A Natural History of Hell: Stories (13 page)

In the dream the gentian tea, tasting like the sweetest dirt, had made her mind race, and now too, beneath the ground, her mind raced. Phrases flew, their letters visible, from every grotto of her mind. She stood at the center of the storm, scythe in hand, cutting through the dross. Eventually she lifted the pen and drew ink. The first line came strong to the paper, and there was a pause—a moment, a day, a year—before she hesitantly began on the second line. Slowly, the poem grew. Midway she sat back and wondered which came first, the words or the visions. Her thoughts circled, and then she leaned forward and resumed her work. When she finished, she read the poem aloud.

The night woke in me—And I rose

blindly wandering in a Snow

To the Sunken house—

its Cornice—in the ground.

Parlor of shadows—in the ground

The distant Wind—a lonely Sound

Winter’s orphans and Me

Undoing knots with Gentian tea.

The instant the last word was spoken, she rejected it; too obvious to undo a spell of life. She crumpled the sheet and tossed it into the fire. A belief in complexity and complication crept into her thoughts and with that the years fell like an avalanche. She drank tea, and stared at the blank sheet, went outside, and listened for groans in the dark back of the tomb. A million times, a place to begin arrived, and she would think of Arthur trapped in his high chair at dinner, and the line would vanish, too insubstantial to survive.

Later, she was brought to her senses by the sound of something shuffling in the dark behind her. She spun in her chair, her heart pounding. It sounded like weary footsteps. Realizing the sound was approaching, she stood and backed against the writing table. Out of the gloom and into the glow of the fireplace, a wasted figure staggered, an old woman, dressed in black, wearing a black muslin cap atop her white hair. Her face was wrinkled and powdered with dust, and there were patches of ice on her brow and sunken cheeks. She clutched a Bible in her crooked hands.

“Hello,” said Emily, surprised as she did so. Even before the old woman stopped and looked up, the poet knew it was the same woman who’d come that time to the house for directions to a place she might stay.

“Excuse me, miss, could you tell me where I might seek lodging in town?” Her voice was low and rumbled in echoes through the tomb. Emily noticed part of the woman’s nose had rotted away and that there was something alive in her glassy left eye by the way it bulged and jiggled.

“Go that way, into the dark,” said the poet and pointed.

“Thank you for your kindness, dear.” The woman turned and shuffled into the shadows.

Emily stood numb from the encounter. “Is the gentian tea still steering my mind?” she whispered.

“No,” came the old woman’s reply from the back of the tomb. “It’s the rising tide of years.”

Some piece of eternity later, she sat with pen poised above paper, her arm aching for how long it had been in that position. She barely recognized anymore the crackle of the fire, the distant wind. The pen’s tip finally touched the blank sheet, and she heard a new sound that distracted her from her words. The nib made a fat black blotch, and she drew her hand back. “What was that noise?” she said. In her loneliness she now spoke all her thoughts. Finally it came again, something outside. “A person shouting?” No, it was the barking of a dog. She leaped up from the chair and rushed to the door of the tomb. Opening it, she stepped out into the blizzard.

Sitting a few feet off, up to his chest in snow, was Carlo, her Newfoundland, a bear of a dog. He barked again and bounded the drifts to reach her. She was overwhelmed and blinked her eyes to be certain he was there. But then she felt his furry head beneath her hand, and he licked her palm. It came to her as if in a dream that she was freezing, and she stepped back into the tomb. The dog followed. After closing out the winter, she sat in her writing chair, leaning forward, hugging Carlo to her. “You’re good,” she repeated, stroking his head. When she finally let go, the dog backed away and sat staring for a long while. His sudden bark frightened her.

“What?” she asked.

The dog barked three more times and then came to her and took the sleeve of her dress. Carlo tugged at her, long his sign for her to follow. It came to her, with his fourth tug and tenth bark, that he was there to take her back. “You know the way,” she said to him. The dog barked. She turned to face the writing table and lifted her pen. She quickly scribbled on the blotched sheet, “Gone Home. Mercy.” Dropping the pen, she stood and wrapped the tippet around her shoulders. The dog came to her side and she took hold of him by the collar. “Home,” she said, and Carlo led her into the dark back of the tomb.

They walked forever and before long he led her by way of a narrow tunnel back into the world. When the moonlight bathed her, she felt the undergarments Quill had given her vanish like a breeze. The dog led her down a tall hill to the end of Main Street. Walking the rest of the way to the Homestead they encountered no one. Quietly, in the kitchen, she gave Carlo a cookie and kissed him between his eyes. After taking off her boots, she tiptoed up the stairs to her room. She removed the white dress and hung it in the closet. She swam into her nightgown and got back into bed.

As her eyes began to close, she felt a hand upon her shoulder. In her panic, she tried to scream but another hand covered her mouth. “Shhh, shhh,” she heard in her ear, and feeling cold breath on the back of her neck knew it was Quill. “Lie still,” he said. “Let’s not wake your parents.”

“Leave me alone,” she said. She lay back on the pillow without getting a look at his face.

“I intend to,” he said. “I merely wanted to tell you that the piece you left in the tomb worked the trick. Three simple words were the key to the spell’s lock; a mad but marvelous thing. Arthur is resting peacefully, so to speak.”

“So I owe you nothing.”

“I’d like to ask you a question, if I may.”

“What?”

“All these poems you’ve written and hidden—so many poems. Why?”

While she thought, morning broke and the birds sang in the garden. “Because I could not stop,” she said, and he was gone.

*
Story Note:
In April of 1862, Emily Dickinson struck up a correspondence with the poet and war hero Thomas Wentworth Higginson in response to an article Higginson published in the
Atlantic Monthly
, offering advice to new poets. In her second letter to him she made this odd statement: “I had a
terror—
since September
—
I could tell to none.” She is obviously referring to September of 1861, which is the setting of my story. The poem I’m riffing off of is one of her most famous, “Because I Could Not Stop For Death . . .” The earliest known version of this poem, of which there are many, was written, as far as I can tell, in 1863. I imagine the “terror” Emily refers to is her experience that plays out in my story. After mulling it for a year, I’ve imagined she decided to capture it in that famous poem.

Rocket Ship to Hell

Twelve years ago, I was at the Millennium Worldcon in Philly, and with the exception of the incident I’m about to relate, I only remember three other things about that long weekend.

1. I recall going to a cocktail party at night in a dinosaur museum.

2. Somewhere along the line, Michael Swanwick told me I should check out Fritz Leiber’s
Our Lady of Darkness
.

3. I remember the walking. The convention center is enormous. I must have walked a hundred miles a day in that place—spacious, empty hallways with columns, rotundas, vestibules. With all the people attending, I couldn’t believe I could trudge for twenty minutes along some dimly lit, marble concourse and never see a soul. I suppose I attended panels and maybe even did a reading, but I can’t conjure one shred of an image of any of that—just the slogging from one distant point to another. Think Kafka’s “An Imperial Message.”

Somewhere in the middle of the third day, exhausted and confused, not having seen the sun since arriving at my hotel attached to the convention center, I found myself near an exit and seized the opportunity. I plunged into a hot, blue day and the light momentarily blinded me. A few moments later, when I could see again, I noticed there was a bar right across the street from where I’d exited. Unfortunately, the place was packed with fellow con-goers having lunch. I had a hangover from the dinosaur cocktail party the night before, and I needed a drink. Before I moved to Jersey, I’d lived in Philly for a while. I was almost certain that there was a little place called Honey’s a few blocks east and then one south.

I found it wedged into the middle of a block of grimy storefronts. It was dark inside and air-conditioned, cool relief from the August day. The walls were covered in cheap wood paneling and the floor was a black-and-white checkerboard that must have been laid back in the thirties. There were a few tables and chairs, and the bar was covered in the same splintered wood paneling. There was no mirror behind it or decoration, just rows of bottles of cheap liquor. I took a seat and the young woman behind the bar told me she had forty-ounce Colt 45s as well as the hard stuff. I ordered one. She gave me a forty and a glass.

Other than the two of us, the place was empty. She looked to be in her early twenties, tall and thin, her hair shaved into a crew cut. The blue-gray T-shirt she wore bore the words
Cannibal Ox
and
The Cold Vein
and carried an image of what could have been astronauts with guns. She was busy, wiping things down with a wet rag, adjusting the placement of the bottles, drying glasses.

“Are you from the neighborhood?” she asked, her back to me.

“No, I’m in town for a thing at the convention center.”

“The science fiction show?”

“That’s it,” I said. “Have you been over there?”

“I’d like to, but I’m working this whole weekend. My daddy’s in the hospital, so I’m filling in for him.”

“Oh, hope he’s OK.”

“He’s got the prostate. You know what I mean?” She turned and looked at me.

“Not yet, but I’m sure someday I will.”

She laughed, put her rag down, and walked through a door to the left.

While she was in the back, the front door of the place opened and I heard someone come in. I knew they were headed for the bar because their labored breathing grew closer. A moment later, an old, heavyset guy in a floppy brown suit and white shirt, yellow tie loosened to the point of uselessness, took a seat a few down from me. I looked over and he nodded his big potato head in my direction. He was mostly bald, but little squalls of hair erupted here and there across his scalp. His thick glasses were steamed, and sweat drenched his jowls.

“It’s a fuckin’ oven out there,” he said.

Trying to avoid a conversation, I just nodded.

The bartender came back into the bar and, seeing him, asked, “What you want?”

He stopped gasping for a moment and said, “Gin, straight up, miss. Not a shot, a full glass.”

She set a glass in front of him and poured right to the rim. Due to past martini experiences, the sight of it made me gag.

“Seven dollars,” she said. He put two twenties on the bar and thanked her.

I knew that eventually the guy was going to start a conversation, and although I wasn’t keen on talking to him, at the same time I had no intention of leaving Honey’s until I’d finished a second Colt.

“You’re at the convention? Right?” he finally said.

I wasn’t wearing my badge and had a moment of panic over the fact that I could be so easily identified with that to which I belonged. There was no denying it, though. The bartender noticed my hesitation. “How’d you know?” I finally said.

“I saw you over there, walking the hallways.” His voice was breathy and slightly high-pitched. There was a kind of weird resonance to it.

“Some hallways. Place is like a labyrinth.”

“I had to rent one of those scooters,” he said, and his laugh turned into a hacking cough.

“You a fan?”

“I’m a writer,” I said.

“Me too,” he confided and took a long drink.

“Two writers at once,” said the bartender. “That might be a first for Honey’s.”

“It’s not as auspicious as all that, my dear,” he said. Then he looked at me and asked what I’d published.

“Last book of a trilogy came out this year,” I said. “I’ve only been at it since ninety-seven.”

“Live long and prosper,” he said and flashed us the Spock split-finger deal. “My first publications were back in the late sixties.”

“Novels or stories?” I asked.

“Always stories,” he said. “I only wrote one novel, and you can’t find that anywhere.”

“I want to write stories,” said the bartender. “I’m in my last semester at community college, and I’m going to Temple to take fiction writing.”

“Three writers,” said the old guy. He took a drink and smoothed his wispy islands of hair.

“You like SF?” I asked her.

“And fantasy,” she said. “I’m taking a lit course this summer. We’re reading Ellison, Butler, Moorcock, Tiptree, Dick.”

“As long as you lay off that slipstream drivel—the lime Jell-O of subgenres,” he said.

“That’s next semester,” she said. “Do you guys make a lot of money?”

We laughed.

“Money can be made,” said the old guy. “But you can’t make a living now writing stories.”

I asked his name and he told me, “Cole Werber.” It didn’t ring a bell, but my knowledge of the genre was minimal. I told them my name, and the bartender told us hers was Breelyn.

“Where’d you publish your early stories?” I asked Werber.

“Back in the day, all over.
Galaxy
,
Amazing
,
F&SF
,
If
, and one you don’t hear about now,
Venture
. I wrote a series of stories about this alien named Pirsute. He lived on the planet Borlox, and he was a kind of vegetable creature—but arms and legs and a head like a human. Skin the consistency of an eggplant, a mop of greenery for hair, a thistle beard, and eyes like cherries. He was a detective. I based him on Poe’s Auguste Dupin. You know, ratiocination, etc. He had a sidekick, who was an orphaned Earth girl with a photographic memory.”

“I love that kind of shit,” said the bartender.

“That sounds cool,” I said.

“Shit may be the operative word,” said Werber. “But my plan was to link all the stories in what we used to call a fix-up and then publish my first novel.”

“Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean it like that,” said Breelyn.

Werber waved his hand and smiled. “I’m just joking.”

“How many stories did you have in the series?” I asked.

“Well, I published the first one in sixty-five, and by sixty-nine I had a dozen and a half published.”

“Eighteen stories in four years? That’s pretty impressive,” I said.

“Not really, not for the time. Some of those writers back then cranked ’em out a couple a month. I think Silverberg published a hundred by the time he was this young lady’s age. I was twenty when I published the first one.”

“Did you have a lot of readers?” asked Breelyn.

“Actually, people liked them. They followed them from magazine to magazine. I’d get a lot of response when I’d go to the conventions.”

“So then why’d nobody read the novel?” I asked.

“It wasn’t that novel. The Pirsute novel was never put together. The one nobody read was called
Rocket Ship to Hell
.”

“Great title,” I said.

“Religion meets science,” said Breelyn and made herself a whiskey on the rocks.

“Maybe not religion,” said Werber, “but the whole thing reeked of mythology. I could tell you folks about it, but it’d take me a little while. It’s a remarkable story, though, no lie. I never really told it to anyone before, but with my health the way it is now there’s not much they could do to me.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” said Breelyn and took a long drink.

I could tell by this guy’s shtick that if I went for his story, I could be there for an eternity. At the same time, the way he stared at me waiting for an answer, eyes big behind those thick lenses, it was almost as if he was offering a challenge, writer to writer—Are you going to go back and walk the empty corridors or are you going to stay right here where the story is?

Although I’d not yet finished my first, I ordered another forty. When Breelyn put it on the bar, I said, “OK, let’s have it.”

The old guy nodded with a look of satisfaction and polished off about three fingers of gin in a gulp. “It was 1969, and I’d run out of Pirsute stories. I tried to go in a different direction, and my imagination always wound up back on Borlox, following the vegetable detective and the girl with the photographic memory, but nothing ever happened. My imagination was shot. The bad part was that I was broke. I’d been trying to live off the money from the stories—late on rent, phone bill, car payments. I was a mess.

“The day after they repossessed my car, I got a phone call from this guy who said he wanted me to come and do a reading and talk for his club. I told him, OK, but that I had no car. He said, ‘We’ll send a car for you. And the event pays three hundred dollars.’ I almost dropped the phone. For that kind of money, I’d have walked.

“Two days later, a limousine showed up in front of my apartment complex to the minute the guy on the phone, Mr. Masterson, had promised. The driver got out and opened the door for me. About twenty minutes later, we pulled up in front of this mansion. I don’t know where it was. The place was gigantic, from some time in the nineteenth century. We got out, and the driver led me inside and through a series of hallways and rooms until we came to a closed door somewhere at the back of the house. The driver knocked; a voice inside said, ‘Enter.’ He opened the door, stood back, and I stepped in.

“There were books lining the walls, and in the center of the room was a well-polished table at which sat four old gentlemen, dressed to the nines, each holding what looked like toy rockets. They put their rockets down and stood when I entered. I made the rounds, shook hands, got their names, and took a seat at the head of the table. Across from me was Masterson, who seemed to be the head of the group. ‘Welcome to the Rocket Club,’ he said.” Werber took a sip and said, “Are you with me?”

Breelyn lit a cigarette, and I pulled the second forty closer. She said, “Yeah,” and he went back to it.

“I’ll try to speed it up a little,” he said. “The Rocket Club was these four old, white-haired farts. They were mad about science fiction. Knew just about everything going back to the thirties and could talk about any writer I mentioned. It was more an education for me than them. To top that, they asked me all kinds of intricate questions about the Pirsute stories. They remembered more about my own stuff than I did. I read them my most recent publication, ‘Slaves of Dust.’ Some solid vegetable love and death. When I was finished, they applauded so much I was afraid one of them would drop over. Instead, Masterson asked me if when I was a boy, I ever wanted to be an astronaut.

“I said, ‘Probably,’ and shrugged, but it was true, I’d dreamed of it when I was a kid. When I’d told my father, he’d said, ‘You’re a blockhead at math and you’re afraid of heights. Forget it.’ But I never did forget it.

“ ‘How’d you like to make fifty thousand dollars instead of three hundred?’ asked Masterson.

“I was stunned. I just sat there with my mouth open.

“ ‘We’re each exceedingly wealthy,’ said the grandpa next to me with the white goatee and sideburns.

“ ‘We can send you into outer space,’ said the heavy one with the ruffled shirt collar.

“I was floored and a little worried they were dangerously insane. When all was said and done, though, this was the deal as proposed by Masterson: They were funding a secret joint project with NASA. Because they were putting up the bread, they called the shots on the mission and rocket design. What they wanted to do was put artists in outer space to witness the experience and then transcribe it to the populace through some work conceived on the journey. In addition to me, who they wanted to be the mission’s official writer, they were looking for a painter and a musician. Four days in space, and I collected for writing a story about it.

“At first, all I could think about was the fifty thousand, but then it began to dawn on me that I wasn’t in the best shape. I was seventy pounds overweight and smoked a couple packs a day. Besides that I didn’t know how to do much else but make up stories about the vegetable detective. I actually said, ‘Do you think I’m the best candidate?’

“Masterson looked at his cronies, and they nodded. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we tried to get Thomas Pynchon, but he turned us down.’ ”

“Come on,” I said to Werber. “Is that for real?”

“I wouldn’t mind doing that,” said Breelyn.

“You’d be a lot more fit for it than I was,” said Werber. “Is it real?” He took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt. “As God is my judge.” He put the glasses back on.

“You say NASA was in on this?” I asked.

“Yes. They were supposed to build the rocket. They used it as an opportunity to test out some new things and to simplify the control mechanisms of the ship, all on the Rocket Club’s dime.”

“You did it, right?” asked Breelyn.

“Yeah,” he said, pushed his glass forward, and took out a handkerchief to wipe his face. She filled him up with gin, and, after a prolonged coughing spree, he was off.

“I took it. I needed the fucking money. Oops, sorry, miss. I needed the money. We shook on it. Two weeks later, with a five-thousand-dollar advance in my bank account, I was in an apartment in downtown Vegas. I was there to train for the mission. My handler and apartment mate was an ex-astronaut named Maxwell Penfield. He was a sturdily built old man with a tan and a crew cut. At night, he’d sit by the air conditioner in his boxer shorts and drink a pint of bourbon while reading Herodotus. The night I arrived I told him I’d never seen his name mentioned in any of the NASA missions. He nodded and said, ‘I only flew secret missions.’ I questioned him about it, and he said, ‘Do you think that every time the US puts men in space that it’s going to be on TV? Seriously, now.’