The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell Read online

  Praise for Song for the Unraveling of the World

  The New York Times, “Best Horror Fiction”

  The Washington Post, “Best Horror Fiction of the Year”

  NPR, “Best Books of 2019”

  Entropy, “Best of 2019”

  Winner, 2020 World Fantasy Award

  Winner, 2019 Shirley Jackson Award

  Finalist, 2020 Los Angeles Times Ray Bradbury Prize for

  Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction

  Finalist, 2019 Big Other Book Award for Fiction

  “Evenson is one of our best living writers—regardless of genre.”

  —NPR

  “Missing persons, paranoia and psychosis.… [Evenson is] the kind of writer who leads you into the labyrinth, then abandons you there.… It’s hard to believe a guy can be so frightening, so consistently.”

  —The New York Times

  “Enigmatic, superbly rendered slices of fear, uncertainty and paranoia.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Evenson at his most intense and discomfiting.… He makes our skin rise and crawl with the intimation that all, although outwardly normal, is certainly not. Why else are we paying attention so closely?”

  —Los Angeles Review of Books

  “These stories are carefully calibrated exercises in ambiguity in which Evenson leaves it unclear how much of the off-kilterness exists outside of the deep-seated pathologies that motivate his characters.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  Praise for Brian Evenson

  “Evenson’s fiction is equal parts obsessive, experimental, and violent. It can be soul-shaking.”

  —The New Yorker

  “You’ve heard of ‘postmodern’ stories—well, Evenson’s stories are post-everything. They are post-human, post-reason, post-apocalyptic.… In an Evenson story, there are two horrible things that can happen to you. You can either fail to survive, or survive.”

  —The New York Times

  “Subtly unnerving dark fantasy.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “Evenson’s little nightmares are deftly crafted, stylistically daring, and surprisingly emotional.”

  —Kirkus

  “A master of literary horror.”

  —GQ

  “Evenson lures readers into each twisted tale by starting not at the beginning, but somewhere else, creating a sense of disorientation and unease. As each tale unspools and each surreal world clarifies into a malformed sort of logic, the creeps set firmly in.”

  —Library Journal

  “America’s greatest horror writer evokes the schism between perceptions and realities, and, to unsettling effect, collapses the unseen bond that so delicately bridges them.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Brian Evenson is one of the most consistently vital and unnerving voices in writing today.… No matter where you start with Evenson’s work, the door is wide ajar, and once you go through it you won’t be coming out.”

  —VICE

  “Evenson’s uncanny but accessible fiction can remind you of Edgar Allan Poe or The Twilight Zone.”

  —Star Tribune

  “Taut, troubling short stories in which the danger seems to always lurk just out of view or beyond definition.”

  —NPR

  “Deal[s] with art, paranoia and the dark urges that haunt even the most normal people.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Evenson is our most impressive explorer of the cracks in things that let in not the light, as Leonard Cohen would have it, but fever, chaos, and darkness.”

  —Vulture

  “I’m not convinced Brian Evenson is entirely human. His literary horror fiction is just too good, too immersive, and too alien for a mere mortal.”

  —The A.V. Club

  “Evenson recalls Poe, as he finds the most frightening way to open another box of horrors.”

  —The Brooklyn Rail

  “Evenson understands both the precision of language and the gut-level appeal of the grindhouse, and the best of his work skates along the border between the two, combining aspects of both.… [A] perfect introduction to Evenson’s work for those who are looking to experience it for the first time.”

  —Tor.com

  “You never realize how deep his fiction has wormed its way into your brain until hours, days, even weeks later, when you’re lying in the dark and Evenson’s images come flooding back, unbidden. A Collapse of Horses will stay with you for a long time … whether you want it to or not.”

  —Chicago Review of Books

  “Violence is punishing but unbelievably subtle in Evenson’s delicate, minimalist stories. And ultimately, there is something cosmic—something utterly Lovecraftian, but without the baroque language—about this type of horror: beneath the slippery, often abstruse plots lies a vast gulf of nothingness, in the purest and most unsettling sense of the word.”

  —NPR

  “Evenson renders the world as a place of infinite and paralyzing delusion.… In an Evenson story, a house isn’t inescapable because of its lack of doors and windows; it’s inescapable because it was built by an impressionable mind.”

  —Los Angeles Review of Books

  “Evenson’s stories, small masterworks of literary horror, are elegantly tense. They operate in psychological territory, never relying on grossness or slasher silliness to convey their scariness.”

  —Kirkus

  “Brian Evenson is one of my favorite living horror writers.”

  —Carmen Maria Machado

  “To read Evenson is to be privy to a precise, vivid, brilliant unpicking of the everyday—and its others.”

  —China Miéville

  “Brian Evenson’s bold and unique short fictions—equal parts surrealism, ontology, and dread—consistently lead the reader to truly shocking discoveries that are as disturbing as they are oddly beautiful.”

  —Paul Tremblay

  “There is not a more intense, prolific, or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson.”

  —George Saunders

  THE GLASSY, BURNING FLOOR OF HELL

  Also by Brian Evenson, from Coffee House Press

  A Collapse of Horses

  Father of Lies

  Fugue State

  Last Days

  The Open Curtain

  Song for the Unraveling of the World

  Windeye

  Brian Evenson

  Copyright © 2021 by Brian Evenson

  Cover art and design by Sarah Evenson

  Book design by Ann Sudmeier

  Author photograph © Kristen Tracy

  Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to [email protected].

  Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Evenson, Brian, 1966– author.

  Title: The glassy, burning floor of hell : stories / Brian Evenson.

  Description: Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021004979 (print) | LCCN 2021004980 (ebook) | ISBN 9781566896115 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781566896153 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Psychological fiction. | GSAFD: Horror fiction. | Dark humor (Literature) | LCGFT: Short stories.

 
Classification: LCC PS3555.V326 G58 2021 (print) | LCC PS3555.V326 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021004979

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021004980

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

  CONTENTS

  Leg

  In Dreams

  Myling Kommer

  Come Up

  Palisade

  Curator

  To Breathe the Air

  The Barrow-Men

  The Shimmering Wall

  Grauer in the Snow

  Justle

  The Devil’s Hand

  Nameless Citizen

  The Coldness of His Eye

  Daylight Come

  Elo Havel

  His Haunting

  Haver

  The Extrication

  A Bad Patch

  Hospice

  The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell

  THE GLASSY, BURNING FLOOR OF HELL

  Leg

  The captain of the vessel was named Hekla, a name that in the language of her ancestors meant cloak, though she had never worn a cloak. One of her legs was not a leg at all but a separate creature that had learned to act like a leg. When she needed to walk about her vessel this served as a leg for her, but once she was alone in her quarters she would unstrap it and it would unfurl to become a separate being, something she could converse with, a trusted advisor, a secret friend. Nobody knew it to be other than an artificial leg except for her.

  Hekla had found the leg before she became captain, a few moments after she lost her flesh-and-blood leg, severed cleanly midthigh in a freak accident. Hekla had the presence of mind to tourniquet what was left of her thigh. She was fading from consciousness, having lost too much blood, when it appeared.

  It was bipedal but strange and glittering, made of angles and light. Each time Hekla looked at it, it seemed subtly different.

  “What is that?” asked the creature.

  “What?” Hekla managed.

  “The dark substance puddling around you.”

  “That is my blood,” said Hekla. “I will soon die.”

  “Ah,” said the creature.

  “You don’t exist,” claimed Hekla. “I’m hallucinating you.”

  The creature ignored this. Instead it said, “Would you not prefer to live?”

  And with this began a relationship that bound Hekla and leg tightly together.

  “I’m bored,” she told the leg one day many years later, once she was captain of a vessel. “We do nothing but float. I want something exciting to do.”

  The leg told her this: “On the winds of the darkness is a creature as long as this vessel, and that moves in a slow, undulating pattern across the currents of space. Its back is quivered with spines, and it is long and thin like a snake but has the head and metal-breaking bill of a bony fish. With a swipe of its tail it could destroy this vessel.”

  “Why do you tell me this, leg?” she asked.

  Leg shrugged. “It is a worthy foe. I thought you might like to hunt it.”

  At first Hekla dismissed leg’s suggestion out of hand. It made no sense to endanger her crew and the passengers sleeping in the storage pods for her own amusement. But as the days dragged past, she began to favor the idea.

  Eventually she listened to the leg with interest. When it told her where such a creature was most likely to be found, she directed the navigator to change their course.

  “Why should I change course?” he asked. His name was Michael.

  “Because I am your captain,” said Hekla, “and I tell you to do so.”

  “We have a destination,” said Michael. “A new life awaits us.”

  “Change course,” said Hekla.

  “I will not do so without a reason,” said Michael.

  So Hekla explained.

  “That is not a worthy reason,” said Michael once she had finished. “If you do this thing many of us will die, perhaps even all of us. No, I will not alter our course. We shall continue to our intended destination.”

  The captain asked again, and again he refused. In the end he made it clear that she would have her way only if she killed him first.

  She returned to her quarters muttering to herself, “What use is it to be captain if I cannot have my way?”

  Once back in her quarters, she released her leg. It unfurled and revealed itself.

  “Did you hear him, leg?” she asked.

  The leg simply inclined its head—for as curious as it seems, the leg, when unfurled, had a head—to indicate that it had.

  “Who is the captain?” asked the leg in its strange voice. “Is it not you?”

  “It is indeed me,” said Hekla.

  “Then force him to do it,” the leg said.

  “He claims he would rather die first,” said Hekla.

  “Then oblige him.”

  But the captain did not want to kill Michael herself. She knew it was wrong and that she would feel guilty doing so. And yet, perhaps if she were not the one to do the actual killing, it would not be as wrong and she would be able to live with what had been done. The only one she could trust to kill Michael and keep her involvement a secret was leg.

  “Leg,” she said.

  “Hekla,” said leg, bowing deeply.

  “Will you kill Michael for me?”

  “Yes,” said leg. “Here is what we will do: You will go to the navigation center when he is alone, and you will secure the door from within. When he asks you what you are doing, you will ignore him and release me, and I will unfurl and kill him.”

  “I do not want to be there when he dies,” said Hekla. “I do not want to see it or for anyone to guess I am involved. Find another way.”

  Leg thought. “Take me off in your room. Then I will unfurl, walk down the corridor, enter the navigation center, and kill him.”

  “People will see you walking and see what you are, and they will shriek and scream. No one must know I have you, leg. If they realize you are more than a leg, they will destroy you, and perhaps me as well. Think again, leg.”

  Leg thought long. “I will change myself,” said leg finally. “I will take on your countenance and in that guise I will kill him.”

  “Can you do that?” asked Hekla, amazed. “Can you become just like me?”

  “Yes, and act like you too. But only if you grant me permission.”

  And so Hekla did.

  As she watched, leg underwent a transformation, taking on first her height and figure and then the specifics of her features. In the end, there was nothing to tell the two of them apart except that the captain was missing her prosthetic, and leg, in becoming captain, had thought to give itself what seemed to be an artificial leg.

  When Hekla looked upon this perfect replication of herself, a shiver ran through her.

  “Go,” she said. “Kill him.”

  “I go,” said leg, and left.

  Leg went through the door and into the passageway. It walked slowly toward the navigation center, where Michael was. This was the first time it had been out of the captain’s quarters on its own. This was the first time it had been away from the captain since leg had found her. Leg enjoyed how this felt.

  Leg arrived at the navigation center. Michael was there, alone.

  “It’s no use trying to convince me,” said Michael. “I won’t change my mind.”

  “I’m not going to try to convince you,” said leg, and killed him. To do this, leg turned itself inside out and engulfed him so that the blood, when it came spattering forth, would be hidden inside. Then leg released the exsanguinated body and turned itself right side out again. Inside, it was spattered with Michael’s blood. On the outside, the false Hekla looked clean and untouched.

  And so leg killed Michael and left his body on the floor. Then it bent over the body and stared at it long and hard. Slowly it took on the shape and form of
Michael, for once someone was dead, leg did not need their permission to become them.

  Leg went back to the captain. At first she thought it was Michael, since Michael was whom it resembled. The captain drew back as leg came closer, afraid, until the moment Michael’s features began to smooth out and leg became itself again. Then it folded up tightly and became her leg again, though now it was aslosh inside with a dead man’s blood. Wherever the captain walked, she heard it.

  And after? Some believe that, once Michael was dead, leg was satisfied to remain as it was, hidden, the captain’s confidant. Others believe leg acquired a taste for being human and did not want to give this up. At night, while the captain slept, it would take on her form or that of Michael and wander the ship. Occasionally, as a special treat, it would turn itself inside out and kill someone, then dispose of the body, at times jettisoning it into space, at others incinerating it with a mechanism incorporated into its body. There are those who say that by the time the vessel reached the vast creature Hekla intended to hunt, leg had destroyed the crew manning the vessel and many of the passengers suspended in the storage pods. Only the captain and leg were left awake and alive, and soon the ship was destroyed and the captain killed.

  And leg? Soon it reached its mature form and became snakebodied with the head of a bony fish, as it had always been meant to do. It is no doubt out there still, swimming alone along a current of darkness.

  In Dreams

  He heard a buzzing in his head that he took at first to be a dream, but of course he could no longer dream. What was it then? Was it in his head after all?

  He called up his familiar. Almost immediately, the noise stopped.

  What was that? he wondered. Though he had not spoken aloud, the familiar read the flexion of his jaw and determined the likely words, and he felt it rummaging lightly about within his memories until it had hold of what the sound had been to him.

  Nothing to worry about, it responded. He heard nothing but still felt the words form in his head. These are merely the noises of the body, misheard. Similar to other noises you have asked about before.

  I didn’t used to hear them.