In the Language of Scorpions. Charles Allen Gramlich
got away from the activity for a while, picked up New Orleans poor boy sandwiches and sat in his room full of books at his house for lunch.
It was everything you’d expect a writer’s lair to look like. Pulps and classics filled his shelves, and beyond the capacity for the shelves, books of all styles and genres were arranged in neat stacks with an organization that made me envious. Robert E. Howard to be sure—Charles is a major Howard fan and a significant contributor to REHupa—but tales of terror and mystery as well, purchased new or discovered in long, careful searches through New Orleans used bookshops.
I tell you that to note again what a nice guy Charles is, but also to observe that the magic in those books is reflected in the pages ahead. Charles has read voraciously, and just like those tellers of tales who’ve come before, he’s absorbed the old and dreamed new dreams, dark dreams herein, carrying on the legacy of the campfire tales and the early pulps, while infusing new energy and vision.
It’s all fresh, new, exciting, sprinkled with the flavor of the things Charles loves and that we all love. It reflects that aforementioned devotion to craft, and an endless energy and enthusiasm for fomenting fear.
So, are we clear? Charles Gramlich: nice guy, voracious reader, great writer. Brace yourself. It’s about to get brutal.
Sidney Williams
2010
PREFACE
The stories of In the Language of Scorpions span many years and many styles, though in all of them I’ve tried to explore the dark and the strange. Such emotions and experiences have been a constant in my life, beginning with the frequent nightmares that first struck in childhood and which continue to this day. And then there was that time in the Ozark Mountains, in the brooding forest....
It has become a cliché for writers to say that their art is what keeps them sane. It’s exactly the opposite for me. Without writing I would be completely and totally sane, and can you imagine anything more boring? I don’t want to look only toward the brightly lit side of the street and ignore the shadows that are also children of the sun. I don’t want to spend every working day with no thoughts beyond my job, and every evening sitting on the couch while the idiot box pulses “reality” TV into my brain.
Personally, I’d rather dream, no matter the consequences.
I hope you will dream with me.
Charles A. Gramlich
Abita Springs, Louisiana, 2011
IN THE RUINS OF MEMORY
Amid the dregs of a human soul
one finds many things,
dolls and dust and empty tin whistles,
wheels off a hundred matchbox cars,
a mother’s face and a whisper of silk
that passed away
It is a world of tombs, of coffins,
filled with bones and stones and sins,
rich with places to hide
And all the scars from all the dreams
that have been given up on....
live there
They know how much it hurts
to face one’s past,
to be reminded of failures
That’s what keeps them fresh,
keeps them so quietly in wait,
till it’s time to give you pain
And you’ll never see them there,
in the ruins of memory
STILL LIFE WITH SKULLS
There were eyes in the canvas that I had never drawn, desert eyes of bronze, sulfur eyes like cicatrices, and river eyes of green—eyes full of dark wings and teeth. There were round mouths open to the night air, and sanguine tongues whose dance burned with holy words. And in the chiaroscuro wastelands of the unfilled canvas there were ruins whose outlines I could not yet trace. I knew only that they held a bitter rapture and smelled faintly of ashes.
I reached out and lowered a sheeted covering down across that chaos face, knowing that I had not yet captured my piece, thinking that, perhaps, I had captured something else. It seemed suddenly smoky dark when I turned out the light, and the shadows came to gather around my still form as if they were dust and I a statue left long on the shelf.
I sat there for an empty time, listening to the beat of my heart, like hungry baby birds, feeling the breath run out of my mouth and down on the floor as if it were dry ice fog, and waiting for riddles to be answered. No answers formed and after a hollow period filled with early morning silence I went coldly to bed, only to dream of chalk bright skulls with jutting brows and liquid black tongues that tickled at my lips seeking entrance.
The dreams were only harlequin shapes in the clouds when morning came at last. Only their perfume and their laughter remained.
I rose up in that dawn and the sky was like white ashes full of dew-killing heat, like a burnished metal shield on which a fallen warrior is carried home to his pale widow. But the gardens where I walked were cool and shaded, sprinklers drawing rainbows in the quiet air. I had not eaten, for the taste of night still filled my mouth. Nor had I looked closely at my canvas, though the sheet had blown away in the darkness from its sainted and porcelain face. Rather, I let the garden flowers bend their heads to comfort me, their skulls petalled in brittle jewels. Would they shatter at a touch? Should I stroke them and watch them die?
I did not.
Striding along there, the path seemed a desert paved with dunes, the hedges and flower beds a jungle, silent as when stalked by predators. I felt like a god, knowing that should they anger me I could cast among them stillness and lay their bodies to waste.
But again I did not.
For a moment, a stone bench seemed open to me with its silent lion’s mouth at either end, as if here two cats mating tail to tail had been quick frozen and their backs sliced away to provide a seat for a god. It hurt me to see those faces turned up in sculpted agony. I touched them in coolness but they did not change, and, of course, I knew that I was no god to set them free. Instead, I passed them by and came in time to the pool where it waited for me gray-faced.
Why was it that Lovecraft, and Poe, and Chambers wrote so frequently of pools, often black and noisome and writhing as if with life? Why does the frowning of pools stir fear? Even this one, clear and bright as it was, held something in it of death. I knew that should I enter it and stand looking down at my legs they would be broken, as a spoon is broken when it is placed in a glass of water.
Yet, there was something else also in this pool, a beauty that I had first seen many days ago, on the day Alisha—my wife—had left me forever. I had stumbled on it by accident as I watched the slow settling drift of a frost-killed leaf from the surface to the depths. Through tears I had seen the colors fade from the autumn-clothed leaf and swirl outward through the water as if they were liquid soluble paints. Faces had formed there, faces of such utter loveliness that they had ripped me to my knees only to watch them fade into gray steel emptiness as they melted together.
For a week I had been trying to capture those water dreams on my canvas, and it sometimes seemed as if some greater artist’s hand guided my brush. For I could not always remember what it was that I had drawn.
And sometimes there seemed things there that I had not painted.
Still, I had not yet captured the truth of what I had seen. I wept for fear that I had not the skill and each day I came to worship here, praying for guidance.
But Alisha did not come back.
The faces in the pool, too, remained distant, only faintly echoed in the black map of dead leaves and fishes that coated the bottom. I knelt there for long and long, gazing down to stain my memory with the faint lines, to chisel those traces