Return to Gehenna
This story first appeared in ‘Dante’s Disciples’, edited by Pete Crowther, (White Wolf, 1996). The contributors were asked to write about gateways to hell. My idea of hell is the mundane reality the protagonist, Lucy, lives in before all the weird stuff starts happening to her! I’ve had day jobs very similar to Lucy’s, and they were often a torment to me. I’d sit there watching the clock, desperate to go home, wishing my life away. There must be more to life than this, I’d think, and thankfully there was, because through sheer tenacity, if not a hideous fear of having to return to that existence, I’ve made a career out of doing something I really love. Another thing touched upon briefly in this piece is the sadness of seeing people you love being sucked away from you into a life of mediocrity and mundaneity. So many times in my life I’ve had to watch the birds of bright plumage shed their gorgeous feathers to become drab and grey. Why does that happen? Why do people feel obliged to conform and shed all the vivacity, sparkle, sense of wonder and exuberance they enjoyed in youth? I didn’t believe that this was the way things had to be when I wrote this story and I don’t believe it now. But still it happens, and I still have a lot more to say on the subject at some point! In ‘Return to Gehenna’, the protagonist’s gateway to hell is actually her doorway to sanctuary.
By the River of If Only, in the Land of Might Have Been
Another story of the Wraeththu, this piece was written way back in 1988 and appeared in a fanzine I published with friends called ‘Paragenesis’. We had formed a creative collective called ‘Thirteenth Key’, which sadly had only a short life. It was a wild, exciting time, when anything seemed possible and the first Wraeththu novels had only just been launched. At the time, I’d planned to write many more Wraeththu novels, but my hopes were crushed by the publishing industry, so that I wasn’t able to return to that world until 15 years later. However, ‘By the River of If Only...’ captures the spirit of that optimistic time. The piece also appeared in ‘Fear’ magazine in 1991.
Fire Born
This story was published in the magazine ‘Science Fiction Age’ in 1996. It is again one of my Grigori spin-offs, and was created while I was writing ‘Scenting Hallowed Blood’. ‘Fire Born’ derives from a vision experienced by a psychic I knew who helped me with the research for the Grigori novels. There wasn’t really a place for this material in the trilogy, but it was too good to waste.
To me, this story has a mood and flavour all of its own. To write it, I interviewed the psychic about their experience and recorded our conversation. They had visualised meeting a strange community of fairy chimneys, which are towering rock formations like those found in Cappadocia. It was almost as if they had visited this place in waking life, because their recall of the scene was incredibly detailed. In the visualisation, the psychic met a peculiar old woman who showed them the secrets of a potent elixir that could bestow either immortality or death. With base material this strong and vivid, it was fairly easy to come up with a plot.
Re-reading this story, I do find it rather harsh and bitter – perhaps a reflection of how I was feeling at the time. It was republished in ‘The Oracle Lips’ collection.
Heir to a Tendency
This story was written for the second volume in Roz Kaveney’s shared world anthologies, ‘The Weerde’. Unfortunately, my contribution, ‘Heir to a Tendency’, wasn’t taken up. However, I never like to waste stories, and as my first Weerde piece had transformed neatly into a Grigori story, I decided to do the same for the second. ‘Heir to a Tendency’ became a prequel to the Grigori trilogy. Peverel Othman appears in it, and the time frame is round about a hundred years before ‘Stalking Tender Prey’. I have never bothered to send this piece off anywhere and for quite some time the transformation process wasn’t quite finished. There were still a few Weerde serial numbers that needed filing off. Then I needed unpublished stories to be included in ‘The Oracle Lips’ collection, so got round to finishing it.
Spinning for Gold
Back in the 80s, I wrote a series of stories that were retellings of fairy tales. ‘Spinning for Gold’ was based upon ‘Rumpelstiltskin’. These pieces languished unused for decades until Stark House republished my novella ‘The Thorn Boy’ in 2002. The editor wanted me to include several short stories in the book. As ‘The Thorn Boy’ was set in the world of the Magravandias Chronicles, I decided that I’d revamp my fairy tales to be in the same universe.
In folklore, you acquire power over supernatural creatures, in particular goblins and fairies, when you can learn their true names. Another version of this story can be found in the Scottish folk tale ‘Whoopity Stoorie’.
‘Spinning for Gold’ is set in the land of Cos, and its king is called Ashalan, as he is in the Magravandias trilogy, but this is a distant ancestor of that character. If the Magravandias stories are set in an alternate Victorian Age, then these fairy tales are in the Medieval Age of that world. This story, and its two sequels, ‘The Nothing Child’ and ‘Living with the Angel’ can be seen as different chapters of the same tale.
The Nothing Child
This piece retells a lesser-known Scottish fairy tale, ‘Nicht Nacht Nothing’. It illustrates how magic takes the path of least resistance and you should be very careful indeed when making deals with supernatural beings, especially in the choice of words used to make the deal.
As he grows older, Jadrin, the protagonist of ‘Spinning for Gold’, becomes a distinctly darker character, which to me made him more interesting. When I wrote this piece, my fascination with capricious angels was already in full flight, and Lailahel, the angel of conception, is a precursor to the fallen angels of the Grigori trilogy. This story also appeared in Stark House’s production of ‘The Thorn Boy and Other Dreams of Dark Desire’ in 2002.
Living With the Angel
Part three of the short series of stories begun with ‘Spinning for Gold’. There are echoes of the androgynous Wraeththu in this piece, probably because it was written while I was working on ‘The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit’ in 1985. At the time, I a pondering deeply the concept of gender and identification, although probably wouldn’t have thought of it in those terms. I must have been playing with these ideas when I devised Variel’s fate in this piece, because if I had followed the premise and theme of the previous two stories in the sequence, it wouldn’t have happened.
The Oracle Lips
Ideas for short stories strike me at odd times. The seed of ‘The Oracle Lips’ occurred in the back of a friend’s car, in an underground car park in Wolverhampton, a town in the Midlands. A group of us were there for a day’s shopping, and before we left the car, I touched up my lipstick. I blotted my lips on a tissue and then the idea came. I said to my friend, ‘Lip prints are as personal as marks on a palm. I wonder if you could tell someone’s fortune from them.’ I thought about this again throughout the day, and by the end of it, I had the beginning of a story. It was fortuitous, because I’d recently been contacted by Laurence Schimel to submit a piece for his ‘Fortune Tellers’ anthology, which was published in 1998. Clearly, the subject of prognostication was burning away at the back of my mind. I wanted to do something different with the theme, rather than resort to a tale about crystal balls or tarot cards.
The setting for the character Francesca’s flat in London is a real place near King’s Cross. In the middle of the city, there’s a quiet alley, with these amazing Italianate buildings. I just had to put them in a story some time.
Storm Constantine, Mythangelus
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