“I do not fear you, Boyce,” she said sadly.
“Good,” he said eagerly. “Then free me, and change with me. Become a great cat tonight, and run beside me, hunt with me. I can lead you to prey you never dreamed of. There is so much we can share. You have felt how it is to change, you know the truth of it, you have tasted the power, the freedom, seen the lights from a beast’s eyes, smelled fresh blood, gloried in a kill. You know…the freedom…the intoxication of it…all the…you know….”
“I know,” Gray Alys acknowledged.
“Then free me! We are meant for each other, you and I. We will live together, love together, hunt together.”
Gray Alys shook her head.
“I do not understand,” Boyce said. He strained upward wildly at his bonds, and swore, then sunk back again. “Am I hideous? Do you find me evil, unattractive?”
“No.”
“Then what?” he said bitterly. “Other women have loved me, have found me handsome. Rich, beautiful ladies, the finest in the land. All of them have wanted me, even when they knew.”
“But you have never returned that love, Boyce,” she said.
“No,” he admitted. “I have loved them after a fashion. I have never betrayed their trust, if that is what you think. I find my prey here, in the lost lands, not from among those who care for me.” Boyce felt the weight of Gray Alys’ eyes, and continued. “How could I love them more than I did?” he said passionately. “They could know only half of me, only the half that lived in town and loved wine and song and perfumed sheets. The rest of me lived out here, in the lost lands, and knew things that they could never know, poor soft things. I told them so, those who pressed me hard. To join with me wholly they must run and hunt beside me. Like you. Let me go, Gray Alys. Soar for me, watch me run. Hunt with me.”
Gray Alys rose and sighed. “I am sorry, Boyce. I would spare you if I could, but what must happen must happen. Had you died last night, it would have been useless. Dead things have no power. Night and day, black and white, they are weak. All strength derives from the realm between, from twilight, from shadow, from the terrible place between life and death. From the gray, Boyce, from the gray.”
He wrenched at his bonds again, savagely, and began to weep and curse and gnash his teeth. Gray Alys turned away from him and sought out the solitude of her wagon. There she remained for hours, sitting alone in the darkness and listening to Boyce swear and cry out to her with threats and pleadings and professions of love. Gray Alys stayed inside until well after moonrise. She did not want to watch him change, watch his humanity pass from him for the last time.
At last his cries had become howls, bestial and abandoned and full of pain. That was when Gray Alys finally reemerged. The full moon cast a wan pale light over the scene. Bound to the hard ground, the great white wolf writhed and howled and struggled and stared at her out of hungry scarlet eyes.
Gray Alys walked toward him calmly. In her hand was the long silver skinning knife, its blade engraved with fine and graceful runes.
WHEN HE FINALLY STOPPED STRUGGLING, THE WORK WENT MORE quickly, but still it was a long and bloody night. She killed him the instant she was done, before the dawn came and changed him and gave him back a human voice to cry his agony. Then Gray Alys hung up the pelt and brought out tools and dug a deep, deep grave in the packed cold earth. She piled stones and broken pieces of masonry on top of it, to protect him from the things that roamed the lost lands, the ghouls and the carrion crows and the other creatures that did not flinch at dead flesh. It took her most of the day to bury him, for the ground was very hard indeed, and even as she worked she knew it was a futile labor.
And when at last the work was done, and dusk had almost come again, she went once more into her wagon, and returned wearing the great cloak of a thousand silver feathers, tipped with black. Then she changed, and flew, and flew, a fierce and tireless flight, bathed in strange lights and wedded to the dark. All night she flew beneath a full and mocking moon, and just before dawn she cried out once, a shrill scream of despair and anguish that rang and keened on the sharp edge of the wind and changed its sound forever.
PERHAPS JERAIS WAS AFRAID OF WHAT SHE MIGHT GIVE HIM, FOR HE DID not return to Gray Alys alone. He brought two other knights with him, a huge man all in white whose shield showed a skull carved out of ice, and another in crimson whose sigil was a burning man. They stood at the door, helmeted and silent, while Jerais approached Gray Alys warily. “Well?” he demanded.
Across her lap was a wolfskin, the pelt of some huge massive beast, all white as mountain snow. Gray Alys rose and offered the skin to Blue Jerais, draping it across his outstretched arm. “Tell the Lady Melange to cut herself, and drip her own blood onto the skin. Do this at moonrise when the moon is full, and then the power will be hers. She need only wear the skin as a cloak, and will the change thereafter. Day or night, full moon or no moon, it makes no matter.”
Jerais looked at the heavy white pelt and smiled a hard smile. “A wolfskin, eh? I had not expected that. I thought perhaps a potion, a spell.”
“No,” said Gray Alys. “The skin of a werewolf.”
“A werewolf?” Jerais’ mouth twisted curiously, and there was a sparkle in his deep sapphire eyes. “Well, Gray Alys, you have done what the Lady Melange asked, but you have failed me. I did not pay you for success. Return my gem.”
“No,” said Gray Alys. “I have earned it, Jerais.”
“I do not have what I asked for.”
“You have what you wanted, and that is what I promised.” Her gray eyes met his own without fear. “You thought my failure would help you get what you truly wanted, and that my success would doom you. You were wrong.”
Jerais looked amused. “And what do I truly desire?”
“The Lady Melange,” said Gray Alys. “You have been one lover among many, but you wanted more. You wanted all. You knew you stood second in her affections. I have changed that. Return to her now, and bring her the thing that she has bought.”
THAT DAY THERE WAS BITTER LAMENTATION IN THE HIGH KEEP ON THE mountain, when Blue Jerais knelt before the Lady Melange and offered her a white wolfskin. But when the screaming and the wailing and the mourning was done, she took the great pale cloak and bled upon it and learned the ways of change. It is not the union she desired, but it is a union nonetheless. So every night she prowls the battlements and the mountainside, and the townsfolk say her howling is wild with grief.
And Blue Jerais, who wed her a month after Gray Alys returned from the lost lands, sits beside a madwoman in the great hall by day, and locks his doors by night in terror of his wife’s hot red eyes, and does not hunt anymore, or laugh, or lust.
YOU CAN BUY ANYTHING YOU MIGHT DESIRE FROM GRAY ALYS.
But it is better not to.
FIVE
HYBRIDS AND HORRORS
I NEVER READ HORROR STORIES AS A KID. AT LEAST, I NEVER CALLED THEM THAT. MONSTER stories, though…those I loved. At Halloween, when we went out trick-or-treating, I always wanted to be a ghost or monster, never a cowboy or a hobo or a clown.
The Plaza was the dingiest of Bayonne’s three regular movie theaters, but I never missed their monster matinees on Saturday afternoons. Admission was only a quarter. The DeWitt and the Lyceum, the more upscale theaters, were where I saw William Castle’s gimmick films, The Tingler and 13 Ghosts. The one time I set foot inside the Victory, Bayonne’s cavernous old decaying opera house, closed during most of my childhood, that was for a monster movie too. The seats were musty and dusty and, it turned out, infested; I came home covered with insect bites, and the Victory was boarded up again shortly thereafter.
There was scary stuff on television as well. You could catch the old Universal horror films at night, if your mother let you stay up late enough. The Wolfman was my favorite monster, though I liked Count Dracula and Frankenstein (he was always Frankenstein to us, never “Frankenstein’s monster” or “the monster”) as well. The Creature from the Black Lagoon and the Invisible Man were not to
be compared to the big three, and the Mummy was just stupid. Besides the old movies, the tube also offered the occasional creepy episode of The Twilight Zone and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour… but Thriller, hosted by Boris Karloff, was scarier than both and then some. Their adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s “Pigeons from Hell” frightened me as much as anything I ever saw on television until the Vietnam War…and the Vietnam War didn’t have a guy come down a staircase with an axe buried in his head.
I devoured monster comics too, though I was too young for the really good ones, Tales from the Crypt and its mouldering EC ilk. I read about those later in the fanzines, but never owned a copy. I do recall coming across a beat-up old comic at the local barbershop that was a lot scarier than the ones I was buying; almost certainly, an old EC that the barber still had lying around. (He had piles of old pre-DC Blackhawk comics as well.) Before Marvel was Marvel, they published a lot of not-especially-scary monster comics where the monsters had these goofy names and came from outer space. Those I got, though they were tepid fare for the most part, and I never liked them half as well as superhero comics.
Funny books, movies, and television planted the seeds, and monstrous seeds they were…but my love of actual horror fiction did not take root until 1965, when I paid fifty cents (outrageous the way book prices were going up) for an Avon paperback anthology called Boris Karloff’s Favorite Horror Stories and read “The Haunter of the Dark,” by H. P. Lovecraft. There were some other great yarns in that book as well, by the likes of Poe, Kornbluth, and Robert Bloch, but the Lovecraft was the one that caught me by the throat and wouldn’t let go. I was afraid to go to sleep that night. The next day I began looking for more books with stories by HPL, who had vaulted to the top of my personal hit parade, where he remained for a long time, sharing pride of place with RAH and JRRT.
We write what we read. I never read Zane Grey growing up, and I’ve never written a western. I did read Heinlein, Tolkien, and Lovecraft. It was inevitable that one day I would set out to make some monsters of my own. As for those hybrids…
…long before H. P. Lovecraft came into my life, I once found a chemistry set waiting underneath the Christmas tree.
Chemistry sets were all the rage in the ’50s, and were found beneath as many trees as Lionel trains or Roy Rogers gunbelts with the matching six-shooters (if you were a boy—girls got the Dale Evans set, and Betty Crocker baking sets instead of chemistry sets). It was the age of Sputnik, the age of Charles Van Doren, the age of the atom; America wanted all us boys to grow up to be rocket scientists, so we could beat the damned Russkies to the moon.
The chemistry sets they sold then (and may still be selling, for all I know) consisted of a big hinged metal box with racks of little glass jars of chemicals inside, along with a few test tubes and beakers, and an instructional booklet describing the various educational experiments you could perform. On the front of the box there was usually a picture of a clean-cut boy (never a girl) in a white lab coat, holding up a test tube as he performed one of the many educational experiments. (White lab coats were not included.) Somewhere, I do not doubt, there must have been some kids like him, kids who dutifully followed the instructions, performed the educational experiments, learned many valuable scientific things, and grew up to be chemists.
I never knew any, though. All of the kids I knew who got chemistry sets for Christmas were more interested in trying to make stuff explode. Or turn weird colors. Or bubble and smoke. “Let’s see what will happen if we mix this with that,” we would say, as we dreamed of finding the secret formula that would turn us into a superhero, or at least Mr. Hyde. Maybe our parents thought the chemistry sets would set us on the path to becoming Jonas Salk or Wernher von Braun, but we were more interested in becoming one of the great Victors…von Frankenstein or von Doom.
Most of the time when we mixed this with that, all we made was a mess. That was probably a good thing. If we had ever actually found a formula that turned weird colors and bubbled and smoked, we might have tried to drink it…or at the very least, see if our little sister could be convinced to drink it.
My chemistry set soon ended up at the back of my closet, gathering dust behind my collection of TV Guides, but my passion for mixing this with that remained as I grew older, and found expression in my fiction. Modern publishing loves to sort the tales we tell into categories, producing racks of books that resemble the racks of little bottles in the chemistry set, with neat little labels that read: MYSTERY. ROMANCE. WESTERN. HISTORICAL. SF. JUVENILE.
Pfui, I say. Let’s mix this with that and see what happens. Let’s cross some genre lines and blur some boundaries, make some stories that are both and neither. Some of the time we’ll make a mess, sure…but once in a while, if we do it right, we may stumble on a combination that explodes!
With that as my philosophy, it’s no wonder that I’ve produced a number of odd hybrids over the years. Fevre Dream is one such. Although most often categorized as horror, it is as much a steamboat novel as a vampire novel. The Armageddon Rag is even more difficult to classify; fantasy, horror, murder mystery, rock ’n’ roll novel, political novel, ’60s novel. It’s got Froggy the Gremlin too. Even my fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, is a hybrid of sorts, inspired as much by the historical fiction of Thomas B. Costain and Nigel Tranter as the fantasy of Tolkien, Howard, and Fritz Leiber.
The two genres that I’ve mixed most often, though, are horror and science fiction.
I was doing it as early as my second sale. Despite its SF setting, “The Exit to San Breta” is a ghost story at heart…though admittedly not a very frightening one. My first two corpse handler tales, “Nobody Leaves New Pittsburg” and “Override,” were further fumbling attempts at the same sort of cross-pollination, offering as they did a science fictional take on an old friend from the world of horror, the zombie. I was going for a horrific feel in “Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels” as well, and (much more successfully) in a later, stronger work, my novella “In the House of the Worm.”
Some critics have argued that horror and science fiction are actually antithetical to each other. They can make a plausible case, certainly, especially in the case of Lovecraftian horror. SF assumes that the universe, however mysterious or frightening it may seem to us, is ultimately knowable, while Lovecraft suggests that even a glimpse of the true nature of reality would be enough to drive men mad. You cannot get much further from the Campbellian view of the cosmos as that. In Billion Year Spree, his insightful study of the history of science fiction, Brian W. Aldiss puts John W. Campbell at the genre’s “thinking pole” and H. P. Lovecraft all the way over at the “dreaming pole,” on the opposite end of the literary universe.
And yet both men wrote stories that can fairly be described as SF/ horror hybrids. There are, in fact, some startling similarities between HPL’s “At the Mountains of Madness” and JWC’s “Who Goes There?” Both are effective horror stories, but both work as science fiction too. And “Who Goes There?” is probably the best thing Campbell ever wrote, while “At the Mountains of Madness” must surely rank in Lovecraft’s top five. That’s hybrid vigor.
A few of my own hybrids and horrors follow.
The oldest story here, “Meathouse Man,” was the third of my corpse handler stories, and turned out to be the last of the series. The horror is sexual and psychological, rather than visceral, but this is an SF/horror hybrid all the same. Easily the darkest thing that I have ever written (and I’ve produced some pretty dark stuff), “Meathouse Man” was supposed to be my story for The Last Dangerous Visions. Harlan Ellison’s groundbreaking anthologies Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions had a tremendous impact on me, as they did on most readers of my generation. When I met Harlan for the first time in the corridors of the 1972 Lunacon in New York City, virtually the first thing I asked him was whether I might send him a story for TLDV. He told me no; the anthology was closed.
A year later, however, it opened up again…at least for me. By that time, I had gotten to
know Harlan better, through our mutual friend Lisa Tuttle, and I’d published more stories as well, which may have helped convince him that I was worthy of inclusion in what was, after all, going to be a monumental book, the anthology to end anthologies. Whatever made him change his mind, change it he did; in 1973, he invited me to send him a story. I was thrilled…and nervous as hell. TLDV would have a lot of heavy hitters in it. Could I measure up? Could I possibly be dangerous enough?
I struggled with the story for several months, finally mailed it off to Harlan in early 1974. “Meathouse Man” was the title, but otherwise it shared only some background and character names with the “Meathouse Man” that follows. It was much shorter, about a third the length of the present story, and much more superficial. I was trying my damnedest to be dangerous, but in that first version, “Meathouse Man” remained no more than an intellectual exercise.
Harlan returned my manuscript on March 30, 1974, with a letter of rejection that began, “Aside from shirking all responsibility to the material that forms the core, it’s a nice story.” After which he eviscerated me, while challenging me to tear the guts out of the story and rewrite the whole thing from page one. I cursed and fumed and kicked the wall, but I could not quarrel with a single thing he said. So I sat down and ripped the guts out of the story and rewrote the whole thing from page one, and this time I opened a vein as well, and let the blood drip down right onto the paper. While 1973 and 1974 were great years for me professionally, they were by no means happy years. My career was going wonderfully; my life, not so much so. I was wounded, and in a lot of pain. I put it all into “Meathouse Man,” and sent the story back to Harlan.
He still didn’t like it. This time he was much gentler with me, but a gentle pass is still a pass.
Afterward I considered simply abandoning “Meathouse Man.” Even now, almost thirty years later, I find it painful to reread. But in the end, I had put too much work into the story to foresake it, so I sent it out to other markets, and ended up selling it to Damon Knight for Orbit, the only time I ever managed to crack that prestigious anthology series. It appeared in 1976, in Orbit 18.