Aftershock & Others: 19 Oddities Read online

  AFTERSHOCK & OTHERS

  Also by F. Paul Wilson

  SHORT FICTION

  Soft and Others

  The Barrens and Others

  REPAIRMAN JACK

  The Tomb

  Legacies

  Conspiracies

  All the Rage

  Hosts

  The Haunted Air

  Gateways

  Crisscross

  Infernal

  Harbingers

  Bloodline

  By the Sword

  YOUNG ADULT

  Jack: Secret Histories

  THE ADVERSARY CYCLE

  The Keep

  The Tomb

  The Touch

  Reborn

  Reprisal

  Nightworld

  OTHER NOVELS

  Healer

  Wheels Within Wheels

  An Enemy of the State

  Black Wind

  Dydeetown World

  The Tery

  Sibs

  The Select

  Implant

  Deep as the Marrow

  Mirage

  (with Matthew J. Costello)

  Nightkill

  (with Steven Spruill)

  Masque

  (with Matthew J. Costello)

  The Christmas Thingy

  Sims

  The Fifth Harmonic

  Midnight Mass

  EDITOR

  Freak Show

  Diagnosis: Terminal

  AFTERSHOCK & OTHERS

  19 Oddities

  F. PAUL WILSON

  COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “Dreams” © 1991 by F. Paul Wilson. First appeared in The Ultimate Frankenstein (Dell/BPVP).

  “The November Game” © 1991 by F. Paul Wilson. First appeared in The Bradbury Chronicles (Penguin/ROC).

  “Please Don’t Hurt Me” © 1991 by F. Paul Wilson. First appeared in Masques IV (Maclay).

  “Foet” © 1991 by F. Paul Wilson. First appeared in Borderlands 2 (Borderlands Press).

  “When He Was Fab” © 1992 by F. Paul Wilson. First appeared in Weird Tales (#305—Winter 1992/93).

  “Itsy Bitsy Spider” © 1995 by F. Paul Wilson and Meggan C. Wilson. First appeared in Great Writers and Kids Write Spooky Stories (Random House). Reprinted with permission.

  “COPPE” © 1995 by F. Paul Wilson. First appeared in David Copperfield’s Tales of the Impossible (HarperCollins).

  “Offshore” © 1996 by F. Paul Wilson. First appeared in Diagnosis: Terminal (Forge).

  “Aryans and Absinthe” © 1997 by F. Paul Wilson. First appeared in Revelations (HarperCollins).

  “Lysing Toward Bethlehem” © 1998 by F. Paul Wilson. First appeared in Imagination Fully Dilated (Cemetery Dance Press).

  “Aftershock” © 1999 by F. Paul Wilson. First appeared in Realms of Fantasy (Vol. 6, #2—December 1999).

  “Anna” © 2000 by F. Paul Wilson. First appeared in Imagination Fully Dilated 2 (IFD Publishing).

  “Sole Custody” © 2004 by F. Paul Wilson. First appeared in Quietly Now (Borderlands Press).

  “Part of the Game” © 2005 by F. Paul Wilson. First appeared in Dark Delicacies (Carroll & Graf).

  “Incident at Duane’s” © 2006 by F. Paul Wilson. First appeared in Thriller (Mira).

  “Sex Slaves of the Dragon Tong” © 2006 by F. Paul Wilson. First appeared in Retro Pulp Tales (Subterranean Press).

  To all my editors across the ages

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  As with my previous collections, the stories here are presented in the order they were written rather than published. I’ve culled stories from 1990 through 2005.

  And as before, I’ve provided year-by-year background on what was going on in my career at the time. Some of you may not be interested. If so, the solution is simple: Turn the page. But if the mail I receive is any indication, an awful lot of you like the interstitial material—a few have dared suggest that it’s more interesting than some of the fiction. (The author bristles.) Certainly it provides a bonus for those of you who’ve already read some of the stories.

  I look at it this way: I will never write an autobiography (my personal life is probably not much different from that of any other married guy with kids and grandkids, so I can’t imagine why anyone would want to read about it), but the introductions in my collections add up to a sort of writing memoir. For those of you curious about writing and the writing process, I trust you’ll find something of interest.

  CONTENTS

  The Secret History of the World

  1990

  Dreams

  The November Game

  When He Was Fab

  Foet

  1991

  Please Don’t Hurt Me

  1992

  1993

  Aryans and Absinthe

  1994

  Offshore

  Itsy Bitsy Spider

  1995

  COPPE

  1996

  1997

  Lysing Toward Bethlehem

  1998

  Aftershock

  1999

  Anna

  2000–2002

  2003

  Sole Custody

  Sex Slaves of the Dragon Tong

  2004

  Part of the Game

  2005

  Interlude at Duane’s

  Afterword

  THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE WORLD

  The preponderance of my work deals with a history of the world that remains undiscovered, unexplored, and unknown to most of humanity. Some of this secret history has been revealed in the Adversary Cycle, some in the Repairman Jack novels, and bits and pieces in other, seemingly unconnected works. Taken together, even these millions of words barely scratch the surface of what has been going on behind the scenes, hidden from the workaday world. I’ve listed these works below in the chronological order in which the events in them occur.

  Note: “Year Zero” is the end of civilization as we know it; “Year Zero Minus One” is the year preceding it, etc.

  THE PAST

  “Demonsong” (prehistory)

  “Aryans and Absinthe” (1923–1924)

  Black Wind (1926–1945)

  The Keep (1941)

  Reborn (February–March 1968)

  “Dat Tay Vao” (March 1968)

  Jack: Secret Histories (1983)

  YEAR ZERO MINUS THREE

  Sibs (February)

  “Faces” (early summer)

  The Tomb (summer)

  “The Barrens”* (ends in September)

  “A Day in the Life”* (October)

  “The Long Way Home”

  Legacies (December)

  YEAR ZERO MINUS TWO

  Conspiracies (April) (includes “Home Repairs”)

  “Interlude at Duane’s” (April)

  All the Rage (May) (includes “The Last Rakosh”)

  Hosts (June)

  The Haunted Air (August)

  Gateways (September)

  Crisscross (November)

  Infernal (December)

  YEAR ZERO MINUS ONE

  Harbingers (January)

  Bloodline (April)

  By the Sword (May)

  The Touch (ends in August)

  The Peabody-Ozymandias Traveling Circus & Oddity Emporium (ends in September)

  “Tenants”* yet-to-be-written Repairman Jack novels

  YEAR ZERO

  “Pelts”*

  Reprisal (ends in February) the last Repairman Jack novel (will end in April)

  Nightworld (starts in May)

  Reborn, The Touch, and Reprisal will be back in print before too long. I’m planning a total of sixteen or seventeen Repairman Jack novels (not
counting the young adult titles), ending the Secret History with the publication of a heavily revised Nightworld.

  1990

  Another award-losing year: Soft and Others, my first short fiction collection, lost the Bram Stoker Award to Richard Matheson’s Collected Stories. No gripes from me. He’s the greatest. A fair number of my stories never would have been written if my teenage mind hadn’t been warped by his Shock collections.

  I can’t complain about 1990. I started off writing the Midnight Mass novella for Robert McCammon’s Under the Fang. This was the first of three “theme” anthologies contracted by the Horror Writers of America to put itself on firmer financial footing. Rick McCammon, Ramsey Campbell, and I were chosen as editors. Rick took the first, a collection of vampire stories with the premise that the vampires have taken over—now what?

  I knocked out Mass over four weekends while working on Reprisal. As I was finishing it Kristine Kathryn Rusch called, asking if I had anything for the Pulphouse novella series she was editing. Since her print run would be less than a thousand, I asked Rick if he had any objection to Pulphouse doing a stand-alone edition. He didn’t. But when Pocket Books (publisher of Under the Fang) learned that my story would be technically a reprint by the time Fang was published, they demanded I cancel the special edition or they’d cut the story. Well, I’d already given Kris my word, and a deal is a deal. So that’s why Midnight Mass didn’t appear in Under the Fang. It did go on to become my most reprinted story.

  Otherwise Reprisal claimed most of my writing time, though editors clamoring for short stories kept interrupting me. In March came Bob Weinberg. I was scheduled to be Guest of Honor at the 1990 World Fantasy Convention and it’s a tradition to include a story by the GoH in the program book. Bob’s wife, Phyllis, loved Repairman Jack so I wrote the “Last Rakosh” and dedicated it to her. (Years later this was blended into the Repairman Jack novel All the Rage.)

  The Dark Harvest hardcover of Reborn, the fourth volume (though chronologically the second) in what I’d eventually call the Adversary Cycle, was published in March, followed a few months later by the Jove mass-market edition with one of the worst covers ever to sully my work: a lolling-tongued demon leering from atop a doorway. Beyond awful. I’d complained about it but no one was listening. The advance orders to this sequel to The Keep were excellent, so where’s the problem?

  Right. Where was the problem? Reviews were excellent and the book was optioned for a theatrical film within months of publication. Things looked good. I’d been wrong about retitling The Tomb, so maybe I was wrong about this. (But I wasn’t. That cover was going to come back to haunt me.)

  In April Richard Chizmar requested a story for an anthology called Cold Blood. I turned to Jack again. The working title was “Domestic Problem” but I ended up calling it “Home Repairs.” (This was folded into the RJ novel Conspiracies.)

  Then in May Joe Lansdale called looking for a dark suspense story—no supernatural—for Dark at Heart, an anthology he was editing with his wife, Karen. He wanted something like “Slasher.” Back to Jack for “The Long Way Home.” (It’s available for download at amazon.com in their Amazon Shorts section.)

  About this time I got to work on my first editing gig: Freak Show, the second of the aforementioned HWA anthologies.

  I wanted Freak Show to be more unified than Fang. So…to all who asked (and to those I particularly wanted in the anthology) I sent out three pages of guidelines outlining the background of the show and how my connecting story would run, plus the general circular route the show would take around the country.

  I asked for regionalism—write about places you lived so the tastes and tangs of the settings would be authentic. I also asked for a description of the freak and a loose outline of the story—necessary to avoid duplication of characters, locations (I didn’t want multiple stories in Chicago or L.A.), and plotlines. A bit of work, yes, but you were pretty much guaranteed that I’d buy the piece if I approved your proposal. Some writers found this approach too restrictive; others blasted off and came up with great stories.

  After the synopses were set, I began tying them together; I also circulated descriptions of all the freaks to the contributors to encourage cross-fertilization (a passing mention of this or that freak in other stories).

  Need I say it turned out to be a lot of work? It took a year of my life and, as time went on, increasingly interfered with my own writing projects.

  But here in 1990 I was oblivious to what I’d let myself in for. In June I finished revising Reprisal and set off on a research trip to Hawaii to gather sights and sounds and locations for the Maui sections of Nightworld. I wrote some of them on the spot while they were fresh. (Yeah, I know—tough work. But no sacrifice is too great for my craft.)

  Careerwise, the high points of 1990 had to be the election of my first novel Healer to the Prometheus Hall of Fame, and being Guest of Honor at the World Fantasy Convention.

  “DREAMS”

  Byron Preiss called asking for a contribution to one of his three “Ultimate” books. I had my choice of The Ultimate Dracula, The Ultimate Werewolf, or The Ultimate Frankenstein. I’d already done a long vampire story earlier in the year (the novella Midnight Mass) and had never found werewolves all that interesting, so I chose Frankie. My challenge was to come up with something fresh on the monster in the allotted 3,500 to 5,000 words. Another restriction was that the story had to be based on the movie version, not Mary Shelley’s original. (Thus the reference to the monster’s creator as Henry rather than Victor.)

  As is my custom, I inverted expectations, turned tropes on their heads, and came up with an angle that delighted me. As I wrote the first line of “Dreams,” I already knew the last. It is also, you will note, a nice little exercise in dramatic irony.

  Dreams

  The nightmare again.

  I almost dread falling asleep. Always the same, and yet never quite the same. The events differ dream to dream, yet always I am in a stranger’s body, a huge, monstrous, patchwork contraption that reels through the darkness in such ungainly fashion. It’s always dark in the dream, for I seem to be a creature of the night, forever in hiding.

  And I can’t remember my name.

  The recent dreams are well formed. My head has cleared in them. So unlike the early dreams, which I can barely remember. Those are no more than a montage of blurred images now—a lightning-drenched laboratory, a whip-wielding hunchback, fear, a stone-walled cell, chains, loneliness, a little girl drowning among floating blossoms, a woman in a wedding gown, townsfolk with torches, fire, a burning windmill, pain, rage, PAIN!

  But I’m all right now. Scarred but healing. And my mind is clear. The pain from the fire burned away the mists. I remember things from dream to dream, and more and more bits and pieces from long ago.

  But what is my name?

  I know I must stay out of sight. I don’t want to be burned again. That’s why I spend the daylight hours hiding here in the loft of this abandoned stable on the outskirts of Goldstadt. I sleep most of the day. But at night I wander. Always into town. Always to the area around the Goldstadt Medical College. I seem to be attracted to the medical college. The reason rests here in my brain, but it scampers beyond my grasp whenever I reach for it. One day I’ll catch it and then I’ll know.

  So many unanswered questions in these dreams. But aren’t dreams supposed to be that way? Don’t they pose more questions than they answer?

  My belly is full now. I broke into a pastry shop and gorged myself on the unsold sweets left over from yesterday, and now I’m wandering the back alleys, drinking from rain barrels, peering from the shadows into the lighted windows I pass. I feel a warm resonance within when I see a family together by a fire. Once I must have had a life like that. But the warmth warps into rage if I watch too long, because I know such a scene will never be mine again.

  I know it’s only a dream. But the rage is so real.

  As I pass the rear of a tavern, the side door opens and two men
step out. I stumble farther back into the shadows, wanting to run but knowing I’d make a terrible racket. No one must see me. No one must know I’m alive. So I stay perfectly still, waiting for them to leave.

  That’s when I hear the voice. The deep, delicious voice of a handsome young man with curly blond hair and fresh clear skin. I know this without seeing him. I even know his name.

  Karl.