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  PRAISE FOR MICHAEL MARANO’S

  STORIES FROM THE PLAGUE YEARS

  “Crammed with tales that beguile you with lyrical prose, seductive imagery, and spot-on characters that steal your breath with unblinking terror.”

  F. Paul Wilson,

  New York Times bestselling author of Ground Zero

  “Michael Marano is a writer’s writer, and Stories from the Plague Years is a haunting tour of Marano’s fierce imagination. This collection is the perfect combination of lush writing, memorable characters and stories served raw.”

  Tananarive Due, American Book-Award winning author of

  Blood Colony, The Living Blood, and My Soul to Keep

  “Few horror authors are better equipped to write about madness than Marano. With an expansive vocabulary, a tenacious commitment to poetic prose, and a willingness to follow whatever discursive paths his whim takes, Marano is an acquired taste—but without doubt possessed of a unique talent. . . . when they hit, they hit big: ‘Burden,’ about the ghosts of an AIDS-ravaged gay community, possesses an unusual power, and ‘Little Round Head,’ about a feral child raised by subterranean beasts, is nothing short of a horror classic.”

  Daniel Kraus, Booklist

  “Stories from the Plague Years is ideal for fans of the kind of horror that gets under your skin and picks away at your brain, for anyone who seeks words of wisdom from an old (and I use that term affectionately) punk who’s seen an awful lot of shit go down in his day and lived to tell about it. Marano has a captivating prose style; I enjoyed the opportunity to see his style evolve and wonder where it will go next.”

  Theresa DeLucci, Tor.com

  “[Marano’s] evocative, unique voice gives us nine terrifying yet tender tales; bridging the gap between a time when our world collided with evil and sickness, to the present—filled with the lasting scars we all wear . . . and can still touch . . .

  if we dare. Stories from the Plague Years is written with a voice wholly unique and powerful. . . . These stories . . . have a depth rarely found in fiction. Marano complements this ability with a terrifying realization . . . we are all survivors of The Plague Years . . . Marano . . . leaves many of his peers in the dust. . . .”

  Ben Eads, Shroud Magazine

  “The images of disdainful or disinterested parents are the true horrors of this story, and Marano captures their apathy and the blasé of their lives quite well. They are characters that could easily fit in the world of a Bret Easton Ellis novel. The vengeful child-spirits, who have returned to exact revenge for their deaths, are the sympathetic characters of this story, and while we know that they returned to commit horrors of their own, we can’t help but be rooting for them, for cosmic justice to right the wrongs done to them. . . . I’m interested to see where his writing goes in the future. . . .”

  Paul J. Comeau, VerbicideMagazine.com

  “Award-winning dark fantasy author and frequent Cemetery Dance contributor Michael Marano compiles seven shorts and two novellas for this collection of abstract stories exploring disjointed minds. Explore the delusional brain of a serial killer in ‘Displacement’ or examine how illness erodes sanity (‘Winter Requiem’). An . . . intriguing series of mindfucks.”

  Jessa Sobczuk, Rue Morgue Magazine

  BY MICHAEL MARANO

  INTRODUCTION BY JOHN SHIRLEY

  ILLUSTRATIONS BY GABRIELLE FAUST

  ChiZine Publications

  COPYRIGHT

  Stories from the Plague Years © 2011, 2012 by Michael Marano

  Introduction © 2011, 2012 by John Shirley

  Interior artwork © 2011, 2012 by Gabrielle Faust

  Cover artwork © 2012 by Erik Mohr

  Author photo © 2012 by RiN Waigand

  Interior designs © 2012 by Danny Evarts

  Originally published as a limited edition hardback by Cemetery Dance Publications.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by ChiZine Publications

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  EPub Edition DECEMBER 2012 ISBN: 978-1-92746-931-6

  All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.

  No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS

  Toronto, Canada

  www.chizinepub.com

  [email protected]

  Edited by Stephen Mitchell

  Copyedited and proofread by Kate Moore

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.

  For my Nanitchka, and for Bill . . .

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Michael Marano and the Forbidden: Introduction by John Shirley

  DAYS OF RAGE

  DISPLACEMENT

  LITTLE ROUND HEAD

  CHANGELING

  PRAYERS FOR DEAD CITIES

  THE SIEGE

  BURDEN

  TWO FOR MARIAN

  . . . AND THE DAMAGE DONE

  EXIT WOUND

  WINTER TALES

  WINTER REQUIEM

  SHIBBOLETH

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Publication History

  Also Available from ChiZine Publications

  “Laura, illustre per le proprie virtù, e lungamente celebrata ne’ miei versi, apparve la prima volta agli occhi miei, nel primo tempo della mia giovanezza, l’anno del Signore 1327, il giorno sesto di aprile, nell’ora mattutina, nella chiesa di Santa Chiara in Avignone; e in quella stessa città, nello stesso mese di aprile, nello stesso giorno, nell’ora medesima, l’anno 1348, quella luce fu tolta dal mondo, essendo io allora in Verona, ignaro ahimè! della mia sciagura.”

  —note scribbled by Petrarch in a copy of Virgil

  MICHAEL MARANO

  AND THE FORBIDDEN

  AN INTRODUCTION BY JOHN SHIRLEY

  This is an age of sound bites, of the Internet, of words flickering by on Twitter, of headlines scrolling by under talking heads; of videogames, YouTube, and the little chat-room boxes in which people hopelessly try to express themselves with something more than claustrophobic superficiality. This is not the age of long thoughts.

  Michael Marano may be close to finding a bridge that could span the static-crackling void between the age of literature and the age of the Internet. But if he is indeed trying to build that bridge—he’s doing the forbidden. It’s not really allowed.

  It’s not allowed, now, especially in writing that is rooted in genre, to have long thoughts, to explore visual descriptions with any depth. Basically what many people do now—sometimes some quite talented writers do this—is they make up their books (and films) out of Legos, out of pre-fab blocks and connectors, pre-existing tropes and
premises and images, bits of their favourite movies and old books, and they click them together in “fresh” ways, form them into “new” shapes. I just saw an enjoyable, high-quality animated movie based on a book by a (very good) respected writer, which did just that. I had a good time watching that picture but, despite its pleasing gothiness, let’s not pretend the writer and filmmaker were reaching for truly original imagery. I see the same in urban fantasy novels—perhaps in works of my own! And Lord knows that’s what the great spreading red puddle of the vampire genre is about—parasitism, ironically, of earlier writers.

  Well. It’s hard to be original. I wrote a very clever story recently—so I thought, but the editor I submitted it to claimed it was too much like a story from the 1970s by one E.C. Tubb. I may indeed have read that story, and forgotten it, and disgorged it, whole, in new terms. I don’t know. But I do know that’s part of the struggle of being a writer, a search for originality—we’re all products of our influences, our reading.

  But writers like Marano transcend influences by merging their absorptions with honest impressions of the world around them; they’re reflecting it, refracting it, through a theme darkly, and their observation, their distinctive interpretation, however surreal the form might seem, is what gives it verisimilitude, the satisfying quality of imagery impregnated by real life; this capacity for observation, this attempt to formulate an existential ballad in fiction, is what can save us from being in lifeless league with whichever “Octomom” of genre-writing is currently spewing books.

  Marano really goes for it. He plunges in; he dives fearlessly down. And I’m telling you that, commercially speaking, at least in the conventional wisdom, this is usually not allowed.

  But the conventional wisdom is often wrong—because it doesn’t take into account talent and originality of vision; it doesn’t take into account personal experience, lived and projected through the lens of art. Marano is well aware of the ironies and underlying psychology of book publishing itself. He writes:

  . . . doubt bowed in reverence to my new certainty as I tranced to the window display of a chain bookstore that doubled as a corporate coffee shop. . . . I looked at the high-end hardbacks and paperbacks laid in a carefully posed jumble. There was no stated theme to the display, beyond the fact that all the novels had been released in the past week. Yet the cover of each book is a prayer. An idolatry to fear and sainted worry. Fear that the sacred home, and all the home implies and the goods it contains, might be violated, might be depreciated by the stigma of a bloody boot-print on its white carpets. The razor-wielding apes and speckled bands swollen with poison that stalked the sitting rooms of more than a century ago are reborn as diabolical killers, Dark and Shadowy Men given new expression as fiends suitable for defeat by Sandra Bullock, Ashley Judd or Angelina Jolie in the inevitable film adaptations. . . .

  We see a number of characteristics on display here—one is Marano’s being steeped in popular culture, old and new. This is one end of the bridge I mentioned. Another is the ironic tone, however grim, and the quick intensity of the imagery, which is very modern: the other half of the bridge.

  We also hear voice. This is the mark of a writer coming into his power—he shows a capability for immersion in voice, in the merging of point of view and narrative. It is apparent when he writes, much later in this book:

  The smoke was beautiful the way that only things that herald death can be, haloed by swirls of crows we were thankful we couldn’t hear.

  Or, this, voice about voice:

  A mirror of steel is silent, as are the ghosts I still feel each day as I walk streets that plague has emptied. Ghosts, like reflections in steel, have only the voices we give them, even though what they speak is theirs alone.

  None of this is allowed, of course. It’s not permissible to think elaborately, to look for real poetry in nightmare. Horror is only to shock—not to express. You’re trying to be expressive with horror? Shocking!

  Nor is it encouraged to write frankly about drug users, and street people, as if they were, in fact, the people right down the street that you pass every day. The lost people all around you. Marano dares to do it, as if Hubert Selby were working in dark fantasy. And in breaking the rules, he engages in a synthesis that may just get him notice, may make his work stand out in the pounding surf of genre literature, like one of those luminous, gelatinous creatures that scared Lovecraft as he stared aghast at a New England oceanside.

  So let this gaping beast of a book consume you.

  You’ll find yourself looking out of its eyes, as you swim through subterranean depths. And suddenly find yourself back on the midnight streets of your hometown.

  DISPLACEMENT

  I didn’t decapitate Catherine.

  I liberated her from her body, trespassing on her self-inflicted inner wound . . . doing her the favour of pulling it to the tangible. She hated her body with the spite a mother saves for an unwanted child—because her body, in its arrogance, never fit the carefully purchased fiction of her life. She punished herself for being fat, though she was translucent-thin from a lifetime of shifting physical hunger to trinkets she could buy and people she could control.

  With one thankful stroke (thankful, in that only one stroke was needed), I rewrote the fiction she’d so foolishly bought. New, red words defaced the Sex and the City calendar that hung in tribal-mask adoration over the Norwegian pine table in her breakfast nook, blurring calligrapher-precise notes made in peacock blue fountain pen. Rude, thick words, darkening, rewrote the still-life tableau of the lone espresso she’d made for herself just before my arrival, marked the perfect twist of lemon rind resting beside it on Italian porcelain that she’d first shown me years ago, when she’d theatrically unpacked the set to which it belonged. Cooling ink blotted the covers of the book she’d placed beside the espresso, so she could preach to me the marketed Truths the book asserted. All that stayed legible of the back cover copy was the idolatrous, bold-type prayer: “She seemed to have it all. . . .”

  I stood in the lifetime of half-seconds, in the muted between that vista’ed from one beat of her Pilates-strengthened heart to the next, taking in the entirety of her kitchen, her home into which she invited me in the way that legend says one should never invite the un-living. And I saw that Catherine had nothing, that she was owned by all she thought she owned.

  So it was a good thing I did for her. A benediction wholesome as St. Francis’s forsaking his life of comfort to wash the sores of lepers.

  True, it was good for me as well—maybe the most intense moment of mutual gratification we’d shared. As her frail and spurting prison fell, I was liberated, too. Liberated from the rage I’d just felt and the stone-heavy hatred for her that had pressed inside me for years. Both rage and hate dissipated like smoke, and at last I knew without distraction the good things my heart held for her. I felt light as the avatar I’d become, ghost-dense as those in trances are said to feel as they let divine spirits speak through them.

  I needed Catherine to understand I was helping her, to understand the baroque theatre she’d invoked by inviting me here. So while her eyes dimmed, I held her by her delicate jawline (and not by her strawberry blonde hair perfumed with the conditioner and shampoo she’d used since before we were lovers), and showed her the still-breathing mass that had been distasteful to her for so long.

  In my dusk-trance, in my becoming her longed-for demon of the vindictive ex-lover, I held her level to the catharsis of my sight, freeing her from her vanity. I shared my view from my apotheosis as myth and let her see her own painfully distant thinness. I let her see that she’d exceeded the elfin slightness she’d always thought beyond her reach. The body she rejected lay where it had fallen beneath hanging expensive cookware she never used. For the first time, she saw herself outside the tyrannical, mirror-defined view of her life that had held her hostage, saw that her starved flesh was worthy of forgiveness.

  I turned her face to mine. Her eyes, clear and blue, we
re losing their glimmer as beads do when they become scuffed and dusty. I smiled, letting her know in those desperate seconds that all was forgiven. And that I still loved her.

  Her lips moved, sweetly, trying to speak. I thought of carpenter ants I used to catch, how their jaws flexed as I hurled them into a spider’s web or steadied them for the Truth of the sun focused through a magnifying lens.

  And that was when, as I was fixed by her lorelei gaze, the police charged and ground me against the refrigerator, which wasn’t necessary, as I’m not a violent person.

  Tackled from transcendence, shoved back into earthly, bruising flesh, I cried out as I was pinned against cold white metal. I cried out at the injustice that my final instant with Catherine should be violated—that the last thing she’d feel would be pain—because the rough blow of the policemen had made me drop her to the wet linoleum floor.

  Through streaked vision, I saw pictures Catherine had taped to the refrigerator of models from the Victoria’s Secret catalogue: motivational reminders for her to stay away from food, to own her body the way she wished to own it.

  And she’d been thinner than those models were.

  Nightsticks came out.

  Soon I was unconscious.

  —You’re very sick, Dean.

  As he spoke, the gaze of the mirror touched us: a fourth wall blinding us to our audience as would stage lights. In blinding us, it took the place of our audience. My twin, my hypocrite brother, lurked behind the mirror and the whirring lens that watched just past the mirror’s dead, silvered gaze.

  —You shouldn’t make judgments like that. It’s not conducive to good patient/therapist dialogue.

  Doctor Johansson was my court-appointed psychiatrist. His statement about my health (said without preamble) raised the curtain on this, the Second Act of our one-room drama. This was when I’d midwife things forward. When I’d make palimpsests of our First Act for those who’d have access to records of our exchanges only from this moment on, due to the red tape thickets of court bureaucracy. By now, Johansson was used to my hijacking his professional rhetoric (even, at times, setting his own rhetoric aside). He struck me as a nice person who knew to not take my Doctor Phil-flavoured parries personally. He wore on his tweed sleeve his rich liberal’s need to help people like me. His voice was soothing and unsettling, like HAL’s in 2001. (—I really think you should take a stress pill and think this over, Dave.) Thoughtful sessions of white wine and NPR programming no doubt filled his evenings, and World Music no doubt filled his CD collection, stacked alphabetically on a teak rack from Pier One. Past his Brahmin demeanour glowed a warmth incongruous as the big, Mr.-Potter-from-It’s-a-Wonderful-Life wooden desk he sat behind in this sterile, fluorescent-lit room. By his desk squatted a dishwasher-sized air filter that seemed placed to pull smoke from the grandfatherly pipe he never lit, but always held.