Fantasy Magazine Issue 55, October 2011

Table of Contents

Editorial, by John Joseph Adams “The Secret Beach” by Tim Pratt (fiction) Author Spotlight: Tim Pratt (interview) Feature Interview: Richard K. Morgan, by Andrew Liptak (interview) “Absolute Zero” by Nadia Bulkin (fiction) Author Spotlight: Nadia Bulkin “The Downsides of Dating a God” by Genevieve Valentine (nonfiction) “Unnatural Disaster” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (fiction) Author Spotlight: Kristine Kathryn Rusch (interview) “Five Ocean-Dwelling Creatures That Look Like Aliens (But Aren’t)” by Jeremiah Tolbert (nonfiction) “The Invisibles” by Charles de Lint (fiction) Author Spotlight: Charles de Lint (interview) “Are You Watching Carefully?” by Christopher Priest (nonfiction) Coming Attractions

© 2011, Fantasy Magazine Cover Art by Bram Lee Horng. Ebook design by Neil Clarke www.fantasy-magazine.com Editorial, October 2011 John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue fifty-five of Fantasy Magazine! Here’s what we’ve got on tap this month. There are some places so magical they can change the very course of your life. In Tim Pratt’s “The Secret Beach,” one man stumbles across such a remarkable place. Now the question is: What will he do to stay there? In our feature interview this month, Andrew Liptak talks to Richard K. Morgan about switching (and blending) genres, cynicism and economics, and what’s next for Ringil Eskiath, the protagonist of Morgan’s epic fantasy The Steel Remains. In “Absolute Zero” by Nadia Bulkin, one man must confront the monstrous truth about his family—before it destroys his town. It’s not easy loving a deity. Genevieve Valentine explores human-god relationships in her article “The Downsides of Dating a God.” When a big-city cop takes over as a small-town sheriff, trouble is bound to happen. But in Kristine Katherine Rusch’s “Unnatural Disaster,” the trouble comes in a surprisingly weird package. Jeremiah Tolbert explores the strange creatures that lurk in the barely explored depths of our oceans in “Five Ocean-Dwelling Creatures That Look Like Aliens (But Aren’t).” In “The Invisibles,” by Charles De Lint, one artist rediscovers the belief in magic he thought he’d buried years ago. Christopher Priest, author of The Prestige, explores the arts of misdirection and magic in his article “Are You Watching Carefully?”

So that’s our issue this month. Thanks for reading!

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as editor of Lightspeed and Fantasy Magazine, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. Upcoming anthologies include: Lightspeed: Year One, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Armored, and The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination. He is a finalist for the 2011 Hugo Award and the 2011 World Fantasy Award, and he has been called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble.com. John is also the co-host of io9’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams. The Secret Beach Tim Pratt

Two teenagers showed me the way, a boy and a girl, not siblings but also not in love, or if they were, trying to hide it from one another. I was walking along the sidewalk toward downtown Berkeley, a few blocks past the long- abandoned ice skating rink, thinking how nice it would be to be the sort of person who bicycles along with a loaf of fresh bed sticking up jauntily from the bike’s basket, instead of the kind of person walking to the drugstore to buy club soda because things haven’t gotten quite bad enough for me to drink cheap Scotch straight yet. That’s when I saw them: dripping wet in swimsuits, each with a towel draped damply over a shoulder, laughing as they turned a corner in one of the residential neighborhoods between downtown and the Bay. I paused because I couldn’t think where they’d be walking from; miles from the Bay, which was way too cold to brave without a wetsuit anyway, and there were no public pools over there, and while there might have been a pool in someone’s backyard, those weren’t common— houses in this part of town tend to be squeezed onto lots barely larger than themselves; the houses with yards of any size are precious commodities, never mind swimming pools. Besides: They had sand on their bare legs, and stuck to their arms, and though I’m the kind of person who uses the self-checkout line at grocery stores just to avoid the necessity of small conversation with a human cashier, I blurted out, “Hey, where were you guys swimming?” as they reached the corner where I lingered. They exchanged a glance of raised eyebrows and quirked lips, both inhabitants of a world of nonverbal communication for which I had neither map nor codebook, and she said, “The beach,” and giggled, the laugh of someone who thinks disappointment is something that happens to other people far away, like earthquakes in China or tsunamis in the South Pacific. They both walked on past me up the street, moving a little faster than before, sparing their exit line from any follow- up questions from the balding thirty-something guy wearing too much black for such a warm day. I forgot about my trip to the CVS and the all- important club soda, even though that first tall glass— filled with ice and two shots of Trader Joe’s Blended Scotch Whisky (9.99 a bottle) and a crackling popping measure of soda to fill it up—had become the closest thing in my life to a sacrament or a vocation. Instead I turned down the sidewalk the way the teenagers had come, and yes, I say they showed me the way: because they’d left wet shoeprints on the sidewalk and the occasional spatter of dripping water, like a blood trail on a forensic crime show, making a trail even a city dweller like me could follow like a great wilderness tracker. I followed their dripping trail past flaking Victorian houses and brightly painted adobe bungalows, yards full of oversized flowers or drought-resistant succulents, until after a block and a half or so their trail ended next to an empty lot enclosed by a chain-link fence so overgrown with vines that it could have passed for the entry to a jungle ruin. Was there some renegade swimming hole in there, a guerilla community art project of hauled-in sand and a concrete-lined pit, like the pocket parks that sprang up sometimes when enterprising hippies or hipsters decided to reclaim waste ground or precious parking spots with a few cubic feet of potting soil, a plastic bench, and an ornamental fountain? Seemed like an ill-advised project, ultimately just a mosquito breeding program, but what else could it be? I pushed through the overgrown shrubs, barely making out a trail, and reached the fence, where I found the chain-link had been cut apart and then re-closed with fuzzy pipe cleaners, green and red and blue. (Does anyone use pipe cleaners to clean their pipes anymore, or are they produced exclusively as arts and craft supplies for children?) I carefully untwisted them and squeezed through the gap, snagging my sagging belly-flesh on a sharp end of wire and sucking in a hiss of air through my teeth. Once I was through, I stood up, under a sky that was noticeably bluer and more cloudless than the one on the other side of the fence, and stared at the closest thing on Earth to infinity: The ocean. Or, at least, an ocean. Now, understand. Berkeley, California doesn’t abut the ocean. Berkeley does touch San Francisco Bay, a few miles to the west, and it’s a pretty enough sight when the weather’s right, the gray city beyond the bay rising up from the water. But this was ocean, blue-green, wide as wide can be, view so clear you could see the curve of the horizon, and a beach of sand the color of bread crumbs toasted golden. The sound of the surf was the world’s own rhythm section, a percussive susurration that had been utterly inaudible beyond the fence, and now filled the world. In stories, people usually assume they’ve gone crazy when things like this happen. It occurred to me that this all might be a dream, but I never notice smells in my dreams, and this was a world of salt tang and crisp air. I sank to my knees in the warm sand and stared at the grand expanse of tumbling waves, and thought if this was a coma or some profound electrochemical misfiring in my brain, then so be it: It was the most beautiful way to go I could imagine. There’s a place in Maui, where I went on my honeymoon, that most people just call Big Beach, considered one of the most pleasant stretches of shoreline in the inhabited world. And there’s a place near Santa Cruz, on Highway 1, where you pass beneath a natural bridge and discover a strand of narrow sand bordered on one side by sea cliffs and on the other by the cold lovely Pacific. Both are glorious places, homes of my heart, from a time when my life was an opening-out instead of a closing-in. I betrayed both instantly. This beach, this twist in the usual flow of time and space, was my new favorite place in the world or out of it. I turned back to the fence. It was still there, but shockingly small, the width of a garage door, pinned between towering cliff walls that gave me vertigo to contemplate, and extended as far as I could see in either direction. Those cliffs weren’t California sandstone, but more like white chalk—like something from the shores of England, but bordering a tropical sea. I went to the gate and refastened the gap with those flimsy pipe cleaners, wishing for chains and padlocks and razor wire . . . but then, this wasn’t mine to claim. I was an interloper, wasn’t I? Those kids hadn’t walked me to the door, but they hadn’t locked up the gate, either, and this place was surely big enough for more than me. I left my shoes by the fence and set out walking barefoot in the sand. Going west, based on my own sense of direction, but going north, judging by the sun, which I realized wasn’t the same sun—a trifle more orange, maybe, perhaps a bit larger and lower in the sky. How could I even be sure the sun was setting, or that it set in the west, or that this place even had a west? After years of being sure of everything and pleased with nothing, being utterly uncertain filled my head with the thrillful fizz of just enough champagne. The sand was glorious under my feet, not too hot, and I walked down to the water, proof enough this was no California coast: The water was pleasantly warm, like a hot bath after forty minutes of soaking, and there were no ugly masses of dead kelp in the sand. No birds, either, or crabs, but lots of seashells. I rolled up my pant legs to my knees and waded into the foaming surf, bending to pick up impossibly smooth stones and bits of shell in colors I’d never encountered before. I filled my pockets with shells and kept walking, and for a long time I didn’t even realize it was a person up there along the beach: It was just a speck that moved. Distances were hard to judge with just skyscraper-high cliffs and infinite ocean for scale, but I’d say I walked only a mile or so before it was a clear: a man, and something low and long and yellow, and rocks. He raised a hand in distant greeting, and I waved back, annoyed. Ridiculous, I know, but I’d found a magical world, gone through the back of the wardrobe, down the rabbit hole, through the bottom of the grandfather clock, onto Platform 9 ¾, through the looking glass. The idea that teenagers swam here and men made bonfires—yes, that was a ring of stones for a fire circle—infuriated me. Late again, late as always. This had all been happening, this had all been here, without me. “My friend!” the man called once I got closer, though he was a stranger to me: pale, beaming, wiry, perhaps in his forties, dressed in khakis and a striped shirt that made him look like a caricature of a French waiter, with a floppy brown, wide-brimmed hat secured by a string under his chin. I nodded at him, and looked at his—camp?—on a little spit of land that stuck farther out into the water than the rest of the beach hereabouts. The yellow thing was a boat, the inflatable kind, with a small motor, and it was half-filled with something covered by a blue tarp. A couple of oars rested inside as well. The thing hardly looked like an oceangoing vessel—but it looked like the kind of boat you could get through the gap in the fence when it was deflated, which was probably more important. The stranger clapped me on the shoulder, barely able to contain his delight at seeing me, not a reaction I’d seen from anyone in longer than I could remember. “Do you have the key?” he said. “Mister,” I said, “I have no earthly idea what you’re talking about.” He frowned and took a step back, looked me up and down, and said, “No, you’re definitely him—you’re here, and that’s proof enough, even if I didn’t recognize you. You never dreamed about me?” “I don’t remember my dreams,” I said, a mostly-truth. I don’t anymore. One of the effects—one of the best effects—of my antianxiety medication is that it spares me from my dreams. He nodded briskly, as if this were a small technical problem he could easily overcome. He had an air of easy competence I found profoundly dispiriting. “Well, let me ask—do you have a key? One you’ve carried around for years, and you don’t know why?” I frowned. My wife, when I had a wife, had called it my lucky charm, though it had never brought me any luck that I’d noticed: an old-fashioned key I’d found as a child in the weeds behind my house and somehow kept ever since, black iron with a barrel as long as my pinky finger and three notched teeth, with an ornate loop of curved metal at the other end. I used it as a fob, hooked to the ring that held my actual keys. My wife had said it might open the door to my dream house, if I ever found it, but I’d always thought it looked more like something to seal up a dungeon—like it had been used to lock-up something terrible, and then thrown away. I crossed my arms. “Look, do you mind telling me what’s going on? What is this place?” I hated the sound of my own voice: nasally and peevish, the voice of a whiner and regretter, talking to a man who was clearly a doer of acts. “Of course, forgive me.” He sat on the sand, cross- legged, and I lowered myself to face him. “I began dreaming of this beach a year ago to the day,” he said. “Every night. At first I ignored it, but one day I just followed my feet to the fence—well, you know, you did the same thing, even if you’ve forgotten the dreams that showed you the way. After I found the beach, the dreams began to tell me what to do, about the voyage I’d take, the perils I’d face, and, of course, the ones who would help me. The woman who brought me a canteen that, in this place, turns salt water sweet. A boy and a girl who brought me a toy compass that shows the way across the sea, and a toy spyglass that sees for miles. They still come here to swim, sometimes, and I think the water may keep them young for a very long time. The old man who brought me the net that summons delicious fish to the surface. And now, you, with the key: the last thing I need.” “Who brought you the boat?” I asked, reaching out and thumping my fist against the inflated side. He laughed, the laugh of a man who always finds whatever he needs near to hand and thinks that’s perfectly natural. “Some things I had to provide myself. I set sail at sunset. Well, not sail, but you get the idea. I just need the key.” “Huh. What if I don’t have it?” His smile didn’t exactly falter, but he looked puzzled. “You’re here. That means you’re meant to be here. I tried to show the beach to my friends, when I first found it, but none of them could even see this place. Most people, if they crawl through that fence, they just find a lot full of weeds and garbage. But not you. You must be him. You belong.” I looked at the boat. The ocean. The lowering sun. “Am I, ah, supposed to go with you?” There was a note in my voice that even I would have been hard-pressed to identify. Now his smile did disappear, slowly, like a pot of water boiling dry on the stove. “No,” he said. “No, it’s not like that.” Story of my life: I was nothing but part of the story of someone else’s life. “I’ll just get you the key,” I said, standing up. “Thank you.” He stood up when I did. “I’ve waited for so long.” I’d never punched anyone before, and it hurt my hand far worse than I can imagine it hurt his face. His nose didn’t even bleed, but he fell down, sitting back on the sand, and stared up at me, bewildered, even when I picked up the oar and swung in a way I hadn’t swung anything since little league when I was seven years old. I didn’t mean to hit him so hard; I’d figured I could just tie him up—he had to have some rope under that tarp somewhere—but he didn’t move again, and some blood ran from his ear into the sand, so I just left him alone after I took the compass and the little plastic spyglass from his pocket; the net and canteen were already in the boat. I am sorry. I am. But I learned long ago that saying “I’m sorry” isn’t the same as saying “I wouldn’t do it again.” He had a notebook and one of those space pens that writes underwater wrapped up in a waterproof pouch. The book has the words “Ship’s Log” and a picture of an anchor on the cover embossed in gold. I’ve been writing in it while I wait for the sun to go down, and by now it’s almost too dark to see the black words on the white page. That’s fine. It’s almost time to push into the waves anyway. I don’t have my medication with me, so maybe tonight I’ll dream. But if I don’t, that’s fine too. Water to drink, sweeter than Scotch and soda, I’m sure. I’ll catch fish to eat. Compass to guide me; glass to see. And a key. My key, whatever another man’s dreams might have to say. My key. And whatever it opens, whatever that brings: mine too. Mine forever. Mine at last.

Tim Pratt’s short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Year’s Best Fantasy, and other nice places. His most recent collection is Hart and Boot and Other Stories, and his work has won a Hugo Award and been nominated for the World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Stoker, Mythopoeic, and Nebula Awards. He blogs intermittently at timpratt.org, where you can also find links to many of his stories. Pratt is also a senior editor at Locus, the magazine of the science fiction and fantasy field. He lives in Berkeley CA with his wife, writer Heather Shaw, and their son River. Author Spotlight: Tim Pratt Jennifer Konieczny

What inspired “The Secret Beach”? Could you tell us a bit about your writing process?

I was out for a walk in my neighborhood in Berkeley earlier this summer, pushing my young son in his stroller, when I saw two teenagers on the sidewalk in a residential area, dripping wet, with beach towels draped around their necks. I’m sure they were just at a pool somewhere, but my mind began wandering, as it does, and I thought about how interesting it would be if there were a portal to a beautiful beach somewhere, in the bushes or in the backyard of an empty house. My son ended up falling asleep in the stroller, so I stopped at a park, sat on a bench, and wrote the first draft of the story while he slept. I’m not sure why the protagonist ended up being such a miserable bastard. Perhaps because miserable bastards need magical beaches the most.

In “The Secret Beach” the protagonist struggles with fate. He suppresses the dreams that would lead him to the beach but finds himself there anyway. He has no recollection of needing a key but carries one with him. When he finally discovers his role in events, he steals another’s fate. How much free will do you think people exercise in their lives?

A deep philosophical question! I tend to think free will is an illusion. Neuroscience tells us that we actually decide to do things before our conscious minds can come up with the reasons why we’re doing them—most behavior is simply impulse followed by rationalization. As time is just another dimension, the “arrow of time” that we perceive as “forward” motion in our lives is illusory: Whatever happens is the only thing that can possibly happen. (Though it’s possible that every other thing happens in another universe; or that, if our own universe is infinite, everything that can possibly happen does happen somewhere out there in the vastness of space.) But life is only manageable, and society can only function, if we act as though humans have free will. And it’s certainly a convincing illusion! It sure feels like I’m deciding to do things consciously, and on a daily basis I don’t interrogate that feeling too closely . . . but sometimes I wonder. (Being a hard determinist is kind of depressing anyway, however compelling I find the arguments; I’d rather be a sustainable hedonist.) At the same time, I don’t believe in fate or destiny— destiny doesn’t even work in this story, at least, not the way the poor dreamer on the beach expects it to. Nothing is meant to happen; things just happen, and we invest those events with meaning ourselves. That’s part of what humans do: find patterns and create meaning. (And readers kind of like it when characters have some kind of motivations, and appear to possess agency.) If pressed, I’ll admit that I think the universe is a blind clashing indifferent machine. But it’s also often a beautiful machine.

How do your dreams influence you? Do you draw inspiration from them for your writing?

I seldom take inspiration from dreams. My dreams are pedestrian: anxiety dreams of rotting teeth and endless corridors and uncontrollable cars, euphoric dreams of flying, the occasional bit of sex. Sometimes a striking image occurs and stays with me until I wake up. I have a story coming out in an anthology next year, “The Carved Forest,” that takes its central image from a dream, but that’s a rarity for me. You are now self-publishing your Marla Mason series. How does serializing the novel impact your writing process? How do you like having financial oversight of the project?

I’ve done a couple of serials in the past few years, and have something resembling a regular process now. I like to get at least six or eight chapters ready before I start, so I have a good sense of where the book’s going before I begin to post weekly chapters. (The inability to go back and revise substantively once a chapter is posted always weighs on my mind.) As long as I can stay a few weeks ahead of my posting schedule, I don’t stress myself out unduly, and there’s a nice energy to writing live without a net. But for my next serial, Grim Tides, I hope to have the whole book written before I start posting chapters in January 2012. (We’ll see if I manage to get it done.) Doing reader-funded books is interesting. For my first two serials, I just asked for donations, and the response was great. For Grim Tides, I did a Kickstarter fundraiser, essentially to see if I could get paid up front, and that worked well, too; I met my funding goal of $6,000 in about 13 hours, and was soon over-funded. My readers are incredibly generous, and I’m delighted that the internet has made it possible for me to continue the series for those fans who love it, even if the audience isn’t necessarily big enough to justify a major publisher continuing to publish the books.

Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. Before we conclude, could you tell us what is next for you?

Oh, many things. My standalone contemporary fantasy Briarpatch is out this fall from small press ChiZine Publications. Next year I have a couple of roleplaying game tie-ins coming out—sword and sorcery! One called Venom In Her Veins, and one called City of the Fallen Sky. (Both were ridiculously fun to write.) I plan to start serializing the next Marla Mason novel Grim Tides in early 2012, and I just signed contracts for a gonzo- historical steampunk-ish novel that doesn’t have a definite title yet. Wow. I don’t think I realized how busy I was before I wrote all that down!

Jennifer Konieczny hails from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. An alumna of Villanova University, she now pursues her doctorate in medieval studies at the University of Toronto. She enjoys working with fourteenth-century Latin legal texts, slushing for Fantasy Magazine, and scanning bookshelves for new authors to read. Feature Interview: Richard K. Morgan Andrew Liptak

Richard K. Morgan is a British author who is known for the blending of speculative genres in his work. His first novel, Altered Carbon (2002), featured a mix of noir detective fiction and cyberpunk, following Takeshi Kovacs as he navigated a web of conspiracies, Catholic religious convictions, and re-housed consciousnesses. The book was followed by Broken Angels, published a year later and also featuring Kovacs, taking on military science fiction and alien archeology. The trilogy was rounded out in 2005, with the publication of Woken Furies, where Kovacs meets his ultimate enemy: a copy of himself housed in a different body. Two stand-alone novels have likewise featured a blend of genres. Market Forces is a mix of bloody battle epic and corporate intrigue, set in a world where corporate raiders literally kill their competitors within a company. Thirteen (titled Black Man in the United Kingdom edition) follows a super soldier, Carl Marsalis, as he works to track down fellow rogue soldiers across the globe. Morgan’s work has attracted considerable acclaim within the genre: Altered Carbon won the Philip K. Dick Award, and Market Forces was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Thirteen won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Morgan’s first foray into fantasy began with The Steel Remains. It is the first book of his A Land Fit For Heroes series, a contemporary and violent take on the genre where a privileged yet savage soldier, Ringil Eskiath, finds himself in exile due to his sexuality. He inhabits a world still rocked by the aftermath of a devastating war and facing a prophecy that promises the coming of a dark lord. Although this is the stuff of high fantasy, the noir sensibility of Morgan’s past books flavors the series. The strong fight, the cunning scheme, and power and expediency always win out over idealism. The Steel Remains ends on an uncertain note, paving the way for the next entry of the series, The Cold Commands, which will be released this month.

Your first novel, Altered Carbon, made a bit of a splash in the science fiction world, and was followed up with several other science fiction novels (Broken Angels, Woken Furies, Market Forces and Thirteen). Why the switch to fantasy?

I think the decision itself was a mix of sheer Because-I- Can-ism (when you’ve had some success already, it’s relatively easy to persuade people—editors, publishers— to let you have a crack at something else) but also a growing desire to shake off some of the confines that my existing work was showing. Genre can, if you let it, have a fairly stultifying effect on your creativity, and it behooves anyone who’s serious about his or her writing (as opposed to just serious about making a living from it) to try to stay fresh. Taking a walk on the sword-wielding wild side seemed like as good a way of doing that as any. And on top of that, there was the fact that I’d been talking a good fight for some years in genre circles about importing the noir sensibility into a fantasy setting—it suddenly seemed like the right time to put my money where my mouth was, and see if it could be done. That said, I tend to see the switch as more a change of instrument than an actual shift in what I’m playing— electric guitar to mandolin, say, or tenor sax to trumpet. The thematic concerns and stylistic form of my work remained pretty much the same in The Steel Remains as they had been in the Kovacs novels or my other standalone SF—there’s just a different set of building blocks in play. And human nature being what it is—i.e. basically immutable—I can critique the political brutalism and stupidity of our times just as effectively from a mock-medieval context as I can using neon-shiny hi-tech futures.

There’s an ongoing argument about the place of genre in the speculative fiction community: Your books seem to defy genre, mixing cyberpunk with detective fiction and military science fiction with economics. What purpose does genre play a role when you set out to write a book?

For me, genre is an almost meaningless word. It’s a you- may-also-like short-cut at best, a marketing trick at worst, and I try as much as possible to ignore it in my own reading choices—I tend to prowl the whole bookshop looking at blurbs rather than stick to any one section, and I apply the same logic to the review section of the paper. When it comes to my own writing, I’ll readily make use of the furniture of any given genre if I like it or can see a use for it, but I rarely if ever consider what genre I’m actually writing in. There’s been, for example, some dispute over whether The Steel Remains is “really a fantasy novel”—whatever that means—and it leaves me completely nonplussed. I mean, who fucking cares? Is it any good, did you enjoy it, would you try something else by the same author? These are surely the relevant questions to ask about a novel, not whether it falls within some arbitrary filing sub-category or not.

Each of your books has a healthy dose of cynicism: The Steel Remains sees one of Ringil’s lovers hauled off for death while Ringil himself is spared for political reasons.

In the end you can only write what you’re moved to write (unless you’re just a hack, of course), and that has to come through the filters you apply when you try to make sense of the world. Cynicism—or, I’d argue, simply sober realism—is a major factor in how I personally do that. I wouldn’t know how to write anything more pastel-shaded or whimsical. That said, I like to think there’s a certain amount of black humour in my books, and that too is wired pretty deeply into my outlook.

Economics play a notable role in your novels, as well as geopolitics. How important do you feel this is in a speculative fiction novel? Is there any difference between its use in fantasy and science fiction?

There’s really no reason there should be (such a difference). Doesn’t matter if you’re living in a colony on Mars or a castle in some mock-Medieval context—people have to make a living, and economics is simply the name we use for how that works out. So I’d say economics is as important in spec fic as in any other kind of fiction—it is one of the basic underlying structures of human civilization, so any fiction written about humans pretty much has to have some economics in it.

Market Forces in particular seems to be particularly relevant right at this moment: Do you have any thoughts on the current health of the global economy?

Yes, it does rather seem as if we’re living through the domino recessions at the moment, doesn’t it! Perhaps I can finally persuade someone to get on and make the movie now . . .

The Steel Remains’s main protagonist, Ringil Eskiath, is gay, in a world that isn’t accepting of his sexuality, a world that goes to harsh measures to discourage it. How far can he push the boundaries, and how far can he go in this world?

As far as the steel on his back will carry him, and that’s really a central point of the narrative. I remember seeing a demonstration of katana strokes a couple of years ago in Australia, and being very struck by the way the demonstrating student stated the philosophy of the blade. He said—I’m paraphrasing somewhat here—that the katana represented (among other things) freedom, because if you were prepared to both kill and die with the blade, then no man could ever make you a slave. Now that came a little too late to make it into The Steel Remains, which had already been published by then, but I felt that it summed up very neatly what Ringil is about. He lives in a world where power grows— paraphrasing again!—from the steel you carry, how well you use it, and whether you are prepared to die with it in your hand. Gil’s noble status buys him a certain amount of leeway, his reputation a certain amount more, but in the end it’s his willingness to fight and die at the drop of a glove—tempered in the crucible of the war just gone— that really lets him get away with behaving the way he does. What other authors do you count amongst the influences upon your writing and why?

Almost impossible to answer that one concisely. William Gibson is always the first name on my lips—it was his Sprawl stories that really fired me up and showed me the kind of thing I wanted to write, way back when I was starting out. There was a superbly gritty underbelly feel to that stuff. But equally, I got an early introduction to cynicism and violence in SF through the works of Poul Anderson, who I’d been reading since I was barely eleven years old—I loved the whole rotten-to-the-core political expedience and weariness of his Dominic Flandry sequence, as well as a whole bunch of his stand-alone novels for the intrinsicly messy humanity he always brought to the table. And of course it was Anderson who wrote what is probably the definitive sword and sorcery novel, The Broken Sword. After that—well, take your pick; I always liked Bob Shaw’s grumpy middle-aged engineer heroes for their gruff cynicism; I enjoy M. John Harrison’s beautifully rendered prose and doggedly grim outlook on life, whether it be in a fantasy setting or not; I was a big fan of Michael Moorcock’s incredibly prolific fantasy output, most notably, I think, his High History of the Runestaff. And this is without even starting in on the noir influences—guys like James Ellroy, Lawrence Block, Pete Dexter, James Lee Burke, Jim Thompson, Walter Mosly, the list goes on . . .

Takeshi Kovaks, Carl Marsalis, and Ringil Eskiath are three of your main protagonists, and all are fairly dark characters, anti-heroes each. Takeshi shoots people in the head to deprive their consciousness of rebirth, Carl is racking up the death toll from chapter one, and Ringil snaps children’s necks like it was nothing. How do you see the role of heroics within a society that creates these people?

I think that as a culture we have spent in the coin of heroes so lavishly over the last few decades that the whole currency is pretty much devalued. Our heroic figures have become bland, tame, teen-friendly, moral, and middle- American to a fault. Above all, they are safe. Great prowess in violence is seen as a handy little sub-set of skills that you can switch on and off as required, and the rest of the time you just revert to being this likeable average guy getting on with his white-picket-fence average existence. You pick up the sword and defeat the evil enemy, then when the war is done you go back to doing whatever cuddly things you were doing before—it’s essentially the lie we told, most recently, about all the men who fought and came back from the second world war, the lie whose rancid expedience it took the Vietnam debacle to really expose to public awareness. Now, thankfully, we all know what a dangerous lie it is. Violence scars, it disfigures lives and souls, whole societies and generations sometimes, and there is no going back from it. And the individuals who excel at it are anything but safe to have around afterwards. That’s a truth I try to come back to constantly in my fiction, and guys like Ringil are the result.

How do you think Ringil Eskiath and Takeshi Kovacs would get along if they found themselves in the same room?

Badly, I imagine. Kovacs is from slum roots, Ringil is a noble, so there’d be that antagonism right from the start. Ringil is very mannered and wears his social status, for all he sneers at it, like another kind of weapon; whereas Kovacs generally derides any kind of affectation and has a cordial dislike of rank in any form. I don’t know, maybe if you could get them on the subject of what bastards their fathers were, you might get them to calm down and not kill each other. Then again . . .

Your main characters are often brash and violent— and ready for violence: Do you worry that your characters are too similar to one another?

I suppose there’s the makings of a fair cop there, yes. But I can’t honestly say it worries me. By definition, you need a tough hard-boiled hero if you’re telling a tough hard- boiled tale, and those are the kind of tales I like to tell. So, within parameters, you are going to see certain similar qualities emerge in the protagonists of those stories. But I’d like to think that within that set of tropes, I lay out a somewhat fresh stall each time—as we’ve just noted, Kovacs and Ringil are almost mirror opposites in social terms and personal disposition. And despite some superficial similarities in occupational training, Marsalis and Kovacs aren’t all that alike either; Marsalis is a far less fucked up human being, he’s done far fewer awful things than Kovacs and is far more tied into his own humanity; he was carefully nurtured as child (albeit somewhat roughly), whereas Kovacs was brutalized and left to his own devices. Marsalis is looking for a way out, whereas Kovacs has long ago come to terms with what he is.

Your name comes up often when people are discussing “new” fantasy authors: George R.R. Martin, Scott Lynch, and Patrick Rothfuss, among others. How do you see the types of stories in fantasy as it exists now, as opposed to those stories published forty to fifty years ago?

Truth is, I don’t read a lot of fantasy, so I’m far from ideally placed to judge. But honestly, I think surprisingly little has changed. Scott Lynch’s stuff, for example, for all its visible debt to Joss Whedon, really isn’t far off what Fritz Leiber was doing with Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser back as early as 1939. A lot of the original Conan tales, penned in the thirties, show levels of atheistic nihilism that would make any modern writer proud. And my own attempt at fantasy owes an acknowledged debt to Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword, which is from 1954, the same year Tolkien published The Fellowship of the Ring. As for George R. R. Martin, well, he is something of a milestone in terms of sheer imaginative scope, true, but the more modern language and cynicism he deploys in his Song of Ice and Fire sequence shows up at least a decade earlier in Glen Cook’s Black Company and M. John Harrison’s Viriconium stories, and probably would have had plenty of even earlier antecedents if the obscenity laws of past generations had been a little less hysterical. Contrary to popular belief, dark and gritty isn’t a new dynamic—what’s really changed is the leeway we now have to express those strains using much more explicit language and content. Simply put, we get to publish what previous generations of fantasists would never have been allowed to put on the page. But the basic elements, the tendency if you like—that’s always been there.

Is there anything that has really changed?

At the risk of generalizing vastly, I’ll stick out my neck and say that there seem to be two very broad—and conflicting—tendencies in genre, and probably in literature as a whole. One tendency leans in towards the real, attempts to interface with it, to imitate, engage with or otherwise interrogate the human condition. The other tendency does the reverse, it yearns away from human realities and prefers to take refuge in a wishful-thinking comfort model where things are the way we’d like them to be—rulers are kind and noble, enemies are external and easy to define, good triumphs over evil, we all live happily ever after. Fiction for small children, in other words. Now I hasten to add that those two tendencies are by no means clearly separated out. They can intermingle and co-exist in any given genre, in the work of any given author, even in the same novel. But the point is that both tendencies have been around forever—it’s changing social sanction and publishing mores, not changing genre, that has brought the darker, more realistic elements to the fore in recent years.

Where do you think fantasy (or speculative fiction in general) is headed in the next couple of years? Any predictions on major themes or attitudes?

Again, I really don’t feel that qualified to judge the fantasy side of things. But I imagine that we’ll go on in much the same way as we always have, with those two tendencies I mentioned continuing to grapple for dominance—and the Comforting Retreat tendency probably continuing to dominate. Sure, you’ll have plenty of people to plough the furrow Martin has made so successful, but at the same time, I look to the multiplexes and I see no sign that people’s need for comfort fiction has decreased. Look at the Solomon Kane movie, and how shabbily its initial conceit—fight evil with evil—fell apart within the first twenty minutes. Likewise, I’ll be seriously shocked if much of the original Conan’s grim self-interest and desolate religious outlook made it into the movie version. Truth is, there are probably always going to be far more people who want to escape from real contexts than there are those who want to engage with them.

Your next book, The Cold Commands, is the follow-up to The Steel Remains. What can fans expect to see in the next installment of the series?

We’re back with Ringil, Archeth, and Egar, but it’s the best part of a year later and so they’ve all moved on, in much the directions implied by the end of the last book. The Cold Commands is quite a bit longer than The Steel Remains, and that’s given me a lot more scope, so we’ll be covering quite a lot of ground. The substantial bulk of the story takes place in Yhelteth, at the heart of the Empire, but there are a number of other settings too, another merchant city in the League, a trip out to An Monal and the ruins of the Kiriath settlement there, a couple of voyages by ship. And of course Ringil continues to spend time in the Aldrain marches, flirting with the destiny Seethlaw always implied he owns.

Between Altered Carbon and Broken Angels, there are some major changes in genre: detective noir to alien military SF. Will there be something similar happening between The Steel Remains and The Cold Commands?

Not really. I’d say that Cold Commands is probably more decidedly urban than Steel was, something that I’m very pleased about, because it was always part of the noir brief I gave myself for the series. But apart from that, the ground is very much the same. I’ve basically taken the implications contained in The Steel Remains, and run with them.

What’s the latest word on the Altered Carbon movie? Still happening? Any chance of similar treatment for The Steel Remains?

The original option with Warner Brothers and Joel Silver lapsed a couple of years ago, but it’s been taken up again, this time by a high-profile Hollywood screenwriter and a production company that they’re tied in with. I’m not currently at liberty to name names, but suffice it to say that both the writer and the production company have had some very major successes over the past few years, and have shown huge enthusiasm for the project, so I’m very excited. Expect an announcement in the not-too-distant future. As for The Steel Remains, well, the screenwriter in question has confessed to being a huge fan of all my books and would love to bring both Steel and Black Man to the big screen at some point in the future, so who can tell? Just keep your fingers crossed!

Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He has written for such places as io9, Tor.com, SF Signal, Blastr, Kirkus and Armchair General. He can be found over at his site and at @AndrewLiptak on twitter. Absolute Zero Nadia Bulkin

“If it were only you naked on the grass, who would you be then? And I said I wasn’t really sure, but I would probably be cold.” —Phillip Glass, “Freezing”

When Max Beecham was eight years old, his mother Deena (delirious from antihypertensives) gave him a Polaroid and then lay down on the carpet behind him. Inside the white border of this photograph lurked a thing with the naked body of a gaunt man and the head of a dark, decayed stag. It sat on a tree stump the way neighborhood men sat on bar stools, surrounded by a cavalry of thin, burned trees. Max almost recognized this nightmare place as Digby Forest, a festering infection of wild land on the edge of Cripple Creek. In the dusk the image was shadowless and tense, as if that black-eyed Stag-Man meant to lunge out of its frame. As if it was only waiting for Max to look away. “What is it?” Max asked. “That’s your father,” said Deena. She had her back to him. Her thin cotton dress stretched to translucency across her long torso. He could see the shape of her vertebrae. “You’re always asking, so there he is.” He thought she was joking and he turned to prod her, but she had fallen asleep. He put the Polaroid face down on the carpet and pressed his fingers against his eyeballs. It was the first thing in his life that he wished he could unsee. He would hear later that time heals all wounds, but the deep slice in his heart that this picture created never got any better. The next summer Max tried to walk Fallspur Bridge for the right to join the Petrinos on the other side, but halfway across and already wobbling, he looked up and saw the Stag-Man crouched in the trees behind the Petrinos. And the bastard never left him alone; the Stag-Man watched him try to impress the slouching upperclassmen, the tall blonde girls in athletic shorts and shirts that claimed them as the property of Jesus. He might win himself a little respite—when he was concentrating on a math exam, for example—but as soon as his mind unclenched, the Stag-Man would be there: looking in the window, waiting behind the fence. During this time, his mother went on disability. She nearly drowned in the bathtub twice—when he pulled her out she said she was trying to “get back to herself.” This was a lie. He knew that she was trying to get back to that thing, that Stag-Man. “Why did you tell me?” he’d shout at her when he got older. By that time she had confined herself to her rocking chair, with her gaze fixed on their lopsided black locust tree. No, it was not their tree—it was older than he was, and he knew she wouldn’t have planted it. It was no one’s tree, and maybe that was why it had grown up crooked. “Why didn’t you just keep this shit to yourself? You could have lied to me, you know. It’s not like I would’ve known.” Max flapped the Polaroid in her face—his mother did not respond. He had tried to destroy the photo but every time he took it to the backyard with a lighter, some bony inner feeling stopped him. So it lived in his closet in a taped-up shoebox, supposedly contained. “Why did you tell me!” he shouted. “Come on, mom!” The urge swelled to seize her and wrestle her to the floor —anything to break her out of the stasis that had closed in around her like a hard coat of amber. He grabbed the chair instead, swung it around so that she couldn’t look at the tree anymore. He immediately wished he hadn’t. Her miserable, time-eaten gaze felt like the swing of an iron bar. “You didn’t like what you saw?” She was breathing shallowly. When she sighed it sounded like wind rushing through a pipe. “Bummer.” She and the tree died that winter. The end was very hard. Deena fought the hospital staff with long-dormant claws whenever they rolled into her room with needles and droopy bags of liquid medicine. “Fuck your poison,” she would say. The hospital was two hours away from Cripple Creek, and the neighbor who drove Max in and out of the city always fishtailed on the icy roads. The flat white landscape would spin past with no beginning and no end; the neighbor would mumble obscenities, and Max would think ecstatically about dying. At first the tree went on without her, its branches twisting round its trunk, but Max burned it down. Max’s grandmother, Rowena, came down from Vertigo to see him through high school. She shed no tears for the one she called her lost child. “She was gone by the time she walked out of those woods pregnant with you,” said Grandma Ro. “So I’ve been mourning your whole life.”

Years later, after Grandma Ro had passed on (she died in her daughter’s bedroom; Max taped the door shut afterwards, designating the room “condemned”), Tom Lowell caught something large and alarming on the edge of his property. By then Max was twenty-six and working at Ticonderoga Mills, buying wheat from the ragged, leftover farms of Cripple Creek. Whenever prices dropped, Max would see them leaning heavy against their trucks, eyes to the dirt. Sometimes they cussed him out. Max reasoned that they shouldn’t have been clinging to their backwards lifestyle anyway. He hated their excuses: Their fathers’ fathers had cultivated that land for generations, and now the grains were in their blood. “What if your fathers’ fathers have been killing for generations,” he would mutter to himself. “What then?” Then you strip yourself down to the smallest, purest molecules and rebuild yourself up to something better, that’s what. Max thought that he had pretty well succeeded at this—at least he did not see those eyes in the mirror anymore, at least he had a job and a girl and a house (his mother’s house, but still)—but then Tom Lowell started running around town saying that he was charging twenty dollars to see the Meanest Looking Thing on Earth, this Devil’s Child. Max began to feel the Polaroid staring at him from inside the shoebox again. Nothing very strange had happened in Cripple Creek in the years between Max’s birth and the capture of what Tom Lowell christened The Creeker—aside from the woman who ran the plant nursery, Chastity Dawes, getting pregnant out of nowhere and giving birth to a small fawn. The hospital had the creature euthanized, despite the mother’s objections. But other than that, life in Cripple Creek had been normal. Progress continued apace. The racetrack, the shopping mall, the microbrewery. They were on track to match Grand Island in annual revenue. God knew theirs was a community on the rise. Kevin from work wanted to see The Creeker. He wanted to see it so he could laugh at it, and at Tom Lowell. “It’s probably just some two-headed cow,” Kevin said. “Lowell’s a nut, you know. I heard he went hunting for some Demon Razorback of Arkansas once.” Of course Max knew what this Creeker was, in the bowels of his soul. It was the Stag-Man. It was his . . . And then he would have to go to the restroom and cradle his head between his knees. Maybe he shouldn’t have gone. On the drive over, his stomach was flipping so badly that he couldn’t talk. But it would have looked strange if he’d bowed out—he’d gone to mock the “crop circles” out at Rookshire, after all—and besides, his depraved subconscious just couldn’t let go of the image of Tom Lowell’s farm and the captive creature behind its fence. In the days before they finally went to the farm his world had warped into a tunnel, a vortex like the one at Rapid City, with all furniture and foliage blurring together and everything hurtling toward a pair of eyes like lumps of coal. Caridee Lowell, sixteen years old with eyes sunken from methamphetamine, sold red tickets out of a tin lunchbox. “To your left,” she hissed after taking their bills. There was no need for directions; the bright yellow fireworks tent was visible all the way down Cahokia Drive. The tent was surprisingly quiet. The dozen people gathered inside would knock heads to whisper to each other, but all their eyes were fixed upon one location: a metal crate on the far side of the tent, large enough to shuttle a cow. “It’s one of Murray’s old transport cages,” Tom Lowell said. Several years ago there had been a short, ugly attempt at a town zoo—both the Ag Department and Fish and Wildlife had to get involved. The surviving animals had all been taken away, supposedly, but one reasonable theory argued that this Creeker was some mutated, mutilated escapee. Angry with man. Hungry for revenge. An old story. “It’s for handling wild animals, so don’t worry. He won’t getcha.” And there, in the cage, was the Stag-Man. After years of staring at a three-inch image in a palm-sized Polaroid, its immense size overwhelmed Max. He would have needed to stoop to get inside that cage, but the Stag-Man had to sit, cramped, its knees to its chin. Its four-foot antlers flared out from its cervine head like skeleton- wings. Max could see immediately that it was too big for this cage, too big for this tent. Its skin was loose—it was not feeding enough. His slow-burning father, the monster. The captive. Why was it just sitting there? What was it thinking? Dread crawled up his throat. He felt fear, yes, but also the early twinges of sympathy. Max and Kevin heard the nervous mumbling as they pushed to the front—”Where the hell did that thing come from?” “What’s it doing here?”—but no one wanted to answer, because no one really wanted to know. Sometimes after they asked these questions they would cough and pat their chests, as if they had accidentally invited themselves down some terrible internal rabbit hole. The ones that simply said, “I don’t know what to say” fared better. Kevin whispered “No fucking way” with his eyes glazed, and Max was thinking, “Father.” Up close the scent of rank earth nearly knocked them down. Max could barely believe the Stag-Man was real and tangible and capable of bleeding—it had made so much more sense as a dream-spirit, his mother’s Boogeyman. He stared at the beast for fifteen minutes, helpless, trapped like a rabbit in a snare. He thought it was because the Stag-Man knew him as a son but post- tent conversation would reveal that everyone in the Creeker’s presence thought it was staring them in the eye, holding them rapt. A little girl standing beside Max clutched the bars as if she was the one imprisoned. She was watching the Creeker breathe, so it seemed, and sobbing quietly the entire time.

There were casualties. Unlike the Big Eats Barbecue, Tom Lowell’s show did not spread joy. People left the tent either stone silent or pissing mad, bickering about “that one night in Reno” and “what you did with my father’s money.” The biggest casualty that night was Pastor Connor from the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church. He had come to pressure Tom Lowell into closing down the show, but of course had to look at the exhibit first. It was a mistake. After staring at the Creeker for several minutes he ran out of the tent, shoving his own parishioners aside, and collapsed on the grass with his hands to his heart. Kevin called an ambulance and Elise Buckley fed him aspirin, but it was too late. “Ah, geez,” said the kid in the paramedic uniform. “I told him not to go.” “You’ve seen the Creeker?” asked Kevin. “I went opening night,” said the paramedic-kid. “I was freaking out for a whole week. Kept thinking about all the squirrels I shot coming back rabid and biting me in my sleep.” He tried to laugh. “Fucking weird, right?” After Pastor Connor was lifted into the back of the ambulance the rest of them stood in a circle with their hands in their pockets. They were more distressed by the Creeker than by Pastor Connor’s death, which seemed like a just response to that monstrous aberration. A small child screamed from some parked car—they glanced up, but dropped their chins when they heard the stern voice of a disciplinarian-father. Finally Elise Buckley lit a cigarette and started to talk. “I guess it was a bad summer, if that thing’s wandering out of Digby this time of year. Isn’t that what happens with bears? If they’re scavenging in October, you gotta figure it’s because they didn’t get to feed enough in the summer. Feeding on what, I don’t know. People’s lost dogs, I guess.” After this little burst they fell quiet again, thinking about dogs they had lost, and horses that had supposedly run away, and then the really unpleasant stuff: the missing people. There had been no more than a handful in the past ten years, but how the news stations had dwelled upon those unlucky few. Everyone around for the last census remembered at least one. Even the missing migrant workers were considered tragedies. They must be cold out there, people said. “That thing’s not ours,” Kevin mumbled into his gloved hands. “It’s not our problem.” Elise shook her head, took a big drag, and walked away. “I really hate all of you people.” Then it was just Max and Kevin watching for shadows on the darkened grass. “I saw a chupacabra once,” whispered Kevin. “I was visiting my grandparents in Texas. It was the middle of the night when I heard it howling. It killed my favorite goat.” The Stag-Man was some kind of witch, Max decided. In all the years that he had known these people, nothing else had warped them so. He knew what Kevin and Elise and everyone else was feeling—like they were wobbling on the lip of a great dark funnel—because he had suffered the power of the Stag-Man’s gaze every night since he was eight. Max wanted to tell them this, but like hell would he admit to his friends and neighbors that he shared any blood with that thing in Tom Lowell’s cage. He had a brief moment of panic: what if Kevin saw some familial resemblance between his long features and that of the Stag-Man? He frantically rubbed his face. He was feeling for rough fur and a soft wet snout, but all he got was dry human skin. When he was twelve he had asked his mother if he had anything in common with the Stag- Man, and now he heard her reply: ”Believe me,” she’d said, with a snort, “You’re nothing alike.”

Mallory Jablonski taught fifth grade at Cripple Creek Elementary. It was the same school Max had attended, but they were not schoolyard sweethearts—she grew up in Lincoln, and she had the straight teeth and designer jeans to prove it. She’d been on a school dance squad, which Max understood to be a mythical troupe of hot girls in black leotards that would never be permitted at Cripple Creek High, where even the cheerleaders wore turtlenecks and chastity rings. Mallory had been on a class trip to New York. She liked sushi. All sorts of things, and still she radiated that earthy glow of harvest corn. Mallory was cultured; Mallory was genuine. He drove her around town slowly, with the windows down, because damn if his classmates wouldn’t be surprised that he managed to catch a girl like that. Mallory always laughed when they stopped at intersections. “Traffic’s real bad today,” she’d say. It was funny because there was no such thing as traffic in Cripple Creek. When the Creeker became the talk of the town she asked him to take her to see it. “All my students are talking about it,” she said. “Have you seen it?” He thought of the Polaroid. The slow-burning eyes. “Yeah.” “And? Is it scary?” She bit her nails, grinning. She probably thought it was some pathetic artifact of rural Americana, a cousin of cow-tipping and haystack rides. “No, don’t tell me. I want to see it myself.” Max took her to the Lowell farm that Friday. The carnival tent was fraying now that the first of the cold fronts were moving in. Mallory had been talkative as they crossed the pesticide-yellow grass, but in the presence of the Stag-Man, she approached the cage as if in a trance. She knelt down at the bars the way she did at Mass and looked soulfully, silently into the Stag-Man’s eyes. Max felt acid bubble into his throat. They were exchanging secrets and truths, he could just tell. She was in communion with the same incubus that had seduced his mother. He would have yanked her out of that deferential pose by her hair, but Mallory stood up just as he was reaching down. She stuffed her hands in her sweatshirt pockets. “Let’s go, I want to go,” she mumbled. “I don’t feel well.” A throng of preteens that had set up a devotional camp outside the Stag-Man’s cage leered up at them. They looked like jackals in black clothes. “Ooh, yeah,” said one of them. “Run along and hi-i-ide.” Max sharply told them to go home—trying to sound like a responsible man, even though his own father was a freak in a cage— but they sang back, “This is home.” He and Mallory walked back to his truck with his arm around her shoulders. He could feel her trembling. It was a cold sort of relief to see that she was suffering instead of enraptured. She was nothing like his mother, he told himself. She was an innocent. Virtuous. Competent. “I shouldn’t have brought you here. This stuff’s no good.” He bit his lips, in guilt. Mallory shook her head absently but didn’t speak until they were in the muscular safety of the Chevrolet Colorado, barreling down Cahokia Drive, listening to Doctor Touchdown on KMKO Radio. “I used to have an imaginary friend.” He turned the volume down. “Huh?” “But I don’t know if she was really imaginary. She came out at night, from the wetlands. She would tap on my window. Glowing like a gravestone. No one else saw her but . . . saw her more and more after my sister died.” Max hadn’t known about this sister. “I think she wanted me to go away with her. She said there was a castle under the water at Napoleon Pond. Oh, God.” She slumped forward in the passenger seat as if something had punched her in the stomach. Max wondered if this was why she could not sleep facing any windows, why she slept in the pitch-black dark with the sheets over her head. “I never told anybody. But I guess seeing that thing on the farm . . . brought it all back.” She looked over at him plaintively. “You think I’m a freak, don’t you? Just say it. I know that’s what you’re thinking.” It was a strange moment. He would dwell upon it later to try to determine what had possessed him to tell her the truth. Maybe he was shocked that a girl as presentable as Mallory could feel his bewildered shame. Maybe he thought shared alienation would deepen their bond. “I don’t think you’re a freak,” he said. “Something even stranger happened to me.” She raised a pale brown eyebrow. “You know that . . . thing on the farm?” She nodded. “Well, that’s my father.” He immediately exploded in terrified laughter. The sensible, screaming part of him wanted to backtrack before things got any worse—tack on a quick “Holy shit, just kidding!”—but when he opened his mouth only nonsense dribbled out. “My mother was a strange lady. She was the kind of person that chased tornadoes, you know? No jeep or cameras or nothing, she’d just head out the door and run after them. She’s dead now. Died a long time ago.” Mallory was trying to smile. But she was waiting for that “just kidding!” and when it didn’t come—when every word that rolled down his chin was a confirmation of the wretched truth—Mallory gathered up the handles of her purse and said to take her home. She looked like she was about to jump out of the truck. “I have a lot of quizzes to grade,” she said. He reached over, teeming with concern, but Mallory recoiled from his hand. It was as if she was saying, No—I never touched you. I disown you. I don’t know who you even are. The road dwindled. Her driveway was covered in fallen leaves. “Mallory,” he said, hoping to remind her of what they had been sharing for the past six months. “It doesn’t change anything.” Mallory’s eyes widened; she was probably remembering the same six months in retrospective horror. “I can’t do this, Max.” The passenger door swung open and the cold rushed in. “I can’t do this now.” And then she was gone. He had wanted to marry her. He had visualized himself walking into her parents’ house in the old part of Lincoln, all brick walls and roundabouts and leafy trees, and introducing himself to her father the banker. “My name is Max,” he would have said, and there would have been no doubt.

He started dreaming about hurting Mallory. He didn’t enjoy these dreams, but they satisfied the same ache in his belly that years earlier made him want to shake his mother until her head popped off. The Stag-Man was there too, watching and waiting, and after the floor swallowed Mallory’s ruined body, the Stag-Man would remain: bright and powerful and merciless. A fire in the woods, an old whispered force. Sometimes the Stag-Man called him “son.” Sometimes Max would curl around the creature’s feet because in the dark the Stag-Man was all there was to the world. With its crown of antlers it looked like some wise and wizened tree. And sometimes when Max woke up he would go to the bathroom mirror and rub his forehead to see if his own velvet-covered antlers were growing in. Tom Lowell had cut the entrance fee in half. Word had spread of the Creeker’s negative side effects —nausea, heartburn, indigestion—and now the farmer stood alone in the middle of his driveway, hands on his hips, watching for vehicles on Cahokia Drive. “You think it makes ‘em feel better to think this stuff doesn’t exist?” he asked Max, cocking his head, chicken-like. “Hey, isn’t this your third time?” Like the Stag-Man was some ride at Worlds of Fun. Three drunks in Husker windbreakers were tossing peanut shells at the Stag-Man. They were giving themselves points for contact: five for the body, ten for the head. They did not deign to speak to it even in the way they spoke to their dogs, even though the body they shot at was just a taller, stronger version of their own. Max felt a pang of defensive anger and shame, but the Stag-Man seemed to be smiling back at them. Not that its deer mouth could grin, but its eyes were gleeful. Max crept up to the cage. It was filthy, and swarming with bronze cockroaches. He sensed the Stag-Man watching him and his legs wobbled—the last two times he’d been in the tent he’d been able to hold steady, but not now. Moving his center of gravity closer to the earth quelled a little bit of nausea, but still he had to ask the question. “Do you know me?” A peanut shell hit the back of his head. “That’s ten for me!” shouted one drunk. “Get out of the way!” said another. Max hissed at them and did not move. Instead he eased his hands between the bars, gingerly laying them on the floor of the cage. A cockroach ran over his empty ring finger and down his sleeve, but the Stag-Man was silent. Max swallowed. Of course it didn’t know him from Adam—God knew how many women from Cripple Creek had gone running into its forest on summer nights. He took out his wallet, and a small secret photo he kept behind his ID. A woman with coiffed black hair and a red Christmas sweater gazed up and out with gorgeous cat- eyes. She was a little drunk but still healthy then, surrounded by cheap tinsel. “This is my mother. Twenty- seven years ago, you . . . ” The Stag-Man looked at the photo and curled its lips back, showing its teeth. Those teeth were pointed. Max shuddered, and one of the drunks started to retch. At first the man spat bile and beer, but upon reaching into the back of his throat, began to pull out a long and thin industrial wire. Max should have gotten fired that week—not that he would have cared—because he couldn’t focus on his paperwork. The window behind his desk let in too much light and too much landscape. Cripple Creek seemed filled with broken pre-war churches and painted-over signs: the skeletons of older towns. No matter where he went—the Kwik Shop, the liquor store—these battered, ghostly layers peeked through the concrete he walked upon. “You remember that lady Chastity Dawes?” Kevin glanced at him over the crest of a golden taco. Max had tried to bring up the chupacabra, but Kevin would always pretend to be choking on something or getting a phone call. “The one that gave birth to a deer?” “Yeah. Whatever happened to her? I know the Gordons own the nursery now.” “She killed herself, man. Well, ‘died of exposure.’ But when you ditch your car off Highway 2 in the middle of a snow storm so you can go walking through a corn field, I don’t know how you call it anything else.” Kevin shrugged. “I guess once you’ve given birth to a monster, what the fuck else are you going to do?” Max tried to picture those corn fields. They were a grim sight in winter—the stalks either pale and withered or draped with silent, crushing snow. “Isn’t that right by Digby Forest?” “Hell if I know. I haven’t been there since elementary school.” “Field trip,” said Max. He remembered his own school-sponsored foray into Digby Forest—or rather, he remembered being terrified that he would see the Stag- Man. He was so frightened, so attuned to any blur of movement and any sound of breaking twigs, that he learned nothing at all about Nebraska’s native forests. And here Chastity Dawes had gone running toward this doom, just like his mother sinking in the bathtub. At the time he had thought, Is this world so bad? but maybe they were onto something. “She was going on a field trip.” “What?” The taco muffled Kevin’s words. “You know, Beecham, sometimes you freak me out.” He kept talking, but Max was looking out the window. Clouds had swooped in from the south in violent formation, armies of fists against armies of hammers. Something was on its way. Judging by the speed of his heartbeat, it was probably his fate.

Tom Lowell and his daughter Caridee were found murdered in their living room on Tuesday the 20th. Tom on the couch, Caridee on the floor, the television broadcasting an episode of the soap opera Coming Up Roses. To say murdered was to put it kindly: They had been disemboweled. The Creeker was gone, its cage bent open like a soup can. Relief washed over Cripple Creek, because people assumed that the malformed beast that shared their name had gone back to Digby Forest. They were duly sorry about Caridee, but at least nobody would have to see that damn thing again. Max alone knew that it was still in town, hiding in collapsed barns and hobbled school buses, and he lay awake at night waiting for it to come crawling through his window. The thought still made his skin crawl, but it was oddly reassuring to feel that he still belonged to someone, something. It was nice to know that he was still someone’s son. At Cabela’s, he looked at the Deer Head Mounts. There was a whole wall of them, right beside the Buffalo Mounts and European Mounts. Some had shoulders, some only necks. The replicas were cheaper, but the originals looked at Max with soft and sad fraternal recognition. They were kin to the Stag-Man, his father— only smaller, with fair and innocent faces. They did not look like monsters spat out of hell. They looked like the deer that the Deer Crossing signs warned of, the deer that lived in the narrow strips of woodland between the farms and the roads. He briefly imagined the heads of all the world’s beasts mounted upon a giant fortress wall. His own head was among them, bolted to a wooden slab. The sales clerk was rambling statistics. “That rack’s a 17-pointer, with a 30-inch spread. Came off an early season northern whitetail . . . ” “Can you take the skin off?” Max asked. The sales clerk looked shocked. “No . . . but we’ve got deer skin rugs.” They had grizzly skin rugs too, as well as wolf skin rugs and cougar skin rugs and muskox skin rugs and child-sized lynx and badger and beaver skin rugs. All had heads attached to their flat and floppy puppet bodies. Unlike the snarling predators—still fighting even in this state of preserved death—the buck’s mouth was stitched closed. “It’s got a canvas backing. Professionally taxidermied.” “I’ll take it,” Max said. That evening he sat on the couch and wrapped himself with the deer skin rug. The buck’s head sat upon his own—he had to slouch to keep it from falling down his back. His new skin was so suffocatingly warm that he turned off the heater. Then he exhaled, trying to feel comfortable. He dug his nails into the hide and imagined it to be his own. What were the odds, he wondered, of having been born into a human body? Maybe it was the wrong one. Maybe he should have been a ruminant all along, just like Chastity Dawes’ fawn. A door opened—judging by the hard slap of metal on wood, it was the screen door in the kitchen. He looked up. The Stag-Man, bloody-mouthed, stood in the doorway. Its antlers were scraping the ceiling. At first it was just breathing, staring; then, it came gliding forward, never raising its hooves off the fake wood-paneled floor. “Father,” mumbled Max, hoping that it would see him in his deer form. The Stag-Man did look into the false glass eyes of the dead buck, but quickly lowered its gaze to Max’s real eyes, all hazel and watery and bursting with nerves. That gaze reached right inside his head and rummaged around. Within this visual stranglehold the house changed and decomposed. Filth rose to the surface. He saw his mother creeping down the stairs out of the corner of his eye. Neither she nor his father saw each other. Her bloated lips called his name. After ten seconds, Max had to look away. The Stag-Man hovered above him, sniffing deeply, then withdrew with a grunt. It paused at the doorway. It was waiting, Max realized. It grunted again and Max got to his feet. They were sharing a floor now, father and son. It was like sharing an earth. How new this night-world was. A man with a flashlight could only point out the random human signposts that survived nightfall in the country—the gravel of a driveway, the lawn chairs on a porch. All else was lost in the dark and gnarly mass: the pulsing, growing stuff that flashlights could not bear to focus on. Max was in the thick of it now, this world without property fences (only land), without cars (only lights), without houses (only wood). He was not sure if he was running or drowning, and he had lost the deer skin somewhere back on Tenth Street. Sometimes he could throw himself fully into this night-run, lose himself in the muscle-searing pursuit of his Stag-Man father who did not run but madly leapt from things that used to be mailboxes to things that used to be trash cans. And then he would look down at his hands and see his pale, chilled human skin. It made his stomach fold. He was pushing so fast that the ground seemed to roll beneath him, so fast his mind tumbled like a whirligig. And all the while, deep welts grew on his skin where trees had clawed him. With blood in the air, the Stag- Man let out a trembling, hungry, open-throated howl. Max felt it in his spine, as deep and familiar as a knife in a wound. He almost stopped. The boy inside him wanted to crawl home. This is home, he told himself. The others would have found you out eventually. You would have started to stink. So don’t mourn. Don’t mourn.

Bill MacAtee was dead, but he was not the one the Stag- Man wanted. The Stag-Man had killed him with a teacher’s patience, lingering over the precise angle and depth of the slice across Bill’s stomach, encouraging Max to scoop out the viscera. Bill was the kind of asshole that used to drive around town calling quiet men fags, and Max (having been Bill’s target once or twice) tried to be glad that Bill was dead. And maybe he was, but not like that, not with long swaths of Bill hanging out and inviting flies, not so Bill could stare up at the clouds like a middle-schooler rolling his eyes. The Stag-Man had already moved onto the true object of its desire: the MacAtees’ sheepdog, groomed and collared with hair the color of a Holstein cow. It had come running after Bill, barking indignantly, but when the Stag-Man turned toward the dog with its branch-like arms outstretched and its dirty claws dripping with the master’s blood, the domesticated little creature buckled down, whimpering. At least the Stag-Man killed it quickly. Max wasn’t sure why—some hint of tenderness, or pity? The dog might have been wild, in another lifetime. After it collapsed, blood soaking its blue collar black, the Stag- Man squatted down and dug a hole beneath the dog’s ribs. Liquid gushed out along with a twitch and a squeak as if the little life was not quite gone. Max pressed his hands against his own belly. The Stag-Man pulled tendons and muscles and gelatinous organs out of this cavity like they were the treasures of the damn Sierra Madre, but all Max saw when the Stag-Man’s hands opened was inside-out-dog, all the wet under-the-skin shit that he didn’t want to see. And then the smell—putrid, sour, like drowned flowers—hit him. Max retched. He slapped his hand over his mouth so that when the salt bubbled up his throat he could chase it back down. When he looked up the Stag-Man was standing at full height. The burnt black eyes drilled down into him as if from the pinnacle of a grotesque tower. The steaming, dripping hand was still available; God only knew he tried to take it. His father was grunting at him, thrusting the hand forward, snorting. He had flashbacks of walking across Fallspur Bridge, and the sunburned children on the other side who screamed at him to hurry and cross. The plank wobbled. The world beneath, the great bottomless funnel, rocked and churned. His body failed him now as it had failed him then. The Stag-Man threw the innards at his heart and Max compulsively shuddered, trying to shake the wetness off without getting it under his nails. Maybe it was this final twitch that ruined it, because the Stag-Man turned then, growling: away from Max, back toward the wild tree line. Max hurried after, mewling like a lost animal. He had not realized until then how warm he had felt in his father’s presence. And then his father had him by the neck in a bristling, rough embrace. His ribs were groaning, but Max tried not to struggle. His mother had sometimes held him this way. “Come here. Oh God. Don’t cry.” A bark-skin hand clenched the roots of his hair—so tightly that he could feel his scalp peeling off his skull, tears shooting into his eyes, so tightly that he forgot all but this pain and an incomprehensible fear—and ripped Max away. Like a man pulling off a leech. A human would have been disemboweled and a fawn would have been taken along, but Max was just tossed into the winter grass, a formless mess not even a mother could love. It came down like an iron gate between them: You are nothing of mine. Max flinched and curled his muscles, trying to turn his trembling body into a fist. The Stag-Man was gliding away toward the foggy pines. “Don’t you dare walk away!” Max shouted. “Hey, you look at me!” There was no response. He remembered his mother sitting in her rocking chair, staring unshaken at the black locust tree. He could have set himself on fire and not drawn her eye—not until she coughed on his ashes would she realize that the skinny thing she sometimes called her child was gone. He grabbed Bill MacAtee’s shotgun, pulling back the cold, thick fingers one by one, and after another warning—another “Look at me!” —he fired it at his father. The cartridge opened a hole in the tawny hide of his father’s back. Blood-petals sprayed into the frosted dawn like a bridal bouquet, but for a full thirty seconds, the Stag-Man kept walking. What call could be higher than its own survival? Max’s eyes began to water and when he looked back after wiping his face, the Stag-Man was gone. A deflated lump so unlike the striking figure in his mother’s Polaroid lay in its place. The pines shook and Max hunched over, shivering. “Bill?” Caroline MacAtee stood on the back porch. Her trembling fingers rose to touch her mouth. Max could not tell—simply could not determine—whether she was staring at him or at the dead things gathered at his feet. “Everything’s okay!” Max shouted, raising the rifle. “It’s gone now, I took care of it!” Caroline MacAtee didn’t thank him—she backed into her house and slammed the door. But maybe he couldn’t blame her, because here it was starting to snow.

The wild had been tamed, and now they were losing visibility. Max was too busy clenching his teeth and the steering wheel to manipulate the windshield wipers, and he drifted toward what looked like a glory-white horizon before recalling fear and slamming on the brakes. He slid to a stop half-on, half-off the shoulder. “A fire out in Digby Forest . . . ” KMKO Radio was starting to cut out. “Not sure if they’re going to send the Fire Department on account of . . . hope it doesn’t come near us . . . ” On the other side of the road, a pudgy man in a green Parks and Recreation jacket stood next to a blinking truck. He was trying to shovel the remains of a very large piece of roadkill into the truck’s open bed. Black tarp was whipping in the wind. Max rolled down his window. “What is that?” he shouted. “Hell if I know,” the Parks and Recreation man shouted back. “Guy said it just showed up in the middle of the road, didn’t even try to get out of the way.” The corpse was the size of a small horse and covered with icy fur, but elephantine tusks protruded from the garbled carcass. “Sixth call we’ve had this hour. I didn’t even know we had these many animals to run down.” The Parks and Recreation man started laughing, then coughing. “You know there’s birds falling out of the sky by the race- track? Something in the weather, I guess.” Deena used to say that animals could tell when it was time to get the hell out of Dodge. “You’ll know when bad times are coming,” she whispered, “Because you’ll hear them howling.” Max closed his eyes. He never wanted to think of that name again. Never wanted to see that bewitched smile again. Stay dead, he thought. Stay dead. “You hear that Digby’s burning down?” Suddenly tired, Max rested his arms against the steering wheel. “Yeah, I heard.” “I hope they let it burn. That no-good place.” The man’s lower lip was trembling. “It’s just a breeding ground for monsters.” Burning the black locust tree had cauterized some of the wounds in his young heart. Maybe that was all Cripple Creek needed: a good cleansing burn, some scar tissue to seal away the unpleasantness. He nodded. “Get rid of it,” he said. “Nothing else you can do.” With growing anger, the Parks and Recreation man smashed his shovel against the unknown animal. The creature was fixed to the ice, more figurine than entity, too ugly and beaten to be mounted on somebody’s wall. Max looked away. Both eastbound and westward, cars were diving off the edge of the road into the white expanse. Max counted eight in all. Their doors were open, their seats were empty. He didn’t know where those drivers thought they were going—did they really think there was anything left to run away to? The world was smothered with ash and snow. Mallory’s fluorescent windows glared like the beacon of an arctic outpost, so harsh he had to squint. He rang the doorbell and listened to her slippered feet approach from the other side. Was she looking through the peephole? Did she see spatters of blood, any antler stubs? No—she was unlocking the dead bolt, unhooking the security chain. She opened the door, and he was surprised by how empty and sterile her home looked, like a hollow egg. Bare as the sky and the buried fields. No, not empty, he told himself. Safe from monsters. “Max?” She leaned her listless head against the door. “What are you doing here?” “I cleaned myself up,” he said. “I bashed in those demons. I dropped that baggage . . . feel lighter already. I’m good as new.” He realized that he could not feel his lips. But after all these years of feeling, he could use a little numbness. It was a small price to pay for the capacity to forget. “I want to start over. Please, Mallory. We can be happy, I know it.” Mallory’s sleepy blue eyes looked him up and down. She smiled faintly. As she parted her lips to speak the wind rose to an ear-splitting shriek, and all the sound in the world went out.

© 2011 Nadia Bulkin. Originally published in Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters, edited by John Langan & Paul Tremblay. Reprinted by permission of the author. Nadia Bulkin is a writer and International Politics M.A. student in Washington, D.C. Her focus is post-colonialism and governance in Southeast Asia. Her stories have also appeared in ChiZine, Strange Horizons, Ideomancer, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. More info is available at nadiabulkin.wordpress.com. Author Spotlight: Nadia Bulkin T.J. McIntyre

“Absolute Zero” is included in the anthology Creature! Thirty Years of Monsters, which is dedicated to stories about monsters. Why do people need monsters in their lives? What purpose do they serve within a given culture?

First and foremost, I think monsters serve as a means of social control, representative of both unsavory behaviors and unsavory punishments. Then there’s also the need we have for an “other” to define ourselves against. But monsters work in that sense because they’re alluring and mysterious and dangerous—get back, temptation, etc. I think monsters are also good for getting us to ask ourselves reflective questions: Why do we find this monstrous? Is the monster really so different from us? How do we treat monsters, and what does that say about us?

What, exactly, is the monster of “Absolute Zero?” It is clearly some sort of horned god figure, perhaps related to the Celtic figure Cernunnos? Or is it more of a traditional pagan figure, a masculine representation of the forest and the wild?

I think that he’s kind of a combination of Pan (as he appears in The Wind in The Willows, my favorite book from childhood) and the Forest Spirit from Princess Mononoke. He’s a representation of wilderness, nature, darkness, and all that is outside the sterilized, anesthetized world of Cripple Creek.

Speaking of horned gods, I’m going to quote from a Wikipedia article concerning the subject: “In considering the Horned God as a symbol recurring in women’s literature, Richard Sugg suggests the Horned God represents the ‘natural Eros,’ a masculine lover subjugating the social-conformist nature of the female shadow, thus encompassing a combination of the shadow and animus. One such example is Heathcliff from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Sugg goes on to note that female characters who are paired with this character usually end up socially ostracized, or worse—in an inverted ending to the male hero-story.” Would this apply to the creature in “Absolute Zero” in your opinion? How so? Very interesting, and yes, I think that would apply to the Stag-Man—clearly Deena Beecham and Chastity Dawes end up on the outside of society, not wanting to go back. It’s not so much about women being naturally closer to the wild—I don’t buy into that theory—as it is about men being able to cling to and derive satisfaction from the power and responsibility they have in normal human society. In Cripple Creek it’s the most vulnerable, least validated people who are the most drawn to the Stag- Man.

During your last interview here at Fantasy Magazine with Rae Bryant, you stated, “I think there’s a lot to be said for humanizing myths.” How would this apply to “Absolute Zero?”

Mythology is filled with children with one human parent and one supernatural one—like most of Zeus’s children. I actually came up with this story when I misheard some SyFy movie—there was a scene of a monster in a cage as part of a sideshow, then I heard a young man say, awkwardly, “Dad?” And I thought, “Wow, his dad is the monster in the cage? What would that be like?” That’s still one of my goals when writing stories—how would a human being really react to this situation? It’s about unpacking tropes, making them viscerally meaningful.

As a child, Max sees his father’s image inside a Polaroid. It is described as “ . . . a thing with the naked body of a gaunt man and the head of a dark, decayed stag.” Max is disturbed and haunted by this image. He grows bitter towards his mother, Deena, and asks her why she told him this creature was his father. Deena replies, “‘You didn’t like what you saw?’” Did she really expect her son to be happy with this revelation? Why would she be surprised that her son is disturbed by the knowledge that his father is a monster?

Well, she’s being somewhat sarcastic. Deena doesn’t see the Stag-Man as a monster, but she fully expects the average human to react negatively to the Stag-Man. Deena was changed by her encounter with him, and spends the rest of her life trying to get back to his world —she’s frustrated by everything in ordinary human society, and she shows Max the picture in a clumsy, even cruel attempt to “wake him up,” so to speak.

On your personal website, you state, “I write speculative fiction that I like to call ‘socio-political horror’—which means it’s dark/horror fiction very much infused with social and political problems and themes.” Why take this approach to writing fiction? How does “Absolute Zero” work as “socio-political horror” and what “social and political problems and themes” did you intend to explore when creating this piece of fiction?

My second passion is political science, so all my stories are narratives of power, of what it means when people are systematically allowed to impose pain on others, and of identity and difference. “Absolute Zero” was inspired by the movie Koyaanisqatsi, which depicts human life out of balance with nature. Cripple Creek is out of balance, and Max is out of balance, and their solution is to just destroy the part of their world that threatens what they consider “normal.” I’m also multiracial, and some of what Max goes through—particularly of his efforts to not only “fit in” but be a champion of his mother’s world, and then his father’s, and failing both times—was taken from my own experience as an Indo.

T.J. McIntyre writes from a busy household in rural Alabama. His poems and short stories have been featured in numerous publications including recent appearances in Moon Milk Review, M-Brane SF, The Red Penny Papers, and Tales of the Talisman. His debut poetry collection, Isotropes: A Collection of Speculative Haibun, was released in 2010 by Philistine Press. In addition to writing poetry and short fiction, he writes a monthly column for the Apex Books Blog and regularly contributes reviews for Skull Salad Reviews. The Downsides of Dating a God Genevieve Valentine

Despite the supernatural nature of the deistic pantheon (and their intramural dating scene), there’s a remarkable amount of god/human canoodling in the mythological tradition. Dating a deity has a certain ineffable appeal— the carefree demeanor, the kinky shapeshifting, the supernatural transportation options, the lure of immortality. However, it’s also one of the most dangerous extracurricular activities in which any legend-dwelling young person can engage, mythologically speaking. Before you get in over your head, consider these warnings against the biggest downsides of making eyes at the celestial sphere.

Unrequited Love Unrequited love is uncomfortable for everyone involved, and disrupts the world’s careful balance of woeful mix tapes. When half of this equation is a deity, there’s no way it’s going to end well. If you’re the piner, making the first move is strongly discouraged. Bodhisattva Quan Yin preferred death to marriage (and, given that she soothes the sorrows of all humanity, she’s probably too busy to date, anyway). Greek hunting-goddess Artemis alone could fill a quarry with the bodies of those who put the moves on her and failed. Actaeon was turned into a deer and torn apart by his own hounds just for laying eyes on her. When twin giants Otos and Ephialtes swore to kidnap her from Olympus and forcibly wed her, she changed into a deer and darted between them to trick them into killing one another with spears. (Sub-lesson: Don’t be a jerk.) If you’re the pinee, and there’s an amorous deity with his eyes on you, the outlook is even worse. (Universal rule of godly power: If it exists in nature, a mortal can be turned into it.) Your best options are to appeal to the deity’s spouse ASAP, and run for your life as soon as the spousal bickering begins, or to look as much like a tree as possible and hope they lose interest (A for effort, Daphne), but even then, with gods, there’s really no knowing.

Awkward Family Dinners So, let’s say you and the god of your choice are lucky enough to have a mutual attraction. Congratulations! Sadly, you’re still in the weeds; eventually, she is going to bring you home to meet the family. And you’re doomed. Pantheons the world over are heavy subscribers to the Keep It in the Family Newsletter. Even worse, these family ties are extremely flexible; what you think is your sweetheart’s mother Bastet might end up being his sister and, occasionally, his wife. And if you’re dallying with Vishnu, you might be able to fill a dining room with nothing but his own incarnations. However, pretty much anything would be better than a reunion in Asgard. Norse god Loki has an entire saga devoted to the time he crashed a dinner party and starting a flyting (a Ye Olde Insult Battle), reminding people of the loved ones he killed until finally they tied him to a rock with the entrails of his own son. Sometimes there just aren’t enough hostess presents in the world, you know? And there’s not even a reassurance that they can keep it in their intermythology pants: Egyptian and Syrian gods were often caught canoodling where both cults were prevalent, and the popular Isis made serious headway into Greece and Rome right through the age of Christianity. You’ll never be able to shake all those gods-in-law.

Two-Timers Of all the things deities are known for, fidelity is at the very bottom of the list, just below “excess ear hair.” If you’re dating one, be prepared for a lifetime of heartbreak. And while Zeus may be the most notorious of all gods ever in terms of stepping out on his wife—half the natural world exists because he couldn’t keep it in his pants and had to shapeshift his exes before Hera showed up, leading to one unlucky mistress staying a cow for years—there are several others hot on his heels. Loki, when not starting enormous fights in Asgard, fathered several children with mortals out of wedlock, and even birthed one—the eight-legged horse Sleipnir—while in the form of a mare, an indiscretion which disgusts his enemy Heimdallr . . . who’s the son of nine mothers, which is an infidelity issue we can’t even fathom. (The family tree problem is no joke.) The Celtic goddess Cliodna took numerous lovers, many of whom met unhappy ends, and for spite of whom, in some legends, she was banished to the sea. Meanwhile, her Greek cousin Aphrodite, goddess of love, made cheating on her husband an art form. To be fair, her husband was the plainest of the gods, and was chosen for her by Zeus to make the other gods stop fighting over the right to marry her. Zeus, of all the gods, should have known better than to think marriage stops outside romantic entanglements. Even if you take sex out of the equation, you might end up with an absentee deity who wanders around for years with twelve guys who can’t stop writing home about how much they love him: Jesus, you’re an awful boyfriend. And a faithful spouse could still make for some awkward moments—such as with the fertility god Min, whose defining feature in art is his erect penis, and in whose honor Egyptian youths had pole-climbing contests in a display of virility that they hoped would flood the Nile. (There’s a photo album to show the kids.)

Break-up Drama Here’s the rub: Even if it’s requited, and even if you manage to get past the family squabbles, and even if you forgive all the stepping out, your relationship is probably doomed. Every once in a while, you luck out and pull an Ariadne, who was discovered by the lovestruck Dionysus moments after being abandoned by her previous mostly- mortal lover. (Upgrade!) But that’s far from the rule, and if there’s one thing the gods really savor, it’s their break- ups. Often it’s a flat-out smiting. Sumerian goddess Inanna actually married the mortal Dumuzi, but when she returned from a period of captivity in the underworld, Dumuzi wasn’t in mourning for her. Inanna divorced him posthaste and condemned him to take her place in the underworld. Sometimes there’s a more roundabout end to a godly relationship. Mesoamerican goddess Mayahuel had a flirtation with Quetzalcoatl that ended when demons chased her down and tore her into hundreds of pieces. Quetzalcoatl’s apology: Burying the pieces in the soil, where the first agave plants sprouted. How . . . sweet. (But since agave could be distilled, Mayahuel eventually became the goddess of drunkenness, so you can always toss one back in her honor.) And even when your love is for real, the pantheon tends to conspire against you; Titan Eos accidentally cursed her mortal lover Tithonos with immortality sans youthfulness clause, which caused him to shrivel until he became a grasshopper. (Sorry, babe—my bad.)

Really, the more one looks across cultures, the more the stats on god-dating build up as overwhelmingly negative. The best thing you could do for self-preservation is to avoid extreme good looks, extreme boasting, or extreme heroism, and never even cast a glance at the skies. But if, after all this evidence to the contrary, you’d like to date a deity, go right ahead: You might be just foolish enough to make a good myth.

Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, was recently published by Prime Books. Her short fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from magazines such as Lightspeed, Fantasy Magazine, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Escape Pod, and in many anthologies, including Armored, Under the Moons of Mars, Running with the Pack, The Living Dead 2, The Way of the Wizard, Federations, Teeth, and The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, among others. Her story “Light on the Water” was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog at genevievevalentine.com. Unnatural Disaster Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Horizontal rain, darkness, and a nearly empty beach. Jaclyn Tadero trudged through the thick wet sand, listening to the ocean’s waves crash beside her. The Coast Guard helicopter flew overhead, its searchlights creating wide arcs of light over the emptiness. Tadero wasn’t sure if she should be grateful that this damn crisis had come in the middle of a storm or not. No one in his right mind would be on this beach in the middle of the night, but the storm was going to make things worse if it didn’t dissipate in a few hours. Her face was covered in rain. The thick army-issue rain slicker she’d bought shortly after becoming police chief of Whale Rock didn’t protect her face, not when she was walking directly into the wind. The slicker was keeping the rest of her dry, except for the part of her jeans that covered her calves. Her boots weren’t high enough to cover that part either. She would’ve been all right if she was walking to shelter. Which she wasn’t. She shouldn’t even be walking on the beach at the moment. No one should. If the sea receded quickly, she would be running for her life up the side of the nearby cliff. Theoretically she had a few more hours until the tsunami arrived, but she didn’t trust theories. Or maybe she did, since she was on this beach instead of one of the tsunami safe points. It was her job to be out here as long as she could. She was searching the beach for idiots. And she was searching it because of an idiot. At least, that was how she thought of Hamilton Denne. Until she stumbled over the body.

Denne had picked her up at her house six hours before. Tadero had been struggling into her uniform while listening to the least shrill news anchors out of Portland. They weren’t panicking, exactly, but they were a little too unhealthily involved. A massive earthquake had hit in middle of the Pacific, sending a tsunami in all directions. The tsunami would hit Japan and Hawaii and probably some other places. Tadero hadn’t paid attention to all the details—not that the possible death of thousands was a detail. No: She was paying attention to the part about the Oregon Coast —her coast—and the fact that it could get hit with a nine- foot wave. No one knew for sure. No one even knew when the wave would hit. The weather guy was doing the math, and he figured the wave would hit around dawn, if it hit at all. Tadero had been told when she started here, all of three months before, that tsunami alerts were often false alarms. Until the warning buoys in the Pacific gave their readings, no one knew exactly where a wave would hit or how big it would be. Until that point, every estimate was an educated guess. But it was better to be prepared, they said—they being the search-and-rescue guys who had given her the initial training. In fact, they said, being prepared was the only way to survive. Better to have a dozen false alarms than to lose half the town because she was too timid to give off an alert. She hadn’t given the okay for an alert yet—not that it was just her decision. The mayor and the fire chief also got a vote, along with some other officials. It wasn’t like a tornado; no one had to make a decision in an instant. At least that was what she was trying to tell herself as she searched for her oldest pair of black shoes, ones she didn’t care about if they got covered with sand or mud or water. Because what she was really telling herself was this: What the hell were you thinking, girl, coming all this way? Chicago didn’t have natural disasters. Tornados never hit the city proper. Flooding missed. Heat deaths were the result of failed air conditioning. Blizzards, the city was used to. Chicago didn’t have natural disasters, just manmade ones. Manmade ones she was trained for. Hell, she’d rather bully her way into a meth house filled with crazy-eyed losers and an entire arsenal than face a gigantic wave that could level her entire town. And yeah, she knew it wasn’t a wave, not really, and she knew if she called the damn thing a wave, no one in this town would take her seriously. Not that anyone here took her seriously anyway. They called her “outsider” to her face, “that bitch” to her back, and worse, although nothing as bad as the stuff she heard from the assholes she’d arrested back in Chicago. “What in the world are you doing?” She jumped. Before she had time to think, she’d whirled and had her service revolver out, aimed, and ready to use. Seavy County’s coroner, Hamilton Denne, stood behind her. He was as dressed down as she had ever seen him, in some kind of exercise shirt that probably wicked away water, and a pair of jeans covered with holes and dabs of paint. But those jeans still looked neatly pressed and even though Denne had to have barged into her house from the stormy outside, he looked dry. Not a strand of his expensive haircut was out of place. His blond hair was layered around his face, making him look like the trust fund baby that he was. Except for the boots. She’d never seen him wear ugly green rain boots that reached to mid-calf. “Jesus Christ, Denne,” she said, holstering her gun, “you shouldn’t sneak up on a police officer like that.” He didn’t look fazed. “Police officers around here don’t usually carry their gun in the house.” She flushed. Denne usually didn’t criticize her directly. “In case you hadn’t noticed,” she said, “I was getting ready to leave.” “In that?” he asked, as if she was wearing a feather boa and a pink tutu. “It’s my uniform.” “No kidding,” he said. “But the last thing you need is your dress blues.” “These aren’t my dress blues,” she snapped. He tilted his head sideways, as if acknowledging that the Great Hamilton Denne could be wrong. “Your uniform, then. You don’t need it. You do need your grungiest clothes. It’s going to be a long night.” “I don’t need grungy clothes. I’ll be spending most of my time in the council chamber.” Arguing with the locals, she thought, but didn’t say out loud. What she did say out loud sounded bitchy enough: “In case you’ve forgotten, that’s where I’m supposed to be in this kind of emergency.” “According to state emergency guidelines,” Denne said. “We don’t follow them.” “What are you people, special?” she asked. She hated the Old Boys Network in this town (even though it did include some old girls). She hated their attitude, their superiority, their idea that no other town on the planet was like Whale Rock. “In cases like this, yes we are,” Denne said. “And even if you were in the council chamber, your uniform wouldn’t give you any additional authority.” “It wasn’t for them,” she said, hearing the defensiveness in her own voice. “It’s for the tourists. I’m sure we’ll probably be doing an evac tonight, and I want to look as official as possible.” He studied her for a minute, as if her thoughts on the evacuation surprised him. Did he think her that stupid that she couldn’t think ahead? “No one’s going to see you in the rain and the wind,” he said slowly. “Put your slicker on and some really good boots. You’re going to get soaked no matter what, but it’s better to have some protection than none at all.” As if he was conceding a point. As if he thought she might do better than he had initially expected. “Why are you here, anyway?” She didn’t bother to ask how he got in. She had the door open so she could leave quickly. “I do know how to find the council chamber on my own. That is where I’m supposed to go—right?— since no one has contacted me.” “Technically, no one needs to be contacted until we hear from the National Weather Service,” he said. “I’m not even sure Lucy’s awake.” Lucy Wexler—the main dispatcher, who was also older than God and crankier than the Devil—didn’t work the night shift, but she always wanted to be contacted when something bad was happening. Tadero wondered if an eighty-year-old woman should be in charge of every crisis that hit Whale Rock, but the decision wasn’t hers—yet. Besides, if she came in and fired the town’s most important fixture, she’d be run out on a rail. “But yes,” Denne continued, “the council chamber is where you’re supposed to go. It has the Reverse 911 lines and the monitoring systems. You won’t be there long. We’re all going to have to go down to the beach.” “Won’t the Coast Guard clear the tourists?” she asked. “We’re not going for the tourists,” Denne said. “Change clothes. I’ll brief you as we go.”

Tadero grabbed her radio. It was cold and so wet that it nearly slipped through her frozen fingers. She brought it to her mouth. “Hamilton,” she said, “I think I have something for you.” Too many locals had police scanners. The last thing she wanted to do was say that there was a body on the beach. But Denne had warned her she would find several bodies, and she was to call him in before touching them. He had also given her other instructions, telling her not to get too close, not to prod it with her toe, not to turn it over if it appeared to be facedown. She had crossed her arms and listened, because she had learned not to argue with the locals. It only pissed them off. But it pissed her off to be treated with something less than the respect she deserved. She had been a decorated detective from the Chicago Police Department who had been on a major career track until the Incident. And even then, she hadn’t done anything wrong. She’d been cleared in the shooting, exonerated in the press, and she would have received even more decorations for that afternoon if she could have stomached accepting them. Instead, she had voluntarily gone to see the department shrink, who told her anyone would break under those circumstances. A movement in the dark, a sudden sharp report—anyone would have fired. She had. And the kid she’d shot had shot at her. He had also been strung out on a cocktail of meth and coke and valium. He had been ten, and small for his age. If he had fired again and hit her this time, he would have shot his second police officer in six months. None of that mattered to her. What mattered was his angelic little scratched-up face, his tiny shoes, his narrow shoulders. What mattered was that he was a kid, not what kind of kid he was. Or maybe it did. Maybe that made it matter more. Because, in her mind, that kid had become a symbol of all that had gone wrong with the city she loved, the city she served, the city she had vowed to protect. But she couldn’t protect it. Not from drug dealers who used kids as bait, not from firearms in the hands of children, not from murderers, thieves, and crack whores. She couldn’t even protect it from herself. So she scouted around for a job she thought would be easy, one that would let her rest, one that would soothe her aching spirit. She got offered a position here, in Nowheresville, and she took it, and they hated her, and she was working hard at not hating them, especially for their superstitions and idiotic attitude of entitlement. The radio crackled. It was Denne. “Where are you?” “Near the beach access on 35th and Ogden.” She had to wipe the water off her face so she didn’t sound like she was drowning. “I’m about five minutes away. Mark it off, and back away.” She rolled her eyes. “Anything I put up will come down in this wind. I’m going to photograph it, at least.” Because if he didn’t get here, and she moved on, the body might get forgotten in the crisis, and then this poor person’s loved ones would never know that he had died before the storm hit. Not that she was positive this was a he. The body was a curved lump of flesh, probably decayed or covered in too much sand. The ocean had coughed him up for a moment and would be taking him back before the night was through. “Don’t get close to it.” Denne sounded exasperated. “Just mark it off. I’m on my way.” She checked her slicker for flares. She wasn’t wearing her uniform, but she still had her utility belt and holster. She had enough weapons and her flashlight. But she wasn’t sure if she’d included a flare or not. So she felt around until she found where she usually kept them. She hadn’t replaced her stash, but she had a few. Before she left here, she’d light it and put it a yard or so away. She knew the flares worked in the worst conditions. She had to use one just last week in the mountainous corridor between Whale Rock and Portland, when some poor kid in an SUV missed a corner in the dark. “Chief.” Her radio crackled again. This time it wasn’t Denne. It was Lucy Wexler, sounding businesslike and wide awake. “The mayor wants to start Reverse 911 now, instead of waiting another hour. I think we should wait for the National Weather Service’s revised—” Tadero clicked her radio on, deliberately cutting Lucy off. Lucy wasn’t one of those officials who got a say in what the town was doing, no matter how much she thought she should. “I agree with the mayor. We got, what, at least a thousand locals in low-lying areas, not counting the tourists who decided to come to their weekend home for some R&R. We only have two ways out of this town, Lucy, and one of them barely tops the Dee River. So yes, by all means, let’s start now with the folks nearest the ocean and work our way out.” “I don’t think we should—,” Lucy started, but Tadero used the radio to shut her down. “You’ve made your position clear,” Tadero snapped. “Now relay mine to the council chamber.” She wished she’d been able to stay to debate everyone, but she hadn’t had time. They needed people on the beach to find the morons who thought watching a tsunami roll in was an option. Her anger made its way to the police scanner at least. She put the radio back on her hip, then pulled out her cell. She had the mayor on speed dial, and she punched that number now. When he answered, she said, “In case you didn’t hear the interchange with Lucy—” “I heard it,” he said. “Thank you.” The “thank you” was actually sincere, which had to cost him a bit. “We’re activating the system now,” he said. “You finding anyone on the beach?” “First pass, I caught about a dozen. This time . . . ” She didn’t know how to report this body. “No tourists.” “Good,” the mayor said. “Then the patrols are working.” Patrols made it sound like they actually had a police department instead of four officers and the volunteer fire department. Plus some locals who tended to come out during emergencies to help, the Solid Citizens of Whale Rock, many of whom Tadero didn’t know. Her cell phone was getting drenched, and the protective cover wasn’t doing a lot of protecting. She thumbed the screen until she found the camera feature then realized it was too dark in the horizontal rain and wind to get a good shot of the body. So she pulled her industrial strength flashlight out of her belt, turned the thing on, and held it up with one hand as she clicked a photo with the other. Then she actually looked at the body in front of her. It seemed to have gotten smaller, as if it were closing in on itself, protecting itself. Then she shook her head, deciding it was all the effect of the darkness, the storm, the pounding rain. It was just a body, and God knew, she’d seen hundreds of those in her life. Except when she moved the light away, the body seemed to resume its original position. It couldn’t be moving. The wind wasn’t that strong. It had to be a trick of the light. She moved the flashlight toward it again, and this time, she saw the thing move. It was some kind of sea creature, pushed up against the log, probably washed on shore to die. She cursed softly, then stuffed her phone back under her slicker and grabbed the radio. She clicked it on and said, “Hamilton, never mind. It’s just—” when she saw something move out of the corner of her eye. She whirled so fast that she made herself dizzy, narrowly getting out of the way of a tentacle. The tentacle wrapped itself around her flashlight, pulling it out of her grip and slamming it into the sand, putting her in complete darkness. “Son of a bitch!” She scrambled backwards, her feet sliding in the wet, her hand reaching for her weapon before she even realized what she was doing. She didn’t need to shoot a dying sea creature, for godssake, but she grabbed her gun anyway, her heart pounding. She still had her radio in her other hand and she was blinking, trying to see in the sudden darkness. All she saw were shapes, and the odd luminescence that the ocean always had, even though that was muted because of the cloud cover. The radio crackled and she put it away, not wanting to deal with anyone’s ridicule, not yet. Except her own, of course. She felt ridiculous, standing there in the driving rain, the wind swirling around her, her gun drawn on—what? An octopus?— some kind of thing. That was the second time she had pulled her gun unnecessarily in the last six hours, and that hair-trigger reaction was the reason why the Chicago PD had put her on leave initially, why—she believed anyway—that ten- year-old kid was dead. Not because she was quick, not because she was defending herself, but because she had grown so jumpy that whenever she saw movement, she drew her weapon. She made herself take a deep breath and slow down. She hadn’t backed away so much as dug a little trench in the soaking wet sand. Thank God Denne hadn’t arrived yet. He’d laugh, and then he’d probably tell everyone else in this stupid town that his ghost stories had gotten to her. Hell, they’d all gotten to her, whether she wanted to admit it or not. “I don’t think it’s that much of a stretch,” Denne said tightly, as he maneuvered the white coroner’s van through the rain-slicked streets. Businesses in the northern part of town were dark, except for a few taverns and one restaurant that occasionally flirted with twenty-four hour service. Still, the streets weren’t empty. Cars were pouring in. Only a few blocks from Tadero’s house, Denne had given her a bullhorn, and he didn’t have to tell her what to do with it. She rolled down the window herself, grabbed the bullhorn, and said, “This is the police. All streets west of Highway 101 will be closed to vehicle traffic heading west. The beach access and the beaches are closed. You have ten minutes to vacate or you will be fined.” Fined for what she didn’t know, but she’d worry about that later. Her little announcement got some cars to turn around, although she had a hunch they’d be back the moment the van was out of their line of sight. So she used Denne’s radio to contact dispatch—who blessedly wasn’t Lucy yet—and told them to send a deputy in a radio car this way and block off the beach access. She also told dispatch to contact the volunteer fire department to help with closing the beaches. “Good job,” Denne said when she was done. “Thanks,” she said, feeling surly. Hell, she was surly. This was going to be a long night, and everyone was going to treat her like the outsider who didn’t have a clue. “You do realize that I know my job.” “I do,” he said. “You just haven’t been through one of these before.” “And you have?” His mouth formed a thin line and he didn’t look away from the road. “Not like this,” he said after a moment. “Not in years.” “Which is it?” she asked. “Not like this or not in years?” “Both,” he said. “We haven’t had a major tsunami alert in decades. I was a kid the last time. But we’ve had to close the roads every few years when we get one of those Storms of the Century. Personally, I think they should be called a Storm of the Half-Decade, but what do I know?” She shook her head, saw two more cars headed toward the ocean, and rolled down her window, issuing the warning again. The cars turned around. “I know you don’t believe me,” Denne said after she rolled the window closed again. “Sure I do,” she said. “I looked up the storms.” “I’m not talking about those,” he said. “I’m talking about the creatures.” She sighed. He wasn’t going to let this go. “No, Hamilton, I don’t believe you,” she said. “And I think it’s really inappropriate to try to scare me with ghost stories when we have to deal with a real life emergency.” “I’m not trying to scare you with ghost stories,” he said in that same tone he had used before he handed her the bullhorn. “I figured you already knew that ghosts weren’t stories. I thought you had that under your belt.” It was her turn to purse her lips together. “I’m willing to concede that strange things happen,” she said. After all, this entire damn town was strange. “But the idea of some sea creature that somehow knows a tsunami is coming and is going to snatch people off the beach is just stupid. People vanish in tsunamis, Hamilton, because they get overtaken by the ocean itself and swept out to sea. Their bodies are never found. So if people in more primitive times made up the story about sea creatures because that was somehow more comforting than getting swept away by the water, fine. I don’t care, except to say that for me, I have to concentrate on what’s really going on here tonight, and not on a monster story designed to keep kids away from the water’s edge.” Denne didn’t look at her. Instead he turned the steering wheel, and the van headed into the parking garage underneath the gigantic glass building that formed the city offices. The building had been planned in the 1980s as a multi-level retail space, but never got rented. Finally, the city took it over and used the space for everything from meetings to the tiny public library. The gray-green florescent lights of the parking structure were almost as eerie as Whale Rock this late at night in the pouring rain. “I wasn’t telling you a monster story,” Denne said as if she had offended him. He was a better actor than she would ever have given him credit for. “I was preparing you for what we’re up against.” She yanked the door open. “Thanks for that. I had somehow thought you wouldn’t be childish enough to try to make me look stupid on a night like this, but I was wrong.” “Jaclyn,” he said. She didn’t listen to the rest. She got out, and slammed the door. Then she headed to the elevator going up to the sixth floor without waiting for him. Maybe she should leave. No one wanted her here. No one trusted her. The problem was that she had signed a five-year contract, the minimum that the city required. There were penalties if she broke it without cause, financial penalties that she couldn’t afford. And what kind of cause could she show? That the entire Old Boys’ Network (and Lucy) in this town was trying to run her out by telling her scary stories? The elevator doors were closing as Denne approached. She resisted the urge to make a face at him as the doors shut all the way. Instead, she watched the numbers change and hoped that inside the council chambers she’d find at least one other serious adult.

Tadero was breathing hard, but her hand remained steady, the gun out and pointed at that creature. Creature, not a body. She didn’t need Denne. She picked up the radio, thumbed it, and it crackled. “Hamilton—” “What?” he said from behind her, sneaking up on her for the second time that night. “Son of a bitch,” she said as she turned. “I told you not to do that.” At least this time, she didn’t have her gun pointed at him. She holstered it and adjusted her rain slicker. Water ran off it onto the drenched sand. “Where’s the body?” He was wearing his own rain slicker and carrying a body bag over his left arm. “It’s not a body,” she said. “It’s—” The movement again. This time, she didn’t grab her weapon. She stepped to the side, and as she did she saw another tentacle whip past her. It wrapped around Denne’s torso, flattening his rain slicker and making him drop the body bag. He let out a squeak, and dug his hands into the sand, but he wasn’t getting traction. Another tentacle whipped out, and Tadero had to move again to avoid it. It wrapped around Denne’s boots. She grabbed her gun in one movement, whirled, and shot into the creature’s lumpy body. A third tentacle came out and she shot at that. Nothing seemed to stop this thing. Nothing— Except it had cringed at light. She had the flares, but they’d take too long. So she grabbed her Taser. It wasn’t light, but it was electricity, and maybe it would stop this thing long enough for her shoot through the tentacles to free Denne. He wasn’t screaming, but he was digging in hard, managing to put up some resistance, the sand gathering below his body in a small pile, slowing down the pull— not that it mattered. He’d be in that creature’s clutches in a matter of seconds. Tadero fired the Taser at the creature itself. The prongs dug into the skin, and let out their charge. She had it on full, and the creature bobbled, then bounced, ghostly bits of light all around it. She thought she saw eyes, peering up at her, but she wasn’t sure. The air smelled of burning fish and rot. The charge stopped and the creature collapsed in on itself, like a suit over a newly popped balloon. Denne wasn’t being dragged any more. He was sitting up, bent at the waist, trying to pull the tentacles off himself. “Hey,” he said, and he sounded panicked now, “I can’t get these things off me.” She put the Taser in her utility belt then reached for her knife. She found it after a minute, wondered why she hadn’t thought of it before, then got a mental picture of herself trying to hack at those flailing limbs. For the first time, she wished she had one of those little utility axes the volunteer firefighters carried on their belts. She moved closer to the smelly creature, which hadn’t moved, and hacked at the tentacles with the knife. Something black and viscous covered her hands, and she tried not to think about what it was. But she managed to sever the first tentacle. The second was harder because it was thicker, but she cut that as well. The creature didn’t move at all. She wanted to believe it was dead. “These things are not coming loose,” Denne said, sounding more like himself. Still, when she looked at him, she saw that he was scooching backwards, using his bound feet to move himself away from the creature in the sand. He was still trying to detach the tentacle around his torso with his bare hands. She moved as close to him as she could get. “I’ll get the one on your boots, but I’m not hacking that close to your stomach. We’re going to get farther away than that.” “You know, Jaclyn,” Denne said, “not everything in nature dies when you hack off a limb. Sometimes the damn limbs continue whatever they’re doing for hours.” “We’re going to pretend you didn’t say that.” She crouched over his feet, careful to put the knife between his boots, and started sawing. More black viscous stuff came out. It took a lot of strength, but she finally got through it. He pulled his legs apart, but still the tentacles still didn’t fall off. “Give me the damn knife,” he said. “We need to move back.” “The knife,” he repeated. She handed it to him. He was the coroner. He knew how to use a knife better than she did. He bent over his own stomach. “I need a light.” Her flashlight was gone, smashed to smithereens back near that creature. She looked over her shoulder. The creature didn’t seem to be moving, but she couldn’t quite tell. She took out her cell phone instead and used it like a flashlight. Denne turned her knife blade sideways and instead of hacking at the tentacle around his waist, he flayed it, taking off one piece at a time. “Get that body bag,” he said. “Jesus, Hamilton, I have no idea where it is.” He waved a hand toward the sea. “I need it.” She wasn’t sure she could find it, wasn’t sure that the wind hadn’t blown it away. “I’ll have to move the light for a minute.” “Fine,” Denne said. She turned the light toward the ocean, and there, pressed against some rocks, was the bag. Then she turned the light toward the creature. It still hadn’t moved. “You still need the light?” she asked. “I need the bag more.” He had made quicker passage through that tentacle than she had by hacking. “Hurry.” She wasn’t sure why she was hurrying, except that she wanted them both out of there, away from that ocean and its impending tsunami, away from this stretch of beach, away from that horrible creature. She grabbed the body bag and dragged it back to Denne. Black stuff covered his shirt and pants. “I hope to God that’s not blood,” she said. “It’s not,” he said, sounding odd, “but I still can’t get this thing off me. You put the pieces in the bag. I’m taking off my clothes.” “What?” she asked. “I’ve been wanting one of these creatures for years,” he said. “I’m not going to let it slide back to the sea.” He already had his pants unzipped and was sliding them down his legs. “Crap, it’s cold.” He managed to wriggle out as she put the slices in the bag. The slices were mushy but had sharp edges, like scales. Denne wrapped his pants into a ball and tossed them in, the only real sign that he was upset. His socks and boots stood to one side and he was shivering. “Help me get this shirt off.” His voice bobbled, probably from the cold. She didn’t argue. Her own fingers were cold and shaking as she unbuttoned the top buttons. She managed to get it down then helped him shrug it off his shoulders. The tentacle had gone through the material, leaving marks on Denne’s skin. Fortunately, moving the shirt moved the tentacle. She tossed the shirt in the body bag as well and started to zip it up. “Not yet,” he said. He had put the slicker over his shoulders, and was putting his socks back on. He looked ridiculous, wearing only underwear and socks. “Listen, if you’re right and these parts still have some life in them, I want this thing closed,” she said. “I want the creature itself.” “No,” Tadero said. He had his boots back on and was staggering toward the creature. She grabbed his arm. “No,” she said again as if he was a child. He didn’t look good. “But I want—” “No,” she said, and dragged him back to the body bag. This time he didn’t protest. She zipped up the bag and handed it to him. “You carry that,” she said. He took the bag. “Okay.” He was slurring his words. He looked drunk. Fall- down drunk. Either he was losing blood or that damn creature’s tentacle had released some kind of toxin into his system. “What’re you going to do?” he asked. “I’m going to carry you,” she said.

And she did. Fireman’s carry, over his protest. She draped him over her shoulder, and wrapped one arm around him, feeling his cold flesh through her sleeve. With her other hand, she got out the radio and gave the officer-down signal before she remembered that the entire town listened on the scanner, and had probably never heard that here before. He had passed out by the time they reached the ramp leading out of the beach access, but he somehow managed to maintain his grip on that stupid body bag. An ambulance waited in the parking area, surprising her. Sometimes she forgot just how small this town was. Thank heavens the tsunami wasn’t due for a few more hours. She had no idea how she would have gotten both herself and Denne up to a safe distance above the rising water. The paramedics met her at the edge of the parking lot. “Use the stretcher,” she said. “I’m not sure if he’s bleeding out or if he touched some poisonous fish, but if he did touch poison, then I don’t want to infect you.” “What about you?” one of the paramedics asked. “I don’t know.” She had a sudden memory of that black stuff covering her hands. “Then we better take you in too,” he said. His partner had put on gloves then eased Denne off her shoulder and onto the stretcher. Denne was ghastly gray, his lips blue, and he was shivering. At least he was still alive. “Part of whatever it was is in the body bag,” she said. “You can type it, see what it is, see if it is poisonous.” “Will do,” said the other paramedic. He took the bag between two gloved fingers, and tossed it into the ambulance as his partner wheeled the stretcher to the back. Together they lifted it as if it weighed nothing. The paramedics helped her into the ambulance and she sat on the bench beside some equipment. She took out her radio and checked in with the dispatch. “I’m heading to the hospital,” she said. “Anyone clearing the beach needs to do it on some kind of ATV. There’s all kinds of junk—” “We got it.” Lucy, her voice sharp and businesslike and filled with contempt. “I don’t think you do,” Tadero said. “There are hazards there now, ones that Denne wanted as a specimen. He’s in the ambulance with me.” She didn’t care who heard it. But she had to figure that Lucy would understand what she meant about the specimens. After all, Lucy regaled her with more ghost stories than Denne ever had. “Oh, dear,” Lucy said, her tone changing. “How is he?” “We don’t know yet,” Tadero said and signed off. She put the radio back on her utility belt, then closed her eyes and leaned her head back. She wasn’t woozy, but the loss of adrenalin made her powerfully fatigued. It only took a few minutes for the ambulance to arrive at the hospital. The hospital was small and dealt mostly with bread-and-butter surgeries, standard illnesses, and the usual series of broken limbs that came with a large tourist presence. The emergency room had only six beds. Anything truly serious got sent to one of the large partner hospitals in the Willamette Valley. She hoped Denne wasn’t one of the truly serious cases. She walked alongside the stretcher as the paramedics wheeled Denne in. They had managed to warm him up so that he wasn’t shivering, but his lips were still blue, his eyes closed, and his skin a horrible gray. The ER doctor met them at the door, looking concerned, and impossibly young. Tadero explained what happened to Denne, and said the remains of the creature were in the bag. Then she held out her hands. They were coated with dried black goo. “Some of it got on me,” she said, “but I seem to be fine.” “No offense, Chief,” the doctor said, “but we’re going to check you, too. I’ll have someone scrape that stuff off your hands.” He beckoned one of the charge nurses. The nurse guided Tadero into one of the rooms, took her blood pressure, and sat her on the edge of the bed. “We don’t have evidence kits except rape kits,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.” “Do what you need to,” Tadero said. “But do it fast. I need to go help with the evacuation.” The nurse nodded, got the rape kit out of a drawer near the bed, and started scraping the black goo off Tadero’s hands. Her clothing was saturated with it, and smelled rank. Her own nose was probably used to the smell by now; she wondered how the nurse managed not to turn away in disgust. “You’re going to have to leave the clothes behind,” the nurse said. “Is there someone who can bring you a change of clothing?” “Not tonight,” Tadero said. “Just give me some scrubs. I’ll make sure the hospital gets them back.” “No problem,” the nurse said. She started to step out as screams echoed in the hallway. Tadero pushed past the nurse and saw a rush of men near the door, a security guard and the paramedics, along with people she didn’t recognize. But she did recognize the things flailing around them. Tentacles. Apparently, Denne had been right. The tentacles had a mind of their own. She hurried down the hall and then stopped in surprise. The body bag had been ripped open, and the creature was in the middle of the hallway, glistening, with a dozen tentacles whirling around it, growing larger, reaching toward the light. But she distinctly remembered not bagging the creature. Had this thing grown from the parts that Denne put in the bag? That wasn’t possible. Was it? “You have a stun gun?” Tadero asked the security guard as she hurried toward him. “Yeah,” the guard said. “Give it to me.” She grabbed his stun gun and her Taser. She hadn’t repacked the Taser with a new gas pack so she couldn’t shoot from a distance. She only had its stun capability, the one that required her to be right on top of the thing. “An electric charge will either stop it or kill it,” she said. “I’m not sure which. Someone back me up. There’s got to be equipment around here that will deliver a charge.” And then without waiting for an answer, she waded into the waving tentacles. The stench was thick here, making her eyes water. One tentacle wrapped around her leg and pulled her off her feet. She landed hard on her back, but fortunately the wind didn’t get knocked out of her. She let the damn creature drag her toward it. Behind her, the men were still shouting, but she didn’t pay attention to them. Instead, she concentrated on the creature. She let it pull her closer and closer while its tentacles waved above her, no longer perceiving her as a threat. When she got close, she sat up, leaned forward, and pressed both the stun gun and her Taser into the thing’s lumpy flesh. It bobbled, then bounced. But unlike on the beach, it didn’t glow. Or maybe it did, but she couldn’t see it here. What she could see was smoke rising from its skin. The stench got worse, like rotted, roasting fish. The thing swelled. She kept hitting it with charge after charge. The guard’s stun gun ran out of charges first. But it didn’t matter. Because the creature was turning black and melting along the floor. “Stay away!” she shouted. “It’s probably poisonous.” Or at least, she tried to shout. She was dizzy and her mouth felt like mush. Too much activity in one night. Too much weird activity. She gave it one more dose, then dropped the guard’s gun and reached for her knife. She hacked at the tentacle around her leg. The smell alone was enough to make her pass out. She concentrated on cutting the tentacle, which seemed much too tight. It made her leg sting. She wondered if she could neatly flay the thing the way Denne had. She grabbed one of the scales, pulled at it, and then swayed. No finesse left. She wobbled, and then put a hand behind herself, trying to prevent a fall into the goo. She failed—or at least, she felt like she was going to fail. And then she toppled backwards.

She woke up to bright sunshine streaming into a window decorated with hideous red blinds. She blinked. She had the worst headache of her life, and her ankle ached. “It’s about time.” She recognized the gravelly tones of Lucy Wexler. What part of hell did Tadero find herself in that she had to be guarded by Lucy? Tadero turned her head. Lucy was sitting in the chair beside the bed, clutching a Kindle. For once, she didn’t have an unlit cigar dangling from her mouth. But she still looked like central casting’s idea of the tough granny, with her silver-gray curls and her sharp eyes. “The tsunami,” Tadero said. Her mouth tasted like dead fish, and her tongue was too big. “Wasn’t as bad as they thought,” Lucy said. “The worst of it went south of us. We’ve had storms cause more damage. Lost some boats, broke some windows, and destroyed a bunch of docks on the lake as the wave swept in. But no one got injured. The beaches were clear. Here anyway.” Tadero closed her eyes. “Thank God.” Then she opened them, frowning. “If not here, then where?” “Northern California. Idiots mostly, on the beaches to watch the tsunami. Lots of damage down there.” Lucy said it all dryly, as if those lives really didn’t matter. And maybe they didn’t to her. Tadero wondered how the police departments felt in those communities. Did their chief feel she failed? Tadero would have, if even one tourist had died on her watch. “We clear?” Tadero asked. A tsunami wasn’t one event but many, and the danger lasted for hours, sometimes days. “The National Weather Service gave us the all-clear about three hours ago,” Lucy said. Tadero nodded, then wished she hadn’t. “Hamilton?” “Still sleeping. They put him in a medically-induced coma. He got more of that stuff than you did.” “What stuff, exactly?” Tadero asked. “The barbs on that creature,” Lucy said. “They have some numbing agent that can be lethal in large amounts. That’s how the thing gets its prey.” “What was it exactly?” Tadero asked. “Dunno,” Lucy said. “No one from Oregon State knows either. They had all their oceanographic guys investigate. They’ve never seen anything that grows so fast. They figure it came up from the deep. They’re all excited that they have a new species.” Tadero hadn’t been in town long, but she’d been there long enough to recognize Lucy’s tone. “What do you figure?” “That it’s an old species. That disturbances on the sea floor like that earthquake wake it up. We’ve lost tourists after even minor underwater quakes, quakes that don’t cause tsunamis.” Tadero frowned, more because of her headache than Lucy’s theory. But Lucy clearly misunderstood the look, so she continued. “We always thought the tourists died because some wave came out of nowhere, or because they were careless. But now I’m wondering if one of these creatures didn’t come up, play possum on the beach, and grab them.” Tadero shuddered in spite of herself. “Too bad we couldn’t save it for Hamilton.” Lucy grinned. “We didn’t save the big piece, the one you toasted. But there were little creatures inside that bag. They’re now in some chamber that Hamilton built a long time ago. They’re not attacking anyone, but I’ll bet they’re growing.” “Great.” Tadero wasn’t sure if she was thrilled for Denne or appalled that more of those things were inside her town. “At least you taught us how to kill it.” To Tadero’s surprise, Lucy smiled. “Looks like you’re going to work out after all.” Then Lucy picked up her Kindle, put her purse over her shoulder, and added, “You look like crap. You need more sleep. I’ll let the nurse know you’re awake.” And with that, she left. Crap was a good word. Tadero felt like crap. Except for a little bit of elation. Approval from Lucy Wexler. How strange. Tadero stretched in the uncomfortable bed. Not bad for a night’s work. Lives saved. Crisis muted. And who was to say that some self-replicating, tentacled sea creature was any stranger than a ten-year- old crack addict who shot his second cop in less than six months. She could deal with strange creatures. In some part of her mind, strange creatures weren’t real. Or maybe they were just like the tsunami, a natural disaster that needed averting. A ten-year-old crack addict with a gun—that was failure on two legs. And not just the kid’s failure. An entire community’s failure. She’d take a town where neighbors volunteered to keep people off the beach in a crisis any day. She could do something here. She did do something here. She smiled. Apparently she was going to work out after all.

Hugo-award winning author Kristine Kathryn Rusch publishes fiction in many genres under many names. Her novels have appeared in 15 countries, and her short stories have appeared in many year’s best collections. Once upon a time, she edited The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, as well as Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, but she gave all that up for writing. Over the next three years, WMG Publishing will put her entire backlist into print, including all of her short stories (in electronic form). For more information on her work, go to www.kristinekathrynrusch.com Author Spotlight on Kristine Kathryn Rusch Wendy N. Wagner

“Unnatural Disaster” does a great job capturing the irritating details of life in law enforcement: the petty politics, the contradictory rules, the personality clashes. How do you know so much about life as a police officer?

In one of my many secret lives, I’m an award-winning, best-selling mystery writer (under the name Kris Nelscott as well as Kristine Kathryn Rusch), so knowing how the police work is important to that part of my writing career. Besides research, how do I know? I used to work for a forensic psychologist. His job was to evaluate people for court—to see if they met the legal definition of insanity, to help with custody cases, to make sure they could continue getting their state-ordered meds. I met a lot of police officers there, and spent a lot of time with them. Plus I have many friends in the FBI (that makes my old hippie self shudder) and lots and lots of friends in the legal community. So law enforcement stuff is almost as natural as breathing to me. This story is a new piece, and the set-up—an earthquake in Japan sparks a tsunami in Oregon— reminds me of the fears a lot of folks had after the March 11th earthquake in Japan. Did that incident influence this story at all? And living on the coast, have you had any uncomfortable storm or tsunami experiences?

We didn’t just have fears. We had tsunamis all along the West coast. Fortunately the tide was out, or parts of the coast would have been leveled, just like in Japan. We would have had a nine to fifteen foot crest had the tide been in. As it was, several people died to the south of us, and there was still a lot of damage—docks, boats, marinas. Did that inform the story? You bet. Initially I was going to write the experience exactly, since Whale Rock is based on my town of Lincoln City. The weather was sunny, and it seemed surreal. But Whale Rock isn’t Lincoln City, so my subconscious wanted rain and terrible weather and no exact date. As for my own experience, well, we’ve been expecting this. We always pay attention to earthquakes in the Pacific because they could devastate us here. So that night, Dean called me out of my office at about 10:30 to tell me that there was a massive earthquake in Japan. We watched the least egregious local news, then I went back to work. When it became clear the tsunami would hit about 7 AM, we paid attention but didn’t do much since our house is outside the historic tsunami zone. About 5 AM, the sirens started going off, warning people off the beach. Low-lying areas had already received reverse 911 calls, and half the town was either leaving or had left. Those of us on high ground stayed. I was up to see the beginnings of it from my window, but there wasn’t much. Another friend had a police scanner and was giving us a play-by-play (with names of the players, since this is a small town with a volunteer fire department) as our friends tried to keep idiots off the beaches. The first crest hit around 7 AM, and the crests kept hitting all day. No one was hurt here, although there was a lot of property damage. The most surreal thing, though, happened about 5 PM. Dean & I decided we were too tired to cook dinner, so we went to a local grocery that has excellent to-go prime rib. As we walked in, we saw a crowd. Everyone who was still in town, everyone who wasn’t working, had lined up for prime rib dinners. No one had gotten any sleep, and no one wanted to cook. It was an impromptu relief party. We all knew we had dodged a major bullet. Whenever a tentacled creature shows up in a story, I think a lot of people immediately think of H. P. Lovecraft. But as a native Oregonian, I tend to think of some of our Northwest creatures, like the mythical Pacific Tree Octopus or the camera-friendly octopods living in Newport’s Hatfield Marine Science Center. Who are some of the cephalopods that have influenced you?

You hit it. I get inspired every time I go to the Aquarium in Newport. (The science center is connected to it, for those who don’t know.) I think the Oregon Coast is a lovely, mysterious place, and it inspires me every day.

This story draws lines between natural phenomena, supernatural phenomena, and truly unnatural phenomena. The unnatural phenomena here are things that humans have done or created that seem like true violations of the natural order, and for Tadero, these have proved to be true horrors. Do you think we live in an era in which the supernatural holds no fear for us? Are we the most horrifying thing on the planet?

To me we are. So I’m like Tadero in that respect. I’ve written many other stories set in the made-up Oregon Coast, though, and the chief that Tadero replaces, Dan Retsler, thought the supernatural was harder to deal with than people. (Those stories are available as stand-alone e- books now. They originally appeared in F&SF and some Daw anthologies.) So I know that opinions vary on this. But I think the stuff Tadero has seen is the most difficult to deal with—not in Seavy Village, but on the streets of Chicago.

Do you have any new projects you’d like to tell us about?

I have a lot of projects underway this year. It’s either feast or famine for me. In September, Audible will release my next Retrieval Artist novel, Anniversary Day, as a two- month audio exclusive. The book (in all forms, including e-book) will appear on December 1. In January, Pyr publishes the next Diving novel, Boneyards. I’m also doing paranormal romance under the name Kristine Grayson. Sourcebooks released Wickedly Charming in May, and Utterly Charming follows in October, with two more in 2012. WMG Publishing is reissuing my entire backlist, including the stories I mentioned above (The first is “Women of Whale Rock”) and the Kris Nelscott mystery novels. In the reissues, WMG is redoing all of my fantasy novels, including my international bestselling fantasy series, The Fey. So I’m quite happily busy!

Wendy N. Wagner’s short fiction has appeared in The Way of the Wizard, Rigor Amortis, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies magazine; her interviews and poetry have run in Lightspeed, Fantasy Magazine, Horror-web.com, and Abyss and Apex. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her very understanding family. You can follow her exploits at operabuffo.blogspot.com. Five Ocean-Dwelling Creatures That Look Like Aliens (But Aren’t) Jeremiah Tolbert

The Earth has considerably more surface area devoted to water than to land, but only in the last few decades have scientists begun exploring the oceans beyond the shallower waters of the ocean shelves. The deep, abyssal ocean accounts for ten times the volume that the shallows do. Surprisingly little of that had been surveyed for life until recently. The Census of Marine Life (CoML), a project rivaling the sequencing of the human genome in scale, recently concluded its ten-year mission to discover and document marine organisms. According to the highlights report, the census increased the estimate for known ocean-dwelling species from 230,000 to an astounding 250,000 species, and that’s after the corrections that lowered the count. While 6,000 potentially new species were documented by the census, twenty percent of the ocean has no entries in the Census database. Who can say how many more species awaiting discovery dwell beneath the surface? It’s not just exciting that the census found so many new species—it’s also where. Life was found “even where heat would melt lead, seawater froze to ice, and light and oxygen were lacking.” In the words of Dr. Malcolm in Jurassic Park, “life finds a way” to infest even the most inhospitable environments. These extreme situations might match conditions found on other worlds, so it’s no surprise that science fiction and fantasy has drawn on the strange life forms of the deep as inspiration for aliens and paranormal creatures. This week, we at Fantasy Magazine bring you five aquatic organisms that could easily be confused for alien or paranormal life (but are actually real).

The Yeti Crab (Kiwa hirsuta) One of the most visually stunning discoveries of the Census of Marine Life, the “yeti crab,” proves that even the best-made toupee would look bizarre on a crustacean. Picture your basic lobster. Now cover it in blond fur. The crab’s flowing pelt is actually made up of setae, and may help the crabs harvest and feed on the bacteria that thrive in the hydrothermal vents of their homes. Some suggest that the setae collect bacteria not for sustenance, but instead to remove the toxic minerals emitted by the hydrothermal vents. The yeti crab was discovered in 2005 at a depth of more than 2000 meters about 900 miles south of Easter Island. Researchers believe that the range of the species— actually a member of a previously unknown family of crustacean—to be very small. Not only is the Yeti Crab beautiful, it’s probably pretty rare to boot. Perhaps bald crabs and lobsters drove them into seclusion with their jealousy?

Bigfin Squids (genus Magnapinna) These are not your standard kraken-style squid—the bigfin squids are barely recognizable as squids with their slowly flapping wing-like fins and long, straight arms held out at right angles from the body. A few feet out from the body, the arms make another right angle turn and drop down towards the ground again. Imagine a squid crossed with a bar stool, and you begin to picture this species’ unusual appearance. Researchers believe they dangle their arms across surface of ocean floor in order to ensnare prey. But little enough is known about the rare group that the odd posture could be a result of them constantly dancing the “Robot.” The most recently described species of bigfin squid was discovered by a Shell Oil Company submersible in the Gulf of Mexico. This marks one of the few times when off-shore drilling was related to finding new ocean species instead of poisoning them with massive oil spills.

Whale Bone-Eater worm (genus Osedax) Life can be a strangely specialized thing; such is the case with the fascinating micro-world of whale-fall ecologies. These patient worms, bacteria, and other creatures wait until a whale gives up the ghost and the corpse falls to the ocean floor. In a surprisingly short period of time, the whale’s body is stripped by creatures that specialize in cleaning up whales. There is an entire genus of worms that specialize in eating the bones of whales. The CoML recorded the first known Antarctic species of bone-eating worm by sinking bits of whale bone to the ocean floor for fourteen months. When brought to the surface, the bait resembled something from a John Carpenter film. Technically, the bone worms don’t actually eat bone. Instead, they rely on a symbiotic microorganism to break down the bone into nutrients for themselves. These worms are so lazy they don’t even have stomachs or mouths. In appearance, they resemble kinky sex toys: long tubes, bright pink in color, and covered in frills and spikes. Bone-eating worms are the sort of creature that the starship Enterprise might have faced in the early seasons of The Next Generation. Most likely, as one-of-a-kind alien beings that the crew was sworn to negotiate with peacefully, they would have infested the insufferable Wesley Crusher. Early seasons-Picard would have totally been tempted to let them feast.

Benthic Comb Jelly (Abyssobenthic ctenophore) Comb jellies, more scientifically known as ctenophores, are easily some of nature’s most alien looking organisms. So much so that James Cameron appears to have used them as the basis for the design of his alien craft in The Abyss. This newly discovered comb jelly appears similar to a semi-transparent kite tied to the muck of the bottom of the ocean with two long strands of tissue (there doesn’t appear to be a scientific term for “string made of jelly”). The benthic comb jelly was found at a record-breaking depth of 7,217 meters, far deeper than scientists had believed such complex life could survive. Its discovery hints that we may not understand the oceans as deeply as we had previously thought. The Mimic Octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus) We at Fantasy Magazine are not convinced that octopuses are not alien life forms stranded on Earth in some kind of octoship crash in the third century BCE. These suspicions were heightened when we learned of the mimic octopus, a species that dwells in the warm waters of Southeast Asia, near Indonesia. Many cephalopods can change color, and some can even imitate shapes. The mimic is unique in that it copies not only the appearances of other organisms, but also their behaviors. If the mimic octopus wants to cover some distance, he takes on the shape and swimming undulation of a flounder, sticking close to the bottom. It can emulate a poisonous sea snake, weaving two tentacles dangerously, threatening to “strike.” It even dangles its limbs like the poisonous fins of the lionfish. This is mostly to scare off predators, but possibly also because impressions are the highest form of art for their species. The mimic octopus was “officially” discovered in 1998, but how many times was it misclassified as a starfish, sea snake, or flounder? This relatively late discovery makes us a little nervous. What if a similar species of octopus is walking amongst us now, emulating the behavior of people? Could this explain that unusually damp-looking neighbor at the end of the block? More scientific enquiry is needed immediately. It may already be too late to prevent them from infiltrating our governments at the highest levels ...... or perhaps not.

Jeremiah Tolbert is a writer, photographer, and web developer living in the foothills of Northern Colorado. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared in places such as Fantasy Magazine, Interzone, Polyphony, The Way of the Wizard edited by John Joseph Adams, and the new ebook fanzine b0t edited by Grant Stone. The Invisibles Charles De Lint

“What is unseen is not necessarily unknown.” —Wendelessen

1

When I was twelve years old, it was a different world. I suppose most people think that, turning their gazes inward to old times, the long trail of their memories leading them back into territory made unfamiliar with the dust of years. The dust lies so thick in places it changes the shape of what it covers, half-remembered people, places, and events, all mixed together so that you get confused trying to sort them out, don’t even recognize some, probably glad you can’t make out others. But then there are places, the wind blows harder across their shapes, or maybe we visit them more often so the dust doesn’t lie so thick, and the memories sit there waiting for us, no different now than the day they happened, good and bad, momentous occasions and those so trivial you can’t figure out why you remember them. But I know this is true: When I was twelve years old, kids my age didn’t know as much as they do today. We believed things you couldn’t get by most eight-year-olds now. We were ready to believe almost any​thing. All we required was that it be true—maybe not so much by the rules of the world around us, but at least by the rules of some intuitive inner logic. It wasn’t ever anything that got talked out. We just believed. In luck. In wishes. In how a thing will happen, if you stick to the right parade of circumstances. We were willing to believe in magic. Here’s what you do, Jerry says. You get one of those little pipe tobacco tins and you put stuff in it. Important stuff. A fingernail. Some hair. A scab. Some dirt from a special place. You spit on it and mix it up like a mud pie. Prick your finger and add a drop of blood. Then you wrap it all up in a picture of the thing you like the best. What if you don’t have a picture of the thing you like the best? I ask. Doesn’t have to be a real picture, he says. You can just make a drawing of it. Might be even better that way because then it really belongs to you. So what do you do with it? Rebecca asks. I can see her so clearly, the red hairs coming loose from her braids, picking at her knee where she scraped it falling off her bike. You stick it in that tin, Jerry says, and close it up tight. Dig a hole under your porch and bury it deep. He leans closer to us, eyes serious, has that look he always gets when he’s telling us something we might not believe is true, but he wants us to know that it is. This means something, he says. You do it right, and you’ll always have that thing you like the best. Nothing will ever take it away. I don’t know where he heard about it. Read it in a book, or maybe his grandmother told him. She always had the best stories. It doesn’t matter. We knew it was a true magic, and that night each of us snuck out of our house and did it. Buried those tins deep. Made a secret of it to make the magic stronger is how Jerry put it. I didn’t need the magic to be any stronger. I just needed it to be true. We were best friends, the three of us, and I didn’t want that to ever change. I really believed in magic, and the idea of the tin seemed to be about the best magic kids like us could make. Rebecca moved away when we were in ninth grade. Jerry died the last year of high school, hit by a drunk driver. Years later, this all came back to me. I’d returned to have a look at the old neighborhood, but our houses were gone by then. Those acre lots we grew up on had been subdivided, the roads all turned around on themselves and changed until there was nothing left of the neighbor​hood’s old patterns. They’re identical, these new houses, poured out of the same mold, one after the other, row upon row, street after street. I got out of the car that day and stood where I thought my house used to be, feeling lost, cut off, no longer connected to my own past. I thought of those tins then and wondered whatever had happened to them. I remembered the drawing I made to put in mine. It was so poorly drawn I’d had to write our names under our faces to make sure the magic knew who I meant. The weird thing is I never felt betrayed by the magic when Rebecca moved away, or when Jerry died. I just . . . lost it. Forgot about it. It went away, or maybe I did. Even that day, standing there in a neighborhood now occupied by strangers, the memory of those tins was only bitter​sweet. I smiled, remembering what we’d done, sneaking out so late that night, how we’d believed. The tightness in my chest grew from good moments recalled, mixed up with the sadness of remembering friends I’d lost. Of course those tins couldn’t have kept us together. Life goes on. People move, relationships alter, people die. That’s how the world turns. There isn’t room for magic in it, though you’d never convince Ted of that.

2

Ted and I go back a long way. We met during my first year in college, almost twenty years ago, and we still see each other every second day or so. I don’t know why we get along so well unless that old axiom’s true and opposites do attract. Ted’s about the most outgoing person you could meet; opinionated, I’ll be the first to admit, but he also knows how to listen. He’s the sort of person other people naturally gravitate to at a party, collecting odd facts and odder rumors the way a magpie does shiny baubles, then jump-starting conversations with them at a later date as though they were hors d’oeuvres. I’m not nearly so social an animal. If you pressed me, I’d say I like to pick and choose my friends carefully; the truth is, I usually have no idea what to say to people— especially when I first meet them. Tonight it’s only the two of us, holding court in The Half Kaffe. I’m drinking espresso; Ted’s got one of those decaf lattés made with skim milk that always has me wonder, what’s the point? If you want to drink coffee that weak, you can find it down the street at Bruno’s Diner for a quarter of the price. But Ted’s gone health-conscious recently. It’s all talk about decaf and jogging and macrobiotic this and holistic that, then he lights up a cigarette. Go figure. “Who’s that woman?” I ask when he runs out of things to say about this T’ai-chi course he’s just started taking. “The one at the other end of the counter with the long straight hair and the sad eyes?” I haven’t been able to stop looking at her since we got here. I find her attractive, but not in a way I can easily explain. It’s more the sum of the parts, because individually things are a little askew. She’s tall and angular, eyes almost too wide-set, chin pointed like a cat’s, a Picasso nose, very straight and angled down. She has the sort of features that look gorgeous one moment, then almost homely the next. Her pos​ture’s not great, but then, considering my own, I don’t think I should be making that kind of judgment. Maybe she thinks like I do, that if you slouch a bit, people won’t notice you. Doesn’t usually work. I suspect she’s waiting for someone since all she’s been doing is sit​ting there, looking out the window. Hasn’t ordered anything yet. Or maybe it’s because Jonathan’s too caught up with the most recent issue of The Utne Reader to notice her. I look away from her when I realize that Ted hasn’t answered. I find him giving me a strange look. “So what’ve you got in that cup besides coffee?” he asks. “What’s that supposed to mean?” He laughs. “I’m not sure. All I know is I don’t see anyone sitting at this counter, male or female. I see you and me and Jonathan.” I’m sure he’s putting me on. “No, seriously. Who is she?” And he, I realize, thinks I’m putting him on. He makes an exaggerated show of having a look, taking off nonexistent glasses, cleaning them, putting them back on, looks some more, but his attention isn’t even on the right stool. “Okay,” he says. “I see her now I think . . . yes, she’s a princess. Lost a shoe, or a half-dozen feet of hair, or a bag of beans or something. Or maybe turned the wrong key in the wrong lock and got turned out of her bearded husband’s apartment, and now she’s here killing time between periods of sleep just like the rest of us.” “Enough,” I tell him. “I get the picture.” He doesn’t see her. And it’s beginning to be obvious to me that Jonathan doesn’t see her, or he’d have taken her order by now. The group at the table behind us, all black jeans and intense conversation, they probably don’t either. “So what’s this all about?” Ted asks. He looks half-amused, half-intrigued, still unsure if it’s a joke or something more intriguing, a piece of normal that’s slid off to one side. He has a nose for that sort of thing, from Elvis sightings to nuns impregnated by aliens, and I can almost see it twitching. He doesn’t read the tabloids in line at the supermarket; he buys them. Need I say more? So when he asks me what it’s all about, he seems the perfect candidate for me to tell because it’s very confusing and way out of my line of experience. I’ve never been prone to hallucinations before, and, besides, I always thought they’d be more . . . well, surreal, I suppose. Dadaistic. Over the top. This is so ordinary. Just a woman, sitting in a coffee bar, that no one seems to be able to see. Except for me. “Hello, Andrew,” Ted says, holding the first syllable of my name and drawing it out. “You still with us?” I nod and give him a smile. “So are you going to fill me in or what?” “It’s nothing,” I say. “I was just seeing if you were paying attention.” “Um-hmm.” He doesn’t believe me for a moment. All I’ve managed to do is pique his curiosity more. “No, really,” I tell him. The woman stands up from the counter, distracting me. I wonder why she came in here in the first place since she can’t seem to place an order, but then I think maybe even invisible people need to get out, enjoy a little nightlife, if only vicariously. Or maybe she’s a ghost. “Did anybody ever die in here?” I ask Ted. Ted gives me yet another strange look. He leans across the table. “You’re getting seriously weird on me,” he says. “What do you want to know that for?” The woman’s on her way to the door now. Portishead is playing on the cafe’s sound system. “Sour Times.” Lalo Schifrin and Smokey Brooks sam​ples on a bed of scratchy vinyl sounds and a smoldering, low-key Eurobeat. Beth Gibbons singing about how nobody loves her. At one time we both worked at Gypsy Records, and we’re still serious music junkies. It’s one of the reasons we like The Half Kaffe so much; Jonathan has impeccable taste. I pull a ten from my pocket and drop it on the table. “I’ll tell you later,” I say as I get up from my stool. “Andrew,” Ted says. “You can’t just leave me hanging like this.” “Later.” She’s out the door, turning left. Through the cafe’s window, I watch her do a little shuffle to one side as a couple almost walk right into her. They can’t see her either. “Sour Times” dissolves into an instrumental, mostly keyboards and a lonesome electric guitar. Ted calls after me. He’s starting to get up, too, but I wave him back. Then I’m out the door, jogging after the woman. “Excuse me!” I call after her. “Excuse me, miss!” I can’t believe I’m doing this. I have no idea what I’ll say to her if she stops. But she doesn’t turn. Gives no indication she’s heard me. I catch up to her and touch her lightly on the elbow. I know a moment of surprise when I can feel the fabric of her sleeve instead of some cool mist. I half expected my fingers to go right through her. “Excuse me,” I say again. She stops then and looks at me. Up close, her face, those sad eyes . . . they make my pulse quicken until my heartbeat sounds like a deep bass drum playing a march at double time in my chest. “Yes?” “I . . . ” There’s no surprise in her features. She doesn’t ask how come I can see her and nobody else can. What I do see is a hint of fear in her eyes, which shouldn’t surprise me. A woman alone on the streets always has to be on her guard. I take a step back to ease the fear, feeling guilty and depressed for having put it there. “I . . . ” There are a hundred things I want to ask her. About how she did what she did in The Half Kaffe. How come I can see her when other people can’t. Why she’s not surprised that I can see her. I’d even ask her out for a drink if I had the nerve. But nothing seems appropriate to the moment. Nothing makes sense. I clear my throat and settle on: “Can you tell me how to get to Battersfield Road?” The fear recedes in her eyes, but a wariness remains. “Take a left at the next light,” she tells me, “and just go straight. You can’t miss it.” “Thanks.” I watch her continue on her way. Two women approach her from the other direction, moving aside to give her room when she comes abreast. So does what appears to be a businessman, suit and tie, brief​case in hand, working late, hurrying home. But the couple behind him don’t see her at all; she has to dart to one side, press up against a store window so that they don’t collide. She’s invisible again. I follow her progress all the way to the end of the block as she weaves in and out of near collisions with the other pedestrians. Then she’s at the crosswalk, a tall, slouching figure waiting for the light to change. She takes a right where she told me to take a left, and a store​front cuts her from my view. I almost return to The Half Kaffe, but I don’t feel up to being grilled by Ted. I almost go home, but what am I going to do at home on a Friday night? Instead, I run to the corner where she turned, cross against the light, and almost get hit by a cab. The driver salutes me with one stiff finger and shouts something unintelligible at me, but I’m already past him, on the far curb now I see her ahead of me, almost at the end of the block, and I do something I’ve never done before in my life. I follow a woman I don’t know home.

3

The building she finally enters is one of those old Crowsea brownstones that hasn’t been renovated into condos yet—five stories, arches of tapered bricks over the windows, multigabled roof. There’d be at least twenty apartments in the place, crammed up one against the other, shoulder to shoulder like commuters jostling in the subway. She could be living in any one of them. She could just be visiting a friend. She uses a key on the front door, but it could belong to anybody. I know this. Just as I know she’s not about to come walking out again. As I know she’d be able to see me if her window’s facing this way, and she looks out. But I can’t help myself. I stand there on the street, looking at the face of the building as if it’s the most interesting thing I’ve ever seen. “She’ll never tell you,” a voice says from behind me, a kid’s voice. Here’s what it’s like, living in the city. The kid can’t be more than twelve or thirteen. He’s half my size, a scruffy little fellow in baggy jeans, hooded sweatshirt, air- pumped basketball shoes that have seen way better days. His hair is black, short and greasy, face looks as if it hasn’t been washed in weeks, half-moons of dark shadow under darker eyes. I look at him and what do I do? Make sure he’s alone. Try to fig​ure out if he’s carrying a gun or a knife. He’s just a kid, and I’m check​ing out what possible threat he could pose. I decide he’s harmless, or at least means me no harm. He looks amused at the way I’ve been eyeing him, cocks his head. I look a little closer. There’s something familiar about him, but I can’t place it. Just the features, not the dirty hair, the grubby skin, the raggedy clothes. “Who won’t tell me what?” I finally ask. “The invisible. She won’t be able to tell you how it works. Half of them don’t even know they go invisible. They just figure people treat them that way because that’s all they’re worth. Seriously low self-esteem.” I shake my head and can’t stop the smile that comes. “So what are you? A psychiatrist?” He looks back at me with a steadiness and maturity far belying his years and his appearance. There’s a bead of liquid glistening under one nostril. He’s a slight, almost frail figure, swamped in clothes that make him seem even smaller. But he carries himself with an assurance that makes me feel inadequate. “No,” he says. “Just someone who’s learned to stay visible.” I’d laugh, but there’s nothing to laugh about. I saw the woman in the café. I followed her home. If there’s a conspiracy at work here, the number of people involved has to be immense, and that doesn’t make sense. No one would go through so much trouble over me—what would be the point? It’s easier to believe she was invisible. “So how come I could see her?” I ask. The boy shrugs. “Maybe you’re closer to her than you think.” I don’t have to ask him what he means. Self-esteem’s never been one of my strong suits. “Or maybe it’s because you believe,” he adds. “Believe in what?” “Magic.” He says the word, and I can see three small tobacco tins, the children burying them in the dirt under their porches. But I shake my head. “Maybe I did once,” I say. “But I grew out of it. There’s nothing magic here. There’s simply a . . . a phenomenon that hasn’t been explained.” The boy grins, and I lose all sense of his age. It’s as if I’ve strayed into folklore, a fairy tale, tapped an innocent on the shoulder and come face-to-face with a fanged nightmare. I feel I should turn my coat inside out or I’ll never find my way back to familiar ground. “Then explain this,” the boy says around that feral grin. He doesn’t turn invisible. That’d be too easy, I guess. Instead it’s like a sudden wind comes up, a dust devil, spinning the debris up from the street, candy wrappers, newspapers, things I can’t identify. That vague sense of familiarity that’s been nagging at me vanishes. There’s nothing familiar about this. He’s silhouetted against the swirling litter, then his shape loses definition. For one moment I see his dark eyes and that grin in the middle of a shape that vaguely resembles his, then the dust devil moves, comes apart, and all that’s left is a trail of debris leading up the sidewalk, away from me. I stare down at the litter, my gaze slowly drifting toward the invisible woman’s building. Explain this? “I can’t,” I say aloud, but there’s no one there to hear me.

4

I return to my studio, but I’m too restless to sleep, can’t concentrate enough to work. I stand in front of the painting on my easel and try to make sense out of what I’m seeing. I can’t make sense of the image it once depicted. The colors and values don’t seem to relate to each other anymore, the hard edges have all gone soft, there’s no definition between the background and the foreground. I work in watercolor, a highly detailed and realistic style that has me laboring on the same piece for weeks before I’m done. This painting started the same as they always do for me, with a buzz, a wild hum in my head that flares down my arms into my fingertips. My first washes go down fast, the bones of light and color building from abstract glazes until the forms appear and, as Sickert said, the painting begins to “talk back” to me. Everything slows down on me then because the orches​tration of value and detail I demand of my medium takes time. This one was almost completed, a cityscape, a south view of the Kickaha River as seen from the Kelly Street Bridge, derelict ware​houses running down to the water on one side, the lawns of Butler U. on the other. Tonight I can’t differentiate between the river and the lawn, the edge of the bridge’s railing and the warehouses beyond it. The image that’s supposed to be on the paper is like the woman I followed earlier. It’s taken on a kind of invisibility of its own. I stare at it for a long time, know that if I stay here in front of it, I’ll try to fix it. Know as well that tonight that’s the last thing I should be doing. So I close the door on it, walk down the stairs from my studio to the street. It’s only a few blocks to The Half Kaffe and still early for a Friday night, but when I get there, Ted’s already gone home. Jonathan’s behind the counter, but then Jonathan is always behind the counter. The servers he has working for him come and go, changing their shifts, changing their jobs, but Jonathan’s always in his place, viewing the world by what he can see from his limited vantage point and through an endless supply of magazines. He’s flipping through the glossy pages of a British pop magazine when I come in. Miles Davis is on the sound system, a cut from his classic “Kind of Blue,” Evans’s piano sounding almost Debussian, Davis’s trumpet and Coltrane’s tenor contrasting sharply with each other. I order an espresso from Jonathan and take it to the counter by the front window. The night goes about its business on the other side of the pane. I study the passersby, wondering if any of them are invisi​bles, people only I can see, wonder if there are men and women walk​ing by that I don’t, that are invisible to me.

5

I find Ted at Bruno’s Diner the next morning, having his usual breakfast of late. Granola with two-percent milk and a freshly squeezed orange juice. All around him are people digging into plates of eggs and bacon, eggs and sausage, western omelets, home fries on the side, toast slathered with butter. But he’s happy. There’s no esoteric music playing at Bruno’s, just a golden oldies station issuing tinnily from a small portable radio behind the counter. The smell of toast and bacon makes my stomach rumble. “So what happened to you last night?” Ted asks when I slide into his booth. “Do you believe in magic?” I ask. Ted pauses with a spoonful of granola halfway to his mouth. “What, like Houdini?” He puts down the spoon and smiles. “Man, I loved that stuff when I was a kid. I wanted to be a magician when I grew up more than just about anything.” He manages to distract me. Of all the things I can imagine Ted doing, stage magic isn’t one of them. “So what happened?” I ask. “I found out how hard it is. And besides, you need dexterity, and you know me, I’m the world’s biggest klutz.” “But that stuff’s all fake,” I say. Time to get back on track. “I’m talk​ing about real magic.” “Who says it’s not real?” “Come on. Everybody knows it’s done with mirrors and smoke. They’re illusions.” Ted’s not ready to agree. “But that’s a kind of magic on its own, wouldn’t you say?” I shake my head. “I’m talking about the real stuff.” “Give me a for instance.” I don’t want to lose my momentum again—it’s hard enough for me to talk about this in the first place. I just want an answer to the question. “I know you read all those tabloids,” I say, “and you always let on like you believe the things they print. I want to know if you really do. Believe in them.” “Maybe we should backtrack a bit here,” he says. So I explain. I don’t know which is weirder—the story I tell him, or the fact that he takes me seriously when I tell it. “Okay” he says. “To start with, all that stuff about Elvis and Bigfoot and the like—it’s not what I’d call magic. It’s entertainment. It might be true and it might not. I don’t know. It doesn’t even matter. But magic . . . ” His voice trails off and he gets a kind of dreamy look on his face. “There’s a true sense of mystery with magic,” he says. “Like you’re having a meaningful dialogue with something bigger than you—bigger than anything you can imagine. The tabloids are more like gossip. Something like what’s happened to you—that’s the real thing. It reaches into what we’ve all agreed are the workings of the world and stirs them around a little, makes a person sit up and pay attention. Not simply to the experience itself, but to everything around them. That’s why the great stage illusions—I don’t care if it’s a floating woman or someone walking through the Great Wall of China. When they’re done properly, you come away questioning everything. Your eyes are opened to all sorts of possibilities.” He smiles then. “Of course, usually it doesn’t last. Most people go right back to the reality we’ve all agreed on. Me, I think it’s kind of sad. I like the idea that there’s more to the world than I can see or understand, and I don’t want to ever forget it.” What he’s saying reminds me of the feeling I got after I first started to do art. Up until then I’d been the perennial computer nerd, spend​ing all my time in front of a screen because that way I didn’t have to take part in any more than the minimum amount of social interaction to get by. Then one day, in my second year at Butler, I was short one course, and for no reason that’s made sense before or since, decided to take life drawing, realized I had an aptitude for it, realized I loved it more than anything I’d ever tried before. After that, I never looked at anything the same again. I watched light, saw everything through an imaginary frame. Clouds didn’t just mean a storm was coming; they were an ever-changing picture of the sky, a panorama of movement and light that affected everything around them —the landscape, the people in it. I learned to pay attention and realized that once you do, anything you look at is interesting. Everything has its own glow, its own place in the world that’s related to everything else around it. I looked into the connectedness of it all and nothing was the same for me again. I got better at a lot of things. Meeting people. Art. General life skills. Not perfect, but better. “Have you ever heard of these invisibles?” I ask Ted. “That’s what the practitioners of voudoun call their deities. Les Invisibles.” I shake my head. “This kid wasn’t speaking French. It wasn’t like he was talking about that kind of thing at all. He was referring to ordinary people that go invisible because they just aren’t here enough anymore.” I stop and look across the table at Ted. “Christ, what am I saying? None of this is possible.” Ted nods. “It’s easier to pretend it didn’t happen.” “What’s that supposed to mean?” But I know exactly what he’s talking about. You can either trust your senses and accept that there’s more to the world than what you can see, or you can play ostrich. I don’t know what to do. “You had anything to eat yet?” Ted asks. “Not since last night.” I let him order me breakfast, don’t even complain when it’s the same as his own. “See, the thing is,” he tells me while we’re waiting for my cereal to arrive, “that you’re at the epicenter where two worlds are colliding.” “So now it’s an earthquake.” He smiles. “But it’s taking place on an interior landscape.” “I saw that woman last night—other people couldn’t. That kid turned into a heap of litter right in front of my eyes. It happened here, Ted. In what’s supposed to be the real world. Not in my head.” “I know. The ‘quake hit you here, but the aftershocks are running through your soul.” I’d argue with him, except that’s exactly how it feels. “Why do you think that kid talked to me?” I ask. I don’t expect Ted to know, but it’s part of what’s been bothering me. Why’d he pick me to approach? “I don’t know,” Ted says. “Next time you see him you should ask him.” “I don’t think I want there to be a next time.” “You might not get a choice.”

6

Maybe I could pretend to Ted that I didn’t want any further involve​ment with invisible people and kids that turn into litter, but I couldn’t lie to myself. I went looking for the boy, for the invisible woman, for things and people out of the ordinary. There was still a pretense involved. I didn’t wander aimlessly, one more lost soul out on the streets, but took a sketchbook and a small paint box, spent my time working on value drawings and color studies, gathering material for future paintings. It’s hard for me to work en plein. I keep wanting to fuss and fiddle too much, getting lost in detail until the light changes, and then I have to come back another day to get the values right. A lot of those sketching sessions were spent outside the invisible woman’s building, looking for her, expecting the boy to show up. I’d set up my stool, sit there flooding color onto the pages of my sketch​book, work in the detail, too much detail. I don’t see the woman. Wind blows the litter around on the street, but it doesn’t rise up in the shape of a boy and talk to me. I find myself thinking of fairy tales—not as stories, but as guideposts. Ted and I share a love of them, but for different reasons. He sees them as early versions of the tabloids, records kept of strange encounters, some real, some imagined, all of them entertaining. I think of them more metaphorically. All those dark forests and trials and trouble. They’re the same things we go through in life. Maybe if more of us had the good heart of a Donkeyskin or the youngest son of three, the world would be a better place. I’m thinking of this in front of the invisible woman’s building on a blustery day. I’ve got the pages of my sketchbook clipped down, but the wind keeps flapping them anyway, making the paint puddle and run. Happy accidents, I’ve heard them called. Well, they’re only happy when you can do something with them, when you don’t work tight, every stroke counting. I’m just starting to clean up the latest of these so-called happy accidents when a ponytailed guy carrying a guitar walks right into me, knocking the sketchbook from my lap. I almost lose the paint box as well. “Jesus,” he says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t see you sitting there.” He picks up my sketchbook and hands it over. “I hope I haven’t totally ruined this.” “It’s okay,” I tell him. It’s not, but what would be the point of being unpleasant? “I’m really sorry.” I look down at the page I was working on. Now there’s dirt smeared into the happy accident. Fixable it’s not. My gaze lifts to meet his. “Don’t worry about it,” I tell him. “It happens.” He nods, his relief plain. “I must’ve been dreaming,” he says, “because I just didn’t see you at all.” He hesitates. “If you’re sure it’s okay . . . ” “I’m sure.” I watch him leave, think about what he said. I just didn’t see you. So now what? I’ve become invisible, too? Then I remember the kid, something he said when I asked why I could see the invisible woman and others couldn’t. Maybe you’re closer to her than you think. Invisible. It comes to me, then. The world’s full of invisible people, and our not seeing them’s got nothing to do with magic. The home​less. Winos. Hookers. Junkies. And not only on the street. The house​wife. The businessman’s secretary. Visible only when they’re needed for something. The man with AIDS. Famine victims. People displaced by wars or natural disasters. The list is endless, all these people we don’t see because we don’t want to see them. All these people we don’t see because we’re too busy paying attention to ourselves. I’ve felt it myself, my lack of self-confidence and how it translates into my behavior can have people look right through me. Standing in a store, waiting to be served. Sitting in the corner of a couch at a party and I might as well be a pillow. The kid’s face comes back to mind. I look down at my sketchbook, exchange the page smeared with happy accidents for a new one, draw the kid’s features as I remember them. Now I know why he looked so familiar.

7

Ted opens his door on the first knock. He’s just got off work and seems surprised to see me. I can smell herb tea steeping, cigarette smoke. Something classical is playing at low volume on the stereo. Piano. Chopin, I think. The preludes. “Were we doing a movie or something tonight?” Ted asks. I shake my head. “I was wondering if I could see that old photo album of yours again.” He studies me for a moment, then steps aside so that I can come in. His apartment’s as cluttered as ever. You can’t turn for fear of knocking over a stack of books, magazines, CDs, cassettes. Right by the door there’s a box of newspapers and tabloids ready to go out for recycling. The one on top has a headline that shouts in bold caps: TEENAGER GIVES BIRTH TO FISH BOY!! “You don’t have to look at the album,” he tells me. “I’ll ‘fess up.” Something changes in me when he says those words. I thought I knew him, like I thought I knew the world, but now they’ve both become alien territory. I stand in the center of the room, the furniture crouched around me like junkyard dogs. I have a disorienting static in my ears. I feel as though I’m standing on dangerous ground, stepped into the fairy tale, but Stephen King wrote it. “How did you do it?” I ask. Ted gives me a sheepish look. “How first? Not even why?” I give the sofa a nervous look, but it’s just a sofa. The vertigo is receding. My ears pop, as though I’ve dropped altitude, and I can hear the piano music coming from the speakers on either side of the room. I’m grounded again, but nothing seems the same. I sit down on the sofa, set my stool and sketching equipment on the floor between my feet. “I don’t know if I can handle why just yet,” I tell him. “I have to know how you did it, how you made a picture of yourself come to life.” “Magic.” “Magic,” I repeat. “That’s it?” “It’s not enough?” He takes a seat in the well-worn armchair across from me, leans forward, hands on his knees. “Remember this morning, when I told you about wanting to be an illusionist?” I nod. “I lied. Well, it was partly a lie. I didn’t give up stage magic, I just never got the nerve to go up on a stage and do it.” “So the kid . . . he was an illusion?” Ted smiles. “Let’s say you saw what I wanted you to see.” “Smoke and mirrors.” “Something like that.” “But . . .” I shake my head. He was right earlier. There’s no point in asking for details. Right now, how’s not as important as . . . “So why?” I ask. He leans back in the chair. “The invisibles need a spokesperson—someone to remind the rest of the world that they exist. People like that woman you saw in The Half Kaffe last night. If enough people don’t see her, she’s simply going to fade away. She can’t speak up for herself. If she could, she wouldn’t be an invisible. And she’s at the high end of the scale. There are people living on the streets that—” “I know,” I say, breaking in. “I was just thinking about them this afternoon. But their invisibility is a matter of perception, of people ignoring them. They’re not literally invisible like the woman last night. There’s nothing magic about them.” “You’re still missing the point,” Ted says. “Magic’s all about perception. Things are the way they are because we’ve agreed that’s the way they are. An act of magic is when we’re convinced we’re experi​encing something that doesn’t fit into the conceptual reality we’ve all agreed on.” “So you’re saying that magic is being tricked into thinking an illu​sion is real.” “Or seeing through the illusion, seeing something the way it really is for the first time.” I shake my head, not quite willing to concede the argument for all that it’s making uncomfortable sense. “Where does your being a spokesperson fit in?” I ask. “Not me. You.” “Oh, come on.” But I can tell he’s completely serious. “People have to be reminded about the invisibles,” he says, “or they’ll vanish.” “Okay” I say. “For argument’s sake, let’s accept that as a given. I still don’t see where I come into it.” “Who’s going to listen to me?” Ted asks. “I try to talk about it, but I’m a booking agent. People’d rather just think I’m a little weird.” “And they’re not going to think the same of me?” “No,” he says. “And I’ll tell you why. It’s the difference between art and argument. They’re both used to get a point across, but the artist sets up a situation, and, if he’s good enough, his audience understands his point on their own, through how they assimilate the information he’s given them and the decisions they can then make based on that information. The argument is just someone telling you what you’re supposed to think or feel.” “Show, don’t tell,” I say, repeating an old axiom appropriate to all the arts. “Exactly. You’ve got the artistic chops and sensibility to show peo​ple, to let them see the invisibles through your art, which will make them see them out there.” He waves a hand toward the window “On the street. In their lives.” He’s persuasive, I’ll give him that. “Last night in The Half Kaffe,” I begin. “I didn’t see the woman you saw,” Ted says. “I didn’t see her until you stopped her down the street.” “And after? When she went invisible again?” “I could still see her. You made me see her.” “That’s something anybody could do,” I tell him. “But only if they can see the invisibles in the first place,” he says. “And you can’t be everywhere. Your paintings can. Reproductions of them can.” I give him a look that manages to be both tired and hold all my skepticism with what he’s saying. “You want me to paint portraits of invisible people so that other people can see them.” “You’re being deliberately obtuse now, aren’t you? You know what I mean.” I nod. I do know exactly what he means. “Why bring this all up now?” I ask him. “We’ve known each other for years.” “Because until you saw the invisible woman, you never would have believed me.” “How do I know she’s not another illusion—like the boy made of litter that was wearing your twelve-year-old face?” “You don’t.”

8

He’s wrong about that. I do know. I know in that part of me that he was talking about this morning over breakfast, the part that had a meaningful dialogue with something bigger than me, the part that’s willing to accept a momentary glimpse behind the curtain of reality as a valid experience. And I know why he sent the illusion of the boy after me, too. It’s the same reason he didn’t admit to any of this sooner, played the innocent when I came to him with my story of invisible people. It was to give me my own words to describe the experience. To make me think about the invisibles, to let me form my own opin​ions about what can be readily seen and what’s hidden behind a veil of expectations. Showing, not telling. He’s better than he thinks he is. I stand in my studio, thinking about that. There’s a board on my easel with a stretched full-sized piece of three-hundred-pound Arches hot-pressed paper on it. I squeeze pigments into the butcher’s tray I use as a palette, pick up a brush. There’s a light pencil sketch on the paper. It’s a cityscape, a street scene. In one corner, there’s a man, sleeping in a doorway, blanketed with newspapers. The buildings and street over​whelm him. He’s a small figure, almost lost. But he’s not invisible. I hope to keep him that way. I dip my brush into my water jar, build up a puddle in the middle of the tray. Yellow ochre and alizarin crimson. I’m starting with the fea​tures that can be seen between the knit woolen cap he’s wearing and the edge of his newspaper blanket, the gnarled hand that grips the papers, holding them in place. I want him to glow before I add in the buildings, the street, the night that shrouds them. As I work, I think of the tobacco tins that Rebecca, Jerry, and I buried under our porches all those years ago. Maybe magic doesn’t always work. Maybe it’s like life, things don’t always come through for you. But being disappointed in something doesn’t mean you should give up on it. It doesn’t mean you should stop trying. I think of the last thing Ted said to me before I left his apartment. “It goes back to stage magicians,” he told me. “What’s so amazing about them isn’t so much that they can make things disappear, as that they can bring them back.” I touch the first color to the paper and reach for a taste of that amazement.

© 1996 by Charles De Lint. Originally appeared in David Copperfield’s Beyond Imagination, edited by David Copperfield & Janet Berliner. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Charles de Lint is a full-time writer and musician who presently makes his home in Ottawa, Canada, with his wife MaryAnn Harris. His most recent books are The Painted Boy (Viking, 2010), The Very Best of Charles de Lint (Tachyon Press, 2010) and Promises to Keep (Tachyon, 2011). His first album, Old Blue Truck, came out in early 2011. For more information about his work, visit his website at www.charlesdelint.com. Author Spotlight: Charles De Lint T. J. McIntyre

Your story, “The Invisibles,” deftly merges the real world and fantasy. As a writer, how do you decide where to draw that dividing line in your stories between the realistic and the fantastic?

It’s a matter of what works for the story. In this case the magical elements are much more subtle than they are in some of my other stories. Since the point being made in the story is to bring to light things and people that “disappear” between the cracks it had to have a firm basis in the world we all know. In fact, I’d argue that’s the basis for all good fantasy stories: Ground the reader in the familiar so that when you do bring more improbable elements on stage, they’re more readily accepted.

On a deeper level, “The Invisibles” is not so much a straightforward fantasy as it is a kind of parable. At least on one level. Or at least that’s how I read it. I read “The Invisibles” as a morality tale of sorts, focusing on the importance of focusing our attention on those outside ourselves, the Invisibles of the real world: the victims, the refugees, the sick, the homeless, those who are hurting and lost and lonely. Why use fantasy to bring attention to reality?

Message stories are a tough sell. It’s much better to “show—don’t tell,” as Andrew says in the text, quoting pretty much every writing and art instructor worth his or her salt. So rather than lecture the reader, I wanted them to simply follow along with Andrew’s experience. On the most basic level I wanted the story to be entertaining or intriguing in its own right. As for why I used a fantasy story as my vehicle, I just like writing stories that are set in the real world but have a little flash of something else to keep things interesting.

According to what publication history I could find, “The Invisibles” first appeared in David Copperfield’s Beyond Imagination. It has since been included in your short fiction collection, Moonlight and Vines. With the original publication date being 1996, some time has passed. What can you tell us about the original path to publication? Is there any interesting story there?

There’s no juicy story to tell. The story was commissioned for Beyond Imagination and because of Copperfield’s involvement I decided to add the elements of stage magic into the mix, rather than faeries and goblins.

Looking back on “The Invisibles” today, has the meaning of this story changed for you at all over the ensuing years since you wrote it? If so, how?

Sadly, I haven’t seen much change in the world at large in the fifteen or so years since I wrote the story. There are still invisibles out there: the kid in school that is so unimportant he or she doesn’t even get bullied, the homeless man in a doorway, the camps filled with refugees . . .

Would you like to announce any upcoming projects for your fans?

I’m just finishing up a final edit of an expanded version of A Circle of Cats, the picture book I did a few year ago with Charles Vess. The story’s about five times longer than the original and will feature fifty new paintings by Vess. It will be published by Little Brown. I’m also in the middle of a three-book Young Adult series for Penguin Canada called Wildlings, which plays with the animal people mythology I’ve been using for years in my adult books. And after far too many years of saying I will, I’ve finally recorded and released a CD of original story songs called Old Blue Truck. It’s a mix of folk-rock and Americana. Samples and a video can be found on my Website at www.charlesdelint.com.

T.J. McIntyre writes from a busy household in rural Alabama. His poems and short stories have been featured in numerous publications, including recent appearances in Moon Milk Review, M-Brane SF, The Red Penny Papers, and Tales of the Talisman. His debut poetry collection, Isotropes: A Collection of Speculative Haibun, was released in 2010 by Philistine Press. In addition to writing poetry and short fiction, he writes a monthly column for the Apex Books Blog and regularly contributes reviews for Skull Salad Reviews. Are You Watching Carefully? Christopher Priest

Why write a book about magic? Not fantasy magic, but real magic. The sort that does not depend on the supernatural, but is indistinguishable from it? Some years ago I wrote a novel called The Prestige (later made into a film by the director Christopher Nolan). The novel is about the obsessive secrecy stage magicians place about their tricks, and the even greater obsessive curiosity many other people feel about the result: something that is uncannily close to the supernatural. For me, it began during a Christmas break in the mid- 1970s. I was living in the suburbs of London, and that year I was spending the holiday with friends. It was not a remarkable event. Between sessions of eating and drinking we watched a lot of television. One evening a variety show came on, and it happened to include an act by an illusionist. I watched it without special attention because at that time magic held no particular interest for me. At the conclusion of his act, the magician performed a simple but spectacular trick. He placed an ordinary wooden chair in the centre of a bare platform, and his female assistant sat down on it. The magician threw a large cotton sheet across her and the chair and smoothed it out so that her shape could still be clearly seen. He spoke to her, and she replied. She waved her hands to prove she was still there. I blinked. As I did so the magician swept the sheet away from her, revealing the now-empty chair. The young woman had vanished. The magician took his well-deserved applause, and that was that. I was intrigued, although not seriously so. Whenever you see a trick performed you know from the outset that you are going to be tricked, so you set up certain mental safeguards while you watch the build-up, trying to see where and how the conjuror could possibly deceive you. In the case of this illusion there seemed little room for trickery, because everything looked so ordinary and visible. The props were simple. The trick appeared exactly as I have described it. I would have forgotten all about it but for a fortunate coincidence—fortunate for me, that is. The following day, while I was again watching television, a different magician came on to perform some tricks. To my surprise he brought his act to a climax with the same illusion. He gave it a small extra twist by using as his assistant a well- known female singer, but in every other respect it was identical. This time I watched like a hawk! I did not blink! The same dazzling effect was achieved with simplest of props: a wooden chair, a sheet and a young woman. As soon as the shops re-opened after Christmas I went into the centre of London and scoured through the big bookstores in search of enlightenment. I found four books on magical methods and techniques, and after a great deal of searching I was able to identify the illusion and its method. Not the exact trick, but one which was almost the same, invented some two hundred years ago. The version I saw had been modernized into a format suitable for performance on television. Nearly all the great illusions have been developed and refined in this way, by modifying classic techniques. The literature of magic is full of references to the great Persian, Egyptian, Indian, and Chinese illusionists. None of those masters could for obvious reasons perform a trick with (say) a cell phone or a laptop computer, but any modern magician who does would certainly be using the same principles. As the trick I saw that memorable evening is still regularly performed, I won’t spoil anything by revealing the method I discovered. But read what I say below about misdirection, and then remember the apparently basic props that were used. Speaking of Chinese illusionists, while I was searching through these books I came across a description of the life and work of a magician from Shanghai called Ching Ling Foo. Ching was one of the first Asian magicians to work in the West (he was born in 1854). By the use of facial make-up, and by habitually wearing an impassive expression, Ching conveyed an unmistakable aura of Oriental mystery, menace and inexplicable magical powers. He was simply a conventional magician using conventional techniques, but through stagecraft he made quite an impression. There were in fact two major Chinese illusionists in this period. Ching Ling Foo was so successful that an imitator, called Chung Ling Soo, emerged. Chung (not Ching) became famous for an illusion in which a member of the audience was invited onto the stage to fire a loaded pistol at him—Chung would somehow contrive to catch the bullet between his teeth. One night the trick went disastrously wrong, and a real bullet was actually fired, hitting him in the chest. As he staggered back he uttered his last words: “Oh my God. Something’s happened. Lower the curtain.” He was the twelfth magician to die while performing this dangerous illusion. According to magical folklore the trick has rarely been performed since. Magicians are superstitious—no one wants to be number thirteen. Chung Ling Soo, incidentally, was not Chinese at all. The confusingly similar name (deliberately chosen, of course) was a nom de théâtre for an American illusionist called William Ellsworth Robinson, who was one of several Western magicians who donned Oriental disguise. While reading about Ching Ling Foo (the real one) I came across a description of his own closing illusion, one that did much to create his fame. It was again simple in appearance, but maddeningly impossible to explain. As this trick is described in the early part of The Prestige, and performed in the film, I’ll leave you to find out about it for yourself. How Ching did his trick was a revelation to me. Not the technique itself, because that is a slight matter, but the degree of secrecy with which he surrounded it. When I was interviewing a magician while researching the novel, he remarked that one of the reasons illusionists are so secretive is because if people found out how silly and simple their secrets are, few would bother to go to their shows. Ching Ling Foo’s secret was a small one, but it dominated his life. It was around this time that I realized that I was beginning to act rather like a magician myself. I was becoming obsessed with other people’s secrets. I let my interest in stage magic slip back into the shadows, and there it remained for at least a decade and a half. Then, seeking a fictional story that could also hint at the art of writing fiction, I remembered the methods an illusionist uses to misdirect his audience. Misdirection is at the heart of magic, as it is in much of fiction. Without drawing too much attention to what he is doing, a magician places images and ideas and actions before the audience and allows them to make their own assumptions about what is going to happen. An example is the moment when a magician produces a brand-new deck of playing cards, still sealed inside their cellophane wrapper. He opens the deck, tosses aside the protective seals, fans the cards to display them, then performs a trick. Most people in the audience will easily assume that by opening the deck in front of them the magician is proving two matters: firstly, that the cards were sealed up until that moment; therefore, secondly, that he couldn’t have interfered with them in any way. This is exactly what the magician wants the audience to think, because the opposite is almost certainly the case. He has used misdirection, and the trick has been performed before anyone can think it through. This then is one of the other themes in The Prestige: The novel sets out to misdirect the reader about many matters, never telling a deliberate lie but quietly setting forward several true facts from which the reader is invited to make assumptions. The revelations that follow are designed to show what every magician knows: You should never assume that what you see is what you get. So there you have the way The Prestige came into being. In describing it, I have, so to speak, built a plain platform and placed an ordinary wooden chair in the centre of it. The simple apparatus of the illusion can be viewed by everyone. But as you now realize, by writing this article I have already begun to misdirect you. Try not to blink . . .

Christopher Priest has written for radio and television, but is best known internationally for his novels. The Prestige has won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was made into an Oscar-winning movie. His twelve published novels, including The Glamour and Fugue for a Darkening Island, have lead to him receiving prizes in Australia, Yugoslavia, Germany, and a lifetime achievement award (Prix Utopia) in France. His latest novel, The Islanders, was published in September. Coming Attractions

Coming up in November, in Fantasy, we have original fiction by Lavie Tidhar (“Red Dawn: A Chow Mein Western”) and new writer K. M. Ferebee (“Seven Spells to Sever the Heart”), plus reprints by Ellen Kushner (“The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death”) and a reprint from Theodora Goss (“Christopher Raven”), from the just-released anthology Ghosts by Gaslight, edited by Jack Dann and Nick Gevers. All that plus our usual assortment of nonfiction and author spotlights. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Fantasy Magazine! Thanks for reading!