Vacui Magia: Stories

By L.S. Johnson

Winner of the North Street Book Prize
World Fantasy Award Finalist

 

L.S. Johnson's provocative first collection brings together dwarves and golems, Fates and minotaurs, murder, metamorphosis, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in eight richly-written stories. 

 

An infertile witch constructs a golem-baby to fulfill her dying mother's wish. A cafeteria worker forms an uneasy alliance with a group of possibly imaginary but nonetheless dangerous little men. An 18th century prostitute finds herself unwillingly immortalized and responds in kind. 

 

Survival, identity, and family are all explored in these poetic tales that mingle terror and sentiment, fear and love. These are stories that dance on the edge of the abyss, that lead you through darkness in search of that single gleam of hope. This is Vacui Magia.

 

"I can say without hesitation, reservation or exception that this is a collection full of brilliantly written and powerfully affecting stories, each of which profoundly impressed me in different ways . . . Johnson's Vacui Magia is a book that never goes quietly, and it is wonderful for it."  - The Future Fire Reviews

 

This deluxe ebook includes extended story notes and new cover art by renowned illustrator Jana Heidersdorf. A hardcover edition can be purchased exclusively on the author's website.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Traversing Z Press
• Release date: Mar 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781386569343

Book preview

Vacui Magia

VACUI MAGIA

STORIES

L.S. JOHNSON

TRAVERSING Z PRESS

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, except by an authorized retailer, or with written permission of the publisher. Inquiries may be submitted at www.traversingz.com.

Copyright ©2016, 2023 by L.S. Johnson. All rights reserved.

Published by Traversing Z Press.

ISBN (hardcover): 979-8985797237

ISBN (ebook): 979-8985797244

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016932851

Editing by Charlotte Ashley and Katrina Roets

Cover art by Jana Heidersdorf

Cover design by Najla Qamber

Interior design and project management by Jennifer Uhlich

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my mother

Here is what I could not say

LITTLE MEN WITH KNIVES

In the darkness, I listen to the couple next door. Paul and Theresa. She sobs and sobs and he bellows, so loudly I have the urge to get up and check my own house to make sure he hasn’t invaded with his liquor and his fists. He calls her terrible names and then there’s a crash, something large and alive hitting a wall. Somewhere a dog starts barking.

Beneath the staccato barks, someone is weeping. I would say Theresa but perhaps it’s Paul. Who’s to say he doesn’t cry afterwards? Her face is distended by bruises sometimes; they make no secret of his violence. Margie across the street used to call the cops and got her car pummeled with a bat for her efforts. Nearly a thousand dollars worth of damage. Now, everyone just turns away. Not a one of us can risk Paul’s anger.

We turn away, but I sneak a glance at Theresa now and again. She’s a lovely woman, younger than I am, but there’s a look on her face that’s familiar: it’s the same look that I see in my own mirror. The look of someone trapped.

Silently, I plead with the dog to shut up, for Paul to pass out, Theresa to get a hold of herself. I need to sleep. I must sleep. I can’t afford another write-up in my file, I can’t afford to be hopeless. That’s what Bill says when I’m late, when I spill food, when I curse in front of the kids. My pay docked each time.

Hopeless, Michael had said on the phone, that last conversation. Hopeless, meaning us.

I read in a magazine that if you imagine something—really see it in every detail—you can make it happen. Actualizing, they called it. Each night I lie here, rigid and bleary-eyed, and imagine the next day. I imagine myself sleeping long and deep and then getting up promptly, showering and drying my hair, and pinning it neatly for once. I imagine myself putting on a clean uniform. I drink a cup of instant coffee while I chop up the hotdogs for the dwarves and toss them with some leftover fried rice. Put on my orthopedic shoes and my coat, and go out the back door, leaving the platter of food on the porch. The neighbors think it’s for strays, they think me the mad cat lady of the neighborhood. But in truth what began as an occasional act of kindness has become a necessity: skip a meal and the little bastards will cut up my uniform again.

I come home smelling of industrial lasagna and children, tacky with sweat from the polyester double-knit. The platter is washed clean and standing upright in the dish drainer; the floors are swept, the windows washed. My kitchen chairs have been dragged all over the place. Afterwards, they helped themselves to some half-pints of milk I keep on the bottom shelf of the fridge, and I add dwarf milk to my shopping list.

In a corner of the kitchen window, someone drew a penis using the soap, which I patiently wash away. I always imagine a younger one, bored with his chores, sneaking in a little bit of petty revenge. I’ve found genitals scratched in the patches of bare dirt in the yard, a swollen-looking woman that I assume is me, a muddy Fuk fuk fuk once on the siding. Each time I just wipe it away. It’s a small price to pay for a clean house.

Under the sink, next to the trash, is the bloody carcass of some animal—a rat? A chipmunk?—skinned and in several bony pieces, all its meat neatly pared away.

It’s still warm.

I make Hamburger Helper and Vienna sausages for their supper and put it on the porch. I’m so tired, I just take a scoop for myself. They love anything processed. They especially like Fridays at the cafeteria, when it’s sloppy joes. It’s hard to tell what they think about anything just by looking at them. Their faces are hidden by thick, knotted beards and woolen caps pulled low. But they make a cooing noise over the sloppy joes that they never make at any other time.

I eat my dinner standing up, watching them through the kitchen window. As soon as I shut the back door, the ivy covering the back fence started rustling. They emerged one by one through the hole in the chain link, tramping up to the porch single-file. About a dozen this time. I would say it’s the same ones, but I can’t really tell them apart. I call them dwarves, like in Snow White, but they’re more like those dwarves’ skid row cousins: besides the caps, they mostly wear old baby things, grey with dirt. Their coveralls and rompers are bedecked with rainbows and toot-toot trains, cheeky monkeys and happy daisies, all as grimy as a mechanic’s uniform. Around their waists, they each wear a leather belt with a sheath, and in each sheath is a knife with a long, curving blade.

No matter how filthy they are, their knives are always spotless.

Once they’re settled about the platter, crossing their legs and chatting in their strange, chirping language, they each draw out their knives and stab at the mound of food, spearing sausages and pasta gleaming with red sauce, shoving the wet blades into their mouths.

As always when I watch them, I try to think how to prove, once and for all, that they’re just figments of my imagination. I never believed in Santa Claus; I hated Disney movies. It seemed cruel to be taunted with these kind fairies and handsome princes that could never exist. Why, then, would I imagine this? Have I become so sleep-deprived I’ve gone off my rocker? Am I drinking heavily and blacking it all out? Hallucinogens in the school food? What about when I was on the pill—did it have some secret ingredient to drive poor women crazy? And so on and so on, until I’m not sure that anything in the world is what it seems, least of all myself.

There is no such thing as dwarves, or dirty little men about two feet high who do housework for franks and beans.

And yet, there is my clean house, my supermarket bill, the snapped links in the fence. The carcass in my trash. The metallic whispering of their sharp, bright knives.

Today I’m salad; Ethel, who is too old for this but has no savings, is drinks. Every day we get a different station in the cafeteria and no more than an hour and a half to clean and prep everything. Lunch lasts for two and a half hours—the classes are staggered—then there’s two hours for cleanup. Al, who’s been here the longest, says that there used to be more time at both ends and we would work special events too, but budget cuts scaled everything back. Now the special events are catered by a company from the city and we get just enough hours to get by, just enough benefits to keep us hanging on.

Of all the stations, drinks and pot-washing are the hardest. Ethel can’t work pots because of some medical waiver about the detergents, but she gets drinks a lot. I think Bill’s trying to get rid of her. Drinks have so much prep: heavy powders and syrups to carry and maneuver, machines so high you need the stepladder to set them up, the ice maker to clean out, hundreds of cups to stack. I do what I can to help, and Al does her cups, but we’re nearly open when she realizes she’s out of Coke syrup.

And then the kids pour in.

It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion. Every day the kids guzzle soda, especially Coke. They swarm around the machine now, beating the nozzle with their cups and kicking the cabinets beneath. When Ethel tries to shoo them away they yell in her face and hit her with their empty cups, like she’s just another machine.

Everyone looks to the manager’s office, but Bill just shakes his head and shuts his door. I finally manage to get a monitor’s attention, and she rolls her eyes and drags herself over to intervene. Ethel looks stricken and again I feel that twinge of recognition at her expression, a combination of anger and impotence.

Later, Bill yells at Ethel in the office, yells and yells, his voice reverberating through the heavy steel and glass door. When Ethel comes out, her face swollen from crying, everyone pretends to be busy cleaning. Like we’re all fine, like it couldn’t be any one of us next.

I follow her into the break room to try and say—what? something, anything—but she won’t even look at me.

You could have said something, she says through gritted teeth. You could have backed me up. You know damn well that station has too much prep for one person. She throws her spare uniform on the table. "Take that, for all your trouble. I won’t be needing it anymore."

Every day, on my long walk to and from work, I pass by a church. Today the sign reads, What good deed have you done today? and I think of Ethel. That will be me soon enough—too old to work and too poor to quit. All of us, trapped: myself, Ethel, Theresa and her bruises.

Had I said anything, would it have mattered? Or would we both be jobless now?

I come home to find the lawn in the backyard trimmed in jagged waves, the bushes pruned to about waist height, and the one flowering bush deadheaded. I heat up some leftover fish sticks and put them out with a stack of chopped carrots and celery. It’s getting harder to take food: Al’s wife just lost her job so he’s stealing everything he can, and Bill rounded off his day as an Utter Bastard by making us throw away the last of the cream of tomato soup.

I make myself a bologna sandwich and sit by the back door, watching the dwarves as they clamber onto the porch. It took several months to get to this point. At first they would vanish the moment I stepped outside; now, as long as I keep my distance, they don’t seem to mind. They even wave at me sometimes, or touch their caps.

Like stray cats. Stray cats that do housework. My craziness in a nutshell.

When Michael and I first looked at rentals out here, the agent told us that this was the elf house. The old lady who had lived in it used to call the police complaining about little men. She said they would sneak around the house at night, messing with her things, and she had tried leaving out pans of milk, did the police have any other suggestions? The agent told us this while rolling his eyes, then he drew circles in the air by the side of his head. Crazy old woman, he said, and then, She was a widow, as if that explained it.

It was only after Michael left that they first appeared. I thought it possums, making that much noise. When I saw them rooting through my garbage, I opened my mouth to scream, only to close it again. I wasn’t afraid. In a way I had been expecting them. I was a middle-aged woman living hand to mouth in a shitty town with no friends or relatives, sagging and fattening and graying with every passing day. There was nothing to be afraid of. I was just going mad. Crazy old woman. It was the order of things.

One of the dwarves spears half a fish stick with his knife. He bites into it with a scowl, tearing at it like it were the haunch of an animal, and I find myself laughing. What else do I have to laugh at anymore? Not for the first time, I wish I was on the other side of the door. As nasty as they are, I doubt any of them lie awake at night, hating the present, terrified of the future. I doubt they’re afraid of anything at all.

In bed, I half-watch Johnny Carson and try to write a little note to Ethel to say how sorry I am that she got fired. I am sorry, but I’m not sorry for keeping my mouth shut. The want ads in the local paper fill one column and half are solely for mechanics and appliance techs. This town only needs people who can keep putting bandaids on it.

On the television, Ed McMahon is clearly lit: he keeps blurting out nonsensical responses and squinting at something we can’t see. Little pink elephants. I haven’t had a drink since that one night Ethel took me out, right after Michael left. Forget about him, she kept saying. They’re all bastards. It’s a shitty world and you gotta toughen up if you’re gonna survive it. It’s survival of the fittest, I’m tellin’ ya.

Her face today, when she realized what was going to happen, how it would be one write-up too many. All of us unable to control our lives, the only lives we’ll ever have.

What good deed have you done today?

Later, the dog begins barking again, its yapping as relentless as a jackhammer. Why doesn’t someone stop it? I wait and wait and then storm out into my scrubby moonlit yard. At least if I can figure out who it belongs to, I can go over and complain. I go right up to the back fence, ears straining, trying to pinpoint what direction. I turn to my right—

and look directly at Theresa looking at me. Her red eyes seem huge in their dark hollows; her thick brown hair hangs loose to the middle of her back. She’s in that thin robe of hers, clutching a beer bottle. She looks like something out of a movie, beautiful despite her suffering. I open my mouth to speak, but she only bares her teeth at me, her smooth face contorting into something animalistic.

Creepy lesbo, she snarls, mind your own fucking business. She turns and stomps back into her house, her bare legs flashing beneath the hem of her robe, the soles of her feet black with dirt.

Creepy lesbo. It’s as if she reached over and slapped me. Is that what everyone thinks? My face feels hot despite the cold air. Is that what everyone thinks? I’ve always thought her pretty, but not like that. Not like that.

Did Michael spread something around, before he left for good? He once asked—but that was because I didn’t want to go down on him.

Reviews for Vacui Magia

[Lov2laf · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Vacui Magia is latin for Magic Void and is an anthology of short stories written by L.S. Johnson.

If you've read "Hawkworth Hall" or "Leviathan" you'll know Johnson writes horror by poetry and is able to spin a pretty darn dark tale. Vacui Magia is no exception.

The anthology holds eight short stories, all of differing lengths and completely different subject matter. They're all effectual in being creepy and impactful in a disturbing way. All are high quality writings.

I particularly liked three stories: "Little Men with Knives", "Vendémiaire", and "Julie".

I usually read lesfic and this doesn't fall into that category. The leads are female, though, and I'd say that many of the stories center around a woman's inner strength when the world is against her.

I don't typically read horror but I couldn't help thinking this would be something along the lines of Stephen King and couldn't help but be impressed.

If you're looking for something on the darker side that's well-written or are a fan of Johnson's other works, definitely give this a read.

4.25 stars