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“He tells stories like Fabergé
made eggs - exquisitely crafted, each one unique and beautiful and of the
finest kind, and I'm eternally grateful to him for sharing. This is fiction for
grown-ups -- emotionally complex, literate and compulsively readable. Highly recommended.”
– Mark Lancaster, Reviewer & Commentator
“THE
MARTYRING is a modern masterpiece, and Thomas Sullivan is a national treasure.”
– Loren D. Estleman, author of BILLY GASHADE
“One
is convinced that an outsize performer is trying his wings – a John Barth or a
John Irving, with a touch of William Gaddis and maybe a dash of Kurt Vonnegut,
Jr.” – The Chicago Tribune
“Thomas
Sullivan is a master of description.” – William X. Kienzle, author of the
Father Koesler mystery series
“A
memorable journey . . . compelling read. Classic Sullivan.” – Fred Bean, author
of EDEN
“Trying
to pigeonhole Thomas Sullivan would be like calling Hemingway an outdoor
writer, or Fitzgerald the king of glamour and glitz. He's that good, moving
effortlessly from one literary landscape to another, his cast of wonderful
characters in tow.” – Lowell Cauffiel, author of MASQUERADE
“Sullivan
is an original . . . [he] turns a phrase with the ease of Ozzie Smith turning a
double play.” – Detroit Free Press
“Reads
like lightning . . .” – Detroit Monthly
“The
man writes like silk feels.” – M. Paulle, columnist
"Sullivan’s
most sustained and strongest yet...” – Kirkus Reviews
Thrillers
Editor’s Recommended Book of the Month
“Highly
recommended spine-chilling entertainment.” – Rue Morgue
“…a
joy to read.” – The Associated Press
“Where
Sullivan belongs is on the best-seller lists.” – Doug Allyn, Flint Journal
“…can’t
be recommended highly enough.” – David Niall Wilson, author DEEP BLUE
“…a
Border’s pick-of-the-month nationally.”
“Thomas
Sullivan has a way with words like few other writers. He could make the back of
a cereal box sound interesting.” – Alan Russell, Author
“Thomas
Sullivan is one of the best writers out there…” – Jennifer Hairfield, Author
and Reviewer
“…work
of impressive imagination…a writer with considerable gifts for language and
style.” – Nate Kenyon, Author & Reviewer
"It's entirely possible, I believe, that Sully is William Wordsworth reincarnated, and I know he's planning a sea kayaking trip in the South Pacific later this year. Hmmm. Maybe he's a reincarnated Joseph Conrad, as well." -- Chuck Hines, Author & Commentator
Praise for other novels by
Thomas
Sullivan
The
Martyring
World
Fantasy Award Finalist
"Thomas Sullivan is a master of description. Even
readers who are not scared by things that go bump in the night may tremble as
the most ghoulish creature since Hannibal Lecter stalks the pages of The
Martyring. A tale of murder and unholy family relationships." —William X.
Kienzle
"A
compelling read and the seed of nightmares. Classic Sullivan." —Fred Bean
"Trying to
pigeonhole Thomas Sullivan would be like calling Hemingway an outdoor writer or
Fitzgerald the king of glamour and glitz. He's that good, moving effortlessly
from one literary landscape to another, his cast of wonderful characters in
tow."—Lowell Cauffiel
Nominated
for the Pulitzer Prize
"One is convinced that an outsize performer is trying
his wings—a John Barth or a John Irving, with a touch of William Gaddis and
maybe a dash of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr."
—Chicago
Tribune
"Once in a blue moon, modem American literature captures
lightning in a bottle, producing a work that is both important and
entertaining. The Phases of Harry Moon is just such a work. In the hands of
Thomas Sullivan, it is a serious character study as seen in a funhouse mirror.
The reader will look, laugh, and come away changed." —Loren D. Estleman
Thomas Sullivan has been a gambler, a Rube Goldberg- style
innovator, a coach, a teacher, a city commissioner, and a born-again athlete.
His short stories have been published in every magazine from Omni to Espionage.
He lives in Minnesota.
BORN
BURNING
Thomas Sullivan
For
Norby Nation
My
Magic Family
GENESIS
1
The teak from
which the chair was cut was old when China was young. What kept it alive is a
mystery of ecology or botany or God. Such trees generally live for two hundred
years or so. This one endured for two thousand.
The soil from
which it sprang was black and deep with the souls of fierce warriors. They had
fought amid the dark forests of what is now Yunnan province and died in sunless
depths, their blood black and thick on the forest floor. It may be that the protean
caverns of some sanguinary subworld fed the thing or it may be that it had
roots in hell, but it sprang lustily from its source at a time when China was
six thousand feudal states in two river valleys. Christ was yet to be born—and
then so far away. Far, too, to the northeast the Huang Ho and Yangtze life
waters spawned dynasty after dynasty. The Shang and the Chou Sons of Heaven
came and went,
and Shih Huang Ti built the Great Wall while China yet crept
west.
Up soared the
tree, taller, thicker, radiant with dense flesh, elbowing aside its rivals.
Whatever touched it of the surrounding forest withered, even the bamboo, which
always accompanies teak. The usual light soil yielded to an ever-widening
circle of black loam. In the time of the Sung dynasty to the north, the local
tyrant lord, Ati Chan, visited the tree and declared that here was a true Son
of Heaven. He made it a symbol of his own feudal tyranny.
But the tree had
not come from heaven, and its roots sank ever deeper into the underworld.
A hundred times
lightning licked and blasted it, but always it healed. Twice, fire assaulted
the forest in which it stood. The barren ring around it held, however, and the
flames roared angrily as they starved themselves out. What there was of
consciousness in the tree accumulated history and the portents of comets and
novas. Revolution, invasion, new orders of ancient travesties teemed all around
it, and of all the mighty warlords who ravaged the land, only Genghis Khan dared
contemplate the tree's destruction. Six times he swung his sword against its
trunk—until the blade shattered—and finding he could not conquer the mighty
teak, he urinated on it. "You are mine now!" he cried. But Khan died.
The tree lived on.
And on.
After the Sung
dynasty came the Yuan and then the Ming, with all its elaboration in stone,
ivory, bronze, jade, rock crystal . . . and wood.
Wood and the idea of wood took on a reverence of its own. The reverence spread
with travel, with commerce, even to the dark forests of southwest China where
teak and tung grew in abundance. When the last Ming was overthrown in 1644, and
the Manchus ruled eastern China, there arose in the forest of the teak a terrible
despot named Khi-tan Zor. His dominions were limited, but his fierceness in
ruling them was all the more cruel. His tortures were slow and exquisitely
subtle. His enemies did not so much die as linger in eternal dying. And it is
said that he ate his own male children at birth to forestall plots of
succession. But what he is known for, what marked him in the ages of man and
beast upon the earth, is that he carved his throne from the colossus in the
heart of the forbidden forest.
What’s more, it
came out of the living tree.
This may be
important ... if understanding is important. For whatever realm the roots of that
anomaly were vested in, whatever the concert of its living consciousness with
the world around it, the teak was in total contact with both when the chair was
torn out of its trunk. Whether it was the incredible strength of the
surrounding wood or its sheer girth, the tree remained standing until it dried
out and, in the middle of a moonless night some seven years later, came roaring
to the ground.
It was another
slow and exquisite murder for the Emperor Khi-tan Zor. But by the time it was
fulfilled, the chair had long been crafted, polished, and employed in his
palace. The original cover was silk embroidered with crescent teeth and a
scarlet serpentine tongue entwined among the bloodied shoals of a half-savaged
infant.
When the emperor
died there was no successor, and a bloody revolt ensued. The palace was looted
and burned, and the chair began its odyssey across the mountains from peasant
to trader to merchant. Battered and scarred, its cover worn to transparency in
spots, it was nevertheless a thing of obvious value. From Mandalay to Katmandu
it was traded and bought and sometimes taken with loss of life, until an
enterprising merchant fashioned a new silk cover for the damaged one and a new
legend more palatable than the old. The chair, it now seemed, was commissioned
for an Indian prince on the occasion of his seventh birthday and later became
his throne. The legend of Khi-tan Zor and the truth of the chair's origins
disappeared forever.
In 1856, the
year before the Sepoy Rebellion against the British, a senior official of the
British East India Company visited Calcutta. Chester Maynard Whitehall was a
proud man, unbending, and with the wealth to make all his whims dictums. At
home in England he had a wife and son. The son, Jacob Alexander, would be seven
next month—the same age as the Indian prince of the false legend. The senior
Whitehall saw the chair and learned the tale from a one-eyed Bihari who led him
from his vat of boiling bones, where fat was being removed, to the gloom of
some hellhole of contraband for the viewing. It was a magnificent piece of
furniture, and Whitehall liked the pedigree of a prince become king in its
embrace. There was no reason to doubt the tale; the chair had royalty in its
grain. It was a thing of authority, an emblem of succession. Whether mandated
by demonic forces and commissioned by an emperor who ate his male children or
sanctified by fictitious Indian potentates, the chair was permanence and power.
It invited occupation. Whitehall paid extravagantly and took it home to found
his own dynasty.
"Jacob
Alexander, you are my firstborn male and my heir," he said to his son when
the boy turned seven. "Happy birthday."
Jacob sat in the
chair and, though it was a bit lumpy, decided he liked it. "May I keep it
upstairs?" he asked.
"It will
stay in the drawing room. We will call it the patriarch chair. It is only the
promise that it will be yours which I give you today. When I die, you may keep
it wherever you wish."
Jacob wished his
father would die soon. He even thought about murdering him. He would sit in the
patriarch chair and formulate ways of accomplishing this. But it wasn't to be.
Two weeks after his seventh birthday, the boy disappeared.
The gardener,
who had a criminal record and had never gotten on with young Jacob, was
suspected from the start. But he fled as soon as he was accused, and the
allegations were never proven. Neither ransom demand nor body ever turned up,
and when his wife also died, Whitehall went to America, where he had a second
son by a second marriage. The chair, of course, went with him, and in due
course his last issue was initiated.
"Arthur
Clement, you are my only son and heir," Whitehall said on the occasion of
the seventh birthday.
Young Clement
grew up uneventfully and married in 1890, the year after Chester Maynard died
and the family fortune passed to him. Perpetuity was established in the will
such that the patriarch chair and the fortune went together, and the creation
of the next will had to echo the conditions of the first. It was almost biblical
in its chauvinism. There were four daughters and three sons from Clement's
marriage. The second male was Robert Chester. Little Bobby Bastard, the
neighbors called him.
He strangled a
kitten when he was eight and a year later set fire to a playmate's garage. The
playmate's father hauled him into court, whereupon little Bobby Bastard looked
up at the judge with elfin innocence and declared, "I love Jesus, and
Jesus says to do unto others as you would have them do unto you." The
judge looked down, saw a nine-year-old boy in velvet Fauntleroy clothes who
could not possibly have committed what the accusations said he had committed,
and dismissed the charges.
"Did you,
Bobby? Did you do it?" his mother pressed him for the half-dozenth time
after the trial.
"If you
loved me, you'd quit asking," he said, and his amber eyes took on the
shade of impenetrable teak.
Lovelessness is
the guilt of every disappointed mother, and Bobby understood this. He used it.
The role of victim suited him. He stole and lied and cheated, and the less
remorse he expressed, the more his mother felt sorry for him. I am bad, and my mother is to blame because
she didn't love me enough.
But when he was
thirteen he did a very bad thing indeed.
He pushed his
older brother down the basement stairs. The injury was severe but not
immediately fatal. Moreover, his mother saw it happen. He had wanted her to see
it. She was standing at the foot of the steps and he simply thrust forward, his
face appearing briefly over the shoulder of his big brother. Bobby wasn't
exactly smiling, but there was self-righteousness and triumph and challenge and
absolute cold clarity in that fleeting look. Here is your choice of sons to
love, Mother. Catch him. Save him. But it is I who am falling and whom you cannot
catch! Thrust.
His mother saw
it all, and though she was riveted upon her oldest son, the fleeting expression
at the top of the stairs went deep into her soul for storing. Her voice cried
out Bobby's name. It was that cry,
echoing through the house and the chambers of his mind, which Bobby took with
him to the study, turning it over and over for scrutiny of its elements: shock,
fear, appeal, remorse. He took it apart while the house resonated with the
frantic movements of others. Took it apart as he sat in the study.
In the patriarch
chair.
When the
aftermath subsided, they came looking for him, of course. Their footsteps broke
the silence of shock, up and down, back and forth. But he was gone by then. He
had gone without taking a blessed thing. His parents searched. The police
searched. Finally, even the neighborhood searched. A man who sold newspapers
thought he had seen him walking along the rail line through the town. But that
was where the trail ended. No trace beyond that. A runaway. His distraught mother
told the police she thought he might have been afraid he would be blamed for
the "accident." It was an accident, she maintained. Bobby had been
there when Kenneth tripped. So many times he had been blamed for things, he
must have been afraid. Blame. A runaway.
She never told
anyone the truth, and in her heart she knew that the rest of the neighborhood
was glad Bobby Bastard was gone.
Arthur Clement
grieved. One suffering brain damage, another fleeing, all on the same day. It
recalled to him the dim tragedy of his own youth and a brother who had been
kidnapped. As before, a portion of life suspended itself and the family did not
move on. Bobby was not dead; he was somewhere. They waited. Grew but waited.
Planned but waited. And when the plans and the growing could not be contingent
anymore, they let Bobby go as surely as if they had buried him.
Peter Wilson
Whitehall was the third son. He was not initiated into the chair until the age
of twenty-three, after Kenneth's degenerative death and the family will was
changed to reflect a new order of succession. After Arthur Clement died in
1923, Peter took over the declining family fortunes. Theirs was a ship-building
enterprise on the Great Lakes, but the days of lumber barons and the ships to
haul the trade were waning. When the opportunity came to invest in the budding
automotive industry, Peter sold the last of the family's holdings in Midland,
Michigan, and moved to Detroit. True to the family heritage, the patriarch
chair accompanied him. Marriage came late, but not too late for a daughter and
a son. By 1955, automotive investments had blossomed into a successful parts
supply industry and an impressive house in Franklin Village. In due course,
Peter initiated the chair's third generation—and fifth candidate—since Maynard
Whitehall's journey to India.
"William
Frank, you are my firstborn male and my heir," he said solemnly on the
boy's seventh birthday.
Young Frank had
already gained a sense of reverence for his ancestors. At this age, he knew
nothing of the two previous generations' tragedies, but the family's resolve to
survive its traumas intact reached into the past and future and this deeply
affected the boy. The patriarch chair seemed to sum everything up, just as
Maynard Whitehall had intended. Frank grew to manhood cherishing the heavy
chair, so stable and permanent, its deep rich wood so soothing to his own
little conflicts. It would be his someday. He would be the keeper of the
dynasty. And nothing would flag under his stewardship. He would marry and have
a son of his own—many sons and daughters—and present the chair at the proper
time, and the family would never again lack for numbers to carry on the
surname.
The second son
born to Peter was Gerald Lucien. This was when Frank was ten. As a baby, Lucien
cried little. As a child he was quiet, patient, clever. He smiled rarely.
Everyone remarked on his good behavior. His mother and his brother loved him
dearly. But Peter could not. He tried, but something in him always held back.
He told himself how lucky he was to have another son, a boy who remembered
virtually everything that was played in a card game, who could devise the
cleverest ways to coax a cat from hiding, who could sit down and reason out
where misplaced items were. The trouble was those rare smiles. It only took one
to shatter all the reasoned love Peter felt for him. Because when Lucien smiled
his face turned elfin, his eyes became as impenetrable as teak, and the corners
of his mouth and the set of his teeth said something silently malevolent. Peter
knew it was malevolent because he had lived with that smile and what went with
it before. And every time it ate across Lucien's face, he saw again his
long-vanished brother—Bobby Bastard.
If Lucien was
aware of the uneasiness his father felt, he did not show it. It seemed likely
he knew—as Bobby Bastard had instinctively known the emotional sub currents of
others—but, of course, Lucien had nothing to compare it with. There had always
been a gulf between him and his father. He never questioned the order of
things. That his brother had been initiated into the patriarch chair before he
himself was born and would inherit the family business and most of its assets
was the way of it. Everything was happy in Franklin Village. They lived in a
magnificent house, went to a picturesque church, attended modern schools, took
lengthy vacations, and acquired the material goods they wished for. Lucien went
on being quiet and patient and clever. And when his father died, he smiled a
sad smile. And when he had to move out of the only home he had ever known,
which was now his married brother's, he smiled a philosophical smile. He would
be comfortable living the quiet life of an artist on his share of the
inheritance.
"You're
welcome to work for the company," Frank told him. "I need a
vice-president I can trust."
"Thank you,
brother," Lucien said, "but not just yet." And Bobby Bastard
smiled.
So the dynasty
was established through its legitimate heirs and the sanction of the patriarch
chair.
Maynard begat Clement.
Clement begat Peter.
Peter begat Frank.
Frank begat . . .
Look for BORN BURNING wherever
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