The Endless Fall and Other Weird Fictions Read online

  “With brutal elegance and chilling subtlety, Thomas pulls his readers into his dark visions immediately from every opening line.”

  – Paul Di Filippo, in ASIMOV’S

  “Jeffrey Thomas’ imagination is as twisted as it is relentless.”

  – F. Paul Wilson

  “In time he will, in this reviewer’s opinion, be listed alongside King, Barker, Koontz, and McCammon.”

  – Brian Keene

  by

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Jar of Mist

  The Dogs

  Ghosts in Amber

  The Prosthesis

  The Dark Cell

  Snake Wine

  The Spectators

  Bad Reception

  Sunset in Megalopolis

  Portents of Past Futures

  Those Above

  The Individual in Question

  The Red Machine

  The Endless Fall

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  In 2003, before the age of Facebook, the happening place for all things Cthulhu Mythos was in the newsgroup alt.horror.cthulhu (it still exists if you ever want to deep dive into its archives). I distinctly recall learning about Punktown from the local maven, James Ambuehl. I tracked down the very first collection, Punktown, from Ministry of Whimsy Press (used copies of this gem are still floating around on the internet). This was my introduction to the wildly creative imagination of Jeffrey Thomas. At first the reader is swept up in the myriad alien races that populate the city of Paxton on the planet Oasis, the clash of culture, foods, languages, all spiced with desperation and violence. The more you settle in for a long stay, the more you browse the anthologies and novels, you realize that what makes the city memorable are the characters that live there. These are real people, mostly on the fringes, barely clinging to existence. They struggle, strive, suffer, live and die. Often the atmosphere is charged with melancholy, as we recognize kindred spirits not quite making it. You can start with Punktown, but as you begin a deeper exploration of Jeffrey’s oeuvre, you discover that this is his most consistent theme, real people caught in desperate, bizarre or terrifying circumstances. The Endless Fall could represent the descent to oblivion for the protagonists. It could also indicate the turning of the year, as a summer of promise darkens to the coldness and shadows. I was very much struck that even if these characters had been left alone and did not encounter the fantastic, their lives would probably just have become more isolated with the turning of the years.

  The Endless Fall collects most of Jeffrey’s recent fiction, not any Punktown stories and barely anything that could be construed as Cthulhu Mythos. I sat down one morning to read one or two, and it was evening when I looked up, the book finished and I was wondering why there wasn’t more. I was completely absorbed and I hope you will have the same experience. I only want to make a few specific comments and then you can lose yourself in his prose.

  “Jar of Mist” is the best Sesqua Valley story I’ve ever read that was not penned by Wilum Pugmire himself. The imagery is haunting, and, of all the contents, the story is the most gentle.

  “Ghosts in Amber” is a brilliant novella that shows the full scope of Mr. Thomas’ talents. At first it is all so mundane and reasonable but soon everything spins out of control.

  Jeffrey has family links to Viet Nam and has traveled there quite frequently. This comes out in some of his fiction, most notably here in “Snake Wine,” where the attention to detail fleshes out the vividness of a wonderfully bizarre tale.

  While “Sunset in Megalopolis” is a cautionary tale for a superhero, it also added the right amount of levity to balance out the proceedings.

  I struggled to choose a favorite here, arguing with myself about “Bad Reception,” where I found the main character so sympathetic, and “Portents of Past Futures,” which worked so well on so many levels, and then I read “The Endless Fall,” which gives the collection its name. Jeffrey Thomas cut his teeth on science fiction. Here the Thomas everyman is trapped on a distant world, trying to make sense of what’s happening. The prose represents the best of Mr. Thomas, showing us how far he has come as a writer since 2000 when the world first met Punktown.

  It should be obvious I admire Jeffrey Thomas’ writing. I love getting lost in the world he creates, and can empathize with the difficulties his characters face, because they are just so real. I envy those of you making your first acquaintance with this author. Those of you who already know Jeffrey skipped this introduction and are two stories into The Endless Fall already!

  Matthew Carpenter

  November, 2016

  JAR OF MIST

  He was the one who had to identify his daughter’s body in the morgue. He was all she had. She had been all he had. His wife, her mother, had hung herself eleven years ago when Aliza had been ten. Oskar had had to identify her body, too.

  The sheet covered her to the waist, so he couldn’t see the wounds she had opened high in each inner thigh to sever the femoral arteries. Oskar didn’t ask to see them, didn’t know if they would be stitched up now or still yawning wide open from the elastic pull of her skin, anomalous deep canyons of raw red tissue in a landscape of smooth whiteness. He doubted seeing those new wounds would shock him any more than the old wounds he could plainly see on both her bared forearms. He drew in his breath sharply when he saw them, and that was when the tears poised at his eyes fell, and when he knew he had neglected his daughter for too long.

  Both of Aliza’s slim forearms were a mass of uncountable, overlapping raised lines, scar tissue so thick it was like a weave of armor…not to prevent blood from getting out, of course, but perhaps to prevent other things from getting in.

  “It’s her,” Oskar wept then, cupping her cold cheek in his palm. He said it as though that hadn’t already been established. He said it as though he had recognized her not by her unmarred youthful face, but by these scars he’d never seen until now. What made him weep so openly was that he did recognize the scars, had known they were there all along, though not in the physical sense.

  The morgue attendant nodded, and drew the sheet up over her face again, like the edge of an advancing tide that would suck his daughter away to unknown and infinite depths.

  Aliza had been living in the town of North Bend, which in itself had mystified Oskar. Previously she had seemed so in love with Seattle, its music scene, its artistic vibe. It was Oskar’s understanding that she had relocated there to live with a young man she’d met at an art show in Seattle. Oskar couldn’t even remember the boy’s name now, though Aliza had mentioned him to her father in their infrequent, brief, and uncomfortable phone conversations.

  Oskar had never visited her in North Bend, though she’d lived there eighteen months. Too absorbed in his work, and in his own relationship: a sordid affair with a much younger married coworker that had recently ended messily. Today was his first visit to Aliza’s apartment. The landlord had let him in.

  It was a small white stucco building on a street corner; just a few rooms above an antiques and curios shop. The floor creaked under his feet in the dusty silence. Oskar drew curtains aside to let light in, and looked out at the forested mountains, the wafting clouds crawling down their bristling flanks. The Snoqualmie Valley. The name meant “Moon, the Transformer,” in reference to Native American folklore and the imagined origin of the Snoqualmie people. Oskar didn’t know the full story and didn’t care to. It was bound to be as inane and deluded as any other human myth of gods, creation and afterlife.

  He steeled himself, then turned to a closer examination of the place where his daughter had spent the end point
of her life. This murky box held the diminishing tail of a comet, itself gone from view, not to come around again in his lifetime or any other.

  He didn’t venture into the bathroom, though he had been assured the tub had been scoured by a cleanup crew.

  Moving like a detective from kitchen, to living room, to bedroom, Oskar took in countless mundane bits of evidence of his daughter’s existence here, but he came across nothing to suggest the presence of her artist boyfriend. No one’s clothes or belongings beyond her own. So he had left her, then? At what point? Might that account for her desperate act? It made sense to Oskar, and as guilty as the feeling was, it came as a kind of relief that it was another man abandoning Aliza – not him, her father – who had inspired her self destruction.

  He was familiar with this brand of guilty rationalization. It was akin to when he had told himself that chronic depression had been to blame for his wife’s suicide. He might even, if he gave in to the impulse now, blame his daughter’s suicide on genetics.

  It was Aliza, ten, who had discovered her mother’s dangling body. Oskar had stayed late at work, but he saw his wife later in the morgue. In red nail polish, on her naked chest she had painted ALL IS NOTHING…though she had presumably been looking in the mirror when she marked herself, because the words were written backwards.

  Is existential despair, Oskar wondered, genetic?

  He couldn’t realistically take all Aliza’s possessions back with him to his room at the McGrath Hotel…her clothes, her books and CDs, her makeup, her pots and pans. What was he to do with these things: bring them home to Seattle, to fill the empty place in his life she herself should have occupied? No, he had to distill her entire existence down to a mere few items that he hoped defined her best – if not to herself, at least to him.

  He uncovered several scrapbooks and a shoebox stuffed with loose photos, though he clapped the cover back on it as soon as he determined its contents. He wasn’t ready to look through them yet; tears threatened to come again just at the thought of viewing them. He set aside her sketch pads and a few paintings, finished and not. Also, a worn stuffed animal his wife had given Aliza: a Doberman Pinscher that resembled their dog Luna, herself long dead.

  In the bedroom, however, atop her bureau he encountered a number of items that perplexed him. The way they were placed – with candles and incense holders between them – or perhaps it was something in their esoteric appearance, made the bureau top seem like an altar. One item was a set of pan pipes made from ivory, or was it lengths of animal bone? Another was a pinecone, curiously blood red, all the more curious for not appearing to have been painted. And then there was the stone statuette, a foot in height and stained green as if it had been stolen from a garden, or from deep woods, that portrayed a troll or gnome or other such creature, squatting on its bestial haunches with a wide impish grin on its toad-like face.

  Oskar didn’t add any of these odd decorations to his pile of memento mori. He couldn’t associate them with his daughter, and wondered if they had been left behind by her departed lover. If so, that might explain why Aliza had showcased them in the manner of a shrine.

  Having remained here as long as he could bear, at least for today, he gathered up his tokens in her own gym bag, which he’d come across in a closet. Then he left the apartment, leaving the door unlocked, as the landlord had said she would be by later to lock up herself.

  Not knowing if he would be returning here tomorrow or if this were a kind of goodbye, Oskar descended the building’s stairs to a little front vestibule. Here he encountered the door to the antiques and curios shop that occupied the ground floor.

  He hesitated outside the door, with its frosted glass panel. He saw a shadowy form pass across its pebbly surface. On a whim, but without enthusiasm – more like a sleepwalker – he reached for the door and pushed it open. Bells jangled as he stepped inside.

  The figure he had seen passing as a watery silhouette turned toward the sound and met his eyes, and Oskar felt his lungs seize up like fists clutching his last intake of air.

  It was a man, though so transformed as to almost represent some other kind of being. It was quickly apparent, though, that this man of indeterminate age had suffered terrible burning, with little reconstructive surgery – though Oskar couldn’t say what he had looked like before whatever procedures he might have undergone. The man looked to be wearing a stocking mask with lidless holes cut out for his watery, red-rimmed eyes, and another hole for his bulbous immobile lips. He had mere slits for a nose.

  When the man spoke it was with a bit of difficulty, owing to the tightness of his thick scar tissue, but Oskar thought there was a smile in his voice, if not on his face. “Welcome,” the man said. “Can I help you?”

  “I was...just...” Oskar cleared his voice. “My daughter lived upstairs, here.” He nodded toward the ceiling.

  “Oh...yes, yes...Aliza.” The shop’s proprietor took a step forward, and now his muddied voice conveyed sympathy. “Poor girl. I’m so horribly sorry for your loss, sir.”

  “Thank you. I was just, ah, wondering how well you knew her. And the boy who lived with her.”

  “Oh...him.” Now Oskar couldn’t tell at all what the proprietor’s tone meant to convey. “Julian.”

  “Yes, that’s his name. I’d forgotten. She told me, but I never met him. I was wondering if you knew whether he’d left her very recently.”

  “Mm, it was recently, I’d say so.” The burned man turned to look off into space as if trying to pierce the past. “I can’t recall precisely the last time I saw him, but I do know he returned to Sesqua Valley.”

  Oskar was confused. Had he heard the man correctly? “You mean Snoqualmie Valley?”

  The proprietor met Oskar’s gaze again. “No, that’s here. Sesqua Valley is...another place.” Since they still stood near to the open door, the burned man swept his arm toward the interior of his shop. “Please, let me get you a cup of coffee. I was just about to pour one for myself. I’ll tell you anything that you might find helpful.”

  “Thank you,” Oskar said sincerely, and followed the man toward the back of the shop, which was a dusty labyrinth of dubious treasures. Furniture piled with knickknacks, framed paintings and photographs filling every inch of wall space. Porcelain dolls and mounted deer antlers, Bakelite radios and books with frayed bindings. At last they reached a glass counter sheltering smaller, more easily stolen items such as old watches, coins, straight razors, hairbrushes, and so on in a museum-like exhibition. Atop this counter beside a modern cash register was a coffee maker, with a half-full pot. When asked, Oskar told the man he took his black.

  The burned man made his own with heaps of sugar and far too much cream, and sucked it through a straw. Even so, his awkward lips became slick with his sweet concoction.

  “What can you tell me about Julian?” Oskar asked.

  “Not much, except I knew he was from Sesqua. He didn’t even have to tell me. Not with those eyes of his.” The man sounded positively wistful. “Beautiful silver eyes.”

  Silver? Oskar was beginning to feel a bit uncomfortable with his host, beyond his shocking appearance. “Do you know why they broke up, if not when?”

  “Well, he did leave her, but it probably wasn’t a breakup in the sense you’re thinking. You see, as Julian told me, Sesquans do something similar to the Amish...when young Amish go out to experience the wider world for a time, before returning to their community. The Amish call it Rumspringa. They get all that yearning and youthful restlessness out of their systems before settling back in and accepting their own nature. I’m sure it was simply Julian’s time to return.”

  Oskar found this explanation a bit hard to process. So had Julian belonged to some cult? Was that what this man was suggesting? “Are you sure you didn’t hear them arguing up there? They didn’t have a big blow-up, or anything?”

  “Oh no, they were no bother. The only sound I ever heard from up there was Julian playing his pan flute, and I didn’t mind that at all.
Such a lovely, melancholy sound it was.”

  “I saw his pan flute upstairs. I think he left some other things, too.”

  “He may have given Aliza the flute to remember him by, but if you saw other pieces from Sesqua Valley upstairs, I think you must be talking about the pieces Aliza bought from me herself, after Julian was already gone. Things she felt would keep her connected to him, I suspect.”

  “A red pinecone? A funny statue of a little...satyr or something?”

  “Yes, yes, I sold those to Aliza. I’m very fortunate to have amassed a number of items from Sesqua Valley over the years, and Julian gave some of them to me himself when he needed money. Though sometimes he’d just trade them for some old books he wanted. Here...I’ll show you my Sesqua collection.”

  Oskar meant to decline, as this was becoming a digression, but the scarred man was already moving toward another nearby glass showcase, and a moment later Oskar drifted after him. When Oskar had joined him, the man gestured proudly at the display.

  “It’s like evidence of Atlantis. Proof of Leng, and Kadath. Look at it!”

  Oskar barely glanced at the items within. “So where is this Sequa Valley?”

  “Huh,” said the scarred man, with a snort meant perhaps to be a laugh. “Where indeed. You remind me of your daughter.”

  “How’s that?”

  “She too was curious about Sesqua, even beyond her love for Julian. She badly wanted to go there...all the more so, of course, after he disappeared...but I’m not sure she ever set foot there. I’d love to visit there one day, myself, but...”

  “But?” Oskar was starting to grow irritated with the man’s eccentric nature. Had the fire that destroyed his face boiled his brain as well?

  “As fascinated as I am by such obscure places, and the things that live in them, I confess to being rather apprehensive about venturing beyond a certain point.” He motioned toward his mask-like visage. “No doubt you’re wondering how this occurred.”