Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (43 page)

The defining story of the collection, however, may be “Derma Sutra (1891).” In the steam-powered, alternate version of Denver, Colorado known as Cherry Creek, a pure-minded, self-styled monster slayer is defiled so thoroughly and transcendently by a creature known only as “the nameless woman” that she becomes, through the tattooing of her stringently “unsullied” skin with desecrating texts and the sexual invasions of her prey-turned-predator, a monster to rival her midwife-maker. “She felt that fleeting instant when the zealot fell and the crusader came to understand that she now numbered among the ranks of the
bites mires
she once hunted with such an insatiable fervor and such perfect conviction... What wakes is unfathomable, and broken, and aroused to new purpose.” The act is liberating and appalling: it obliterates “Stephanie Brockett” and awakens in her reforged body something even more unclassifiable than its parent, never even described with the same epithet twice. “[A]
novel
being... the lovely creature coiled inside the husk of Tess Brockett... the living embodiment of two profane books... this flawed and flawless vessel.” At one point the nameless woman makes mental reference to “her Creation, this delicate, indestructible Construct” as if in homage to Mary Shelley’s Creature, but the style is the closest Kiernan has allowed herself to a pastiche of Lovecraft (describing acts which would no doubt have horrified him). It is also the most clinically and erotically graphic of the stories in this collection, tabulating the chemical makeup of an aroused woman’s juices with the sane attention it devotes to the geography of Cherry Creek or the listing of real and fictitious texts that have gone into the “vessel”’s tattoos. With the same frankness, the nameless woman explains her rationale for the transformation rather than elimination of Tess Brockett in terms that might stand equally as an apologia for the existence of
Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart
in all its polyvalence as opposed to the kinds of shape-change signified by the were-leopard boyfriends who populate the shelves of paranormal romance alongside sparkling vampires: “But in such an easy deed would have lain no glory and no genuine accomplishment. Most importantly, no
perversion
.”

To pervert, from the Latin
pervertere:
to turn round or turn about, to turn a thing from its rightful course and send it in another direction altogether, now used almost solely in the sexual sense or the sense of ideological distortion.
In quae miracula... verteris?
one of Ovid’s characters asks another, mid-transformation—
What astonishing thing are you turning into
? (A dolphin, as it happens. Do not mistreat Dionysos,
virginea puerum... forma, a boy with a maiden’s look.)
It is an alterity that would be recognized by more characters than Medon or Tess Brockett, though some of them would also count it a gift. It is the twists and bends the author gives to familiar elements of myth and folklore as they are retold and repurposed in the telling, so that neither mermaids nor harpies nor satyrs can look quite the same when these stories are done with them. And it is a depravity, if it is a depravity, or a release, if it is a release, which is not confined to the turning page. Reader, you have let the writer in. You have allowed her stories to enter you and they must, like any foreign introduction, effect a change. (In the red book of “The Peril of Liberated Objects, or The Voyeur’s Seduction,” rape is committed by one archetypal figure of innocence on another while the woman reading reaches climax: “‘She perceives the unicorn’s every violent thrust, but is no less the victim than the rapist, no more the ravager than she is the ravaged, broken maiden. And she won Id have it no other way.” Did you read the story? Were you her, too? Is that perverted? Discuss.) At the end of this book, you also lie broken and transformed. Or perhaps you are admiring your tattoos. Either way, Caitlín R. Kiernan has changed you, and like all the best metamorphoses, it is not over yet.

It is that sinister enchantment which derives from a profound evil that is kept at just the right distance from us so that we may experience both our love and our fear of it in one sweeping sensation.

Thomas Ligotti, “Nethescurial” (1991)

The preceding stories first appeared in
Sirenia Digest,
Issues Nos. 23-41, October 2007-May 2009. The author would like to thank all the people who have made, and continue to make, the
Digest
possible, beginning with the subscribers, and including William K. Schafer, Vince Locke, Kathryn Pollnac, Jacob Garbe, Gordon Duke, Sonya Taaffe, and Geoffrey H. Goodwin. You guys
still
keep the wolves at bay.

“Subterraneous” and “Fecunditatum (Murder Ballad No. 6)” originally appeared as “Untitled 31” and “Untitled 33,” respectively. “Murder Ballad No. 7” originally appeared as “Murder Ballad No. 6.” Also, the Elder Sign as depicted in “At the Gate of Deeper Slumber” follows August Derleth’s version, and for that I apologize to the memory of Lovecraft.

Trained as a vertebrate paleontologist, Caitlín R. Kiernan did not turn to fiction writing until 1992. Since then, she has published eight novels—
The Five of Cups, Silk, Threshold, Low Red Moon, Murder if Angels, Daughter of Hounds, The Red Tree
, and, most recently,
The Drowning Girl: A Memoir.
Her short fiction has been collected in
Tales of Pam and Wonder; Wrong Things
(with Poppy Z. Brite);
From Weird and Distant Shores;
the World Fantasy Award-nominated
Alabaster
and
To Charles Fort, With Love;
and
A is for Alien.
She has also published a short sf novel,
The Dry Salvages
, and two volumes of erotica,
Frog Toes and Tentacles
and
Tales from the Woeful Platypus.
She has scripted graphic novels for DC Vertigo, including thirty-eight issues of
The Dreaming
and the mini-series
The Girl Who Would Be Death
and
Bast: Eternity Game.
In 2012, she will return to comics with
Alabaster
(Dark Horse). Her many chapbooks have included
Trilobite: The Writing of Threshold, The Mere wife,
and
The Black Alphabet.
In 2011, Subterranean Press released a retrospective of her early work,
Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One).
She recently completed her next novel,
Blood Oranges.

Version History

Version #:
v3.0

Sigil Version Used:
0.7.2

Original format:
ePub

Date created:
April 20, 2013

Last edited:
April 20, 2013

Correction History:

Version History Framework for this book:

v0.0/UC
==> This is a book that that's been scanned, OCR'd and converted into HTML or EPUB. It is completely raw and uncorrected. I do essentially no text editing within the OCR software itself, other than to make sure that every page has captured the appropriate scanning area, and recognized it as the element (text, picture, table, etc.) that it should be.

v1.0
==> All special style and paragraph formatting from the OCR product is removed, except for italics and small-caps (where they are being used materially, and not as first-line-of-a-new-chapter eye-candy). Unstyled, chapter & sub-chapter headings are applied. ~35 search templates which use Regular Expressions have been applied to correct common transcription errors: faulty character replacement like "die" instead of "the", "comer" instead of "corner", "1" instead of "I"; misplaced punctuation marks; missing quotation marks; rejoining broken lines; breaking run-on dialogue, etc.

v2.0
==> Page-by-page comparison against the original scan/physical book, to format scenebreaks (the blank space between paragraph denoting an in-chapter break), blockquotes, chapter heading, and all other special formatting. This also includes re-breaking some lines (generally from poetry or song lyrics that have been blockquoted in the original book) that were incorrectly joined during the v1 general correction process.

v3.0
==> Spellchecked in Sigil (an epub editor). My basic goal in this version is to catch most non-words, and all indecipherable words (i.e., those that would require the original text in order to properly interpret). Also, I try to add in diacritics whenever appropriate. In other words, I want to get the book in shape so that someone who wants to make full readthrough corrections will be able to do so without access to the original physical book.

v4.0
==> I've done a complete readthrough of the book, and have made any corrections to errors caught in the process. This version level is probably comparable in polish to a physical retail book.

Some additional notes:

vX.1-9
==> within my own framework, these smaller incremental levels are completely unstandardized. What it means is that I—or you!—have made some minor corrections or adjustment that leave me somewhere between "vX" and "vX+1". It's very unlikely that I'll ever use these decimal adjustments on anything less than a "v3".

Correcting my ebooks
— Even at their best, I've yet to read one of my v3.0s that was completely error free. For those of you inclined to make corrections to those books I post (v3, v4, v5, and all points in between), I gratefully welcome the help. However, I would urge you to make those correction in the original EPUB file using Sigil or some other HTML editor, and not in a converted file. The reason is this: when you convert a file, the code—and occasionally the formatting—is altered. If you make corrections in this altered version, in order to use that "corrected" version, I'm going to have to reformat it all over again from scratch, which is at best hugely inefficient and at worst impossible (if, say, I no longer have an original copy available). More likely, I'll just end up doing the full readthrough myself on my file and discarding all of your hard work. Unlike some of the saintly retail posters who contribute books that they have no interest whatsoever in reading, I never create a book that I don't want to read... at least a little. So, having to do a full readthrough on my own books isn't really going to put me out, but it will mean that the original editor's work (i.e. your work )will have been completely wasted, and I'd feel more than slightly crummy about that. So, to re-cap, I am endlessly grateful to those who add further polish to the books I make, but it's only an efficient use of your time if you make corrections in the original EPUB file as you downloaded it.