Nightmare Magazine, Issue 80 (May 2019)

TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 80, May 2019

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial: May 2019

FICTION Malotibala Printing Press Mimi Mondal The Deer Boy Micah Dean Hicks Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island Nibedita Sen Fail-Safe Philip Fracassi

BOOK EXCERPTS Inside the Asylum Mary SanGiovanni

NONFICTION The H Word: The Tragedy of La Llorona Aaron Duran Interview: Gabino Iglesias Lisa Morton

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Mimi Mondal Nibedita Sen

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

Editorial: May 2019 John Joseph Adams | 266 words

Welcome to issue eighty of Nightmare! This month, Mimi Mondal plays with a classic Bengali trope about ghosts in her new short story “Malotibala Printing Press.” Remember being in school and writing bibliographies for your papers? Well, Nibedita Sen spins that academic exercise into true horror in her new short “Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island.” We also have some nightmarish reprints by Micah Dean Hick (“The Deer Boy”) and Philip Fracassi (“Fail-Safe”). Writer, podcaster, and all-around geek Aaron Duran brings us the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word.” Of course we have author spotlights with our authors, and we also have a feature interview with Gabino Iglesias. Plus, our e-book readers will get a special e-book exclusive excerpt from Mary SanGiovanni’s new novel, Into the Asylum.

Awards News As you may recall, back in March, we told you about how two of our sister-magazine Lightspeed’s authors, José Pablo Iriarte and Sarah Pinsker, were named 2018 Nebula finalists. Both José’s novelette, “The Substance of My Lives, the Accidents of Our Births” (lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/substance-lives-accidents-births) and Sarah’s short story, “The Court Magician” (lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-court-magician) were published in Lightspeed’s January 2018 issue. Now we’re pleased to also announce that Sarah Pinsker’s story is also a finalist for the Hugo Award, as is frequent Lightspeed cover artist Galen Dara. Congrats to them both!

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

Malotibala Printing Press Mimi Mondal | 6305 words

I cannot understand why, but the young men of this generation have developed a new sport—to go and spend a night in a haunted house. Every three months or four, I receive a group of guests. It goes the same way each time. They arrive after sundown, bringing hurricane lamps, candles, sleeping mats, snacks and bottles of water lovingly packed from home. They come in groups of four or five, almost always the atheist, sceptical students of the Presidency College who remind me of my own youth. They sweep aside dirt and rabble from the floor, unfurl their mats, light a hurricane lamp at the centre of their circle, and settle down to tell ghost stories. I love listening to those stories, though there is little truth in any of them. Often, I find someone narrating how this very establishment— Malotibala Printing Press—came to be such an abandoned wreck. It is not an antique tale. Even so, the embellishments in the narrative are nothing less than dazzling. “I have heard that, in its day, Malotibala Printing Press was the most prosperous business on Chitpur Road,” tells the young man to his companions. “Of the thirty-four printing presses along this road, Malotibala was the richest of all.” With a nod, I lean in closer to listen. “But then came its downfall—a heart-wrenching tale of unrequited love and rejection.” . . . Oh?! “Friends, all of us must have purchased books from Malotibala Printing Press in our schooldays. But I bet nobody remembers them,” says the storyteller. “There was nothing remarkable about the books from Malotibala in those days. Cheap prints of the Ramayana and the Mahabharat, some standard mythologicals, insipid romances—the same as every other press was churning out. We may have bought books that were printed in this very room, on that cobwebbed machine at the corner, or we may have bought the same books from another press.” My pride somewhat injured, I continue to listen. “But then came the big break for Malotibala Printing Press—it was approached by the immensely talented author known as Kojagori Debi!” Sly grins of recognition appear on the listeners’ faces. The storyteller continues, “But of course, Kojagori Debi was a pseudonym. Behind it was a young lady from one of the wealthy households of the city, educated at home, not the kind of lady who can afford to be seen in mingling with the printers on Chitpur Road. Rumor is that this young lady was as beautiful as she was, hrrm, intriguing. And, as Secret Annals of the Queen by Kojagori Debi started flying off the peddlers’ boxes and booksellers’ stalls, as second and third and fourth reprints were set to run, the luckless owner of Malotibala Printing Press was falling in love. “This chap, called Udayan Dhar, was the lowest of the low, no different from any other pulp-book printer, with little money and no pedigree. Hardly a match for the daughter of a wealthy, high-caste household, even in this age of scandal. He dared to ask her hand in marriage, and was duly despised. Heartbroken, Udayan Dhar returned to his press and committed suicide in that little compositor’s room at the back. “Since that day, these premises have been haunted by the spirit of Udayan Dhar. His family—wanting to have nothing to do with the print business—sold off the press, but all the work started going wrong. Sheets of paper would come out blank, carefully composed pages would come out rudely misspelled, obscenities would creep into the text of respectable books. The worst assaults of the ‘printer’s devil’ were suffered by Secret Annals of the Queen by Kojagori Debi. Eventually the new owner, Bibhishon Bhattacharya, decided to shut down the press. And thus it has remained till this day.” A collective sigh emerges as the story comes to an end. A couple of boys peer at the long shadows on the wall, trembling gently with the flame of the hurricane lamp. It is approaching midnight. I begin to talk. “I don’t know where you heard this story,” I address the original storyteller, “but I know a different version—quite a scintillating one on its own. I will present it, if I may.” The night is long and there’s no other entertainment in this house, so the young men consent. “This is the story of Udayan Dhar,” I begin. “The former owner of Malotibala Printing Press was twenty-four years of age on the day he was murdered—murdered, yes! One can hardly commit suicide by clubbing himself at the back of the skull. Did not read that part in the newspaper, did you? None of the gossipmongers speak about it? Yet another miracle that money and connections can achieve.” I relish the shock on their faces. “Udayan Dhar was not born a pauper. His father had been a textile merchant, once quite prosperous. Udayan was the only son—stubborn, eccentric, hardly wise to the ways of the world. One of his obsessions was the printing press. As a schoolboy he had devoured those cheap romances and mythologicals. When he grew up, he wanted to print more of them. “There is a false perception that books are a genteel business. No such thing in the murky alleyways that branch off Chitpur Road. Out here, authors steal each other’s material, turf wars between vendors turn bloody, henchmen walk about in broad daylight extorting money from the printers. Young Udayan plunged himself into this world, and unsurprisingly, he sank. “While he struggled not to shut down his little press, one day Udayan was approached . . . not by any beautiful lady who populates these tales of romance, but a hard-knuckled hack writer whose name was Bibhishon Bhattacharya. This man had prowled these rough streets for many more years than young Udayan. ‘I have written many bestsellers with a wide variety of names,’ said the writer to Udayan, ‘but I bring you my best invention yet—a saucy young lady from a wealthy household called Kojagori Debi. She will write an account of the amorous escapades of the rich and famous women of the city, not in the least her own. Ooh, what a scandal it will be! No one will be spared Kojagori Debi’s salacious pen— all the wives and daughters of zamindars, politicians, social reformers, wealthy businessmen, doctors and professors; why even the mems of the Ingrej, so haughty and prim when they appear in public, yet inclined to unimaginable perversions behind closed doors. Kojagori Debi will expose them all! The public will eat it up! We will become millionaires!’ “It seemed like a viable project, though larger than any Udayan had handled before. He did not shy away from printing the occasional lascivious paperback—those were the books that kept any printer in profit, as much as they boasted of their mythologicals and chaste, didactic novels. But there was a catch to this particular project. In lieu of his brilliant plan and penmanship, Bibhishon Bhattacharya demanded ninety per cent of the book’s profits. He even brought his own compositor to set the pages of his book. All he wanted from Udayan were the name and the premises of Malotibala Printing Press. “Under such unequal terms came about the publication of the now- infamous Secret Annals of the Queen. As Bibhishon Bhattacharya had predicted, the city was aflame with gossip as copies of the book flew off booksellers’ shelves before reprints could even be printed. Udayan Dhar found himself thrust to attention, maintaining the pretense of shielding the honor of his mysterious lady author, while in the shadows Bibhishon Bhattacharya was minting money. Udayan received his meagre share, but it was barely enough to keep his press running. Ceaseless reprints of Secret Annals had put a stop to his other titles. Many of his regular authors had migrated, disgruntled, to other presses. Finally, a year after Secret Annals was unleashed into the world, Bibhishon Bhattacharya approached him with another proposal. “‘Malotibala has turned out to be my lucky press! It has made me so wealthy I may as well be Kojagori Debi myself,’ he said with one of his throaty chuckles. ‘I could buy any other press on this street—bigger, newer—but this is the one I must own.’ “To Udayan Dhar, his little press was dearer than life. He had resolved not to marry, often calling Malotibala his wife in jest. He declined the offer, but not only that. The look on Bibhishon’s face threw our young protagonist into a state of frenzy. The next day, Udayan brought in a mat and began to sleep within these walls. He no longer went home. He would’ve starved to death if not for the old lady who cooked at a nearby hotel he had patronized in his better days, who sent a boy running to Malotibala Printing Press each day with food wrapped in oily newspaper. “His vigilance lasted a couple of weeks. Eventually, one evening, some of the other printers coerced Udayan into going with them for a concert at the akhara nearby. They had grown worried about him—he was disheveled, beginning to mumble and smell. Once the concert ended at midnight and the other men ambled on their ways home, Udayan rushed back in panic to his press. “The night was pitch dark and all of Chitpur Road perfectly desolate; you could hear the cries of foxes wafting in from the salt marshes far along the eastern edges of the city. As Udayan approached his premises, he found the doors unlocked. He lit a candle and set it down by the door; darted to the letterpress to make sure it was unharmed. Right then, something heavy and metallic hit him hard at the back of his skull. (He would later learn it was a compositing stick.) As Udayan dropped to the ground, he could see in the candlelight the ink roller being wrenched out of the letterpress by a pair of muscular arms. In the pooling dark of the night, the scarlet of his blood ran into the crisp black of the printing ink . . .” The listeners give off a collective shudder. “How do you know all of this, anyway?” asks one of the young men, suspicious. “Who are you?” The group is suddenly aware that they have one member more around the circle of light than they did when they arrived. With a sigh, I give up my act. (Such a good act it was, too.) Someone raises the hurricane lamp to my face. I cannot help the translucent specter that’s cast on the wall behind me, unlike one of their solid shadows. What happens next is always the same. The young men depart as quickly as their feet will carry them, screaming the names of suddenly remembered gods, always leaving their mats and water bottles behind. The same people never come back, so I never make any friends.

• • • • Daytime is difficult for a ghost. Stripped of its raiment of flesh and bone, the spirit scorches too fast in the sun. So I hold my curiosity for nearly a week after I notice that someone has taken up residence at Malotibala Printing Press during the hours of the day. It is an uncanny presence. It sleeps in the furthest corner of the inner room, curled up under the letterpress, unbothered by cobwebs or dirt. It is not a dog or a cat—no stray animal, for I have reached out to its mind and sensed the contours of sapience. But its sapience is not like any human I’ve met so far. Visceral like an animal’s, but not quite. Older, vaster, oddly amorphous. What on earth is this thing? I catch the creature on the evening of the eighth day. At dawn, it had brought back the half-eaten carcass of a goat kid. There is still meat left on it in the evening, so my lodger does not go out to hunt. It is perfectly dark within the walls of Malotibala Printing Press when I make myself visible, but my lodger’s eyes are phosphorescent. He senses me immediately; raises his head to sniff. Then he emits a low, surprised growl. I can see the hairs on his upper body prick up. Over his lower body, somewhat awkwardly, he has managed to drape a dirty lungi. “No need to be alarmed,” I speak, half to myself. “This is my house, but you are welcome to stay.” The creature sniffs again, suspicious, and then, to my surprise, answers me in a gruff, awkward voice, trying out the words as he pronounces them. “You are not a man.” “I was once,” I sigh, then shrug. “But neither are you.” “I am now.” He pushes up on his hunches. “Or so I think.” My curiosity knows no bounds. “Do you have a name? Who are your folks?” “Naiwrit Ray.” The creature munches on a raw shank of goat. “My folks are tigers. But they are all dead.” Dead . . . uh, tigers? The creature that calls himself Naiwrit Ray lets it sink in before he says, “Ever heard of a goddess called Bon Bibi?” Of course I had. Bon Bibi was the heroine of several mythologicals regularly printed from the Chitpur Road presses. “Patron goddess of loggers, fishermen, honey gatherers and other men who make their living off the mangrove forests of the Sundarbans. She protects them from the evil claws of Dakshin Ray, deity of the man-eating tigers that roam in those forests.” “Dakshin Ray is not evil!” My guest flares up like the beast he is. “If the men who destroy the forests can claim for themselves a divine protector, may not the forests—the animals, the rivers, the mangrove—be granted a protector of their own? Is it evil for the forest to resist the greed of man?” He spits. “Besides, no tiger worth his skin would touch human meat if he could choose. But the tigers of the Sundarbans are hunted and left injured by men; they can no longer hunt for anything stronger or faster. Do you know how many tigers are murdered in the forest by men? I lost my mother as a cub. There were four of us in the litter, of whom only I survived to adulthood. But by then, there was no deer or rabbit left to hunt in the forests. One night, after I had starved for days, I skulked close to a village by the forest, hoping to pick up a stray goat or calf. I had done it before, though not enough times to be always well fed. “I did not know that, this time, the villagers had laid a trap for me. They spotted me, and up they sprang from the rice fields surrounding their village with torches, bamboo sticks and spears. I bolted back, but I took a spear to the hind leg, and the rice fields were flooded with water. Blind with pain, I kept sinking under my weight. I lost my sense of which way to escape—the men kept coming from every direction. Other sharp weapons pierced me in the dark, I couldn’t fathom what they were, just that they were bleeding out my life. I closed my eyes, let myself drown, knowing it was over— “—but the next morning I woke up in a rice field, right where I last remembered myself, and found myself turned into this,” finishes the creature, clumsily waving at himself. “I was caked in mud and blood, and the blood was mine, but I was no longer a tiger. I did not have any clothes, knew no human words, could not even stand up on my hind legs—I learned all that in later days. But the villagers must have found me in this shape, thought me a madman or scavenger unfortunately caught in the midst of their tiger hunt, and left without murdering me. “Now I can no longer return to the forest, but I also cannot live among men. They are always suspicious, always assuming the worst, but only the worst of their kind. They ask me where I’m from, what is my caste or trade, and I never have the correct answer, so they call me a beggar or thief. I kept being driven out of village after village, till I overheard someone say that in the city, no one asks you these questions —everyone is from somewhere else. So I found my way here, but nothing has been different. No one will give me a place to stay. I am willing to work for food, but I do not understand their work, and no one agrees to show me. They shoo me off as if my very existence offends them, though I pass for one of them now.” I sit still and watch him—this scraggly, impossible half-man half-tiger, labouring under his tragic delusion. He passes as much for a man as I do. “Well,” I finally speak, swallowing the astonishment in my own words. “It does say in the stories that Dakshin Ray could take on human form whenever he wished. Only . . . I’d expect him to be a rather more efficient human than this.” “From what I have heard, your human gods also sound like rather more efficient humans than the rest of you,” grumbles my guest. “Dakshin Ray is a myth, just like Bon Bibi. My line is said to have descended from him, but that means as much as any of your kind claiming to have descended from your gods. Perhaps I would’ve learned more about it if a poacher’s bullet did not take my mother while my siblings and I were still cubs. Perhaps if my brother and sisters had lived, they would’ve shared with me this uncalled-for humanity. As it happens, there is only me, and I have nowhere to go.” I tell him, “You can live here as long as you wish. Not that these quarters have much to recommend, but at least there is a lack of other people. They stay away for the fear of me.” “What is there to fear about you?” The expression on his face is genuine bewilderment. I sigh. I suppose I’m not a particularly fearsome ghost. “It is part of human nature to fear their dead,” I tell Naiwrit Ray. “In life, I had been a very harmless man. In death, I’m perhaps more so—I can no longer go out in the sun; I cannot visit my family or friends. I cannot even move corporeal objects; I pass right through. Yet no one fears the villains who took my life as much as they fear me.” As I say that, I am struck by an idea.

• • • •

The fundaments of a printing press aren’t easy to explain to someone who has no use for reading or writing. But Naiwrit Ray is all I have, besides all the time in the world. Of course, Noru is far from unintelligent. I do not even want to find out how he procures money; some secrets are best left under the shroud of the night. But he listens to my instructions with the deepest concentration, and acts on them fast. In a few days’ time, he has returned with two sets of new clothes, a pair of sandals, a barber’s razor, a plastic comb, a bar of soap for bathing. Every night I inspect his efforts at grooming, until I finally declare him worthy to pass in daylight. He is large for a man—strikingly muscular and hirsute—but he can just about slip into the acceptable range for a person. I send him out next to replace the parts of the letterpress that are broken or gone to rust. He buys paper, ink. In the dark of the night, long after the eyes of humans have given away, the pair of us sit head to head at Malotibala Printing Press and compose the story the world should know. It is a long, painstaking undertaking. I point out each letter as Noru arranges them into the compositing stick, transfers them to a forme, inks them, and runs the paper through the letterpress. The process takes days, weeks. Noru’s large, stubby fingers—still loaded with the memory of being paws—are anything but nimble. He fails to recognize one letter from the next. He must eat, so I give him a few hours off each night to go hunting. But the haunted Malotibala Printing Press comes to life every night, whizzing and rattling, keeping the interest of prying eyes at a distance. A month is gone before Noru succeeds in cutting the printed paper in proper shape, till we have hundreds of flimsy pamphlets, immaculately inked. As I go through them for inspection, my heart swells with pride.

• • • •

It takes three days for the deluge to spread. Three days since I have sent Noru out to distribute the pamphlets up and down the bustling stretch of Chitpur Road, to every bookseller who trades in Secret Annals of the Queen. That raunchy bestseller, needless to say, has outlived Malotibala Printing Press by a decade, inviting new generations of readers into its lurid pages. It is printed ceaselessly from three different presses, which are dedicated solely to its reprints. Bibhishon Bhattacharya, says the word on the street, now owns a mansion in the upscale quarters of Shova Bazar, not far from where the fictitious Kojagori Debi might have lived. The days of lingering in the alleyways of Chitpur Road are behind him—he has redesigned himself as a philanthropist and patron of the literary arts. For a commission, any bookseller would slip a pamphlet within the pages of a book. Even the rare bookseller who can read does not spare his hard-earned literacy reviewing the pamphlet—usually advertising the latest scintillating romance of the season; newfangled cosmetics for the ladies; the most marvellous astrologer for the future-conscious; potent herbal remedies for the infelicitous in bed. It is the surest way to reach a readership; far more reliable than the newspaper, where the editors would heckle for evidence and kowtow to important social figures before printing a revelation as big as this. No one reads a pamphlet until the book is purchased and its pages turned, so we spend three days waiting before there is a rumble, then a deafening roar. Lurking indoors during daytime, Noru and I listen as the tone of gossip changes on the road outside Malotibala Printing Press. On a regular day, people pass quickly by my derelict house, hardly sparing it a glance. But on the third day since the pamphlets go out, there is suddenly a lot of passing by, which, by the afternoon, turns into lingering, and then we start noticing small groups of people, always innocuously doing something else. Finally, little clouds of conversation, which we strain to hear. “Did you read . . . ?!” “What a scandal, what a scandal! Such slander in the name of our esteemed Bibhishon Babu! A pillar of the society if there ever was one!” “But what if it’s true? What if we really never knew? It’s an age of treachery, brother.” “I’d like to know how the author of this story knows it to such intricate detail! Was he there? How does he know Udayan Dhar was hit on the back of his head with a—what was it?” “A compositing stick!” “And then his skull was smashed with a—” “An ink roller! What’s those fancy words mean, anyway? Do these printing presses actually get away with carrying such murderous weapons? In broad daylight?” “What I’d like know is whether there was ever a real wealthy young lady behind Kojagori Debi at all.” “And what if there was? You’d ask her to marry you? Ha ha ha!” “What I’d like to find is the chap who spun this yarn, and ask him some questions myself.” “What I’d like to find is chap who printed it, and the chap who put it inside the books. Who are they? Where are they?” “Psst—I heard word that Malotibala Printing Press has started rolling again. The homeless on the street have been talking about it for weeks. Nobody has seen anyone come in or leave, but it keeps them up at night!” “You believe that kind of supernatural stuff? In broad daylight?” They stand on tiptoe and try to peer through my windows, but they do it from across the road. The broad daylight they swear by has been dimming by now, and with it, their quest for the truth.

• • • • The crowd that returns the next morning is bigger. I observe a group that has come prepared to break into the premises of Malotibala Printing Press, armed with metal rods, broomsticks, torches, and lidded jars filled with the filthy water of the Hooghly to ward off evil. Even from my crouch indoors, I can see the worms wriggling in that water. I instruct Noru to start running the letterpress. He is baffled. “But what are we to print? There isn’t even any paper or ink.” “Keep your voice low,” I say to him. “Those people cannot see me, my friend, but you are made of corporeal matter. We must keep them out, or you will get caught.” The reanimation of the press freezes the ghostbusters in their tracks. A moment ago they were adamant crusaders, seething under the noontime sun, but suddenly not a single one among them wishes to take the first step over the threshold of Malotibala Printing Press. “It’s a prank, we’re being duped.” They elbow each other. “Whoever has heard of a ghost operating a printing press? There’s a man hiding in there, laughing at us as if we’re a bunch of imbeciles.” “And what man would that be, eh? Would it be the tall, burly man that we heard of—built like a wall, tawny hair all over like an Ingrej, who turned up and distributed these pamphlets all over Chitpur Road, then vanished into thin air?” “Not like an Ingrej, more like a humongous dog is what I heard.” “Maybe he was the one who killed Udayan Dhar?” “Maybe he is Udayan Dhar himself, come back from the dead?” “You believe there’s a man like a dog-Ingrej-ghost-of-vengeance walking around in these streets? In broad daylight?” “What I know is that if a man like that existed, I wouldn’t like to go up against him, less so inside of that wreck across the road.” “Okay, listen up, brothers—if there is truly a man in there, surely he can hear us? Why don’t we politely ask him to step out, and then we can all have a conversation? We are not his enemy!” “No, no, of course we are not!” “We aren’t going to hand him to the police! What Bibhishon Babu’s lawyers will do once they learn who is behind all this rabble-rousing is a different matter, but we are just decent citizens. All we want is to find out the truth.” “Yes, yes, absolutely! Decent citizens! The truth!” So they write up a pompous speech; repeat it four, five, six times from their camp across the road. Someone brings out a horn. The poetically inclined among them sing a few ditties about truth, justice, and the invincible human spirit; there’s even a patriotic military march thrown in. One person suggests summoning a tantrik to perform a ritual of exorcism and finds himself quickly, embarrassedly, shushed. No one wants to enrage the presence inside Malotibala Printing Press before figuring out what exactly it is. Through all those antics, we keep running the empty letterpress. It will fall apart soon, I observe with a tinge of sadness, but its function has come to an end.

• • • •

When the mob departs that evening, I tell Noru, “You must leave. I will never be able to repay you for all that you have done, but I can no longer allow you to live here.” “Where will I go?” my companion of the past two months asks with barely concealed horror. He is curled under the exhausted letterpress like a homing cat. I can tell that he has begun to starve. It has not been safe to go out hunting ever since he appeared in public to distribute the pamphlets. Something stirs in my mind from a long-lost past, back in my days as a man. I say, “Follow the river till you reach the southernmost edge of the city, down to the docks. Avoid going through human neighbourhoods. Swim if you have to. Can you do that?” He nods. It is too much to expect of a man, but a tiger will have no difficulty swimming for hours. “The streets by the dockyard are the most disreputable quarters of the city,” I continue, “replete with thieves, smugglers, drunks, prostitutes, sailors of every race and flag, charlatans of all manner. There you will not stand out as odd, but also do not be taken by anyone. Look only for an old woman—a cook and housekeeper—who lives by herself in a shack. When you find her, tell her you come from me; that you seek refuge and a job from her employer.” “But you have been dead for ten years.” “She will understand,” I promise him. If there is anything in the world of the living about which I am left with any conviction, it is this. “Then why have you not gone to this place yourself?” Noru asks. “Why linger here if you have friends in other places?” “It’s been a while since I had the joy of uninhibited movement in the corporeal world, my friend,” I remind him with a bitter smile. “Malotibala Printing Press is where I died. It is the only place my spirit can inhabit.” “But what of Bibhishon Bhattacharya?” Noru is unrelenting. “Nothing we have done has caused a scratch on that scoundrel! People think our pamphlet is a prank, a baseless scandal, even a new advertising gimmick for that accursed book—all it has done is to give a fresh boost to its sales. Bibhishon Bhattacharya did not even come down to Chitpur Road see for himself what the furore was all about. He is probably even now sitting in his mansion, counting his renewed profits, smirking at us.” “We have done our best. We published our story; spread it among hundreds of people. We planted the seed of doubt. It was more than I had ever hoped to accomplish, telling the truth to one group of college boys at a time. What more did you expect—divine retribution?” Noru’s eyes flare up at my words. “Divine retribution is exactly why I exist,” he snarls. “That is my role in the world.” “But you are now a man,” I laugh, trying not to sound unkind. Noru—Nairwrit Ray, last living descendant of the tiger-deity of the mangrove forests—lowers his head into his hunches, away from me. Awash in the city moonlight dripping through the squalid windows, he looks less like a man than he ever has.

• • • • After Noru is gone—even the faint shadow of his half-man, half-tiger form vanished around the bend of Chitpur Road—I am returned to the boundless solitude of all my years of haunting Malotibala Printing Press. I am stunned by how still the night is. Not a crack of conversation, not a rustle of a tree; the only sound carried on the wind is the cries of foxes all the way from the salt marshes. Is it me, or is tonight exactly like another night across the gulf of the years? That night, I had lost something from which I never recovered. I had watched myself flow away from it, feeling angry, helpless, trapped; my futile rage slamming against at the injustices of fate. Tonight, the taste of bereavement on my phantom tongue feels exactly the same.

• • • •

The mob arrives indecently early the next morning. I was about to retire at daybreak, finally at peace for no longer having to keep watch of Noru; but I am jolted awake by the shouts that at first make no sense to me. “Break it down! Tear it down! The monster is hiding out there! Don’t let him escape!” The letterpress is silent today, so the men rush in unafraid, smashing and prodding with metal rods, shining flashlights into cobwebbed corners. The religious ones sprinkle holy water on every dusty surface, dribbling little puddles of mud. They are baffled not to find the culprit they’re expecting. It does not make them stop destroying my house. Invisible in the corner, wincing under the flashlights, I witness the mayhem. “—was sitting at his desk with his head lolling from the neck! Each of his fingers smashed, chewed through and through! What a horror, what a horror!” “And would you talk about the stacks of Secret Annals of the Queen arranged neatly on his desk! And the folder of old, yellowed documents laid open before him! Rumour is that the police officer found the blood from his neck dripping directly onto that paper—the contract he wrote to Udayan Dhar ten years ago! It is true—everything on that pamphlet is true!” “Don’t be ridiculous! Maybe he did write Secret Annals—I never believed any actual woman from a respectable household could be that promiscuous anyway—and maybe he also skinned Udayan Dhar of his profits, but nothing about that contract proves that he got him murdered as well! A gentleman like Bibhishon Bhattacharya would never do that!” “But what of this terrible way he was—” The speaker fails to finish his sentence, shudders, chants, “Ram, Ram.” “I do think it was a stray fox or civet run away from the marshes,” says the rational one, but his voice is drowned in the wails of the others. “What stray fox or civet climbs into a man’s bedroom on the second floor of his mansion, surrounded by walls and gardens, past gates that are always locked? It was no stray animal, brother! It was him!” “Him without a doubt! Just like divine retribution,” proclaims the one who always blurts out the wrong thing at the wrong time. The others turn to glare at him. “Ram, Ram,” they all chant in unison, sprinkling their holy water with renewed vigour over the shattered remains of the letterpress, the threadbare mats and other garbage left by visitors before them, their own murky footprints on the floor. The filth in the holy water makes me sneeze. I hope Noru has made his way to the river, that slow-moving sludge of holiness and detritus that will carry him to his destination, like it has carried thousands of others over the centuries. I hope he is received with grace, offered the food and security that are the essence of the living. I don’t think I will ever find out. I clench my stomach for the entertainment of the afternoon—the long- threatened exorcism with the tantrik, since all other efforts have failed.

• • • •

The exorcism turns out to be little more than a mild annoyance. They build a holy fire in the outer room of the press. My insubstantial hands bunch into fists—fire is the last thing one should bring inside a printing press. But the beard-swinging, ash-smeared fellow who leads the charade is as unreasonable as the rest of them. That mantra you’re mumbling too fast for anyone to hear happens to be the morning prayer from the Kamakhya temple in Gauhati, I want to interject; available in a booklet from Projapoti Press, seven houses down from here. But the sun is still bright in the sky, so I cannot bring myself to manifest. Men keep milling in and out of the rooms, breaking, trampling whatever they want, till I no longer care. They take down the board outside the house that proclaimed “Malotibala Printing Press”—painted letters on cheap asbestos sheet—which had hung on rheumatically through the inclemency of the years. They chop up the doors and window panes to make wood for the holy fire. By sundown, even the pieces of the letterpress are gone, probably to be sold as scrap metal at the junkyard. I am far beyond being bothered when someone suggests they torch the entire place down to its foundations. As Malotibala Printing Press goes up in flames, the crumbling walls doused in kerosene oil and fortified with dried leaves and twigs, I can sense the knots in my spirit loosen. I feel no pain—have felt no pain for a decade now—but I sway in the gusts of wind that fan the fire. With each gust, a little bit of me is dissipated; the me-ness of my spirit becomes less and less distinct. This is not unlike drowning in an opium haze, or sinking in a waterlogged field of rice under a night sky studded with stars, though I do not know if I will wake up, and who I will be when I do. By the time the fire has consumed it all, embers glowing in ash and debris against the pallid grey of the dawn, the men all gone home after a night of sitting by the flames, drinking and wild speculation, there is barely enough of me to hold these thoughts together. I give up trying to hold on to them. I go.

©2019 by Mimi Mondal. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mimi Mondal writes about politics and history, occasionally camouflaged as fiction. Her first anthology, Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, won the Locus Award in 2018, and was a finalist for the Hugo Awards and the British Fantasy Awards. Mimi has formerly been an editor at Penguin India and Uncanny Magazine and is currently the nonfiction and managing editor of Goobe’s Otherworldly, a magazine of South Asian science fiction and fantasy. Her short stories have been published by Tor.com, Strange Horizons, Fireside Magazine, Podcastle, Daily Science Fiction, Juggernaut Books and other venues. Mimi lives physically in New York and emotionally in Calcutta, India, but spends most of her time at @Miminality on Twitter.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight The Deer Boy Micah Dean Hicks | 5753 words

I never had a place. A girl, and the oldest of five. Two brothers and two sisters with howling mouths. Mother sleepwalking from home to work and back. Father was nothing but a flat hand and restless, punishing eyes. They were all noise and need, all shit-kick the dog and eat the last oily handful of lunchmeat from the fridge. All bony-knuckled punch through wood paneling and stinging slap on my cheek. There were miles of woods around the house, sap running summer- hot and matting my hair. But that wasn’t my place, either. The timber company told us so, their red slashes of paint on the bark, their signs saying, No Trespassing. My family had stories about the forest. Cousins who’d gotten lost walking under oak shadows and never come home. My uncle who, as a boy, followed a dog into the woods, and then the dog turned into a woman and tried to drag him into her house dug into a hillside. He still has her nail-scars on his arm. And my mother who found a talking goose as a girl, broken-winged and flailing on the leaves. She’d carried it home and locked it into the old barn. Every day, she caught minnows to feed it from the pond, and the goose cried, “Don’t touch me. Let me go.” Two weeks later, the stubborn thing died. So when my father brought back the deer boy, so small and weak that he was almost thrown to the dogs for dead, why did I think it had anything to do with me? It was near dark, the last blue glow dying in the sky, when my father walked out of the woods. Blood ran down his neck and matted his shirt, heavy sweat stains from the June heat under his arms. On his back, he carried a dead deer, its swollen belly rising to the sky. He didn’t have to tell me to knock my sister’s toys off the picnic table, to shoo away the circling dogs with their salesman’s whine. He dumped the body across the table, and I touched its stomach, still hot. “You shouldn’t have killed a mother,” I said. My heart was big and red and soft then, like a target. He smacked me across the back of the head and held a finger to his lips. Voices carried far from our hill. Anyone nearby would have heard his gun in the woods. The last thing we needed was the game warden at our door. He cleaned the deer fast and I studied it, how he cut the cuffs of the forelocks, slit the skin and peeled it off like a shirt. The deer lay fat- mottled, red and white and alien in the light from the back porch. He cut open the belly and scattered handfuls of gut to the dogs, who tore ears and bit snouts, gulping it down hot without chewing. When he found the deer’s fetus, he pulled it free and set it on the table beside me, to punish or sate my curiosity, I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t a deer. At least, we didn’t think so at first. It was a baby. Two arms, two legs, ten fingers and toes. My brothers and sisters wandered out of the house to see, crooked teeth and stale-breathed, shirtless and shoeless to prod and talk, to ask what was wrong. They checked for the nubs of horns, checked its feet for hooves. Looked for fur, the backwards-bending knees. But it was a child. A little boy. It was my uncle, drunk and stumbling, who came out of the house, took one look at the child laid out on the table, and picked it up. He smacked it hard across its tiny ass, then hit it again on the back and shoulders, shaking it by the feet like a chicken. The baby choked and wailed, sucked in a breath, threw up fluid. It squalled itself red-topped, arms trembling. My uncle pushed it into my arms. I sat back on the table and let it lay against me. While it sobbed, I smoothed dry the blood on its skin. Next to me, my father sectioned the deer and stacked meat, threw organ and skin to growls under the table. My brothers and sisters leaned close, blew into the baby’s face, tried to pull it away. I held tight and kicked. I wouldn’t trust them with a kitten. How many pets had drowned, or gotten run over, or been shot in a rage under our mean watch? So the deer boy became mine. At least, for years, that’s what I thought. I kept the baby safe in my blankets, begging my mother to bring me diapers and bottle, syrupy formula from the store. He lay on my bare belly at night, crying in his stuttering voice if I moved. I washed an old, tooth-scarred pacifier that had been my sister’s. Found old baby clothes to keep him warm. Treated him as soft as I would a human child. Outside, the deer came at night. Sniffing deeply at my window, they knocked the glass with their snouts. They stood like revenants in the blue yard, a twist of moving shadows. They lifted their sharp heads to the moon and made their creaking, cervine calls. Give him back, they seemed to beg. I covered the baby’s ears with my palms.

• • • •

For a few months, the deer boy seemed like a baby, like any other child. But after half a year, he was growing fast and he’d started to walk. Not the tottering, clumsy walk of a human baby. The deer boy bounced and gamboled, tossing his small head and running sideways, jerky in his movements like a baby goat. My brothers stole a cap gun from a church yard sale, and they chased the deer boy through the house, making loud detonations and puffs of smoke. The deer boy made his wordless cry and ran down the hall, pissing himself while my sisters ran to tell my mother. He grew older, but he did not like wearing clothes. I would tie his pants on with a length of rope so he could sit at table. Whenever my brothers or sisters moved through the room—shouting and pulling hair, scuffing chairs and fighting for the TV remote—he kept a startled eye on them. When my father opened the door, the deer boy bolted out of his chair. I’d tackle him in the hallway and drag him back, while my father looked around the room and drew breath to lay into us: “These goddamned dishes—That slutty dress—The ever-fucking noise you kids make—An animal, sitting at my table.” For dinner, my brother had hacked out slabs of deer steak, flattening and perforating them with a rusted little mallet, before we breaded and fried them in old grease. The table dripped with potatoes, boxed mac and cheese, boiled green beans. Every day, I made salads for the deer boy, the only thing he would eat. Underneath the shredded lettuce and tomato, I layered wildflowers collected from our yard, hoping my parents wouldn’t notice. “You’ll make him feral,” my mother had told me, watching me feed him clover blossoms. My father tossed a piece of crisped meat into the deer boy’s bowl. He sniffed at it and rumbled in his throat, curled his lips. He picked it up and threw it at my father, striking him in the eye. The table became so quiet, we could hear the sound of ice melting, its soft chime and splash in the glasses. My siblings put down their forks, sitting very still. My mother got up and walked to the back of the house. My father picked up the piece of meat and stood. He walked around behind the deer boy, who made a bray of warning. My father grabbed the deer boy’s face, forcing his mouth open. He shoved the piece of meat, hot and bloody-tasting, into the deer boy’s mouth and down his throat. I pulled at my father’s forearm, hammered on him with my fists, but he grabbed my neck with his free hand and squeezed until I went slack. When the deer boy, gasping and biting, finally swallowed all of it, my father grabbed his lovely, tawny hair and pulled his face close. “You’re an animal. Don’t think I won’t shoot you like one.” The deer boy ran into the hallway and started heaving. I coaxed him into the bathroom and shut the door, guiding his head to the toilet. I stroked his back while he vomited, the sound of my brothers’ laughter coming through the thin paneling. “I’ll protect you,” I said. “I love you.” In our bed at night, I told him everything—how I hated my family, how he and I would live alone some day—but what did it matter? He’d been with me six years then, and the deer boy understood no more words than one of our dogs.

• • • •

He was too skittish for school. We’d never been able to get the deer boy into a car without him wailing, battering his hands against the windows, shitting himself in fear. So when the bus came to get us in the mornings, I locked the deer boy in my bedroom with the blinds raised, hoping nothing would have happened to him by the time I made it home. Home wasn’t my place, but neither was school. My work was never done. It was hard to read chapters and write reports in the evenings. There was laundry to fold, pots to scrub, floors to clean. My parents and siblings didn’t give me space to work. And then there was the deer boy to take care of, to worry over and hold, to protect from every smirking face in the house. When I went to Ms. Tillman’s desk one day to apologize for being behind on my work, she gave me a tired smile and blinked her soft eyes and said, “Oh, honey. I didn’t expect any different.” The other students thought I was strange. I’d failed a grade, so I was in class with my brother, and he told the others about me. I heard them whispering: She’s in love with an animal. It sleeps in her room. Her brother saw her kissing it. On the school bus, I sat near the front where I could watch the forest whip by through the big windows. I imagined running through the woods with my deer boy. He wasn’t a person, but I didn’t think he was completely a deer either. Whatever he was, that’s what I wanted to be. When I came home from school, I ran to beat my siblings inside. He’d gotten out of my room, jumping and making his strange bray of joy in the kitchen. I straightened everything he’d knocked over and took him out for a walk. In the deep field of the backyard, he ran circles, snatched up flowers and thick tufts of leaves, grunting in his throat. We went as far as the old barn on the edge of our land, right before the trees started. I ran with him until I was out of breath, keeping watch. If we stayed out too long, the deer would come. They stood under the lip of the woods, waiting. If the deer boy saw them, he would take a cautious step their way. I never let him close to the forest. He had grown so fast in our years together, already taller and broader than me. If he made it under the trees, I wasn’t sure I would ever get him back. One spring, after he’d been stuck inside for rainy weeks, the deer boy stepped through the uncut grass, sniffing deeply. In the back of the yard, very near the tree line, a march of hoof marks stamped the soft ground. He knelt and pressed his hand against the ground, making his own human-shaped mark. “Let’s go,” I said, not knowing if he understood. I brought him a fistful of my mother’s pink irises, but he’d found something tangled in the grass. He crouched over white curves of bone, and for a moment I was afraid he’d come across something dead, a bird carcass with thin ribs cupping nothing but ants. He pulled two thorn- crooked antlers out of the grass and held them to his chest, barking with pleasure. They were wide and jagged, four points to a side, the bases thick and grained like tree-bark. He balled up his fists around the base of the antlers and raised his hands like claws. “What do you want with those?” I asked. He went to a tree in the middle of our yard and scraped the antlers against the bark, making a wide gash. He shredded the bark until strips of it hung like paper, the blonde wood underneath wet and sweet smelling. I screamed for him to stop. I didn’t like this strange violence. I didn’t understand what the deer boy was trying to say. Most of all, I didn’t like that he was ignoring me to do some secret thing of his own. My uncle, unemployed and unmarried, walked over from his place to check on us, finding me and the deer boy in the back yard. He held out an apple and the deer boy, finally distracted, ate it out of his hand. “Everything’s fine,” my uncle said. “He’s just a deer. This is what deer do.”

• • • •

In the morning fog, deer crowded in the backyard, standing near the deer boy’s scrape. Usually I walked him before school, but not this morning. I told him over and over to stay in my room, but he kept coming out, even before I’d left the house. I closed all the blinds and curtains to keep him from seeing what was outside. I forgot to take away his antlers. When I got home, the deer boy had scraped deep tracks in the walls. He’d knocked down curtains. One window was shattered, the worst thing he could have done because it would have to be fixed right away and it would be expensive. Furniture was knocked over, and the floor was a maelstrom of shredded fabric and broken things. Had the other deer come and called to him through the walls? Had he paced madly through the house, rattling the locked door and braying while my parents were at work, all of us at school? It must have been hard for him to be alone all day. I’d trained him to piss on the tile floor of the bathroom, had left a plate of lettuce and a bag of carrots out for him to graze on, but I couldn’t do any better than that. My brothers and sisters walked through the house, righting the table and chairs, sweeping up broken glass and drywall. They didn’t speak to me, and if the deer boy wandered close to them, they threw up their hands and hissed for him to go away. I gave the deer boy a carton of sweet strawberry yogurt, and he shoved his greedy nose into the cup. While he ate, I took his antlers and ran down to the edge of the driveway, where our trash can was chained to the fence, and threw them away. I forced a shirt over his arms, did up the buttons and straightened the collar. Made sure his jeans were buttoned. I even tried to put shoes on his feet, but he thrashed and kicked, his heel knocking me in the jaw so hard that I spat blood in the sink. If he looked like a person, I thought, my father wouldn’t be able to kill him. My mother came home and started going through the wreckage, touching an old quilt that the deer boy had ripped to pieces with his antlers. “Why would he do this?” she asked, and I didn’t know what to tell her. My oldest brother came out of my father’s room with the shotgun broken across his arm, feeding a red-jacketed shell into the chamber. I stood in front of the deer boy. “Put that away.” My brother wiped his nose with his free hand. “I’m just getting it ready for when dad gets home.” “Dad’s not going to kill him. That would be murder.” “That thing isn’t a person,” my oldest sister said, “and you’re sick for treating it like one.” I grabbed her by the top of the head with one hand and smashed her nose with my other. She ran down the hall, blood streaming from her nose, while the deer boy hopped and snorted. My brother lifted the gun to shoot him, but I grabbed the barrel and we struggled, my mother yelling for us to put it down. The rim of the barrel bit into my stomach. My brother looked at me with such a nasty, jealous hate. Was he lonely? Did he resent that I had the deer boy and he had no one? “You might as well be an animal too,” he said. My brother pulled the trigger. My mother and sister froze. We watched his finger pull back, and I held onto the barrel and waited for the shot to tear through me. The gun made a tiny click of metal touching metal. Nothing happened. By my brother’s thumb, the safety was still on, preventing the gun from firing. He let go of the gun, and I took it back to my room, hiding it deep in my closet so my father wouldn’t find it in his anger. I sat on the bed and wrapped my arms around the deer boy, trying to keep him still and silent, though he was impatient to go outside after being in all day. I kept picking up his arms and wrapping them around me, pressing his palms to my stomach where the barrel left its “o” in my skin. But his hands fell. He didn’t know what I wanted, and he didn’t know what was coming. So I held him, and we waited. My father came home. I heard my mother talking to him in the kitchen, her voice low and muddy. My brother, defiant as he tried to explain himself. Then my father yelling. My brother thrown against the wall. The flat, almost wet sound of my father’s hands battering my brother’s head and back and shoulders while the rest of my family stood silent, only witnessing. When it was late enough that the sun had disappeared and the crickets sang outside my window, my father finally opened my door. He was gray-headed and looked tired in the dim light. The deer boy grunted a warning at him, feral eyes flickering from my father to me and back. “I’ve spoken to your brother,” he told me. I nodded, too afraid to say anything. “Tomorrow, you will take your pet into the woods, and you will get rid of him.” When he left, I pulled the blanket over us. His skin was warm, his cheeks round and human. Nothing about him was a deer. Nothing, except everything. I ran my hands over his face, telling him that I would find a way to keep him. He nosed into my palms, licking them for salt or carrots, and finding nothing, rolled away from me.

• • • •

Early in the morning, I tied an old leash around the deer boy’s neck and led him out of my room. My uncle sat at the kitchen table. He did this sometimes, letting himself in and making coffee while everyone else was asleep, going through the refrigerator for leftovers. “Don’t go too far,” he told me. I walked the deer boy toward the edge of our land, the trees waiting. It was dark and foggy under the pine limbs. I imagined I could see the shapes of deer moving. He strained against the leash, sniffing the air. Once I turned him loose, I knew he would be gone. Instead of letting him go, I pulled on the leash and dragged him into our old barn. It was a leaky, gap-shingled old building of weathered gray wood. It had no lights or electricity. A few damp bales of hay lay molded in the middle of the space, surrounded by broken furniture and piles of old tools that had been my grandfather’s, now rusting in their bins. It was all the way at the back of our yard, where the grass was never cut, and the trees reached out their long fingers and pressed its side, scraping the wood when the wind blew. We’d kept animals in the barn before. A flock of guinea fowl when I was little, lost to ants and damp. A dog who fought too much with the others, dead of distemper. And the goose my mother had caught as a girl, pleading with her to let it go, killed most likely by infection from its broken wing, if not from sheer hate for my family. Now, my deer boy would be stabled there, bedded down with all those ghosts. Every day when no one was around, I opened the barn door. He groaned and ran into the light, moving in his lilting, nervous way. He bent to graze on the grass in our yard, or ate vegetables from my hands. After a short walk, I locked him away again. Each day, he seemed a little more wild, and I wondered if the deer surrounded the barn and spoke to him at night. He had soiled and torn his clothes so badly that they fell off of him, and I washed him clean in the sun with our water hose, kneading his shoulders and scrubbing his head while he groaned. He was naked and beautiful in the sunlight, water rushing over his shoulders. Though I hid him, heads of lettuce disappeared from the refrigerator. My mother’s flowers were chopped off. Of course, they knew what I was doing. Wild as he was, they must have known how it would end. No one stopped me.

• • • •

It rained for a week, and I wasn’t able to take him out. I opened cans of spinach and filled a bowl for him. He rattled the boards of the barn and barked to be let out. When the rain finally stopped, I let him out and saw that his leash was gone. He ran up and down the yard, retreating whenever I got too close. He sprinted right to the edge of the forest, then wheeled and came back, again and again. I let him have a good, hard run before I opened the barn doors wide and tried to coax him back in. He wouldn’t come. I grabbed at his arm, offered him an apple, pleaded in my softest tone with clenched teeth. Every time I approached him, he made a step toward the forest. My nails dug into my palms. I hated this so much, hated him so much for the first time, that I could feel it burning in my stomach. In the barn I found rope, snapping it between my hands to see if it had dry-rotted. I tied a slipknot and tumbled the apple to him. While he crouched and fed on it, working his jaw in small, delicate bites, I slipped the rope over his head and jerked hard. He was bigger than me, stronger, but I pulled the rope tight enough to choke him, tugging him toward the barn while he gasped. “Run away?” I asked him. “When I’ve done so much for you? You deer-brained son of a bitch.” I locked him in the barn, listening to him fling himself against the door and scream, hoarse noises no human throat could make. I walked back to the house, my palms stinging from rope burns. In the kitchen, my oldest brother stood looking out the window, his face still purpled from my father’s hands. “So much for you being the kind one,” he said. In the bathroom, I ran cold water over my palms and cried. “I love him,” I whispered into my raw hands. “Don’t I love him?”

• • • •

The next day, I came to the barn and pushed handfuls of grass through the crack in the door. The deer boy roared at me and threw the grass back. I sat against the door and pleaded with him. I offered orange wedges and peppers, flowers on long stems. I ran to the barn in the morning to chase away the deer, milling in their tens and muttering like goats. I pleaded. I chanted, “You’re mine.” Still, he wouldn’t eat. After four days, I opened the doors. The deer boy stumbled into the light. He growled, whipping his bloody fists and tossing his bruised head like it bore antlers. He walked past me and into the forest, vanishing into the open arms of the oak trees. “You did right,” my father told me that afternoon. “You can’t make a wild animal a pet.” And what he didn’t say, but I understood: “You can’t make a beast your lover.”

• • • •

I began to walk in the woods. My uncle showed me his scarred arm and warned me about the old woman of his nightmares. “She’s still out there,” he told me. “If you see her, run home.” I’d gotten good at spotting deer-sign: their dark excrement heaped in pellets, the trees gashed open by their horns, their split hoof prints stabbing the mud, the flattened grass where they lay together at night. I walked under heavy limbs and stepped over long-thorned briars spreading over the ground like fire. I worried over his feet, tender and thin-skinned, not made for walking shoeless through the woods. I spooked crowds of deer dipping their heads to drink from streams, chasing after them and scanning the trees for the deer boy. I finally heard his voice one evening, a half-animal grunt, and followed it into the forest gloom. I found him wrestling with a long- bodied deer. He grappled her with his arms and tried to plant himself behind her, hanging onto her rump. I picked up a stone and struck him in the back of the head. The doe bolted away, and the deer boy wheeled on me, angry and confused. I could see that he recognized me. He seemed as embarrassed as I, looking at the ground and trotting closer. He got close enough to sniff my hair, to touch me on the arm, checking my palms for salt. Hadn’t I wanted just this moment? I shoved him away, shouted, picked up sticks and threw them at his face. He hadn’t done anything wrong, had he? He was only a deer, doing what a deer did. So why was I so angry at him for it? He ran into the forest, moving with the strange grace of an animal, slipping through the crossed limbs and mats of vines like a shadow. He was gone, back with his own kind. I knew that he was never coming back home with me.

• • • •

Years went by, and my graduation was coming up. My brother had plans to move away with friends, to find a job in a new city. My mother asked what I would do in her fearful way. Something had to come next, but I couldn’t imagine what. I still took walks in the woods, but it had been a long time since I had seen a deer. One morning, I found a hoof- print near my window, but it meant nothing. My deer boy didn’t have hooves. My father still hunted occasionally, though he never took a pregnant deer again. Every time he came back from the woods, I waited for him to tell me, but he only shook his head. One morning in January, my father came back from hunting early, his hands shaking. He emptied his gun of shells and threw them in the trash. Locked his gun up and didn’t touch it again, though he wouldn’t tell me anything, only, “Stay out of the woods. They’re not our place.” My uncle nodded, digging through our refrigerator. “Haven’t I been saying that for years?” I took his hunter’s orange vest off the table and went into the woods myself. What if he’d seen him? What if he’d shot and killed the deer boy and was too ashamed to bring him back? My father had worn a track between the trees. I followed it and climbed into his stand, a nest made of iron and tin. The wind was cold up so high, and I hadn’t brought warm enough clothes. The metal seat burned my thighs through my jeans. It didn’t matter. I would wait. It wasn’t until evening, with the sun falling through the branches, that the deer came. Brown-furred and white-tailed, they came snorting through the trees. There were so many of them, the shapes of deer receding into the brush as the herd moved under me, on their way to ponds and pasture land on the other side of the woods. A tall, thin shape came, pushing branches out of the way. I leaned forward, waiting. It was a woman. At first, I was afraid it was the old woman my uncle had warned me about, come to drag me away. But this was a young woman, her hair wild and full of burrs. She had small breasts, her sides textured with overlapping scars from branches. She moved like the deer, graceful steps, dipping low and springing back up, quick and silent. I couldn’t breathe. Ever since I was a child, I’d dreamed of being something like her. Behind her, others came. They were people, but they were deer too. Or maybe they were only deer, regardless of their shape. They ran like deer, made deer calls, moved with the others through the forest without clothes or speech or human gesture. My deer boy came with them. From his forehead, he’d grown a pair of huge, spreading antlers. At their base, where horn met his skull, his skin was mounded in scabs. Dried blood dripped down his nose. The tip of one horn had broken off. I pulled off my clothes and climbed down the ladder, my skin drawing tight in the cold. I would give up my humanity, the mean house I’d come from, every confusion and disappointment of growing older. I would vanish into the woods, like my cousins had before me. When I came down the ladder, the deer spooked. The herd rippled, moving away in every direction. I ran straight for my deer boy. He lifted his nose, sniffed, and I saw by his eyes that he knew me. He ducked his head and ran at me with his horns, sending me stumbling back. I fell onto the leaves, a branch stabbing into my bare leg. I reached out and tried to touch his shaggy head, to run my fingers over his new horns, but he shook his neck from side to side, the points hooking toward me in a warning. He held me at bay until the other deer had gone away into the trees. Then, without another look, he turned and ran too. I tried to follow. Flung myself off the leaves and ran, my feet shredded on rocks and frozen roots. The herd moved into the forest, so much faster than me. They weren’t people. I could see it. I thought, if I ran hard enough, if I wanted it enough, I could be like them. I could be that wild, beautiful thing running through the woods at his side. There could be a place for me here. In a few moments, I fell gasping to the cold ground. The deer were gone. Sobbing, I went back to the deer stand to get my clothes, before the cold killed me. On my way back, I heard a whimpering. Small, regular grunts. At the base of a tree, a very young girl stood, hair cascading down her back in a nest of sticks and leaves, looking for her mother and father. She was one of the children who’d come walking behind the deer boy, his daughter. He would come looking for her. Or he wouldn’t. Who could say with animals? I cornered the girl against the tree and grabbed her. She bit me on the arm, and I slapped her hard across the face. She barked, and I slapped her again, pinning her with my knees and hitting her until she became silent. I picked up the dirty little thing and carried her out of the woods. We still had old clothes from when I’d been a girl. And she was too small to fight me. It was easy to pitch her into the bath, to rip the comb through her tangled hair, to force her to drink a glass of milk and eat a peanut butter sandwich for dinner. At night, the deer came into the yard and cried for her with their creaking voices. She turned circles in my room, yelping back. I held her, smoothed her raw scalp. “They left you,” I said. “But it’s okay. They left me too.” She would go to school. She would wear dresses, eat with a fork, and learn to shit on the toilet. She would learn speech, even if I had to shake the words out of her. Through her, I would prove that we can be who we have to be. For myself and for the deer boy, I would understand what we had lost.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Micah Dean Hicks is a Calvino Prize-winning author whose writing has appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The New York Times, Lightspeed, and Kenyon Review, among others. His story collection Electricity and Other Dreams is available from New American Press. Hicks teaches creative writing at the University of Central Florida. His new novel Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones is available from John Joseph Adams Books. Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island Nibedita Sen | 1421 words

1. Clifton, Astrid. “The Day the Sea Ran Red.” Uncontacted Peoples of the World. Routledge Press, 1965, pp. 71-98.

“There are few tales as tragic as that of the denizens of Ratnabar Island. When a British expedition made landfall on its shores in 1891, they did so armed to the teeth, braced for the same hostile reception other indigenous peoples of the Andamans had given them. What they found, instead, was a primitive hunter-gatherer community composed almost entirely of women and children. [ . . . ] The savage cultural clash that followed would transmute the natives’ offer of a welcoming meal into direst offense, triggering a massacre at the hands of the repulsed British . . .”

2. Feldwin, Hortensia. Roots of Evil: A Headmistress’ Account of What Would Come To Be Known as the Churchill Dinner. Westminster Press, 1943.

“Three girl-children were saved from Ratnabar. One would perish on the sea voyage, while two were conducted to England as Her Majesty’s wards. Of these, one would go on to be enrolled in Churchill Academy, where she was given a Christian name and the promise of a life far removed from the savagery of her homeland. [ . . . ] Regina proved herself an apt pupil, industrious, soaking up offered tutelage like a sponge does ink, if prone to intemperate moods and a tendency to attach herself with sudden fits of feverish fondness to one or more of the other girls [ . . . ] None of us could have foreseen what she and Emma Yates whispered into each others’ ears behind closed doors as they planned their foul feast.”

3. Schofield, Eleanor. “Eating the Other.” Word of Mouth. State University of New York, 2004, pp. 56-89.

“It’s not for no reason that women have, historically, been burdened with the duties of food preparation. Or that it is women, not men, who are called upon to limit their appetites, shrink themselves, rein in their ambitions. A hungry woman is dangerous. [ . . . ] Men are arbiters of discourse, women the dish to be consumed. And the Ratnabari, in the exercising of their transgressive appetites, quite literally turn the tables on their oppressors.”

4. Morris, Victoria. “Memory, Mouth, Mother: Funerary Cannibalism among the Ratnabari.” Journal of Ethnographic Theory, vol. 2, no. 2, 1994, pp. 105-129. Jstor, doi: 10.2707/464631.

“We are all cannibals at birth, and our mother-tongue is the language of the mouth. When the Ratnabari eat of their dead, they embrace what Kristeva calls ‘the abject’—the visceral, the polluted, the blood and bile and placenta and the unclean flesh we associate with the female body. Return to us, they say to their dead, be with us always. [ . . . ] Science has yet to explain how it is that they almost never bear sons, only daughters, but it is scarce to be wondered at that their society is matriarchal in nature, for they spurn the clean, rational world of the patriarchal symbolic, remaining locked in a close, almost incestuous relationship with the maternal semiotic instead.”

5. Aspioti, Elli. “A Love That Devours: Emma Yates and Regina Gaur.” A History of Twentieth-Century Lesbians, edited by Jenna Atkinson, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 180-195.

“What is it about love that makes us take leave of our senses? What makes a girl of barely seventeen carve fillets of flesh from her ribs and, lacing her clothes back up over the bulk of soaked bandages, serve her own stewed flesh to a table of her classmates at her wealthy private school?” 6. Rainier, Richard. “A Rebuttal of Recent Rumours Heard Among the Populace.” The Times, 24 Apr. 1904, pp. 14.

“Every rag barely worth the paper it is printed on has pounced on the regrettable happenings at Churchill Academy, and as such salacious reporting is wont to do, this has had an impact on the minds of impressionable youth. [ . . . ] [A] rash of imitative new fads in the area of courtship, such as presenting a lover with a hair from one’s head or a clipping of fingernail to consume, perhaps even a shaving of skin, or blood, sucked from a pricked finger [ . . . ] As to the rumours that the Ratnabari gain shapeshifting powers through the consumption of human flesh, or that they practice a form of virgin birth—I can say with certainty that these are pure exaggeration, and that their proponents are likely muddling real events with the mythological figure of the rakshasi, a female demon from the Orient.”

7. Gaur, Shalini. “The Subaltern Will Speak, If You’ll Shut Up and Listen.” Interviews in Intersectionality, by Shaafat Shahbandari and Harold Singh, 2012.

“[ . . . ] the problem is that we have everyone and their maiden aunt dropping critique on Ratnabar, but we’re not hearing from us, the Ratnabari diaspora ourselves. If I have to deal with one more white feminist quoting Kristeva at me . . . [ . . . ] No, the real problem is that our goals are fundamentally different. They want to wring significance from our lives, we just want to find a way to live. There’s not a lot of us, but we exist. We’re here. We don’t always quite see eye to eye with each other’s . . . ideology, but we’re not going anywhere, and we have to figure out what we are to each other, how we can live side by side. So why aren’t we getting published?”

8. Gaur, Roopkatha. A Daughter’s Confession: The Collected Letters of Roopkatha Gaur, edited by Mary Anolik, Archon Books, 2010, pp. 197- 216. “Mother didn’t know. What Emma was planning, what was in the food that night, any of it. I’ve kept this secret so many years, but now that she’s long gone, and I am old, I feel I can tell it at last, at least to you, my darling, and if only so I can pass beyond this world free of its weight. [ . . . ] Why did Emma do it? Does it matter? Love, foolishness, a hunger to believe in magic and power, a twisted obsession with Mother’s supposed exotic origins, what does it matter? She did it. The truth is, I’m grateful. Whatever her motives, that meal gave Mother what she needed to escape that place. And I wouldn’t have been born without it, though that’s another story altogether. You could say a little bit of Emma lives on in me, even after all this time.”

9. Gaur, Shalini. “We Can Never Go Home.” Hungry Diasporas: Annual Humanities Colloquium, May 2008, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.

“We know Ratnabar’s coordinates. Aerial reconnaissance has confirmed people still live on the island. But how do I set foot on its shores, with my English accent and my English clothes, and not have them flee from me in the terror that was taught to them in 1891? Where do we go, descendants of stolen ones, trapped between two islands and belonging on neither—too brown for English sensibilities, too alien now for the home of our great-grandmothers? How shall we live, with Ratnabar in our blood but English on our tongues?”

10. Gaur, Ashanti. “Dead and Delicious II: Eat What You Want, and If People Don’t Like It, Eat Them Too.” Bitch Media, 2 Nov. 2016, https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/eat-want-people-eat/2016. Accessed 8 Dec. 2017.

“My cousin Shalini is an optimist. She believes in keeping the peace, getting along, not rocking the boat. What do I believe in? I think—let’s be real, ladies, who among us hasn’t sometimes had a craving to eat the whole damn world? You know which of you I’m talking to. Yes you, out there. You’ve tried so hard to be good. To not be too greedy. You made yourself small and you hoped they’d like you better for it, but they didn’t, of course, because they’re the ones who’re insatiable. Who’ll take everything you have to give them and still hunger for more. It’s time to stop making ourselves small. And above all, remember . . . there may be more of them, but we don’t need them to make more of us.”

[Submitted for Professor Blackwood’s Sociology 402 class, by Ranita Gaur.]

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Nibedita Sen is a queer Bengali writer, editor and gamer from Calcutta. A graduate of Clarion West 2015, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Podcastle, Nightmare, Fireside and The Dark. She helps edit Glittership, an LGBTQ SFF podcast, enjoys the company of puns and potatoes, and is nearly always hungry. Hit her up on Twitter at @her_nibsen.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight Fail-Safe Philip Fracassi | 6065 words

The door was thick. The room, well-made. I knew. I’d seen. Every step. I never heard Mother screaming in the night. I knew she was, it was obvious. I’d seen her with the cameras. Father had made me watch when I was young. Father had worried I didn’t fully understand. Fully believe. But I did. My favorite days were when it was over and Mother was allowed to return. Mine and hers both, I imagine. She was never happier than after. She would hold me and squeeze me tight, and I’d laugh and she’d pepper my cheek, neck, and forehead with kisses. Father would stand by, watching, smiling, looking haggard and wistful. After giving us time to reshape our natural bond, he would join as well, hugging us both. Kissing us greedily. I loved my parents. Loved them dearly.

• • • •

Deep down, secretly, I worried I would wake up one morning and find myself alone. That the room would take them from me. I’m only a boy still, sure, only twelve. But I’m growing. Learning. When Father first built the room I had watched. Had helped, even. In those days, Mother had been held elsewhere. By men I did not know. By friends of my father’s. But she always came back, happy and healthy, hugging and kissing, just like it was after the room was built. I liked it better, having the room here. Liked her being home, with me and Father. The room is not large, but it’s well built. It has many fail-safes. Father explained these to me as he built them into the room’s design. The walls are steel. Thick, slick, impenetrable from the inside. The door also, steel. One foot thick of it. Handle-less. Released by internal bolts that are hidden behind the metal-plated walls. There is one light. A pair of fluorescent tubes behind a cage in the ceiling. Impossible to reach. That’s what we thought. The restraints, however, are really impressive. Crafted to hold, but not hurt. That’s what Father said. To keep her, and us, safe. I nodded when he told me these things. I felt I was learning, getting older, wiser. Helping. “Then there’s the gas,” Father said, showing me the vents high in the walls, just below the ceiling. Far above where even her unnaturally- lengthened hands could reach them. “That’s our last line of defense,” he said, ruffling my hair, messy as always. “That’s if all else goes to hell.” I nodded, but Father could see I didn’t fully understand. He knelt down, took my arm, pressed kinda hard, looked into my eyes. “If she gets free of the restraints,” he pointed to them lying listless on the smooth concrete floor, “she still can’t leave the room, see?” I nodded again, growing. “If she gets to the door, does some damage, then I hit a button, and whoosh!” He expanded his hands in a circle to show the spreading affect. “She gets the gas.” “Then what? She goes to sleep?” Father nodded, dropped his eyes a moment, then found mine again. “She’ll be dead.” I thought about this. “And we’ll know she’s dead because of the cameras.” Father smiled broadly, eyes sparkling with pride. “That’s right, Son. The cameras.” We were standing in the half-constructed room at the time, and Father pointed to high corners where reflective orbs were tucked. I waved, saw a distorted reflection of another boy—a smeared, tiny boy—waving back. “We’ll watch her and make sure she’s dead before we come in,” he said, then put a firm hand on my shoulder. “She’d want us to be sure.” I knew this was true, because she’d told me so a hundred times herself. She told me to always be sure, if something were to go wrong, to always be sure we’d killed her. “I might lie,” she said. “I might pretend.” “Like a game,” I said. Mother smiled and nodded, stroked my hair away from my forehead. “Like a game you must always win.” When Father and I left the room, now deemed ready, Father stopped by the heavy steel door, the shining heads of the sliding bolts poking inch-high from the edges of its frame. “One last thing,” Father said, taking off his lab coat and hanging it on a bent steel nail next to a mask and a tarnished yellow rubber suit. “And this is the most important thing of all. There’s always a chance, a very, very slim chance, that Mother won’t keep turning. That she’ll turn once, and stay that way. Forever. You understand?” I nodded. “If that happens . . . or, if anything goes wrong. If I’m not here, for whatever reason . . .” He paused, because there were too many wrongs to think about. “Well. There’s one last fail-safe.” I waited, thinking it silly, knowing Father would always be around, but willing to hear him out, to learn. “It’s a timer, see?” he said. “I start it every time your mother goes into the room. If for any reason, any reason at all, I don’t stop or reset that timer in twenty-four hours, the room fills with gas.” “Whoosh!” I said, mimicking Father’s hand gesture. “That’s right,” he said. “That way, if something, well . . . if something goes amiss, then all you have to do, see, is wait it out. You don’t have to do a thing. Just wait twenty-four hours, and that timer will tick off, and things will be handled inside. The gas will go off, and the gas is poison. Poison that kills. You got that?” I remembered something from my lessons. “Like the cat.” Father’s eyebrows came together in confusion. “Schroeder’s cat.” Father thought a second, then laughed out loud, a wonderful laugh that filled the steel and concrete room he and his friends had just completed. “Schrodinger!” Father bellowed, still laughing. Laughing so hard he was wiping tears from his eyes. “Schrodinger’s cat. Not Schroeder. He’s from Peanuts.” Father continued laughing, wiped his eyes once more, and rested a hand on my shoulder, pushed me gently from the room. “But yeah. Sure, I guess. Like that.”

• • • •

We tested the room many times. Mother inspected every inch of the walls, the floors, the vents, the cameras. Inspected the restraints, the heavy steel cuffs, the chains and cables that held them, the clasps that bound them fast to the wall. The first night we were all a bit nervous. Mother had always been with Father’s friends on these nights. They were infrequent, yes, but regular. But Father seemed calm, and we both helped secure her to the new restraints. She smiled at me as I locked her wrist tight. She watched our work closely, studied the clamps around her wrists, tested them. She yanked her arms against them hard, making them clink. I took an unthinking step away from her. “Not that testing them now matters,” she said that first time, smiling sadly at Father. “I’m half the strength.” “If that,” Father agreed, but nodded. “They’ll hold. They could hold a mad gorilla.” Later, Father and I sat outside the room. Father watched the monitors closely. I sat on a stiff, dusty-smelling couch behind him, reading a comic book. “There,” Father said. I set down my comic, walked over to the monitors. I watched in grainy color, like a television, as my mother turned. Her eyes, then her skin. She looked up at the cameras, watching us watching her. As I looked on in fascination, she went still. Sort of . . . slumped. I held my breath. A trick, I thought. Then she went mad. A whipping tornado wrapped in flesh, all teeth and nails, venom and fire. Her mouth spread open, chin dropping impossibly, eyes bulbous, her muscles doubling in size, squeezing against the inside of the restraints. She screamed at the pain. Pure fury. She looked so strong. She thrashed and kicked like a pale-skinned monster. “Holding just fine,” Father said, sounding relieved, and a bit proud. “Holding just fine.” He turned to me and smiled. “She won’t be getting us tonight.”

• • • •

In the months after Mother’s first night in the new room, things went perfectly. I enjoyed having Mother home more, even though some nights I couldn’t see her. It comforted me because she was still there. Still home. Even if she was locked away. Father’s friends came over and watched the first few times, assuring themselves of the safety and security of the room. I sat nearby and listened while Father explained the fail-safes to them. He patiently explained the gas, and the timer. The men watched, some shifted their feet. A few turned away from the monitors. When they were all there, crowded around, I could not see Mother on the screens, but I knew she had already turned. They called it turning because she turned a little and she was one thing. But then she kept turning and was herself again. Turning and turning forever. The Great Fear was that she would turn and not turn back. It had happened to others. I always prayed it would never happen to her. “Here,” Father said, and flipped a switch. The room filled with screams. Mother’s screams. They were terrible. They reminded me of a screeching eagle I had seen on television. Screeching so loud it echoed in the room around us, swirled around our heads. “She could talk if she wanted,” Father said, raising his voice to be heard. “She could sound just like herself. But not when she’s angry like this.” He watched her writhe a moment, as if considering. “Not when she’s hungry.” “Turn it off,” one of the men said, the biggest one. Father flipped the switch and the screeching stopped, leaving the room so thick with silence no one dared speak. “Should he be here?” one man said, tilting his head toward me. Another man turned around to look at me, eyes narrowed, but by doing so, exposed the small screen on the desk. I could see Mother, naked and twisting, bleeding from the wrists, teeth large and snapping, black tongue whipping across her lips. Father looked at me, then back to the man, holding his eyes. The man seemed nervous and swallowed and said nothing more. After a while they all seemed satisfied. They waited until the morning, waited until Mother was okay to be let out. Father went in, dressed her, treated her wounds. After a few minutes they came out. As always, Mother seemed tired, her skin slick with sweat and covered in a hot rash but pleased to have it behind her. Wrapped up in a coarse green blanket, she looked at me and winked. I tried to wink back—it was hard doing just one eye—but she smiled so I figured I’d done close enough. They all talked then for a long time. I got bored and wandered across the basement and upstairs. I went outside, closed my eyes, and listened to the sounds of the neighborhood. Cars rolled by. Kids laughed from somewhere in the distance; behind a neighbor’s house, maybe. I opened my eyes, saw a man watering some bushes with a hose, watching me. It was so sunny and peaceful . . . I’ll never forget it. After a few minutes I turned away, went back inside, and closed the door.

• • • •

Once the routine had been established, I felt we were just like any other family. The last evening, we sat around the dinner table. Mother had prepared fish and salad. We didn’t eat meat. I drank milk. I drank a lot of milk, because my parents assured me it would help me grow. And I wanted to grow. Wanted it more than anything. I would be thirteen in two days, and I couldn’t wait. Thirteen meant manhood. Thirteen meant adult. That night, I watched my parents eating, smiling, content. My father opened a bottle of wine, which is what parents drink instead of milk. I watched Mother closely, looking for signs. I’d been trained what to look for, although I knew it was unnecessary, because Mother always knew first, knew way before Father and I knew. We almost depended on her, in a way, to tell us. To let us know when it was time to go into the basement, into the room. If she didn’t tell us, it’s possible we might not know in time. That’s how fast it happens. One second, a loving mother. The next, death. “Mom,” I said, picking up a green bean with my fingers and biting off the tip. Mother turned to study me, cocked her head. “You have a fork,” she said. I took another bite. She always said that about the fork. “Do you think . . .” I said, flushed with the embarrassment of the young and ignorant. “Will I be like you one day?” I knew there were others like Mother. Hundreds. I also knew you could become like her if she attacked you. Spread into you. Mostly people died when attacked, but some lived, and then they turned, too. Like vampires or zombies, but real. Mother’s eyes went to Father, who looked at me like I’d said something sad. Their eyes met for a moment while he gathered his thoughts. “The truth is, Son, we don’t know,” he said, wiping his mouth with a napkin before setting it neatly down on his empty plate. “Not yet.” I finished the green bean, took a drink from the heavy milk glass they always gave me. “When?” I asked. “Soon,” he said, looking more troubled. “When you’re . . . when you’ve become a man.” “I’m almost thirteen now!” I cried out excitedly, knocking a knife off the table with my elbow. It clattered to the floor. “It’s more than just age that makes a grown-up.” I was confused. “What, you mean when I’m a dad?” Father laughed, and Mother smiled, but it was a sad smile, the one she used before she went into the room. The one she used when she told me everything would be all right. “No, not that kind of man. When you are through puberty. There will be . . . signs,” he said, then hurriedly added, “but it’s nothing for you to worry about.” I smiled, set down my milk and burped. “Because we can build another one. Just for me,” I said. “Right? We’re good at it now. I can have my own room.” Father looked at his plate, set his fork down on the table. Mother said nothing.

• • • •

Later, we were watching television when Mother announced she was going to turn, and soon. She said it felt strong this time. Hours, maybe. Father looked at her, nodded. He turned off the program, a documentary on the migration of birds. I was sad, even more sad than usual. I sulked but knew it wouldn’t make a difference. I didn’t want Mother to get locked up, so I delivered my best, haughtiest frown, and walked out of the living room. Mother called after me, but I kept walking into my bedroom and shut the door behind me. After a little while I grew bored of sulking, and anxious about Mother. I ventured back out, expecting my parents to already be downstairs. But they were there, waiting. “You okay?” Father said. I nodded, sniffed, wiped at my mouth. I turned to Mother. I didn’t want to help that night. I wanted to be a normal boy, with a normal mother. I didn’t want to see her turn. That night, I figured, I could pretend. “Will you tuck me in?” She set down her magazine, stood up and came toward me. I was too big for her to pick up, but she hugged me hard. I felt her hot breath on my neck. It smelled foul. I snuggled underneath the covers while Mother stood over me, stroking my forehead. The light in the ceiling gave her a halo and left her face in shadow. Her bob of hair made her head seem bigger than it was, expanding the black shape of her head upward and outward, tiny wings at the tips. “Will you sing me to sleep?” She nodded, reached out and switched off the light. I felt her weight on the bed. I wondered how much time she had. “What shall I sing?” she asked, her voice a husky whisper. “How about Jesus Loves Me?” I shook my head, then realized she probably couldn’t see me. Her eyes sparkled in the dark. She coughed. “Sing the hush one.” She placed a hand on my arm, squeezed it. She sighed, then sang softly, almost in a whisper. Hush little baby, don’t say a word, Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird. I closed my eyes, let Mother’s voice float into my mind, fill my body with her love, her words. I let myself drift. And if that mockingbird won’t sing, Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring. And if that diamond ring turns brass, Mama’s gonna buy you . . . She stopped suddenly. I opened my eyes. I was almost asleep, annoyed she’d stopped at my favorite part. “A looking glass,” I prodded. “Like Alice.” Her hand tightened on my arm. She was a dark shape on my bed. “Mom.” The dark shape did not move, did not speak. Her hand squeezed me harder. “Mom.”

• • • • Hours later, Father came upstairs, poked his head into my room. “You awake?” he said. “Sorta,” I replied. I hadn’t been, but he’d woken me. Like he needed to talk, to not be alone. “I just, well, I wanted to tell you everything is just fine, Son. Nothing to worry about.” He laughed, but strangely. Like pretending. “It’s all pretty routine now, eh?” I nodded, hoping it was true, and closed my eyes. “Well, goodnight then. I love you.” I listened to Father leave. After a moment, I heard the sound of the basement door open, heard his footsteps going down the stairs. As the sound of his steps grew fainter, then vanished, exhaustion took hold. I fell back asleep; a strange half-sleep, half-dream state. I dreamed of the cells inside my blood, forming and re-forming, clustering like galaxies, making me a universe. I woke in the middle of the night, shaking and upset. I’d had a nightmare. I couldn’t remember. The house was deathly quiet. Father would still be in the basement, watching Mother. My bedroom was pitch dark. There was no moonlight, no light from other houses, no light from the street. It was a small, quiet neighborhood, and late at night, like this, it was as if the whole street just turned off. Click. I was thirsty, and I had to go. I went to the bathroom, washed my hands, and walked into the hallway. The lights were all off, so I stood there a moment, in the dark, the floor cold beneath my feet, waiting for my eyes to adjust. Then I went to the living room, past my parents’ bedroom, which I noticed, without surprise, was empty. Then to the kitchen. I got a glass, stuck it under the sink, let the water get cold. I filled the glass and drank down the whole thing. I never took a breath. The door to the basement was open a little. Light came through the slit. This was unusual. Father always locked the door to the basement when Mother was in the room. Not to keep me out, but as a “precautionary measure.” Protocol. I stood there, holding the glass, looking at the bar of light. I listened but heard nothing. Nothing at all. I decided to go downstairs. At the bottom I saw Father standing over the monitors, looking tense. He turned quickly, saw me there. His eyes were wide, his face strained. “What are you doing?” I shrugged. “I was thirsty.” Father licked his lips, looked at the monitors again, then at the steel door that led to the room. Where Mother was. “Dad?” Father raised a hand. “Stay there. Just . . . stay there. Okay?” I was confused. I was always allowed to go to the room. My parents never hid what happened in the room from me, hid what happened to her. They wanted me to know, to be aware, to fear it, but not fear her. It was the only way, they used to say. “We all have to be in this together,” Mother always said. “Or we will all die.” Father pressed something on the wall by the door, and there was a sharp hiss, and a sound of metal sliding on metal, and the door clicked open, pushing outward a couple of inches. He opened the door, I thought, hardly believing it. Without looking back, Father pulled the door wide, peered inside. “Dad,” I said. This was not procedure, I knew that. This was not procedure in the slightest. I watched him as he stared into the room, the back of the door blocking my view. I waited. There was no sound coming from the room. No screeching, no gurgling chatter, no panting. None of the usual sounds Mother made. Father turned to me once more. “I was wrong. I need you.” He wiggled his fingers, wanting me to come closer. I didn’t want to. I was afraid. But he needed me, and the room was so quiet, and I was almost a man. I started toward him. “No!” Father snapped, holding up a hand once more. “Sorry,” he said, wiped the hand over his face. “Wait until I’m inside. Then come over here and watch. Open the intercom if you have to, but watch the monitors. When you see me wave at you, open the door and let me out. Understand?” I did, and I nodded. “But only if your mother is still restrained. If she’s not restrained, do not open the door. No matter what. Okay?” I nodded again. “Because sometimes she pretends.” Father looked at me a moment longer. He looked as sad as I’ve ever seen him, like he had something else to tell me. He started to say it, then lowered his head. “When I wave.” Then Father went into the room. The heavy door sealed shut behind him. I walked slowly to the desk where the monitors and the intercom were. I pushed aside the rolling black chair Father always sat in, looked at the screens. They flickered once, and I saw a flash and vague movement. Then they went completely black. I tried pressing the small power button in the lower corner of the monitors. Turned them off, then on. Off, then on. A small red light by the button proved they were on, and powered. Then why are they black? I wondered. And how am I supposed to see Father wave? I waited. I studied the steel door. My eyes went to the large rectangular black button next to it, the one Father had pressed. It was as big as my whole hand. I had pressed it before. I knew how to do it. How to open the door. I shook off the idea for the moment, looked at the other machinery on the desk. There was the black intercom box. Next to it was the switch that turned it on, or “opened it up,” as Father said. There was a long green box with cables running out the back, toward one of the walls of the room. I knew this box controlled the gas. There was a clear plastic tab that flipped up, and under the plastic tab was a black button. When you pressed the button, the gas in the room released, and everyone who breathed it would die. Everyone, whether they were human or not. There was a thin black screen with red digital numbers on the box. It was a timer. I saw it counting down. It was at 18:43:06. A second later, it showed 18:43:05. Next to the timer was a knob and a switch. The knob, I remembered, made it more time or less time. The switch turned it on or off. I left it alone. I pulled the chair over and sat down. I waited, humming to myself the song Mother sang earlier that night, hoping the screens would come back to life, show me what was happening inside the room. I moved my hand to the intercom switch, flipped it. Listened carefully. But there was nothing. Some light static, maybe a sound of some shuffling, some heavy sliding movement. But nothing else. Father wasn’t yelling for me. Mother wasn’t screeching like an eagle. It was like the room was empty. After a few minutes, I went to the couch that sat against the wall facing the steel door. I sat down, then laid down. I was still very tired. It was the middle of the night. I fell asleep.

• • • •

“Hello?” Mother. “Hello? Can you hear me, sweetie? Can you hear Mommy?” I woke up to her voice and opened my eyes, stared straight at the steel door. Still closed. I stood up, rubbed one eye with the heel of my hand, and walked over to the desk. I was so tired but I knew I should stay awake. Father might need me. I sat in the black swivel chair, eyelids heavy, shoulders slouched. I looked at the green box, the one with the timer counting down. 13:22:02 . . . 13:22:01 . . . 13:22:00 . . . There was sound coming from the intercom. Breathing, I thought. Heavy breathing. And . . . giggling? Like my parents were playing a game. I almost smiled, but realized that it didn’t make sense. Not at all. “Hello? Can you hear me?” It was Mother’s voice again, coming through the intercom. There was light static, her voice sounded far away, thin and nasally. Like she was transmitting from the moon. I felt frozen. I forgot to breathe. “The red intercom light is on in here, so I think you can. Honey, if you can hear me, I need to tell you something. Listen carefully, okay?” “Okay,” I said out loud, even though I knew she couldn’t hear me. “Your father is in here. He’s . . . he’s hurt. But I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me. It was an accident. I’m . . .” There was a pause, then a scratchy sound. It sounded like whispers. “I’m fine. I’ve turned back and I’m okay. So it wasn’t that. He had an accident. He came in, and he fell, and he hit his head. He needs a hospital I think. Okay? You understand?” I yawned, looked desperately at the blank monitors. I waited, hoping they would turn back on. The light, I realized. There’s no light. Mother’s voice came again, louder, as if her mouth was pressed right up to the microphone. “Baby,” she said, her voice a harsh whisper. “I need you to open the door.”

• • • •

Later, I went up to the kitchen to look for food. I was upset, confused, but also hungry, and so very tired. Sleeping on the couch had been uncomfortable, and I had woken a bunch of times to the sound of Mother’s horrible, pleading, demanding voice. I thought about calling Father’s friends. The men who had taken Mother before we built the room, who had handled her. But I didn’t want to call them. I just needed time to think. A man made his own decisions. Even the hard ones. I split a bagel, put it on a plate and into the microwave, heated it for thirty seconds, then slathered peanut butter on both open halves. There was half a jar of orange juice, and I poured myself a tall glass. I felt better. I chewed on the sticky bagel, washed it down with cold juice, and debated my options. I knew what Father would say. Father would say to let it ride. Wait for the gas. The gas would kill them both, and then I would be safe. I would also be alone. I have no other family. No relatives. I don’t go to school. I have no friends from the neighborhood. My parents give me lessons every day, teach me science and mythology, math and languages. There was no one to turn to. No one at all. I finished breakfast and went to get dressed.

• • • •

The basement was cold, and I was bored. It was late afternoon now, almost a full day since Mother had been locked inside. Time was running out. I sat at the desk, watched the timer ticking down. 03:34:46 . . . 03:34:45 . . . 03:34:44 . . . The intercom had been silent, the cameras showed nothing, the monitors black as empty space. Anything could be happening inside the room. On one hand, my parents could both be alive and well. Trapped, perhaps injured. But themselves. It was possible. Or Mother might have turned, and not turned back. It usually took at least a day before she became herself again. But there was always the possibility it would be forever. I couldn’t trust her not to pretend. Not to trick me. I watched the timer. My stomach rumbled. I was about to get up and find more food when Father’s electric voice came through the intercom. “You there, Son?” I froze. My mouth went dry. My eyes fell to the top of the desk. I was angry, anxious, scared. I ran a finger along the grooves in the tired old wood. My spine was itchy. “I’m okay, Son. I was . . . hurt. I’m still hurt, but I’m awake now, and feeling better. Much better in fact.” Father’s voice sounded ragged, his words coming too fast. His breathing was heavy. Irregular, he would say. Abnormal. “Listen, I have a feeling our time is growing short in here. I don’t . . . according to my watch, anyway, I’d say we have only a few hours until the gas releases. Is that right?” I looked at the timer. Getting close now. And it’s almost my birthday. I was having a hard time thinking, my brain felt fuzzy, and I was so very tired. I rested my head on the desk, my ear flat against the rough wood, feet kicking air. “Son. Please. We’re fine. We . . .” More whispering. “Your mother is still restrained. The keys . . . I don’t know where they are, but your mother is still restrained. And I’m hurt, not badly. But . . . I’m okay, you understand?” I slipped down from the chair, walked to the room’s steel door. I pressed my ear against the cold metal and listened, but I could only hear the sound of my own blood rushing through my ears. I closed my eyes. My blood sounded like waves, like wind. Like the inside of a seashell. I banged a fist against the door. Once, twice. Father’s voice came screaming over the intercom. “That’s right! Oh, thank God! Son, listen, you need to turn off the gas. Do you understand? Or . . .” Mother’s voice interrupted him. Loud, insistent. “Do you want us to die, baby?” she said, sounding more and more like the eagle, high-pitched and scratchy. “Do you want to be alone? If you don’t open the door, we will die. We will die, and you will be totally alone. I don’t mean to scare you, but that’s the truth. Please, do you hear me?” Then there was silence. They were waiting. I couldn’t think. I didn’t want to think anymore. I didn’t want this to be happening. I’d never felt more alone. I pressed my palm against the cool steel door. I didn’t want to make any hard decisions, didn’t want to be an adult. I missed them so much. I laid down at the foot of the door, curled into myself, and cried.

• • • •

There is no time now. I’ve waited, watched the timer tick slowly down. 00:02:13 . . . 00:02:12 . . . 00:02:11 . . . There is no way to stop the gas other than the green box. Opening the door, I know, will not stop it. The only way to stop it is by turning the little knob and resetting the timer, or shutting if off completely by flipping the small black switch. I take a deep breath. My decision is made. I have no intention of stopping it. I walk away from the table, cross the chilled air of the small basement toward the steel door, toward the room. There is loud pounding from the door at the top of the stairs. Men yell savage curses. I look to the stairs, toward the yelling. There must have been another fail-safe I didn’t know about, one that alerted Father’s friends. For a brief moment I panic, then relax. The door leading from the basement to the house is locked, reinforced, bolted. No one can get in without breaking it down, and it’s thick, solid. It would take time, and tools. I take a deep breath. My parents have been quiet for the past hour or so. Waiting, I know. Hoping. I don’t know what’s inside the room. I have some ideas, some possible outcomes, in my mind. Mother, hideously pale skin streaked with blue veins. Anger and flaring nostrils, yawning jaw. Her teeth, her eyes . . . Father, poisoned by her, but alive. Reborn in monstrous flesh. Waiting, biding his time. Pacing frantically, his amped-up nerve endings flexing for the very first time, the air around him feeding energy into his altered bones, his sensitized flesh. A six-foot-tall rabid dog. If I open the door they will run at me, grab me. Tear me apart. But I imagine other options. They are lying in there dead. Human or monster. Maybe half-turned. Maybe half-eaten. Or maybe the room is empty. Or maybe the room is gone. What do I believe? I want to believe it will be my parents, alive and human. Just Mother and Father, tired, perhaps injured. Hungry not for flesh but for freedom. Air, food, water. They will run to me and hug me. Kiss me on the face, wipe away my tears, rub my back soothingly. Sing to me at night. Take care of me. Protect me. Everything will be like it was, and we will be together again. Once I open the door, once I go inside . . . I put my fingers on the smooth black panel that releases the heavy bolts of the lock. My face is burning, there is a throbbing pain behind my eyes. The men scream and pound. I can’t wait for the end. I’ve been counting down the numbers from the screen in my head. . . . sixteen . . . fifteen . . . fourteen . . . I’m tired, but I smile. I’ll be thirteen soon. I will change. One way or the other. . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . . I hear the faint sound of frantic scratching on the other side of the door. I can hear it through the steel. Desperate, monstrous. My parents clawing for life, maybe. Or something else. Something I haven’t thought of. I love them so much. . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . I push the large black button, feel the click of the release vibrate up my arm. Metal slides on metal, the heavy door hisses. I pull it open. The room is pitch black. Silent. I step inside, ready for whatever waits. There’s a shushing sound. The darkness is total. I move deeper into the room, confident. It’s almost my birthday. Something moves toward me. I lift my chin, spread out my arms. No matter what comes . . . I close my eyes tight. . . . I will be a man.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Philip Fracassi, an author and screenwriter, lives in Los Angeles, California. His adapted screenplays have been distributed by companies such as Disney Entertainment and Lifetime Network, and his short stories have been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best Horror of the Year, Dark Discoveries, Cemetery Dance, Lovecraft eZine, and Strange Aeons among others. He is the author of the award-winning story collection, Behold the Void. For more information on his books and screenplays, visit his website at www.pfracassi.com. You can also follow him on Facebook, Instagram (pfracassi) and Twitter (@philipfracassi). BOOK EXCERPTS EXCERPT: Inside the Asylum (Kensington Books) Mary SanGiovanni | 3955 words

From “master of cosmic horror” (Library Journal) Mary SanGiovanni, comes the latest terrifying novel featuring occult specialist Kathy Ryan. A mind is a terrible thing to destroy . . . Kathy has been hired to assess the threat of patient Henry Banks, an inmate at the Connecticut-Newlyn Hospital for the Criminally Insane, the same hospital where her brother is housed. Her employers believe that Henry has the ability to open doors to other dimensions with his mind— making him one of the most dangerous men in modern history. Because unbeknownst to Kathy, her clients are affiliated with certain government organizations that investigate people like Henry—and the potential to weaponize such abilities. What Kathy comes to understand in interviewing Henry, and in her unavoidable run-ins with her brother, is that Henry can indeed use his mind to create “Tulpas”—worlds, people, and creatures so vivid, they come to actual life. But now they want life outside of Henry. And they’ll stop at nothing to complete their emancipation. It’s up to Kathy—with her brother’s help—to stop them, and if possible, to save Henry before the Tulpas take him over—and everything else around him.

Coming May 7, 2019 from Kensington Publishing Corp.

Chapter 1

March twenty-seventh marked three years since Henry Banks had woken up from the coma. He kept track in a day planner, with new calendar refills for subsequent years, by drawing a symbol he had been taught by his friends in the upper right-hand corner of each day’s page. Other than therapy sessions, he had no real appointments anymore, but Henry jotted down notes about the day’s events, things he learned or discovered, and each night before bed, he drew that symbol of his far- reaching goals. Journaling, even Henry’s odd version of it, was encouraged and allowed to continue as a means of reconnecting with one’s self and feelings. His was more of an odd, disjointed grimoire of his mind, but that seemed to be okay, too. He never forgot, not even during the trial, when his mind was . . . elsewhere. On days he couldn’t get to the planner, Maisie made sure that at least the days were marked. It was important to him. He never forgot, so neither did she. Every day that passed reminded him that he was drifting farther and farther from the rest of humanity, so Henry didn’t think the three-year anniversary was cause for celebration. Dr. Pam Ulster did, though, or at least convincingly pretended to. Every year prior, she had suggested Henry do something nice for himself to commemorate his “return to the world.” The irony was not lost on him. He didn’t see how he was supposed to do much of anything, since the orderlies, who were not big on celebrations, watched him like hawks. Even if he wanted to, what could he really give himself in his current situation? A walk in the sunshine around the hospital grounds? An extra muffin with breakfast? Anything else—anything worthwhile—would be noticed and probably taken away. Besides, it wasn’t like he’d come back from the dead. He’d just come back from . . . somewhere else. Henry figured other people would have had reason to celebrate March twenty-seventh if he’d died instead of coming out of that coma. Maybe that should have happened, but it didn’t. Maisie, Orrin, Edgar, and the Others made sure of that. They’d come out of Ayteilu and saved him. Or maybe they were right, and he had saved them. The police and the lawyers and the doctors told him he’d done something bad to the teenagers in his basement right before the coma. He couldn’t remember much about that. He was pretty sure he hadn’t been the one who’d done it, but it was his fault all the same. He’d seen those teenagers before; they hung around outside the Dollar Tree and said mean things to him from behind the safety of their cigarette smoke clouds when he went to shop there. The girl was pretty, but she was sharp where she should have been soft, like something made of glass or porcelain, something whose temper could shatter her into a thousand jagged, deadly pieces. The three guys were mostly messy mops of hair, black trench coats, and jeans. Their faces didn’t matter to him. Their fists did, and their words; they often threatened the former with the latter. Henry wasn’t even sure if they’d had eyes, but he imagined that if they did, those eyes were cold. They made fun of the holes in his t-shirts and the way he walked and the scar on his shaved head. They made fun of the burn marks on the back of his shoulder and neck and the way he growled at them instead of using words. Still, they had always been an away-problem, an outside- the-house problem, like savage dogs on leashes. They were tethered to the Dollar Tree, and if he could make it past them to his car and then to his home, he would be safe. Then it turned out that they weren’t on leashes. They could move anywhere they wanted. And they had chosen to break into his house, his safe space. They’d brought baseball bats and knives. The Viper and the Others had come simply to protect him. Sometimes, Henry thought he should have started keeping count in his planner on that night. Dr. Ulster had asked him once during a session why he bothered to maintain such meticulous records of the past three years, if he honestly believed everything in his life had fallen apart since the coma. Why approach the planner as a constant reminder of his deterioration, then? Why not just put the past behind him and focus on getting better? Henry had told her then the truth about the Others, just like he had told the police when they found what was left of the four teenagers in his basement. He told them about Ayteilu and its tendency to swallow up reality. He’d told them about Maisie and Orrin and Edgar and all the Others. He’d even told them about the Viper. Maisie said that was okay. The problem was, he couldn’t show the police or Dr. Ulster, so they hadn’t believed. He couldn’t make it all happen on command, not back then. But he was learning, and over the last 1,095 days, he was steadily growing better at it. What he didn’t tell anyone was that in three days’ time, as set forth by Edgar’s prediction, he’d have complete control in summoning the Others at will and opening the way to Ayteilu. The Others hadn’t wanted him to share that part with anyone else. Henry peered through the gloom of his bedroom. His cot was against the wall across from the door, which of course was locked now that it was lights out. On the far side of the room was the door to his simple bathroom—one sink, one toilet, both gleaming white—and next to that door was a small closet in which hung his hospital-issued clothes, soft and harmless. No zipper teeth or sharp metal claws there, not even buttons or laces. Beneath the clothes, like obedient lapdogs curled up on the closet floor for the night, were a pair of loafers and a pair of slippers. Against the back wall, near where the head of his cot lay, was a small, barred window. The orderlies could open it sometimes to air the room out, but they had keys to do that and were allowed to reach through the bars. That night, his window was closed, but Henry didn’t mind. He just liked having one, and from his, he could see the parking lot. Some people liked seeing the neat, tight little lawns that constituted the hospital grounds, but he preferred the parking lot. It reminded him that there was still a real world out there, with normal people who had jobs and houses and pets, and that those people could actually leave hospitals and move freely through it. He got up from the cot and shuffled over to the window. The moon was mostly hidden behind clouds, but in the lot below, the arc-sodium lights illuminated patches of asphalt in a soft melon color. Shadows skirted those halos of glow, darting quickly from one spot to another in the dark. It wasn’t their shape so much as their movement that Henry caught, but it was soothing all the same to see they were down there. Probably it was Maisie who had sent them. She was thoughtful like that. Maisie always knew when he was sad or angry or just feeling drained. That night, Henry was exhausted. The geliophobia had been particularly bad all day. He had shouldered the burden of many crippling mental conditions since early childhood, but the one that garnered the least sympathy and understanding was his fear of people laughing at him. Decades of laughter, pressed between the pages of his memories, always found a way to resurface, to grow fat and loud again in his thoughts and even in his ears. When he was stressed or tired, he could hear a chorus of guffaws and giggles, tittering and peals from people who should have kept their damn mouths shut. The laughter echoed in the back of his thoughts, jarring and ugly like the squawking of angry hawks, and he tried to put it out. Bad things happened in the dark when he couldn’t, and he didn’t have the strength to make the bad things go away. Not tonight. His limbs felt heavy and his eyes were dry and burning. He shuffled back to the cot and climbed beneath the blanket. Henry forced each of his muscles to relax, starting with his toes and working his way up to the top of his head, just like Dr. Ulster had taught him. Then he worked on clearing his mind. He imagined the inside of his head as debris on a darkened stage, and with a big broom, he swept away all of them like they were piles of dust. Sleep came on like a slow tide, lapping at him in waves and eroding his conscious thought. Just before he drifted off, he heard Maisie moving gently through the dark. “Good night,” he mumbled. A butterfly flutter of lips brushed his forehead, and a soft, cultured voice replied, “Good night, Henry.”

• • • •

Ever since Martha’s death the weekend before, Ben Hadley had been on edge. He was a nervous man by nature; his nerves had, in part, put him in Connecticut-Newlyn Hospital to begin with. That damned clumsy woman, with her barking, thumping dog in the apartment upstairs from his, had finally compelled him to take action. This was different, though. He was on meds now; he wasn’t supposed to get nervous, not like this. Of course, it was hard not to be a little out of sorts when all around him, people were dropping like flies. There had been the suicides last month—the twins, Belle and Barney McGuinness, who had jumped off the roof of Parker Hall and made a terrible mess on the front steps. How they had gotten up there was anyone’s guess; apparently security protocols were “still being looked into,” for all the good that would do. And then there was Sherman Jones, who had supposedly died in his sleep. Sure, he was ninety-eight, but he’d been fine all day, alert and active as ever. Ridley Comstock had come as less of a surprise. They’d found him hanging all blue-lipped and bloated in his own closet. Autoerotic asphyxia was the culprit there, according to Toby Ryan, and given Ridley’s proclivities on the outside, that was probably true—an accident, but an ugly one, if the orderlies’ gossip was to be believed. But then there was Martha, and hers was one death too many, and with far too many strange circumstances surrounding it. At first Ben thought Toby had done it. Toby killed women; it was his thing. Of course, he’d sworn he hadn’t killed Martha, that he couldn’t have. He said he’d been locked in his room overnight, the same as everyone else. Ben didn’t argue. Toby scared him. As it turned out, though, a new and more likely suspect had emerged over the course of the week: Henry Banks. Of all the inmates at Connecticut-Newlyn, Henry had always seemed the most harmless. Soft-spoken with an occasional stutter, he’d never seemed dangerous before. In fact, he’d seemed so undangerous that Ben had even harbored doubts as to whether Henry had actually killed those teenagers. That was, of course, before Ben learned about Henry’s friends. The thing about them, Ben had discovered, was that they weren’t mild-mannered, and they certainly weren’t locked down at night. Henry’s friends came and went as they pleased, and they mostly answered to Henry. Martha had threatened to tell the doctors about them; she’d said so the day before in the common room. She was going to tell, and Henry had been worried. His friends, after all, were only there to protect him. Toby had said it was a silly fight; Henry’s friends were imaginary, and Martha was getting all worked up over nothing. Still, someone didn’t think it was too silly a fight to silence her. If Henry didn’t kill her, then one of those allegedly imaginary friends must have. Ben wasn’t crazy, despite his lawyer’s convincing case to the court. Ben was just nervous. Sometimes, he got very nervous, and he understood that if Henry’s friends had gotten nervous, too, about Martha telling on them, they might have felt compelled to take action. That didn’t make Ben any less sad or nervous. There was probably a whole town out there that was glad Martha was dead—Martha, who had drowned her own four children in a bathtub on the advice of an angel— but she had been one of Ben’s only friends. He didn’t believe she would have told the doctors or orderlies anything. The doctors claimed Martha choked in her sleep, but Ben had seen the blood all over her room—the walls, the sheets of her cot, her neck. He’d seen her eyes, wide and scared and glazed over. Her mouth had hung open like a small, crooked cave. Her tongue, torn out by the roots, had been on the pillow beside her, close to her ear. He’d seen it all . . . before two of the orderlies realized he was standing there and roughly led him away. No, Henry’s friends were not mild-mannered at all. And Ben didn’t think Henry knew everything they got up to in the night. He thought all these things as he lay on his cot, waiting for the sun to come up. He’d resigned himself to the fact that he’d be getting no sleep that night. He was too wired for that. Plus, he wanted to watch the door. Henry’s room was right next to his, and if these friends, imaginary or not, were moving around the halls out there, he wanted to know about it. They could obviously move through doors and maybe walls. If they could get into Martha’s room, they could get into his as well. The doors to each room had small windows made of Plexiglas, and from his position on the cot, Ben could just see the top of the far hallway wall and a bit of the ceiling through his. It was quiet out there; the dark remained still and the ceiling tiles—twelve in his line of sight—were all accounted for. He’d learned not to try to look outside at night. Shadows had shape out there, and moved in deliberate and predatory ways that shadows shouldn’t. It was better for his peace of mind just to look out the little window in his door. Ben might have dozed for a moment, but he didn’t think so; in the next, however, he saw a hazy, wavering face peer in, followed by an equally insubstantial palm on the Plexiglas. Ben froze, and a moment later, the palm was gone. His heart pounded. Who were they looking for? Would the morning bring another dead inmate? There was no sound of footsteps. Henry’s friends were quiet; he’d give them that. But they were also clearly on the move.

• • • •

Orrin and Edgar sat in the dark, waiting for Maisie. She watched over Henry at night, at least until he fell asleep, and while they waited for her to come out of the hospital, Orrin and Edgar watched over the Others. Tonight, Maisie would be late. She had taken an interest in some of the other inmates there, who she claimed had special knowledge locked up in their heads that she was certain would prove useful to them. Of course, she made Orrin and Edgar swear never to mention this to Henry, because it would only upset him, and Maisie didn’t like to see him upset. They had, so far, held to that promise. Edgar didn’t like to cross anyone, and as for Orrin . . . well, he had other reasons for wanting to keep Maisie happy. He couldn’t understand what she thought she’d gain by getting to know these other guys, but Maisie was a thinker, and she probably saw a way to protect them and the Others somehow. Most of her plans involved protecting them or making them stronger, and Orrin could get behind that. He didn’t trust damn near anybody, not even Edgar, and they were brothers, but he trusted Maisie. So they sat and waited while the Others ran and tore at things in the darkness, a silent show of mad, dancing, light-changing silhouettes. Two of them had set upon an owl and were pulling off its wings while a third extended the fingers of its tendrils into the meat of the bird to explore its insides. “D-d-do you think she’ll b-be out soon?” Edgar asked in that stop- start, jerking way he had. His good eye glowed like an ember in the dark. “Soon,” Orrin said, and gave his brother a reassuring nod. “They’re not easy t-to wrangle when they’re this r-riled up,” Edgar said, gesturing at the Others. “Henry’s g-gonna b-be pissed if he looks out the window tomorrow and sees d-dead b-b-birds all over the parking lot.” “You worry too much,” Orrin told him. “D-do I?” Orrin didn’t reply just then. Edgar’s worries weren’t without substance. Henry could be pacified, but the longer Maisie spent in that hospital, the greater the chance that someone else would discover him and Edgar and the Others and cause them to make an unpleasant scene. That wouldn’t be good for Henry or anyone else. Finally, he said, “She’ll be out soon.” “Then what?” “Then we find the Viper and see what comes next.”

• • • •

As Henry dreamed, the darkness spread in silence. Inside the utility shed about two and a half acres behind the hospital, the darkness pooled in the corners and seeped through the cracks in the floor. Waves of inkiness washed over the detritus of hospital maintenance. Tendrils snaked around and inside the lawn care equipment and tools. Bottles of chemicals were probed and poked until they spilled, and their smoking, acidic contents were drunk and assimilated. The darkness lapped up the shadows and the night itself and made them its own. As it took the shed’s contents, it changed them. It brought the imps through from Ayteilu to claim and reshape them. Orrin had called it “giving land to a country.” Maisie and Edgar just called it “breaking through.” But the Viper knew it for what it was. He sat on a length of old fence just outside the shed and watched through the open door as a riding lawn mower became a silverbacked beast whose underside contained rows of mouths and bladed teeth. Leathery wings broke through the creature’s back and folded themselves neatly against it. Its legs, shaped like a bulldog’s, only longer and more powerful, grew from its sides, hoisting its bulk a good two feet off the ground. It had no eyes and no discernible nose, but it seemed interested in sniffing around the doorframe of the shed, adjusting to its new surroundings. The Viper hopped off the fence and strolled over to the shed. Inside, a new shape was forming from a puddle of darkness and industrial cleaner. He watched as the substance traveled upward, dipping in and out of feminine curves as it formed legs and hips, a waist, breasts, arms and shoulders, a neck, a head. The last things to appear were the eyes, which, when opened, focused a cold, bright green gaze on him. Black swirls lifted off her body like steam. This new being, an ebony mist condensed in human form, took a step forward and waited. She and the Others coming through and developing behind her would follow the Viper’s orders. Maisie couldn’t control them; the mist Wraiths only ever listened to the Viper, even in Ayteilu. What had once been a rake wiggled off its hook on the wall and slithered by the Viper’s feet. The rake head had formed a bottom jaw, and those rust-colored tines grew sharp. The creature’s jaws were immense. What passed for the Viper’s smile found his face as he watched that snaking tail, muscled though it was, just manage to push forward the large skull in front of it. The Viper looked up at the sky. It was a clear night; the stars of this universe twinkled overhead like tiny eyes. He supposed that one night, he’d look up and see Ayteilu’s familiar constellations . . . but not tonight. He took a step back as the shed itself began to change. The wood creaked a little and then stretched, and the dimensions of the building increased. In minutes, it was the size of a large barn. The substance of the wood had taken on the faint red tint and rough grain of the trees in Ayteilu. From within, the newly formed were beginning to find ways to make sounds—little sounds, but new and exciting to them all the same. Soon, they would growl and roar, and find the strength to devour this world. Soon . . . when the constellations of Ayteilu remapped the sky. Gently, he closed the barn door. The darkness and its changes would spread soon enough, but there was no sense in letting the creatures inside roam free just yet. Maisie and Orrin and Edgar had to do their parts first to make Henry stronger. The Viper glanced up at the sky once more, then walked off into the darkness. The shed-turned-barn shuddered with the new life inside it, and the darkness began to spill out from under the door.

Copyright © 2019 by Mary SanGiovanni. Excerpted from Inside the Asylum, by Mary SanGiovanni. Published by permission of the author and Kensington Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mary SanGiovanni is the Bram Stoker-nominated author of the Kathy Ryan novels, Savage Woods, Chills, and numerous other novels, novellas and short stories. She also contributed to DC Comics’ House of Horror anthology, alongside comic book legends Howard Chaykin and Keith Giffen. She has been writing fiction for over a decade, has a Master’s in writing popular fiction from Seton Hill University, and is a member of The Authors Guild, Penn Writers, and International Thriller Writers. Her website is marysangiovanni.com.

The H Word: The Tragedy of La Llorona Aaron Duran | 847 words

Nearly every culture has the lone woman in white. For some, she is a harbinger of death to come. For others, she is a bringer of death herself. And in other cultures, she is a warning to those who stray from societies’ morals. Cursed to exist forever with her shame. To the people of Mexico and the American Southwest, La Llorona—the Wailing Woman—is all these things. Yet she is often portrayed in modern media as a one-note boogeyman (or woman, in this case). Growing up in a Mexican household, I only knew La Llorona as a threat. A way to scare me home before dark: “Hurry home, mijo. You don’t want La Llorona to take you away.” Trust me, those simple words had more of an impact than any threat of grounding or having my Nintendo taken away. Just as they had for my parents, my grandparents, and all who came before. Now, this is where one would normally go into the history of the myth, where her tale first came to life. But like much of Mexico’s past, La Llorona’s beginning is not so simple. In some versions of her myth, she was a beautiful woman who seduced a wandering man and convinced him to settle down. After having children, he grew enraged at her holding him down. To prove her loyalty, she drowned her children. Another version presents her as a simple but stunning peasant woman who falls in love with a wealthy Spaniard. He rebukes her love, telling her he can’t be with a woman with children who are not his own. His rejection inspires her to drown her children, believing he will then marry her. Instead, her action shocks the man and he curses her, and she throws herself into the very river where she drowned her children. Further back, she is the lover of Cortes’, playing a part in the destruction of the Aztec people. We finally learn of her first inspiration, that of Aztec goddess Chihuacóatl, who attempted to warn her people of the coming invasion, but failed to do so, and must endure her failure as her curse. Regardless of her original story, the creation of La Llorona always begins with removal. Not of her children or her people, but of her agency. And therein lies the true horror and tragedy of the myth. Her rise comes as a result of manipulation and power over her own sense of self and value. She is more than just a monster used to scare kids home before dark. She is a warning to those who wish to move beyond their social status. And while her deeds are indeed horrific, the message behind every version of La Llorona is not about protecting children. It’s about knowing your place. If she had simply played the part of the noble peasant mother, her children would be alive. This is even evident when you examine her foundations as a goddess. Ignoring her agency, Spanish and Catholic Church chroniclers resign her to the domain of fertility and motherhood. Lacking any form of authority or control, she foresees the demise of her people. Yet, when they do not heed her warning, she is the one who receives the punishment: She is doomed to forever wander a land that she attempted to save. It is an aimless wander with no sign of ending as The Curse of La Llorona sets to debut in theaters in 2019. Like many horror fans, especially one who grew up with La Llorona’s frightening story whispered in my ear, I was excited to see our weeping woman coming to life. To many people, La Llorona is more than just a flavor of the week monster. She reaches deep into a cultural core. Unfortunately, that is not how the trailer presents the film and character. Indeed, the trailer suggests La Llorona is just another dangerous monster from south of the border, come to wreak havoc upon the innocent and hard-working American. It’s this altered interpretation of the weeping woman as shown in the trailer that adds another layer of tragedy to her myth. Her story is again becoming manipulated and twisted to suit a modern narrative. One that removes what little humanity and agency she had left. That’s not to say a fantastic horror story can’t be told with La Llorona. There most certainly is one, but one that brings her true story to life. Without a sense of humanity, La Llorona is just another monster. But she is so much more than that. She is a constant evolution of a people who slowly had their identity stolen and drowned in that river. When she wails in the night “¡Ay, mis hijos!”, she is looking for more than her own lost children. She is seeking herself. She is seeking us. She wishes to take back everything stolen over the centuries. Such a reality is worse than any jump scare. Her existence is one of horror and tragedy. One I hope we do not repeat.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Aaron Duran is a writer in Portland, OR. He’s the founder and co-host of the popular podcast, Geek in the City Radio. Aaron is an author of multiple comic books, including his creator-owned series Dark Anna and the Pirates of Kadath and Dial F for Foodie, as well as the Forgotten Tyrs young adult horror series of novels. Aaron draws much of his literary inspiration from the creepy folktales told to him by his small but feisty abuela. When he isn’t writing, you can find Aaron in the kitchen. Where he spends time coming up with tasty recipes and experimental beer and cider brewing for his incredibly supportive wife to enjoy. Interview: Gabino Iglesias Lisa Morton | 2819 words

Gabino Iglesias is an Austin-based writer who seemed to pop up on a lot of readers’ radar over the last year. His “mosaic novel” Coyote Songs, which chronicles the lives of immigrants, families, and artists living and moving along the border, has earned him rave reviews, a Bram Stoker Award nomination for Fiction Collection, and a reputation as a breakout Latinx horror author. Coyote Songs is Iglesias’ fourth novel (following the bizarro book Gutmouth, the underwater horror novel Hungry Darkness, and the acclaimed Zero Saints, which is the first work to explore what he calls “barrio noir”); he’s also a prolific author of reviews, essays, and short fiction, and works in several different genres.

Your first book was a bizarro novella called Gutmouth, and you also wrote some short pieces in the bizarro realm. What first attracted you to bizarro fiction?

I started reading bizarro in 2007. I was also reading a lot of crime, horror, and literary fiction at the time, but nothing was as free as bizarro. What attracted me the most was the freedom to ignore all the rules. Bizarro is a genre that obeys nothing and no one, and creating narratives with no rules is a very liberating, exciting exercise.

After Gutmouth, your next stand-alone book was a work of straight horror fiction (involving a team of divers and a fisherman encountering a monstrous cephalopod) called Hungry Darkness. How did that come about, and did it feel like shifting gears after writing bizarro for a few years?

I was also writing horror and crime while writing bizarro, but it was mostly the bizarro stuff that was getting published. I started working on Zero Saints before starting to work on Hungry Darkness. Zero Saints was heavy. I was emotional, political. It took a lot of my time and effort. I was finding my voice and writing in Spanglish for the first time, trying new things and allowing culture, experiences, language, and the syncretism that surrounded me growing up to seep into my world. From time to time, I would need a break from it to refocus, so I’d write a short story. One day I decided to write a creature feature as a palate cleanser. I wanted to do something extremely fun and pulpy, bloody and fast. Hungry Darkness was the result of that itch. It was short and was published quickly after getting picked up by Severed Press. It’s now out of print, but maybe one day I’ll revise it and bring that little monster back to life as part of something bigger . . .

Reviews for Hungry Darkness compared you to Peter Benchley and Joe Lansdale. When you get comparisons like that, is it flattering, or does it add to your stress load the next time you sit down to write?

I pay attention to those for a few minutes and then move on. Being mentioned alongside Lansdale is an honor, but no one can compare to him. The man is a national treasure. It’s good for the ego to get a comparison like that from time to time, but I ignore it because I already put enough pressure on myself to make the next one better. I feel like every writer has to do that. Never rehash a story. Never be the same writer you were when you wrote the previous book. Strive to be better. Work hard at getting better. That’s a lot of pressure. If I added “Try to be the next Lansdale” to that, I’d be doing everyone a disservice. We already have a Lansdale, a master of every genre he touches. I don’t want to be the next Lansdale, I want to be the first Gabino Iglesias.

Stylistically, Hungry Darkness and the barrio noir books seem light years apart: Hungry Darkness is fast and spare in its language, whereas the later stories are more poetic, using both English and Spanish to describe the world of la frontera. Do you see that as a natural evolution?

Barrio noir was the coming together of everything I wanted to do with my fiction. Horror, crime, supernatural stuff, and weirdness wrapped up in multiculturalism, syncretism, and bilingualism. I wrote Zero Saints knowing that it’d be hard to get a press to touch it. It was too weird, too political, too full of Spanglish and Spanish. Accepting that gave me the freedom to do exactly what I wanted. Inventing barrio noir also meant that I was the one saying what could fit in the narrative. It was horror, but also crime, so I could grab the elements I liked the most from those genres and mix them together into something weird. It does feel like an evolution now. I hope I evolve with every book.

Would you say your 2015 novel Zero Saints was the first time you explored the idea of “barrio noir,” and what exactly does that term mean to you?

I’d explored different elements of it before, but the first time I decided to bring it all together was with Zero Saints. I decided to use Spanish without italics. No language is an Other language; it’s your inability to read or speak it that makes it “alien.” I decided I didn’t care if the book was too full of horror for the crime fans or it had too many crime fiction elements for readers of classic horror. The hardest part was explaining it all to myself in a way that allowed me to explain it to others, that gave me the courage to write “a barrio noir” under the title when submitting it instead of writing “a novel.” Now I’m good at summarizing it. Barrio noir is any writing that walks between languages, borders, and cultures. It’s writing from the barrio, from your hood, from your trailer park. It’s fiction that’s full of truth. It’s writing that occupies a plethora of interstitial spaces and isn’t afraid to engage with all religions and superstitions as well as to bring in supernatural elements. You’ve lived in Austin, Texas, for some time. How much has that city influenced your work?

A lot. The first thing it did was amplify my experiences in the Caribbean. There were no beheaded chickens left in front of doors here. No limpias. No botanicas in every corner. Distance acted like a magnifying glass for everything that surrounded me in the barrio growing up, in the dirty streets of San Juan as a teenager and beyond. The second thing it did was throw me in the middle of the frontera struggles. I worked with undocumented workers. I met DREAMers. I inhabited a borrowed culture that forced me to realize my status as a second-class citizen from a colony that can’t vote for the president was still, in some ways, more desirable than being undocumented. I taught ESL to adults at night for a year. Their stories about crossing the border and money and drugs and coyotes and violence will stay with me forever. I wouldn’t have been in touch with that if I hadn’t moved to Austin.

Coyote Songs opens with Pedrito, a young boy who is curious, smart, fascinated by his father, and proves to be very determined. How much of your childhood went into him?

I realized there was a bit of me in him when I put a book in his hands. I was always curious. Books gave me answers. After that, his story is, thankfully, very different from mine. Oh, and I’m the son of a migrant, so I guess that adds something, but I used that with Alma. Being the migrant son of a migrant makes you wonder about the migrating gene . . .

In approaching the “mosaic novel” structure of Coyote Songs, how did you decide on the order of the individual pieces? Did the order change as you worked through the book?

I needed to start with a bang. I needed blood quickly. I needed pain. Those were my hooks. At one point, I talked to writer and editor Cameron Pierce about writing a novel that started with a kid and his father fishing. Pierce, who was the head honcho at the now defunct Lazy Fascist Press, also edited a nonfiction anthology of fishing stories. I was working on my piece for that book while working on Coyote Songs, so the fishing things were at the forefront of my mind. That and conversations with author David Joy about alligator gar. That’s why I made David the author of the book Pedrito holds in that first chapter.

In Coyote Songs, the story of Jaime, a young man who has just been released from prison and is having difficulty living with his mother and her abusive boyfriend, is spread out over several chapters, but it first appeared as a single short story, “Faster Than Weeping Angels,” in the anthology Blood and Gasoline: High-Octane, High- Velocity Action. Tell us a little about how a single short story became several pieces of your “mosaic novel”—how did you decide to break it up? Did you consider rewriting any of it, or did you fit any of the other stories in Coyote Songs around it?

Like a lot of my fiction, there are elements of that story that are pulled from real life, from people I met and hung out with in the past. Jaime was first a very violent flash fiction piece. It grew a bit, and I had an opportunity to have it in that awesome anthology edited by Mario Acevedo. Then it grew even more to become part of Coyote Songs. Luckily I didn’t have to rewrite anything, because every time I worked on that story, I always did so knowing it would end up being part of the original project it was meant for, the mosaic novel. The breaking up was harder. Ultimately I went with breaks that worked for me as a reader, breaks that made me want to keep reading to know what came next. Hopefully it works for everyone else!

Some of the characters in Coyote SongsPedrito, Alma—have names, while others—The Mother, The Coyote—are known by their titles, suggesting that they are more iconic. How did you decide on the characters that would be nameless and yet archetypal?

Alma is soul. Pedrito is a classic name used in many jokes about a little kid at school. The Bruja was a powerful bruja who morphs into an angry ghost, so titling her chapters that way struck me as better. However, she has a name: Inmaculada. It means immaculate. You know, like the Virgin Mary that enters the story later. As for The Coyote, I wanted him to be a force, a man on a holy mission. I wanted him to inhabit his role to the point that it became his whole identity. It made more sense to not give him a name. If their role overpowered everything else, I went with no name. The Mother, for example, becomes her own context. I think some readers will pick up on that. I can hope, right?

I love the use of politics in Coyote Songs, and I love that you’re unafraid to name names. I often encounter speculative fiction writers who think that using politics in their fiction renders it automatically “preachy.” How would you respond to those writers?

If you’re going to do the writing thing, leave fear at home. The only fear in your career should be the one you make your readers feel. I’ve heard that getting political can hurt your sales, but I don’t care. I’ve also been told using Spanglish and characters from other countries and backgrounds can hurt sales. Again, I don’t care. I care about telling my stories in the most authentic way possible. I care about entertaining and making readers feel things. I care about getting a bit better with every book and not allowing my desire for sales and success to affect my moral compass. Plus, I don’t have to write for everyone. Those who try my work and hate it have a million other writers to check out. There are some things you can’t control as a writer, but your politics is something you control. Use them fearlessly. Or don’t. That decision is up to each writer, but they all need to know that not taking a political stance is also a political move.

My favorite character in Coyote Songs is Alma, a Puerto Rican performance artist trying to use her art to make sense of her world. I think one of the things I liked so much about the Alma stories is that they shouldn’t even work as stories—they don’t have a traditional beginning-middle-end structure, her character isn’t revealed through plot, but through her art—and yet these stories are deeply moving. How did you first envision Alma, and did you deliberately set out to give her stories such a different form?

I thought about having a female writer in there, but quickly realized a performance artist would be a better character. Her actions would say more. And she could also write a bit because many performance artists and painters dabble in writing. I wanted her to embody a different kind of strength than that of The Mother and Inmaculada. She’s tired. She’s angry. She’s constantly hustling and creating. She becomes possessed. Her narrative had to be different, but I couldn’t pull off a performance on the page, so I went with a different structure for her.

Coyote Songs has just been nominated for the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Award (for Fiction Collection). How would you answer someone who asks you what kind of horror it is?

A Stoker! Can you believe it?! Haha. I’m still processing it. Anyway, back to your question: it’s timely horror that wants to show you the monstrousness behind some everyday truths. Oh, and there are actual monsters in there. And a lot of blood . . .

You have reviews all over the internet! How much has your work as a reviewer informed your fiction? I think every writer is inspired by every piece of superb writing we read. That said, I’ve learned to switch hats. I review for crime sites and horror sites and for places like NPR. I review literary fiction and thrillers and poetry and bizarro. I switch hats and focus on the author I’m reading at the moment so I can talk about the book I read. I wouldn’t be able to do that consistently if I kept thinking about my own work while I read. It’s weird, but it works for me.

You’re now editing a book of border stories. Are you finding that you enjoy working as an editor?

I recently edited a book of crime and horror stories inspired by the music of Biggie Smalls for CLASH Books and loved the experience. The border noir anthology is something I’d been thinking about for a while. Someone tweeted about me being perfect for it, so I decided to make it happen. I was lucky that Polis Books jumped on it. I love picking stories and helping to make them a bit better. I love working with great editors. It’s a different experience, and hopefully the start of many more.

Can you imagine that twenty years from now, you might look back at yourself and see that you were at the head of a new wave of Latinx speculative fiction writers?

I don’t know if I’m at the head or running with the herd, but I’m happy to see more books by Latinx writers out there, getting attention and accolades. I just received a Bram Stoker Award nomination! I love seeing diversity on the ballot. We’re moving in the right direction. I will do everything in my power to keep it going. Horror is for everyone and written by everyone. I’m happy to be part of all of it.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of non-fiction books, and award-winning prose writer whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening”. She is the author of four novels and more than 130 short stories, a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award®, and a world-class Halloween expert who has been interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Real Simple Magazine, and The History Channel (for The Real Story of Halloween). She co-edited (with Ellen Datlow) the anthology Haunted Nights, which received a starred review in Publishers Weekly; other recent releases include Ghosts: A Haunted History and the collection The Samhanach and Other Halloween Treats. Lisa lives in the San Fernando Valley and online at lisamorton.com.

Author Spotlight: Mimi Mondal Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali | 1789 words

What was the inspiration behind “Malotibala Printing Press”?

Two of my favourite things went into the writing of “Malotibala Printing Press”—I grew up reading lots of horror stories in Bengali, of which there is a tradition of over 200 years; and I am trained as a Publishing Studies scholar. Calcutta, the city in India where I’m from, has the oldest tradition of printing in South Asia. I didn’t use the name of Calcutta in the story, but every other detail in it is historical, including the name of Chitpur Road where the printing-press neighbourhood came up around the early nineteenth century. I wrote the earliest draft of the story three years ago, and shared it with the professor who had introduced me to book history and the mechanism of old letterpresses (perfect murder weapon, don’t you think?), Dr. Abhijit Gupta of Jadavpur University in Calcutta. My joke was that this story was all I had to show for my master’s degree in Publishing Studies, since I didn’t stay in the academic field. There’s also a third inspiration: The myth of Bon Bibi and Dakshin Ray is a syncretic local myth from the coastal forests of the Sundarbans, very close to where my father’s family originated. That’s a myth I heard often as a child. It’s funny that I never read a story that brought together all three, since they are fairly recognizable local themes from Bengal, and I have read a lot of Bengali popular fiction. “Malotibala Printing Press” is also the fifth standalone story to be published from a world that I had been building for over a decade. It wasn’t a planned project, so the world kept expanding as I wrote. Naiwrit Roy aka Noru was a character in the first published story, “Other People,” which occurs later in the overall chronology. I had made up his origin story when I started writing that story in 2008, but in it he was a mysterious character whose history the POV character never gets to learn, so I couldn’t include it. Udayan Dhar had a very minor appearance in the third story, “The Trees of My Youth Grew Tall.” Since I never planned out these stories as a whole, it was a surprise to me as well that they would meet and have an adventure together. There are other characters with brief appearances in these stories who may grow out in other interesting directions later, but I have no idea right now.

I appreciate that the setting of this story is a non-Western one. In this story, and in others you have written, is this a conscious choice, or is this simply natural to your storytelling?

Most of my fiction publications in recent years were in the Majestic Oriental Circus world, which itself is just a convenient way of calling them, since the series never had a planned name. I went to Clarion West in 2015, which was my first visit to the US and introduction to the larger American SFF culture. I started writing this world long before that, back when I had never been anywhere outside India. I think what I consciously try to do, at least in my original fiction, is to not really write characters or situations completely outside my personal experience. This is less of an agenda and more of a hesitation, I suppose. My background for a long time didn’t include many interactions with people from other countries, so every time I tried to write white people, they would read like generic white people rather than nuanced individuals, and writing them from a first-person POV was always a disaster. Don’t even get me started on characters or situations from non- white, non-South Asian cultures. On the other hand, I’m a university pedant, so it really bothered me not to get the minutest details of a character as correct as possible. (This is only true of my own style of writing. I do enjoy other fiction that’s very heavily speculative.) One of the stories I published two years after moving to the US has a POV character who was a grad student from India in the US, which was as far as I could trust my understanding to stretch at that time. Now that I’ve lived here for a while and actually met a wider range of people, maybe I’ll try to expand my range in later stories.

You co-edited “Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler” which won a Locus award and a Hugo nomination in 2018. Congratulations. This anthology sounds like one of such inspiration. Tell us more about the anthology. What was the inspiration?

Luminescent Threads, to be honest, was an opportunity I was given, rather than a project of my own conception. I had worked at Penguin India and as a freelance editor before, but back in 2016, I was still too new to international SFF to start compiling my own anthology from scratch. Alexandra Pierce, senior editor for Luminescent Threads, already had the call for submission in circulation when her second editor became unavailable, and she asked around for a replacement editor from the community of Octavia E. Butler Scholars. (The scholarship annually funds one student each to the Clarion and Clarion West writing workshops.) It was pretty amazing for me to get on board. I learned a lot about editing from Luminescent Threads, especially about how to ethically work with marginalized creators, why it’s not simply enough to put out a call for submissions, when and how to identify and disrupt superstructures—even in our own editorial training —that bias the system to keep out disempowered perspectives. These are all the theories I had learned at university, but it’s a whole different training to put them into implementation. Luminescent Threads made me a better editor.

I know you for your SFF, but I understand that you write in other genres as well. Tell us what else you write. And, do you have a favorite genre or form? Why?

I’ve had a publishing career of over fifteen years writing different kinds of things, because I came from a family that didn’t know anything about writing at all. I started out with journalism in high school, did a little part-time content writing at college, was a poet for a few years around the same time, wrote some truly horrendous advertising copy (one of which actually got made!), a few half-hearted realism stories and a bunch of academic papers, before I decided to come back to writing SFF in my late twenties. I think my favourite form of all of these is SFF, but fiction takes me a long time to write. The other kind of writing I enjoy is what I like to call high-concept nonfiction, usually published in magazines and news venues. It’s mostly opinion pieces. The distinction might sound pretentious, so please let me explain the context. Journalism was my first love, but in India it’s nearly impossible for a young woman with no pedigree to have an intellectually satisfying journalism career rising directly from the bottom. I got into journalism very young and left disappointed a few years later, because my most passionate ideas always got shot down, and I was only made to do unimaginative reportage, often not even given a byline. I moved on to academic writing, which was more intellectually satisfying, but the usually highly elitist scope of academic writing began to catch up with me after a few years. I always wanted my writing to be read by the kind of people who came from my background, and not many of them understand university jargon, which does not mean they cannot appreciate high-concept ideas, or shouldn’t be allowed to engage with them. It prickles my conscience that academic discourses on marginalization, even from an own-voices perspective, are only accessible to a small section of the marginalized community which is its most educated. I understand why it’s inevitable—we cannot possibly overturn all structures at the same time; and we marginalized intellectuals face our own challenges within the system. If we cannot play to the system even better than the people who made the system, we’re not even given a place in the room. If we choose not to use a polysyllabic word, it’s assumed that we don’t know that polysyllabic word. There’s a reason why so many of us often come across as self-important and pretentious. If we don’t remind people of what we’re worth, we’re usually presumed to have none. So that’s why I said I write high-concept nonfiction instead of saying journalism. I’m really proud (and relieved) to have finally outgrown the only kind of “journalism” I was allowed to do a decade ago. But that’s also the reason I did return to journalism. I’ve always wanted to write high-concept ideas for a non-university readership, but I had to come through this long, circuitous route to be allowed to write it. That’s the same impulse which drives both my nonfiction and my fiction. For fiction, I try to aim somewhere halfway between high literary (or even high SFF, which is its own club of elitism, as we all know) and popular commercial. Basically, if my very intelligent, sensitive, diversity- supportive but non-university-educated, only-functionally-English- literate mom can’t understand it, it’s possibly not something I would write. That’s a small, subjective, achievable goal, and I hope it keeps my compass directed toward the person I want to be in the world.

Do you have any upcoming projects you would like to share?

I’m trying to write a little outside my range in a few collaborative projects, all of which are not mine to announce. Besides that, I am really excited for a monthly column called Other Indias that I started writing for my Patreon (patreon.com/mimimondal) since February. It’s mostly an infodump of a lot of obscure South Asian historical and mythological research that I do for my fiction, not all of which end up in the stories, since I write so few. They’re mostly narrative, worldbuilding-style articles, which may be of interest to readers who want to hear some of the less-often-highlighted stories from South Asia, and also I hope writers who are looking for fresh settings for writing fiction.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali is a writer, editor and narrator. Her publications include Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, Fiyah Magazine and others. Her fiction has been featured in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 12 edited by Jonathan Strahan and The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Three edited by Neil Clarke. Khaalidah is a proud World Fantasy Award nominee for her work at PodCastle.org, where she was co-editor from 2017-2019. You can hear her narrations at any of the four Escape Artists podcasts, Far Fetched Fables, and Strange Horizons. Of her alter ego, K from the planet Vega, it is rumored that she owns a time machine and knows the secret to immortality. She can be found online at khaalidah.com. Author Spotlight: Nibedita Sen A. Merc Rustad | 989 words

When I was asked to interview you for the Nightmare Author Spotlight, I definitely made very loud screeching noises of delight—I am a huge fan of your work. Your stories have a delicious range: the humor and food in “Never Yawn Under a Banyan Tree”; the building, eldritch dread and stunning, unsettling reveal in “Leviathan Sings To Me in the Deep”; the sweetness and hilarity of a high school romance (complete with robot dinosaurs!) in “Sphexa, Start Dinosaur”; the compact, necromantic delight of “Pigeons”; and now “Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar”—which is a wickedly wonderful story about heritage and diaspora and eating people. Do you decide on specific elements or themes when writing, or do you find they develop naturally as a story progresses? What elements do you find yourself drawn to in your work (whether obvious or not)?

I tend to start with a cool idea, then develop it. For instance, “Ten Excerpts” started with me going “I’d really like to write a story in the form of an MLA bibliography,” while “Leviathan” was “I want to write something dark and Dishonored-y involving whaling ships.” Often, the story ends up changing so much in the process of writing it that the final product bears no resemblance to the original idea—for instance, both of my upcoming stories in Fireside initially started out as the same story- seed (pun entirely intended) about motherhood, faerie plants, and odd children, but then split into two as I worked on them! As for themes, I feel like it hardly needs stating at this point that food crops up a lot in my fiction. Not just food, but the cultural assumptions and strictures surrounding appetite, hunger, and consumption—“Ten Excerpts” is a pointed middle finger at how colonialism Others and declares monstrous the very cultures it, itself, is in the process of devouring. The paper titles and sources have absolutely wonderful (and sometimes punny) titles, many of which I would like to read! I take it you have much experience writing academic papers—can you tell us about how you chose the structure for this story, and what were some of the bonuses or challenges that resulted from a unique format?

As I like to tell people, I just survived a three-year MFA in Illinois. During that MFA, I took a literature course on the American Gothic, and later, did a number of independent studies of my own design to follow up on specific subgenres of this that interested me. All of these involved producing an annotated bibliography at some point, so I got pretty good at it, and also increasingly fascinated by how annotated bibliographies consist of interlocking components that tell a story larger than the sum of its parts. Because academic notions of objectivity be damned—a story is exactly what a bibliography is telling, one that has been deliberately constructed. This wasn’t my first exposure to academia; I have an MA in English Lit from back home in India. As such, I was uniquely positioned to notice the despairingly white, cishet, male, and Western limitations of my professor and classmates’ perspectives as we critiqued material that often dealt with transgressive gender, atrocities against people of colour, and colonialism. This got me thinking about how Western academia has been a tool of colonialism, and how racist perspectives and practices are absolutely built into its existing frameworks. I’d already had the idea to write a story in the form of an annotated bibliography. Now I realized that I could do a lot more by using content to subvert the form, rather than playing it straight. Using the master’s tools to flip the bird to the master’s house, if you will.

What I loved is how we get subtle glances of the history and lives of the characters, and the threads bringing it all together grow clearer and more sinister as the tale unfolds; the story is rich in detail and creepy elements, and it lingers in the brain, a dark and sensuous satisfaction. When you write short stories like this, are you tempted to explore the characters more in future work, or do you find that once a story is told, it is closed for good? Somewhere in between?

Oh, definitely—I have a longing to write a whole series of sequels to “Never Yawn Under a Banyan Tree,” for instance, following the adventures of Meena and Rupsha. “Ten Excepts,” though, is about how colonialism-in-academia steals and rewrites conquered people’s stories— and how diasporas also engage in (albeit much more positive) processes of retelling and remaking their heritage into their own, new stories. We never will know the truth of Regina’s story; all we have is versions of it that people have made up to serve their various purposes. Besides, sometimes, you can make an ending more effectively horrifying by stopping just short of explicitly revealing what happens next, and letting the reader’s imagination do its worst instead.

Care to tell us about one of your most memorable meals?

Oh no, why would you ask me to choose? Okay, I’m going to cheat. First, here’s one of my perennial favourites: mutton biryani, Bengali- style; full of potatoes and ghee and saffron. Second, here’s the most memorable thing I ate recently: deep-fried ricotta fritters at a pub in Ann Arbor. They were so good!

I see you have stories forthcoming in Fireside and The Dark, which is very exciting! What else is next for you? Any long-form projects in your future?

Hah! Maybe if I can conquer immigration stress enough to finish this novella. Ask me again in a year. ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER A. Merc Rustad is a queer non-binary writer who lives in Minnesota and is a Nebula Awards finalist. Their stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Fireside, Apex, Uncanny, Nightmare, and several Year’s Best anthologies. You can find Merc on Twitter @Merc_Rustad or their website: amercrustad.com. Their debut short story collection, So You Want To Be A Robot, was published by Lethe Press (May 2017).

Coming Attractions The Editors | 101 words

Coming up in June, in Nightmare . . . We have original fiction from Megan Arkenberg (“The Night Princes”) and Alanna J. Faelan (“The Taurids Branch”), along with reprints by Laird Barron (“In a Cavern, In a Canyon”) and Gary McMahon (“Strange Scenes from an Unfinished Film”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, and a book review from Terence Taylor. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Nightmare. Thanks for reading! Stay Connected The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Nightmare:

Magazine Website www.nightmare-magazine.com

Destroy Projects Website www.destroysf.com

Newsletter www.nightmare-magazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed www.nightmare-magazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed www.nightmare-magazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter www.twitter.com/nightmaremag

Facebook www.facebook.com/NightmareMagazine

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

If you enjoy reading Nightmare, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Nightmare store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12- month subscription to Nightmare more than 45 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain! To learn more, including about third-party subscription options, visit nightmare- magazine.com/subscribe. We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors, and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Nightmare ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! Buying a Bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. Buying either of the half-year Bundles saves you $3 (so you’re basically getting one issue for free), or if you spring for the Year One Bundle, you’ll save $11 off the cover price. So if you need to catch up on Nightmare, that’s a great way to do so. Visit nightmare-magazine.com/store for more information. Support Us on Patreon or Drip, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard The Editors

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

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

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

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

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

About the Nightmare Team The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief John Joseph Adams

Managing/Associate Editor Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher Robert Barton Bland

Reprint Editor John Langan

Podcast Producer Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor Jim Freund

Podcast Host Jack Kincaid

Art Director Christie Yant Assistant Editors Erika Holt Lisa Nohealani Morton

Reviewers Adam-Troy Castro Terence Taylor

Copy Editor Melissa V. Hofelich

Proofreader Devin Marcus

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

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

ANTHOLOGIES

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

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

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

Armored

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

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

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

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

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (with Carmen Maria Machado) [Forthcoming Oct. 2019]

Brave New Worlds By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers

Dead Man’s Hand

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: Ignorance is Strength (with Hugh Howey) [Forthcoming 2020]

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: Burn the Ashes (with Hugh Howey) [Forthcoming 2020]

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: Or Else the Light (with Hugh Howey) [Forthcoming 2020]

Epic: Legends of Fantasy

Federations

The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

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

Lightspeed: Year One

The Living Dead

The Living Dead 2

Loosed Upon the World

The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination

Operation Arcana Other Worlds Than These

Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen)

A People’s Future of the United States (with Victor LaValle)

Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Seeds of Change

Under the Moons of Mars

Wastelands

Wastelands 2

Wastelands: The New Apocalypse [June 2019]

The Way of the Wizard

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

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn

Sand by Hugh Howey

Retrograde by Peter Cawdron Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty

The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn

The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette

In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

Gather the Fortunes by Bryan L. Camp

Reentry by Peter Cawdron

Half Way Home by Hugh Howey

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear

Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer

A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker

The Conductors by Nicole Glover The Chosen One by Veronica Roth

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