Swamp Foetus (2 page)

But I had no place quiet or dry. Twenty minutes later I was on a panel with Harlan, Gahan Wilson, and several other talented people, all emoting with high energy while I sat there mute, still reacting to the Poppy Z. Brite story. In the middle of an energetic exchange, Harlan wheeled on me and said, “Simmons, you haven’t contributed anything to this argument. What do you think?”

I had no idea what we were discussing.

I paused a minute, decided not to fake it, turned to the audience of a hundred or so pale faces waiting patiently in the dripping gloom, and said, “Let me tell you about a story I just heard…”

Which brings us full circle.

4. WHERE THE REAL REASON FOR THIS INTRODUCTION IS REVEALED.

I think you should read Poppy Z. Brite. She is a writer of immense talent and incredible potential. Her work may be described—perhaps even by her—as “splatterpunk,” but it is not. Splatterpunk fiction is an energetic but limited phenomenon which has had its day and run its course. Poppy Brite’s fiction, however vicious, erotic, or viciously erotic it can be, will continue to mature and confound and horrify and delight for many years to come. Her earliest work had a distinctive voice; her most recent work is finding a voice so confident and unique that the rest of us can only watch and marvel.

My friends tell me that I am fond of quoting Joseph Conrad, so I will repeat a Conradian comment—“The writer of imaginative prose stands confessed in his works.”

And what has Poppy Z. Brite confessed to us in these stories?

She has confessed that she is not only a sensuous person, a woman alive to her senses, but—a more rare phenomenon—a writer who can communicate the full range of sensory experience to the reader. Witness these casual celebrations of scent in “Missing,” a story which begins and ends with the evocative power of smells:

“In the street the smell was the grease-dripping odor of frying oysters, the sharp scent of oil paints and turpentine left behind by the street artists who had all gone home hours ago … (In the room was) the fruity odor of the wine and the tangy private scent of their sweat… The day smelled of coconut suntan lotion and seafood being deep-fried in hot oil.”

And Poppy Z. Brite has confessed in her prose that she has that rare prose-stylist’s ability to paint subtle and complex settings by selecting a few perfect details. This from “Xenophobia”:

“…we got off at the wrong stop and found ourselves in the porn district. The light of the setting sun was as red as desire. X’s paraded across every marquee. The poster girls’ nipples and lipstick had long since faded to a dusty orange.”

And finally, Poppy Z. Brite has confessed through her works that she has that most sought-after writer’s ability—the skill of capturing human characterization in language that approaches poetry in its simplicity. From “The Georgia Story”: “Hollow-eyed Gene and sharp-faced prettyboy Sammy shared a room and a rum-stained mattress, and created drifting gray mountains of cigarette ash every day. Each tried to outdo the other’s thinness, and they wrote Freudian lyrics together, Gene with his vampire face, Sammy with long tangled sparkles of hair as glossy as ravens, with knowing green eyes that darkened in the presence of pain—ours or his own.”

There are more confessions, of course, and more examples to be shared—but this is where I leave and you take over. There remains only this…

5. WHEREIN THE INTRODUCTION IS MADE.

Listen carefully, because smart money is betting that this will be the last time that Poppy Z. Brite will ever have to be introduced to readers. After this, says the smart money, readers will be introducing themselves to Ms. Brite in ever-increasing hordes.

So listen carefully. If you miss it, I’m not going to repeat myself.

It is my great pleasure to introduce to you a very fine writer, Poppy Z. Brite.

There. It’s done. You can read on and find what you came for now.

I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Dan Simmons

Longmont, Colorado

I.
GHOST

“Can’tcha see the time is here for us to find... Rivers, mountains, nothin’ can be far behind... Can’tcha see... You gotta find out this one for yourself... Can’tcha see...”

Throaty Carolina voice full of gravel and gold, growling deep, rising to a fluttering crescendo that skimmed over the terrible guitar playing. Coat-hanger wire across the strings, angels smashing their harps! Steve glanced in the rear view mirror and said, “How in hell did you ever manage to get it that far out of tune?”

“It’s not out of tune. Listen.” Ghost twisted his fingers around the neck of Steve’s guitar and strummed what Steve supposed was meant to be a chord. It rang through the car, vibrating the glass and metal, raising dust from the seats until Steve rolled his window down to let it out and Ghost began to sing again, happily, gloriously massacring the way-back FM hit with the wind whipping long translucent strands of hair across his eyes. “Amy... whatcha gonna do... Ameeeeee... I kin stay with you...”

Forty miles later, past gas stations with killer bears caged in the back, past checkerboard fields of wheat and tobacco, past telephone poles that stood like stark crucifixes against the sky, the T-bird belched forth masses of angry steam, coughed, and stopped.

Steve busied himself under the hood for a while, cussing and hurting his hands on the hot metal while Ghost strummed and sang to him from the back seat. When Ghost said “Heads up” and tossed him a Bud from their little cooler, Steve ran his sore hands through the fringe of dark hair that hung over his forehead and eyes. Strands of his hair stood out in loops and angles, stiff with engine grease. “It is beyond my powers,” Steve said. “It is cursed, old Ghost, it is fuckin’ cursed. We need a phone.”

Ghost got out of the car. His pale eyes turned skyward and lit upon strands of telephone wires trailing away over the rises and misty falls of the road. He stood swaying gently for a moment, his hands trembling at his sides, his mind travelling the wires. Then he shook himself, turned in a circle, and said, “See that church over there? There’s a path back behind it and we go through the cemetery and the woods, and there’s a big house up on a rise.”

They trailed through the cemetery, casting long shadows over the softly rotting gray stones and the bright patches of grass and earth and sunlight, still sipping from cans that dripped foam and amber sparkles caught by the sun. Steve wiped his hands on a red bandanna. Ghost, still humming his song, caught the tops of the tall weeds between his fingers and let them slip away again. Burrs clung to the cuffs of Steve’s jeans and Ghost’s gray wash pants, and Steve began to whistle.

The twins sat on the front lawn in the cool mud of their wishing well, tracking the travellers’ progress for ten minutes before the swish of leaf-laden branches and the crunch of pine needles could be heard from the overgrown path in the woods. When the travellers’ shadows wavered around the bend in the instant before they would come into view of the lawn, the twins each pulled up a handful of grass and tiny blue starflowers, flung them into the wishing well, and darted under the front porch. Two pairs of yellowy-green eyes peered out; two heads leaned together, whispering about the cracked leather of Steve’s cowboy boots and the purple Magic Marker drawings on Ghost’s white sneakers.

Ghost stopped to look at a muddy spot on the lawn, a shallow hole carefully outlined by rocks. Rough gray stones bordered the red clay gash in the scrubby grass; lines of smaller white pebbles radiated out, half-embedded like teeth in the patchy lawn, a sunburst in stone. Gently, Ghost traced a line of pebbles with the toe of his sneaker. “What’s that?” asked Steve.

“Little hole in the ground. There’s flowers in here, Steve. And pennies.”

“Trash heap, maybe. Listen, we ought to get rid of these brews before we knock on their door.”

They set the beer cans down in the shade of the porch steps. Out of the corner of his eye, Ghost saw two small, stick-thin, spidery hands creep out from under the porch and snatch them. He got down on his hands and knees and tried to peer between the boards. Rotten leaves, patches of sun and shadow... a small hand, scuttling out of sight.

A kid answered Steve’s knock and looked up at him through a curtain of auburn hair as brilliant as a robin’s breast. The kid was in his late teens, perhaps, only a couple of years younger than Steve, but smaller and shyer; he said nothing but “H’lo” and stepped back to let Steve in. Steve glanced back at Ghost on his knees, his eye to a chink in the porch, his hand searching in his pocket. Ghost pulled out a shiny dime and dropped it through the chink.

“Saw the twins, prob’ly,” said the kid. Steve shrugged and stepped into the foyer.

Ghost had been right; the house was big. It was also damp, and dim, and full of the presence of Jesus. His picture hung huge in the front hallway, eyes as sad and wise as a basset hound’s, hands outspread in benediction. When Steve looked at it from a different angle, the palms oozed blood. The wallpaper was velveteen-flocked maroon blotched with water stains. The ceiling hung heavy with plaster fruit, ivy leaves, dull-eyed cupids.

When Steve explained about the T-bird, the kid brightened. “I might be able to fix it. I can, sometimes.” “She’s a perverse old whore,” Steve warned him. “She’d as soon pop her radiator cap in your face as look at you. Maybe we better just call the junkyard.”

Ghost, letting himself into the foyer, heard this. “Steve, you won’t let that old car go until the back end falls off. Let’s go back and get our stuff, at least. If we’re going to be here long, I want to practice the guitar.” Steve groaned. They stepped back out onto the porch, and Ghost caught his breath. “Look. They came out.” The twins were crouched next to the wishing well, their heads bent over the muddy hole. Their shadows spilled across the grass, black and twisted. When they turned, Steve, who was a year older than Ghost and sometimes protective, couldn’t help grabbing his friend’s wrist and pulling him back.

The two small figures on the lawn had gleaming eyes shadowed by bone and pallor. Their faces were ferally delicate. Their bare chests were bony little hollows covered with white skin, and the shoulders they pressed together were raw, pink, puckered... and somehow so misshapen, so wrong, that Steve could not at once grasp the nature of their deformity.

The twins stared for a moment, still hunched over their wishing well. Then they darted and were gone—

whether into the woods, around the house, or back under the porch, Steve wasn’t sure. He glanced nervously behind him and said, “What...”

“It happened right after they were born,” the kid told him. “They came out of Mama’s belly grown together. Nearly ripped her open. She had to have thirty stitches. The twins were born with one arm each, Michael’s on the right and Samuel’s on the left, and the doctor cut them apart at the shoulder.”

Steve stared at the spot where the twins had been, seeing again the twisted little shapes, their way of leaning on each other, shoulder to truncated shoulder. He tried to think of something to say, and could only come up with “Sorry.”

Ghost closed his eyes and followed Steve and the kid through the woods, letting his feet find their own way along the path, seeing by the ragged light that filtered through his eyelids. He imagined himself tender, tiny, naked, barely formed, protected only by the being whose bone and blood and soul were fused with his. He felt the cold pain of the knife, the hot, slicing agony of the cutting apart. A whimper escaped him, a tiny sound of aloneness.

“Huh?” said Steve, turning.

Ghost opened his eyes. “Nothing.”

When they reached the T-bird, Ghost got Steve’s guitar out again. Steve and the kid stuck their heads under the hood and began speaking with enthusiasm about the perversity of cars. Ghost listened to them for a few minutes, half-smiling at the inanity of car talk. Then he walked back through the woods to the house and sat on the porch steps and played all the songs he knew. He sang them loudly and joyously, making up what words he couldn’t remember, and he was moaning an accompaniment to a strange wordless song that had suddenly possessed his fingers when the twins tumbled around the corner of the house, mops of dark hair wet and tousled, bodies dripping, faces streaked with water or tears. The scars on their shoulders stood out vivid and angry against their paleness.

The twins were naked, and Ghost realized they were older than he’d thought: their crotches were dusted with soft dark velvet, though there, as elsewhere, they were underdeveloped and small. When they saw Ghost they fell to the ground, huddling, trying to shield each other with their single arms.

Ghost reached for them, wanting to gather them to him, give them something to cling to. When he saw the terror in their faces he stopped, forced himself to put his hands back on the guitar. “What happened to you all?” he asked.

“She gave us a bath,” one of the twins said finally, spitting the words out, staring at the guitar.

“Who, your mother? Why doesn’t she let you lick yourselves clean? That’s what my grandmother used to do—or let me take mud baths.”

Smiles wavered and died on the twins’ lips. Ghost watched them gravely for a moment, then began to play the strange song again, plucking the notes from the strings, letting them fall and shatter like drops of colored water, throwing his head back and wailing sounds that were nearly words. When one of the twins reached up to touch the silver inlays on the guitar, Ghost didn’t stop playing. The song grew wilder and stranger, pulling Ghost’s fingers across the strings. It separated into long ribbons of sound and merged again into washes that encircled the twins, drew them closer, pulled them to their feet still leaning against each other.

They placed their hands together, the lines and hills of their palms interlocking like a puzzle of flesh. They bowed their heads until their foreheads were touching and then they swayed apart and began to dance, circling, pressing flat together along the length of their little bodies as if they would merge once more, clutching at each other with childish lust and desperation, spinning away and pulling each other back, skinny poetry, music of flesh and bone. The music rose and spiralled.