Lord of the Fantastic Stories Martin H Greenberg

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There were deer running in the woods beyond the meadow: I could
smell them on the winter s night air.
And I was, above all things, hungry.
* * * *
I was naked when I came to myself again, early the next morning, a
half-eaten deer next to me in the snow. A fly crawled across its eye, and its
tongue lolled out of its dead mouth, making it look comical and pathetic, like
an animal in a newspaper cartoon.
The snow was stained a fluorescent crimson where the deer s belly
had been torn out.
My face and chest were sticky and red with the stuff. My throat was
scabbed and scarred. And it stung; by the next full moon it would be whole
once more.
The sun was a long way away, small and yellow, but the sky was blue
and cloudless, and there was no breeze. I could hear the roar of the sea
some distance away.
I was cold and naked and bloody and alone; ah well, I thought: it
happens to all of us, in the beginning. I just get it once a month.
I was painfully exhausted, but I would hold out until I found a deserted
barn, or a cave; and then I was going to sleep for a couple of weeks.
A hawk flew low over the snow toward me, with some-thing dangling
from its talons. It hovered above me for a heartbeat, then dropped a small
gray squid in the snow at my feet, and flew upward. The flaccid thing lay
there, still and silent and tentacled in the bloody snow.
I took it as an omen, but whether good or bad I couldn t say and I
didn t really care anymore; I turned my back to the sea, and on the shadowy
town of Innsmouth, and began to make my way toward the city.
* * * *
AFTERWORD
I first met Roger Zelazny in 1990, at a convention in Dallas, Texas. We
were signing books at the same time, at the same table. This had excited
me when I had heard about it: I imagined that I would get to talk to him, and
Roger had been a hero of mine since, at the age of eleven, I had read Lord
of Light. Actually, we both sat and signed books for a line of people, and all
I managed to do was mumble something about being an enormous fan of
his, and I thrust a copy of the Sandman collection The Doll s House at him,
saying something about the Sandman being one of Roger s illegitimate
godchildren.
We did not talk for another year, and then, in 1991, at a World
Fantasy Convention in Tucson, Arizona, my friend Steve Brust sat me down
in the bar with Roger, and the three of us spoke about short story structure
for most of the evening. When Roger spoke Steve and I listened.
Many of my better short stories, said Roger, pulling on his pipe,
explaining how to write short stories, are just the last chapters of novels I
did not write.
The next time I saw Roger he was a guest of honor at the 1993 World
Fantasy Convention, in Minneapolis. I was toastmaster, and we were both
working hard, doing panels and readings and whatever else one does at
conven-tions. We bumped into each other in the book dealers room, and
exchanged books: I gave him a copy of Angels and Visitations, the
miscellany of my work that had just been published, and he gave me a copy
of his novel, A Night in the Lonesome October.
I got the impression that it was the first novel he had written in some
time that he felt had worked as he had wanted it to. Or at least, that it had
been as much of a surprise to him as to his readers.
I remember how tired I was that night, and I remember planning only
to read the first few pages of A Night in the Lonesome October. I read
them and I was hooked, unable to stop reading, and I read until I fell
asleep.
I loved a number of things about the book the delight in a story told
from the wrong point of view (Jack the Ripper s dog), the fun in assembling
a cast out of stock characters (including Sherlock Holmes and Larry
Talbot), and the sense of Lovecraftian nastiness as a sort of a dance, in
which everyone knows the moves they should make and in which the door
to permit the Great Old Ones in to eat the world is, always, ultimately,
opened a crack, but never all the way.
I wrote this story in February 1994, and sent it to Roger to read. It was
directly inspired by what he had done in A Night in the Lonesome
October, although my Larry Tal-bot was no more Roger s than he was the
original Wolf-man of the movies, or Harlan Ellison s marvelous Talbot in
Adrift Just off the Islets of Langerhans, Latitude 38� 54 N, Longitude 77� [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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