Nightmare Magazine, September 2018 (Issue

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TABLE OF CONTENTS September 2018, Issue 72

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial: September 2018

FICTION House of Small Spiders Weston Ochse The Brink of Eternity Barbara Roden True Crime M. Rickert The Pike Conrad Williams

NONFICTION The H Word: Paranoia for Beginners Grady Hendrix Book Review: September 2018 Adam-Troy Castro

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Weston Ochse M. Rickert

MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Stay Connected Subscriptions and Ebooks Support Us on Patreon or Drip, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard About the Nightmare Team Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue seventy-two of Nightmare! We have original fiction from Weston Ochse (“House of Small Spiders”) and M. Rickert (“True Crime”), along with reprints by Barbara Roden (“The Brink of Eternity”) and Conrad Williams (“The Pike”). In the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” Grady Hendrix digs into the role of paranoia in horror. Plus, we have author spotlights with our authors, and Adam-Troy Castro reviews Paul Tremblay’s new novel, The Cabin at the End of the World.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Nightmare, is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, an science fiction and fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, including The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent projects include: Cosmic Powers, What the #@&% Is That?, Operation Arcana, Loosed Upon the World, Wastelands 2, Press Start to Play, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a two- time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been a finalist eleven times) and is a seven-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams. FICTION House of Small Spiders Weston Ochse | 7761 words

Some houses never have a soul. It’s not their fault. It’s just the way it is. For a soul to be born to a house, almost too many things have to happen. Three or more families have to have lived there. Someone has to die in the house. Blood has to be spilled. And something, even if it’s just an idea, has to be born in the house. You can always tell when a house has a soul because of the small spiders. They’re everywhere, non- obtrusive, and ever watchful. The small spiders are the eyes of the house, watching those who live in it much like a great beast would observe its own fleas. Like the man in the living room staring at a silver-framed photo of a family of four. Or the girl in her room, cutting the cream-white skin of her thigh and making tick marks like a prisoner would count the days, using the blood to write on the wall in an alphabet of her own making. Her cuts are small but deep, crimson inkblots of her soul, transferring secrets on the back wall of her closet in a language only she and the house could read. And in those secrets, an idea is born. “Susan, you up there?” She looks up, cuts once, writes a bit, then closes her eyes. “Susan, I asked if you’re up there!” She brings the razor to her left eye, closes it, and presses it against her eyelid, producing a thin vertical red line evident whenever she blinks. “Susan! Answer me!” She sighs. “Dad, I’m here.” The words slip from her mouth like the last breath of the dying. She slips the razor into her mouth and beings sucking at it. She puts a prepared bandage over her new cut and smooths down her shorts. She stands, steps out of her closet, then arranges her dresses so that it appears as if no one had been there. Just as she closes the door to the closet, her father appears, plump, short, out of breath and face beet red. “Susan, I—” “Sorry, Dad. I was taking a nap.” He glances at the made wrinkle-free bed, then back to her. In a low clear voice, he asks, “Were you in the closet again?” She stares levelly at him, the razor to the right of her tongue. When it seems that he’s going to ask again, she whispers, “You’re not supposed to ask.” A pained look radiates from his eyes. He tilts his head sideways. “I can’t help it, dear. I just can’t. Not after—” “And you’re not supposed to mention her.” She pauses for effect. “Ever.” He holds out his hand. “I won’t. I promise. But give it to me.” “Will I get it back?” she asks. He sighs heavily. “You’ll know where you can steal it again.” She considers his words, then opens her mouth and spits the razor gently into his hand. He makes a fist around it. “What is it you’re writing?” “The same I always do.” “And can others read it?” “Only me,” she says, then adds, “mostly.” He turns to go but pauses in the doorway. Without turning around, he asks, “Then why write it? Why do it at all?” “So there will be a memory of what she did to us.” His whole body sags, lessening him to a man twice his age with half the life. “It’s not like we’ll ever forget,” he murmurs, then slips away. The idea was born seven weeks ago, right after the house fed on the blood of her mother. Dinner had been as unspectacular as every other, more a ritual in the variations of edible cardboard. No one had said a thing. They were a family, so no one had to. Then her mother had said her three last intelligible words, “I’m going, now.” She went to the kitchen. The unmistakable unsheathing of a butcher knife from the block made Susan start, the sound so out of character with post-dinner moments that she’d had trouble parsing the data. So it wasn’t until her mother had pulled open the door and her footsteps had begun to recede down the steps that Susan got to her feet. “Dad,” she’d said, her voice simultaneously cracking uncertain and earnest. “Mother. A knife. Basement.” Her father had looked up from his nearly empty place. He’d held a fork with the dregs of the tasteless meal—a combination of water, milk, a box of something, and a microwave. He seemed to have heard but not understood, his eyes blank and hollow. Susan had backed away from the table, arms straight into fists, bent over and screaming. “Mother has a knife and went into the basement!” He’d looked at her as if for the first time. Then he’d stood and took shambling steps to the top of the basement stairs and ran down. Susan felt the urge to be present to whatever was happening. Reality slammed into her when she reached the basement with such force she couldn’t move from the bottom step for fear she’d drown in the terrible drama unraveling in the basement before her. Her father stood unmoving halfway between her and her mother. Her mother hunched atop the dryer, plunging the knife again and again into her stomach, slowing with each plunge. Her face pointed upward, eyes wide, “My fault, my fault,” she repeated over and over. Then she’d stopped. Even now, Susan can’t be sure if it was her mother or the knife that hit the ground first, but she did recall the blood and how it seemed to move of its own volition in the concrete cracks along the floor. The last thing she’d remembered for a long time was watching her dad watch her mom and how he never did anything, hadn’t even moved a muscle, until she finally fell. Only then did he seem to resume motion, realizing that he still held his fork in his hand. Blindly, insanely, casually, he’d lifted the bite of food to his mouth, took a bite, and chewed. Then the spiders had begun to chatter to her in earnest.

• • • •

They tell her things. Ask her for things. They are here to help, they say, but they also need to be fed. For this house has a soul, and to keep it alive, it needs sustenance. The spiders are almost screaming at her by the time the Seventh Day Adventists come to the door. She’d fed them what she could of herself, but she has nowhere else to cut that won’t show. They introduce themselves as Daphne Drake and Jonathan Oliver and are rather nice in their earnest need to convince her to discard her beliefs and adopt theirs. She almost feels sorry for them when her father rushes around the corner with the baseball bat. He’d heard the spiders as well, both of them now privy to the house’s communication. She’s been able to deal with it to a greater degree, probably because in the act of feeding it, some nurturing gene in her is satisfied. Her father, on the other hand, has no such gene. He is an accountant or had been. Since he hadn’t shown up for work in weeks, they’d sent a letter officially letting him go. The letter was followed a couple days later with two boxes of his belongings, including a World’s Best Dad coffee cup and a picture of the four of them when life had been so much better. He’d been going slowly insane, sometimes standing in corners and muttering to one spider or another, as if he was at his office water cooler and they were passing the time talking about a Netflix or Amazon Original or a dead wife. Jonathan never sees it coming. One moment he’s talking about how his church has sponsored doctors to treat children in war-torn Afghanistan, the other his face is slack as the left side of his head caves in. The swing is so hard that one eyeball pops free from the socket and hangs, swaying as the head falls, finding a home in Daphne’s lap. Daphne opens her mouth to scream but all that comes is a desperate rasp. Her eyes wide, she turns her head stiffly in the direction of father, just in time for the Louisville Slugger logo to catch her in her cheek. Teeth and blood spew across the floor, staining the carpet. Father’s follow-through sends her tumbling over the edge of the couch and onto the floor. Susan meets his eyes and he meets hers, as he stands, breathing heavily, holding a bat that drips blood on the sofa. They’ve crossed a line. They’ve chosen the house over humanity. Or is it their sanity over humanity and the house is just the beneficiary? Does it even matter now that it’s done? The cleanup is awful. While the man’s face—she refuses to call him by his name now that they’ve killed him—is an unreal façade with the dangling eye, every time she glances at the dead woman’s face, she feels shivers spin down her spine. While the jaw and lower face has been destroyed by her father’s attack, her eyes are unblemished, staring at Susan in a constant of blue accusation. Still, Susan and her father do as the spiders bid. The evisceration is father’s job. He does it as he’d done mother, releasing the blood on the basement floor, the viscous fluid moving into the cracks, feeding the house and silencing the spiders. Separation of the bodies is her job. They’d broken the electric carving knife on mother, but had found a serviceable replacement in a Craftsman 19-volt handheld reticulating saw from Home Depot. She wears a disposable poncho, plastic gloves, large yellow goggles, a paper facemask, and yellow rubber galoshes. Putting the pieces in different piles keeps her occupied as she thinks about where she could be instead of destroying evidence of their crime. And as surely as she knows she has to satisfy the house, she knows what they’re doing is wrong, and knowing it makes her want to cut herself if only so that her universe could shrink to a razor, a line of red, and a micro-storm of exquisite pain. Then the doorbell rings. She stops what she is doing and stands. As does father. They stare at each other, each enshrined in blood-covered plastic. She is the first one to move. She steps away and silently removes her poncho, mask, goggles, and gloves, dropping them into a pile. She makes her way up the stairs and locks the door to the basement as the doorbell rings again. If it is the police, they are screwed. But don’t they deserve to be arrested? What they’ve done is terrible . . . no, far beyond terrible. She jumps a little as the doorbell rings a third time. She glances at the blood on the couch and rug and table and floor, then makes her way to the door. She takes a deep breath, then opens it just enough so that she can be seen but no one can see inside. A young man stands on the porch instead of the police. He’s wearing jeans, Vans, and a Volcom shirt. He has short black hair, shocking blue eyes, and a handsome face. She registers all of this in a second, then peers around him to see if there is anyone else. The spiders are begging her to drag him inside, but she knows better. He looks strong, much stronger than her. “Hey,” he says “Hey,” she replies. He thumbs back over his shoulder. “Moved in across the street. Introducing myself around so folks don’t think I’m a serial killer.” He sticks out a hand. Susan finds the gesture old-fashioned and quaint, which brings a smile to her face. She accepts the handshake, then says, “My name is Susan. Me and my dad live here.” “Oh yeah? No mom?” Then his face darkens. “Damn. I’m sorry.” He shakes his head. “It’s none of my business.” She agrees, but says, “It’s all right. Where are you from?” she asks to change the subject. “Seattle.” “Ah. Much bigger town.” “A lot bigger, but more rain.” He points at her feet. “Say, are you butchering something in there?” She glances down and freezes. She’s forgotten to remove her yellow galoshes, now covered in a wet film of red blood. She looks up at him and sees the knitting of his eyebrows. The spiders scream for her to take him out. Her mouth opens but nothing comes. He laughs darkly. “It’s like that scene in a movie where a neighbor rings the doorbell and it’s answered by a serial killer caught in the act of murder.” He laughs again. She forces herself to laugh but blinks rapidly as scenes of her in various prisons and finally in the electric chair dazzle through her mind. She needs to say something, but nothing at all comes to her. She is a complete blank, wearing evidence of the murders of the two Seventh Day Adventists on her feet, yellow galoshes meant to jump in puddles, Big Sarah’s Yellow Boots, now the undoing of everything. He waggles fingers at her and makes a spooky sound. “Whatever,” he says. “I just wanted to introduce myself.” He backs away from the door. She inhales sharply as the spider cries almost overwhelm her. Then she says, “It’s not blood . . . I mean it is but . . .” She glances left, then right, and says in a low voice, “My dad’s a hunter. We were dressing a deer in the basement.” He makes a face. “Isn’t deer season in the fall?” She nods, putting as much reluctance into it as she can. “Yeah. But we need to eat and my dad lost his job.” He stares at her for a moment, then grins. “We all gotta do what we gotta do,” he says. He turns and begins down the steps. “Wait,” she hears herself saying. “What’s your name?” “My friends call me Del.” “Cool.” She says. He nods. “Later.” She nods in return and watches as he goes down the stairs, crosses the street, and into his own house. When she closes the door, she slides to the floor, hyperventilating as she hugs her knees. Two days later, Del rings the doorbell again. Susan opens it and he makes a joke about her not having any bloody galoshes. She actually laughs and after a moment of thought, lets him in. The spiders are silent now, the house slumbering after a Seventh Day Adventist surfeit. She only allows him into the dining room. She brings sodas and they sit at the table. For a while she feels normal, a teenage girl chatting with a teenage boy about the oddities of friends, family, and the frugalities of being poor, lonely, and Millennial. She learns that Del is alone with his father and in a similar situation as her own, except that his mother is in prison for criminal DUI instead of dead, chopped up, and sunk into the Columbia River. She explains that her mother died from breast cancer and he shakes his head and mumbles the appropriate response. He isn’t going to school either, counting on his smarts to get him a GED. It turns out they have more in common than not, and she finds herself enjoying his presence despite herself. Her dad pops his head in for a moment, startled at the idea of someone else in the house. His gaze remains fixed on Del, that of a mouse spying a mouser, worried that any movement he might draw the predator’s attention. A look of relief passes over his face after Susan surreptitiously waves him away, dismissing him from his probable executions. And then the next day Del comes over again. And then the next. She goes from allowing him only to access the dining room to letting him into the kitchen, then the living room, then finally her bedroom. Two weeks of trust building and teasing starts the itchy finger of desire that soon begins its dance along her spine every time she sees him. Then finally, “Hey, Suz,” he says, a single red rose in his hand, presenting it shyly but with a smile that promises he feels like she does. The sex is fast. Both times. It isn’t until they try and laughingly fail at a third, that they roll over and begin talking about real things instead of the surface bullshit they’ve been building their relationship on. She finds out his dad used to beat his mom, which is why she began to drink. She started in the late afternoons, afraid her husband will come home after work on the construction site with the foreman up his ass, only too happy to take out his frustration on his personal punch dummy. Before long she was drinking at noon, then vodka and OJ for breakfast, disguised as plain juice. The drinking and punching would have continued had Del not broken his leg at school and had the nurse not called to tell his mom that before he could be admitted, she had to be at the hospital to sign an insurance form. She almost made it except she couldn’t anticipate an ambulance jetting out of the emergency lot. She hit it broadside at fifty miles an hour, killing both EMTs—one who was new to the job with a wife and baby on the way, and another who was a grandmother two weeks from retirement. Then Susan tells Del her secret of secrets. “You know how you keep asking me about the picture of a little boy in the family photo and I always tell you I don’t want to talk about it?” He nods and strokes her long blonde hair. “His name was Nathanial. We called him Nate and he is my brother.” “Something bad happened to him, didn’t it?” he asks, voice barely above a whisper. “The worst,” she says, acid forming in her mouth from even uttering the words. “It was two years ago. I was fourteen and my brother was six. We were so far apart, I felt more like an aunt than a sister. I really couldn’t play with him . . . maybe if he had been a girl I could have, but trucks and soldiers you know . . . not something I really cared about.” She pauses and closes her eyes. The spiders church whisper a collective No! She ignores them. When she opens her eyes again, her lids glisten with moisture. “I should have tried harder. I should have tried to be more of a sister. If I had, he might still be alive,” her voice cracks on the last word. “What happened?” Del asks. “What did he do?” Don’t tell him. Never tell him. Susan sits up and pulls the sheet to her chin. She laughs the laugh a mother might give remembering the quirkiness of a dead child, and says, “Nate was an inventive soul. I was able to stop him from putting the zipline over the highway there where it meets the bridge. I was able to stop him from turning his wagon into a tank using the old square BBQ we had, then running it down the middle of Alameda Avenue. I was able to do a lot of things, but I utterly failed to stop him from becoming an astronaut.” Del’s blue eyes narrow. Susan laughs mirthlessly, then gently thumps Del in the middle of his head. “You mean astronaut as in going to the moon?” he asks. “Nate wanted to go to Mars and knew he had to practice. So he . . .” She inhales, hoping to get enough fuel to say something she’d never said aloud before, but all it does is lodge in her throat. She swallows, managing to clear it. “So he wrapped himself in tinfoil and saran wrap, put on a football helmet and goggles, climbed into our top-loading washer, and faced upwards, practicing everything he would say to Houston control. All that Houston Control, this is Nate, am I cleared for takeoff crap.” Del’s face gets serious. You are going to regret this, the house whispers. “He’d done it dozens of times. He knew the danger. He knew not to let the top fall down. But it fell. And it locked and he passed out.” Her fingers are dancing along the hem of the sheet like the legs of many daddy longlegs sizzling on a hot surface. “And that would have been fine, except for my mother who—” The last bit comes out as an owl calls, and she can’t continue. Just the sound of it makes her laugh and cry at the same time. “Who,” Susan says again, reveling in the sound of the owl, happy to be away from the memory. “What did your mother do?” Del asks. This stops her. She swallows again, then in a carefully controlled- robotic voice says, “My mother came down, put some sheets in the washer, then headed back upstairs. She set the clothes on delicates because that’s what she always did. It wasn’t until we heard the incredibly loud thumping of the out of balance washer that we came down, and by then the washer was halfway across the basement. I think of that thumping and I can’t but wonder if it had been Nate pounding against the sides of the spinning drum, trying to get out of sloshing water, spinning, spinning, spinning—” She pauses because her voice has become strident in the telling. Then in a lower voice says, “But the doctor told us that he’d died of asphyxiation and that there was no water in his lungs, which makes me feel better . . . as if dying that way was better than living and being the weird kid who wanted to be an astronaut and travel to Mars.” “Oh my God, Suz, that’s horrible!” She sighs as she says, “He died on delicates,” she says, thinking this will be the last of it. But the spiders shout in a glee-filled chorus, He died on delicates, and their contribution sends Susan over the edge.

• • • •

Three days pass before she speaks with Del again. Not because she’s mad at him, in fact, it isn’t about him at all. She needs the time to calm herself so she won’t break down again. After he left, she’d become hysterical, screaming to the spiders to shut up, condemning them that it is their fault, that they could have told her Nate was in the washer. They never answer, but she heard them nonetheless, their silence a brash admission of guilt. Del came by every day, but she had her father tell him that she didn’t want to see him. On the fourth day, he breaks in and leaves a bouquet of flowers on her bed with a card that says I love you. Meanwhile, the spiders are beginning to chitter. The house is getting hungry and will need to be fed soon. It still won’t respond to Susan’s condemnation, but it is softening. She can feel it as if at any moment, it will speak to her and let her know why the spiders never told her about Nate. Then on the fifth day, she lets Del back in. They sit amiably together on the couch. He is quiet, then eventually says, “Your house is sort of weird.” Beware. Yes, beware. “What do you mean?” she asks, wondering what the spiders mean. “Every time I’m here I feel like I’m being watched.” He eyes her speculatively. “Don’t you feel it, too?” Does he know about the spiders? She wonders. Can they talk to him? “It’s just an old dumb house,” she says. “I guess you’re right. It’s just a characteristic of older houses,” he says eventually. “Listen,” he says. “I want to—” She cuts him off. “I don’t want to talk about it.” She’d placed that memory in a box, locked it, and dropped it into the Sea of Forgetfulness. It is still bobbing, but she hopes it will eventually sink forever. He stares at her like he is about to say something, then nods slightly. “I thought maybe that it’s time . . . time we go out on a date,” he says, as his gaze drifts to the ground. Then he looks up. “That is if you leave the house. When’s the last time you left this firetrap?” She realizes she’s just been asked on a date and feels heat blossom in her cheeks. Sex is one thing, but a date is a commitment. “I—I don’t know when. Has it been so long? It’s my father. He needs me, you know. After my mother—” “Died of breast cancer.” Something bothers her about the way he says that. She can’t put her finger on it, but something seems off. “Have you had any contact with your mother?” she asks. He stares at her as if he’s seeing someone else, someone far away. His lips tighten into something near malice. She recognizes it, but somehow doesn’t think it is directed at her, rather . . . “I’m sorry, Del. I shouldn’t have brought it up.” He shakes his head and blinks, returning to the now. “No,” he says. “No contact.” She leans over and kisses him on the cheek. “Three months,” she says. “Three months?” “That’s how long it’s been since I’ve been out of the house. It’s been three months.” “So long,” he says. “How do you manage?” Don’t ask us. We won’t tell. Go away. The spiders are suddenly confusing. Susan doesn’t know what they’re trying to tell her. She fights to ignore them and manages to say, “We live simply. My father goes out a couple of times a week to get things.” She shrugs. “Otherwise,” she gestures with her right hand, “It’s just the two of us.” Kill. Hungry. Hungry. Kill. The spiders are becoming maddening. How is she to make sense of them? Are they commanding her to kill—or are they talking to each other? They seem disinterested, as if their need is mechanical rather than passionate. Not the way she’s come to know them. All through the night and the following day, they whisper strange things, responses to questions she never asks, and comments to things she’s never done. Is it the souls of the Seventh Day Adventists? Are they somehow inhabiting the spiders? The funny thing is that she never once doubts her own sanity—that the spiders are real. So, it is her search for another reason that keeps her up most of the night and almost makes her cancel the date when the spiders go silent. The next night finds her having dinner with Del at the Riverfront Bistro, an upscale restaurant right on the Columbia River. She can actually see the upper window of her house from the restaurant’s front door, which makes her feel a little less nervous. Not having been out of the house in almost a hundred days gives her the occasional shiver. Still, the fried Wallapa Bay oysters are succulent, the salmon from the river is delicate and a treasured replacement from her diet of TV dinners. The crème brûlée is the perfect end to the night. She leaves the table for a moment to use the ladies room, and when she returns, Del has ordered a second dessert of ice cream. She’s full but doesn’t want to turn him down; she eats it, only once noting an acidic tinge to the whole bean vanilla as if it were thawed and refrozen several times.

• • • •

When Susan finally comes to, her hands are tied behind her and her feet are tied to the legs of a chair. She’s naked except for her underwear, her skin cool enough to cultivate goosebumps. She’s in the basement seated halfway between the heater and the washer and dryer. Laid out on the floor beside her is her father, face and head a mass of bloody pulp, his murderous bat lying beside him. By the occasional rise and fall of his back, she can tell he’s alive. She glances around, but there is no one else . . . nothing else going on in the house. The spiders are still silent. The last thing she remembers is . . . her date with Del. She had dinner with him, then—blank. Whatever happened after is gone now. A thump comes from upstairs. She cranes her head to look toward the unfinished stairs. The door at the top opens, shedding more light than what’s coming through the windows. She starts to yell but bites it back. Instead, she concentrates, sending out thoughts to the house, begging the spiders to tell her what’s happening, but they refuse. A figure works its way down the stairs, pulling something heavy, each thump, thump, thump, a weight falling on a wooden stair. When the figure comes into view, she sees who it is and her breath leaves her. Del pulls a young woman down the stairs, her hands and feet bound, gag over her mouth. She’s alive and her eyes are insane with the need to escape. He deposits her on the floor on the other side of Susan’s chair, then straightens, facing Susan. “The spiders are mine now.” The spiders . . . what the . . . can he . . . but that’s impossible. Is that why the spiders won’t talk to her? Is that why they’ve gone silent? “What have you done?” Susan finally asks. He grins happily, like a boy who’s just been commended for doing something well. “Yours isn’t the only house with small spiders, you know. They’re everywhere if you know just where to look.” “Why do you want my spiders?” He puts his hands on his hips. “Oh, they’re your spiders now, are they?” She closes her eyes and begs the spiders to respond. “They won’t listen to you,” he says, as if knowing what she is doing. “You can try, but the spiders and I have come to an agreement.” She opens her eyes. “What agreement?” He claps his hands together with delight, then reaches down and picks up the bat. “Now we’re cooking with grease. These old houses hold secrets. Too often they go unknown, the secrets lost to eternity. But if a house has a soul, if a house has small spiders, then it can give up the secrets. It can tell someone who wants to know.” He cocks his head, then chuckles. “I know. I know. For a price.” Then he turns back to her. “It can tell someone who wants to know for a price.” Susan glances between her father and the newcomer, then back at Del. Whatever fear she feels ebbs away with the tide of anger that follows. “We’re the price. You’re going to feed us to the house.” “Bingo! Prize for the cute girl tied to the chair. My original idea was to feed it you and your dad, but it seems you’ve had the house on a starvation diet. I couldn’t believe you’ve been feeding the house your own blood like this is some sort of suburban Little Shop of Horrors. Then I saw your legs and your arms when we had sex and when the spiders told me, it all made a certain sick sense. You aren’t a real cutter. You’re a feeder.” A tear slips down her cheek for the days when all she’d been was a cutter. “So when I approached them with my proposition, they wanted more than just the pair of you. They wanted a third. They wanted an innocent. In fact, it’s a complicated bargain all around.” Susan can’t help glancing at the girl. She wonders who she is and how Del knows she’s an innocent. “Why are you doing this to us?” “Feeding you to the house? Haven’t you been listening?” “Because you want to know the house’s secret, asshole. I heard you. What fucking secret?” “Oh, my. Language young lady,” Dell says waggling the bat towards her. “This is old Uniontown, the part of Astoria where the Finns lived. It’s well known that the Finns didn’t trust anyone, much less banks, so they tended to keep their money hidden, often buried. In fact, this is the third house in three months I’ve been able to convince to give up its secrets.” He chuckles. “It’s really rather easy. I know what they want and I give them what they want.” “Money? You’re doing this for money?” she asks, another tear falling. She wants to push it back, but it leaves an indelible trail down her cheek. “What else is there?” He grins. “Oh, did you . . . did you think we had something? That what we had was real?” He shakes his head. “You mean the poor agoraphobic girl with a crazy daddy who couldn’t take the fact that he’d hacked up the remains of his wife to feed to his house thinks I really had a thing for her?” “What about your mother? How’d it feel when she crashed the car?” It isn’t much, but it’s something. The malice returns to his face. He grips the bat tight as he points it at her. “Let me tell you about my mother and father. Right after my arm healed, my dad began to beat on me because my mother wasn’t available. He did that for two years and then I killed him with a hammer to the head one night when he was passed out drunk in his chair. I dragged his sorry ass into the yard and set him on fire. When the police came, I told them what I’d done, and I was arrested and sent to juvie. I saw tons of shrinks and was finally released when I turned eighteen, the government assured that I was only acting out because of the abuse.” He grins. “Sorry, I lied. I’m not seventeen. When I was seventeen I was trying to keep my fellow inmates from raping me. I was mostly successful. I’m really twenty and about to turn twenty-one next week. Too bad you won’t be around to wish me happy birthday.” All the while he’d been talking, she’d been begging the spiders to listen to her, but so far nothing. But there is something, as if the house is waking and noticing what is transpiring. She feels an attention now, the same attention she’d felt before when strangers were staring at her, spinning around, only to catch them watching her. “Where was I? Right!” He snaps his fingers. “When they let my mom out, I was there to meet her. I took her to an old house I’d rented—a dump even older than this one. I made her dinner and added Special K like I gave you. She woke up in the basement and I opened her up and let her bleed as I told her everything my father had done to me because she wasn’t there to protect me. That night the house awoke and the spiders started talking to me. It was that night I realized that houses could have a soul if only they are fed.” “You killed your father and your mother,” she says flatly. “Rootin’ tootin’, I did.” She hears the squeak of a single spider and begins to talk with it. “According to the spiders, the concrete floor was put in about six years ago. A tin box full of special belongings is buried in the dirt underneath. When I kill your father, it will tell me exactly where.” “Then why kill the girl?” “They wanted a cherry on top.” “Then why kill me?” He leans back. “Oh! Oh! That’s precious. You think I’m going to kill you. Oh, no. The house won’t let that happen. The house needs you. You’re its provider. You’ll be left to feed it forever. Isn’t that the plan all along anyway?” In a manner of speaking it is. “Please, don’t kill my father,” she says. “Sorry, babe. It’s a done deal.” Then she begins to speak to the house in earnest. She speaks to it as Del grabs her father. She makes promises as he cuts the veins on her father’s arms from wrist to elbow, then follows up by slicing deeply into his jugular vein. Through the pain of her father’s murder, Susan finally understands. She commands the house to listen to her and invokes her brother Nate, whose death was the inciting incident that created the house’s soul . . . taking Nate’s soul and molding it into its own . . . making the house essentially a different version of her little brother. The boy who wanted to be an astronaut, instead now a house with small spiders who can be his eyes and mouths. Only now, they are also his ears because Susan is speaking directly to her brother, making a promise only a sister can make to a brother. She feels a spider crawl up her left leg. Del is too busy to notice. She watches its tickling journey as it crests her knee, crawls across her thigh, up her stomach, over her bra, then up her neck. She loses sight of it as it climbs into her left ear. But she hears its whisper. She hears and she understands. Her father’s blood draws into the cracks of the floor at alarming speed, as if the structure is famished. Del stands, cocking his head this way and that, then grins. “Ha!” he says. “Ha!” He marches to the southwest corner of the home and lays the bat down on a spot. “Be right back,” he says. “Going to get some tools.” He starts to head to the stairs, then pauses and turns. “Don’t go anywhere,” he says, then giggles as he takes the stairs two at a time. She waits until after the door is shut and she hears the thumps across the floor before she speaks to the hostage. “Okay, now, listen to me. We don’t know how long he’s going to be gone so we have to move fast. Are you listening to me?” The girl’s eyes pin Susan to her seat. “Are you listening?” Susan says in a steel voice. The girl nods. “Behind the washer and dryer, I have a battery-operated reciprocating saw. If you can inchworm over there, you can reach it and bring it to me. Do you think you can do that?” No response. “I said, do you think you can do that?” The girl nods. “Then fucking do it or we’re both going to die!” It seems to take forever for the girl to get started and figure out how to move on the rough concrete floor, but it’s only sixty seconds. Susan knows because she’s counting. Once the girl gets the hang of it, she moves faster and makes it the dozen feet to the back of the washer and dryer, manages to grab the saw with her hands behind her, then inches her way back. “Now kick my chair over.” The girl kicks once and misses. Her second attempt rocks the chair. The third sends Susan over. Susan goes rigid so her head wouldn’t bounce off the floor and knock her out but she needn’t have worried. She lands on her dead father’s chest, her eyes staring into his eyes. Perhaps it’s better this way. He would have never been able to do what she is going to do. He didn’t have it in him. The spiders warn her. Del is returning. “Now hand me the saw.” She can’t see the girl but hears her moving towards her. The spiders begin to scream. “Hurry,” Susan whispers. Then she feels the hard-composite plastic in her hands. It is backward from how she needs it. She reverses it, then depresses the trigger and cuts through the slip tie holding her wrists together. She bites back a cry of pain as the blade dives into the side of her wrist, but there is nothing to be done about it. As soon as her hands are free, she saws through the tie holding her ankles. Then she rights the chair and returns it where it is, now empty. The door to the stairs opens and Del comes down, carrying something heavy. Susan runs to the bat, scoops it up, then creeps to the unfinished stairs. When Del’s feet come into view, she swings the bat right into his ankles. He falls forward in a clatter of equipment. Susan runs around, prepared to finish him, but sees the fall’s knocked him unconscious. When Del awakes a few minutes later, he’s tied to the chair much like Susan had been, naked down to his classic tightie-whities. He comes to with a grim look, eyes back and blue from the concrete face plant. Susan stands before him, holding the baseball bat. “I renegotiated the deal. Turns out they don’t need you.” “But I promised them . . . I promised them everything they wanted.” Susan shrugs. “They could get everything they wanted anyway. I offered them more.” “Like what?” “I told them that if they followed you, as soon as you left I’d kill myself and they’d have no one to feed them.” Del’s eyes widen slightly. “You didn’t think of that, Jelly Belly, now did you?” His eyes narrow. “What’s to keep you from doing that anyway? You could kill yourself whenever you wanted. Or just up and leave.” Del turns his face to the ceiling and shouts, “Did you ever fucking think of that?” “But I’m different. I’m not just anybody.” “What the hell does that mean?” “I’m the sister. I’m the sister of this house.” “That makes no sense at all,” Del says. “I realized that my mother had gone crazy because the newborn soul of the house was speaking to her. Nate was speaking to her through the spiders. It really couldn’t communicate what it wanted. It hadn’t the ability. All it knew is it wanted its mother—my mother—his mother.” “That makes no sense at all,” Del says with little conviction. “Where do you think souls come from? The soul bank? The spiders told me. For a soul to be born to a house, almost too many things have to happen. Three or more families have to have lived there. Someone has to die in the house. Blood has to be spilled. And something, even if it’s just an idea, has to be born in the house. The idea that was born was Nate. He refused to let the house have his soul. Instead, he gave it to the house with the catch being that he could always be near his family. You’d convinced the spiders to help you, but you hadn’t convinced the house. That’s who I finally talked to. The house. My brother.” “What are you going to do now? Kill me?” “Oh, no. You’re going to be its provider.” Susan moves quickly over to the girl, then holds up the razor Del used to kill her father. She and slices it swiftly across the young woman’s neck. Blood spurts as her eyes frantically beg Susan for help that never is going to come. “You killed her,” Del says. He sounds surprised. “It is part of the deal. My brother needs to be fed.” Then Susan moves to Del. She picks up the reciprocating saw and cuts off his left hand. His blood gushes out for a long moment as he screams, then she quickly applies a tourniquet above the wound until the blood slows to a trickle. He is hyperventilating when she speaks next. “You’ll feed Nate for as long as I can keep you alive. After that, we’ll find someone else as deserving. This girl is the last innocent killed in this house. Everyone else is going to be like you.” Then Susan walks up the stairs. She wants a bath. She wants something to eat. Then she needs to go out and buy a model spaceship for her brother, Nate. What she did had little to do with violence and was more about family. The blood, the evisceration, the killing—none of it has to do with her, but rather her love for her brother, the house, and the small spiders. As she bathes, she realizes the truism of her new existence. Some people are able to live a satisfactory life in a home made of metal and steel. Some can even make do in an apartment. Still others can live their entire life in a raised ranch in a cul-de-sac of an upscale neighborhood in the best suburb. But not one of them will ever know what it’s like to live in a house with a soul, nor will they understand what’s necessary to survive a house of small spiders.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Weston Ochse is the author of more than twenty books. His work has appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including The Tampa Review, Vol 1 Brooklyn, Soldier of Fortune, IDW and DC Comics. His work has also been a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award five times and he’s been honored to have won the Bram Stoker for First Novel. He’s recently worked on several franchises, including Aliens, Predator, Hellboy, Clive Barker’s Midian, V-Wars, Joe Ledger, and X-Files. He splits his time between Arizona and Oregon and absolutely loves the outdoors. When he’s not writing, you can find him hiking, running, fly fishing, or just fusting about.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight The Brink of Eternity Barbara Roden | 5701 words

The knife is long and lethal yet light, both in weight and appearance; a thing precise and definite, which he admires for those reasons. It has not been designed for the task at hand, but it will suffice. The sound of a heart beating fills his ears, and he wonders if it is his heart or the other’s. He will soon know. The knife is raised, and then brought down in a swift movement. A moment of resistance, and then the flesh yields, and vivid spatters spread, staining the carpet of white, bright and beautiful. He brings the knife down again, and again. He can still hear the beating, and knows it for his own heart, for the other’s has stopped. He fumbles for a moment, dropping the knife, pulling off his gloves, then falls to his knees and plunges his bare hand into the bruised and bloody chest, pulling out the heart, warm and red and raw. He eats.

WALLACE, William Henry (1799-?1839) was born in Richmond, Virginia. His family was well-to-do, and William was almost certainly expected to follow his father, grandfather, and two uncles into the legal profession. However, for reasons which remain unknown, he abandoned his legal studies, and instead began work as a printer and occasional contributor of letters, articles, and reviews to various publications. In this respect, there are interesting parallels between Wallace and Charles Francis HALL (q.v.), although where Hall’s Arctic explorations were inspired by the fate of the Franklin Expedition, Wallace appears to have been motivated by the writings of John Cleve Symmes, Jr. (1779-1829), particularly Symmes’ “hollow earth” theory—popular through the 1820s—which postulated gateways in the Polar regions which led to an underground world capable of sustaining life. From We Did Not All Come Back: Polar Explorers, 1818- 1909 Kenneth Turnbull (HarperCollins Canada, 2005)

• • • •

He could not remember a time when he did not long for something which he could not name, but which he knew he would not find in the course laid out for him. The best tutors and schools, a career in the law which would be eased by his family’s name and wealth, marriage to one of the eligible young ladies whose mamas were so very assiduous in calling on his own mother, and whose eyes missed nothing, noting his manners, his well-made figure, strong and broad-shouldered, his prospects and future, of which they were as sure as he; surer, for his was an old story which they had read before. But he chafed under his tutors, a steady stream of whom were dismissed by his father, certain that the next one would master the boy. School was no better; he was intelligent, even gifted, yet perpetually restless, dissatisfied, the despair of his teachers, who prophesied great things for him if he would only apply himself fully. He was polite to the mamas and their daughters, but no sparkling eyes enchanted him, no witty discourse ensnared him; his heart was not touched. He studied law because it was expected of him and he saw no other choice. And then . . . and then came the miracle that snapped the shackles, removed the blinders, showed him the path he was to follow. It came in the unprepossessing form of a pamphlet, which he was later to discover had been distributed solely to institutes of higher learning throughout America, and which he almost certainly would never have seen had he not, however reluctantly, wearily, resignedly, followed the dictates of his family, if not his head and heart. Proof, if it were needed, that the Fate which guides each man was indeed watching over him. The pamphlet had no title, and was addressed, with a forthright simplicity and earnestness Wallace could only admire, “To All The World.” The author wrote:

“I declare the earth is hollow, and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentrick spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles twelve or sixteen degrees; I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the world will support and aid me in the undertaking.” JOHN CLEVES SYMMES Of Ohio, Late Captain of Infantry.

• • • •

He opened the pamphlet, his hands trembling. A passage caught his eye: “I ask one hundred brave companions, well equipped, to start from Siberia in the fall season, with Reindeer and slays, on the ice of the frozen sea: I engage we find warm and rich land, stocked with thrifty vegetables and animals if not men, on reaching one degree northward of latitude sixty-two; we will return in the succeeding spring.” The words seemed to inscribe themselves on his heart. “One hundred brave companions”; “start from Siberia”; “find warm and rich land”; “return in the succeeding spring.” In an instant he knew what it was that he had to do. After long years of wandering and searching, his restless feet were halted and pointed in the only true direction.

• • • •

It is his first food in—how long? He has lost count of the days and weeks; all is the same here in this wasteland of white. He remembers Symmes’ “warm and rich land” and a laugh escapes his throat. It is a rough, harsh, scratched sound, not because its maker is unamused, but because it has been so long since he has uttered a sound that it is as if he has forgotten how. The remains of the seal lie scattered at his feet; food enough to last for several days if carefully husbanded. There will be more seals now, further south, the way he has come, the way he should go. Salvation lies to the south; reason tells him this. But that would be salvation of the body only. If he does not continue he will never know. He fears this more than he fears the dissolution of his body. He grasps the knife firmly in his hand—he can at least be firm about this—and begins to cut up the seal, while all around the ice cracks and cries.

One of the earliest pieces of writing identified as being by Wallace is a review of James McBride’s Symmes’ Theory of Concentric Spheres (1826), in which Wallace praises the ingenuity and breadth of Symmes’ theory, and encourages the American government to fund a North Polar expedition “with all due speed, to investigate those claims which have been advanced so persuasively, by Mr. Symmes and Mr. Reynolds, regarding the Polar Regions, which endeavor can only result in the advancement of knowledge and refute the cant, prejudice, ignorance, and unbelief of those whose long-cherished, and wholly unfounded, theories would seek to deny what they themselves can barely comprehend.” From We Did Not All Come Back

• • • •

His path was set. He threw over his legal studies, to the anger of his father and the dismay of his mother, and waited anxiously for further word of Symmes’ glorious expedition. How could anyone fail to be moved by such passion, such selfless determination, such a quest for knowledge that would surely be to the betterment of Mankind? Yet no expedition was forthcoming. Symmes’ words had, it seemed, fallen on the ears of people too deaf to hear, too selfish to abandon their petty lives and transient pleasures. Wallace had fully expected to be a part of the glorious expedition; now, faced with its failure, he cast round for something that would enable him to dedicate his life—or a large part of it —to those Polar realms which now haunted him, in preparation for the day when Symmes’ vision would prevail, and he could fulfil the destiny which awaited him. He became a printer, for it seemed that his only connection with that region which so fascinated him was through words; so words would become his trade. He found work with a printer willing—for a consideration—to employ him as an apprentice, and learned the trade quickly and readily. When he was not working he was reading, anything and everything he could to prepare himself. He read Scoresby’s two volume Account of the Arctic Regions and found, for the first time, pictures of that region of snow and ice, and of the strange creatures living there, seals and whales and the fearsome Polar Bear and, strangest of all, the Esquimaux who, in their furs, resembled not so much men as another type of animal. It was true that Scoresby scorned the idea of a “hollow earth”; yet he was only a whaling captain, and could not be expected to appreciate, embrace the ideas of someone like Symmes, a man of vision, of thought. Wallace expected more from Parry, that great explorer, and was heartened to find that the captain believed firmly in the idea of an Open Polar Sea, although he, like Scoresby, declined to accept a hollow earth. Wallace knew that it existed, knew with his whole heart and soul that such a thing must be; those who denied it, even those who had been to the North, were either wilfully blind, or jealous that they had not yet managed to discover it, and thereby accrue to themselves the glory which belonged to Symmes. When Symmes came to Richmond on a speaking tour Wallace obtained a ticket to the lecture and sat, enthralled, while Symmes and his friend Joshua Reynolds preached their doctrine, hanging on to every word, eyes greedily devouring the wooden globe which was used by way of illustration, and displayed the hollows in the earth at the Polar extremities which led to a fantastic world of pale beings and weak sunlight. In 1823 he heard that Symmes’ friend, the businessman James McBride, had submitted a proposal to Congress, asking for funding to explore the North Polar region expressly to investigate Symmes’ theory. Here at last was his opportunity; and he waited in a fever of excitement for the passing of the proposal, the call to arms, the expedition, the discovery, the triumphant return, the vindication. The proposal was voted down.

• • • •

He has been living thus for so long that his body now works like a thing independent of his mind, an automaton. The seal meat is still red, but no longer warm; the strips are hardening, freezing. He must . . . what must he do? Build a snow house for the night; yes. And then he must load the seal meat on to his sledge, in preparation for the next day’s travel. In which direction that will be, he can not say. He does not know what lies ahead, what awaits, and it frightens him as much as it elates him; he does know what lies behind, what awaits there, and that frightens him even more, with no trace of elation whatever.

Following Symmes’ death in 1829 his theory largely fell out of favor, as a wave of Polar exploration failed to find any evidence of a “hollow earth.” Symmes’ adherents gradually deserted him, or turned their attentions elsewhere; Joshua Reynolds successfully lobbied Congress for funding for a South Seas expedition which would also, as an aside, search for any traces of a “Symmes hole,” as it came to be known, in the Antarctic. Although no sign of such a hole was found, the voyage did have far-reaching literary consequences, inspiring both Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.

Poe published an article in praise of Reynolds, and the South Sea expedition, in the Southern Literary Messenger in January 1837; a reply to this article, penned by Wallace, appeared in the March 1837 issue. Wallace commends Poe on his “far-sighted and clear-headed praise of what will surely be a great endeavor, and one which promises to answer many of the questions which, at present, remain beyond our understanding,” but laments the abandonment of American exploration in the North. “A golden opportunity is slipping through our fingers; for while the British Navy must needs sail across an ocean and attack from the east, through a maze of channels and islands which has defied all attempts and presents one of the most formidable barriers on Earth, the United States need only reach out along our western coast and sail through Bering’s Strait to determine, for once and all, the geography of the Northern Polar regions.”

Elsewhere in the article Wallace writes of the Arctic as “this Fearsome place, designed by Nature to hold and keep her secrets” and of “the noble Esquimaux, who have made their peace with a land so seemingly unable to support human existence, and who have much to teach us.” These references make it clear that Wallace had, by 1837, already spent time in the Eastern Arctic, a fact borne out by the logbook of the whaling ship Christina, covering the period 1833-5. On board when the ship left New London in May 1833 was one “Wm. H. Wallace, gent., late of Richmond,” listed as “passenger.” In late August the log notes starkly that “Mr. Wallace disembarked at Southampton Island.” Where he lived, and what he did, between August 1833 and March 1837 remains a mystery; Wallace left behind few letters, no journals or diaries that have been discovered, and did not publish any accounts of his travels. It has been assumed that he, like later explorers such as Hall and John RAE (q.v.), spent time living among the Inuit people and learning their way of life; if so, it is unfortunate that Wallace left no account of this time, as his adoption of the traditional Inuit way of life, in the 1830s, would mark him as one of the first white men to do so. From We Did Not All Come Back

• • • •

Even when Symmes died, and his theory looked set to die with him, Wallace kept faith. There would, he now knew, be no government- backed venture in search of the hollow earth; it would be up to one man of vision, daring, resolve to make his own way north. That man, he swore, would be William Henry Wallace, whose name would ever after ring down the annals of history. Yet it was not fame, or the thought of fame, which spurred him on; rather, it was the rightness of the cause, the opportunity to prove the naysayers wrong, and a chance to break truly free from the shackles of his life and upbringing and venture, alone, to a place which was shrouded in mystery, to see for himself the wonders which were, as yet, no more than etchings in books, tales told by travellers. He had lived frugally, not touching the allowance still provided by his father, who hoped that the Prodigal Son would one day return to the family home; and with this he set out, early in 1833, for New England, where he persuaded a reluctant—until he saw the banknotes in the stranger’s pocketbook—whaling captain to let him take passage on board his ship. Only when the Christina had set sail for the north did William Henry Wallace, for the first time in many years, know a kind of peace. But it was a restless peace, short-lived. He spent the days pacing the deck with anxious feet, eyes ever northward, scanning the horizon for any signs of that frozen land for which he longed. When the first icebergs came in sight he was overcome with their terrible beauty, so imperfectly captured in the drawings he had pored over until he knew their every detail as well as if he himself had been the artist. Soon the ice was all around, and while captain and crew kept a fearful eye on it always, Wallace drank in its solemn majesty, and rejoiced that each day brought him closer to his goal. When the Christina left him at Southampton Island he was oblivious to the crew’s concern for a man whom they obviously thought mad. Yet they did not try to dissuade him; they had business to attend to, and only a short time before the ice closed in and either forced them home or sealed them in place for long, dreary months. The captain did try, on one occasion, to stop Wallace; but after a few moments he ceased his efforts, for the look in the other’s eyes showed that no words the captain could muster would mean anything. At least the man was well provisioned; whatever qualms the captain might have about his mental state, his physical well-being was assured for a time. And once off the ship he was no longer the captain’s concern. Wallace had studied well the texts with which he had provided himself. In addition to clothing and food and tools, he had purchased numerous small trinkets—mirrors, knives, sewing needles, nails—and they paid handsome dividends amongst the Esquimaux, who were at first inclined to laugh at the kabloona come to live among them, but soon learned that he was in earnest about learning their ways. Before long Wallace had shed the outward garb of the white man and adopted the clothing of the Esquimaux, their furs and skins so much better suited to the land than his own cotton and wool garments. Their food he found more difficult, at first, to tolerate; it took many attempts before his stomach could accept the raw blubber and meat without convulsing, but little by little he came to relish it. His first clumsy attempts at building a snow house, or igloo, were met with good-natured laughter, but before long he was adept at wielding the snow knife, a seemingly delicate instrument carved from a single piece of bone which ended in a triangular blade of surprising sharpness. He learned to judge the snow needed for blocks, neither too heavy nor too light, and fashion the bricks so they were tapered where necessary. He learned to make windows of clear ice, and of the importance not only of a ventilation hole at the top of the structure, but of ensuring that it was kept free of the ice that formed from the condensation caused by breath and body warmth, lest it become a tomb for those inside. The casual way in which the Esquimaux men and women shared their bodies with each other shocked him, at first; after a time he came to see the practicality of sleeping, unclothed under furs, in a group, but he remained aloof from the women who plainly showed that they would welcome him as a partner. In all other ways he admired the natives of that cold land: what other travellers remarked on as their cruelty, he saw as a necessity. Illness or frailty in one could mean death for all; there was no room in that place for pity, or sentiment, and he abandoned without regret the last traces of those feelings within his own soul. He became skilled at traversing the fields of ice and snow, and would often set out alone. The Esquimaux, who only ventured across the ice when necessity compelled them in search of food, were puzzled by his expeditions, which seemed to serve no purpose. In reality he was searching, always searching, for any indication that he was drawing closer to the proof he sought, the proof that would vindicate Symmes, and his own life. He did not mark, in that realm of endless snow, how long he searched; but eventually he realized that he would not find the answers he was seeking in this place of maze-like channels. Symmes had been correct when he said that the answer lay from the west, not the east; and if he had been correct in this, why should he not be correct in much else? When the Christina put in at Southampton Island in 1836 he had been cut off from his own kind for three years. The captain—the same man who had left him there—was astounded when he recognised, among the natives who crowded to the ship to trade for goods, the figure whom he had long thought dead. He was even more astounded when Wallace indicated—in the halting tones of one mastering a foreign tongue—that he sought passage back to New London. He spoke vaguely of business, but further than that he would not be drawn, except to say, of his time in the north, that he did not know whether he had found heaven on earth or an earthly heaven.

• • • •

His igloo is finished. Small as it is, he has had difficulty lifting the last few blocks into place. He is vaguely surprised that the seal meat, coming as it did to revive him after his body’s stores had been depleted, has not given him more energy. Instead, it seems almost as if his body, having achieved surfeit in one respect, is now demanding payment in another regard. After days, weeks, months of driving his body ever onward, all he can think of now is sleep; of the beauty of lying down under his fur robes and drifting into slumber, even as the ice bearing him drifts closer to those unknown regions about which he has dreamed for so long.

Wallace’s reference, in his article, to the west coast of America and “Bering’s Strait” suggests that he felt an attempt on the Arctic should be made from that side of the continent, and this would have been in keeping with Symmes’ own beliefs. No such formal expedition along the west coast was to be made until 1848, when the first of the expeditions in search of the Franklin party set out, but it is clear that Wallace undertook an informal—and ultimately fatal—journey of his own more than a decade earlier. An open letter from Wallace, published in the Richmond Enquirer in April 1837, states his intention of travelling via Honolulu to Hong Kong and thence to Siberia, “which location is ideally placed as a base for the enterprising Polar traveller, and has inexplicably been ignored as such by successive governments, which have declined to take the sound advice of men such as Mr. Symmes, whose work I humbly continue, and whose theories I shall strive to prove to the satisfaction of all save those who are immune to reason, and who refuse to acknowledge any thing with which they do not have personal acquaintance.”

Wallace’s letter continues, “I shall be travelling without companions, and with a minimum of provisions and the accoutrements of our modern existence, for I have no doubt that I shall be able to obtain sustenance and shelter from the land, as the hardy Esquimaux do, until such time as I reach my journey’s end, where I shall doubtless be shown the hospitality of those people who are as yet a mystery to us, but from whom we shall undoubtedly learn much which is presently hidden.”

It is not known when Wallace left Virginia, but the diary of the Rev. Francis Kilmartin—now in the possession of the Mission Houses Museum in Honolulu—confirms that he had arrived in the Sandwich Islands, as they were then known, by March 1838, when he is mentioned in Kilmartin’s diary. “Mr. Wallace is a curious mixture of the refined gentleman and the mystic, at one moment entertaining us all with his vivid and stirring tales of life among the Esquimaux, at another displaying an almost painful interest in any news from the ships’ captains arriving in port from eastern realms. His theories about the Polar region seem scarcely credible, and yet he appears to believe in them with every fiber of his being.” In an entry from April 1838 Kilmartin writes, “We have said our farewells and God speeds to Mr. Wallace, who departed this day on board the Helena bound for Hong Kong. While I am, I confess, loath to see him go—for I do not foresee a happy outcome to his voyage—it is also a relief that he has found passage for the next stage of his journey, which he has been anticipating for so long, and which consumes his mind to the exclusion of all else.” From We Did Not All Come Back

• • • •

He had not wanted to return to Virginia, but there was that which needed to be done, preparations he needed to make, before setting out once more. He was uncomfortable with his parents, although not as uncomfortable as they with him. His father declared, publicly, that he would wash his hands of the boy, as if Wallace were still the feckless lad who had abandoned his studies so long ago; his mother thought, privately, that she would give much to have that feckless lad back once more if only for a moment, for she found herself frightened of the man who had returned from a place she could barely imagine. He left Richmond—which he had long since ceased to think of as home—in early summer of 1837, and made his way to the Sandwich Islands, thence to Hong Kong, and thence—but later he could hardly remember the route by which he had attained the frozen shore of that far country about which he had dreamed for so long. He seemed to pass through his journey as one travels through a dream world, the people and places he saw like little more than ghosts, pale and inconsequent shadows. It was not until he stood on that northern coast, saw once more the ice stretching out before him, that he seemed to awaken. All that he had passed through was forgotten; all that existed now was the journey ahead, through the ice which stretched as far as his eyes could see.

• • • •

The ice moves, obeying laws which have existed since the beginning of time. Currents swirl in the dark depths below, carrying the ice floe upon which he has erected his igloo, carrying it—where? He does not know. It is carrying him onward; that is all he knows.

Kilmartin’s fears were well founded, for it is at this point that William Henry Wallace disappears from history. What befell him after he left Honolulu is one of the minor mysteries of Arctic exploration, for no further word is heard of him; we do not even know if he successfully reached Hong Kong, and from there north his passage would have been difficult. His most likely course would have been to travel the sea trading route north to the Kamtschatka Peninsula and then across the Gulf of Anadyr to Siberia’s easternmost tip and the shore of the Chukchi Sea, from whence he would have been able to start out across the treacherous pack ice toward the North Pole.

Whether or not he made it this far is, of course, unknown, and likely to remain so at this remove, although one tantalising clue exists. When the crew of the Plover were forced to spend the winter of 1848-9 in Chukotka, on the northeast tip of the Gulf of Anadyr, they heard many tales of the rugged coastline to the west, and met many of the inhabitants of the villages, who came to Chukotka to trade. One of the party—Lieutenant William Hulme Hooper— later wrote Ten Months Among the Tents of the Tuski about the Plover’s experience, and in one chapter touches on the character of these hardy coastal people. “They are superstitious almost to a fault,” he wrote, “and signs and events that would be dismissed by most are seized on by them as omens and portents of the most awful type. . . . One native told of a man who appeared like a ghost from the south, who had no dogs and pulled his own sledge, and whose wild eyes, strange clothes, and terrible demeanor so frightened the villagers that they— who are among the most hospitable people on Earth, even if they have but little to offer—would not allow him a space in their huts for the night. When day came they were much relieved to find that he had departed, across the ice in the direction of Wrangel Island to the north, where the natives do not venture, upon seeing which they were convinced that he was come from—and gone to—another world.”

Historians have debated the meaning behind Hooper’s “a man who appeared like a ghost from the south.” The author would, of course, have been hearing the native’s words through an interpreter, who might himself have been imprecise in his translation. Hooper’s phraseology, if it is a faithful transcription of what he was told, could mean that the stranger appeared in ghost-like fashion; that is, unexpectedly. However, another interpretation is that the man appeared pale, like a ghost, to the dark-skinned Chukchi people; this, when taken with the direction from which the man appeared (which is the course Wallace would almost certainly have taken) and his decision to head northeast toward Wrangel, means that Hooper’s description of “the man like a ghost” might be our last glimpse of William Henry Wallace, who would have gone to certain death in the treacherous ice field; although whether before, or after, finding that Symmes’ theory was just that—a theory only—will never be known. From We Did Not All Come Back

• • • •

The land ice—the shelf of ice permanently attached to the shore—was easy enough to traverse. He towed a light sledge of his own devising behind him; he had no need of dogs, and now laughed at Symmes’ idea that reindeer would have been a practical means of transport. Here there was one thing, and one thing only, on which he could depend, and that was himself. An open lead of water separated the land ice from the pack ice, and it was with difficulty that he traversed it. From that moment his journey became a landscape of towering ice rafters and almost impenetrable pressure ridges, formed by the colliding sheets of ice. On some days he spent more time hacking a trail through the pressure ridges, or drying himself and his clothes after falling through young ice or misjudging his way across a lead, than he did travelling, and would advance less than a mile; on other days, when his progress seemed steady, he would find that the currents carrying the ice had taken him further forward than he anticipated. He headed ever northward. He passed Wrangel Island on his left, and could have confirmed that it was an island, not a land bridge across the Pole connecting with Greenland; but by now such distinctions were beyond him. All was one here, the ice and snow and he himself, a tiny dot in the landscape of white. Did he believe, still, in Symmes? Would he have recalled the name, had there been anyone to mention it? But there was no one, and with every step forward he left the world, and his part in it, further behind. Each night he built his house of snow. The Esquimaux had built their igloos large enough to accommodate several people; his own houses were small, large enough to accommodate only one, and consequently he had had to train himself to wake every hour or so, to clear the ventilation hole of ice so that he could breathe. It was not difficult to wake at regular intervals; the ice cracked and groaned and spoke almost as a living person, and more than once he sat in the Arctic night, listening to the voices, trying to discern what they were saying. One day, perhaps; one day. His provisions, despite careful husbanding, gave out eventually, and for several days he subsisted on melted snow, and by chewing on the leather traces of the harness which connected him to his sledge, his only remaining link with his past. In reality, he was almost beyond bodily needs; he only remembered that it was time to eat when the increasing darkness reminded him that another day was drawing to a close. The seal was the first living thing that he had seen in—how long? He did not remember; yet instinct took over, and he killed it and ate it, and when he had sated his hunger he had a moment of clarity, almost, when his course seemed laid out, stark and level. Either he hoarded the seal meat, turned, and set back for the coast, or he continued, onward through the ice, toward: what? An Open Polar Sea? Symmes’ hollow earth? It did not matter. Nothing mattered. His destiny was here, in the north, in the ice. It was all he had wanted, since—he could not remember when. Time meant nothing. The life he had left behind was less than dust. This was the place that he was meant to be. He would go on.

• • • •

He crawls into the igloo and fastens the covering over the opening, making a tight seal. His fur-covered bed beckons, and he pulls the robes over himself. Around and below him the ice cracks and cries, a litany lilting as a lullaby which slowly, gradually, lulls him to sleep. The ventilation hole at the top of the igloo becomes crusted with ice, condensed from his own breath. He does not wake to clear it. And the ice carries him, ever onward.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Barbara Roden is the World Fantasy Award-winning editor and publisher of Ash- Tree Press, which she co-founded with her husband Christopher in 1994. She was born in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1963, and now lives 200 miles northeast of that city, in the heart of cattle ranching country. Since 1994 she has also been joint editor of All Hallows, the journal of the Ghost Story Society. Publisher’s Weekly has described her work as “eloquent” and “a standout”. Her story “Northwest Passage” was nominated for the World Fantasy, Stoker, and International Horror Guild Awards, and appeared in two Year’s Best anthologies. True Crime M. Rickert | 987 words

He cut off her arms and threw them on the side of the road. They wanted a boy. Her uncle taught her how to play the game. The last time anyone saw her she was dancing. She was drunk. She was flirting with everyone. She was wearing a short skirt. She had a lot of eyeliner on. She got into the car, which anyone knows is a stupid thing to do. She was stupid. Actually, she was very intelligent, but had no common sense. It wasn’t her fault. But what was she thinking? He pulled over to ask if she had seen his dog. She skipped down the sidewalk because she had just learned how to do so. The first time he hit her, he apologized and vowed never to do it again. He did it again. She had a crook in her nose where he broke it. She learned what brand of makeup covers bruises. Nobody guessed the trouble she was in. A lot of people knew she was in trouble, but a person who doesn’t want to be helped can’t be. They dated for six months before he murdered her. She was very popular. No one can remember her name. She was asleep in her bedroom, which was a diorama of her life from the pile of stuffed animals in the corner, to the cheerleading ribbons, to the college applications splayed on her desk. He snuck in through the window. A pillow can muffle screams and gunshots. She was strangled. She met him at a bar. Her friends begged her not to leave with him. She laughed. When she danced, she raised her arms overhead, her fingers apart, her hands catching the light. She spun in an ever-widening circle. She hoped there was a way out. She tried to remember everything she’d been taught about self-defense. She remembered all of it. She blamed herself. She cried. Her father told her he felt terrible. Her father told her it was a secret. He told her it was all her fault. She hiked alone. She married him. She told him she knew what he had done. She was waiting for the school bus. She didn’t run fast enough. She wore dark lipstick. When she opened her mouth to scream, she threw up instead. She wasn’t paying attention. She was day dreaming. Her mother told her she could not go on spring break, but she went anyway. She met her best friend for a walk. She fought until the very end. She couldn’t believe it was happening to her. If she hadn’t been wearing heels, she might have gotten away. He locked her in a room, but sometimes let her out. Why didn’t she escape? She simply disappeared; no one is even sure she is dead. She was home alone, studying, when they broke in. She jumped from the car. It was in broad daylight. When she screamed, he shot her. He used a knife. He was a stranger. She recognized his voice. He was a cop. He was a priest. He was her professor. Her husband. Her father. Her lover. Her boyfriend. Her ex. He was the high school star football player. He said he just needed to see her one last time. She went. She didn’t go. She was five years old. She was only seventeen. She was in college. She was excited about her first apartment. She was a newlywed. An empty nester. Never married. A grandmother. She was beautiful. She was plain. She had a bright future. An impressive career. Her whole life was a mess. She took drugs. She never took drugs, not even caffeine; that’s what her mother thought, but they found a Keurig in her kitchen. Was it a clue? Her Facebook page was mostly kittens. She didn’t have a Facebook page, which was strange. Her Facebook page was full of politics, and her opinions made her less appealing. How could she believe the things she did? She had a crack in her voice that was annoying. Actually, she was a crappy friend. She stole boyfriends and forgot birthdays. She rode her bicycle to the store to get napkins for the party. They never found her. She used to sing in her sleep. He thought she was older. He thought she was younger. He thought no one was watching. She thought maybe she’d become a private investigator so, when he showed up, she used her smart phone to stealth take a picture of him. She died anyway. She stands by the side of her parents’ bed, watching them sleep. She is a ghost. She runs over the same hill every night, and she doesn’t know why she is there. She’s afraid. She’s making a plan. He ties her wrists. He ties her ankles. She left the window open because it was a hot night. She came home and he was there. He was her first kiss. Once, she thought she loved him. She suspected he had moved on to her little sisters. She hoped she was wrong. She was frozen. Alive. She was broken like a doll. She was a doll. She was a bitch. She was crazy. She was timid. She was born to parents that loved her so much. She cried a lot. She never made a sound. She tried to do the right thing. She deserved it. She never, for one moment, believed it was her fault but she was sorry. She prayed. She cursed. She asked why. She never even had time to speak. She woke up and he was there. She turned, and he was there. He came out of nowhere. She raised her arms to the sky, her fingers splayed; she turned her face to the stars, she was spinning in the light, and everyone stopped to watch her.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR M. Rickert has published three short story collections: Map of Dreams, Holiday, and You Have Never Been Here. Her stories have been collected in numerous anthologies including American Fantastic Tales (Library of America), The Big Book of Ghost Stories (Vintage), Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror (Tachyon) and Shadows and Tall Trees 7 (Undertow Publications). She is the winner of the Crawford Award, World Fantasy Award and Shirley Jackson Award. Her first novel, The Memory Garden, won the Locus award. Before earning her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts she worked as a kindergarten teacher, coffee shop barista, Disneyland balloon vendor and personnel assistant in Sequoia National Park. She currently lives in Wisconsin where she is working on a new novel, and teaching yoga. Her story, “The Shooter” will be published in 2019 in Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories. Find her online at www.mrickert.net.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight The Pike Conrad Williams | 6313 words

Carpers further down the canal were using fishmeal and pellets to try to tempt the doubles, but Lostock wasn’t interested in them. Carp might fight for longer, but they weren’t as aggressive as pike. He didn’t like the look of them, those bloated and gormless mouth-breathers. They turned his stomach. He’d talked to bailiffs and other fishermen about the water. Some were happy to chat with him, others hunched over their gear like poker players protecting a good hand as he approached. They’d tell him what he already knew. They suggested he find another place to fish, that this place was dead now after long years of pressure, of inexperienced anglers fouling the stock. Nothing much left. I only fish here because it’s close to home and I can’t get around as much as I used to. In their eyes: Piss off. This is my swim. Sling your bleeding hook, or rather, don’t. It was a deep canal; five feet in the main, sinking to six in some places. The margins were shallower, and this was where most of the snags were to be found. Weed-beds, shopping trolleys, knotted drifts of ancient polythene. Over the years, Lostock had lost any number of rigs to rusted, sunken bicycles or reefs of fly-tipped refuse. It wasn’t ethical to lose a baited treble hook in the water—no matter that they were barbless these days—so now he tested extensively the stretches he fancied, clearing the water of obstacles, or making sure of the depth so he could cast accurately above the bed. He noticed that in some areas near the bank the depth was similar to that in the middle. Pike were known to lie up against the bank or within holes. They’d be attracted to this extra foot or so of water. He knew he might be on to something when he found one such spot near a factory. Outflow pipes flooded the canal with warm water. Fish bliss. He’d often been told by his grandad that if you ever found an area like this, you should give it some time. Tend it like a garden, you’ll reap rewards. So he’d bought a clean, empty paint tin from B&Q and punctured it all over with a screwdriver. He’d begged the fishmonger for a bucket of his waste and filled the tin with chopped heads, fins and guts. He’d added oil from a carton of mackerel fillets and left it by the heater in his shed all afternoon. He took the stinking tin to the canal in the evening and tied a rope to the plastic handle. It had hurt to do so, but he managed to sling it out to the swim he had his eye on. That bit of the water that roiled and rolled with the warm current from the outflow. He pegged the rope down and beat it into the packed soil of the bank and went home, checking first that nobody had seen him at work. He ate. He bathed. He coated his skin in Imiquimod cream. He slept. There never seemed to be any great stretch between closing his eyes and opening them again. He couldn’t remember his dreams anymore. It was his skin, rather than the alarm clock, that brought him back. Skin so tight and dry it must belong to another body. It itched constantly, no matter how much of the cream he applied, or how often. The doctor wanted him to go for surgery, but Lostock had a thing about scars. Scars changed the way you looked. You became someone else, and he was only just coming to terms with the person that he had been shaped into. But then, maybe, it would be for the best if he did change. To be physically altered, to be at some part removed from the cast of his ancestors. The slightly prominent forehead. The downward slope of the mouth. It would help him to forget that he was the sum of a number of parts that were at best defective. “Whynt y’get ’itched, Jimmeh? Whynt y’settle down?” He turned away from the voice. He became absorbed by the routine. The flask of tea, the sandwiches—one beef paste, one ham and cheese— wrapped in greaseproof paper and tucked into the lunch-box with an apple, a Ski yoghurt and half a packet of Malted Milk. His little radio, permanently tuned to Talksport. He never listened to a word, but he needed the mutter and grumble to help distract him from more persistent voices. A check on the tackle he’d loaded, the foldaway chair, the bait. He put the car into neutral and let the handbrake off. He coasted down the rise to the main road and only switched on the engine when he was twenty feet clear of the last house. Five a.m., and a white skin on the world. Everything shivering: the trees, the engine, the fine net of frost hanging in the air. He drove past a bungalow with a red Fiat 127 in the drive and he almost cried out. His first car had been a 127, a hand-me-down from his dad who was half-blinded by glaucoma and unable to drive. He remembered many journeys prior to that, sitting in the back seat. No radio. No seat-belts in the back. Wind-up windows. The most basic model. His mother: “Oh, it’s got a ruddy engine then?” An episode leapt to the head of the queue, the one time Dad took him and his grandad fishing. Grandad hauling in breath to a pair of lungs turned to worn leather after a lifetime of heavy smoking. He’d listened to his dad moaning about the prime minister, about his lack of a pay raise, about the quality, or lack of it, of the beer at The Imperial. He didn’t understand a word of it. He just watched his grandad’s hawkish profile, his wet blue eyes, the dry, sucking slit of his mouth. Later, when the deck chairs had been set up, his grandad sat and watched his rod. He didn’t speak. He never spoke, not to Lostock, anyway. He always wore a faraway look, as if he was remembering his youth, before asbestos, or smoking, or pneumonia took it away for good. He’d never been hugged by the man, though he’d opened his arms to him when it was time to say goodbye. His grandma hugged him plenty; enough for the both of them, he supposed. What remained of his white hair curled out from beneath his cap like the barbs of a feather. Dad showed him how to thread the line through the eyes of the rod and attach a float, the lead shot, the hook. They’d brought bait in labelled Tupperware tubs: breadcrumb, sweetcorn and maggot. His Dad told him there was a trick to making a maggot wake up quickly after a night in the fridge. “Pop one in your mouth for a few secs, warm ’im up, then hook ’im on.” But Lostock wouldn’t do it. His mum had told him that a boy had done exactly that on a fishing trip, and something in or on the maggots had infected him, burned his tongue and his lips and his penis from the inside out. He was all blisters now, and he would never have kids of his own. “Y’talkin’ nonsense, Barb. Don’t fill the lad’s ’ead wi’ shite like that.” “I ruddy amn’t. You let him put maggots in his mouth and I’ll play holy hell, Bill Lostock. See if I ruddy don’t.” His dad showed him how to keep a finger on the line while you were casting, right up until the last second. Grandad’s float was orange, Dad’s was yellow and his own was luminous green. He stared at it for hours. He stared for so long, that the float became superimposed on eyelids whenever he closed them. Waterwolf. Slough shark. Old Jack. “Jack’ll take your fingers,” his grandad told him, while his dad went off to take a piss. “If you don’t show him some respect. Almost killed my father.” The mere lay before them like a trembling brown skin. Lostock was shocked into silence, by the suddenness of Grandad’s utterance, and the way his voice sounded. It was really quite lovely: rich and liquid and touched by inflections that didn’t sound like anybody he knew in his home town. Grandad had been on a boat as a child with his father, Tom, fishing for pike, when the pike rammed them. His father and he both fell into the water. Grandad almost drowned. The pike rammed Tom in the face, scarfing down an eye. Grandad managed to pull himself back into the boat and splashed at the water with the paddle until he was sure the fish was gone. He didn’t know who was screaming the most, him or Tom. Other fishermen on the bank had been roused by the commotion and waded out to them. “Is that the worst thing you ever saw?” Lostock asked him, and his voice had been tiny in the oppressive room, under the cracked Lancashire slur of his grandad, leaning over him with his hawkish face, the grim, shark-bow mouth. “It were the worst I ever felt. Watchin’ me dad go into the water and see that monster try to drill itself into his head.” He leaned closer. Lostock smelled tobacco and Uncle Joe’s. “We all of us have a chapter like that. A black chapter. Sometimes you write it yourself. Sometimes some bastard writes it for you.” His dad came back then, face red from the sun. They stayed until dusk and packed up, empty-handed, his dad cursing the water and the idiots that were supposed to stock it. Kev Beddall had told him there were scores of perch in the mere. Big ones too, five pounders. He reckoned there might be a British record in that water. “Kev Beddall’s got shite fer brains,” he remembered his dad saying. His grandad resembled a fish discarded on the bank, sucking uselessly at the air, waiting for the priest to batter the life from him. He had wondered if maybe his grandad was a pike in disguise, and might be better off in the water. Lostock had stared at his dad in horror, wondering if he had read his own black chapter yet. They stopped off at the pub on the way home, but he couldn’t swallow his Coke for the fear that swelled in his throat. Lostock reached the swim, his head thick and itchy with unpleasant memories that had not encroached for many years. His grandad had died maybe two or three years after that fishing trip, the only one they’d shared, and he could barely remember a conversation between them. It was as if Lostock did not exist when they were in the room together. His grandad stared straight ahead, at the wrestling on TV if it was on, or if not, at a space above it. “Lived longer than I will, though,” Lostock thought now as he set up his rig, fixing a wire leader to the line to foil the pike’s teeth, attaching a circle hook, digging through the tubs of deads for some suitably tasty lure. He cast nervous glances east, to the factory, and what lay beyond. His skin trembled, as if in recognition. The sun was a bare thin line skimming the houses in an area that had once been known as Arpley Meadows, where Thames Board Paper Mill had stood. He used to cycle up Slutcher’s Lane to watch the cricket matches there in the summer, and root about in the grounds because sometimes you could find spare rolls of gaffer tape as large as a tyre. He might take some bin liners with him and fill them with the shreds and offcuts from the factory, caught in the guttering and ditches like wizards’ hair. He went round the lanes near his house, selling it as bedding for rabbits and guinea pigs, a bit of pin money to keep himself stocked up on hooks and fresh line. He’d kept that green float, for luck, and he used it now. He cast into the swirl of warm water by the outflow pipe and settled into this chair. He put on his sunglasses and cricket hat. He angled his umbrella against the coming dawn. He waited. Basal cell carcinoma. This skin cancer was, the doctor had related to him, a result of “solar damage,” as if he was no different to some kind of satellite. Plaques and lesions had formed and grown on his legs and arms, the skin becoming sore and red and even, in some places, scaly and crusted. The doctor wanted Lostock to go for surgery, had impressed upon him that this form of cancer was eminently survivable, but he didn’t want any knife near him. Which left him with dawn and dusk to hide his face, and a scarf when these uninhabited acres became dotted with loners like him. Whynt y’get ’itched, Jimmeh? Whynt y’settle down? He closed his eyes to his dead mother’s voice, as if that might provide her with an answer that would satisfy her. She had, probably rightly, blamed his obsession with the fish for his inability to land what she called a proper catch, a keeper. His objections were down to his skin, but it wouldn’t wash with Mam, who had always made it sound as though he was to blame for his condition. “No Lostock ever ’ad the skin cancer befowah. And we sunned ussel’s daft, got sunburned and everythin’. All I can say is you ’int made of the same gristle as the rest of us. You daft get.” He hadn’t the heart to mention all the holidays they’d taken to Rhyl and Prestatyn and Aberystwyth when he was a child. Every summer in a caravan, two weeks of traffic jams, his dad pissed every night, and a diet of burgers, chips and ice cream. Dawn till dusk out in the high 70s without sunblock, sucking down warm, sugary lemonade, always thirsty because of it. And when he woke up in the middle of the night in agony, his skin the colour of boiled lobsters, blisters the size of footballs on his legs, his mother had sterilised a needle with the flame from a cigarette lighter and lanced them, then squealed at him to sleep on the sofa when the lymph from within drizzled on to his sheets. That had happened so many times he couldn’t count them. His GP had gone spare when he saw the scars. He ordered his mother to either keep him out of the noon day sun or slather him in factor fifty. “What’s that pale nobend know about suntans an’ doctorin’?” his mother had wanted to know. “Ant got no ruddy clue and how dare he shout at me like that? The jumped up snot-nose bastid. What is he, twelve years old? An’ thinks ’e’s God’s gift to ’ealin’?” Thanks, Mam. Thanks for everything. His first memory of his mam: reaching out to her from the pram, her oval face framed with prematurely grey hair, her brown eyes wrinkling under a brown smile. The filter between her brown fingertips. She used to dip his dummy in rum laced with honey to get him off to sleep. She forced it in his mouth like a plug that was slightly too small for the sinkhole. One time, she caught a ragged fingernail on his lips and he cried so hard his throat hurt and the breath snagged in his chest— The green float disappeared beneath the surface of the water. He stared at it a moment, thinking of the fake emeralds around his mother’s throat as they dipped below the scalloped neckline of her dress. He wondered where she had bought that, or who had given it to her. Behind every trinket, a story. She would— Christ. Any other fish and he’d have lost it. But it was okay, with pike, to take your time. Most of them attacked fish acrossways, content to wait until they arrived back at their lair to turn their meal around and eat it head first. “Hi Jack,” he said, without realising. He struck into the fish and the immediate resistance of it corded his forearms; it was a big bastard, maybe twenty-plus pounds. The far bank, the factory, the wedges of leaden cloud rising on the horizon, all of this receded until his focus took in only the tip of his rod and the boiling surface of the canal just beyond it. It was in such moments, when the world mostly went away and he was blindly connected to the animal on his hook, that he felt anything like alive. His mind stopped harking back to a time when he wished he might have been happier. It did not pick at the scab of his grandfather or mope over the decay that drove his parents apart. His skin was just a dull sack that contained him, rather than a complex structure that was degrading, conspiring to pull him apart. There was a single, pure thought. How to deliver something from one element into another. The fish fought for a long time, longer than he was expecting. He wondered if maybe after all he’d struck into a carp, but then the fish rose and its duck-billed head became visible. An eye swivelled towards him from just under the surface, with its fixed black pupil like a hammered tack. He was granted a view of its pale belly as the fish rolled away from him, all bronze, gold, rust. It was endless, ageless. The fish sank and Lostock felt the tremor of its body as it flexed, finning for depth. The line had broken. Now Lostock felt a pang of guilt through the brief depression of his loss; fish hooked deep enough might starve to death because the hook and wire trace couldn’t be removed without damage to the delicate gut. He put down his rod and cleaned his hands. The winter sun was finding a way through the mist, despite being unable to rise much higher than the factory roofs. Lostock got out of his chair and stretched his legs. Fighting the pike, and all that remembering had tired him, but it was still too early to turn to his lunchbox. He poured out another beaker of tea and took it downstream to the hump-backed bridge. The road was cracked, studded with pot-holes. On the other side of the bridge it split into two. One branch curved left and cleaned up its act before it met the main roads on the outskirts of town. The other branch ended after a hundred yards at a steel fence locked into place with breeze-blocks. The factory beyond was out of bounds, awaiting the wrecker’s ball, presumably, or a slow decay into the foaming acres of autumn hawkbit and mind-your-own-business. There was a security poster fixed to the diamond links with nylon ties, but in all the hours Lostock had spent on the canal bank he had seen no sign of a patrol. No white vans. No dogs. He placed a foot against the fence and it bowed inwards; someone had been here before. Further along, where the fence became lost within a tangle of branches and brambles, it was torn and buckled. Lostock pushed his way through, careful not to snag his sore skin on any of the metal claws, and approached the factory entrance. The door had been recently secured with what looked like old railway sleepers bolted across the frame. The ground floor windows were boarded up with fresh panels. He took a mouthful of tea and spat it out: cold. He’d been standing on the forecourt, staring up at the building, for fifteen minutes. Cramp laced the backs of his calves. He shook it out and walked around to the side. The hair on his back and shoulders was rising but the temperature, if anything, had improved since dawn. Ducts and pipes, corroded by time and rust into metal wafers, sprawled from the factory wall like something gutted. He placed his hand against one of the less ruined conduits and felt warmth. He remembered the outflow pipe at the canal, with its constant drizzle of warm water. What had they made here? Was the factory abandoned after all? He remembered this place from his childhood. You could see its sawtooth roof on the bus to and from school if you sat on the top deck. His grandad had worked here, but he had no idea what he did. Dad told him he did carpentry in his spare time, and had constructed the frames for the houses that backed on to the M6 through some of the villages dotted around south Cheshire. But this didn’t look like any kind of timber factory. He saw now, how, if he climbed on to the pipes that swarmed from the shattered housing, he’d be able to lever himself up to a window that was only partially obscured by chipboard. The lure of the fish was only so great now that he was in the shadow of the factory. He felt the delicious tremor of criminality, unknown for years, since minor indiscretions as an underage drunk, or shoplifting bars of chocolate from the corner shop. He placed his cup by the pipe and hoisted himself on to it, realising, too late, that if the metal gave out under his weight he would injure himself badly. His skin was in no mood for cuts or abrasions. It held, but it made plenty of distressing creaks and groans. Flakes of rust and paint fell psoriatically away. As he drew closer to the window, there was a smell of chemicals and mildew, reminding him of the bathroom at his grandad’s house, before he was moved to the home. He was fond of harsh-smelling products: Vosene, Listerine, Euthymol, TCP, Dettol. He would never have touched a jar of moisturiser. It was a wonder he had not dissolved in some of the things he slathered on his own skin. Lostock pulled at the chipboard; it broke apart under his fingers. He pushed it away and gazed through the open window-frame. The factory looked as though it had been abandoned in a hurry. There was a melamine table with a mint green surface covered in a film of grease and grime, peppered with plates and mugs. A padded jacket hung on a chair. Beyond that was a cavernous area swimming with motes. His fingers still sang with the tension from the fish, and he didn’t feel the dull pebbles of glass that remained in the frame as he levered himself into the factory. His boots crunched on more of that glass and the dust and dead insects of God knew how many years. The air was cold and old. It smelled of feathers and spoors. There was a rich, mushroom odour underpinning the faint chemical ghosts. Empty paint tins stood glued the floor by rust and their own leakages. In a corner, a pair of vermin-chewed boots stood facing the wall. Layers of paint and plaster peeled from the walls, revealing the lathe beneath, like rudimentary ribs in a creature that had been ignored by evolution. A calendar clung to what was left. Much of December woman had leeched into the tiles above a bowl containing a boulder of solid sugar. Her face was smeared, her eyes accusatory. Leaflets explaining how to join a trade union were a gummed mass considering a leap from the corner of the work-top. Lostock moved through the room, hating the gritty echoes that his feet threw up. He opened a door into a corridor flanked by offices. All of them were empty, the furniture flogged, the fittings and fixtures stolen, or stripped out by renovators abruptly stymied by the plummeting economy. He found some evidence as to what the factory produced on the floor of what might have been the Human Resources base. There were yellowed dockets and invoices spilling from a file swollen with damp. They mentioned paper orders and quotas for recycled pulp. What he’d smelled all along was not the dank organic stench of mushrooms, but the ancient rot of paper. He meant to leave then, sick of the smell, and the way the air was somehow coalescing around him, the tiny fibres of cellulose tickling his nostrils and blanketing his lungs. But something about the smell was growing more familiar to him, the further along this corridor he progressed. Under the factory odours was something domestic, but not of these times. It was a mingling of notes that fled as soon as they arrived, like a word that would not sit still on the tip of the tongue. Naphthalene, suet, the hot cotton scent of antimacassars scorching by direct sunlight. Bleached hardbacks on a shelf, barely touched in fifty years. Brasso. Wright’s coal tar soap. Camp coffee. He was standing in an office without understanding how he’d reached it. Depressions in the floorboards showed where a desk and chairs had once stood. Gaps in the grille across the window allowed him to see his deck chair by the canal. What was he thinking? There was a couple of hundred pounds’ worth of gear lying there, waiting to be nicked. But he was rooted. Something in the air: this smell, this peculiar mixture of smells that he’d not known for thirty years. He stared at where the desk would have been, and tried to imagine the shape of the head of the man sitting behind it. He found it hard to believe that people might have come to him to ask his advice on an aspect of work, when he was so very recalcitrant in his private life. Lostock imagined him at Christmas parties, or outings, tie off, the neck buttons undone. Handing out pints, helping women into their coats. “Thanks, Jack. Bye, Jack.” There was a large plastic rubbish bin in the opposite corner. Somebody had made a half-hearted attempt at clearing out the room but had either given in or stopped when it became clear the building was a hopeless case. He saw great clods of hoovered up dust and carpet fibres, whiteboard markers, broken in-trays. There was a manila file in there too, with Lostock’s initials on it: J.K.L. James Kenneth Lostock. Inside were pictures drawn by a child, yellowed by time around the edges, pitted here and there by thumbtacks. Pictures of the man who had owned them, all gigantic faces and arms akimbo. Here was a picture of Grandad holding a fish in his fist. Lostock did not remember drawing them, but there was his name at the bottom of each page, with the “e” and the “s” back to front. He wished his grandad back for the first time, then. He thought he might be able to help him, in the way the doctors and his parents had not. “Whynt y’get itched, Jimmeh? Whynt y’settle down?” “Is that the worst thing you ever saw?” Lostock was twelve when he went fishing for mirror carp with his best friend at the time, a boy from his class at school called Carl. They’d cycled to the gravel pit, mist-covered and grey this particular winter morning, with rods already set up and baited, pieces of corn infused with vanilla extract speared on their hooks. Lostock had told Carl vanilla extract was a bit gay, but Carl said the fish liked it, that they wouldn’t spit the corn out because of it. They ditched their bikes next to the pit and pitched a tent. They made their casts and sat watching the tips of their rods. Soon Lostock dug into his rucksack and started divvying up their breakfast. Morning rolls spread with peanut butter and mashed bananas, cold crispy bacon wrapped in kitchen paper, a flask of hot chocolate. Lostock was bored after a couple of hours. He wasn’t the fishing nut; he’d agreed to come along with Carl, who had a passion for carp. It had sounded like an adventure. It was just cold and dull. He told his friend he was going to do a round of the pit on his bike, maybe see if there was anywhere to do some jumps. Carl waved him off. Something made Lostock turn to look back at his friend, when he was on the opposite side of the pit. A figure, slight and pale, wearing a Lord Anthony covered in Star Trek badges and jeans so faded they were almost white. Almost immediately he heard the sound of cows lowing. He turned toward the noise, nervous. He didn’t like cows. He didn’t like their thick pink tongues licking at too-wet nostrils. He didn’t like their swollen udders and the caking of shit around their tails. They stank. They attracted flies. He drove his mother berserk because she was worried he wasn’t getting enough calcium inside him. There were no cows in the field. He could hear the groan of morning traffic rising from the main road, a couple of hundred metres away. And this lowing. He scrambled through the sludge of rotten leaves and mud, splashing cold, dirty water all up the back of his cords—and his mother was going to clear his lugholes out over that when he got home—and found his way barred by a fence. Behind that were a couple of parked cars and an open door. The sound was coming from that. He thought to go back to Carl and ask him about it; he knew his way around this place, but instead he dumped his bike and climbed over the fence. He went to the door and peeked inside. There were five men in white gowns and helmets, like a team of weird construction workers dressed up as ghosts. One of them turned around and Lostock was aghast to see an apron slicked with blood. He stepped back out into the cold air, glad of it in his chest, smacking him in the face. He thought about getting back on his bike and cycling to a phone booth, calling the police. There was murder going on here. He had to make sure. He ran around the back of the building, where lorries were backed up against open bays. He heard the cows again. And other noises. Screams and squeals. This sounded nothing like the deaths that occurred on Kojak. Through a window he saw cows being led to pens. A man with what looked like a large black wand bent over them and pressed it to their heads. There was a hiss, a deep ka-chunk sound, and the animals dropped. He didn’t know whether what he felt then was relief or sickness. It was just another kind of murder, after all. He was thinking of bacon sandwiches, and whether he would miss them if he decided to become a vegetarian, when he heard another scream. This one was altogether different. It was high pitched. Somehow . . . wetter. It suggested a knowledge of what was happening to its author. He ran back to the windows, thinking of intelligent animals, wondering crazily when the British public had developed a taste for dolphins or octopi, and saw a long steel trench with lots of metal teeth turning within it. Someone had been piling indeterminate cuts and wobbling, shiny bits of offal from a plastic chute into one end but had got his arm trapped. His mates were running towards him and the man was screaming shut it off, shut it off. Thankfully, Lostock couldn’t see his face. He didn’t say anything else after that, because the auger ground him into the trench and he was killed. He heard the scream cut out as if he’d flicked off his own power switch. He’d heard, even at this distance, through the glass, the pulverisation of thick bone. He’d seen the teeth of the machine impacted with flesh and torn clothes. His face had risen from the trench, scooped up by a blade, like a bad horror mask on a pound shop hook. Lostock was sick where he stood, violent and without warning. It was as if someone had punched it out of him from within. He didn’t remember climbing back over the fence, collecting his bike, or returning to Carl. “Where have you been, you bone-on?” Carl demanded. “You nearly missed this.” He stood back to allow Lostock a look at the mirror carp lying in grass. It was enormous. It seemed deformed. Its skin was olive-coloured, there were maybe four or five scales, dotted near the tail and the dorsal fin. Its eyes protruded, its huge mouth gawped, gasping in the air. Lostock felt suddenly detached from nature. He couldn’t understand how this thing could still be living, how it could have come into being in the first place. There was this sudden impact in his mind about the outrageousness of animals. He had sucked up science fiction films since the age of five and stared out at the night sky wondering if aliens truly existed without giving any thought whatsoever to the bizarre creatures that lived on his own planet. Elephants. Rhinoceroses. Squid. Mirror carp. Here was as weird as you could get. He saw Carl for what he really was; a network of organs, blood vessels, bones and nerves. A brain with ganglia. Meat. The boy in the snorkel parka was gone for ever. Everything had changed. “I have to go home,” he might have said. He didn’t remember cycling back. He returned to the canal bank and loaded a hook with bait. The skin on the back of his hands was a mass of red striations. It felt loose on his face, like a latex mask he might be able to get his fingertips under and peel away. Despite the stink of the canal, and the constant breath of the exhaust coming down from the main roads, he could smell the sweet riot of decay pulsing off him. He pushed it all away and concentrated on the green float as he cast the rig into the water. Almost immediately, he saw the pale underbelly of a pike as it rolled on the surface by the far bank. Something was wrong. Lostock picked up his landing net and ensured his disgorger and his pliers were in his pocket, then hurried over the bridge to the other side. It was the same pike he’d caught that morning. He slid the net beneath it, careful not to startle it away, but this fish was going nowhere. There were ulcers all over its body, he could see now. Maybe where the fish had been fouled by careless anglers in the past, or something more serious. Struggling with the weight, Lostock brought the fish ashore and got it on to its back. It must have been forty pounds. He placed his legs either side of the body. With his gloved hand, he grasped the pike’s chin bone and tugged it upwards. The mouth yawned open, revealing a coral-coloured throat. Nylon line reached into the shadows. Lostock clamped the line between his pliers and wound it around the jaws; the gut rose into the mouth, revealing the embedded hook, awash with blood. “Christ, I’m sorry,” Lostock said. With his other hand he used the disgorger to remove the hook and pushed the gut back with the blunt end while holding the head as high as he could. His muscles burned and trembled under the weight of the fish. Its eye was fixed on Lostock the whole time. There was a cold, ancient wisdom there, and despite the circumstances, and the poor condition of its flesh, Lostock, as ever when he was in such close proximity to pike, felt an immense swell of wonder. He heard his dad’s voice, softened by beer, and a twelve-hour shift at the depot: They’re mean-looking buggers, and they fight hard, but they have a glass jaw, them pike. They die easy. He slipped into the water and drew the fish in alongside him. He tried to coax some movement from it, but it kept rolling on to its flanks. The majesty of it. The power. All potential was reduced in the end. Every spike of adrenaline was only a temporary thumbing of the flatline’s nose. Because you have nothing else. Because you want to say goodbye. The cold crept through him, despite his exertions with the fish. His skin no longer troubled him. The pain was like something viewed through thick fog. This fish had been around for millions of years. He wondered if it was related to the one that had attacked his grandad as a child. He wondered if, in some freak of longevity, it was the same beast. And there was a jolt of alarm as he considered the fish might be faking its sickness, and only wanted to trap him. But that passed. And he kept on with his ministrations. He got down low to the surface, close enough to smell the mud in its flesh, and he whispered to old Jack until night concealed everything.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Conrad Williams is the author of nine novels: Head Injuries, London Revenant, The Unblemished, One, Decay Inevitable, Loss of Separation, Dust and Desire [originally Blonde on a Stick], Sonata of the Dead, and Hell is Empty. His short fiction is collected in Use Once then Destroy, Born with Teeth, and I Will Surround You. He edited the anthologies Gutshot and Dead Letters. He has won the British Fantasy Award, the International Guild Award and the Littlewood Arc prize. Conrad lives in Manchester with his wife and three sons. NONFICTION The H Word: Paranoia for Beginners Grady Hendrix | 1075 words

In 2017 my phone rang, I picked it up, there was some fumbling on the other end and then a laughing female voice said, “Sorry, I dropped my headset. Are you still there?” “Sure,” I said. She laughed again, “I’m just having one of those days. Anyhoo, do you mind if we go over that credit card issue you emailed us about again?” It took me a minute to realize she was a recording, one that was designed to cover the pause between when the robo-dialer heard my voice and when its software was activated by pretending to drop its headset; one with volume and EQ levels that sounded natural on an earpiece, one that used social engineering to phish for my financial information. A chill of paranoia wrapped my brain in Icy Hot. Trapped on a hard drive somewhere was this splinter of a human personality designed to make me lower my guard. Compared to that, The Conjuring is downright adorable. That a fabricated personality could trick me, even for a second, into mistaking it for real is the least of my problems. Because while I wasn’t looking, reality was colonized by an entire fabricated world, governed by the tenets of horror. When I was a kid, conspiracy theories were my safe space. I had a couple of books that collected the addresses of different groups and I’d sit in my room, writing away for literature from UFO cults like Unarius and the Raelians. The United States Postal Service was a cornucopia of crackpot conspiracies, disgorging pamphlets from Minnesota’s Warlords of Satan, Christian comics from Jack Chick, apocalyptic photocopied newsletters like The Crystal Ball, catalogs for underground books from Loompanics Press, MK-Ultra exposés from Finland, shocking revelations of CIA weather control photocopied by whistleblowers on company time. I lost touch with the conspiracy community around Y2K, but in 2016 I checked back in to research my new book and walked into a horror movie, already in progress. The boards were full of talk about Pizzagate, bots, groomers, Beta alters, QAnon, and birthers. Nothing was funny anymore. Everyone felt out of control of their lives, they felt angry, they felt like drones enslaved by the one percent, and freedom wasn’t an ideal but a delusion for the sheeple. Basic human compassion for murdered children was snuffed out beneath talk of crisis actors and false flag operations. Individuals in the grip of psychotic breaks channeled their desperation into discussions of gangstalking. It’s one thing to say that people who believe the president should be impeached live in an online echo chamber. It’s another thing to see people who believe that hundreds of strangers are coordinating air traffic patterns, television broadcasts, and random street encounters in an effort to gaslight them into killing themselves getting those fantasies validated in an online echo chamber. Horror is the only fictional genre that claims to be true, going all the way back to at least The Castle of Otranto in 1764, which is supposedly based on the translation of a 1529 manuscript recounting a very unlucky family’s history. “The Turn of the Screw” is positioned as a true story that happened to a friend, and Dracula pushes against the boundaries of the novel with its fake transcripts, letters, and diary entries. Some folks still swear The Blair Witch Project was a documentary, or at least inspired by true events, or at least kind of based on an urban legend that was real. Honest. If horror fiction aspires to be indistinguishable from reality, then horror’s greatest achievement is the digital facsimile of reality that exists parallel to our analog world. Here, crowdsourced narratives, steeped in fear, despair, and paranoia have become viable alternatives to the truth. Fiction comforts us with a pleasing narrative neatness and by satisfying emotional needs left unfulfilled by reality, and now fictional devices have become weapons of mass delusion. Reporters are taught to “craft a narrative,” while PR firms try to “control the story.” Movies aspire to “worldbuild.” Real events and personalities are cut and pasted into fictional contexts to augment fiction with the grit of reality. Real events are burnished with the pleasing symmetry of narrative. Mentions of black sites and medical studies are sprinkled over fictional stories of mad scientists and first contact until these fictional conspiracies sound real. Catfishing, a form of weaponized storytelling in which a completely artificial online personality is cobbled together out of social media accounts and emails to con innocent people out of their money and their dignity, is what this looks like on a personal level. Pizzagate, the anti-vaxxing movement, and the reduction of global warming into a war of dueling narratives is what this looks like on a global scale. It’s been happening for decades. A totally fictional story about weapons of mass destruction led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Aum Shinrikyo cultists gassed the Tokyo subway system because they believed their leader had comic book superpowers. Just as some engineers are so fully invested in one fictional narrative, Star Trek, that it inspired them to invent cell phones and QuickTime, Timothy McVeigh’s belief in another fictional narrative, The Turner Diaries, inspired him to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Conspiracy theories have been around for centuries, but never before has the technology existed to let this fiction mesh so seamlessly with real life. Recently, Congressional representatives signed a letter stating the Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated Washington, D.C. It hasn’t. Two congressmen in 2017 talked about the dangers of One World Government, something I only used to see in homemade pamphlets duplicated on color copiers. In the 2016 election, presidential candidates blamed the country’s problems on vast right-wing conspiracies, on vaccines, on illegal immigrants, on the Deep State. All fiction. The desired emotional states this parallel fictional world seeks to produce are pain, anger, alienation, and despair—the horror palette. But the old metaphors we have—vampires, zombies, ghosts—don’t feel strong enough to counteract what has become the culmination of a few thousand years of horror fiction: an alternate, hopeless world that exists over, around, and beside this one. We’ve lost control of our creation, and while it runs amuck we play with our toys on the beach, not noticing how deep and treacherous the sea beside us has become.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Grady Hendrix is a novelist and screenwriter living in New York City. He’s the author of Horrorstör, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, and the Stoker-Award-winning history of the horror paperback boom of the Seventies and Eighties, Paperbacks from Hell. His latest book is We Sold Our Souls, a paranoia-inflected, heavy metal riff on the Faust legend, due out in September from Quirk Books. Book Review: September 2018 Adam-Troy Castro | 1096 words

The Question Worth Answering

The Cabin at the End of the World Paul Tremblay Hardcover / Ebook ISBN: 9780062679109 William Morrow, June 2018, 288 pages

Many, many years ago, your devoted servant was more obviously still learning this sometimes-disreputable craft (he still is, hopes never to stop, and avers that any writer who says otherwise is likely not worth reading). A workshop participant provided him with the following comment, written in red Bic Pen in the margin of his current horror story (one that eventually got published, despite being not very good), beside a gratuitous, but particularly loving description of shotgun-scattered brain matter slowly sliding down a tenement wall. She wrote, “Is this trip necessary?” He thinks now, as he thought then, that this is a primal question, relevant to any story you might want to tell. It’s not just about gore. It’s about whether the events on the page, the emotional journey traveled by the characters, ultimately have a point beyond a bunch of things happening. An astonishing number of published works and any number of filmed stories fail this simple test, and in many cases it’s not all that important. You want to present a frothy heist film, where the cute guy and cute girl get away with the money? Not much significance needs to hang on that hook. Or some story where a youthful protagonist has a largely stress- free vacation in Europe? Not much significance needs to hang on that hook. Hell, not much needs to hang on the hook of a bunch of heroes trying to stop a giant monster from stomping all the buildings in Sheboygan: as long as the stomping is fun, and their response equally compelling, then so be it. No deep thesis required. It’s when you get into darker horror, and sometimes gorier horror, that the “Is this trip necessary?” test comes to the forefront. If your protagonist is imprisoned in a basement and tortured at length, then the ordeal we’re experiencing along with that unfortunate damn well does require a point. There must be a reason we’re there, aside from vicarious sadism. And an awful lot of horror stories, in particular horror films, do miss this requirement. Those stories where some group of nobodies is subjected to viciousness of the most awful sort, where one last survivor almost gets away only to be mowed down at the last gasp—if there’s no point, then we’re just masturbating to all the great blood and gore, for its own sake, thrilling to those descriptions of viscera for their own sake, and an emptier exercise can hardly be imagined. One critic, addressing the Friday the 13th films by this criterion, coined the scornful phrase “Spam in a Cabin,” a reference to the characters being ambulatory meat waiting to be butchered. And that, at long last, brings us to today’s offering, The Cabin At the End of the World by Paul Tremblay, a novel which does indeed almost entirely take place in that traditional horror setting, the isolated wilderness cabin where any number of bloody atrocities can take place without the cops being called, or any neighbors intruding to ask why the rustic air is being disturbed by so much screaming. (Also: no cell phone reception, a condition that these days makes thriller writers sigh with the deep contentment of house cats. Getting rid of the cell phones does make everything so much easier.) We are introduced to a married couple, Eric and Andrew, enjoying their weekend getaway with their cute-as-a-button adopted Chinese daughter, Wen. She’s happily engaged in catching grasshoppers, out of sight of her parents, when the first stranger, Leonard, comes walking up the road to engage her. He has friends, who will be showing up to subdue her two daddies in just a moment. The newcomers, strangers who claim to have not known each other until a couple of days earlier, will report that they have been delivered of a revelation, either divine or demonic: the world will end unless this random loving family of three can be induced to willingly perform an act of profound evil. There will be ambiguous indications before the end that this ultimatum is not bullshit, that the price of the three not capitulating will indeed be global catastrophe. But there are possible mundane explanations, too. Andrew, an academic, is particularly insistent on those. Eric is not so sure. And as the confrontation between the home invaders and their captives turns increasingly violent, spattering that isolated cabin with the kind of stains that will simply never come out, that ambiguity only increases. It’s a short novel by today’s standards, occupying a very compressed period of time, and Tremblay fills the space by relating its various sections in intense sensual detail, from the point of view of characters who include Eric, Wen, and a couple of the invaders. It all becomes less a simple survival story than something more cosmic and horrific. Heartbreaking, of course. The characters go through hell and experience bloody horrors, one in particular, that raise the question we started with: ultimately, can this escape the trap of being just masturbatory darkness? Is this pure nihilism and nothing else, or will we ultimately arrive at a place that justifies such a nasty journey? The answer comes down to the very last few paragraphs. It’s not a “surprise ending,” so those of you who like blowing those for yourselves can refrain from looking. It is, however, the destination point at which the cataclysmic and the personal contract to a singularity, illustrating the way humanity endures and responds to the unspeakable. The whole, superb nightmare of a book comes down to that single moment, and—I contend—exists only because of that moment, one that is currently frustrating a tremendous number of reviewers on Amazon. It is the answer to the question that my workshop colleague wrote in the margins of that manuscript, so many years ago: “Is this trip necessary?” The question then was larger than the story under discussion. And it is also larger than the novel under discussion today. The difference between the two stories is that Paul Tremblay’s takes a noble stab at providing the answer. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Adam-Troy Castro made his first non-fiction sale to SPY magazine in 1987. His twenty-six books to date include four Spider-Man novels, three novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and six middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. The penultimate installment in the series, Gustav Gloom and the Inn of Shadows (Grosset and Dunlap) came out in August 2015. The finale published in August 2016. Adam’s darker short fiction for grownups is highlighted by his most recent collection, Her Husband’s Hands And Other Stories (Prime Books). Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd-Laßwitz Preis (Germany). He lives in Florida with his wife Judi and either three or four cats, depending on what day you’re counting and whether Gilbert’s escaped this week. AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Author Spotlight: Weston Ochse Sandra Odell | 1585 words

“The house felt familiar and homey almost immediately, despite the horrific things that happened there.” What was the genesis of this story? What were some of the ideas you were playing with?

If I told you that the house spoke to me, would you believe me? This is true. I believe that a creative person opens him or herself to the universe. The more creative one is, the more open one is to the possibility of the universe speaking to him. The house in the story is my house in Astoria, Oregon. We spent Christmas 2017 at the house with some friends. The house doesn’t have ghosts. I’d know if it did. But it does have something . . . some special character. Then one morning, the sunlight skipping off the Columbia River through the picture window woke me. I sat up straight in bed and these words were in my brain: “Some houses never have a soul. It’s not their fault. It’s just the way it is. For a soul to be born to a house, almost too many things have to happen. Three or more families have to have lived there. Someone has to die in the house. Blood has to be spilled. And something, even if it’s just an idea, has to be born in the house. You can always tell when a house has a soul because of the small spiders. They’re everywhere, non- obtrusive, and ever watchful. The small spiders are the eyes of the house, watching those who live in it much like a great beast would observe its own fleas.” As you can imagine, I was pretty stunned. Out of more than one hundred and twenty published stories, I can count on two hands the number of times that’s happened. I knew it was something special. I also knew that there was a story to be told and that I needed to make sure I wasn’t going to ruin it. When stories come like this, or when characters take over stories, I’ve learned to let them do it. Early on, I stopped them and exerted control. But soon, I discovered that such strategies were wrong. There are some twists and turns in “House of Small Spiders.” I didn’t anticipate them. I didn’t know they were coming. They were as a surprise to me as hopefully they were to the readers.

The poetic, “sanity over humanity,” lines really stood out to me, both for the way they maintained the emotional distance, and still offered no escape from the horror. How do you balance engagement, distance, and voice while still keeping the reader hooked?

The title of the story is “House with Small Spiders.” Many think that the spiders are the story, but as it was in the beginning, it is in the end . . . the house is the main character of the story. My problem was that the house didn’t have a voice. I couldn’t take all of the thousands of voices of the spiders and make anything cogent. So I chose a young girl . . . someone who had a story of her own, much like the story of the house, to narrate the tale. I also wanted to spend some careful thought on a character who felt the need to self-harm. I wanted to highlight the issue without dramatizing it. Then as Susan began to gain her own voice, I noticed a certain detachment. This detachment was what I needed and allowed her to step back and become the house’s narrative voice, making her older and wiser than her years. Had Susan not stepped forward as she did, I never would have achieved the “emotional distance,” as you call it. We owe our thanks to Susan.

Both Susan’s mother and Del’s mother are removed from the main narrative, and the absence of a mother-figure is a trope for a reason. What kind of openings or opportunities did it create for these characters and this story? Would it have been the same if the parents’ roles had swapped?

I needed both mothers to be gone. I didn’t realize it at first. When the house had me writing the story, she just wasn’t there. But then I realized that the house was the mother. She had her own ideas about nurturing and raising the things within her. And Del, because he came from similar circumstances, required a similar backstory. What I felt was interesting is that both mothers were victims as well.

How do you define characters who have suffered? Do you focus on their coping mechanisms, or how their experiences set them up to be the worst/best-equipped hero? I’m interested in how you approach stories with characters like these.

Having spent so much time in the military and around first responders, I’ve become adept at noticing which ones have PTSD and am able to imagine reasons why. Whether it’s the classic thousand yard stare, the way one might react to sounds, the location of seat choice in a busy cafe, or even the hyper-vigilance, I see the external symptoms of those who have encountered something that their brains are having difficulty cataloging. When I finished my SEAL Team 666 trilogy, I realized that I’d left my characters half-formed. In my opinion, the ratio of what they’d seen and done and how it affected them was off. And that was my fault. Then I wrote a story called “Righteous” that was a Bram Stoker finalist that delved into secondary PTSD, or the idea that someone, in this case a father who forced his son to go into the military where he died, had a guilt complex that drove him to do things an ordinary stable person wouldn’t do. I felt I was getting closer, but I hadn’t yet used primary sources. So, in the now completed trilogy that began with Grunt Life, I specifically created a cast of characters who were exhibiting various symptoms of PTSD and I allowed the readers to discover everyone’s backstory. Then, I gave the whole world PTSD. Finally, I thought, I sat back and figured that I’d finally written about the subject in such a way that I’d added to the canon and could move on. But then I realized I’d never given my characters a chance to recover from it. I’d never allowed them to heal or attain any real catharsis. Thus began my idea for Burning Sky, my new series. Like before, I have a host of broken characters, but unlike before, we have a much longer road ahead. My characters are all good people, then you discover that each did something irredeemable. And I mean terrible. Then I try and make it so that you, the reader, will accept them as they learn to come to terms with themselves. I’m super excited about the way the first book turned out, and am about to begin working on the second book. Shortly after I turned in Burning Sky to the publisher, I wrote “House of Small Spiders.” I wanted to try something new. What if I was to give the house PTSD? So many of us think of a home as a living and breathing place. A house is witness to all of the good and all of the bad. Knowing what goes on behind our own closed doors and shuttered windows, we can only guess at what happens with our neighbors. So I wondered, if a house did have a soul and if a home is inherently good, then how would bad things affect it? How would a home exhibit PTSD? Would it co-opt the residents and use them? Was that the visible symptom? Or would seeing and experiencing evil change the nature of a home? Would it then make the home evil? I’m already on record as coming up with the first paragraph in its entirety while I stayed in my home in Astoria, Oregon. The rest of this, the supposition, came after. The house gave me the idea that the spiders would be its eyes and ears. My supposition gave them their voice. And to write the story, all I had to do was listen.

What’s next for you? What can we expect in 2018?

My next novel is Burning Sky, and comes out in paperback from Solaris Books this month. This is the long awaited first book of a new series from the publishers of Grunt Life, Grunt Traitor, and Grunt Hero —where I spent a thousand pages dissembling the abilities of PTSD sufferers to defend the planet against alien invasion. In Burning Sky, I return to the military horror milieu and continue the theme of broken characters trying to come to terms with themselves. But Burning Sky also introduces a race of ancient monsters that have been reported to be in the region known as Afghanistan long before Alexander the Great made it his playground. My publishers believe this is the best thing I’ve ever written and have gushed over the narrative. I just hope my fans love it, because more and more I realize I’m writing for them.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Sandra Odell lives in Washington state with her husband, sons, and an Albanian miniature moose disguised as a dog. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s Universe, Daily Science Fiction, Crossed Genres, Pseudopod, and Cast of Wonders. She is a Clarion West 2010 graduate, and an active member of the SFWA. Find out more at writerodell.com or follow her on Twitter at @WriterOdell. Author Spotlight: M. Rickert Sandra Odell | 935 words

“True Crime” is all the more potent for the meta stream of consciousness form, the single paragraph encompassing so many realities and identities, too many for one woman, yet each embraced by a single feminine form. I read it aloud for my second read, savoring the experimental poetry of syllables and images. How did you approach the challenge of creating an entire narrative out of this particular form?

I didn’t think about this one a whole lot. I don’t tend to think about first drafts, in general. I write what I feel compelled to write, and then look at it and decide what to make of it. This one needed only a few minor adjustments. My early writing career was as a poet, however, and I do see the influence of those years of studying poetry and form in this piece.

Tell us something about the inspiration behind “True Crime.”

A couple of months ago, David Barr Kirtley interviewed me on the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast and we got into a conversation about true crime as a genre. David mentioned that he was conflicted about enjoying such programs. I assured him that there is no reason to feel guilty for watching them. We are not made monstrous for trying to understand the monsters amongst us. Still, there is a voyeuristic aspect to that experience and, after our conversation, that aspect rose within me and asked to be addressed.

Prose is both the scaffolding of a story and the vehicle that carries the narrative forward. The staccato nature of the prose brought to mind spinning under the flashing lights of a dance floor, a sentiment also reflected in the first and last lines of the story. When writing, how much thought do you give to a story’s structure? Are you conscious of the form, or does it flow from the narrative?

The form flows from the narrative and then I consider it. For instance, I really appreciate your keen observation about the staccato nature of the prose in this piece and how it works with the fourth and last lines. My first draft ended in a slightly different place, which didn’t feel whole. After reading it through again, I discovered that reference to dance early in the story and saw how picking it up again at the end might work. Often, if I have moved forward in a piece to arrive at an unsatisfactory destination, I look at where I have been to determine where to go. It meant a lot to me to discover George R.R. Martin’s observation that some writers are gardeners and some are architects, while none are exclusively either. (Brandon Sanderson has an excellent lecture series on YouTube where he covers this subject as well.) I am a gardener in my initial approach, but all following drafts must satisfy the architect. In the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, I devoted two semesters of my critique work to consideration of form within various novels and, as I said earlier, I began in poetry which is very form-aware.

There are those who insist that writing should not be political, and others who believe that the act of writing and having an opinion is, in itself, a political act. Where do you fall in that spectrum? Do you consider “True Crime” to be a political story?

I stand, passionately, by the power of language as an instrument for action. I think that those writers who feel inclined to write political work should dare to try. Writers should be wary of anyone who says their strength must be deployed only as a tool of entertainment. I do think of this particular story as being political, however. You’ve skirted the edges of horror and dipped your toes into the waters of dark fantasy. What scares you? What gives M. Rickert the shivers?

Many years ago, when I lived and worked in Sequoia National Park, I worked ten days and had four days off. Sometimes, I could run those four days together so I had eight days off to go hiking. I was on such a trip once when I realized I was being followed by a young couple from Germany on the same trail. We didn’t walk together, but we were in shouting distance of each other. Eventually, a man passed me going in the other direction. What was it about him? I’ll never know. He sent a cold shiver down my spine, and I remember thinking how glad I was that those other two were close behind. His eyes were very dark, and he didn’t point at me like the guy in the Joyce Carol Oates story, but I felt like he had. People scare me most of all. I had been surprised by, and surprised, bears during my time in Sequoia. Once I almost stepped on a rattler. Another time I thought I was on a trail but it was a ravine, and I came very close to basically walking off the side of the mountain until a bird called overhead, catching my attention. All those moments were frightening.

Your website remarks on the “mysterious gaps” in your biography as where the truly interesting stuff happened. What is one of those bits of interesting stuff?

Oh, I was just trying to be clever. My life is pretty boring. That’s the truth. Mostly.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Sandra Odell lives in Washington state with her husband, sons, and an Albanian miniature moose disguised as a dog. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s Universe, Daily Science Fiction, Crossed Genres, Pseudopod, and Cast of Wonders. She is a Clarion West 2010 graduate, and an active member of the SFWA. Find out more at writerodell.com or follow her on Twitter at @WriterOdell. MISCELLANY Coming Attractions The Editors | 118 words

Coming up in October, in Nightmare . . . We have original fiction from Joanna Parypinski (“The Inheritance”) and Halli Villegas (“A Mother’s Love Never Ends”), along with reprints by Micah Dean Hicks (“Ghost Jeep”) and John Langan (“The Underground Economy”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, and a feature interview with editor Amber Fallon. 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! Stay Connected The Editors

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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Subscribe www.nightmare-magazine.com/subscribe Subscriptions and Ebooks The Editors

If you enjoy reading Nightmare, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. You can subscribe directly from our website, via Weightless Books, or via Amazon.com. For more information, visit nightmare-magazine.com/subscribe. We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors, and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Nightmare ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! Buying a Bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. Buying either of the half-year Bundles saves you $3 (so you’re basically getting one issue for free), or if you spring for the Year One Bundle, you’ll save $11 off the cover price. So if you need to catch up on Nightmare, that’s a great way to do so. Visit nightmare-magazine.com/store for more information. Support Us on Patreon or Drip, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard The Editors

If you’re reading this, then there’s a good chance you’re a regular reader of Nightmare and/or Lightspeed. We already offer ebook subscriptions as a way of supporting the magazines, but we wanted to add an additional option to allow folks to support us, thus we’ve launched a Drip (d.rip/john-joseph-adams) and a Patreon (patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams).

TL;DR Version If you enjoy Nightmare and Lightspeed and my anthologies, our Patreon and Drip pages are a way for you to help support those endeavors by chipping in a buck or more on a recurring basis. Your support will help us bring bigger and better (and more) projects into the world.

Why Patreon and Drip? There are no big companies supporting or funding the magazines, so the magazines really rely on reader support. Though we offer the magazines online for free, we’re able to fund them by selling ebook subscriptions or website advertising. While we have a dedicated ebook subscriber base, the vast majority of our readers consume the magazine online for free. If just 10% of our website readers pledged just $1 a month, the magazines would be doing fantastically well. So we thought it might be useful to have an option like Drip and Patreon for readers who maybe haven’t considered supporting the magazine, or who maybe haven’t because they don’t have any desire to receive the ebook editions—or who would be glad to pay $1 a month, but not $3 (the cost of a monthly subscriber issue of Lightspeed). Though Lightspeed and Nightmare are separate entities, we decided to create a single “publisher” Drip and Patreon account because it seemed like it would be more efficient to manage just one page on each platform. Plus, since I sometimes independently publish works using indie- publishing tools, we thought it would be good to have a single place where folks could come to show their support for such projects. Basically, we wanted to create a crowdfunding page where, if you enjoy my work as an editor, and you want to contribute a little something to help make it easier for us to produce more cool projects, then our Drip or Patreon is the place to do that.

What Do I Get Out of Being a Backer or Patron? Well, you get the satisfaction of helping to usher the creation of cool new short fiction projects into the world! Plus, the more support we get, the better we can make the magazines and compensate our authors and staff. By becoming a supporter via Patreon or Drip, you help fund our growth and continued publication of two award-winning magazines. Of course, if you’re already one of our ebook subscribers (thank you!), you are already supporting us. This is for those who prefer to read the issues each month on our free websites, or wish to support our efforts more generally. By becoming a supporter, you are also bestowed a title, such as Dragonrider, or Space Wizard, or Savior of the World and/or Universe, thus making you instantly the envy of all your friends.

Thank You! If you’ve read this far, thanks so much. We hope you’ll consider becoming a backer on Patreon or Drip. Those URLs again are d.rip/john- joseph-adams and patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams. Thanks in advance for your time. We look forward to hopefully being able to make the magazines—and my other publishing endeavors—even better with the support of people like you.

About the Nightmare Team The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief John Joseph Adams

Managing/Associate Editor Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher Robert Barton Bland

Reprint Editor John Langan

Podcast Producer Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor Jim Freund

Podcast Host Jack Kincaid

Art Director Christie Yant Assistant Editors Erika Holt Lisa Nohealani Morton

Reviewers Adam-Troy Castro Terence Taylor

Copy Editor Melissa V. Hofelich

Proofreader Devin Marcus

Webmaster Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios Also Edited by John Joseph Adams The Editors

If you enjoy reading Nightmare (and/or Lightspeed), you might also enjoy these works edited by John Joseph Adams:

ANTHOLOGIES

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey)

Armored

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 (with Charles Yu)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 (with N.K. Jemisin) [Oct. 2018]

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live Cosmic Powers

Dead Man’s Hand

Epic: Legends Of Fantasy

Federations

The Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes

HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects

Lightspeed: Year One

The Living Dead

The Living Dead 2

Loosed Upon the World

The Mad Scientist’s Guide To World Domination

Operation Arcana

Other Worlds Than These

Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen)

A People’s Future of the United States (with Victor LaValle) [Feb. 2019]

Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Seeds of Change Under the Moons of Mars

Wastelands

Wastelands 2

The Way Of The Wizard

What the #@&% Is That? (with Douglas Cohen)

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn

Sand by Hugh Howey

Retrograde by Peter Cawdron

Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty

The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn

The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

Gather the Fortunes by Bryan L. Camp

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.