any.
Not the kind of treatment you’d expect from a polite professor of psychology, but Charles is living proof of what I’ve believed for a long time: horror writers are some of the nicest people you’re likely to encounter. Dark impulses are dealt with on the page—saved for the page, in fact—where stygian ideas will serve the ultimate master and purpose, The Story.
Charles is as supportive of other writers as he is dedicated to the craft. He’s quick to leave a comment of encouragement on a blog and quick to offer ideas and other support, and I can attest personally to his hospitality.
We met sometime right after the first fish decided to leave the primal muck and check the weather on the beach. It was at the New Orleans Science Fiction and Fantasy Festival.
My old friend and collaborator Robert Petitt and I were having beers in the hotel bar and talking over a Robert McCammon story. Turned out the guy next to us had read it too. That was Charles, and we’ve been buddies ever since.
Another year at NOSFF or maybe it was when World Fantasy was in New Orleans, Charles and I got away from the activity for a while, picked up New Orleans poor boy sandwiches and sat in his room full of books at his house for lunch.
It was everything you’d expect a writer’s lair to look like. Pulps and classics filled his shelves, and beyond the capacity for the shelves, books of all styles and genres were arranged in neat stacks with an organization that made me envious. Robert E. Howard to be sure—Charles is a major Howard fan and a significant contributor to REHupa—but tales of terror and mystery as well, purchased new or discovered in long, careful searches through New Orleans used bookshops.
I tell you that to note again what a nice guy Charles is, but also to observe that the magic in those books is reflected in the pages ahead. Charles has read voraciously, and just like those tellers of tales who’ve come before, he’s absorbed the old and dreamed new dreams, dark dreams herein, carrying on the legacy of the campfire tales and the early pulps, while infusing new energy and vision.
It’s all fresh, new, exciting, sprinkled with the flavor of the things Charles loves and that we all love. It reflects that aforementioned devotion to craft, and an endless energy and enthusiasm for fomenting fear.
So, are we clear? Charles Gramlich: nice guy, voracious reader, great writer. Brace yourself. It’s about to get brutal.
Sidney Williams
2010
PREFACE
The stories of In the Language of Scorpions span many years and many styles, though in all of them I’ve tried to explore the dark and the strange. Such emotions and experiences have been a constant in my life, beginning with the frequent nightmares that first struck in childhood and which continue to this day. And then there was that time in the Ozark Mountains, in the brooding forest....
It has become a cliché for writers to say that their art is what keeps them sane. It’s exactly the opposite for me. Without writing I would be completely and totally sane, and can you imagine anything more boring? I don’t want to look only toward the brightly lit side of the street and ignore the shadows that are also children of the sun. I don’t want to spend every working day with no thoughts beyond my job, and every evening sitting on the couch while the idiot box pulses “reality” TV into my brain.
Personally, I’d rather dream, no matter the consequences.
I hope you will dream with me.
Charles A. Gramlich
Abita Springs, Louisiana, 2011
IN THE RUINS OF MEMORY
Amid the dregs of a human soul
one finds many things,
dolls and dust and empty tin whistles,
wheels off a hundred matchbox cars,
a mother’s face and a whisper of silk
that passed away
It is a world of tombs, of coffins,
filled with bones and stones and sins,
rich with places to hide
And all the scars from all the dreams
that have been given up on....
live there
They know how much it hurts
to face one’s past,
to be reminded of failures
That’s what keeps them fresh,
keeps them so quietly in wait,
till it’s time to give you pain
And you’ll never see them there,
in the ruins of memory
STILL LIFE WITH SKULLS
There were eyes in the canvas that I had never drawn, desert eyes of bronze, sulfur eyes like cicatrices, and river eyes of green—eyes full of dark wings and teeth. There were round mouths open to the night air, and sanguine tongues whose dance burned with holy words. And in the chiaroscuro wastelands of the unfilled canvas there were ruins whose outlines I could not yet trace. I knew only that they held a bitter rapture and smelled faintly of ashes.
I reached out and lowered a sheeted covering down across that chaos face, knowing that I had not yet captured my piece, thinking that, perhaps, I had captured something else. It seemed suddenly smoky dark when I turned out the light, and the shadows came to gather around my still form as if they were dust and I a statue left long on the shelf.
I sat there for an empty time, listening to the beat of my heart, like hungry baby birds, feeling the breath run out of my mouth and down on the floor as if it were dry ice fog, and waiting for riddles to be answered. No answers formed and after a hollow period filled with early morning silence I went coldly to bed, only to dream of chalk bright skulls with jutting brows and liquid black tongues that tickled at my lips seeking entrance.
The dreams were only harlequin shapes in the clouds when morning came at last. Only their perfume and their laughter remained.
I rose up in that dawn and the sky was like white ashes full of dew-killing heat, like a burnished metal shield on which a fallen warrior is carried home to his pale widow. But the gardens where I walked were cool and shaded, sprinklers drawing rainbows in the quiet air. I had not eaten, for the taste of night still filled my mouth. Nor had I looked closely at my canvas, though the sheet had blown away in the darkness from its sainted and porcelain face. Rather, I let the garden flowers bend their heads to comfort me, their skulls petalled in brittle jewels. Would they shatter at a touch? Should I stroke them and watch them die?
I did not.
Striding along there, the path seemed a desert paved with dunes, the hedges and flower beds a jungle, silent as when stalked by predators. I felt like a god, knowing that should they anger me I could cast among them stillness and lay their bodies to waste.
But again I did not.
For
