Dreamsongs. Volume I

  “Remembering Melody,” some three years later, was my first contemporary horror story. Lisa Tuttle gets the blame for this one. When we were starting work on “The Fall” in 1979, I flew down to Austin for a few weeks to consult with her in person, and get the novella started. We took turns at her typewriter. While she was pounding on the keys I would sit around reading carbons of her latest stories. Lisa was turning out a lot of contemporary horror by then, some wonderfully creepy tales that gave me the urge to try something along those lines myself.

  “Remembering Melody” was the story that resulted. My agent tried (and failed) to place it with some of the big, high-paying men’s slicks, but Twilight Zone magazine was glad to snap it up, and it appeared in the April 1981 issue.

  Hollywood has had a love affair with horror fiction that goes back as far as Murnau’s Nosferatu in the days of silent film, so it should come as no surprise that three of the six stories in this section have had film or television versions. “Remembering Melody” was not only the first of my works to go before a camera, it remains the only one to be filmed twice—first as a short student film (full of short student actors), then later as an episode of the HBO anthology series The Hitchhiker.

  If you know my work at all, I suspect you’ve heard of “Sandkings.” Until A Song of Ice and Fire, it was the story that I was best known for, far and away the most popular thing I ever did.

  “Sandkings” was the third of the three stories I wrote during that Christmas break in the winter of 1978-79. The inspiration for it came from a guy I knew in college, who hosted Creature Features parties every Saturday. He kept a tank of piranha, and in between the first and the second creature feature, he would sometimes throw a goldfish into the tank, for the amusement of his guests.

  “Sandkings” was also intended to be the first of a series. The strange little shop on the back alley where queer, dangerous items can be bought had long been a familiar trope of fantasy. I thought it might be fun to do a science fiction version. My “strange little shop” was actually going to be a franchise, with branches scattered over light-years, on many different planets. Its mysterious proprietors, Wo & Shade, would figure in each story, but the protagonists would be the customers, like Simon Kress. (Yes, I did begin a second Wo & Shade story, set on ai-Emerel, a world much mentioned in my old future history, but never seen. It was called “Protection” and I wrote 18 pages of it before putting it aside, for reasons that I no longer recall.) If you had asked me back in January 1979 about the three stories I’d just finished, I would have told you that “The Ice Dragon” was going to knock people’s socks off. I ranked it right up there with the best work I’d ever done. I felt “The Way of Cross and Dragon” was damned good too, might even win some awards. And “Sandkings”? Not bad at all. Not near as strong as the other two, mind you, but hey…no one hits a home run every time.

  I have never been so wrong about a story. “Sandkings” sold to Omni, the best-paying market in the field, and became the most popular story they ever published. It won both the Hugo and the Nebula in its year, the only one of my stories ever to accomplish that double. It has been reprinted and anthologized so many times that I’ve lost count, and has earned me more money than two of my novels and most of my TV scripts and screenplays. It was adapted as a graphic novel by DC Comics, and someday soon may be a computer game as well. Hollywood producers flocked to it, and I sold half a dozen options and saw half a dozen different screenplays and treatments before the story was finally filmed for television as the two-hour premiere episode of the new Outer Limits, adapted by my friend Melinda M. Snodgrass.

  Is it the best thing I ever wrote? You be the judge.

  The success of “Sandkings” inspired me to try more SF/horror hybrids, most notably with “Nightflyers,” my haunted starship story.

  I’d put ghosts in a futuristic setting way back as early as “The Exit to San Breta,” but those were actual spirits of the dead. In “Nightflyers” I wanted to see if I could provide a legitimate sfnal explanation for the hauntings.

  The original version of “Nightflyers,” published in Analog with a nice Paul Lehr cover, weighed in at 23,000 words…but even at that length, I felt it was severely compressed, especially in the handling of its secondary characters. (They did not even have names, only job titles.) When Jim Frenkel of Dell Books offered to buy an expanded version of the novella for his new Binary Star series, an attempt to revive the old Ace Doubles concept, I leapt at the opportunity. It is the Binary Star version you’ll find here.

  “Nightflyers” won the Locus Poll as the Best Novella of 1980, but lost the Hugo to Gordon R. Dickson’s “Lost Dorsai” at Denvention. It was soon optioned by Hollywood, and became the first of my works to be made into a feature film. Nightflyers starred Catherine Mary Stewart and Michael Praed, and was so terrific that the director took his name off the film. Large hunks of my story are still recognizable in the movie, although for some inexplicable reason the single scariest sequence in the novella was dropped.

  “The Monkey Treatment” and “The Pear-Shaped Man” both date to my Gerold Kersh period. Kersh was a major writer of the ’40s and ’50s, the author of some excellent mainstream novels like Night and the City as well as a plethora of bizarre, disturbing, delightful short stories, collected in On an Odd Note, Nightshades and Damnations, and Men Without Bones. Because he tended to publish his short fiction in places like Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post rather than Weird Tales or Fantastic Stories, he was little known to fantasy readers even in his own time, and today he seems utterly forgotten. That’s a great shame, as Kersh was a unique voice, a brilliant writer with a gift for taking his readers to some odd corners of the world, where strange, disturbing things are wont to happen. Some small press really needs to gather all of Kersh’s weird fiction together in a book as large as this one, and put him back in print for a new generation of readers.

  “The Monkey Treatment,” the older of the two stories, was easy to write but hard as hell to sell. It seemed to me to be the sort of story that would appeal to a more general readership, so I set out to try and place it with one of the large slicks, Playboy or Penthouse or Omni. Frustration followed. The story elicited admiring comments everywhere it went, but no one seemed to feel it “right for us.” Too strange, they said. Too disturbing. “Boy, is it repulsive,” Ellen Datlow of Omni wrote me, in the same letter where she said how much she wished that she could buy the story.

  I would have tried Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post next, but they were both long defunct by 1981, so in the end I fell back on my usual genre markets, and sold the story to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science-Fiction. Strange and repulsive or not, it was nominated for the Nebula and the Hugo, losing both.

  “The Pear-Shaped Man” had an easier time of it, perhaps because “The Monkey Treatment” had primed the pump. Ellen Datlow had only been an assistant editor at Omni when Robert Sheckley returned “The Monkey Treatment,” but she had moved up to fiction editor by the time I wrote “The Pear-Shaped Man,” and she took it straightaway. It appeared in Omni in 1987, and won one of the first Bram Stoker Awards, given by the newly-formed Horror Writers of America (HWA) for the best horror of the year.

  The founding of the HWA (originally it was going to be called HOWL, for Horror and Occult Writers League, a much cooler name that got howled down by members desperate for respectability) coincided with the great horror boom of the ’80s. Subsequently horror has suffered an even greater bust, a victim of its own excess. Today there are those in publishing who will tell you that horror is dead (“and deservedly so,” others will add).

  As a commercial publishing genre? Yes, horror is dead.

  But monster stories will never die, so long as we remember what it’s like to be afraid.

  In 1986, I edited the horror anthology Night Visions 3 for Dark Harvest. In my introduction, I wrote, “Those who claim that we read horror stories for the same reasons we ride rollercoasters are missing the point. At
the best of times we come away from a rollercoaster with a simple adrenalin high, and that’s not what fiction is about. Like a rollercoaster, a really bad horror story can perhaps make us sick, but that’s as far as the comparison extends. We go to fiction for things beyond those to be found in amusement parks.

  “A good horror story will frighten us, yes. It will keep us awake at night, it will make our flesh crawl, it will creep into our dreams and give new meaning to the darkness. Fear, terror, horror; call it what you will, it drinks from all those cups. But please, don’t confuse the feelings with simple vertigo. The great stories, the ones that linger in our memories and change our lives, are never really about the things that they’re about.

  “Bad horror stories concern themselves with six ways to kill a vampire, and graphic accounts of how the rats ate Billy’s genitalia. Good horror stories are about larger things. About hope and despair. About love and hatred, lust and jealousy. About friendship and adolescence and sexuality and rage, loneliness and alienation and psychosis, courage and cowardice, the human mind and body and spirit under stress and in agony, the human heart in unending conflict with itself. Good horror stories make us look at our reflections in dark distorting mirrors, where we glimpse things that disturb us, things that we did not really want to look at. Horror looks into the shadows of the human soul, at the fears and rages that live within us all.

  “But darkness is meaningless without light, and horror is pointless without beauty. The best horror stories are stories first and horror second, and however much they scare us, they do more than that as well. They have room in them for laughter as well as screams, for triumph and tenderness as well as tragedy. They concern themselves not simply with fear, but with life in all its infinite variety, with love and death and birth and hope and lust and transcendence, with the whole range of experiences and emotions that make up the human condition. Their characters are people, people who linger in our imagination, people like those around us, people who do not exist solely to be the objects of violent slaughter in chapter four. The best horror stories tell us truths.”

  That was almost twenty years ago, but I stand by every word.

  MEATHOUSE MAN

  I

  IN THE MEATHOUSE

  THEY CAME STRAIGHT FROM THE ORE-FIELDS THAT FIRST TIME, TRAGER with the others, the older boys, the almost-men who worked their corpses next to his. Cox was the oldest of the group, and he’d been around the most, and he said that Trager had to come even if he didn’t want to. Then one of the others laughed and said that Trager wouldn’t even know what to do, but Cox the kind-of leader shoved him until he was quiet. And when payday came, Trager trailed the rest to the meathouse, scared but somehow eager, and he paid his money to a man downstairs and got a room key.

  He came into the dim room trembling, nervous. The others had gone to other rooms, had left him alone with her (no, it, not her but it, he reminded himself, and promptly forgot again). In a shabby gray cubicle with a single smoky light.

  He stank of sweat and sulfur, like all who walked the streets of Skrakky, but there was no help for that. It would be better if he could bathe first, but the room did not have a bath. Just a sink, double bed with sheets that looked dirty even in the dimness, a corpse.

  She lay there naked, staring at nothing, breathing shallow breaths. Her legs were spread; ready. Was she always that way, Trager wondered, or had the man before him arranged her like that? He didn’t know. He knew how to do it (he did, he did, he’d read the books Cox gave him, and there were films you could see, and all sorts of things), but he didn’t know much of anything else. Except maybe how to handle corpses. That he was good at, the youngest handler on Skrakky, but he had to be. They had forced him into the handlers’ school when his mother died, and they made him learn, so that was the thing he did. This, this he had never done (but he knew how, yes, yes, he did); it was his first time.

  He came to the bed slowly and sat to a chorus of creaking springs. He touched her and the flesh was warm. Of course. She was not a corpse, not really, no; the body was alive enough, a heartbeat under the heavy white breasts, she breathed. Only the brain was gone, ripped from her, replaced with a deadman’s synthabrain. She was meat now, an extra body for a corpsehandler to control, just like the crew he worked each day under sulfur skies. She was not a woman. So it did not matter that Trager was just a boy, a jowly frog-faced boy who smelled of Skrakky. She (no it, remember?) would not care, could not care.

  Emboldened, aroused and hard, the boy stripped off his corpsehandler’s clothing and climbed in bed with the female meat. He was very excited; his hands shook as he stroked her, studied her. Her skin was very white, her hair dark and long, but even the boy could not call her pretty. Her face was too flat and wide, her mouth hung open, and her limbs were loose and sagging with fat.

  On her huge breasts, all around the fat dark nipples, the last customer had left tooth-marks where he’d chewed her. Trager touched the marks tentatively, traced them with a finger. Then, sheepish about his hesitations, he grabbed one breast, squeezed it hard, pinched the nipple until he imagined a real girl would squeal with pain. The corpse did not move. Still squeezing, he rolled over on her and took the other breast into his mouth.

  And the corpse responded.

  She thrust up at him, hard, and meaty arms wrapped around his pimpled back to pull him to her. Trager groaned and reached down between her legs. She was hot, wet, excited. He trembled. How did they do that? Could she really get excited without a mind, or did they have lubricating tubes stuck into her, or what?

  Then he stopped caring. He fumbled, found his penis, put it into her, thrust. The corpse hooked her legs around him and thrust back. It felt good, real good, better than anything he’d ever done to himself, and in some obscure way he felt proud that she was so wet and excited.

  It only took a few strokes; he was too new, too young, too eager to last long. A few strokes was all he needed—but it was all she needed too. They came together, a red flush washing over her skin as she arched against him and shook soundlessly.

  Afterwards she lay again like a corpse.

  Trager was drained and satisfied, but he had more time left, and he was determined to get his money’s worth. He explored her thoroughly, sticking his fingers everywhere they would go, touching her everywhere, rolling it over, looking at everything. The corpse moved like dead meat.

  He left her as he’d found her, lying face up on the bed with her legs apart. Meathouse courtesy.

  THE HORIZON WAS A WALL OF FACTORIES, ALL FACTORIES, VAST BELCHING factories that sent red shadows to flick against the sulfur-dark skies. The boy saw but hardly noticed. He was strapped in place high atop his automill, two stories up on a monster machine of corroding yellow-painted metal with savage teeth of diamond and duralloy, and his eyes were blurred with triple images. Clear and strong and hard he saw the control panel before him, the wheel, the fuel-feed, the bright handle of the ore-scoops, the banks of light that would tell of trouble in the refinery under his feet, the brake and emergency brake. But that was not all he saw. Dimly, faintly, there were echoes; overlaid images of two other control cabs, almost identical to his, where corpse hands moved clumsily over the instruments.

  Trager moved those hands, slow and careful, while another part of his mind held his own hands, his real hands, very still. The corpse controller hummed thinly on his belt.

  On either side of him, the other two automills moved into flanking positions. The corpse hands squeezed the brakes; the machines rumbled to a halt. On the edge of the great sloping pit, they stood in a row, shabby pitted juggernauts ready to descend into the gloom. The pit was growing steadily larger; each day new layers of rock and ore were stripped away.

  Once a mountain range had stood here, but Trager did not remember that.

  The rest was easy. The automills were aligned now. To move the crew in unison was a cinch, any decent handler could do that. It was only when you had to keep several corpses busy at several different t
asks that things got tricky. But a good corpsehandler could do that too. Eight-crews were not unknown to veterans; eight bodies linked to a single corpse controller moved by a single mind and eight synthabrains. The deadmen were each tuned to one controller, and only one; the handler who wore that controller and thought corpse-thoughts in its proximity field could move those deadmen like secondary bodies. Or like his own body. If he was good enough.

  Trager checked his filtermask and earplugs quickly, then touched the fuel-feed, engaged, flicked on the laser-knives and the drills. His corpses echoed his moves, and pulses of light spit through the twilight of Skrakky. Even through his plugs he could hear the awful whine as the ore-scoops revved up and lowered. The rock-eating maw of an automill was even wider than the machine was tall.

  Rumbling and screeching, in perfect formation, Trager and his corpse crew descended into the pit. Before they reached the factories on the far side of the plain, tons of metal would have been torn from the earth, melted and refined and processed, while the worthless rock was reduced to powder and blown out into the already unbreathable air. He would deliver finished steel at dusk, on the horizon.

  He was a good handler, Trager thought as the automills started down. But the handler in the meathouse—now, she must be an artist. He imagined her down in the cellar somewhere, watching each of her corpses through holos and psi circuits, humping them all to please her patrons. Was it just a fluke, then, that his fuck had been so perfect? Or was she always that good? But how, how, to move a dozen corpses without even being near them, to have them doing different things, to keep them all excited, to match the needs and rhythm of each customer so exactly?