September 2016

TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 48, September 2016

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, September 2016

FICTION Four Haunted Houses Adam-Troy Castro Who Binds and Looses the World with Her Hands Rachael K. Jones Little Widow Maria Dahvana Headley Laal Andhi Usman T. Malik

NONFICTION The H Word: The People of Horror and Me Nick Mamatas Panel Discussion: Witches in Horror The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Adam-Troy Castro Rachael K. Jones Maria Dahvana Headley Usman T. Malik

MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Stay Connected Subscriptions and Ebooks About the Nightmare Team Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue forty-eight of Nightmare! We have original fiction from Adam-Troy Castro (“Four Haunted Houses”) and Maria Dahvana Headley (“Little Widow”), along with reprints by Rachael K. Jones (“Who Binds and Looses the World with Her Hands”) and Usman T. Malik (“Laal Andhi”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, and a panel discussion on witches in the horror genre.

Hugo Award Results As I write this, I’m just back from MidAmeriCon II, the 74th annual World Science Fiction Convention (a/k/a, Worldcon). The Hugos were presented on Saturday, August 20. Nightmare’s Alyssa Wong very narrowly lost the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to The Martian author Andy Weir, and the extended nominations tally revealed that her Nebula Award-winning story “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” came extremely close to being nominated for the Hugo as well (in Best Short Story). Because of this near-miss, Alyssa did receive an Alfie Award from George R.R. Martin, at his second annual Alfie Awards, which were presented at his “Loser’s Party” at the majestic Midland Theater, a few blocks away from the convention center. (If you’re not sure what the Alfie Awards are, or why GRRM started handing them out, check out this io9 post if you want to learn what prompted it: bit.ly/alfie_awards.) Lightspeed’s two contenders—me, in Best Editor (Short Form), and Brooke Bolander, in novelette (for “And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead”)—also both lost, albeit to very deserving winners, and, in Brooke’s case, by only an incredibly small margin. The Best Novelette Hugo went to “Folding Beijing” by Hao Jingfang (from Uncanny Magazine), and Best Editor (Short Form) went to Ellen Datlow. Uncanny also won Best Semiprozine, which Lightspeed won the last two years; we are no longer eligible in that category, but the voting results show that a good number of people still tried to nominate us anyway. In any case, as they say, it’s always an honor to be nominated, and congratulations to all of the winners and the other nominees. If you’d like to see the full list of winners— and/or the extending nomination lists (so you can see what else nearly made the ballot)— visit thehugoawards.org.

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 As you may recall, in addition to editing Nightmare and Lightspeed, I am also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, which launched last year. The first volume was guest edited by Joe Hill, and the 2016 volume (which comes out October 4) is guest edited by Karen Joy Fowler. The table of contents for the 2016 volume were recently announced over on io9, which includes two stories from Lightspeed (“Things You Can Buy for a Penny” by Will Kaufman and “Tea Time” by Rachel Swirsky), as well as many authors familiar to Nightmare readers. Visit johnjosephadams.com/basff to see the full table of contents and/or to pre-order!

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That’s all we have to report this month. I hope you enjoy the issue, and thanks for reading!

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, a new SF/Fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & 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 and forthcoming projects include: 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 nominated ten 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 Four Haunted Houses Adam-Troy Castro | 3716 words

One

This is your haunted house. The realtor was very perceptive the day you first came by, looking for a home that would provide more than mere shelter, a haven that would instead be an expression of your love of eccentricity and strangeness for its own sake, a place special and unique. She saw in the two of you young professionals a pair of people with the right proportion of rationality and imagination, the kind of folks who would be delighted by spooky old legends without being frightened off by them, who would find in the local legends of supernatural visitations a point of interest that you would be more than happy to nurture as you began your new lives within these vintage walls. She showed you this grand old house, providing with it a long and colorful history of its growing reputation as the domain of disturbed spirits: from the tragedy that took place a long time ago, to all the supernatural visitations observed or at least reported by those who slept here in all the years that followed. She told you flat out that these stories have historically scared most prospective buyers away, but that this would also keep the selling price down to a fraction of what would normally be expected, for a home of this opulence and size. You fixed the place up, repaired the damage done by years of neglect, installed all the modern conveniences, and otherwise furnished the multiple rooms in ways that complemented the Victorian-era architecture, from decorative leather-bound volumes in the library to portraits of mutton-chopped dignitaries in the foyer. Now it’s a neighborhood showcase. You love giving guests the grand tour, taking special pride in the secret passage behind the bookcase, the gargoyle statuary glaring down from the four gables, the ornate staircase leading up to a balcony where, you love to claim, a melancholy female figure in a long white gown can sometimes be seen wandering past the arched stained-glass windows. Some of your overnight guests find all this a tad too evocative and lie in their beds sleepless and terrified, popping cold sweats over perfectly natural atmospheric sounds like the rustle of the wind, or the crash of distant thunder. The innocent sound of floorboards creaking in the hallway, as one or more of their fellow restless guests head down to the kitchen for a post-midnight glass of milk, is enough to make the spooked clutch their covers and think dark thoughts of the ghastly stories they didn’t take seriously when they were among friends but suddenly seem achingly plausible now that their skepticism has fled to wherever common sense goes in the dark. It’s all harmless. Once dawn creeps through the windows, nobody will be found dead, faces contorted in masks of exquisite terror from unspeakable sights glimpsed in the night. Nobody will have been driven irretrievably mad. Nobody will have gone missing forever. What will happen instead is that they will all come down to breakfast and chuckle at the credence they gave your stories in the wee hours, the big joke that you have played on all of them by inviting them to this, your private museum of the macabre. They will compliment you on this delightful and picturesque treasure you’ve found and they will exchange fond reminiscences of the great haunted houses from the books they’ve read and the movies they’ve seen; the stories concocted by people like Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson and Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro that their sleep-deprived minds raided, so deliciously, with every sound your home’s living walls made in the hours between midnight and dawn. Later, returning to their jobs and homes and their other circles of friends, they will embellish the story of their night in your house with as much sensory detail as they can muster, spreading the legend; and as time goes on, its reputation will grow, until strangers come to gawk at it from behind the iron fence, and paranormal researchers write to ask if they can take their measurements. If you’re willing, idiot reality shows might drop by and film episodes in which their teams of canned investigators wander about without using your perfectly functional electric lights, and offer half-baked dark suppositions about the meaning of every errant noise. You find all this delightful. You also know that it’s all bullshit. There might very well be ghosts here, but in truth you’ve never seen any, or ever come close to believing in any. Maybe they’re around, watching everything you do, and maybe they’re amused, or bothered, or enraged, but they’re also imperceptible, and so by all practical measurements, nonexistent. This house will never come right out and kill you, not out of malice. You may succumb to an accident like tripping over your own stupid feet while halfway down a flight of stairs, or you may topple a heavy cabinet on top of yourself while trying to move it to another part of the room, or you may suffer your first chest pains while too far from a telephone to summon assistance. But you might very well live a long life here. You should be happy to hear it. So, cheers.

Two

Or perhaps this is your haunted house. You may have inherited it and you may have purchased it, considering its sprawling footprint and labyrinthine architecture a fine space to raise a family, but the elements that once made it a merely eccentric place have catalyzed into something much worse. The upstairs corridor that was always unnaturally cool even at the blazing heights of August, a phenomenon you once wrote off as some idiosyncrasy of architecture and air flow, is now not just cold but spectral, a place you avoid because of the icy fingers that caress the base of your spine. The room of quaint portraiture in which the two of you once drank yourselves silly, making up stories about the people in those paintings who you gave names like Commodore Tightass and Admiral Stupid-Beard, is now a room that you can no longer bear to enter: a gallery of malignant old bastards, guilty of terrible sins, in concert with God alone knows what otherworldly entities. It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that they are still somehow conscious and aware on canvas, their antiquated features having long since twisted into sneers of pure hatred. Their gaze is somehow worse each time you see them, seeing past your reserve to all your worst secrets. They are proud of the stone weight that sits in the pit of your stomach, whenever they might be able to see you. The wailing sound the wind makes as it roars past your windows is no longer a delicious part of the gag, but a sentient and despairing force, as damned by its imprisonment within your walls as you are, to be locked in here with it. At night, the flower patterns on the wallpaper, still dimly visible because of the faint phosphorescence of the white spaces, become monstrous tableaux, re-enacting atrocities that once took place here, and are in a sense still happening. They are profane rituals conducted in subterranean candlelit rooms, by hooded figures chanting over innocents who they have shackled to slabs, who cry out for mercy as terrible images are painted on their bare flesh. Creatures neither earthly nor natural appear that were summoned by those rituals and still dwell here. You are aware of them but you cannot escape them, because the stain has transferred to the two of you. You will never be free of it. Once, you were young and happy; now you are white-haired, drawn, reclusive, half- mad, and defeated. Once, you finished off bottles of wine because you were in love and that is what young couples do; now you nightly drink yourself to oblivion in the vain hope that the nightmares will leave you alone. Once, you would have fled this house when you saw blood dripping from the ceiling. Once, you would have been in the car heading for brighter vistas when the glowing woman appeared at the foot of your bed, lost and forlorn and begging for release you could not provide. Once, you would have burned the place to the ground, just on general principle, when her appealing features ran like wax and revealed the face of something that would suck the marrow from the bones of infants. Now you endure these outrages because you longer have a choice. The house owns you. You cannot escape unscathed now. In the mornings you step out the front door in the cold light of dawn, not warmed by the golden light on your pale skin. You face your car, offering transportation back to the main road and with it to the modern world, and you regard it as if you no longer know what it’s for. In truth, you are not trapped here. You leave almost daily to tend to the necessities of life, the acquisition of money and groceries and so on that makes continued existence possible, but you have long since sensed that these are temporary departures the house permits as an indulgence. The two of you no longer manage to leave at the same time, not even for the span of a restaurant meal. Always, one of you remains behind, as hostage. The house gets angry if you attempt more, punishing you in more and more debilitating ways, aging you in ways that show on your face, horrifying you on the rare occasions when you permit yourself a glance at your own reflection. After minutes, shivering despite the warmth of the day, you return inside, once again reconciled to your damnation. You have lived here for six weeks. You will be here until there’s nothing left of you.

Three

On the other hand, this can be your haunted house. The two of you, your wife and yourself, have now forgotten the circumstances that led you to choose this place as your home. You know that once upon a time you traveled the world. You crossed borders. You slept in many of the globe’s great cities. You dwelt in places where family smiled on you and the warm sun shone down on you, places where it didn’t matter whether any day was at all different from the last, because at the very least they each had a beginning and an end, intervals interrupted by sleep, and the fresh promise of a new dawn. You always had a past and a present and a future. You had hopes and plans. There are no such chapter headings now. You do not sleep and you do not eat and you do not go to the bathroom or watch TV or read books or see friends or make love or have conversations; you simply trudge down the halls, forever, searching in vain for the stairway down and the way out. The air here is so thick that you move as if underwater, one deliberate step after another, following the cries of the one you love, who is always calling you from just around the corner, at the end of the hall you now walk. Your thoughts are sludgy and so you have not learned yet that by the time you reach that next corner, the one you love will have turned the corner after that; that there will be no catching up, not even if you chase her cries another ten or fifty or hundred years. There are any number of things that a being moved by more than unthinking habit could do in this situation. You could stop and wait for the love of your life to complete a full circuit of this level, and catch up with you. You could speed up, or slow down, or turn around and therefore arrange an interception preferable to all this chasing. You could shout out an advisory: wait where you are, I’m coming. You could enter one of the rooms to your right, the ones with windows leading to the outside world, and break out, escaping to summon help. But none of these things ever occur to you. You are a creature with one impulse, following those cries, catching up with the owner of that voice, seeking a reunion that you still believe in, even if common sense should tell you that it will never come. This is a mindless quest, but a desperate one, driven by love and loneliness, and occupying so much of your attention that you rarely think of anything else. When you do, the epiphanies you find vanish back into the fog. You honestly don’t want to hold on to the knowledge that you walk through but somehow never disturb inch-deep dust, that the floorboards don’t creak beneath the weight of your feet, and that honestly, you’ve been doing this longer than any human being can draw breath. You certainly don’t wish to remember a night of black rage and blood-stained bedsheets followed by suicide, a night that would not seem to lead to this unending monotonous chase, not in the world of life. Your mind always becomes clouded again just as you seem about to understand it. It’s all right. You don’t need to worry about anything but catching up, to whoever’s making those cries just around the next bend. If you even ask how long you’ve been here, you miss the point.

Four

But maybe this is your haunted house. It is like the first in that it will never kill you. It is like the second in that you will be here until there is nothing left of you. It is like the third in that if you even ask how long you’ve been here, you miss the point. It is again like the first in that you might very well live a long life here. Unlike the first three we have already visited, it does not strike anyone as a likely haunted house when see from the outside. It is a small L-shaped suburban home, painted some bright color at harmony with the rest of the lazy, tree-lined street. Step outside late in the afternoon and you will hear dogs barking, children shouting taunts at one another from the shared park on the next street over, lawn mowers grinding fresh green grass to the length approved by the neighborhood board. Cars sit unattended in driveways. You are a three-minute walk to a bus stop, and a five-minute drive from a supermarket. The sun shines bright on the shade trees. Open the front door and you will find a family sharing the space, but existing in a strange silence that is for the most part broken only by necessity. Close examination will reveal that there are fewer of them than there seem to be in the framed photographs adorning one wall. An oil painting over the mantel depicts a man, a woman, and three children, which include two boys and a girl; all smiling, all prosperous, glowing in the manner that only an idealized image can accomplish. You are one of these people. We will not say which one. The man and the woman in the portrait are many years younger than the graying selves you now know. The man has since lost hair and acquired fat. The woman has since become drawn, developed a vague unfocused look that she maintains with regular trips to the medicine cabinet. You will find her sitting on the edge of her bed in the untidy master bedroom, staring at nothing. She is as lost in whatever she’s thinking, or not thinking, as creatures unaware of their own undead state can be, forever walking in circles around the same dusty corridors. The oldest child, the daughter, who is beaming in the portrait, now sits in her upstairs room, pale-skinned and sullen-eyed, the glossy hair of the painting now stringy and lifeless. If you check on her right now, you will be able to catch her making hash-marks in one forearm with the edge of an X-Acto Knife. She is very serious about this project, which has been her secret compulsion for years now and which has turned the once- unmarked skin into an archeological record of her need for control. The tip of her tongue emerges from between her teeth as she concentrates on the latest incision of many. She winces at the moment the blood dribbles. She dabs at the wound with a square of toilet paper and casts a brief longing glance at the drawer where she keeps her cigarettes. It’s not like she enjoys smoking all that much. But the lit end can be as good as any blade. The youngest boy is also ensconced in his room, drawing pictures. They are not nice pictures. He has recently discovered his own sexuality, and has not separated it from some other things he’s been feeling; things that manifest in his drawings as guts from open wounds. He has also discovered the joys of jerking off, but not of lubricant, and several times a day rubs himself raw to images that are still capable of shaming him. Sometimes he wraps a tight leather belt around his neck and hangs himself from the doorknob until the darkness gathers at the corners of his vision and the pounding in his head seems ready to explode. He has at times come so close to passing out from the pressure that he later thrilled to the nearness of his escape, though whether he’s so energized by survival, or the nearness of not-survival, is an issue that still puzzles him. There are school books on his desk, books that he’s opened and pored through and occasionally sounded out with at great cost, but as far as he’s concerned they have next to nothing to offer him. Nobody asks him why he’s covered the windows with black plastic bags, or why he sometimes sits in absolute stillness even while awake. Between the master bedroom where his mother sits, and his own, there is another, which joins the rest of the world as a place where you will never find his older brother, the middle child, no matter how hard you look. It is now half-shrine to an overwhelming absence, half storage facility for any possessions that need to be put somewhere so they won’t inconvenience the rest of the house. There are boxes within boxes, some filled with disused toys, some filled with nothing more than the Styrofoam packing for appliances. Dig deeply enough, behind all the clutter, and you will find a once-beloved family schnauzer, freeze-dried after its death of old age. Its presence reflects what seemed like a good idea at the time, years ago, when there was a brief local fad of preserving deceased pets in this manner. But nobody in the family wanted it around, and since nobody wanted it thrown out either, it ended up buried in this room’s clutter and, though forgotten, in a way more present than the boy who once slept here. It’s certainly left more physical evidence that it once drew breath. The house shakes as the garage door opens and the father’s truck pulls in. He staggers from the driver’s seat, entering the home from the garage door, and moves directly to the living room bar, where he fixes himself a scotch and soda. His hands stop trembling. He notes the debris in the living room and calls his family down. Over the next ten minutes or so they arrive, one at a time, and in the half hour after that they do not so much gather at the dinner table but congeal around it. By then he has another drink. By then his daughter is wrapped in the dark long-sleeve shirt that she almost never washes and that conceals the various places where fresh wounds have bled through. By then the boy has girded himself for a half hour of stony silence. By then the mother has sufficiently recovered from her afternoon medication to warm up something. There is very little conversation at the dinner table, beyond the father asking, once again, if it’s too much to ask for somebody to clean the fucking downstairs already. After dinner the family separates with the urgency of pool balls after a violent break, the father to more drinking and a football game he plays at excessive volume, the mother to another spell of chemically induced catatonia, the son to his failing grades and magazines he keeps under the mattress, the daughter to the latest of a series of notebooks she keeps about how nothing makes sense and how with any luck she’ll die soon. The night outside turns black, the stars hidden behind a veil of pregnant clouds. Nothing unseen wanders within these walls. No doors open to anything but rooms or closets. There are no portals to alien, incomprehensible places, unless you count the front door, an escape route that no member of the family, but one, has ever used to its fullest potential. Wherever they’ve gone, they’ve always carried this house with them, and they’ve always returned themselves to its dark embrace. From all available evidence, it’s quite possible that they always will, even if they find themselves on the other side of the world. The game ends. A new program begins. The father sleeps through most of it, but then he stirs in a wet snort of arrested breath, smacks his crusted lips over the foul taste he finds in his mouth, and remembers where he is. After a moment he takes the remote, stabs enforced silence at the screen, and heads for the stairs, which he takes one step at a time, his every footfall an announcement audible to those who have been waiting for him. Welcome to your haunting.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Adam-Troy Castro made his first non-fiction sale to SPY magazine in 1987. His 26 books to date include four Spider- Man novels, 3 novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and 6 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 will appear 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

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight Who Binds and Looses the World with Her Hands Rachael K. Jones | 5247 words

1. Stranger On days when Selene locked me in the lighthouse, an old familiar darkness would well up within me, itching my skin like it had shrunk too tight to contain my anger any longer. I had grown accustomed to the rage’s ebb and flow, sometimes bubbling near the surface, sometimes dormant as a seed awaiting the right time to break open. But it always rose to high tide on my days of confinement. I knew better than to complain to Selene. I often watched from the windows of the lanthorn, the little room which housed the lighthouse’s beacon, when the merchants made landfall. From my distant perch, I could just make out Selene, resplendent in dyed blue wool, hands spinning impossibly fast in the bewildered men’s faces. Out beyond the dock, two green arms of land reached toward our island home in an incomplete embrace. That was the Mainland, where sorcerers lived. Long ago, it was sorcerers who built our lighthouse in the stone branches of the ancient petrified tree. Do not talk to the Mainlanders, Selene always warned, hurrying me up the stone steps which spiraled inside the tree’s heart. She would repeat the warning later at night, when we watched the beacon flash round and round through the window over our bed. I would nestle against her chest, and her hands would dance out tales about sailors, how their days at sea would drive them so mad with lust, they would seize any woman when they made landfall. I am sorry to hide you, she would say. I do not want to lose you. The apology mollified the darkness inside me, but never quelled it completely. I first found the stranger by blind luck, while herding my sheep along the shoreline at dusk. He had washed up on the leaf-shaped stones which littered the island, his sloop dashed to splinters on the rocks. We never expected visitors this late in the season. The shipping traffic had already dried up before the winter storms, and anyway, except for the rare merchant, no one visited Corail Island on purpose. He stank of kelp and wet wool. He looked so ugly, I almost left him for the gulls. It had been years since I had seen a man up close, not since the old lighthouse keeper died. His beard revolted me. His chest rose and fell unsteadily, but he did not respond to my signs or prodding. I supposed he was a hearing man. Selene found me crouched on the rocks beside my catch, trying to wake him. What is this? she said, her signs formed around the jar of oil in her left hand. Why did you not fetch me immediately? She knelt and checked his breath, and her expression soured. Give me your shears. I hesitated. She had an evil look in her eye. Why? So I can finish what the ocean failed to do. Selene! Horrified, I touched the shears in my apron pocket and took a step back. She flashed a devilish grin, the dangerous spark subsumed by playfulness. My Love, she signed, stroking my chin, I am only teasing. I just want to cut off his beard. I questioned whether it had been a joke. I could never be sure with Selene. You might offend him, I said. We cannot read lips through all that hair. The shears, please. She set to work shaving him, mounding hair like limp, gray seaweed on the rocks for the gulls like limp. I worried what the stranger might think when he awoke, but then again, I had never seen Selene ask permission for anything.

2. Selene I do not remember a time in my life before Selene. This is my history as she told it: for her tenth birthday, her father the lighthouse keeper bade her name a present. She asked for a playmate, a girl, Deaf like herself, so the old man went ashore and found me. I don’t recall the Mainland, not mother nor sibling nor beast nor town. I remember only the island, the great petrified lighthouse-tree, and Selene. In my earliest impression, I see her climbing barefoot on the twisting stone roots that flowed skirt-like downhill to the island’s every part, her long dark hair floating, hair I brushed each morning with a golden comb, picking through the knots with patient fingers. When she brushed my hair in turn, she would yank the comb downward, oblivious to tangles, until my scalp stung and my eyes watered. On that first day, Selene said, she seized my hand and claimed me for her own, naming me Girl, which looks like this: thumb stroking the cheek downward from ear to chin, which resembles the sign for long-suffering. My name, though, is Doriane. I know it, just as I know the pulsing tide of darkness in my heart. It is the only memory left of the time before Selene. I couldn’t help but love Selene. Her name-sign was a closed fist for S against the chest. When swung like a punch, this sign also means rebellious. When she reached the age to marry, her father again told her to name her heart’s desire, and instead of a man, she demanded me, running her own thumb down my jaw so tenderly it made me shiver. For I couldn’t help but love her. I had no one else. No one on the island but her, me, and the old man, until his death. No one to speak to but Selene; my all, my world, my lover, my wife. And my captor.

3. Spinning Thump, thump, thump went the treadle on the floor when I did my spinning. I did not hear it so much as feel it in my skull. Thump, thump, thump—and our little cabin’s petrified walls pulsed like a heartbeat. Heart, said my hands to the tuft of wool, finger pinched to thumb in a sign that could also mean lucky. As I spun, I pictured warm things. My sheep tearing at the coarse shrubs growing in the petrified roots. The golden beacon refracting from the lens in the lanthorn. Selene curled against me in the winter, gentled by sleep, soft and strong like new yarn wound round and round the bobbin. I was spinning when the stranger awoke and raked fingers through the stubble on his face. If he swore about his missing beard or attempted to question me, I did not catch it. My eyes focused on the fibrous cloud thinning and stretching into yarn Selene would use to run lines between the cabin and lighthouse, a web to guide her through the winter storms. From the bed, the stranger stared at me with hungry dark eyes beneath heavy lids. He stared when I rose for water. He stared when I wound the new yarn on the bobbin. He stared like a heron hovering over waters pregnant with fish. His lips moved, but I did not catch the words.

4. Sorcery He is a sorcerer, Selene announced as we polished smoke from the lantern panels the next morning. Wicked beasts, sorcerers. My father and I used to see them on the Mainland, always with an ensnared slave in tow. They can do that, you know: enslave you, bind your mind, if you let them talk. How do you know he is a sorcerer? I asked. Selene draped her polishing cloth over the window sill, where the wind off the sea set it aflutter. I saw him pull water from the air today. His cup was empty, and then I saw him drink from it moments later. He thinks we don’t notice, but Deaf people see everything. She cut her eyes toward me on the last word. I suppressed a shiver and smoothed the worry from my features. He is our guest, I reminded her. Sorcerer or no, we cannot harm someone we have taken into our care. Just don’t speak to him, she said, and because she was mostly in a good mood today, she pulled me close and kissed me, combed fingers through my long black hair, teasing out the tangles, only pulling a little. Later, in the cabin, I found a folded paper beneath my basket of carded wool. From the bed, the stranger lifted an imperious eyebrow at me. He cocked his head toward Selene. I read a word on his lips: Secret. I slipped the paper beneath the batting and, remembering my sheep, made my face dumb.

5. Secrets Since the season for storms drew near, Selene departed the next morning to string the web which served as a guide up the path to the lighthouse all winter. The moment she left, I sat down at the spindle and read the stranger’s note: We are in great danger. The other woman is a powerful sorcerer. Help me, and together we will escape to the Mainland. I caught the man’s eye, and he struggled to stand. We have to go at once, he mouthed, and with a finger he forced my chin upwards so I gazed into his fearful eyes. Now, quickly, while the sorcerer—words tumbled from his lips so fast I lost the speech’s thread, though not the tenor. I had never seen such terror before. I waved for him to stop. I covered my ears and my mouth, and shook my head. The stranger paused, nodded. From a fold in his sweater, he produced a black-streaked glass pen and a bottle of black ink, objects I did not recognize. They certainly had not been in his possession when we carried him from the shore. I accepted the pen and wrote, Where did you get these? His neck craned to watch the door so his scrawl went crooked down the page. I made them. He pointed toward the fireplace. Paper drawn from wood. Ink drawn from soot. Glass drawn from the sand that blows from the shore. Surprised, I threw down the sorcerous pen as if it were a viper. It shattered into three pieces against the stone floor. The stranger collected them, held them close to moving lips, and they became whole again. You really are a sorcerer, I wrote, my script shaky. So is the other woman, the one who has enslaved you. I will explain it on the way, but we should go. Now! He yanked my arm, stepping toward the doorway. I planted my feet and threw my weight against him, and my leverage sent the frail old man tumbling to his knees. I grabbed the pen and wrote. She hasn’t enslaved me. She is my wife. The old man stole another glance toward the door. His shoulders sagged. He wrote until he covered half the sheet with fine scrawl. Think about it. You know the truth. I have watched you both. She gives orders, and you obey. She is cruel to you, and you accept her abuse. I saw you last night preparing dinner. I could not follow your hand- language, but she pressed your arm against the hot kettle. And you smiled. You smiled at her, though you were in pain. You fear her. I rubbed the pink weal on my wrist. It had already begun to heal, but the sight made the darkness surge inside me. With an effort, I forced it down again. She just has a temper, I wrote. But she loves me. She doesn’t mean to be cruel. He appraised me, a lean and hungry look. He scrawled again, Did you know the sailors have a superstition about this place? That they avoid it at all costs? This island was built as a prison, and that woman is the prisoner. She has enthralled you too. I will free you, if you will help me. You’re wrong, I answered. I have known her my whole life. I would know. Have you ever been off the island? he asked. Of course. I was born on the Mainland. But do you remember it? I bit my lip. I recalled the long days locked inside the lighthouse at her insistence. Selene said it was for my own protection. You’re wrong, I wrote again. I slammed the pen on the stone floor, nevermind the shards, and stormed out of the cabin to find my wife. 6. Speech On the twisting path that climbed up to the lighthouse, Selene navigated the gray petrified tree roots, winding the yarn between them. From a distance, she resembled a spider in a huge blue web. I rubbed the pink burn on my wrist. How I loved her and feared her. She paused from her labor, wiped her face, and cast a look downhill, caught me staring. Grinned, waved, and name-signed, Girl! I returned the wave. I could not recall the last time she had called me by my real name, Doriane. Perhaps she never had. Overhead, a seagull wheeled and flew off toward the bay, toward Mainland, and all at once my skin felt constricting, the air thick and oppressive. Perhaps I really was enslaved. The sorcerer waited for me at the cabin’s door, lips drawn in a wolfish sneer. He had already repaired the glass pen. I stretched out my hand for it and wrote. What must we do to escape? I will teach you sorcery so you may cast the spell to break her hold. Fine, I said, but you mustn’t harm Selene. I still loved her, after all. Fair enough. But you may feel differently when your soul is free. Now pay close attention. The sorcerer snapped the glass pen in half. Sorcery is a force that gives form to substances, he said. It presses meat into bone, squeezes rain from the air and stone from wood. All these things have a bound state, and a loose state. He indicated the petrified walls. Sorcery binds these wooden walls into a state of stone. Speak to the element to bind it. He whispered to the pen’s shards. The glass ran together like water, rejoining into one smooth piece. This can be reversed too, he said, and his lips moved again near the glass. At once it crumbled into black sand. He spoke a third time, drawing out the sand between long fingers, and it fused into the form of the pen. Binding and loosing. You try. He passed me the pen. I don’t speak, I reminded him, touching my ear and mouth. He pressed lips together, and his eyes darted toward the door again. He fetched a pillow from the bed and teased out a gray feather. Watch me, he said, then held the feather to his chin. Before his puckered lips, the down vibrated and swayed. He passed it to me. As you breathe out, shape the air with your lips. I practiced under his instruction for a few minutes, and then he said, Next, you add vibration. He placed my hand on his throat, and it buzzed beneath my fingertips. I touched my own neck and imitated him until I felt my throat buzz. He reached for the pen, but before he could write, his eyes snapped toward the door, wrinkles flattening into a mask of terror. Selene stood in the doorway, face flushed and chest heaving.

7. Solitary She beat me, of course, her cheerful mood evaporated. Do not talk to the Mainlanders, she said, and her fists resembled her name-sign. Selene said the blow to my jaw. Selene, Selene on each ear. Selene, I tried to sign back, but she would have none of it in her rage. She pulled my hair and kicked at my ribs when I knelt at her feet. She beat my ears the worst, and when I cast myself toward the sorcerer, he turned away, brushing black sand from his palms. She locked me in the lanthorn as punishment. I tried not to touch my raw, swollen face as I curled on the floor, doubly imprisoned, as if I could run anywhere but home. I fought with the darkness inside me, struggled to master it, but with each hour of my confinement it swelled, gained momentum. That night, she had pity enough to bring me my drop-spindle and distaff so I might occupy myself with spinning. I watched the lantern rotate and the lens flash its warning from my small prison. The spindle whirled like the lantern in miniature. The fibers stretched between my fingers. Heart, they groaned, for my knuckles were scratched and swollen from defending my face. I touched my bruised throat and it vibrated with sobs that shook my shoulders. What is the distance between love and hate? No more than a finger’s width. The darkness flared. My hands on the yarn shifted. Now, index finger to thumb, they said puppet, which with a different movement can also mean detach. Sorcery is binding and loosing. Sustained by darkness, I spun late into the night, fingers shuddering, mind afire. The wind from the window made me shake and gutter like a flame with no glass to protect it.

8. Storms By the time Selene forgave me, the storms were upon us. Winter on Corail Island is like this: the sea rises and grabs the rocks. It rolls all the way up to our doorstep, and Selene must wade up the path to the lighthouse, clinging to the webbing between the great petrified roots so that she will not be swept out to sea. The sheep we gather into their fold, and feed them from stocks stored against the lean months. Selene occasionally slaughters one for the fresh mutton. She always makes me select the one to die. When I returned to the cabin, the sorcerer had been relegated to a mat near the fire, feet and hands hobbled by ropes. Selene wanted to kill him, but there were things even she feared, and the laws of hospitality did not yield lightly. Once taken under our roof, we were beholden to him until Spring. It did not mean, though, that Selene would permit him to leave the island alive. I forgive you, Selene said when she brought me down from the lighthouse. You are too trusting, my Love. He tried to enslave you, to turn you against me. Do you believe me now? You cannot trust sorcerers. I wanted to believe her, but my half-healed cuts ached, and I no longer knew who to trust. I wanted to speak to the sorcerer about it. I often caught him picking through the woodpile and the sand on the floor. In the mornings I sometimes awoke to his eyes fixed upon my face, his lips moving, and I felt the hateful old darkness stirring within like a slumbering dragon rousing in its hoard. The sensation thrilled me, but I distrusted it. Perhaps the enthralled always experienced their binding as a sense of freedom. Do not talk to him, Selene warned me whenever my gaze strayed toward the fire. Now that her temper had passed, she wrapped me in her arms at night, and I did my best to ignore the old yellow bruises on her hands that bore witness to her violence. When she fell asleep, I would roll toward the wall, and in the darkness make my throat vibrate under my fingers and watch wisps of my hair flutter in the unheard sounds.

9. Separation Be careful, I told Selene, wrapping her in a heavy blue mantle as she prepared to brave the storm. She stroked my cheek with a thumb—Girl, it said—and kissed me. I will be back in an hour. Storms meant shipwrecks. Storms meant Selene must tend the lighthouse all night long, following the ropes laid like highways from the cabin to the tree, through black ice and bracing cold and beating rains that blinded her. Selene pushed against the wind, a hand on the guiding rope anchored to the front door as the dark swallowed up her steady, retreating steps. The frozen air assaulted me, and the heat pulled me from behind, and then the sorcerer appeared at my elbow, wearing his broken bindings slung over one shoulder. Sorcery is binding and loosing, I remembered. Selene’s knots had never really restrained him. Now is the time, he mouthed. Cut the rope and lock the door and be rid of her. He reached for the anchor line, a black glass knife in hand. No! I shouldered my way between him and the door. It was not supposed to be like this. He had promised. The sorcerer seized my shoulders. He had gained weight during imprisonment, and I could no longer tip him to the floor with a little leverage. We struggled for dominance, and the wind from the open door fought for possession of my body. He slashed at the anchor rope. I threw my shoulder into his stomach. The glass knife sunk into my arm, and pain exploded in my brain. Suddenly woozy, I went limp. He dragged me inside. I scrabbled at the floor, punched at him, kicked. Selene! screamed my fists. Selene! Selene! He wound my hands with cord from my spindle, knocking over the wheel without bothering to detach the distaff. Hands bound, I was muted. The wind beat the cabin, and answering from within my breast, shuddering sobs tumbled from my throat. The storm drummed against the stone like a woman’s fists against a locked door.

10. Signs Pain kept me lucid. I forced myself to hold to the pain, and reviewed my predicament. The wound in my upper arm shrieked. My hands were bound together in a sign that meant slave. I twisted my wrists against the biting cord until I could touch my fingers to it. I signed to the strand, pressing it hard between cold fingers. Detach, I reminded it, shifting motions, detach. Sorcery is binding and loosing. Detach, detach! The ropes severed and slackened. Blood rushed into my aching hands. I lay still and scanned the cabin. The fire had died to red embers, and shadows blanketed the corners. The severed bobbin lay by the door. My captor hunched by the fire, running his fingers through a sand- heap, shaping it into an enormous glass plate. Selene had not returned; perhaps she’d reached the lighthouse. I wanted her. I needed her. If I found her, I swore I would never disobey her again. Against my back, the storm’s vibrations faded from the stone wall. I commanded my throat silent. Occasionally he sneered at me, each tooth gleaming in the yellow light. I remembered my sheep and made my face dumb like theirs. Passive, stoic, unthinking, like a good slave. Between my fingers, I pressed the cord’s broken ends together and signed heart, and then lucky. The ends joined, whole again. Slowly, so very slowly, I tied a loop, a lasso, a noose. Puppet, my fingers screamed for eyes that could read it, puppet, puppet, puppet! Quickly now, before he could understand, before he could suspect, I rolled to my feet and charged. His head snapped toward me and he raised the glass thing at my approach— it resembled a great lens with keen edges. I flung my lasso over his neck, and hit the mark, and he was caught like a sheep. He sank to his knees, eyes wide with terror, hands clutching at the glass sheet so hard it sliced open his palms. Blood ran down his wrists. He couldn’t move. Puppet, I signed, victorious. My puppet! I laughed and laughed in his helpless face, the dark swelling up around me like great black wings. Then I remembered Selene.

11. Silence I found her frozen between the lighthouse and cabin when the dawn touched the horizon. The sorcerer had cut all the guidelines behind her while I lay bound. Around her shoulders she still wore the blue wool mantle I had woven for her. In death, she looked peaceful. I hated it. I wanted her mouth, her eyes, and most of all her hands. I wanted her hands around my waist at night. I wanted her fists to beat me. Mostly I wanted them to speak to me, but they were silenced now. I had no one left to speak with in the whole world. In her death, my hands too were muted, useless as shears missing a blade. I turned to my Puppet, who trailed behind me up the path. Why? I demanded, grief- stricken. Why did you do this? His elbows jerked upward, and before his horrified eyes, his hands danced out an answer. The lighthouse was built to warn people away from this place. Something older and more powerful than sorcery was imprisoned here, stripped of its power and bound into a different form, like the stone tree. I know that already. You told me Selene was a sorcerer. No. She was only your keeper, just like the lighthouse keepers before her. His eyes flashed and his hands danced faster. Any sorcerer who could control you would soon be the greatest of all sorcerers. He would have anything he wanted. None would dare oppose him, for fear of you. No. This is a lie, I said, trembling, but the darkness inside my heart stirred again, lifted its head, sniffed the winds. I knew in my gut my Puppet could not lie to me. Why did you kill Selene? You could have just enslaved me and fled. You and the lighthouse are bound with one spell, and you cannot leave until the spell breaks. The keeper was part of it. Her death is another broken link in the chain. Now you need only speak the right words, amplified with a lens, and you will be free. I made my Puppet carry Selene back to the cabin and lay her by the fire while I began weaving her shroud. My heart contracted within me. I was being pinched, drawn out, twisted like fleece into something hard. All my fear had died with my Selene. Now all I had left was rage. We wrapped her in the shroud in the morning. I hadn’t slept while weaving it. I needed no rest anymore. A darkness I could no longer master sustained me. Puppet tended the sheep and cooked the food, body obedient and eyes terrified. I knew what must be done next. At dusk I placed her body on a great twisted root thrown up like an arch between the lighthouse and cabin. Two stone leaves held her eyelids closed. I placed the lens in her folded arms, pinning it to her breast. Speech is sorcery, he had said. Sorcery is binding, and sorcery is loosing. I brought my hands down in a sign that meant fury doubled, and the glass shuddered, amplifying the magic like the lanthorn amplified light. A great wind kicked up beneath Selene’s body and shook the island down to its foundations. A cloud of dry brown leaves kicked up from the ground, flew out to sea where they crashed into the waves like the bodies of dead birds. Puppet sat down in surprise on the tree root, which rippled with colors as it crackled and unpetrified all along its length, running up the slopes to the lighthouse, where the great old tree unstiffened and swayed in the wind again. Free. But it was still a dead tree. Sorcery could not bring it back, nor could it bring back Selene. She looked so fragile in death. I wondered how I ever feared her. Only Selene ever restrained me, and she was gone. I gave Puppet an axe and set him to chop the roots while I packed the things we would need from the cabin: some clothes, my drop-spindle and distaff, and Selene’s golden comb, which I wore in my hair. I released the sheep from their pen. Free, I signed to them, and for good measure, lucky. Puppet waited for me at the dock in a boat he had magicked from a tree-root. I gave him the oars. I would see the world at last—the world Selene had shielded from me. As I stepped into the boat, the darkness bloomed within me, my body a seed from which uncurled the first tentative shoot of a ravenous, strangling weed. I raised a hand and signed, Doriane. In the dusk, a thin line of smoke trailed from the lighthouse, and then suddenly the whole tree ignited. Tonight, the Mainlanders would see a different beacon from Corail Island. Let them wonder. Let them fear.

12. Siren My Puppet has gotten what he always wanted, although not in the way he wished. He is known far and wide as the greatest of sorcerers, who holds the Siren of Corail Island in thrall. Her voice, they say, drives men mad. Her singing, they say, lures sailors to their death on the rocks. Only the mighty sorcerer, the greatest of sorcerers, stands between the world and her fury. Kings daren’t turn us away. Emperors hurry to appease us. When Puppet stands before the mighty, I sit on a stool beside him and work the drop-spindle and distaff. When he speaks, they listen, but always their eyes are upon me and my fingers, which flick and twist in weird patterns they do not comprehend. They cannot understand the words, but my spells work all the same. They think they are safe because I do not speak. They think, in my silence, I do not control each and every one of them like so many puppets dangling on so many nooses cinched about their throats. Oh, but they are wrong. They are so wrong about me. It is not my voice they should fear, but my name, which they will read at last on my dancing fingers when all the threads go taut.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Rachael K. Jones grew up in various cities across Europe and North America, picked up (and mostly forgot) six languages, an addiction to running, and a couple of degrees. Now she writes speculative fiction in Athens, Georgia, where she lives with her husband. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in dozens of venues, including Shimmer, Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, PodCastle, Flash Fiction Online, InterGalactic Medicine Show, Clockwork Phoenix 5, and Daily Science Fiction. She is a SFWA member and a secret android. Follow her on Twitter @RachaelKJones.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight Little Widow Maria Dahvana Headley | 7025 words

I was fourteen and at a sleepover when the cult drank poison. The sleepover mom turned on the TV and said “Oh my lord, Mary, would you look at this? It’s the feds is what, and a bomb, right out there where you come from.” But it wasn’t the feds, and it wasn’t a bomb. It was us. We were destined to die. I watched it burn, and listened to the news call us a cult, which was not what we called ourselves. We called ourselves Heaven’s Avengers. I watched it for a while, and then I threw up hamburger casserole. Miracle didn’t have a stoplight. Miracle didn’t have a grocery store. Miracle didn’t typically attract anything but traffic going the dirty way to some other place. We were on the road to California, and people sorrowing in other states found their way to Disneyland through us. Miracle had no marvels. It was named after a thing that’d happened back in 1913. People got lost—a whole troupe of the religiously devout on a pilgrimage—and then they got found. They came up out of a lake bottom and walked on the water, briefly, before they disappeared again. A cult got started around that notion, and a hundred years later, on the anniversary of the water walk, my cult killed itself. Now it was trailers and scraggly dogs and everyone who hadn’t been part of the dead cult was an ex-con turned to factory work. An hour away, we had a sugar factory and you could get a company bus. Most of our town worked there, bleaching brown to white. I watched the compound burning on the news. My mom and dad were in there, and everyone else too, all sleeping on the floor. Nobody’d noticed that we were having problems, or maybe people had—the police had visited us and done a couple of circles with their sirens on, but another cult had lately gunned down half the police force in a little town in Texas. The locals let us be. We were hippies only in theory. In reality, we were working on an armed takeover of heaven. The Preacher thought if we meditated white knives into our minds, we’d hit heaven as a unified army, slashing. We wanted heaven for ourselves. We didn’t see the point of suffering. The plan was to rise up, and so the Preacher put poison in the pop. A lot of the kids in the town had been born into the cult, and when it committed suicide, there was an epidemic of orphans. The little ones got sent out to the rest of the state, but some of us stayed. We were old enough to be okay. The leftover kids milled around Miracle, grieving and weird, not fitting in. The sleepover had been at the house of a friend who wasn’t really, and I wasn’t right in the world, not with my long dresses and my uncut hair. I was married already, but no one except my fellow orphans knew that. I’d been married to the Preacher since I was seven. I was the Littlest Wife, and that was a special role. I brewed tea, and balanced crystals in the palms of my hands, while the rest of the wives did other things. There were fifty of us. All but three were dead now, and we were only alive because we were too young to commit to being killed. Somewhere in the mind of the Preacher there was a notion of legal. Our life in Heaven’s Avengers was not like some people thought it was. People had ideas about us, that we’d grown up in a sex cult. It was the reverse, except for the Preacher and his army of wives. Most of those were not having intercourse with him. They were just a battalion. The Preacher preached. Once a year, each wife, the of-age wives, spent a night with him, and got a baby or didn’t. We were trying to grow Heaven’s Avengers. There were only a hundred of us total, though we had some international followers who came to us through our website, and participated long distance in preaching. So I was married to him, but I was still a virgin. I was a wedded warrior. There were long traditions of wedded warriors, which most people didn’t know about. Armies of women, all married to a chieftain. This is the kind of thing you knew about if you were from Heaven’s Avengers. Back then, I was called Mary out in the world, and the other two were called Rebekah and Ruth, but all three of us were “Sister” on the compound. We knew better than to stay Sister. When everyone died, we chose emergency new names. We looked at a magazine of celebrities and picked by dress color. I chose Natalie, and the other two Sisters, who were both sixteen, chose Reese and Scarlett. Then Reese took out a pair of scissors, cut off my hair, and hacked my dress up from the ground to my knees. She snipped her own hair so short she could pass for a boy. Scarlett tore her hem into a miniskirt, and chopped her hair into a bob. We were all crying, but we looked better. We got taken in by the Stuarts, and they let us have their old teenager’s bedrooms. The Stuarts had lost two sons in Afghanistan. They didn’t care that we were cult kids. There was room in the house for us, and they fed us cereal and scrambled eggs and didn’t ask us to go to church. Mrs. Stuart was a faded-out redhead with white roots, a tight jaw, and a nose that’d been broken four times while bull riding. She chewed tobacco and tended cattle. Mr. Stuart had a motorcycle on the weekends, but during the week he worked at the factory. They left us alone. We didn’t mind. We wanted to be alone. The three of us tried to figure out school. We could read, at least. We were lucky. The littler ones couldn’t. No one had taught them. Things had gotten too intense, what with the coming of the War, and schooling had slid. We could fight with our minds, and that did no one any good in high school. Now we didn’t think about white light, nor about knives. We tried not to think about how maybe everyone we knew was warring in heaven now, but Reese sometimes looked up and cried at the sky. She missed her boyfriend, who’d turned eighteen just before the exit. He was a crack shot, and could do a backflip, but I’d never liked him. He hit me in the face once for stealing a piece of gum. Scarlett was sad about the suiciders too, but not as sad as Reese was. Scarlett had a natural figure for fortune, and knew how to sew. She stitched up a party dress from dishtowels, wriggled into it, and went out to the first school dance of the year wearing shoplifted lipstick. Within a minute, she was leading cheers at the football games, and nobody cared that she was missing some back teeth, and had a crooked arm from breaking it during battle training. Scarlett had strawberry blonde hair and unlikely curves, a waist like a funnel. Reese was the reverse. Her body was round, with tiny wrists and ankles. She had curls, tight ones the color of cake batter, and eyes so pale they looked blind. She was smart as a whipsnake, which tricked people. Her albino coloring made people in Miracle think she was mental. She wasn’t. She was going somewhere. She was a genius in ways that might scare a person, if you didn’t know for sure she liked you. Then there was me, Natalie, with a scar where my lip had been prayed back together, my body a unified width from chest to hips, the same turned sideways as front. My mama was adopted when she was nine from Delhi and Reese’s when she was six from Ethiopia, and they both started as Littlest Wives. We didn’t know where Scarlett came from. Her mama’d died of a rattlesnake when she was three, and then her dad dropped her off on the compound, and that’s how she ended up married to the Preacher. She was no relation to him. The other two of us were chastely married to our father. No one really regulated the religious, and so the Preacher had saved a bunch of girls from uncertain futures in countries other than America. By saved I mean saved for first marrying and then suiciding. In theory, this was no one’s fault, the fact that no one helped to save any of the older wives from death once Heaven’s Avengers decided to suicide, but some part of me had started to wonder if every agency actually just felt like sacrificing a few people every year in lieu of doing their proper jobs. Most of us were brown. Most of the people around us were not. Maybe we’d been purged by lack of social work. I didn’t like thinking it, but I thought it anyway, and it put me in a pissed off place. School was hard. This was why. All us three were suffering badly from the pissed offs. No one knew much about us, and we kept it that way. We’d been the Sisters Stuart for a year when the carnival showed up. People called us that without irony. We didn’t correct them. Privately, we called each other Little Widow. The carnival came in a truck and a tent, and it looked like shit, but we were still interested. We liked new things. It set up just outside of Miracle. We hadn’t seen television until recently. The fire onscreen was the first time I’d ever watched the news. I didn’t know much about fairs, nor about carnivals and neither did the other two, so we dressed up in our best clothes and walked out over to the grassless ground of the high school football field. There was a big poster of a girl in a yellow bikini covered in fringe and holding a chicken. I pointed at it. We’d never had bikinis. Reese put her hands on my head and fluttered up my hair. She’d been studying the world. She had a boyfriend again, one with a license to fly a crop duster, and they were having sex. She’d learned how to fly the crop duster too. She was planning things about the rest of her life. “Don’t worry, Little Widow,” she said. “She’s not that great.” But I was staring. “Can we go see her?” I asked. “She’s only a stripper,” said Scarlett and cracked her bubblegum. I didn’t know what a stripper was. I thought it had something to do with crows and crops, or maybe threshing. “I don’t care,” I said. “I want to see her.” GEEK said the sign, in giant letters. The tent was as yellow as the bikini, and also trimmed in fringe, and outside it there was a big bearded man with a flat black hat lazing around, looking too warm. His arms were all over tattoos of naked ladies and pirate ships. They weren’t good tattoos. We had better. The women of Heaven’s Avengers were artists at tattooing. Each one of us had a small suit of armor under our clothes. It grew with us. I got mine when I was seven, the year I became Littlest Wife. It was an eight-hour tattoo on my solar plexus, and afterwards, it felt like chickenpox mixed with a third degree burn, both of which I’d also had. “It’s a buck,” the man said. “Seventy-five cents if you show me your tits.” Scarlett looked at him coldly. “I have made a covenant with mine eyes,” she said. “How then could I gaze at a virgin? Job, 31.1.” “Damn,” he said, offended. “I was only messing with you.” “Messing leads to trouble, and trouble leads to regrets,” she said, and stabbed him in the eyeballs with her worst white light. She spilled a shower of purse-change into his bucket, and we went in. “I’m not a virgin,” she said, wiping her hand on her skirt. “But, Little Widows, that’s what nasty is asking for. He may break out in boils next.” I had no doubt on that. Scarlett was not someone anyone should mess with. The tent was dark inside. We sat down in folding chairs and stared at the curtains and the stage, a wooden platform with more fringe on it. There were a lot of people in the tent, most of Miracle’s population, male category. Us three were the only girls, but no one bothered us about it. No one wanted to talk to us when we were together. They thought they might catch cult like catching flu. Separately, we were no fuss to anyone, but when we walked down the main road, people crossed it, and anyone who stepped in our sister shadow shook himself. They weren’t wrong. When we were together, we were scary on purpose. We were perfectly capable of being regular, but we didn’t see the point. Regular might get us nabbed by some other cult, and we weren’t in the market for culting. We worried someone would snatch us, and then we’d be under the thumb of a plum stealer again. We weren’t in the mood for any more of that. We wanted, ultimately, to be normal. As normal as we could be. We were interested in flush toilets and potato chips. The curtains didn’t open, but they started to move, the fringe bobbing around like horses on the gallop, and I leaned forward to check if I could see anyone’s feet. This was the best I’d felt in months, since the rest of everyone went to heaven, and Reese and Scarlett felt pretty good too. They were on either side of me, and they each took one of my hands when the curtains shimmied up and the music started playing. “Step right up,” said someone, and a girl came out. No one stepped up, but I felt like stepping. The girl was tanned with braided black hair, and her yellow bikini stood out against her skin like it was made of sun. It was covered with fringe, and it jiggled like a haystack on a flatbed. She was not much older than we were, and in her hands, she had a basket. “You wanna see the devil dance?” the girl asked the tent, and the tent stamped its feet. Lust in the air in here. We could smell it. “Well, I’m not the devil,” she said. “And I don’t dance. I’m a geek.” Nobody stamped for that. No one was quite sure what to do. But beside me, I felt Scarlett smiling. The girl set the basket on the ground, and stalked around it. “Do you know what you’re getting into? Do you know why you’re here, Miracle? That the name of this little town?” “Yes,” I said, from the back row. “This here’s Miracle.” Somebody shushed me, but they turned around, saw Scarlett and Reese, and stopped shushing. “You ever seen a girl bite off someone’s head?” “No,” I said. “It’s a dying art,” said the girl casually, and then squatted down and pulled the top off the basket. I leaned forward. She pulled out a chicken, and looked up at the audience as she put her teeth around its neck. I blinked. Three men got up and out of there. Everyone else stayed still, because there was no way she was going to do what she looked like she was going to do. The chicken made a whirr, deep in its throat. She took her mouth off it, and it clucked. “The feathers make it easier,” she said. “The feathers make it feel like you’re biting down on a pillow, like you’re dreaming a great dream of heaven. But you don’t want to see me kill a bird, do you, Miracle? I could eat a white dove flying mid-air. Sometimes I hold a flock of sparrows in my mouth and spit them out one at a time. That’s basic carnival shit. We’re all better than that, aren’t we? Today, I’ve got something special for you.” She put the chicken down and it tripped away, over the wood, shedding feathers. The bird had bells around its ankles. It pecked its way out into the audience, jingling and clucking. She pulled on long yellow leather gauntlets. The Preacher’d thought that fighting angels might require falconry skills, so I knew what they were. She went back into the basket and brought something else out. There was a quiet gasp in the tent, and then people started to mutter, because the thing she was holding wasn’t possible. “What the fuck is that?” someone said, and then someone else said it back, echoing like the tent had gone box canyon. The pterodactyl had feathers, so that at first you might mistake it for a crow, but it wasn’t. It had a pointy skull with a crest heading backward from it, and membranous wings, each one supported by a long thorny finger. The feathers were the color of oil on asphalt. The girl held it tightly in her cupped hands, and it struggled slightly, making a high chitter. It had bright black eyes. “That’s a dinosaur,” I said to Reese, and Reese said yep, and Scarlett said yep, and then we all folded our hands in our laps. It was real. It was a pterodactyl. We knew about dinosaurs. Heaven’s Avengers had a book of all the different kinds and the kids got it for a treat sometimes. I’d had it to myself the whole first week I was Littlest Wife. “This is one of our pterodactyls,” the girl said, and looked into the audience, her painted eyebrows up. “Want to check if it’s real? You. In the back. Get your hands here.” I was already halfway down the aisle. None of the men of Miracle wanted to touch a dinosaur. A few more were rushing right out, past Scarlett, looking longingly at her, the kind of girl they’d thought they were coming in here to see. They were on the way to carnival food. We’d smelled fried dough on the way in, and seen a cotton candy stand. I wondered if they thought the dinosaur was a lizard dressed up with fake wings. They acted like it would be more interesting to see a naked girl than an extinct reptile, but I’d seen a lot of naked girls in the fifty-wife bathhouse. I wanted a world full of dinosaurs. I wanted the ground to shake. “Touch it,” she said. I was on the stage beside her, looking at her fringe, at her hands in their yellow leather, and at the way they pinched into the little dinosaur’s scales. She smelled like cigarettes and chocolate. Her lipstick was orange and drawn on with a sharp pencil, the bows of her lips extra pointy. I could see the glue for her fake eyelashes. In her hands was something as perfect as she was. The pterodactyl was chicken-sized, almost exactly, its body the size of my palms put together, with wings about three feet in span. It was cold to the touch, like a snake, and its down was soft as angora, but it didn’t look like it had much in the way of brain. It did have a lot of teeth. It looked at me, and opened its mouth. “You’re going to bite its head off?” I asked her. “That’s the show.” “But what if it’s the last one on Earth?” She beckoned me in and whispered in my ear, all the while shimmying her hips to give the audience something to see. “We have a lot of them,” she said. “They’re common as chickens, if you know what you’re looking for.” I looked up into the crowd and saw Reese and Scarlett looking back at me. “Would you like to hold its neck in your teeth?” the girl asked me. The audience shifted uncomfortably. I could hear folding chairs creaking. “That’s one of the cult kids!” someone shouted from the back. Desperate high voice, voice of an old man. “That’s one of the girls that killed themselves! You don’t want to give her a chance to kill something else or she’ll go wild! They’re all crazy from out there!” “We didn’t kill ourselves,” Reese said, with dignity. “Look at us,” Scarlett said. “We’re absolute alive.” But both of them were standing up, Reese in her pink starched dress and Scarlett in her flowered curtain fabric. They looked intimidating up there, in the light, with the sawdust in the air. They looked like what the town thought we might be. I already had the lizardy neck in my mouth, and the girl in the yellow bikini met my eyes and nodded. I bit down hard, and cold blood came into my throat, through the softness and the down, through the dinosaur wings. Rough scales. No resistance. It went limp between my teeth, and I stood in front of Miracle, in my best dress, biting a dinosaur. I let go of it, and the headless pterodactyl took flight and did a circle around the tent, blood sputtering out like a sprinkler. People screamed. Most of them were freaking and getting the hell out of the tent. I had no regrets. The other two Sisters were already out of their seats and down to the stage. People were rushing out, and a grown man vomited, which annoyed me. I pulled some feathers out of my teeth. This was what I’d been trained for. This was what I’d imagined it might be like to fight an angel. We’d been raised for this kind of combat. Who knew what kinds of lizards populated heaven? Who knew that heaven hadn’t already been colonized? The girl in yellow was grinning at me, and I wiped blood off my chin. “That wasn’t wise, Little Widow,” said Scarlett, and sighed. “She couldn’t help it,” said Reese. “You can’t spend a life being trained to do battle and think she wouldn’t do this.” She turned to the carnival geek. “What do you want? You’re not normal.” The dinosaur’s body dropped out of the air, and fell down at my feet. I looked down at the head in my hand and for a moment it looked like a chicken. Then like a baby. Then like a pile of rubber and feathers. I could taste salt and tar. The prong at the back of its head was soft and malleable, like a rooster’s comb. “What kind of carnival is this?” said Scarlett, and the girl just looked at her. “We heard about you three,” the girl said. “That’s why we’re here.” “What did you hear?” asked Reese. “Your people took over some contested land.” My mouth got dry. “Our people?” “I’m from up there,” said the girl in yellow. “I work for your mamas now.” She didn’t look like an angel. But what did we know? We’d been trained to kill angels, not to like them, and this girl was a girl I liked already. “I’m Valerie,” she said, and shook out her black braids. Her hair was as long as mine had been. “You want to join us?” This was what we had dreaded. This was a recruitment. Why didn’t I mind? Reese had a very stiff spine. “I have a boyfriend here,” she said. “Do you want out of this town, Sister?” asked Valerie. “You do. It’s written all over you. You don’t care for him more than you care for yourself. Come help us out in Heaven.” “Do you know the Preacher?” Scarlett asked her, suspicious. I was suspicious too. I’d come to the conclusion that Littlest Wife was nothing right. There was a social worker at the school who kept trying to hand me stuffed animals so we could talk about love. “Know him?” Valerie said, and laughed. “We came down here for him too. We have him in the back of the cargo truck with Rexie.” We stood there for a moment, in the sawdust, blinking. This was how we found out that our father had not in fact suicided his way to Heaven, but had left his own soda undosed. This was how we learned that he’d taken off and stayed alive, letting the rest of Heaven’s Avengers fight angels without him. Valerie took us to him. The cage was big, dark and dirty, full of hay, and the Preacher looked up when Valerie brought us in. “Sister,” he said. “Sister, and Sister.” We were quiet for a minute. There he was, worse for the wear, this old man in a dirty shirt with no cult. He’d lost his beard, and his face without it looked skinny and toothy. He looked like the pterodactyl, but not beautiful. I could see where the back of his head might be soft. I thought about biting through his spine, putting my teeth in and shaking my head. I thought about a frenzy, me and the rest of the Little Widows. We could shred him limb from limb. We could spread his entrails over acres. We could tear him into tiny pieces and strew him about, a sacrifice, a religious act. We knew how to kill a man with the maximum amount of pain. Men were easier to kill than angels. I heard Scarlett inhale. Normally we would have sent white light, or I would’ve balanced some crystals on my hands, and prayed the bars away. We were no longer normal. “You bastard,” Scarlett screamed and flew at the cage, rattling it. “You cowardly motherfucker!” We’d always known how to swear. It was part of our training. We’d figured “damn it” might be useful in a land of the undamned. “Murderer,” Reese hissed and poked him through the bars with the handle of a muck shovel. The Preacher looked reduced. “I didn’t mean it,” he whimpered. “I never wanted this gig. I inherited Heaven’s Avengers from my papa. It was my legacy. What was I supposed to do? I didn’t want to die, but dying was the deal.” I spat at him. A fleck of dinosaur blood hit his cheek. Valerie was looking on in pride, I thought, and so I spat at my husband again. “I’m not your wife anymore,” I said. “Neither are they. No one gets to have that many wives. There’s no prize like that in the actual world.” Something moved at the back of the Preacher’s cage, and I saw a big orange eyeball open up. Even though I was me, I still felt part of my guts seize up. “That there’s Rexie,” said Valerie casually. “She’s roosting over a clutch.” The dinosaur clucked and moved her tiny arms a little, looking at the Preacher. I wondered if she was going to eat him. I felt less worried about myself than I might have. The cage looked strong, and the tyrannosaurus in it looked sleepy. “How many of those you got?” I asked her. “Ten. We’ve been traveling in a caravan. The Preacher’s in charge of mucking out their henhouses. Mission from above says we have to do some things to the Earth.” Rexie shuffled herself around. I could see a little heap of eggs underneath her. Her head was maybe ten feet long, and her ears were pinholes. Her fangs were yellow as Valerie’s gloves. The Preacher looked pitiful beside her, and I was glad. “It’s not my fault, girls,” he said. “You’re alive, and that was all my doing. I saved you. I took mercy on the children. You gotta help me get out of here.” “What are the wages in Heaven?” I asked Valerie. “True believer,” she said and grinned. “Room and board. But it’s not bad up there.” “Was this a screw up?” Scarlett asked. “You know dinosaurs are extinct, right?” Valerie sighed. “The rules are complicated. Geekshow full of pterodactyls. Henhouse full of Rexes. Some of them wanted to come down, and this was how it had to be done.” “Even Heaven doesn’t have its shit together,” Reese said and rolled her eyes. “Nowhere does,” said Valerie. “But the new administration wanted to get in touch and give you the opt-in. Things are changing.” Even miracles were messes. We’d been helping the mess along since the suicide. We’d never have admitted it to anyone but each other, but we had some skills, the three of us together. Out behind the carnival was the lake where everyone’d risen up and walked on the water back in 1913. It was a green algae slime-covered pool, and theory went that it hadn’t actually hosted a real miracle. Instead the miracle had been lake overturn. Poison gases had asphyxiated the original swimming devoted and then brought their bodies back up from the bottom, perfectly preserved. There were photographs of them floating naked and pale after the limbic eruption. All those bodies stayed inviolate for a year, bobbing on top of the great green lake, and that was the everything of Heaven’s Avengers. It was why we were where we were, who we were, and what we were. A bunch of dead people. Nobody ever rose, not really, but call it risen and you get worshippers in from all over. People hallucinated here still, and the lake got the blame, those poisons pushing up into the air. If the wives were in Heaven—and I wondered for a moment about the Rexes; there was something about the look of them that reminded me of my mothers—they’d won, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to go up there. I didn’t mind being cultless. I liked life among the living. We joined hands, me, Reese, and Scarlett. We were sisters and wives. We were widows. “Did you know chickens used to be a remedy for black plague?” Reese said. Reese had worked in the infirmary. She knew a lot about bad ways to heal things. “You’d pluck a chicken’s ass and strap it to the bubo, and then the sick person and the chicken would just walk around together.” “Did it work?” I asked, kind of knowing the answer. “The chicken would get replaced until the chicken and the patient both died. You know what I like about the modern world, Natalie? You know what I like about it, Scarlett? Vaccinations and antibiotics.” “Me too,” said Scarlett. “I don’t mind being alive.” “We have to vote on him,” I said. I had another look into the hen cage and saw Rexie put a claw out in the direction of The Preacher, her mouth opening a little. The eggs shook beneath her, and her orange eyes shone. The Preacher moaned. “Honor thy father,” he whined. “And thy mother. You poisoned the pop,” Reese said. “You don’t deserve honoring. What if they weren’t in Heaven? What if they’d just died?” We thought about that for a moment. The real thoughts. The way our mothers’ bodies had been put in the high school gym. They way they’d been covered with sheets. The way the smoke smelled in Miracle, and the way no one cared. The way the town got swarmed with evening news for two weeks. The way we’d been brought up to take everything down. No one cares about dead mothers. No one cares about dead women, period; that’s what we learned when our cult suicided. The women weren’t on the news. Reese’s boyfriend was on the news, because he was good at sports. Everyone just thought the women were dumb as rocks to fall in with a person such as The Preacher. But we weren’t dumb. We were adopted and born into this. We were daughters and wives. We were supposed to be killed, but we knew how to kill too. Vulnerable softnesses. Skulls and bones. We were just little girls—that’s what people thought about us, the Sisters Stuart. Give any of us a drawing of the human body, and we could map the veins, the likely points for access. Give any of us a list of plants and we could tell you what the poisons were and how to mix them. We could give you a dose of goldenseal that’d make you hallucinate walking on the surface of a dead green lake, rising up and diving down through the green mire and into the muck, over and over, for the rest of your life. We had kill skills, that’s what the Preacher called them. Did we want to use them? Did we want to be known for that for the rest of our lives? We had other plans. Killing wasn’t the only thing to do on Earth. Reese shook her shoulders back and looked at the Preacher. “You’re shit out of luck. I’m going to be a pilot.” “I’m going to run the country,” said Scarlett. “You’re dead, officially, and unofficially, you’re in a cage with something hungry.” “Join us,” said Valerie, but she looked only at me. “Come up to Heaven.” My sisters rippled with white light. It wasn’t bunk. I didn’t want the crystals and the prayers anymore. I didn’t want to be good. I wanted to war. I wanted to kill. But I didn’t want to die to do it. “When I was seven,” I said to my sisters. “And I was made Littlest Wife, do you remember what happened?” “All the chickens died of pox,” said Reese. “All the eggs were full of two-headed chicks,” said Scarlett. “And you stood in the middle of the henhouse, with all them dead, and took out the wishbones with your pocketknife,” said Reese. It was a legendary moment in Heaven’s Avengers history. I was a miracle. I was a sign from somewhere, that everything would be okay, that we were winning. I was only a kid, but I cut and cut. I opened up my purse and showed them my collection. I hadn’t broken them. They were precious. I had forty-seven. I fetched up the dead pterodactyl and sliced into its sternum with my pearl-handled blade, and within a moment, I had forty-eight. There was a ritual to do. I brought out a packet of matches, and a little bit of tobacco. I set a small fire, and sprinkled the tobacco on, and then I started breaking bones and wishing. “Gotta get to the end sometime,” said Reese. “Gotta call in the wishes, real and fake.” “Good girl,” said Scarlett, and smiled at me. “It’s time to get our vehicle,” Reese said, and walked out from the circus grounds, her pale hair shining in the backlights. I was here, breaking bones and making wishes on them, and none of my wishes were pretty. Scarlett took one end and broke a wish with me. Her eyes were shut and so were mine, and we felt that bone give. All bones will give if you ask them. I looked at the Preacher. We were here together because of him, but that didn’t mean he was a good thing. I whistled and the orange eyes opened. Back in the dark, I could see other cages. Scarlett whistled too. Other orange eyes. The eyes of the hens. We’d both worked in chicken houses. We knew what hens were like. We knew what mothers were like in general. In the cage where the Preacher was, Rexie shifted. The man was seventy years old and full of sham. “Sisters,” he said, in his supplicating voice. “Sisters of Heaven’s Avengers.” “Daughters of a dead guy,” said Scarlett. “Wives of a dead guy.” Rexie poked her head out, bending the bars. All over the carnival grounds, dinosaurs emerged from their cages, tottering, that high-kneed bird-walk, their chests full of wishbone. Behind us, the lake simmered and a bunch of 1913 ghosts trotted around on the surface of the water. The Preacher looked scared. The dinosaurs started to tromp harder, thunder-footing, and the Preacher looked even more scared. “I’m just a simple man,” he said, and then tried to make a run for it. Valerie lassoed him and dragged him back by his ankle, him scrabbling all the way. “And I’m just a cult kid,” I said. “You set your henhouse on fire. You made some bad mistakes.” We could hear the humming of a crop duster now, and Scarlett and I whistled louder at the dinosaurs. All over the grounds, pterodactyls pecked and Rexes stamped their feet, and the eggs from the henhouses wobbled and shook. I thought about what would hatch. Everything. The thought made me so happy I could hardly stand it. I wanted to yelp and whoop and run around, but I stayed still. The surface of the lake trembled, and out there in all their glory, ghosts danced on the green, victims of tremors, like these dinosaurs had been back when. The crop duster landed beside me, Scarlett, and the angel in the yellow bikini. I could see Reese in the pilot’s seat, and I said “Heaven’s just a plot of land.” The angel looked at me and grinned. “I might stay down here myself,” Valerie said. “We’ve got no monopoly on good these days. I got sent like somebody’s secretary, down here to recruit. I was thinking I might want to be a truck driver. Maybe I’ll run into you out there.” “Might do,” I said, and shook her hand. She was an angel in a bathing suit, and I was a kid in a bloody dress. I looked at the rest of the feathery Rexes and figured angels didn’t look like most people thought. Reese leaned out the window of the plane and beckoned us inside; we hopped up, me and Scarlett. “Little Widow,” Scarlett said. “Little Widow.” The Preacher was squatting, a Rex standing over him, looking at him with her head tilted. Scarlett hung out her window as the crop duster took off, down a little runway in the dirt, past the dinosaurs, and up into the sky. The dinosaurs started to dance, all the hens of the world, a circle of them stepping high, claw-footed, their feathers standing up. I watched the Preacher get snatched up into the teeth of Rexie, and I watched her rooster come running, a gleaming, green-feathered gigantic. The Preacher’s head was in Rexie’s mouth, and his body went into the mouth of Rexie’s mate. We watched as they wishboned him, tearing him into two sections, one bigger than the other. We watched the angels make certainties of his bones. The dinosaurs surged up in a roaring wave of feathers and scales, stampeding, a henhouse from heaven, and maybe they were our avenging mamas and maybe they were not. Maybe they were just Heaven’s livestock. But down here, they’d been livestock too, and so were we. We didn’t truck with that anymore. We weren’t for breeding. We weren’t for feeding. We were our own flying things. From the cockpit of the crop duster, the three Sisters Stuart smiled as we flew just over the surface of the Earth, low enough to see it, high enough to consider our futures. “Little Widows,” I said, with solemnity. We weren’t broken. We were human like everyone else was human. “Now’s the time for us to bless the dead.” “Bless them,” said Reese. “Bless them,” said Scarlett, and we took each other’s hands and blessed. Below us, Rexes ran rampant, a beautiful flurry of greens and blues and reds, flapping and strutting, eggs hatching in the dirt. “Bless the dead and keep them dead,” I said. I dropped the head of the pterodactyl out the window, a spinning thing like an axe blade, twisting beaked and toothed to plant itself in the corn. No one living had ever heard dinosaurs singing before, their trilling lark roars, their falcon wails, but they heard them now, these heavenly lizards, these glorious angels closest to God. Out we went, my sisters and I in our little crop duster, flying together, us three, up, and up, into the clear sky, and out of Miracle. Out went the dinosaurs, a flock of them from our old town, for a hundred hungry miles, their bellies full of meatcows, sheep, and one old man with no wives left to his name. They ran over blood-drenched ground, singing as they went.

Editor’s Note: This story was co-edited by Douglas Cohen and will also be appearing in the new anthology, What the #@&% Is That?, edited by John Joseph Adams and Douglas Cohen, out November 1 from Saga Press. Visit johnjosephadams.com/wtf to learn more.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Maria Dahvana Headley is the author of the young adult skyship novel Magonia from HarperCollins, the novel Queen of Kings, the memoir The Year of Yes, and co-author with Kat Howard of the short horror novella The End of the Sentence. With Neil Gaiman, she is the New York Times-bestselling co-editor of the monster anthology Unnatural Creatures, benefitting 826DC. Her Nebula and Shirley Jackson award-nominated short fiction has recently appeared in Lightspeed (“Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream,” “The Traditional”), on Tor.com, The Toast, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Apex, The Journal of Unlikely Entomology, Subterranean Online, Uncanny Magazine, Glitter & Mayhem and Jurassic London’s The Lowest Heaven and The Book of the Dead, as well as in a number of Year’s Bests, most recently Year’s Best Weird. She lives in Brooklyn with a collection of beasts, an anvil, and a speakeasy bar through the cellar doors. Find her on Twitter @MARIADAHVANA or on the web at mariadahvanaheadley.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight Laal Andhi Usman T. Malik | 7333 words

When a laal andhi rises, understand that an innocent has been murdered. — Pakistani proverb

On the 7th of July, 2005, while threading through heat-drowsed traffic near Bhatta Chowk, I nearly ran over a pedestrian dashing across the road. The man was tall, lanky, bearded. He wore a white prayer cap, dusky shalwar kameez, and a navy blue sweater bulging around his chest. He didn’t flinch when the wheels screeched and the bumper lurched to a halt inches from his torso; just cocked his head, as if listening to something distant, leaped across the manhole by the sidewalk, and disappeared in the crowd. Panting, I shouted at his back and clutched the steering wheel with knuckles that had turned white. I was in my thirties then and had a nervous disposition, and this brush with a certain fatality left me shaken. Eventually I murmured my thanks to Allah, jerked the gearshift forward, and drove on to my uncle’s jewelry shop near Delhi Gate in the walled Old City. All day I fingered gold chains, pearl necklaces, lapis lazuli earrings, diamond wedding sets, and I couldn’t get the incident out of my head. Something about the man, his profile, the way he ran, head tilted as if with torticollis, one arm still and dangling like an ape’s, kept returning to me. In bed that evening I tossed and turned, thinking about the near miss, wondering why the stranger’s memory wouldn’t leave me alone. Two days later when a grainy black-and-white photo showed up on Geo, Samaa, Dawn News, and other channels, I knew. I sat quietly as winter shadows gathered amidst the peepal and sukhchain trees in our backyard. My wife brought sarson-ka-saag and makai roti for dinner, my favorite meal, and I was trembling, she said later. She put the tray down, touched my forehead, and I was burning up, I had a fever, oh God please don’t let it be malaria, it can kill so quickly. That night I had drenching sweats. I slept and jerked awake, dozed and dreamed; and in my dream, Lahore was enveloped in red dust that shrieked and blew across the city in crimson funnels. The back roads, the unlit intersections where countless had died, glimmered and faded in the mouth of the laal andhi. The evening newscaster stood swathed in shadow, flecks of red plastered to her eyelashes. Two children among twenty dead, she said, her bright, clear eyes staring at my numb, terror-shaped face, even as her camera panned on three bloodstained teeth lying like pearls in the alley’s gutter. My wife was shaking me awake. She held my flailing arms and hugged me as I whispered over and over again, Nearly killed him twice. Nearly killed him twice. It was a dark and very long night. Not even the fajr azaan from the neighborhood mosque could soothe my fears. • • • •

The summer of ’85, and Lahore lay like a dying fish, belly up, even as we struggled to grow up inside it. Its scales still bloodied from the riots of the seventies, arteries exposed and twitching in a concrete gut blackened with hegemonic fear, the city oozed a human plasma that coagulated within its core. It was a blistering, dry hell of a season filled with scorching lu winds that swept up from the plains and left not a drop of unvaporized water in their wake. A summer of sunstrokes and hangings and midnight kidnappings. Of bloody hockeys and roaming thugs and rumors about Russia and Amreeka’s Cold War drifting from the north. The Great White Helper, we were told, had sent our Afghani brothers powerful weapons to fight the good fight. Anti-aircrafts and Kalashnikovs and Stinger missiles would weave the tapestry of resistance. General Zia’s state machinery ran nationalist jingles on TV and radio. The Queen o’ Melody Noor Jehan made appearances, singing tributes to the Pak Army’s heroism in ’65, while a dull-faced woman in a headscarf assured us that our brothers across the border would win, for wasn’t their cause just and righteous? ’85, and it was the summer we were still young and untouched. Four teenage boys who lived in the same neighborhood and went to the same school and were equally short of money to buy shakarkandi, salted peanuts, or roasted corn bhutta. Once or twice we stole sugarcane ganderi and apples from vendors fanning themselves with old newspaper outside the school, but after I heard the Maulvi Sahib deliver a thunderous Friday sermon about theft and its hellfire consequences I refused to participate again. (Wasif just laughed and, slipping his feet into some unfortunate’s new shoes from the mosque rack, left his sandals behind.) It was the year we discovered magazines with women baring all. Buxom girls with never-ending legs wearing nothing but tall heels, cowboy hats, and fake silver crosses groped themselves and squeezed breasts with pink nipples, brown nipples, black nipples. You could find these totay behind the counters of certain shops in Urdu Bazaar. The proprietor had a secret signal for customers like us, passed on by word of mouth: if you kept staring at him during a regular purchase (the latest Imran series novel by Ibn-e-Safi, for example, or a new book by A. Hameed) he would glance at you and knock thrice against the plywood wall with his knuckles. If you reached over and rang the brass bell sitting on the countertop, he would smile broadly and ask if you needed “something else.” Wasif and Ali Malik were experts at the ritual. Me, I always blushed and mumbled, and they’d push me away rudely and step forward to negotiate. Saleem, Wasif, Ali Malik, and I. Always the four of us banded together against the uncertainties of a city running on trepidation. In this season of yoking and yearning, of bereavement and besetment, we started doing the thing we did, for with fear and death and sulfur in the air who would stop us? Who would point and say, watch it, children, you must survive your age. Must get through one hell to enter another. ’85 was the year of army generals and feudal lords touring their fiefdoms grandly while the populace died thrashing in gutters from starvation and heat and Hadood Law amputations. Of VIP villas and ruined shanties, bright-tiled facades and haunted houses, “police encounters” and prison suicides, and insurgent bomb attacks. Most of all, though, it was the summer we went to Bad Bricks during a laal andhi.

• • • •

I might have suggested the game, true, but Wasif took it to its awful conclusion. This I’d swear before any qazi, judge, or jury. Three kilometers from our muhallah was a graveyard. Five acres of crumbling headstones, weeds, and overgrown grass. We sat in the shade of the banyan grove on the other side of which lay my grandfather, and that was where Wasif came up with the twist. It was Grandfather who told me many stories. He was an unsmiling tall man, browned by years of rice-picking on the family farm in the country. Sitting with his arms around my very pale-faced grandmother, he spoke to me of terrible legends honed in the villages far from Lahore. Tales told by braziers not yet replaced with heaters; in the heart of pitch- black nights not slashed open by gleaming airplanes. So it went that these stories made their way to my lips and I spoke—first hesitantly, then emphatically—of the hellish game I had designed. It was simple. We would congregate at a place where the vagaries of death had swooped—bomb blasts, gangland shootings, suicides, homicides, executions. At each crossing where human limbs, riding blast waves, had risen like shrieks, we stopped and paid our respects. We lamented the departed with elegies and dark fables. Tales of terror, torture and turpitude that we filled with the presence of those passed. We imagined their lives of our own making. We prayed for the victims with mantars of madness. We read to the dead. In retrospect it was stupid and dangerous, but really, how could we have known? How could we have understood? At the time, it was enthralling to give meaning to their slaughter; and the game was taken up ecstatically by the boys, especially Wasif. He suggested the initial reading by Grandfather’s grave (later we moved our mecca around, but inevitably returned to the cemetery every few months). We gathered to read our stories weekly. The whispering breeze, gentle rustling of hallowed dust as it curtained and showered over old graves; the smell of flowers bloomed from such dust; the flexing and twitching hag-fingers of branches beckoning us close; and the two skulls we found half-buried by a grave and carefully dug out, cleaned, and preserved—they consummated the unholy process. On this particular Thursday evening (night of souls, night of saints), we sat in the graveyard with a furious red sky above us, and a heavy, grit-filled wind beginning to blow. It was Saleem’s turn that day, simple Saleem, gentle Saleem, fourteen-years-old, the youngest of us. It was his turn to read, his pledge to the dead, when Wasif spoke of the laal andhi and changed our world. I remember exactly what we were all doing. Saleem was shuffling the pages of his notebook. Ali Malik smoked a cheap Capstan, his back against a headstone, and I dug into the moist earth with a twig. “Well?” Wasif said. “Well, what?” I said, not looking up. The twig scraped and wedged on a pebble. When I yanked, it broke. I threw the sharp end away and glanced at the sky. An angry red, the horizon throbbed with coiled clouds, blood glories unfurling. Dead leaves spun in the air and blew against my lips. I spat on the ground. “A laal andhi is starting up, man. Who knows if it will rain after.” Wasif looked around, his lips peeled back, a shred of lunch chicken tucked in the web of his mustache. He was tall, dark, and the first of us to sprout a man-beard. He slapped my back. “Why don’t we get away from this stinking graveyard, these dog-pissed streets, for a change? I’m sick of them.” “And go where?” said Ali Malik in my stead. “Forget the muhallah or the tobacco- and-paan shop, man. My dad will beat the living shit out of me if he sees me smoke, make no mistake. He’s everywhere, and I’ve just got to have my smokes when we read.” Wasif looked at Ali as if he were a particularly nasty malaria-laden mosquito. “I have no clue why we put up with your shitty explanations. Grow a pair of balls. Or buy ’em from the eunuchs.” He scratched his head. “Well, lemme think. I’m sure I will . . .” A smile cracked his face, a sideways grin that spilt his teeth into the sun. I knew that grin. Usually it meant trouble. I turned and gazed at the sky, listened to the softly murmuring laal andhi. The crimson storm. Backwoods folk, country folk scoffed. You never could talk to them about Richter scales and earthquakes and monsoon winds. They held onto their dark worries, dismissing scientific explanations of red dust blowing from the mountains, howling across vast plains, carpeting the cities in its wake. Country folk believed in other things. Grandfather had heard these myths and once talked to me about them. He had that look in his eyes, stark-red worry, a carefully cultivated respect for the unknown. “Raza baita,” he said and licked his lips. “The crimson storm is not like any other storm. It’s a vast, moving veil. Evil things slip out from behind it. Jinns, Dyos, alien and terrible, smear blood all over their naked melting bodies and scream until the earth gags and gives up its tenants. Solemnly they raise their heads and take off their masks of passing. The storm’s wind itself is foul, you understand? It makes things happen. It turns people and time. Son, don’t you ever go out in a laal andhi, you hear me? Stay in the safety of the house, baita. Stay.” But Grandfather was dead, sunk below the dark waters of oblivion. Worms and rodents swam over and nibbled on his face now. I shivered. “Bad Bricks!” Wasif was beaming. “Didn’t I say I had the perfect place this time?” His words hung in the air for a moment, splintered, and faded away. The wind gusted and the headstone Ali was leaning on toppled and crashed, taking Ali with it. “Motherfucker,” Ali grunted, and heaved himself up with his elbows. Wasif sniggered. “You’re talking about the reporter’s house,” Saleem said quietly. He raised his head and looked at Wasif. “There is a cellar under the stairs,” said Wasif. “I saw it once with Fareed people when we scaled the boundary wall to smoke joints. It’s perfect for your story. Ah, the candles in the skulls, the shadows, the ambience. I can just picture it.” Saleem was silent. I was silent. He was pale, his full, almost feminine lips colorless as grave-slabs. He had been chewing them again, and the lower one was torn, a shimmer of pink visible in the shades of gray. He is scared, I thought. He is terrified. Why? Saleem’s face turned blank. “Sure,” he said. “Sure.”

• • • •

’85 was the year of my father’s affair with Auntie Nasreen from four streets down. Each evening, Father would return from the 7-UP factory, his half-sleeve white shirt bobbing like a flag in the alley, and walk right past our house. Spitting and hacking (he had pneumonia as a child and his lungs were scarred), he returned home only when it was time for dinner. Mother would never say a word, but she slammed steel bowls on the dinner mat and broke a china plate, and once at night I heard her crying. It was the year of the Hadood grounds near Lahore Railway Station. Scores of prisoners were brought there blindfolded, hands tied behind their back, tethered to bamboo posts, and lashed one by one. Public hangings occasionally followed. It was also the summer Saleem’s father went missing. This happened two months before the laal andhi and the incident at the reporter’s house. His father had been leading a pro-Bhutto rally near Kalma Chowk one evening and chanting slogans against the dictatorship. On his way back, someone shot at his bicycle fifteen times, puncturing the wheels, winging the side mirrors, knocking the bell off. His white skullcap was bloodstained and lying near the axle when they found it. Wasif’s mother and uncle begged lawyers, session judges, and journalists to take the case national. Every police station in the city was scoured and draped with his photographs, but no news was to come of him.

• • • •

The sky was a blood-soaked mantel as we trudged down the streets. A steadily building wind clutched newspapers, daubed them red, and hurled them away. Plastic shopping bags spun, the burning air visible through their flesh, and rolled away like heads. Sprinkles of vermilion dust blew in my face, crawled into my eyes, and scrabbled up my nose as the gale shook a bloody fist at us. The crimson storm was gathering strength. Then we saw it from afar. The place many Lahorites had named Bad Bricks stood like a weed amidst the cheerful residences under Sherpao Bridge. The neighborhood was great, suburban to the core: two-story walled villas, gleaming Jeeps and vans, and manicured lawns. Short flagstone driveways coursed parallel to the grass. Happy residents parked their cars underneath hanging terraces. Snug, welcoming red brick houses. Not Bad Bricks. The house was dead. Weary, stunted trees leaned against its rain-bleached boundary walls. Paint was gouged off its sides like skin off a maimed beast. Rusted black iron gates that must have gleamed once hung open like mouths frozen in agony, twisting and shuddering in the wind. We stood and gazed at the cracked driveway winding inside, lapping at the front door. I glanced at Wasif and stepped forward. In the years before the suppression and insurgence we sometimes played cricket in these streets. Someone would score a six and the ball would rise, spinning in the air, arc above the boundary walls, and bounce across the lawn. The older kids would have to climb them to retrieve it. The house’s reputation made it an ominous task. I was young then, and had escaped that fate. Today, however, I looked at the lawn. It was a jungle. Weeds grew frantically, high grass wavered in tentacles. Uprooted plants and undergrowth sprawled over cracked gardening pots. Patches of underbrush stirred; with wind or life, who could tell? What puzzled me was the absence of animal droppings. There should have been dried bird-shit and turds from stray cats. No garbage either. No rotting banana skins, orange rinds, or gnawed chicken bones. Just pebbles, broken ceramic, and shattered brick. “Lovely,” Wasif said. The storm moaned, ripped leaves off the undergrowth, and flung them over us. Dead petals pressed against my skin. Brick and storm dust mingled and whirled away. And then we stood in front of the entrance, a splintered wooden door choked at its hinges by termites, swinging slowly back and forth. The last inhabitants of Bad Bricks left in ’79. It had stayed empty since. The first owner was a retired army colonel who gifted the house to his son, a crime reporter, in ’74. I knew these dates because Uncle Dara, a friend of Father’s, was a realtor, and told stories of houses for sale whenever he came over for dinner. The reporter was an eccentric man (shit-crazy, Uncle Dara said), who was digging up skeletons in the land- grabbing mafia’s backyard. He had a plan to write a book. To scoop out the corruption of the army personnel in cahoots with the land-grabbers. Until one night the mafia came for him. So it goes that the maid enters the house. It’s cold and feels empty. She’s come to dust the windows and scrub the floors, and his red-white eyeballs are staring at her from the dinner bowl on the table. She shrieks, and her fifteen-year-old grandson stops sweeping the patio and comes running. He sees his grandma wheel, try to run, trip on something and go down, and when she does she’s lying next to the reporter’s body, arm out from under the sofa. The holes that were his eyes are crawling with ants. Grandma has an epileptic attack—she tends to miss her pill sometimes—and starts seizing. The boy screams and runs to her, and now grandma’s turning color. Her head bangs against the dead man’s wham! wham! wham! and the child backpedals, lets out a last shriek, and flees from the house. By the time paramedics and police get there, the old maid is long dead from aspiration, face engorged and blue, arms wrapped around the murdered reporter. After, the house is empty for a while (the colonel dies of a heart attack months later). Lahore Development Authority claims the property. They try to auction it, but no one wants it. Eventually a newly married couple takes it—low rent and all—and, in the middle of the night, rush out the front door in their underwear, screaming and gibbering. They jump into their Suzuki Alto, race away at eighty kilometers per hour. Collide with a brick truck on the main road, fishtail, and go up in smoke and flames. Not much left to tell. The house is baptized Bad Bricks. Neighbors whisper it is haunted. Something shuffles inside the place at twilight. Rumors of visitations, of faces at windows, of moonlight congealing like blood on the iron gates, and the LDA gives up. It leaves the house to smolder like a pile of litter. Now there we were in front of the entrance. Four brave souls in search of the holy dead. Wasif waited. Above us thunder screamed. Lightning ripped the clouds open, spewing their slippery guts forth. Rain reddened by the storm began to hiss around us. Silver- brown lines of water snaked down the driveway, curling around our shadows. The storm began to whirl and dance. Ali Malik was the first to step forward. He reached for the door, paused, grasped the rusted handle. Perhaps I was the only one who saw the hesitation, that tremor in his fingers as they gripped the metal tight. He yanked the handle and flung open the door. Oil- hungry hinges creaked. Dust rose, moved forward with gentle arms to embrace us, and dissipated. Sunlight had died in the heart of the storm and we gazed at absolute darkness. Red shadows hung from twisted vines and branches by the swollen black throat that was the doorway, and without a light Saleem could never ever read his story in there. We didn’t have to enter. We didn’t have to move into the beyond. I was ecstatic, relieved, damn the house, fuck bravado, and I turned to say so. Wasif had a flashlight in his hands. In the tatters of daylight the bulb glimmered, and woke up as he flicked the switch. A knob of light shot at the rain, expanded into a vortex, and cut through the cavernous gloom. We stepped inside the house.

• • • • This one I can’t be certain of, but my heart tells me it’s true: ’85 was the spring Saleem and I found the Rampuri chakoo knife at the foot of the banyan tree. We were returning from school. Saleem was beaming. His grandfather, a clerk at National Bank, had visited that weekend and given him a crackling five-rupee note. We frequently pooled our allowance and my share of this treasure was secure. Visions of samosas and keema pakoras danced before our eyes. I suggested we take a detour along Kabootar Purah, where most vendors sat. From WAPDA bus stop, a dirt track led through a grove of peepal, keshu, and villayati shisham, curved around an abandoned construction site, and ended at the market. Swinging an old shoe on a plastic string, we dashed between the trees, giggling. It was early March, Saleem’s father’s disappearance was two months away, and the keshu and shisham had blossomed. Blazing orange and gentle lilac flowers lined the branches like birds. Their sweet perfume, coupled with jasmine growing in clumps and thickets by the main road, overwhelmed the diesel fumes left behind by roaring trucks and school vans. I would’ve missed it had its face not caught sunlight at an odd angle and burst into reds. It looked like a shower of blood in the corner of my vision, and when I jerked my head, the illusion dissipated. I nudged Saleem and we walked to it warily. The trees made a bower here, hemming in the grove from the road. The grass, though dense, was short and pushed back by roots. Five feet from an old banyan’s trunk, the knife was driven point first into the ground, a gilt carbon steel blade about sixteen inches long. The handle, shaped like a leg with a boot heel on the bottom, was hand-chased and depicted flowers with a rat curled among them. “What the. . . .” Saleem crouched and touched the rivets close to the pommel with awe. “This is real, Raza. By God, this is a real slipjoint.” “What?” “Slipjoint. A folding Rampuri chakoo.” He grabbed the handle and wrenched the knife out of the ground. In the afternoon light the face glittered even though it was pitted and covered with a patchy dark membrane from point to guard. “Now watch.” Saleem pressed his thumb on the blade’s spine, forced it down and backward until it clicked into a groove at the bottom of the handle. “See, how easy that was. Uncle Hamid, who lives in Sargodha, sells chakoos. Hunting knives, switchblades, slipjoints. He showed me one just like this when we were there last year. Said this kind used to be made in Rampur, India. Town was famous for ’em. Real expensive, too.” Grinning, he tossed it from one hand to another. “Wasif is going to leak shit when I show him this.” He scratched the blade with his nails and rust-colored flakes fell off it. “I want a look.” I made a grab for the chakoo, but he was quick and leapt away. We chased each other around the tree trunks. A fat white slug dropped off the banyan. Before it could scurry under a root, Saleem stepped on it and squashed it. “Bastard, give it up,” I yelled, panting and laughing. “Come and get it, faggot.” He stepped back when I feinted a lunge, tripped on a root and crashed to the ground. I dove at him at once, but before I could tackle him he had cocked his arm back and heaved the knife. Up it went spinning, arcing over the banyan branches. It caught the light, flared like a lamp, and came down twenty feet away in a tangle of wildflowers and grass. I grunted and rolled off Saleem. “Asshole. What if you broke it?” Saleem said nothing. When I looked, his gaze was riveted on something overhead, his eyes large. “Raza,” he whispered. “What is that?” We were in the tree’s shadow, and when I tilted my head upward, a shaft of sunlight blinded me. I squinted, rose to my feet, and there above us something hung from the banyan. Slowly, I walked forward until I stood directly below it. It was a massive, heavy- looking gunnysack dangling from the fattest branch. When the wind picked up, the tethering rope stirred and the sack turned gently. Its bottom was black at the center. I dropped my gaze and what I saw chilled me. The grass below my feet was crisp and red-black. I touched it. The blood was still sticky. I stood in a puddle of it. Softly speaking, enunciating each word, Saleem said, “What the fuck is that?” We looked at each other. Somewhere above us, a golden oriole whistled. Saleem licked his lips. He had almond-shaped eyes, black as oil puddles, and something swam in them. I think he had already figured it out. “I don’t know,” I said. “Saleem, let’s get out of here. Fuck the chakoo.” I backed away from the blood. On my left, the knife gleamed amidst dandelions and jasmine, the blade still folded in its gilded handle. “Wait.” Saleem bent and rummaged through the underbrush, found a rock, lifted it. “What are you doing?” He aimed the rock, threw his arm back, and launched it. He had a good throwing arm, and the rock sped like a bullet and hit the sack right in the blackened center. “Aaaaand score!” yelled Saleem, arms high above his head. His voice was hoarse, filled with more than a touch of hysteria, and the golden oriole along with a dozen sparrows and starlings took wing. The grove echoed with their squaws and trills. “That’s how you do it.” I stared at him, watched the smile on his face vanish and his eyes widen. His arms dropped and dangled like pendulums. His eyes were deeper and darker with terror. New sounds cut through the avian scolding. A gurgling from above, followed by intermittent choking. “Ya Allah,” Saleem said, staggered back, and fell to the ground. “Ya Allah.” I didn’t want to look up. I could feel my heart beat in every inch of my body. It should’ve filled my ears, my head, but the sound wouldn’t let it. Hissing and whispering that ebbed and rose. I raised my head and the sack was twitching. It swung and shook, as if its contents were having a grand mal seizure. It gurgled. Fresh red bloomed at the bottom and began to spread. Saleem moaned and dug his heels into the grass as he scrambled. I followed him and we both fled through the trees, out the grove past the deserted construction site with its monstrous yellow digger trapped in a ditch. We ran home and told our parents. The police were called and a squadron was sent to the grove immediately. The Rampuri chakoo was found and confiscated. (An official looking man with a sweetmeat belly came to Saleem’s house a week later, applied blue ink to his palms and asked him to place both hands on a shining white cardboard carefully. When Saleem refused, frightened of the man’s blank face, his father slapped him and told him to do exactly as the officer said.) I was grounded for a week and Saleem for a month. They never told us what was in the sack or who had put it there, but for months I had bad dreams. I’d be back in the grove with the sack twisting and gurgling above me. It would be dusk. The birds hung limply in the sky as if staked to the night itself, and the knife driven into the grass would quiver as if the earth were pulsating. The mouth of the sack would open, and a river of black lice-infested hair streamed out and poured across the foliage, rotting everything in its path. The jasmines would wilt, their smell that of spoiled meat, the dandelions crumbled into dust beneath my feet, as I fled through the darkening, whispering grove. But the path would not open, not open before me, and the gurgling would not stop. It would not stop.

• • • •

Back in Bad Bricks, four teenagers were piled in front of the cellar. The door was open, swaying back and forth above an abyss. For a moment, all those old fears burrowed out of my heart and sat on its stony ground, watching me with dull black eyes. In the shadows, gunnysacks flapped and twitched with the moaning thing, the bloodied nightmare that wore body bags. Ah, you’re back, aren’t you? The gunnysack whispered. My sweet child. Know then, that evil children, devilish children who celebrate the dead, never escape. I come for them, I spill for them, and they smell me. Smell my hair. Looking for me, have you? I know. I know. So come smell me, rub your face in my clotted fabric. Come you little brat, come . . . The hair on my arms stood on end. I shuddered and tore my gaze away from the hole of the doorway. The blackness was a tattered thing, ancient evil grew in its belly, and all at once I was sick of this stupid, twisted game. I wanted to get through Saleem’s reading and get the fuck out of this terrible house where awful memories slept, coiled, in their graves. We began to descend the wooden stairs. Wasif’s flashlight threw a wobbling circle of light across the dusty stone wall. A carpet of filth, spider silk, and frayed old rope dangled from the metal rail on my right. Threadbare coal sacks lay draped over its edge. Some were curled up at the bottom when we reached it, bits and chips of coal spilling out their mouth. I smelled the damp in the sacks, an odorous disease eating through the fibers, but I also smelled something else. Dank, termite-pored wood and dead rats. (. . . come smell me, smell death, smell the grave, and devilishhh children are sacrificed to the Devil . . .) Wasif and Ali began to clear a corner. Saleem shivered. He wrapped his cashmere shawl tight around himself. I could only see his eyes now, white and glittering, suspended in the air. I placed the skulls on the floor. Took the wrapped shopper out of my pocket. Unfolded it, brought the matchbox out. Flick! The flame touched the candlewicks one after the other. In their trembling light the skulls began to grin. Saleem drew a circle on the floor with blue chalk, arranged the skulls on opposite ends so that the light would just fall on his notebook, leaving gashes of darkness around him. We settled cross-legged inside the circle. Wasif turned the flashlight off. The night lunged closer and crouched beside us. Saleem’s face was swallowed by the gloom, but his eyes glowed, particles of yellow dancing in them. He began to read. Now, years later, I still remember that magic circle we made, the grimacing skulls staked by the candles, the air in that cellar frozen with dread; but, try as I might, I can’t remember the story Saleem read to us that horrible storm-lashed evening. When I strain my memory, the words rattle in my head; a few sentences, etched in eternal red, that glisten in a fog of forgetfulness: “‘I have heard the dead pawing at my door. “‘I have seen Your Crimson Servant snuff out heaven’s stars. “‘From Pataal’s earth explodes an army of dust crows.’ “As Hashim turned the pages of Al-Kitabul Khabaith, he learnt these lessons and more. The meaning turned him inside out, stripped the skin off his bones, and finally he understood what altar the Red City gazed at, unblinking . . .” That is all I remember. Granted that half-words and phrases flit about my mind like restless bats. Al-Kitabul Khabaith comes to me again and again. The crawling thin-men flapping in the wind. Natasha’s fingers that wiggle in a storm’s skein. The knife that cuts a thousand worldthroats. Of the plot, I remember nothing. Only that it petrified me, like it did us all. We were plunged into a coma of listening. The story was about the worldskin melting away; a moaning, juddering melt. About effervescing in death and rising like blood vapors. Truth be told, we were induced into a near-death state ourselves, a rigor mortis that left as quickly as it came once Saleem stopped speaking. The candles had sagged deep inside the skulls. We started and shuddered, a ripple to melt the death grip. Saleem had lowered the notebook in his hand. The candle flame danced in his eyes. I flexed and stretched my back. Ali coughed. Wasif threw his head back, shaking off the stiffness. Saleem just sat there, silent. Unmoving. Perhaps he was waiting for applause, a standing ovation to the masterpiece he had written and performed. He knew perfectly well that no one would best that story, its elegant, haunting prose, the powerful narrative; and I opened my mouth to congratulate him. The candle flame writhed in Saleem’s eyes, a serpent thrashing out its death dance. It was strange, I thought, very strange that the flame would do that. The candles were sunken inside the skulls and they were behind him. With palsied hands, I pulled away his shawl. The torn, empty jute sack sank to the floor, an avalanche of black coals tumbling out of its cloth-skin. Two glowing, smoldering embers rose from where Saleem’s eyes had been and began to swim lazily in the air. Wasif screamed. Ali moaned, a sound that raised the hair on my neck, and the candles in the skulls went out. I lunged at the flashlight, switched it on, and I was screaming too. From the darkest corner, which the light’s glow never reached, a low humming came. A familiar childhood tune. Maybe One, Two, Three—The Old Sawbone’s Machine. A terrible sound, a haunting lullaby that made my flesh crawl. The humming changed, ebbed into a muffled growl, and finally a gurgling sound that filled my heart with so much terror, I couldn’t do anything but clap my hands over my ears. Something moved in the corner. The coal sacks stirred. Wasif broke into a run, leaving everything behind. Ali followed, his eyes bone-white, mouth gaping. I ran too. We clattered up the steps. Thud! Thump! Thud! A nightmare memory fretted and laughed inside my head. A darkening grove with no way out. Wasif and Ali fled to the hole of light at the top. They burst out the doorway, dusty hands flopping at their side, and I leapt after them. Last step, and my foot punched through the rotten wood. Frantically I yanked at my leg, eyes bulging, fingers clawing at the edge of the doorway. Below me, behind me, the stairs creaked, snorted, and began to scream as something made its way toward me. Wood splinters dug into my flesh and blood began to ooze. (Raza, my son, the Crimson Storm is a bloodstorm. In its eye, the dead raise their fermented, lolling heads from the well of death. Stay home, child. Stay safe.) I didn’t want to—how could I?—but I looked back, I had to look, and I saw. A shadow that crawled up on all fours. A face that flashed in a quick loop of light, features muffled, a black cowl spilling onto its singed forehead. Was it the reporter with his eyes scooped out; or the epileptic maid, eyes sewn together by the undertaker with thread, strands of it hanging over swollen cheeks, lips drawn back in the seizure agony, foam curdling and bubbling at the corner? . . . And if devilishhh children are caught doing evil, they will hear the dead knock at their door and the hammering will be loud. Natasha’s fingers will wiggle, and the Knife that cuts a Thousand Worldthroats will chop their feet, their stinking fucking feet off . . . Was that spit glistening on those yellow teeth? Spiders hanging from her hair, his hair, my hair; pouring out from the caverns of our cheeks, dropping down, scuttling away? Were those hands twisting into claws, elbows bent at impossible angles, as if in catatonic seizure, as if in rigor mortis? Was it a gunnysack that twitched its way toward me, a tangle of lice-squirming hair spilling from its mouth? I was screaming and screaming, and the steps were laughing and laughing. The cellar echoed and throbbed with it all. I smelled filth, the city’s menstrual blood, unwashed pubic hair, dead meat. Then I was yanking my foot, shrieking, a last powerful jerk, for surely that was all the strength left in me, and my foot slipped out of the shoe and I bounded across the last step. Something black and frayed wavered in the corner of my eyes. I fled through the pursuing, hollering, tugging crimson storm. Wasif and Ali were long gone, and as I ran past the lawn, out the gates to the end of the street, I turned my head helplessly to look at Bad Bricks one last time. On the edge of the boundary wall stood a figure. It was no taller than Saleem. It wore a gunnysack, and its arms were outspread as if embracing the city’s bloody sky. The laal andhi whorled around it, shrieking, lifting the ends of the sack, but it stood motionless even as rain pelted it and turned it black from head to toe. The figure never moved. It will keep its watch forever.

• • • •

After each storm, Lahore is peaceful for a few days. People visit their doctors and hakims, complaining of grit-itch in their eyes. Fallen trees are cleared away, power pylons pulled upright, gleaming electric cords snapped back into place. Slowly, the city emerges from the hurt. Thugs and insurgents, the military and the militants, subdued briefly by the storm, slip into routine again. Gangland violence, lathi charges, homicides, executions. Railway Station, Data Sahib’s shrine, a girls’ school. It’s a matter of time. It was a matter of time before Saleem staggered home that night. His eyes were cracked marbles, his hair completely white. He shivered uncontrollably, head cocked to one side as if in torticollis; his fingers snapped and pinched as if trying to grasp the corner of some cloth. And he stank. Musty jute sacks. Dead insects. Rotting meat and wildflowers. We didn’t tell anyone anything ever, and Saleem could not anymore. He stared into a deep intimate distance where no one could reach him, and spoke in whispers. To whom? I never knew. Once he muttered, “That black hair, all that twisted black hair. It’s his smell, yes. His smell.” After that, I didn’t go to see Saleem. Father moved us to a neighborhood in Defence some time later (something to do with Aunty Nasreen from four streets down and my mother’s swearing that she’d cut her own wrists if we didn’t move away), and our paths didn’t cross for fifteen year until that hot summer day in ’05, when he barely escaped getting run down by my car. Hours later, at the gate of a children’s Montessori, my childhood friend Saleem blew himself up. I don’t know why he did it. His mother and younger brother were taken in for interrogation by the military. Some feared they would go “missing,” but when reporters from as far as Amreeka and England took notice and clamored, the two were let go. What could they have told anyone anyway? What could they say? That his father didn’t return home one summer many years ago? That, for months, Saleem had been wandering the streets at night, scratching and pissing himself, like a tired, senile dog? I do remember what his mother said to the TV people who showed up on her door. This one guy, an asshole with a dense mustache and a mole on his upper lip, kept pushing her on camera as to why her son would commit such an atrocity, until she finally screamed, “Leave me alone. Blood seeks blood. My son was killed by your city. He died a long time ago. He was a good boy. He was good. You turned him. Leave me alooonnneee.” That was all I could take. I stopped watching the news all together.

• • • •

When my wife asked me, I told her everything that happened during that spring and summer of ’85. The gunnysack, the crimson storm. Bad Bricks. She didn’t believe me, not really. She asked what happened to Wasif and Ali Malik. She had never heard me mention them before. Wasif moved away, I told her, a pale shell drifting in his own cloud of guilt and misery. Ali smoked his smokes and ended up in his dad’s workshop, hammering metal pipes and replacing car parts. Last I heard, he took up heroin, breathing the whispering vapors in old Coke bottles. “Chasing the dragon” is what they call it. Me, I nodded right along with my beloved city (until I moved to the States in 2009). I went to work at Uncle Asad’s jewelry shop and I returned every night. Sometimes I dreamt and woke up trembling. We go through one hell to get to another. We walk in the midst of the dead and the dying; gold-red explosions, dust clouds, acid flings. Uncle Dara the realtor told me once that the crime reporter, that batshit crazy man, wanted to write a book. Maybe sometimes memories can be written in the restlessness of the grave. Maybe sometimes we come back to read our words aloud, just to hear them echo in a membrane of life. Maybe sometimes old maids die, unwanted, unloved. Hell, what do I know? Maybe sometimes children grow up in a limbo filled with body bags hanging from trees like slaughtered goats, a nightmare that never flickers, never recedes from us. So it went that Lahore breathed, quiet in its slumber, and waited for another laal andhi. I did too.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Usman T. Malik is a Pakistani writer of strange stories. His work has won the Bram Stoker Award and been nominated for the Nebula. He resides in two worlds.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight NONFICTION The H Word: The People of Horror and Me Nick Mamatas | 1455 words

The horror fiction field most often reminds me of a particular comic strip from the long-running series Cathy. I was never a huge fan of the strip, but this one stuck with me: Cathy has an epiphany. She doesn’t actually have that many bad hair days; she has a perception problem. One time, a decade prior, she looked in the mirror and her hair was utterly perfect. That apex one-time-only great hair day became in her mind what she looked like on average, and thus she was constantly bedeviled by bad hair days. So too the horror field, and the boom in horror fiction that lasted from the mid-1970s through to the late 1980s. I was part of the target demographic of the horror boom, but I never really got into it. Freddy and Jason I didn’t care for, and the paperbacks I read ranged from the modern classics (Carrie, The Boys from Brazil) to stuff like Mendall Johnson’s Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ (which I still like!) and Rex Miller’s Slob, which was actually read to me at work. In college I was a camera operator for my university’s teaching hospital, taping everything from symposia to kidney transplants, and the technical director liked to keep himself amused by doing Chaingang’s victims in different voices into my headphones. But I was more interested in science fiction, and in the “transgressive” fiction of Kathy Acker and Dennis Cooper. I even came to Lovecraft, not thanks to classic horror collections, but thanks to the 1995 anthology This Starry Wisdom, which I picked up because it contained work by J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, and Michael Gira. Brian Lumley? “Who he?” Thanks to having only a marginal attachment to the work of the horror boom, when I started writing and submitting for publication, my work was first accepted by anywhere but horror venues. Men’s magazines. Fiction journals so obscure they can barely be Googled. Literal underground publishers—my first book was published by a building janitor who ran a publishing company out of a basement on Ludlow Street in New York’s Lower East Side. But I was attracted to horror as a field, partially because the boom was long over. Other than Leisure Books and the occasional Kensington title, and a few hold- outs among bigger publishers (Caitlín R. Kiernan, Bentley Little, F. Paul Wilson), horror was a non-commercial enterprise. As a non-commercial writer, I grew interested. I was so non-commercial that a chance look at the remaindered book dump at St. Mark’s Bookshop, where I saw a book of Lovecraft’s letters, and a book of Jack Kerouac’s letters, gave me the idea to combine the two, leading to my first novel, Move Under Ground. For the record, such books don’t sell to all Lovecraft fans and all Kerouac fans, but only to those Lovecraft fans who are also Kerouac fans. Once ensconced in the horror “community”—they were more forgiving of the Beat injection into Lovecraft than literary sorts were—I found myself in an odd position. My work was being published and read fairly widely, but the only people who really understood my fiction to be horror were the sort to have never actually read very much of the stuff. To horror readers, I was doing some sort of fantasy or science fiction; to SFF readers I was clearly both too confusing and too dark. Editors, who read widely, liked my stuff, so getting work wasn’t much of a problem, and my books and stories have been fairly well-reviewed. I was writing the non-commercial version of a commercial mode of fiction that itself hadn’t been commercial in decades, and my work looked like pretty much nothing else out there. And so it’s gone for more than ten years, though I never really understood what had been happening with (and to!) my “career”—a word that must always be placed within quotation marks of dubiousness—until recently. In March 2016, at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA), scholar and writer J. T. Glover presented a paper by the name “Anxiety, Nomenclature, and Epistemology after the Horror Boom.” The title is absolutely stultifying, but luckily once you settle in to one of the conference rooms at ICFA you can’t really leave without causing a scene, so I stayed. I’m glad I did, because I think Glover really understands what happened in the horror scene over the past twenty-five years. Glover contends that though the horror boom ended, “the people of horror” were able to stay together thanks to the Internet, which became widely available to the general public just as horror fiction was withdrawn from the mass market. Though much dark fiction was cleverly recast as thriller, dark fantasy, and even literary fiction, the fans that had grown up and developed their literary tastes during the horror boom found one another online, and any number of small presses emerged to cultivate these fan groups into a market. And I found them! And we didn’t always get along. It’s mostly too much to go into, but here’s one example: as someone who lived within the debris field of the World Trade Center on the eleventh of September, 2001, I generally received a fair amount of sympathy for my thoughts on the atrocity in the blogosphere, on MUDs and other chat services, and on the first social media outlets. It was on the Horror Writers Association message board, though, that someone wished al-Qaeda would launch another terror attack on New York City and kill me. Tee-hee, somebody’s edgy! Anyway, back to Glover. In the revised version of the paper (bit.ly/2afgXWn), Glover gives both me and Nightmare’s own H-Word column a shout out. I and other members of the post-boom wave are “heavily influenced by mainstream literary or academic writing cultures, are socio-politically aware in ways that carry over to their fiction, business practices, or both, and occasionally write metafictional or otherwise highly reflexive stories that engage with the genre’s history.” I plead guilty. There is a second wave as well, one that represents the long tail of the boom now a quarter of a century gone. The people of horror like both, but really, they sure do spend a lot of their money and mental energy on that nostalgia wave. That wave represents a sort of taxonomical center of what horror is supposed to be. On one hand, I’m happy to declare “Include me out!” But, on the other, it’s these two waves that have allowed me a career at all. Had the boom continued indefinitely, the taxonomical strictures of dark fiction would have grown stronger, and less amenable to the reflexive stories I write— like I Am Providence, my latest novel, in which an annoying author with an unusual surname gets his ass murdered at a horror convention. (Write what you know.) It is because the boom has all but collapsed that there was room for the second wave of which I am a part. At the same time, boom-style horror hasn’t vanished entirely in the way, for example, the Western has, which meant that the people of horror were able to find one another, and create the conditions in which the second wave could emerge. Better a lifetime of bad hair days than no hair at all. (Just ask Brian Keene.) Now, as Glover points out, second-wavers such as Paul Tremblay are making a splash into the mainstream, and without many of the formerly necessary accouterments of the boom wave. Let’s all go. We can do it now. In essays like this, usually the kicker involves a suggestion to look in the metaphorical mirror. Horror is all about morally implicating the gaze of the consumer in the bloody shenanigans going on, after all. It was old when Lovecraft did it: “I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.” So, I’d like to make the opposite suggestion—let’s stop looking in the mirror, hoping to see that one “good” head of hair and being forever disappointed. Forget the boom, forget the “H-word”, and just get writing and reading, horror people.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including Love is the Law and I Am Providence. His short fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Tor.com, Weird Tales, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and many other venues. As editor, Nick has edited or co-edited several anthologies, most recently the hybrid Japanese/SFF/crime anthology Hanzai Japan, which was nominated for the Locus Award. A native New Yorker, Nick now lives in California. Panel Discussion: Witches in Horror The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy | 11065 words

Author Grady Hendrix and author-slash-witch historian Katherine Howe join Theresa DeLucci, television and horror fiction reviewer, to discuss the role of witches in the horror genre. This panel first appeared in June 2016 on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by David Barr Kirtley and produced by John Joseph Adams. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the interview or other episodes.

Today on the show, we’ll be discussing the way that witches are portrayed in horror books and movies. This will involve spoilers for the recent movie The Witch, directed by Robert Eggers, so just be aware of that. I’m joined by three guests. First up, we’ve got Grady Hendrix making his eighth appearance on the show. He’s the author of such books as Occupy Space and Satan Loves You. His novel, Horrorstör, about a haunted IKEA is being developed for television by Gail Berman, producer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. His new novel, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, is out now. Grady, welcome to the show.

Grady: I’m excited to be here talking about witches.

Next up, we’ve got Theresa DeLucci making her fifth appearance on the show. Her Game of Thrones reviews appear on Tor.com, and her Hannibal reviews appear on Boing Boing. Follow her on Twitter at @TDeLucci. Theresa, welcome to the show.

Theresa: Thanks for having me back. I appreciate being invited to talk about witches.

Also joining us today is Katherine Howe. She’s the editor of the Penguin Book of Witches, and her debut novel was the New York Times bestseller The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, about the Salem witch trials. Her other novels include The House of Velvet and Glass, Conversion, and The Appearance of Annie Van Sinderen. She also appeared on the National Geographic channel TV show Salem: Unmasking the Devil. Katherine, welcome to the show.

Katherine: Thanks so much for having me. Katherine, since you’re joining us for the first time, let’s start off with you and have you tell us a little bit about how you got interested in witches.

Katherine: It started because I was in graduate school studying American and New England studies. I was living in a little town right next door to Salem in Massachusetts. I was really interested by the fact that if you go to Salem today, which you absolutely have to do for Halloween—it is an amazing place to visit—a lot of their industry is about witches, the legacy of witches. There’s a lot of pointy hats. There’s a lot of feathered boas, and it’s awesome, and it’s totally fun. I felt like I’d never seen a story that talked about Salem that took the colonial attitude towards magic seriously. I felt like we’re all familiar with The Crucible story and its skeptic version of Salem. And, I feel like we’ve all seen the kind of Harry Potter version of magic and witchcraft. I felt like we were missing a piece by overlooking the fact that for generation upon generation upon generation people actually believed that witches were real. I started to work on a novel, and that was The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, which is about what if the Salem witches were the real thing, but the way colonists believed witches to be. What does the world look like if having a witch trial is a rational thing to do?

Right, and you’re actually descended from some of these Salem witches.

Katherine: It’s true. Distantly. I have connections to Elizabeth Howe, who was one of the first people who was executed at Salem. Another one was Elizabeth Proctor, who was supposed to be executed at Salem, but who ended up getting by on a loophole because she was pregnant when she was condemned. So they were going wait, very generously, for her to have her baby before they put her to death. Isn’t that thoughtful? She ended up getting pardoned after the fact. And then, only a couple of years ago, I discovered I also have a connection to Deliverance Dane, who was a real person. She was a character in my first novel, and that just about made my head explode when I found that out.

You wrote a book about this person, and then you discovered that she was an ancestor of yours?

Katherine: Yeah, and I only picked her because I thought that her name was the most metal thing I’d ever seen in my life.

You said that there were no actual witch burnings in the US or in England.

Katherine: No. That was something that happened on the continent when witchcraft was treated as a religious crime, as a heresy. Here in North America, we were following English law at the time, and witchcraft as treated as a felony. So, it was punished just like a felony. It was punished by hanging. It’s a pretty common misconception. They did not burn people at the stake for witchcraft in North America or England.

You talked about wanting to look at witches from the point of view of the people who believed in them, and that’s sort of what this recent movie The Witch did. The reason I want to talk about witches right now is that a couple of episodes ago we did a panel on demonic possession, and Grady, you and Jordan got talking about the evil goat in The Witch. At the time, I hadn’t seen the movie. I had no idea what you guys were talking about. But I have since seen the movie, and I loved it, and I really want to talk about it. Grady, why don’t you say a bit more about, other than the goat, what did you think of the movie The Witch? What did you think of it overall?

Grady: I thought The Witch was so weird. I really enjoyed it. It’s a really well made movie, and it was really a lot of fun. But it’s so weird because it takes witches very seriously. It takes that seventeenth century view of witchcraft very seriously, and really portrays the folklore realistically and literally. It’s funny because then it just becomes a movie not really about anything because, ultimately, when you look at the movie, I’ve never seen a movie about witches, or witchcraft, or witch hunting where the point of the movie seemed to be, “We just didn’t kill enough witches soon enough.” If the people in this movie had just taken accusations of witchcraft seriously and responded by killing those accused of witchcraft they would have been fine.

Theresa, what do you think about that? Or what did you think of The Witch overall?

Theresa: Overall, I loved it. I started getting served these Facebook ads for the movie with the trailer with Black Phillip, the goat, and I’m like, “What the hell is this goat? Why does it keep appearing on all of my social media?” Then when I went to check it out, I was just blown away by how unsettling it was and how beautifully it was filmed, too. I haven’t seen a movie quite like that in a long time. I think it had some of the most beautiful cinematography using natural light since The Revenant. I thought both of those movies showed nature and how terrifying and threatening it could be, like the forest was a personality and a character all its own. But, then ultimately, what made me enjoy the movie was the ending, which I felt was super feminist, super unexpected, for that movie. I came out of the movie feeling really energized and wanting to see it again because I was just blown away by that ending. Grady: Theresa, I want to ask you, what did you find feminist about it? Theresa: Well, she chose. The whole movie, Thomasin, who is the teenage girl, she’s become a scapegoat for her family as things start to go wrong for them. I just felt like because she was a beautiful young girl who was coming into womanhood that was seen as a threat. The ending, when the mother is screaming at her, being like, “I see the sluttish way you looked at your brother, and you made him look at you, and you’re going to do it to your father too.” Puberty is out of her control. She’s a young woman coming into herself in a religion that says she is less than a man. She’s weaker than a man, automatically, just by her nature. They’re all corrupt in nature, according to their beliefs, but I think with the Puritans, women had to speak to God through a man, their husbands and their fathers and their priests. They didn’t have a direct line to God because they were women. Man was made in God’s image. Woman was made from man. Katherine: I don’t know if I entirely agree with that, Theresa. You’re correct that it was an incredibly hierarchical society, and that hierarchy was based on gender, but it was also based on class and on race. One of the things that made the Puritans interesting was that they had a very individual relationship with God. It’s one of the reasons that literacy was such an important part of that religion. In fact, Puritans founded both Harvard and Yale, and it was partly because they were originally founded as schools of religious instruction. Puritans were encouraged to read the Bible, to have their own relationship with the Bible. In fact, the modern day descendants of the Puritans are the Congregationalists, and they’re called that because of the “congregational” organization of each community of faith. You’re one-hundred percent correct that Thomasin lived in a world in which her father was the head of the household as Christ was the head of the church, in which her opinion was taken to be less important than it would have been otherwise.

Katherine, what do you make of Grady’s idea that the message of this movie was “we should kill more witches and then we’ll be safe?”

Katherine: It was interesting to me. First of all, I agree with everything everyone said about the aesthetic of the film, and I know that Robert took the research for it very seriously. The monologue that the son speaks before he coughs up the apple and is in this kind of ecstasy of possession—I actually recognized it. It was taken from a speech from a primary source that I’d read. I was like, “Wow, that’s amazing.” So, that was all incredible. I agree with Grady, though. Ultimately, the plot is: there’s a witch, she messes everything up, the end. One thing I found myself wondering was how, and this is probably just my own interest in historiography, and in the ways our understanding of reality change from time to time. I would have been so curious to see a version of that film, maybe like an edit of the film, where we never see the witch at all. If we don’t see her even once. If instead, we see people wandering in the forest. If we see the explosion of the barn and the kids are missing. If we see Thomasin walking nude into the forest at the end. That would have scared the pants off me if we never saw the witch whatsoever because it would have made it an open question of “what is really happening to this family?” Is this a family falling apart in the face of religious mania? Is it a family being stalked by a wolf that they simply can’t see? It would have been so terrifying. And, so often, in the early modern period, witchcraft is used as a way to explain otherwise unexplainable phenomena or instances of bad luck or instances of bad feeling. I am curious to see how that version of the film would feel. Grady: It’ll probably be on the Blu-ray. The witch-free edition.

Like, The Witch without the witch like Garfield without Garfield.

Grady: Theresa, I never thought about that. I think you’re right that in the sense that if you do identify strongly with Thomasin, there is a feminist reading of the movie. I guess, to me, because the movie posited that witches are old ugly ladies who eat babies, and live in the woods, and screw up your life, I sort of didn’t see that reading, but I see what you’re saying. Theresa: The whole movie, she is scapegoated for all of these bad choices—which point, the first bad choice was made by the father to leave the plantation. Because I don’t know that much about Puritans, how hardcore was he that he got kicked out of the Puritans? Honestly. Katherine: Rhode Island was founded by people who were kicked out of Massachusetts. There were a lot of religious dissensions and religious distinctions and also people moving deeper into the wilderness to claim more land for themselves. I mean, at this time, Maine was part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It was called The Eastwood. It seems strange because I always imagine Maine as being up, but actually relative to Massachusetts it’s to the east. The idea of splintering away from a community is not all that out of hand. It’s funny because this movie first came to my attention because it was endorsed by the Satanic temple. Presumably there are people out there who feel that there is a pro-Satan interpretation of this movie, right? That it’s not just “the witches are evil and we need to kill them all.” Like Theresa is saying, there does seem to be a substantial empowerment interpretation of this movie. Grady: But, it’s a super problematic interpretation because it’s like, even if you go along with the reading that Thomasin is rejected and has to turn to this group of outsiders to feel any power in her life or any validation, it’s still a group of outsiders who steal and eat babies. Theresa: Different strokes. Grady: Yeah, I feel like once you belong to a group that’s eating babies and turning them into body lotion, you kind of lose any moral authority you may have had. Katherine: Grady, you’re being so bourgeois. Theresa: Knowing a little bit about the Church of Satan—I read this really fantastic interview with the founder, Anton LaVey, in Rolling Stone a number of years ago, and he said Satanism was mostly about selfishness, like owning your selfishness and your self- interest. That’s what the devil did. It’s a reading of what the devil had done when he got kicked out of heaven. He was acting in his own best interests. That’s why I thought it was kind of interesting that the Church of Satan endorsed The Witch because if you look at Thomasin from that way, again, scapegoated. She’s in this family being blamed. She chooses to go with the witches. She’s choosing the taste of butter, to live deliciously. That’s on her own terms, and she’s kind of accepting it, and then that ecstasy at the end when she’s rising. It’s her fulfilling this wish to act in her own self-interest for a change and not have that fear of condemnation on her all the time, which I thought was an interesting interpretation. Also, the Church of Satan kind of loves publicity, so . . . Grady: They’re like professional trolls these days. They’re kind of great. Katherine: Talking to Grady’s point about life stages and the way that the film represented them at different moments—both Thomasin, who is on the cusp of being a woman, and the unnamed crone that we spot making body lotion in the woods— statistically the age of a woman who was most likely accused of being a witch was a woman of middle age from between about forty to about sixty. So, anyone who should have been accused as a witch, statistically speaking, was the mother. If you look back at the Salem trials, for instance, it was girls Thomasin’s age who were accusing women of Thomasin’s mother’s age. I think that the crone archetype is something that we actually get later. We get that in nineteenth century fairy tales to some degree; the idea that witches are all old and bent. But, typically, there is a tangled relationship between the historical idea of witchcraft and women’s power.

I thought it was so interesting when I heard you say that, Katherine. It occurred to me that it seems like every witch that I can think of in a movie—they are virtually all super sexy or super old and scary. Hollywood has this tendency to make middle aged women invisible. It seems like there’s kind of an interesting clash between the historical reality and Hollywood reality.

Katherine: Most definitely.

Speaking of pacts with the devil, I got an email from the Satanic Temple saying that they were going to have a screening of The Witch and I would get to see their Baphomet statue that they crowdfunded.

Grady: Oh, it looks good, actually. Theresa: Oh, I love that one. It’s gorgeous. I wanted to see it so much, and so I followed the link, and I went to their website, and I couldn’t find how I got my invitation to the party. The only thing I could find was there was this link and it said, “Sign the Devil’s book.” And so I thought, “Well, maybe that’ll get me on their mailing list or something.”

Katherine: Oh, Dave, we’re going to miss you.

So, I did that, and the next thing I know I’m on their list of Satanists in the New York area, right? So, that’s how the Devil got me.

Katherine: Do you want us to call someone for you?

[Laughter]

Theresa: You’re still a protected class. Satanists are still a protected class under court of law. It’s all good.

I wanted to ask Theresa, though—speaking of the movie The Witch, I thought the responses to the movie were interesting because some people thought it was terrifying. I did. The power actually went out while I was watching it, and I was totally terrified watching it. But, then a lot of people said they didn’t think it was scary, but then also a lot of people really liked it and a lot of people didn’t. I noticed that on Rotten Tomatoes this movie is at 91% among critics and only 55% among viewers. I was wondering as a film critic-type person if you have any thoughts about that stuff.

Theresa: I hate to always play this angle, but when something gets a lot of acclaim for being feminist, whether that’s right or wrong, or the critics kind of feel like, “Oh hey, this is a really cool girl power interesting kind of movie,” sometimes I feel like IMDB, internet forums, Rotten Tomatoes, places where people can vote has that Gamergate effect. Like MRA people just gang up and down vote, you know? Not that that would be the only reason that there would be such a disparity between critics and user reviews, but sometimes I do think that can factor into it, if there’s a certain narrative about how this movie is received as a response to that. Also, if you’re like, “Oh yeah, a witch movie. It’s going to be gory. It’s going to be scary. People are saying it’s so scary.” And then you go and you find this Puritan family with thick accents that you might have trouble understand and a lot of ominous shots of the woods. You might be disappointed. It sounded like Grady that you had kind of mixed feelings about the movie?

Grady: I think, look, I definitely think Theresa is right. Anytime a movie has a feminist read, I think you’re going to pull out people who just object to it on principle, and they can often be very vocal. But I also think part of the problem that I have with the movie, and I think other people might have, is that the family never stands a chance. When you think they stand a chance, it just turns out you’re stupid and you don’t understand how screwed they really are. It does take the wind out of your sails a little bit. Theresa is talking about coming out feeling really invigorated. Maybe it’s because I’m a guy, and I feel a castration or something. But I came out of it going, “Oh, we might as well just lie down and wait for the witches to eat us.” Katherine: I mean, the dad got off relatively easily by dying the way he did. In the Malleus Maleficarum, there’s a whole lot about how witches are able to steal men’s penises, so it could have been a lot worse. Grady: Well, but the penises get to all live in boxes together like baby birds, which kind of sounds fun for the penis.

But, I mean, you don’t think Thomasin had a choice at the end? Couldn’t she have gone to the town?

Grady: She would have just starved to death, and why is she going to go to the town? Who is going to be accused of killing everyone? Probably her. Nothing good is going to happen to her. Katherine: She would have been bound out to service, which is what they were planning to do with her, which is what poor families did all the time. Which really sucked. Grady: Yeah, so I get some of the objection in a way because you’re watching this movie that’s really great, and then it’s so depressing. Theresa: That’s why I think I liked it, because it has some of the nihilism to it where it’s like, “Fuck it, we’re all doomed. Bad things happen.” I think actually seeing the witch and all her different forms added this weird-with-a-capital-W fiction element to it, which I’m always interested in, where it’s the order of nature subverted, and you’re kind of helpless and small in the face of it. That sense of awe. There’s something out of the natural order of the world that I can’t explain. I either stand against it or let myself be lost to it, and I think that is nihilistic, but also kind of refreshing to see that in a movie. I just wasn’t expecting it. Grady: It’s so funny though, because they do posit that the witches are somehow more in touch with nature and the forest and all these things in the film when the worldview at the time was that witches were completely unnatural. They were the least natural thing of all. They were viewed as the most unnatural thing possible, because they had taken the most unnatural act possible.

Did you think this movie was scary, Grady? Because there were no jump scares in this movie, but man, when the goat talked, I jumped out of my skin, and I don’t think I’ve ever jumped so much just from somebody speaking in a soft voice.

Grady: This movie has one thing that they really did well: it had so many unexpected moments. I did not expect the baby lotion so early. I did not expect that at all. I did not expect Satan to appear. I didn’t expect the folklore to keep so much fidelity to how it was. So much of it was unexpected. Theresa: I was watching it again last night, and we had a house guest who is a screenwriter in China, so he works on a lot of Chinese horror movies, and looks at film from a screenwriter perspective for him and how it would play in certain markets. He had never seen The Witch before, and he likes horror movies, so I’m like, “Oh, let’s watch it.” He just kept remarking on how . . . he’s like, “Nothing is happening, but I’m so scared.” A good part of it was just the music. Let’s recognize that the soundtrack was fantastic. Best witch movie soundtrack since Suspiria. I thought there was some definite Goblin nods in there. Maybe I’m crazy, but like, the clanging and the hollering and stuff like that. It was really effective at creating dread. I could see why people wouldn’t necessarily find it super scary. It’s just like a pervasive dread and then punctuated with these moments of extremely bizarre, unsettling, disturbing imagery, like the knife above the baby. That one really bothered me. Then the next scene to see her pounding . . . ugh . . . it was gross. Katherine: There were some really intense images in that film, it’s true. The crow is what sticks with me. Theresa: Oh, can I say that that actress . . . poor Lysa Aaryn (Kate Dickie) always breastfeeding something really weird. That actress really plays to a type, and it’s a very specific, uncomfortable type. Poor Kate Dickie. Grady: I think that was one of the things that’s so strong about the movie is you’re right, the imagery is so strong and so squick-making, and yet it’s all pulled out of this past folklore and accounts of witch trials and stuff that are generally considered musty and dusty these days. And clichéd. It’s interesting that they could make that stuff have a frisson to it again.

Katherine, was there anything that you thought was not historically accurate?

Katherine: I don’t want to nitpick, all things considered, like I don’t think that that is the point. It’s not a documentary about witchcraft in the past. The farm should have been many times bigger. Little things. None of that is important though, because the point of the film is to talk about the development of this one fictional thing and to put them in this historical context. I thought that was done very well. I’m intrigued by the relationship between the family and the woods. I think that that is actually one of the most historically accurate parts of it. Anglo-People who were colonizing North America both relied on the woods and had a tremendous fear of it. Actually, if you look at one of the best history books on Salem—In the Devil’s Snare by Mary Beth Norton—the author makes that case that a lot of the early modern English accounts of the Devil used the same language that they used to describe the native population, the first people who were here.

That’s interesting, because when I used to go hiking a lot with my family as a kid, you would always hike by “Devil’s Panhandle” or “Devil’s Tower” or all these things. I always thought that was really cool, but I eventually found out that those were just all the sacred sites to the native peoples.

Katherine: Yep. Grady: I’m going to get my names and dates wrong, so I’m leaving them out, but there was a belief, I think it was relatively obscure, that North America was the Devil’s country, and that the native peoples who lived here had been lured to it by the Devil originally, many hundreds of years ago, and that this was his place. This was his hangout, and it had to be reclaimed.

I guess one other thing that I wanted to say about the movie, Theresa, is that you said that your friend said nothing happened, and a lot of the reviews from people who didn’t like the movie said something similar. “It’s too slow. Nothing happens.” I feel like if you diagram the plot of this, that every single scene moves the plot forward. It’s just, it does so in sort of like an understated, quiet way. I don’t think there’s any scenes in this movie that aren’t directly advancing the plot.

Theresa: Oh, I totally agree with that. It’s just a quiet sort of plot. What I thought was great about the movie is it’s only an hour and a half long. I’m like, thank God. Why does every movie need to be two and a half hours? Especially a horror movie. It could be really effective to keep it short and keep everything tight and necessary to the story. Yeah, so when he said “Nothing is happening,” he meant it was more like, “No one is getting owned.” He kept saying, “No one is getting owned yet. Oh, now the ownage is going to come.” And then at the end, when Black Phillip speaks, then he lost his mind. “Oh my God, this is crazy.” That scene was so impressive, so amazing. I think that’s when I really was just like . . . my jaw fell open in the theater, and I was like, “Oh my God. That man, you never really see his face.” The first time you see his hands and hear his voice, and you’re like, he must be the most beautiful, most seductive-looking man she’s ever seen. We can’t really picture him, because it’s better to have that in our imagination. Like, who would Satan be to you when he comes to you to make you an offer to write in his book? How would he seduce you? When you think about how dry and really void of pleasure their lives were, that butter is something that would be a luxury to you. Katherine: Butter was a big deal. Theresa: I know. It’s like, I’ve tried the Whole Thirty diet and in like two weeks and had a piece of chocolate, and I was like, “Oh my God, this is the sweetest best thing ever.” Can you imagine not tasting butter for months? Or apples? They keep wishing for apples. “We haven’t had an apple since England.” England is the land of apples and butter and Shakespeare and fun. Katherine: And glass windows. Theresa: Yes, and they’re over here living these very hard scrabble, dour lives.

It’s funny because that scene, I actually watched that scene with my girlfriend a couple of times, and the first time I just thought it was all dark in the background, but you can actually see the figure a little bit if you look carefully, and as he circles around behind her, I think what happens is you see him step with a human foot and then he steps with a goat leg. That didn’t register for me, if I’m seeing it right, when I first saw it, but I think it did register on some subliminal level because I was so creeped out by that scene. Like I said, I really, really liked this movie The Witch, and I feel like I can’t really think of a ton of witch movies I’ve loved in recent—

Katherine: How did you feel about Blair Witch?

I actually really liked Blair Witch. I feel like that was a really long time ago.

Katherine: I feel like it was the last time I saw a witch movie that I found really exciting. I remember watching it when it came out right after I graduated college. I saw it in New York City, and I was living up by Inwood Hill Park, and I had to walk past the park to get to my apartment, and my friend and I were clutching each other, trembling as we walked past Inwood Hill Park. It’s this very last stand of wooded Manhattan, and it’s really eerie and creepy. I felt like I was thinking a lot about The Blair Witch project while I was watching The Witch.

Well, it’s another movie where “nothing happens” but it’s terrifying.

Grady: And another movie set in the woods. Katherine: In the woods with a small cast having an intense experience. They’re isolated from the rest of their community, and maybe that’s one of the reasons that I’ve fantasized about seeing a supercut of The Witch without the witch in it, because in Blair Witch we never see the witch. Grady: I was just about to say Blair Witch is your dream movie. You never see it. Speaking of that, The Conjuring, isn’t the ghost in The Conjuring a witch?

Yeah, like Bathsheba or something.

Grady: Yeah, and used to no great effect, I thought. I mean, I like The Conjuring fine, but it doesn’t feel like a witch movie, and she doesn’t feel like a witch the way something like The Witch or The Blair Witch Project or Black Sunday or Suspiria do. Theresa: I agree. I like The Conjuring a lot, actually. I thought it was really atmospheric, but it didn’t have that element of weirdness to it that Suspiria does. Blair Witch did. Where it’s something just off kilter but in a different way. In a way we don’t see a lot in movies. Like not always outright. They could show killing a baby, but to hint at it is ten thousand times worse.

Theresa, I haven’t seen Suspiria or Black Sunday. Are those worth watching?

Theresa: Oh, absolutely. I really love Suspiria. I’m a huge Dario Argento fan. He uses soundtracks, vivid colors, and his stories, Suspiria in particular, has this nightmare logic, and I guess that’s what it is about witch movies that I like when they’re good. They have this dreamy, trapped in a nightmare logic where things might not make sense from a plot perspective, but emotionally they do. That’s what Suspiria is. It’s directed by Dario Argento, and based on a screenplay from his then-wife Daria Nicolodi, who is a famous Italian noir actress. She had a relative who went to a boarding school in Germany in these woods that were supposedly haunted by a witch, so that’s where Suspiria came from. And it’s so brutal and colorful and garish. It’s part of this trilogy, the Three Mothers trilogy. Mater Suspiriorum is the Mother of Sighs. There’s Mater Tenebrarum and then Lachrymarum. He finally made the last film, The Mother of Tears, in the early 2000s. It wasn’t quite as good, but it did have this corrupting mother witch force ruining lives wherever she went, which I thought was really creepy and effective and super violent, because it’s Dario Argento. Grady: I wonder if, in movies, the more effective witches are the invisible witches or the witches you see less of. Like, in The Conjuring she’s front and center a lot. But, Blair Witch Project or The Witch or Suspiria even, the witch is largely unseen, because the fear of the witch is often a fear of conspiracies and things moving in the shadows and the invisible forces behind daily life that seek to corrupt and overturn it. I wonder if the less you see a witch in the movie, the cooler the witch is, because that’s where that original concept, that urge, comes from, maybe. Theresa: Yeah, I would totally agree with that. Katherine: I would agree with that too. The reason that Arthur Miller hit upon witches for making his ultimate statement about communism was because the central question of witches in early modernism is: Who is and who isn’t? How do we recognize who or what a witch is? It was an ongoing problem for people at that time, and it gets to a fundamental sense that we have among the essential unknowability of other people. People that you think that you know. Grady: It’s a story I hated the first time I read it, and I’ve come back to it as an adult, and I realized that I was an asshole, and it actually is great. Katherine: Which story is that? Grady: “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, which is such a simple story. Dude goes for a walk, he gets caught up in a black mass, and discovers that basically everyone in his community belongs to Satan and is a witch or practices black magic. Then suddenly he is back in normal time, and now he’s returned to his home, and he’s like, “I don’t know. Is my wife a witch? Is everyone a witch?” There is something really destabilizing about that conspiracy idea that witches seem to embody on some level. And James the First. He was killing witches left, right, and center, but I think a lot of that had to do with the idea that, at the time, that people were secret Catholics, and they had to be rooted out and destroyed or converted, and that fed right into witches. Katherine: James’ writing about demonology is also partly his attempt to reassert the authority of his claim to the throne, to show intellectual mastery for his position as head of the Church of England. It’s funny, some of the comments I’ve read about his book Demonology say that none of the witch hunting stuff that he has to say is in any way original. He just lists ideas from other people who were writing around the same time. But he still has to show that he knows his stuff in order to demonstrate his authority. Grady: It’s weird because he took witches super-duper personally too. People probably know this, but he really got after witches in Britain after he thought that witches tried to drown his bride, Anne of Denmark, on her way over to get married to him. The first thing he did when he went over to get her and bring her back is like, “I’m going to kill all the witches!” And had a big trial in Scotland where, I don’t know if it was seventy people who were accused or if there were seventy executions, but somewhere in there. Between the threat to his home, the threat to his wife, the threat of Catholics—he just hated them on a really deep level. Katherine: He had a lot to deal with.

Katherine, are there other fictional treatments of witches in books that you want to recommend? Katherine: There was kind of a bloom of Salem fiction around the same time that my first book came out. One of them was The Heretic’s Daughter, which came out, I think, in 2008, and is also a Salem story. It’s about Martha Carrier, who was accused later on during the Salem panic and was called “The Queen of Hell” during the course of her trial. She was from Andover. Most people don’t realize that actually more people were accused in Andover than were accused in Salem Village. The panic started in Salem Village and then spread very quickly. That one is really good. The Lace Reader is a more contemporary Salem story by Brunonia Barry, who is a Salem writer. A lot of people really enjoyed that book and connected with it really well. It depends on what your taste is, what you’re in the mood for. I really enjoyed The Witches of Eastwick, which I think most of us first think of the film with Cher and Jack Nicholson, but before that it was a novel by John Updike. He actually did a sequel, too, called The Widows of Eastwick. It’s also very beautifully steeped in knowledge about the early-modern North American beliefs in witchcraft: how it worked, what it could do, how it could function. And, in typical Updike fashion, it’s very drenched in sex and tomatoes compared with testicles. Theresa: That’s what I remember, because I read Witches of Eastwick when I was really young, and I was like, “What?” Katherine: And you were grossed out? Theresa: Yeah, I was grossed out, and we’re Italian, so there’s always lots of tomatoes in our house. Katherine: Now you can’t look at a tomato the same way. Theresa: I can’t unsee it. Katherine: It’s worth a look. For someone who is interested in this stuff, and is interested in maybe a more magical realist rather than a fantasy approach to witchcraft, that is one that I often point people to.

I haven’t read the novel, but I saw the movie for the first time yesterday.

Katherine: How’s it hold up?

It’s weird. It’s uneven, I would say. I enjoyed it, but I found it more fascinating than enjoyable. There’s just so many weird things in the movie. There was a line I wanted to ask you about, Katherine, because there’s a part where Jack Nicholson’s character says that witches were hunted by the medical profession because they wanted to remove the competition of midwives. I was wondering if there was any historical basis to that at all?

Katherine: That was a hypothesis that was advanced, I want to say, in the 1980s. The short version is, there’s not much to hold that up. The long version is that when we talk about early-modern beliefs about witchcraft, we’re actually talking about two different cultural phenomena. One is the belief in witchcraft on the legal level—the public belief in witchcraft, the trial kinds of beliefs in witchcraft, the stuff that’s talked about by theologians, the stuff that’s legislated against. And that is different from, but kind of related to, a folk belief in witchcraft, cunning folk. Cunning folk, in the early-modern period, would be someone who offered occult services for a fee. So dousing for water was something that a cunning person would do. Charms to find lost property was a big part of cunning folk business. There is this widespread sense of folk belief that is magical in basis that is walking the line of what is morally acceptable. In English the word cunning has, as I’m sure you know, kind of a morally ambiguous sense. It means really smart, but it also means sneaky, potentially, so it’s not a totally positive connotation. There is, in some cases, the sense that a cunning person could be someone that you would want to watch out for. For the most part, people who were accused of being witches were not accused because they were of this netherworld, interstitial moral space. People who were accused as witches were Christian people who didn’t fit in with their culture for whatever reason: because they were argumentative, because they were too poor, they were too grasping, they were too hard to deal with, they were mentally unsound for whatever reason. It is true that the early-modern period is when medicine was beginning to professionalize, and it was a professionalization that was, of course, on gendered lines. But it was not, by any means, a conspiracy or anything like that. There is something to be said about the gendering of knowledge and the hierarchies of power within that gendering process. But, for the most part, if you were accused as a witch during the early-modern period, it was because you were the wrong kind of person and you had the wrong attitude, not because you were doing anything wrong.

I’ve heard you make this point—Grady said something similar in our demonic possession panel—but these people who are accused of being witches have never become rich and powerful and beautiful as a result of their deal with the devil.

Katherine: Exactly! Which is actually a point that one of the best known skeptical writers made in the early-modern period. Reginald Scott made this exact point. He’s like, why, if witches are able to make a pact with the devil to get whatever they want, why are they all poor, bleary eyed, distracted people? And that’s exactly his point. Reginald Scott makes the case that in the early-modern period the people who were accused as witches were at the fringes of society. Grady: It’s interesting because I thought the theological response to that was: “Because Satan is tricky.” I remember this thing where they were like— Katherine: That they were fooled. Grady: Yeah, they were all fooled. Theresa: That could work for anything. It’s a great retrofitting. Grady: Yeah, but they made a deal with the devil and the devil has taken advantage. Katherine: The devil tricked. That’s true.

I watched The Witches of Eastwick yesterday, and then I also watched The Witches based on the Roald Dahl novel, and The Craft. Theresa you said that you liked The Craft, right?

Theresa: Oh yeah, The Craft was super fun. I mean, ’90s goth girl in high school? Of course I loved The Craft. Fairuza Balk was like, aspirational. There are some scenes that I always remember there, with Neve Campbell’s character she had been disfigured in a fire, and people are mean to her because she’s ugly, well, Hollywood ugly. But as soon as she gets her witch powers with her coven, she becomes super-hot and starts wearing midriff tops, and making the people who are mean to her, like her main bully, go bald. How scary that was when I was a teenager—like, oh my God, what if I had this power? Would I use it for good or bad? The Craft was a way better version of that ’80s movie Teen Witch with Robin Lively. I don’t know if anyone else saw that. Grady: Um, yeah. It’s amazing. Theresa: One of the best rap battles in all of cinema history, right? But, The Craft was just so creepy and so much about Fairuza Balk’s performance because she sells you on the crazy from the moment she bugs her eyes out. She is fantastic.

What makes it better than Teen Witch?

Theresa: Well, it’s a hell of a lot less cheesy. It’s not as dated. Although, I guess it depends. The Craft isn’t a great movie, but it’s fun. Teen Witch is just really bad, and that makes it kind of hilarious to watch. They actually did a really wonderful reading of it on the “How Did this Get Made?” podcast that I highly recommend checking out. If you have any nostalgia for that movie at all, you will laugh your ass off about how dated it is and how awful it is.

And anti-feminist, right?

Theresa: Oh yeah, totally. All she wants is to have Brad, the high school football captain, without his consent—and it’s also kind of creepy then. The Craft was a lot better because at least it did deal with some of that stuff being like, “Yeah, maybe love spells are not morally okay. Maybe we should not do that. It’s kind of dangerous and a dick move.”

Katherine, what did you think of these ’80s witch movies?

Katherine: I don’t remember Teen Witch. I think I saw it, but if so it would have been in the ’80s. A lot has happened since then. I think about The Craft a lot, actually. Obviously, I saw it as a teenager and loved it and aspired to it because I felt like I was a weirdo in high school. One of the things that I really like about it is that it does get to this thing about hunger for power, which I think comes up again and again, both in the history and the popular culture aspects of it. About power and women, and the fact that women can’t seem to get it through normal means, and what happens when they step outside the carefully drawn boundaries that our culture has drawn for them. Grady: That’s one of those things about those movies that I always can’t stand is that they always turn out to be cautionary tales about power. The sort of “be careful what you wish for.” Oh, you’ve got power and had to go outside society, now look at you, you’re killing everyone you love. Which is why I love movies like Blair Witch Project or The Witch or even Suspiria to some extent that are just like, “These are witches. Don’t fuck with them.” Theresa: Right, I feel bad for men in a way. There’s all these wonderful witch movies. What do guys have? Guys have Julian Sands in Warlock, I guess? Not that there’s anything wrong with Warlock. Katherine: I don’t know, Theresa. Guys have Congress. Grady: Yeah, we’ve got the patriarchy. We don’t need some movies. Katherine: I think they’re doing okay. Grady: But we’ll take your sympathy. Theresa: You’ll take Julian Sands, is what you’re saying.

Theresa, when you were watching The Craft as a teenager, did you believe in magic? Did you ever think, “Oh, I should try some of these spells?”

Theresa: No, I mean, token goth chick. I was living in Brookfield, Connecticut at the time, and all of the weirdo goth kids kind of hung together, and yeah, after The Craft came out, I always thought it was kind of obnoxious because then a bunch of friends became, “Oh, we’re Wiccans.” You know? We used to get the Mormons on the street like, “Hey, kids, let me tell you about my lord and savior.” And I had one friend who would launch into, verbatim, the speech from The Craft, like, “God and the devil are playing on a football field. We’re the football field. We’re nature.” I’d just kind of roll my eyes. There were times in graveyards with candles and incense and stuff, but I never believed like that, no. I was too cynical even then. If witches were real, they wouldn’t be going to New Milford High School. Katherine: I don’t know. In Twilight the vampires, unaccountably, keep going to high school even though they don’t have to. I don’t understand.

They just really want to learn trigonometry.

Theresa: They’re going back to when they peaked.

Speaking of cautionary tales, I wanted to watch a bunch of witch movies in preparation for this panel, so I just typed “witch” into iTunes to see what came up, and I mentioned, I watched a couple of movies, but there were a couple of movies that I was not brave enough to watch. We have The Last Witch Hunter at 16% on Rotten Tomatoes. Hansel and Gretel at 15% on Rotten Tomatoes. And Season of the Witch at 10% on Rotten Tomatoes. Have you guys seen those?

Theresa: I reviewed The Last Witch Hunter for Tor.com. My God. The headline of my review was “Please let this be the last witch hunter” because it was terrible. Rose Leslie from Game of Thrones played Ygritte, and in The Last Witch Hunter she was the last of the witches, or whatever, and she was a super cute goth chick. She worked at a bar and could make the lights go out. Everything was awful. Vin Diesel . . . ugh, I love Vin Diesel, like unironically, I really do, but this was no Pitch Black. It had moments of wanting to be like a D&D campaign, but with a few witches thrown in. There was no logic or rhyme or reason, but not in a creepy, weird way like Suspiria. It was just “who the fuck is writing this?” Why is this happening? It was painful. Katherine: Because they wanted to buy boats—that’s why it’s happening. Theresa: The scariest thing I saw in the theater was the guy who was sitting two rows in front of me with his bare feet on the seat in front of him. Grady:Season of the Witch, I think that’s that George Romero movie that he made early in his career. It’s like a bored housewife in the suburbs and she becomes a witch.

Oh no, this is the recent Nicholas Cage one.

Grady: Ohhh.

But if there’s another Season of the Witch that you want to talk about go ahead.

Grady: No, no I haven’t seen it. Theresa: I saw the George Romero one, but it was a long time ago, and I was in high school. I remember falling asleep to it. I remember being really excited because I was like, “Yay, George Romero. Dawn of the Dead.” And then falling asleep after about 45 minutes of housewife drama. I don’t know if Season of the Witch is a remake with Nicholas Cage.

No, it’s like a medieval adventure movie.

Theresa: Oh. No. No, I have not seen that one. Katherine: Does Nicholas Cage play Matthew Hopkins, witch finder general? That would be awesome. Grady: Wouldn’t that be amazing? Katherine: I’d pay money to see that. Grady: There is a great movie, though, I’m going to pronounce it wrong: V-I-Y. It’s a Russian film from, I want to say, the ’70s, but I might be wrong. It’s based on a folktale, and it’s about a traveling theology student, and he stops in a village. They say that he can stay there, but he has to sleep in the church to guard the body of a young woman who has been accused of witchcraft who is dead, and she has to lie in state for three days before they’ll bury her. Each night, he’s visited by different supernatural things, and there are all these great practical effects. And of course she is a witch, and she is a pain in the ass, and ultimately she does have to go to hell, but it’s really great. And like The Witch, it’s very straightforward. It takes the folklore very literally and very seriously and manages to get a lot of charge out of it, which I thought was interesting. And the fact that it was made in the Soviet Union at the height of communism is kind of fascinating.

Is there something to be inferred from the fact that if you just search for witch movies some of these really low scoring things are among the first things to come up? That there aren’t a ton of good witch movies? Or it’s really hard to make a good witch movie? Or anything like that?

Katherine: I think it’s hard to make a good witch movie. I think it’s easier to write a good witch book because in a book you have so much room to play and greater room for nuance. That’s, of course, my biased position because I like books, but that’s my impression. I feel like, with a movie, ultimately, you have to make the decision, which is something that we keep bringing up with all of the movies we’ve talk about, is the witch real? Do you show her? What does that mean? Theresa: I wonder with the success of The Witch if we will see more witch movies come out. Because everything kind of comes and goes in waves. Although I don’t think witches will be as popular as zombies.

It seems like the zombie formula is easy to imitate, and imitating The Witch seems very, very difficult to me.

Theresa: Yeah, I would agree. Grady: I don’t think there is a witch formula. I think like Katherine is saying, you have to make a choice with a witch movie. If your witch is real, then your good guys are the people who are hunting and torturing them to death and killing them. If your witches aren’t real then you’ve made a witch hunt and you may as well just remake The Crucible again. Katherine: And if the central interesting motivating factor about witchcraft and witches is unknowability and unrecognizability, I think that that is a fairly hard concept to convey in the visual lexicon. Theresa: I agree with Katherine’s point about books doing it well. When I was thinking about witch books, one of the first ones I thought of was The Croning, by Laird Barron. There’s kind of a cosmic horror, Children-of-Old-Leech, Lovecraftian ancient evil from out of time deities. But it’s the cult on Earth who worships him that’s the problem. It opens with a really creepy retelling of Rumpelstiltskin and moves into modern day where a man’s wife is very mysterious and possibly causing all of these unnatural things to happen around her, and I thought that handled the mysteriousness of witches really well. It took place a lot in the Pacific Northwest, in the forests and stuff, so again you’re getting weird cairns in the woods, and caves, and stuff like that, where darkness could come. The other book that I thought did it really well recently was Hex by Thomas Olde Huevelt. He is a Dutch novelist, and he’s won the Hugo award. This is his debut novel translated for American audiences, and it is about a small town under the curse of witch who’s got her eyes and mouth sewn shut. It’s really creepy because the elders of Black Springs, this town, have quarantined the town so the hex won’t get out. But the teens are so tired of being cut off that they kind of go viral with these hauntings, and it becomes a big deal, and the town kind of spirals into a death knell. It was really well done. Really creepy.

Wow, yeah, that sounds really cool. Katherine, you were talking about writing witch fiction yourself. Is there anything more to say about that, just in terms of your approach or challenges or interesting experiences you’ve had while writing fiction about witches?

Katherine: I’ve now written two fictional books and edited one non-fiction book about witchcraft. I think the reason I haven’t seen as many of these witch movies as you guys have is because I’m just full up on witches already. My disk space for witches is totally full. There are many things that I enjoy about it. My approach to writing historical fiction is maybe a little bit different than others, since I came out of an academic background. I spent a lot of time in the archives. I really enjoy trying to understand the mental world of the people I’m trying to write about. Because I write about these sorts of things that happen in a space between reason and belief, I hear a lot of stories from people. People like to tell me stories. Like, my most recent novel, The Appearance of Annie Van Sinderen, is a ghost story, and the number of people who have then come up and told me their own encounters with ghosts is amazing and really fun and really interesting. Once, I was at a signing and a guy comes up and says, “Thank you for your talk, I really enjoyed it.” I say, “Thank you,” and we’re making pleasant chit-chat, and I’m asking how I should make the book out, and he says, “You know? I have memories of being burned.” I say, “Oh, really? Wow. When was this?” He thinks for a second, and he says, “I’m pretty sure it was the fifteenth century. I think it was in Germany.” I was like, “Alright, great, well thank you so much for coming to the talk today.”

At least he didn’t say he was burned in Salem.

Katherine: Yeah, nobody wants to undermine anybody’s sincere feelings about themselves. Grady: Primary source. Katherine: Exactly. But it’s neat. One of the things that I really enjoy is thinking about different moments in history when our understandings of reality were totally different, and I think I enjoy that in part because it’s a reminder that our beliefs about how the world works are totally historically contingent, and that holds true for us too. So, I feel like it’s a neat way to try and get back in touch with humility and our relationship with history and human knowledge.

Yeah, speaking of your hard disk being full, Katherine, you were telling us before you got started that you actually spent five years working on The Penguin Book of Witches.

Katherine: I did. Off and on, because I started working on it shortly after The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane came out in hardback, so while I was promoting that book I was also writing The House of Velvet and Glass and starting to work on The Penguin Book of Witches, and I’d never done a primary source reader before, so I learned by doing witches, which was pretty intense. It did take a long time, but if finally came out in 2013, and I’m really happy with it, and I think readers are really happy with it, and I always tell people to make sure they read the footnotes because I put humorous asides in some of the footnotes.

I think we’re going to wrap things up there. We’ve been speaking with Grady Hendrix, Theresa DeLucci, and Katherine Howe. Thank you so much for joining us.

Katherine: Thanks so much for having us. Grady: Yeah, it was a blast. Theresa: Thank you for thinking of me when you thought of witches. I’m flattered.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is produced by John Joseph Adams and hosted by: David Barr Kirtley, who is the author of thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, in books such as Armored, The Living Dead, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He lives in New York. AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Author Spotlight: Adam-Troy Castro E.C. Myers | 845 words

The description that came to mind when I read “Four Haunted Houses” is “quietly devastating.” The second was “choose your own misery,” since the tone and format reminded me a bit of those classic Choose Your Own Adventure books. What gave birth to this distressing quartet of scenarios?

It occurred to me that there are multiple definitions of “haunted,” as the word can be applied to a home. I point out with the story that only one of the four is desirable, in the sense that having a sorta kinda but not really haunted home might be fun. Two others are the stuff of horror fiction, and the fourth happens on this planet. The story is an attempt to provide one scenario with each definition, and the final house is the one I consider most important.

The third and fourth haunted houses were particularly shocking and sobering. Without spoiling too much, one of the things that I find so interesting about this piece is that it suggests that we haunt ourselves, and the horror comes from a very personal place—which perhaps makes it so much harder to escape. Do you find psychological horror more compelling (or scarier) than purely supernatural horror?

Although there’s significant variation for the skill of the author, on average I find supernatural horror among the least disturbing forms of fiction extant. It can provide a fun little chill and it can keep me turning the pages, but because it is so dependent on a mythology I’ve internalized, it rarely lingers in the way that stories of human dysfunction or evil do. Shirley Jackson’s Hill House was a terrifying place, but the story is scary, and lingers decades after the first encounter, primarily because of what’s happening inside Eleanor.

A quick look at your bibliography shows you have written more horror stories than in any other genre. Do your reading preferences also reflect the ratio of the stories you write, or does something else compel you to delve into the dark side time and again?

Left to my own devices, I tend to read more mysteries and thrillers than either science fiction or horror, though my work as a reviewer tends to enforce a more fantastic diet. I note that the category labels in my bibliography can be deceptive, as there are horrific elements in a great number of stories categorized otherwise: science fiction stories “Fuel” and “During the Pause,” fantasy story “Of A Sweet Slow Dance in the Wake of Temporary Dogs,” Spider-Man story “The Stalking of John Doe,” and the more-or-less true story “The Pussy Expert.” My prior Lightspeed story “Her Husband’s Hands” received award nominations as both science fiction and horror. The Andrea Cort and Gustav Gloom novels are also both tinged by dark considerations. I take care to note, though, that while the imagination runs dark, that only means it is where this particular muse most frequently finds the tension that drives fiction. Others emerge downright cheery, and light as air.

Along the same lines, what are you reading now, or what recent book or story would you recommend for readers of Nightmare magazine?

My most recent source of absolute adoration was the western Paradise Sky by Joe R. Lansdale. But you wanna be surprised by something that’s pretty difficult to reconcile with my output? One Good Dog by Susan Wilson, a novel about a wretched man who adopts an abused pit bull, and how they wind up fixing each other. I guarantee to you that it will unleash your tear ducts within the first four hundred words. (My wife can testify: I weep so easily, it’s downright embarrassing.)

Your sixth and final Gustav Gloom book, Gustav Gloom and the Castle of Fear, was just published in August. (Congratulations on completing a great series!) What other work do you have out now or soon? Can you tell us anything about these “projects to be announced” for release in 2017 and beyond?

Analog is about to publish “The Soul Behind the Face,” second in a series of stories about the quest of a retired spy named Draiken. I have another horror story, the EC-camp “Framing Mortensen,” coming out this very month in the John Joseph Adams/Douglas Cohen anthology, What the #@&% Is That? There are many more coming at Lightspeed, and in other venues: about a dozen in the pipeline, right now. Of the “projects to be announced” I am not yet certain that I’m allowed to say much about the novel, launching a new series, that is now weeks from completion, but I will let slip part of the title: Spooks. And after that’s put to bed, I return to the proposal for a very different project entirely, still top-secret. All will be revealed when it is ready to be revealed.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER E.C. Myers was assembled in the U.S. from Korean and German parts and raised by a single mother and the public library in Yonkers, New York. He is the author of numerous short stories and three young adult books: the Andre Norton Award–winning Fair Coin, Quantum Coin, and The Silence of Six. His next novel, Against All Silence, a thriller about teenage hacktivists investigating a vast conspiracy, is scheduled to appear next spring from Adaptive Books. E.C. currently lives with his wife, son, and three doofy pets in Pennsylvania. You can find traces of him all over the internet, but especially at ecmyers.net and on Twitter @ecmyers. Author Spotlight: Rachael K. Jones Erika Holt | 760 words

This story could be read as a fairy tale retelling, perhaps “Rapunzel,” but also seems to contain hints of many tales and myths, and takes an unexpected (and brilliant) turn at the end. How did it come together?

This story came out of a project where I decided to write a series of stories based on legendary female figures in history and literature. For example, I did a science fictional riff on the Oracle of Delphi. The seed for “Who Binds and Looses the World with Her Hands” came from the myth of the Siren, and Mark Twain’s translation of an early 19th century German poem called “Loreleylied” by Heinrich Heine. Many of this poem’s images and themes made it into my story—a woman in the water, a golden comb, a hint of an ancient darkness that lingers just out of sight. I also intended “Who Binds and Looses the World with Her Hands” to be a tribute to Deaf Culture, and specifically Deaf literature. Within Deaf Culture, capital-D Deafness isn’t considered a disability, but a linguistic and cultural difference, the centerpiece being sign languages such as ASL (American Sign Language). People who identify with Deaf Culture are proud of having a Deaf identity, and push back against well-meaning but misguided efforts by hearing culture to “fix” what isn’t broken. The magic system in this story is based on some conventions of ASL poetry. ASL words can “rhyme” with one another by sharing the same handshape or position, but being signed with a different motion. This creates room for extremely creative wordplay and storytelling. In Deaf literature, hands and sign language are commonly used as symbols of independence and freedom from oppression. One particularly important sign for members of Deaf Culture is the name-sign. Name-signs are traditionally only given to someone by a Deaf person already in the Deaf community. They can be very simple—the first letter of your name signed in a position on your face to match your gender—or they can indicate something distinctive about your physical appearance or your personality. Most importantly, getting a name-sign is a major step into entering Deaf Culture. This is why Doriane’s name-sign plays such a major role in the story, and especially the ending.

What genre(s) do you most like to write in? Why?

I write the way I read: in cycles, in binges, as the mood strikes me. This translates into months camping out in science fiction, then migrating over to fantasy for a few stories, and then taking a quick dip into horror as a palate-cleanser when I think I’m getting a little too optimistic. Maybe because of this tendency, I have a special undying love for weird fiction, anything that’s messy with genre boundaries. Ridiculous mad science sci-fantasy with girl geniuses and absurd inventions, supernatural horror, disembodied brains in jars, reincarnated time travelers, you name it. The only thing I don’t write so often is humor. This is great, because I really particularly love to read humor, and it means I never burn out on it because I’m not trying to take it apart to see what makes it tick.

You’ve had many short stories published. Any plans for a novel?

I’m happy to say that as of this writing, I’ve just finished drafting the first chapter of a novel! Trying my hand at a longform project is exhilarating and challenging after so much short fiction. One of the biggest upsides is that I finally have space to put just about everything I love into one story: narratives driven by diverse people, themes of exile and friendship, economic warfare across planets, body modification, and symbiotes. Maybe even a few pirates. Just because I like pirates.

What are you working on now?

Aside from my novel, I’ve got a few short fiction projects in the work: a YA sci- fantasy novelette about a girl genius, a fantasy piece starring an evil sweater, and a humor collaboration with a friend of mine (and this after I said I don’t write much humor!). And I’ve been wanting to try out some Southern Gothic-style horror as of late, something in the style of Flannery O’Connor, one of my favorite short fiction authors. Summers in Georgia always put me in this mood, perhaps because the heat makes the whole environment feel sinister, even under a blue and cloudless sky.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Nightmare assistant editor Erika Holt lives in Calgary, Alberta, where she writes and edits speculative fiction. Her stories appear in several anthologies including Not Our Kind, What Fates Impose, and Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead. She is also co-editor of two anthologies from EDGE and Absolute XPress: Rigor Amortis, about sexy, amorous zombies, and Broken Time Blues, featuring such oddities as 1920s burlesque dancers and bootlegging chickens. Find her at erikaholt.com or on Twitter as @erikaholt. Author Spotlight: Maria Dahvana Headley Lisa Nohealani Morton | 1523 words

Tell us a bit about “Little Widow.” What inspired you to write it?

A combination of things. I’m from a very rural place in Idaho, and the setting of “Little Widow” is based on the wide-open high desert I’m from. There were lots of edge religious personalities in that part of Idaho, including a lot of Fundamentalist Mormons, and several families of what now seem to me to be very conservative branches of Pentecostal Christianity: all daughters, who were not allowed to cut their hair, and only allowed to wear dresses. Some of those families seemed to work okay, and others . . . not so much. Daughters died of things like tetanus and “cat-scratch fever.” At least one of these families also believed in snake handling. One of my childhood best friends was a daughter of one of these families, an outcast in our grade due to her height, her dresses, and her long blonde hair. This was the ’80s. I was an outcast because I meowed compulsively and because my father had a hundred sled dogs. And our other friend was an outcast because her family raised bull terriers in a trailer. Yeah, I think you can see what kind of a strange place this was, and how it’s related to this story. Over a couple of years, two daughters in one extended family died, one of scarlet fever, and the other of a rattlesnake bite. I felt as a child, very fervently, that I’d like to go flying at the fathers of these families, and kick some serious ass. This fell under religious freedom, and thus it seemed to me that it was legal to kill one’s daughters with medical neglect. (And frankly, it was. It isn’t legal to do this to a minor child, but the social services in this part of the country are radically lacking, and horrible things of this kind happened all the time.) The men could, of course, wear and do whatever they wanted to. I’m a God wrangler: Though I’m not a believer, I’m perpetually interested in the parts of the story that say men can do certain things to their fellow man (and usually woman) that to me seem absolutely ghastly. I’m way interested in belief, and in stories about it. There are lots of stories about cults run by men, multiple wives, these charismatic suicide cults. Hence, Little Widow. A cult full of women and girls, and a suicide plan to take over heaven that the patriarch decides to weasel out of. This leaves some angry, living girls, who take action. Oh, and somewhere in here I read an article about feathered dinosaurs, and thought about enormous feathered Tyrannosaurus hens, angels, and carnival geeks at the same time, and since this was a raw western town, I thought about a chicken-biting carnival geek showing up . . . and I don’t know what happened. My brain does things with interesting information, and it tends to be a mysterious process, even to me. By and large, though, this story is about my rage about the things people do to girls. It’s pretty much an endless fount of rage. I like to write stories that deal in bloody reparations. I’m a pretty nonviolent person, but people who hurt children? They bring out my fury.

You do a lot of work, in “Little Widow,” to humanize the Heaven’s Avengers cult, and to create sympathy for those left behind. Is the real horror of these sorts of events always in the aftermath? How do we understand those stories?

I think in any scenario like this, there are always so many victims, who got sucked in by either wanting to believe in something brighter than living in this world, or by being born into it, or brought in as small children of cult members. I can’t imagine being born into a cult, but well—I guess I can. There are cult aspects to all society. The beliefs we’re given as tiny children form the rest of our lives, and they’re hard to resist. Patriarchal society is a cult. It isn’t logical. It’s a bullshit hierarchical belief that people have agreed on as a society. So, resisting those “normal” societal ideas is often like trying to leave a cult. It’s hard. You have to keep examining your beliefs to see what they really are, and what they logically should be. That’s one way to think about it. Another way is to think about what it would feel like if everyone you knew went to heaven, and you got left behind. Terrifically traumatic. I read interviews with survivors of several suicide cults, and that’s what they said. It was very hard to let go of the fear that the cult was right, and you were wrong. Certainty is persuasive, because being human is confusing. Cult leaders always have certainty. Inside the cults, there was always a ferociously charismatic and convincing leader—Jim Jones, for example, who killed over 900 people on his Guyana compound, with cyanide laced Kool-Aid. For some it was a suicide, but not for everyone. Many people had no choice in the matter. Babies had cyanide squirted into their mouths with syringes. The interviews with people who escaped—they’re devastating. Some mothers were there because their babies had been kidnapped into the cult by other family members. Only one cemetery would accept the bodies of the dead, and there’s a mass grave there of over 400 people, mostly children, because there was a belief that they were impure. Oh my god, it’s horrific. Then there’s the Heaven’s Gate cult—upon which I partially based Heaven’s Avengers’ optimistic belief that they were off by suicide to fight a turf war in heaven. So, yeah. Cults are full of humans, and humans are vulnerable to listening to those who seem certain. Sometimes people who seem utterly certain about the rules of how humans should live are very, very evil. I mean, quite often, if you think about it. Charismatic evil has often, throughout human society, been incredibly persuasive.

What are you working on these days?

I’m writing The Combustible, a new YA novel for HarperCollins about superheroes and supervillains; finishing up edits on The Mere Wife, which is an adult novel for Farrar, Straus & Giroux inspired both by translation fails in Beowulf and suburban malaise novels like Revolutionary Road and Tom Perrotta’s Little Children; and writing The Devil’s Halo, a crazily epic three act, three century musical based on an unpublished Anne Rice short story, with my collaborator Lance Horne. Among other things, I’m also writing some kind of longish nonfiction/fiction piece based on the women and girls of Peter Pan, a novel based on volcano myth, and a short story that is a furious retelling of Rapunzel. Never not busy here.

Any upcoming publications or exciting projects that readers should watch for?

Lots of things coming in the next few months. Here are a few! Lightspeed has my story “See the Unseeable, Know the Unknowable” in September, which is another “circus comes to town” story, but very different from this one. This one’s about solitude rather than sisterly solidarity. It’s a little Something Wicked This Way Comes, a little Twilight Zone, with a desperate woman at the center. Actually, they’re kind of great companion pieces, though it’s total coincidence they’re being published so close together. I wrote them years apart! Aerie comes out in October from HarperCollins—that’s the sequel to Magonia, at last! And I have a Weird horror story in Ellen Datlow’s Children of Lovecraft anthology, coming out in September: basically The House of Bernarda Alba with a monster in said house.

What’s your best advice for surviving an apocalypse (dinosaur or otherwise)?

Look the trouble in the eye, and if you have to go down, go down singing. I suspect I’d be watching the comet fall, whirring at the dinosaurs, and dying in a ball of fire. Maybe I’m not an apocalypse survivor. I’m not the person you’d find in a bunker in twenty years, unless I happened to already be in a cave somewhere when the apocalypse hit. I’m too obsessed with humans and with life among the living. My mottoes for survival involve ferocious trust, and always have. I put my life in other people’s hands on the regular, because I don’t know any other way to live. Plus, hey, I’m an insulin-dependent diabetic. I need civilization in order to survive. So, who knows? I might advise people to fling themselves up on the dinosaur’s back and ride. That’s what I’d try to do.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Born and raised in Honolulu, Lisa Nohealani Morton lives in Washington, DC. By day she is a mild-mannered database wrangler, computer programmer, and all-around data geek, and by night she writes science fiction, fantasy, and combinations of the two. Her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, and the anthology Hellebore and Rue. She can be found on Twitter as @lnmorton. Author Spotlight: Usman T. Malik Sandra Odell | 996 words

“Laal Andhi” is an intensely dark and unsettling story about childhood, loss, and the meaning of horror. Tell us something of the inspiration behind the tale.

This story had an interesting journey in the making. I first wrote a version of it in Urdu when I was nineteen. It was published in a Pakistani pulp horror digest called Darr, based in Karachi, and it was my second adult fiction publication (no payment either time, if I remember correctly). Months later, I translated it into English and it was accepted by a Canadian anthology Thirteen Stories (I subsequently discovered that Michael Kelly and John Mantooth also had stories in it; John sent me a picture of it in 2014 when he found a dusty copy in his garage). But there was something missing in the story. I thought it had potential and that it was better in my head than on the page, so after I had begun developing my voice a bit more post-Clarion West and made a few pro sales, I decided to try my hand at it again. I wrote several drafts, changing the story and significantly altering some of the thematics, and this was the one that stuck. At the end of the day, the story, like much of horror, is the mirror maze in which we see uneasy pieces of ourselves. I saw in it the fears and loathings of a city haunted by its inhabitants.

Horror often explores the dark, secret places where children may well lose themselves on their way to becoming adults. Here, such places are revealed by corner store rituals, grim shadow games, daring the dark forbidden places. Your descriptions and pacing stir the shadows, bringing those heavy, smothering fears to life, whether through the eyes of the child becoming man or the man trapped by the memories of childhood. What is it about childhood that appeals to you as a horror writer?

I suspect I’ve been writing about childhood for a long time now. Many times nostalgia, sometimes pain, occasionally terror corral those memories into fictive corners. Most of what we are is a child in the shape of an adult woman or man. Often the child is lonely and frightened and often the sins of the grownup visit the child. Horror assumes its most ferocious forms thus. It would be difficult to explore the child’s present without reaching out to the moments that reared her.

Your prose in “Laal Andhi” weighs down on readers and characters alike, smothering hopes and dreams for the future. To me, this is the mark of quality horror writing, where the writing walks hand in hand with the plot to drive home the rusted spike of dread. How do you define quality horror? What makes a horror story sing to you?

It really depends on what the story is trying to do, I guess. Aickman does things very differently from Clive Barker. Naiyer Masud aims for uncanniness, while Stephen King goes for the avuncular campside mode. Richness of prose, the writer’s vision for the trope (or not) of his choice, believability of character drivers, and setting—these, for me at least, are the unifying forces for good horror.

From horror to fantasy, your stories draw on your experiences as a Muslim and a Pakistani writer and reader. In 2014 you led the first speculative fiction workshop in Lahore, Pakistan. You have made every effort to reach out to other non-Western writers, seeking to encourage their efforts and promote their works. Why is it important to you as a writer and human being that these voices be heard? If you could speak directly to those who feel diversity is unnecessary and harmful to SF/F/H, what would you say?

I remember being a child and dreaming of some day meeting Stephen King or Clive Barker, of telling them how much their work has meant to me. I wanted to find my town, my people, my city in the stories I read. There were none, not in my preferred genre at least. Without a precedent, most of us have no conviction, no guiding light to steer us toward our dreams. I’ve been fortunate to have had some success, and I dearly want others in that part of the world to believe they too can tell their stories.

It is impossible to speak to you about horror fiction and not address “The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family,” winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement In Short Fiction, a story commented upon by Samuel R. Delaney during Clarion West 2013. Has your approach to writing in general, and horror in specific, changed since winning the Stoker Award?

I think I understand the process of writing a bit better. “Vaporization” was written more instinctively than cognitively. Neil Gaiman once said sometimes we write first drafts to discover what the story is about, and I suppose that was true for “Vaporization.” Subsequently, though, most stories I’ve written I’ve more or less understood what I was attempting to accomplish with them, even if the attempts fail, as they many times do.

What’s next for Usman Malik? What’s up and coming for readers in the next six months?

While I haven’t been writing much recently, my novelette “In the Ruins of Mohenjo- Daro” in Paula Guran’s The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu did just come out in May 2016 (“Ruins” is cosmic horror set in Sind, Pakistan). I have a story nearly accepted at a decent anthology (can’t give details yet) and “Vaporization” will be translated into Hungarian, from what I’ve been told. After that, it’s likely going to be nonfiction, academic articles for me for the next two years that I will be in school.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Sandra Odell is a forty-seven-year old, happily married mother of two, an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, Daily Science Fiction, Crosssed Genres, Pseudopod, and The Drabblecast. She is hard at work plotting her second novel or world domination. Whichever comes first. MISCELLANY Coming Attractions The Editors | 187 words

Coming up in October, in Nightmare . . . It’s a double-sized special issue: People of Colo(u)r Destroy Horror!, the latest installment in our Destroy series (for more information, be sure to check out destroysf.com). For this issue, we’ve brought on a team of amazingly talented creators of color to explore the horror genre and to smash inequality in our field. World Fantasy award-nominated editor Silvia Moreno-Garcia is serving as our Guest Editor and has wrangled original fiction from Nadia Bulkin (“Wish You Were Here”), Valerie Valdes (“A Diet of Worms”), Gabriela Santiago (“None of This Ever Happened”) and Russell Nichols (“The Taming of the Tongue”). The legendary Tananarive Due is our Reprint Editor, and she’s sourced us classic fiction by Nisi Shawl (“Cruel Sistah”), Priya Sharma (“The Show”), and Terence Taylor (“Wet Pain”). We also have a host of nonfiction features edited by the talented Maurice Broaddus. He’s lined up new essays and articles by Alyssa Wong, Chinelo Onwualu, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, and Chesya Burke. Be prepared for some bad dreams, because it’s another great issue of Nightmare! Stay Connected The Editors

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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. About the Nightmare Team The Editors

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If you enjoy reading Nightmare, you might also enjoy these anthologies edited (or co- edited) by John Joseph Adams.

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 & Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill) Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler) [forthcoming Oct. 2016] Brave New Worlds By Blood We Live 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) 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) [forthcoming Nov. 2016] Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above. Each project also has a mini-site devoted to it specifically, where you’ll find free fiction, interviews, and more.