Original fiction by Lisa Mantchev
Copyright (c) 2007 / May not be reproduced without permission

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[Editor's note: A mad posse of fantasy and science fiction writers have declared today International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day: a day to celebrate the greatness of the Internet by posting a piece of free fiction. Here at WEIRD TALES we post several free stories from every issue of the magazine -- you can find them listed over to the left. Today we're chiming in with a great piece by new WT contributor Lisa Mantchev. Enjoy!]


I. Numb

Ice Princess. December Queen. Abominable Snow Woman. They call me by many names, but there’s only one truth:

It was a mistake to move to Los Angeles.

My people told me that I needed an agent. I needed an endorsement deal. I needed to appear on the nightly talk-show circuit.

“You’ll be a star!” they said. “Our people will call their people and our people will get big bucks from their people and you’ll end up rich and famous!”

Everything is said with exclamation points in Hollywood.

Banished are the sledges pulled by polar bears in favor of air-conditioned limousines while I try to get cold again. My ice castle is gone, so I frequent the malls and skating rinks and movie theaters. My face tilts up at the silver screen while I wait for the crystal-studded cell phone to ring.

“Report to the studio. You’re wanted in make-up!”

It takes hours to rouge my cheeks and give the illusion of an operating circulatory system, so I leave the theater. Outside, the sidewalks shimmer. Passers-by sweat. I, however, melt.

I reach for my vial of perfume; cold coats the crystal and I remove the stopper with a sigh. It’s a concoction of ice-rimmed mint, arctic frost and vodka-in-snow. I dab a little at the dent between my collar bones, the inside of each wrist, behind each bare knee.

Just a little. I have to make it last.

The numbness spreads from the points of contact along my limbs and down my throat. When I exhale, a drift of snow coats the sidewalks and pedestrians slip in the slush.

My laughter is vanilla ice cream, each word an ice cube as I duck into the welcome chill of the limo.

“To the studio, please.”

I put the ice in a silver shaker and reach for the olives.

* * *

II. Wicked

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, tell me how great my ass looks in these jeans.”

“Your posterior, m’lady, is splendid. Pert and round. Fairer than any other backside in this town.”

“That didn’t rhyme very well, mirror.”

“Sorry, m’lady! I promise to do better next time.”

In the highest tower of the tallest apartment building downtown, she studies the empty bags and boxes that litter the floor: supplies acquired.

A velvet corset and thigh high boots.

Liquid eyeliner, false eyelashes, burgundy lipstick, pale foundation.

No spinning wheels or spindles. No apples from Fruit-of-the-Month. No brooms and cinders.

Just a deep, brooding malice. An aura of majesty.

The sheen on the blade of a very sharp knife.

At the stroke of midnight, the spell will be complete. She sits at the dressing table and runs an ivory comb through her ebony hair. She dips the comb in liquid malevolence—

Myrrh and jasmine . . .

—And smoothes it through the ravens’ wings that frame her face—

Draped in the subtlest rose.

The perfume contains the magic; the power soaks deep inside her and takes root. Thorns and briars again, but on the inside. She can feel the pin-pricks in her heart and welcomes the pain.

Vengeance is on the menu tonight. She’s been slighted. She’s been cheated. She’s been tricked by simpering females singing over wells and princes with plastic swords.

But no more.

The crown will be hers. The fortune will be hers. The prince will grovel at her feet this time around. And woes befall the courtier that doesn’t fork over the glass slipper.

This time, the happily-ever-after will be hers.

* * *

III. Zombi

Men find it hard to fall in love with a dead girl. They tell her it’s a turn-off that they take her hand at the movies and a finger lands in the popcorn. They say her kisses are nice, but it’s disconcerting that the occasional worm crawls out of her mouth. And don’t even get them started on her appetite for brains (although she thinks it’s fair to point out that most men only have enough for a light snack.)

At least she smells nice. All zombie girls know they have to compensate for the tattered clothes and the moaning thing. They all wear the same perfume, steeped in a coffin for a dozen decades and decanted into vials that the undead girls buy with stolen quarters.

Close the eyes of the dead with silver!

Sitting in the restaurant, she watches the candlelight flicker in the watery blue eyes of an investment banker while she butters another slice of bread. She won’t eat it, but it gives her something to do with her hands. He’s talktalktalking about himself, his career, his goals, his plans.

She analyzes his receding hairline and guesses he’s packing approximately three pounds of meat between his ears. Probably a bit stringy, considering his profession, but she’s had a dry spell and she is famished.

She crumbles the bread into her plate and takes another sip of wine. The left side of her jaw starts to slide into the glass and she catches it just in time. He’s halfway through his salad and there’s spinach stuck in his teeth.

She reaches in her pocket and uncorks the vial:

Dried roses.

Spanish moss.

Deep brown earth.

The scent of lady-in-graving drifts across the white linen and silverware to wrap skeletal arms around Mr. Moneybags. Before he realizes what’s happening, he’s paid the check and they’re heading back to his place.

For dessert.

* * *

IV. Bliss

The copper tub sits with purpose in the center of the rug; candle- and firelight dance over warm metal.

She doesn’t have to check the lock on the door; the children are in exile and the master of the house is ensorcelled by the football game.

She empties a vial of treasured scent into the contents of the tub. She twists Grecian curls into a knot atop her head. She smiles as she tugs the satin sash of her bathrobe. Creamy fabric puddles around her ankles and she steps into the tub and sinks chin-deep . . .

In chocolate.

The serotonin-slathered scent of cacao slides down her throat in hazelnut handfuls as she lets it idle up her neck. No mere bubble bath for her; only chocolate will do. Chocolate to tease the tension from her muscles and chocolate to pluck the terrors of the day from her mind like rotten fruits from a tired vine.

Self-indulgent, yes.

Hedonistic certainly. The minister would faint if he could see.

She cringes when distant voices crack the candy-coating that covers her chest.

“You are so gonna be in trouble! Mom!”

“No, I’m telling on you! MOM!”

No. The chocolate is still warm and the wood on the fire burns yet bright.

“Honey!” Now the prince joins the summons.

No. She slides down until chocolate sloshes over her cheeks and fills her ears. The voices cannot reach through confectionary armor and she basks in the sweet, sweet silence.

Perhaps they pound on the door, but she only feels the darling lovely pull of a kiss from Côte d’Or.

* * *

V. Lurid

There’s no drama here; just rows of metal filing cabinets, crappy fluorescent lighting and a never-ending heap of paperwork.

It’s just a job.

It pays the rent.

It bores her to death with a jagged Jack-the-Ripper knife to the jugular.

She files her life away in this dreary subterranean corner of the world. Moldering papers coat her fingers with dust and suck the moisture from her skin. She hates it, but she’s saving her pennies for a vacation in London.

She hefts another dossier and the weight of a thousand ailments drags at her arm. She files it under “Bullshit”, reaches for another —

And touches glass instead.

Her fingers recoil from lead crystal and then amethyst angles lure her back. The gold-flecked vial is everything her life is not: luminous and rich. Lovely and unique.

She uncorks the unexpected gift and inhales: black currant, Bulgarian lavender and white musk with a dollop of thick resin and a voltaic charge of ozone notes, and he’s there. Hands around her throat, blade at the ready.

It’s nice to be shocked, she thinks, after all the tedium.

“'Ello, me lovely,” he says. “Fancy meetin’ you ‘ere.”

He carves the buttons from her blouse, one by one and with precision. His need presses against her back, fierce and savage, when he slips the knife under the lace strap of her bra.

She’s shocked. Horrified. Pulled backwards against her will into him and his ferocity.

“Don’t—”

But he’s an oily splash of crimson on her black and white canvas when the knife kisses her throat, and there’s no one to hear her scream.

* * *

VI. Shattered

“You don’t smell like an opera rat.” He appeared without warning and gazed at me over the wreckage. Bits of chandelier sparked in the light from my candle.

I inhaled sharply. Ours together was a scent as sharp as glass shards, as brittle as a broken heart: my peppermint and lotus, his white champagne notes and crystalline aquatic blossoms.

So, flowers bloom even in the underground lake.

I thought he’d gone. But I’d also thought she’d stay with him. Wrong on both counts and glad
for it.

“And what do the opera rats smell like?” I asked.

He didn’t hesitate. “Debauchery and grease paint.”

“I’m no opera rat. I’m a dancer,” I said and raised my hand to the level of my eyes. Just as a precaution.

His laughter was short and without humor. “You are a woman and therefore just another whore.”

I wasn’t taking that, even from a masked psychotic.

“I’m not Christine, monsieur. I loved her dearly, but she was a fool.”

“Really?” He took one step into the broken glass, and then another; leather over crystal. “And are you any smarter, little dancer? Here. Alone. With me.”

“I don’t sing.” I managed a shrug, but my hands were shaking. “I don’t see how you can break
me.”

“Non?” He grasped my wrist and twisted it away from my face. “Ma chère, I could kill you before you drew your next breath. And I wouldn’t think twice about doing so.”

The words cut deep, but I didn’t need a corset to hold my spine in place.

“Yes. Or perhaps you could learn to love a woman that has more substance than a cloud of hair and a nice singing voice.” I shoved a broom into his lethal hand. “But for now, clean up your mess, monsieur. I am also not the maid.”

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The six scents featured in this story were inspired by fragrances from Black Phoenix Alchemy Laboratory. When not scribbling, Lisa Mantchev can be found on the beach, up a tree, making jam or repairing things with her trusty glue gun. Her stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, Aeon, Abyss & Apex, and the SFWA anthology New Voices in Science Fiction — and more will be appearing soon in Japanese Dreams and Electric Velocipede. She recently completed her first novel, Scrimshaw.

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It's the new WEIRD TALES! Issue #344 features a nonfictional tale of haunting by Caitlin R. Kiernan; an in-depth interview with George R. R. Martin; new book reviews by Scott Connors; thoughts on Kafka by Darrell Schweitzer; and, of course, nine bizarre and eerie short stories by Richard Parks, Lisa Mantchev, Trent Hergenrader, Scott William Carter, and more.

Huge thanks to Anita Zofia Siuda for the cover painting, "Spider Woman with Apples." She's an incredibly talented young artist from Poland who we discovered online -- and we expect to see more great things from her in the future!

And there's still another ten days left to take advantage of our incredible subscription deal: $12 for six issues!
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Copyright (c) 2007 / May not be reproduced without permission

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Book critic Scott Connors looks at Charles Stross's return to Lovecraftian mathematics, Victor Rousseau's classic WEIRD TALES stories of a psychic detective, and Ellen Datlow & Co.'s latest installment of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror.

THE JENNIFER MORGUE
by Charles Stross
(Golden Gryphon Press, $25.95)

The idea of a meta-fiction that takes over reality is explored in The Jennifer Morgue, Hugo winner Charles Stross’ sequel to 2004's The Atrocity Archives. That entertaining fusion of Lovecraft and tradecraft described a branch of British intelligence called the Laundry that cleaned up after certain complex mathematical formulas were accidentally solved by unsuspecting supergeeks that opened portals into other realities inhabited by Lovecraft’s creatures. Bob Howard, the hacker-hero of the earlier book, returns to prevent a billionaire from using a CIA deep sea exploration platform built by Howard Hughes to raise up a Russian sub that contains a device allowing communication with the dead. Unfortunately, his efforts may awaken Cthulhu and Company, which the British and American governments understandably consider to be a Bad Thing. The billionaire is employing a geas that renders him immune to everybody except a certain fictional British spy with a license to kill, so Bob finds himself teemed with an American female agent whose family hails from Innsmouth (think The Squid Who Loved Me), thinking that he was being shoe-horned into the James Bond archetype. Stross manages to make Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones seem less of a menace than accountants, and packs enough British eccentrics into his story to satisfy any fan of British comedy.

THE SURGEON OF SOULS
by Victor Rousseau
(spectrelibrary *at* gmail.com, $40)

Victor Rousseau (1879-1960) was one of those colorful characters whose fertile imaginations supplied Weird Tales and other pulp magazines with a seemingly endless stream of tales of varying degrees of competency. A British journalist who served during the Boer War in an irregular cavalry unit like that depicted in the Australian film Breaker Morant, he later emigrated to the United States and became an editor for Harper’s Weekly. Rousseau was best known for an early proto-science fiction novel, The Messiah of the Cylinder (1917), but he also contributed a series of stories about a psychic detective named Ivan Brodsky to this magazine; eleven such tales appeared between September 1926 and July 1927. These have long been regarded as his “last hurrah” of quality fictioneering, since the 1930s saw him falling more and more into the formula trap as he became a staple of the “spicy” and “weird menace” pulps. Now Morgan Wallace’s Spectre Library has collected the tales of The Surgeon of Souls, as Dr. Brodsky was styled, in an attractive hardcover limited to a mere 200 copies. Genre historian Mike Ashley provides an informative introduction to the volume in which we learn that the Brodsky stories were in fact written around 1909, and are probably among Rousseau’s first efforts in the genre. It also made them contemporaneous with Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence stories, which were published in the United States the same year. Like Blackwood, Rousseau was a believer in the occult, spiritualism to be precise, and like Blackwood’s character Brodsky specializes in cases where the patient is afflicted with various spiritual ailments. This was a time when psychiatry was perceived as being somewhat akin to magic, something that becomes readily apparent if one has ever read much of C. G. Jung’s writings, but Brodsky’s portraits of people caught up in despair and confusion read like case studies. The problem with these and all psychic detective stories is that a detective story by definition indicates that a problem will be resolved at the end. That, combined with the writer’s evident belief that what he describes is a real possibility, and the stories lose much of the sense of awe and the numinous that weird tales evoke at their best. Nonetheless, these are highly competent examples of the type of story that this magazine published during its period of greatest financial success.

THE YEAR'S BEST FANTASY AND HORROR
edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link, and Gavin J. Grant
(St. Martin’s Press, $35)

Any collection that styles itself as a “best of” anything naturally raises questions as to the general taste and standards of the editors. To put it another way, this is a perfect example of the old adage that you can always measure the intelligence of another person by the degree to which their opinions happen to agree with yours. I am happy to report that the 2006 edition of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, the nineteenth such collection, has been edited by geniuses. While I had not read every selection previously, a substantial number of stories that I had penciled in for my own list show u p in this collection, among them tales by Joe Hill, Reggie Oliver, Kim Newman, Mark Samuels, China Miéville, Howard Waldrop, and Jack Cady. Glen Hirshberg’s story “American Morons” is included, as is Barbara Roden‘s wonderful “Northwest Passage,” a tale of Fortean mystery in the Pacific Northwest that evokes both Blackwood’s “The Willows” and Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness” without being in any way derivative of either. A valuable feature of this annual is the inclusion of surveys of the year in fantasy and horror, with coverage extended to include films and television, music, anime and manga. Horror and fantasy have become so widely published, with stories and poems often climbing over the ghetto wall and insinuating themselves into unsuspecting “mainstream” literary magazines, that it is almost impossible for any one person to stay on top of everything, but editors Datlow, Link and Grant provide an excellent selection of much of the best of the year.

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Books submitted for review should be sent to Scott Connors, 4277 Larson Street APT 52, Marysville, CA 95901.

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original fiction by Scott William Carter
Copyright (c) 2007 / May not be reproduced without permission

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Like me, you suffered a tragedy too great to bear. You lost a father or a mother or a brother or a spouse. You loved and you lost, and how it haunts you, stays with you, only you know. If this is the first time you have experienced such loss, if you feel as though hope has fled and will never return, then listen. My words are for the virgins of sorrow.

There is a bar known as Mourning’s Deep. In this bar is a man who can give you hope again.

Here is how you get there:

Get in your car and drive downtown. You can do it in this city or another, it does not matter. Simply drive to where the tallest buildings block the sun. It must be a cool and shadowy place, and if it is grimy and grungy like so many of our biggest cities, all the better. If vagrants scrounge the dumpsters, if ravenous dogs fight over leftovers from a Chinese restaurant, if businessmen in limos drive past, their faces obscured by smoked glass, this is preferred. But it is not necessary.

Any city of decent size will do.

With your mind firmly on the person you lost, circle the block five times, then turn and go five times the other way. If it is a one-way street, do it anyway, and ignore the blaring horns. Find the darkest alley between two buildings and put your car in reverse. With your eyes closed, and they must be closed, back into it for five seconds. One Mississippi... Two Mississippi... Do not open your eyes! If you give in to temptation, you will have to start over.

I see that you do not believe me. You think this is nonsense. But I ask you, have you ever done it?

When you open your eyes, and if you have done as I said, you will see a plain metal door set in a red brick wall. There will be no sign, but the name of the place has been scratched on the door with a knife:

Mourning’s Deep.

Leave the car running. You will find the door unlocked. Go inside. It will be smoky and dim, as all such bars are, and a somber tune will be playing from the jukebox. Pay no attention to the figures in tattered black cloaks at the mahogany bar. If they look at you, do not look back!

Walk quickly past the pool table, and do not be alarmed if the pool balls are moving of their own accord. Push through the swinging doors to the room in the back.

Only a faint orange glow from the fireplace will guide your way. You will see him, a slim, shadowy figure in the corner, sitting at a small, round table. He will be wearing a cloak like the others, but his will be gray, not black, and out of his sleeves will come fingers yellowed and dry like old newspaper. He will be the only one in this room. He may have a beer in front of him or he may not, but he won’t drink while you are there. Do not put wood on the fire! It must be kept dark so you can’t see him.

Sit at the table. Tell him of your suffering, tell him of this first, deep loss that threatens to destroy you, and do not to look at him. When you are done, put your hand on the table, palm upward. The wood, stained with years of spilt beer, may stick to your skin, but leave it there. If you are honest, if you hold nothing back, he may chance to reach out and touch you. His fingers will be as cold as the ocean’s deep. The touch will last only a moment, but you may feel light-headed. This will pass.

When he pulls his hand away, rise and walk out of the bar. The cloaked figures will not look at you, for you have nothing for them now.

Go through the door back to your car. Leave the alley. Merge with traffic and drive where you must.

Soon you will be able to think of the person you lost and feel nothing. You will be able to look at the events from afar, dispassionately, as if they happened to someone else. You will have hope again. It will not take long. An hour perhaps.

Finally, and this is of utmost importance, you must never go back. No matter who you love and lose the rest of your days, do not return to Mourning’s Deep. If you do, if you burden him with your agony once again, he will touch you, but this time all you forgot will come rushing back, and it will be worse than before. And if you plead with him, if you beg, if you cry out for him to have mercy, he will only laugh and call for the cloaked ones to throw you on the street. Once outside, the door will be gone, and you may search the rest of your days in all the cities of the world, and you will never find it.

So do not give into temptation. Be satisfied he gave you hope again. If you go back, you may lose it forever, and spend eternity looking for it.

I would know.

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Scott William Carter has sold over two dozen stories to venues including Analog, Asimov's, Ellery Queen, and Realms of Fantasy. He lives in western Oregon with his wife, children, and thousands of imaginary friends.


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film reviews by Darrell Schweitzer
Copyright (c) 2007 / May not be reproduced without permission

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I urge WEIRD TALES readers to see Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (Picturehouse, 2006) — but if you are expecting a bittersweet fairy tale about a young girl who escapes the cruelty of the adult world through the discovery of a secret, magical realm, you may be in for a shock. Mr. del Toro is very close to being two directors entirely. One makes movies in English, such as Hellboy. The other makes them in Spanish, such as The Devil’s Backbone, one of the great ghost films. The English films are commercial and very Hollywood. The Spanish ones are more personal, art films.

Pan’s Labyrinth is the work of the director of The Devil’s Backbone.

Once more, in Pan’s Labyrinth, we are taken to the Spain of the early Fascist era. The Civil War is ostensibly over, but Republican guerrillas continue to operate. 11-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Banquero) travels with her mother (Ariadna Gil) to a military outpost where the mother, recently widowed, is to marry (Fascist) Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez), by whom she is pregnant. Vidal is not only every child’s nightmare of a usurper-of-mother’s-affections, but the kind of guy who gives Fascism a bad name, whether shooting innocent peasants or brutally torturing prisoners.

Ofelia has apparently found her way into Fairyland and learned that she is a lost princess from an underground realm. She must go on a quest to open the portal to her real father’s kingdom. All of this parallels the adult world. Look closely for symbolic objects: two knives, two keys, and Captain Vidal’s watch.

“Reality” moves from grim to horrific. Since Vidal has shot the only available doctor as a Republican spy, an army paramedic delivers the baby. Ofelia’s mother dies. The only person to whom Ofelia can turn for help, the housekeeper Mercedes (Maribel Verdu), is also a Republican spy, and Vidal finds out. The war closes in.

To this point, Ofelia’s quest into Fairyland has something of a Neil Gaiman sensibility, like Mirrormask only much darker, with the adult world and the child’s fairy world in conflict, one reflecting the other. Ofelia is an innocent child right on the cusp of (not-so-innocent) adolescence. When she eats a couple grapes in the Otherworld — something mythic characters must never do — she is told that the magical realm is closed to her forever. But she just as she gets a second chance, she attempts to poison Captain Vidal in order to save Mercedes. This is a justifiable act in adult terms, but does it mean that Ofelia is no longer entirely a child? Can anyone but a child resort to Fairyland magic in her moment of supreme crisis?

I’ve promised no spoilers, so let me just say that it ends in tragedy, from the failure of the child’s magical solution being applied to the brutal, adult world. The film’s bitter conclusion offers only scant, magical comfort, in which we, having grown up beyond our ability to see fairies, do not really believe.

This is a superb effort. The visual effects (beginning with an insect that turns into a fairy) are flawless. The performances are excellent. Ivana Banquero (Ofelia) is apparently 12 but fully capable of such a demanding role. Sergi Lopez as Captain Vidal is a entirely believable villain, a man obsessed with his own heroic myth. Every totalitarian regime, from Franco’s to Pol Pot’s, has needed such fanatics to actually do the dirty work.

Pan’s Labyrinth is a profound meditation on the nature and limitations of the imagination. But this is one story about a little girl and fairies that is for adults only.

* * *

Much more for kids (if anyone) is Eragon (20th century Fox, 2006), based on Christopher Paolini’s novel.

Let me try to get this straight: Darth Vader, a dragon-rider of Pern, betrays his fellow Jedi Knights, then becomes a Dark Lord (OMT). (Official Management Term. See Diana Wynne-Jones’s A Tough Guide to Fantasyland.) Although pursued relentlessly by a Ringwraith, the spunky Princess slips the last dragon egg to 17-year-old Luke Skywalker (Edward Speleers) before she is captured. Luke, living with his uncle in rustic Assendofnowhere, discovers his Destiny just as his uncle is killed by Imperial Stormtroopers. He is then guided by Aragorn/Han Solo (Jeremy Irons), learning to fight, ride the dragon, and pose heroically. Unsurprisingly (there are no surprises here), he is the sole Hope of the Land, but, adolescent twit that he is, he risks everything by breaking into the Deathstar to rescue of the Princess (remember her?)... and then the good guys triumph at Helm’s Deep, but the hero has not yet confronted the Dark Lord and we haven’t even met the bloody elves yet. Sequels loom menacingly.

This might even entertain very young audiences but anybody else can skip it. It is the bare-bones boy-becomes-hero fantasy, with no emotional cost.

* * *

I chanced to see Charlotte’s Web (Paramount), which is everything Pan’s Labyrinth is not: a sweet story about a brave little girl, her special pig, and Life’s Lessons with all the hard parts removed. You would have to have a heart of stone not to be uplifted.

But it didn’t put me off eating bacon.

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Darrell Schweitzer is senior contributing editor at WEIRD TALES. The other editors do hope that he is at least eating organically raised bacon.
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Our fellow magazine publishers over at the pagan-culture journals PanGaia and NewWitch, in conjunction with the mind-and-spirit publishing house Llewellyn Worldwide, have announced their inaugural Pagan Fiction Award contest. We note in passing that regular NewWitch contributor Phil Brucato has a rockin' story coming up in WEIRD TALES later this summer...
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We've learned that WEIRD TALES #343, which we'd thought mailed out to subscribers many weeks ago, was held up due to a glitch in the distribution system. The problem has now been fixed, and we are assured that the issue is in the mail now -- which means you'll be receiving #343 only a couple weeks before #344. Our apologies for any confusion or concern; we hope you enjoy the magazine.

UPDATE 4/19: We've heard that subscribers have finally begun to receive their copies in the mail as of today.
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