Where We Live and Die (15 page)

Primitive man gathers in a cave. Outside, the ice draws closer, the cold bites with teeth sharper than any carnivore. For comfort against the darkness, man invents the first story. It is a horror story.

The darkness is beautiful and filled with wonders.

Fast forward.

Beowulf, Macbeth, and Faust sing The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The Apparition of Mrs. Veal appears to Arthur Mervyn in The Castle of Otranto. The gothic era is born when The Monk and Melmoth the Wanderer tell the Children of the Abbey the History of the Caliph Vathek. Dracula and Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus as his friends call him, investigate The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at Wuthering Heights while The Sorcerer’s Apprentice reads The Diary of a Madman.

The darkness grows stronger.

The Pit and the Pendulum swings, ushering in a new era, A Descent into the Maelstrom. The Black Cat and The Gold Bug play Hop-Frog over The Cask of Amontillado during The Fall of the House of Usher. Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, and upon his arrival, used The Monkey’s Paw to activate The Turn of the Screw.

The Death of Halpin Frayser occurs in The House of the Seven Gables, directly beneath The Yellow Sign. The King in Yellow flees on The Phantom Rickshaw, while The Purple Cloud follows in his wake. The Great God Pan watches as The Ghost Pirates escape on The Boats of the Glen Carrig, and sail into The Night Land. Count Magnus spies The Picture of Dorian Gray in A Shop in Go-By Street.

The Call of Cthulhu echoes over The House On The Borderland At The Mountains of Madness. The Wendigo stalks The Dead Valley, where Lukundoo administers The Mark of the Beast at The Camp of the Dog, while listening to The Music of Erich Zann.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth grows longer. The darkness grows stronger.

The Fury of the third age brings Dangerous Visions and Dark Forces. The Doll That Ate Its Mother is a Psycho. He shouts I Am Legend and I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. The Exorcist chases Rosemary’s Baby and All Heads Turn When The Hunt Goes By. The Manitou sits in The Dark of Charnel House, listening to The Rats. Christine and Carrie open The Books of Blood and tell a Ghost Story. Tread Softly on this Dark Mountain, for The Watchers with the Twilight Eyes are there, playing The Damnation Game, causing Misery to the Lost Souls while the Hot Blood runs and runs again over The Bridge. The Breeder does the Goat Dance to the beat of The Tommyknockers and The Kill Riff.

Then The Cleanup begins. The AfterAge. The Swan Song. The darkness is swallowed by a garish day-glo. Its lifeblood is drained dry by one too many vampires run amok.

The darkness goes away.

This is where we come in. Think of us as EMT’s. We check the pulse of the genre, and though it is dead, we fight to bring it back.

Subterranean by design, we dance the Cemetery Dance at our Leisure. In Delirium, we tell DarkTales of the Eraserhead. We throw down the Gauntlet, slide down the Razor Blade, and in the Night Shade we eat our Flesh & Blood Medium Rare. It’s Prime time.

Now is the time of Natural Selection. The time of Maternal Instinct. We are the Deadliest of the Species and we stand firm. The Distance Travelled was a long one, but there is No Rest For The Wicked. We see in Colors. Broken in our Sorrow, we cry Salt Water Tears. We are the Dregs of Society—Deadfellas—the Holy Rollers. As The Sun Goes Down we gather an army of Scary Rednecks and Other Inbred Horrors that reek of Bum Piss and Other City Scents. Partners In Chyme, we prepare a feast of Shoggoth Cacciatore and drink The Blood of A Blackbird. The Spectres and Darkness celebrate This Symbiotic Fascination. Ghosts, Spirits, Computers and World Machines deliver The Big Punch, while Dead Cats Bounce.

Wake up!

We came of age while the genre was Among The Missing. We crawled from The Cellar of the Beast House during the Off Season. We were the Lot Lizards; Incubi and Succubi taking in the Nightlife and celebrating Ladies Night while we stared Deep Into That Darkness, Peering at The Light At The End of the Road To Hell. You did not hear us coming because the din of your dark echo rang in your ears. This is your wake up call. The revolution happened while you were sleeping…

And the darkness has never been stronger.

1. Never say, “Well, life can’t get any worse.” Because that is when life will invariably kick you in the teeth.

2. In the end, the only people you can really trust are your kids. All others are suspect, even your cat or dog.

3. Yes, your kids can break your heart, too, but that takes years. Your dog or cat will eat your face after just a week with no food.

4. Except for maybe the Six-Million Dollar Man’s bionic dog. But the dog on the original
Battlestar Galactica
? That dog would have totally eaten Boxey’s face.

5. They say that success breeds contempt, but they are misinformed. Success breeds one thing—loneliness.

6. Before you are successful, you have friends. Once you are successful, you have more friends. You will also attract sycophants.

7. Some sycophants don’t mean to be sycophants. Others do. I
t can be very hard to tell a sycophant from a friend. They are like John Carpenter’s
The Thing
.

8. Worse, some friends can become sycophants. Even your pre-success friends are not immune to this transformation. So you adopt an attitude of “Trust No One.”

9. The problem with that is you can no longer tell the difference. So you end up treating your friends like sycophants and your sycophants like friends.

10. And after that, you build a wall, just like in the Pink Floyd song. Eventually, you either go insane, become an addict, kill yourself, or push back and clean fucking house.

11. If you love your kids, as I do, the first three ain’t an option. So you choose number four. And after you’ve cleaned house, you find yourself truly alone for the first time in a very long time.

12. Success breeds loneliness, but it is in that loneliness that you can finally breathe and hear yourself think, and in that silence, truly start to live.

This was originally published as a limited edition hardcover from Cemetery Dance Publications. It also appeared in my collection
A Conspiracy of One
(which is out of print) and my collection
All Dark, All The Time
. I think it fair to say that this is my twist on the traditional ghost story—a meta-fictional mash-up of M.R. James and Hunter S. Thompson. Although I don’t usually care for my work after I’ve finished writing it, I’m proud of this one. I honestly think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written. But it’s also the saddest. I wrote this as a last ditch effort to save my troubled marriage—a marriage that had been mostly good up until the pressures of writing for a living began to impact it. Those pressures, slow to build but oh-so-fucking-heavy, are detailed here.

Since its initial publication, people have often asked me which parts of
The Girl on the Glider
were true, and which parts were fiction. Honestly, ninety-nine point nine percent of this was true. All of the behind-the-scenes angst and drama and fuckery that was going on—I didn’t make that shit up. That’s exactly what it’s like to make your living as a mid-list horror novelist. There is no 401K. There is no health insurance. And publishers never pay you on time. The other stuff was true, too—everything from Coop fishing a dead body out of the river to the image I saw on my son’s baby monitor. A girl really did die at the top of my driveway, and she really did teach me an important lesson.

Sadly, the lesson came too late. I said above that ninety-nine point nine percent of this story was true. The part I made up…the part that was fiction? Well, that was the happy ending. In real life, the story didn’t end so well. I finished writing this novella in December of 2009. Three weeks later, in January of 2010, my wife of eight years, a woman who I’d been with for sixteen years, asked me for a separation…and eventually a divorce. And she was right to do so. She was absolutely right to do so. The lessons that the girl on the glider taught me came too late. I didn’t realize that then, but I do now. At the time, I blamed everyone around us. But the blame lay elsewhere…

Several years have passed, and my ex-wife and I remain best friends. Indeed, I think we get along better now than we ever did during those past sixteen years. We’ve both grown a lot. So has our son. Our son is healthy and happy and has two parents who love him. And I still don’t blame her. Not one bit. Nobody should have to live with the guy in this novella, the guy who is chained to such an unforgiving and unhealthy job, but can’t do anything else. A guy who is trapped by his muse, trapped by who he is, trapped by what he is…a guy who will never escape those things. A guy who is a writer.

I used to live in a mountaintop cabin along the banks of the Susquehanna River. At the time, Cemetery Dance asked me if I’d like to be in a four-author anthology with Peter Straub, Joe R. Lansdale, and Ray Garton. That’s like asking Justin Bieber if he’d like to record an album with The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Guns N’ Roses. “Of course I want to be in that anthology,” I said, and then asked about the guidelines. The only stipulation was that all the stories had to be about killers.

I thought about it for a long time. I wanted to deliver my very best for this project. At the time,
The Girl on the Glider
was getting rave reviews, so I thought maybe I should try the meta-fiction route again. I also had an idea of some of the themes I’d like to explore—how we artists seemingly sacrifice it all for our muse. As Bono sings, “Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief. All kill their inspiration and sing about their grief.”

While all that was swirling around in my head, I took a walk down to the river (just like in the story) and saw three girls, and everything clicked into place. I hurried back up the hill and wrote this story that night.

The first and last sentences of this story came to me one day, and I liked them so much that I wrote a story to tie them together. Author Kelli Owen read this story prior to its publication, and said it was a metaphor for my current place in the horror genre. At the time, I didn’t believe her, but looking back on it now, she was correct. It was written at a point in my career when I could have sold my grocery list and publishers would have lined up to buy it. Thus, while at first glance, it might not seem like the story is about writing, it really is.