The Ape's Wife Part 18

"Forgive me, Golden Mother, but you are. You are seeking refuge in guilt that is not your guilt."

"I am not your mother," Ann tells her. "I have never been anyone's mother."

A branch whips around and catches her in the face, a leaf's razor edge to draw a nasty cut across her forehead. But the pain slices cleanly through exhaustion and shock and brings her suddenly back to herself, back to this night and this moment, their mad, headlong dash from the river to the gate. The Cyclopean wall rises up before them, towering above the tree tops. There cannot now be more than a hundred yards remaining between them and the safety of the gate, but the ape is so very close behind. A fire-eyed demon who refuses to be so easily cheated of his prize by mere mortal men. The jungle cringes around them, flinching at the cacophony of Kong's approach, and even the air seems to draw back from that typhoon of muscle and fury, his angry roars and thunderous footfalls to divide all creation. Her right hand is gripped tightly in Jack's left, and he's all but dragging her forward. Ann can no longer feel her bare feet, which have been bruised and gouged and torn, and it is a miracle she can still run at all. Now, she can make out the dim silhouettes of men standing atop the wall, white men with guns and guttering torches, and, for a moment, she allows herself to hope.

"You are needed, Golden Mother," the girl says, and then she steps through the open mouth of the shop window. The blistering sun shimmers off her smooth, dark skin. "You are needed here and now," she says. "That night and every way that it might have gone, but did not, are pa.s.sed forever beyond your reach."

"You don't see what I can see," Ann tells the girl, hearing the desperation and resentment in her own voice.

And what she sees is the wall and that last barrier of banyan figs and tree ferns. What she sees is the open gate and the way out of this nightmare, the road home.

"Only dreams," the girl says, not unkindly, and she takes a step nearer the red stream. "Only the phantoms of things that have never happened and never will."

"No," says Ann, and she shakes her head. "We made it to the gate. Jack and I both, together. We ran and we ran and we ran, and the ape was right there on top of us all the way, so close that I could smell his breath. But we didn't look back, not even once. We ran, and, in the end, we made it to the gate."

"No, Golden Mother. It did not happen that way."

One of the sailors on the wall is shouting a warning now, and at first, Ann believes it's only because he can see Kong behind them. But then something huge lunges from the underbrush, all scales and k.n.o.bby scutes, scrabbling talons and the blue-green iridescent flash of eyes fashioned for night hunting. The high, sharp quills sprouting from the creature's backbone clatter one against the other like bony castanets, and it s.n.a.t.c.hes Jack Driscoll in its saurian jaws and drags him screaming into the reedy shadows. On the wall, someone shouts, and she hears the staccato report of rifle fire.

The brown girl stands on the far side of the stream flowing along Fifth Avenue, the tall gra.s.s murmuring about her knees. "You have become lost in All-At-Once time, and you must find your way back from the Everywhen. I can help."

"I do not need your help," Ann snarls. "You keep away from me, you G.o.dd.a.m.n, filthy heathen."

Beneath the vast, star-specked Indonesian sky, Ann Darrow stands alone. Jack is gone, taken by some unnamable abomination, and in another second the ape will be upon her. This is when she realizes that she's bleeding, a dark bloom unfolding from her right breast, staining the gossamer rags that are all that remain of her dress and underclothes. She doesn't yet feel the sting of the bullet, a single shot gone wild, intended for Jack's attacker, but finding her, instead. I do not blame you, she thinks, slowly collapsing, going down onto her knees in the thick carpet of moss and ferns. It was an accident, and I do not blame anyone.

"That is a lie," the girl says from the other side of the red stream. "You do blame them, Golden Mother, and you blame yourself, most of all."

Ann stares up at the dilapidated skyline of a city as lost in time as she, and the Vault of Heaven turns above them like a dime-store kaleidoscope.

Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time. Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime? Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime; Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?

"When does this end?" she asks, asking the girl or herself or no one at all. "Where does it end?"

"Take my hand," the girl replies and reaches out to Ann, a bridge spanning the rill and time and spanning all these endless possibilities. "Take my hand and come back over. Just step across and stand with me."

"No," Ann hears herself say, though it isn't at all what she wanted to say or what she meant to say. "No, I can't do that. I'm sorry."

And the air around her reeks of hay and sawdust, human filth and beer and cigarette smoke, and the sideshow barker is howling his line of ballyhoo to all the rubes who've paid their two-bits to get a seat under the tent. All the yokels and hayseeds who have come to point and whisper and laugh and gawk at the figure cowering inside the cage.

"Them bars there, they are solid carbon steel, mind you," the barker informs them. "Manufactured special for us by the same Pittsburgh firm that supplies prison bars to Alcatraz. Ain't nothing else known to man strong enough to contain her, and if not for those iron bars, well...rest a.s.sured, my good people, we have not in the least exaggerated the threat she poses to life and limb, in the absence of such precautions."

Inside the cage, Ann squats in a corner, staring out at all the faces staring in. Only she has not been Ann Darrow in years just ask the barker or the garish canvas flaps rattling in the chilly breeze of an Indiana autumn evening. She is the Ape Woman of Sumatra, captured at great personal risk by intrepid explorers and hauled out into the incandescent light of the Twentieth Century. She is naked, except for the moth-eaten sc.r.a.ps of buffalo and bear pelts they have given her to wear. Every inch of exposed skin is smeared with dirt and offal and whatever other filth has acc.u.mulated in her cage since it was last mucked out. Her snarled and matted hair hangs in her face, and there's nothing the least bit human in the guttural serenade of growls and hoots and yaps that escapes her lips.

The barker slams his walking cane against the iron bars, and she throws her head back and howls. A woman in the front row faints and has to be carried outside.

"She was the queen and the G.o.ddess of the strange world she knew," bellows the barker, "but now she comes to civilization, merely a captive, a show to gratify your curiosity. Learned men at colleges forsaking the words of the Good Book proclaim that we are all descended from monkeys. And, I'll tell you, seeing this wretched b.i.t.c.h, I am almost tempted to believe them, and also to suspect that in dark and far-flung corners of the globe there exist to this day beings still more simian than human, lower even than your ordinary n.i.g.g.e.rs, hottentots, negritos, and lowly African pygmies."

Ann Darrow stands on the muddy bank of the red stream, and the girl from the ruined and vine-draped jewelry shop holds out her hand, the brown-skinned girl who has somehow found her way into the most secret, tortured recesses of Ann's consciousness.

"The world is still here," the girl says, "only waiting for you to return."

"I have heard another tale of her origin," the barker confides. "But I must warn you, it is not fit for the faint of heart or the ears of decent Christian women."

There is a long pause, while two or three of the women rise from their folding chairs and hurriedly leave the tent. The barker tugs at his pink suspenders and grins an enormous, satisfied grin, then glances into the cage.

"As I was saying," he continues, "there is another story. The Chinaman who sold me this pitiful oddity of human devolution said that its mother was born of French aristocracy, the lone survivor of a calamitous shipwreck, cast ash.o.r.e on black volcanic sands. There, in the hideous misery and perdition of that Sumatran wilderness, the poor woman was defiled by some l.u.s.tful species of jungle imp, though whether it were chimp or baboon I cannot say."

There is a collective gasp from the men and women inside the tent, and the barker rattles the bars again, eliciting another irate howl from its occupant.

"And here before you is the foul sp.a.w.n of that unnatural union of anthropoid and womankind. The aged Celestial confided to me that the mother expired shortly after giving birth, G.o.d rest her immortal soul. Her death was a mercy, I should think, as she would have lived always in shame and horror at having borne into the world this shameful, misbegotten progeny."

"Take my hand," the girl says, reaching into the iron cage. "You do not have to stay here. Take my hand, Golden Mother, and I will help you find the path."

There below the hairy black tumulus, the great slumbering t.i.tan belching forth the headwaters of all the earth's rivers, Ann Darrow takes a single hesitant step into the red stream. This is the most perilous part of the journey, she thinks, reaching to accept the girl's outstretched hand. It wants me, this torrent, and if I am not careful, it will pull me down and drown me for my trespa.s.ses.

"It's only a little ways more," the girl tells her and smiles. "Just step across to me."

The barker raps his silver-handled walking cane sharply against the bars of the cage, so that Ann remembers where she is and when, and doing so, forgets herself again. For the benefit of all those licentious, ogling eyes, all those slack jaws that have paid precious quarters to be shocked and t.i.tillated, she bites the head off a live hen, and when she has eaten her fill of the bird, she spreads her thighs and m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.es for the delight of her audience with filthy, bloodstained fingers.

Elsewhen, she takes another step towards the girl, and the softly gurgling stream wraps itself greedily about her calves. Her feet sink deeply into the slimy bottom, and the sinuous, clammy bodies of conger eels and salamanders wriggle between her ankles and twine themselves about her legs. She cannot reach the girl, and the opposite bank may as well be a thousand miles away.

In a smoke-filled screening room, Ann Darrow sits beside Carl Denham while the footage he shot on the island almost a year ago flickers across the screen at twenty-four frames per second. They are not alone, the room half-filled with low-level studio men from RKO and Paramount and Universal and a couple of would-be financiers lured here by the Hollywood rumor mill. Ann watches the images revealed in grainy shades of grey, in overexposed whites and underexposed smudges of black.

"What exactly are we supposed to be looking at?" someone asks, impatiently.

"We shot this stuff from the top of the wall, once Englehorn's men had managed to frighten away all the G.o.dd.a.m.n tar babies. Just wait. It's coming."

"Denham, we've already been sitting here half an hour. This s.h.i.t's pretty underwhelming, you ask me. You're better off sticking to the safari pictures."

"It's coming," Denham insists and chomps anxiously at the stem of his pipe.

And Ann knows he's right, that it's coming, because this is not the first time she's seen the footage. Up there on the screen, the eye of the camera looks out over the jungle canopy, and it always reminds her of Gustave Dore's visions of Eden from her mother's copy of Paradise Lost, or the ill.u.s.trations of lush Pre-Adamite landscapes from a geology book she once perused in the New York Public Library.

"Honestly, Mr. Denham," the man from RKO sighs. "I've got a meeting in twenty minutes "

"There," Denham says, pointing at the screen. "There it is. Right f.u.c.king there. Do you see it?"

And the studio men and the would-be financiers fall silent as the beast's head and shoulders emerge from the tangle of vines and orchid-encrusted branches and wide palm fronds. It stops and turns its mammoth head towards the camera, glaring hatefully up at the wall and directly into the smoke-filled room, across a million years and nine thousand miles. There is a dreadful, unexpected intelligence in those dark eyes as the creature tries to comprehend the purpose of the weird, pale men and their hand-crank contraption perched there on the wall above it. Its lips fold back, baring gigantic canines, eyeteeth longer than a grown man's hand, and there is a low, rumbling sound, then a screeching sort of yell, before the thing the natives called Kong turns and vanishes back into the forest.

"Great G.o.d," the Universal man whispers.

"Yes, gentlemen," says Denham, sounding very pleased with himself and no longer the least bit anxious, certain that he has them all right where he wants them. "That's just exactly what those tar babies think. They worship it and offer up human sacrifices. Why, they wanted Ann here. Offered us six of their women so she could become the bride of Kong. And there's our story, gentlemen."

"Great G.o.d," the Universal man says again, louder than before.

"But an expedition like this costs money," Denham tells them, getting down to bra.s.s tacks as the reel ends and the lights come up. "I mean to make a picture the whole d.a.m.n world's gonna pay to see, and I can't do that without committed backers."

"Excuse me," Ann says, rising from her seat, feeling sick and dizzy and wanting to be away from these men and all their talk of profit and spectacle, wanting to drive the sight of the ape from her mind, once and for all.

"I'm fine, really," she tells them. "I just need some fresh air."

On the far side of the stream, the brown girl urges her forward; no more than twenty feet left to go and Ann will have reached the other side.

"You're waking up," the girl says. "You're almost there. Give me your hand."

I'm only going over Jordan I'm only going over home...

And the moments flash and glimmer as the dream breaks apart around her, and the barker rattles the iron bars of a stinking cage, and her empty stomach rumbles as she watches men and women bending over their plates in a lunch room, and she sits on a bench in an alcove on the third floor of the American Museum of Natural History. Crossing the red stream, Ann Darrow hemorrhages time and possibility, all these seconds and hours and days vomited forth like a bellyful of tainted meals. She shuts her eyes and takes another step, sinking even deeper in the mud, the blood risen now as high as her waist. Here is the morning they brought her down from the Empire State Building, and the morning she wakes in her nest on Skull Mountain, and the night she watched Jack Driscoll devoured well within sight of the archaic gates. Here's the Bowery tenement, and here the screening room, and here a fallen Manhattan, crumbling and lost in the storm-tossed gulf of eons, set adrift no differently than she has set herself adrift. Every moment, all at once, each as real as every other; never mind the contradictions; each moment d.a.m.ned and equally inevitable, all following from a stolen apple and the man who paid the Greek a dollar to look the other way.

The world is a steamroller.

Once I built a railroad; now it's done.

She stands alone in the seaward lee of the great wall and knows that its gates have been forever shut against her and all the daughters of men yet to come. This hallowed, living wall of human bone and sinew erected to protect what sc.r.a.p of Paradise lies inside, not the dissolute, iniquitous world of men sprawling beyond its borders. Winged Cherubim stand guard on either side, and in their leonine forepaws they grasp flaming swords forged in unknown furnaces before the coming of the World, fiery brands that reach all the way to the sky and about which spin the hearts of newborn hurricanes. The molten eyes of the Cherubim watch her every move, and their indifferent minds know her every secret thought, these dispa.s.sionate servants of the vengeful G.o.d of her father and her mother. Neither tears nor all her words will ever wring mercy from these sentinels, for they know precisely what she is, and they know her crimes.

I am she who cries out, and I am cast forth upon the face of the earth.

The starving, ragged woman who stole an apple. Starving in body and in mind, starving in spirit, if so base a thing as she can be said to possess a soul. Starving, and ragged in all ways.

I am the members of my mother.

I am the barren one and many are her sons.

I am she whose wedding is great, and I have not taken a husband.

And as is the way of all exiles, she cannot kill hope that her exile will one day end. Even the withering gaze of the Cherubim cannot kill that hope, and so hope is the cruelest reward.

Brother, can you spare a dime?

"Take my hand," the girl says, and Ann Darrow feels herself grown weightless and buoyed from that foul brook, hauled free of the mora.s.s of her own nightmares and regret onto a clean sh.o.r.e of verdant mosses and zoysiagra.s.s, bamboo and reeds, and the girl leans down and kisses her gently on the forehead. The girl smells like sweat and nutmeg and the pungent yellow pigment dabbed across her cheeks. The girl is salvation.

"You have come home to us, Golden Mother," she says, and there are tears in her eyes.

"You don't see," Ann whispers, the words slipping out across her tongue and teeth and lips like her own ghost's death rattle. If the jungle air were not so still and heavy, not so turgid with the smells of living and dying, decay and birth and conception, she's sure it would lift her as easily as it might a stray feather and carry her away. She lies very still, her head cradled in the girl's lap, and the stream flowing past them is only water and the random detritus of any forest stream.

"The world blinds those who cannot close their eyes," the girl tells her. "You were not always a G.o.d and have come here from some outer, dissolute world, so it may be you were never taught how to travel that path and not become lost in All-At-Once time."

Ann Darrow digs her fingers into the soft, damp earth, driving them into the loam of the jungle floor, holding on and still expecting this scene to shift, to unfurl, to send her tumbling pell-mell and head over heels into some other now, some other where.

And sometime later, when she's strong enough to stand again, and the sickening vertiginous sensation of fluidity has at last begun to ebb, the girl helps Ann to her feet, and together they follow the narrow dirt trail leading back up this long ravine to the temple. Like Ann, the girl is naked save a leather breechcloth tied about her waist. They walk together beneath the sagging boughs of trees that must have been old before Ann's great-great grandmothers were born, and here and there is ample evidence of the civilization that ruled the island in some murky, immemorial past glimpses of great stone idols worn away by time and rain and the humid air, disintegrating walls and archways leaning at such precarious angles Ann cannot fathom why they have not yet succ.u.mbed to gravity. Crumbling bas-reliefs depicting the loathsome G.o.ds and demons and the bizarre reptilian denizens of this place. As they draw nearer to the temple, the ruins become somewhat more intact, though even here the splayed roots of the trees are slowly forcing the masonry apart. The roots put Ann in mind of the tentacles of gargantuan octopuses or cuttlefish, and that is how she envisions the spirit of the jungles and marshes fanning out around this ridge grey tentacles advancing inch by inch, year by year, inexorably reclaiming what has been theirs all along.

As she and the girl begin to climb the steep, crooked steps leading up from the deep ravine stones smoothed by untold generations of footsteps Ann stops to catch her breath and asks the brown girl how she knew where to look, how it was she found her at the stream. But the girl only stares at her, confused and uncomprehending, and then she frowns and shakes her head and says something in the native tongue. In Anne's long years on the island, since the Venture deserted her and sailed away with what remained of the dead ape, she has never learned more than a few words of that language, and she has never tried to teach this girl, nor any of her people, English. The girl looks back the way they've come; she presses the fingers of her left hand against her breast, above her heart, then uses the same hand to motion towards Ann.

Life is just a bowl of cherries.

Don't take it serious; it's too mysterious.

By sunset, Ann has taken her place on the rough-hewn throne carved from beds of coral limestone thrust up from the seafloor in the throes of the island's cataclysmic genesis. As night begins to gather once again, torches are lit, and the people come bearing sweet-smelling baskets of flowers and fruit, fish and the roasted flesh of gulls and rats and crocodiles. They lay multicolored garlands and strings of pearls at her feet, a necklace of ankylosaur teeth, rodent claws, and monkey vertebrae, and she is only the Golden Mother once again. They bow and genuflect, and the tropical night rings out with joyous songs she cannot understand. The men and woman decorate their bodies with yellow paint in an effort to emulate Ann's blonde hair, and a sort of pantomime is acted out for her benefit, as it is once every month, on the night of the new moon. She does not need to understand their words to grasp its meaning the coming of the Venture from somewhere far away, Ann offered up as the bride of a G.o.d, her marriage and the death of Kong, and the obligatory ascent of the Golden Mother from a h.e.l.lish underworld to preside in his stead. She who steals a G.o.d's heart must herself become a G.o.d.

The end of one myth and the beginning of another, the turning of a page. I am not lost, Ann thinks. I am right here, right now here and now where, surely, I must belong, and she watches the glowing bonfire embers rising up to meet the dark sky. She knows she will see that terrible black hill again, the hill that is not a hill and its fetid crimson river, but she knows, too, that there will always be a road back from her dreams, from that All-At-Once tapestry of possibility and penitence. In her dreams, she will be lost and wander those treacherous, deceitful paths of Might-Have-Been, and always she will wake and find herself once more.

Notes.

"The Steam Dancer (1896)" ~ I strongly suspect this is the most reprinted of the recent crop of "steampunk" stories. Fortunately, I'm extremely fond of it. "The Steam Dancer (1896)" originally appeared in the June 2007 (#19) issue of my monthly e-zine, Sirenia Digest, and has since been reprinted in Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy (2008), Steampunk Reloaded (2010), The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (2012), and Lightspeed Magazine (2012) where it can be found as in both prose and audio format. Frankly, I think this story deserved a Nebula. Or a Hugo. Either one. Probably not both, though; I'm not greedy. It was written in June 2007.

"The Maltese Unicorn" ~ Here's a story that began as a joke. Ellen Datlow had invited me to write a story for Supernatural Noir, an anthology of, well, supernatural noir. I'm a huge fan of noir film and prose but had a lot of trouble coming up with a story I wanted to write. In my blog (5/6/10), I wrote, "Last night, trying to sleep, thinking about potential stories, the t.i.tle 'The Maltese Unicorn' popped into my head. Gagh. No, I will not be writing a story called 'The Maltese Unicorn.' I wanted to punch myself in the face just for thinking of it." But then, the next day, the t.i.tle lingered, and a plot involving a d.i.l.d.o carved from a unicorn's horn began to take shape. I sheepishly pitched it to Ellen. She said, "Go for it!" So, I did. The homages to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are, of course, obvious. The story was written in May and June of 2010.

"One Tree Hill (The World As Cataclysm)" ~ This is the newest of the stories included in this collection, written in July 2012 for Issue #80 of Sirenia Digest. It has a sort of quiet wrongness weirdness about it that I'm almost always striving for, but rarely achieve.

"The Collier's Venus (1898)" ~ Few short stories have given me as much trouble as this one did. I'm pretty sure it actually did not want to be written. But it was, in October and November 2008, for Ellen Datlow's Naked City anthology. It's one of five stories I've set in the fictional frontier town of Cherry Creek, Colorado. I wanted the t.i.tle to be "The Automatic Mastodon," but the story, it had other plans.

"Galapagos" ~ Jonathan Strahan asked me to write a story for Eclipse Three, but I can't recall much about this story's genesis. I do, however, recall the t.i.tle had originally been intended for a different story entirely, and that "Galapagos" was a b.i.t.c.h to get started. It earned a place on the Honor List for the 2009 James Tiptree, Jr. Award, for its exploration of gender, and of that I am very, very proud.

"Tall Bodies" ~ Another story from Sirenia Digest #80, and like "One Tree Hill," this one went right where I wanted it to go. The feat of capturing the inexplicable and knowing that it must remain inexplicable, or there was no point in writing the d.a.m.ned thing. I suspect this story was, at least in part, inspired by Richard A. Kirk's beautiful, disarming endpapers to mine and Poppy Z. Brite's 2001 collaboration, Wrong Things.

"As Red As Red" ~ Written in March and April of 2009, for Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas' Haunted Legends anthology, it was inspired in part by a couple of miserably cold, slushy days in Newport. And, too, by pretty much everything that inspired The Red Tree, which I'd finished the previous October. In a sense, "As Red As Red" is a sideways footnote to the novel, exploring a few bits of Rhode Island folklore that didn't make the final cut. But it also presages some of the major themes of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, and so acts as a sort of bridge between those two novels. The story was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award.

"Hydraguros" ~ This story originally appeared in Sirenia Digest #50 (January 2010), and was then reprinted in Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy 2. It's a prime example of the sort of science fiction story that I most enjoy writing. I'm not sure what to call it, though. Near future neo-noir? David Bowie's Outside (1995) first led me to discovering this voice, this approach, which I have also employed in tales like "In View of Nothing" and "A Season of Broken Dolls." Two years on, "Hydraguros" remains a personal favorite.

"Slouching Towards the House of Gla.s.s Coffins" ~ And here's another sort of science fiction entirely. This story was written in August 2011, for Sirenia Digest #69. I keep going back to Mars. This story bears the mark of my frustration with the way that almost all science fiction ignores the reality of linguistic evolution, largely, I suspect because working out and employing the results of such phenomena as unidirectional short-term drift and cyclic long-term drift is simply to much trouble. Add to that my suspicion that most readers don't want to have to work that hard, and, unfortunately, the end product is a lopsided undertaking. Writers imagine radically new technologies and cultures, but ignore that most fundamental aspect of story: the language by which it is conveyed. With "Slouching Towards the House of Gla.s.s Coffins," I only begin to superficially address the problem; I've done so to much greater degrees in some of my (not surprisingly) more obscure sf. Also, I should probably mention this story shares quite a bit in common with an earlier piece, "Bradbury Weather."

"Tidal Forces" ~ Another story that first appeared in Sirenia Digest (#55). It was later reprinted in Jonathan Strahan's Eclipse Four. I wanted to write something about individual dissolution, something about a personal apocalypse, and about intimacy and the lengths that may be necessary to save the ones we love. It's an odd tale, as mine go, in that it has, I think, a "happy ending." Also, only after finishing "Tidal Forces" did I realize that I'd already written almost the exact story twice before: "Sanderlings" (2010) and "The Bone's Prayer" (2009). It was an eerie realization. Regardless, I finally got it right with "Tidal Forces," which was written in June 2010, and was chosen for Jonathan Strahan's The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Six (Jonathan really liked this story!).

"The Sea Troll's Daughter" ~ I was approached by Lou Anders and Jonathan Strahan to write a sword and sorcery story, which was a thing I'd never even attempted. After a bit of dithering, a sort of feminist retelling of Beowulf occurred to me (I very rarely consider my stories to have any sort of sociopolitical slant, so this one is also unusual in that respect). The original t.i.tle was "Wormchild," though I discarded that almost immediately. Written in June and July of 2009, it first appeared in Swords and Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery (2010), and was later reprinted in The Sword and Sorcery Anthology (2012). Truthfully, this is a story that I believe deserved a lot more attention than it received. Yeah, I do say so myself. And, while I'm at it, "The Sea Troll's Daughter" should have at least been nominated for a World Fantasy Award.

"Random Thoughts Before a Fatal Crash" ~ Anyone familiar with my work should also be familiar with one of my recurring characters, a fairy-tale obsessed artist named Albert Perrault, who first appeared in "The Road of Pins," written way back in 2001. Though the story included his death, he subsequently played a crucial role in several stories, culminating with his pivotal part in my novel The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (2012). The narrator concludes with a section labeled "Back Pages" (thank you, Bob Dylan), and though "Random Notes Before a Fatal Crash" was written in March and April 2011 for Sirenia Digest #64, and subsequently reprinted in Subterranean Magazine (Spring 2012), I got it in my head that this rather long piece belonged in "Back Pages." Peter Straub quickly and firmly pointed out that it didn't, and it was removed from the ma.n.u.script before publication. Thank you again, Peter, for stopping me from breaking the book. Also, "The Magdalene of Gevaudan" was written by Sonya Taaffe, and is the only part of "Random Notes Before a Fatal Crash" that was included in The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. The t.i.tle Last Drink Bird Heard, blame Jeff VanderMeer for that.

"The Ape's Wife" ~ This story was written in April 2007 for Clarkesworld Magazine, and was voted "readers' favorite" for that year. It was also chosen for Stephen Jones' The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (Volume 19). As with "Emptiness Spoke Eloquent" and "From Cabinet 34, Drawn 6" before it, "The Ape's Wife" is the result of my occasional desire to play around with how stories might have ended in some alternate universe or another. King Kong was one of the many things that, as a child, fostered my love of paleontology, and it was wonderful repaying that debt.

Black Helicopters (included only with the limited edition) ~ Having just finished the only genuinely wretched novel of my career (t.i.tle tactfully withheld), I needed to write something I would love, something that would allow me to sink back into the dense and slippery language that is natural to me. That and a nonlinear narrative. A nonlinear narrative that preserved the inexplicable, instead of making it explicable. That said, Black Helicopters doesn't feel finished. I suspect I could easily expand it to 50,000 words. However, this would be an unfurling of events (earlier and later events) within story that remain currently unspoken, not the elucidation of that which has been written. I can't help believe it should be a short novel, not a novella. There's too much of it still rattling about my head.

Acknowledgements.

My thanks to the editors who solicited and bought the tales that first appeared in anthologies and magazines, and to the editors who published reprints; to the many subscribers to Sirenia Digest, for they keep the lights on (literally and metaphorically); to William K. Schafer of Subterranean Press, who not only published this collection, but who suggested its t.i.tle (and insisted I write Black Helicopters) and is an amazingly patient man; to Vincent Locke for his ill.u.s.trations and Vincent Chong for his cover; to Kyle Ca.s.sidy for the author's photo; to Merrilee Heifetz and Sarah Nagel at Writers House, saviors, the both of them; to Sonya Taaffe for "The Magdalene of Gevaudan"; to Denise Davis of Brown University for French translation on Black Helicopters (8); to Lee Moyer; and to my partner, Kathryn A. Pollnac, who hasn't yet murdered me in my sleep, though I certainly have it coming.

Author's Biography.

Caitlin R. Kiernan is the author of several novels, including The Red Tree (nominated for the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards) and, most recently, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (winner of the Bram Stoker and James Tiptree, Jr. awards, nominated for the Nebula, British Fantasy, Mythopoeic, Locus, Shirley Jackson, and World Fantasy awards). Her tales of the weird, fantastic, and macabre have been collected in several volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Sh.o.r.es; To Charles Fort, With Love; Alabaster; A is for Alien; The Ammonite Violin & Others; Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart; and Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One). Her early erotica has been collected in two volumes: Frog Toes and Tentacles and Tales from the Woeful Platypus. From 1996 to 2001, she scripted The Dreaming for DC/Vertigo, and has recently returned to graphic novels with her critically acclaimed series, Alabaster (Dark Horse Comics). Trained as a vertebrate paleontologist, her research has appeared in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, Journal of Paleontology, The Mosasaur, and the International Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island with her partner Kathryn and two Siamese cats.

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