habit to always tell the truth about things that don’t matter, she can lie about the really important things under almost any circumstances—drunk, high, sober, sobbing.

  And the puppets, I know about them too: How Pat’s always liked being able to move things around to her own satisfaction, to make things jump—or not—with a flick of her finger, from Barbie and Ken on up. To pull the strings on something, even if it’s just a dead man with bolts screwed into his bones and wires fed along his tendons.

  Because she can. Because it’s an art with only one artist. Because she’s an extremist, and there’s nothing more extreme. Because who’s going to stop her, anyway?

  Well. Me, I guess. If I can.

  (Which I probably can’t.)

  A quick glance at the angels, who nod in unison: No, not likely.

  Predictable, the same way so much of the rest of this—experience of mine’s been, thus far; pretty much exactly like all the tabloids say, barring some minor deviations here and there. First the tunnel, then the light—you rise up, lift out of your shell, hovering moth-like just at the very teasing edge of its stinging sweetness. After which, at the last, most wrenching possible moment—you finally catch and stutter, take on weight, dip groundwards. Go down.

  Further and further,
then further still. Down where there’s a Bridge of Sighs, a Bridge of Dread, a fire that burns you to the bone. Down where there’s a crocodile with a human face, ready and waiting to weigh and eat your heart. Down where there’s a room full of dust where blind things sit forever, wings trailing, mouths too full to speak.

  I have no name now, not that I can remember, since they take our names first of all—name, then face, then everything else, piece by piece by piece. No matter that you’ve come down so fast and hard, fighting it every step; for all that we like to think we can conquer death through sheer force of personality, our mere descent alone strips away so much of who we were, who we thought we were, that when at last we’ve gotten where we’re going, most of us can’t even remember why we didn’t want to get there in the first place.

  The truism’s true: It’s a one-way trip. And giving everything we have away in order to make it, up to and including ourselves, is just the price—the going rate, if you will—of the ticket.

  Last stop, everybody off; elevator to . . . not Hell, no. Not exactly . . .

  . . . goin’ down.

  Why would I belong in Hell, anyway, even if it did exist? Sifting through what’s left of me, I still know I was average, if that: Not too good, not too bad, like Little Bear’s porridge. I mean, I never killed anybody, except myself. And that—

  —that was only the once.

  Three years back, and counting: An easy call at the time, with none of the usual hysterics involved. But one day, I simply came home knowing I didn’t ever want to wake up the next morning, to have to go to work, and talk to people, and do my job, and act as though nothing were wrong—to see, or know, or worry about anything, ever again. The mere thought of killing myself had become a pure relief, sleep after exhaustion, a sure cure after a long and disgusting illness.

  I even had the pills already—for depression, naturally; thank you, Doctor. So I cooked myself a meal elaborate enough to use up everything in my fridge, finally broke open that dusty bottle of good white wine someone had once given me as a graduation present and washed my last, best hope for oblivion down with it, a handful at a time.