Salt Water Tears Read online

  Table of Contents

  – Copyright –

  Foreword: Ashes, The Rain, Brian Hopkins, and I [by Gary A. Braunbeck]

  – Dedication –

  – Epigraph –

  North

  The Promised Hour

  Crocodile Gods

  Wisteria

  Flotsam

  The Baited Night

  Sand King

  Wind and Sea and Time

  Wrinkles at Twilight

  Gramps Goes Fishing

  “North” originally appeared in Black Gate (2001)

  “The Promised Hour” originally appeared in Pulp Eternity (1998)

  “Crocodile Gods” originally appeared in Brainbox: The Real Horror (2000)

  “Wisteria” originally appeared in Twilight Showcase (1999)

  “Flotsam” originally appeared in Flesh Wounds (1999)

  “The Baited Night” originally appeared in Terminal Fright (1995)

  “Sand King” appears here for the first time

  “Wind and Sea and Time” originally appeared in Wrinkles At Twilight (2000)

  “Wrinkles at Twilight” originally appeared in Wrinkles At Twilight (2000)

  “Gramps Goes Fishing” originally appeared in Flesh And Blood (1999)

  ISBN 1-888993-21-9

  FIRST EDITION

  Text Copyright © 2001 by Brian A. Hopkins

  Introduction Copyright © 2001 by Gary A. Braunbeck

  Cover Art Copyright © 2001 by A. B. Word

  Dark Regions Press

  P. O. Box 1558

  Brentwood, CA 94513

  http://darkregions.hypermart.net/

  Ashes, The Rain,

  Brian Hopkins, and I

  by Gary A. Braunbeck

  Be warned: I am about to show my age here.

  In 1973 my fellow Ohioan Joe Walsh fronted a rock group you might have heard of—the James Gang. ’73 saw the release of what remains their most popular album, Rides Again. “Funk #49” came from that album. So did “The Bomber” and “Tend My Garden”—songs that hard-rockers who share my age undoubtedly know, while the under-40s in the crowd probably encounter them on any of the “classic rock” stations that have cropped up over the last decade. Those three songs received more than their share of air play, while the album itself was met by surprisingly good reviews. I say “surprisingly” because most music critics (who, thinking they had the James Gang pegged as just another glorified garage band, were gunning for the album months before its release) found themselves dumbfounded that three yahoos from central Ohio were capable of producing a popular album that not only fulfilled its obligation to kick serious rock derrière, but as an added bonus sprinkled the proceedings with songs that revealed a musical and philosophical depth rare for that time in rock. Specifically, they were floored by the album’s closing cut, “Ashes, the Rain and I.” If you have never heard this song, your spirit is all the poorer for it. Beginning with an acoustic guitar rhythmically picking out four simple notes, the sound of raindrops pinging against a cold autumn window, four austere notes which remain constant and never change, the song builds in emotional and musical intensity, culminating in a three-minute instrumental finale where the group is joined and then replaced by an orchestra whose individual instruments compliment the underlying four-note foundation in the same way wind, thunder, lightning, and other storm-sounds accompany a sudden spring downpour. The music is both glorious and sad, tinged at the edges with a certain darkness, an unnameable fear that I believe we all experience at one point or another during rainstorms; as the instrumental section nears its close the four-note foundation suddenly stops, leaving only the melancholy musings of the other instruments, which mix into one another like the stray thoughts of one for whom the rhythm of the rain brings a sense of peace, but when robbed of that rhythm, when finding there is no longer the constant pinging of those raindrops against the autumn window, is left to their own devices, slowly succumbing to the sadness which the sound of the rain had helped them avoid facing. Listening to the second half of “Ashes,” you can close your eyes and effortlessly picture the drab gray sky and cheerless soaked world that the song’s narrator sings of with such simple and profound elegance:

  Sometimes I sit and I stare at the rain

  Isn’t rain filled with sorrow?

  Wonder if I’ll see my home again

  Will it be dry tomorrow?

  Time passes softly and I’m a day older

  But still I live in days gone by

  Ashes to ashes, the rain’s turning colder

  Finding tomorrow the ashes, the rain, and I.

  This is a song that, once heard, cannot easily be forgotten. It’s one of the most eloquently sad pieces of music ever written. Period. And it forced music critics to view the James Gang in a new light.

  You will find that same eloquent sadness, that same melancholy, that same darkness at the edges, the same unnameable fear, that same profound elegance, in this collection—which, once read, cannot easily be forgotten. And, just like the smartass music critics of 1973 were forced to do with Joe Walsh and the James Gang, you will come away from this collection seeing Brian A. Hopkins in a whole new light. Those of you who think you had him pegged as just another science fiction writer will be proven wrong, for herein he demonstrates with these ten marvelous stories that he’s not someone who’s afraid to exercise his (you’ll pardon the term) literary side; his work in general, and these stories in specific, possess an emotional and philosophical depth that is rare in the field today.

  Just as the musical raindrops are the foundation upon which “Ashes” is built, the presence of water, in all its forms, is the foundation of the stories in this collection. There are echoes of Conrad, Melville, Hemingway, and others in these tales—and not the obvious echoes: there are no nods to Moby Dick or Heart of Darkness or The Old Man and the Sea—no, the echoes here are of Melville’s “Billy Budd,” with all of its subtle psychological complexities, Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer,” with its otherworldly exploration of man’s dual nature (particularly in the majestic “The Promised Hour”), and what for me is Hemingway’s finest novel, Islands in the Stream—whose final sequences are, in a way, given a shattering counterpart in the ending of the terrifying “Crocodile Gods,” which serves as a reminder of how horror, when it employs the element of genuine human tragedy—not the merely tragic—can hit you in both the gut and the heart, robbing your world of some small sense of safety (I defy you to get through this story, reach its anguished conclusion, and ever want to go snorkeling or scuba diving again... and just try to forget the last two lines of dialogue).

  Whether consciously or not, Brian has provided a flow to these stories; the rhythms of his prose have never been more assured than they are here, nor has his near peerless sense of how words, when in the hands of one who respects the complexities of the English language, can create their own melodies. If this last statement smacks a bit of hyperbole, then check out the opening passages of “Sand King,” a dazzlingly surreal sequence that can easily take its place alongside the most memorable passages of Harlan Ellison and Kobo Abe. In fact, upon rereading the stories in this collection for the third time (out of choice and not necessity), it strikes me that perhaps, more so than any other story in the collection, “Sand King,” like those four notes which open “Ashes, the Rain and I,” can be sighted as serving as the foundation upon which the rest of Salt Water Tears is built. This story—clocking in at less than 5,000 words—has the epic scope you’d expect to find in a much longer work, yet its very brevity is what gives it its power; starting with a foam-and-thunder opening that could have been pulled from a David Lean film, the story swirls—and sometimes snarls—with the kind of big-voiced energy that wo
uld make William Blake nod his head in approval, if not envy. In fact, “Sand King” has a lot in common with the work of Blake, not the least of which is its unapologetic romanticism—and by that I do not mean “romantic” as in sentimental treacle such as Love Story or The Bridges of Madison County, but romantic in the sense that Hopkins, like Blake, struggles valiantly with the themes of love, purpose, violence, grief, and how something as seemingly tiny as the human soul fights to reconcile these forces with belief in a Just universe—and maybe, in the process, find a reason for individual existence.

  Yeah, yeah, I know—how can one short story attempt to encompass so much and still manage to spin a compelling yarn? Trust me, Brian does it in spades: “Sand King” is equal parts Revisionist myth, love story, and hard-core horror, and achieves a near-operatic grandeur by its end. Do me a favor when you read this one; go back and read the way I described “Ashes” and apply that description to the narrative structure of “Sand King”—you’ll not only see how these two disparate works could be unconscious companion pieces, but you can be surprised to find—as was I—that Brian Hopkins has never heard “Ashes, the Rain and I.”

  I spoke earlier of flow, be it conscious or not. That these stories have a thematic flow will be easily discerned by the reader, but what is even more impressive—and less obvious at first—is the elemental contained in these stories.

  Having assembled a few collections of my own work over the years, I can tell you from experience that most writers sweat blood over the order in which the stories appear; you want to keep the momentum going, but at the same time you don’t want the reader to get to the halfway point and feel that they’ve read this next story before: you want to keep it fresh. You don’t want to have two or three stories that deal with, say, a serial killer grouped too closely together—it matters not one whit if these three stories approach the subject from radically different viewpoints; put them too close together, and you’ll seem to be repeating yourself, even if you’re not. Finalizing a table of contents ain’t as easy as you think.

  You don’t have to worry about that here. No two stories in this collection are even remotely the same; you’ve got your sweat-inducing horror, your ethereal fantasy, your action-adventure, your quiet character study, and a handful of short-shorts that run the gamut from Dali-esque phantasms to nasty little zingers in the tradition of Robert Bloch (“Gramps Goes Fishing,” which reads like a psych-sexual analysis of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea written by Carl Jung after a bender).

  But that elemental flow... aye, there’s the rub. Watch the order of the stories; each one ends with some element which is used to begin the next. The thing which washes up on the shore at the beginning of “Flotsam” could very well be one of the corpses the heroine of “Crocodile Gods” encounters; this sea which gives up its monsters could very well be the same one where the little girl in “Gramps” encounters her dream-creature; and that same dream-creature was probably responsible for the death of the being you encounter at the start of “Sand King”... flow.

  This collection is arguably Brian’s most mature and thoughtful one yet. His writing—always excellent—is here among the most painstakingly exact he’s ever produced. He never gives into the temptation to use traditional genre tomes and, in fact, knows how to use your expectations of those tomes against you, and to great result: read and then wonder at the craftsmanship of “North,” which starts out like something by a young Theodore Sturgeon, and then quickly and effortlessly becomes an adventure worthy of Jack London.

  The thoughtfulness is evident in the way he has chosen to portray his characters’ psychological makeup; these are all imperfect people whose actions don’t always make sense, even to themselves, and Brian never once apologizes for these natural contradictions inherent in all human beings, nor does he ever try to make amends for these contradictions by introducing populist contrivances in order to make the stories wrap up neatly—there is no reason why, at the end of “Wrinkles at Twilight,” the heroine shows mercy to someone who absolutely does not deserve it; she doesn’t understand why she does, nor does the person who is the recipient of that mercy, and Brian makes no attempt to explain her actions. He doesn’t have to; each of you will find a way to justify her actions in a way that will make the ending of “Wrinkles” a satisfying one; each will be different; each will be correct.

  One last observation and comment, then I’ll let you get to the Good Stuff.

  When Brian first sent these stories to me, I took one look at the title of the collection and said, “Oh, it’s called Salt Water Tears. How... uh... yeah.”

  I will admit that, at first glance, the title Salt Water Tears seems a bit, well...precious. Oh so sensitive. So literary. Or like something you’d see across the cover of a Harlequin Romance. It didn’t matter to me how good the stories inside were going to be; with the collection’s title, I thought Brian had bitten down on the Imperial Big One.

  Wrong.

  The title of this collection comes from the story “Sand King.” You’ll know it when you get there. And the implications on the title will give you a good shudder, I promise.

  So turn the page, my friends, and set sail on the seas of Brian Hopkins’ unique world. When you reach the end I think that you, like me, will sometimes sit and stare at the rain... but instead of thinking it’s filled with sorrow, you’ll see, as Brian does, the washing away of the mundane to reveal the wonder underneath.

  –Gary A. Braunbeck

  Dayton, Ohio

  April, 2001

  For Mark and Judi,

  who have shed a few with me.

  “The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach—waiting for a gift from the sea.”—Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  North

  * * *

  (A story celebrating Christmas 1999;

  dedicated to Jalen Howsare of Iowa City, Iowa,

  bereft of his eyes at 18 months of age.)

  Bilateral retinoblastoma the doctors called it. A cancer. There were more than a hundred small tumors in Joey’s right eye; slightly less in his left. Aggressive. Invasive. Lethal. Impervious to chemotherapy.

  He was three years old when they removed his eyes. The places, people, and images he had captured in those first short years would have to last him a lifetime. In the years to come, Joey would come to think of those who had taken his eyes as wolves, the dark villains of many a bedtime story, amorphous beasts that couldn’t possibly be deciphered and visualized through the tactile ambivalence of braille. Monsters. Killers. They’d come out of the darkness and robbed him, leaving him a prisoner in eternal night. He would wake screaming when he dreamed of them, drenched in sweat, heart racing. In the quiet terror of an empty room, he would sometimes feel them slinking closer and closer until he would run, screaming and rebounding off furniture and walls, looking for his mother.

  The only thing that kept Joey sane was his mother.

  When Joey was six, they took his mother. He lay trapped in the back seat, the roof of the car pressed against his back, listening to his father’s frantic cries in the front. From his mother: nothing. Not a sound, not a whimper. The last thing he had heard her say was, “Joey, I think it’s time you had a haircut,” which had sent his fingers questing over his head. He’d been about to tell her that he liked his hair long, that it felt good running through his hands, when the world became an inverted chaos tortured by the shrieking of twisted metal. He was thrown to the floorboard and pummeled with broken glass. The roof of the car came down on him. He tasted blood in his mouth. Then everything went deathly quiet. He waited in his terrifying and familiar dark, unable to move, unable to even reach her. He screamed for his father, but his father just kept saying his mother’s name over and over again. When the warm, thick fluid flow
ing from the front seat began to soak Joey’s shirt, he thought it was oil from the car, but when he pressed it to his nose, he knew the wolves had been there. This was their scent. He’d smelled it in the hospital when he was three. Though they’d tried to hide it with pine-scented disinfectants and alcohol, he’d smelled it wafting from the sunken cavities where once had been his eyes. He would never forget it. It was the spoor of the wolf, acrid and metallic. Death’s calling card.

  When he was nine, his father took a new job in British Columbia. “Canada,” he said. “It’ll be a fresh start for us, Joey.”

  “Where is Canada?” Joey asked, but all he was really thinking was that it was good that his father would be working again.

  “North.”

  Joey knew that North was a direction, but the only clear directions in his world were those which could be interpreted by his four remaining senses. The fireplace was toward the heat. The dinner table, where they seldom sat since Mother’s death, was toward the smell of food. The sound of his father crying alone at night was down the hall. The stinging taste of the last drop from a bottle kicked down the stairs by Joey’s cautious feet... well, that was the direction which threatened to eat his father alive. In that direction waited the wolves.

  Right. Left. Up. Down. These were directions he could touch. North meant nothing to him.

  On the long drive, he came to understand that North was the direction of cold.

  “Three steps up to the door,” his father said by way of introduction to the new house, and their fresh start began.

  • • •

  Margaret Bay the place was called, an inlet off Queen Charlotte Sound. Father described the bay as “beyond beautiful.” The banks were crowded with ice, but most of the bay was clear, sparkling in the sunlight, touched by the long shadows of the mountains and the trees. Joey knew ice as absolute cold, as if a piece of reality had somehow been pressed so tightly that nothing could escape except a liquid chill, dripping and puddling, lacking the power to return to its former shape. Yet he also associated ice with what little he remembered of light—antithesis to the dark in which he lived. Ice, said father, is the true measure of civilization, which made no sense to Joey. Since he’d quit drinking, Father had become quite eloquent, and it was from him that Joey had been acquiring his powers of description. Father had made it his job to spend hours describing the things that Joey couldn’t see.