The Spider Tapestries: Seven Strange Stories

From Mythic Delirium Books

The Spider Tapestries: Seven Strange Stories

Copyright © 2015 by Mike Allen

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover photo by Ben Heys. Licensed by 123RF.

Cover design © 2015 by Mike Allen

Published by Mythic Delirium Books

mythicdelirium.com

This book is a work of fiction. All characters, names, locations, and events portrayed in this book are fictional or used in an imaginary manner to entertain, and any resemblance to any real people, situations, or incidents is purely coincidental.

Our gratitude goes out to the following who because of their generosity are from now on designated as supporters of Mythic Delirium Books: Saira Ali, Cora Anderson, Anonymous, Patricia M. Cryan, Steve Dempsey, Oz Drummond, Patrick Dugan, Matthew Farrer, C. R. Fowler, Mary J. Lewis, Paul T. Muse, Jr., Shyam Nunley, Finny Pendragon, Kenneth Schneyer, and Delia Sherman.

Introduction copyright © 2016 by Nicole Kornher-Stace

The Spider Tapestries first appeared in Lackington’s 8, Fall 2015.

Sleepless, Burning Life first appeared in Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories, ed. JoSelle Vanderhooft, Torquere Books, 2011.

Twa Sisters first appeared in Not One of Us 47, 2012.

Silent in Her Nest is original to this collection.

She Who Runs first appeared in Sky Whales and Other Wonders, ed. Vera Nazarian, Norilana Books, 2009.

Stolen Souls first appeared in Altair 3, 1999.

Still Life with Skull first appeared in Solaris Rising 2: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction, ed. Ian Whates, Solaris, 2013.

For Ian Watson

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

THE SPIDER TAPESTRIES

SLEEEPLESS, BURNING LIFE

TWA SISTERS

SILENT IN HER NEST

SHE WHO RUNS

STOLEN SOULS

STILL LIFE WITH SKULL

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Books by Mike Allen

Praise for The Spider Tapestries

Like many, I first became aware of Mike Allen’s work as a celebrated poet and editor. (Specifically because in his capacity as an editor he rejected one of my poems, but that’s neither here nor there.) Reading his poetry I was immediately impressed by the depth and the voice and the scope of the stuff, blurring back and forth across boundaries of form and tone and genre at top speed and with immense surety. Fluidity of voice like that is a powerful tool to keep the reader on her toes, disrupting expectations in the best possible way. Read enough of it—or, better yet, attend one of his readings and listen—and you start to suspect he’s toying with you. If, that is, you’re the kind of person who likes your reading material easy to shelve by genre.

Remember that; it’ll be important in a minute.

While Mike Allen was piling up his Rhysling wins, publishing his speculative poetry/fiction zine Mythic Delirium, and putting together the critically-acclaimed Clockwork Phoenix weird fiction anthology series, he was also busily plugging away at amassing a significant body of his own short fiction, including the Nebula finalist The Button Bin. Bizarrely, or maybe not, given his tremendous success in the poetry and editorial fields, for years Allen’s reputation as a poet and editor eclipsed the one he was quietly developing as a writer of short fiction.

Until, that is, the release of his first short fiction collection, Unseaming, in 2014. With which, in the words of Laird Barron’s introduction, Allen immediately made a case for his inclusion at the forefront of the New New Wave of a new golden age of horror. Within that genre, Allen still put on full display that remarkable flexibility of form and tone that he honed in his years as a poet: it’s horror, but it also borrows from pretty much every corner of speculative fiction, and the end result is multilayered and complex. And yet, in the words of Thomas Ligotti’s blurb of that book, "fun. Not ‘good’ fun, and certainly not ‘good clean’ fun. They are too unnerving for those modifiers, too serious, like laughter in the dark ... "

Remember that too.

In his latest collection, The Spider Tapestries, Allen outdoes himself even further, borrowing and synthesizing across genres with gleeful abandon. Having made a name for himself as poet and editor, then proving with Unseaming that he can crank out top-shelf horror fiction with the best of them, the subsequent The Spider Tapestries feels like the throwing down of a gauntlet to anyone who so much as thinks of pigeonholing the versatile body of work of which Mike Allen is capable.

Here, then, we witness an adept blending of Allen’s poetry and horror toolboxes. The muscular, vivid prose and genre mashuppery of the former; the disquieting ambience and characterization of the latter. This results in stories like Twa Sisters, with an atmosphere and setting as if Heironymous Bosch had been brought in as a consultant on Blade Runner. Or Sleepless, Burning Life, which, with simultaneous nods to steampunk and metaphysics, explores and upends the familiar trope of Mortal Chosen by the Gods. Or Stolen Souls, a hard SFnal noir piece whose alien thugs are named after characters in ancient mythology.

Meanwhile The Spider Tapestries seems at times to be in conversation with Unseaming: the future-tech body modifications of the former echoing the present-day body horror of the latter; the monstrous visitations in Unseaming presaging the self-made monstrosities in The Spider Tapestries. If in Unseaming, monsters are Lovecraftian and unknowable, in The Spider Tapestries they’ve become part of the everyday landscape.

Under all of it, though, runs that aforementioned current of fun. There’s a definite sense that while Allen is borrowing from these various themes and materials, he’s poking at them as well. From lampooning the hard-boiled detective narrative voice (From the waist down, she had me at hello, which she didn’t say, because she had no mouth.) to parodying a Tarantino-esque over-the-top glorification of violence (Velvet blood geysered into the air, and even its innards were achingly beautiful as they spilled wet and gelatinous into the void beyond the sprocket’s tooth-studded edge.).

A further, deeper layer of his collections and anthologies alike involves the collaboration of his wife, artist Anita Allen. She arranges the stories in such a way that each book reads like a concept album, full of callbacks and refrains to earlier material, foreshadowing to the pieces that come later. The Spider Tapestries, with its tendency to hopscotch back and forth across genre lines, highlights her contribution to great effect. There is a sense, deliberately uncomfortable though not at all unpleasant, of being shuttled back and forth across those boundaries, from timeless mythos to slick future tech, so smoothly and deliberately that the word tapestries in the title hardly feels coincidental.

A fascinating incursion into and across any number of genres and themes, The Spider Tapestries adroitly continues the upward trajectory begun with Unseaming and guarantees Allen a place high on the writers-to-watch list of any reader who appreciates vividly original work that defies easy categorization.

In the meantime, though, enjoy.

The azure star spider injects ink when it bites, an umber venom that paints the veins if the skin has paled enough, that steeps the brain in a fire of extrasensory comprehension. We collect their poisons in the wild, on cautious days-long crawls through the caverns formed by the roots of the blood-scented basalt trees, whose crowns cannot be seen beneath the ever-present cloud cover.

Though the spider-mothers are quick and fearsome, their phosphorescent legs longer than our fingers, they present the least of the threats that wait. The beacon mantis opens the lamps of its many eyes to blind us, and sometimes the visors we wear fail to darken their tints in time, leave us paralyzed and blinking, primed to be dragged off in its long jaws.

On truly unfortunate journeys, the incisor gods that scavenge between the great fissures of bark fail to harvest enough mewling grubs to sate their hunger, and descend on all nine paws into the root tunnels, investigating the noises we make as we crawl. Our maps guide us along paths excavated deep and narrow to keep the holy teeth from finding purchase in our backs, but the gods are clever and ruled by their appetites, so our engineering is not always enough. It is rare for a harvest season to pass without a crawler giving up her life in an agonizing sacrifice to let the rest of an expedition escape.

Charming the spider-mothers with plucks on the disordered lyres of their webs, delicately milking their fangs with soft metal thimbles, these things hardly seem frightening in comparison.

The crawlers who return to our hive are greeted with unblinking eyes and limbs lifted in silent, reverential dance. The leader of the foray will pass her first primed vial to the dancers, who will unstop it and paint their tongues umber. Their breath becomes heady ambrosia on the instant, and the exhausted crawlers will open their own mouths to receive kisses and then collapse. The terrors and wonders they experienced will transfer to the dancers during the touch of tongues, and the dancers will retract their eyes as the visions fill their ganglia, guide their spines. They will dance blind, yet never stumble. Their feet will beat a history in the soft earth. They will weep, their voices rising to scar the names of the deceased into the salt spikes that stab slow from the vaults of our roofs.

They will dance until the chamber of return can no longer contain them, emerge into the tunnels reciting new verse in every contortion of muscle, bone, and chitin, accompany themselves with notes made from the scraping together of serrated legs.

We will understand their song without having heard a word. Their melodies and percussions will thrum through the stones and fissures of our homes, wash across our skins and shells. They will stay in motion until the poison coma takes them, and they collapse in crescents of paralysis, dreaming themselves as spider-mothers patiently mending webs, patiently awaiting prey.

It is not for us to taste the venom unfiltered as the dancers do. We cannot survive its visionary fire, though we all long for the strength to contain it in our veins. The vials brought back from the crawl will be taken to vaults in our city’s iciest deeps and nestled in walls of yielding mud to ferment. That loam will release acrid scents of centipede treacle as it parts to receive our treasures.

High above the nests where we dwell, oven-warm chambers mirror the icy spaces underneath our halls and streets. Through the roofs of these rooms pierce wooden stalactites: the heavy branches of the eidolon shrubs, bent to the ground by their own weight, burrowing through toxic slag surface, past tangles of roots, through softened bedrock and further still, breaching into our space. Miraculously, the buried tips of their branches bear fruit, soft berries tinted blue (so claims the lore) as the sky our kind once knew.

Ten children will ascend there, chosen by their high marks at learning and their skills at weaving fiber and shaping clay. Hefting pails made from the shells of the most soft-spoken of their elders, these children are the only ones permitted to gather the berries, not for hygiene’s sake or from any mystical notion of purity, but because they have proven themselves of the right mindframe. Their touch will color the juice with earnest curiosity and devotion to the furthering of the soul. Thus not one tender fruit need be discarded, even if it bursts.

Other ingredients we collect are more mundane: lichens peeled from our home gardens; meaty grubs from our terrariums; lush roots and sharp-flavored spores from the mosses that cluster around our lamps. These offerings are brought to the natural obelisk that rises from the shallow pool in the center of our northernmost plaza, a place where wares are sold, histories are read, laws debated and revised.

As we clean and cook, the protégés of the dancers prepare to stomp the berries. They pull on stockings spun from the webs of previous feasts, stitched in iridescent patterns that trick the eyes. The pails are arranged in interlocking triangles, and the stompers execute a puzzle dance, hopping from one