Drink for the Thirst to Come (42 page)

This story’s history? Until now it was a virgin, untouched by human eye. The shared-world anthology for which it was written never happened. That happens.

THANKS FOR YOUR MEMORIES:
ROOT SOUP, WINTER SOUP

At this writing Tycelia and I have been married eight years. We have known each other for a half-century. We met in an empty room in a college town in eastern Pennsylvania, dated for a short time then lost touch. Forty years on we reconnected through an article in an alumni magazine. At the time, she was teaching French in Maine and I was writing for Mayor Daley in Chicago. At first, our courtship was two chums catching up by email. We wrote every day; we shared news, thoughts, and, as boomers will, we reminisced. Tycelia is from Mississippi. Her childhood was filled with tired old places, hard folk etched with histories and memories of food. One day she mentioned she was slicing parsnip ‘fingers’ for a root soup.

I was off.

Where Cordelia comes from is a mystery. Without being specific, the voice of the story is southern though Cordelia could be from any place at any time. She is a woman with a past, deeply wronged, scarred by someone, left damaged to live and be a small monster in a tiny world. She lives beatifically and embraces goodness as only a true monster can. Her place in the woods is taken from a place in which a philosophy prof/friend of mine lived in the year before I went into the service. That old house in the woods was one of the most haunted places I’ve ever entered. See, it had been a station on the Underground Railway before the Civil War and…

Damn. I have got to do something with
that
place sometime. I’ll say no more except: that haunted little house in the woods, that name, Cordelia, the image of chopping fingers for a root soup… That was enough.

ZOMBIES IN THE TRENCHES:
WIND SHADOWS

Again, I received an email from an editor who invited me to submit to an anthology. This time, Zombie stories. The other invitees formed an impressive list. I was honored. I’d recently been nominated for a Bram Stoker Award by the Horror Writers Association and, for the second time, had been beaten for the award by the same guy. That’s probably why I said yes.

I’ve never been a fan of zombie entertainments. I’d never written a zombie story. I’d read only one zombie tale. Even zombie films (excepting
Shaun of the Dead
) left me, forgive me, cold. Still, it was an invitation. I had no idea what I’d do but, hell, I had six months to do it in.

I re-watched a few Romero films, read
How to Survive a Zombie Attack
and some other things. Two months in, and no good ideas presented. Hell, I had four months.

What was my problem?

I don’t like working the old tropes. That was my problem.

One Sunday afternoon Tycelia and I were wandering around Hyde Park, Chicago. We stepped into one the bookstores that services that rather idyllic University of Chicago neighborhood. Tycelia headed for the foreign language section. I bungled about. For no particular reason—which is the salient feature of bookstore bungling—I picked up a long, wide, and not-so-thick book called
Harry’s War: Experiences in the ‘Suicide Club’ in World War One. Harry’s War
is a facsimile of a self-illustrated diary kept by a British soldier named Harry Stinton. Harry had been a so-called “bomber,” a ground soldier trained in hand-grenade warfare, during the First World War. I bought and devoured it in a day.

The almost casual acceptance of violent death surrounding Private Stinton suggested a direction.

I research by immersion. It’s very non-academic. I eat books, take no notes, try to catch the feel and flavor of a place, an era; I try to hear, to touch. When I can smell that world, I begin to write.

Smelling the “First War’s” trenches is no fun.

The draft was more than 13 thousand words. I cut. I submitted. The story was accepted. Then, the project was delayed in favor of another book-to-be in which the editor was involved, something called
A Dark and Deadly Valley
, horror and dark fantasy set during World War II. He thought that since I had a feel for war stories I might have something for that one.

I did.

The zombie book was further back-burnered when the editor opted to do yet another anthology. This was to have been a shared-world work, ten authors tethered to a single universe, one in which humankind barely survives a nuclear war. He asked me to be one of the ten. My contribution to this effort eventually would be called
Drink for the Thirst to Come
.

The zombie book never happened. The authors retrieved their stories and groused to each other. I put
Wind Shadows
aside and never tried to sell it. Face it, it’s too zombie for straight markets, not zombie enough for the shuffle and moan crowd. Every now and then, though, a wind blows across the fields and I run into one of the authors, ask about his or her contributions to this and other books that never were.

Now you’ve read my contribution.

A strange thing: until I considered it for this collection, I’d not read
Wind Shadows
myself. As a writer, yes, reading as I went, reading as I cut, pared, adjusted, proof-reading. But as a member of the audience? No. Interesting experience. Hell, it must be a zombie story, it was accepted into an anthology of zombie tales. Okay. It is about the dead animated by… Well, by something. It wasn’t until I finished reading it that first time as an audient that I realized it’s about what war does. War takes people to a place, below; it brings them to that blank wall, to themselves. The other side of which is something unseen, unseeable for most of us this side of the grave. It gives a warrior a hint of that something that lurks beneath us all. In World War I it was called shell-shock. Now we call it Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

My war was Vietnam. My wartime experiences were mild compared with the people I write about. Still, I could tell you stories…

ONE FROM THE ID:
IN A DAINTY PLACE

My father never went to war. I’m an only child. The “dainty place” was a lie I told my grandmother.

In a Dainty Place
was the jump-off point for a novel set in the world inside the wall. The novel, still pending, is set in a medieval milieu mixed with the made-up family stories our hero tells his kid brother. The book begins in the world of the wall and
In a Dainty Place
is back-story, revealed as the story progresses.

I almost know where this story comes from. I am sure that in writing it I was ridding myself of something that had niggled since I was a tot. That something was the side hallway of the large old house my parents moved into when I was five. The hall was a long, dark splintery place where aged vacuum cleaners lived and where—don’t ask me why—the British lay in wait for me.

Okay. Ask.

Okay, I’ll tell. I could read before I went to school. Not bragging, it was an accident. My grandfather used to sit me on his lap and read to me. Stories, poetry, whatever. Granddad would read and I’d follow his finger as it touched the words. I learned that certain places his finger touched made certain sounds come from Granddad. The sounds were stories. The stories were wrapped in the words.

Granddad liked Edgar Allan Poe. At that lap-age I honestly thought poetry was so-called because Poe had written it, all of it.

One writer with a silly name, Longfellow, wrote a poem about Paul Revere. The poem was a rush of terrifying sounds: belfry arch, muffled oars, midnight ride. In it were graveyards and horses galloping the night of another time, across a younger land. The hero, Paul Revere, rode to sound the alarm to every Middlesex, village, and farm, calling them forth because monsters called the British were coming. The British of the poem came from a black hulk silently afloat in the dark harbor, they loomed out of the mists of the river. Having loomed, they landed and marched with a steady tread through the town…

Our town?

No, no. A distant place. Boston.

In my mind the British were too awful to see. They were large, dark, hairy, and smelly, they came by the thousands and crouched in shadows and dust and hid among Electrolux hoses in the unlighted hallway that led to our attic stairs.

Why there? In that corridor was wallpaper similar to that described in the story. Not as detailed but it was from an older time, a different place. It was from that wallpaper that I annealed a terror of “the British” with a fear of blood hunting.

As mentioned, I have no brother or sister. I am my own sibling. I am Raymond. I banished me to that wall, the place of blood and death bordered by deep forest, distant villages and, somewhere invisible, to a castle of my own making. I built that room, the dainty place within. I filled it with the machineries of wonder…

Oh, yes. That.

Once upon a time, the rods for our kitchen curtains vanished. My grandmother had taken down the curtains to wash them and left their spring supports on the table. They vanished.

Where had I put them?

I didn’t know. Truly. The taking of and hiding the things had slipped from my five-year-old consciousness and the rods truly had vanished. Magic.

I finally admitted I’d hidden them. I didn’t remember but it seemed better to confess.

Where were they?

In a “dainty dish” I insisted. Which notion I suspect I’d cribbed from the nursery rhyme, “Sing a Song of Sixpence.” Eventually, I allowed that they were in a dainty place rather than just a dish. I stuck to that. For weeks, I insisted I’d put them in a dainty place.

Eventually, someone found them in the junk drawer in the kitchen. I did not remember putting them there, I do not remember. It must have been magic.

RAF LAKENHEATH:
AT ANGELS SIXTEEN

“It is well that war is so terrible—lest we should grow too fond of it.” —Robert E. Lee

1966 through 1969 I was in the U.S. Air Force. For most of that time I was in England, some of it near Cambridge, most of it in London. At 24 in that era of Vietnam I was older than most just entering the ranks but still, I was a kid. Now and then something from those years will pop up and I write. Typically, I mothball what emerges. Why? No idea.

I wrote this story when another writer and I thought we might package and sell an anthology of war-themed horror. I dipped into memories and out came RAF Lakenheath near Brandon, Suffolk, England. The night I drove there from London, the farmers of Suffolk were burning chaff from their fields following the fall harvest. When I got to the Heath, USAFE (United States Air Forces, Europe) was conducting a practice alert and RAF Lakenheath was locked down. I spent my first night in-country in the base jail, safely out of the way of colonels and master sergeants who wandered the evening dropping smoke bombs and telling people they were dead and their posts destroyed. Apparently, the brig was not part of the game and we FNGs were out of the way.

My eventual home on base was a World War II-era Quonset hut, a corrugated steel structure that looked like a silo lying on its side and half buried in the earth. Most of the guys assigned to them hated the huts. I loved mine. I had my own little room at the rear of the building, my own kerosene stove. My own back door opened onto a field where cattle grazed. I even had my own cow who greeted me mornings at the fence. A hundred yards beyond my cow was a forest. What’s not to like?

Lakenheath hadn’t been a base during the Second War. It had been a target. German night raiders tasked to bomb RAF Mildenhall, about 4 miles away, were expected to pound the dummy flightlines, mock aircraft and bogus buildings of Lakenheath.

The core of
At Angels Sixteen
came from an article I read when I was about 10.
Boys’ Life
,
Reader’s Digest
, not sure which. The story was about a man who survived a fall from an airplane. He survived in circumstances much as the German doctor posits about our tail gunner in the story.

I didn’t buy the explanation when I was 10. Obviously magic saved the guy, but you’re free to accept the Nazi version of the story.

B-17s. I love them. I got a ride in one at an air show in Reading, Pennsylvania when I was about 7. There were plenty of the old war birds doing such work in 1949. One or two still fly. The noise, the smell, the bone-chatter was magic, magic to the core. See? We boys love the machinery of warfare. It isn’t until we’re grown that we realize that combat is terror, boredom, loss, flesh, and pain.

There’s the story. Our proposed anthology never came about and I never submitted it until the editor of the zombie book-that-never-was asked if I had any World War II-centered horror/fantasy tales for an anthology to be called
A Dark and Deadly Valley
.

I did.

FIRST VOYAGES:
SOME STAGES ON THE ROAD
TOWARD OUR FAILURE TO REACH THE MOON

There once was a sub-realm of science fiction called First Voyages. These were stories of mankind’s baby steps off-world. Cyrano de Bergerac wrote one,
ditto
Jules Verne and countless more. Kids of my generation had Lester del Rey’s
Mission to the Moon
and Robert A. Heinlein’s
Rocketship Galileo.
We had films too. I can’t tell you how many wet summer afternoons I spent in my Uncle Jim’s Lyric Theater in Chester, PA, watching
Destination Moon
and
Rocketship X-M
, a first voyage that does not end well for the intrepid explorers.

Yes, this story is autobiographical. My dad was not killed in Korea or any war. Reinhart’s name was not Reinhart. The hat had a major’s gold oak leaf on it and had been my Uncle Bonney’s and he remained alive long enough to divorce my Aunt Ida and move out of all our lives. I did pray to be the first guy on the moon. I drew countless pictures, made hundreds of plans. There was a well traveled-in refrigerator carton in our basement. Other than not getting to the moon, that’s it. In the ’80s of the last century, I had occasion to pick up Buzz Aldrin at O’Hare Airport and deliver him to a book signing at THE STARS OUR DESTINATION bookstore in Chicago. That’s as close as I got.