In Concert Read online

  IN CONCERT

  By Melanie Tem & Steve Rasnic Tem

  A Macabre Ink Production

  Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition Copyright 2011 / Melanie Tem

  Copy-edited by: Erin Bailey

  Cover images courtesy of:

  wyckedbrush.deviantart.com

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  MEET THE AUTHORS

  Melanie Tem’s work has received the Bram Stoker, international Horror Guild, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy Awards, as well as a nomination for the Shirley Jackson Award. She is also a published poet, an oral storyteller, and several of her plays have been produced.

  She is a social worker, and also has a freelance editing business.

  She lives in Colorado with her husband, writer and editor Steve Rasnic Tem. They have four children and four granddaughters.

  www.m-s-tem.com

  NOVELS

  Black River

  Blood Moon

  Desmodus

  Making Love

  Prodigal

  Revenant

  Slain in the Spirit

  The Deceiver

  Wilding

  Witch-Light

  WITH STEVE RASNIC TEM

  Beautiful Stranger

  Daughters

  In Concert

  The Man in the Ceiling

  WITH JANET BERLINER

  What You Remember I Did

  COLLECTIONS

  Daddy’s Side

  The Ice Downstream

  UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS

  Blood Moon – Narrated by Mikael Naramore

  Prodigal – Narrated by Christine Padovan

  Slain in the Spirit – Narrated by Ann Richards

  Steve Rasnic Tem was born in Lee County Virginia in the heart of Appalachia. He is the author of over 350 published short stories and is a past winner of the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy Awards. His story collections include City Fishing, The Far Side of the Lake, and In Concert (with wife Melanie Tem). Forthcoming collections include Ugly Behavior (crime) and Celestial Inventories (contemporary fantasy). An audio collection, Invisible, is also available. His novels include Excavation, The Book of Days, Daughters, The Man in the Ceiling (with Melanie Tem), and the recent Deadfall Hotel. In this Edward Gorey-esque, Mervyn Peak-esque novel a widower takes the job of manager at a remote hotel where the guests are not quite like you and me, accompanied by his daughter and the ghost of his wife—”a literary exploration of the roots of horror in the collective unconscious.”

  Steve Rasnic Tem’s short fiction has been compared to the work of Franz Kafka, Dino Buzzati, Ray Bradbury, and Raymond Carver[citation needed], but to quote Joe R. Lansdale: “Steve Rasnic Tem is a school of writing unto himself.” His 200-plus published pieces have garnered him a British Fantasy Award, World Fantasy and a nomination for the Bram Stoker Awards.

  NOVELS

  Deadfall Hotel

  Excavation

  The Book of Days

  WITH MELANIE TEM

  Beautiful Stranger

  Daughters

  In Concert

  The Man in the Ceiling

  COLLECTIONS

  Absences: Charlie Goode’s Ghosts

  Celestial Inventory

  City Fishing

  Decoded Mirrors: Three Tales After Lovecraft

  Fairytales

  The Far Side of the Lake

  The Hydrocephalic Ward (poems)

  DISCOVER CROSSROAD PRESS

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  “Prosthesis,” Asimov’s June 1986

  “The Sting,” SF International 1, Jan/Feb 1987

  “Resettling”, Postmortem, ed. Dave Silva & Paul Olson, 1989

  “Kite,” Starshore 2, Fall 1990

  “The Tenth Scholar,” The Ultimate Dracula, ed. Byron Preiss, 1991

  “This Icy Region My Heart Encircles,” The Ultimate Frankenstein, ed. Byron Preiss, 1991

  “Mask of the Hero,” Chilled To The Bone, ed. Robert Garcia, 1991

  “Beautiful Strangers,” as a Roadkill Press chapbook, 1992

  “Safe At Home,” Hottest Blood, eds. Jeff Gelb & Michael Garrett, 1993

  “The Marriage,” Love in Vein, ed. Poppy Brite, 1994

  “More Than Should Be Asked,” Scream Factory 15, Autumn 1994

  “Mama,” Sisters of the Night, eds. Barbara Hambly & Martin Greenberg, 1995

  “Nvumbi,” Xanadu 3, ed. Jane Yolen, 1995

  “The Perfect Diamond” Fantastic Worlds 1, 1996

  “Lost,” Imagination Fully Dilated, eds. Alan Clark & Elizabeth Engstrom, 1998

  “North,” Extremes 2, Brian Hopkins editor, 2001

  “Empty Morning,” The Many Faces of Van Helsing, ed. Jeanne Cavelos, 2004

  “Pit’s Edge,” Mondo Zombie, John Skipp editor, 2006

  “In Concert” Asimov’s SF Magazine

  “Bees from the Hive” (original to this volume)

  “The Man On the Ceiling” was a chapbook published by American Fantasy Press

  IN CONCERT

  CONTENTS

  PROSTHESIS

  THE STING

  RESETTLING

  KITE

  THE TENTH SCHOLAR

  THIS ICY REGION MY HEART ENCIRCLES

  MASK OF THE HERO

  BEAUTIFUL STRANGERS

  SAFE AT HOME

  THE MARRIAGE

  MORE THAN SHOULD BE ASKED

  MAMA

  NVUMBI

  THE PERFECT DIAMOND

  LOST

  NORTH

  EMPTY MORNING

  PIT’S EDGE

  IN CONCERT

  BEES FROM THE HIVE

  THE MAN ON THE CEILING

  PROSTHESIS

  Candelaria gasped. Only with deliberate effort did she manage to hold her ground. The little alien thrust itself at her again in a broadly suggestive way, touched and then massaged her sides with the broad blue flats of its hands.

  It was squealing excitedly in rapid-fire and heavily-accented English. She could catch some of the words. “Hello, lady! Hello, pretty lady! Welcome to my world! You are new here,
are you? Oh, you are new! Will you talk to me? May I show you around? Buy you a drink? Can we— “

  She shook her head and pushed the alien away. It stayed close, all but touching her, still talking. Another hustle, she thought wearily. She ran into this on practically every assignment, and by now could recognize a come-on even through the most confusing cultural overlay. Irritating as the routine was, her impulse this time was to laugh. The alien was clumsy, the line a conceit, a parody, and outdated at that.

  “Alien” was not, of course, the right word. Candelaria was the outsider, the visitor, and in fact she felt very out of place. But this creature surely couldn’t be called “native” either, even if it had been born here. It looked made up, artificial in a hodgepodge way; she stared at one part of it after another, cataloguing. She should have been prepared for this, by her own research, her journalistic training, and the briefing — such as it was — that she’d received from the main office for this particular assignment. But the longer and more closely she looked at the creature who had accosted her, the more amazed she was.

  The alien was short; it came barely to her shoulder. On its head was a blonde beehive wig through which she could see down to the pinkish rubber scalp among the remaining follicles of old-style nylon hair. It wore a bulbous fake nose, an enormous glue-on moustache, two artificial legs and three arms of various skin tones affixed at distorted angles to its body like the fins of an impressionistic pinwheel. The makeup on its face and neck had not been blended into its blue-gray skin, and had turned dark and crusty where the edges overlapped. A female breast replacement with a flushed areola and raised nipple jutted outside the tattered jacket, which looked as if it had probably come from one of the NASA Surplus Stores that languished elsewhere but reportedly flourished here, with sales volumes out of all proportion to the size and real income of the population.

  “Bizarre,” she observed into the tiny microphone that hung like an appendage around her neck. “Clownlike. Childlike.” But none of the adjectives seemed quite right.

  The alien was rubbing itself against her like a hungry cat, squealing and hissing in a frenzy. It crossed her mind to step back, but she didn’t. The alien reached up and patted her cheeks. Its hands were cold, metallic; she couldn’t tell if they were real or not. “What’s your name, lady? What’s your name?”

  She hesitated, but could think of no graceful way to withhold the information and no good reason for doing so. “Celia Candelaria,” she said, and instantly, for no good reason, regretted it.

  The alien seized her name, wrapped its garishly-painted mouth around it, drew frames for it in the air with both real and artificial limbs. “Celia Candelaria Celia Candelaria Celia Celia Celia Candelaria Celia.” It repeated her name so quickly and so many times that the name lost its meaning in her own ears. She was distinctly uneasy, as though she’d provided the creature with some intimate part of herself, something that could be fashioned and used against her, like the lock of hair in the guts of an ancient voodoo doll.

  To stop the alien’s chanting of her name, she asked sharply, “Is this Simms’ Emporium?”

  “Right!” The alien grinned and showed capped teeth. Candelaria could see that its teeth were naturally broader at the base than those of humans, so that the inexpert dental work had resulted in cracked enamel and torn gums.

  “Masochistic,” she said into her machine. “A perverse kind of vanity.” That had a nice ring to it and so she might use it, but she knew it wasn’t quite right either.

  “Simms! Simms!” The alien was hissing frenetically. “What you want from Simms, pretty lady? Oh, he got everything!” It had reached up high to stroke the sides of her head; fortunately her hair was too short and straight for it to tangle its fingers. “What you looking for, pretty lady?”

  “I’m looking for Mr. Simms himself.”

  The alien made a series of short noises that was unmistakably laughter. “That be hard.”

  “Why?”

  “I take you in. I introduce you. I — “

  “No,” she said stiffly. “I prefer to speak with him alone.”

  The creature stepped back as though she’d slapped it, and Candelaria found herself feeling guilty. Peculiar reactions; she made a mental note of them. She also noted that she felt both relieved and abandoned now that the little creature was abruptly no longer touching her, now that she no longer had any physical contact with it. That was peculiar, too.

  Then the alien writhed its head in a gesture she could not interpret, making the fluffy blonde wig slip backward so that a shiny expanse of its blue forehead was suddenly exposed. Shocked, Candelaria averted her eyes. The creature laughed again and scuttled away.

  Candelaria took a deep breath and pushed open the lightweight metal door to Simms’ Emporium. Inside it was dusty and dim; her nose began to itch almost immediately, and her eyes to widen reflexively. She stood still for a few moments in an attempt to get her bearings, then proceeded with caution.

  The place looked like a warehouse. Obviously there had been little attempt to set up an attractive sales floor. Boxes were stacked everywhere; some hung open, others were sealed shut, while others still bore shipping tags. Candelaria had to squint and peer to read the labels: “Hands.” “Noses.” “Feet.” “Ears.” Here and there an item of merchandise protruded, a hand or a foot gleaming pink or yellow or brown or black in the half-light. Though she was moving slowly and carefully, Candelaria tripped over something — a leg, its syntheflesh ripped in places to reveal the wires and hydraulics underneath. She stifled a twinge of irrational horror.

  She laid the leg down and resisted the impulse to wipe her hands on her pants. She advanced slowly, her reporter’s senses askew. She was so disoriented that she was experiencing some actual vertigo and was afraid to brace herself against the towers of boxes for fear they’d tumble down and scatter fake human body parts across the floor. The image made her laugh, made her stomach lurch. Rocket lag certainly, and the effects of unfamiliar food, no matter how terrestrialized it was claimed to be, and the emotional aftermath of that oddly intense encounter with the alien outside the Emporium.

  But there was also something intrinsically disorienting about this place itself. Candelaria made a whispered impressionistic note about her responses for later refinement, not wanting to disturb the eerie silence by speaking aloud. There were state-of-the-art recorders that could pick up subvocalizing; of course, Infonet wouldn’t spring for such a thing. Candelaria frowned irritably.

  Suddenly she stopped short, face-to-face with what was apparently the Emporium’s only display. It was crude, but — she told herself wryly — effective: her heart was pounding. A shabby antique mannequin had been set up near the center of the cluttered floor. Thick blue-gray paint layered its egg-shaped face. It wore synthetic ears, two left hydroarms, four breast replacements with the straps and connectors dangling. Enormous and very white false teeth jutted from the gaping mouth cavity. A fake nose was attached to the dummy’s abdomen where the navel should have been; one nostril ring glinted silver. Candelaria’s gaze traveled on downward and she laughed aloud; a giant dildo had been fastened in an erect position between mismatched hydrolegs.

  “May I help you?”

  Candelaria started, then turned to peer along a corridor formed by two high walls of boxes all labeled, with racist imprecision, “Face Paint Flesh Tone.” A figure stood in this irregular canyon, one arm extended as if gesturing toward her. The figure was distinctly human, but for an instant she thought there was something subtly wrong with it — a shoulder out of line, perhaps, or a hip turned at an unnatural angle, or the torso bent impossibly. Like a body viewed through running water, she thought, or like an ancient human being’s fantasy of what an alien would look like.

  The figure came toward her and the distortion was gone. Candelaria couldn’t imagine what she’d seen that had confused her, and that confused her even more. This person seemed normal enough, although at first she couldn’t decide the gender.r />
  “May I help you?” the milky voice repeated. “Looking for something special? A memento for the kids? A novelty gift for the lover?”

  Annoyed to be taken so lightly, Candelaria said firmly into the slightly-echoing space between them, “I’m not shopping. My name is Celia Candelaria, and I’m a reporter for Infonet.” She offered him her card. It seemed to take a long time before the card was out of her hand and into his. “Mr. Simms, I presume.”

  He bowed. “At your service.”

  “You’re the manager of — all this?”

  “Manager, owner, proprietor, founder, monopolist. If I do say so myself. To what do I owe the honor of your visit, Ms. Candelaria?”

  “There’s been a great deal of interest at home lately in colony businesses. And yours is rather well-known, Mr. Simms.”

  “Gordon,” he said, taking charge, and stepped toward her with both hands extended. He came so close so quickly that she would have stepped away if her back had not already been pressed against the wall of boxes. As it was, she took advantage of his proximity to take stock of his appearance for use in a future report. Her first impression was that he was a remarkably unhandsome man. He was tall, probably in his late thirties, dark-haired, somehow awkwardly built. Candelaria found herself more interested in him than she’d expected to be. She also noticed that he held her hand in both of his slightly longer than necessary.

  “I thought you’d be much older,” she told him. “According to my research, you were one of the first merchants here.”

  He nodded. “Been here a long time.”

  He sat down on a box marked “Breasts” and casually crossed his legs. In this context, the commonplace gesture seemed almost obscene. She leaned gingerly against a stack of makeup boxes and switched on the mic, reflecting on the strange and inconvenient places she’d conducted interviews since her assignment to the colonies. She was tired of it; tired of the travelling and the perpetual sense of rawness, of the feeling that everything was just now forming rules and patterns everywhere she went.