Nightmare Magazine Issue 06

Nightmare Magazine Issue 6, March 2013

Table of Contents

Editorial, February 2013 The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins—Molly Tanzer The Sign in the Moonlight—David Tallerman Jetsam—Livia Llewellyn No Breather in the World But Thee—Jeff VanderMeer The H Word: “The F Bomb”—R.J. Sevin Artist Gallery: Daniel Karlsson Artist Spotlight: Daniel Karlsson Interview: Jonathan Maberry Author Spotlight: Molly Tanzer Author Spotlight: David Tallerman Author Spotlight: Livia Llewellyn Author Spotlight: Jeff VanderMeer Coming Attractions

Welcome to issue six of Nightmare! This month, we have original fiction from David Tallerman (“The Sign in the Moonlight”) and Jeff VanderMeer (“No Breather in the World But Thee”), along with reprints by Molly Tanzer (“The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins”) and Livia Llewellyn (“Jetsam”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with all of our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview with bestselling author Jonathan Maberry. 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:

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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 four-time finalist for the Hugo Award and 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. The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins Molly Tanzer

Concerning the life and death of St. John Fitzroy, Lord Calipash—the suffering of the Lady Calipash—the unsavory endeavors of Lord Calipash’s cousin Mr. Villein—as well as an account of the curious circumstances surrounding the birth of the future Lord Calipash and his twin sister

In the county of Devonshire, in the parish of Ivybridge, stood the ancestral home of the Lords Calipash. Calipash Manor was large, built sturdily of the local limestone, and had stood for many years without fire or other catastrophe marring its expanse. No one could impugn the size and antiquity of the house, yet often one or another of those among Lord Calipash’s acquaintance might be heard to comment that the Manor had a rather rambling, hodgepodge look to it, and this could not be easily refuted without the peril of speaking a falsehood. The reason for this was that the Lords Calipash had always been the very essence of English patriotism, and rather than ever tearing down any part of the house and building anew, each Lord Calipash had chosen to make additions and improvements to older structures. Thus, though the prospect was somewhat sprawling, it served as a pleasant enough reminder of the various styles of Devonian architecture, and became something of a local attraction. St. John Fitzroy, Lord Calipash, was a handsome man, tall, fair-haired, and blue-eyed. He had been bred up as any gentleman of rank and fortune might be, and therefore the manner of his death was more singular than any aspect of his life. Now, given that this is, indeed, an Infernal History, the sad circumstances surrounding this good man’s unexpected and early demise demand attention by the author, and they are inextricably linked with the Lord Calipash’s cousin, a young scholar called Mr. Villein, who will figure more prominently in this narrative than his nobler relation. Mr. Villein came to stay at Calipash Manor during the Seven Years’ War, in order to prevent his being conscripted into the French army. Though indifference had previously characterized the relationship between Lord Calipash and Mr. Villein (Mr. Villein belonging to a significantly lower branch of the family tree), when Mr. Villein wrote to Lord Calipash to beg sanctuary, the good Lord would not deny his own flesh and blood. This was not to say, however, that Lord Calipash was above subtly encouraging his own flesh and blood to make his stay a short one, and to that end, he gave Mr. Villein the tower bedroom that had been built by one of the more eccentric Lords some generations prior to our tale, who so enjoyed pretending to be the Lady Jane Grey that he had the edifice constructed so his wife could dress up as member of the Privy Council and keep him locked up there for as long as nine days at a stretch. But that was not the reason Lord Calipash bade his cousin reside there—the tower was a drafty place, and given to damp, and thus seemed certain of securing Mr. Villein’s speedy departure. As it turns out, however, the two men were so unlike one another, that what Lord Calipash thought was an insulting situation, Mr. Villein found entirely salubrious, and so, happily, out of a case of simple misunderstanding grew an affection, founded on deepest admiration for Mr. Villein’s part, and for Lord Calipash’s, enjoyment of toadying. All the long years of the international conflict Mr. Villein remained at Calipash Manor, and with the passing of each and every day he came more into the confidence of Lord Calipash, until it was not an uncommon occurrence to hear members of Lord Calipash’s circle using words like inseparable to describe their relationship. Then, only six months before the signing of the Treaty of Paris, the possibility of continued fellowship between Lord Calipash and Mr. Villein was quite suddenly extinguished. A Mr. Fellingworth moved into the neighborhood with his family, among them his daughter of fifteen years, Miss Alys Fellingworth. Dark of hair and eye but pale of cheek, her beauty did not go long unnoticed by the local swains. She had many suitors and many offers, but from among a nosegay of sparks she chose as her favorite blossom the Lord Calipash. Mr. Villein had also been among Miss Fellingworth’s admirers, and her decision wounded him—not so much that he refused to come to the wedding (he was very fond of cake), but certainly enough that all the love Mr. Villein had felt for Lord Calipash was instantly converted, as if by alchemy, to pure hatred. In his dolor, Mr. Villein managed to convince himself that Miss Fellingworth’s father had pressured her to accept Lord Calipash’s offer for the sake of his rank and income, against her true inclinations; that had she been allowed to pick her heart’s choice, she certainly would have accepted Mr. Villein’s suit rather than his cousin’s. Such notions occupied Mr. Villein’s thoughts whenever he saw the happy couple together, and every day his mind became more and more inhospitable to any pleasure he might have otherwise felt on account of his friend’s newfound felicity. A reader of this history might well wonder why Mr. Villein did not quit Calipash Manor, given that his situation, previously so agreeable, he now found intolerable. Mr. Villein was, however, loath to leave England. He had received a letter from his sister informing him that during his absence, his modest home had been commandeered by the army, and thus his furniture was in want of replacing, his lands trampled without hope of harvest, his stores pilfered, and, perhaps worst of all, his wretched sister was with child by an Austrian soldier who had, it seemed, lied about his interest in playing the rôle of father beyond the few minutes required to grant him that status. It seemed prudent to Mr. Villein to keep apart from such appalling circumstances for as long as possible. Then one evening, from the window of his tower bedroom, Mr. Villein saw Lord Calipash partaking of certain marital pleasures with the new Lady Calipash against a tree in one of the gardens. Nauseated, Mr. Villein called for his servant and announced his determination to secretly leave Calipash Manor once and for all early the following morning. While the servant packed his bags and trunks, Mr. Villein penned a letter explaining his hasty departure to Lord Calipash, and left it, along with a token of remembrance, in Lord Calipash’s study. Quite early the next morning, just as he was securing his cravat, Mr. Villein was treated to the unexpected but tantalizing sight of Lady Calipash in deshabille. She was beside herself with grief, but eventually Mr. Villein, entirely sympathetic and eager to understand the source of her woe, coaxed the story from her fevered mind: “I woke early, quite cold,” gibbered Lady Calipash. “Lord Calipash had never come to bed, though he promised me when I went up that he should follow me after settling a few accounts. When I discovered him absent I rose and sought him in his study only to find him —dead. Oh! It was too terrible! His eyes were open, wide and round and staring. At first I thought it looked very much like he had been badly frightened, but then I thought he had almost a look of . . . of ecstasy about him. I believe—” Here the Lady Calipash faltered, and it took some minutes for Mr. Villein to get the rest of the story from her, for her agitated state required his fetching smelling salts from out of his valise. Eventually, she calmed enough to relate the following: “I believe he might have done himself the injury that took him from me,” she sobbed. “His wrists were slit, and next to him lay his letter-opener. He . . . he had used his own blood to scrawl a message on the skirtingboards . . . oh Mr. Villein!” “What did the message say?” asked Mr. Villein. “It said, he is calling, he is calling, I hear him,” she said, and then she hesitated. “What is it, Lady Calipash?” asked Mr. Villein. “I cannot see its importance, but he had this in his other hand,” said she, and handed to Mr. Villein a small object wrapped in a handkerchief. He took it from her, and saw that it was an odd bit of ivory, wrought to look like a lad’s head crowned with laurel. Mr. Villein put it in his pocket and smiled at the Lady Calipash. “Likely it has nothing to do with your husband’s tragic end,” he said gently. “I purchased this whilst in Greece, and the late Lord Calipash had often admired it. I gave it to him as a parting gift, for I had meant to withdraw from Calipash Manor this very morning.” “Oh, but you mustn’t,” begged Lady Calipash. “Not now, not after . . . Lord Calipash would wish you to be here. You mustn’t go just now, please! For my sake . . .” Mr. Villein would have been happy to remain on those terms, had the Lady Calipash finished speaking, but alas, there was one piece of information she had yet to relate. “. . . and for our child’s sake, as well,” she concluded. While the Lord Calipash’s final message was being scrubbed from the skirtingboards, and his death was being declared an accident by the constable in order that the departed Lord might be buried in the churchyard, Mr. Villein violently interrogated Lady Calipash’s serving- maid. The story was true—the Lady was indeed expecting —and this intelligence displeased Mr. Villein so immensely that even as he made himself pleasant and helpful with the hope that he might eventually win the Lady Calipash’s affections, he sought to find a method of ridding her of her unborn child. To Mr. Villein’s mind, Lady Calipash could not but fall in love with her loyal confidant—believing as he did that she had always secretly admired him—but Mr. Villein knew that should she bear the late Lord Calipash’s son, the estate would one day be entirely lost to him. Thus he dosed the Lady with recipes born of his own researches, for while Mr. Villein’s current profession was that of scholar, in his youth he had pursued lines of study related to all manner of black magics and sorceries. For many years he had put aside his wicked thaumaturgy, being too happy in the company of Lord Calipash to travel those paths that demand solitude and gloom and suffering, but, newly motivated, he returned to his former interests with a desperate passion. Like the Wife of Bath, Mr. Villein knew all manner of remedies for love’s mischances, and he put wicked spells on the decoctions and tisanes that he prepared to help his cause. Yet despite Mr. Villein’s skill with infusion and incantation, Lady Calipash grew heavy with child; indeed, she had such a healthy maternal glow about her that the doctor exclaimed that for one so young to be brought to childbed, she was certain of a healthy accouchement. Mr. Villein, as canny an adept at lying as other arts, appeared to be thrilled by his Lady’s prospects, and was every day by her side. Though privately discouraged by her salutary condition, he was cheered by all manner of odd portents that he observed as her lying- in drew ever closer. First, a murder of large, evil-looking ravens took up residence upon the roof of Calipash Manor, cackling and cawing day and night, and then the ivy growing on Calipash Manor’s aged walls turned from green to scarlet, a circumstance no naturalist in the area could satisfactorily explain. Though the Lady Calipash’s delivery was expected in midwinter, a she-goat was found to be unexpectedly in the same delicate condition as her mistress, and gave birth to a two-headed kid that was promptly beaten to death and buried far from the Manor. Not long after that unhappy parturition, which had disturbed the residents of Calipash Manor so greatly that the news was kept from Lady Calipash for fear of doing her or her unborn child a mischief, the Lady began to feel the pangs of her own travail. At the very stroke of midnight, on the night of the dark of the moon, during a lighting storm that was as out of season as the she-goat’s unusual kid, the Lady Calipash was happy to give birth to a healthy baby boy, the future Lord Calipash, and as surprised as the midwife when a second child followed, an equally plump and squalling girl. They were so alike that Lady Calipash named them Basil and Rosemary, and then promptly gave them over to the wet-nurse to be washed and fed. The wet-nurse was a stout woman from the village, good-natured and well-intentioned, but a sounder sleeper than was wanted in that house. Though an infant’s wail would rouse her in an instant, footfalls masked by thunder were too subtle for her country-bred ear, and thus she did not observe the solitary figure that stole silently into the nursery in the wee hours of that morning. For only a few moments did the individual linger, knowing well how restive infants can be in their first hours of life. By the eldritch glow of a lightning strike, Mr. Villein uncorked a phial containing the blood of the two-headed kid now buried, and he smeared upon both of those rosy foreheads an unholy mark, which, before the next burst of thunder, sank without a trace into their soft and delicate skin.

II.

A brief account of the infancy, childhood, education, and adolescence of Basil Vincent, the future Lord Calipash, and his sister Rosemary—as well as a discussion of the effect that reputation has on the prospect of obtaining satisfactory friends and lovers

While the author cannot offer an opinion as to whether any person deserves to suffer during his or her lifetime, the author will say with utter certainty that Lady Calipash endured more on account of her Twins than any good woman should expect when she finds herself in the happy condition of motherhood. Their easy birth and her quick recovery were the end of Lady Calipash’s maternal bliss, for not long after she could sit up and cradle her infant son in her arms, she was informed that a new wet-nurse must be hired, as the old had quit the morning after the birth. Lady Calipash was never told of the reason for the nurse’s hasty departure, only that for a few days her newborns had been nourished with goat’s milk, there being no suitable women in the neighborhood to feed the hungry young lord and his equally rapacious sister. The truth of the matter was that little Rosemary had bitten off the wet-nurse’s nipple not an hour after witnessing her first sunrise. When the poor woman ran out of the nursery, clutching her bloody breast and screaming, the rest of the servants did not much credit her account of the injury; when it was discovered that the newborn was possessed of a set of thin, needle-sharp teeth behind her innocent mouth, they would have drowned the girl in the well if not for Mr. Villein, who scolded them for peasant superstition and told them to feed the babes on the milk of the nanny goat who had borne the two-headed kid until such a time when a new wet-nurse could be hired. That the wet-nurse’s nipple was never found became a source of ominous legend in the household, theories swapped from servant to servant, until Mr. Villein heard two chambermaids chattering and beat them both dreadfully in order that they might serve as an example of the consequences of idle gossip. This incident was only the first of its kind, but alas, the chronicles of the sufferings of those living in or employed at Calipash Manor after the birth of the Infernal Twins (as they were called by servant, tenant farmer, villager and gentleperson alike, well out of the hearing of either Lady Calipash or Mr. Villein, of course) could comprise their own lengthy volume, and thus must be abridged for the author’s current purposes. Sufficient must be the following collection of vignettes: From the first morning, Basil’s cries sounded distinctly syllabic, and when the vicar came to baptize the Twins, he recognized the future Lord Calipash’s wailing as an ancient language known only to the most disreputable sort of cultist. On the first dark of the moon after their birth, it was discovered that Rosemary had sprouted pale greenish webbing between her toes and fingers, as well as a set of pulsing gills just below her shell-pink earlobes. The next morning the odd amphibious attributes were gone, but to the distress of all, their appearance seemed inexorably linked to the lunar cycle, for they appeared every month thereafter. Before either could speak a word, whenever a person stumbled or belched in their presence, one would laugh like a hyena, then the other, and then they would be both fall silent, staring at the individual until he or she fled the room. One day after Basil began to teethe, Rosemary was discovered to be missing. No one could find her for several hours, but eventually she reappeared in Basil’s crib apparently of her own volition. She was asleep and curled against her brother, who was contentedly gnawing on a bone that had been neatly and inexplicably removed from the lamb roast that was to have been Lady Calipash and Mr. Villein’s supper that night. Yet such accounts are nothing to the constant uproar that ensued when at last Basil and Rosemary began to walk and speak. These accomplishments, usually met with celebration in most houses, were heralded by the staff formally petitioning for the Twins to be confined to certain areas of the house, but Mr. Villein, who had taken as much control of the business of Calipash Manor as he could, insisted that they be given as much freedom as they desired. This caused all manner of problems for the servants, but their complaints were met with cruel indifference by their new, if unofficial, master. It seemed to all that Mr. Villein actually delighted in making life difficult at Calipash Manor, and it may be safely assumed that part of his wicked tyranny stemmed from the unwillingness of Lady Calipash to put aside her mourning, and her being too constantly occupied with the unusual worries yielded by her motherhood to consider entering once again into a state of matrimony, despite his constant hints. For the Twins, their newfound mobility was a source of constant joy. They were intelligent, inventive children, strong and active, and they managed to discover all manner of secret passageways and caches of treasure the Lady Calipash never knew of and Mr. Villein had not imagined existing, even in his wildest fancies of sustaining this period of living as a gentleman. The siblings were often found in all manner of places at odd times—after their being put to bed, it was not unusual to discover one or both in the library come midnight, claiming to be “looking at the pictures” in books that were only printed text; at cock-crow one might encounter them in the attic, drawing betentacled things on the floorboards with bits of charcoal or less pleasant substances. Though they always secured the windows and triple-locked the nursery door come the dark of the moon, there was never a month that passed without Rosemary escaping to do what she would in the lakes and ponds that were part of the Calipash estate, the only indication of her black frolics bits of fish-bones stuck between her teeth and pond-weed braided through her midnight tresses. Still, it was often easy to forget the Twins’ wickedness between incidents, for they appeared frequently to be mere children at play. They would bring their mother natural oddities from the gardens, like a pretty stone or a perfect pine cone, and beg to be allowed to help feed the hunting hounds in the old Lord Calipash’s now-neglected kennels. All the same, even when they were sweet, it saddened Lady Calipash that Basil was from the first a dark and sniveling creature, and pretty Rosemary more likely to bite with her sharp teeth than return an affectionate kiss. Even on good days they had to be prevented from entering the greenhouse or the kitchen—their presence withered vegetation, and should one of them reach a hand into a cookie jar or steal a nibble of carrot or potato from the night’s dinner, the remaining food would be found fouled with mold or ash upon their withdrawing. Given the universal truth that servants will gossip, when stories like these began to circulate throughout the neighborhood, the once-steady stream of visitors who had used to come to tour Calipash Manor decreased to a trickle, and no tutor could be hired at any salary. Lady Calipash thanked God that Mr. Villein was there to conduct her children’s education, but others were not so sure this was such a boon. Surely, had Lady Calipash realized that Mr. Villein viewed the Lady’s request as an opportunity to teach the Twins not only Latin and Greek and English and Geography and Maths, but also his sorcerous arts, she might have heeded the voices of dissent, instead of dismissing their concerns as utter nonsense. Though often cursed for their vileness, Basil and Rosemary grew up quite happily in the company of Mr. Villein, their mother, and the servants, until they reached that age when children often begin to want for society. The spring after they celebrated their eighth birthday they pleaded with their mother to be allowed to attend the May Day celebration in town. Against her better judgment, Lady Calipash begged the favor of her father (who was hosting the event); against his better judgment, Mr. Fellingworth, who suffered perpetual and extraordinary dyspepsia as a result of worrying about his decidedly odd grandchildren, said the Infernal Twins might come—if, and only if they promised to behave themselves. After the incident the previous month, at the birthday party of a young country gentleman, where the Twins were accused to no resolution of somehow having put dead frogs under the icing of the celebrant’s towering cake, all were exceedingly cautious of allowing them to attend. This caution was, regrettably, more deserved than the invitation. Rosemary arrived at the event in a costume of her own making, that of the nymph Flora; when Mr. Villein was interrogated as to his reasoning for such grotesque and ill-advised indulgence of childish fancy, he replied that she had earlier proved her understanding that May Day had once been the Roman festival of Floralia, and it seemed a just reward for her attentiveness in the schoolroom. This bit of pagan heresy might have been overlooked by the other families had not Mr. Villein later used the exact same justification for Basil’s behavior when the boy appeared at the celebration later-on, clad only in a bit of blue cloth wrapped about his slender body, and then staged a reenactment for the children of Favonius’ rape of Flora, Rosemary playing her part with unbridled enthusiasm. Mr. Villein could not account for the resentment of the other parents, nor the ban placed on the Twins’ presence at any future public observances, for, as he told Lady Calipash, the pantomime was accurate, and thus a rare educational moment during a day given over to otherwise pointless frivolity. Unfortunately for the Twins, the result of that display was total social isolation—quite the opposite of their intention. From that day forward they saw no other children except for those of the staff, and the sense of rank instilled in the future Lord Calipash and his sister from an early age forbade them from playing with those humble urchins. Instead, they began to amuse themselves by trying out a few of the easier invocations taught to them by Mr. Villein, and in this manner summoned two fiends, one an amorphous spirit who would follow them about if it wasn’t too windy a day, the other an eel with a donkey’s head who lived, much to the gardener’s distress, in the pond at the center of the rose garden. Rosemary also successfully reanimated an incredibly nasty, incredibly ancient goose when it died of choking on a strawberry, and the fell creature went about its former business of hissing at everyone and shitting everywhere until the stable boy hacked off its head with a the edge of a shovel, and buried the remains at opposite ends of the estate. Unfortunately, these childish amusements could not long entertain the Twins once they reached an age when they should, by all accounts, have been interfering with common girls (in Lord Calipash’s case) or being courted by the local boys (in Rosemary’s). For his part, Basil could not be bothered with the fairer sex, so absorbed was he in mastering languages more recherché than his indwelling R’lyehian or native English, or even the Latin, Hebrew, and Assyrian he had mastered before his tenth birthday (Greek he never took to—that was Rosemary’s province, and the only foreign tongue she ever mastered). Truth be told, even had Basil been interested in women, his slouching posture, slight physique, and petulant mouth would have likely ensured a series of speedy rejections. Contrariwise, Rosemary was a remarkably appealing creature, but there was something so frightening about her sharp-toothed smile and wicked gaze that no boy in the county could imagine comparing her lips to cherubs’ or her eyes to the night sky, and thus she, too, wanted for a lover. Nature will, however, induce the most enlightened of us to act according to our animal inclinations, and to that end, one night, just before their fifteenth birthday, Rosemary slipped into her brother’s chambers after everyone else had gone to bed. She found Basil studying by himself. He did not look up at her to greet her, merely said fhtagn-e and ignored her. He had taught her a bit of his blood-tongue, and their understanding of one another was so profound that she did not mind heeding the imperative, and knelt patiently at his feet for him to come to the end of his work. Before the candle had burned too low, he looked down at her with a fond frown. “What?” he asked. “Brother,” said she, with a serious expression, “I have no wish to die an old maid.” “What have I to do with that?” said he, wiping his eternally-drippy nose on his sleeve. “No one will do it to me if you won’t.” Basil considered this, realizing she spoke, not of matrimony, but of the act of love. “Why should you want to?” asked he, at last. “From everything I’ve read, intercourse yields nothing but trouble for those who engage in libidinous sport.” Rosemary laughed. “Would you like to come out with me, two nights hence?” “On our birthday?” “It’s the dark of the moon,” said she. Basil straightened up and looked at her keenly. He nodded once, briskly, and that was enough for her. As she left him, she kissed his smooth cheek, and at her touch, he blushed for the first time in his life. Before progressing to the following scene of depravity that the author finds it her sad duty to relate, let several things be said about this History. First, this is as true and accurate account of the Infernal Twins of Ivybridge as anyone has yet attempted. Second, it is the duty of all historians to recount events with as much veracity as possible, never eliding over unpleasantness for propriety’s sake. Had Suetonius shied away from his subject, we might never have known the true degeneracy of Caligula, and no one could argue that Suetonius’ dedication to his work has allowed mankind to learn from the mistakes made by the Twelve Caesars. Thus the author moves on to her third point, that her own humble chronicle of the Ivybridge Twins is intended to be morally instructive rather than titillating. With this understanding, we must, unfortunately, press on. The future Lord Calipash had never once attended his sister on her monthly jaunts, and so it must be said that, to his credit, it was curiosity rather than lust that comprised the bulk of his motivation that night. He dressed himself warmly, tiptoed to her door, and knocked very softly, only to find his sister standing beside him in a thin silk sheath, though her door had not yet been unlocked. He looked her up and down—there was snow on the ground outside, what was she about, dressing in such a nymphean manner?—but when she saw his alarm, given his own winter ensemble, she merely smiled. Basil was in that moment struck by how appealing were his sister’s kitten-teeth, how her ebon tresses looked as soft as raven-down in the guttering candle-light. He swallowed nervously. Holding a single slender finger to her lips, with gestures Rosemary bid him follow her, and they made their way down the hallway without a light. She knew the way, and her moist palm gripped his dry one as they slipped downstairs, out the servant’s door, and into the cold, midwinter night. Rosemary led her brother to one of the gardens—the pleasure-garden, full of little private grottoes—and there, against a tree already familiar with love’s pleasures, she kissed him on the mouth. It was a clumsy kiss. The Twins had been well-tutored by the Greeks and Romans in the theory, but not the practice of love, and theory can take one only so far. To their observer—for indeed they were observed—it seemed that both possessed an overabundance of carnal knowledge, and thus it was a longer encounter than most young people’s inaugural attempts at amatory relations. Rosemary was eager and Basil shy, though when he kissed her neck and encountered her delicate sea-green gill pulsating against her ivory skin, gasping for something more substantial than air, he felt himself completely inflamed, and pressed himself into the webbed hand that fumbled with his breeches buttons in the gloaming. The Twins thought themselves invisible; that the location which they chose to celebrate their induction into Hymen’s temple was completely obscure, and thus they were too completely occupied with their personal concerns to notice something very interesting—that Calipash Manor was not completely dark, even at that early hour of the morning. A light shone dimly from the tower bedroom, where a lone figure, wracked with anger and jealousy and hatred, watched the Twins from the same window where he had observed two other individuals fornicate, perhaps somewhat less wantonly, almost sixteen years earlier.

III.

Containing more of the terrible wickedness of Mr. Villein—a record of the circumstances surrounding the unhappy separation of the Ivybridge Twins—how Rosemary became Mrs. Villein—concluding with the arrival of a curious visitor to Calipash Manor and the results of his unexpected intrusion

Mr. Villein’s pursuit of the Lady Calipash had lasted for as many years as Rosemary remained a child, but when the blood in her girl’s veins began to quicken and wrought those womanly changes upon her youthful body so pleasing to the male eye, Mr. Villein found his lascivious dreams to be newly occupied with daughter rather than mother. Since the time, earlier in the year, when Rosemary had finally been allowed to dress her hair and wear long skirts, Mr. Villein started paying her the sort of little compliments that he assumed a young lady might find pleasing. Little did he imagine that Rosemary thought him elderly, something less than handsome, a dreary conversationalist, and one whose manners were not those of a true gentleman; thus, when he watched the virginal object of his affection sullied enthusiastically by her ithyphallic brother, the indecent tableau came as substantial shock to Mr. Villein’s mind. The following day found Mr. Villein in a state of unwellness, plagued by a fever and chills, but he appeared again the morning after that. The Infernal Twins enquired kindly of his health, and Mr. Villein gave them a warm smile and assured them as to his feeling much better. He was, indeed, so very hale that he should like to give them their birthday presents (a day or so late, but no matter) if they might be compelled to attend him after breakfast? The Twins agreed eagerly—both loved presents—and midmorning found the threesome in Mr. Villein’s private study, formerly that of St. John Fitzroy, Lord Calipash. “Children,” said he, “I bequeath unto you two priceless antiques, but unlike most of the gifts I have given you over the years, what is for one is not to be used by the other. Rosemary, to you I give these—a set of tortoiseshell combs carved into the likeness of Boubastos. To Basil, this bit of ivory. Careful with it, my dearest boy. It was the instrument of your father’s undoing.” Basil, surprised, took the handkerchief-swaddled object, and saw it was the carven head of a young man, crowned with a wreath of laurel-leaves. As Rosemary cooed over her gift and vowed to wear the combs in her hair every day thereafter, Basil looked up at his tutor inquisitively. “How—what?” he asked, too surprised to speak more intelligently. “The idol’s head was given to me by a youth of remarkable beauty whilst I was abroad in Greece,” said Mr. Villein. “I have never touched it. The young man said that one day I should encounter the one for whom it was truly intended, the new earthly manifestation of the ancient god which it represents, and that I must give it to him and him alone. Given your abilities, Basil, I believe you are that manifestation. I made the mistake of showing it to your father, and he coveted it from the moment he saw it—but when he touched the effigy, I believe the god drove him mad to punish him. I have never told you this, but your father took his own life, likely for the heinous crime of—of besmirching that which was always intended for other, wiser hands.” Basil clutched the fetish and nodded his deep thanks, too moved by Mr. Villein’s words to notice the agitated tone in which the last sentiment was expressed. That he was the embodiment of a deity came as little surprise to Basil—from an early age, he had sensed he was destined for greatness—but he found it curious that Mr. Villein should have failed to tell him this until now. The ivory figurine occupied his thoughts all during the day, and late that same night, after a few hours spent in his sister’s chambers, during which time they successfully collaborated on a matter of urgent business, Basil unwrapped the icon and touched it with his fingertips. To his great frustration, nothing at all happened, not even after he held it in his palm for a full quarter of an hour. Bitterly disappointed, Basil went unhappily to bed, only to experience strange dreams during the night. He saw a city of grand marble edifices, fathoms below the surface of the sea and immemorially ancient, and he saw that it was peopled by a shining dolphin-headed race, whose only profession seemed to be conducting the hierophantic rites of a radiant god. He walked unseen among those people, and touched with his hands the columns of the temple which housed the god, carved richly with scenes of worship. A voice called to him over and over in the language he had known since his birth, and he walked into the interior of the fane to see the god for himself, only to realize the face was already known to him, for it was the exact likeness of the ivory idol! Then the eyes of the god, though wrought of a glowing stone, seemed to turn in their sockets and meet his gaze, and with that look Basil understood many things beyond human comprehension that both terrified and delighted him. The future Lord Calipash awoke the next morning bleary-eyed and stupid, to the alarm of both his sister and mother. He was irritable and shrewish when interrogated as to the nature of his indisposition, and his condition did not improve the following day, nor the following, for his sleep was every night disturbed by his seeking that which called to him. He would not speak to any body of his troubles, and when his ill humor still persisted after a week, Rosemary and Lady Calipash agreed on the prudence of summoning the doctor to attend the future Lord. Basil, however, turned away the physician, claiming that he was merely tired, and, annoyed, left to take a long walk in the woods that comprised a large part of the Calipash estate. Let it be noted here that it was Mr. Villein who suggested that Basil’s room be searched in his absence. There, to the family’s collective horror, a ball of opium and a pipe were discovered among Basil’s personal effects. The doctor was quite alarmed by this, for, he said, while tincture of opium is a well-regarded remedy, smoking it in its raw state was a foul practice only undertaken by degenerates and Orientals, and so it was decided that Basil should be confined to his room for as long as it took to rid him of the habit. Upon the lad’s return there was a sort of ambush, comprised of stern words from the doctor, disappointed head-shakes from Mr. Villein, tears from Lady Calipash, and, for Rosemary’s part, anger (she was, frankly, rather hurt that he hadn’t invited her to partake of the drug). Basil insisted he had no knowledge of how the paraphernalia came to be in his room, but no rational person would much heed the ravings of an opium-addict, and so he was locked in and all his meals were sent up to his room. A week later Basil was not to be found within his chambers, and a note in his own hand lay upon his unmade bed. His maid found it, but, being illiterate, she gave it over to Lady Calipash while the lady and her daughter were just sitting down to table. Scanning the missive brought on such a fit of histrionics in Lady Calipash that Mr. Villein came down to see what was the matter. He could not get any sense out of the Lady, and Rosemary had quit the breakfasting room before he even arrived, too private a creature to show anyone the depth of her distress, so Mr. Villein snatched the letter away from the wailing Lady Calipash and read it himself. He was as alarmed by its contents as she, for it said only that Basil had found his confinement intolerable, and had left home to seek his fortune apart from those who would keep him imprisoned. The author has heard it said that certain birds, like the canary or the nightingale, cannot sing without their mate, and suffer a decline when isolated. Similarly, upon Basil’s unexpected flight from Calipash Manor, did Rosemary enter a period of great melancholy, where no one and nothing could lift her spirits. She could not account for Basil’s behavior—not his moodiness, nor his failure to take her with him—and so she believed him cross with her for her part in his quarantine, or, worse still, indifferent to her entirely. Seasons passed without her smiling over the misfortunes of others or raising up a single spirit of the damned to haunt the living, and so, upon the year’s anniversary of Basil’s absence, Mr. Villein sat down with Lady Calipash and made a proposal. “My lady,” he said, “Rosemary has grown to a pretty age, and I believe her state of mind would be much improved by matrimony and, God willing, motherhood. To this end, I appeal to you to allow me to marry her, whereupon I shall endeavor to provide for her as the most doting of husbands.” Lady Calipash was at first disturbed by this request, as she had long assumed that Mr. Villein’s affections were settled upon her and not her daughter, but when Mr. Villein mentioned offhandedly that, with Basil absent, he was the only known male heir to the Calipash estate, and should he marry outside the family, neither Lady Calipash nor Rosemary would have any claim to the land or money beyond their annuities, the Lady found it prudent to accept Mr. Villein’s suit on Rosemary’s behalf. Mr. Villein expected, and, (it must be admitted) rather ghoulishly anticipated Rosemary’s disinclination to form such an alliance, but to the surprise of all, she accepted her fate with a degree of insouciance that might have worried a mother less invested in her own continued state of affluence. Without a single flicker of interest Rosemary agreed to the union, took the requisite journey into town to buy her wedding clothes, said her vows, and laid down upon the marriage bed in order that Mr. Villein could defile her body with all manner of terrible perversions, a description of which will not be found in these pages, lest it inspire others to sink to such depths. The author will only say that Rosemary found herself subjected to iterations of Mr. Villein’s profane attentions every night thereafter. If any good came out of these acts of wickedness performed upon her person, it was that it roused her out of her dysthymia and inspired her to once again care about her situation. Not unexpectedly, Rosemary’s emotional rejuvenation compelled her to journey down paths more corrupt than any the Twins had yet trod. Her nightly, nightmarish trysts with Mr. Vincent had driven her slightly mad, as well as made her violently aware that not all lovers are interested in their partner’s pleasure. Remembering with fondness those occasions when her brother had conjured up from the depths of her body all manner of rapturous sensations, in her deep misery Rosemary concocted a theory drawn as much from her own experience as from the works of the ancient physician Galen of Pergamon. As she accurately recalled, Galen had claimed that male and female reproductive systems are perfect inversions of one another, and thus, she deduced, the ecstasy she felt whilst coupling with her brother was likely due to their being twins and the mirror-image of one another. To once again achieve satisfactory companionship Rosemary therefore resolved upon creating a companion for herself out of the remains housed in the Calipash family crypt. By means of the necromancies learned in her youth, she stitched together a pleasure-golem made of the best-preserved parts of her ancestors, thanking whatever foul gods she was accustomed to petitioning for the unusually gelid temperature of that tomb. Taking a nose that looked like Basil’s from this corpse, a pair of hands from that one, and her father’s genitalia, she neatly managed the feat, and, dressing the creature in Basil’s clothing, slipped often into that frigid darkness to lie with it. Sadly, her newfound happiness with her ersatz brother was, for two reasons, imperfect. The first was that none of the vocal chords she could obtain were capable of reproducing Basil’s distinctively nasal snarl, and thus the doppelgänger remained mute, lest an unfamiliar moan ruin Rosemary’s obscene delights. The second trouble was more pernicious: she realized too late she had been unable to entirely excise the putrefaction wrought by death upon the limbs of her relations, and thus she contracted a form of gangrene that began to slowly rot her once-pristine limbs. For another year did this unhappy status quo persist, until one dreary afternoon when Rosemary, returning from a long walk about the grounds, noticed a disreputable, slouching individual taking in the fine prospect offered by the approach to Calipash Manor. Unafraid, Rosemary advanced on him, noticing the burliness of the man’s figure, the darkness of his skin, and the shabby state of his long overcoat. “Are you in want of something?” she called to the stranger, and he looked up at her, his face shaded by a mildewing tricorn. “There is scant comfort to be found here at Calipash Manor, but if you require any thing, it will be given to you.” “To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?” queried he in the rasping accent of a white Creole, all the while stealing polite glances of her slightly moldy countenance. “I am the daughter of the lady of this house,” answered Rosemary. “Then thank you, my lady,” said the man. “My name is Valentine, and I have only just returned from Jamaica to find my family dead and my house occupied by those with no obligation to provide for me.” “Have you no friends?” “None, not being the sort of man who either makes or keeps them easily.” “Come with me, then,” said Rosemary, admiring his honesty. She led Valentine up to the house and settled them in her private parlor, whereupon she bid the servants bring him meat and drink. As he ate, he seemed to revive. Rosemary saw a nasty flicker in his eyes that she quite liked, and bid him tell her more of himself. He laughed dryly, and Rosemary had his tale: “I’m afraid, Lady, that I owe you an apology, for I know one so fine as yourself would never let me into such a house knowing my true history. I was born into the world nothing more than the seventh son of a drunk cottar, and we were always in want as there was never enough work to be had for all of us. I killed my own brother over a bite of mutton, but given that we were all starving, the magistrate saw it fitting that I should not be hanged, but impressed to work as a common hand aboard a naval ship bound for the West Indies. I won’t distress you by relating the conditions I endured, suffice it to say I survived. “When I arrived at our destination, however, I found that it was not my fate to remain in the navy, for my sea- captain promptly clapped me in irons and sold me as a white slave, likely due to my being an indifferent sailor and more likely to start riots among the men than help to settle them. I was bought by a plantation-owner who went by the name of Thistlewood, and this man got what labor he could out of me for several years, until I managed to escape to Port Royal with only the clothes on my back and a bit of food I’d stolen. There I lived in a manner I shan’t alarm you by describing, and only say that having done one murder, it was easy to repeat the crime for hire until I had enough coin to buy passage back to England— but as I said earlier, when I returned home, I found every living person known to me dead or gone, except those with long memories who recalled enough of my character to kick me away from their doorsteps like a dog.” Rosemary could not but be profoundly moved by such a tale, and she felt her dormant heart begin to warm anew with sympathy for this stranger. She assured him that he should have some work on her estate, and Valentine was so overcome that he took Rosemary’s hand in his—but their mutual felicity was interrupted by Mr. Villein, who chose that inopportune moment to enter Rosemary’s chambers uninvited. “What is the meaning of this treachery?” cried Mr. Villein, for though he often engaged in infidelities, the notion that his bride might do the same did not sit well with him, being that he was a jealous man by nature. “Release my wife, foul vagabond!” “Wife!” exclaimed Valentine, his yellowish complexion turning gray. “How is it that I return home, only to find myself betrayed by one whom I thought harbored love for me?” It would be impossible to guess whether Rosemary or Mr. Villein was more confused by this ejaculation, but neither had time to linger in a state of wonder for very long. The man withdrew a veritable cannon of a flintlock, and cast off his wretched, threadbare overcoat to reveal that beneath it, he wore a rich emerald-green brocade vest threaded through with designs wrought in gold and silver, and his breeches were of the finest satin. When he looked down his nose at them like a lord instead of lowering his eyes like a cottar’s son, they saw he had all the bearing of a gentleman of high rank. Recognizing him at last, Rosemary shrieked, and Mr. Villein paled and took a step back. Though strangely altered by time, the man was unmistakably Basil Vincent, Lord Calipash, returned at last to reclaim by force what should have been his by right of birth!

IV.

The conclusion, detailing the reunion of the Ivybridge Twins—an account of the singular manner in which Rosemary defeated the gangrene that threatened her continued good health—what the author hopes the reader will take away from this Infernal History

“You!” cried Mr. Villein in alarm. “How dare you? How can you? They said the navy would keep you at least a decade in the service of this country!” “They?” demanded Rosemary. “Who?” “The press gang!” blustered Mr. Villein. “For the sum I paid them, I’ll have them—” But the Infernal Twins never discovered what Mr. Villein’s intentions were regarding the unsatisfactory press gang, for Rosemary, overcome with grief and rage, snatched the flintlock pistol out of Basil’s grasp and shot Mr. Villein through the throat. A fountain of blood gushed forth from just above Mr. Villein’s cravat-pin, soaking his waistcoat and then the carpet as he gasped his surprise and fell down dead upon the ground. “Basil,” she said. “Basil, I’m so—I didn’t—” “You married him?” “It was all Mother’s doing,” said Rosemary, rather hurt by his tone. “But—” “You were gone,” she snapped, “and lest Mr. Villein marry some common slut and turn Mother and myself out of our house . . .” Even with such reasonable excuses, it was some time before Rosemary could adequately cajole Basil out of his peevish humor; indeed, only when Rosemary asked if Basil had lived as a monk during the years of their estrangement did he glower at her as he had used to do and embraced her. They sat companionably together then, and Basil gave her a truer account of his absence from Calipash Manor: “The carven ivory head which our loathsome former tutor bequeathed unto me on the fifteenth anniversary of my birth was the instrument, strangely, of both my undoing and my salvation,” said Basil. “Mr. Villein lied to me that I was the manifestation of the old god which it represents—indeed, I believe now that his intention was to take me away from you so that he might have you for his own; that I, like my father before me, would be driven to suicide by the whispered secrets of that divine entity. Little did he know that while I am not some sort of fleshly incarnation of that deity, I was born with the capacity to understand His whispered will, and walk along the sacred paths that were more often trod when His worship was better known to our race. “I believe once Mr. Villein saw that I was only mildly troubled by these new visions, he concocted a plot to be rid of me in a less arcane manner. The night before you discovered my absence, he let himself into my chambers and put a spell upon me while I slept that made me subject to his diabolical will. I awoke a prisoner of his desire, and he bade me rise and do as he wished. Dearest sister, I tell you now that you did not detect a forgery in my note, for it was written by none other than myself. After I had penned the false missive, Mr. Villein bade me follow him down to Ivybridge, whereupon he put a pint of ale before me and compelled me, via his fell hold upon me, to act in the manner of a drunken commoner, brawling with the local boys until the constable was called and I was thrown in jail. Not recognizing me, due to my long isolation, my sentence was as I told you—that of forced conscription into the navy. “To a certain point, my tale as I told it to you whilst in the character of the scoundrel Valentine was true—I suffered much on my voyage to Jamaica, and was subsequently sold as a slave. What I did not tell you was the astonishing manner of my escape from that abominable plantation. My master hated me, likely because he instinctively sensed his inferiority to my person. My manners mark me as a noble individual, even when clad in rags, and being that he was a low sort who was considered a gentleman due to his profession rather than his birth, my master gave to me the most dangerous and disgusting tasks. One of his favorite degradations was to station me at the small dock where the little coracles were tied up, so that I could be given the catches of fish to clean them, constantly subjected to wasp stings and cuts and other indignities of that sort. “Yet it was this task that liberated me, for one afternoon I arrived at the dock to see the fishermen in a tizzy, as one had the good fortune of catching a dolphin. The creature was still alive, incredibly, and I heard its voice in my mind as clearly as I heard their celebration. Save me, and I shall save you, it said unto me in that language that has always marked me as bacchant to the god of which I earlier spoke. I picked up a large stick to use as a cudgel and beat the fisherfolk away from their catch, telling them to get back to work as the cetacean was of no use to our master, he should want snapper or jackfish for his dinner rather than oily porpoise-flesh. They heeded me, for they were a little afraid of me— often, as you might imagine, dear sister, bad things would happen to those who chose to cross me in some way— and I heaved the dolphin back into the sea. At first I thought it swam away and that it had merely been sun- madness that had earlier made me hear its voice, but then, after the fishermen had paddled out of sight, the dolphin surfaced with a bulging leather satchel clutched in its beak. It contained gold and jewels that my new friend told me were gathered from shipwrecks on the ocean floor, and that I should use this wealth to outfit myself as a gentleman and buy passage back to England. The creature’s only caveat was that upon my arrival I must once again visit the sea, and return to one of its kin the ivory head, as our tutor had not, as it turns out, been given the object. Rather, it seems that Mr. Villein defiled an ancient holy place near Delphi during his travels in Greece by stealing the artifact away from its proper alcove. “I agreed to these terms and, after waiting at the docks for a little longer so I might poison the fish it was my duty to clean, and thus enact a paltry revenge upon my tyrannical master, hastened back to Devonshire, as I knew nothing of your situation, but feared much. Upon returning home I assumed the persona of Valentine as a way of ascertaining if, in my absence, your sentiments had changed toward your long-absent brother and the manner in which we were accustomed to living with one another. Seeing your heart go out to such a picaroon assured me of your constancy, and I regret very much that I earlier so impugned your honor. But sister, now that you know of my distresses, you must tell me of yours—pray, how did you come to be married to Mr. Villein and so afflicted by the disease that I see nibbles away at your perfect flesh?” Rosemary then recounted what has already been recorded here, and she and Basil resolved upon a course of action that shall comprise the denoument of this chronicle. Both were determined that the gangrenous affliction should not claim Rosemary, but until Lady Calipash, wondering why her daughter did not come down to dinner, intruded into the parlor where the siblings colluded, they could not see how. The idea occurred to the Twins when Lady Calipash’s alarm at seeing Mr. Villein’s corpse upon the carpet was so tremendous that she began to scream. Basil, fearing they should be overheard and the murder discovered before they had concocted an adequate reason for his unfortunate death, caught Lady Calipash by the neck when she would not calm herself. As he wrapped his fingers about her throat, Basil noticed the softness of his mother’s skin, and, looking deeply into her fearful eyes, saw that she was still a handsome creature of not five-and-thirty. “Sister,” he began, but Rosemary had already anticipated his mind, and agreed that she should immediately switch her consciousness with Lady Calipash’s by means of witchcraft she and Basil had long ago learned (and once utilized in their youthful lovemaking) from the donkey-headed eel-creature they had conjured, and henceforth inhabit her own mother’s skin. This was done directly, and after securely locking Rosemary’s former body (now occupied by their terrified mother) into the family crypt, along with Mr. Villein’s corpse, mother and prodigal son, rather than brother and sister, had the carriage made ready, and they drove to the head of the River Plym, whereupon Basil summoned one of the aquatic priests of his god, and handed over the relic that has figured so prominently in their narrative. To conclude, the author hopes that readers of this History will find this account entirely mortifying and disgusting, and seek to avoid modeling any part of his or her behavior upon that of the Infernal Ivybridge Twins— though to be fair, it must be recorded that, for all the duration of their cacodemoniacal lives, the Twins preserved the tenderest affection for each other. Still, there has never been found anywhere in the world a less-worthy man or woman than they, and, until the moonless night when the Twins decided to join the ranks of the cetaceous worshipers of their unholy deity—Lord Calipash being called thence, his sister long-missing her former amphibious wanderings—there was not a neighbor, a tenant, or a servant who did not rue the day they came into the company of Basil and Rosemary.

Molly Tanzer lives in Boulder, Colorado along the front range of the Mountains of Madness, or maybe just the Flatirons. She is a professional writer and editor, among other things. Her debut, A Pretty Mouth, was published by Lazy Fascist Press in September 2012, and her short fiction has appeared in The Book of Cthulhu (Vols. I and II), the Lovecraft eZine, and Fungi,and is forthcoming in Geek Love: An Anthology of Full Frontal Nerdery, The Starry Wisdom Library, and Zombies: Shambling through the Ages. She blogs—infrequently—about writing, hiking, cocktail mixing, vegan cooking, movies, and other stuff at mollytanzer.com, and tweets as @molly_the_tanz. The Sign in the Moonlight David Tallerman

You will have heard, no doubt, of the Bergenssen expedition—if only from the manner of its loss. For a short while, that tragedy was deemed significant and remarkable enough to adorn the covers of every major newspaper in the civilised world. At the time, I was in no position to follow such matters. However, in subsequent months I’ve tracked down many journals from that period. As I write, I can look up at the wall to see a cover of the New York Times I’ve pinned there, dated nineteenth of May 1908, bearing the headline, “Horror in the Himalayas: Bergenssen five reported lost in avalanche.” In a sense, I suppose, it’s a spirit of morbidity that draws me back to those days upon the mountain and their awful finale, which I failed to witness only by the purest chance. Equally, there’s a macabre humour in the thought that to almost all the world I am dead, my body shattered and frozen in the depths of some crevasse. But what draws me most, I think, is the memory of what I saw after I left Bergenssen and the others—that knowledge which is mine uniquely. It’s without disrespect to the Times that I say they know nothing, nothing whatsoever, of the horror of Mount Kangchenjunga. Likely, there is no one else alive who does. No rival can rightly be offended when I say that Bergenssen was the finest mountaineer of his generation. No other but that fierce and hardy Swede would have considered an expedition upon Kangchenjunga after the dramatic failure of the first attempt, and the very suspect circumstances of that failure. I recollect clearly how we spoke of the matter, when he first proposed the climb to me. Coincidence had brought us together in a London gentleman’s club that I favoured whenever I was there on business. His tone was scathing as he cried, “Aleister Crowley, that self- publicising fool? The man’s as much a mountaineer as I am Henry Ford.” “You can’t deny that Dr. Jacot-Guillarmod knows his business.” “Pah! I’ll deny what I like. I doubt if they ever left Darjeeling.” “Then how do you explain the death of Alexis Pache and those three porters?” Bergenssen furrowed his brows. “Must I explain it? Perhaps what they say about Crowley is true. Perhaps those unfortunates were sacrificed to whatever ghoulish spirits the man had devoted himself to that week. More likely, he plied Pache with alcohol, drugs, or some yet darker vice and the man remained in India to indulge himself. Even if it’s true, a better climber would have known the warning signs of an avalanche and avoided it accordingly.” With retrospect, those words seem bitter with irony, but at the time, I was caught up by the Swede’s immense self-confidence and courage, which were as infectious as any cold. “Then you really think it’s possible? Freshfield and Sella confirmed the findings of the Great Trigonometric Survey—it truly is the third-highest peak on Earth. It would be a grand achievement.” “I believe there’s nothing to be lost in the trying.” “Nothing except our lives.” “Well, of course.” He grinned, baring perfectly even white teeth. “So are you with me?” I was violently tempted to agree on the spot. Instead, I prevaricated, knowing in my heart that I was little more than a hobbyist and, in the final analysis, not fitted to such a venture. Bergenssen’s dream was a marvellous one, but outside the smoky environs of the club it would evaporate, and though I might think of our conversation with a certain wistfulness, that would soon pass. I was wrong. That month brought both personal and business misfortunes, and with each fresh trial, my mind called back to Bergenssen and to misty, snow-clad vistas. By the end of February, almost in despair, I wrote a brief note and mailed it immediately. If the offer still stood, then I was in. Bergenssen’s reply came three weeks later, by telegram to my offices. Aside from the date, time and place for our rendezvous it bore only a simple message: GOOD TO HAVE YOU SIR.

I won’t trouble the reader with facts that can be gleaned elsewhere, and which have no bearing upon the substance of my tale. The details of our preparation are common knowledge, and the names of our three companions may be found from many sources, not least the May obituaries. Bergenssen—somewhat contradicting his earlier comments to me—thought it wise to follow the route established by Crowley and Jacot-Guillarmod, and if we didn’t all agree with his logic then there was no question of debate. He was our leader absolutely, and no one would have suggested the excursion become a democracy. Therefore, after much prevarication on the part of the local authorities, we began in India, and approached our object via the Singalila Ridge in West Bengal. From Ghum, we trekked through Jorpakri, Tongly, Sandakphu and Falut, in an unremitting downpour of the most torrential rain I’ve known. There’s little else to tell of those days, except that Bergenssen travelled under something of a funk, which in turn infected the rest of our party, even down to our squadron of porters. He avoided any questions as to what had put him out of sorts, and so I took it for a mood of grim determination, or perhaps mere consequence of the abysmal weather, leaches, and other hardships. In any case, we made good progress. We proceeded in short order through Gamotang, whence the work of mountaineering began in earnest, and on through successive camps until—late of an afternoon, with violet hints already softening the robust blue of the Himalayan sky—we came upon camp five. In my mind’s eye, I’d expected some place remarkable, befitting the violence that had occurred nearby. In fact, it was nondescript, nothing more than a small mound nestled in the shadow of one minor peak. Strangely, this disappointment didn’t so much mitigate my sense of nervous excitement as increase it—as though I’d unconsciously decided to seek elsewhere for the tragic drama the scenery failed to provide. We were all of us very quiet, however, and Bergenssen seemed practically catatonic, having said not a word all through the afternoon. By the time we’d pitched our tents and retired, the sky was a dark and livid purple that made the snow seem almost black, and my excitement had risen nearly to fever pitch—though I still couldn’t say why, or what might possibly relieve it. Rather than settle down to sleep, I sought out Bergenssen, and was pleased to find him in better cheer than he’d been throughout the day. Without to-do, I said, “This is the point where the Crowley expedition floundered, isn’t it? Do you think we’re in any danger?” “If Crowley’s to be believed then no, none whatsoever. He blamed the matter entirely on Tartarin and Righi’s incompetence, as I’m sure you know.” I detected a note in Bergenssen’s tone. “And if he isn’t to be believed?” “Well . . . it’s all very strange, you know.” He lapsed into silence, and for a while it seemed this cryptic statement would be his last word on the matter. Finally he continued, “One newspaper claimed that he heard their screams but chose to stay in his tent, drinking tea rather than hurrying to their aid. There was a quote I memorised: ‘A mountain accident of this sort is one of the things for which I have no sympathy whatever,’ he said. Can you believe it?” “If there’s anything in the rumours about him, I can. They refer to him in certain circles as ‘the wickedest man in Britain.’ Do you really think it’s strange that he’d let his fellows go to their deaths unaided?” “That? No, that isn’t it.” There followed another long pause. These silences unsettled me more than anything because they were so out of keeping with Bergenssen’s characteristic bluster. What he eventually said, however, was nearly as unexpected. “You know, I suppose, what Kangchenjunga means?” I’d passed a few hours in research before we set out. “The Five Treasures of Snows. . .the natives associate the five peaks with the five repositories of their god.” “Did you know that Crowley claimed the porters were willing to continue—the next morning, that is, after the accident? He said they told him that the spirits of the mountain had been propitiated. One death for every peak.” “But every account reports only four deaths, those of Pache and three of the porters.” Bergenssen looked away, to stare distractedly at the wall of the tent. “Yes. I know.” I sensed that his brief spell of loquacity had come to an end. I bid him goodnight and retired to my own small shelter. Feeling suddenly exhausted, I climbed straight into my sleeping bag and extinguished my lamp. Yet sleep was not forthcoming. As often happens, bodily tiredness served only to exacerbate the activity of my mind. Outside, the wind ranged between eerie soughing and a penetrating, almost feline screech. Every so often, a crash marked the passage of some loose snow bank into the abyss. As I lay staring into perfect darkness, I thought upon the rumours I’d heard of Aleister Crowley, tales he seemed to delight in and even propagate. I wondered what succour such a man could hope to find amidst the soul-wrenching desolation and wild beauty of the Himalayas. I imagined myself at the very spot where Crowley had sat, listening as his colleagues were torn from the mountain face, sipping tea as they tumbled down and down toward horrific deaths., I don’t remember falling asleep, but I have vague recollections of dreams in which I was led not by the hardy Bergenssen but by Crowley himself, who beckoned me through the most hazardous of routes, paths he crossed effortlessly only to laugh and caper when I couldn’t follow with the same ease. I remember how I raged at him—and how my cries only made him laugh the harder.

I woke late. It was that, I suppose, that saved my life. I transitioned abruptly from deep sleep into wakefulness, and realised the sounds from outside were my colleagues preparing for our departure. Yet I had no urge at all to move. I felt cold beyond belief, and it was more than I could do to control my shivering.Nevertheless, I struggled into my coat and boots, whilst the urge to vomit rose in my gullet. The moment I stepped outside, Bergenssen rushed over. “My God, man, are you all right? You look like death! Can you stand?” I struggled to control my thoughts. “I had the malaria,” I said. “Last year, in Egypt. I think perhaps it’s back.” I brushed a palm across my brow, found it clammy. “I’m afraid I’ll be going nowhere today.” “Not to worry, old man,” Bergenssen said—though in fact, he looked more dejected even than I felt. “It’s a poor time for a delay, though.” I couldn’t see how this was true. The wind was high, visibility was poor, and in all it promised to be a bad day for mountaineering. When I pointed this out, he said, “Yes, but we have a while yet. I wanted badly to make camp six.” I was startled by the lack of sympathy in his tone. It was a sort of childish spite that made me say, “You should go on. I’ll be better soon, I’m sure.” Then, beginning to realise how foolishly I was jeopardising myself, I added, “If you rope the worst parts and send someone back in a day or two, I’ll be able to catch up.” Bergenssen nodded vigorously. I could see that he very much wanted to believe me. “Yes, I suppose that’s the only way. You can manage, can’t you? I’d leave one of the porters, you know . . .” “Yes? “ I said, with sudden hope. “But we’ll need them all at six, you see.” My heart sank. I felt a flush of horror at the thought that the man before me was nothing like the Bergenssen I knew; that no words I could say would move him. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “What’s the worst that can happen to me here?” So they set out, and I watched until they disappeared. Had I any premonition? I remember being ill at ease, but of course there was the sudden rush of sickness, my half- remembered nightmares, and Bergenssen’s uncharacteristic behaviour. With all that, it was easy to dismiss any doubts as fanciful. Yet very soon, I had graver reasons for concern. The weather worsened drastically: the wind rose in a matter of minutes, until soon it was a gale, flinging pirouettes of snow and wailing banshee-like across the cliffs. It wasn’t long before I was driven back into my tent, where I huddled shivering, hoping against hope to hear the sounds of their return. What I heard instead was the worst thing I could have expected—a colossal crash that seemed to go on for minutes before it subsided into a low muttering. It could only be an avalanche. I think I grew feverish then, if I hadn’t been already. I know it wasn’t long after the avalanche that I convinced myself my companions would not be returning. They were gone, and I was alone. I shouted and raved for a while. Afterwards, I imagined I’d returned to lucidity. The truth was that my temporary madness had taken a different turn. I was sure I should go outside and start back to camp four, where a portion of our entourage was waiting with supplies. If I didn’t, I would be buried—as Bergenssen and the others had been buried. I staggered outside. The storm was like nothing I’d seen. Visibility was non-existent, except when a flash of lightning offered brief and violent illumination. Other than that, there was only darkness and snow, mixed inseparably, an ever-shifting funnel that howled around my every step. In a minute, I’d lost all trace of my tent. On one level I realised I was as likely to blunder off a cliff as to come anywhere near our last camp, but that realisation did nothing to slow my steps. Increasingly, I was unsure of where I was going, or why. Was something pursuing me? Yes, that was it—now that I thought, I could hear it, hear its measured steps through the bludgeoning of the gale. Was it a thing or a man? Perhaps it was something of both. I stumbled often and fell more than once, but I seemed to have grown oblivious to pain, or sense, or anything but my fear. I reeled without direction, with no sense of time, unaware even of the storm. I don’t remember finding the valley. All I recollect is a change in the pitch of the wind, a relaxing in the lash of the snow against my back. It seemed quite abrupt. There was light, for the first time in ages. At first, I thought it was artificial. Then I recognised the pallid glow of the moon. It hung low and gigantic, as though I’d scaled a peak that had somehow brought us face to face. It was bright enough for me to see the crevasse walls to either side—and ahead, the building that rose where those walls met. I thought it must be a monastery, but it looked as much like a fortress, with four windowless tiers raised on columns, each level roofed in the peculiarly sharp and steep Tibetan style. The wide doors were of plain, black wood, and there was none of the usual ornamentation, except for one detail—the huge, golden pentagram mounted high upon the fourth storey. At that sight, though I might rationally have assumed myself rescued and safe, my fear redoubled. I managed one more step, before all the strength left my body at once. I pitched forward. The blackness took me, and—God help me—I was grateful.

I woke by stages. For some immeasurable period, I’d been aware of sensations—motion, and later, the cool of water on my brow—but had lacked any understanding of what those feelings meant or how they came to be. I was oblivious to the passage of time. Regardless of whether my eyes were open or closed, they were met by the same ruddy gloom. I was afraid, but in an indistinct way, as one might fear the concept of dying more than the prospect itself. I’ve no doubt that my fever was still raging, for I remember phases of awful cold and enormous heat. Eventually, I examined my surroundings with something like clarity. I was muddled, the effort of moving my neck made it ache cruelly, and my inner clothes were moist with sweat, but I was lucid enough for curiosity. However, the room I was in was very plain. I lay on a low, hard bed, and the only other furnishings were a stool in the opposite corner, a small table beside me, and a narrow brazier. I thought it might be a cell, though there was no indication of a lock on the door. Then I remembered the building I’d seen, and how I’d thought it must be a monastery. The chamber was plain enough to be a monk’s. Yet that was strange in itself. If Crowley had been correct then we’d reached to around twenty-five thousand feet; even a conservative estimate placed us at well above twenty-thousand. Such a height was tremendously isolating, far too much so for any regular supply or communication from the outside world. I thought back to the research I’d done before I’d joined with Bergenssen. There’d been one sect in particular who considered Kangchenjunga sacred, and who might very well have built a monastery high amongst its peaks. What were they called? The Kirati, that was it —descendants of an ancient local people, practitioners of a religion rife with shamanism and ancestor-worship. If I remembered rightly, their god was “Tagera Ningwaphuma,” called the Supreme Knowledge. Perhaps here, high upon the mountain, I had come upon one of their extreme outposts. Then I remembered the pentagram above the door. Maybe it wasn’t the Kirati after all—or if it was, some even more obscure offshoot cut off from the rest. Five points, I thought, five points for five peaks, and something in the notion made me shudder. I climbed unsteadily to my feet. The effort made my head spin, and only a hand outstretched to the wall kept me standing. After a minute, however, the dizziness began to pass. I crossed the stone floor by small steps and tested the door. Sure enough, there was no lock. It swung open freely. The man who waited outside, who turned at the sound of the door’s opening, was swathed in robes of deep crimson. He looked like any other priest of the region, except for two details: his robe was hooded and the hood drawn up, so that I could see only a crude hint of features, and in his hand he gripped a wooden staff which he clearly didn’t require for support. He moved to bar my way. He was smaller than I was, but agile. He said something I didn’t understand; it didn’t sound like any dialect of Tibetan I’d heard. Something in the words and in his stance made me nervous. “I’m grateful for your hospitality,” I said, “but I won’t impose any further.” I don’t know if I really expected him to understand English. When he evidently didn’t, I added in broken Tibetan something to the effect of, “Now I must go.” He pressed closer, with the staff upraised, as if herding me back into my cell. He spoke again, this time more abruptly. “No,” I said, reverting to English, “my friends . . . on the mountain . . .” I’d suddenly thought of Bergenssen, and the previously unconsidered possibility that someone might have survived. “Thank you, I must be leaving.” This time he spoke loudly, and waved one hand close to my face as though swatting at an insect. Suddenly, I felt terribly afraid. I pushed him away. At that, he looked as though he’d shout along the passage for help. In panic, I grabbed for his staff, and had it away from him before he even realised what was happening. He took a swift step back. I swung clumsily. The blow caught his shoulder. In a crouch, he backed off again, and I knew he was preparing to run. I struck again. This time, he slipped backward and his balance went. His head struck the wall with a ghastly slap. I stood panting for a while, staring down in uncomprehending horror. Finally, I realised the dark trickle pooling between the cobbles was blood. Was he dead? I dared not check. But he wasn’t moving, and I could hear no sound of breathing. It had been an accident. Or had it? In either case, how could I explain it? I’d committed an abominable deed. I had killed a man on the most tenuous of grounds. Yet all I felt was fear, so profound that it swallowed every other sensation or possibility, morality included. I decided I must hide the body. That might forestall any suspicion until I could get out of there. Setting the staff down, I grasped under his shoulders and, with much clumsy effort, managed to manoeuvre him into the room where I’d awoken. I tried to drag him onto the bed, but it was too difficult. I let him flop to the floor instead. As I did so, his hood fell back, and I finally saw his face. He was slim- featured, quite young, and unexceptional—except for the scar on his cheek. It was a perfect pentagram of whitened skin. I shuddered with a feeling far worse than fever. Something was terribly wrong here, and in that moment, the fact I’d killed a man didn’t seem the worst of it. What had I stumbled onto here, high upon Kangchenjunga? If I was under threat and had no means to reason with my captors, if I was already responsible for the death of one of their number, there could be no question but that I’d be safer even in the tempest outside. I returned to the corridor and considered it properly. It was very plain, and so long that I thought it might stretch the entire length of the building. Spaced along its length were other rooms or cells at roughly even intervals. At the far ends were double doors, each pair like those I’d observed from the outside. It seemed a safe assumption that one set led out to the valley from whence I’d arrived. But which? I settled on the nearest. In the interest of covertness, and also because its tip was sodden with blood, I abandoned the staff, choosing to support myself against the wall instead. I moved softly, on the very border of panic, convinced I’d be discovered at any instant. In fact, I reached the doors without incident. After much nervous hesitation, I pushed one slightly open. Only blackness lay beyond. I pushed harder. Crouched low, I eased through the gap. I was aware of a large space, then of light at its centre, and finally of figures standing within the illumination. Cockroach-like, I scurried through the shadows, hoping for some intense dark to conceal me. I was sure I’d be seen. Yet when I paused to look, the figures were still absorbed. That calmed me fractionally—enough that I could take in the scene about me. I crouched at the edge of a large, circular chamber cleanly split into halves. The inner portion, where I knelt, was bordered only by plain stone walls. The other, however, presented a series of arches to the most astonishing vista. Evidently we were perched on the very edge of the mountainside, because the view was horizonless and dizzying. At the centre of the room, directly above the point where the figures were gathered, a narrow well in the domed ceiling let in a beam of scintillating moonlight. Beneath, borne on a low pedestal, sat a large, pentangular dish of crystalline filigree, so delicate and translucent that it might have been carved from ice. So much did it glow and its surface ripple that it seemed to have been filled by the rays shining from on high. I could make no sense of it all, except to find it strange and frightening. Nor had I time to consider. Suddenly the figures, who previously had appeared sunken in reverie, began to mill about and to converse in that clipped tongue the monk had employed. I feared I’d been discovered, and tensed instinctively. But none of them were looking in my direction. It occurred to me they must be wondering after their missing companion, and this was confirmed when a delegation hurried out through the double doors. A minute later came shouts, and a second party followed the first. For a while, there was much activity. I was sure that at any instant one of them would penetrate the shadows and discover me. Yet, though they had time to scour the place, not one seemed to consider that I might have penetrated their sanctum. Eventually they reconvened, and I allowed myself the faintest release of held breath. My relief was premature—and hopelessly misjudged. The gathering split into two factions. Five of the monks surrounded the pentangular dish, whilst the others retreated to form a crescent round it, with the open side in the direction of the doors. Immediately they set up a chant, in a language just as unfamiliar but quite different from the one they’d employed before. The words played havoc on my nerves, and brought incomprehensible images into my mind—as though I was perceiving something I couldn’t rationally grasp. As the chant heightened, raising towards crescendo, so the slant of moonlight seemed to brighten, and then, to pulse. At last, it was as though a column of brilliant, throbbing whiteness fell through the centre of the room. Though it scorched my eyes, it never occurred to me to look away. The dish seemed full almost to overflowing, as though brimming with fluid light. The five monks assigned to its pentagonal tips, who so far had played no part, lurched abruptly to life as if galvanised. Each grasped his respective point and heaved with all his might. Slowly, the bowl began to tip. As impossible as I knew it to be, I expected its contents to run out, to splash like mercury over the floor. Instead, just as impossibly, they were projected—in a manner that bore no resemblance to the projection of light. The flow seemed to crawl and seethe through the air. It fell upon the door, where it splashed like thrown paint. When it settled, a glimmering pentagram hung upon the boards. I’d barely registered all this when the chant adopted a new tone, shifting register without any loss of intensity. My attention was focused entirely on the doors. They looked soft and unreal under the stamp of fluid moonlight. They seemed to shudder—once, twice, and a third, most violent, time. With a force that made wood shiver like paper, they sprang open. I fell backwards. I think I even cried out. If I did, it drew no attention. All thought was devoted to that hideous mantra—which seemed now like a wail of condensed experience, of horrible knowing borne by unfathomable words. All eyes hung on the open doorway. I couldn’t help but look. My first thought was of a mirror, so similar was the scene beyond. There was the circular chamber, there the arches opening onto inconceivable space, the pedestal, the figures clustered about it. Yet almost straight away, I perceived a difference. The view through the distant arcade was not the one behind me. Those stark grey pinnacles were unlike any on Earth. Then it struck me. They weren’t of Earth at all. If they were, what could explain the blue-green orb hung in the sky behind? I knew with absolute certainty that I looked upon a world not my own. More, I felt sure it was our moon, the very same that cast its rays through the ceiling—whose radiation had somehow riven a path through untraversable space. But if that was true, who were those unshapely forms, robed like their earthly brethren, who turned towards us? They were not men; too tall, too long in limb. A faint and bluish glow ebbed from within their cowls. As they moved towards the door, the shadows flickered jarringly around them. The swish of an arm revealed . . . what? Not a hand. They lurched closer, and my heart contracted. I knew that something wholly, inimically inhuman approached. They were almost upon the doorway, and I was frozen. I could only watch—as the foremost reached the brink, tilted its head, as I caught a glimpse of what lay beneath that updrawn hood . . . With a cry of horror, I threw myself forward. All I could think to do was hurl myself upon the pentangular dish. I struck it with all my strength. It moved a little, and the moonbeam wavered. Every one of the creatures turned its stare upon me. Together, they hissed in fury. I heaved. I thought my bones would break before that dish moved, and still I drove against it. For something so seemingly light, it felt like lead set in concrete. I pushed, without hope, too desperately afraid to stop. At any moment, one of the monks—or, unimaginably worse, one of the moon-beings—would pry me away. I pushed harder, though I thought my tendons must snap. When finally it shifted, it was by hardly an inch. I could do no more; I fell back, panting, my back and arms slick with sweat. I’d given my all, and still I’d failed. Yet somehow, that minute jilt was enough. Free of its axis, the disk tilted, rocked—and fell. As it shattered, it was like ice cascading over the cobbled floor. Looking back to the entrance, I saw the doors still stood open—but upon that familiar passage I’d arrived by. I sank to my knees, no longer concerned for my safety. Let the monks tear me to pieces if they would. I’d saved my world from something appalling. Even in death, I could take comfort in that. No hand fell. No blow was struck. When I eventually dared look up, I understood why. Dust was showering from the ceiling, as though the building were in the grip of a minor earth tremor. An instant later, I felt it, a pulse travelling up through the floor tiles. The pulse became an unrhythmic throb. A block tore loose from the roof and shattered, showering us in fragments. One of the monks screamed and stumbled. Though I hardly glanced back, I’m sure I was the only one who tried to flee. The monks merely stood, resigned, as their blasphemous temple ruptured around them. Only I ran—darting amongst the falling rubble, certain that at any instant I’d be pulverised. I forgot my weakened state, forgot everything except the hope of night air on my face. Reaching the second set of double doors, I found them already mangled and half off their hinges. I pressed through the gap, and still I didn’t stop. I kept going until the last rumbling subsided—until the night was utterly still. Only then did I pause to look back. There was nothing to see but a vast bank of snow, pierced here and there with hints of shattered masonry. The monastery had been utterly erased.

You may wonder how I survived to write this record. I wonder too. I walked, or staggered rather, for some time—hours, days, I can’t say. I don’t remember how I discovered the remnants of camp four. I came to myself huddled in a tent, with only fragmentary recollections of the intervening time. I suppose I’d been uncommonly lucky. What had happened, I later discovered, was this: five men died that day on the way to camp six—Bergenssen, our three mountaineering companions, and one of the Sherpas. The rest of the porters turned back immediately, found me gone from camp five and so backtracked to four. Meeting with the party stationed there, they had democratically decided to forget the whole sorry mess and return home. From either idleness or some vestigial loyalty, they’d left both the tents and the supplies. Thus, I found shelter, food, and medicine enough to nurse myself back to health. Eventually I felt capable of attempting the downward climb. It was slow progress, but I was in no hurry. In Sandakphu, I learned the truth regarding Bergenssen and the others. It came as no surprise. I carried on, deeper into India. I had some money with me, and access to more. I felt dimly that I could not go home. I write now from a location I choose not to disclose. I will send this tale to a number of reputable journals, in the hope that one may see fit to print it, whether they believe it or no. No one should think to seek me out. They won’t find me. I’ve come to realise I have too many unanswered questions weighing on my mind. What had been that impossible passage in the moonlight? What those gangling, unearthly figures? The monastery had been destroyed, its tenants crushed and buried; yet dare I hope that there were no other temples, no other routes between worlds, no acolytes so destitute in soul that they might open them? And thinking upon that last, one more inescapable question came to my mind: what part in this monstrous affair was played by Aleister Crowley, so-called “wickedest man in Britain.” Could that wickedness extend to the betrayal of all mankind to something malicious and inhuman? I have my suspicions. Now, too, I have a little knowledge; hints to dark and sordid truths, the corrupted fruits of my research. In the course of my search, I have made allies . . . a very few. The one thing I lack now is proof. When the time should come that I have it, only then will I return—and there shall be a reckoning for the horrors of Kangchenjunga.

David Tallerman is the author of the novels Giant Thief and Crown Thief, both published by Angry Robot. He’s also written around a hundred short stories, comic and film scripts, poems, and countless reviews and articles. Many of these have been released in one form or another, and others are on their way over the next few months. Most of his remaining time is eaten up by his regular employment as an itinerant IT Technician, and whatever's left he spends reading books, watching films, hiking, drinking wine, and renovating his house. To learn more, visit davidtallerman.net. Jetsam Livia Llewellyn

“The part of a ship, its equipment, or its cargo that is cast overboard to lighten the load in time of distress, and that sinks or is washed ashore.”

I’m writing this down because I’m starting to forget. I may need to remember some day. The chemical air is already kissing my mind, biting my memory away. Something terrible happened at work today. Beyond imagining . . .

Jay stops reading the worn fragment of paper, and looks up. “I don’t remember writing this. Where did you find this, again?” She speaks to the young man behind the counter, who’s examining the creases of a jacket flap. His glasses slide down his nose as he stops to pull a book out of the thick stack on the counter. “It was stuck in this one.” The man holds up a worn copy of a short story anthology. It is one of about twenty books Jay has lugged into the used bookstore to sell. “Oh. I thought I searched all of them.” Jay takes the book from him. It is old, as thick as a tombstone. Her hand trembles from the weight. “Wait. This book doesn’t look familiar—are you sure it’s mine?” “It was in the box with the others. The paper was stuck behind the jacket flap. That’s why I like to go through everything before you leave the store. Thought you might want it back.” “Thanks,” says Jay, and walks away from the counter. She sits down on a worn upholstered chair and turns the paper over in her fingers. One side is crammed with writing, and the other is affixed with a single name tag, a sticker with a smeared red mark on it. She recognizes her writing. But she doesn’t recall writing the words.

It was so still after all the previous commotion, as if the traffic and people had bled off the edges of the city. Emptiness, everywhere. Only smoke plumes in the sky, coiling like worms.

What day was this? What date? Nothing on the paper gives it away. Annoyed, Jay lets it drop to her lap. At the top of the torn edge, the name of the old publishing company she worked for stands out in crisp block letters. It’s surely the thought of her former job that sends little shivers of distress sparking up her spine, and nothing else. That’s what she tells herself. “A lot of books from the same company,” the man calls out. He is still methodically examining her offerings. “You’re in publishing, right? I can usually tell.” “Not anymore,” Jay says. “I work in finance now. Better pay.” Jay runs her finger along the jagged edge of the paper. She’s really only told part of the truth. She didn’t leave the company. The company left her. “Didn’t like the job, eh?” “Didn’t have a choice. They left the city,” she replies. “The attacks. Some people jumped ship. You know.” The man is respectfully silent.

Everyone was in their offices, all cramming things into boxes, or staring numbly out the windows into space. Like I was.

The company did more than jump ship. It vanished. Jay and a few employees—the ones who hadn’t been warned —traveled into the city one morning to find the building as empty of life as the smoldering ruins on the tip of the island. Whispers on the street said they’d fled to another country, leaving behind the detritus of their long history: piles of old books, unread manuscripts, and discarded employees. Just as devastating, in its own way. “I have your total.” The man holds another slip of paper, the credit for the books. “This is how much we’ll give you in books, or you can take half that amount in cash. You can use it now or later—just don’t lose it.” Jay takes the cash. Not much, as always, but it doesn’t matter. Relief is the only payment she needs— relief that there is a little less crowding around her, a little less intrusion on her life. She needs to know that at home, at night, she has some space to think and breathe. “Thanks. I’ll come back next Saturday with the last load.” Jay grabs her metal shopping cart and heads for the door. As she picks her way through dusty stacks, she shoves the receipt into her pocket. She stares at the fragment one more time, then slides it in as well.

From my office, I watched the apartment building across the street. Some windows were lit up in the rainy gloom like soft yellow candles, others were dark and tomb-like. Most had pale curtains drawn across the glass.

As she walks back home, Jay sees herself reflected over and over again in dark storefront windows. In one tall pane of glass, a ghostly woman walks beside her whose face still flirts with middle age while her body has fully embraced it. In another she is thin and chic, a woman of the City, proudly urban in her clothing and demeanor. In a third pane, she’s little more than a wraith. But her face remains the same in all those reflections: there’s a furrow nestling between her eyes, a deep line of fear bisecting her brow. The sight of it shocks Jay. She hasn’t seen that look on her face for almost five years. That’s how long ago her old life ended, how long she’s kept herself from dwelling on her past. No reason to remember, Jay tells herself. It’s over. But even now, part of her still wonders why the company left without a trace, while another part secretly rejoices that she escaped something worse than what had been intended for her. What had been intended . . . ? As she rounds the corner, her apartment building slides into view. It is thick and solid, comfortably utilitarian. From across the street, her living room window is just one of many black rectangles, indistinguishable from the others. It doesn’t have a view of the city skyline—she blocked it off years ago. She has no desire to see where she’s been.

To the left of the building a massive clock tower rose like a cream-colored phallus, laced with delicate scaffolding from base to tip. The clock, the time—it was the last day she’d gone to work in the city, that was it. She’d been late. Only a week since the attack, and smoke still billowed in toxic sheets over the lower part of the island. Chemicals and flesh— the dead settled in their mouths and lungs. Jay hadn’t wanted to step outside. But bills had to be paid. So she’d reluctantly crept down into the subway, taking her place within the throng of silent commuters. And when she emerged from the underground, when she saw the company’s triangular building, saw the dun of the sky— No. She does not want to remember. To her right sits a battered trash can. Through the iron mesh, magazine covers press against thick seeping paper bags, sodden bricks of newspapers, strange dribblings of food. The fragment is a tight ball in her hand. It’s only trash. But her fingers can’t release it. She stares at the crumpled paper as it unfolds, an image blossoming in her mind . . . Broken things pressing against each other, faces and bricks all jumbled into one terrible mass . . . And a word —no. A single letter. Everywhere she had turned that morning long ago, she had seen that strange mark. Jay crosses the street in quick steps. She pushes the shopping cart into the building courtyard, past the molding statue and stunted trees, toward her entrance. She stops to take out her keys, and the ball in her hand flattens out suddenly as her fingers work the paper open. It’s a compulsion she cannot control.

Between the buildings two inky smears of clouds slowly passed. They lingered briefly in the space before drifting toward the open square, as if surveying and cataloging the sodden masses below. If only I’d known—

She saw something that day. Not clouds, not smoke, not the ashes of her friends. Something moved . . . Jay stands at the edge of the entrance, her body rigid. Her eyes slide up to the tops of the building and beyond, looking for the edges of the city, reassuring herself that she cannot see it. That it cannot see her. She runs her tongue around her mouth. It tastes as if something foul has just moved through her. There is more than the memory of ash in her mouth. She tastes marked. The door swings out behind her. “Could you—” says the janitor, and Jay grabs the door as he wheels his cart out. He gestures to the gaping mouth of plastic. “Trash?” Jay looks down at the fragment. “No. Thanks.” She shoves it into her pocket. “No books today? That’s a first.” The man smiles pleasantly at her. Jay sidles past him into the empty hallway. “Not today. I’ve read enough already.” She drags her cart up to the seventh floor.

Giant bins of trash surrounded the building—the last remnants of the publishing company. Just twenty minutes ago, men were walking from bin to bin, red paintbrushes in their hands, marking them for removal.

Jay presses her back against the bolted door. The solid slab of painted metal makes her feel safe. Before her a cool and empty living room sits in silence. The lack of furniture and decoration comforts her profoundly. Owning nothing means nothing can be taken or thrown away, nothing can be forgotten. She examines the sticker more closely. “MY NAME IS” borders the top in thick letters. The white space below is stained red, smeared and slightly cracked. Jay cocks her head slightly as she tries to interpret it. The original mark is lost to her. All that’s left is on the paper. Dropping her coat to the floor, Jay walks to a large, empty bookcase and pulls it aside with a groan. Behind the case, a grimy window looks out on the quiet street, the buildings, the sky. Breathing hard, Jay presses a finger to the glass, then, as if writing a secret language, slowly traces the tops of the buildings as they sprawl across the horizon. The creeping skyline of this city both fascinates and repels her. No matter where she looks, the sky seems to stop at the rooftops—and there is a space, a thin crack where reality does not quite knit together. She imagines something pulsating at the edge, watching and waiting. Waiting for a sign, a mark.

Workers clustered in small groups, whispering fearful gossip back and forth. During the night a thousand companies fled. We had been abandoned.

“If I get rid of this, there won’t be anything left of that day. Not even my memories. But you can’t take things I don’t have,” Jay whispers. Her hand curls around the paper, crushing it neatly. “You can’t take nothing.”

A woman with a clipboard was shouting. “Proceed to your floor and pack your belongings—”

Her hand uncurls. It’s no use. She still has the fragment. And now: trickles of memory, staining her soul like drops of blood in water. Still marked, she tells her reflection in the glass. “—nothing will be left behind.”

The sky looms overhead like a bowl of metal riveted to the edges of the earth. Jay stands in the middle of an empty street, before her old employer’s building. Beyond it, the island stretches out in one festering sweep of land. In five years, the corruption of the attack has spread outward and up the blocks. Now only smoldering piles of metal dot the landscape. Nothing whole remains, except the strangely triangulated building before her—a stone ship caught in a scoria sea. A low boom catches her attention: in the distance a colossal wall, one hundred stories high, slices the island in half like a surgical scar. Rooftops of still-healthy buildings are visible over the top, while, at the base, tiny figures scurry back and forth in the thunder and wake of ponderous machines. Below, subways gag on hardening concrete. Jay had to bribe a man at the borough docks to ferry her across the water to the island. There was no other way in. “Why not you?” Jay asks her old building. It cannot be coincidence that it alone remains. Rows of windows grin at her like blackened teeth, revealing nothing. Pink stains the worn stone. Some brighter color once ran down its sides, then faded with time. Jay’s fingers grasp the wrinkled paper.

The woman slapped a name tag on my coat while a man shoved an empty cardboard box into my arms. “You have fifteen minutes to get to your floor,” he said. “Put your personal items in this, and wait in your office to be escorted out.” As I made my way through the lobby, my fingers slid over the tag. They came away red.

She picks her way past the rounded tip of the building and tries the lobby door. After a few pulls on the handle, it swings open. The landscape behind her reflects as wavering ribbons in the thick glass and brass. Jay looks back over her shoulder. Two dark gray clouds float along the eastern shore. They creep over the rubble as if they are snuffling and rooting their way inland. Jay slips into the building and pulls the door firmly shut, then presses her face against the glass. One cloud rises slowly, thinning out as it catches the sluggish wind. The other pulses slightly—the ruins beneath it shift. Jay backs into the lobby until darkness envelops her. More drops of memory trickle through her. Outside, the gray mass of air spreads itself farther out and up, until it is beyond her vision. At the far end of the lobby, beyond the elevator banks, there is an open door to a brown stairwell. Jay hesitates, listening for any sound. After a moment of silence, she begins to climb. Her footfalls sound distant, as though her body is walking somewhere she can’t yet see. She knows something terrible happened that day, to everyone who entered the building. Somehow, she escaped so thoroughly that she even escaped the remembering of it. Her bones remember, though.

My floor was a wreck. I picked my way through broken furniture, crushed bookcases. Dust choked the air. And everywhere, papers and books crammed in boxes, all marked with the same red paint. The same letter.

The water fountain is dry. Jay clenches her jaw, and air shoots out of her nostrils in tortured bursts. Fourteen floors—twenty-eight small flights of steps. A quick glance to the glass doors of the old office space: the glass doors are open slightly, one large crack running down the right side. Beyond lies empty office space. Jay walks through the doors into the reception area. The silence is profound. As she makes her way down the narrow hall, Jay marvels at how stripped and spare it all is. No boxes or books anywhere, no furniture, no light fixtures. She moves through bands of muted light and shadow—even the blinds were removed. As she passes each office, she glances at the sky. At the thinnest end of the building is her little nook. It’s not really an office, just a space made out of bookcases and file cabinets. Jay stops before the opening. Her desk is gone, but two thick indentations mark the carpet where it once rested. She steps in and runs the toe of her shoe along the groove, then turns to the bookcase, placing her back to the window.

I packed my box in minutes, then sat on the desk and pulled the name tag off. It stuck to my fingers as I held it to the light. What did this red mark mean? As I lowered it, a movement caught my eye. I glanced out the window.

She swivels around and stares at out the window. Five years ago, clouds had reflected off glass buildings, cold and clean.

The sun shifted, and light threw red reflections across the glass. I watched the color intensify in waves—red sunset in midday. And then . . . “I saw,” Jay says, although the words mean nothing. She still can’t remember. “I saw.”

That’s when I realized what it was. What I had become.

Jay imagines herself five years ago, suspended in cold air, mouth open and slack, eyes huge with the sleepy pull of the clouds as they drift from left to right. She imagines pulling the layer of past over the present, moving one gray sky onto another, matching the clouds one by one . . .

I saw I don’t remember the name remember remember

But she cannot, and there is nothing more on the paper to help. The last sentence ends in an illegible scrawl of repeated pencil marks, smudged beyond recognition. She squints at the last word, larger than the rest, in the darkening light, then frowns. The letters are barely distinguishable, but still. It looks like her name. Jay rubs her eyes. She has no idea what happened that last afternoon. But does it really matter? Will it change anything? She came here for an epiphany, for understanding and resolution. There is none. She has a new life now. Everything else is trash. It will only drag her down if she clings to it. She crumples the fragment into a ball and throws it against the window with a papery ping. Her eyes continue up to the top of the frame. A wet red line oozes down the glass. Everything fades and falls away, except for the line, suspended between her and the sky. It grows thicker as it descends, as if an invisible hand is marking where she stands. Another line joins it, and a third. The buzz of blood and fear nips at the back of her neck and down her spine, until her body flushes it out in a thin stream of urine. Behind the red line, the horizon grins wide, hiccups, then splits. “I knew,” Jay says. “I knew.” Where the sky has stopped short at the edges of the horizon, hundreds of cloud-like creatures blossom and spill forth like sea anemones expanding to catch the currents. One cloud darts forward shockingly fast. The blunt end expands. Ropey spirals of wet flesh unfurl and catch the rotting ruins, suckling them up. “Were you waiting for me?” The words barely pass her lips. Jay sees giant chunks of buildings work their way through the tubes into churning pockets. Sides bulge outward; bodies expand and adjust. They fan out across the island. The largest stretches leisurely and shoots out toward the building. “Yes,” Jay says to the floating beast, “I think you were.” Red explodes across the glass. Jay leaps back into the hall. Moving in slow strides toward her are figures in white biohazard suits. She backs up into the final office, all the way to its very end, to the prow of the building; she’s trapped. The window is painted shut. Below she sees more men in suits move an undulating hose back and forth. Red bursts forth from it like fire, dancing intricately around the coils, forming the mark they once had five years ago. “Stop! I’m still in here!” She pounds on the window, but they can’t hear. Above, the creature pulses, and tiny veins of lightning run down its sides. Something slides around inside the mass, bending the gray flesh without breaking: the tip of the old clock tower. She punches the glass, ignoring the blood and pain. “Turn her around!” Figures grab her from both sides and pin her arms against the walls, while a third holds up a clipboard. An electric voice pours out of a black faceplate. “Is this you?” He thrusts the clipboard into her face. One thick finger points at a word on the page. “No.” Her voice is firm over the rising wind, with only a tinge of panic. They will listen to reason, she tells herself—they have to. “That’s not my name, there’s been a mistake. Please get me out of here.” “I didn’t ask if this was your name. You don’t have one! This is you, right?” “No! That isn’t me. I told you. I have a name!” “What are you, then?” The man raises his voice. “Come on! I don’t got all day—tell me what you are! What’s your ‘name’? Jay’s face hardens. “My name is—my name—”

I’m writing this down because I’m starting to forget, I may need to remember someday.

Her name. She cannot remember her name. “My name is Jay?” she asks. “Hey, wadda ya know? That’s what this says.” Even with the creature growling outside, she hears their laughter float through the room. “She’s the last of the trash, boys—let’s do it.” Someone steps forward with a small machine and presses it against her right arm. Shafts of metal tear through the bone and flesh, impaling her to the stone wall. Her head snaps back against the glass, and the window finally breaks. Too late. Gloved hands rip open her blouse, and another machine appears. Thin lines of light embroider her skin, searing through the flesh. Someone is screaming—is it her? “Yeah, she won’t escape this time.” More laughter. The entire building shudders. Everyone falls silent and looks up at the ceiling. From above, there is a crackling, then a thunderous roar of ripping stone and metal. “It’s started—everyone out!” The figures grab their equipment, jostling with each other to be the first from the room. “Why?” Her howl bounces off their backs. “Why are you doing this? What’s happening?” From above a second wave of destruction pounds down through the building. The man with the clipboard looks back at her but doesn’t stop moving for the door. “Nothing personal, lady. I’m just the garbage man.” He turns and runs. Vibrations burrow deep in her bones—they travel up from the stone and through the metal pins. Bits of ceiling break away. With a waterfall of sound, everything around her rises. Something smashes against her side, then rips away. Jay no longer feels her right arm. She no longer feels. She stares up into the sky. There is no sky, only the pulsing gray. Membrane and ridges curl back to reveal a mouth as wide and long as her blood-stained eyes can see. “This isn’t my name.” She wants to point to the mark but cannot move. “I’m Jay. I’m Jay—” She lets out a small sob, almost a laugh, as the weight of her name drags it downward. It seeps through the skin, nestles into her soul. Jay is a letter. It is the mark. It is not her name. The gray sky inhales, and she rises. Jay is a traveler now, squeezed through tubes and shunted from one contraction to the next. Shapes flood her eyes and graze her skin: bones, granite faces, bits of carved railing and brass fixtures. Trash. Flashes of light ripple across her vision—the gray membranes holding her become translucent as they rise. Below, she sees another creature move in to finish the job. It spreads great sails of skin and strands of flesh as it rides an unseen current. Jay would sigh at the terrible beauty of it if she were able to breathe. Now they skim in silence over the top of the massive wall. The rest of the city appears, healthy and alive. Jay’s severed right arm lies slightly below her—spires of steel sift between the fingers. She sees the city, a slow-moving river of rooftop gardens and secret alcoves, silver windows and neon smears, resting like the body of a lover, safe in sleep. For now. One calm moment of beauty, worth the price of Jay’s pain. The creature tilts. Trash rumbles about her as Jay is thrust forward through hooked membranes. Mucus uncoils from her throat. Everything shifts. Jay plummets into darkness like a blood-tipped comet, the remnants of the building her silky-stoned tail. Nothing is left behind.

My name— “What are you looking for?” Jay looks up at the sound of the boy’s voice. She is unaccustomed to being spoken to, unaccustomed to anything other than the sound of her hand sifting, sorting, pushing aside, and breaking. She pulls a cardboard box to her side, and opens her mouth. But the words fail her, as always. If she could just find the fragment, she might remember what to say . . . The boy steps back and watches as Jay shoves her hair back from her face and stares into the valley. Jumbles of skyscrapers fill deep pockets in the land, separated only by occasional trickles of rivers and accidental bridges. Up where they are, blind horses canter down cracked streets with deformed dogs nipping at their sides. Here, potter’s fields and wooden shanties cling despondently to each other, and the people do the same. Perhaps they are afraid if they let go, they will drift away. From where she stands, she sees no difference between the brown of earth or sky. There is no up or down in the universe’s midden. Jay and the boy both crouch as a wind rises. Heaps of trash stir and hitch around them, great stinking piles of garbage—old toys and dishes, broken lamps, bits of magazines, clothes. It is their history. It is everything they ever jettisoned in life, before life jettisoned them. Her box is full of paper. She reaches inside with long, dirty fingers. They curl around like dark worms. Papers crumble. If she could only find a fragment, a piece, a certain word . . . She doesn’t remember. She only remembers the wind and the search, and that sometimes the sky will open up and vomit more broken memories across the land. “What’s your name?” My name— The boy is speaking again. She tries, tries to mold the feelings up out of that festering sore in her chest, to trick it from the darkness in her mind. Her fingers creep, searching for inky triggers. But they find nothing, and the only word that comes out is the only word she knows. It cracks open her mouth and hovers before them, then floats away in the filthy wind, nothing more than what it is—which is everything around it, everything she has ever been. “Jetsam.”

Livia Llewellyn is a writer of horror, dark fantasy, and erotica. A graduate of Clarion 2006, her fiction has appeared in ChiZine, Subterranean, Sybil’s Garage, PseudoPod, Apex Magazine, Postscripts, The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, and numerous anthologies. Her first collection of short fiction —Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors—was published in 2011 by Lethe Press, and was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Collection. You can find her online at liviallewellyn.com. No Breather in the World But Thee Jeff VanderMeer

The cook didn’t like that the eyes of the dead fish shifted to stare at him as he cut their heads off. The cook’s assistant, who was also his lover, didn’t like that he woke to find just a sack of bloody bones on the bed beside him. “It’s starting again,” he gasped, just moments before a huge, black, birdlike creature carried him off, screaming. The child playing on the grounds outside the mansion did not at first know what she was seeing, but realized it was awful. “It’s just like last year,” she said to her imaginary friend, but her imaginary friend was dead. She ran for the front door, but the ghost of her imaginary friend, now large and ravenous and wormlike, swallowed her up before she had taken ten steps across the writhing grass. From a third floor window, the lady of the house watched the girl vanish into the ground, the struggling man become an indecipherable dot in the sky. Then nothing happened for a time, and she said to the dust, to her long-dead husband, to the disappeared daughter, to the doctor who now lived somewhere in the walls: “Perhaps it’s not happening again. Perhaps it’s not like last year.” Then she spied the disjointed red crocodile walking backwards across the lawn: a smear of wet crimson against the unbearable green of the finger-like grass. The creature’s oddly bent legs spasmed and trembled as it lurched ahead. No, not a crocodile but a bloody sack of human flesh and bones crawling toward the river at the edge of the property. Was it someone she knew? Of course it was someone she knew. An immense shadow began to grow around the unfortunate person like a black pool of blood. This puzzled her, until she realized some vast creature was plummeting down from an immense height toward the lawn. Raw misshapen pieces of the behemoth began to rain down, outliers of the body itself. Within seconds, it would descend, whole. The crawling bag of bones redoubled its efforts, seeming aware of the danger, frantic to avoid being caught in that impact. Now the lady of the house could not contain her fear any longer. She turned and ran, intending to flee down the stairs and seek shelter in the basement. But something wide and white and cut through with teeth reared up out of the darkness and bit her in half, and then quarters, and then eighths, before she could do more than blink, blink rapidly, and then lie still, the image of the crawling man still with her. For a while. In the basement, waiting for the lady’s return, a furiously scribbling man sat at a desk. He did not look up once; beyond the candlelight things lurked. As his mistress fell to pieces above him, the man was writing: Time is passing oddly. I feel as if I am sharing my shadow with many other people. If I look too closely at the cracks in the wall, I fear I will discover they are actually doors or mouths. There’s something continually flitting beyond the corner of my eye. Something she tells me that I don’t want to remember. Flit. Flit . . . No. Tilt. Tilt, not flit. Tilt. He stopped for a moment to restore his nerve because a certain mania had entered his pen . . . and he didn’t know who he was writing to. The child? The doctor? God? Something white and terrible waited in the shadows, its movements like the fevered wing-beats of a hundred panicked thrushes crushed into the semblance of a body. With an effort, he continued: The tilt is a gap. The gap is the cracks becoming corridors when I look away, and yet there is no way out. This ends well only if I can be in two places at once. But if other people are using my shadow, isn’t that a kind of door as well? Can I use my own shadow as a window? Can I escape?

A mighty crash and thud shook the mansion, as if something enormous had landed on the lawn. Dust and debris cascaded down on the man writing. A distant rattling cry came that did not bear thinking about. He looked up from his work for a second, thought, It’s happening again, just like the doctor warned, but continued writing, as if the words might be the spell to undo it all. . . . or is it just an inkling? Inklings are like questions that haven’t been answered yet: by the time we ask them, we’re being swallowed by the doors they open. And all that’s left at the end, after the question’s answered, is the shadow, haunting us. The man looked up one more time, and now his own pale shadow leered up and curled monstrous across the wall, the desk, the candle, and the rictus of his face. “It’s just an inkling, an inkling!” he screamed, but still his own pale shadow took him, teeth glittering cold in the chilly room in the bowels of the mansion where no other thing stirred, or should have stirred, and yet sometimes did. No words, soothed the shadow, as if it made a difference. No words. I’m happening again. I’ll always happen again. But the shadow was him, and he could not tell where his writing ended and the shadow began. On the first floor, the maid had fallen to her knees at the impact of the monster from above hitting the lawn. Now it tore into the grass as it bounded forward. It hit the side of the mansion like a battering ram so that the chandeliers cascaded and crashed all around like brittle glass wedding cakes, shards splintering across the floor and beads rolling with a heavy clunk under chairs and sofas. The thing shrieked out words in a language that sounded like dead leaves being stuffed into a gurgling fresh-cut throat. But she kept her grip on the shotgun she had taken from the study cabinet. “It won’t be like last year,” she shouted, although “last year” was something horribly vague in her memory. “It’s too soon!” She shouted it to the house, to the lady of the house, to the man in the basement who had come to document everything the doctor had wanted to do, a very long time ago. I will not blame the child. Again the monster smashed up against the mansion. Unpleasant chortles and meaty sounds smashed down through her ears, tightened around her heart, her lungs. She stood with an effort and headed back to the study. The study window was occluded by a huge, misshapen blue-green eye ridged with dark red. The monster. She brought the shotgun to her shoulder, braced for the recoil, and fired. The monster blinked and bellowed but the shots did not fall hot into its corona. Instead, the shotgun barrel curled around to sneer at her. A flash of white. From behind, something wet and unpleasant slapped her head from her neck. For longer than she would have thought, as her head rolled across the suddenly slippery floor, the maid saw the eye and the great bulk behind it withdraw from the window, and then, for a moment, the searing blue sky beyond and a black tower around which flew hideous bird-like shapes. “It’s different than before,” she wanted to say—to the butler, to the lady of the house, to the young writer in the basement who had become her lover—but that impulse soon faded, along with everything else. Earlier that day, the maid had argued with the butler, for the butler had seen the eyes of the dead fish move while in the kitchen and knew better than to fight. He had retreated to the huge coffin abandoned near the huge back doors to the mansion when the lady of the house had decided on the mercy of cremation for her husband instead. To either side lay the twin cousins, age twelve, all three waiting for it to be over. “Surely it will be over soon,” one twin whispered into the watchful silence. “It was over last year very quickly,” the other twin said in a hopeful tone. But neither twin could tell the butler exactly what they thought had happened last year. The butler knew, and had avoided the doctor ever since, but it made no difference now. As they lay there, the coffin expanded into a limitless night, and at the edges grew terrifying fangs until the coffin was a gigantic mouth, forever contracting until the fangs were too sharply close. The butler lost his nerve, and though he told the twins to close their tear-streaked eyes as he prepared to escape, still they saw all that happened next. As one they burst from the coffin—and through the back doors of the mansion, seeking the grass, the limitless sky, the verdant forest beyond. But the monster lay in wait, had opened its huge mouth to cover the door, and they in their headlong rush were crunched down, heads pulped, before even one of them could do more than think, “It’s much, much worse than before.” The doctor received tell-tale glimmers of the butler’s demise from his secret compartment in the walls at the heart of the mansion. Skilled in both medicine and the arcane arts, he had spent a year of disturbing visions, secret guilt, and hysterical mania building a place of mirrors meant to repel the uncanny, breaking almost every piece of glass in the house to capture the shards and position them with glue and nail. Each mirror piece reflected some fragment of another, so that from all sides, using cunning angles, he could glimpse moments of what was happening elsewhere. The doctor saw a hint of the cook turned to quivering meat, a scintilla of the cook’s lover carried off, a suggestion of the girl betrayed on the lawn, and all of the rest. Now he stood quite silent and still in his narrow chamber of bright fragments, lit by a lantern, sweat dribbling down his face, arms, and chest. Many quick-darting thoughts passed through the doctor’s mind, reflected in the rapid blinking of his eyes. The flow of these thoughts was interrupted only by the continued siege of the mansion by the monster outside. Each lurch changed his focus. Did I make the pieces small enough? Did I make it impossible for them to see me, or do they see all of me now? Why would this happen to me who did nothing out of sequence or step? No one should endure this, and yet almost all of them are dead and they did nothing except the writer who carried on with both the maid and the lady of the house, but how would this concern it? How I wish I had never used a bone saw or performed surgery. It makes this all so much worse because [lurch] She was kinder than anyone I knew to tell me what to expect, that poor child, and perhaps I should have indulged her about her friend but I am a man of science too and how could I and now I wonder if her friend was indeed a manifestation or simply a terror in her mind and that I should have ergo ego ego . . . should have conducted an exorcism while I could rather than recommend a psychiatrist a séance to her mother but her mother was so nice to me and so concerned and there was no way to tell that creating a circle might [lurch] Was that a sound? Was that a noise other than whatever is outside? How can I tell? I cannot tell a sound beyond that sound. How hellish it is to be trapped within one’s mind for even an instant without recourse to another person. How like a hell and all the thoughts that come pouring out and [lurch] Be composed. Be composed. You have planned well. The glass will hold. The glass is good. Oh how now I would give for just a glimpse or touch of my beloved, thigh, face, feet. To be in her embrace, and yet this is selfish selfish selfish. [lurch] Is the beast closer? A surgical cut, across the throat, from any of these shards, would be quick, painless, without guilt. No one would blame me for that. No one would blame me for that. No one left to. Oh that day we all spent on the lawn, that day glorious and sun-soaked before it began, and how could I ever give up hope of that again. Let that be what makes me strong. Do I deserve to? Do I deserve? Did I feed it? Did encourage it? [lurch] Fear that brings sickness Fear that brings sorrow. Fear that inhabits the smallest places. Fear that undoes me. Fear that makes me ill. Oh my chest. Oh my stomach. No lurch disrupted the doctor’s thoughts next. Instead, the white worm of a creature embedded inside of him so many months ago while he slept had awakened, drawn by the cries of the monster outside. As it crunched through tissue and organs, soon there was nothing larger than a fragment of the doctor left, and every single fragment of mirror covered in its entirety with blood, so that his once blazing light chamber was now the darkest place in the mansion. Early in the process, the doctor felt a fierce and annihilating joy that made him shout his ecstasy to the heavens. Is that you, my imaginary friend? Late in the process, he managed to whisper, “Where am I?” But he knew where he was, and then he knew no more. The doctor’s screams—amplified from his hiding place by the vents, the dumbwaiter, the floorboards, the very pores of the walls—seemed to the lady’s older daughter, kneeling beside a chimney on the roof, to emanate from a mansion in agony. She had chosen this vantage to observe the monster and the growth of the tower. Long ago she had been an amateur biologist familiar with certain types of animal mimicry. Now she crouched with a small telescope aimed at the tower. She could no longer force herself to observe the monster. The stench of it wafted up and made her feel as if she were being smothered in maggot-covered meat no matter how she tried to unsee the atrocity of its form. Using the telescope was akin to using the microscope in her make-shift laboratory to examine cells from the strange grass of the lawn: a way to know the truth of things, no matter how uncomfortable. The telescope confirmed that it was all happening again, although only the accounts of others from that time told her anything, really. She had avoided thinking about the implications of her own notes from last year, which were incomprehensible and toward the end written in blood: center of the shadow near the marrow might be a door a door a door that in the white shadow there comes a presence that is made of the center of the door that in the window reflects mimics a wall a room but if we were to touch would recoil would we recoil from that the tiny white worm inches and inches cross the floor watch it carefully resurrecting, this extraction is extracted.

At the far edge of the lawn, the tower had grown pendulous and resembled less a tower now than the upper half of some thick serpent or centipede. It had been birthed by the monster, which had planted a huge, glistening white egg in the crater created by its impact. The tower curved and shook from side to side now while the ragged bird-things circled it, cawing. The scientist also followed the cook’s efforts to reach the stream; with the telescope his blunt visage was still recognizable despite the awful softness of his skull. Coming from the tower on his left, the bird-things swooped down at times to tear flesh and gristle from him, returning to toss it onto the top of the tower. Somehow, his excruciating journey seemed important, but the scientist did not know why. She knew only what the writer and doctor had speculated, for she had not been part of the circle. “You did this while I slept?” she had said, enraged that they had taken such a risk. Then retreated to her experiments to keep at bay the feelings of depression and helplessness that ever since threatened to engulf her. Below, the monster attacked the mansion again and the mansion screamed and she made observations of a scientific nature to calm her nerves. She dispassionately noted, too, the way the forest to all sides seemed thicker, more impenetrable, and the sky brighter than ever before, and took grim delight in her detachment in recording that “long, fleshy arms have begun to sprout from the sides of the tower.” As she watched, these arms began to snatch the bird-things from the sky and toss them into a gaping pink opening near the top of the tower. “It is feeding itself to grow even larger,” she observed. “And it is now obvious that it is not a tower. I do not believe it is a tower. I do not believe it is a tower.” She had to say it three times to truly believe it. She had no notepad to record these thoughts, and even when she braced her arm against her knee, the telescope shook a little. Now the tower sang to the monster battering the mansion, and the monster seemed unable to resist the melody. The singing intensified and the scientist wished she had cotton to stuff in her ears, for the song was so sweet and light and uplifting that it was like an atrocity in that place, at that time. And especially now against the extreme quiet of the mansion, for the screams had stopped. Finally. “It’s nothing like last year.” The monster, swaying in a drunken fashion, came closer and closer to the tower, trying to break away, unable to break away from its song. Until, finally, within the unbroken circle of fact that was the telescope’s lens, the indescribable beast curled up at the base of the tower. The tower was cooing now, almost as if in reassurance, and the scientist’s fascination at this muffled her terror . . . even though she could hear wet, thick sounds on the stairwell that led to the roof . . . and a snuffling at the locked door directly behind her. The tower, still cooing, stretched impossibly tall, lunging up into a sky beginning to bruise in anticipation of dusk. It leaned over to contemplate the monster below with something the scientist thought might be affection. With incredible speed and velocity, it dove down to pierce the monster’s brain. The monster flailed and brought its legs up to struggle, to push out the dagger of the tower, but soon this effort became half-hearted, then ceased altogether. A flow of gold-and-emerald globules rose up through the tower’s darkness from the monster. The farther these globules rose, the more transparent they became, until the tower had assimilated them entirely and was as dark as before. The monster lay husked. The tower grew taller and wider. The mansion beneath the scientist grew spongy and porous, and a kind of heartbeat began to pulse through its many chambers. But the scientist observed none of the things. The tower’s song and the piercing of the monster’s brain had pierced the telescope, too. The telescope, grown strange and feral and querulous, had punctured her eye on its way to her brain, and as she lay there and the tower ate the monster, so too the telescope made a meal of her. Satisfied, the white worm behind the door retreated. Dusk came over the land. An impossibly large, impossibly purple-tinged moon sent out a blinding half- light across the wandering grass, the mansion, and the tower. The cook had finally reached the lip of the river bank, and in some instinctual way recognized this small victory, even though the remains of his head were twisted above by happenstance to look back across the lawn. The mansion had become watchful and its upper windows gleamed like eyes. The corners of the mansion had become rounded so that it squatted on powerful haunches, poised to spring forward on four thick legs. The cook was unsurprised: he had argued for months that the mansion had been colonized by something below it, rising up, and the walls had begun to even seem to breathe a little. But they had laughed at him. “It’s like last year,” he said, although he could not really remember last year . . . or why the fish had looked so strange. At a certain hour, the tower began to stride toward the mansion, and the two joined in a titanic battle that split the air with unearthly shrieks: solid bulk against twisty strength. Around the two combatants, their tread shaking the ground, the grass rippled with phosphorescence and from the forests beyond came the distant calls of other mighty beasts. The remains of the cook found no horror in the scene. The cook was beyond horror, all fast-evaporating thought focused on the river that had been the site of his happiest memory—a nighttime rendezvous with his lover. As they lay beside each other afterwards, the contented murmur in his ear of a line of a poem. “No other breather. . . .” This memory tainted only by the pain of remembering his lover’s reaction when he had slid into bed that last time, after having been so reduced by the white worm that had sprung at him from the walls of the kitchen. So he slid and pushed, still hopeful, losing more flesh and tissue and bone fragments, down the bank of the river, and by an effort of will he managed to whip his head around to face the water. There, through his one good eye, the cook saw his lover and the little girl and the lady of the house and the doctor and the maid and the butler, the lady’s two young cousins, and the scientist . . . they lay at rest at the bottom of the river. Waiting with open, sightless eyes. He had a sudden recollection of them all sitting around a table, holding hands, and what came after, but then it was gone gone gone gone, and he was sliding down into his lover’s embrace. The feel of the water was such a balm, such a release that it felt like the most blissful moment of his entire life, and any thought of returning home, of reaching home, vanished into the water with him. Behind him, under stars forever strange, the tower and the mansion fought on.

Jeff VanderMeer recently signed a three-book, six-figure deal with Farrar, Straus & Giroux. His novels have made the year's best lists of the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and he is the recipient of both an NEA-funded Florida Individual Writers' Fellowship and Travel Grant. VanderMeer is a three-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, twelve-time finalist, and has been a finalist for the Nebula, Hugo, Philip K. Dick, and Shirley Jackson Awards, among others. His latest short story collection is The Third Bear (2010). He also regularly reviews books for the New York Times Book Review, the Guardian, Los Angeles Times Book Review, and the Washington Post. He has lectured at MIT, the Library of Congress, and many other institutions. He serves as the co-director of Shared Worlds, a unique teen SF/F writing camp located at Wofford College in South Carolina. The H Word: “The F Bomb” R.J. Sevin

I write this missive from the ruins of December 21, 2012, which came with blood and fire upon the heels of not one but two Raptures. I write to you from the propane- warmed heart of my Y2K shelter, where my fridge is stocked with Tang and canned juice, my shelved piled high with Maruchan ramen and bulging bags of Malt-O- Meal. The stock market has crashed: the dollar is worthless. The recently dead are walking the streets with food in their teeth, and we’re what’s for dinner. It is as we have always feared: the world has ended. Before we discuss the end of all things and why we crave it, I want to talk a bit about fear itself. The two are connected, you see: I fear—you fear. Fear motivates us. It debilitates us. It freezes us in our tracks; it sends us running. It makes us do stupid things. We use it against others and we are controlled by it, each of us, every single day. What do you fear? I fear all sorts of things. Same as you—sudden accidents, sudden deaths. Injuries. Terminal illness. Someone smashing into your house at three in the morning, and you’ve only just gotten to sleep because you and your significant other were fighting again, and you see a shadow and there’s a flash maybe, and then you’re nothing. Or worse: you see that flash and hear the blast, and it’s the back of your kid’s head that takes the shot instead of your stomach. Her pigtails twitch, her baby-blues go this way and that, and her face turns inside out. She hits the ground like a ragdoll with a rumpled fold of meat and hair for a head. One of her teeth is stuck to your cheek, and then the guy gut-shoots you and rapes and kills your wife on the floor beside you while you bleed out. And then you’re nothing. Now, I know—that’s an extreme example. It’s not likely to happen to you at all. No way. But: The vehicle jerking into your lane: nothing. The static charge when you touch the plastic gas tank brimming with noxious amber fluid: nothing. The sudden hot tightness in your chest during sex: nothing. The slip getting into the shower: nothing. The errant blood-clot racing through your brain while you’re driving your family to the mall: all gone. Me, personally—I fear becoming ill and dying before I get to see my son grow up. That shit scares me. What also scares me: raising a son. Shaping the fucking life of a human being who then has to go out into the world and figure out all this shit. I fear losing my son. I fear losing my wife. I fear one of our rare date nights becoming the night on which our son becomes an orphan. I fear the moment when I learn that my mother has died. What about you? Seriously—think about it for a second. Get yourself worked up. Roll it around on your tongue and taste it. Fear is everywhere and in all things. It is the thing that unites us. You and I pretty much fear the exact same thing, right down to those dark little fears that crawl about in the middle of the night when you’re trying to get to sleep and it’s almost four—the nasty little private fears we never admit to anyone. Tornados terrify me. As in, I have tornado nightmares on a semi-regular basis, and they are horrifying. Tornados and cancer and getting shot in the head and car accidents and being decapitated by a maniac with a machete. One fear, however, reigns above all: the bomb. I was a very sharp, aware ten-year-old in 1985. I watched Nightline every night, network news daily. Sixty Fucking Minutes. Cable brought an onslaught of boobs and violence and twenty-four hour music videos and news. Loved the news, and followed all that Cold War business like religion. It didn’t help that my mom grew up in the fifties and was traumatized by the Cuban Missile Crisis as a young woman. Because of this, the motherfucking atomic bomb glows white hot at the center of my fears. I had nightmares for days after reading Alas, Babylon. I fear that flash in the distance—maybe it blinds me, maybe it doesn’t, but then there’s the rumbling, and it grows and grows and then everything around me is bursting into flames and I’m trying to hold my family, trying to say something to them, and then we’re on fire and our lungs boil and then we’re nothing. Deconstructed, our varied individual fears boil down to the same thing: fear of losing control, fear of things falling apart. The individual fears personal apocalypse. Society fears Apocalypse. See, we fear the sweeping upheaval of the infrastructure of our lives—but, on some level, we also crave it. We’ve grown sick of this world and the stream of injustices and indignities it vomits out on a daily basis, and we want to see it toppled, laid to waste. And rebuilt. This craving, this need to conquer our ultimate fear by embracing it, can even cloud our judgment. Four examples from within our own dark little corner: George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Stephen King’s The Stand. Robert McCammon’s Swan Song. The Walking Dead. Most Romero fans rank Dawn as their favorite of his films, and Stephen King has lamented that, for many of his Constant Readers, he may as well have have died after writing The Stand—to “Stand-fans,” nothing he’s done since will ever compare. Good luck finding copies of Baal, Stinger, The Night Boat, or any other early McCammon at your nearest B&N, but they have at least one copy of Swan Song in stock at all times. The Walking Dead is the most popular show on TV. Is The Walking Dead the best show on television? Hardly—you can probably point to four TV dramas that leave AMC’s zombie opera looking directionless, muddled, and occasionally laughable (it’s all three). Swan Song, a novel that I’ve always considered to be, at best, an entertaining but ultimately shallow rip-off of The Stand, is not McCammon’s finest novel—readers will point to his later work instead. I cherish memories of reading The Stand for the first time, but King has written tighter, better novels—The Dead Zone, his follow-up to the sprawling tale of Stu, Fran, Larry, and that Walkin’ Dude, is but one example. Dawn of the Dead is a masterpiece, but Romero’s somber vampire thriller, Martin, is the finer film. No—these works are not popular because they are masterworks (though some of them are). They have become indelible because they tap our shared apocalyptic fears. Constant-Readers love The Stand for the same reason that Bible-Thumpers obsess over Daniel and Revelation: they want front-row seats during the apocalypse, and they want that apocalypse to be manageable. Ditto for the popularity of zombies in fiction/movies/video games in general these days—it’s got nothing to do with zombies. It’s about imagining the coming upheaval and placing oneself at the center of it, not as victim but as survivor. It’s about fear—fear that drives us as individuals and as a culture—and it’s about conquering that fear, even superficially. Temporarily. Because it’s only temporary, you realize. Your fears will come home to roost, and whether or not the bombs fall from the sky or society crumbles in riot and ruin, your world will end within the next fifty or sixty years. You will know fear in those final, gasping moments leading up to your transition from something to nothing, and you will scream.

We at Nightmare Magazine like discussions. Please use the comments feature to give us your thoughts on whether the H brand is an albatross or worth holding on to. Print may be dead, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be old school and have a good, old-fashioned letters page.

R.J.Sevin is the co-editor of the Stoker-nominated anthology Corpse Blossoms and he currently edits Print Is Dead, the zombie-themed imprint from Creeping Hemlock Press. His nonfiction has appeared in Cemetery Dance, Dark Discoveries, Fear Zone, Famous Monsters of Filmland Online, and Tor.com. Artist Gallery: Daniel Karlsson

Artist Spotlight: Daniel Karlsson Julia Sevin

Daniel Karlsson is an autodidact illustrator living in Sweden who believes that “nothing is ever 100% pure/evil.” His pop surrealist and horror art, both digital and traditional, is primarily made for self-expression rather than income.

Daniel, if I’m understanding things correctly, you only rarely illustrate for income, yes? So most of the rather grotesque and even sexually twisted imagery we see in your portfolio is not just a visualization of someone else’s fiction or franchise, but rather a raw fruit of your own psyche. It’s largely pretty disturbing. What does this process do for you? And do you worry about being personally judged by your family, friends, coworkers?

Socially, I’m not always allowed to doubt or question other people’s idea of happiness, beauty, and normality— not without risk of alienating them—but through my art it’s possible for me to criticize, violate, and expose those things. It’s a way for me to communicate my emotions and thoughts without forcing anything upon anyone. It’s there for anyone to listen to, and if they understand or relate to it then there is a meaningful connection between us. I’m not worried about what people close to me think because I’m confident that most of my other traits disarm any worries my art might stir up.

Much of your work is sexually graphic, and not in a pleasant or positively erotic way. What has the reaction been to that? Is it comparable to horror art with regard to public judgment?

I’ve had many different reactions. Some people think it’s beautiful, some find it funny, and some think it’s disturbing and distasteful. If I look at the worst or/and strongest reactions I’ve ever gotten, then the majority of them are probably related to pieces that have some kind of sexual reference. Any reaction is better than no reaction at all, yet I tend to become a bit disappointed when people get angry or upset.

Additionally, your warped plays on pop culture, typically video game and cartoon characters, are discomfiting, to say the least. What is the purpose of integrating Megaman or Donald Duck into your work?

Taking something familiar that a lot of people can relate to, like Megaman or Donald Duck, is an easy way of establishing a connection and an interest with the audience. The hard part, but also the most fun, is to do something original and interesting with it. Some people have great skill and they produce great pop culture fan- art, but they don’t always take it to an interesting place, and a lot of the time it simply becomes reproduction.

Illustration is a side venture for you. What is your day job?

Technically I don’t have a day job, because I only work nights. I’m employed as a guard at a low security prison. I have been doing this for five years now. It’s not very stimulating and it’s certainly not great, but it pays the bills and has some perks.

You report having been rejected from art schools, but it’s clear to me that you didn’t need to be taught a thing. Reviewing your massive output from the past few years, your skills have consistently leveled up. How do you manage to produce so much in your spare time? How long does a typical piece take you to complete?

One of the perks of my day/night job is the long twelve- hour shifts. I’m basically paid to sit awake at night and just watch the place so, unless anything happens, I have a lot of time on my hands. I always bring my laptop and wacom-tablet to work, and I keep myself busy with those in order to stay awake. Also, longer shifts mean I work fewer shifts and have more days off, and that’s when I go to my studio and paint in traditional media. Combine all that with a lot of discipline, motivation and being somewhat of a social hermit, then you have an explanation for the high output. In regards to how long a piece takes to produce, it’s hard to say. Some pieces are done in a session or two, while some of the traditional pieces can take months.

In addition, your work has been featured in an exhibition, is that right? Can you tell us about it?

It was actually two exhibitions/shows during the course of two years. Both at the same gallery here in Stockholm. I went to the gallery and asked them if I could possibly have an exhibition there, and they said yes. They took a fee and a percentage of the sales, so it’s not a big scale event where some gallery found me and showcased me to the world. I wanted the experience and it motivated me to paint approximately eighty paintings in two years time, which was very good for me. I sold more than I had expected, but then again my expectations were low. The first show was just about the experience, so the paintings were kind of random in tone and subject. The second show had a theme and a direction, and I might have been trying to please the audience a bit too much. I’m considering having a third one eventually, in which I’ll just go full out and uncensored. Sort of a big middle finger to any rules or ideas of what sells, devoid of any sort of compromise.

You work in both digital painting and traditional painting media, correct? Do you have a preference?

Yes, that’s correct. I enjoy them both and don’t really have a preference. There are different perks to both media. I can experiment more easily with color and composition in the digital format, and it’s a lot faster. The biggest downside is that I don’t get a physical painting that I can sell or put in a gallery. Traditional media offers a lot more randomness, like drips and textures, that can lead to great and unexpected results. Sometimes I feel that if I can’t produce at the same level traditionally as I am producing digitally, then I’m cheating somehow. So, somewhere in me there is a deep rooted sense that traditional media is worth more than digital. But I know that that’s not true. Artists have always used whatever tools are available to produce the best results possible, and it’s stupid to let prestige get in the way of a great piece being realized.

Do you still draw ideas from fiction?

I draw inspiration from fiction all the time. Not so much clean-cut ideas, but small impressions that generate emotions that I later try to reproduce. I don’t read as much as I used to, so it’s hard to name any specific inspiring author. Most of my intake of fiction consists of video games, movies, and TV. The other day I saw a Belgian movie called Bullhead, in which there is a disturbing scene involving a young boy’s testicles getting smashed with rocks over and over again. I cringed and moaned when I saw that, and that’s the kind of feeling that I’d try to reproduce and capitalize on as a result of consuming fiction. Other artists I that I admire and find inspiring are Egon Schiele, Gustave Courbet and Anders Zorn. In the living section of inspirational artists I’d like to put James Jean, Ashley Wood and Mattias Snygg as some of the more important influences.

What are you working on right now?

Right now I have a commission for a digital piece, sort of a classical portrait but with a twist. Nothing too disturbing, really. I also have a several traditional pieces going. Some are more experimental in terms of color and brushwork, while others are more typically dark and weird with a more controlled and planned process. I like to switch between different ways of working as to avoid getting bored or too frustrated.

What’s your dream illustration job?

I’d love to do character design/concept art for video games. I remember watching a video of the artists behind Silent Hill 2 doing concept art for the Pyramid Head character and that filled me with awe and admiration. I could definitely see myself working in that type of environment.

Originally hailing from Northern California, Julia Sevin is a transplant flourishing in the fecund delta silts of New Orleans. Together with husband RJ Sevin, she owns and edits Creeping Hemlock Press, specializing in limited special editions of genre literature and, most recently, zombie novels. She is an autodidact pixelpusher who spends her days as the art director for a print brokerage, designing branding and print pieces for assorted political bigwigs, which makes her feel like an accomplice in the calculated plunder of America. Under the cover of darkness (like Batman in more ways than she can enumerate), she redeems herself through pro bono design, sordid illustration, and baking the world’s best pies. She is available for contract design/illustration, including book layouts and websites. See more of her work at juliasevin.com or follow her at facebook.com/juliasevindesign. Interview: Jonathan Maberry Lisa Morton

Phrases like “modern Renaissance man” or “the real deal” get overused in reference to writers, but both seem perfectly applicable to New York Times-bestselling author Jonathan Maberry. A martial arts expert and former bodyguard, Maberry has written fiction and nonfiction, novels, novellas and short stories, graphic novels, and even greeting cards (he was one of the first writers on the “Maxine” series of cards). He has created three successful horror series: the folklore-based Pine Deep trilogy that begins with Ghost Road Blues, the Joe Ledger books (including Patient Zero, Assassin’s Code, and the forthcoming Code Zero), and the Benny Imura zombie series for younger readers. His first book as editor, V Wars, was recently published, and his novella Strip Search is featured in the forthcoming anthology Limbus, Inc. He also travels tirelessly to promote his works, and this interview was conducted in a meeting room in the Seattle Convention Center during the 2013 Midwinter Conference of the American Library Association. Most writers build careers steadily, maybe starting with a novel or a string of short stories, but you seemed to burst fully formed onto the horror scene around 2007, with Ghost Road Blues and nonfiction books like The Cryptopedia.

There’s actually a secret history to that. First off, I’ve been writing professionally (not always full-time) since 1978, my second year of college. I started selling magazine feature articles then—I’ve done 1,200 of those and 3,000 columns. When I was teaching at Tempe University, I wrote textbooks for my classes and for other teachers’ classes. Around the year 2000 a friend of mine was starting a small press with some inheritance money, and because he was a lifelong friend I agreed to write four nonfiction books to help him get the company started. There were several results of that: one, I did three nonfiction books on martial arts for him, and then I wanted to do one that was a complete change of pace, because all my books up to that point had either been martial arts, safety awareness, self-defense, or something like that (I’ve been involved in jujitsu since I was a little boy). I decided to write a book on the folklore of vampires. It was called The Vampire Slayer’s Field Guide to the Undead. It was the only book I’ve ever written under a pen name—I wrote it under the name “Shane MacDougall.” The reason I used a pen name was that my publisher was afraid that martial arts readers would think I’d had a cerebral accident of some sort if I suddenly started writing about vampires. It turned out that book was substantially more successful than the other books combined, so it got me really interested in researching more and more about monsters. My grandmother, who was a spooky old broad, taught me when I was a little kid everything about monsters—she believed in a larger world, and she believed in everything. I don’t believe in everything. I believe in a lot of stuff, but not everything. So by the time I was eight she’d taught me how to read tarot cards and tea leaves; I knew about redcaps and hinkypunks before I’d ever seen a horror film, so I knew the folklore first. Knowing that, it’s not really surprising that I’d write a book on folklore . . . but the book was so well received that Shane MacDougall was getting invited to a lot of events that Jonathan Maberry was not. There was an acrimonious relationship developing between the two. The second thing that happened—unfortunately there was a falling out between myself and that publisher, and I never got paid for those books. As a result I went out and learned everything I could about the publishing industry. I knew a lot about magazines, but I didn’t know a lot about the book world because all my books up to that point had been college textbooks. So I was screwed over in that deal, but I took it as a learning experience rather than getting bitter about it. As a result now I know the business very, very well. The step from that to writing fiction. . .for the next couple of years, I was struggling to make an income— we’d hit a soft spot in the economy. My wife read an interview with Dean Koontz where he said his wife had worked for five years to earn the income and get health benefits while he stayed home and tried to build his career, and my wife offered me the same deal—she’d go back to work, pay the bills, get us health coverage, but I had to put in full days on my writing career. I was determined that she would not have to do this for very long. During that time, I did more research for another nonfiction book that I wanted to put out under my own name—that became Vampire Universe. I started complaining actually that I couldn’t find any novels with folklore backgrounds—most of them were Hollywood retreads of monsters. She said, “Stop bitching and write one,” so I wrote Ghost Road Blues. I just did it as an experiment to see if I had any talent for fiction, because I had never tried fiction before. And the book did very well —it won awards, it spawned a trilogy, and suddenly I was in the horror world. Part of the explosion of awareness came from winning the First Novel Award. Winning a Stoker is fantastic, but winning First Novel may be one of the most important Stokers you can win, because as much as I want to win for Best Novel one of these days, winning for First Novel indicates something about the potential of your career, and people turn and look at that. And my desire was to live up to those expectations, for them and for myself.

Did you intend Ghost Road Blues to be a trilogy from the start?

I did. The first draft was about a million pages. It was called Dark Harvest at the time. Right around the time I started reaching out to an agent, there was a book published called Dark Harvest, and then there was another book called Dark Harvest, and then there was a movie called Dark Harvest, so I went back to I think the twenty-eighth title choice, which was Ghost Road Blues. I knew it was going to be a trilogy, but what happened was: I wanted to pitch it as horror, but I happened at the time to run into Keith Clayton, who was an excellent editor over at Random House, and he read it, and as much as he liked it he said Random House would not allow him to buy a horror trilogy, because nobody was doing trilogies in horror—this was 2005, there weren’t many trilogies in horror, paranormal thrillers hadn’t blossomed yet. He said, “They won’t allow me to buy it, but here’s a tip: call it a ‘supernatural thriller,’ don’t call it horror.” Now, I’m dedicated to the word “horror,” and it felt like grief to me to change it. I didn’t change a word of the story, but we changed what it was called—it was the difference between not selling it or selling it to a small press, or selling it to a major for a really significant deal. It got me my agent and it got me my deal . . . but it’s horror as far as I’m concerned.

Your Pine Deep trilogy—Ghost Road Blues, Dead Man’s Song and Bad Moon Rising—are in rural settings and have something of the feel of folktales, whereas your later Joe Ledger series are techno-savvy thrillers. What caused that shift in setting and tone?

I’m a science geek, too. I’ve always liked the scientific background behind something. One of my favorite writers growing up was Richard Matheson, who I met when I was a teenager. His novel I Am Legend was the first novel in which hard science was used to tell a horror story. Granted, it’s not the first horror-science fiction crossover —we have Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde—but it’s the first one in which hard, believable science was used to explain it, and that book was landmark for me. Matheson gave me a copy of that when I was thirteen. My dream project if I ever write a screenplay is to write an accurate and authentic interpretation of that book and it’s never been done. The closest was the Vincent Price version, but even that wasn’t close enough. I read a lot of science, and to me it’s scarier if the horror is backed up by believable science because then it’s part of our world as opposed to something that’s so outré that it’s not a part of our world, it’s not connected to us. It’s not that I don’t like those other kinds of fictions— I read them. But for me as a writer, I want to tell something that would scare me. I’m not scared of supernatural monsters. I am frightened of a bacterial or bio-weapon that is misused, so I write what scares me.

The Pine Deep books received comparisons to Stephen King, especially in the way they used a small town and a large cast of characters. Was King an influence on you? Absolutely. First off, Salem’s Lot stands as my favorite vampire novel of all time. I love the book, and I recently re-read it and saw that there are quite a few mistakes in it, which I find charming because it was only his second novel and he was still working it out. Even though it has some flaws, it’s brilliant, and it does what I love, which is old-school monsters. I want my monsters mean, nasty and scary. I don’t like friendly monsters. I mean, I like Spike from Buffy . . . but if I’m writing something, I want the monster to be scary. I want the story to be about people fighting monsters. My favorite sub-genre is the American Gothic. The Haunting of Hill House is my all-time favorite horror novel. Salem’s Lot is American Gothic. Robert McCammon’s Mystery Walk is American Gothic. Ghost Story by Peter Straub is American Gothic. So when I decided I wanted to write a novel, I made a short list of novels in that sub-genre that I thought were not only beautiful novels, but also spoke to me, and I read them first as a reader, then read them four or five times as a writer, deconstructing how they were built. So I deconstructed Salem’s Lot—I storyboarded it out, I wrote the outline for it, I looked at the balance between dialogue and prose, I looked at where exposition came in, at how much exposition came through what went on as opposed to a big block of exposition, I looked for instances of hyperbole and allegory and metaphor, not just how the author used them, but when he used them. And I also looked at when they worked and when they didn’t. So I actually reverse-engineered the basic plan from those novels. By deconstructing them, I had a blueprint for what the American Gothic novel should look like in its base form. I also had a long list of things I absolutely did not want to do, because I don’t want to imitate. I don’t want to be the next Stephen King—I want to be Jonathan Maberry who appeals to the readers of Stephen King. I did meet Stephen King shortly after the Stokers. We met at the Edgar Awards. I sat down and talked with him, and with Tabby—wonderful folks—and he had been up for an award the same year. We were both up for the Stoker for novel of the year, and he won for Lisey’s Story. Shortly after that, he sent me a sympathy card—“So sorry for your loss. Much love, Stevie.” He was the one who pointed out that winning First Novel was more important to my career than winning Novel. And I see and agree with his point. I told him about how I’d deconstructed his novel, and he told me that if he ever teaches another novel course, he’s going to recommend that same process, because it takes you down to the nuts and bolts. It allows you write a good novel, but at the same time it keeps you from imitating. Your books are steeped in pop culture, be it references to scream queens Brinke Stevens and Debbie Rochon in Bad Moon Rising or the extensive knowledge of the Marvel universe on display in your graphic novels. Do you consciously try to expose yourself to a lot of pop culture?

I’m a total pop culture geek. I subscribed to Entertainment Weekly magazine from issue one. I love the in-jokes. I like the layers of what you know and how fun it can be to have those in-jokes built in. At the same time I have to make sure that they don’t interfere with the process of telling the story, because not everyone knows those references. But I happen to know Brinke Stevens, and Debbie Rochon I’d met at a couple of events. . .all of the people who appear in that book—Ken Foree, Tom Savini, Joe Bob Briggs, Stephen Susco and James Gunn —they’re all in the horror world. I’d met them at one event or another, and asked them if I could write them into the story as themselves, and they were all delighted with it. It was fun writing that story, because it’s based around an attack of vampires during a Halloween festival. Of course there are going to be celebrities at a Halloween festival. Did any of them beg you to kill them?

Actually, most of them were pretty adamant that I did not. But I did give each of them action scenes—they all get to kick a little ass. It was fun to have Tom Savini kill a vampire, because he’s just a badass little guy. He’s one of those guys that if the apocalypse happens, I’m pretty sure he’s going to get through it on general crankiness alone. He’s great.

You have a background in martial arts, and the Joe Ledger books feature some of the best descriptions around of fights (and have raised the bar on action in horror novels). Was being able to pack a horror novel with your own fighting skills one of the reasons for writing Patient Zero (the first Joe Ledger novel)?

It isn’t the reason I write them—it’s the reason martial arts is in them. I’m a fight scene snob. You can kill my interest in something really quickly with a bad fight scene. For example, the movie Taken, with Liam Neeson —the first two-thirds of it, the fight choreography is brilliant. It’s exactly the way a tall, middle-aged man would fight, because a tall, middle-aged man would fight differently than a tall young man. Then he starts dodging machine-gun bullets and it all falls apart. I’ve had forty- eight years in jujitsu and kenjutsu, I was a bodyguard, I was a bouncer, I was a martial arts instructor, I created self-defense programs for women, for the visually impaired, for the physically challenged, for kids, I was the Philadelphia D.A.’s office expert witness for murder cases involving martial arts, and also I ran a company called CopSafe, which taught arrest and control workshops to all levels of law enforcement, including SWAT. Jujitsu is all about physics. Physics will overcome brawn every time. So I draw all that in there. Everything that Joe Ledger does is possible, and a lot of that I have done, although I have not killed anyone. I have dented a few people. I also have quite a few friends in SWAT and in Special Forces, and after I write an action scene they usually vet it for me. Any technical errors that show up in gunplay are mine because I’m just not an experienced handgun expert. When I was a bodyguard, I carried a revolver and never pulled it. So there may be a few little technical errors there, but the hand-to-hand stuff —that’s all real.

When you’re asked to write something like The Wolfman movie novelization, do you feel like your own style is sometimes in conflict with the pre-existing material?

It was a funny thing that happened with that. First of all, the way that I got that project was that I’m sitting at home on a Saturday night, and I get a call from someone claiming to be the Vice President of Licensing for Universal Pictures. I thought I was being punked by one of my friends—I have friends who will do that sort of thing. It turned out that her assistant was one of my fans on Facebook, having read the Pine Deep novels, which have a werewolf in them. She asked me if I’d ever heard of The Wolf Man, and I said, “Really?” Then she asked me if I knew they were remaking it (which I actually didn’t know at the time) with Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins. I said, “That’s really cool,” and she said, “Would you be interested in possibly novelizing the script?” I had never done a novelization. Now, the weird thing is, I didn’t know that you don’t get to see even a rough cut of the movie. In fact, I didn’t see the movie until a week after the book was in stores. I saw five production stills—no, actually production sketches. You can’t just wrap a paragraph around a line from the script and call it a novel, so I asked them, “What do you expect me to do to get a story here?” And she said, “Well, you’re a novelist—write a novel.” I had never written a novel in the classic gothic style before, so I did. I did research into the era, everything from the economy to the styles to the foods and everything else. Did my research, and then wrote a gothic novel. Built a couple of motifs in there about the masks we wear, because he’s a Shakespearean actor, about the beast within, about the goddess of the hunt (because the moon is the symbol of the goddess of the hunt), and I wrote a gothic novel. I had fun with it. It was my first New York Times bestseller. It sold a gazillion copies, and it went on to win the Scribe Award for Best Movie Adaptation, which thoroughly floored me. I knew I was on the nomination list, but I thought it was kind of a token thing. . .and I won. It was stunning. I was so surprised. Now one of the things that happened—it’s kind of unfortunate for Universal but great for me—when they gave the press kits out, they included the novel in the press kit, and the critics hated the movie and loved the book. They kept saying in all of the reviews, “Don’t watch the movie—read the book.” That is a little unfair, because the movie’s not terrible. But in the edit, they simply went in the direction of the gore, and left behind some of the beautiful subtleties that were in David Self’s original script. They also did something else that appalls me as a geek: the makeup effects were Rick Baker —American Werewolf in London—and they CGI’ed over Rick Baker! It’s like putting a drop ceiling in the Sistine Chapel. Rick Baker?! It was the reason I would’ve gone to see that film.

Is it ever hard to switch gears between something like one of the Benny Imura young adult zombie novels and the more adult Joe Ledger books?

I have a trick for switching gears: I go to a different Starbuck’s. I call myself a “caffeine nomad.” I’ll go to one Starbuck’s, and they know which table I like, so if they know I’m coming in they’ll make sure my table is set aside—that’s nice. I usually work on one project in the morning, and then I’ll go to the gym or whatever, then I’ll go to another Starbuck’s in the afternoon and I’ll work a different project. But sometimes you don’t have that luxury—you finish one project, and bang, you’ve got to go right onto something else. The thing that’s the buffer zone—that allows me to change—is ten minutes out of each hour I do social media. I’ll do fifty minutes of writing and ten minutes of social media. You have to do the social media, and doing it in that orderly fashion allows me to get things done, but it’s also a great way to change direction.

Is part of the appeal of zombies that they allow authors to create heroes who can act out our secret fantasies?

Except in very rare cases, zombie stories are not about zombies. Warm Bodies is, yes, but it’s a zombie becoming human. And Scott Browne’s excellent Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament, but it’s deliberately a satire. But in the scary zombie stories, the zombies do not have a personality—unlike vampire stories, where the vampire has become the story (so much so that it’s no longer about the humans in the story—Bella’s family dynamic is far less interesting than Edward’s). As a result vampire fiction has stopped being scary, because the more you go into the monster, the less scary the monster is. It’s kind of like in monster movies—by the time you see the monster, it’s shifted from horror to thriller. Jaws is a horror movie up until you see the shark, then it’s a thriller. With zombies, we have a totally different thing: You never get inside the zombie’s head, except in very rare cases. The zombie is established as a massive, immediate shared threat. Every character is propelled into that, and as a result every character’s personal life is shattered, their personal affect is torn away, and they have to deal with this threat. Which means that the focus of our story is about people dealing with a problem . . . and that’s drama right there. We don’t tell stories about people having a good day; we tell stories about people having a terrible day, a day that will challenge them so they can rise above it. Even if you have a love story, it’s all about boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl crisis. It’s all about crisis, calamity, catastrophe, conundrum . . . a lot of “c” words. So the zombie stories allow us to tell stories of people in real crisis, and it’s one of the reasons it’s so easy to use zombie stories as metaphors for anything else—I can’t imagine any fear not being able to be told as a zombie story. It’s also why the genre will never die. We’re not rehashing George Romero; George Romero told his story. Max Brooks told his story. Joe McKinney told his story. I tell my stories . . . and they’re all different.

You’ve written more short stories than many of your fans might realize . . .

I have, but they’re not all in horror. I think the second short story I was asked to write was military science fiction, and this was even before the Joe Ledger novels. The invitation was just based on Ghost Road Blues, and I was like, “Really? Military science fiction?” So I did it. I did a historical zombie story—my first short story was for Kim Paffenroth’s History is Dead, which was a historical zombie anthology, and I did a comedy zombie story, “Pegleg and Paddy Save the World.” Since then, I’ve done steampunk short stories, I’ve done a weird western for John Joseph Adams—a weird west ghost story—I did an Auguste Dupin story for an anthology of Edgar Allan Poe-inspired stories using that character, I did an Oz story —it’s the first story I’ve ever written where nobody dies. It’s a charming little tale about a little girl winged monkey whose wings are too small, so she goes to a town to buy some traveling shoes, and they happen to be the silver slippers, but a damaged version of the silver slippers. I’ve done a Cthulhu story recently—it was a long-term dream of mine to write a Cthulhu story!—and just all sorts of things. So the reason most people don’t know about my short stories is they’re all over the place —detective stories, Sherlock Holmes stories . . . and I love it, because as a writer it’s an opportunity to stretch. I have a great dislike of writers who pigeonhole themselves; I think the writers are short shrifting themselves. When I was a kid, one of the things Richard Matheson said to me was, “A writer writes.” That’s the only definition that you should give yourself—you’re a writer. To tell the truth, it’s also one of the reasons I’m making money at this. Because people know they can come to me, and offer a project, and if I think the deal is right for me I’ll do it. It doesn’t matter if it’s outside my wheelhouse; a lot of other writers will say, “It’s not my kind of thing.” If somebody asked me to write a romance story, I’d write a romance story if I thought I could bring game to it. I just don’t like to accept the fact that a writer —any writer—will willingly accept a limitation. I just think that’s bad.

You also created and edited the anthology V Wars. Was it interesting editing other writers?

It was. And to be clear, I edit content—I do not edit grammar or spelling or anything else, because I’m a product of the Philadelphia school system and not their best example. But I edited content, and I loved it. That was a shared world thing; I created the concept, which was polar ice is melting and it releases a bacteria that triggers dormant genes, and those genes happen to be what originally caused vampirism. The first people who had that gene were hunted to extinction, in witch hunts and so forth, and now people are becoming vampires again, so it creates a race war and so on. I love the concept—it’s hard science, we got some good science in there, and I reached out to some of my favorite writers. Writers who I thought not that they’d all be able to write in this style, but writers whose styles were different. Nancy Holder, James A. Moore, John Everson, Scott Nicholson, Yvonne Navarro, Keith R.A. DeCandido and Gregory Frost—even though they’re all in horror and fantasy, they’re in no way alike. I love that vibe. I told them the set-up and then I just let them go. When they gave me their stories, we made some development changes or edits that kept it in line with what other people were writing. A couple of them kind of crossed the line into supernatural and we had to bring them back, because it’s not a supernatural kind of story. It’s really a nod to Richard Matheson—it’s science fiction about vampires. Some of these writers I was reading long before I considered writing my first horror stories. It’s a very humbling thing when you’re editing someone who inspired you to write in the first place. Scott Nicholson, for example—I love Scott’s writing, and he and Gary Braunbeck are probably the two modern writers whose work drew me into writing horror. I absolutely love both of their writing, and I wanted to be them—more so than I wanted to be Stephen King or Peter Straub. It was a real pleasure and an honor to do it, and the book came out beautifully. It’s being pitched to television right now, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed.

Is there a dream project for you?

Yeah, and it’s probably not what you would expect. I would love to write a literary novel about a writers’ colony—I’ve got one cooking in my head. I’ve got several dream projects: I want to write a good old-fashioned action-western, a Louis L’Amour-style western. I love westerns, and I would love to write one. My grandfather- in-law was a pulp fiction writer and he wrote westerns, as well as other things. I’d love to re-start the Doc Savage series, but as Doc Savage’s son or something. . .but I’ll never get the rights to do it. And probably one of the things that I most want to do is write a straight-up noir- mystery. I’m playing with it a little bit with an urban- fantasy character Sam Hunter, who I introduced originally in a short story and I liked the character. I wanted to do a novel—I didn’t quite have a novel in my head, but I had a lot of stories in my head. Then when Christopher Payne and Anne Petty asked me to do something for the first Limbus, Inc. book, I took one of my ideas and did a novella from that. It’s very noir, and it’s also smartass— I’ve been accused of being a smartass, and I have no counter-argument on that one—but also I’m going to be writing novellas on that character for the next two Limbus books. I’ve got eight short stories and novellas for that character in one- or two-sentence pitches in my head, so I want to write more of that character. It’s noir, and I love noir. Except for what I read for cover quotes, I probably read more detective fiction and police procedurals than anything else, including some that cross the line over into horror, like John Connolly. I love the scientific, methodical, but also dark and moody approach to solving crimes, so I want to do that. But I don’t think there isn’t a genre that I wouldn’t want to take a swing at just for fun. If I had the time, I’d do a thousand novels a year, not for the money but because I just want to play in all these different playgrounds.

Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of nonfiction books, award-winning prose writer, and Halloween expert whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” Her short fiction has appeared in dozens of anthologies and magazines, including The Mammoth Book of Dracula, Dark Delicacies, The Museum of Horrors, and Cemetery Dance, and in 2010 her first novel, The Castle of Los Angeles, received the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel. Recent books include the graphic novel Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Times (co-written with Rocky Wood, illustrated by Greg Chapman), and Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween. Forthcoming in 2013 are the novellas Summer’s End and Smog, and the novel Malediction. A lifelong Californian, she lives in North Hollywood, and can be found online at www.lisamorton.com. Author Spotlight: Molly Tanzer Lisa Nohealani Morton

“The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins” is a sort of eighteenth-century take on Lovecraftian horror. What sparked you to write a story combining the two?

Two things, mainly. I had watched Barry Lyndon, that old Kubrick film with Ryan O’Neal, and during the . . . let’s be diplomatic and say “less exciting” parts of the film (of which there are quite a few) I found myself contemplating what it might mean to combine the picaresque with necromancy. I find necromancy an entertaining profession, I love eighteenth century-style narratives, and I adore shady heroes, so it seemed a natural combination. So anyway, I had that in the back of my head when I happened to see that Innsmouth Free Press was putting out an anthology called Historical Lovecraft, and I still had a few weeks until the deadline. I can’t really explain it, but something just fell into place for me about the project when I thought about combining my former mess of ideas with Lovecraftian horror. Usually I’m not the kind of writer who has eureka-in-the-bathtub moments, but in this case, it really was.

You’ve recently released a collection of stories chronicling the peculiar histories of the Calipash family. Will readers discover anything more about the lives of Basil and Rosemary in the book? Can we look forward to more Calipash stories in the future?

A Pretty Mouth contains five Calipash stories. “The Infernal History” is reprinted there, as is “The Hour of the Tortoise,” which first appeared in The Book of Cthulhu II. The other three are originals (including the title piece, which is a short novel). When Cameron Pierce (my editor at Lazy Fascist Press) first contacted me after reading “The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins,” asking if I’d thought about writing more about the Calipash family, I pitched him the idea of doing a collection, with each of the stories being set during a different time period in English history. I had been watching a lot of Blackadder at the time. He had been, too, as it turned out, so he thought it was a swell idea. So, no, nothing directly new about Basil and Rosemary, just their past and future family members— though the stories do provide a broader perspective on those Infernal Twins. As to whether there will be more Calipash stories, very probably! I don’t have any planned right now, but I can’t imagine I’ll be able to go too long without my Lovecraftian horror/English lit fix . . .

“The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins” interlaces nameless Lovecraftian horror with a certain amount of sly humor. Do you find it difficult to mix horror and humor, or do you find the two go together naturally?

For me they go together very naturally indeed, probably because I’m the kind of person who is given to laughing inappropriately when everyone else is being really serious. That tends to bleed into my work, even—perhaps especially—my Lovecraftiana. It’s weird, I think my favorite non-Lovecraft Lovecraftian story is Charles Stross’ “A Colder War,” which is straight-up cosmic horror and not at all funny, or even amusing. But the one time I tried to write a serious Lovecraftian story it was a total disaster. Maybe it’s because I came late to Lovecraft, and my introduction began with the Stuart Gordon films Re- Animator and From Beyond. I mean, before I’d even read a single story Lovecraft himself had written I’d seen Barbara Crampton moaning in BDSM gear while Jeffrey Combs turns on that weird Resonator, stimulating her pituitary gland or whatever. And then he eats brains out of a jar. Haha! Which I think is supposed to be funny . . . maybe? Regardless, it was formative for me. Were I to wax prosy about this subject I would say that since what people find humorous is entirely subjective—even more subjective than what people find horrifying, in a lot of ways—the humor/horror author runs an even greater risk of his or her work falling flat. But it’s a risk I’m willing to take because it’s what I love, and I’m extremely grateful so many people have found that “The Infernal History” hits that sweet spot.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a few projects—a novella about some patients in a mental institution in Portland, OR, a short story about mummies, and some other things of a more novel-ish nature. Always a few irons in the fire!

What’s the scariest nightmare you’ve ever had?

Haha, I’m really not sure! I think I’ll cheat and instead tell the tale of how one of my nightmares scared my husband badly. I don’t remember the details of the dream, just that it was one of those nightmares that are super-duper- realistic. I was in my own bed, in my bedroom, and there was some scary shadowy man looming in the doorway, staring at me. I guess I started saying out loud, “there’s someone in the room, oh god there’s someone in the room with us, he’s right there” whilst still dreaming/asleep, which of course woke up my husband. He shook me awake and it was fine, but to hear him tell it, there were a few moments where he was lying there with his eyes closed, hoping I was dreaming, but not sure because I was being really quiet and intense about it. I’m not sure who was more relieved that there wasn’t actually someone in the room with us!

Born and raised in Honolulu, Lisa Nohealani Morton lives in Washington, DC. By day she is a mild-mannered database wrangler, computer programmer, and all-around data geek, and by night she writes science fiction, fantasy, and combinations of the two. Her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, and the anthology Hellebore and Rue. She can be found on Twitter as @lnmorton. Author Spotlight: David Tallerman Seamus Bayne

What research did you do to write “The Sign in the Moonlight”?

I read a little about Kanchenjunga, its history, and the early attempts to climb it. My main source, though, was Aleister Crowley’s diaries; they were just an amazing resource, and they’re all available on the internet, I couldn’t believe my luck. Really, the whole story went like that. I’ve never written anything where the pieces came together so easily. I began with the idea of a horror story set during a mountaineering expedition and all the detail, Kanchenjunga, its five peaks, Crowley, all of that came out of the research. I just kept discovering these weird facts and coincidences and everything slotted into place. It felt like I’d stumbled onto a story that wanted to be told, which has never happened before or since.

This has the classic feel of pulp horror. Are there authors in that style who have influenced your writing or who you admire? Absolutely, I’m a big fan of classic pulp horror. Lovecraft was one of my early shaping influences as a writer, and I went on to read most of the authors that he’d drawn from and some of those he’d gone on to inspire. Over the years I’ve written quite a few stories that came from that tradition—which, fingers crossed, will be coming out together in a collection next year. I think “Sign in the Moonlight” possibly comes more from a pre-Lovecraftian place, though; to me, there’s a lot of Chambers and Machen creeping in there. Maybe even more so, it draws from early pulp fantasy, which I love equally as much, and which often seem to feature mountaineering heavily. There’s a fantastic Fritz Leiber, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story, for example, called “Stardock,” that revolves almost entirely around them climbing a more or less un-climbable mountainside.

Why did you choose not to mention the protagonist’s name?

I guess that sometimes you want a protagonist that the reader can get involved with, get to know and think of as a character in their own right, but sometimes you just want someone whose head the reader can get inside easily and experience the story through. When the narrator is something of a blank slate, there’s perhaps more scope to be absorbed in what they’re going through and feeling. For horror especially, I think that that approach can be quite effective. In this instance, I had a more specific motive too: I didn’t want to out and out contradict any known historical facts more than I had to. If I gave the narrator a name then we’d know for a fact that there was no such mountaineer; that such a person never existed. Even if I’d somehow managed to find a real person who’d disappeared around that time, it would still have meant sacrificing the ambiguity of the ending. This way, it feels to me that the story sits in the cracks of the known history of Kanchenjunga rather than going against it.

This tale is open ended. Have you ever written a continuation? If not, do you plan to?

No, I’m happy with where “Sign” ends. Both as a reader and a writer, I like open endings; I like to have the option of going away and thinking about what might happen next, without necessarily having it written out for me. But while I doubt I’d ever write a direct sequel, I might return to Crowley one of these days. There’s so much fascinating scope there.

Can you tell us about the comic project you’re developing or anything else that you’re working on currently?

Endangered Weapon B is something I’ve been developing for a long, long time . . . an absurdist, sort-of- steampunk, comedy adventure series that draws on everything from King Solomon’s Mines to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Umberto Eco (and that’s just in the first four pages). Issue one will premier this Free Comic Book Day—May fourth—and the first trade follows soon after, in July. Then I’ve got the third of my Easie Damasco novel series, Prince Thief, coming out from Angry Robot in September. I’m putting the finishing touches on both of those right now, while starting to make some concrete plans for my upcoming projects: a novella, and a couple more novels and graphic novels.

Seamus Bayne got his start writing during the ’90s working in the roleplaying game industry. In 2010, he attended the Viable Paradise writer’s workshop. Seamus is the co-founder and host of the Paradise Lost writing retreat held annually in Texas. You can learn more about him, and his writing at www.seamusbayne.net.

Author Spotlight: Livia Llewellyn Erika Holt

How did “Jetsam” come to be?

The first part of the story came to me in early 1999, when I was working at Tor, in the Flatiron Building. From the window of my little work area, I could look across the street and see this massive apartment building, all the windows and lights flicking on and off all day as people went about their lives. There was one window with curtains that moved back and forth behind the glass, which always struck me as odd, since the rest of the windows had flat shades and blinds that never moved. One rainy morning I wrote down a very brief description of that window and those curtains, and then I put it away and forgot about it. Six years later, after 9/11 and when I had started writing fiction in earnest, I found that description of the curtain at the windows in a stack of papers, and it all came together—the building, the city after 9/11 and how very divided it seemed, how isolated lower Manhattan was from the rest of the city, those strange creeping movements at the window. All of those separate ideas and incidents, plus a healthy dose of a rediscovered love for Lovecraft’s mythos, turned into “Jetsam.”

In a recent interview for the Weird Fiction Review, you mention admiring Laird Barron’s work, saying, “he has the maddening habit of writing around the edges of cosmic horror, leaving out just enough of the story that it makes me want to tear apart the pages thread by thread, hoping I’ll eventually find out what that black void or terrible event was.” If I may say so, you do that very successfully in this story! What interests you in this approach?

That approach to fiction interests me because it’s the exact opposite of who I am and what I want to interact with anything artistic in general. Whether it’s fiction or movies or plays or dance, I’ve always wanted to know more—I want the backstory, all of it, all of the sordid and exciting and boring details of the characters, the world building, the mythology. I want the preface, the maps, the illustrations, the appendices, the books explaining the books. It’s just part of my psyche, from when I was little. I call it Tolkienism, for reasons which should be obvious to anyone who’s familiar with Tolkien’s meticulous and prodigious obsession with his own creation. And that kind of research was always beneficial to me as an actor, because I always had a director to help me pare away the excess and help me be a part of the performance, rather than above it or outside of it. Not putting everything out there allows the audience to fill in the gaps, it gives them permission to weep when you’re wounded, to feel triumph when you’ve conquered, to be a part of the performance in the spaces you’ve left for them to occupy and contribute to. But as a writer, you work alone, and there’s no one to tell you to get out of the way of your awesome, fancy ideas, and you forget that art is a conversation, not a command. So, you have to learn how to vet your output, how to edit the work before you send it off to an editor. You have to learn to be generous to the people who have yet to read your words, to embrace and trust restraint. It’s something I struggle with all the time, every single second that I write. So, not telling the whole story is something I admire in writers like Laird, and something I struggle and strive for every minute that I write.

“Jetsam” seems to be a post-apocalyptic tale told from the point of view of a transformed, marked, or somehow damaged woman rather than from the perspective of an unaffected or healthy survivor. Given her deficiencies of memory and understanding, was this a challenge? This also reverses the usual balance of sympathies, in that we as readers root for her rather than the exterminators (if that’s what they are). Was this intentional?

It was intentional, because “Jetsam” is to an extent very much my story of what happened to me after 9/11. What I discovered in the years immediately after the attack was that people who didn’t live in the NYC area had a completely different emotional and ideological view of what happened, and in their minds, their vision of the events trumped mine, even though I saw every single second of the towers falling, I felt the ashes of buildings and the dead smeared against my skin, I breathed them into my lungs. That afternoon of the eleventh, after the subways opened back up, I stood on an underground platform with a thousand ash-covered people, and no one spoke a single fucking word. A thousand people, and there were no words. We were all affected, we were all damaged. But there were times, during extremely heated conversations with West Coast friends and relatives, that I thought maybe I’d dreamed everything I’d seen and smelled and felt, because they had at some point decided that their 3000-mile-removed version of what happened was the real version, the “American” version, and that I was delusional and a psychopath and traitor and needed to shut up and go away. “Jetsam” is most definitely a response to how I saw people responding to and shaping and silencing my “version” of what happened, of how nothing in history is uncontested and that even at the genesis of events there are always conflicting accounts of what actually occurred—but understand that even “Jetsam” is itself an extremely sanitized and flawed story, a victim of the emotional terraforming that happens within us during truly horrifying, traumatizing times in life. I think there is a much uglier, more emotionally violent and starker version of it somewhere inside me. I just haven’t found the means for digging it out of me yet.

Do you plan on writing any novels in future, or does the shorter form hold the most appeal for you?

Certain lengths don’t have any particular pull over me than others—somewhere in the start of every project, I realize that the idea or plot I’m working with might lend itself better to a story than a novella, or vice-versa. Every year or so I come up with an idea for a novel, but I haven’t had much success in writing one that’s—to be blisteringly honest—any good. And I’ve come to a point in my life where I view writing and selling a novel as some kind of horrific task that I have to slog through in order to get to some imaginary “higher level” of, I don’t know, artistic and financial success, fame, respect—a level that of course isn’t guaranteed no matter what I write. And when something you love turns into a form of self-punishment, then it’s time to stop. So the answer is, I currently have no plans to write a novel. Maybe someday I’ll find myself attempting one again, but they’ll never officially be on my writing to-do list. I really just want to get on with my life, and if it’s novel-less, that’s fine with me.

What are you working on now?

I’m finishing up a few short stories for various markets— after that, I’ll start working on the first of five novellas that should all be finished by the end of this year. Hopefully I’ll be able to sell them to a publisher as my next collection. If not, then, um, I’m going to have five horror novellas for sale in 2014, if anyone’s interested . . .

Erika Holt lives in the cold, white North (i.e. Calgary, Canada), where she writes and edits speculative fiction. Her stories appear in Shelter of Daylight issue six, Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead, and Tesseracts Fifteen: A Case of Quite Curious Tales. She has co-edited two anthologies: Rigor Amortis, about sexy, amorous zombies, and Broken Time Blues, featuring 1920s alien burlesque dancers and bootlegging chickens. Author Spotlight: Jeff VanderMeer E.C. Myers

The cook’s assistant quotes a line from an unnamed poem, “No other breather . . .” According to my rigorous internet research, the word “breather” apparently originated with Shakespeare, and was used in “Sonnet 81” as well as in his play As You Like It (in which Orlando says, “I will chide no breather in the world but myself, against whom I know most faults.”). Did the title come to you early with this story, or did you find it only after writing it? Can you tell us a little about what inspired and shaped the story?

To be honest, I don’t remember when I first saw that quote or the one from the sonnet, “When all the breathers of this world are dead; You still shall live,” but there seemed something mysterious about it and it stuck in my head, probably without much of the original context or perhaps with more of it than I realized. The story came to me in the form of the first paragraph, and then the realization that of course it would be one of those rare short stories from multiple points of view. So then it was just a matter of following the threads of that idea, combined with the thought that something had gone terribly, terribly wrong. And that sometimes after something has gone terribly wrong, it’s not so easy as picking up the pieces and starting over . . . not if something irrevocable has occurred.

Fiction of “the weird” like this often experiments with style and format, departing from what most consider traditional narrative in order to evoke a certain mood and elicit an emotional response from readers. This piece links story fragments from multiple viewpoints, just as the doctor’s mirror shards reflect fractured images. Did you write with that particular structure and theme in mind from the start, or did it evolve in the telling?

I think what fiction of the weird does first and foremost is commit to the reality and truth of its premise. Which is to say, a weird tale doesn’t wink at you and it doesn’t try to tell you that what you’re reading isn’t real. The story isn’t all that experimental; it’s just that there’s not much experimentation done in genre fiction in terms of structure. A binturong isn’t necessarily strange in a certain part of the world, but if you encountered it walking down the street in Florida you’d probably do a double take. It’s still a mammal, though. I also don’t ever think, “Let me write a story with a structure like a pretzel.” But a pretzel is tasty.

To me, this story conveys a sense of inevitability as the characters struggle to understand or escape the unfolding horrors. I wonder if the underlying message is that searching for an underlying message and trying to find meaning in it all is simply beside the point. What did you hope readers would take from it?

I think there are stories that are meant to hold your attention and surprise you during a first read, and then to reveal other things on a second or third read.

You’ve mentioned that you don’t like to fetishize the act of writing; that you prefer to vary your routine. That said, how and where did you write this story? Do your surroundings influence the outcome at all?

The surroundings don’t affect the telling of the story, but I wrote it in the Black Dog Café in Tallahassee, Florida, which is a place I frequently write in. I wrote it longhand like I write all of my stories and novels. I would say that writing longhand helps me get into the rhythm of a piece.

You have devoted a lot of effort to helping other writers improve, both in their craft and in living the writing life. Why is it important to you to pay it forward? What advice or support has had the most impact on your own development as a writer and in the way you have approached your career?

I grew up thinking that being a writer meant being involved in literature in all ways. Not just to write fiction, but to write nonfiction, to edit, to perhaps run a publishing house from time to time. And part of that too is the idea that your own success is likely to involve the help of other people, and that it just naturally should be part of what you do—to return the favor. Michael Moorcock embodies all of these virtues and was a big influence. When he got me my first big break by introducing me to his agent and I thanked him, all he said was, “pay it forward.” There have been lots of other people who have been inspirational as well. My wife Ann first and foremost. You’re a prolific fiction and nonfiction writer and editor who usually juggles multiple projects at once. Which of your current works-in-progress are you most excited about right now? What forthcoming publications can we expect to see soon?

I am about to turn in Wonderbook: An Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction (Abrams Image), which is a groundbreaking creative writing book in that it has over 200 full-color images, many of which replace instructional text. And though it’s for any beginning or intermediate writer, it takes as its foundation fantastical fiction rather than realism. Then I start work on the second and third novels in the Southern Reach series, which is about a strange forbidden zone and the expeditions that try to discover what is going on there. Those books will be out from Farrar, Strauss & Giroux in 2014. I’m also working on two other novels: The Book Murderer and Borne. I also keep my hand in at editing Weirdfictionreview.com and will soon begin work on editing a 900-page omnibus of the fiction of the great Finnish writer Leena Krohn. There are also several secret projects. E.C. Myers was assembled in the U.S. from Korean and German parts and raised by a single mother and a public library in Yonkers, New York. He has published short fiction in a variety of print and online magazines and anthologies, and his young adult novels, Fair Coin and Quantum Coin, are available now from Pyr Books. He currently lives with his wife, two doofy cats, and a mild-mannered dog in Philadelphia, and shares way too much information about his personal life at ecmyers.net and on Twitter @ecmyers. Coming Attractions

Coming up in April, in Nightmare . . . We’ll have original fiction from Marc Laidlaw (“Bonfires”) and Weston Ochse (“Gravitas”), along with reprints by Angela Slatter (“The Coffin Maker’s Daughter”) and Elizabeth Hand (“The Bacchae”). We’ll also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with all of our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Nightmare. Thanks for reading!