The Night Listener and Others (48 page)

Japan enthralled me, and offered me prime settings for fiction. The most haunting of these was the Hasse Kanon Temple at Kamakura, which is as I have described it in “The Pebbles of Sai-no-Kawara.” When I wrote the story, I was concerned that it might be seen as an anti-abortion screed, since I’m personally pro-choice. The story is, in my view, not about abortion, but about choices made, choices that in this case could not easily be lived with. I’m thankful that I never had to make the decision that Lattimore and his wife did, one which, years later, returned to haunt him. The question would always remain,
what if?
In Lattimore’s circumstances that question’s answer, whether real or imagined, is devastating.

A FATHER’S TEARS (
Quietly Now
, ed. by Kealan Patrick Burke, 2004)
Charles L. Grant has always been considered the master and lead proponent of “quiet” horror, the kind of stories that eschew the graphic and favor the subtle. I first met Charlie at the First World Fantasy Convention in 1975, when he was on the “New Voices in Fantasy” panel, and I was a rabid fan. When I got to really know him ten years later, I found him to be a sheer delight—acerbic, funny, opinionated, and charming. We worked together during the early days of HWA, and I sold him stories for
Final Shadows
and
The Seaharp Hotel
, both of which were reprinted in my earlier collection.

This story, however, first appeared in
Quietly Now: An Anthology in Tribute to Charles L. Grant
, one of those delightful tribute volumes that appeared
before
the honoree has left the stage. Charlie died in 2006, two years after this book appeared, mourned and remembered by many. I was quite glad to be a part of the volume.

JEAVES AND THE DETERIORATING RELATIONS (
Joe R. Lansdale’s Lords of the Razor
, ed. by Bill Sheehan and William Schafer, 2006)
Horror and humor don’t often blend well, but P. G. Wodehouse has always been among my favorite authors, actually making me laugh out loud while reading, a rare achievement. So when I was given the opportunity to write a tale in the world of Joe Lansdale’s God of the Razor, I decided to overlap that world with the English country-house world of Wodehouse, and trust that stomach-churning hilarity might ensue. I came as close as I possibly could to capturing Wodehouse’s unique style, and had an absolutely ripping time writing it. The result seems to be oojah-cum-spiff (as P. G. would put it), since the public readings I’ve given of it have elicited audible and plentiful laughs. Purists will note that Wodehouse’s characters, among them Jeeves and Wooster, have undergone minor name changes to prevent the writer from major litigation.
THE SMOKE IN MOONEY’S PUB (
Taverns of the Dead
, ed. by Kealan Patrick Burke, 2006)
Another story taken from life. From 2002 to 2008, I played guitar and provided lead vocals for Fire in the Glen, a Celtic duo, with my fiddle and bodhran playing buddy Tom Knapp. We played a
lot
of smoky bars and pubs, and when I came home, it was straight to the cellar to strip off all my clothes, which were reeking of smoke, and then into the shower to wash my hair and try to cough the crap out of my lungs and throat. It was when I started to think about the age and the
nature
of the smoke in some of those pubs that the germ of this story was born. We also loved to play an occasional Irish rebel song. There were some listeners who hated them, and others who sang along almost savagely, and I was always surprised and, I confess, pleased that those simple songs could produce such strong emotional reactions. All those experiences burned inside me until “The Smoke in Mooney’s Pub” drifted up.
FROM THE BACK PAGES (
Retro Pulp Tales
, ed. by Joe R. Lansdale, 2006)
Now
this
one was
fun!
I’ve been a pulp magazine collector ever since I bought a 1935
Weird Tales
when I was nineteen, and when Joe Lansdale offered a chance to write something pulpish, I thought it might be fun to do a “back-of-the-book” story that used excerpts from the supplemental features of certain pulps. I recalled H. P. Lovecraft’s idea of “the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents,” and decided to correlate the contents of disparate pieces from very different pulps over a thirty-five-year period, bringing to light a story that would not otherwise be told. All the departments and features I used are real ones, with the exception of the letter column in
Terror Tales
. (The weird menace pulps weren’t real big on idea exchange—read, drool, and move on…) Even the taxidermy book is real. It probably doesn’t matter to most readers, but it does to me, and this kind of research is
fun!
AND SO WILL I REMEMBER YOU (
At Ease With the Dead
, ed. by Barbara & Christopher Roden, 2007)
This tale probably comes as close to a “classic” ghost story as any in this collection. It was written for Ash-Tree Press, which published
Figures in Rain
, my first collection. As I stated in the original notes, this story, except for the supernatural elements and the meeting with Anna Huber’s descendant, is mostly true. Todd Pruzan’s article on Mrs. Mortimer indeed led me to the perusal of my own copy of
The Peep of Day
, which bears all the annotations quoted in the story. During the writing, I tracked down the location of Anna Huber Hostetter’s gravestone, and even took a photograph of the book on top of the stone. And yes, I thanked her for giving me the story. She has not as yet responded.
A TRICK OF THE LIGHT (
666
, ed. by David Moody, 2007)
I was invited into this immensely high-paying young adult anthology, and tried to ride the edge as much as I could. The germ of the story came as the result of spending several days in a wonderful and caring hospice when Laurie’s mother was dying, and the thought that maybe the dying aren’t meant to go into “The Light,” but rather into the darkness. I liked this story so much that I wrote a treatment for a projected series of Y/A novels, but only submitted it to Scholastic, which had published the original anthology. They declined, and I wonder if it was because the anthology seemed to be unsuccessful in terms of sales. Maybe the tykes just weren’t ready for really dark stories, though I was pleased to see one young reviewer’s comment: “The only one I really loved so far was the one by Chet Williamson.” Here’s lookin’ at you, kid…
MARLEY’S CAT (
Shivers V
, ed. by Richard Chizmar, 2008)
One of my favorite publishers, Richard Chizmar, (whose Cemetery Dance has published my novel
Second Chance
, and my more recent novella,
The Story of Noichi the Blind)
, asked me if I had a story that would be suitable for the
Shivers
series of anthologies he edits. I’ve written a story for Laurie every Christmas since 1980, a few of which have later appeared in anthologies, and the most recent at that time was this piece of dark whimsy that put a new spin on Dickens’
A Christmas Carol
. Rich was delighted with it, and thus it found a more public home.
THE FINAL VERSE (
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, May-June 2011)
My pal Tom Monteleone contacted me one day to see if I’d be interested in doing one of a series of chapbooks with an accompanying CD for Borderlands Press. It could be a reprint, and I would record the story for the CD. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to write an original story, and, what’s more, something that would be written specifically to be
heard
. I love American roots music, and got into bluegrass when my son Colin started playing bluegrass fiddle in middle school and I began to accompany him when he entered fiddle contests (most of which he won). So I came up with a story about a song, specifically about its long lost-final verse. I wrote an original melody to go with the lyrics, and recorded the story in Tom’s basement studio, with me doing the vocals and guitar accompaniment. Tom ran into cash flow problems (the bane of small presses everywhere) and offered to let me have the story back rather than keep it indefinitely, so I sent it to Gordon Van Gelder at
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
. Gordon’s a fine, painstaking editor, and after I made a few changes he requested, it was published there, and Ellen Datlow also picked it up for her
Best Horror of the Year, Vol. 4
.

In the past few years, along with writing, I’ve been narrating audiobooks for Crossroad Press, all of which are available for download at Audible.com. Along with a number of my own novels, I’ve recorded work by Clive Barker, Joe Lansdale, Michael Moorcock, Tom Piccirilli, Jack Ketchum, Kealan Patrick Burke, Charles L. Grant, John Skipp & Craig Spector, and many others. One of these days, I’m going to rerecord “The Final Verse” so people can actually experience the story the way it was meant to be experienced— aurally. Until then, if you’d like to make up your own little tune for “Mother, Come Quickly,” feel free!

APPOINTED (
Black Wings II
, ed. by S. T. Joshi, 2012)
I’ve never written much Lovecraftian fiction, and when I do it tends to be more satirical, as with my tongue-in-cheek “From the Papers of Helmut Hecker,” which appeared in
Lovecraft’s Legacy
(and my previous collection,
Figures in Rain
). S. T. Joshi had asked me to contribute a story to his second HPL-inspired anthology, and “Appointed” came to me when I attended Horrorfind in Gettysburg for the first (and so far only) time. I was equally impressed and
de
pressed by the many older actors there whose claim to fame consisted of having been in a few (usually sub-par) horror films, and who were selling their signed 8x10 glossies and DVDs of films in which they’d appeared. Despite these actors’ greater fame, I couldn’t help but feel, dare I say, superior, in that my fellow writers and I were sitting at our tables selling something we had actually
created
, i.e., our own books that we had written, while the actors were
interpreters
, only one element of a film, and could only sell their own images rather than something they had created from whole cloth (and believe me, as a member of Actors’ Equity for nearly forty years, I
know
how much easier acting is than writing). The hotel and dealer’s room are pretty much as described, as are many of the con guests. Who “Wesley Cranford” is will remain my secret, though my inspiration wasn’t at all as seedy as Cranford, though he was certainly as dignified and polite a gentleman.
SILKEN WORDS
This is a previously unpublished story, written very much with Robert Bloch in mind, particularly the Robert Bloch of such tales as “The Weird Tailor.” As such, it’s almost retro, and I like to imagine it appearing in an old 1953
Weird Tales
, or being adapted as a 1960 episode of
Thriller
. In glorious black and white, of course.
BLANKET MAN
This final story in this collection is
nearly
previously unpublished. A Canadian small press publisher wanted to create a chapbook of my work and house it in a special box. So I decided to write another story set in Japan and pair it with “The Pebbles of Sai-no-Kawara.” The chapbook’s title would be
Kaikon
, which means “remorse” in Japanese, a fitting title, since both stories dealt with that emotion. The publisher created wonderfully evocative art, printed the chapbook on lovely Japanese papers, and designed a small wooden box in which to house the book, with sculpted bas-relief resin elements on both front and back. An unexpected chemical reaction in the plastic resin rendered it unstable and sticky after a short time, and the publisher called off the project in despair. He had already printed a number of the booklets and sent me some of them. Those that he had left he marked as review copies so as not to devalue those he had given me. So the chapbook, and the story, were never officially released.

“Blanket Man,” while dealing with remorse, also deals with its cousin, guilt, perhaps because it’s so easy for an American to feel guilty in a strange land and culture: guilty of not knowing the language, guilty of not understanding and appreciating the customs, guilty, in short, of being an
American
. The blanket man I describe was all too real. He caught my attention as Laurie and Colin and I walked across the Sanjo Bridge one warm and sunny July afternoon. We passed back over the bridge an hour later, but the figure was gone and I didn’t see him again. I was hoping to, since I, like my character McBride, wanted to give him something. The figure stayed with me. Though the blanket might have merely been protection from the sun, my imagination suggested that there was more to it than that. My remaining days on that particular Japan trip were spent thinking about the blanket man. He colored my thoughts in Kyoto, in Hiroshima, and in Tokyo, and though I’d written nothing down, by the time I returned home the story was already constructed in my head.

I’m glad the day has arrived when both of my Japanese stories can appear in one book, as was intended, and hope that they offer the reader at least a small part of the fascination I feel toward that engaging and perplexing country, at once bustling and contemplative, inviting and aloof, now and always mysterious.

The Night Listener and Others

Copyright © 2015 by Chet Williamson

The right of Chet Williamson to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Originally published in printed book form by PS Publishing Ltd in 2015. This electronic version published in December 2015 by PS by arrangement with the author. All rights reserved by the author.

FIRST EBOOK EDITION

ISBN 978-1-84863-353-7

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