Bloody Mary Norman Partridge

TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 13, October 2013 FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, October 2013 by John Joseph Adams FICTION 10/31: Bloody Mary by Norman Partridge All You Can Do is Breathe by Kaaron Warren The Crowgirl by Megan Arkenberg The Score by Alaya Dawn Johnson NONFICTION The H Word: Reveling in the Literary by F. Brett Cox Artist Gallery: Peter Mohrbacher Artist Spotlight: Peter Mohrbacher by Julia Sevin Interview: Margo Lanagan by Lisa Morton AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Norman Partridge Kaaron Warren Megan Arkenberg Alaya Dawn Johnson MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Subscriptions & Ebooks © 2013 Nightmare Magazine Cover Art by Peter Mohrbacher www.nightmare-magazine.com Editorial, October 2013 John Joseph Adams Welcome to issue thirteen of Nightmare! Wow, has it really been a whole year already? It’s true! We launched back in October 2012, so this month’s issue is our anniversary issue—happy birthday to us! You really don’t need to get us anything, but if you insist, now would be a wonderful time to subscribe; or, if you already do, tell a friend! Thanks to all of our wonderful writers and our ever- vigilant and hardworking staff that have helped us get to this point. And, of course, thanks too to all of you—the readers who have supported us since our inception; we’re glad to see you sticking with us, and to see your ranks growing by leaps and bounds. Here’s to the next twelve months and beyond! * * * * In other news, over in the Nightmare ebookstore (nightmare-magazine.com/store), I just wanted to point out that we currently have the following ebook bundles available: Nightmare (Issues 1-6)—$14.99 Nightmare (Issues 7-12)—$14.99 Nightmare (Year One: Issues 1-12)—$24.99 Buying a Bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. Buying either of the half-year Bundles saves you $3 (so you’re basically getting one issue for free), or if you spring for the Year One Bundle, you’ll save $11 off the cover price. So if you need to catch up on Nightmare, that’s a great way to do so. Of course, if you don’t want to buy a Bundle, you can also just purchase an individual ebook issue, or if you’d like to subscribe directly from us, you can do that too. All purchases from the Nightmare store are provided in both epub and mobi format. Visit nightmare- magazine.com/subscribe to learn more about all of our subscription options. * * * * With our announcements out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap in October: We have original fiction from Megan Arkenberg (“The Crowgirl”) and Norman Partridge (“10/31: Bloody Mary”), along with reprints by Kaaron Warren (“All You Can Do is Breathe”) and Alaya Dawn Johnson (“The Score”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview with award-winning author Margo Lanagan. That’s about all I have for you this month, but before I step out of your way and let you get to the fiction, here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Nightmare: Website www.nightmare-magazine.com Newsletter www.nightmare-magazine.com/newsletter RSS Feed www.nightmare-magazine.com/rss-2 Podcast Feed www.nightmare-magazine.com/itunes-rss Twitter www.twitter.com/nightmaremag Facebook www.facebook.com/NightmareMagazine Subscribe www.nightmare-magazine.com/subscribe Thanks for reading! John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Nightmare (and its sister magazine, Lightspeed), is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Oz Reimagined, Epic: Legends of Fantasy, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. He is a six-time finalist for the Hugo Award and a five-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. He is also the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams. 10/31: Bloody Mary Norman Partridge The boy never goes out in daylight. Oh, he could, and some do . but he doesn’t. Maybe that’s why he is still alive. He holes up in crawlspaces during the day. There are five houses he uses in rotation, all abandoned, none occupied by the dead or the living. As the world spins and sunlight and shadows travel the rooftops of his little town, he listens for a floorboard creak that doesn’t belong, hoping he won’t be discovered by the familiar boogeymen that have made this world their own since the dawning of 10/31—werewolves and witches, mummies and zombies, and other nameless things the boy would rather never see. The boy isn’t very large. The way things are these days, he figures that’s a plus. He is less of a target at night, and for this reason he has come to trust the darkness. Strange to trust darkness in a world overrun with nightmares . but that’s the way it is. It is not an exciting life. At night, the boy forages. He clings to the black spaces, shunning lightning flash and Jack o’ Lantern glow. During the day, he matches his silence with stillness. Occasionally, he dozes. Mostly, he spends his time with a flashlight and books, or sometimes a magazine. He likes the old ones with gory covers and pictorial articles about monsters, because they teach him secrets about the things he wants to avoid. On cold days he waits among wall studs and insulation, and on hot days he tucks himself next to cool concrete foundation. He lurks between sour earth and floorboards that rarely creak with tread inhuman or human, and he moves little or not at all, and he reads and learns, and he waits for night. He waits until the pumpkins start to scream. * * * * The pumpkins sit on porches. They sit there night and day. Some of them for years now. The ones that survived grew and thrived in ways that most pumpkins don’t, while the others rotted long ago. After the first calendar page was left unturned in the wake of 10/31, those ordinary pumpkins began the fast slide from orange to black. Within days their mouths were choked with cobwebs of mold. Within weeks their eyes collapsed into noses and their grins sagged into rotten frowns, as if with some strange withering disease. The ones that didn’t sluice away in the first rains petrified long ago. Those that remain are dry mummified memories of a world that no longer exists, as much a part of ancient history as candy, and costumes, and the idea of trick or treat itself. But those other pumpkins, the ones that thrived— They also sit on porches, but like sentinels. Survivors call them Jacks. They gleam, as if freshly waxed at the pumpkin patch. Razor teeth bear the dewy shine of pumpkin-sap, giving the illusion that a carving knife had touched them only seconds before. And they scream just as twilight disappears, a signal to the new masters of this bleak world as surely as a cockcrow once marked time for those who trod an older and brighter one. But the Jacks are quiet in the daylight, unless something gives them cause not to be. Something like a cat. The Jacks like cats. And this particular Jack, waiting unnoticed on a porch, is no different. But this particular cat is wary. It knows things have changed. This suburban block, its entire world. The family that cared for it is gone, and the place that was once its home is now a hovel for a brutish monster that (long ago) bashed out doors along with the frames which held them in order to accommodate its bulk. Just down the block, that creature sleeps (in daylight) on a pile of mattresses heaped on the sagging living room floor. Were the cat to scent those mattresses, it could still identify a faint trace of its owners. But then again, it would also scent them on a pile of gnawed bones long forgotten in one corner of the kitchen. But the cat has survived, though there is much that has disappeared from its world and its memory. It has forgotten its own name, and other once-familiar behavioral triggers are buried so deeply they might as well be forgotten—the vacuum snap of a cat-food can opening, the heady scent of a catnip mouse, the rhythmic music of its own purr. But some memories and some triggers—the enduring kind—have kept the cat alive, and one of those is still familiar, even in this new world. That is the scent of a rat. A hard fist of hunger swells in the cat’s belly as it creeps toward a fat knothole in the sagging porch. Its green eyes spy rat droppings along the railing that borders the hole, along with threads of gray-black hair around the splintered edges of the hole itself. Close enough now, and still crouching, the cat waits for a meal to appear. It will wait a long time if it has to, but the watcher behind it will not wait.

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