Haunted Worlds Read online

  Haunted Worlds

  riaH gnoL

  H aunted W orlds

  Jeffrey Thomas

  Introduction by Ian Rogers

  Hippocampus Press

  ————————

  New York

  Copyright © 2017 by Hippocampus Press

  Works by Jeffrey Thomas © 2017 by Jeffrey Thomas.

  Introduction by Ian Rogers © 2017 by Ian Rogers.

  Published by Hippocampus Press

  P.O. Box 641, New York, NY 10156.

  http://www.hippocampuspress.com

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any

  means without the written permission of the publisher.

  Cover painting “Nightmare Sentinels–the Nightmare Grove”

  © 2017 by Kim Bo Yung. Courtesy of the Stephen Romano Gallery.

  Frontispiece “riaH gnoL” © 2017 by Kim Bo Yung. Cover design

  by Kevin I. Slaughter.

  Hippocampus Press logo designed by Anastasia Damianakos.

  First Electronic Edition

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  ISBN 978-1-61498-208-1

  Contents

  Introduction

  Part One: Our World

  Carrion

  Spider Gates

  Feeding Oblivion

  Mr. Faun

  The Left-Hand Pool

  riaH gnoL

  The Toll

  Saigon Dep Lam

  The Green Hands

  Part Two: Other Worlds

  The Green Hands

  Good Will toward Men

  The Temple of Ugghiutu

  Drawing No. 8

  Redemption Express

  Story Notes

  Carrion

  Spider Gates

  Feeding Oblivion

  Mr. Faun

  The Left-Hand Pool

  riaH gnoL

  The Toll

  Saigon Dep Lam

  The Green Hands (Parts 1 and 2)

  Good Will toward Men

  The Temple of Ugghiutu

  Zul and the Black Temple

  Drawing No. 8

  Redemption Express

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Jeffrey Thomas haunts me.

  Most of the time I’m okay with that. Sometimes I even think it’s a good thing. I’ve been a fan of Thomas’s work for years, from his standalone works of horror to the stories set in his sprawling monstropolis of Punktown. As a reader, I am an ardent fan. As a writer, I am in a perpetual state of awe.

  The title of this new collection is appropriate for several reasons. Thomas has established himself as a creator of worlds, a dark architect not just of cities but of lives. Whether it’s Punktown, Hades, or Boneland, his worlds come alive because of the people he creates to live in them. Punktown is revisited here, but Thomas has upped his already considerable game by exploring inner landscapes of the human soul that are no less dark and unsettling.

  We live in a world of doubles: our waking lives and our sleeping lives; our work lives and our home lives; day and night; love and hate. No matter how bad things may get, we’re told that it’s always darkest before the dawn, that tomorrow is another day. But what if the day never comes? What if our lives are left to the darkness of a never-ending night? Or what if the day comes but nothing changes, nothing is better? Can the sun shine in the sky and still leave us drowning in darkness?

  We may not want to consider such things, but Jeffrey Thomas does. I don’t know if that makes him foolish or brave. I suspect it’s a bit of both. As an author you could say it’s an occupational hazard. I’m torn between wanting to pull him back from the brink of this dark gulf and letting him go on so he can report back on what he finds. If he comes back.

  The theme of duality in Haunted Worlds is present at the outset, in the table of contents, which groups the stories into two sections, “Our World” and “Other Worlds.” But this is more than a categorization. In fact, the worlds presented in these stories have a great deal in common. In some cases, so much so that it suggests there is really only one world, a haunted landscape with no delineated borders. Such things may not seem possible, or are they? It would seem so to the protagonist of “Spider Gates,” who says: “a thing can exist in two places, and in two forms, at one time.”

  One would do well to remember that upon entering the bifurcated realm of Thomas’s imagination. We are not readers; we are travelers, pioneers. Moving through lands of dark and light, love and hate, looking for the path, like the road between the two bodies of water in “The Left-Hand Pool”—one teeming with life, the other a stagnant quagmire of decay.

  People can be haunted, too. Not just by ghosts, but by feelings, memories, regrets. The things they lack or, like the protagonist in “Carrion,” the things they’ve lost. These stories are populated by broken people, broken hearts, and broken lives. Thomas doesn’t truck in anything so banal as good or evil. Despite his penchant for opposing forces, there is no black and white to be found here. There is only gray—the color of ash, the color of the past.

  Thomas has learned, as we all must learn, that life is a series of shades. Through his work we come to understand that there are those who welcome the dark, who welcome the end with open arms. The thought of pain may be feared, but its arrival can be seen as a gift, a mercy. Pain is simply another type of haunting. For the scarred protagonist in “Saigon Dep Lam” pain is loneliness, the thought of never making a connection with a man she sees wandering the streets. She follows him, she haunts him, and becomes the ghost.

  One of Thomas’s strengths as a writer (and he has many) is his ability to create realistic characters who exist whole and breathing in fantastical settings. This is perhaps best displayed in the dual-novella “The Green Hands,” beating at the center of the book like a black, double-chambered heart. In addition to providing the connective tissue between Thomas’s haunted worlds—a feat of literary bilocation that caused me more than one sleepless night—the story also presents an idea that is horrifying both in its implications and its believability: that there is no escape from the numinous, that every world is haunted in some way, that we carry our ghosts with us wherever we go.

  Perhaps that is the most frightening aspects of Thomas’s work: the realization that there is no protection from the forces that haunt our lives, no succor even in death. The truth that comes with such knowledge is that these haunted worlds are not only connected, but may in fact be shades of a single world—a frail, broken reality where everything is gray.

  But there is hope in Thomas’s Haunted Worlds . It is perhaps fitting that the story that closes the collection is titled “Redemption Express.” I do not think this was an accident. For all the darkness that fills these stories, there is a promise of light at the end of the tunnel. But is it a promise or is it merely something else that will elude us in the end?

  As I said: Jeffrey Thomas haunts me.

  He will do the same to you.

  You can thank me for it later.

  —Ian Rogers

  Peterborough, Ontario

  Part One: Our World

  Carrion

  Lambert had never in his fifty-five years lived in a rural area, but he did now. Back roads carved through woods that just seemed too dense for central Massachusetts, unaccountably curvy as if they twisted up mountainsides. At night on some of these wooded stretches there was no light from houses—indeed, there were no houses—and there were no streetlights, so that sometimes he couldn’t see anything beyond the reach of his headlights, feebly pushing back all that blackness like the beams of a bathysphere. Just unbroken double yellow lines unspooling before him, seemingly unto infinity. As a boy, riding in his fath
er’s car at night, he would imagine the broken white line of the road was a stream of energy beams being fired ahead of their fighter spacecraft. Back then he could trick his eyes to perceive the white segments as flying away from the moving car, rather than toward it. It had only been an illusion, though. In truth, the white dashes didn’t carry a rider forward with them, but trailed away behind to vanish.

  Lambert felt somewhat exiled out here. His wife, an attractive Filipina fifteen years younger than himself, had met a man four years younger than herself, and now Lambert’s house was gone along with his marriage. He had stayed on in the city, paying too much for too little in his one-bedroom flat. Last month he’d finally roused himself to move from the city where he’d spent nearly his entire life, having found that apartments tended to be less expensive out here, in a region he had always derided as “the sticks.” One of the young men who had moved him into his new place—a second-floor apartment in a large house divided into four units—had confided, “You’ll like it in this town . . . there aren’t any blacks or Asians.” Lambert had wanted to say there would have been one Asian, if she hadn’t divorced him.

  Today on his drive to work he noticed a dead animal on the right side of the road, where it had been thrown by impact or crawled to die. It was curled away from him, head and limbs and tail—if it had one—tucked out of sight from his viewpoint, leaving just a rounded shape. Almost ball-like. It was maybe the size of a cat, but too plump, and he could tell it was not a cat or small dog by its coloration. It didn’t have fur that was black, or white, or brown, but actually a kind of equal mix of all those colors; the coloration of a wild thing that needed to blend into shadows and leaf litter. This grainy color gave the fur the coarse appearance of an animal that had not been bred for petting.

  But if Lambert had been pushed to describe the carcass as being of a single color, he would have settled on gray.

  *

  Lambert didn’t know her name, but from her dark complexion and general aspect he assumed she was Indian, though she had no detectable accent that he had discerned when he saw her in the cafeteria at first break or at lunch, exchanging small talk with coworkers or the cashier. He also presumed, since she worked somewhere upstairs, that she was part of the company’s extensive human resources branch, while he himself worked on the ground floor helping manage the data storage company’s inventory, which for him meant mostly disk drives. (Sometimes he would bring to the shipping dock, on a hand truck, a pallet of boxed disk drives exceeding the value of the house he had lost in his divorce.) He often thought of these human resources people upstairs as Eloi and the downstairs people like himself as Morlocks—or, as his friends put it, inhuman resources.

  Sometimes when he and this woman made eye contact in the cafeteria—and he often, probably too often, stared at her from his table until she did make eye contact—she would smile at him, her white teeth and dark eyes shining as brightly as when she smiled at her sharply dressed coworkers. Then other times she’d avert her eyes quickly, looking uncomfortable or even, he worried, perturbed. What was he to make of this?

  She was very short, and very cute, with shoulder-length black hair. Late twenties, early thirties? While there was a good number of attractive female employees of all ages and ethnicities working in the company, he found himself watching for the Indian woman in particular at each break. His taste had always run toward more, dare he say, exotic manifestations of beauty, as his ex-wife might demonstrate. His two immediate coworkers—seated with him at their usual table like judges at a beauty contest—avidly followed the strutting appearance of taller, blonder women. Lambert would whisper appreciatively along with his friends, never telling them that it was only the unnamed Indian woman whose appearance he was truly enthusiastic about.

  God, he would wonder, why did he still feel this way at his age? Was it that he still possessed a healthy sexual appetite, or was it simply (simply? ) that he was lonely? Either way, he was fifty-five; he would have thought that he’d be past such concerns. He supposed it had a lot to do with having something, anything to look forward to each day, to help break up his stultifying work routine. After all, he’d had better jobs—more rewarding financially, and in every other way. But those jobs had gone the way of, well, everything else that he’d lost.

  He kept an eye out for her today as always, while he ate his breakfast of cereal, which he brought in with him to save money and to help regulate his weight. (In the past, every morning he’d had the cook behind the counter make him an omelet or egg sandwich.) He was always careful not to drink the remaining milk from his bowl while she was around, lest she think he was crude. Ah . . . and here she came now.

  But as fate would have it, in fate’s typically sadistic way, he felt an irritating tickle in his left eye just as he saw her enter the cafeteria. It had to be a detached or bent eyelash. He rubbed at his eye, but that only seemed to make the itchiness worse. The tickle turned into something more insistent, and though he was afraid to scratch his cornea, he kept rubbing at it. Finally he pinched his eyelid and pulled it away from his eye, hoping to dislodge the lash or bit of grit that was harassing him.

  When his eye finally felt clear again, she had already passed his table. Leaning around one of his friends, he saw her standing at the counter, ordering something from the cook. She always requested eggs, or pancakes, or something else substantial. Her body was compact, meaty, humanly imperfect, and he liked that. It made her—seemingly, at least—more accessible.

  Today, when she crossed the room again to carry her tray of food back to her own work area—rather than dine with the Morlocks—it was the quickly averted gaze and the perhaps disapproving little frown.

  Lambert’s eye felt burned and sore from all his rubbing. He felt burned and sore inside as well.

  *

  When next he spotted the dead animal, it looked the same: a plump ball of coarse black/white/brown grayness, almost as serene as if it were merely taking a nap. Peacefully hibernating in plain view, as it were. It was September, after all, the air becoming cool, and maybe the ants and flies were feeling too sluggish to set to work on it. But in any case, there it was in the same spot, like a stone set down as a mile marker, a kind of landmark, placed precisely at the border where the road met the edge of the woods. Straddling worlds.

  *

  Because she was curvy, Lambert didn’t notice right away that the perhaps-Indian woman’s belly was becoming rounder, until one day it was simply unmistakable—as if she had leapt into her second trimester overnight. He’d considered that she might be married, and yet it was a disappointment to realize her condition. Seeing her pregnant was like seeing her strut into the cafeteria wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed “I HAVE FUCKED.” It made him irrationally jealous, irrationally hurt, as if scorned. As if he had been cheated on, cuckolded all over again.

  Previously, Lambert had mostly just fantasized about kissing her, holding hands with her while they walked through a mall or museum, basking in her avowals of love. Now, as if for the first time, he imagined what she looked like when she was making love . . . the expression on her face. Did she smile dreamily, as some women did? Or contort her face as if physically pained, as some women did? Did she cry out? Did she stifle all sound?

  Her husband must be so much younger than him . . . like the man his wife had left him for. Recently, noticing in his new bathroom mirror with its row of harsh light bulbs the way his lips had become thinner in recent years and the flesh around his chin had begun to sag, he had started growing a mustache and goatee so as to mask these changes. But the coarse facial hair grew in stark white, whereas the hair on his head was a salt-and-pepper mix of black and white. Though if he had to use only one word to describe the color of his hair, it would be gray.

  Because it only made him look older, he had shaved off his white mustache and goatee.

  He watched the woman cross the cafeteria with her tray of food. He could smell it as she passed, taunting him as he hunched over his cardb
oard cereal. Eating for two; now he understood. She didn’t smile at him, nor did she glance at him and look away. She didn’t acknowledge him at all. And yet, despite that, and despite her pregnant state, he was attracted to her all the more.

  She was bearing new life. What could be more vital, more sensual, than that?

  *

  When he’d first moved in here, the glossy wood floors had been gritty with dirt, as if the college student who’d been the previous occupant had never once swept them. Lambert had spent hours sweeping, vacuuming, then washing the golden boards prior to the move, and in the course of that he’d found dead bugs on the floor: large moths, and even an alarmingly sizable spider stuck to the wood as if it had been there for a very long time, preserved in amber. Had the boy propped the door open while he’d moved his furniture out? It seemed too much even for that scenario.

  Furthermore, even after his eight-hour cleaning session and the move, one night in his first week of occupancy Lambert had found a dead cricket in his bed. He had never heard a single chirp in his apartment. Had he rolled over and crushed the poor thing before it could sing a note? And then, several days later, he found a second cricket under his quilt. But when he picked this one up, it seemed lighter, a mere hollow husk. Did crickets molt their old skins? Was this a couple that had mated and then died together, under his unconscious godlike body, or two halves of the same creature? A self and a shadow self?

  *

  The roadkill was finally starting to look a bit less plump, more deflated, like a pregnancy in reverse. What processes, what creatures, were at work inside it? he wondered. Only microscopic entities, or a stubborn autumnal swarm of bugs? Idle thoughts to pass the time as he drove toward his latest bout of monotony.

  His ear itched deep inside, the way it had tickled years ago when his wife would tease him by inserting one of the long black hairs growing from her head into his ear when he was almost asleep. He reached up to dig a finger in his ear, and he thought he felt a whispery touch brush across his knuckle when he did so . . . but the sensation withdrew, and he returned his hand to the wheel.