Weird Tales #342 is available now! Our special feature on legendary horror author John Shirley includes a brand new novella, "Buried in the Sky," that smashes the Lovecraft Mythos into the lives of 21st-century Los Angles teenagers. Free online content this issue includes our interview with Shirley, book reviews by Scott Connors, and a new short story by Carrie Vaughn, author of the "Kitty the Werewolf" novels.
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Copyright (c) 2006 / May not be reproduced without permission

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It’s hard to think of an author who has broken out of more jails than John Shirley — the jails, that is, of genre. He’s busted out of horror, science fiction, suspense, fantasy ... you name it. No literary walls can confine his writing; the only classification applicable is sui generis.

Shirley’s life, which has included a night or two in real jail cells, is as unique as his work. No matter what legends you may come across, the truth — good or bad — is usually even more bizarre. He is a natural-born eccentric, brilliantly autodidactic, and a passionate seeker of the spiritual as well as human and political justice. His writing is informed by experience: a personal knowledge of extreme people, mental, and emotional states; insight and an empathetic connection to both the completely alien and the deeply human; damnation and redemption. And there is a small but essential part of John Shirley that, even now, remains delightfully unpredictable and uncivilized — you are never quite sure just what he will do next.

His first professional short-story sales came in the early seventies while he was fronting a variety of punk rock bands, including Sado-Nation, in Portland, Oregon. First novels were Transmaniacon (1979) and Dracula In Love (1979) — which Shirley wrote much of while still in his teens. His City Come A-Walkin’ (1980) is acknowledged as the first cyberpunk novel, and a stint living in France provided the European background crucial to another seminal cyberpunk epic, his A Song Called Youth trilogy.

Back in the States and living in Los Angeles in the late ’80s, Shirley began working as a screenwriter — and also as a songwriter for the legendary band Blue Öyster Cult (a relationship that continues to this day). He wrote the early drafts of the script for the gothic comic-book movie The Crow, released in 1994; the same year saw the release of the Sylvester Stallone/Sharon Stone thriller The Specialist, based on series of books Shirley wrote under the pseudonym John Cutter.

He began working and recording with his post-punk band, the Panther Moderns, in 1995, and a year later published the science fiction novel Silicon Embrace. In 1997 he moved to the San Francisco Bay area, where he still lives. In 1998, “Cram” won an IHG award as best short story; he repeated the next year with the collection Black Butterflies: A Flock on the Darkside.

Recent novels have included Demons (2000), The View From Hell (2001), Her Hunger (2001), And the Angel with Television Eyes (2001), Spider Moon (2002), and Crawlers (2003). His first nonfiction book, Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas, was published in 2004. Shirley’s spectacularly original novel The Other End will be out this fall, and his short-story collection Living Shadows is forthcoming in spring 2007.

Weird Tales recently had the pleasure of listening into a wide-ranging conversation between Shirley and his literary agent, Paula Guran.

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WEIRD TALES: You occasionally reference H.P. Lovecraft in your work (as in “Buried in the Sky,” p. 58), but unlike many writers who deal with the weird — Ramsey Campbell, for one, comes immediately to mind — you never went through “the school of Lovecraft.” Do you see yourself as influenced by HPL?

JOHN SHIRLEY: I went through the “Junior High School of Lovecraft,” because that’s when I was first reading him big time. I read all I could find and I sent away to Arkham House for The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (a work I still admire) and even Fungi From Yuggoth, a collection of his highly uneven but charmingly outré poetry. I remember not getting my books from Arkham fast enough and after six weeks or so sending them a postcard demanding them. Then I got wind of some of HPL’s personal prejudices and this put me off him for twenty-five years or so. (I’m told a biography of Lovecraft reveals that in the latter part of his life he emerged from the dim caverns of prejudice and became rather progressive.)

I recently re-read a number of his works and I can see that he was a master storyteller, mordantly imaginative. I think a lot of his writing effects were borrowed from certain works by Poe, and someday I’m going to write an essay showing which of Poe’s works specifically helped form Lovecraft’s distinctive voice.

Lovecraftian imagery crops up, flailing its rubbery tentacles, in my novel Wetbones and perhaps a bit in A Splendid Chaos (which is now out in a new edition from Babbage Books). Cellars (also recently re-published) includes a touch of Lovecraft.

WT: But with Wetbones, you combined a grisly serial killer with the tentacles. Even when you use supernatural elements your weird seems more reflective of “the times in which we live” or “the individual going over edge” ... the psychological and the personal. So where, would you say, does your sense of the weird come?

JS: I wrote a song for the Blue Öyster Cult called “The Real World” (it’s on the Heaven Forbid album), which describes weird events and then says “the real world is weird enough for me.” I regard “normal” life itself as a bizarre phenomenon. I have always felt somewhat disassociated from the deep sense of identification with the process of living life as a human being on this backwater planet. I have easily fallen into what Dali called “the paranoid critical method,” which, simplified, means looking at things around you as if you’d never seen them before. This is a world of rampant parasitism in the animal world; of media becoming the dominant shared reality in the human world, resulting in modern mankind living in a vast, dreamlike, interlinked marketing organism. If I evoke the bizarre, it’s only poetry about life as I see it.

Then again, in my new story, “Buried in the Sky” [in the current issue, #342, of Weird Tales] we see the ordinary modern world, a big high-rise yet, revealed as becoming more and more alien, a piece at a time, so that the nightmarish otherworldly aspects integrate until we accept them as part of the “ordinary” world — and then all is literally inverted; and the stygian metaphysical substructure, hidden in the darkness of the collective unconscious, is exposed as the true reality ... well.

WT: You mentioned Poe and you’ve been called “the postmodern Poe.” Do you think that’s apt?

JS: I read a lot of Poe as a youth and read a biography of him recently. He was a talented, gifted bumbler — I’ve got the bumbler part down, anyway. But I do think that I am capable of creating state-of-mind as literary atmosphere with a high degree of control; and my use of words, in a modern dialect, is not dissimilar. I am drawn to the dark romanticism of the nineteenth century, too, and it crops up in my work.

WT: Poe, of course, wasn’t a “genre writer.” We typified your authorial life as being “jailed” by genre in the introduction. Do you feel this is true?

JS: I feel it is mostly what has happened. No use whining about it now. When I was young it seemed to me there was a revolution in science fiction and horror and fantasy, as represented, for example, by the “new wave” writers and the Dangerous Visions books. There was some misplaced optimism that suggested that science fiction and fantasy could be absorbed into the mainstream, or at least into literary respectability — partly because of crossovers like Kurt Vonnegut and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Ursula Le Guin.

And it seemed to me that these genres were places where one could make a statement, where the metaphors for allegory were very rich and also the cyberpunk thing was emerging — the sensibility that fused science fiction with William Burroughsian/Pynchonesque perceptions. There were great talents like Ballard and Ellison to be inspired by, too. So I was seduced by all this and threw myself into the sf pulp vat, headlong. I wasn’t much suited for it, or it for me.

My rock’n’roll-infused early cyberpunk novel City Come A-Walkin’ was a freakish Frankenstein monster of a book. Eclipse was too leftist for most of sf and too sf for the left. Plus I was not mature enough as a writer to really break through — I was too hasty, too impulsive, too improvisational in the early days.

I began to feel that I’d made the wrong choice in breaking into writing through genre. But I have a love for the genres too — Jack Vance, Bruce Sterling, Zelazny, Lovecraft, imaginative people with great literary voices — and so my jailbreaking was always from the cellblock, but never quite entirely out from the prison walls.

It’s an agreeable prison, however. We basically run it. The warden is usually drunk. I will say, though, that after I became a teenager I read at least as much outside the genre as within it — I read avant-garde writers, I read nineteenth-century imagist poets, I read early twentieth-century novelists of all stripes ... and this informs my writing in whatever genre or non-genre I take it into.

Also many of my stories are not tales of the fantastic, they are based on my knowledge of the dark side of the “real” world, stories like “Cram” and “Nineteen Seconds,” “Jodie and Annie on TV,” “Barbara,” “What Would You Do for Love?” and so many other short works. You see, right there I’m resisting pigeonholing again.

WT: But without genre, would you have become a writer?

JS: It did give me an easier place to break into. But I think I would, in time, have started writing for “little literary” magazines, I would have taken the Charles Bukowski route (in terms of publishing) perhaps. As for why I started writing, it was because that’s what there was for me — it was the only thing I was good at. Also I looked around at the world and found I had a great deal to say about it and couldn’t rest till I’d said it. It may be significant that I first published in underground political publications.

WT: In truth, you’re a “literary” writer rather than a genre writer, but you were writing “transgressive” fiction before it was lit-chic. You’ve always pushed the edge, even when you were considered a “science fiction writer” ...

JS: William Burroughs was writing “transgressive” fiction in the 1950s and he mixed science-fiction imagery with drug-induced delirium and paranoiac insight, although he was probably indifferent to science fiction per se. I was trying to write within the sf genre — but writing to subvert it. My dark stories have little to do with the “genre” of horror — they attempt to do what horror is supposed to do but seldom does: subvert.

WT: What does William Gibson mean when he calls you an “outsider artist”?

JS: You’d have to ask him. But I suppose it’s a term for artists who stand outside the mainstream to comment on it — they use imagery that will seem very “outside” (which is even an admiring pop cultural term, in music and poetry, for “odd” or “weird” imagery). Being outside means you can see things objectively and you have a wide variety of imagery to draw from-and you can have a feeling of freshness that, you hope, is exhilarating.

WT: You were, shall we say, not like other sci-fi guys. Sterling says he, Gibson, Rucker, et al., were, as Sterling has out it, really pretty normal in a rumpled, but button-down way, while you were “a total bottle-of-dirt screaming dog-collar yahoo.”

JS: I pushed out the envelope, wherever I was. Sometimes it was meaningful; sometimes it was not much better than self-indulgence, a consequence of my boredom with the droning nerdiness of, for example, parties at sf cons. I grew out of much of it, but I’m sure I’m marked by it. I’m somewhat eccentric. I still perform musically at times and somewhat wildly. [Note: Hear for yourself.] Though not as much as when I was lead singer of punk bands — tearing up Christmas trees from the corners of the stage and humping them across the room as I sang, jumping onto people’s tables, smashing beer bottles in the process, getting into fights onstage with other bands... ah, those were the days!

WT: Perhaps, on that nostalgic note, it would be best to go back to literature . . . Genre at least allowed you to publish things like the metaphysical Demons and, now, The Other End.

JS: People like Atwood and Vonnegut and Aldous Huxley — a writer I very much admire, especially his Time Must Have A Stop — and George Orwell and Philip Wylie and C.S. Lewis and J.G. Ballard, later on, did it; so could I. Demons isn’t a scary novel about demons though it is technically about an invasion of demons that transfigures the world — it’s really a novel about how people are demonically selfish, and whatever way it was marketed, it was intended to speak to everyone. I think of The Other End as a crossover novel, a kind of allegory about social values and consciousness, in the tradition of Huxley or Wylie.

WT: But it takes on the “fundamentalist” view of the Apocalypse. So, are you just being outrageous with The Other End? Just needling Biblical literalists?

JS: The Other End is a kind of chance for psychological refreshment, a way to take a deep, long breath, and look at the world freshly. It’s an “alternative Judgment Day” novel, needed because Biblical literalists were staking out great sections of the consensus mind with their twisted mis-interpretations of Biblical texts, their foolish literalism. I’m inspired by spirituality and even by some doctrinaire Christians, like C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton, but I’m strongly against any kind of scriptural literalism, in any religious context. The Other End’s Judgment Day does not involve any conventional notion of God.

Recently I heard [religion writer] Karen Armstrong say that most people get their religious ideas at the same time as they learn about Santa Claus — they grow out of believing in Santa Claus but retain childish ideas of God. I provide an alternative phenomenology, an alternative metaphysics in The Other End, and also I provide the joy of seeing real justice overtake the world at last. This is no horror novel, though there are dark, horrific elements in some of it — this is a novel about “the wrong things being made right” as the line was in The Crow, but on a global scale, and not with violence — I don’t want to give away how it’s done. It’s different. There is an apocalyptic factor — “apocalypse” originally meant a great “disclosure” — a revealing. That is, a shocking new way of seeing ... I believe that this book will lift people’s hearts. Especially those who are sick of the right wing enforcing its neurotic ideas of ultimate values, imposing its vision of the future of the world ...

WT: Isn’t this a little risky? I don’t think Pat Robertson declares “fatwas,” but some of these people are pretty powerful and they are absolutely certain that they alone possess the truth.

JS: They are actually in the minority. They’re a vocal minority who seized power through dirty tricks. Most people are more rational. I’m counting on the rational majority.

WT: You’ve said you are incapable of writing without social commentary. You’ve also said you are basically an entertainer. Can the two co-exist?

JS: I’m not incapable of writing without social commentary — I do it sometimes — think I said that it emerges from much of my writing because it’s natural to me, and I let it emerge because it’s called for, and because one can write entertainingly and have something to say. Were not Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World entertaining? It’s possible to make a statement without being too heavy-handed and irritating about it; one can fuse it so much with story you almost don’t notice it while you’re taking the story in, but the message gets across somehow. I enjoy entertaining; I get pleasure from it; I never stray from it knowingly.

WT: I understand Demons may become a movie?

JS: Demons has been optioned by the Weinstein brothers (formerly heads of Miramax), for their new company, The Weinstein Company. An enthusiastic, talented young director was attached last I looked and they paid well for the option so I think they’re “serious.”

WT: Infrapress has re-published two of your early horror novels — In Darkness Waiting last year and, recently, Cellars. In Darkness Waiting has been optioned, too.

JS: In Darkness Waiting is at Gold Circle (My Big Fat Greek Wedding and White Noise) and there is a script that seems pretty strong . . . we’ll see. There is now interest in my novel Cellars and my film agent is asking to see The Other End. Also my script for Edgar Allan Poe’s Ligeia (set in modern times) is close to being financed. It’s produced by Jeff Most who did The Crow. But nothing is ever certain with films until they are showing in your hometown multiplex — and even then you can’t be sure.

WT: Babbage Books released new editions of your cyberpunk Eclipse trilogy and a few years ago and, earlier this year, A Splendid Chaos. The Eclipse books are gritty, realistic future scenario sf, but Chaos is ... uh ... not. It’s not fantasy, but it is certainly fantastic ...

JS: A Splendid Chaos is an interplanetary fantasy; it was an influence on various people — China Miéville gave it a nice quote recently [“... a revel of delirious, intoxicating, popular surrealism”], he’d read it early on — and I’ve re-edited this new edition, if I may say so myself, to something closer to perfection. It evokes crystalline-sharp tableaus of some of the most surreal scenes ever appearing in a science-fiction context. It was an attempt to do the impossible, the contradictory: to write logical surrealism. I wanted the reader to see moving paintings in their minds, to see the strangest movie they’d ever seen, in their minds’ eyes, while reading the book. I think it is one of the best, most original things I’ve written ...

WT: But there’s a fantasy project you’ve been rumored to be thinking about that doesn’t sound like “John Shirley” at all.

JS: That would be Northmen, probably. It’s set in a parallel universe, an Earth that is familiar and unfamiliar, and follows the story of a young “Viking.” (“Viking” is, of course, not the correct term, but that conveys the idea here.) Since it is set in an alternative world, the “Viking culture” is similar but not exactly the same. The young man is adopted by a “higher” or more decadent culture in the south, and tries to stop a war between these two civilizations — I deliberately set out to have a Robert E. Howard-type character “invade” the world of high fantasy. It’s a deliberate clash — and merging — of two kinds of fantasy ... and it’s something I always wanted to do. I can see the scenes playing in my mind.

WT: You have had a parallel career to writing: music. We’ve touched on it a bit. Are you still doing music? Still doing lyrics for BÖC?

JS: Music’s probably part of my writing, too. William Gibson said he always thought of my writing that he could “hear the guitars” in my writing. I think it’s because I listen to music while writing — I try to evoke that energy in the prose. I was listening to Wolfmother while writing “Buried in the Sky” for example.

I try to give up writing songs and can’t ever quite manage to. Blue Öyster Cult has a sheaf of lyrics by me and if they have a new album, which is unknown at this point (they need to be produced by someone like James Hetfield, the lead guitar/singer of Metallica, someone who will acknowledge how much they influenced him), they will probably use some by me. I do have plans to record new material and am thinking of putting together a band to be called The Screamin’ Geezers. The demographic is there! The older rockers will take back the stages . . . with their “axes” in hand!

WT: Somehow, that seems like the right note to end upon.

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Paula Guran is the editor of fantasy imprint Juno Books. She reviews regularly for Publishers Weekly, is review editor for Fantasy Magazine, and is a columnist for Cemetery Dance. In an earlier life she produced weekly email newsletter DarkEcho and edited Horror Garage, winning several IHG and Stoker Awards. She's a publisher (Infrapress), teaches, and is author John Shirley's literary agent.
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Freaky old books are reborn and strange new ones claw their way out of the darkness, as columnist Scott Connors reviews recent releases and reissues from Leonard Cline, G.G. Pendarves, Eric Frank Russell, George Zebrowski, Thomas Ligotti and more.

THE DARK CHAMBER by Leonard Cline
(Cold Spring Press, $6.99)

Leonard Cline’s 1927 novel The Dark Chamber is one of the titles described by H.P. Lovecraft in his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” that actually reads better than Lovecraft’s description. Cline was a talented and critically acclaimed novelist whose career was tragically cut short as the result of a prison sentence for manslaughter. He is an excellent example of how mainstream writers prior to the 1920s could utilize themes and subject matter that would be thrust into a literary ghetto in a few years with the rise of critics such as Irving Babbitt and Edmund Wilson. Like Jane Eyre, The Dark Chamber is partially a delicious parody of Gothic mannerisms and memes: the isolated and lonely Old Dark House, the Byronic villain, the huge menacing dog, “experiments of a semi-scientific nature,” etc. Even the names of the characters assault the reader with their blatant symbolism: the dog is named “Tod,” which we are reminded means “death” in German, while the seldom-seen Master of the House is one “Richard Pride.”

It would be too simple to dismiss this as kitsch were it not for two things. The first is the seminal importance of the story to modern horror fiction. As Douglas A. Anderson points out in his informative introduction, Lovecraft read the book and passed it along to several of his associates, including Donald Wandrei, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, and Henry S. Whitehead. All of these wrote stories dealing with ancestral memory that owe their existence in large part to Cline, but Cline’s treatment of the theme, besides being the first, is also the most powerful. Cline used the Gothic trappings as a cultural shorthand that allowed him to communicate ideas that were cutting-edge during the 1920s.

The other redeeming factor is the sheer pleasure of Cline’s style. In an essay appended to this edition, Cline noted that “there is a music in words no less sensible than the music in an orchestra after the baton rises,” and if Cline is inclined to Stürm und Drang, so what? Language such as “On the bows of trees strained taunt the night fiddled with a giant bow,” or “the doomed year dress herself in October and stood for a little thoughtful in loveliness,” to give just two examples plucked at random, are like a stage magician, distracting us with their beauty while communicating meaning unnoticed by the audience.

THING OF DARKNESS by G. G. Pendarves
DARKER TIDES by Eric Frank Russell
(Midnight House, $45 each)

Midnight House has issued two collections of stories from Weird Tales’s early days that are of more than a little interest.

G. G. Pendarves was one of the many second-string writers who provided the bulk of stories in an issue after the Lovecrafts, Seabury Quinns, and Edmond Hamiltons finished their contributions; Thing of Darkness is the first of two collections gathering her contributions to this magazine. A native of Cornwall, she wrote in a direct, energetic manner that manages to create a spooky atmosphere despite a certain crudity of technique.

Miss Pendarves also had a keen interest in occultism, which lends her work a certain aura of authenticity at the expense of awe. Lovecraft once made the assertion that it was easier for an atheist or agnostic writer to concoct a weird tale than it would be for a devoted believer; and regardless of its applicability to the genre as a whole, in this instance HPL was right on the money. Pendarves was on such familiar terms with her material that much of the sense of wonder was diminished. In addition, she wrote of a very human evil driven by a desire for power and a willingness to storm the gates of heaven to gain it, but her own belief in the triumph of good makes many of these villains mere stick figures who collaborate in their own destruction. This is nowhere better illustrated than in “The Grave at Goonhilly.” A sensitive young lad who belongs to the local golf club becomes obsessed with the notion that the fifth hole contains something that is trying to possess him. He tells a friend who has a profound knowledge of the occult, and his friend discovers that the fifth-hole mound is the burial spot of a 16th-century alchemist and sadist, who was searching for a body through which he could return to our town. Reminiscent of both H. R. Wakefield’s “Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster” and Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, its pulpish origins are nowhere more apparent than in the climax, where the villain is vanquished despite his full knowledge of the hero’s true identity. The fact that there is a hero is itself a shame, since, as HPL wrote several times, the true hero of a weird tale is the phenomenon described. In Pendarves’s favor are her ability to capture the nuances of Cornish village life; and if her characters are drawn with a broad brush, at least she uses a full palette.

While Miss Pendarves is largely remembered for her association with this magazine, it is often forgotten that not only was Eric Frank Russell (1905–1978) a mainstay of Weird Tales in the late 1940s, but that one of our distinguished competitors, Unknown Worlds, was started in 1939 for the purpose of providing a home for his Fortean novel Sinister Barrier. Back when I was a teenager, eagerly purchasing back issues from mail-order dealers, I turned to Russell’s contributions with a gusto ordinarily reserved for tales by Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, and Fritz Leiber; and as with their tales, I was not often disappointed. Russell’s prose displays a rare sense of irony and wit that Clark Ashton Smith undoubtedly appreciated, and does the reader the compliment of presenting the story in an indirect fashion so that he has an investment in the tale. His stories are more science fantasy than horror, since they often deal with the manifestation of a superior science that is mistaken for magic, as in the wonderful tale “The Ponderer,” one of the joys of a misspent youth that has not diminished with the years.
“The Sin of Hyacinth Peuch” is proof that humor and horror can work effectively together as his ironic depictions of a series of hideous murders bring first a smile to the reader’s lips before it is replaced by a grimace. “Displaced Person” is a more conventional allegory on whether our national ideals are as firmly established as we might think. But even if this book consisted of just “Rhythm of the Rats” it would be worth every cent. This updated märschen has retained all of its power from the first time I read it in this magazine, graced by one of Matt Fox’s grotesque covers that managed to capture the malignant idiocy of the tale’s villain. If Thing of Darkness is best read in multiple sittings, Darker Tides can be safely devoured in one sitting; in fact, one might be compelled into doing just that.

THE MOTION DEMON by Stefan Grabinski
(Ash-Tree Press, $47.50)

In a previous column I quoted Jean Cocteau to the effect that the English-speaking world had a gift for the tale of the weird and macabre. The Polish writer Stefan Grabinski (1887– 1936) is eloquent proof that this gift is not uniquely Anglo-Saxon. His champion and translator Miroslaw Lipinski has followed up the earlier The Dark Domain with this first of a series that will reprint all of Grabinski’s collections as well as a number of uncollected tales. Grabinski writes in a deceptively simple style that takes the unusual occurrences he describes as matter-of-fact, but this very nonchalance serves to make the overall impression quite memorable. The Motion Demon collects his stories about trains, a symbol of man’s technological “progress” and the change that it causes in human life and society. “Engineer Driver Grot” is the tale of an isolated loner whose life revolves around his job as a locomotive engineer, and who becomes more and more obsessed with speed. The story works both as a commentary upon the irrelevance of mankind to the universe at large, or as a description of developing obsessive-compulsive disorder. “The Wandering Train” reveals that man’s obsession with schedules and routine ultimately counts for nothing.

“The Sloven” is an effective variation upon the banshee theme, where a disheveled and idiotic specter appears whenever chaos is about to erupt into the well-ordered existence of the rail system. “The Perpetual Passenger” contrasts the ideas of motion/change with order/stagnation, creating a character for whom a settled existence is not an option. The title story depict man as being at the mercy of chaotic impulses, equating as it does the train’s conquest with space with man’s conquest of others in war, making the railway an instrument of chaos. One looks forward to seeing more of this writer’s work, as well as other European writers in the genre such as Thomas Owen and Jean Ray.

GASPARD DE LA NUIT by Aloysius Bertrand
(Black Coat Press, $20.95)

Another writer whose work, like that of Grabinski, will be new to most readers is the French Romantic poet in prose Aloysuis (or Louis) Bertrand, whose masterpiece Gaspard de la Nuit inspired generations of French decadents, from Victor Hugo on through Baudelaire and Verlaine. Bertrand was also a significant influence on the one of the few Americans to embrace the prose poem form, Clark Ashton Smith, both directly through Stuart Merrill’s translations and indirectly through the example of Baudelaire. Now Donald Sidney-Fryer has provided a scintillating and accessible translation of this monument to French Romanticism that puts on displays its affinities for the fantastic, the grotesque, and the medieval.

Bertrand was in many ways the prototype of the starving artist. He died in obscurity only to have his work posthumously championed by friends. However, the reader will find no sense of self-pity or sentimentality in his writings, but rather a robust gusto for life and living seasoned with a taste for the macabre and the impious. The work of art closest to it in spirit that comes to mind is Carl Orff’s secular cantata Carmina Burana, crossed perhaps with the Berlioz of the “March to the Gallows” sequence of Symphonie fantastique.

Like Smith, Bertrand draws mental images of extraordinary vividness with his words and delights in doing so: “But me, the iron rod of the executioner, at the first blow, had broken like a glass.” Graced with an introduction by T.E.D. Klein and a cover by Gahan Wilson, as well as Sidney-Fryer’s own exhaustive and illuminating introduction, Gaspard de la Nuit is available directly from the translator (signed upon request) at 6505 Firebrand Street, Los Angeles, Ca 90045 (add four dollars for postage and handling).

SONGS AND SONNETS ATLANTEAN: THE THIRD SERIES by Donald Sidney-Fryer
(Phospor Lantern Press, $20.95)

Sidney-Fryer’s poetry collection Songs and Sonnets Atlantean was the last book published by Arkham House during the lifetime of founder August Derleth. He has now followed that with a third series collecting much of his recent work, some of which has appeared in these pages. A linear descendent of Edmund Spenser by way of the California Romantics (a group that included Clark Ashton Smith, George Sterling and Nora May French), Sidney-Fryer’s work emphasizes clarity, accessibility, and simplicity in form — and magic, music, and continuity in content. Included is a dramatic-poem, “The Fugitives,” inspired by an uncompleted play of the same name that provided two of the poems in Smith’s 1925 collection Sandalwood; although I hasten to add that the author does not style this any sort of “collaboration,” posthumous or otherwise. There is little here that is terrible, but much that is wondrous, often infused with a fey wit that reflects a gentleness we could only wish were more often found in this world.

BLACK POCKETS AND OTHER DARK THOUGHTS by George Zebrowski
(Golden Gryphon Press, $24.95)

Turning to more contemporary writers, let us examine George Zebrowski’s Black Pockets and Other Dark Thoughts. Like Eric Frank Russell, Zebrowski is not usually thought of as a writer of horror stories, but his first collection in the genre should serve to shatter that preconception. Zebrowski divides his tales into three cat-egories: the Personal, the Political, and the Metaphysical, working outward from the specific to the general, although one wonders how he came to classify each story into their final categories. For instance, “Earth Around His Bones” strikes me as being an expression both of a personal phobia as well as an existential angst about the final state of the human condition. One wonders if “Jumper” is not perhaps a metaphor on man’s lack of insight for where his abilities may ultimately lead. The Political Terrors are more pensive studies in magical realism, in which an Undead Fidel Castro continues to linger on long after his relevance has died. The Metaphysical Terrors provide the juiciest tales, as is good and proper after all. Jesus returns as both a victimized derelict and as a supernatural prankster who reveals that we are just part of a science experiment. “Black Pockets” is a study of two souls locked hopelessly in hate so intense that even their own destruction is acceptable as long as their enemy also perishes. “The Lords of Imagination” strikes me as more manifesto than story, with its melancholy recognition that fantasy and horror were truer representations of “our black, anarchic souls, for all that we had leashed, chained, and imprisoned within ourselves” than the bland, sterile optimism of Roddenberry SF. While I would not go as far as Howard Waldrop does in his introduction and equate Zebrowski’s achievement with that of Fritz Leiber in “Smoke Ghost,” this is nonetheless an impressive collection that will repay repeated readings.

SLEEPING POLICEMEN by Dale Bailey and Jack Slay Jr.
(Golden Gryphon Press, $24.95)

Does a weird story have to have a supernatural or paranormal explanation? Lovecraft argued that William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” was not a weird tale because it could actually happen —whereas the crux of the weird tale is that it cannot possibly happen. The boundaries have blurred between the genres a bit since then, since such novels as Robert Bloch’s Psycho and Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs are now regarded as iconic works. In Sleeping Policemen, International Horror Guild nominees Dan Bailey and Jack Slay, Jr. present a story that is genuinely horrific without ever even bending a natural law.

Three college students returning from a road trip kill a stranger in a hit-and-run accident. The rich boys want to keep going, but their friend Nick, who comes from a much humbler background, insists on going back and seeing if they can help. From this good intention several miles of Hell are paved as Nick, his friends, and his girl friend Susan are drawn into a nightmarish world of snuff films and runaways overseen by a grotesquely Mabuse-like figure known as the Pachyderm. The authors contrast Nick’s own moral strength with the lack of strength shown by his friends, yet it is apparent that the compromise of that strength is what worsens their situation. There are many self-conscious references to works by Conrad and Fitzgerald that drive this home, but what Sleeping Policemen boils down to is how Nick and his friends act when confronted with moral evil.

THE WHITE HANDS AND OTHER WEIRD TALES by Mark Samuels
(Tartarus Press, £9.99)

One drawback to the domination of our genre by small-press publishers producing beautiful editions for the collectors’ market is that their products are often, if not always, priced out of the reach of the casual reader. It is refreshing to see that Tartarus Press, at least, has reissued one of its most distinguished recent collections in an affordable paperback. To call Mark Samuel’s first collection, The White Hands, a freshman effort is perhaps the literal truth, but it is a truth that conceals rather than reveals. Samuel’s prose is some of the most highly polished and surreal it has been my pleasure to read since I first discovered Thomas Ligotti. He is, like Ligotti, Matt Cardin, Quentin Crisp, and a number of other contemporary writers, something of a counter-realist. One of his characters defends weird fiction on the grounds that “the anthropocentric concerns of realism had the effect of stifling the much more profound study of infinity.” Contem-plation of the infinite “was the faculty that separated man from beast.” Realism “was the literature of the prosaic.” This has its roots in writers as diverse as Arthur Machen and Clark Ashton Smith, but Samuels embraces it and makes it his own. Beginning with “The White Hands,” he evokes the sense of alienation and sin that pervaded the weird fiction of the Yellow Nineties while drawing a cautionary tale of the hazards of literary research that I for one found a trifle disquieting. “Vrolyck” is what Lovecraft might have written had he done The Shadow out of Time from another perspective. He closes it symmetrically with “Black as Darkness,” an entertaining ghost story that deals with a never-released British portmanteau horror film that nonetheless still shows up on the shelves of the local videostore where the right person might stumble across it.

THE SHADOW AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD by Thomas Ligotti
(Cold Spring, $13)

The attentive reader may correctly deduce that I regard Thomas Ligotti as one of the pre-eminent writers working in the genre today. Much of his best work has been unavailable since the retrospective anthology The Nightmare Factory went out of print, but now the best of that work has been reissued in a handsome trade paperback, The Shadow at the Bottom of the World. Beginning with the deservedly famous “The Last Feast of Harlequinn,” an exercise in the sort of pseudo-realism pioneered by the latter Lovecraft but run into the ground by Stephen King and Dean Koontz, we enter a world that is not only indifferent to mankind and his aspirations, but possesses an inherent malignancy that gradually manifests itself both physically and spiritually in an ever-widening erosion and degradation of those hopes and aspirations. He tells us in “Vasterien” that “nothing ever known has ended in glory,” while “The Tsalal” tells of a “great blackness “ [that] has always prevailed.” Ligotti is not a writer that one reads for casual entertainment: his vision is too unremitting, too bleakly nihilistic. Like Poe, Lovecraft, and Machen, he is a writer that one reads to understand what lies beneath the surface of our “reality.”
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original fiction by Carrie Vaughn
Copyright (c) 2006 / May not be reproduced without permission

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IN A CERTAIN kingdom, very young women — still girls — commonly had babies. It proved they were not virgins, and so their names would not go into the lottery that was held every year to choose a sacrifice for the dragon.

Jeannette had asked her mother once why only girls were made to be sacrifices, why her brothers had not faced the lottery.

Her mother, who had been quite young when she bore Jeannette and was still fresh-faced, smiled sadly. “The dragon would probably take a boy virgin as well as a girl. But there’s no way to tell with boys, and the priests won’t take a chance of making a mistake.”

“That isn’t fair.”

“No, it isn’t,” her mother said. “But women go through childbirth while the men sit back happy as you please, and that isn’t fair either.”

The year came when soldiers rode to Jeanette’s family’s holding. Their captain announced that from the sea to the mountains, Jeanette was the only woman over the age of ten known to be a virgin. Only one possible name could be drawn in the lottery.

Jeanette’s mother sobbed, and the soldiers had to tie her father to keep him from doing violence. They held her three brothers off with crossbows. Her family had urged her time and again to marry someone, anyone, a young whelp, an old widower on his deathbed. They had even begged her to find a likely boy to love her for a night and give her a child. But Jeanette had refused, because she knew that this day would come, that one day she would be chosen, and she knew her destiny.

Before the soldiers led her away, Jeanette held her mother’s face in her hands. “It’s all right. I have a plan, I know what to do.”

She kissed her mother’s cheeks, smoothed away the tears, smiled at her father and her brothers, and rode away, seated behind the captain on his horse. She smuggled with her a homemade lock-pick and a dagger.

Jeanette sat by the fire, wrapped in a blanket, eating the bread and dried meat the soldiers had given her. One of the soldiers sat a little ways off, cleaning the sweat from girths and saddles. He watched her with a gaze that burned like molten iron in the firelight.

“You’re a pretty girl. I could help you.”

She ignored him and his hands rubbing the leather with a soiled cloth. She stared at the fire, but felt his gaze on her, heavy, like a calloused fist.

The captain walked past and cuffed the soldier’s head. “Keep your eyes on your work.”

The captain sat between him and Jeanette to finish his own meal. She suspected his job was to protect her, to ensure she reached her destination safely and intact, as much as it was to take her prisoner and ensure she fulfilled her obligation.

“Perhaps this is best for her. She can’t be normal, a virgin at her age.”

Whispering and staring, hundreds lined the road where Jeannette walked, flanked by guards and led by priests. The people believed in destiny as Jeanette did, but the one they believed was different. They looked on her with curiosity and pity.

The procession was something out of a story, happening just the way the stories had told it for generations. Beautiful, in a way. Garbed in white, white flowers woven in her dark hair, she looked ahead, at the back of the brown cloak of the priest who walked in front of her, and tried to be calm. She’d had her chance to avoid this. She could have accepted the soldier’s offer, let him lead her into the dark and raise her skirt for him. The captain and priests might have punished her, but she probably wouldn’t have died. She’d have been sent home in disgrace, perhaps. But alive.

She had known this day would come. She had looked forward to it, because she had a plan. It was all right. It was going to be all right.

“The girls usually cry.”

“She doesn’t even look frightened. It isn’t natural.”

The dragon lived in a corner of the arid plain in the northern part of the kingdom. Dry brush sprouted on the dusty land, which became more rocky the farther north one traveled on the narrow road. Ravines cut across the plains, crumbling spires of granite rose from windswept outcroppings, and ridges held caves and channels that delved into the earth.

A path led from the road to one of these caves. The mouth of the cave was a dark slit in the rock, a depthless shadow, empty and featureless even in the midday sun. Outside the cave, a platform of rock stood exposed. A tall iron pole had been driven into the granite. A cold wind rattled a set of chains dangling from the pole. Jeanette brushed a strand of hair from her face.

The priests led her to the pole. The soldiers stood near, guarding her in case she panicked and tried to run, as some girls had done in other years, or so Jeanette had heard. Four manacles dangled from chains, two at the base of the pole and two in the middle. The master of the priests guided her to the pole and fastened the bindings himself, one on each wrist, one on each ankle.

The priests recited a blessing, a plea, begging their nemesis to accept the offering, to keep the peace for another year. They lauded the value of virgins, who were most pure. Jeanette knew the truth, though, that no one prized virgins. If virginity were valuable as anything other than a bribe for dragons, why did all the girls want to lose it so quickly?

She wondered how one small virgin could satisfy a dragon for a whole year.

“Go to your fate in peace, child.”

The master priest was an old man who had sent dozens of girls on this final journey, had probably given them all this final command.

“I’ll be fine,” she told the priest, keeping any tremor out of her voice.

The priest met her gaze suddenly, like he hadn’t meant to. He’d kept his face downcast until that moment. Now he looked at her with a watery, wavering gaze. Jeanette smiled, and he quickly turned away.

The priests and soldiers departed, and the crowd that had come to watch followed them quickly, before the dragon appeared. Jeanette was left alone, tied hand and foot to a post at the mouth of the cave, to await her fate.

She didn’t know how much time she had before the dragon emerged from the cave. She waited until the procession had gone away and she couldn’t hear them anymore, so no one could stop her. She hoped she had time. She only needed a few moments.

The chains weren’t meant to restrict her movement, only to keep her from leaving. She was lucky in that. By leaning down and reaching up, she retrieved the lock-pick she’d woven among the flowers in her hair.

She had been afraid the priests would find her tools and take them away. She’d kept them hidden among her clothes while she changed into the ceremonial gown and a priestess washed and braided her hair. Her guardians turned their backs for a moment, and she slipped the pick into her hair and tied the dagger to her leg. They didn’t expect such behavior from a pure young girl, so they weren’t looking for rebellion.

For months, she’d practiced picking locks. She had practiced with all sorts of variations: hands chained above her head, behind her back, on many different kinds of locks, by feel, with her eyes closed, and she’d practiced for speed.

These shackles were difficult because they were stiff with rust and grime.

Stay calm. She kept her breathing steady. Even so, she let out a sigh when the first shackle around her wrist snapped open.

This was taking too long. She hadn’t yet heard a dragon’s roar or the crunch of massive footfalls on the rocky ground. She didn’t know what she would hear first. The beast must have been near.
Working methodically, keeping her hands steady — she dared not drop the pick — she finally sprang the second lock. She crouched and started work on the bindings around her ankles.

That was when she heard the scrape of claws against stone, felt the ground tremble as some monstrous beast stepped closer. A few pebbles tumbled from the hill above her.

The grime caked into the keyholes and cracks of the shackles was old blood, of course.

The dragon seemed to take forever to climb from its den, along the passage to the mouth of the cave. Jeanette fumbled, cut her hand and dropped the pick. Drawing a sharp breath, she found it and tried again. The scraping footsteps crept closer.

Finally the last shackle snapped open, and with a yelp she clawed it away and sprang from the pole. She climbed the rocks, scrambling to get above the cave entrance. She found a sheltered perch behind a jagged boulder.

It wasn’t enough just to escape. Without its sacrifice, the dragon would break the peace and ravage the countryside. Another girl would be brought here, and the sacrifices would continue. Jeanette had to find a way to destroy the dragon.

She retrieved her dagger. It was a fool’s hope. Perhaps she’d be lucky.

At last the dragon slipped out of the cave and into the light.

It raised itself on a boulder and looked around, snout lifted to the air, nostrils flaring. It was perhaps twice the size of a horse, broad of back, with a long, writhing neck and sinewy limbs.
It was also thin. Its ribs showed above a hollow belly. Its scales were brown, dull. Many were missing; scattered spots of flaking pink skin showed along its length. Its yellow eyes squinted. It pulled back its lips to reveal broken teeth.

When it turned to make a circuit of its realm, it limped, one of its forelegs stumbling under its weight. It stepped, slumped, picked itself up and lurched forward again, making agonizing progress over the rocks. Tattered membranes hung between its forelegs and body, the remnants of wings.

The dragon was old, its skin cracked, its scales stained, its body wasted. It might once have been a terror, but not for many years. It might once have flown over the countryside, devouring every living thing in its path. Now, it might be able to do battle with a young girl. But only if she were tied to a post.

This dragon couldn’t ravage the countryside. A few men on horseback with spears — the soldiers who had brought her from her family’s farm, for instance — could put it out of its misery. Jeanette wondered when was the last time anyone had seen the dragon, or if the priests and soldiers had simply been abandoning the girls to the rocks without a backward glance all these years.

The task before her became much less difficult, though she almost felt sorry for the beast. If she did nothing, it would probably starve. It looked as if it was barely surviving on its one virgin a year. But if she wanted to return home and ensure that no other girls were bound here and left to die, she had to do more. She couldn’t leave the beast alone.

It hadn’t seen her yet. It was sniffing around the rocks, searching slowly and carefully. Perhaps it couldn’t see at all.

Still crouched on an outcropping above it, she inched toward the edge, gripping her knife, preparing herself. It was just a creature, after all, though it may have lived a thousand years and devoured a million men. She had hunted rabbits and helped slaughter pigs. She knew how to kill beasts. She could not be afraid.

She jumped.

Landing on the dragon’s back, she sprawled and almost slipped, tumbling off the animal. Desperate, she scraped her hands against the scales, hoping to reach a handhold. She found a grip on the ridged spine with one hand while supporting herself with the knuckles of the hand that held the knife, which she couldn’t drop or she was lost. A living heat rose off the creature, smelling of peat and dying embers.

The dragon shrieked, a choking, wheezing sound. Not so much as a puff of smoke emerged from its mouth. At least Jeanette didn’t have to worry about fire. The beast lurched, but not very quickly. She kept hold of her perch. She could imagine the dragon at the peak of its strength, its great body pulsing with power, flinging itself one way and another in the blink of an eye, its fierce head whipping around to snap at her with dagger-like fangs.

But its head turned slowly on a neck stiff with age. It hissed, and its chest heaved with labored breathing. It was almost dead already.

Gripping the ridges where its backbone protruded, she crawled up its back, then up its neck, which collapsed under her weight, smashing against the rock. The dragon squealed, snapping uselessly as it tried to reach back for her. The tail lashed against the rock, knocking loose pebbles which clattered around them.

Slumped on its neck, pinning it to the ground, she reached over its head. Its body rolled as it tried to free itself, and the joints along its spine cracked.
She placed her hand between the curled spines that grew out the back of its head, and balancing herself, she drove her knife into its right eye, using her body to force the weapon as far as it would go, until her shoulder rested on the bone of the socket, and the knife lodged deep in its brain.

The dragon shuddered, its death rippling along its entire body. Jeanette held on tightly, closing her eyes and hoping it would end soon.

She lay stretched along the dragon’s neck, her head pillowed on its brow, her arm resting in the wetness of the burst eye socket. The blood was growing cold and thick. It smelled sweet and rotten, much worse than slaughtered pigs. The bones along its neck dug through the fabric of her gown, making an uncomfortable bed.

She scraped the brain and gore off her arm as well as she could, wiping her hands on the hem of her gown. The silky fabric wasn’t much use for that.

She could go home. Though if she wanted them to believe that the dragon was dead, she had to bring back proof. She’d show the priests, and they wouldn’t hold any more lotteries.

She couldn’t carry back the head, as impressive as it would be to see it hanging on a wall. In the end, she cut off a toe and its claw, unmistakably the black, curved claw of a dragon. Once it might have been as sharp as a sword, but now it was dull with age. She left the dragon sprawled among the heaps of stone. Within half an hour of walking, she looked back, and the dragon’s body was only another shadow among the crevices.

A flock of ravens circled overhead.

One would think, having slain a dragon, she could face anything.

She did not find shelter by nightfall, so she lay down in a sandy depression on the lee side of a boulder, hugged herself, and tried to sleep. She also had not found any water, and her throat was swollen, her mouth sticky. Her gown and skin were grimy, itchy.

The desert was painfully cold at night, even in summer. Too cold to let her sleep. She clutched the dragon’s claw and longed for morning, for light. She had killed a dragon, she had the proof here in her hands. She would not let the night kill her.

She’d held the claw for so long, so tightly, that it was warm to the touch. Hot, even. As if it still had life, despite the scabbed stump. The toe still had muscles, it still flexed. It hadn’t stiffened in death.

It gave her warmth, a small and odd companion in the lonely darkness.

They will not thank you for killing me.

The voice came as a whisper, like wind through desert scrub.

She must have fallen asleep; her mind was thick with dreaming, and she couldn’t open her eyes. She imagined that she held the dragon in her hands, she held its life in her hands.

They will fear and curse you.

“No, they won’t. They will thank me. I’ve saved them.”

You have destroyed a tradition that has lasted for centuries. But I must thank you. Dragons cannot die, they can only be killed. I waited a long time.

“You could have been killed anytime, you could have found a warrior anywhere and let him kill you.”

Its chuckle rumbled through the earth. Don’t you think I tried that?

Jeannette curled tighter to herself, shivering, and whimpering.

Hush there. You’re probably right. They’ll cheer for you and throw flowers in your path, and you’ll be safe. Sleep now. Don’t be afraid.

She nestled into what felt like the warm embrace of a friend and fell asleep.

On the second day she found a pool and slow-running stream, enough water to wash and to keep herself from dying of thirst.

On the third day, disheveled and exhausted, she arrived at the door of the abbey at the first town beyond the northern waste, where she had been washed and dressed for the sacrifice.
People stared at her as she passed by. Her white gown, no matter how stained and tattered, made clear who she was, or who she was supposed to be — the sacrifice to the dragon. By the time she reached the abbey, a crowd had gathered to watch what the priests would say about her return.

She pulled the chain at the door of the abbey. It opened, and the priest who appeared there looked at her, eyes wide.

“I killed the dragon,” she said and showed him the claw.

Stammering, he called back into the abbey. Jeanette stayed at the door, unsure of what would happen, of what she expected to happen when she came here. She thought they would be happy. The crowd remained, whispering among themselves and hemming her in.

The dragon’s claw, as long as her forearm, lay in her hands, still warm, as if it were still attached to the dragon’s foot and ready to spring to life. The scales were dull. She ran her finger along the claw. It was smooth, hard as iron.

She wanted to go home.

The priest returned with several of his fellows. They grabbed her, surrounded her, pulled her inside, shut the door behind her. It happened quickly, and they did not seem surprised, or glad, or impressed that she had returned. Instead, they seemed worried, which made her afraid.

In moments, they’d brought her to the room where she’d been prepared as a sacrifice, a bare stone antechamber with a fireplace and washbasin, where a week ago she had been cleaned and anointed. She stood in the middle of the room, a ring of priests surrounding her. The master priest stood before her.

“What have you done?” he said.

“I killed the dragon.” She cradled the claw to her chest.

“Why have you done this?” Horror filled his voice. Inexplicable horror. Was there something about the dragon Jeanette didn’t know?

They will not thank you.

“I didn’t want to die. I thought — I believed I could do this thing.” She hoped she might, eventually, by chance, say the thing that would make this right. “It was old, crippled. Anyone could have done it. I picked the locks on the shackles. I planned it. I — I didn’t understand why no one had done it before. Someone should have killed it a long time ago.”

Harshly, the priest said, “Whether or not the dragon could be killed, whether or not it should have been killed, is not important. The sacrifice is important. The sacrifice is why you were chosen, why the choice is made every year.”

Very quietly she said, “I don’t understand.”

“Fear,” the old priest said, his voice shaking. “We sacrifice so that we will not have to fear. Without the dragon, how will we banish our fear? What we will sacrifice, so that we do not have to be afraid?”
“Nothing,” Jeanette said without thinking. “We can choose not to fear.”

One of the other priests said, “How does a girl kill a dragon?”

“It isn’t natural,” said another.

“It isn’t possible.”

“Not without suspicion.”

“Suspicion of witchcraft.”

Jeanette looked around as the priests talked. She began to understand, and began to fear in a way she hadn’t when she faced the dragon.

“We cannot tolerate a witch among us.”

The old priest stepped toward her, the circle closed around her, and she had a vision of herself bound to another post, with knotted rope she couldn’t escape from, and flames climbing around her, which she couldn’t kill. They had found a new fear to make a sacrifice to; something else to kill, to comfort themselves.

The dragon’s claw was dull, worn by age and use. But it still had a point on it, and this was the hand she had used to kill a dragon.

Don’t be afraid. Some hunters believe they take the power of the creatures they kill. You have killed me. My power is yours.

Jeanette slashed the claw at the old priest, as the dragon might have slashed in its younger days. He fell back, and the priests shouted in panic. Half of them reached to help their master, half lunged to stop Jeanette.

She was young and quick and escaped them all, running out of the room. She didn’t know if the crowd would still be gathered at the front door, so she escaped to the back of the building and found another door, another way out.

She couldn’t go home; the priests would send soldiers after her. Instead, she traveled far away, to a desert land where a dragon might live.

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THERE WAS A KINGDOM that held a lottery every year, to choose a virgin who would be sacrificed to the witch who lived in a cave at the edge of the northern desert. She was so powerful, it was said, that she knew the ancient language of dragons, which had not been spoken on earth in centuries.

The girls were chained to a rock near her cave and left to their fates. The witch used their pure white bones in her spells, and fed on their untainted flesh, to preserve and restore her own rotten body.

One year, the girl who was left on the rock had only just begun to grow the first curve of breast and to dream of dancing at the country fair. Now that the priests were gone and could no longer intimidate her to silence, she cried and struggled against the chains until her wrists bled.

When the witch appeared at the mouth of the cave, the girl screamed and thrashed like a wild thing, stupid with fear.

The witch was an old, old woman, with gray hair tied in a braid draped over her shoulder, coiled and tucked into her belt. She walked stooped, leaning on a cane of knobbed wood. And it was true what the stories said, that she had bound a dragon’s claw, curved and polished black, to the head of the staff. She held a key in her hand.

“Hush, child, hush. I am too old to fight you.”

Her voice was old and kind, like a grandmother’s voice, which made the girl fall still and silent.
“There, that’s a good girl,” the witch said.

One by one, the witch unfastened the shackles with her key. The girl started trembling so hard her teeth chattered.

When she was free, the witch took her hand and helped her to her feet. Then she unfolded the cloak she’d held draped over one arm and put it around the girl’s shoulders. “You can’t travel in that flimsy gown they gave you, can you? And here.”

The witch put a pouch filled with coins into the girl’s hand.

Holding her other hand, the witch led her to the far side of the hill, opposite the mouth of her cave. She pointed to a path that led down the hill and away, far into the distance.

She said, “Take this path. In a day it will bring you to a country where girls are not sacrificed to anything. The family at the first farm will help you. Go now, and don’t be afraid.”

The girl stared at the witch a long time, deciding whether or not to be afraid, wondering if she should dare to believe that she would live. The witch smiled a grandmother’s smile.

Impulsively, the girl hugged her, arms around the witch’s shoulders, gently because the woman seemed frail. Then she drew away and ran down the path, clutching the cloak around her.

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Carrie Vaughn is the author of Kitty and the Midnight Hour and Kitty Goes to Washington, as well as numerous short stories. Though she writes about werewolves, the only monster she has at home is a 15-pound miniature American Eskimo dog named Lily. She has an M.A. in English Literature, is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, and lives in Boulder, Colorado. Visit her at www.carrievaughn.com.
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