Something Wicked SF and Horror Magazine #5 Read online

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  'Coming up with something new’ has served Stephen fairly well as skills go. “Around the time I came to South Africa a magazine called Laughing Stock (run by journalist Gus Silber, writer Arthur Goldstuck and Rico Schacherl) started up under the Enosi Publishing label. I saw the mag in stores and being young and arrogant I thought, ‘I can write funnier stuff than this'. So I wrote a few things and went to see them. They liked my stuff and started publishing it. Later we started doing joke books for the Cardies chain—things like 101 Uses for a Dead Yuppie, Great Reasons to Keep Smoking, and All Men Are Bastards. Those did pretty well. We also brought out Macho Pig Magazine—it was in really bad taste,” Stephen laughs, “you couldn't get away with it today."

  * * * *

  After a stint running the legendary Fantamania comic book shop in Norwood, it was time for Stephen, Rico and Arthur to reassess. By now firmly established as comrades in comedy, the team, along with Harry Dugmore, went on to form a creative agency, planning to put together a kind of Doonesbury cartoon. “The idea of a madam and a maid as characters was very unique to me. In the US a madam is something very different, more along the lines of Heidi Fleiss,” Stephen says. “The first South African madam I met was my own mother-in-law. She'd always be saying, ‘you wouldn't believe what the maid did today’ and then the maid would come and say the same thing about the madam. That set-up fascinated me.” Uniquely South African as the concept was, Stephen believes he was able to spot its potential precisely because he wasn't born and raised here. “I came to it with a fresh pair of eyes,” he says simply. “Many people are surprised that the idea came from an American but I think that's why it came to me. There are things right in front of you that you just don't see anymore because they're there every day.” As for the title, Stephen says, “Sometimes the best ideas are the simplest. Adam and Eve, Madam and Eve ... I couldn't believe no-one had done it before."

  * * * *

  It was an idea whose time had come. “We were really lucky to have started Madam & Eve when we did. It was a great time in South Africa—Mandela was about to be released, apartheid was almost gone ... I still thought I was going back to the US in a month though. Then The Weekly Mail picked Madam & Eve up and they loved it straight away. At first a lot of people said we were crazy, or racist. We had to be very careful to keep it light and fuzzy but still keep pushing the envelope,” Stephen says.

  * * * *

  Today, Stephen and artist, Rico, work on a turnaround time of one or two days, delivering the cartoon by 9:30 am for publication in the following day's papers. It's a full-time job, and they work from an office (albeit an office full of very cool toys), but it's become home to an empire. Madam & Eve is printed daily by most of South Africa's major newspapers, (barring contractual obligations that prevent competitive publication). The strip has run in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, while the graphic novels have found an audience in France, Sweden, Denmark and Norway, with the original artwork having sold in galleries as far a field as Finland. Back home, the characters have infiltrated popular culture, and few South African's fail to get news headlines declaring ‘Eves to be Taxed', or the one about ‘The Madam and Eve Gang’ (on a story about a real-life madam and maid who ran a cheque-fraud scheme). Seemingly undaunted by the boundaries between commerce and art, the team is now at work on branding, (despite the misgivings of their creative souls) a range of environmentally-friendly cleaning products called Magic Maid. Madam and Eve have become icons, both at home and abroad.

  * * * *

  "One of Madam & Eve's greatest strengths is that it's so South African, but internationally, that's one of its greatest weakness,” Stephen explains. “We get letters saying, ‘I really loved your cartoon ... but what's a mielie lady?’ Especially from the US. If anything's not American they don't seem to get it.” Humour is notoriously difficult to translate, especially the colloquial, culture-specific brand that has made Madam & Eve so successful at home. When it comes to the European editions, Stephen says they simply have to trust the translators. “We try to keep the humour universal, but I do love it when Madam & Eve gets topical and reflects the headlines. We're working on a new book at the moment, ripping off the ‘bring me my machine gun’ thing and making it ‘bring me my washing machine', but we also had a lot of success with Madams of Caribbean, and The Maidtrix."

  * * * *

  Madam & Eve has taken to the small screen in a live sitcom of 175 episodes and counting. Although the show is produced by Penguin Films, Stephen has worked on a few instalments. “We wrote some of the scripts, the really funny ones. The not-so-funny ones we didn't write,” he grins. “That's been hugely successful and they're talking about doing another season, so we're looking to make some changes and update it a bit."

  * * * *

  The series hasn't been Stephen's only success in writing for other media either. Although Slash went virtually straight to DVD upon its release in 2002, it's managed to be one of the few local productions that brought the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) a return on its investment. The film, about a rock band stranded on a haunted farm over the ‘blood harvest', was never going to launch an Oscar® bid, but it did what it set out to do. “We wanted to do a horror movie. Horror is cheap, and it's an easy way to sell to the US market, so I thought ‘what have they got a lot of in the US that we also have here?’ I came up with farms. The next question was, ‘what's scary about a farm?’ Gus Silber and I were brainstorming the script and someone literally said, ‘Old MacDonald had an axe—eee, aai, eee, aai, aaaargh,’ and that's where it started. The film could have been better, we wanted a lot more humour in it, but it made its money back.” And that's no small feat in the local movie biz.

  * * * *

  So are there more horror scripts floating around on a To-Do list somewhere in the back of Stephen's brain? “I enjoy writing for film,” he admits. “I would love to write another horror movie, maybe about some mystical South African spirit like the tokoloshe that can become a South African Jason or Freddie. Nothing turns me on more than a really good creative concept that makes you go, ‘why didn't I think of that?’ Like the Saw movies. They were really original—something no one's done before."

  * * * *

  For now though, Stephen counts himself a very lucky man, thankful to be doing something he really enjoys. For a creative, it doesn't come much better than having a day job you're passionate about, that also pays the bills. In Stephen's case it's also essentially the same thing he's been doing since he was a kid—being the clown. For love and profit. And occasionally at midnight.

  * * * *

  * The “clown at midnight” concept has been attributed severally to Baudelaire, Ray Bradbury and silent screen star Lon Chaney.

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  [Back to Table of Contents]

  BONE FIRE by Evan Morris

  illustrated by Vincent Sammy

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  In October of 1817, Lord Charles Somerset, Governor of the Cape Colony, dispatched a young Irish soldier, Captain Francis Faran, into the central Karoo to investigate the viability of establishing a town near the farm Hooyvlakte. Faran and his men never reached Hooyvlakte, and never returned.

  * * * *

  Grant smiled as Shelley stopped the car on the shoulder of the highway. “Is this a joke?"

  Shelley smiled back, shaking her head. “No joke. This is the place."

  The place was expansive and empty. Five pm on a Wednesday afternoon, middle of the Karoo. Not a soul in sight, nor a town, nor a structure, just flat scrub-brush and sand everywhere you looked.

  "You're going to leave me here?” Grant asked, maintaining the smile on the outside only.

  "Do you want to see Sowan?"

  A minute later he was watching the little Corsa trundle away from him into the emptiness. He wanted to pretend, even to himself, th
at he could deal with this, but it felt as if his bones were shrieking silently. Just stay standing upright till she can't see you any more, he thought.

  It was a long, long way to the horizon, and sunlight still glinted off the tiny speck of the car in the distance when the fear overwhelmed him and he had to sit down.

  Grant had been on foot in the Karoo before, many times. Much of his military career had been spent out here, in the dark old days of Apartheid, training the country's white young men to hunt and kill. It was not the circumstance of being abandoned in the semi-desert that terrified him. It was the circumstance of being abandoned here on this particular night, October 31, by Shelley.

  * * * *

  He had met her one year earlier in a bar in Cape Town. He and some friends had been out carousing after he'd convinced them Halloween was worth celebrating. Few people in South Africa noticed the holiday, or cared, but Grant had been brought up to respect it by his Irish grandfather, who had called it Sowan. Every October 31st of his childhood, until the old man died when Grant was twelve, the two of them had built a bonfire, bobbed for apples, and swapped stories until after midnight. Daddo's stories were always much better than his, filled with strange-sounding words made exhilarating by the fact that when written they bore no resemblance to their spoken forms. Sowan, he learned, was spelled Samhain. Daddo was spelled Daideó. His cousins sometimes called their grandfather Shannaher, which they wrote as Seanathair in their letters. It was as if the heart of mystery was encoded into language itself; the mystery of existence and transformation.

  In adolescence Grant often tried to arrange Halloween parties for his friends, but there was no tradition in the country and his ideas sparked little interest. Some of his friends celebrated Guy Fawkes, though, and he found comfort in this. It was only five days late, and he could pretend, as he tossed old bones onto the bonfire, that Daddo stood beside him, whispering weird fables in his eldritch tongue.

  Adulthood, with its ever-full bottle of disillusionment and disappointment, had seen Grant personalize his celebrations. He never spoke to anyone of Samhain, and Halloween became in his mind just another American thing: horror movies, trick-or-treat, a foreign curiosity. But he celebrated nonetheless. Each Samhain he built a fire and threw bones on it. Each Samhain he remembered the dead, all the dead, especially Daddo. Each Samhain he wept privately at midnight, his tears fuelled both by sorrow and by the beauty of memory.

  He accepted, now, that is was destiny that he should meet Shelley. Why else was he out that night? Normally he would have been in the bush, but a catalogue of accidental events led to his meeting up with old acquaintances and bar-hopping, trying to arouse in them some enthusiasm for the holiday. Near midnight, in a little dive off Long Street, he leaned against the bar and, enthused by drink as well as pent-up emotions, shouted “Happy Halloween!"

  Seated beside him was a woman whom he had barely noticed before: pale, with tied-back auburn hair and eyes that—when you looked at them—seemed to prod you physically. After his outburst she spoke. “Happy Samhain,” she said.

  * * * *

  No explanation was ever found for the disappearance of Captain Faran's party. Official documents simply list them as “missing". Local Xhosa were reportedly punished for their death by the confiscation of cattle, but since the whites needed only feeble excuses to confiscate black-owned cattle, this should not be taken as evidence of Xhosa guilt.

  * * * *

  It took long for the Karoo day to end. Grant walked through its final hour, into the wilderness as Shelley had instructed. A wind came up first as the sky bruised and then burned. Rocks and bushes solidified and protruded more than before. A jackal howled and then night welled up from between the cracks, like oil. It diffused slowly over everything.

  The moon was waxing from new, just a jagged bone among the million shattered bone fragments that were stars. Without knowing why, Grant stopped beside a particular rock and then sat on it. Creatures scuttled and burrowed just out of sight but he was not afraid of them. He became afraid after a few minutes, however, when he realized that the rock on which sat was part of a circle of near-identical rocks, and that he had arrived.

  * * * *

  His time with Shelley was something even less comprehensible than romance. An entire adult life without long-term companionship, and then the sudden upheaval of Shelley Faran. He guessed she was about thirty, but she never told him her age or birthday. She hardly told him anything, and he told her everything: he was forty-two, he'd served in the army for fifteen years, his private security company had failed, he was fortunate to have inherited his parents’ house, and he supported himself in the neighbourhood with odd jobs. He had a low income but even lower expectations, so it didn't matter.

  She moved in with him. At least, she stayed there often enough, but usually brought a bag with her, as if his house was a hotel. She never told him where she was going when she left. She cooked intriguing, delicious food and she sang in Gaelic. She was like a Selkie, he thought; a fairy seal that appeared as a human woman. And, like any fairy creature, she knew magic, which she showed him in the night. Candle, stone, rope, bone, and fire. “You know the word bonfire comes from bone fire, don't you?” He didn't believe her, but when he looked it up it was true. Even in his own language, mysteries were concealed. He wondered where the bones had come from, to fuel such fires.

  He told Shelley about Daddo and his youth. She said: “That's why I'm here,” and he misunderstood this in different ways for months. She never did anything dangerous, but she frightened him anyway; frightened him even though he was enchanted by her. Once, looking over his shoulder at a book of Celtic fairy tales he was reading, she said, “It's not like that.” The picture was of a man bound down by the roots of a tree while gleeful creatures danced around him, bearing torches.

  Early in September he said: “We should celebrate Samhain together. Do something really special."

  "We will celebrate,” she said. “Not together, although I will show you true Samhain."

  * * * *

  There is a tradition among the local farmers that an Irish witch lives in the Karoo. Academics have traced the legend to the early 18th century, based on references in the letters of English missionaries. The origin of the legend is not known.

  * * * *

  It was not cold in the desert, but Grant shuddered continually. He felt his throat constrict and his chest tighten, gradually, as if he was being slowly suffocated by invisible fingers: fingers of memory, fingers of history.

  The first to appear was, surprisingly, a Bushman. An old man with a calabash, on the rock opposite his. The old man carried a leather sack, the contents of which he spilled out onto the sand: old bones.

  To Grant's left the rocks filled up with other apparitions: unkempt men in tattered uniforms that Grant could not place although he felt he knew them. To his right, the rocks filled up with other things, not human. He felt as if he was drunk, and knew that his breathing had become so shallow and infrequent that he was intoxicated from lack of oxygen. He was sure that one of the things on the rock nearest him was a honey badger, but this made no sense at all. He wanted to laugh but could not.

  The sky seemed to travel away very quickly and then come thundering back down until it was right above him, like a ceiling. He felt the jolt in his ears as stars, moon and space slammed to a halt only arm's lengths above his head.

  In the centre of the circle stood a man with antlers. The first thing Grant thought was “Puca", the name of a horned creature Daddo used to scare him with. But this was something different. The man was larger than a human, probably two and a half meters to the shoulder. Atop the shoulders was a heavy, inhuman head that Grant could not convince himself was a mask, even though he wanted to. It was not a goat's head or a bull's head or an antelope's head, although he would have chosen one of those to describe it. The head turned as the body turned, silently acknowledging those present, and then its eyes settled on Grant and the horned man cocked his
head to one side.

  * * * *

  In a private letter to his father, the 5th Earl of Beaufort, Lord Somerset wrote: “I expect Faran ran off to live with the natives. I fear I trusted him too much. I should never have let him go, nor acceded to his request that his wife travel with him. I believe that woman was mad."

  * * * *

  There was music. Grant could not identify the source, but it was mournful and sweet music, played on something like a flute or pan-pipe. The horned man continued looking at him, and then opened his mouth. A squealing, mewling, half-roaring noise burst forth from it, and all the other creatures leaned forward and echoed the noise, in whispers and mutters. There was silence, then another roar, another echo, and in the centre of the circle, behind the horned man, a fire blazed up.

  The Bushman collected his bones and threw them into the fire, then stood motionless, staring at Grant. One soldier approached the fire and looked at him. Another, haggard and limping, did the same. One by one the others joined them. Then the desert creatures, badger, lizard, jackal, karakul, all gathered close to the roaring flames, all looked at him. Their eyes flickered and shone. Grant rose despite himself. His bladder ached and he felt like crying, not out of sorrow or beauty this time, but out of sheer terror. He whimpered, trying to prevent himself from moving, but could not. The horned man was motioning to him to come, come forward, come now, come, and the movement of his fingers seemed to move Grant's feet.

  He felt the heat of the fire searing his skin as he approached it. He was still a few paces from the flames and yet it felt as if his skin was beginning to blister. Peering into the fire he saw the bones thrown there by the Bushman, and while they appeared to be the source of the heat, they were not consumed.