Black Static 82/83

By TTA Press

New modern horror fiction by Simon Avery, Aliya Whiteley, Steve Rasnic Tem, Sarah Lamparelli, Ray Cluley, Rhonda Presley Veit, Julie C. Day, Neil Williamson, Josh Bell, Françoise Harvey, Andrew Hook, Tim Lees. Cover art by Richard Wagner, with story illustrations by Jim Burns, Vincent Sammy, Ben Baldwin, Joachim Luetke, Warwick Fraser-Coombe, Dave Senecal and others. Book reviews by Peter Tennant, film reviews by Gary Couzens, and columns by Lynda E. Rucker, Ralph Robert Moore, and Stephen Volk.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Jan 25, 2024
• ISBN: 9798215235133

TTA Press

TTA Press is the publisher of the magazines Interzone (science fiction/fantasy) and Black Static (horror/dark fantasy), the Crimewave anthology series, TTA Novellas, plus the occasional story collection and novel.

Book preview

BLACK STATIC 82/83

DOUBLE ISSUE

The final Black Static, with thanks to everybody who has supported the magazine, special thanks to those who go all the way back to TTA1 in December 1993, extra special thanks to Peter Tennant, and in memory of all the friends we’ve lost along the way.

See you on the outside.

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© 2023 Black Static and its contributors

PUBLISHER

TTA Press

website: ttapress.com

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EDITOR

Andy Cox

EVENTS

Roy Gray

STORY PROOFREADER

Peter Tennant

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BLACK STATIC 82/83

TTA PRESS

COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2023

PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

CONTENTS

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COVER ART

BEAUTIFUL FRIEND

RICHARD WAGNER

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WHAT DID YOU SAY?

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

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NOVELETTE ILLUSTRATED BY BEN BALDWIN

THE CREASE

SIMON AVERY

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STORY

R IS FOR REMAINS

STEVE RASNIC TEM

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STORY ILLUSTRATED BY WARWICK FRASER-COOMBE

RETENTION

SARAH LAMPARELLI

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PIZZA

INTO THE WOODS

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

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STORY ILLUSTRATED BY JIM BURNS

A WEDDING BY THE SEA

RHONDA PRESSLEY VEIT

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STORY ILLUSTRATED BY VINCENT SAMMY

WHOLE BODIES ARE NEVER LEFT BEHIND

JULIE C. DAY

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STORY ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD WAGNER

THE SALTED BONES

NEIL WILLIAMSON

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FRIENDS & FAMILY ONLY

CASE NOTES

PETER TENNANT

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ISLANDS IN THE STREAM

BLOOD SPECTRUM

GARY COUZENS

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NOVELETTE ILLUSTRATED BY JOACHIM LUETKE

SOMETIMES MY STEPFATHER IS A SEX ZOMBIE

JOSH BELL

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STORY

CUL-DE-SAC

FRANÇOISE HARVEY

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STORY ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD WAGNER

POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS

ALIYA WHITELEY

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ELECTROCUTING AN ELEPHANT

COFFINMAKER’S BLUES

STEPHEN VOLK

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STORY ILLUSTRATED BY DAVE SENECAL

THE ENFILADE

ANDREW HOOK

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STORY

SUMMER OF LOVE

TIM LEES

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STORY

CABIN FEVER

RAY CLULEY

NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND

LYNDA E. RUCKER

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WHAT DID YOU SAY?

I’ve had so many inchoate thoughts while pondering the writing of this column. That it’s meant to be about horror – whatever that is, right? – for a horror magazine has never limited me; horror is the stuff of life, after all. We’re born in blood and we die alone – peacefully, if we’re lucky, but few people are. Horror, like life, is appalling, tragic, and ugly – and like life, it’s also beautiful, transcendent, awe-inspiring.

Things that have been on my mind: death, and life; ageing; illness; art; expression; courage; community; iconoclasts; authoritarianism; how things end. How do you wedge all that into a 1400-word column focused on horror, the final column for a magazine that has meant so much to me (along with its predecessor, The Third Alternative)? The temptation to deliver a eulogy is great but it’s also misguided, I think; let this last issue stand on its merits and those of the many preceding issues, untarnished by any maudlin musings from me.

And yet there’s no way to write this final column without an any last words? quality hanging over it.

Over the past ten years, I’ve enjoyed talking to you all in the dark. I hope you enjoyed it as well, whether you agreed or disagreed with what I wrote here. (I suspect that were I to go back and reread old columns I’d find plenty to disagree with myself!) You can read my last words when you get to the end, but for now I’ll say this: The Third Alternative and Black Static have been everything a magazine should be for writers and readers alike: bold and uncompromising and iconoclastic. Vale.

***

Now. Let’s talk about Art, and the power of ambiguity:

A man with no memory of the murder of his wife that he’s been convicted for vanishes inexplicably from his prison cell, and in his place is a young mechanic who has seemingly no connection with the man or the crime – yet the mechanic becomes obsessed with the doppelganger of the dead wife. A group of friends remain haunted well into middle age by an occult experiment they performed as university students although the precise nature of the ritual or even the haunting is never fully revealed. A shy, polite Polish immigrant in Paris becomes paranoid and convinced that the suicidal young woman who rented his apartment before him is trying to possess him and drive him to share her fate. A writer pens an increasingly unreliable account of her discovery of an old manuscript and growing obsession with a sinister tree on the remote property where she’s gone to work.

What does it all mean?

Those are the mysteries at the core of a film, a book, a film, and a book, all of which I love (Lost Highway, The Course of the Heart, The Tenant and The Red Tree.) And I’ve described them all in ways much more straightforward than how the stories actually unfold, and therein lies one of the many conundrums that these works raise – to recite these bald facts is to miss the point almost entirely. Writing about music is not the only thing that can be likened to dancing about architecture. Perhaps that seems more obvious when it comes to film, which can feed us images much as they come to us in dreams, but even when it comes to writing about writing, words can fail us. Often – not always, but often – fiction is at its finest when it comes to us in multiple oblique ways; it’s not what happened but how the story unfolded, what words the writer chose – and what is left unsaid. Alan Garner is a master at the last, leaving lacunae that speak greater volumes that pages and pages written by lesser talents.

There was once a time when I thought the point of such mysteries as those in the works I mentioned above was to figure them out. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The point isn’t what happened. The point is how it made you feel; whether it entered your dreams; if the moon looked different the next time you saw it; that you suddenly understood a secret language; that the world changed.

Of course you can make art with a modicum of ambiguity. This is why I was careful to say often but not always when it comes to an oblique approach. This is why the plain prose and straightforward storytelling of a Chinua Achebe or George Orwell – that great champion of always choosing the simplest route through a sentence – continues to resonate. But to expect, to demand, an answer to all kinds of stories – especially to the stories that are resolutely withholding that answer – is to miss the point entirely, not just the forest but the trees as well, and the land spreading out beyond.

We equally impoverish ourselves when we demand stories that tell us how to live and how to be. This type of storytelling leaves us not with moral fiction but didacticism; even moral fiction should raise more questions than it answers, must grapple with ambiguity. Anything less leaves us not in the realm of a Flannery O’Connor, a Leo Tolstoy or a Graham Greene but with Pilgrim’s Progress.

It seems important at this juncture to note that perhaps strangely, neither virtue nor self-knowledge seem to have much bearing on what a writer produces on the page – and being read and remembered is no reward for possessing either of these qualities. Fiction sometimes seems to take on the quality of a kind of automatic writing, as though a story were being dictated from some mysterious spiritual force outside the fallible, lumpy, exasperating human scribbling it all down. I attribute this to the fact that there are monsters and angels living inside every single one of us – and every single one of us, more often than we would like, lets the monster win, sometimes even when we think we’re doing the opposite. I even suspect it’s often the monster and not the angel that drives the greatest work.

Here we find ourselves back at ambiguity because it’s not just about what happened but about who we are – all of us rife with contradictions, probably wrong about practically everything, endlessly fucking it up while circling back for yet another go. Producing great art means being unafraid to understand and even empathize with the monster. How would the world look to me if I accepted as true the essential principles under which this person operates? This is an exercise that can be profoundly destabilizing and profoundly enlightening.

Ambiguity is especially suited to the horror genre because in the end, our terrors are pre-verbal: a fear of shadows on the cavern wall, of an unknown something wailing in the night. It’s also effective because there really is no terror like that of not knowing. This is why families whose loved ones go missing beg for some kind of resolution, even when the news is the worst it can possibly be; it’s why, equally, in film, there’s the sense of release when the monster is finally revealed. Ambiguity denies us that release, and makes us collaborators. When we collaborate in the creation of terror, it becomes a part of us. When we inhabit the psyches of people who are different from us, it changes us. And this, after all, is the ultimate horror: the dissolving of boundaries, losing ourselves, letting in the monstrous and finding it is more appallingly familiar than we could have imagined.

Ambiguity meets us in the place where words fail us, which may seem like a strange thing to say coming from a writer, but in the end, the words are only there in the service of something larger: making a world, creating a feeling, invading the subconscious. There is something essentially and delightfully perverse in taking language, that vehicle of logic and coherence, and using it to drive us into irrational places, into shadows, into enigma.

There is no moral of the story. What does it mean? Ask better questions.

THE CREASE

SIMON AVERY

illustrated by Ben Baldwin

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1

Verity’s mother was seated at the piano. She was playing the old songs, the ones that made Verity feel like they were still a family, but they weren’t, not anymore. Verity’s father had left this morning to fly to the other side of the world, as far away as he could possibly be from them, to start a new chapter of his life with a woman called Astrid. She had been his secretary. Verity’s mother had referred to her more than once as a walking fucking cliché. Verity didn’t really know what that meant but the venom her mother mustered when she said it suggested to Verity that she really didn’t like the woman, the situation, or indeed, Verity’s father anymore. He’d packed his suitcase early this morning and, before leaving, sat clutching Verity tightly while the taxi idled in the lane. Verity didn’t really know what to say to him. He was not, he’d insisted more than once over the years, cut out to be a father. He loved his daughter but not enough to remain here with her. He told her she could visit him anytime. He would pay for her to fly out to New Zealand once he was settled. He told her he’d always be her dad, that she could call him at any time, but then the taxi driver had sounded his horn and he’d risen, suddenly stiff with purpose. Verity looked past him, all the way down the hall, past the upright piano, where her mother stood in the kitchen doorway, her bare feet on the flagstones, unwilling to concede to tears while he was still here. But then her father was gone without a backward glance, out past the garden gate and down the narrow lane to where the taxi waited.

Verity’s mother came to stand beside her daughter, ran her fingers through her thick red hair and finally gave in to tears as the sound of the taxi diminished to nothing.

After that Verity’s mother retreated to the piano and played songs that were familiar to her: ‘Annie’s Song’, ‘Piano Man’, ‘The Year of the Cat’, ‘Wednesday Morning, 3 a.m’… Her voice would carry the length of the hall, all the way out into the garden, as it did now. A voice like a crystal stream, singing songs constructed from the broken fragments of the morning. There was one dead key on the piano that you’d hear on occasion, a flat empty note that would jar Verity momentarily, but then the song would continue and she’d forget about it until the next time it happened.

Verity had retreated out of the house finally, into the garden, where the heat of a summer’s day was gathering. Her teacher had told the class that this year, 1976, was thought to be the hottest summer for more than 350 years. One of the kids’ dads had turned up at the school gates with a T-shirt that read: Save Water. Bath With A Friend. He’d been told off and informed not to wear it again. Verity didn’t really understand why. She lingered in the shade of the old house, running her fingers over the ancient warm stone. She watched her mother for a moment, hoping that she might lift her head and look down the length of the passageway and smile at her, but she didn’t. Verity felt untethered, as if adrift in space. She didn’t know how she felt about her father leaving. It didn’t sit inside her head properly. She couldn’t imagine the house without him in it, despite the fact that these last few weeks it had been difficult to ignore the arguments and the distance her mother and father had put between each other in order to simply coexist. Her father had slept in the spare room and her mother had tried to go on as normal, except she drank more wine than usual and was argumentative and unyielding. The piano was her refuge, the familiarity of these songs her only escape.

Verity ventured out of the shade and down through the orchard. Her mother would pick apples and pears and figs, together with a bounty of vegetables, the surplus of which would be sold at the W0men’s Institute Market or distributed amongst friends and neighbours along the lane. Despite the neglect of the past few weeks, the flower beds were scented and shimmering, vibrating with colour. Fruit rotted in the tall grass. At the edge of their property was a narrow stream and a beech wood, the branches of the trees stooping across the water. Beyond the speckled shade of the wood the bare and rounded summits of the South Downs lifted and rolled. The day was bright and languid and still. The lanes and hedgerows and tangled banks seemed to quiver with heat. Soon Verity couldn’t hear her mother’s piano anymore.

The Crease was close.

Verity had been told to stay away from the Crease.

But why, Mummy?

Because it’ll eat you up!

Verity had laughed. "Don’t be silly, Mummy. Why can’t I go there?"

It’s dangerous, sweetheart.

But it’s just a ditch going around the hill. A long hole in the ground.

"Yes, and big bloody ditches are dangerous. You could fall in and hurt yourself."

It’s not even that deep. I reckon I could climb out if I fell in.

Oh, is that what you reckon?

I heard Alison say people get lost in there and they never come out.

Alison is a wise woman.

"Mummy, she’s six."

There were all kinds of stories. Stories to frighten children against their base instincts. She’d heard her mother call it superstitious nonsense when she thought she was out of earshot of her daughter. But still something persisted, a deep-rooted instinct borne from her own experiences of venturing out down to the Crease herself as a little girl.

They said time was thin in the Crease. Time could bend and break and wash you away, like the sea.

Verity went anyway.

But something was different today. She wondered if her father’s sudden desertion was colouring the rest of the world with its shades of grey. Even out here where the day was still and the sun at its zenith, she felt like she was standing in shadow. Perhaps it wasn’t even that. Verity realised that she could feel something beneath her bare feet – a low bass hum inside the earth, like when her mother played the low notes on the piano and she felt it vibrating inside her chest. There was an almost imperceptible shift in the atmosphere as she approached the Crease. Verity was aware that everything here was amplified somehow, every sound, every sensation was gradually intensifying. She could feel the blades of grass between her toes as she crested the lip of the Crease. She heard the low industrious hum of bees in the lavender. She could feel the heat of the sun, unbridled on her pale skin.

Above her was a circle of beech trees, planted at the summit of the hilltop. Verity’s teacher had told the class once that it had been the site of Bronze and Iron Age fortifications, and even a Roman temple. There was a spiral of terraces built into the hill side, growing deeper and deeper until the pit of the Crease that circled the base, like an empty moat.

There was a dead lamb, halfway down the wall of the Crease. There was blood matted in its fur. It was brown now. There were flies in the wound, and buzzing around the lamb’s empty eyes.

A strange queasy feeling descended on Verity. She felt bound to scramble down into the Crease to get nearer the lamb. What if it was only injured and needed her help? The grass was brittle beneath her, the earth no more than dust lifting under the soles of her feet. She slipped and came to rest with her hand on the lamb. Its blood was sticky on her palm. She couldn’t feel a rise and fall to its body. This close she could see and smell that it had been dead for some time. The air seemed to grow thin; it began to whine in Verity’s ears, like a scream in reverse. The birds above her fell silent. The breeze dried up.

The world stilled and then changed around her.

The road that cut through the whaleback downs around her diminished somehow. The car that had up until a moment ago been threading its way across the hills blinked out of view and became a cart. An old man was leading a shire horse across what was now a bridleway towards it.

The world was still, pregnant with something Verity couldn’t begin to grasp. She scrambled away from the lamb, her hand still sticky with its blood and followed the Crease south. She felt a chill run across her skin and realised that the heat had receded, and with it the summer itself. There were leaves underfoot suddenly, crisp like paper. The trees hung above her, shorn and frigid shadows of their former selves. Grey clouds massed in the sky above the downs and the sun went away. It was autumn in the blink of an eye.

Verity’s heart quickened and she hurried along the Crease, thinking how tall its walls were after all. Her instinct was to return to her mother, but, even in the midst of this confusion, her home did not feel much like home at all. It hadn’t for so long, longer than Verity had realised until now. It wasn’t her mother’s fault, but at the moment, she didn’t feel like anyone’s mother, just a stranger in a house Verity no longer recognised as her own. So, she hurried on, hoping that the Crease would relinquish her further along the track.

The village was no more than a couple of minutes’ walk away. When the church spire was in sight the Crease released Verity without her noticing. She was cold and afraid but a sense of distraction followed her out of the Crease; she couldn’t focus on any one thing; she had to tug the breath from out of her knotted chest. As the village came into view she heard the warnings again, the rumours and the superstition, trickling through the generations: Time is thin in the Crease. Time can bend and break and wash you away, like the sea.

The village was changed. The electricity pylons that towered in the fields, like giants marching through the land on fizzing wires, were gone, leaving the sky strangely bereft. Leaves lined the lonely lane that led to the church’s door. Empty tree branches gathered and knitted over Verity’s head. Her skin prickled with cold. She bunched her toes against the ground, wiped her sticky hands against her top again and again, but the blood would not shift.

There was no one around. Perhaps, Verity thought, they were all in church. But it wasn’t Sunday morning, was it? And the bells were not ringing. The houses along the lane looked lonely and abandoned. The road that snaked through the village was no more than a rutted track. She realised then that there were no cars, no lines on the road, no aerials on the roofs, no pub on the corner, no telegraph poles. The houses too seemed changed to Verity. They were rough, timber-framed, like something from out of the past, something from her school’s history books. The windows were small and dirty. She stopped outside one dwelling and peered inside but the kitchen inside was dusty and bare save for a rutted table in the centre of a flagstone floor. There were cobwebs across everything, like it had been long forgotten.

At the end of the lane, she saw that the church had no bell tower. There were no parishioners here assembled for worship, there was no one anywhere. The silence of the village, the deep and profound sense of abandonment began to settle then sink into her bones, bringing her to her knees finally. She was suddenly very afraid of being lost here forever.

Time can bend and break and wash you away, like the sea.

She heard the piano then, and for a moment she believed it was her mother and her heart swelled with hope, but then how could it be her, this far away from home? Verity got to her feet and retraced her steps through the abandoned village, going from house to house but the sound of the piano never got any closer or further away. It was a simple melody and soon it was lodged in her head. It calmed her somehow, in a way that her mother’s playing could calm her. But she hadn’t heard this song before. Her mother had never played it to her. In her mind she saw her mother in the hallway, seated at the piano, her pale fingers moving across the keys, her long red hair lit up in the wash of this morning’s sunshine, and Verity suddenly felt a lurch in her chest, an absolute need to be in her arms and away from the harm of time. Fear unseated Verity finally and she ran all the way back down the lane with its canopy of branches, back up to where she’d left the Crease. She ran alongside it now, and then above it. When she saw the body of the lamb, she realised that she was close to home.

She hadn’t noticed the sweat on her brow, the welcoming warmth on her skin. The sun had returned to the sky, the clouds chased away, like a dream. The bees had returned to the pollen and the leaves to the trees. The solid stone outline of her home was bordered by unbroken blue skies by the time Verity was racing through the garden. The sun was flashing on the windows. She ran across the threshold and down the flagstone hall, weeping, and into her mother’s arms, unable to say what was wrong, not now, not ever.

The melody had followed her home. Later that day, unable to get it from her head, Verity sat down at the old upright piano with its one dead key and attempted to pick out the fugitive melody. She’d resisted her mother’s attempts at tutoring in the past, but some hitherto untapped ability discovered the notes for her and soon she was playing the tune. She realised as she played it, over and over, that there was still lamb’s blood beneath her nails.

2

Verity met Matthew in a pub just around the corner from her flat in Camberwell. She’d moved up to London at the tail-end of the eighties to study graphic design at Camberwell College of Arts, and shared a flat with three other girls. It had crooked door frames and wonky stairs that tested them all after a late night at the Joiners Arms. Her room already overflowed with paperback books and vinyl records she’d amassed from second-hand shops across the city. There were crucifixes on the wall, scarves draped over antique lamps, a huge steamer trunk to house her clothes at the foot of the bed, a vast old writing bureau that she and the other girls had carried back from a junk store three miles away. It sat in the corner of the room, rutted and chipped and smelling faintly of old cigar smoke, covered in art supplies and paintings and course notes. Verity had pinned a sea of postcards above it from the capital’s art galleries, old photographs from family albums, love letters and William Morris textiles.

Matthew had ventured across the pub halfway through one evening at the Joiners Arms. He’d spent several hours stealing glances at, in his words, the girl with the flame-red hair who looked like she’d just stepped out of a Rossetti painting. As Verity would later discover, this wasn’t something he was naturally inclined to do; he was reticent in almost every aspect of his life, but he was luckier than some because he was, quite clearly, a beautiful boy with hair that tumbled just so across