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 © 2018 Nightmare Magazine Cover by Grandfailure/ Fotolia www.nightmare-magazine.com FROM THE EDITOR Editorial: September 2018 John Joseph Adams | 88 words 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.