Flesh Wounds Read online

  Table of Contents

  – Title Page –

  – Copyright –

  – Author Image –

  – Acknowledgments –

  An Emotional Bloodletting

  Dead Art

  And Though a Million Stars Were Shining

  Wish One Knight

  Roses in December

  The Woodshed

  Night Bite

  Of a Darker Kind

  The Baited Night

  I Saw What You Did

  Gaffed

  What’ll the Neighbors Think?

  Pieces

  Thunder of the Water

  The Scissor Man

  Much More Than You Know

  To Walk Among the Living

  Gramps Goes Fishing

  Scarecrow’s Dream

  Feast of the Crows

  Sheepskins

  Shrovetide

  The Night was Kind to Loretta

  The Endless Masquerade

  All Colors Bleed to Red

  Flotsam

  Out the Back Door

  Ten Days in July

  Lost Things

  Comfortably Numb

  Flesh Wounds

  Flesh Wounds

  * * *

  Brian A. Hopkins

  Lone Wolf Publications

  Oklahoma City, OK

  Copyright © 1999 Lone Wolf Publications.

  Stories and art copyright © 1999 Brian A. Hopkins. Introduction copyright © 1999 Ken Abner. Brochure cover art, “Dancing with the Edge of Storms,” copyright © 1999 Andrew Shorrock (for a virtual tour of Andrew’s incredible art, see the installation instructions included with the CD). The Photographs on pages 51, 302, 328, and 455 copyright © 1999 Susan Burgard (other photos were taken by the author). Acrobat Reader is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Inc. Acrobat Reader Version 3.02 distributed with the permission of Adobe Systems Inc. Kai’s Power Show is a registered trademark of MetaCreations Corporation. Distributed with permission.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. The acknowledgments on pages 5 and 6 constitute a continuation of this copyright information.

  FIRST EDITION

  Lone Wolf Publications

  13500 SE 79th Street

  Oklahoma City, OK 73150

  Acknowledgments

  The following stories originally appeared in other publications: “Dead Art” in Bones of the Children (Oct 96); “And Though a Million Stars Were Shining” in After Hours (Apr 94); “Wish One Knight” in The Tome (Apr 93); “Roses in December” in Millennium Science Fiction and Fantasy (Dec 98); “The Woodshed” in Sleuthhound (Feb 99); “Night Bite” in Eldritch Tales (May 95); “Of a Darker Kind” in The Tome (Nov 91); “The Baited Night” in Terminal Fright (Jul 95); “I Saw What You Did” in Dark Muse (Oct 98); “Gaffed” in Something Haunts Us All (Aug 95); “What’ll the Neighbors Think?” in Millennium Science Fiction and Fantasy (Aug 96); “Thunder of the Water” in Aberations (sic) (Feb 92); “The Scissor Man” in Terminal Fright (May 96); “Much More Than You Know” in Horrors! 365 Scary Stories (Sep 98); “To Walk Among the Living” in The Midnight Zoo (Jun 92); “Gramps Goes Fishing” in Flesh and Blood (Mar 99); “Scarecrow’s Dream” in The Best of the Midwest’s Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, Volume 2 (Mar 93); “Feast of the Crows” in Horrors! 365 Scary Stories (Sep 98); “Sheepskins” in Aberations (sic) (Feb 93); “Shrovetide” in The Midnight Zoo (Feb 93); “The Night Was Kind to Loretta” in The Tome (Nov 92); “The Endless Masquerade” in Dark Whispers (Sep 98); “Flotsam” in The Martian Wave (Sep 98); “Out the Back Door” in Pirate Writings (Feb 97); “Ten Days in July” in The Beekeeper (Jul 94); “Comfortably Numb” in Pulp Eternity (Sep 98).

  I’d like to thank the editors who thought enough of these stories to publish them: Paula Guran, William G. Raley, David Niall Wilson, Lorraine Van Valkenberg, Joan Popek, Peggy Farris, Crispin Burnham, Ken Abner, Terry West, J. Moretz, Stefan Dziemianowicz, Jon Herron, Jack Fisher, Brian Smart, Ivan Graves, James Baker, Ed McFadden, Carol Hall, and Steve Algieri.

  “Flesh Wounds,” “Pieces,” and “Lost Things” appear here for the first time. “Pieces” is scheduled to appear in Rain Graves’ ERRATA. Thank you, Rainy! “Lost Things” is a story I wrote long, long ago and stuck in a drawer when someone told me it reminded them of Harlan Ellison’s “Paladin of the Lost Hour.” I should have taken the comment as a compliment, but I was more worried at the time that I had subconsciously stolen from Ellison. Years later, I can see that the two stories share nothing more in common than a cemetery scuffle, an old man, and a dangerous young man, so I offer it here for the first time ever. “Flesh Wounds” was written specifically for this collection.

  For complete bibliographical information, reference http://www.sff.net/people/brian_a_hopkins/biblio.htm.

  My heartfelt thanks to Ken Abner, Andrew Shorrock, and Susan Burgard, who helped make this package that much more attractive. None of them are getting anything more substantial than my deep appreciation as payment. The Flesh Wounds disk includes a virtual gallery of Andrew’s excellent art—be sure and take the tour. Ken, of course, is the genius behind Terminal Fright Publishing—be sure and check into his wonderful line of books.

  As always, I couldn’t have done this without my family: Betty, Derek, and Summer. I’d also like to thank Mom and Dad, James Van Pelt, Brett Savory, David Niall Wilson, the “Waders,” the “Coon Hunters,” Delice Weaver, Barry Hunter, Judy Sadler, Mike Huyck, Sheila Wakely, anybody else I should thank but have forgotten, the scarecrow’s lady, the poetess, and what dreams may come.

  Brian A. Hopkins

  Oklahoma City, OK

  March 1999

  An Emotional Bloodletting

  by Ken Abner

  “There are things we should never reveal, even to those we love. There are things which we are meant to take to the grave.”

  –Brian A. Hopkins, “The Scissor Man”

  Make no mistake, reading the stories of Brian Hopkins is very difficult. Not due to any deficiencies in his mechanics or prose—he is both eloquent and poetic, lyrical and deeply moving—but because of the subject matter he most often chooses to write about.

  Brian writes of our weaknesses: spiritual, emotional, physical. He forces us to confront our flaws before our own inner mirrors so that we may see the deformities for what they are—the faults within all of us. No one achieves perfection. Brian reminds us of this time and again with painful truths. And who among us can truthfully say they don’t harbor a secret or two? Perhaps secrets so old that we’ve had time to convince ourselves of an alternate past... or simply justified them in ways more palatable? You may find old truths bubbling to the surface while reading these stories, and discover that Brian knows intimately all your hidden places. Things you thought safely tucked away long ago. He’s a bastard in that way, and in that way he succeeds where other writers might falter or even refuse to go.

  Reading Brian Hopkins is akin to being tossed into a tumultuous ocean, where waves of grief, regret, longing and despair pound you into a psychological froth, a self-pitying melancholy. You may understandably find yourself a character in any number of these stories, for the people he writes of are not the one dimensional cut-outs often found in today’s fiction. They react and feel very much as we ourselves might act and feel given similar circumstances. They anger and have moments of self-doubt; they scare, tremble and cry. B
ecause his characters carry so much emotion, and because Brian places them in situations which don’t require extraordinary leaps of faith on the reader’s part, they become very much alive and believable to us.

  You’ll notice that Brian often foreshadows his stories with quotes from sometimes well-known, sometimes obscure literary works. Having known him through correspondence for five years now, I can say that he at times appears to have read everything. (Leaving me to wonder if we taxpayers are getting our money’s worth from this government employee . Then again, perhaps it’s only my jealousy showing through.) That he gets inspiration in this manner is without doubt. He is a poet at heart, and I imagine he has a thousand snippets of verse and collected quotes from works he’s read to last several lifetimes of short story writing.

  Brian Hopkins is a skilled subtlest, and from reading his work, one can postulate that he takes pride in not hammering his readers with the obvious. It’s rare that you’ll find a Hopkins tale which relies on a bang and twist—although one story almost ends with the detonation of a small nuclear device—to carry the moment. He instead conveys an emotion which often lingers with the reader long after the story has reached its logical conclusion. This approach is much more rewarding.

  I asked Brian which of these thirty or so stories was his favorite. For a writer who has amassed as many stories as he—this collection is less than half of what exists, though most of the other work is in the science fiction and fantasy arenas, to speak nothing of his numerous collaborations which he readily admits to being a “collaborating slut”—this is an inevitable question. But I posed it anyway, because I have personally enjoyed so much of his work, and was curious. After some waffling, he relented that “All Colors Bleed to Red” could be labeled as such. Which came as no surprise to me. Brian often writes of the environment and ecology, and the outdoors almost always plays a role in his stories. But perhaps none more so than “Colors.” It is an ecological horror tour de force, which required an enormous amount of research to get the science of the story correct, which eventually led to his “...great feeling of accomplishment...” when he finished it. This, along with the fact that the story is about as close to real-life horror as possible, makes it his favorite.

  My own personal favorite is a story I published in Terminal Fright magazine back in May of ‘96. A story for which I’ve pushed aside work to reread several times since. “The Scissor Man” strikes a very personal chord with me, and packs the emotional wallop one familiar with Brian’s work has come to expect. It’s a story we will all confront, eventually, in one manner or another: old age, death, separation. It’s contemplative and heart-rending, and few writers could have pulled it off so successfully.

  Brian Hopkins succeeds because he is a passionate writer, and because he holds nothing back. Opening himself up, he gives everything he has to give, and bleeds his feelings into each and every story. You can’t help but get pulled under by his constant storm of emotions.

  He’s just a bastard in that way.

  Ken Abner

  Easter 1999

  Black River, New York

  * * *

  Ken Abner is the editor/publisher of Terminal Fright Press, a regular venue for Brian. After three and a half years of producing Terminal Fright Magazine, he decided it was way too much work, and switched to hardcover books instead. He finds producing books to be more fulfilling, and believes one can never read or own too many of them. For a current TF catalog write to: Terminal Fright, PO Box 100, Black River, NY 13612.

  * * *

  Dead Art

  “Works of art are of an infinite loneliness... Only love can grasp and hold and fairly judge them.”

  –Rilke

  1. Artist and Canvas

  He washes her first, a good, hard scrubbing that takes off the dead, top layer of skin. Ironic, that thought. As if part of her is more dead than others. As if death is nothing more than the inevitable collapse of all our defenses, so that the death we all carry on the outside eventually sinks through to our insides.

  They brought her to him quickly enough, rigor mortis having set and gone already, leaving her pliant to his soapy brushes and sponge. He’s careful to wash all her secret places: between her toes and behind her ears, the soft white crease under each breast, her navel, her nostrils, her eyelids and rectum and neck. With pliers he removes all her nails, then tenderly cleans the debutante-pink flesh he’s revealed. With tiny scissors, he trims her now ragged cuticles, until each of her ten digits ends in a blunt and polished alien pad, smooth on top, concentrically crenulated on the bottom.

  He takes a razor and begins at her feet. He shaves the fine pale hair on the top of her toes and her feet, moving onward and upward to meet the courser stubble of her legs. He’s careful around the ankles and knees, mindful of the razor’s edge against the thin, bone-taut skin there. The hair on her thighs where she traditionally stopped shaving is so fine as to be almost invisible. It slides away from the razor like a film of soap. With scissors, he removes most of the hair from her groin, then follows up with the razor, pulling on her bath-moist labia so that he can get at all the stubble in that tender region between her legs. He follows a trail of down up her belly, around her navel (where he finds a mole with a single dark hair that he plucks with tweezers), around the arc of her rib cage, and between her breasts which sport the same fine blond hair he encountered on her thighs. Her shoulders. Her neck. Her face. With shears, he removes most of the hair from her head. The razor completes the job.

  Then he turns her over and does the other side.

  When he’s done, he washes her again.

  She’s now clean and pristine. The only hair left on her body is her eyelashes and the hair in her nose. The latter he leaves. Her eyelashes, he plucks one by one. When they’re all out, he sews her eyes shut with surgical thread, pulling it from the inside where it can’t be seen. He does the same with her mouth.

  By this time, he’s been bent over the table for three hours and his back is killing him. He’s not as young as he used to be. He curls up on the damp, soiled floor beneath the table, shivering now that he’s not working, not occupied with his art. His joints ache with arthritis as much as fatigue. He’s spent too many years in this freezer. But once started, he never leaves them. If there were room on the table, he would sleep at her side. Lacking that, the concrete floor will do. They’re not meant to be alone, these souls in his trust. He can only imagine their terror at being alone, at being incapacitated, impotent, abandoned... dead.

  Two hours later apprentices bring him food. Simple fair. Cold cheese and sausage. A glass of milk—which is all he allows himself when he’s working. While he eats, his apprentices set up the inks and needles. Another begins the base layer of acrylic. They should really pour the acrylic in a cleaner room, but he insists it all be done here under his supervision... and hers. It means more work for the apprentices; they’ll have to clean and polish the surface of the base before she’s placed upon it and the balance poured over her, but it’s a minor inconvenience.

  When he’s finished eating, he lets his hands roam her flesh, learning what he can. There’s a small scar on her chin (a childhood spill from that first bicycle?) and another on one knee (long and jagged, as if made by the tooth of an angry dog). He noticed them both while preparing her, but now he truly studies their topography: the way the original flesh flows around the swollen tissue of the scar, the arrangement of pores, the texture and color variations. He plays phrenologist, exploring the shape of her skull. He shifts her breasts for best effect. Arranges her hands. Explores her intimately and surmises that she never bore children. Her palms reveal no hard use. He knows she came from money—otherwise she would never have been brought to him—but still, sometimes, you find that even the rich enjoy a callous-rendering hobby. So she was pampered and kept (the soft deposits around her middle tell him that), fit for another five or six years, he estimates, before life would have caught up with her and she would either exercise or en
dure liposuction.

  He starts with her head, working the inks under the skin with his needles, dabbing with paper towels as she bleeds preservatives, following finished patches of the mosaic with swipes of a Vaseline coated tongue depressor. He injects her flesh with color, painting her life as it had been told him by husband and friends, as it had been interpreted by his questing hands and artist’s intuition. Her colors are bright. No earth-tone woman, this. No mother. No auntie. This was a woman of parties, of late nights, of cocktails and sequins and bright lights. The strokes he uses are bold and presumptuous, as forthright and in-your-face as he knew she must have been.

  Time passes. When he’s tired, he sleeps. When apprentices bring him food, he eats it. Beneath the unwavering fluorescents of the freezer, it’s impossible to tell how long it takes, but its span is measured in days, not hours. He paints every inch of her, turning her this way and that, the images following the contours of her body but telling of her soul. When he’s done, he kisses her painted forehead, then stands aside as the apprentices move her to the waiting slab of acrylic.

  He supervises as they put up the forms and carefully—oh so carefully, lest there be air bubbles—pour on the remaining acrylic. Through the translucent forms, he can still see her, but her image is murky and cloud-puffy with hardening polymers. Hardly the work of art her husband commissioned. But when the forms come off and the encasing, sheltering, immortalizing acrylic runs clear as glass, she will be perfect... forever.

  The apprentices leave him alone with her and he collapses, beyond exhaustion. His vigil won’t end until her cocoon has cured, another eight hours. There remains, however, one final task. He retrieves needles and ink, removes his shirt, and looks for a bare stretch of skin on which to remember her.