TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 95, August 2020

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial: August 2020

FICTION Dead Girls Have No Names Claire Wrenwood The Hour In Between Adam-Troy Castro Redder Vajra Chandrasekera Yours Is the Right to Begin Livia Llewellyn

NONFICTION The H Word: The Rational Vs the Irrational Tim Waggoner Interview: John Langan Gordon B. White

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Claire Wrenwood Vajra Chandrasekera

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

© 2020 Nightmare Magazine Cover by Zapatisthack / Adobe Stock Footage www.nightmare-magazine.com Published by Adamant Press.

Editorial: August 2020 John Joseph Adams | 117 words

Welcome to issue ninety-five of Nightmare! This month, Claire Wrenwood brings us “Dead Girls Have No Names,” a deeply unhappy story of a mother’s vengeance sewn into flesh. We’ve got a new short by Vajra Chandrasekera: “Redder,” a story of blood and pain written across generations. We also have reprints by Adam-Troy Castro (“The Hour in Between”) and Livia Llewellyn (“Yours Is the Right to Begin”). In “The H Word,” our column on horror, author Tim Waggoner talks about the irrational and its role in the genre. Plus our staff brings us author spotlights with our authors, and we have a feature interview with author (and former Nightmare reprints editor!) John Langan.

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.

Dead Girls Have No Names Claire Wrenwood | 3415 words

Our bones are cold. It is the type of cold that comes only after death, and it will never leave us now. We mourn what must have come before: hands holding ours. Sunlight warming the tops of our heads. Cats on our laps and nightclubs where we danced out of our minds and Pop-Tarts straight from the toaster. Life, pulsing hot and fat beneath our fingers. Mother keeps us in a chest freezer. “For preservation,” she says, and perhaps this is true. But here is another truth: The night she brought us back from death—after she had canvassed local papers for the right news and hunted through grave-soil for the right parts and sewn them into the right approximation of the female form—she let us sleep in her daughter’s room. Amongst the heart-shaped pillows, the grass-stained soccer uniform still puddled on the floor, she cried and cradled us and called us her daughter’s name, and we knew even as we strained toward her touch that it was all too much, it couldn’t last. In the morning, she moved us to the freezer. But the tenderness she had shown during the night still lingered. Her dark brown hand hovered on the lid as though unwilling to let it go. “What will I call you?” she said. Our old names flared within us, firing into deadened muscle and marrow-stopped bone: Charmaine-Nikita-Salma-Alicia-Kat— The softness in Mother’s face fell away. She laughed, a flat, lifeless sound. “Listen to me. Trying to name a dead girl.” As the lid slammed shut, the truth of our new existence dawned: Never again would any mother name us or hold us or take this cold from our bones. There in the terrible darkness, we tried to weep and discovered we could not.

Our left pinky toe belongs to her daughter. It was all they ever found. How is this possible? What did he do with the rest of her? No one knows. No one much cares. Except Mother. When she brought us back to life, she gave us strength and an appetite and a nose drawn to badness like a buzzard to a corpse. Then she sent us into Atlanta, its suburbs and city streets. “Find him,” she said. And we did—or rather, we found men like him. We cornered them in darkened streets they had never learned to avoid, in parking lots they had never learned to speed-walk through with keys clenched in their fists. We let them know how it felt to bruise and then we asked them: “Was it you?” “No, no,” they sobbed, and when our left pinky toe confirmed this truth with a regretful twinge, we took them apart and ate them limb by bad-tasting limb, which satisfied our hunger but did not make us feel less empty. This, of course, was why Mother made her monster out of other dead girls: she knew her hunger was only matched by our own. Six long weeks of this; and when everything inside of us began to change, we did not notice until it was too late.

Our head is rebelling tonight. The whimpering of little girls fills our ears. Their high, thin voices needle our bones, followed by a spike of pain. They are in us. We want them out. We open our mouth and regurgitate our last meal onto the dirt in great, undigested chunks. We spit out another spur of bone, then groan as pain guts our body like a fish. Nearby, a feral cat wails in response. It is well past midnight. We are in a scrubby patch of woods between two golf course fairways. The man we dragged here, now spattered across the pine straw, owned a string of successful dance studios. He scoured the poor neighborhoods for talented girls and gave them scholarships; their delight turned to terror as he took them into the back room and showed them what they still owed. It is their voices we heard just now. And not just theirs. Over the past few weeks, we have started hearing other voices, the victims of other men we have consumed. And with their voices, their suffering—so much that our body has begun to fall apart, the seams splitting as if they can no longer hold all this pain. We bury the man as best we can and stagger home, clutching our torso. Mother strips us down and examines our body with a seamstress’s eye. “Nothing some thread can’t fix.” “But the pain . . .” we say, again. “It’s not for long. We’ll find him any day now.” She sews up our loosened seams, her hands hovering over but rarely touching our skin. We do not dare voice our thoughts: What if he is too far away? What if we never find him? What will you do with us then? “There.” She raises a hand as though to pat our shoulder, then drops it. “Just needed tightening, is all.”

Our stomach is never full. This used to be a good thing, because the supply of men who have done evil never ends—only now we cannot eat them. We try, again and again, but our stomach heaves them back out. We poke the parts into sewers and trash cans, knowing it is only a matter of time before someone discovers them. One night, as we are burying a body in the woods, our shoe comes loose and a splinter drives itself deep into our heel. When we get home we show it to Mother, head lowered, waiting for a lecture about protecting the limbs she worked so hard to bring to life. But her voice, when it comes, is soft. “My girl got a big splinter in her foot just like this. She was little, maybe six or seven. I tried to tweeze it out but she ran off hollering. Got blood all over the carpet. In the end, she took it out herself. She always hated it when I fussed over her. Not like you.” Although she has prised out the splinter, her hand still hovers over our heel. “No,” we say, when she does not move. “Not like us.” “You remind me of her sometimes. Your eyes. The way you tilt your head.” “We are not your daughter.” “I know.” We expect to hear bitterness in her voice, but she just sounds resigned. She picks up her needle and guides it along its familiar path, tightening the sutures at our neck, our right shoulder, our thighs, up the center of our chest—retracing the joins she made, all those nights ago, when she stooped low over us and breathed life into our limbs. Occasionally, when she tires, the heel of one palm comes to rest on our skin. We try not to tremble at each shock of warmth, try not to lean into her touch. A knocking at the door interrupts this ritual. We both freeze. Another volley of knocks, louder this time. “Downstairs,” Mother murmurs. “Quick.” Toward the door, she calls, “Coming!” We hurry down the stairs and climb into the freezer, pulling the lid shut. Drawing our knees to our chest, we try to make out noises from the floor above us. We hear only the freezer’s steady hum. After a long time passes and no angry police officer hauls open the lid, we lie back, pressing our cheek against the frost-encrusted wall. Mother will come for us, we think. Once her visitors have gone. But she does not come for us. We wait there in the darkness and the cold, the minutes unspooling into hours and then days. At last, she throws open the lid of the freezer. She squints down at us with bloodshot eyes, her breath clouding the air. Unfamiliar fumes roll toward us: orange juice and tequila and sweat. “They found her,” she says. “Well—not all of her. A piece of her. Her torso. In Virginia. Virginia!” Her words spill out in a too-fast staccato, and we see that the news has undone her. Like us, she is coming apart at the seams. The only difference is that she has no one to put her back together. “You have to go. It’s a sign. You have to find him.” Her hand scrabbles at something in the bottom of the freezer. We sit up, our mind slow with coldness, and see that she has grabbed our left foot. “What are you doing?” She props our ankle on the lip of the freezer and unties our shoelaces. “I need her toe.” “But we need it. We need it to sense him.” “I’m only going to take part of it.” She eases off the shoe, tosses it aside. “But—” “It’s mine. I gave it to you and now I need it back.” We notice, for the first time, the small meat saw in her right hand. She positions it next to our left pinky toe, just below the nail. Our foot jerks and she grasps it firmly. Setting the blade against us, she begins to saw. The sensation is nothing like the pain that comes after we have eaten. It is more of a dull irritation, a worrying at the skin. We watch, frozen, as the woman who has always stitched us together takes us apart. She does not look at us as she works, and we realize that in all this time she has never met our eyes, not once. We remember that first moment of gasping into the light—lying stunned and terrified as a strange woman bent over our chest and wept. At the time, the gesture soothed us; we thought she did so out of love. But we were wrong. You cannot love an instrument. Our hand shoots out and grabs Mother’s wrist. She tries to shake us off, clucking with irritation. But she has imbued our girlish limbs with the strength of ten men. Our hand is steady, unmoving. “Please,” she says. “I need it. I need something to hold onto.” But we have been taken apart too many times. We squeeze harder. The saw clatters to the floor. She looks at us then, stares straight into our eyes, and we almost recoil from the force of fear and revulsion we find there. “I gave you life,” she hisses. “I could take you apart again, just like—” she snaps the fingers of her free hand “—that.” When we release her, she walks away, rubbing her wrist. At the foot of the stairs, she pauses. “What are you waiting for? Go. Get out of here. Don’t come back until you’ve found him.”

Our legs should tire, but they do not. When Virginia turns up no trace of our quarry, we zigzag across the country: wandering beside endless fields of tobacco and later corn and soy, through new-growth forests, along gravel country roads. Men in trucks lean on their horns, slow down beside us, but do not stop. Once, an old woman gives us a lift in her beat-up Corolla, then drives off in a spray of gravel-dust, making the sign of the cross. The seasons turn: from asphalt-melting heat to sudden crispness, forested hillsides cloaked in reds and yellows so brilliant they make our eyes hurt. At a strip mall outside Kansas City, we buy a portable sewing kit. We learn how to dig the needle deep into our skin so it will not tear. We stitch ourselves up and think that, perhaps, we can learn to live without Mother. Every meal still makes us vomit, so we stop eating. In time, our hunger dwindles to a dull ache. But the cold in our bones never leaves us. One night in Milwaukee, there is a man in a beautiful suede coat whose smell makes our left pinky toe throb. We follow him through snow-carpeted streets to an outdoor holiday market. As he disappears between the stalls, we hesitate. Mother has warned us from places like this, where the smells could overwhelm us or someone could see us for what we are. But the fairy lights beckon prettily, and we hear laughter and see white clouds of breath emerging from mouths and mingling in the air. We want to be among these people, to place ourself in proximity to their bodies, their heat. Pulling up the hood of our sweatshirt, we plunge into the crowd.

Our heart is missing. “You were better off without one,” Mother said. No cunt either—she made us smooth and sexless as a doll. Our heart is missing, and yet. As we edge through the press of people, the weight of their badness descends and we feel it all. There: a man buying mulled wine for a woman he has known since high school. At a bar later tonight, he will stir a crushed pill into her drink, and when she wakes the next morning the world she thought she knew will invert like a tipped glass. And there: a man and woman walking together, a boy between them clutching their hands. When the woman leaves for her night shift, the man joins the boy in his narrow bed. The boy told his mother about this last week. She said that God punishes little boys who lie. A teen who is barely a man, yet who has already learned how to press down on his dates’ heads in the backseat of his car. An old man, now wheezing with emphysema, who once threw his ex-wife so hard her body broke through the drywall and into the next room. A powdered donut seller, who once took a girl off a reservation in Nevada and never brought her back again. People who have hurt others. People who will hurt others. People who will be hurt and do not know it yet; all of their past and future pain clamors in our head, bearing down. The man is almost out of sight, the tan of his coat a faint, dwindling smudge. We stagger after him, the pressure building, compacting our vision. Above us, strings of lights hover and pulse. Yellow globules flex toward us, then shrink away. We jump as a woman to our left laughs, too loudly; it sounds like a child’s shout. Our foot snags on something and we lurch forward, smacking into a bulky man and sending a cupful of cider sloshing down his front. We barely register his look of outrage before we are darting around him. “Bitch!” he yells. “Come back here and—” We break into a run, clutching our head, trying not to moan as the pain grows, trying to make out the tan coat of our quarry amidst the lights and the pooling darkness and the people and the dim white snow. But he is gone. We are not even sure he was the right man. Outside the market’s entrance, it has begun to snow. We extend our hand and watch the flakes accumulate on our palm, unmelting. We know what Mother would say: What are you waiting for? He’s getting away. We should leave the market, slog through the snow-banked streets, search until we find him. But, for the first time, some stubborn impulse prevents our legs from moving. “I’ve been watching you,” a voice behind us says, and we start. We turn, thinking for a moment that it is the man in the beautiful coat. But this is a different man, shivering in a beanie and scuffed denim jacket. He thrusts something into our arms. We look down. It is a coat, brown and puffed like a toasted marshmallow. “I couldn’t stand it, watching you freeze,” he says. He hurries away and we stand there with the coat in our arms, snow piling onto our eyelashes, and we are tired, we are so tired—

• • • •

our bones our left pinky toe our head our stomach our legs our heart our missing heart—

• • • •

they ache and we want them to stop. We are done with this world and its unending pain. We are done with the pieces of this body, which will never form a whole no matter how much thread we wield. We remember Mother’s words: I could take you apart again, just like that. We long to be taken apart. We begin the journey home.

• • • •

Mother’s apartment smells like laundry. On the kitchen table, a stack of clothes sits neatly folded. A green-and-gold shirt catches our eye: a girl’s soccer uniform. We find Mother curled on the bed in her daughter’s room. She is facing the wall, holding one of those heart-shaped pillows in her arms. At first, we think she is asleep. Then we see that her eyes are open and the muscles in her arms are quivering with exertion. She is pressing the pillow to her chest, squeezing it, and we realize that it is not the pillow she is holding but the memory of her daughter, her dead daughter who she will never hold again. “You’re back,” she says. “Does that mean—” “No,” we say. “We did not.” She is silent. We step into the room. There are words we have been rehearsing as we traveled home. Words we need to say before she returns us to death. “We don’t remember what it was like to die. But we remember what it was like to come back.” (The terror of tumbling back into a body that worked against our will; into a mind scrubbed clean of all memory save for the faint echo of our former names.) “It was a different kind of death, and we were just as powerless to stop it. Because you never asked us, did you? If we wanted to hunt those men. If we wanted to come back at all.” Without being aware of doing so, we have crossed the room to stand over the bed. Mother’s shoulders quiver—with fear? Sadness? We know so little about the woman who brought us back to life. “I know,” she says. “I’m sorry.” “And now we are done searching.” “Yes.” Her voice is muffled by the pillow. “You’ve done everything you can.” “Then . . .” we hesitate. “Then it’s time for you to take us apart.” “Is that what you want?” She has never asked us this. No one has. At first, we do not know how to reply. We remember all our long, lonely days and nights on the road. All the times we yearned to obliterate our self, to go back below the earth and stay there. We imagine our own mothers, curled on our beds, and we grieve despite our missing heart, because the world has too many mothers curled on their dead daughters’ beds, and because we could catch bad men until the end of time and never catch them all. We look at Mother, her body like a fragile comma holding back a story she cannot bear to end. All this time, we have been longing for her touch. Perhaps she, too, has been longing for ours. Perhaps this is enough. “No,” we say. We sit on the edge of the bed. One of her corkscrew curls has fallen onto her cheek. Hesitantly, feeling that we are reaching across a great distance, we tuck it behind her ear. “If you stay—” she says, and our hand tremors against her skin “—you’ll need a name.” We think of all the girls we once were. Charmaine. Nikita. Salma. Alicia. Kat. There are more, many more, pressing against our chest, all the men we consumed and all the people they hurt. “There are too many,” we say. “We have time,” she says. We lie down next to her, curling up against her back. And when we wrap our arms around her, we are holding our own mothers, yes, but we are also holding her. Heat radiates down the length of our patchwork, perfect body. It sinks into our bones. For the first time in this life, we are warm.

©2020 by Claire Wrenwood.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Claire Wrenwood grew up in Indiana and New Zealand and now lives in Durham, North Carolina. A member of the Clarion class of 2019, she has work published or forthcoming at Tor.com and Lightspeed Magazine. Find her at clairewrenwood.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight The Hour In Between Adam-Troy Castro | 5062 words

Oscar crept up on his sleeping wife and shattered her skull with five blows from a claw hammer. The years might have robbed much of the strength from his legs and obliged him to do most of his walking these days with a cane, but his right arm was still almost as powerful as it had ever been. The first thundering impact struck Deanna with a crunch he could feel at the base of his spine. There was still value in being sure, and so he raised the hammer again and brought it down a second time, burying much of its head in everything she had been: the toddler who had chased butterflies, the bride who had beamed in her wedding photos, the teacher who had taught English Comp for twenty years, the mother of one failed daughter and one merely defeated son, and finally the old woman who in her last years had precious little to say to her husband beyond businesslike reminders of whatever needed to be done around the house. He did not want her to linger, so he struck her the third, fourth, and fifth times, none of these three blows as accurate or as effective as the first two, but devastating enough between them to put out Deanna’s right eye, and flatten her nose, and turn the crater he had made into a larger and wetter obscenity. This, he understood once the deed was done, was the moment that would forever come to define him. Very soon, he would only be the man who, at the end, bludgeoned his sleeping wife before then joining her in death. It was only Deanna who’d be remembered in her fullness, Deanna whose passage through her last seconds would not become the image that defined her forever, but would instead be the sad footnote to a life well-lived. As he’d always expected, nausea struck. The room had been dim enough to protect Oscar from seeing everything his hammer did, and was now light enough to ensure a quick retreat to the master bath. Oscar hurried around the queen-sized bed, past the bookcase and bureau, and into the room he thought he needed. For a second or two he thought he would not make it, but by the time he was ready to kneel by the toilet, the spasm had faded. The water in the bowl could remain unsullied. He stopped at the sink to scrub his bloody hands and he almost got sick again when he flipped on the light. The face in the mirror was covered with a fine spray of red freckles, larger wet spots that looked like open wounds, and—sticking to the side of his face like postage—one shard of something that could only be chipped bone. Washing his face was pointless. It would only get bloody again later, when he shot himself. But there were too many things still left to do, and the thought of continuing to do them while pieces of Deanna dried on his skin seemed beyond obscene. So he turned on the water and grabbed the hand soap, working up a powerful pink lather in water just hot enough to burn. Afterward, he used one of the hand towels to clean the bloody hand print at the light switch, and another to clean the floor and counter of any blood that had dripped off him in the length of time it had taken him to surrender to this last, pointless vanity. His pajama top, drenched with Deanna’s blood, went in the basket. So did the soap, though he’d washed it clean too. This was pure consideration for his son, Richard. He didn’t know what happened to basic toiletries when a house had to be cleaned up after a murder-suicide, but the thought of Richard, or some other member of his family, innocently washing up with the same bar that had soaked up Deanna’s blood, struck Oscar as almost as loathsome as the killing itself. So he spared everybody that, at least. A light moan escaped him when he turned on the bedroom lights and faced the aftermath of his crime. He’d already prepared himself to find Deanna’s head reduced to an imploded bowl, and yes, that was pretty much as awful as expected. But he hadn’t figured on all the blood he’d flung against the walls and ceiling with every upswing. The carved headboard was a spotty, dripping abstract. Her bedside lamp dripped pieces of her. The ceiling was a constellation of random red stars. The room where Oscar and his wife had slept for the last eight years, since the rising cost of retirement living had forced the two of them to sell the house he had never stopped considering their real home, had been marked in places he had never thought the murder could reach. There was even some marking the spines of the complete Dickens arrayed side by side on a shelf so far away from the bed that he could only marvel at how far blood could fly. He hadn’t expected the rising stench. Over and above the copper tang of blood were the more acrid smells of urine and feces, the last salvo of the final argument Deanna would ever have with him. Oscar couldn’t sit on her side of the bed. He did rest for a moment on his. If he had not had a few things still left to do he might have gotten the revolver and shot himself right then. But the moment seemed to require more in the way of last words, perhaps an apology or epitaph. He could not come up with one. What rushed to fill that empty space, in the absence of any legitimate eloquence, was a pair of before and after snapshots, one from the beginning of their marriage, and one to this, its last night: in the first snapshot, a soft-focus close-up of the early post-honeymoon days when he and Deanna had made sweet love more often than not; the second snapshot the final exchange of every evening for more nights than he wanted to name, including this night’s, Deanna waiting until he was safely under the covers to ask him whether he’d made sure the front door was locked, and not feeling fully safe until he got up to double-check. That had become every night’s last conversation, in this house. It had been their final conversation, period. Did you lock the front door? Yes. Can you check? Okay. There had never been any point in saying that he had already made sure before coming to bed. It was not real for her, not safe, until he got back up and trudged to the front door and rattled the knob. Yes, he would say, coming back, I checked. Unspoken in the exchange was confirmation that all dangers were now left outside; a sick joke, he thought now, given that she eventually lost her life to a husband who had always shared the fortress with her. Nor was that the only thing left unspoken. Did you lock the front door? Yes. Can you check? Yes. Do you love me? Unmentioned, not for so long that he could not remember the last time either one of them had uttered the words. Now she was gone and here he sat trying to come up with something else he could say, something that could possibly make a difference to a cooling sack of flesh that could neither accept, nor reject, his excuses. No, there was no point in saying anything, now. There would be epitaphs later, from people who had the right to say something. Any words from him would be an abomination. He returned to the bathroom, moistened a washcloth, and returned to her side just long enough to retrieve the favorite photograph which sat framed on her nightstand. Deanna had been the one who insisted on keeping this photograph, one of the only ones they still had of all four family members together. He had caught her sitting at the edge of the bed holding it from time to time, and had known it was not the younger version of herself she was looking at, not the younger version of her husband or the younger, happier version of Richard. She was lost in the image of Erin, captured in an instant long passed that Oscar had always known said nothing at all relevant about his only daughter. The frame he didn’t even bother to try cleaning. It was an overwrought silver thing, sculpted with ivy and French curves and so ornate in its determination to honor whatever image it surrounded that some of the blood that had descended into its fissures would be next to impossible to remove from there. But for Deanna, and for Richard, who might be taking this photo home afterward, Oscar could spare the few seconds it would take to wipe the glass. He used the washcloth to scrub at the blood spots, first thinning them and then clearing them away, until a day thirty years past was once again clear. The photo captured four people standing in sunlight, against the blurred, but colorful outlines of an amusement park merry-go-round. The parents stood in back: Oscar, wearing black glasses and slight moustache of a type that the verdict of time had decided ugly. Deanna stood next to him, tilting her head, her slight overbite adorable in the way it had always been, back then. Their grins were forced, as both had been fighting killer tension headaches. Richard and Erin stood before them, smaller versions of their parents. Fourteen-year-old Richard’s smile guarded in the way that it would somehow always turn out to be guarded, into well into his years as a man who could never free himself from the awareness that life could plunge him down a trap door at any moment. And Erin? Erin. Captured in a rare moment between screeching tantrums, between refusals to eat, between cutting herself and shoplifting and arrests for prostitution, before an adulthood that manifested as disappearing without word for years at a time, Erin here appeared as the platonic version of herself, her eyes bright, her smile uncomplicated, her warmth for the complete stranger the family had drafted as photographer so undiluted by her well of rage that it was possible, just from the image, to fall in love with her. Oscar would have liked to know that girl. He would have given an arm for a way to show her to the Erin he’d been obliged to raise, the Erin who might not still be alive for all he knew, and say, this, honey, this girl, this one here, that’s who you were meant to be, and who you should have been. The photo was one of those random moments of stopped time that tell the wrong story, that lie in the way that the wrong kind of grin can sometimes make the most exceptional paragon of humanity look, in that instant, like a creature depraved and evil. The actual day had been a nightmare. Nothing had made Erin happy. The rides were stupid. The food was disgusting. Her parents were awful. Her brother was gross. She didn’t want to be there. For half an hour, no more, the sun had seemed to come out and she’d seemed willing to forget the bottomless loathing she had for them, for her brother, for herself, and for life, really. She had said she’d try to have a good time, and held on to that promise long enough for the photo to be taken. But only half an hour later she’d be a storm of resentment again. There were precious few other photographs of Erin. She’d destroyed many of them in her early teens, retaliating against her parents for one punishment or another; and had, after fifteen, become such an impossible terror, a nightmare of uncontrollable anger and sudden violence that the impulse to commemorate the moment had somehow never come up. A lone fleeting photo of Erin at sixteen, sticking her tongue out at the camera, trying to evade the lens and thus reducing herself to a blur, was the most recent image Oscar and Jeanne had; there were none of her as an adult, as she would never allow any to be taken during any of her rare subsequent appearances. Oscar had stored away as many of the remaining pictures as he could. He didn’t destroy them and had no problem with them continuing to lie stacked in boxes he never opened or in albums he never cracked, but for the most part didn’t them hanging in plain sight, ambushing him at odd moments like evidence brandished by some angry prosecutor. Deanna had insisted only on continuing to treasure this one. He had no idea why. But looking at the picture, really looking at it, Oscar was struck only by two things: one, that despite everything, Erin had been a very pretty girl, and two, that if she was in fact alive, it might be a very long time before word ever got to her about what had become of her parents. She might never find out. Or she might find out right away and storm into the funeral, to make it the same screeching atrocity she had made of everything else. Either way, it was outside his power, and none of his business. That was the thing about death. It drew a curtain, made everything outside your own years a sequel that you would never be permitted to attend. He stored the cleaned photograph in a drawer, protecting it from the spatter yet to come. Tracking blood through the house but forcing himself to the knowledge that it really didn’t matter much at this point, he went to the kitchen and poured himself a tall glass of ice water, from the dispenser on the refrigerator door. He drank that in a gulp and filled a second glass, to be nursed while he parked himself at the breakfast nook and peered out a window that, at this time of night, facing the woods the way it did, shielded from starlight the way it was, might as well have been painted black. It was a view he knew well, because he’d slept only fitfully in his old age and had made many post-midnight trips to this table and that view, finding in its very impenetrability an eloquence that spoke to him in ways that a more conventional landscape never could. Tonight, the view seemed even more illustrative. Nothingness, it was cleansed of everything that he would no longer see again: the glitter of sunlight on rippled water, birds cocking their heads at nearby sounds, leaves animated by errant breezes, clouds that looked like dogs, rainfall making ripples in tiny puddles, motionless frogs deciding for reasons of their own that it was time to head somewhere else. Hell, forget the things he would never see again. The list of things he’d now done for the last time was even longer, and more primal. He’d never take another shower. He’d never read another book. He’d never issue another apology. He’d never eat another apple, never smell another flower. He’d never see another running child, never receive another kiss on the cheek, never squint at a bright light reflecting off another mirrored surface. He’d never encounter another appalling headline and would certainly never hear the words deficit, bipartisanship, gerrymandering, socialist, reactionary or global warming ever again. The total number of steps he still had left to walk, once he rose from this table, were certainly less than one hundred and likely less than fifty. Now, that was an interesting statistic. He felt some minor curiosity over the exact figure. He could count those final steps, if it mattered, crawl into bed for the last time aware at the end that his last mile had consisted of precisely thirty-two paces, or something like that. But no; such idle interests would serve him not at all, and were also therefore best forgotten. His son, though. His son remained. Oscar returned to the refrigerator, filled his glass, and once again sat down at the breakfast nook, which was now forever just a nook because he’d eaten his last breakfast. He had spent a lot of time, over the last few months of increasing resolve, debating just what kind of message he should leave for Richard. He had thought about writing a note, thinking about how a few words would never be enough and how pages on end would be far too much. He had put aside the idea of an apology and given up on ever providing a list specifying all the things that his final brutal act was not. No, neither one of us was sick. No, I was not depressed. No, I did not act in anger. No, I did not hate her. No, life had not become too hard. No, I did not crave death; I just looked at the time that remained and saw that we were old and knew that every day still remaining to us it would less and less resemble anything worth living. Had Oscar been inclined to explain himself, he would have written something he’d learned early on: that life is a series of thefts, some small, some large, some gifts yanked away in moments of horrible trauma but most ferreted away in secret while you aren’t paying attention. He would have written: our childhood sense of play goes away. The sense that everything’s going to be all right goes away. The warm glow of youth goes away. Freedom from responsibility goes away, passion goes away, illusions go away, health goes away, potency goes away, the sense that life can still surprise you goes away, and so on, until you finally reach the point where you’re left with nothing to do and four walls you know by heart. He knew he didn’t need to write this down because Richard already knew it. For as far back as Oscar could remember, Richard had faced life with a kind of resigned dread that stayed with him even as he did all the expected things, married and fathered children and been what other people would call a success, without ever shaking the melancholy that clung to him wherever he went. His joys had always been fleeting, his smiles those of a man shaking off an open wound. Oscar had never found his son really celebrating anything, not his graduations from high school and college, not his marriage to Delia, not his success in small business, and not even the coming of his own two children, without keeping some stored sadness in reserve. He was the one you spotted at family gatherings, in moments when he happened to be away from others, dropping his false face and revealing the trapped gaze of a trained animal, performing the expected tricks of adulthood without ever taking any special satisfaction in them. He was the one, sipping beer on the patio while he and his father watched the grandchildren bounce a ridiculous inflatable ball around, who had suddenly said, “They don’t have a clue, do they? Those two still think it’s going to be fun.” Oscar had said, “You don’t know. It might be.” Richard had shaken his head. “I don’t remember the last time I had fun. I don’t even remember the last time I wanted to have fun. I’m just acting out of habit. And part of me can’t wait for it to be over.” Oscar remembered what it had felt like being the father who wished he had known some wise and knowing thing to say to that. He hadn’t any. He’d wound up commiserating. In not so many words, but in laments that had lasted much of the afternoon: I agree, son. I wish it was over, too. The two had wound up sitting in silence warmed not at all by the nearby laughter of children, knowing each other better than they had ever wanted to, the chief connection between them that of men who had forgotten what their lives had ever been for. Richard didn’t need a note. Richard would be living through enough of a nightmare over the next few days, and beyond, but he didn’t need a note. He wouldn’t take what his father had done as an enigma. He’d see it as grim confirmation: just more of life’s true shape, revealing itself as its false fronts failed. Richard only needed to be alerted so he could do what he’d always done, and just get on with it. The breakfast nook possessed the family’s last corded phone, an antique now, not quite ancient enough to be rotary but certainly a relic of the days when push-button was still a new thing. A laminated list of frequently-dialed number sat upright on a wire stand that had once been used to display the table number at a relative’s wedding. Oscar looked under the line for RICHARD (HOME) and the line for RICHARD (CELL) for the only line he could use tonight, RICHARD (WORK). He was prepared to hang up in a hurry in the highly unlikely event that a human being was in the office to answer the call at this time of night, but after four rings Richard’s recorded message replied, identifying the firm and inviting Oscar to leave a message. Despite all of his inner rehearsal, Oscar found himself wholly unprepared to speak. “Um.” This was awful, communicating a hesitancy he didn’t feel. “Richard, this is me. Dad. I’m, um, calling a little bit after One a.m. I . . .” This really was terrible. He hadn’t demanded eloquence from himself, but he had promised to deliver a sharp blow, instead of a parade of false taps. “I’m sorry to leave this message on your office phone, but I didn’t want to wake you with it. I’d rather you just get it when you make it into the office, in the morning.” He swallowed. “I always felt terrible that I wasn’t a better father to you and your sister. I did my best. I know it wasn’t enough. You’re better at it than I was. But I tried. I love you. I . . .” Now his voice had almost broken, the image of Deanna’s ruined face was rising in him like a cancer, and he found himself in serious danger of bequeathing his only son a message that spent too much time filling him with useless dread. “I just killed your mother.” There. The rest would be easier, now. “She didn’t suffer. It was very quick. I made sure of that. I did it with love, whatever that means. I did it because I didn’t think there was anything left for us. In a few minutes I’m going to join her. It’s for the best.” He almost hung up. “I know you’re going to be very angry with me, but I want you to do what I say this one last time. You need to call the police and meet them at the house, but please, whatever you do, don’t go inside yourself, not until we’ve been taken away. Your mother or I would never want you to see us like this. Please follow my wishes on that.” A last thought occurred to him. “If you see your sister again, don’t let her think it was her fault. This has nothing to do with her. I’m serious. It has nothing to do with her, or with you. It was just that . . . the time had come. That’s all.” He hesitated one last time, putting off the inevitable, aware that the two words to follow would be the last two words there would ever be. Then he said, “Goodbye, son.” He hung up the phone, surprised that his overwhelming emotion now was not sadness, but relief. The most difficult part was done, with perhaps a few too many missteps and false starts, but with a level of rational calm that would help Richard hold on to his own in the difficult hours ahead. The parade of lasts continued. That had been his last phone call and his last message to his son. There were any number of other last things he could do now, like perhaps straighten up a bit before pulling the trigger on himself, but for all he knew, his son’s office had night- time cleaning staff, not some recent immigrant legal or otherwise who couldn’t understand enough English to comprehend the meaning of the alien words coming from the speaker, but someone with a command of the language who could take immediate steps to make sure the police got involved now and not hours from now. He had a deadline now. He needed to do whatever else needed to be done quickly. He brought his glass to the sink (his last time doing that), and left the kitchen (his last time doing that), stopping at the thermostat to do the police a favor by turning the air conditioning up as high as it could possibly go (his last time, ever, fiddling with that little dial). Returning to the bedroom, he walked right past the terrible carnage on the bed and into the master bathroom, where for the very last time in his life he stopped to pee, sparing his imminent corpse the least of its upcoming releases. He flushed, put the seat down, and lowered the cover on top of it, aware that this was the last time he would perform any of these simple acts. Out of custom, he washed his hands again, and forever. He turned off the bathroom lights and got into bed beside his wife, discovering as he did that he had counted his remaining steps after all. Thirty-seven. That might not have been enough to get out to the mailbox and back. But he had taken the last of those while alive, and now he pulled the blanket up over himself for the last time. He opened his bedside drawer and removed his revolver. It was all too easy to keep fueling his obsession over the paucity of time he had left. What was it now? Certainly less time than it would take to listen to even the longest favorite song, possibly less time than it took to sit through the average commercial on television. How many breaths still remained? Ten? Five? He could lose himself in counting, slicing the time in smaller and smaller increments until even the seconds had no more meaning than the last few years. The only remaining decision for Oscar, as he clamped his teeth around the barrel, was whether to fire at the roof of his mouth or at the back of his throat. He had read arguments in favor of both methods, differing on which one was less likely to leave him a hopeless vegetable or, worse, an intact mind trapped by misadventure in a body that couldn’t see or hear or move. The consensus, he’d found, was that neither method offered absolute certainty of success. Freak trajectories happen. Sometimes people survived as warm meat, befouling their sheets years after a just God would have had them achieve ambient room temperature. From what Oscar understood, a controlled trajectory toward the back of the mouth offered the closest possible thing to a guarantee, though if he beat the odds and became something that had to be wired up to machines, he sure had no idea who he could see to invoke that guarantee for refund. Doing the job while lying down made the shot he wanted more difficult than he’d expected, so he pulled himself up and scooted up against the headboard, using it as backrest. The barrel was colder in his mouth than he’d imagined. How much time left now? Twenty seconds? Ten? He considered delaying long enough to say something pithy to Deanna, something that would communicate to the air if not to her spirit that he’d done what he’d done in full memory of how much he’d once loved her. No. His only remaining question was whether he would hear the shot. As it happened, he did not. He had the fleeting sensation of noise and light, but not enough time for his brain to analyze it and identify the only thing it could signify. He was not aware of his bowels letting go, his heart stopping, the arm that held the revolver falling to one side and landing beside him, as if what he held was not a weapon but a novel that had put him to sleep. Guilt, memory, wonder, thought, sensation, and morality all became parts of his past. Right or wrong, it was over. The haze swirled. All was darkness. Then Deanna’s corpse, speaking in a voice wet and polluted by fragments of itself, asked him, “Did you lock the front door?” Oscar’s corpse pursed its lips, bloodying them further, answering with the aggrieved reluctance of a thing that would rather remain asleep. “Yes.” “Can you check?” His corpse sighed. “Yes.” It lifted a flap of blanket and trudged from the room, leaving shiny pieces of itself behind. It was not capable of emotion or conscious thought, and indulged in none on the way, but any witness observing its demeanor as it made its way to the front of the house and tested the knob would have found the implied attitude easy to read: a sense of the formalities being observed, and of the rituals being respected. The errand took less than a minute. Then what was left of the man followed its greasy trail back to bed, pulled the covers up over itself, and moved no more.

©2019 by Adam-Troy Castro. Originally published in Shivers VIII, edited by Richard Chizmar. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Adam-Troy Castro made his first non-fiction sale to Spy magazine in 1987. His twenty-six books to date include four Spider-Man novels, three novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and six middle- grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. Adam’s darker short fiction for grownups is highlighted by his most recent collection, Her Husband’s Hands And Other Stories. Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd-Laßwitz Preis (Germany). His latest release was the audio collection, And Other Stories (Skyboat Media), which features thirteen hours of his fiction, including the new stories “The Hour In Between” and “Big Stupe and the Buried Big Glowing Booger.” Adam lives in Florida with his wife Judi and a trio of revolutionary cats. Redder Vajra Chandrasekera | 2420 words

I chew the leaf and spit out my red days. They splatter. You chew the leaf and spit out your hours of mad redder. They splatter. They chew the leaf and spit out the reddest moments they have ever seen. They splatter. This is a scene of crime, chalk me, morn me, eve me. My red life drying on my chin. Your red history a bitter powder crust. Their thin red lines, their spun red webs, their red praxis and deceit. My eyes are open. The leaf is still caught in my mouth, choking me, holding me down— no, the leaf is my tongue. An end is something I once red. You asked me if I came, and I said yes, apart. All these red lines diagramming the angels of the splatter: I am all of them but also none but one. You are my grandmother redder and uncouth, gnarling your leaf and pounding it in your brass. You were once redder of blood than this and I am that and you too. Every one of us afloat on red rip tides: somewhere my death is but also yours, and every death there has ever been, and every death to come, a red web and tide, a red wave and pride. Your rictus smiles at me through the thin mask it wears. The mask wrinkles and sags, and then is smooth and unbroken again. In your death did you look at my young mask and see the grim of my undergrin? The red in your mouth is not always the pounded leaf; sometimes it is blood beaded from the tooth or the fist, sometimes blood flushed from the kiss. My two mouths too are red from fist’s kiss and knife’s bite. We are kin. The lake is enormous. I am on an occluded shore. I am lying on the ground. The dead leaves and the grass are rough on my bare skin. I try to close my eyes but the effort is beyond me. It is night, but there is too much light. There are five full moons. One in the sky, one in the lake, two in my eyes, and one in the pooling red. It is the night of the fifteenth of December, 1986—the full moon of Unduvap, 2530. It is the hour of my death. It is every night, every hour. I am drained and at rest: the red wheel worlds around me. So much death uncoils into time from every direction. Perhaps I feel like an unwilling fulcrum only because I am seeing the wheel from where I lie. The back of my head hurts where it touches the earth. Perhaps they broke my skull as well as cutting my throat. They were interrupted by pilgrims on the lake; this red redundancy is their haste made evident. I too am left evident: undismembered, the crocodiles unfed, the questions unanswered, the violence thwarted. As evidence, I am a beginning. I am not meat in the belly of reptile monsters from an age without war. I am the scene of the crime. Did you come, I ask. They are not here to answer, but I know they are frustrated, blue- balled, unsatisfied, interruptus. They were my rivals and opponents that I did not imagine would so easily become my torturers and murderers. They asked me to come negotiate, and I imagined red debate and hot disagreement, not the fist and the knife. There is a whole red world that I bleed out as I lie here: the long struggle to stand for not just revolution, but for revolution that I can stand, one that is not hopelessly tainted by bastard saffron blood magic. But my revolution flees from me now as my murderers recede, marked red. In this hour my struggle has become narrow and specific: I will that I will close my own eyes. Nothing happens. I cannot blink or twitch. Perhaps I am already dead, but then why does it still hurt? My grandmother spits redly into the lake and the crocodiles make a deep throbbing noise from the water. It is not a roar; it is the noise that monsters made before roars were invented, a wet, primordial groan, a rattling of the gates of death. Unable to move, I cannot twist my head to see them. I listen instead for the sound of them rising out of the water. I imagine that I will hear their steps, their breaths, the song of fluids rushing through their bodies. They are so close. Instead, I hear cicadas. My grandmother, who has been dead these many years, leans over to pat my cheek. Her mouth is full of her leaf, her lips stained red. The leaf in my throat is itchy from the blood’s attempts to clot itself still. I cannot smile, but my second mouth bubbles redly a little, spilling time in welcome. My grandmother squats by me and tells me a story. She talks out of the side of her mouth, pausing occasionally to spit. The fine corrugations in her skin dance like rivulets in the rain at every movement of her face. Peace. As I tell this story I will close your eyes, she says. Now will you listen? Her voice is rough and cracked, a smoker’s voice. She says this is a story of when she was young. Not only when she was young, but when she lived inland, deep in the past. You can still visit that past, she says, because time is nothing but distance. You can walk into the past simply by walking east from here. If you could get up, she says, and if you could walk inland now, far from this lake, far from these modern coastal districts with your electricity and your TV and your radio and your newspapers, if you could walk and walk until the telephone lines stop and the power lines stop and the radio waves die out and the roads are dirt and not asphalt, if you walked and walked into the oldest jungle paths and found the old villages in their wattle and daub, and you kept walking uphill until you were long before the British, before the French, before the Dutch, before the Portuguese, before the Chinese, before the Chola-Kalinga-Vanga, before even the Buddha, before all that is new, then you could meet me there as a young girl, unbowed by all this time I carry. After tonight I will walk that way one last time myself, grandchild. I don’t know if I will recognize myself after all these ages, but some rites must be completed in their own time. I remember the house well, though. It’s at the back of the village near where it becomes jungle again, far from the river and the cultivated fields and the big houses of the farm- keepers: the house of drums and drum-makers, the house of your grandmother’s grandmother. If you had come upon that house of a night like this night, of an hour like this hour, you would see me slip out of the door in secret under the moon. I have spent all day, as I spent most of my days then, keeping myself wilted and damp, because your grandmother’s grandmother is harsh and demanding and I am not yet skilled enough to satisfy. She puts me and her other grandchildren to work during the day, because we make all the drums for many villages around, the drums for ritual and the drums for music and the drums for the heralds who bring news from the king. My cousins take to the art better than me. In my hands the drum’s skin becomes slack and its heart dismal, no matter how often I tighten it with care, my left palm flat and smoothing the skin over the frame before tightening the reed skirt with my right hand. I put pride into this work, and duty too, and the alert readiness that a drum is meant to evoke. Slowly I bind into it each new layer of tension. Then I tap out a quick rhythm to test the sound, the tips of my fingers flickering and the ball of my thumb snapping back and forth, thar-rikita-thar. If I made it right, red fire should rise from the drum, grandmother says, but I can make only sparks, and must undo it and re-do it. Grandmother scolds me for failing the calling of my birth. My hands ache and my back hurts and I can’t even chew the leaf because grandmother says I am too young and too unfired for it. All day I listen to her spit and complain. After she goes to sleep, at night when the village is quiet and the jungle is deafeningly loud with cicadas, I sneak out under the moon. The small aches and pains of the day fade. The red glow within me is banked, I know, and not absent like grandmother says. I feel more awake under the moon than I did all day. I stand in the night until I can see; the moon is full and there is plenty of light. When I can see the leaves on the trees, I walk into the jungle. In a few minutes’ walk, I am in the true wild, the wild that simply does not exist here in your time, the endless rainforest of thousand-year trees that covers most of the island. In that place, the green goes on for ever. At first I follow trails the hunters use, but after a time I find the trail that is mine alone. It is my secret, difficult to find if you don’t already know where it is. I pause to retie my hair— so thick and curly in those days—and rewrap my skirt higher, passing it between my legs and tucking it in the back, so that it doesn’t snag on undergrowth. It’s all I wear, much like you stripped to your undergarment, grandchild, except that they did this to shame you and we had not yet learned these new shames of the body, in that place. The soles of my bare feet are tough and callused. I move quickly, even though the jungle is uncleared and wild. I have made this journey in the dark so often that I know by timing alone where there are obstacles to duck under or hop over or circle around. Branches that should have whipped my face are a gentle brush against my cheek; roots that could have broken my ankle are instead footholds for me to launch longer and longer strides. I move faster and faster as I enter the jungle that is mine alone, the jungle where no other person has ever walked, not since it grew back after the great ash. I am young and strong and it is a joy to run and leap. When I finally arrive at the mound, I am moving so fast that the sudden stop makes me stagger and breathe hard. The mound is an old fallen tree, soft and decaying, its back broken across a great boulder. When I climb to the top, above the entanglement of the understory, the canopy above me has a sudden, startling gap, as if I am at the bottom of a well. The sky is so full, dusted with glittering jewels. The moon has not yet reached that tiny empty patch of sky, but I can see its glow approaching. It will soon be overhead. The top of the mound is covered in a layer of black soil so thick that I would have to dig to find the stone of the boulder. The black earth is flattened and compacted here from my own feet: I have come here on a thousand nights like this and will come for nineteen thousand more before my body weakens too much for it. When I stamp into the beginning steps of my dance, it feels like a ritual. Could ritual be something that isn’t handed down from ancient days from generation to generation, from grandmother to grandchild, but something that I could make from nothing for my own self? I believed so then and I believe so now. In that place, I was and am the prophet and priest of a secret new religion, my bare feet thumping on the black earth as I step and leap under the moon, a drummer whose drum is the earth. That fire that I could never grasp in the day, that I could never put into my given-work under my grandmother’s eye, the power that slips and twists uselessly through my hands when I tap on the drum-skin, it comes to me clean in this jungle clearing under the star- speckled sky, here surrounded by the great wall of cicada song, when I am unpolluted by the wrong instrument. I was born into a drummer’s family but I am a dancer. In my dance, I look up and see the moon grow red, as if it had filled with blood after a great blow. As I breathe and huff and shout with the cicadas, as my fists cut the air and my feet thump and leap, as the sweat slicks my body, the red web of time unfurls for me as it has for you: I can see it behind the moons in your eyes. I see the red of my life to come, the fists and kisses, the bites and blooding, the bleedings and birthings—I make dances for them all, for courage, for faith. I see you lying here near the lake with your eyes open and your throat cut and my heart breaks for you, red of my red. My new religion needs a funeral rite, a dance to grieve the dead. I dance it as I craft it for you. I follow the red of my bleeding feet, I howl red through my bleeding lips. My fire rises raw and roiling in coruscating ropes of carmine fire that slowly rise up my legs every time my feet slap the earth, from ankle to calf to thigh to hip, that climb into my belly, that rise to fill the hollow in my breast, that spout in great ragged gouts of flame from my mouth when I roar into the red moon so loud that the cicadas fall silent and I tear the long muscles in my flame-seared neck.

©2020 by Vajra Chandrasekera.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Vajra Chandrasekera is a writer from Colombo, Sri Lanka. His work has appeared in Black Static, Liminal Stories, and Three-Lobed Burning Eye, among others. He blogs occasionally at vajra.me and is @_vajra on Twitter.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight Yours Is the Right to Begin Livia Llewellyn | 4288 words

1 November Outside Bistritz Sunset

“. . . darkness, lapping water, and creaking wood.”

• • • •

Tick, tick, tick at the end of the chain swings the watch, and back against your fireside bed of needles and furs you collapse and drift away, sweet sister Mina, your thoughts unmoored by the doctor’s trick twitch of his mesmerizing wrist, your mind free to wander the wild woods, gleaning the lingering scent of your captive beloved, reporting back to that fierce, relentless Helsing demon all the secrets hidden within our master’s untamed kingdom of night. Or so we make him believe. Drip, drip, drip go the sounds of my thoughts under each little tick of the watch, each unspoken word welling plump from the dark woods and rushing waters and starry void of my mind, staining red all the untouched pink flesh of your soul. In this manner I speak to you, as did the First, who spoke to me a century ago, who plucked me like turning fruit from a long- forgotten tree. Out there in the cold crisp dying of the sunset’s flaming light you speak of inconsequential things to your doctor, visions of trails and pathways and roads unseen. Inside, your thoughts drift to the man you love, directing my desires away from your unbroken velvet neck, and yet even as your supple mouth silently wraps around his name I slip into your visions beside him, unheard and unseen, nestling like a buzz just beyond your ear, a warm vibrating hum whispering warm against the rising hairs on your skin. That flush on your pale cheek, my innocent Mina, that effervescence coursing through your blood, is that not also a pure and perfect love? Can I not give you the same? I am the youngest. I am the Third. What the others have long forgotten, what dark centuries and the monotony of undying time have scrubbed away, I remember still. Traces in the air and against my tongue, like the remnants of a last unforgettable meal. The swelling valleys and hills of the Mittel Land, vast expanses of bright green fields under brilliant sun, the snow- capped mountains but a hazy suggestion at the horizon. Pears and cherries, hard red apples dropping to the warm earth. She came from these lands, the First told me, and to them she returned in the low mists of one early summer some half a century ago, burrowing her way through the warm brown earth, her gold hair and fair limbs entangled in the soft roots of tall grass and vegetables. There as the season quickened did she take both rest and power, soaking up the heat of the sun, small insectile life and fragile boned burrowers that heard her lovely, low call. And above the ground, as the season ripened, we heard her silent song, and we came, too. Rumors of a mist, sparkling like crushed stained glass, swirling around dusky plums that couples stole and ate before they sunk into the grass, into each other, into the earth itself, their bodies found at daylight, hollowed and open-eyed, dry cavities packed with sticky stems and stones. Young girls from neighboring farmlands wandering down roads in the early hours of the morning, covered in beads of dew, pale and feverish, their shaking fingers scratching at wounded necks as they asked which way was home, the words dribbling out of their split lips in slow crimson waterfalls. Mothers sleep-walking newborn babies into the fields, leaving them under the fruit trees like offerings, only days later to awaken in horror, unable to remember what they had done. Circles of cats and dogs, bloodless, beheaded and neatly arranged on the grounds of a local church cemetery. In the center of each circle a pink newborn’s hand placed upright, a cold supplication, a decaying plea. The village slipped into paralyzed silence as the summer bloated and crept toward its autumnal end, cobblestone streets emptied out, windows shuttered tight and rooms darkened, clusters of crosses and garlic swung at every door. It meant nothing. She fed on us all, and left the seeds and cores and skins of her human crop to shrivel away. I remember my father coming to me during the day, thick ropes of iron dragging from his worn, broken hands. He stopped, stared up at the ceiling, and began whispering replies at the shadowy corners to questions I never heard. Eventually he dropped the chains and left the room. I never saw him again. Outside, insects chattered and buzzed incessantly in the heat. So many creeping things, and not a single bird left to cull them. Cows dying and crops fallow in the fields, and only that one lush mound of the valley blossoming like a poison-soaked paradise, whilst all the land around it cowered and waited. Every night I dreamed, thrashing away the soaking sheets, ripping off my bedclothes. In the stifling dark, my hands crept across my body, and my brown skin was the valley, and she was there, in the center, under the folds of the earth, calling out my name, waiting for my touch. And though I held out longer than the rest, so, too, like the others in the village, I found myself drawn to her as well, making my way through a late-summer village drained of all people and life, walking through rotting and fly-blown orchards and fields in the star-studded hour before nightfall, a bouquet of dead, dried flowers in my shaking hands, flowers that exploded into life as I neared her ground, bursting with sticky pollen and green water. And there on that hill in the vast rolling Mittel Land, I, the last of my village, the last of my valley, slid my fingers inside the rich damp loam of the world, teasing her out little by little until she unfurled over me and inside me, gold wheat hair and milk skin, plum sweet lips and a tongue of sharp, sour wine. And there was pleasure, unlike any I had ever known, wave after wave of rich red desire rising up to crash abated against my body’s shores, and she pressed my head against her breasts and throat like a hungry child. And a single lap of her blood took it all forever away. Our bodies are dead, our souls are dust, and decay cannot desire. So she says. My mind cannot forget her, though, cannot shed the memories of her on me, inside me, as she did before I was undone. Like a tickle, a silvery shiver against my skin, the maddening ghost of a touch never truly realized, a desire never fulfilled. The First floats above us in the night when our master has not allowed us out to be fed, and we, the Second and the Third, open our mouths like helpless birds. She bites her fingertips like a cat, and we catch the trickling of blood running off her sharp nails with our snapping teeth and pointed tongues, lapping up more air than sustenance. In each drop I remember the sensation of summer, the crops and fields and lap of the midday sun. I remember her tongue, the smell of the living earth on her breasts and hands. I remember, but my body is cold. I reach up for her, but she is always too far away. And I would go mad at the memory of it all, except for the blood, those few drops of thick plum from her hands that abate the hunger and pain. And so I scrabble greedily about in a cold barren room in a castle that has no name, for a few exquisite sparks of a long-lost summer. Endless winter in these mountains, endless desiccated life, two lovers, and no love at all. Will this be your existence? Will this be you? What is it that I say and do here in the cold, in the snow of a country that it not my home? I do not wish to know. Full of beauty of all imaginable kinds this country is, and every woman, delicious Mina, is a country. Terrible is the country that you travel to. She reaches out to you even now, and you will live forever in a land pregnant with dead branches of desire, continually consumed in hunger’s red wave. I do not think it is there that you belong. And the first tendrils of purple morning swell up through the thick trees, and I rise with them, exploding and scattering like floating seeds. Later, when you awaken, your wet clothes will still glitter with the spent remains of that which once was me.

2 November The Carpathian Spurs Sunrise

“. . . darkness, creaking wood, and roaring water.”

• • • •

Night swells and peaks, and still you sleep. I grimace and ride the hours with it, even to the painful razor edge of it, until dawn begins to push its way up through the thin membrane of the horizon, anxious to start the day. Only then does your good companion take out his watch, and so begins your inevitable turn on the Catherine wheel of my thoughts. I waste no time. I am the Second. I was there at the beginning, I watched the First die and unbecome, and then she cleaved unto me and once again we were brought together in all things and through all things, I once again her willing servant ready to give her my undying life and love. There are rules, stubborn little Mina. Just as there are rules that govern the entirety of nature, rules that dictate the passage of that water you think you hear, the swaying of those wind-blown branches you think you see, so there are rules that govern his entire world, which is this entire world. As I did, as we all did, you will become a servant to each and every one. No man or mortal shall do your unnatural bidding again. You will be Fourth, and you will drink last, never first. You will be last in everything, you will be the Least. Unbecome by her blood, you will finally learn to submit. You must never again pay heed to the words and actions of the Third. You must never leave our chambers unless by his command, through the First. You must never raise your head in his presence, or look him directly in the eyes. As he is in all things above you, so in all things must you forever remain below. You must never speak in his presence; and throughout all of the castle confines and the world itself, for all time, you must never speak, or even think, his name. You must never mention his long-dead sons, though you will be made, as we all are, to dress in their rusting armor and place their helmets over your bound and braided hair. You must show no fear when he drags us to barren fields of skeletons and stone, and under storm gray skies mounts us upon petrified pikes and crosses, crying out betrayers, betrayers all with every hammer blow, black gouts from your body squirting against ragged pike and steel, impaled flesh firing white-hot bolts of pain into your shrieking, shrinking soul. You must pay no heed to his laughter when the rays of a feeble morning sun curl the edges of your skin, burn wet layers of your eyes away like autumn mist. All our wounds heal, eventually. You must not pass out when he nails your clothes to your breasts, when he drives a spike through your tongue. You must learn to lick your lips and pant for more. In every moment of your existence, you must remember that the physical world is his domain, and no longer yours to command. By air alone, you must travel backwards and never forward, never touching ceilings or floors or walls, whether he is there to see you or not. Always you must travel with your ruby eyes seeing only where you have been, never where you are going, because your destination is nowhere. There is only the past, he says, and we must never forget it. We live forever, but for us there is no future. We are dust, and we move as such. Books are forbidden, as is music and all the forms of the arts. You must learn to find stories in wind, knowledge in thunder and rain. Your thoughts will no longer be yours to write down, your little diaries and letters shredded and burned. Every transgression will be paid to him with a finger, which he will place in a thin glass bottle and display on our chamber walls. You are not allowed to touch these bottles or take them down. Centuries will pass, and you will gaze upon the forest of fingers you have lost and regrown and lost again, ageless and perfectly preserved in their transparent reliquaries. Unnecessary, useless, broken, replaceable. You will learn that this is us. This will be you. Once a year, he will dress you in the remnants of a four hundred year old gown, lead you backwards up broken stairs, floating over toothless gaps in the stone, until you find yourself in the highest crooked tower, perched over the deepest ravine in the Carpathians, staring half a mountain’s length down to a river so ageless and relentless and hard it has split the very heart of the land in half, never to be whole again. You must not resist his spider-hard grasp at the small of your back as he sends you flying over the edge, nor must you allow your flailing limbs to claw for purchase as you plummet unstoppable into the ravine’s crooked maw, bones breaking and snapping with every outcrop of jagged rock. He will fly with you, twisting and turning with every spiral of your breaking body, fingers grasping your neck as he watches all the moments of your life rise and fall like oily tides on your grimacing visage. Do not ask what it is he looks for, what undiscovered truths he seeks in the dark calligraphy of tears penned by your horrified eyes. The ice black currents will not stop or slow your descent, only push your ribs up through breaking skin like snowy mountain peaks, red mist rising from your body like a distant summer dawn. And when the raging waves vomit your ravaged body from their foamy grip, you will not plead for death or mercy as he rearranges the wet velvet folds of your gown against the iron shores, whispers in your ear the name of a woman you do not know, then leaves your split corpse to gather the first feathers of midnight snow. And I will come for you, gentle, broken, fearless Mina, as I came for the First so many centuries ago, when I witnessed her fall, the first fall. I will collect your body and carry you backwards all the way, backwards and up through crevices and caverns and passages, no guide except all the ghosts of my former journeys through lost centuries, the worn grooves in the packed earth, the smooth hollows in the stones. And to our chambers I will deliver you, and outside the thick castle walls seasons will pass and change as we lick your wounds and the ivory of our teeth clicks against the white of your ribs, pushing the destruction back inside, back down. Our lips against yours, hot kisses in the darkness, fingers crawling and stitching, swollen folds of flesh closing and opening, the wet of our blood and desire a crucible to transmute and banish all pain: until the following year, when he throws you off the tower once again. And he will be there, at all times watching over all your deaths and rebirths, because all that you do will be for him. All that you experience will be his, over and over, for all eternity. You must break, and you must heal, and you must break, and you must heal. Sisyphus, never resting at the summit. Icarus, never reaching the opposite shore. Is this you, pretty finger in a jar? Will this be you? Except. I feel it on your breath, against the rigid curve of your spine, in the beat of your steady heart behind such cold, small breasts. There is nothing wax about you. And the watch on its chain slows and stops, and you slip away, toward the mysterious country of daylight I can no longer travel through. And night flows on across the mountains, dragging with it the ominous grays of another relentless day, indistinguishable from any other before it, or after.

3 November Borgo Pass Sunrise

“. . . darkness and the swirling of water.”

• • • •

Those glass-cased fingers embedded in the castle walls, Mina: they are not hers. Flesh of my flesh, each one severed from my hands. A forest of defiance and insurrection, thousands of markers pointing every way in every direction, proclaiming at once, I am everywhere, and here. He catches me looking at them, running my newly grown fingers over the filthy vials, pinpricks of blood coalescing in my eyes. He mistakes the look on my face for sorrow, for resignation, for ruin. Everywhere men are surrounded by life, and see it not at all. Malformed, grotesque monstrosity, he drags his loathsome remains to the center of the web and thinks himself safe as he hallucinates away his years, dreams and schemes of his former self made whole, an immortal conqueror striding across an impaled and broken world as he blots out the sun with the crimson letters of the ancient, unspeakable First Name. He does not realize the name he writes is mine . “This is the way.”

4 November Borgo Pass The Red of the Dawn

“Why fear for me? None safer in all the world from them than I am.”

• • • •

In the blissful black silence of the woods, beneath the hiss of wind and snow, you hear them. The faint suck and suction of their mouths, the swift rush of life down their transparent throats, the soft sighs of steam rising off the fallen horses entwined in their smooth brown arms. Life: never extinguished, simply traveling, from one perfect creation to the next. Pale flakes drift up around the undead and the dying, all of them heedless to the rising drifts, the pressing cold. Stars wheel and gyre mindlessly in the heavens above us. Branches dislodge their heavy wintery burden, anointing the heads of wolves with silver crowns. And all the terrors of the night have vanished, valiant Mina, deep into the obsidian oblivion of a sudden sleep. Is this not the most beautiful of all countries? Is this not the most wondrous of all nights? Twice have I come to you in the valleys and mountains of this kingdom, moving the mindless bodies of the Second and the Third as the rosemary honey of my words poured from their puppet mouths. Twice have I watched as you stood trembling but resolute, and refused. Trails of salty blood now crack and flake against my sister’s cheeks, yet already they no longer remember that less than a winter’s breath ago, they gnashed their teeth at you a third time, wept and rent their garments and breasts as they screamed. That is who they are, and what you might have become. No less animal than the helpless animals they now suckle at, no less mindless in their destruction like winter storms. They speak and spin stories of such aching beauty and pain, yet the words and emotions that pour from their fang-tipped mouths, the shifting forms of their flesh, the touch of their pliant hands are mere traps to catch flies. Bereft of me inside, their actions are nothing but the hunger, taking what revolting shapes and sounds it needs, the quicker to fell the prey, the quicker to feed. They forget what they are, what they used to be. United in infinite confusion and pain, they exist as much on blood as the ever-changing fantasies of what I tell them their meaningless lives could have been, could still be. To the Third I came in the dregs of a plague-laced summer, the crops and animals already long dead, the villages of that distant valley festering under disease and endless sun. I imbued and impregnated the overworked earth with the corruption of my presence, and rose from flies and fumes hissing from poisoned ground, from slick green ropes of mossy decay bubbling from stagnant pools. I lingered in the blackening veins and mottled skin of all living creatures who lapped and nibbled away at the fruits and flowers and leaves of my sweet false call. A vegetable husk of life she was when the Third succumbed to my song, when she dragged her withered breasts and brittle bones across the soft black pulp of her lands and family to fall apart in my arms, aching for release. Death alone is release. My embrace gives none. To the Second I came in the mirror shards of soured celestial visions, an iron maiden angel born from the fevered blood mists of suppressed perversions and misplaced belief. Beneath the revolting excess of vaulted stone ceilings, golden crucifixes and diamond- studded monstrances, far below the scratching swirl of incense, the smoke of white wax and blue flame, under layer upon layer of monotone, miserable lives lived in fealty to a long- dead god, I burrowed up from pagan foundations and writhed against crumbling mosaics, feeding on plump, lost novices and fucking ossified bones as I howled my song of songs. It was there she crawled to me, whip-lashed and pierced, begging for my mortification of her sin-choked, naked flesh, begging for a pain-filled path to a virgin monstrosity. And under the unblinking watch of the skull-studded ceilings and walls did I eat the lids off her wondering eyes, and reveal the darkness and emptiness of faith, the vast insignificance of the human soul, forever in the cosmos falling and alone. And at the last, undisguised by guile and sorrows and dreams, I come to you. I am the First and am in all things the First, which is my eternal right. I alone bestowed that power and privilege upon myself a hundred hard lifetimes ago, and no man or creature fashioned or forged me. I am a creature of my own making, as all women are. Even to him, I was the First, making him who he was, though he no longer remembers and has usurped my place, rewritten his history and calls himself my Master. And yet even this betrayal shall eventually serve me, for I tell truths to few women, and to no men. I am the Queen of Lies. I live and breathe in the black cracks of doubt and terror that spread vast and malignant throughout all life. I am the mother of flesh rebirthed beyond perfection; I am the devouring furnace of the soul. The low horrid laugh of my sisters, moving slow against the silence and cold. Satiated, content for an eye-blink moment of time, they drift up, float and dance with the thinning flakes of snow. I feel them at the corners of my mind, casting about for me, heads swiveling for a glance of a presence they have always known yet have never truly seen. You see me, Mina. You see me and you do not look away. The cosmic motes of my incorporeal being slide through your clothes, rippling over the curves of your cream skin, curled hair, warm lips. You breathe me in, and I stream past the hot crimson slick of your tongue into the velvet chambers of your heart, settle against and under the most secret curves of your swelling flesh. Searching, rushing through the hot motes of blood, riding the tender trembling contractions of muscles and lungs, drawing out one lingering, delicate contraction of pleasure after another and mining it for purchase. There are vast pristine skies within here, colors and landscapes and light I have not seen for centuries, achingly full with memory and promise. I could live in you for lifetime after lifetime until the heavens bled stars, and never feed. In you, I have no need to be First. I have no purchase. In you I am contentment, nothingness, alone. The only darkness within you, inviolate Mina, is me. Outside our bodies, outside of dreams and sleep, the beautiful sun is breaking across the jagged mountains, golden light creeping through slender trees and sparkling snow. Streams and strands of me pour like the morning mists from your limbs, minute shards of ice that settle against the branches, burn away. Later you will wake, you will rise, you will turn your face upward into the light of a world that is the mirror of your soul, and you will continue your descent into my kingdom, swelling like the great and gentle ocean until there is no more darkness, no more water, no more lies and dreams. Until only you remain, and your right to begin. Come to me.

©2013 by Livia Llewellyn. Originally published in Suffered from the Night: Queering Stoker's Dracula, edited by Steve Berman. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Livia Llewellyn is a writer of dark fantasy, horror, and erotica, whose short fiction has appeared in over forty anthologies and magazines and has been reprinted in multiple best-of anthologies, including Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year series, Years Best Weird Fiction, and The Mammoth Book of Best Erotica. Her first collection, Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors (2011, Lethe Press), received two Shirley Jackson Award nominations, for Best Collection, and for Best Novelette (for “Omphalos”). Her story “Furnace” received a 2013 Shirley Jackson Award nomination for Best Short Story. Her second collection, Furnace (2016, Word Horde Press), was published this year. You can find her online at liviallewellyn.com, and on Facebook and Twitter.

The H Word: The Rational Vs the Irrational Tim Waggoner | 1220 words

When I was in first grade—we’re talking 1970 here—I was excited to discover that the high school drama club was going to put on a play called The Ghoul Friend. I was already a dyed-in-the-wool horror geek by this time, and I pestered my parents until they agreed to let me go. I don’t remember much about the plot after all these years, but I remember there were lots of cool monsters . . . and at the end the actors took off their masks to reveal they were all humans in disguise and not really monsters after all. Scooby-Doo was a relatively new cartoon show back then, and I of course watched it, so I was familiar with the “It was Old Man Jenkins all along!” type of ending. I hated those endings. What was the point if the monster wasn’t real? But of course, that’s the message of such stories, especially when they’re aimed at children: Monsters aren’t real. Reality—which for a time seems to have been violated by an aberrant impossibility—is the same as it always was. Maybe not altogether safe, but safe from intrusion of the can’t-be-mustn’t-be-real. There was a rational explanation for the seemingly paranormal events in The Ghoul Friend, but all good horror—even the most seemingly realistic—is irrational at its core. Horror fiction speaks to the existential conundrum of what it means to be human. We are sentient beings aware of our own impending death, and this sense of mortality shapes our identities and how we live our lives. But death makes no sense. In our minds, it seems we’ve always existed, and no matter how hard we try, we cannot imagine not existing. The closest we can come is the experience of sleep. We say rest in peace, after all. Death and nonexistence are inherently irrational. There are no answers for why is there death and what is it like to not exist. Therefore, the prime experience of being human is irrationality. And it’s this truth that we wrestle with all our lives, and horror fiction is one of the prime ways we do this. The rational is a powerful lure, in both life and fiction. It’s understandable, safe, orderly. It has rules, and these rules can be known and followed, making reality controllable (or at least more so than it otherwise might be). The rational is reassuring, comforting, and provides a sense of meaning and one’s place in existence. The irrational, on the other hand, is unknowable, uncontrollable, and unpredictable. There are no rules. It’s wild, dangerous, nightmarish, and ultimately without meaning. Therefore, neither you nor existence itself has any meaning. Too much explanation—too much rationality—kills horror. Depicting clearly defined dark forces with specific origins and rules that govern their behavior and abilities, all of which can be known to both characters and audience, removes any sense of mystery. And giving dark forces weaknesses which can be discovered and exploited ultimately makes these forces controllable and able to be defeated. When this happens, a story edges away from horror into adventure territory. The heroes in these stories could just as easily be battling criminals or terrorists as vampires or zombies. The movie Sinister is a prime example of (a bit) too much explanation. Mr. Boogie is a wonderfully enigmatic force until the point where a university professor explains that he’s an ancient Babylonian god named Bughuul who demanded children be sacrificed to him. Mr. Boogie becomes a more known quantity, one with a clear motivation, and that makes him safer for the audience. He’s been quantified, categorized, and labeled, and in the process made less frightening (and less interesting). In the television series Supernatural, Sam and Dean Winchester research a dark force on the internet, quickly learn about its weaknesses, and dispatch it with little difficulty, often bantering with it along the way. No horror here, only adventure, albeit within a horror/fantasy setting. (And as someone who’s written a number of Supernatural tie-ins, I don’t mean to disparage the series by saying this. Adventure is fun. It’s just not horror.) And of course, Scooby-Doo is the apotheosis of too much explanation. The monster is always a human posing as a supernatural entity in order to commit or cover up a crime. On the other hand, too much irrationality can kill horror, too. If anything can happen at any time, a story can become absurd and comical. In order for horror to work, there must be a reality to be violated, to be taken apart piece by piece. Too much unreality constantly reminds the audience that what they are experiencing is a story—is unreal—and it can ruin the suspension of disbelief for some people. The work of David Lynch is a prime example of this, at least for a mainstream audience. His movies and television series are entirely irrational—even when they pretend to be otherwise—and without any solid reality for (some) viewers to hold onto, they bail. Since I gravitate toward surreality in my own fiction, I love Lynch’s work, but a steady diet of it to the exclusion of any other kind of horror would be too much for me. But when rationality and irrationality work together, they can create some of the most effective horror. Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” may be the horror story with the most perfect partnership—the perfect tension—between the rational and irrational. The concept of the Lottery itself, the belief that stoning a villager each year will ensure a good harvest, is irrational in the modern world. There isn’t even a specific god the sacrifice is meant for. It’s just supposed to work, as if it’s a natural—if brutal—process of cause and effect. Readers are supposed to accept that the people in this village have conducted Lotteries for decades, perhaps centuries, and all of them have gone along with the program. And not just in this one isolated town, but in many communities. None of this is rational. So what is rational in this story? The normal, everyday way the villagers behave and interact with each other (apart from the Lottery, of course). The setting—a small American town—which is the epitome of normal, and the fact that times are changing and some towns have decided to do away with the Lottery. Those towns have become rational—and this rationality makes the horror of the Lottery even more intense. Readers know there’s no supernatural force to placate, that the Lottery occurs only out of mindless tradition, and that this town, like others, could have abandoned the Lottery, but hasn’t, thus making the death of this year’s sacrifice even more tragic and meaningless. Terence McKenna, enthnobotanist and psychonaut, once said that “Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we’ve managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.” I can’t think of a better description of horror. Or of life.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Tim Waggoner has published over forty novels and five collections of short stories. He writes original dark fantasy and horror, as well as media tie-ins, and his articles on writing have appeared in numerous publications. He’s won the Bram Stoker Award, the Horror Writers Association’s Mentor of the Year Award, and he’s been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the Scribe Award. He’s also a full-time tenured professor who teaches creative writing and composition at Sinclair College in Dayton, Ohio. His latest release is Writing in the Dark, a book on writing horror. Interview: John Langan Gordon B. White | 4419 words

John Langan’s newest book is a collection, Children of the Fang and Other Genealogies. He lives in New York’s Mid-Hudson Valley with his wife, younger son, and a room full of books—so, so many books.

First off, congratulations on the release of your fourth collection, Children of the Fang and Other Genealogies (Word Horde, 2020). I was fortunate enough to read an advanced copy and this is a pretty hefty collection, coming in at almost 400 pages. Can you tell us a little bit about the book, perhaps including how it was organized?

Thanks very much! Children of the Fang collects twenty-three stories of varying lengths, from short-short to novella, the majority of them written over a five-year period. In putting the stories together, I had in mind the big collections I read as a kid, King’s Skeleton Crew and Barker’s Books of Blood (granted, the Barker was published in the US in six individual volumes). It’s organized mostly in chronological order, with the exception of the last two stories, which I flip-flopped because I thought the second to last one made a better last one, and a couple of short-short stories I smuggled into the story notes.

As with your previous collections, this latest one has a memorable title which follows suit to your prior books—Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, The Wide Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies, and Sefira and Other Betrayals. In those, the “and Other ______s” seem to really capture the tone for the stories within, but at what stage do you settle on a collection’s name? Are the title story and the “and Other ______s” guides at the beginning that help shape the selections, or do they come afterwards, once you’ve pieced every-thing else together?

The subtitle tends to come after I’ve roughed out the collection’s contents and decided on the first half of the title. Sometimes it’s obvious—as in the case of my third collection, Sefira and Other Betrayals—others, it takes me a while to figure out. I should add, I think each collection could have at least one other subtitle, maybe more. In the case of Children of the Fang, for example, while writing the story notes for it, I became aware just how many of the stories featured trips to other(wordly) landscapes, to the extent that the subtitle to my second collection, “and other monstrous geographies,” could have been applied to it, as well.

As a sort of follow up, since you’ve now put together four collections, are you able to see thematic patterns in your work over time? If so, do you see these as reflections of working through different themes at different stages in your writing life, or are any apparent unities of theme more a result of the curation?

That’s an interesting question. The answer would be, it depends. To return to Sefira for a moment: in that case, I was very much aware of that these stories were rather obsessively returning to a central theme. In my other collections, I’ve been aware more of certain aesthetic preoccupations, of a general interest in exploring the assorted traditions associated with a variety of monsters, say, of employing different narrative approaches to the material of the horror story, of responding to the work of previous writers and occasionally filmmakers, most of whom have worked in the horror field. I should mention here, though, that the critic S.J. Bagley once asked me if one of my major themes wasn’t time, and while I hadn’t thought of that before, the minute I heard it, it struck me as absolutely correct.

In addition to many pieces of short fiction, you’ve also published two novels—House of Windows (2009) and The Fisherman (2016), the latter of which won the Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel. I believe it may have been in the acknowledgments to House of Windows where you wrote: “This book had a hard time finding a home: the genre people weren’t happy with all the literary stuff; the literary people weren’t happy with all the genre stuff.” A decade later, do you still think that sort of resistance to hybridism exists in general publishing? How about in the small presses?

It’s been a while since I’ve shopped a novel to one of the big presses, so I’m not sure how well I can speak to that aspect of the question. I’ve had stories published in several of Ellen Datlow’s big-press anthologies, pretty much all of which have seemed to me to sit in that in- between area, and no one from those presses has complained (that I’m aware of, anyway). Granted, this is different from publishing a novel. It’s certainly my impression that the big presses, like all major producers of entertainment, have remained fairly conservative in the work they’re willing to publish. So a writer such as Michael Cisco, one of our contemporary geniuses, remains unknown outside the small press world. Obviously, this speaks highly of the small press, which, due to the presence of the Internet, can and has been more effective in advertising and distributing its work, but I’m not sure it speaks too well of the bigger presses.

The Fisherman was an excellent novel, one which has often been described as “weird” fiction. Weird fiction is a term that can be sort of hard to pin down, but how do you think of your own work—is horror, weird, or something else?

For a long time, I’ve thought of my work as horror fiction, and to be honest, that’s still how I see it. I suppose it’s because the model of horror fiction I have comes from King’s Danse Macabre, and also Ramsey Campbell’s essays and reviews. It’s a big tent capable of covering Thomas Pynchon’s V and Brian Keene’s Ghoul, with space in-between for Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom. However, I found that when I described my work as horror to readers who weren’t familiar with the genre, shutters would come down over their eyes, and whatever else I might say to explain my work would go unheard, blocked off by their association of the word horror with the worst (usually filmed) examples of the field. For a little while, I was self- righteously satisfied with that, but then I started thinking maybe I should try to reach out to those readers a little more. Describing what I wrote as ghost stories didn’t feel quite accurate, nor did it receive a much better response, so I finally settled for saying, “Stephen King kind of stuff,” which, due to King’s greater cultural acceptance, has tended to receive a better response. (But I still write horror.)

In my mind, there are certain pieces of your work that would be undoubtedly “weird”— The Fisherman, of course, as well as short pieces like “Bor Urus” in Sefira and Other Betrayals. To me, the overt horror stories often show our world intruded upon by the unreal, but the weirdness in those other works is in how they peel back a veil. They don’t just offer a monstrous disruption, but a glimpse ofsomething vastly bigger, perhaps incomprehensibly so, that would drastically change our way of conceiving of reality. Do you notice a similar distinction along these lines in your work between “weird” and “horror,” or is there a different line you draw?

I tend to see the kinds of stories you’re describing as points on a continuum, with room for all manner of distinctions in between. As I recall, Lovecraft used weird and horror interchangeably, and I suppose I follow that trend. I’m reminded here of the epigraph to Ramsey Campbell’s novel, Midnight Sun, which quotes a critic (David Aylward?) distinguishing between writers of supernatural horror of the past, who strove for awe and achieved horror, and the present, who strive for horror and achieve disgust. It’s a facile comparison, but it gets at the variety of aims within the horror field.

As an author who works in multiple forms—short stories, novellas, novelettes, and novels —which of those are your favorite to write?

I like them all. The very short stories continue to be the ones I struggle the most with, since my natural inclination seems to be towards the expansive. For that reason, I’m most comfortable working in the long-novelette and beyond. Was it Thomas Wolfe who said, “I’m a putter-inner, not a taker-outer”? Me, too, Tom. These days, I find myself tending more and more in the direction of the novella, with an eye towards the next novel (or three). But I apply myself towards the shorter stuff as a way to keep challenging myself as a writer. Elsewhere you’ve talked about how genre stories—the zombie story, the vampire story, etc.—can serve as structures akin to various poetic forms (e.g., a sestina, a sonnet). In that way, genre can sometimes serve as a set of constraints which channel an author’s creativity into new and surprising expressions. Your short fiction has explored this to great effect, with one of my personal favorites being “The Wide, Carnivorous Sky,” which is an entirely new take on a classic monster. Which of these genre experiments is your favorite?

It’s a cheat, I know, but I love all of them. I will say, though, that there is a story in Children of the Fang called “The Communion of Saints” that makes nods to several of the monsters of the 1970s and 80s, as well as to King’s It, which does more than I realized when I was writing it.

Building a little more on that, are there any stories that started off as a reworking of well-worn genre tropes, but which ended up so far afield that readers might not recognize their original form?

Yes. As its title suggests, my first novel, House of Windows, started out to be my take on the haunted house trope. There’s something of that still in it, I suppose, but I see it now as much more about the curse or malediction; though I suspect readers will have no trouble recognizing the haunted house elements. There’s also a story in Children of the Fang called “Episode Three: On the Great Plains, in the Snow,” that’s a kind of riff on the idea of the kaiju, or maybe it’s the Ray Harryhausen movies of my childhood, but is also a lot of other things.

I think many readers would agree that one consistent aspect of your short fiction is its stylistic inventiveness and, as mentioned above, your tendency to draw on different forms. When you develop these, do you conceive of the subject matter and the form in different stages, then meld them together? If so, which comes first and, if not, how do you develop the synergy between the two pieces?

At any given moment, it seems, I have ideas for kinds of stories I would like to write (say, a story in the form of a film script) and ideas for monsters or tropes I’d like to employ (say, the Sasquatch). I wish it were as simple as thinking, “Ah, then, I’ll just write my movie-script story about the Sasquatch!” Usually, there has to be a third element (at least) that draws those two things together and makes them make sense. That third element tends to appear somewhat mysteriously: usually, it steps off the elevator from the deeper levels of my brain without warning and everything starts to fall into place. After that, what happens is a kind of movement among the narrative construction, the material of the story, and whatever the other thing is, each shaping the other two even as it is shaped in turn by them. Depending, there may be excursions online or into books for relevant information about some aspect of the story; depending on how it’s going, there may also be conversations with my wife or younger son or a close friend like Laird Barron or Paul Tremblay.

While we’re on that topic, then, what is your writing process like? Given the apparent level of detail and care in some of your stories, on the one hand it seems like perhaps you have meticulous planning, but on the other hand your narrative voice often tends to feel almost effortless, and that sort of natural flow feels like it may organically develop. Do you have a “standard” process for your stories? Are your stories primarily shaped at the outline stage or in the edit?

I try to write every day. These days, I find I write better at night than I do in the morning. If I can complete a page a day I can be satisfied; though I’m happy if I can push on even a little to a second page. While I’m writing a story, I’m always thinking about it. No matter what else I’m doing, there’s someplace in my mind, some level of my consciousness, where the Fornits are trying to figure out what the story is going to be and how it’s going to be that. The majority of the time, when I begin a story, I’m not sure where it’s going to end up and then, in the writing, I become aware of what the ending is going to be, at which point, I start writing towards that ending—although the ending may change once I arrive at it. I think my stories are primarily shaped in the writing, with the clarification that I tend to edit heavily as I go.

Similarly, I wonder if you could pinpoint what your typical “unit” of construction is when you’re writing a story. While your prose is immaculate but often in service of an unobtrusive narrative voice; as a result, while reviewers and readers sometimes focus on prose at a sentence level, your work seems to be constructed on longer units. Is it perhaps the paragraph? The scene? Something longer?

This question fascinates me, as it’s a way I haven’t thought about my fiction before. I usually start with a sentence that grips me, that promises more to come. This quickly expands to the level of paragraph, which expands to the level of page, which expands to the level of the most recent several pages, which expands to the level of the entire story. As I go, though, I’m constantly looking back over what I’ve done, tweaking a word here, a sentence there, adding a block of dialogue or a paragraph or several paragraphs as needed. It’s a back-and- forth process in which I’m moving from the micro to the macro, shuttling among the different parts of the story. Some days, I won’t move forward in a story: I’ll spend my time filling in a space in it that’s suddenly become apparent to me, a place where there’s a gap of some kind that needs to be addressed. Another aspect that some readers may consider particularly “Langanesque” is the story within a story. In your shorter works this is sometimes an interlude or an achronological recounting. There’s a particular standout use of this technique in The Fisherman, with an extended recounting of the local lore. Do you recall when you first began working with that style, or what drew you to it?

It was there in my first published horror story, “On Skua Island;” though, interestingly the stories and novels I wrote before that were more straightforward affairs—which suggests a connection between the technique and the genre, doesn’t it? I’m not sure why that should be, unless it’s because so many of my favorite examples of the field, from Robert E. Howard’s “The Horror from the Mound” to Straub’s Ghost Story to King’s Pet Sematary, employ it. Yet, to speak more generally, many of the works and writers I’ve studied throughout my academic career employ versions of the nested narrative, from Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to James’s Turn of the Screw to many of Conrad’s works (Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, etc.) to Ethan Frome to The Great Gatsby to The Professor’s House to All the King’s Men. Beyond this, I think it has something to do with coming from a family in which storytelling played more of a role than I was always conscious of. Both my father and mother told stories of their youth growing up in Scotland during the Second World War, of their early years after immigrating to the US—my father would recount for my brother and me the plots of movies in great detail. So I think it may have been one of those cases where the narrative conventions of a book like Lord Jim or Ghost Story aligned on a deeper level of my consciousness with the experience of my youth. Perhaps my embrace of this technique also explains why I found more success with my horror stories than I had with the work preceding them.

On a technical note, how have you learned to employ these time- and/or attention-shifts to improve the piece as a whole and without sacrificing the effectiveness of the larger narrative? What kind of balancing act goes on there?

Honestly, I’m not sure I’ve learned anything in a formal sense. Whenever I interpolate a long narrative within another narrative, I’m aware of the demands I’m going to be placing on the reader’s attention, the strain to which I’m likely submitting the framing narrative. I’ve largely been fortunate in terms of the reception these experiments have received—so maybe the lesson is, be bold with your experiments?

Now, let me ask you for a story within a story. You were one of the founders of the Shirley Jackson Award, which recognizes “outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.” Could you tell us how that came about? A group of us (Brett Cox, JoAnn Cox, myself, Sarah Langan, and Paul Tremblay) decided that the horror field was robust enough to support a new award, especially since we’d received word that the International Horror Guild Award was in the process of winding down after recognizing some brilliant work. As I recall, it was Brett Cox who had the idea of contacting the Jackson estate to ask if we could use her name for the award; once they agreed, we were off and running. For the first couple of years, Brett, myself, Sarah, and Paul read for the award’s categories, which was both exhausting—since the award’s remit is so large— and cheering—because it reinforced and expanded my sense of all the great work being done in the darker end of the pool.

Shirley Jackson certainly has left her mark on a wide variety of authors and works. On the topic of influences, your collection Children of the Fang and Other Genealogies has story notes which identify the specific authors whose influence was foremost in your mind when writing the stories. I found this particularly fascinating, because not only are there the expected classics—Lovecraft or King, for instance—but also much more contemporary writers, like Laird Barron or Michael Cisco. There are also several non- horror authors and even filmmakers, as well. What are your thoughts about continuing to be influenced by newer works even as you yourself build an influential body of work, rather than just returning to the sources you may have read in your formative years? What about drawing influence from outside the genre or even the medium?

I was listening to an interview with Jonathan Lethem the other week, and he used the metaphor of the slag heap to describe that pile of influences that melts together during your youth and whose radiation continues to heat what you write afterwards. I’m aware of a core of such influences reaching back to my childhood and early teens, a list that includes Howard, King, Straub, Flannery O’Connor, Faulkner, and Alan Moore, to name a few. There will still be moments when I’m writing and I’ll realize I’m drawing on one or more of those figures. At the same time, I think it’s useful for me as a writer to continue to be open to the effect that newer writers—both in the “newer to me” and “more recent” senses of the word— might have on my work. (As it were, to add more material to the slag heap.) I have read and continue to read with great interest the work of friends and contemporaries such as Laird Barron, Dan Chaon, Michael Cisco, Brian Evenson, Gemma Files, Jeffrey Ford, Elizabeth Hand, Glen Hirshberg, Marlon James, Stephen Graham Jones, Victor LaValle, Kelly Link, Livia Llewellyn, S.P. Miskowski, and Colson Whitehead—and also such departed figures as Robert Aickman, Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Graham Joyce, Vernon Lee, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Lucius Shepard (whom I find myself missing more and more the longer he’s gone). What I’ve said about fiction also applies to the other arts, as well.

This may be an awkward question, but where do you see your own influence on the genre? If that’s too uncomfortable, you can pretend I asked: “What other contemporary authors do you think will have an impact on the field?”

As far as the influence of my work goes, I have no idea. Obviously, I hope my work is making a contribution to the field, but it’s difficult for me to see what, if any, that is. It’s easier for me to see the effects of my contemporaries, to recognize the impact a writer like Laird Barron has had and continues to have on the horror genre. I’m not sure any of my compatriots has energized and revitalized it in the numerous ways that he has—though I think both Victor LaValle and Paul Tremblay’s recent novels probably are. I think everyone is still catching up to Kelly Link, too. There are a host of terrific writers at work right now, but these are the figures whose work I believe has been responsible for seismic changes in the horror field.

Of course, it’s not just other artists that influence one’s work, but the world we live in. At the time we’re conducting this interview, things are in dramatic upheaval. We’re still in the throes of the Covid-19 pandemic and adjusting to new social distancing requirements. Have these circumstances had an effect on your own work or working process?

Absolutely. I’ve found it much more difficult to function, let alone, to write, during this period. Everything has felt like more of a struggle. I’ve tried to fight this as best I could—by getting out of the house as often as I can to take my younger son fishing, say, and reading in the car for a few hours while he goes in search of trout. I’ve tried to catch up on my Netflix and Prime queues. I’ve tried to listen to episodes of favorite podcasts I’ve fallen behind on, things such as The Horror Show with Brian Keene and This Is Horror. It’s all helped, but things are still difficult.

Because you’re a teacher and so have both a deep knowledge of the genre but also regular contact with college students, I wonder if you have any expectations about how horror and weird fiction will respond to the pandemic? Do you think that there will be a change to reflect a “new normal” in the wake of Covid—with stories that reflect social distancing, calls for demilitarization of the police, and other shifts in the world? Or do you think that writers will try to write backwards towards the “old normal”?

I suspect the answer is “all of the above.” Certainly, plague narratives have a long and venerable place in the larger horror genre. Indeed, Paul Tremblay’s forthcoming Survivor Song is almost unbearably prescient in its portrayal of the early days of dangerous pandemic. Actually, Paul’s book is an interesting example to consider. While writing it, he took stock of the situation in the United States at the time and extrapolated from it. I imagine that a number of writers will do something similar, look at the way things are right now and write their narratives accordingly. It’s an interesting question: is it possible, at this point, knowing what we know, to “write backwards” in any kind of a serious way? It would be nice to think not, but I’m guessing that’s not true.

Finally, other than Children of the Fang and Other Genealogies, what’s next for John Langan? In addition to any concrete plans or releases, are there any new ideas or projects that you’re just starting to work on?

I have a new novella in Ellen Datlow’s anthology of film horror, Final Cuts. Oh, and my fifth collection, whose tentative title is Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies, is currently under submission. More news to follow, I hope.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Gordon B. White is the author of the collection As Summer’s Mask Slips and Other Disruptions (Trepidatio Publishing 2020). A graduate of the Clarion West Writing Workshop, Gordon’s stories have appeared in dozens of venues, including The Best Horror of the Year Vol. 12 and the Bram Stoker Award® winning anthology Borderlands 6. He also contributes reviews and interviews to outlets including Nightmare, Lightspeed, Hellnotes, and The Outer Dark podcast. You can find him online at gordonbwhite.com.

Author Spotlight: Claire Wrenwood Nibedita Sen | 1178 words

Frankenstein is an obvious source of inspiration here, but I love that you approached it from the monstrous motherhood angle—which is, when you think about Mary Shelley’s life, possibly the richest and most immediate!—rather than the more common science and rationality interpretations. What were some of the other inspirations for this story?

Thank you! Frankenstein was certainly a rich starting place—there are so many resonances to be found in the idea of a body that carries the scars and fragmentation of its larger society (I’m thinking here of works like Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad). I was also interested in how anger and grief might give birth to a magic beyond the reach of scientific instruments. While these were my intellectual interests, the animating force behind this piece was something simpler—rage. I was angry about how existing in a female- identified body in this world brings with it such an ever-present calculus around negotiating danger. The what ifs we carry as we walk down the street, go to work, exist in nature, exist in our homes, exist. The violence inflicted, in particular, upon the bodies of poor women, black and indigenous women, trans women and nonbinary folks. I was angry about seeing the same old stories play out again and again and again—at having to carry the burden of these stories, those already told and those not yet manifested. The premise of this story is that a mother creates an avenging monster not from a place of scientific inquiry, but because her daughter was murdered and nobody cares. And so there’s this animating impulse having to do with, how do we fight and struggle and make our voices heard in the midst of an uncaring world, the forces of which so often feel amassed against us?

I’m also fascinated by the use of a conglomerate point of view—fractured voices welded into one. Would you tell us a bit more about why you chose to write the story with this POV, and in this structure?

You know, I’d always been vaguely suspicious of writers who talk about the voice of a character just sort of appearing in their head . . . until it happened to me. This story arrived in the form of the girls speaking in unison. The voice is very specific—it’s probably not how these teenage girls would speak in the everyday world—yet it had a mythic quality that I found really compelling. The unity of this voice also echoed the commonality of their experience. Any woman, anywhere, could become part of that “we.” I wrote in this voice for a while without a firm structure in mind, but the story really came together when I alighted on the idea of dividing the sections by body parts. It helped me provide a counterpoint to the plural POV—reflecting the internal tension of the narrators’ body coming apart even as the mother attempts to make them a single entity. It also enabled me to build the inherent horror of the premise into the story’s scaffolding. I didn’t want to replicate the naked and defiled bodies we see on so many detective shows, violence displayed for the sake of titillation. We know that the mother hunted through graves to find different body parts—doesn’t that give us all the awful information we need?

Speaking of disparate pieces, was there a section of the story that was harder to write than the others, or that you’re more proud of? Something that got left behind on the cutting room floor in edits, maybe?

Normally, it takes me forever to align the vision I have in my head with what comes out on paper. My stories go through rafts of revisions—whole drafts, characters, plotlines left on the cutting room floor. But this was one of those miracle stories that appeared in my head and then consented to come out on paper in pretty close alignment with the vision I’d had. The one thing that I did cut was the original title—“Frankenbitch.” I was so attached to that title, but I also had to do a lot of work to shoehorn a justification for it into the text, and ultimately it didn’t really fit the tone of the rest of the story. But the narrator will always be Frankenbitch in my heart.

The anger in this piece is so real, and that ending so cathartic. How did you thread the needle of acknowledging the anger while also making space for hope?

It’s tempting to answer this solely from the level of narrative structure; to say that, in very broad and reductive terms, good stories often have arcs, and that two common arcs that work well are (1) circumstances that start well and go downhill (the classic tragedy structure, and also what we see in many horror stories), or (2) stories where a character struggles and ultimately triumphs. I knew that, if I were grounding the story in so much horror from the beginning—like, not only have these girls been murdered, but they’ve just been brought back to life by this uncaring woman and shut in a freezer, yikes!—then I would need some element of hope. It’s hard to read stories that are just badness from end to end because that’s kind of already the world we live in, right? So, from the beginning, I knew that the brutality would need to cohabitate with something else—in this case, a finding of oneself, one’s community, a homecoming of sorts. But it was also more than that. This story is about anger that corrodes. It came from a place of being angry for years and years, and asking myself, What do I do in this terrible world? How do I go on? And what good does it do to harden myself to the world—who does that serve? All of these questions feel more urgent today than ever. I’d like to think that this story presents one possible remedy, one option. For me, the ending is not about a retreat from the world but rather a reckoning with how the mother has replicated some of the same evil the girls have already faced. And there is a hopeful note at the end, because they have finally seen each other, have chosen to turn toward each other. But beyond that, there is the reality that the daughter’s killer walks free, that the world is still full of evil. Where does that leave the girls and their mother? Where does that leave us? I don’t know. But for the moment, we are holding one another, and that is enough.

What’s next for you? Any upcoming projects we should know about?

I have another story, called “Flight,” coming out at Tor.com this month. I am also tinkering away at other story drafts—stay tuned!

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER 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. Author Spotlight: Vajra Chandrasekera Sandra Odell | 846 words

“Redder” is poetry. It is sensation and impression, violent impossibility and glorious imagery. Each read unveiled new details I had not noticed before. Were you conscious of the poetic nature of the prose while writing this story?

Thank you! It was written consciously in the sense that it was very much written with intention, though it was also written in a couple of intense sittings, in that submerged and fast- flowing state of no-mind in which you are barely aware that you exist and are typing. So perhaps it was also written unconsciously in a sense, in that it was more grown in a vat than constructed and fitted together like a house.

Tell us something of what inspired this story. What brought this dream into being?

Some of it is based on history, of course. The kind of history you live through and at the time you don’t understand how much it matters. I’d been thinking a lot about long cycles of grieving and hopelessness, and how to talk about them without, as best as I could, despair or platitudes. It’s a story of secrets and mysteries, which is to say, of things set apart and silences kept, of things grown red and sacred in the dark.

In many cultures, the power of women and night are intimately linked, and this power is echoed in the story. We see it when the grandmother first begins her story, when she dances on the mound beneath the open sky as a young girl, as she refers to the main character as “red of my red.” Here is a story where that power stretches into the future and the past. Do you feel the narrative would have been as potent if, instead of grandmother, it had been a grandfather or other male family member? Why?

I think it could have been just as potent, but perhaps it wouldn’t have been quite this story. Gender is a deeply weird gramarye with deep resonances, associations, and connotations that feel simultaneously primal and very tired, and changing something like that might have unravelled this story and braided it back together as something else. Though it also might not have, necessarily: it would depend on the characters, and their particular histories and relationship to that old magic. The particular unwritten grandfather I half-imagined in the margins of this story would definitely have had a very different story to tell in the grandmother’s place.

Were you raised a reader? What is one of your first memories of recognizing words on a page and feeling that first sense of wonder? Very much so! I grew up in a house full of books. Mostly old, used, and weird. I don’t remember the first book I read in any language. I do remember being monolingual for most of my first half-decade, and what it felt like when the mysterious and exotic glyphs of English finally began to resolve into letters and words. Comic books were a big part of that, I think. I have a particular memory—around the same time, perhaps that I was unknowingly living through history—of trying to read the avalanche scene in Tintin in Tibet by looking at the pictures and making up a narrative of my own, until the switch flipped over and I found myself reading the words that were actually on the page. It was a fairly obvious scene, so the transition from story-as-imagined to story-as-written was smooth as a key turning in a lock. And even before that, I remember tracing tall black letters of newspaper headlines with my fingers, already knowing what they said from the pictures and from the grim talk of adults, but not able to read them except as signs and portents.

Life is change, an ebb and flow that can often catch us off guard. The same can be said for the publishing industry. If you could dance a similar dance and walk back in time to speak to the young Vajra, what might you say to him to encourage his passion for words when faced with such changes?

If I could walk back in time, I don’t think I’d talk to that person about writing at all. There is so much else I would want to say about our life! And I would worry about getting the threads tangled, I think. You want to spare your younger self pain, perhaps, but then without pain, who even are you? So in the end it could only be a platitude, intended to obscure the unspeakable but provide whatever small reassurance is causally safe: do what you can, do what you think is best, and in the end it will have mattered. That last part is unlikely to be true, of course but he wouldn’t know that for sure any more than I do. As always, the faint hope of it would have to be enough.

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

Coming Attractions The Editors | 130 words

Coming up in September, in Nightmare . . . We have original fiction from Ray Nayler (“Outside of Omaha”) and Sonya Taaffe (“Tea with the Earl of Twilight”), along with reprints by Kivel Carson (“The Night Has No Eyes”) and Gary McMahon (“My Boy Builds Coffins”). Suyi Davies Okungbowa talks about the difference between Nigerian horror and American horror in “The H Word.” Plus, Terence Taylor reviews some excellent new reads, and of course we have author spotlights with our authors. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Nightmare. Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got new fiction on the way from David Tallerman, Maria Dahvana Headley, and Caspian Gray. Thanks for reading! Stay Connected The Editors

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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 Patreon (patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams).

TL;DR Version If you enjoy Nightmare and Lightspeed and my anthologies, our Patreon page is 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? 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 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 Nightmare and Lightspeed are separate entities, we decided to create a single “publisher” Patreon account because it seemed like it would be more efficient to manage just one account. Plus, since I sometimes independently publish works using indie-publishing tools (as described above), 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 Patreon is the place to do that.

What Do I Get Out of Being a 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, 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. That URL again is 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/Senior Editor Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Editor Arley Sorg

Podcast Producer Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor Jim Freund

Podcast Host Jack Kincaid

Art Director Christie Yant

Assistant Editors Lisa Nohealani Morton Sandra Odell

Editorial Assistant Alex Puncekar

Reviewers Adam-Troy Castro Terence Taylor Copy Editor Melissa V. Hofelich

Proofreader Devin Marcus

Webmaster Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher Robert Barton Bland 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 APOC​ALYPSE TRIP​TYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOC​ALYPSE TRIP​TYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOC​ALYPSE TRIP​TYCH, 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)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 (with Diana Gabaldon)

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers

Dead Man’s Hand

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

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

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 [forthcoming] Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer [forthcoming]

A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker [forthcoming]

The Conductors by Nicole Glover [forthcoming]

Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth [forthcoming]

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