Book of the Dead (3 page)

Again: by itself, this would be more than bad enough; and, as the critics of the overt mode are quick to point out, that is precisely where we
should
stop. To go any further is to pander, to lower oneself into the slag-pit of cheap sensationalism.

But the advocates of the
less is more
school of horror are specialists in the art of averting their eyes, and their
modus operandi
tends toward a far more irrational brand of fear. It’s the insistence that the unknown
remain
unknown, the oblique and introspective terror of an ostrich with its head in the sand. It takes the axiom
what I don’t know can’t hurt me
to its logical conclusion:
I never even knew what hit me
. It is, with all due respect, an evasion of the most fundamental sort.

Which brings us to the third level: the level of gestalt, of fusion and reintegration. At this point, you can no longer detach; the unknown has become tangible and all too real, beyond cheapening on the one hand or denial on the other. You can see the wet hole and the charred stump, yes; but beyond that—and in vital, visceral conjunction— you can know how it feels to be a part of it.

That is the essence of horror’s frontier: meat meeting mind, with the soul as screaming omniscient witness. It is the point at which true illumination becomes possible: neither one nor the other but both, and more. There is no sacrifice of one for the other. Such sacrifice is worse than pointless.

To go too far is to come that much closer to having it all; and in dangerous times like these, we
need
it all if we are to survive.

“You must choose:

Do you wish to see (perceive) nothing, or do you want to see things as they really are?

It is not hard to see things as they really are, it is simply a matter of tearing down walls, ridding oneself of defenses and presumption, rendering oneself vulnerable, an idiot, a fool.

But it is not easy to see things as they really are, because it is painful, it is real, it requires response, it’s an incredible commitment.

To go nine-tenths of the way is to suffer at every moment utter madness.

To go all the way is to become sane.

Most people prefer blindness.

But most people are a dying race.”

Paul Williams

We are a culture suffused with violence. Pick up the newspaper. Turn on the TV. Look out your window. Death and mindless brutality have permeated every aspect of our lives to such a degree that there is no escape, no place safe to hide. And while violence
per se
is certainly nothing new, it might be safe to assert that during the twentieth century some dark, twisted component of the human spirit has come of age. And in doing so, given rise to a radical twist in the nature of Absolute Values in relation to
life as it is
.

When the first poison gas blew through the trenches of Belgium and France, something fundamentally twisted. When the first ovens fired at Auschwitz and the first mushroom clouds bloomed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, something twisted. When we watched the First Lady scrambling onto the back of the Presidential limo to scrabble at the skittering pieces of her husband’s skull, something twisted. When we were force-fed napalm and body bags for breakfast, lunch and dinner, courtesy of network news and the public’s need to know, something twisted. When oppressed peoples rioted in the streets or were led off to slaughter, when it became all too clear that our fearless leaders were more often than not bald-faced businessmen who sold us out in the name of profit, when killer cultists who listened to The Beatles carved up Sharon Tate and her unborn baby, ushering in an era of serial killers and Khmer Rouge, drive-by shooters and day-care rapists, hijackings and knee-cappings, death squads and body dumps…

Something twisted. And it keeps on twisting, in the winds of change.

Viewed in this light, Tipper Gore’s statement takes on a provocatively comic bent. She states that we’re about to o.d. on violence, as if violence were something new, or as if the overdosing process were of itself a negative thing. As if, were we simply to stop looking at it—to just say
no
— the carnage would simply
go away
, or at least recede to a more “reasonable” level.

It’s a reasonable enough assumption, with one minor flaw. It doesn’t work. It never has. And it never will.

Perhaps because as a culture we’ve seen too much, and don’t know what to do with it, we have become disoriented. The old maps grow frayed at the edges; whole new vistas open up where before there was the fog and the fading to black. The currents shift before we’ve adjusted to the last wave that struck us, and we don’t know where we stand anymore.

It’s understandable, in such times, to wish to dig in: to hold still, to not venture into even more uncertain realms. Or better yet, to return to the last place we felt comfortable. The last place we felt we knew.

Your Humble Editors would offer that it is better to press on: to squint past the old horizon and look beyond, to see what comes next. If there’s anything that will help us come to grips with how far over the edge we’ve gone, that thing is to do what pioneers have always done.

To go too far.

Until we’ve gone all the way.

“I don’t know how you perceive my mission as a writer, but for me it is not a responsibility to reaffirm your concretized myths and provincial prejudices. It is not my job to lull you with a false sense of the rightness of the universe. This wonderful and terrible occupation of recreating the world in a different way, each time fresh and strange, is an act of revolutionary guerrilla warfare. I stir the soup. I inconvenience you. I make your nose run and your eyeballs water.”

Harlan Ellison

Which brings us back to the book at hand.

You hold in your hands a world of hurt: a psychic neutron bomb disguised as a bunch of zombie stories, able to vaporize the conventions of a genre while leaving the glory and terror intact. You hold in your hands a universe of grisly possibility, replete with all of the hope and humanity supportable by such a place.

Not bad for a book of zombie stories.

The contributors responded to our invitation with an enthusiasm that both stunned and delighted us. We asked for their most intense vision. But we never expected the level of intensity that came pouring in, story after story. It just
came
: so strong, so personal, that we knew a genuine nerve had been struck.

Everybody knows something about the world of the walking dead.

This is our way of probing the boundaries, penetrating the unknown, making sense of the nonsensical and the abhorrent. It has been brought to you by a handful of the wildest frontiersmen that this world has to offer, guys who have gone to the edge and have the arrows in their backs to prove it. We won’t categorize or count off their accomplishments to date; by the time you read this, they will already have blazed new trails to follow.

Read these people. Read every goddam thing they write. They are not writing for no reason. Each in their own way, they are pushing us toward
understanding
: the noblest cause that a human being can undertake.

If we are to rise above this nightmare, we must first make peace with the monster inside ourselves: that shambling dead thing that would tear us apart and eat us alive, never questioning why. We, the inhabitants of the latter half of the twentieth century, ride a razor’s edge. A new dark age beckons on the one side. A renaissance, on the other.

If there is any hope for the future, it surely must rest upon the ability to stare unflinchingly into the heart of darkness.

Then set our sights on a better place.

And prepare ourselves.

To go too far.

—Skipp & Spector

York, Pa., 1989

BY CHAN McCONNELL

“Each of us has a moment,” Quinn told her. “The moment when we shine; that instant when we are at our absolute best. Just as each of us has an aberration, a hidden secret. Some might call it a perversion, though that’s rather a rough word. Crude. Nonspecific. Is it a perversion to do that thing you’re best at, to enjoy your individual moment?”

Amelia nodded vaguely, watching the older man through her glass of Sauvignon Blanc. He was going to answer his own obtuse question, and the answer he had already decided upon was no. It was the puffery that preceded the crunch—was she going to fuck him tonight, or not? She was positive he had already answered that one in his head as well. Dinner had run to ninety-five bucks, not counting the wine or the tip. Dessert had been high-priced, higher-caloric, chocolate, elegant. Cabs had been taken and token gifts dispensed.

She had worked in loan approvals at Columbia Savings for nine months, riding the receptionist’s desk. Older men frequently asked her out. When Quinn invited her to dinner, a weekend date, she had pulled his file, consulted his figures, and said yes. All the girls in the office did it. He drove a Jaguar XJS and was into condo development.

The dinner part had been completed two hours ago. Now it was
his place
. When your income hit the high six figures there was no such animal as date rape. Amelia had herpes. It was inactive tonight. Best to stay mum; it was like compensation. To her certain knowledge she had never bedded bisexuals or intravenous drug users, and in truth she feared contracting AIDS in the same unfocused way she feared getting flattened in a crosswalk by a bus. It could happen. But probably not. There was no way in the world either of them could fit a condom over their mouths, so it was academic. Right?

Quinn’s watery gray eyes glinted as he rattled on about aberrations and special moments. Probably the wine. It had gotten to Amelia half an hour ago, a fuzzy vino cloud that put her afloat and permitted her to tune out Quinn’s voice while staring past him, to nod and generate tiny noises of acknowledgment on a schedule that allowed him to believe she was actually listening. She had disconnected, and felt just fine. She took a deep, languorous breath, keeping him on the far side of her wine glass, and stifled the giggle that welled within her. Oh my yes, she felt nice, adrift on a cumulus pillow of gasified brain cells. She would look past him, through him, in just this way when he was on top of her, grunting and sweating and believing he had seduced her… just as he now believed she was paying attention.

She rewound back to the last utterance she cared to remember and acted upon it. “I have an aberration,” she said. She added a glowing smile and toyed with a long curl of her copper hair. Just adorable.

His interest came full blast, too eager. “Yes? Yes?” He replaced his wineglass on the clear acrylic tabletop and leaned forward to entreat her elucidation.

She played him like a catfish on a hook. “No. It’s silly, really.”
Look at my legs
, she commanded.

Through the tabletop he watched her legs recross. The whisper of her stockings flushed his face with blood. His brain was giddy, already jumping forward in time, to the clinch. “Please,” he said. His voice was so cultured, his tone so paternal. He was losing control and she could smell it.

She kept a childlike killer smile precisely targeted. “Well. Okay.” She rose, a slim and gracile woman of thirty-four, one who fought hard to keep what she had and had nothing to show for her effort except a stupid airhead bimbo job at Columbia Savings. So much bitterness, there beneath the manner and cosmetics.

There was a tall vase of irises on an antique end table near the fireplace. Firelight mellowed all the glass and Scandinavian chrome in the room, and danced in the floor-to-ceiling wraparound windows of Quinn’s eighth-floor eyrie. He kept his gaze on her. The fire was in his eyes as well.

Every inch the coquette, Amelia bit off the delicate chiffon of the iris. Chewed. Swallowed. And smiled.

Quinn’s face grew robust with pleasure. His old man’s eyes cleared.

“Ever since I was a little girl,” she said. “Perhaps because I saw my cat, Sterling, eating grass. I like the flavor. I don’t know. I used to think the flower’s life added to mine.”

“And this is
your
…” Quinn had to clear his throat. “Aberration. Ah.” He left his chair to close up the distance between them. It became evident that his erection was making him blunder.

Amelia’s eyes dipped to notice, bemused, and she ate another flower. She had made a point of telling Quinn she liked lots of flowers, and he and his Gold Card had come through in rainbow colors. All over the penthouse were long-stemmed roses, carnation bouquets, spring bunches, mums, more.

Quinn found the sight of Amelia chewing the flowers throat-closingly erotic. His voice grew husky and repeated her name. It was time for him to lunge. “Let me show you my specialty. Dear Amelia. My aberration.”

She had been tied up before. So far, no big deal. Quinn used silk scarves to secure her wrists and ankles to the mahogany poles of the four-poster bed. With a long, curved, ebony-handled knife he halved the front of her dress. Into the vanilla highlands of her breasts he mumbled promises of more expensive replacement garments. His hands lost their sophistication and became thick-fingered, in a big masculine hurry, shredding her hose to the knees and groping to see if she was as moist as his fantasies. Then he was thrusting. Amelia rocked and pretended to orgasm. This would be done in a hurry. No big deal.