Lethal kisses, p.1
Lethal Kisses, page 1
Lethal Kisses
18 Tales of Sex, Horror, and Revenge
Edited by Ellen Datlow
For Pat Cadigan
I would like to thank Merrilee Heifetz,
Caroline Oakley, and Lucius Shepard
for helping to make this anthology possible.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Ellen Datlow
… Warmer
A. R. Morlan
Anamorphosis
Caitlín R. Kiernan
A Grub Street Tale
Thomas Tessier
Back in the Dunes
Terry Lamsley
Leave Me Alone God Damn You
Joyce Carol Oates
Butcher’s Logic
Roberta Lannes
A Lie for a Lie
Pat Cadigan
Keeping Alice
Simon Ings
A Punch in the Doughnut
David J. Schow
Unforgotten
Christopher Fowler
O, Rare and Most Exquisite
Douglas Clegg
Martyr and Pesty
Jonathan Lethem
Foreign Bodies
Michael Marshall Smith
Ships
Michael Swanwick & Jack Dann
The Dreadful Day of Judgement
Ruth Rendell
A Flock of Lawn Flamingos
Pat Murphy
Touch Me Everyplace
Michael Cadnum
The Screaming Man
Richard Christian Matheson
Rare Promise
M. M. O’Driscoll
A Biography of Ellen Datlow
INTRODUCTION
You’re walking down the street and the one who broke your heart walks by. You feel feverish, your heart starts beating faster, and your stomach clenches. You see that person step off the kerb and in your mind’s eye you see a bus barrelling down the street, running down and squishing him (or her) like a bug on the windshield. And you smile.
Or perhaps you lose the promotion you earned at work to some jerk you can’t stand and know only beat you out because she sucked up to the boss or is related to someone higher up. And you have to see this person daily. You feel angry and resentful and imagine poisoning her coffee at the next weekly meeting. Even though the passion, the fury, the disappointment will fade with time, initially you find yourself obsessing about getting back at those who wronged you. But most likely you won’t, at least not in a particularly destructive way – because that’s what keeps us civilised. Francis Bacon acknowledges this by saying ‘Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.’ Civilisation teaches humans not to act on these and the other dark, roiling passions residing within, for if each of us did, society would collapse.
But we can still imagine. Perhaps that’s why revenge, one of the great motivators of life, is as naturally one of the great themes in literature, particularly in dark suspense and horror literature. From William Shakespeare, John Steinbeck and William Faulkner to Edgar Allan Poe, Joyce Carol Oates, Ruth Rendell and Stephen King, revenge – for actual or imagined slights and deeds – has been a compelling motive in storytelling along with vengeance, the active complement – the punishment inflicted on the recipient of the revenge.
When I approached writers, I asked them to employ intriguing motivations for their characters’ furies in addition to unusual methods/actions in which this payback would be dispensed, and I think the nineteen stories in this anthology reflect this dictum better than I had hoped. The motivations range from romantic failures or slights (intended and unintended) and professional envy, to unacknowledged racism, self-hatred and the desire to shake up the status quo. And the methods range from the down-to-earth direct approach of physical violence to the more subtle and occasionally supernatural.
The contributors are a varied lot, but most have one thing in common – they are cross-genre writers; they ignore genre boundaries. And I believe it’s this impulse to write what they want in whatever genre works that makes for a strong brew of powerful and effective stories.
Vengeance doesn’t have to be ugly, but one thing seems crucial – a dimihishment of the other party in some way. Even in humorous stories someone must be defeated, either physically or emotionally. So we have A. R. Morlan’s grisly little opener set against the rock and roll business, David Schow’s dialogue between two ex-friends in Hollywood, Pat Cadigan’s SF story about a woman convinced she’s been robbed at the end of a bad relationship, Michael Cadnum’s first-person turn about a man abducted by aliens, Pat Murphy’s paean to chaos, Joyce Carol Oates’s story of a woman who just wants to be left alone, and Christopher Fowler’s treatment of London as a living entity. Ghosts, a traditional vehicle for vengeance, play a part in at least six of the stories in this anthology.
Whatever you personally may believe about revenge – that it demands an eye for an eye, that it is sweet, that it is a dish best served cold – you will probably find it addressed here.
Perhaps these tales will persuade you that if vengeance could be yours, it might be best just to go on living well.
… WARMER
by
A. R. Morlan
A. R. Morlan lives in Wisconsin. Her short fiction has been published in magazines such as Night Cry, The Twilight Zone, Weird Tales, Worlds of Fantasy and Horror, The Horror Show, Phantasm, and in the anthologies Cold Shocks, Obsessions, Women of the West, The Ultimate Zombie, Love in Vein, Deadly After Dark: The Hot Blood Series, Sinestre, Night Screams and Twists of the Tale: An Anthology of Cat Horror. They have been reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. She has published two novels, The Amulet and Dark Journey, and has recently finished a third.
Morlan is a flexible and talented stylist. Here she takes a poke at the sometimes sleazy world of rock and roll, in a story that, belying its title, gives the reader quite a chill.
Before Edan Westmisley faxed his summons to my agent, my only legitimate (as in you could see my face) claim to semi-demi-fame was the Steppe Syster’s ‘Love Victim’ video where I licked the tattoo off the chest of their lead guitarist, Cody Towers.
Yeah, that was me. Not that anyone makes the connection between the big-hair, tits-swaying-in-a-bikini-top, thong-bottomed retro pre-AIDS bimboid slithering up the paint-drizzled riser towards Cody’s semi-desirable, love-handled bare torso, tongue out and lashing against candy-apple lips, just before he notices me, slings his Stratocaster behind his pimply back and hoists me up by the armpits, so I can lovingly slurp off his licorice-icing tattoo (painted on over his Dermablend-smeared real phoenix-in-flames tattoo by a bandanna-covered bald-pated tattoo artist) in slo-mo close up, and what I am now, thanks to Edan Westmisley and his once-in-a-career offer –
– the offer he didn’t share with my agent, or with anyone employed in his hidden/not hidden studio; the offer which held out the promise of me becoming something far more spectacular and memorable than just a tattoo-devouring bimbo …
‘Thaaat’s riiight, kiddo, Edan Westmisley, Gran’ Poo-bah-supremo at Genius Productions, as in get your mini-skirted bum down to his office, pronto –’
It wasn’t unusual for my agent Gerhard Berbary to speak in italics, but for him to even come close to swearing (he was Canadian, which made ‘bum’ synonymous with ‘ass’ or worse), something much bigger than just another metal video shoot or frontal nude body-doubling part was at stake here, especially as far as Gerhard’s cut was concerned. And at this point in my ‘career’, considering how few videos, walk-ons and tit-’n’-ass insert shots he’d been able to round up for me, I knew that he would’ve sold my corpse for morgue gape shots if it would’ve netted him a commission …
Not that being dead could’ve made me feel any less uneasy than Gerhard’s wake-up call about Westmisley wanting me to come to his studio early that afternoon; while I didn’t consider myself an ‘insider’ when it came to the music scene, I did have subscriptions to Billboard, Variety, Rolling Stone and Spin … and with all my free time, especially after the ‘Love Victim’ shoot, I’d had the opportunity to learn more than I actually cared to about Mr Westmisley, formerly of the sixties Fluxus movement (a well-to-do group of what Gerhard dubbed ‘art-farts’ which included Yoko Ono and her bare-buttocks-in-a-row film, really classy shit like that), and currently sole owner, stockholder, president and producer-in-residence at Genius Productions Ltd, a record company that produced hard-core industrial, techno, alternative and speed metal acts (like Steppe Syster), almost none of which ever charted higher than 150 on the Billboard Album Chart, but which were killers on the college charts – all the more ironic because Westmisley had supposedly (if the unauthorised bios reviewed in Rolling Stone could be believed) been all-but-bodily-thrown out of every university in Europe and the East Coast, for a little more than simply flunking out or missing dorm curfew –
(– as in things even pay-to-say journalists like Kitty Kelly were afraid to reveal after one unauthorised bio writer turned up belly-bloated on the Nantucket shoreline after interviewing some ex-Vassar co-ed in her nursing home bed … the bed she’d been confined to after dating soon-to-be-ex-Harvard alumni Westmisley –
– one of the same universities he’d later endow with trifles like libraries, gymnasiums and radio stations during the early eighties, after he’d finished the last round of chemo-and-radiation for his near-fatal bout with skin cancer.
He’d contracted said skin cancer during a two-year round-the-world junket in his favori
And now Edan Westmisley wanted me to drive to his office, for a reason even my agent didn’t know –
I asked Gerhard twice, ‘You mean to meet with him, like face-to-face?’ and both times, his answer was the same … and as maddeningly vague:
‘You want me to read you his fax? Here it is: “Gerhard, please send your client from the Steppe Syster ‘Love Victim’ shoot to my office for a private meeting, noon today.” Hear that, dearheart? The man said “Please” …’
‘He didn’t mention me by name,’ I’d countered both times, as the phone cord wrapped itself around my wrist like a curly python, but Gerhard was adamant – I was his only client to appear in a Steppe Syster video.
‘But Ger, Westmisley only produces records, as in musicians … his people handle videos, he just oversees what they come up with.’ As I pleaded with him, I squeezed the receiver anxiously, my skin crawling under the remembered pressure of Westmisley’s smoke-glass-shielded eyes.
I suppose people who saw the ‘Love Victim’ video assumed that my tattoo-slurping cameo was morphed, but that wasn’t ‘Edan’s style.’ Or so said Kenny, the director, while everyone waited for Mr Bandanna to finish embellishing Cody’s chest as he stretched out like a fallen Christ on the drum riser, bitching about how much the black paint-thin icing tickled as the glumly sweating tattoo guy spent an hour of studio time painting faux needlework between Cody’s nipples. There was only so much butt-wiggling for Kenny to do in that hour, so eventually he confided, ‘Great Scarface’s into sensation, albeit visually simulated sensations … he can’t feel a damn thing any more.’ Kenny whispered in his irresistible Capote-esque drawl, glancing towards the rear of the studio, past the terminator of on-set lights, between every word. After the third or fourth glance, I looked back towards what he was staring at … Edan Westmisley, or some of him. He was a featureless, dark slice of shadow against the murky studio shadows, with only the plump, convex ovals of his sunglass lenses reflecting the arc-light glare.
‘Looks like roadkill before it’s run over,’ I whispered in Kenny’s hoop-lobed ear; he whispered in my thrice-pierced ear, ‘Oh no, Edan’s not roadkill … he’s an immobile, hulking beast that smashes and twists grillwork, before sending your car into the fucking ditch,’ just as the suspended-in-darkness lenses drifted away to the clup-clup of his retreating lizard-skin boots. Once Kenny seemed sure that he was out of range in the huge studio, he added, ‘I’ve developed “shoulder eyes” while working for him … all Edan has to do is stare at me, and my skin writhes … like getting a sunburn while staying dead-fish-white.’
I thought Kenny was just blissfully melodramatic, but once Bandanna-Guy was finished, and Kenny started flat-clapping his hands, begging for ‘Qui-et,’ as he cued the lights and the assistant director set the electronic clapboard, I heard that steady, rhythmic clup-clup echoing in the far reaches of studio, a staccato wooden-heeled counterpoint to the fuzzed-out tape the band was syncing to … and while I could barely see those disembodied shimmering discs of reflected light hovering behind Kenny’s muscular, T-shirted back, they began to bore down on my exposed skin, the way light rays exert a trace of real weight – an unseen, yet measurable pressure. If Kenny endured ‘shoulder eyes’, I endured ‘body eyes’… and by the time I snake-slithered up that riser, and tiny splinters dug into my exposed midriff, my skin felt as if it were being smothered, each pore screaming for air, and once Cody’s sweating, calloused hands hoisted me up for my tattoo-tonguing close-up – Kenny barked orders at the Steady-cam operator, but his voice seemed filtered, as if unable to penetrate Edan’s suffocating stare – I forgot Kenny’s directions about keeping my eyes open, and began furiously lapping and slurping up bitter black icing, not caring where or how furiously I licked, until Cody jerked back, yelping, ‘Hey! Watch the nipple ring, wouldja?’ after my left incisor snagged the gold ring jutting out from his raisin-like nipple, and Kenny soothed, ‘Go with it, Codeee, make it work for you,’ but all the while I couldn’t shake that hand-firm pressure all over me, as if Westmisley’s eyes were doing a King Kong on my Fay Wray skin, so I wound up licking Cody’s Adam’s apple before Kenny burbled, ‘Cut! Per-fect … it’s a wrap. Hon … Honey, time to get up –’
Only, I didn’t want to get up, not with Edan still there, behind Kenny; I stayed on my knees until Cody hoisted me up by the armpits, roughly, and whispered, ‘Get lost, wouldja?’ then stalked off for his dressing room, whining to Kenny, ‘She almost yanked my ring out, man.’ I still couldn’t open my eyes, though, until Kenny shot back, ‘Just as long as it wasn’t in your dick … not that that’s big enough to pierce,’ and under those playfully drawled words, I heard the ever-more-distant clup-clup of Edan’s boot heels, as he left the studio.
‘Don’t mind that pimpled twit, dear, he’ll never stop you from working,’ Kenny began as I opened my eyes, as if it was Cody I was so obviously scared of; not wanting to spoil Kenny’s fantasy about Edan being hung up on him, I just smiled, nodded, and took the hand-down he offered me, before stepping off that riser and out of the studio, into the fading-but-real touch of sunlight on my oxygen-starved flesh.
‘– listen, kiddo, do I question Edan Westmisley and still expect to make any more deals in this charming burg? If he faxed me a request that I personally swab out his private vomitorium with my tongue, I’d glaaadly do so – am I speaking English to you, or am I jabbering in fucking Greek?’
Privately replying, ‘No, Gerhard, you’d gladly do him if he’d stoop to dropping his pants for a third-rate wanna-be-like you,’ I mumbled, ‘English, Ger,’ before asking (even as my brain protested), ‘When did he want me there?’
‘Noon … do you realise that any other of my clients would already be at Westmisley’s as I speak, doing the knee-dance under his desk in gratitude? And swallowing every damn drop? If he hadn’t of asked for you in particular, I’d have called one of my other clients … what’s the matter, you scared of the stories about him?’
Even though he had no way of seeing me, I shook my head of would-be-video-queen big-hair No; crazy producer stories were as commonplace as urban legends – didn’t Tina Turner once see Phil Spector pick up an apple core coated with cigarette ash out of a tray and eat it? The quirks and foibles of producers were the stuff of Rolling Stone’s ‘Random Notes’ column, weren’t they? But the underground zines, the grungy hand-Xeroxed jobbies sold at the bigger book stores, they had the real, fresh dirt on No-Eyes Westmisley: the over-lord attitude with his engineers; the sudden, blackball firings; the kinky stuff his ex-lovers only hinted at; the way he circumvented customs with whatever fetishes or artifacts he’d glommed on to during that cancer-causing last jaunt of his; and how he’d beaten said cancer by going to Third World doctors who’d try anything, from whatever source, to heal what should never be healed … yet, despite all the weirdness he’d indulged in from the sixties on (long past the time when his fellow Fluxus members went respectable – like when Yoko made huggy-kissy with McCartney at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction), Edan Westmisley was the original Teflon Dude, and never mind Ronbo Reagan.
No union could touch him. No woman – no matter what bed or cell or worse she occupied – could blackmail him. Whether it was out of fear, or because he was so well insulated (old money rich, from a peerage in England), no one knew for sure, save for knowing that Edan Westmisley was about as close to a god as a man could be and still need to shake his dick after pissing (or so Kenny advised me during a chance meeting outside of Spago).
Yet, as powerful as Westmisley was, he’d said ‘Please’ to the cut-rate agent of a would-be actress … someone who couldn’t do a tattoo-licking shot without almost removing a guy’s nipple ring the hard way.
To get a ‘Please’ from Westmisley was far rarer than gobs of manna dripping on the Walk of Fame … a courtesy he wasn’t obliged to give to anyone, for anything. But as Gerhard gave me directions to Westmisley’s office-cum-studio, I wondered just what sort of price-tag – be it actual or something less tangible – was attached to that unexpected show of civility …
