Michael Chabon - McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury

McSWEENEY'S

MAMMOTH

TREASURY OF

THRILLING

TALES

EDITED BY MICHAEL CHABON

ILLUSTRATIONS BY HOWARD CHAYKIN

VINTAGE BOOKS

A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE, INC. NEW YORK

Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division

of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by

Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

This collection was also published in slightly different form as Issue #10, No. 1, Winter 2002-3, McSweeney's Quarterly, San

Francisco.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McSweeney's mammoth treasury of thrilling tales / edited by Michael Chabon.- 1st Vintage Books ed.

p. cm. Simultaneously published as McSweeney's, issue 10, winter 2002-3, no. 1.

ISBN 1-4000-3339-X (trade pbk.) 1. Short stories, American. I. Chabon, Michael. II. McSweeney's.

PS648.S5M39 2003

813'.0108-dc21

2002192265

www.vintagebooks.com

Cover illustration originally appeared on the cover of the October 1940

issue of Red Star Mystery Magazine and is used with the permission of

Keith Alan Deutsch and Argosy Communications, Inc., the approval

of the Estate of H.J. Ward, and the assistance of Joel Frieman.

Artwork reproduction materials courtesy of CAPE Publishing.

Printed in the United States of America 10 98765432

The Editor's Notebook

A Confidential Chat with the Editor

For the last year or so I have been boring my friends, and not a few strangers, with a semi-coherent, ill-reasoned,

and doubtless mistaken rant on the subject of the American short story as it is currently written.

The rant goes something like this (actually this is the first time I have so formulated it): Imagine that, sometime

about 1950, it had been decided, collectively, informally, a little at a time, but with finality, to proscribe every kind of

novel from the canon of the future but the nurse romance. Not merely from the critical canon, but from the store racks

and library shelves as well. Nobody could be paid, published, lionized, or cherished among the gods of literature for

writing any kind of fiction other than nurse romances. Now, because of my faith and pride in the diverse and rigorous

brilliance of American writers of the last half-century, I do believe that from this bizarre decision, in this theoretical

America, a dozen or more authentic masterpieces would have emerged. Thomas Pynchon's Blitz Nurse, for example,

and Cynthia Ozick's Ruth Puttermesser, R.N. One imagines, however, that this particular genre-that any genre, even

one far less circumscribed in its elements and possibilities than the nurse romance-would have paled somewhat by the

year 2002. Over the last year in that oddly diminished world, somebody, somewhere, would be laying down Michael

Chabon's Dr. Kavalier and Nurse Clay with a weary sigh and crying out, "Surely, oh, surely there must be more to the

novel than this!"

Instead of "the novel" and "the nurse romance," try this little Gedankenexperiment with "jazz" and "the bossa

nova," or with "cinema" and "fish-out-of-water comedies." Now, go ahead and try it with "short fiction" and "the

contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment -of-truth revelatory story."

Suddenly you find yourself sitting right back in your very own universe.

Okay, I confess. I am that bored reader, in that circumscribed world, laying aside his book with a sigh; only the

book is my own, and it is filled with my own short stories, plotless and sparkling with epiphanic dew. It was in large

part a result of a crisis-a word much beloved of tedious ranteurs-in my own attitude toward my work in the short story

form that sent me back into the stream of alternate time, back to the world as it was before we all made that fateful and

perverse decision.

As late as about 1950, if I referred to "short fiction," I might have been talking about any one of the following

kinds of stories: the ghost story; the horror story; the detective story; the story of suspense, terror, fantasy, or the

macabre; the sea, adventure, spy, war, or historical story; the romance story. Stories, in other words, with plots. A

glance at any dusty paperback anthology of classic tales proves the truth of this assertion, but more startling are the

names of the authors of these ripping yarns: Poe, Balzac, Wharton, James, Conrad, Graves, Maugham, Faulkner,

Twain, Cheever, Coppard. Heavyweights all, some considered among the giants of modernism, source of the

moment-of-truth story that, like homo sapiens, appeared relatively late on the scene but has worked very quickly to

wipe out all its rivals. Short fiction, in all its rich variety, was published not only by the pulps, which gave us Hammett,

Chandler, and Lovecraft among a very few other writers now enshrined more or less safely in the canon, but also in the

great slick magazines of the time: The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Liberty, and even The New Yorker, that proud

bastion of the moment-of-truth story that has only recently, and not without controversy, made room in its august

confines for the likes of the Last Master of the Plotted Short Story, Stephen King. Very often these stories contained

enough plot and color to support an entire feature-length Hollywood adaptation. Adapted for film and radio, some of

them, like "The Monkey's Paw," "Rain," "The Most Dangerous Game," and "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,"

have been imitated and parodied and have had their atoms scattered in the general stream of the national imagination

and the public domain.

About six months ago, I was going on in this vein to Mr. Eggers, the publisher of this magazine, saying things

like, "Actually, Dave, horror stories are all psychology," and "All short stories, in other words, are ghost stories,

accounts of visitations and reckonings with the traces of the past." Emboldened by the fact that he had not completely

succumbed to unconsciousness, I went on to say that it was my greatest dream in life (other than hearing Kansas's

"Dust in the Wind" performed by a mariachi orchestra) someday to publish a magazine of my own, one that would

revive the lost genres of short fiction, a tradition I saw as one of great writers writing great short stories. I would

publish works both by "non-genre" writers who, like me, found themselves chafing under the strictures of the Ban,

and by recognized masters of the genre novel who, fifty years ago, would have regularly worked and published in the

short story form but who now have no wide or ready market for shorter work. And I would toss in a serialized novel,

too, carrying the tradition all the way back to the days of The Strand and Argosy. I would-

"If I let you guest-edit an issue of McSweeney's," said Mr. Eggers, "can we please stop talking about this?"

The McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales is the result of this noble gesture. Whether the

experiment has been a success, I leave to the reader to judge. I will say, however, that while they were working on their

stories, a number of the writers found within these covers reported to me, via giddy e-mails, that they had forgotten

how much fun writing a short story could be. I think that we have forgotten how much fun reading a short story can

be, and I hope that if nothing else, this treasury goes some small distance toward reminding us of that lost but

fundamental truth. -Michael Chabon

All Stories Original and Complete!

TEDFORD AND THE MEGALODON

by Jim Shepard

13 He went in search of a relic of earth's past, and came face-to-face with the mortal specter of his own!

THE TEARS OF SQUONK. AND WHAT HAPPENED THEREAFTER

by Glen David Gold

31 Revenge is a sport best played by those whose memories are long-and that made her a dangerous foe, indeed.

THE BEES

by Dan Chaon

53 No hellhound hunts a man more implacably than the memory of the son he once abandoned.

CATSKIN

by Kelly Link

73 The witch had made her children what they were-literally. But when her blood cried for revenge, only one had the wit and

courage to undo her murderer.

HOW CARLOS WEBSTER CHANGED HIS NAME TO CARL AND BECAME A

FAMOUS OKLAHOMA LAWMAN

by Elmore Leonard

IO1 The fate of a bank-robbing murderer resided in two scoops of peach ice cream on top of a sugar cone.

THE GENERAL

by Carol Emshwiller .. 125

They had conquered his people, then raised him as one of their own. How far would they be willing to go to destroy their own

creation?

CLOSING TIME

by Neil Gaiman

143 It was in the nature of boys to get into trouble. But sometimes you had to knock.

OTHERWISE PANDEMONIUM

by Nick Hornby

155 It was just a lousy secondhand VCR-but it brought him to the very brink of love and desolation!

THE TALE OF GRAY DICK

by Stephen King

173 They had looked everywhere for protection from their most devastating foe-except to the murderous know-how of their old

wives' tales.

BLOOD DOESN'T COME OUT

by Michael Crichton... 191

A man can only be pushed so far-especially when his mother is the one pushing.

WEAVING THE DARK

by Laurie King

2O2As the darkness gathered around her, she embarked upon the greatest adventure of her life-in her own backyard.

CHUCK'S BUCKET

by Chris Offtutt

221

Sometimes a man makes such a hash of his life that his only recourse is to bend the temporal fabric of reality itself!

UP THE MOUNTAIN COMING DOWN SLOWLY..

by Dave Eggers

237 How much were they willing to sacrifice to prove an uncertain point, to no one in particular, about a mountain that none of

them could begin to understand?

THE CASE OF THE NAZI CANARY

by Michael Moorcock . 285

The Nazis entrusted the future of their party to the capable hands of Sir Seaton Begg, Metatemporal Detective-the only man

who could possibly destroy them!

THE CASE OF THE SALT AND PEPPER SHAKERS

by Aimee Bender

331 The murdered couple was matched as perfectly as the salt and pepper shakers they collected. But the murderer of their

passion for each other was the greatest mystery of all.

GHOST DANCE

by Sherman Alexie

311 The Cheyenne woman came to him in a dream, with death in her kiss. But the nightmarish Seventh Cavalry came in waking

life-with a taste for human flesh.

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT

by Harlan Ellison

351 At the end of a grand adventure, the answer to all the riddles of existence-with fries and a large Coke.

PRIVATE GRAVE 9

by Karen Joy Fowler . 365

The mummy's eyes gazed out of the ancient past. .. and into the depths of his soul!

THE ALBERTINE NOTES

by Riek Moody

38OAlbertine, solace of a city in ruins. Any memory you wanted, anytime you wanted it. All for the low, low price of-history

itself.

THE MARTIAN AGENT. A PLANETARY ROMANCE

by Michael Chabon ... 447

They were the sons of an imperial traitor, marked for life. Their only honor lay in their loyalty to each other. Their sole chance

for salvation lay in the empire of the clouds.

Tedford and the Megalodon

By JIM SHEPARD

He went in search of a relic of earth's past, and came face-to-face with the mortal specter of his

own!

He'd brought some books with him on the way out, but had lost the lot of them on the transfer to the smaller boat.

One of the lifting pallets had upset and spilled the crate down the side of the ship. His almanac had been saved, for

which he was thankful.

Among the losses had been his Simpson and his Eldredge; his Osteology and Relationships of

Chondrichthyans; his Boys' Book of Songs, Balfour's Development of Elasmobranch Fishes, and, thrown in from his

childhood, his Beadle's Boy's Library, including Wide Awake Ned: The Boy Wizard.

Above his head, interstellar space was impossibly black. That night he wrote in his almanac, Velvet set with

piercing bits of light. There seemed to be, spread above him, some kind of galactic cloud arrangement. Stars arced up

over one horizon and down the other. The water nearest the ice seemed disturbingly calm. Little wavelets lapped the

prow of the nearest kayak. The cold was like a wind from the stars.

Thirty-three-year-old Roy Henry Tedford and his little pile of provisions were braced on the lee side of a talus

slope on a speck of an island at somewhere around degree of longitude 146 and degree of latitude 58, seven hundred

miles from Adelie Land on the Antarctic Coast, and four hundred from the nearest landfall on any official map: the

unprepossessing dot of Macquarie Island to the east. It was a fine midsummer night in 1923.

His island, one of three ice-covered rocks huddled together in a quarter-mile chain, existed only on the

hand-drawn chart that had brought him here, far from those few shipping lanes and fishing waters this far south. The

chart was entitled, in Heuvelmans's barbed-wire handwriting, alongside his approximation of the location, The Islands

of the Dead. Under that Heuvelmans had printed in block letters the aboriginal word Kadimakara, or "Animals of the

Dreamtime."

Tedford's provisions included twenty-one pounds of hardtack, two tins of biscuit flour, a sack of sweets, a bag of

dried fruit, a camp-stove, an oilskin wrap for his almanac, two small reading-lanterns, four jerry cans of kerosene, a

waterproofed one-man tent, a bedroll, a spare coat and gloves, a spare set of Wellington boots, a knife, a small tool

set, waterproofed and double-wrapped packets of matches, a box camera in a specially made mahogany case in an

oilskin pouch, a revolver, and a Bland's .577 Axite Express. He'd fired the Bland's twice, and both times been knocked

onto his back by the recoil. The sportsman in Melbourne who'd sold it to him had assured him that it was the closest

thing to field artillery that a man could put to his shoulder.

He was now four hundred miles from sharing a wish, or a word, or a memory. If all went well, it might be two

months before he again saw a friendly face. Until she'd stopped writing, his mother had informed him regularly that it

took a powerful perversity of spirit to send an otherwise intelligent young man voluntarily into such a life.

His plan looked excellent on paper. He'd already left another kayak, with an accompanying supply depot, on the

third or westernmost island, in the event bad weather or high seas prevented his return to this one.

He'd started as a student of J.H. Tate's in Adelaide. Tate had assured himself of volunteers for his fieldwork by

making a keg of beer part of his collection kit, and had introduced Tedford to evolutionism and paleontology,

enlivening the occasional dinner party by belting out, to the tune of "It's a Long Way to Tipperary":

It's a long way from Amphioxus,

It's a long way to us;

It's a long way from Amphioxus

To the meanest human cuss.

Farewell, fins and gill slits,

Welcome, teeth and hair-

It's a long long way from Amphioxus,

But we all came from there!

Tedford had been an eager acolyte for two years and then had watched his enthusiasm stall in the face of the

remoteness of the sites, the lack of monetary support, and the meagerness of the finds. Three months for an old tooth,

as old Tate used to put it. Tedford had taken a job as a clerk for the local land surveyor, and his duties had exposed

him to a panoply of local tales, whispered stories, and bizarre sightings. He'd found himself investigating each, in his

free time, in search of animals known to local populations but not to the world at large. His mode was analysis, logical

dissection, and reassembly, when it came to the stories. His tools were perseverance, an appetite for observation, a

tolerance for extended discomfort, and his aunt's trust fund. He'd spent a winter month looking for bunyips, which he'd

been told inhabited the deep waterholes and roamed the billabongs at night. He'd found only a few fossilized bones of

some enormous marsupials. He'd been fascinated by the paringmal, the "birds taller than the mountains," but had

uncovered them only in rock paintings. He'd spent a summer baking on a blistering hardpan awaiting the appearance

of the legendary cadimurka.

All that knocking about had become focused on the day that a fisherman had shown him a tooth he'd dredged up

with a deep-sea net. The thing had revealed itself to be a huge whitish triangle, thick as a scone, the root rough, the

blade enamel-polished and edged with twenty or so serrations per centimeter. The heft had been remarkable: that

single tooth had weighed nearly a pound.

Tedford had come across teeth like it before, in Miocene limestone beds. They belonged, Tate had assured him, to

a creature science had identified as Carcharodon Megalodon, or Great Tooth, a recent ancestor of the Great White

Shark, but nearly three times as large: a monster shark, with jaws within which a tall man could stand without stooping,

and a stout, oversized head. But the tooth that Tedford held in his hand was white, which meant it came from an

animal either quite recently extinct, or not extinct at all.

He'd written up the find in the Tasmanian Journal of Natural Science. The editor had accepted the piece but

refused its inflammatory title.

A year later nearly to the day, his eye had been caught by a newspaper account of the Warrnambool Sea

Monster, christened for the home port of eleven fishermen and a boy, in three tuna boats, who had refused to go to

sea for several days. They'd been at work at certain far-off fishing grounds that only they had discovered, which lay

beside a shelf plunging down into very deep water, when an immense shark, of unbelievable proportions, had surfaced

among them, taking nets, one of the boats, and a ship's dog back down with it. The boy in the boat that had capsized

had called out, "Is that the fin of a great fish?" and then everything had gone topsy-turvy. Everyone had been saved

from the vortex except the dog. They'd been unanimous that the beast had been something the like of which they'd

never seen. In interviews conducted in the presence of both the local Fisheries Inspector and one B. Heuvelmans,

dentist and naturalist, the men had been questioned very closely, and had all agreed upon the details, even down to

the creature's length, which seemed absurd: at least sixty-five feet. They'd agreed that it was at least the length of the

wharf shed back at their bay. The account made clear that these were men used to the sea and to all sorts of weather,

and to all sorts of sharks, besides. They had seen whale sharks and basking sharks. They recounted the way the sea

had boiled over from the thing's surfacing and its subsequent submersion. This was no whale, they'd insisted; they'd

seen its terrible head. They'd agreed on everything: the size of its dorsal, the creature's staggering width, its ghostly

whitish color. What seemed most to their credit, in terms of their credibility, was their flat refusal to return to the sea

for nearly a week, despite the loss of wages involved: a loss they could ill afford, as their wives, also present for the

interviews, pointed out.

It had taken him a week to get away, and when he'd finally gotten to Warrnambool no one would speak to him.

The fishermen had tired of being the local sport, and had told him only that they wished that anyone else had seen the

thing rather than them.

He'd no sooner been back at his desk when other stories had appeared. For a week, there'd been a story every

morning, the relevance of which only he apprehended. A small boat had been swamped south of Tasmania, in calm

seas, its crew missing. A ninety-foot trawler had struck a reef in what was charted as deep water. A whale carcass,

headless and bearing trenchlike gashes, had washed ashore near Hibbs Bay.

As soon as he could get away, he took the early coach back to Warrnambool and looked up B. Heuvelmans, the

dentist, who turned out to be an untidy cockatoo of a man holed up in a sanctuary at the rear of his house, where he'd

built himself a laboratory. As he explained impatiently to Tedford, in the afternoons he retired there, unavailable to his

patients' pain and devoted to his entomological and zoological studies, many of which lined the walls. The room was

oppressively dark and close. Dr. Heuvelmans was secretary to the local Scientific Society. Until recently he'd been

studying a tiny but monstrous-looking insect found exclusively in a certain kind of dung, but since the fishermen's

news, the Sea Monster story had entirely obsessed him. He sat in a rotating chair behind a broad table covered with

books, maps, and diagrams, and suggested they do what they could to curtail Tedford's visit, which could hardly be

agreeable to Tedford, and was inexpressibly irksome to his host. While he talked, he chewed on the end of what he

assured Tedford was a dentifricial root. He sported tiny, horn-rimmed sunglasses and a severely pointed beard.

He wanted no help and he was perfectly content to be considered a lunatic. His colleagues only confirmed his

suspicion that one of the marvels of Nature was the resistance that the average human brain offered to the

introduction of knowledge. When it came to ideas, his associates stuck to their ruts until forcibly ejected from them.

Very well. That ejection would come about soon enough.

Had he information beyond that reported in the newspapers? Tedford wanted to know.

That information alone would have sufficed for him, Heuvelmans retorted; his interviews at least had

demonstrated to his satisfaction that if he believed in the beast's existence he did so in good company. But in fact, he

did have more. At first he would proceed no further upon that point, refusing all direct inquiry. The insect he'd been

studying was apparently not eaten by birds because of a spectacularly malodorous or distasteful secretion, which

began to rise faintly from the man's clothing the longer Tedford sat in the stuffy little room.

But the longer Tedford did sit, mildly refusing to stir, the more information the excitable Belgian brought forth. He

talked of a fellow tooth-puller who'd befriended some aborigines up near Coward Springs and Bopeechee and who'd

reported that they spoke of hidden islands to the southeast infused with the spirit of the deep upwellings, something

terrible, something malevolent, something to be avoided. He'd reported that they had a word for "shark that devours

the sea." He displayed a piece of fisherman's slate-from a boat he said had gone entirely missing-on which was written

"Please help us. Find us soon before we die."

Finally, when Tedford apparently seemed insufficiently impressed, he'd gone into a locked cabinet with a great

flourish and had produced a tooth-white-identical to the tooth Tedford had been shown. The Warrnambool fishermen

had pulled it from the tatters of their net-line, he said.

Moreover, the dentist said, working the dentifricial root around his back molars, he'd found the fishing grounds.

And with them, the islands.

Tedford had been unsuccessful at concealing his shock and excitement.

The job had taken him a couple of weeks, Heuvelmans had gone on, but on the whole he was quite set up by his

overall ingenuity and success. He was traveling there in a matter of days, to positively identify the thing, if not catch

it. Could Tedford accompany him? Not by a long chalk.

What they were talking about, Heuvelmans mused, after they'd both had sufficient time to ponder the brutality of

his refusal, would be second only to the Sperm Whale as the largest predator the planet had ever produced. He then

lapsed into silence with the look of a man peering into deep space.

When Tedford finally asked what sort of weapons he intended to bring, the man quoted Job: "He esteemeth iron

as straw, and brass as rotten wood." And when his guest responded, "Am I to understand that you're proceeding

unarmed?" Heuvelmans said only merrily, "He maketh the deep to boil like a pot."

Tedford had taken his leave intending to return the next day, and the next, and the next, but had come back the

following morning to discover Heuvelmans already gone, on, as his housekeeper put it, "a sea-voyage." He never

returned.

Tedford finally asked the housekeeper to notify him if there was any news, and two weeks after that the good

woman wrote to say that part of the stern of the ship her master had contracted, the Tonny, had floated ashore on the

Tasmanian coast.

He'd prevailed upon the housekeeper to give him access to the sanctuary-in order that he might help solve the

mystery of the poor man's disappearance-and there discovered, in the course of tearing the entire place apart, the

man's notes, a copy of the precious map: everything. On one of the three islands there was said to be a secret opening,

a hidden entry to a sort of lagoon otherwise completely encircled by rock and ice. He was to look for light blue ice

along the water level, under a half-dome overhang, to paddle up to that place, and to push through what he found.

That would be his private gate into the unknown.

It had reached the point at which his friends had noticed that the great majority of his expressions reflected

discontent, and he'd started speaking openly about being crowded round by an oppressive world. Everything had

been herded into a few narrow margins; everything had been boxed up and organized. What was zoology-or

paleontology-but an obsessive reordering of the boxes? Finding what science insisted wasn't there-that was the real

contribution.

He liked to believe that he was the sort of man who viewed the world with an unprejudiced eye and judged it in a

reasonable way. In letters to those few undemanding correspondents who'd remained in touch, he described himself

as suppliant before the mysteries of Nature.

He felt more frequently as though his only insight was his desire to be left alone. Passing mirrors, he noticed that

his bearing was that of someone who'd seen his share of trouble and expected more on the way.

He didn't find himself to be particularly shy. When addressed he always responded. He had proposed to one

woman, and she had visibly recoiled, and replied that their friendship had been so good and so pleasant that it would

have been a pity to have spoiled it.

His first memory was of beating on the fireplace hob with a spoon. Asked by his father what he thought he was

doing, he replied, "I'm playing pretty music."

His mother, whose family had made a fortune in shipbuilding, was prone to remarks like, "I have upgraded my

emeralds, down through the years."

As a boy he'd felt his head to be full of pictures no one else could see. It was as if the air had been heavy-laden

with strange thoughts and ideas. He'd grown up on an estate far outside of their little town, with his brother Freddy as

his closest and only friend. Freddy had been two years older. They'd trapped bandicoots and potoroos in the

understory of eucalyptus stands, and Freddy had taught him how to avoid getting nipped by jew lizards and

scaly-foots. They'd ridden each other everywhere on the handlebars of their shared bicycle, and worked together on

chores. They couldn't have been more different in their parents' eyes: tall and fair Freddy, who'd announced at the age

of fourteen that he'd been called upon to minister to lost souls in the interior, once he came of age; and the diminutive

Roy, with a mat of brown hair he'd never fully wrestled into order and a tendency to break jars of preserves or

homemade wine just from restlessness. Freddy had helped out at the local hospital, while Roy had collected filthy old

bones and left them lying around the house. Freddy's only failing, in fact, seemed to have been his inability to more

fully transform his brother.

Until it all went smash, the day before Roy's fourteenth birthday, when Freddy, on an errand to the lumber mill,

somehow had pitched into the circular saw and had been cut open from sternum to thigh. He'd lived for two days. His

brother had visited him twice in the hospital, and each time Freddy had ignored him. Just before he had died, in Roy's

presence, he had asked their mother if she could hear the angels singing. She had fallen to weeping again, and had

Michael Chabon - McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: