The Monkey's Other Paw: Revived Classic Stories of Dread and the Dead

by Luis Ortiz (Editor)

Overview

Several of the best modern horror writers are brought together in this collection of new stories that are all revivals of classic dark tales. From sequels and prequels to retellings and homages, these pieces continually elude expectations and are full of surprising twists and turns. The literary endeavors include Gay Terry, Carol Emshwiller, and Don Webb each tackling some of H. P. Lovecraft’s writings from alternative points of view, the graphic artist Martos illustrating what becomes of the painting of Dorian Gray after the death of its subject, and Paul di Filippo riffing on Dylan Thomas’s ghost story “The Followers.” Embracing and expanding upon themes explored in classic horror, this anthology injects a new dose of dread into the genre.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781933065533
Publisher:	NonStop Press
Publication date:	06/06/2014
Sold by:	INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	401 KB

About the Author

Luis Ortiz is the author of Arts Unknown: The Life & Art of Lee Brown Coye and Emshwiller: Infinity X Two, the latter of which was nominated for both the Hugo and Locus Awards. He is also the editor of Outermost: The Art + Life of Jack Gaughan and Why New Yorkers Smoke and the coeditor of Cult Magazines: From A to Z. His writings have appeared in Comics Journal, Filmfax, and Illustration Magazine. He lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

The Monkey's Other Paw

Revived Classic Stories of Dread and the Dead

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By Luis Ortiz

Nonstop Press

Copyright © 2014 Alegría Luna Luz
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-933065-53-3

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CHAPTER 1

The Unheimlich Maneuver

Damien Broderick

COCAINE really was the bees' knees, safe yet soaringly efficacious. It sent Freud's mind whirring, powered him through sleepless nights of research and uneasy insight. Finally, though, he now felt ready to crash. He dismissed his nurse and his receptionist, lay back on the brocaded couch reserved for his patients and, as anticipated, dreams, nightmares and vapors of eternity rushed about his closed eyes.

In the instantaneous transition of dream, the alienist gazed down from a tall building exactly like this 13 story steel, brick, glass, and oak medical center recently built at Berggasse 19, in the ninth district, by Tesla Gesellschaft. From his 11th floor consulting room, and through his bearded, fragmented, floating reflection in the leaded casement's glass, Freud saw something that sent a thrill through his flesh. It moved far below in the busy street. He took up the new electrical field glasses presented to him by his most famous patient, pressed them to his eyes. In and out of the scurrying pedestrians, gentlemen in frock coats and toppers, haughty fashionable ladies in immense bustles like ships under sail, servants in dirndlgewand, buggies, Fiacres, charabancs, cabriolets, officers on horseback, and a few honking Teslaforce-powered horseless carriages spitting sparks, a curious gray bush actually seemed as if it were striding toward him. Freud shuddered, and redoubled his pacing in the woods under the spinning shape of the zeppelin.

Piercingly sharp tones brought him bolt upright from the couch. Zeppelin? What? But no, it was the Teslaphon, piping him from sleep, as hectoring and demanding as a patient in deep transference. He snatched up the headset, clapped its cool Lamenite over his ears.

"It's Flieβ. You free to talk?"

"Dude!"

"I'll take that for a ja. Hey, that invert thing at the conference about da Vinci? You totally fucked up."

Straight into it, no small talk with Wilhelm Flieβ. Unless he was soothing you into a therapeutic hypnotic trance, or poking around in your nose, and that was hardly chit-chat anyway.

"What would you know about da Vinci, you dabbler? I've been studying the man's work for years." Freud was genuinely nettled, he realized.

"Leonardo's dream. It wasn't a vulture."

"Of course it was. The significance of the Egyptian mother goddess Mut is obvious, dummkopf. Der Geier, a vulture. With its tail feathers opening the kid's mouth. How homoerotic do you want a dream to be?"

"Nibbo, not geier," Flieβ said. "A kite. Wrong myth, meshuggah."

Immediately, like a thunderbolt, Freud understood the magnitude of his goof. And it struck him that he and his whimsical younger friend were speaking in the louche Viennese German of his childhood, picked up in school after the family relocated from Freiberg in Moravia. Crushed, he crossed to the window and stared down into the street. Traffic was incessant. The shadow of a zeppelin passed slowly across the nearby red-tiled roofs. The world was changing fast.

Flieβ said, "How's the monograph doing? Man, coke's gotta be more gripping than carving up 900 eels looking for their balls."

"Trust me. Yeah, the cocaine treatise's getting a respectful hearing. At least there won't be any scandal with this topic."

"But listen, bro," Flieβ said, "how's your pal Brueur's Miss Pappenheim? Still got it together after the breakup?"

"Totally."

"Awesome."

"But man, let's not call Bertha by her real name, not even in private. Anna O."

"Whatever."

The heavy headset was squeezing his ears, as if someone invisible stood behind him, pressing hard; he shifted it, and his ears throbbed, his eyes watered, his nose tingled. Nasal reflex neurosis. Time for more cocaine treatment. "I'm guessing there's some reason you called."

"I have a patient you might consider taking on. Very interesting case. Talk about hysteria. Can I send this cat over?"

Freud leafed through his appointment book. "I have an opening Tuesday week at ... hmm ... after lunch. Two o'clock?"

"Dynamite."

Day was fading. Freud activated the gas lamps, and in the brightening light reached for his casebook, drawing his pen and ink toward it. If he failed to jot down at least the fundamentals of his oracular dream, it would be lost.

* * *

"Come in, young man," Freud said. He did not extend his hand. "I expected an introductory referral from your otorhinolaryngologist, Dr. Flieβ, but the mail's been delayed for the last several days. Now, you are —" He took up his pen, leaned to the casebook open on his desk.

"Frantz Travesti," the patient mumbled in a French accent, then covered his mouth with his free hand. The other held a book. "A joke. I am Nathaniel Bernhardt."

Freud shifted effortlessly to formal French. "No relation to the celebrated Sarah?"

"You might say I'm her son."

"I see." Freud jotted a note, keeping his features expressionless. Bernhardt, or more likely "Bernhardt," was a striking if somewhat androgynous fellow, hardly beyond 20 or 21, and his strong nose did indeed rather resemble that of the great actress — who, though surely by coincidence, had been wildly infatuated with Nikola Tesla. (Or was that what had brought the boy here, via Flieβ as an attempted feint?) Of course Tesla had repudiated her yearnings. Freud had satisfactorily cured the inventor's molysomophobia, his neurotic terror of physical contact and attendant infection, but Nikola remained obdurately resistant to sexual expression.

"Not literally," Nathaniel said. "You might say I am her spiritual child. I am an actor and dancer."

"A travesti, then," Freud murmured. "Adopting the role of a female on stage, as your namesake not infrequently takes the role of a man, Hamlet, for example."

Astonished, the young fellow gazed at the alienist. "Absolutely correct, sir. But this season I am not in women's costume. I have the role of, of ..." He faltered.

"Frantz, in Delibes' Coppélia, yes."

The young man relaxed a little. "Ah. I see you have had a report from Dr. Flieβ after all. Or have you been to the theater and seen me on stage with your own eyes?"

"Neither. A series of inferences or scientific inductions, Mr. Bernhardt. You carry a volume of Hoffmann's Phantasiestücke in Callots Manier. Granted your profession —"

"Ah," said Nathaniel, "ah. You are astute. May I take my place upon your famous couch? I feel somewhat ... faint."

"By all means," Freud said. "You may hang your coat on the stand over there. The shoes, please remove them. You may cover your feet with the rug if you feel cold. A joke is no joking matter, jests and dreams are the royal roads to the unconscious. Frantz is the luckless protagonist in the operetta. You see yourself foreshadowed avant la lettre in Hoffmann's story?"

Nathaniel shuddered theatrically. "More than you could possibly imagine, doctor." He put the book on the floor at his side, lay down with a certain epicene grace. "I have begun to remember the most horrific events from my childhood. And now, now that I, that I —"

Freud took the chair behind the patient's head. Commentators in the press sometimes speculated that this position was chosen to allow his patients the free expression of their every thought, without the authoritative and censorious gaze of the analyst burning into their own undefended eyes. It was not so, of course. Freud permitted himself an undetected smile. No, it was simply that he could not tolerate being stared at by other people for eight hours or more a day. On the whole, he had found little that was "'good'" about human beings. In his experience most of them were trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribed to this or that ethical doctrine, or to none at all. They enacted the urgings of their instincts, base and wholesome alike, no better than wind-up mechanisms set free to roam the streets. But that was something you could not say aloud, or perhaps even think.

Freud had allowed the moment of strangled silence to extend long enough. "There is something you cannot say aloud? The very purpose of our sessions, sir, is to give you absolute carte blanche to utter whatever comes to your lips, however it might seem to stray from the purpose, however disgraceful, depraved or simply boring it strikes you. I myself shall say very little, Mr. Bernhardt —"

The patient twisted, looking over his shoulder. "Please call me Nathaniel."

"Very well, Nathaniel. Now lie back and gaze at the ceiling. Allow your thoughts to wander where they will, and your tongue to give them free expression."

Another silence. "Really, I don't know where to begin."

"Recall some vivid and meaningful event. You just told me that you have been troubled by memories of the most horrific events from your childhood."

"Yes. Yes. And more recently. Oh, dear God —"

"First, childhood. Close your eyes, if you wish. You are perfectly safe and protected here, Nathaniel."

"Where's your pad? Aren't you meant to be taking notes?"

Freud said, "I do not take notes. It is distracting. I need to keep my attention focused on what you will say. Now let us begin."

* * *

"My father was a professor of ... anatomy at the University of Paris," the young man said. "His name was Alessandro ..." Again he hesitated. "Well, Bernhardt, obviously. My mother is Maria Josephina, and I have no sisters, and just one brother, Sigismund."

Freud's lips tightened involuntarily. But the youth was not addressing him, not with such easy familiarity. So Sigismund was Nathaniel's brother's name. But there had been resistance. Alessandro was no name for a Frenchman. Something was being hidden. It was sheer coincidence that Freud's own given name had been Sigismund, until he changed it to Sigmund when he was 22, working hard on his doctorate at the University of Wein. It was not a common name, certainly not among the French, for all its heraldic virtue — "protection through victory"; Freud felt the faintest uncanny shiver.

"We seldom saw father," the young man was saying. "He ate separately from us boys, came home late from his laboratory, went straight upstairs without a word to us, either to his study or the marital bed. In the morning, when we prepared for school, he was either gone or kept his own counsel. But we heard his passage on the stairs, as we tussled after dinner or finished our homework beneath mother's stern eye, his steady tread and the squeaking of the steps. And then later, as we made ready for bed, the further squeaking and crashing of another pair of boots ..." He broke off, said nothing for a time.

"Mother sent us up to bed with the injunction, 'Off you go now, the Sandman will visit you soon. He'll sprinkle sand in your sleepy eyes and send you off to dream land.' Sigismund and I puzzled over this, half excited, half shuddering, until it occurred to me that this heavy tread up to father's study was the Sandman. I asked our nurse one day who this Sandman is, and she gave me a look of horror, or pretended horror. 'Oh, little boy, he is a very wicked fellow, who visits bad children when they refuse to go to bed, and throws sharp grinding sand into their face, until their eyes burst bleeding from their heads. He hides these eyes in his bag and flies them up to the crescent moon to feed his children.' 'Oh no!' I cried, filled with horror and terror, and little Sigismund burst into frightened tears. I put my arms around him, crying myself. 'Oh yes,' said Nanny, 'those children of the Sandman perch by moonlight in their nest in the sky, and with their crooked beaks they pick up the eyes of the bad human children, and gobble them for their supper.'"

With frantic abruptness, Nathaniel sat up straight on the couch, flung his feet to the floor, and turned a piteous, bleached face to the alienist. "That was the man who visited my father in the night, and worked with him in his laboratory. The Sandman. The Sandman."

Freud glanced at his clock. It seemed longer, but they had been at it less than half an hour.

"Pray settle yourself, sir," he said. "We rehearse memories and fancies and phantasies in analysis, yet these have no power to harm us. As children, yes, such images might bring our eyes almost literally starting from our heads. But now we are men, and know that dreams or nightmares can bring us to treasures of self-knowledge but they cannot hurt us. Please lie down again, young man, and resume your recollections. Or feel free to change the subject. The only requirement here is that you will utter your associations freely, without hindering them, without embroidery. And now, let us resume."

Two or three minutes of obstinate mutescence followed, and Freud heard only the stertorous breathing of a man in deep pain. He bit his lip and said nothing. Finally Nathaniel spoke again, and now his voice held the false calm and clarity of a theatrical on a stage ringed with gas lights.

"I have said nothing yet, doctor, of my true horror. One evening, goaded by curiosity, I crept upstairs from my bedroom and hid inside a closet in father's study. Laboratory, rather. It was a large, long room, filled with glass vessels and pieces of dead creatures floating inside jars and acids and other dangerous substances, and at the far end a hooded enclosure fitted with a dull iron box as large as a coffin, serviced by pipes for gas. Despite my anticipation, I drifted off to sleep, and woke only at the double tread of feet, like the stamping of twins in a march, rising up the stairs. The door creaked open, and slammed closed. Night was falling; a single gas mantle gave sepulchral lighting to the room. I saw my father put on a heavy protective garment of rubber, and help his companion into one similar. They bent over the coffin, sighing, muttering, and fired up a blaze of purple light that flickered and settled into a steady, uncanny glow. I could not quite see the Sandman's face, but his shoulders were broad and his hands, when they fell into the light, dark with thick hair. "Coppelius," my father said, "we are all but complete in our work, but we have no eyes." They stood back and I seemed to see lifeless human faces without eyes, just deep dark holes penetrating the flesh above their cheeks. "We need human eyes, living eyes!" this Coppelius groaned. I screamed, and dashed from my hiding place. The Sandman took hold of me and dragged me to the coffin, which now seemed filled with flame. "Here are eyes," he cried to my father, "a handy pair of child's eyes." He drew with his tongs from the flame some red-hot grains, intent on flinging them into my eyes. My father shouted his horrified objection, "No, you must leave my son Nathaniel his eyes!" Coppelius laughed, and said: "Yes, very well, I'll leave his eyes, he'll need them to weep, but let us at least examine the machinery of his hands and feet." He seized me so forcibly that my joints cracked, and screwed off my hands and feet, and then put them on again, one here and the other there. The room went altogether dark, a cramp took me, and I lost all feeling. I was not quite lost to consciousness, though. I heard my father cry in rage — or was it Coppelius? — and an explosion shook the laboratory, then another, and fire rained down upon us all, took hold of the heavy curtains and walls. When I woke I was lying, cold and dripping in the street, my mother insensible with grief, the house almost entirely devoured by flames. They told me that Sigismund was safe, but that my father had perished in the flames. Of the Sandman there was no smallest sign. No one had set eyes on him as he arrived, or if he left. The magistrates concluded later that no visitor had been there, that my father's reckless experiments brought about his fate, and ours, and that if any other had visited us that night, he was either long gone or had perished in the same fire that burned the flesh from my father's hands and face and boiled away his poor eyes."

* * *

High, luminously clear air parted with the mildest purr before the teardrop prow of the Friedrichshafen out of Berlin, now cruising above the blue, blue waters of the Danube. Green and brown fields stretched to the horizon on every side. Now and then they passed over a quaint village, and invariably the yokels and children ran about to gaze upward, agog, waving their hats and crying wordlessly. He could never have afforded such luxury, such frivolity, had not he and Breuer been sent an engraved and signed invitation from the desk of Tesla himself. Was he anxious at this elevation above his adopted country, this taunting of fate in the fashion of Icarus? A little, Freud confessed to himself, but only a little. Yes, zeppelins had crashed, crumpled, burst terribly into flame — but that was in the early days, years ago now, when Count Zeppelin's craft had employed hydrogen for lift, rather than the safe, inert helium urged by Tesla. The reflection made his lips quirk. Hydrogen, the element of water, burned like the flames of Hell, while the essence of sunlight, helium, isolated in air only after its absorption line had been plucked out of a spectrograph of the Sun, was entirely placid, coolly so.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Monkey's Other Paw by Luis Ortiz. Copyright © 2014 Alegría Luna Luz. Excerpted by permission of Nonstop Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction These Will Chill You Luis Ortiz,
The Unheimlich Maneuver Damien Broderick,
And Frightened Miss Muffet Away Paige Quayle,
Richard Nixon Saved From Drowning Barry N. Malzberg,
The Terminal Villa Barry N. Malzberg,
The Doom that Came to Devil's Reef Don Webb,
A Most Extraordinary Man Scott Edelman,
The Monkey's Paw W. W. Jacobs,
The Monkey's Other Paw Alegría Luna Luz,
Eddie The Great Steve Rasnic Tem,
A True Blue Bouquet Ivan Fanti,
Ghostless Paul Di Filippo,
The Alighted House Elgar Allan Poe, Completed by K.J. Cypret,
Footfall Gay Partington Terry,
Acknowledgements,
Authors,

Editorial Reviews

The Monkey’s Other Paw [...] offers stories in which 13 contemporary writers re-imagine or pay tribute to the work of various classic horror authors. Don Webb’s 'The Doom That Came to Devil’s Reef' opens quietly: 'Among Lovecraft’s papers at Brown University was a large manila envelope containing . . .' and then reveals what may be the true origins of 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth.' Scott Edelman’s 'A Most Extraordinary Man' neatly imagines a sequel to Saki’s most famous and witty shocker, 'The Open Window.' Set against the loneliness of New York City, and in homage to Dylan Thomas’s 'The Followers,' Paul Di Filippo’s 'Ghostless' focuses on a spectral matchmaking service for ghosts and mortals." —Michael Dirda, the Washington Post

From the Publisher