Page 22 of Grimdark Magazine Issue 48

Slather, slavery?

What the boy does here, what he’s just now realizing he should have been doing all along, is reach across, delicately thump the man’s cheek, and then pretend not to see past the office, out the window, to the small brown rabbit in the flowers, watching.

Soon enough it’ll be white.

The boy smiles.

Some woods, they’re big enough you never find your way out.

Stephen Graham Jones is the NYT bestselling author of thirty-five or so novels and collections, and there’s some novellas and comic books in there as well. Stephen’s been an NEA recipient, has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction, the Los Angeles Times Ray Bradbury Prize, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, the August Derleth British Fantasy Award for Best Horror Novel, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, the Western Literature Association’s Distinguished Achievement Award, the American Library Association’s RUSA Award and Alex Award, the 2023 American Indian Festival of Words Writers Award, the Will Rogers Medallion Award, the Locus Award twice, the Nebula Award, five Bram Stoker Awards, three Shirley Jackson Awards, and six This is Horror Awards. Stephen’s also been inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame, he’s been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and the Eisner Award, and he’s made Bloody Disgusting’s Top Ten Horror Novels, been a New York Times Book Club selection, and been on Barack Obama’s Summer Reading List. He’s the guy who wrote Mongrels, The Only Good Indians, My Heart is a Chainsaw, Earthdivers, I Was a Teenage Slasher, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, and Killer on the Road. Next up will be Off the Reservation. Stephen lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Kissing Carrion

by Gemma Files

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 con-tempt 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 mouldy 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 nothing-ness 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 wait-ing 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.