All Lights Will Forever After Be Dim

By Joseph Pastula

An apartment hunt that winds through sinister streets not found on any map. A legendary delicacy in a secluded region that demands more from gourmands than just their appetites. A band's performance that no one present will ever forget, if any of them are left when it's over. An office worker's long walk home shows him a side of the city that sends him running for his life.

These stories by Joseph Pastula take us to the crowded subway platforms and red-light districts of Tokyo, where he has lived and worked since 2003. In the humid days of the interminable rainy season, in the hideous rites at forgotten temples in the hinterland, and in the humdrum lives of bored and desperate salarymen, Pastula locates a unique blend of cosmic horror and urban paranoia. These are the nightmares a great metropolis whispers to itself, the uncanny dread behind the high-tech and prosperous facade.

Heralding the arrival of an exciting new voice in weird horror, these stories will burrow deep into your dreams, and leave you unsettled and uneasy long after you've closed the book …

• Language: English
• Publisher: Orford Parish Books
• Release date: Jul 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386860365

Book preview

FOREWORD: YOU FIND YOURSELF DEVOURED

Have you ever sort-of known someone? I’ve sort-of known Joe Pastula for a long time, the same amount of time, roughly, that I’ve been hanging around with our mutual friend Tom, who is publishing this, Joe’s debut story collection. Joe and I have been at the same parties. Or maybe there was only one party. I saw him with Tom at Borders Books in Manchester a few times. Or maybe it was just the once. I remember him as quiet, soft-spoken, wry and drily witty. I remember that if I was in a loquacious mood, which I am sometimes, I worried that he found me obnoxious. For a brief time I convinced myself he didn’t like me.

For a long time, the thimble-full of what I did know about Joe I knew secondhand. He was an employee at Target. He was fluent in Japanese. He, in fact, decamped to Japan from Manchester, Connecticut, a former farming community turned mill-town east of Hartford, and is now an expatriate in Tokyo, doing translation work as a temp in some high rise, playing video games, going to clubs, dodging the occasional earthquake and tsunami. And writing.

At some point after he moved, I connected with Joe on Livejournal. I don’t use the platform that much these days, but I logged in today and checked. We are still friends there.

I remember the videos he posted: mainly video game reviews and snack-tasting. Fresher in my memory are the pictures, far from mundane: Joe in the streets of Shibuya in stylish clothing with wild hair, or else in elaborate costumery of, it turns out, his own design. Blonde wig and white make-up with strange curlicues painted on his face. Bluish skin with cheeks torn away to reveal striated muscle; sunken eyes and a rows of pointed teeth. Varicolored pigtails, leopard skin face with matching vest, elongated eyes. Blue skin with lizard-like diamond shaped ridges around the eyes, grey wig and white feather boa.

But the best of Joe’s Livejournal page were the bullet-point formatted personal posts about health issues, ennui, pie making, online dating, periods of dire financial straits, work stuff. Potentially mundane subject matter, but in Joe’s hands compelling and fascinating and compulsively readable, these slices of life in a faraway place from an observer with a keen eye and a facility with words. He had a second account that he used to post a few pieces of short fiction. Reader, I sort-of-know Joseph Pastula, but I can brag of having read him for years.

Cut to some years later. Tom has founded Orford Parish books, whose favored métier has been mini-anthologies with curiously specific themes. The first, the American-flag themed Old Gory, contains Joe’s story Orison for the Departed, a story about a man who returns from his home in Paris to a small Connecticut town to deal with the house and the personal effects of an Aunt he’d spent a few summers with in his youth. I read the story with mounting excitement: this was a tense, taut tale of a certain occult significance in the profusion of American Flags in a small New England town. When I finished the story, I clapped the book closed and thought, More people need to know about Joseph Pastula.

The coming years saw two more stories from Joe in Orford Parish books. A Severance of Roots in the wrestling themed Three Moves of Doom and An Office Manager in Orford Mills. Next came a book told mainly in pictures, the first in a promising hint of a series entitled Picture Books for Weird Kids Vol. 1: Little Oren and the Noises. These little tastes of a striking new voice had me craving a collection.

Now we have one.

All Lights Will Forever After Be Dim starts unassumingly, with a first person account of a plainspoken young woman helping her boyfriend in an apartment-seeking foray. The couple exhibit a curious, detached equanimity when shown a series of increasingly strange rentals, even as their shell-shocked realtor ends up fleeing. From there, Pastula ramps up the weirdness, leading the reader on a demented tour through the unseen streets of Japan, down train tracks, up steep streets and curious staircases, through brothels, temples, punk rock clubs, rural food festivals, patriotic New England towns and houses stuffed with wrestling memorabilia and secrets. These are stories of depression and obsession, of things just below the surface of our world, or brazenly sitting right on the surface—on apartment floors, clinging to the building across the way, sitting across from us on a train or on the other side of an office conference table—to frighten and dislocate and disturb.

I’m not sure if comparisons are necessary in forewords in general, but here I feel they may offer a few helpful points of reference: I see similarities to Aickman; a hint of Lovecraft, subverted, naturally; a touch, maybe, of Barker; certainly some Ramsey Campbell.

But let me be clear: Joe’s voice and vision are singular and strong. It is, as of this writing, in mid-2018, probably a cliché to note that readers of weird fiction have no shortage of choices these days, works of high quality across a variety of styles and subgenres. I don’t consider it hyperbole to say that this unique collection assumes a rightful place in the best of what is on offer today. It has elements of classic weird tales, with a skewed and singular point of view, stories of subtle weirdness, and stories where the blood flows like sake.

As for Joseph Pastula himself, I consider myself lucky to sort-of-know him. He is a hell of a writer, and a visual artist of extraordinary skill. He will, I’ve learned, be back in the states soon. Having read this collection of deeply weird stories, I’m looking forward to again being in the company of the strange and excellent mind that concocted them.

I hope I survive the experience intact.

Matthew M. Bartlett, July 13, 2018

All lights will forever after be dim

After this, nothing can be the same.

The sweet smell of the fall breeze will forever after be weak.

The green of the forest will forever after be dull.

The taste of a home cooked meal will forever after be unsavory.

The familiar will forever after give no comfort.

All streets will forever after be unknowable and winding.

The sounds of music will forever after be less inviting.

And all lights will forever after be dim.

The One That I Want

It’s like my boyfriend is a magnet for unusual things. He’s always leading us into strange encounters with strange people. It’s because he wants to be different; even if it’s to his detriment, he needs to stand out by doing something odd. That’s why I like him, I guess.

Most of the time, there’s a level of excitement to this, but at other times I need to act as the voice of reason and reign in his more extravagant impulses. This is the reason I came along with him when he went on an apartment search. Obviously, that’s not the only reason:  I’ll be spending time there, too, after all, but without me, who knows what kind of place he’d end up in.

That decision was almost immediately validated once we arrived at the realtor’s office.

The office itself was pretty nice. It was on the fifth floor of a recently renovated building. It was bright and modern with various desks set up for realtors and customers to look over potential houses using both the computer and large binders filled with sheets containing housing information.

The realtor we spoke with, a younger guy with carefully styled black hair and a tailored suit, began asking us about our apartment needs.

Finding an apartment is like learning a secret code. You need to know the difference between a 1LDK (a one bedroom with a living room and dining kitchen) and a 2K+S (a two bedroom with a kitchen and added storage space).

You also need to answer a barrage of questions about your preferences. What style of rooms do you want (western or Japanese)? Do you want a separate shower and toilet or a combined bathroom? Do you have a piano? Which direction does the room face in relation to the sun? What floor do you want to live on?

And then there are the fees. Do I need to pay a security deposit, or key money, or gift money? How much is the realtor fee? What about property management fees?

The whole ordeal is frustrating and expensive, which made me glad I was only along to help my boyfriend make a decision. That help was needed quickly, though, as my boyfriend immediately began searching for houses that stood out to him. Despite the realtor doing his best to meet the conditions we had discussed, the choices my boyfriend made never seemed to match his expectations.

He’d see a picture of an apartment with a strange layout or a spiral staircase or a one-bedroom apartment with two kitchens and he’d be all over them. Even the realtor seemed exasperated by his choices. I know my boyfriend was enjoying this, like he was purposely trying to provoke a reaction from either the realtor or me. It’s just the way he is.

Eventually, with my intervention, my boyfriend picked what I thought were the least weird or inconvenient places, and we finally settled on an itinerary of five visits to make. It was hard to get him to agree to narrow it down to this many, since he really didn’t want to give up on some of these apartments. Especially the apartment that boasted immediate access to a silkworm sanctuary. Neither of us understood what that was, but it immediately caught his attention.

The three of us got into an elevator and the realtor directed us through a series of narrow yet tidy alleyways to a parking garage where his company car was parked. The car was new, clean, and smelled vaguely of air freshener.

We’ll start with the location farthest away and work our way back, if that’s OK with you, the realtor said.

We agreed and, after about a 30-minute drive with very little traffic, we arrived at the first of the apartments.

It was a smaller building that housed 6 apartments in total; 3 on the first floor and 3 on the second. It looked decent from the outside, but it was incredibly close to the building next to it, leaving only about a meter of space between the door and the structure opposite. There was also, for some reason, a number pipes going in and out of the walls of each apartment.

The realtor opened the door to the apartment, revealing clean white walls and a wooden floor. We removed our shoes near the door and walked in. The kitchen, which was the first room we entered, was small and narrow. There was a space for a refrigerator and small countertop but that was it; standard for apartments in this city, really.

The living room was where things became odd. The back wall of the room was strangely shaped, so that it wasn’t a single flat plane but jagged like the parapet of a tower or the teeth of a jack o’ lantern. In the center of the room was a single, thick copper pipe that ran through the ceiling and floor. On the wall was a large metal hatch that opened to reveal a strange series of buttons, pulleys, and gears.

What is this for? my boyfriend asked, reaching his hand toward the housing for the mechanism.

Well, it’s hard to say, really. I don’t think I’ve ever had a real explanation for this. I think it’s the breakers and gas switches for the apartment, though.

I knew this was incorrect because, like most apartments, those switches were located at the entrance to the building. However, before I could say this, my boyfriend started flipping switches. There was a sudden grinding noise and the gears went into motion. The wall in the living room shifted forward about a meter, while the inset parts pulled backwards, revealing a series of hatches in the floor. A series of crashes and thuds could be heard from all around us, as the movements seemed to have affected all of the other apartments as well.

I could see a familiar look in my boyfriend’s eyes: the one that tells me he is going to do something rash. And just as he started asking about the rent and possible move-in dates, I started talking him out of his enthusiasm.

It’s very nice, but look at the shape of this room, I said. That pipe is going to make it hard for you to fit your furniture in here. Also, it’s a little small for all of the stuff you have. Maybe we should keep this place on the back burner?

Yeah, I guess you’re right. It’s a really interesting place, though, he said. I guess I should look at some other places first.

We were off to the next apartment.

***

The second apartment took longer to reach. It was not far from a large train station but was situated in a location that couldn’t be accessed by cars, and so required a bit of a hike from where we parked. We walked through a maze of narrow back streets, each corner decorated with a small inlet containing a Buddhist sculpture of some type. I’m not really knowledgeable on those kinds of things, but I did notice the realtor seemed to be using them as markers to get to the building.

The apartment building itself was located on a hill so steep there were actually stairs built into the road, hence the inaccessibility to cars. There were two sets of stairs necessary to reach the apartment, but if climbing stairs was the worst part about the place, then it would be fine.

We entered the apartment to see notifications posted near the door by a cleaning company, dated the day before. We took off our shoes and walked through the typically small kitchen. There were seperate rooms for the toilet and bath, which is always nice. I noticed then what I assumed was the oddity of this place, a spiral staircase going up to a second floor. Not a common thing in Japan.

The first floor had a living room area that led out onto a balcony that looked out onto other buildings, but also a carpeting of plants and trees. A thick underbrush had grown in the area between the buildings and a sloping hill dotted with scrubby trees gave the impression that a forgotten section of woods was making a gradual effort to take back the land that had been ceded to the buildings.

We made our way to the second floor and the bedroom. It was slightly smaller than the first floor, with two windows and a small area for storage. No closets in the entire apartment was a little strange, but it could be dealt with. Of the two windows, one slid open and the other