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TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 93, June 2020

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial Announcement for 2021 Editorial: June 2020

FICTION We, the Folk G.V. Anderson Girls Without Their Faces On Dégustation Ashley Deng That Tiny Flutter of the Heart I Used to Call Love Robert Shearman

NONFICTION The H Word: Formative Frights Ian McDowell Book Reviews: June 2020 Terence Taylor

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS G.V. Anderson Ashley Deng

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 Grandfailure / Fotolia www.nightmare-magazine.com

Editorial Announcement for 2021 John Joseph Adams and Wendy N. Wagner | 976 words

We here at Nightmare are very much looking forward to celebrating our 100th issue in January 2021, and we hope you are too; it’s hard to imagine we’ve been publishing the magazine for that long! While that big milestone looms large, that’s got your humble editor thinking about the future. . . and change—and thinking about how maybe it’s time for some. Don’t worry—Nightmare’s not going anywhere. You’ll still be able to get your weekly and/or monthly scares on the same schedule you’ve come to expect. It’s just that soon yours truly will be passing the editorial torch. Neither is that a reason for worry, because although she will be newly minted in title, the editor has a name and face you already know: Our long-time managing/senior editor, Wendy N. Wagner. If you’re a diligent Nightmare reader, you’re already with her editorial contributions: She was the guest editor for our Queers Destroy Horror! special issue back in 2015. But in truth if you’ve read any issue since 2014 you’ve seen Wendy’s input; she’s been my stalwart advisor and lieutenant for more than six years. I know that I’m leaving the magazine in the best possible hands. I won’t be going far, however. I’ll still be publisher of Nightmare, and I’ll still be editor (and publisher) of Nightmare’s sister-magazine Lightspeed. So whenever you’re missing me, you’ll know where to find me. Plus, I’ll keep editing anthologies, serving as series editor of Best American and , and running my imprint for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. So, you know, I’ll be keeping busy. Issue 100 will be my last issue as editor of Nightmare, but despair not, friends, for I honestly can’t think of a better person to take the reins . . . and I for one can’t wait to see where Wendy leads us next. —John Joseph Adams

I do a lot of things at Lightspeed and Nightmare, but my favorite job over the years has been running our “The H Word” column, where writers get to dig into the cogs and wheels of the horror and see just what makes it tick. I’ve seen writers ask big questions like: Does horror need to be scary? What do happy endings mean in a horror story? How does horror help us cope with the terrible things that happen in real life? And listening to our writers ask these questions has taught me an incredible amount about the meaning and value of our dark art. Horror and fiction gives readers the chance to look at the most difficult aspects of the human condition and reframe our responses to them. Our genre is a genre that spins the worst of life into something new. And whether that “something new” gives you a jolt of energizing adrenaline, a long moment of despair, or even just an overwhelming urge to vomit, we hope the fiction we publish leaves an impression on you. I’m so excited to lead Nightmare in our search for potent and powerful new work in the horror and dark fantasy . All eras are challenging, but right now, across the globe, we are facing tremendous uncertainty and incredibly dangerous situations. Climate change threatens our air, land, and oceans. The gap between the rich and poor widens every day while governments and corporations encroach on our rights. We are lonelier and more isolated than at any time in human history, while social media allows us to livestream every wrenching new tragedy into the palms of our hands. I don’t think we’ve ever needed great so badly. Nightmare turns eight years old this October, and in January 2021, we’ll celebrate our 100th issue with a special issue packed with delightful bonuses. It will be JJA’s last issue as our editor-in-chief, and I know I will miss him desperately. For the past ten years—on and off—I have been privileged and honored to work with him in both a writing and an editorial capacity. As just a fledgling writer, his painstaking edits taught me to think about story in new ways. More importantly, working with him has taught me to how to be a story’s best advocate, how to take care of our writers, and how to love editing. While the name on the cover might be changing, most things at Nightmare will stay the same. We’ll still be running our terrific nonfiction columns. We’ll still be looking for fiction driven by interesting characters and powerful prose. We’ll still be our stories’ biggest and best fans. We’ll still be sharing the leaders of genre writing, but hopefully lots of new voices, too. To find some of those voices, I plan to open Nightmare to submissions for a week in September—the first time in over a year! If you know any horror or dark fantasy writers, let them know. I’ll be looking for stories that, just like “The H Word” column, dig into the guts of horror to see what makes it work. That means, yes, experimental and Weird stories. Yes, stories that push into the boundaries of literary, noir, prose poetry, and even creative nonfiction genres. Yes, magic and spells and dark wonder! But there’s also plenty of room for , tentacles, , cannibals, serial killers, and gross-out . It’s a big, horrible world out there. We’re here to help you enjoy the Nightmare. —Wendy N. Wagner

ABOUT THE AUTHORS 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 (for which he has been a finalist eleven times) and is a seven-time 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. Wendy N. Wagner is the author of the SF An Oath of Dogs. Her other work includes two for the Pathfinder Tales series and more than forty short stories. She serves as the managing/senior editor of Lightspeed and Nightmare magazines. She is also the non-fiction editor of Women Destroy Science Fiction!, which was named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014, and the guest editor of Queers Destroy Horror! A gaming and gardening geek, she lives in Oregon with her very understanding family. Editorial: June 2020 John Joseph Adams | 141 words

Welcome to issue ninety-three of Nightmare! If the movie Midsommar piqued your interest in , you’ll be delighted by this new story from G.V. Anderson: “We, the Folk.” Find yourself transported to post-World War I Britain, where tea time and cottages stop being cozy and start being very, very creepy. If you enjoy mushrooms in your meals, Ashley Deng’s new short “Dégustation” may make you rethink your dinner. We also hope to unsettle you with reprints by Laird Barron (“Girls Without Their Faces On”) and Robert Shearman (“That Tiny Flutter of the Heart I Used to Call Love”). In “The H Word,” Ian McDowell wonders about what kind of childhoods your favorite horror writers had. Plus we have our usual author spotlight mini- interviews, and Terence Taylor digs into some new dark fiction.

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.

We, the Folk G.V. Anderson | 6120 words

The maypole dancers are restricted by what’s left of the ribbons. I watch them squeeze past each other with shining faces flushed pink from the heat. Too pink to be skin. More like meat. To my right, John’s wickerwork bath chair crunches as he shifts. “Raymond tells me you’re writing again,” he says. I swallow a scowl and nod. Raymond—Ray—John’s doctor. That man can’t smell gas without striking a match. On the hospital green, the dance comes to an end, and as we applaud with the rest of the crowd, it occurs to me that I ought to elaborate. “I’m compiling a book on folklore.” I sense rather than see his brows twitch. “So.” He tips his head towards the beribboned maypole. “This must be research. And here I was, thinking it a social call.” “Can it not be both?” He chuckles under his breath. “Always the opportunist, weren’t you, Dot?” A memory rears its head. Something I said, long ago. You were telling me about the puddle, John? I burn a hole in the May Queen’s dress, at a loss for where to look. “I came because I needed Ray’s help.” “Oh, it’s Raymond these days,” he says. “He’s decided he hates Ray. It’s not doctorly enough.” I glance up at the balcony behind us, my gaze snagging on a familiar pair of tan gabardine trousers. Ray is there, laughing and smoking with his colleagues. He has a sandwich in hand, a limp, white triangle lined with ham and pickle. I plumped for cheese earlier and regretted it. Good West Country cheddar shouldn’t be left out to sweat like that. I start to say something bitter—Isn’t it a little late to play the good doctor?—when I catch John’s eye. His knuckles are bloodless, clutching the bath chair’s handlebars. A muscle ticks in his jaw. “What kind of help, anyway?” “With the bank.” “Are you in trouble?” I , surprised by his genuine concern. “No. Nothing like that. His name is still on my account. The publisher’s cheques go through him, too. I’m not a child anymore—I want it stopped. I’m thirty-two, for God’s sake.” “If you needed an agent, I wish you’d asked me. I am your cousin.” I glance at him. He’s wearing shirt-sleeves to blend in with the merry crowd despite being rather too peaked to look merry himself. Not enough flesh on his bones even sixteen years after the Great War. A misnomer if there ever was one. “You were in no condition,” I mutter. “Besides, you’d have insisted on a bigger cut.” “Didn’t I deserve one?” His mild takes us both unawares and for a tentative moment my heart dares to lift; has enough time passed that we can make light of what I did? But it’s not that easy, of course. It can’t be. He rolls his bony shoulders and asks, why folklore when I could be telling my own stories? Why folklore, indeed. Three days later, Ray—Raymond; but, oh, let’s not give him the satisfaction!—Ray strikes a match in his office and holds the flame to the tip of a cigarette, the window behind him stippled with rain. He’s grown an Errol Flynn moustache three years too late to be fashionable. I long to tell him how silly it looks, but I don’t like to test his temper. I accept a cigarette instead. He lights me up and leans back, ejecting smoke from flared nostrils. “It’s a little Godless, isn’t it, Dot?” His lips glint beneath the fringe of dark hair, perversely wet. “All that paganism?” I smile tightly. “In Moreton,” say I, “church-goers leave sprigs of willow and yew at the end of every pew during Easter. No one knows why. Interesting, is it not? When you think of folklore, you think of the absence of God, whereas I find there’s rather too much of Him . . . It must be all the punishment.” His eyes flick to mine. “What punishment?” “Rough music. Skimmity rides. Villagers march sinners through the streets, banging pots and pans, and when they get to a lake or a stream, they hold the sinner underwater.” I watch the rain, my unwanted cigarette pincered between my forefingers. “Not long enough to drown,” I murmur. “Just long enough that everything bad gets washed away.” He taps cigarette ash into the dregs of his brandy. “Oh, do grow up,” he says.

• • • • I itch to quit the hospital—and by association, to quit my old self. I send up silent thanks when the good doctor looks up from his coffee one morning and says, “A friend of mine happens to know the last man to have the Dorset Ooser in his possession, or however one says it. You ought to interview him for this little book of yours, Dot. You conduct interviews so well, after all.” He shoots a sly look at John who, as one of the ward’s long-term residents, is taking breakfast with us. His tone is jovial, but ever since I cut him out of my affairs, his eyes say get out, and take your talk of punishment with you. So, I give John a dry peck on the cheek and return home to write my little book. Although my pride stings, my curiosity is piqued. The Ooser—it variably sounds like osser, wurser, or oozer depending on whom you ask—was a hollow horned head, worn during skimmity rides as a form of humiliation. It was lost around the turn of the century and no two accounts agree on the circumstances of its disappearance. The man who possessed it last must be long in the tooth by now: this could be my only chance at a firsthand account. The thought of squeezing someone for information sickens me, but despite my desire, and John’s urging, that I return to novels, my sales suggest I do far better with another’s words than my own. Therefore, I shut away my unease— away it goes, as unsettlingly smooth as ever—and I make contact with this man, a Mr. Lawrence Durbin; or rather, I contact his daughter, Edith, who has set herself up as something of a broker. She warns me that her father’s time comes at a steep price. I assure her I can pay. At the tail end of May, I find myself taking a roundabout train to Crewkerne via Exeter, and rapping on the Durbins’ blue front door. Before it opens, I step back and note the pointing. Compared to other, less isolated cottages in the area, the walls are in good repair. Edith lets me in. She’s grey, lean—but not hungrily so. The first thing she does is put out her palm like a beggar. Money first. One has to admire the sheer cheek. I give her hand a firm shake instead. There’s dirt under and around her fingernails. “How do you do, Miss Durbin.” “Miss Miller, how be on? You got here all right.” She asks where I’m staying and I tell her I’ve taken a suite at the old coaching inn, the George, back in Crewkerne; it’s a pleasant walk, and yes, my boots are definitely up to task, and no, I’m not a bit tired. “But you’ll have to excuse me; I left my purse behind.” I pinch off my gloves, finger by finger. “We can settle another time, once we’ve ascertained how much you’re due.” “Mm. I suppose you’d better meet Dad, then,” she says, scratching the back of her neck. “He’s through here.” She shows me into the sitting room. A cream-chested lurcher comes over to greet me, quite the opposite of its master, Lawrence, who watches me warily from the best armchair. I glance at Edith. She assures me she’s told her father about my visit, so I say how do you do to the old man, et cetera; he nestles deeper into the seat. The room is silent save for the lurcher’s tail thumping the sofa. “He’ll warm up. Tea?” “Smashing.” She puts the kettle on while I find somewhere to sit, which is awkward because the lurcher won’t let me pass. I settle on the ottoman instead. Despite the season, the upholstery is cold, almost damp, and the room smells vaguely mineral. Like turned soil, exposed worms. Lawrence doesn’t soften until the arrival of the tea tray reminds him of his manners. He asks me my name. Edith shakes her head, pouring tea. “I did tell you, Dad. I swear it’s in one ear and out the other these days.” “It’s quite all right,” I say. “Sir, my name is Dorothy Miller. I’d like to ask you a few questions, if I may.” Lawrence accepts the mug his daughter passes him and sets it loosely on his blanketed lap. It’s half empty to prevent spills, the tea inside as milky as you’d give to a child. The lurcher comes over to investigate. He scratches the dog’s head. “You’re not from around here.” “I live in Bristol, Mr. Durbin—oh, you have sugar? Two please, black; thank you, Edith.” I take the teacup—from a daintier set, saved for best—and return to the conversation. “In fact, this is my first visit to Crewkerne. I understand you’ve not always lived here?” His lips thin. “I moved here with my employers, the Caves, in the 1880s. They were Dorset folk.” I ask if he’s ever been back to Dorset and he says no, he didn’t leave much behind. “And it’s just the two of you?” “Mum passed on a few years ago,” says Edith. An unexpected pang prompts me to give the usual platitudes. My own mother died of tuberculosis, and the Jutland conflict did for my father shortly afterwards. I was fifteen. My aunt and uncle had room to spare, with John away at the Front, so they took me in. They’re decent people, all told, though I’ll never forget that when my aunt read my first short story, she called it a good effort. Suddenly, Lawrence looks at me. “Why are you here, Miss . . . Miss . . .” “Miss Miller, Dad.” “Why have you come bothering us, Miss Miller? There’s nothing here for the likes of you.” “Dad—” “Well, what’s this all about, eh?” Lawrence’s voice rises as his grasp of the situation escapes him. John displayed the same disorientation when he came home; senility and war shock aren’t so far off from one another. “What does she want?” “I’m sorry I’ve not been clearer,” I say. “I’m a writer. I’ve been corresponding with your daughter.” “She’s Dorothy Miller, Dad,” Edith says through gritted teeth. “She wrote that book you like?” Lawrence’s eyes flick from me, with my bob and blue slacks, to his daughter, whose sleeves are patched at the elbow. We were born in different centuries. I don’t blame him when he asks what we could possibly have to correspond about. “I’m writing a book on—well, on folklore, and a mutual friend said you might be able to shed some light on the fate of the Ooser.” The old man turns puce. “No.” “I will compensate—” “No—NO!” “—its cultural significance—” He jumps to his feet. “I got rid of it—why would I invite it back? Get out!”

• • • •

The lurcher’s nosing at something in the hedgerow. A rabbit and her kits, perhaps, or a frog. When Edith whistles through her fingers, she backs off, her find—whatever it was—already forgotten. Daft thing. “I hope this wasn’t a wasted journey,” says Edith. She wheezes as she walks, escorting me across the fields to town. By the clock’s reckoning, the day’s getting on, but it’s almost midsummer, so we’re suspended in those queer hours of light between supper and sleep, when a clock’s hands cease to matter and nightingales beckon us outside. Not wasted, no. Whatever the outcome with Lawrence, it’s good to get away, to breathe unfamiliar air, to purge oneself. To discover what it’s like to be Dorothy instead of Dot. It was Ray who first gutted my name, made it sharp. A name that forces one to bare one’s teeth at the end. I clear my throat. “What do you know of the Ooser? The Caves left it in your father’s care. He must have mentioned it over the years, surely?” A smile grows around her mouth as she recalls something. “I wore it once. Must have been in ’01 or ’02.” “As late as that?” “Oh, it was in poor shape. One horn missing, hair falling out. Mum wouldn’t go near it,” she adds. “She dint like how the eyes bulged, otherwise it might have been better looked after. Anyway, Dad used to get it out every so often and wear it to scare the local children.” “I’m sure the little beasts deserved it.” The lurcher trots ahead of us, lithe as a sickle. “I begged to try it on.” Her voice is pitched lower than before. “I wanted to take it off as soon as it was on my shoulders.” “Why?” “There were no eyeholes,” says she. “The inside was pitch-black and stank like the underside of a rotten log. There was a hinge you could work with your chin, a hinge to open the lower jaw, but you yourself couldn’t talk without working it. When it all got too much and you tried to say you’d had enough, the clack of wooden teeth made it so no one could hear you. I suppose you already know that those made to wear it were dunked in the end? Imagine being held underwater while wearing such a thing.” You were telling me about the puddle, John? My foot catches on something. Edith turns to look back at me. Cricket-song surges around us. “I’m sorry. Is this too much?” I shake my head. “Go on.” She says it wasn’t just the dark or the smell or the hollow clack-clack that made her want to tear the Ooser off. It was heavy, solid wood, but there was more to it than physical weight: the Ooser had been placed on the heads of sinners as far back as anyone could remember. “They stained it, somehow,” Edith says. “It’s hard to get nasty stains out of wood.” I nod. We continue on our way. “I was a babber,” she says bracingly. “No doubt I let my imagination run away with me. Still, I couldn’t help but believe the thing was evil. I thanked God when Dad said it was gone.” “And did he tell you where it went?” Edith sets her jaw. “He’s been saying different things for years—Mum threw it out, it crumbled to bits, an American collector took a shine to it. I thought he was having a bit of fun. Now, I wonder if his mind hadn’t started to go . . . For instance, I once heard him say that a man from East Chinnock came for it, but when I made enquiries there, they knew of no such person. I weren’t surprised —Dad said the man had no head.” “Poor fellow.” The last hill is hard-going. We catch our breath at the top and then skip down the other side, almost too fast for our feet. As I climb over a stile, I say, “What do you make of that bit at the end? It seemed so specific, so lucid. ‘I got rid of it—why would I invite it back?’” “I wouldn’t put much stock in his ravings, Miss Miller,” replies Edith. “Uh, talking of stock—I wonder if you’d stop at the bookshop and sign a few copies of Unto the Breach while you’re here? I’m afraid I promised you would.” My cheeks burn. That rag. Breach was my first bestseller, a collection of war stories from Ray’s earliest patients, including John. The words therein aren’t mine; my name has no right to grace the cover. I’d pulp every last copy if I could. Edith looks unhappy to have presumed. Might as well put it to use, I suppose. Dot or Dorothy, I’m an opportunist at heart, like John said. Damn him. No, that’s unfair—damn myself. “I’ll sign them, but I expect quid pro quo.” At her furrowed brow, I explain: “A favour for a favour. Your father’s time at no extra charge.” I bid the dog an exuberant goodbye before the woman can protest. Night, when it comes, comes fast. Crewkerne’s lamps still run on gas— electricity hasn’t touched this part of Somerset yet—and gas gives off very little light. The George’s inner yard has a pond-water murkiness to it, a depth that’s hard to discern, and I can’t help but imagine someone moving in the stables—or worse, someone keeping perfectly still. I decline supper and head straight upstairs, my heart lurching in my breast. My room is as cold as a tomb. I kick off my boots and burrow into bed fully clothed. Beneath the blankets, my breath sounds too close to my own ears. If I open my mouth wide enough, my jawbone clicks. The hinge mechanism catches your chin so you can’t pull your head out, and anyway there are hands on the back of your head—your neck—your shoulders, holding you under. Oh, I can’t breathe! I fling the blankets away with a yelp. Those hands—they were as good as mine, once. When I interviewed John for Breach, talking over the few details about his time at the Front that he felt able to share, he was dark around the eyes. I used my typewriter; I didn’t transcribe longhand because I thought hearing the rapid-fire rat-a-tat-tat would do him good. Exposure therapy, Ray called it. When the sound made John cry, I asked if he wanted to stop for to-day. He wiped his nose on his sleeve—I remember being disgusted by that. “No. You’re the only one who talks to me anymore.” I handed him a handkerchief. “You were telling me about the puddle, John?” At this, he clammed up. His foot started jiggling.

• • • •

My pen hangs poised over one of a dozen title pages. By signing these books, might I not induce someone to buy them? The thought of some stranger pawing over John’s memories, the same way I did, pains me. At length, I purchase the bloody things myself. As I lug them back to the George, Edith catches up with me. Her face is so muzzy with exhaustion, I almost don’t recognise her. She says that since my visit, her father has suffered the most distressing night-terrors. The thrashing, wailing kind. We pass beneath the coaching inn’s arch. The yard glares at us, every excruciating detail of cobble, lead and nail picked out by over-zealous sunlight. “I shall come by to-morrow and talk to him.” “No! You’ll make him worse.” I bite the inside of my cheek. Our voices sound too crisp, too bald in the yard. I draw her aside, close to the walls where the air smells damp. “Things have to get worse before they get better, and an interview might be just the ticket. There are ways of getting a scared man out of a funk, and making him face his fear head-on is one of them.” Her eyes are flints. “I’ve read your books. Those ways are cruel.” “They get results.” “Torture generally does.” “I think you misunderstand me,” I snap. “I want to have a cup of tea with your father, not put him in thumbscrews.” “You’re not seeing him. No one is—don’t look at me like that.” “But this is hardly fair: your father told me nothing! Without his account, the chapter on Dorset will be most unsatisfying.” She scowls. “I’m sorry a book means so much to you that you’d harass an ill man, Miss Miller.” A sudden vertigo takes hold of me. I touch the wall to steady myself. “You were quite happy to charge me for the pleasure. Me and many others, I expect.” She flinches and an ugly laugh bruises my throat. I think of the sugar —sugar, at a time when families can’t afford bread!—and the fine tea service; the pointing. “Who else has come asking after the Ooser? Armchair historians, was it? Folklorists? You’ve done very well off your father, I’m sure, so don’t you dare accuse me of taking advantage.” “Stop saying its name!” I pull away, baffled. As Edith’s breaths become quick and shallow, and the hand that touches her forehead shakes, my rage dies. All this from a woman who held her hand out for payment before greeting me? “What’s happened?” I murmur. She clamps her eyes shut. “It . . . it came for me last night. A man with no head—it makes sense now. And to think I wore it . . .” Eyes spring open. A stumble backwards. An extended, accusatory finger. “Get gone from here before it comes for you, too. Or maybe it don’t matter where you are; it’s quick . . .” I can get no further sense out of her. My God, she’s gone mad. The George is on the telephone; as I pass the booth on my way upstairs, I’m tempted to try Ray. Ray, I would say, how do you shake sense into the deranged? And he’d say, what do you need me for, Dot? You got awfully good at it. In the privacy of my suite, I chain-smoke—something I haven’t done in years. I chuck copies of Breach onto the fire as penance. There’s a clear view of the church spire from my window seat. I stare at it all afternoon, Edith’s words constricting my heart. I’m sorry a book means so much to you that you’d harass an ill man. Ray made a name for himself treating war shock. This one jumps at loud noises? Rap on his door. That one can’t stand the cold? Prop his windows open. More men returned from the trenches with neurosis than they did with physical injuries, men who’d never even been within range of artillery, so Ray had no shortage of patients for me to write about while I was visiting John. I got quite good at prescribing whatever would torment them most. It’s amazing how fast someone becomes a subject, a person becomes a body. Is such a lack of empathy innate, or does one take it up willingly? Either option is monstrous. I was monstrous, in a hundred small ways. You were telling me about the puddle, John? “I lay in it for three days.” He was sitting on his unmade bed. His shirt hung off him, one spindly collarbone peeking from the open neck. Thinness made his eyes protrude. They were grey like rain on a November morning. “I wasn’t even in the trenches yet,” he whispered. “I think that’s the worst thing. It’s so bloody stupid.” He scratched his forearm: a new compulsion. I rested my fingers on the typewriter keys; he was ready to tell me, then. “We were called up for a shift change. To get to the Front, you had to walk for miles across these—these duckboards because the ground was so waterlogged, and you had people coming the other way with stretchers and whatnot so there wasn’t a lot of room. And these duckboards were slippery, absolutely coated in mud. We had to cross a flooded bit and . . . I don’t know what happened. The slats just—just gave out. I went down with all my kit. A horse broke his leg and fell on top of me, and knocked all the air out of me so I couldn’t shout for help. The lads thought I’d been crushed and couldn’t spare the time to shift the horse and check. They had to leave me.” He tried to look at me, but I might as well have been vapour; he couldn’t focus his gaze. “I was—I was stuck there, Dot. With half my face underwater, straining my neck to keep my nose out of it. I couldn’t sleep. If I dozed off, I’d get a lungful of water. And the whole time—the whole time this horse was rotting. Just falling apart like a braised leek.” I raised an eyebrow. “I thought I’d have to eat the bloody thing,” he said, disgusted; but he was laughing, too. “No—don’t put that in your book.” I snatched my fingers off the keys and waggled them at him. We shared a brief smile. “How did you get free?” “I passed the time by scooping out the mud around me; it kept my mind active. Eventually it rained, and the water buoyed the horse up enough for me to wriggle out.” He’d managed to keep his tone clinical so far, but he had to pause there, collect himself. “I crawled to the medical tent. The nurses gave me a swig of some truly terrible rum and a pat on the back, and told me I had to report to my commanding officer, that I was late and for that they’d dock my pay. Well, I fell about laughing. What could I do? I left the tent and marched up to the trenches, saluting the horse as I passed.” As I’d done with the other patients, I took John’s jagged words and shaped them into palatable prose. Their raw forms, I saved for the good doctor. I told Ray that John was terrified of drowning, and the very next day, Ray held my cousin’s face in a bowl of water. He did it many, many times. I learned to watch and take notes. I sacrificed a whole, gleeful chapter of Breach to John’s rehabilitation. I tuck in my legs and press my eyes into my knees. How long does one have to watch a man drown, and do nothing, before one might as well be doing the drowning?

• • • •

The fields around Crewkerne are beautiful this evening. Heat has faded the grass to a watercolour wash, with brushstrokes of apple and buff, and the sky looks like a bolt of blue silk. I go carefully, a little dazed, wildflowers tickling my palms. I’ve come outside to clear my head after being cooped up at the George all day. I wrote a little, to my surprise. I wrote something new. As I worked, I felt the lure of pencil on paper, the quiet susurration so like the sound of thought. It’s been a long time since the outer edge of my left hand and smallest finger were grey and shiny with lead. Perhaps—I glance in the direction of East Chinnock, an hour’s walk while the light’s still good, and Yeovil past that, and the boundary with Dorset beyond—oh, perhaps it’s a blessing that the Ooser’s whereabouts will die with Lawrence Durbin! There’s far more sin in the world now than when the timber to make it was chopped down. How many days and nights of rough music could absolve all that? There’s a discarded sock in my path. How strange. I whirl about in confusion. An old man is ambling a hundred yards away in a nightshirt and coat. I gape. Speak of the Devil! I hold my hat to my head and make for him. He reeks of gin and musk, and when he sees me it’s clear he doesn’t recall who I am. “Are you all right, Mr. Durbin?” He mumbles something about Edith. “You shouldn’t be out like this on your own.” I place my hands on his shoulders to steer him homeward. He’s trembling through his coat. It can’t be from cold. To-day’s heat is only just lifting, the baked ground still warm. It must be fear. Fear of what? As we approach the cottage, I ask if his daughter is in. “I’d like to make sure she’s all right. She wasn’t herself this afternoon.” “She’ll bear it,” Lawrence slurs. “Like I have.” The front gate opens with a melancholic squeal. “I’m afraid I don’t follow.” He sighs. “You kept saying its name, the both of you.” I open the front door, guide him in. The hallway smells dank, like a burrow. “I did the same when I knew no better, and so it found me.” I frown. “What found you?” His eyes are baleful, a bloodhound’s. “It wanted its head back . . . Men cut it off long ago, to wield judgement for themselves, see.” I can’t help myself. My curiosity rises, dependably as a corpse bloats. “Please, enough with this nonsense. What did you do with the Ooser? If it’s more money you want—” A chill breathes down my neck. A twig snaps. Night, when it comes . . . Lawrence hisses like I’ve burned him—don’t say the name, he wails. Something draws my eyes west towards the dying sun. A coppice there is outlined by a blazing corona. A figure emerges from the trees. It has the shape of a man except everything’s wrong. It’s too wide and square, and its limbs groan with every movement. A bullock horn tapers out of the left side of its head; the right one is missing. When it sees me, it snaps its jaw. The echo of wooden teeth travels: clack-clack-clack-clack-clack. Laughter. The Ooser—for what else could it be but the relic reunited with its body, exactly as Lawrence said—strides towards me. Each footfall rattles my bones. “Run, child, run!” cries the old man. I run, trusting the ground to catch my feet. The wind tastes of rot and soil and stagnant water. The Ooser’s gait sends tremors up my heels, boom-boom-boom, and repeats in my heart, boom- boom-boom. I dare a glimpse. My mind makes no sense of the creature chasing me, my eyes won’t take it in—its chin jerks up and I hear a hollow clack, an admonishment for trying to escape—so I look to the cottage for help. There it is, and there stands Edith and Thomas by the front gate, lurcher at their heels. Edith watches, simply watches, as the Ooser runs me down. Terror sends me straight into the next hill rather than around. Too steep. I scrabble up on all fours, losing my lead. A hand bigger than my own head grabs my skull and throws me forward. My nose crunches. Coppery heat floods the back of my throat and dribbles down my lips onto my splayed hands. “Please . . .” Clack-clack—Shut up. Wooden fingers tangle in my hair and the lapel of my coat. I’m marched to a brook, gagging on my own blood, and plunged in before I remember to take a breath. No, no—not plunged. The water’s no more than three inches deep. Half in, half out. A punishment curated especially for me. I try to push up, to turn my head; rushing water shoots up my nose; I cough and drag in air, but there’s no air to be had. My lungs burn, water scalding worse than fire. I must pass out because suddenly I’m bursting up from the brook, retching and alone. I crawl to dry ground, a drip of blood marking my passage. The sun’s set now but the horizon still glimmers, hovering between night and day before the dark evens out and there are stars to see by. A shadow flits beside me. I don’t even flinch; I’m resigned to another dunking. Then a warm muzzle pushes into my face and starts licking away the blood, and I gasp with pain. Someone hauls the dog away, grunts, “That’s enough.” It’s Edith. She delivers me into the care of the George’s appalled porter without a word.

• • • •

I travel home via Salisbury instead of Exeter. Moments before the 13:10 pulls in, I see a horned silhouette moving on the platform opposite. The blood drains from my face and my heart drums an uncomfortable rhythm as I walk from the station to my flat. I share John’s phobia now—I couldn’t bear to stand over the en suite basin this morning, my back to the room. Couldn’t trust that I was alone. I unlock my front door with shaking hands and step inside. I set my travel case down and reacquaint myself with my home. It has a brittle odour: the smell of disuse, of closed, unloved rooms. I unlatch the windows, sliding them up with a whisper of wood on wood, and throw out the browning peonies on my writing desk. There’s an outline in the dust where my typewriter usually goes. I wipe it all down with my sleeve, brew a pot of tea, and then the telephone rings. It’s John calling from the hospital. He says, as if from far away, “Raymond’s dead.” My breath catches. I cover my mouth. “What?” “An intruder broke into the ward. It’s not—not clear what he wanted, nothing was stolen, but it seems the chap ran Raymond right through the first- floor window. The clerk described him to the police as a huge—a huge—well, I don’t know. The staff are scared out of their wits.” “When was this?” “Last night.” The creature can traverse counties in an instant, then. I lean against the wall, unsure of my balance. Outside my front door, a floorboard creaks. As if a weight rests there, attention cocked to the keyhole. “Dot? Can you hear me?” I inhale sharply, snap to it. “Yes. Yes, I heard you.” “Good. Well. The funeral’s next Monday. The ward will have to close, of course.” I ask him where he’ll go; does he need somewhere? I have the room. His trust isn’t quite mended enough for that, yet. “My parents are putting me up . . . Have you just got in?” “Mm-hm.” He tells me he’ll feel better if I keep my door locked; and did I get what I needed in Crewkerne? I give a non-committal reply and agree to meet him at the church on Monday before placing the receiver gently in its cradle. The presence outside broods. I grasp the doorknob, terrified of what I might see in the hallway—do I open it slowly or do I get it over with? Dive or sink? In the end, there’s nothing. I close the door and turn the key out of a sense of duty to John, though I’d be a fool to think a lock can keep something out if it truly wants to come in. A draught knocks my travel case over. Without my typewriter inside, which I left at the George, it weighs nothing at all. I take it through to the bedroom and fold away my clothes. My notebook finds its way to my desk. Yesterday’s hesitant start lies inside, a threaded needle waiting to be taken up. As I pluck a pen from my collection and start to read—and how painfully it reads, this newborn thing!—as I reach the next clean page, mould starts spreading across the sitting room wall, blistering the paint with moisture. It takes the shape of horns. I watch its progress, and when it gets too close to stand any longer, I set my nib to the page.

©2020 by G.V. Anderson.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR G. V. Anderson is a World and -winning writer from Dorset, UK. Her short fiction has appeared in , Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Lightspeed, and has also been selected for such anthologies as The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror. To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight Girls Without Their Faces On Laird Barron | 5675 words

Delia’s father had watched her drowning when she was a little girl. The accident happened in a neighbor’s pool. Delia lay submerged near the bottom, her lungs filling with chlorinated water. She could see Dad’s distorted form bent forward, shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, cigarette dangling from his lips, blandly inquisitive. Mom scooped Delia out and smacked her between the shoulder blades while she coughed and coughed. Delia didn’t think about it often. Not often.

• • • •

Barry F threw a party at his big, opulent house on Hillside East. He invited people to come after sundown. A whole slew of them heeded the call. Some guests considered Barry F an eccentric. This wasn’t eccentric—sundown comes early in autumn in . Hours passed and eventually the door swung wide, emitting piano music, laughter, a blaze of chandelier light. Three silhouettes lingered; a trinity of Christmas ghosts: Delia; Delia’s significant other, J; and Barry F. “—the per capita death rate in Anchorage is outsized,” Barry F said. “Out- fucking-sized. This town is the armpit. No, it’s the asshole—” “Bethel is the asshole,” J said. “Tell it on the mountain, bro.” “I’ll tell you why Bethel is the worst. My dad was there on a job for the FAA in ’77. He’s eating breakfast at the Tundra Diner and a janitor walks past his table, lugging a honey bucket—” “Honey bucket?” “Plumbing froze, so folks crapped in a bucket and dumped it in a sewage lagoon out back. Honey bucket. It’s a joke. Anyway, the dude trips on his shoelace . . . Go on. Imagine the scene. Envision that motherfucker. Picking toilet paper outta your scrambled eggs kills the appetite. Plus, cabin fever, and homies die in the bush all the livelong day. Alcoholism, poverty, rape. Worst of the worst.” “Please,” Delia said. “Can we refrain from trashing a native village for the sin of not perfectly acclimating to a predatory takeover by the descendants of white European invaders?” “Ooh, my girlfriend doesn’t enjoy the turn of conversation. Sorry, my precious little snowflake. Folks weren’t so politically correct in the 1970s. I’m just reporting the news.” “If we’re talking about assholes, look no further than a mirror.” “Kids, kids, don’t fight, don’t derail the train,” Barry F said in an oily, avuncular tone. “Anchorage is still bad. Right?” “Wretched. Foul.” “And on that note . . .” Delia said. “Haven’t even gotten to the statistics for sexual assault and disappearances —” “—Satanists. Diabolists. Scientologists. Cops found a hooker’s corpse bound to a headboard at the Viking Motel.” “Lashed to the mast, eh?” “You said it.” “Hooker? Wasn’t she a stripper, though? Candy Bunny, Candy Hunny . . . ?” “Hooker, stripper, I dunno. White scarves, black candles. Blood everywhere. News called it a ritual killing. They’re combing the city for suspects.” “Well, Tito and Benny were at the Bush Company the other night and I haven’t seen ’em since . . .” “Ha-ha, those cut-ups!” “I hope not literally.” “We’re due for some ritual insanity. Been saying it for months.” “Why are we due?” “Planet X is aligning with the sun. Its passage messes with gravitational forces, brain chemistry, libidos, et cetera. Like the full moon affects crazies, except dialed to a hundred. Archeologists got cave drawings that show this has been a thing since Neanderthals were stabbing mammoths with sharpened sticks.” “The malignant influence of the gods.” “The malignant influence of the Grays.” “The Grays?” “Little gray men: messengers of the gods; cattle mutilators; anal probe- ists . . .” “They hang around Bethel, eh?” “No way to keep up with the sheer volume of insanity this state produces. Oh, speaking of brutalized animals, there was the Rabbit Massacre in Wasilla.” “Pure madness.” “Dog mutilations. So many doggy murders. I sorta hate dogs, but really, chopping off their paws is too damned far.” “And on that note . . . !” Delia stepped backward onto the porch for emphasis. “On that note. Hint taken, baby doll. Later, sucker.” Delia and J separated from the raucous merriment of the party. The door shut behind them and they were alone in the night. “What’s a Flat Affect Man?” Delia wore a light coat, miniskirt, and heels. She clutched J’s arm as they descended the flagstone steps alongside a treacherously steep driveway. Porchlights guided them partway down the slope. “Where did you hear that?” Sportscoat, slacks, and high-top tennis shoes for him. Surefooted as a mountain goat. The softness of his face notwithstanding, he had a muscle or two. “Barry F mentioned it to that heavyset guy in the turtleneck. You were chatting up turtleneck dude’s girlfriend. The chick who was going to burst out of her mohair sweater.” “I wasn’t flirting. She’s comptroller for the university. Business, always business.” “Uh-huh. Curse of the Flat Affect Men, is what Barry said.” “Well, forget what you heard. There are things woman was not meant to know. You’ll just spook yourself.” She wanted to smack him, but her grip was precarious and she’d had too many drinks to completely trust her balance. Hillside East was heavily wooded. Murky at high noon and impenetrable come the witching hour. Neighborhoods snaked around ravines and subarctic meadows and copses of deep forest. Cul-de-sacs might host a house or a bear den. But that was Anchorage. A quarter of a million souls sprinkled across seventeen-hundred square miles of slightly suburbanized wilderness. Ice water to the left, mountains to the right, Aurora Borealis weeping radioactive tears. October nights tended to be crisp. Termination dust gleamed upon the Chugach peaks, on its way down like a shroud, creeping ever lower through the trees. A few more steps and he unlocked the car and helped her inside. He’d parked away from the dozen or so other vehicles that lined the main road on either side of the mailbox. His car was practically an antique. Its dome light worked sporadically. Tonight, nothing. The interior smelled faintly of a mummified animal. The couple sat in the dark. Waiting. She regarded the black mass of forest to her right, ignoring his hand on her thigh. Way up the hillside, the house’s main deck projected over a ravine. Bay windows glowed yellow. None of the party sounds reached them in the car. She imagined the turntables gone silent and the piano hitting a lone minor key, over and over. Loneliness born of aching disquiet stole over her. No matter that she shared a car with J nor that sixty people partied hardy a hundred yards away. Her loneliness might well have sprung from J’s very proximity. After nine months of dating, her lover remained inscrutable. J lived in a duplex that felt as sterile as an operating room—television, double bed, couch, and a framed poster of the cosmos over the fake fireplace (a faux fireplace in Alaska was almost too much irony for her system). A six- pack in the fridge; a half-empty closet. He consulted for the government, finagling cost-efficient ways to install fiberoptic communications in remote native villages. That’s allegedly what he did when he disappeared for weeks on end. Martinis were his poison, Andy Kaufman his favorite (dead?) entertainer, and electronica his preferred music. His smile wasn’t a reliable indicator of mood or temperament. Waking from a strange, fragmentary dream, to a proverbial splash of cold water, Delia accepted that the romance was equally illusory. “What is your job?” she said, experiencing an uncomfortable epiphany of the ilk that plagued heroines in gothic tales and crime dramas. It was unwise for a woman to press a man about his possibly nefarious double life, and yet so it went. Her lips formed the words and out they flew, the skids greased by a liberal quantity of vino. “Same as it was in April,” he said. “Why?” “Somebody told me they saw you at the airport buying a ticket to Nome in early September. You were supposed to be in Two Rivers that week.” “Always wanted to visit Nome. Haunt of late career Wyatt Earp. Instead, I hit Two Rivers and got a lousy mug at the gift shop.” “Show me the mug when I come over for movie night.” “Honey pie, sugar lump! Is that doubt I hear in your voice?” “It is.” “Fine, you’ve got me red-handed. I shoot walruses and polar bears so wealthy Europeans can play on ivory cribbage boards and strut around in fur bikinis.” He caressed her knee and waited, presumably for a laugh. “C’mon, baby. I’m a square with a square job. Your friend must’ve seen my doppelganger.” “No. What do you actually do? Like for real.” “I really consult.” He wore a heavy watch with a metal strap. He pressed harder and the strap dug into her flesh. “There’s more,” she said. “Right? I’ve tried to make everything add up, and I can’t.” “Sweetie, just say what’s on your mind.” “I’m worried. Ever have a moment, smack out of the blue, when you realize you don’t actually know someone? I’m having that moment.” “Okay. I’m a deep cover Russian agent.” “Are you?” “Jeez, you’re paranoid tonight.” “Or my bullshit detector is finally working.” “You were hitting it hard in there.” He mimed drinking with his free hand. “Sure, I was half a glass away from dancing on the piano. Doesn’t mean I’m wrong.” “Wanna get me on a couch? Wanna meet my mother?” “People lie to shrinks. Do you even have a mother?” “I don’t have a shrink. Don’t have a mother.” His hand and the watch strap on his wrist slid back and forth, abrading her skin. “My mother was a . . . eh, who cares what the supernumerary does? She died. Horribly.” “J—” Would she be able to pry his hand away? Assuming that failed, could she muster the grit to slap him, or punch him in the family jewels? She hadn’t resorted to violence since decking a middle school classmate who tried to grab her ass on a fieldtrip. Why had she leapt to the worst scenario now? Mom used to warn her about getting into bad situations with sketchy dudes. Mom said of hypothetical date rapists, if shit got real, smile sweetly and gouge the bastard’s eye with a press-on nail. piano key in her mind sounded like it belonged in a 1970s horror flick. How much did I have? Three glasses of red, or four? Don’t let the car start spinning, I might fly into space. J paused, head tilted as if concentrating upon Delia’s imagined minor key plinking and plinking. He released her and straightened and held his watch close to his eyes. The watch face was not illuminated. Blue gloom masked everything. Blue gloom made his skull misshapen and enormous. Yet the metal of the watch gathered starlight. “Were you paying attention when I told Barry that Planet X is headed toward our solar system?” he said. “Yes.” Except . . . Barry had told J, hadn’t he? “Fine. I’m gonna lay some news on you, then. You ready for the news?” She said she was ready for the news. “Planet X isn’t critical,” he said. “Important, yes. Critical, no. Who cares about a chunk of ice? Not so exciting. Her star is critical. A brown . It has, in moments of pique that occur every few million years, emitted a burst of highly lethal gamma rays and bombarded hapless worlds many light years distant. Every organism on those planets died instantly. Forget the radiation. She can do other things with her heavenly body. Nemesis Star first swung through the heart of the Oort Cloud eons past. Bye-bye dinosaurs. Nemesis’ last massive gravitational wave intersected the outer fringe of Sol System in the 1970s. Nemesis has an erratic orbit, you see. Earth got the succeeding ripple effect. Brownouts, tidal waves, earthquakes, all them suicides in Japan . . . A second wave arrived twenty years later. The third and final wave hit several days ago. Its dying edge will splash Earth in, oh, approximately forty-five seconds.” “What?” she said. “I don’t get it.” “And it’s okay. This is when they come through is all you need to understand. I’m here to greet them. That’s my real job, baby doll. I’m a greeter. Tonight is an extinction event; AKA: a close encounter of the intimate kind.” Delia fixated on the first part of his explanation. “Greeter. Like a store greeter?” She thought of the Central Casting grandad characters stationed at the entrance of certain big box stores who bared worn dentures in a permanent rictus. “Stay. I forgot my jacket.” J (wearing his jacket, no less) exited the car and be-bopped into the night. Stay. As if she were an obedient mutt. She rubbed her thigh and watched his shadow float along the driveway and meld into the larger darkness. Chills knifed through her. The windows began to fog over with her breath. He’d taken the keys. She couldn’t start the car to get warm or listen to the radio. Or drive away from the scene of the crime. Delia’s twenty-fifth birthday loomed on the horizon. She had majored in communication with a side of journalism at the University of Alaska Anchorage. She was a culture reporter, covering art and entertainment for the main Anchorage daily paper. People enjoyed her phone manner. In person, she was persistent and vaguely charming. Apolitical; non-judgmental as a Swiss banker. Daddy had always said not to bother her pretty little head. Daddy was a sexist pig to his dying breath; she heeded the advice anyhow. Half of what interviewees relayed went in one ear and out the other with nary a whistle-stop. No matter; her memory snapped shut on the most errant of facts like the teeth of a steel leghold trap. Memory is an acceptable day-to-day substitute for intellect. Her older brothers drove an ambulance and worked in construction respectively. Her little sister graduated from Onager High next spring. Little sister didn’t have journalistic aspirations. Sis yelled, Fake news! When gentlemen callers (bikers and punk rockers) loaded her into their chariots and hied into the sunset. Delia lived in an apartment with two women. She owned a dog named Atticus. Her roommates loved Atticus and took care of him when she couldn’t make it home at a reasonable hour. They joked about stealing him when they eventually moved onward and upward with trophy spouses and corporate employment. I’ll cut a bitch, she always said with a smile, not joking at all. Should she ring them right then for an emergency extraction? “Emergency” might be a tad extreme, yet it seemed a reasonable plan. Housemate A had left on an impromptu overnighter with her boyfriend. Housemate B’s car was in the shop. Housemate B helpfully suggested that Delia call a taxi, or, if she felt truly threatened, the cops. Housemate B was on record as disliking J. Am I feeling threatened? Delia pocketed her phone and searched her feelings. Her ambulance-driving brother (upholding the family tradition of advising Delia to beware a cruel, vicious world) frequently lectured about the hidden dangers surrounding his profession. Firemen and paramedics habitually rushed headlong into dicey situations, exposing themselves to the same risks as police and soldiers, except without guns or backup. Paramedics get jacked up every day. While you’re busy doing CPR on a subject, some street-dwelling motherfucker will shiv you in the kidney and grab your wallet. Only way to survive is to keep your head on a swivel and develop a sixth sense. The hairs on the back of your neck prickle, you better look around real quick. Words to live by. She touched the nape of her neck. Definitely prickling, definitely goosebumps and not from the chill. She climbed out and made her way into the bushes, clumsier than a prey animal born to the art of disappearing, but with no less alacrity. She stood behind a large spruce, hand braced against its rough bark. Sap stuck to her palm. It smelled bitter-green. Her thigh stung where a raspberry bush had torn her stocking and drawn blood. A starfield pulsed through ragged holes in the canopy. She knew jack about stars except the vague notion that mostly they radiated old, old light. Stars lived and died and some were devoured by black holes. Nearby, J whooped, then whistled; shrill and lethal as a raptor tuning a killing song. Happy and swift. He sounds well-fucked. Why did her mind leap there? Because his O-face was bestial? Because he loved to squeeze her throat when they fucked? The subconscious always knows best. As did Mama and big brother, apparently. J’s shadow flitted near the car. His whistle segued to the humming of a nameless, yet familiar tune. Delia shrank against the bole of the tree and heard him open the driver’s door. After a brief pause, he called her name. First, still inside and slightly muffled (did he think she was hiding under a seat cushion?); second, much louder toward the rising slope behind him; last, aimed directly toward her hiding spot. Her residual alcohol buzz evaporated as did most of the spit in her mouth. “Delia, sweetheart,” he said. “Buttercup, pumpkin, sugar booger. I meant to say earlier how much I adore the fact you didn’t wear makeup tonight. The soap and water look is sexxxxxy! I prefer a girl who doesn’t put on her face when she meets the world. It lights my fire, boy howdy. But now you gotta come here.” His voice thickened at the end. By some trick of the dark, his eyes flared dull-bright crimson. His lambent gaze pulsed for several heartbeats, then faded, and he became a silhouette again. “No?” he said in his regular voice. “Be that way. I hope you brought mad money, because you’re stranded on a lee shore. Should I cruise by your apartment instead? Would your roomies and your dog be pleased to meet me while I’m in this mood? Fuck it, sweetheart. I’ll surprise you.” He laughed, got into the car, and sped away. The red taillights seemed to hang forever; unblinking predatory eyes. The entire scene felt simultaneously shocking and inevitable. Of course, she speed-dialed her apartment to warn Housemate B. A robotic voice apologized that the call would not go through. It repeated this apology when she tried the police, her favorite taxi service, and finally, information. Static rose and rose until it roared in her ear and she gave up. She emerged from cover and removed her heels and waited, slightly crouched, to see if J would circle around to catch her in the open. A coyote stalking a ptarmigan. Yeah, that fit her escalating sense of dread—him creeping that ancient car, tongue lolling as he scanned the road for her fleeting shadow. The cell’s penlight projected a ghostly cone. She followed it up the hill to her nearest chance for sanctuary, the house of Barry F. Ah, dear sweet Barry F, swinging senior executive of a successful mining company. He wore wire rim glasses and expensive shirts, proclaimed his loathing of physical labor and cold weather (thus, he was assigned to Alaska, naturally), and hosted plenty of semi-formal parties as befitted the persona of a respectable corporate whip hand—which meant prostitutes were referred to as companions and any coke- snorting and pill-popping shenanigans occurred in a discreet guestroom. Notwithstanding jocular collegiality, Barry and J weren’t longtime friends, weren’t even close; their business orbits intersected and that was the extent of it. J collected acquaintances across a dizzying spectrum. Scoffing at the quality of humanity in general, he rubbed shoulders with gold-plated tycoons and grubby laborers alike. Similar to the spartan furnishings of his apartment, individual relationships were cultivated relative to his needs. What need do I satisfy? Physical? Emotional? Victim? Delia recalled a talk show wherein the host interviewed women who’d survived encounters with serial killers. One guest, a receptionist, had accompanied a coworker on a camping trip. The “nice guy” wined and dined her, then held a knife to her throat, ready to slash. At the last second, he decided to release her instead. I planned to kill you for three months. Go on, the fear in your eyes is enough. The receptionist boogied and reported the incident. Her camping buddy went to prison for the three murders he’d previously committed in that park. Which was to say, how could a woman ever know what squirmed in the brains of men? As Delia approached the house, the porchlight and the light streaming through the windows snuffed like blown matches. Muffled laughter and the steady thud of bass also ceased. At moments such as this, what was a humble arts and entertainment reporter to do? Nothing in her quarter century of life, on the Last Frontier notwithstanding, had prepared her for this experience: half- frozen, teeth chattering, absolutely alone. Darkness smothered the neighborhood. Not a solitary lamp glimmered among the terraced elevations or secluded cul-de-sacs. She looked south and west, down into the bowl of the city proper. From her vantage, it appeared that the entire municipality had gone dark. Anchorage’s skyline should have suffused the heavens with light pollution. More stars instead; a jagged reef of them, low and indifferent. Ice Age constellations that cast glacial over the mountains. The phone’s beam flickered, perhaps in response to her fear. She assumed the battery must be dying despite the fact she’d charged it prior to the evening’s events. It oozed crimson, spattering the stone steps as if she were swinging a censer of phosphorescent dye. She barged through the front door without a how-do-you-do. Warm, at least. In fact, humid as the breath of a panting dog. Her thoughts flashed to dear sweet Fido at the apartment. God, please don’t let J do anything to him. Oh yeah, and good luck to my housemate too. She hesitated in the foyer beneath the dead chandelier and put her shoes on. Her sight adjusted enough to discern the contours of her environment. No one spoke, which seemed ominous. Most definitely ominous. A gaggle of drunks trapped in a sudden blackout could be expected to utter any number of exclamatory comments. Girls would shriek in mock terror and some bluff would surely announce he’d be checking the fuse box straight away. There’d be a bit of obligatory ass-grabbing, right? Where were all the cell phones and keychain penlights? A faucet dripped; heating ducts creaked in the walls. This was hardcore Bermuda Triangle-Mary Celeste shit. Snagging a landline was the first order of business. Her heels clicked ominously as she moved around the grand staircase and deeper into the house to its spacious, partially sunken living room. Everyone awaited her there. Wine glasses and champagne flutes partially raised in toast; heads thrown back, bared teeth glinting here and there; others half-turned, frozen mid-glance, mid-step, mid-gesticulation. Only dolls could be frozen in such exaggerated positions of faux life. The acid reek of disgorged bowels and viscera filled Delia’s nostrils. She smelled blood soaked into dresses and blood dripping from cuffs and hosiery; she smelled blood as it pooled upon the carpet and coagulated in the vents. Her dying cell phone chose that moment to give up the ghost entirely. She was thankful. Starlight permitted her the merest impressions of the presumed massacre, its contours and topography, nothing granular. Her nose and imagination supplied the rest. Which is to say, bile rose in her throat and her mind fogged over. Questions of why and how did not register. The nauseating intimacy of this abominable scene overwhelmed such trivial considerations. A closet door opened like an eyeless socket near the baby grand piano. Atticus trotted forth. Delia recognized his general shape and the jingle of his vaccination tags and because for the love of everything holy, who else? The dog stopped near a throng of mutilated party-goers and lapped the carpet between shoes and sandals with increasing eagerness. A human silhouette emerged next and sat on the piano bench. The shape could’ve been almost anybody. The figure’s thin hand passed through a shaft of starlight and plinked a key several times. B-flat? Delia retained a vague notion of chords—a high school crush showed her the rudiments as a maneuver to purloin her virtue. Yes, B flat, over and over. Heavily, then softly, softly, nigh invisibly, and heavily again, discordant, jarring, threatening. I’m sorry you had to bear witness. These words weren’t uttered by the figure. They originated at a distance of light years, uncoiling within her consciousness. Her father’s voice. The human animal is driven by primal emotions and urges. How great is your fear, Delia? Does it fit inside a breadbox? Does it fit inside your clutch? This house? The shape at the piano gestured with a ’s casual flourish and the faint radiance of the stars flickered to a reddish hue. The red light intensified and seeped into the room. The voice in her head again: Looking for Mr. Goodbar stuck with you. Diane Keaton’s fate frightened you as a girl and terrifies you as a woman. In J, you suspect you finally drew the short straw. The man with a knife in his pocket, a strangling cord, a snub-nose revolver, the ticket stub with your expiration date. The man to take you camping and return alone. And sweetie, the bastard resembles me, wouldn’t you say? Ice tinkled in glasses—spinning and slopping. Glasses toppled and fell from nerveless fingers. Shadow-Atticus ceased slurping and made himself scarce behind a couch. He trailed inky pawprints. Timbers groaned; the heart of the living room was released from the laws of physics—it bent at bizarre, corkscrew angles, simultaneously existing on a plane above and below the rest of the interior. Puffs of dust erupted as cracks shot through plaster. The floor tilted and the guests were pulled together, packed cheek to jowl. There followed a long, dreadful pause. Delia had sprawled to her hands and knees during the abrupt gravitational shift. Forces dragged against her, but she counterbalanced as one might to avoid plummeting off a cliff. She finally got a clean, soul-scarring gander at her erstwhile party companions. Each had died instantaneously via some force that inflicted terrible bruises, suppurating wounds, and ruptures. The corpses were largely intact and rigidly positioned as a gallery of wax models. Strands of metal wire perforated flesh at various junctures, drew the bodies upright, and connected them into a mass. The individual strands gleamed and converged overhead as a thick spindle that ascended toward the dome of ceiling, and infinitely farther. The shape at the piano struck a key and its note was reciprocated by an omnidirectional chime that began at the nosebleed apex of the scale and descended precipitously, boring into plaster, concrete, and bone. The house trembled. Delia pushed herself backward into a wall where normal gravity resumed. She huddled, tempted to make a break for it, and also too petrified to move. There are two kinds of final girls. The kind who escape and the kind who die. You’re the second kind. I am very, very proud, kiddo. You’ll do big things. Cracks split the roof, revealing a viscid abyss with a mouthful of half- swallowed nebulae. It chimed and howled, eternally famished. Bits of tile plummeted into the expanse, joining dead stars. Shoe tips scraped as the guests lifted en masse, lazily revolving like a bleeding mobile carved for an infant god. The mobile jerkily ascended, tugged into oblivion at the barbed terminus of a fisherman’s line. Delia glanced down to behold a lone strand of the (god?) wire burrowing into her wrist, seeking a vein or a bone to anchor itself. She wrenched free and pitched backward against a wall. The chiming receded, so too the red glow, and the void contentedly suckled its morsel. Meanwhile, pianist hunched into a fetal position and dissolved. Run along, her father said. Run along, dear. Don’t worry your pretty head about any of this. Delia ran along. • • • •

Alaska winter didn’t kill her. Not that this was necessarily Alaska. The land turned gray and waterways froze. Snow swirled over empty streets and empty highways and buried inert vehicles. Powerlines collapsed and copses of black spruce and paper birch stood vigil as the sun paled every day until it became a white speck. Delia travelled west, then south, snagging necessities from deserted homes and shops. Her appearance transformed—she wore layers of wool and flannel, high-dollar pro ski goggles, an all-weather parka, snow pants, and thick boots. Her tent, boxes of food, water, and medical supplies went loaded into a banana sled courtesy of a military surplus store. She acquired a light hunting rifle and taught herself to use it, in case worse came to worst. She didn’t have a plan other than to travel until she found her way back to a more familiar version of reality. Or to walk until she keeled over; whichever came first. In the beginning, she hated it. That changed over the weeks and months as the suburban softness gave way to a metallic finish. Survival can transition into a lifestyle. She sheltered inside houses and slept on beds. She burned furniture for warmth. However, the bloodstains disquieted her as did eerie noises that wafted from basements and attics during the bleak a.m. hours. She eventually camped outdoors among the woodland creatures who shunned abandoned habitations of humankind as though city limits demarcated entry to an invisible zone of death. The animals had a point, no doubt. Speaking of animals. Wild beasts haunted the land in decent numbers. Domestic creatures were extinct, seemingly departed to wherever their human masters currently dwelled. With the exception of the other Atticus. The dog lurked on the periphery of her vision; a blur in the undergrowth, a rusty patch upon the snow. At night he dropped mangled ptarmigans and rabbits at the edge of her campfire light. He kept his distance, watching over her as she slept. The musk of his gore-crusted fur, the rawness of his breath, infiltrated her dreams. In other dreams, her mother coalesced for a visit. Now it can be said. Your father murdered eight prostitutes before lung cancer cut him down. The police never suspected that sweet baby-faced sonofabitch. You were onto him, somehow. She woke with a start and the other Atticus’ eyes reflected firelight a few yards to her left in the gauze of darkness that enfolded the world. “Thanks for the talk, Mom.” Delia continued to walk and pull the sled. Sometimes on a road, or with some frequency, on a more direct route through woods and over water. She didn’t encounter any human survivors, nor any tracks or other sign. However, she occasionally glimpsed crystallized hands and feet jutting from a brush pile, or an indistinct form suspended in the translucent depths of a lake. She declined to investigate, lowered her head and marched onward. One late afternoon, near spring, but not quite, J (dressed in black camo and Army-issue snowshoes) leaped from cover with a merry shriek and knocked her flat. He lay atop her and squeezed her throat inexorably, his eyes sleepy with satisfaction. “If it were my decision, I’d make you a pet. You don’t belong here, sugar pie.” He well and truly applied his brutish strength. Brutish strength proved worthless. His expression changed as terror flooded in and his grip slackened. “Oh, my God. I didn’t know. They didn’t warn me . . .” Her eyes teared and she regarded him as if through a pane of water. Her eyes teared because she was laughing so hard. “Too late, asshole. Years and years too late.” She brushed his hands aside. “I’m the second kind.” He scrambled to his feet and ran across fresh powder toward the woods as fast as his snowshoes could carry him, which wasn’t very. She retrieved the rifle, chambered a round, and tracked him with the scope. A moving target proved more challenging than plinking at soda bottles and pie tins. Her first two shots missed by a mile. Delia made camp; then she hiked over to J and dragged him back. He gazed at her adoringly, arms trailing in the snow. He smiled an impossibly broad, empty smile. That night, the fire crackled and sent sparks homeward. J grinned and grinned, his body limp as a mannequin caught in the snarled boughs of a tree where she’d strung him as an afterthought. The breeze kicked up into a chinook that tasted of green sap and thawing earth. “Everything will be different tomorrow,” she said to the flames and the changing stars. Limbs creaked. J nodded, nodded; slavishly agreeable. His shadow and the shadow of the tree branches spread grotesquely across the frozen ground. The wind carried to her faint sounds of the dog gnawing and slurping at a blood-drenched snowbank. The wind whispered that Atticus would slake himself and then creep into the receding darkness, gone forever. Where she was headed, he couldn’t follow. “So, while there’s time, let’s have a talk,” Delia said to Grinning J. “When we make it home, tell me where I can find more boys just like you.”

©2018 by Laird Barron. Originally published in Ashes and Entropy, edited by Robert S. Wilson. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Laird Barron is the award-winning author of several books, including the horror collections The Imago Sequence, and The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. His stories have also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. The novella “—30—” was recently adapted as the film They Remain. His latest novels chronicle the saga of Isaiah Coleridge, a hard boiled detective featured in Blood Standard, Black Mountain, and the forthcoming Worse ; all published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Barron currently resides in the Rondout Valley writing stories about the evil that men do. Dégustation Ashley Deng | 3509 words

You are a spore, barely more than a twinkle in your many parents’ breeding- breathing air. They are your family, among other things, living as a colony in the dim light beneath an abandoned office building. They fill the already-damp air with the encouraging words of hopes and aspirations for you and your siblings. And though you are nothing more than a speck in the air, the sentiment is warm, just as the earthy mulch you settle into that embraces you like a blanket. Your parents—the colony—tidy their gills, exchange tender kisses on lips and on cheeks, and close the reed-blinds just enough to still let in the silver moonlight from above. The mulch smelled of the world, your parents would later tell you. The nursery was the world, for all you knew. And though your people grow fast, and you and your siblings are on your feet, free from the mulch before your parents could blink (as they tell you), your lives are in the nursery with only short trips for play and food. When you are old enough, you go to school with the other kids. You and your siblings are sent to different schools, in different districts; far enough away that the subtle differences of your people don’t get noticed. You’re just a slightly odd child among the many. The teachers take little notice, but the kids, oh somehow you’ve been caught in the kids’ eyes, their stares from afar feel menacing more than simple curiosity. You can’t quite pinpoint why, not yet. Perhaps, you think, your skin is too plump, too ashen. Perhaps they can see that you are different. (you don’t notice perhaps that your responses to their questions come out jumbled to them; you aren’t aware of how they sound just yet) Learning to speak with the other kids is like learning to speak in tongues. You find that constant smiling is off-putting to them, but laughing as a response to stories puts them at ease. You learn this balance, carefully navigating a needle through a tightly-woven tapestry to place your thread among the hundreds of thousands already coexisting as a lush landscape. You feel yourself falter every time you remember the way your classmates sometimes speak to you, and you can’t help but wonder why. Eventually, you learn the scripts. The scripts are still not enough. (you don’t yet know that your conclusions are drawn from a network of connections within the aether of your mind; strange to the other kids yet ruthlessly efficient to you) You’re alone at recess, as you always are, when a classmate greets you one day (a girl by the name of Jenny, whose hair twists in curls the other girls call beautiful) with a grin you’ve never seen her bare. Not to you, anyway. She’s friends with all the other girls in your class, and she’s normally found with her clique of tight-knit preteens. Although, you don’t see them right now. You feel a flutter of anxiety and discomfort that flies up from your belly to the tips of your ears. You frown at her with suspicion. “Do you need help with something?” you ask. Because they only talk to you when they want help. “No!” Jenny replies. “I wanted to talk to you.” You don’t make eye contact, not that you ever do, but you can see out of the edges of your vision that her eyes are pinned to yours like needles. You search over her shoulder for signs of her friends among the other children playing on the pavement. You don’t question her further, either; your mouth is closed like someone has sewn shut your lips, though the pressure builds inside for you to leave. “What, you’re not going to say anything?” Jenny asks, tilting her head as if disappointed. Your eyes pass hers briefly and you try to respond with a smile. Gentle, you hope. Sympathetic. “Talk to me about what?” You drag each word out of your mouth like molasses; slow, viscous, and unwilling from the aether’s tight grip. Jenny’s expression changes; she puffs out her cheeks, contorts her face into a pout, and mutters “weirdo,” under her breath. (You still hear her, though; the tone of her voice will haunt you for longer than her words.) “Nevermind!” she says, louder this time. “They dared me to come talk to you.” You search the playground again for her friends and this time you find them, peering around the corner of the school like a small flock of observant seagulls. Jenny takes off with her same grin from before (glee laced with malice and no fear of consequence), running to meet with her friends.

• • • •

High school is slightly better. One of your siblings is here, although your family was careful in ensuring no one else knows you’re siblings. You’re told that the world thinks you’re cousins. This works out okay, although you two are never in the same classes together. It isn’t long before you make a friend. That is, Kat talks to you like she needs you and spends her spare time by your side (although you don’t yet realize that she doesn’t listen to you, and your friendship grows like a rosebush around you, thorns threatening to pierce from all sides as you try to smell the flowers). She’s kind, you think. She offers you advice and tells you she knows it can be harsh sometimes “but the real world sucks!” as she’s exclaimed more than once. You’re walking home with her after school when she offhandedly comments on the small bump on your chin. “That’s just a zit, right?” she asks. “It looks . . . weird. Y’know, like it isn’t red or anything. I get zits too so, like, don’t worry, I’m not, like, judging you or anything. It just looks funny.” You feel around your chin with the pads of your fingers, brush over the bump with your thumb. You smile nervously and tell Kat you’ll take a look at it later. “I’d bring you my concealer, but I don’t think it’ll match your skin,” she says, putting her hand next to your face. “I’m definitely lighter than you.”

• • • •

When you arrive home, you head straight to the bathroom before your mother can ask you about your day. You look into the mirror and see a girl with ashen brown skin and chestnut hair. You look fine, you think. Maybe a little more grey than the others. Maybe a bit rounder in the face. But you look like a girl, just like all the others your age, and your eyes fall to the pale white bump on your chin. You know what this is, and you can’t blame Kat for thinking it’s acne. And you know it’ll get bigger. As always, your family prepares dinner for the colony. It’s a mix of mothers and fathers who come home early enough to prepare a feast and those who are home already, resting as their sprouts mature. It’s been a particularly wet week, and your home smells of fresh earth; the adults of your family have removed fresh sprouts from their bodies and now prepare them for the meal. Suddenly, it makes sense that you have one on your chin. You’re about the age when they start to grow, and the moisture in the air has been especially fertile. But you’re young, and your body is not yet used to producing sprouts so progress on yours has been slow. You find your mother in the kitchen, cutting a sprout off her shoulder. She stayed home from work when it began to protrude past her skin and she could no longer cover it up with her sleeves. Another, smaller sprout juts out from the base of her neck. That one, you notice—in its twisting maitake form—has not quite finished its growth. It graces your mother’s neck like petals, delicate and promising. You suspect your mother will be taking more time off work. “Homework?” she asks as she slices the portobello sprout she took from her shoulder. You shake your head. “Can you go check on the elders, then? Take a basket.” You nod and take a small, woven basket and duck under the low doorframe that leads into the basement below the basement. The ground here is fruitful, you can smell it in the air. It’s musky and teeming with life and the darkness is peppered with luminescent fungi protruding from cracks in the brick and lazy fireflies floating along in a haze. Your grandparents—the colony’s grandparents—sit amongst the mulch and rocks in caverns connected by small hallways. They busy themselves with books and talks over tea, while some of your younger siblings run through the caverns shuttling food and drinks. You sidestep out of the way as a child almost runs into you plate-first. Next to you, a grandfather laughs. “Be careful now,” he says. “These kids have energy and absolutely everywhere to put it.” You smile as you take your seat at a table filled with grandparents. In the dim light, you see their faces; the cracks and wrinkles in ashen skin, their hair darkened with age. Their sprouts are numerous, with too many varieties to name, all along their arms and faces and legs and hands. You hold up your basket. “Mom wanted me to come collect,” you say. A grandmother pulls out a small knife with a shaky hand and presses it into yours. “Go ahead,” she says. “We’ll get back to our game after.” And, surely enough, as your eyes adjust to the darkness, you notice the cards on the table laid out in a few games of solitaire. The elders are helpful in pointing you to their sprouts. They smile as you cut away mushroom after mushroom, patting your arm in thanks as you free them of their growths. (this feels natural, not just because this what your people do, but because you are helping; the disconnected parts of your mind clicking together in pleasant rhythms) “Bring us some of the feast,” they ask, as though the colony never did. Growing sprouts is too energy-intensive not to give back to the colony.

• • • •

You cut off your first sprout the day you visit Kat’s house. Her parents aren’t home, though she insists she’s allowed to have you over for a sleepover. Hesitant but excited, you agree to dinner but make an excuse to not sleep over. The sprout pops from your skin—a shiny button mushroom, pearly white and perfectly round—on your way home from school. Panicking, you pinch it at its base, pluck it free (it doesn’t hurt at all, despite what you expected) and, watching in the reflection of a closed coffee shop, you watch your skin close up around it, like nothing was there before. Holding the sprout in your hand, you get an idea. “I’ll cook!” you say as you step foot into Kat’s home. Her house feels like a suburban castle, although from the way she talks about money, you expected something smaller. Still, it feels cozy and more like the expectation of a home than the basement of an abandoned office building in which you live. “Cook what?” asks Kat, leading you to the kitchen. “I was just gonna order pizza or something. You can cook?” “I help my mom all the time,” you reply. You unload the ingredients bought on your way over from your backpack; your sprout stands out from other button mushrooms in a paper bag—rounder and whiter than the store-bought ones. You pull it out to show Kat. “I found this growing on the way home,” you lie, although you know it’s a safe lie. “Thought I’d make mushroom pasta for us.” Kat’s eyes narrow. “You know how to pick mushrooms? How do I know that’s not gonna like, kill me or something?” You shrug, reciting another lie you’ve practised over and over on your way here. “My parents are mushroom scientists,” you say. “Uhh, mycologists. They taught me how to forage.” You drop it back into the bag and hand it to her. “You can compare them yourself!” You feel the tinge of relief as she shakes her head and tells you she trusts you, and the high of the day gives way to the fatigue that goes into growing a sprout. The spot on your chin feels numb. Kat thanks you for cooking (her words sound hollow, but you think you’re misreading the leaves for thorns), although she brings up that she was just going to order pizza when your pasta takes more time than you expect to cook. You fry up the mushrooms and your sprout in a pan of hot butter, crushed garlic, and a bed of tart greens. The world comes together in Kat’s kitchen, and you hope she appreciates it, despite her impatience. When you taste your completed dinner, you’re satisfied with the dish, even if it’s a little on the salty side. Kat doesn’t finish it. You watch her take the empty bowls and throw the untouched pasta away. (you don’t yet know that the break you feel is the scratching of thorns tearing your skin as you slowly break free; all you feel now is the twisting, shearing pain) “I guess I’ll go,” you say instead of asking what was wrong. You lie to both her and yourself because it’s easier not to cry when you believe it. “I have a lot of homework to do tonight anyway,” you say. You swallow pride with sadness, churning it into disgust in your belly and tying a knot in your throat. You force yourself to smile because you know it puts people at ease, but the pit in your stomach and tangled, unformed thoughts in your mind swell into a gully. You know you should thank Kat for having you over, but the words don’t reach your tongue.

• • • •

When you tell her, your mother suggests you keep your sprouts to yourself. And that’s what you do, for a time. You cut them off before they get too big, stay home from school on particularly damp days, and sleep all day as the sprouts mature, leaving you too exhausted to do much else. You keep them in a small paper bag in your room where you know they’ll stay fresh. You bring one out sometimes to show Kat (knowing now that she’s not exactly the best person to impress with your cooking), who does seem to entertain your interest in foraging mushrooms. Once, when you bring a small handful— porcinis this time, bright yellow and buttery—you see her eyes widen. “Whoa, aren’t those super expensive?” she asks. You shrug. “Can I . . . Can I have them? Mom will be impressed that I brought these back.” You agree, and feel a small spark of acceptance clicking into place as your friend takes your offering. You drop them back into their paper bag, take great care in folding the opening closed, and hand them to Kat. The next day is normal. Kat talks at you, not with you, about her latest TV show obsession that you haven’t been interested in watching, and you wait until the very end of the day before asking how dinner went with her mushrooms. Your friend simply shrugs. “Mom didn’t cook it,” she says. “Oh,” you reply, disappointed. “Why not?” “She didn’t trust them.” You catch Kat’s eye. “Hey! I mean, how do you know they for sure aren’t poisonous? I know your parents taught you and all, but lots of things look like other things.” You only nod. You know the energy it took for those sprouts to mature. You know that the sprouts that grow on your people are not poisonous. But that is a secret you can’t reveal. And so, you half-heartedly—defeatedly—agree that there’s a chance you’re wrong, and that it’s safer Kat’s family doesn’t eat them. You only wish Kat had told you herself.

• • • •

When you finally move out for university, you’re tired of being talked at and not listened to. You make friends with the others in first year; brief, fleeting relationships you hope will last (until you learn that they, too, find you cold and standoffish, despite the warm smiles and gentle laughter). You offer to cook for your floor of your residence, and they think kindly of you, despite the mixed reactions to meals cooked with mushrooms. The cooking is therapeutic, an extension of your efforts as you produce something tangible to be enjoyed and shared. “Some of these are hard to get, some are just expensive,” you tell them of the maitakes and morels and chanterelles and porcinis. “Just . . . try them?” you insist with a smile even you aren’t sure is convincing. You find friends who listen and smile and give advice, and you’re comforted for the first time in too many years. Something feels like it’s settled into place, and you offer to share what you can. Your friends here, they trust you and they take your offerings happily. That is, until Oliver breaks up with Heather and you’re told there’s another rule you’ve not yet learned: the girls stick together, even if you were closer friends with Oliver. You suggest cooking a post-break-up feast, mentally preparing yourself to use the stores of your sprouts that sit in your fridge. Heather, Emily, and Pauline agree, but it’s only Pauline who shows up. Pauline is sympathetic. She even offers to take some of the food home. You like her, enough that you hope her words aren’t empty and that her actions are genuine. She hovers in the doorway as though she senses the awkwardness, and smiles and laughs sympathetically at the whole ordeal. “Shit happens,” she says with an exasperated smile. “It’s probably nothing, but . . . take care of yourself.” “It feels personal,” you say. “That’s all.” (it feels nice, too, saying that; you’ve learned to identify your pain even if you’re still learning the language to describe it) “I dunno. If you don’t want to ask, you don’t have to. Especially since they didn’t say anything. I mean, look, I know it’s shitty, but would it be worse if I asked them for you?” “No, no, it’s fine. T-Thanks, though.” (you don’t want to be a burden, and asking feels like you’re intruding upon a decision already made regardless of how you were affected; despite your friendship some walls are built with plans you were never privy to) You’re left alone in your apartment when Pauline leaves. It takes less than a month after the break-up for neither Heather nor Oliver to talk to you ever again. (you don’t know, yet, how fleeting these friendships can be; how deep confessions expressed long past midnight can be ignored and pushed aside when they look at you again years later like you’re a stranger) You feel another sprout growing on the inside of your elbow, its brown ribbon-like gills slowly pushing up against your skin. That, you think, will take a while. And it does. You spend the next few days at home, relaxing between classes and watching the rain come down against your apartment windows as you sit nested under blankets and sipping vanilla tea. You consider calling Pauline over for dinner, but as the maitake blooms and you watch it unfold its petals as it emerges from your skin, you think otherwise. The day it blooms fully from your arm, you take your knife, dig it out from the base, and admire it on your cutting board for a moment before finding your nicest bowl to put it in. No cooking it this time, you think. You make yourself a pot of tea, placing it and your sprout on your coffee table as you nestle into your blankets and pillows on the couch and swipe on the TV to something you love. You break off pieces from your maitake, taking in the beauty of the gills and soft skin. (the fruits of your labour deserve to be savoured for once, you think—for you understand your work and your thoughts and your intentions—you have no one else to please) Your sprout is yours to eat, to indulge; piece by piece, all to yourself.

©2020 by Ashley Deng.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ashley Deng is a Canadian-born Chinese-Jamaican writer with a love of fantasy and all things Gothic. She studied biochemistry with an interest in making accessible the often- cryptic world of science and medicine. When not writing, she spends her spare time overthinking society, culture, and . You can find her at aedeng.wordpress.com or on Twitter at @ashesandmochi.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight That Tiny Flutter of the Heart I Used to Call Love Robert Shearman | 7084 words

Karen thought of them as her daughters, and tried to love them with all her heart. Because, really, wasn’t that the point? They came to her, all frilly dresses, and fine hair, and plastic limbs, and eyes so large and blue and innocent. And she would name them, and tell them she was their mother now; she took them to her bed, and would give them tea parties, and spank them when they were naughty; she promised she would never leave them, or, at least, not until the end. Her father would bring them home. Her father travelled a lot, and she never knew where he’d been, if she asked he’d just laugh and tap his nose and say it was all hush-hush—but she could sometimes guess from how exotic the daughters were, sometimes the faces were strange and foreign, one or two were nearly mulatto. Karen didn’t care, she loved them all anyway, although she wouldn’t let the mulatto ones have quite the same nursery privileges. “Here you are, my sweetheart, my cake, my baby doll,” and from somewhere within Father’s great jacket he’d produce a box, and it was usually gift- wrapped, and it usually had a ribbon on it—”This is all for you, my baby doll.” She liked him calling her that, although she suspected she was too old for it now, she was very nearly eight years old. She knew what the daughters were. They were tributes. That was what Nicholas called them. They were tributes paid to her, to make up for the fact that Father was so often away, just like in the very olden days when the Greek heroes would pay tributes to their gods with sacrifices. Nicholas was very keen on Greek heroes, and would tell his sister stories of great battles and wooden horses and heels. She didn’t need tributes from Father; she would much rather he didn’t have to leave home in the first place. Nicholas would tell her of the tributes Father had once paid Mother—he’d bring her jewellery, and fur coats, and tickets to the opera. Karen couldn’t remember Mother very well, but there was that large portrait of her over the staircase. In a way, Karen saw Mother more often than she did Father. Mother was wearing a black ball gown, and such a lot of jewels, and there was a small studied smile on her face. Sometimes when Father paid tribute to Karen, she would try and give that same studied smile, but she wasn’t sure she’d ever got it right. • • • •

Father didn’t call Nicholas “angel cake” or “baby doll,” he called him “Nicholas,” and Nicholas called him “sir.” And Father didn’t bring Nicholas tributes. Karen felt vaguely guilty about that—that she’d get showered with gifts and her brother would get nothing. Nicholas told her not to be so silly. He wasn’t a little girl, he was a man. He was ten years older than Karen, and lean, and strong, and he was attempting to grow a moustache; the hair was a bit too fine for it to be seen in bright light, but it would darken as he got older. Karen knew her brother was a man, and that he wouldn’t want toys. But she’d give him a hug sometimes, almost impulsively, when Father came home and seemed to ignore him—and Nicholas never objected when she did. Eventually Nicholas would say to Karen, “It’s time,” and she knew what that meant. And she’d feel so sad, but again, wasn’t that the point? She’d go and give her daughter a special tea party then, and she’d play with her all day; she’d brush her hair, and let her see the big wide world from out of the top window; she wouldn’t get cross even if her daughter got naughty. And she wouldn’t try to explain. That would all come after. Karen would go to bed at the usual time, Nanny never suspected a thing. But once Nanny had left the room and turned out the light, Karen would get up and put on her clothes again, nice thick woollen ones, sometimes it was cold out there in the dark. And she’d bundle her daughter up warm as well. And once the house was properly still she’d hear a tap at the door, and there Nicholas would be, looking stern and serious and just a little bit excited. She’d follow him down the stairs and out of the house; they’d usually leave by the tradesmen’s entrance, the door was quieter. They wouldn’t talk until they were far away, and very nearly into the woods themselves. He’d always give Karen a few days to get to know her daughters before he came for them. He wanted her to love them as hard as she could. He always seemed to know when it was the right time. With one doll, her very favourite, he had given her only until the weekend—it had been love at first sight, the eyelashes were real hair, and she’d blink when picked up, and if she were cuddled tight she’d say “Mama.” Sometimes Nicholas gave them as long as a couple of months; some of the dolls were a fright, and cold to the touch, and it took Karen a while to find any affection for them at all. But Karen was a girl with a big heart. She could love anything, given time and patience. Nicholas must have been carefully watching his sister, just to see when her heart reached its fullest—and she never saw him do it; he usually seemed to ignore her altogether, as if she were still too young and too silly to be worth his attention. But then, “It’s time,” he would say, and sometimes it wasn’t until that very moment that Karen would realise she’d fallen in love at all, and of course he was right, he was always right.

• • • •

Karen liked playing in the woods by day. By night they seemed strange and unrecognisable, the branches jutted out at peculiar angles as if trying to bar her entrance. But Nicholas wasn’t afraid, and he always knew his way. She kept close to him for fear he would rush on ahead and she would be lost. And she knew somehow that if she got lost, she’d be lost forever—and it may turn daylight eventually, but that wouldn’t matter, she’d have been trapped by the woods of the night, and the woods of the night would get to keep her. And at length they came to the clearing. Karen always supposed that the clearing was at the very heart of the woods, she didn’t know why. The tight press of trees suddenly lifted, and here there was space—no flowers, nothing, some grass, but even the grass was brown, as if the sunlight couldn’t reach it here. And it was as if everything had been cut away to make a perfect circle that was neat and tidy and so empty, and it was as if it had been done especially for them. Karen could never find the clearing in the daytime. But then, she had never tried very hard. Nicholas would take her daughter, and set her down upon that browning grass. He would ask Karen for her name, and Karen would tell him. Then Nicholas would tell Karen to explain to the daughter what was going to happen here. “Betsy, you have been sentenced to death.” And Nicholas would ask Karen upon what charge. “Because I love you too much, and I love my brother more.” And Nicholas would ask if the daughter had any final words to offer before sentence was carried out; they never had. He would salute the condemned then, nice and honourably. And Karen would by now be nearly in tears; she would pull herself together. “You mustn’t cry,” said Nicholas, “you can’t cry, if you cry the death won’t be a clean one.” She would salute her daughter too. What happened next would always be different. When he’d been younger, Nicholas had merely hanged them. He’d put rope around their little necks and take them to the closest tree and let them drop down from the branches, and there they’d swing for a while, their faces still frozen with trusting smiles. As he’d become a man he’d found more inventive ways to despatch them. He’d twist off their arms, he’d drown them in buckets of water he’d already prepared, he’d stab them with a fork. He’d say to Karen, “And how much do you love this one?” And if Karen told him she loved her very much, so much the worse for her daughter—he’d torture her a little first, blinding her, cutting off her skin, ripping off her clothes and then toasting with matches the naked stuff beneath. It was always harder to watch these executions because Karen really had loved them, and it was agony to see them suffer so. But she couldn’t lie to her brother. He would have seen through her like glass.

• • • •

That last time had been the most savage, though Karen hadn’t known it would be the last time, of course—but Nicholas, Nicholas might have had an inkling. When they’d reached the clearing, he had tied Mary-Lou to the tree with string. Tightly, but not too tight—Karen had said she hadn’t loved Mary-Lou especially, and Nicholas didn’t want to be cruel. He had even wrapped his own handkerchief around her eyes as a blindfold. Then he’d produced from his knapsack Father’s gun. “You can’t use that!” Karen said. “Father will find out! Father will be angry!” “Phooey to that,” said Nicholas. “I’ll be going to war soon, and I’ll have a gun all of my own. Had you heard that, Carrie? That I’m going to war?” She hadn’t heard. Nanny had kept it from her, and Nicholas had wanted it to be a surprise. He looked at the gun. “It’s a Webley Mark IV service revolver,” he said. “Crude and old-fashioned, just like Father. What I’ll be getting will be much better.” He narrowed his eyes, and aimed the gun, fired. There was an explosion, louder than Karen could ever have dreamed—and she thought Nicholas was shocked too, not only by the noise, but by the recoil. Birds scattered. Nicholas laughed. The bullet had gone wild. “That was just a warm up,” he said. It was on his fourth try that he hit Mary-Lou. Her leg was blown off. “Do you want a go?” “No,” said Karen. “It’s just like at a fairground,” he said. “Come on.” She took the gun from him, and it burned in her hand, it smelled like burning. He showed her how to hold it, and she liked the way his hand locked around hers as he corrected her aim. “It’s all right,” he said to his little sister gently, “we’ll do it together. There’s nothing to be scared of.” And really he was the one who pulled the trigger, but she’d been holding on too, so she was a bit responsible, and Nicholas gave a whoop of delight and Karen had never heard him so happy before, she wasn’t sure she’d ever heard him happy. And when they looked back at the tree, Mary-Lou had disappeared. “I’m going across the seas,” he said. “I’m going to fight. And every man I kill, listen, I’m killing him for you. Do you understand me? I’ll kill them all because of you.” He kissed her then on the lips. It felt warm and wet and the moustache tickled, and it was hard too, as if he were trying to leave an imprint there, as if when he pulled away he wanted to leave a part of him behind. “I love you,” he said. “I love you too.” “Don’t forget me,” he said. Which seemed such an odd thing to say—how was she going to forget her own brother? They’d normally bury the tribute then, but they couldn’t find any trace of Mary-Lou’s body. Nicholas put the gun back in the knapsack, he offered Karen his hand. She took it. They went home.

• • • •

They had never found Nicholas’ body either; at the funeral, his coffin was empty, and Father told Karen it didn’t matter, that good form was the thing. Nicholas had been killed in the Dardanelles, and Karen looked for it upon the map, and it seemed such a long way to go to die. There were lots of funerals in the town that season, and Father made sure that Nicholas’ was the most lavish, no expense was spared. The family was so small now, and they watched together as the coffin was lowered into the grave. Father looking proud, not sad. And Karen refusing to cry—”Don’t cry,” she said to the daughter she’d brought with her, “you mustn’t cry, or it won’t be clean”—and yet she dug her fingernails deep into her daughter’s body to try to force some tears from it.

• • • •

Julian hadn’t gone to war. He’d been born just too late. And of course he said he was disappointed, felt cheated even, he loved his country and whatever his country might stand for, and he had wanted to demonstrate that love in the very noblest of ways. He said it with proper earnestness, and some days he almost meant it. His two older brothers had gone to fight, and both had returned home, and the younger had brought back some sort of medal with him. The brothers had changed. They had less time for Julian, and Julian felt that was no bad thing. He was no longer worth the effort of bullying. One day he’d asked his eldest brother what it had been like out there on the Front. And the brother turned to him in surprise, and Julian was surprised too, what had he been thinking of?—and he braced himself for the pinch or Chinese burn that was sure to follow. But instead the brother had just turned away; he’d sucked his cigarette down to the very stub, and sighed, and said it was just as well Julian hadn’t been called up, the trenches were a place for real men. The whole war really wouldn’t have been his bag at all. When Julian Morris first met Karen Davison, neither was much impressed. Certainly, Julian was well used to girls finding him unimpressive: he was short, his face was too round and homely, his thighs quickly thinned into legs that looked too spindly to support him. There was an effeminacy about his features that his father had thought might have been cured by a spell fighting against Germans, but Julian didn’t know whether it would have helped; he tried to take after his brothers, tried to lower his voice and speak more gruffly, he drank beer, he took up smoking. But even there he’d got it all wrong somehow. The voice, however gruff, always rose in inflection no matter how much he tried to stop it. He sipped at his beer. He held his cigarette too languidly, apparently, and when he puffed out smoke it was always from the side of his mouth and never with a good, bold, manly blast. But for Julian to be unimpressed by a girl was a new sensation for him. Girls flummoxed Julian. With their lips and their breasts and their flowing contours. With their bright colours, all that perfume. Even now, if some aged friend of his mother’s spoke to him, he’d be reduced to a stammering mess. But Karen Davison did something else to Julian entirely. He looked at her across the ballroom and realised that he rather despised her. It wasn’t that she was unattractive, at first glance her figure was pretty enough. But she was so much older than the other girls, in three years of attending dances no man had yet snatched her up—and there was already something middle-aged about that face, something jaded. She looked bored. That was it, she looked bored. And didn’t care to hide it. Once in a while a man would approach her, take pity on her, ask her to dance. She would reject him, and off the suitor would scarper, with barely disguised relief. Julian had promised his parents that he would at least invite one girl on to the dance floor. It would hardly be his fault if that one girl he chose said no. He could return home, he’d be asked how he had got on, and if he were clever he might even be able to phrase a reply that concealed the fact he’d been rejected. Julian was no good at lying outright, his voice would squeak, and he would turn bright red. But not telling the truth? He’d had to find a way of mastering it. He approached the old maid. Now that she was close, he felt the usual panic rise within him, and he fought it down—look at her, he told himself, look at how hard she looks, like stone; she should be grateful you ask her to dance. He’d reached her. He opened his mouth to speak, realised his first word would be a stutter, put the word aside, found some new word to replace it, cleared his throat. Only then did the girl bother to look up at him. There was nothing welcoming in that expression, but nothing challenging either—she looked at him with utter indifference. “A dance?” he said. “Like? Would you?” And, stupidly, opened out his arms, as if to remind her what a dance was, as if without her he’d simply manage on his own in dumb show. She looked him up and down. Judging him, blatantly judging him. Not a smile upon her face. He waited for the refusal. “Very well,” she said then, though without any enthusiasm. He offered her his hand, and she took it by the fingertips, and rose to her feet. She was an inch or two taller than him. He smelled her perfume and didn’t like it. He put one hand on her waist, the other was left gently brushing against her glove. They danced. She stared at his face, still quite incuriously, but it was enough to make him blush. “You dance well,” she said. “Thank you.” “I don’t enjoy dancing.” “Then let us, by all means, stop.” He led her back to her chair. He nodded at her stiffly and prepared to leave. But she gestured towards the chair beside her, and he found himself bending down to sit in it. “Are you enjoying the ball?” he asked her. “I don’t enjoy talking either.” “I see.” And they sat in silence for a few minutes. At one point, he felt he should get up and walk away, and he shuffled in his chair to do so—and at that she turned to look at him, and managed a smile, and for that alone he decided to stay a little while longer. “Can I at least get you a drink?” She agreed. So he went to fetch her a glass of fizz. Across the room, he watched as another man approached and asked her to dance, and he suddenly felt a stab of jealousy that astonished him. She waved the man away, in irritation, and Julian pretended it was for his sake. He brought her back the fizz. “There you are,” he said. She sipped at it. He sipped at his the same way. “If you don’t like dancing,” he said to her, “and you don’t like talking, why do you come?” He already knew the answer, of course, it was the same reason he came, and she didn’t bother dignifying him with a reply. He laughed and hated how girlish it sounded. At length she said, “Thank you for coming,” as if this were her ball, as if he were her guest, and he realised he was being dismissed. He got to his feet. “Do you have a card?” she asked. Julian did. She took it, put it away without reading it. And Julian waited beside her for any further farewell, and when nothing came, he nodded at her once more and left her.

• • • • The very next day, Julian received a telephone call from a Mr. Davison, who invited him to have dinner with his daughter at his house that evening. Julian accepted. And because the girl had never bothered to give him her name, it took Julian a fair little time to work out who this Davison fellow might be. Julian wondered whether the evening would be formal, and so overdressed, just for safety’s sake. He took some flowers. He rang the bell, and some hatchet-faced old woman opened the front door. She showed him in. She told him that Mr. Davison had been called away on business and would be unable to dine with him that evening. Mistress Karen would receive him in the drawing room. She disappeared with his flowers, and Julian never saw them again and had no evidence indeed that Mistress Karen would ever see them either. At the top of the staircase, Julian saw there were two portraits. One was a giantess, a bejewelled matriarch sneering down at him, and Julian could recognise in her features the girl he had danced with the night before, and he was terrified of her, and he fervently hoped that Karen would never grow up to be like her mother. The other portrait, much smaller, was of some boy in army uniform. Karen was waiting for him. She was wearing the same dress she had worn the previous night. “I’m so glad you could come,” she intoned. “I’m glad you invited me.” “Let us eat.” So they went into the dining room and sat either end of a long table. The hatchet-face served them soup. “Thank you, Nanny,” Karen said. Julian tasted the soup. The soup was good. “It’s a very grand house,” said Julian. “Please, there’s no need to make conversation.” “All right.” The soup bowls were cleared away. Chicken was served. And, after that, a trifle. “I like trifle,” said Karen, and Julian didn’t know whether he was supposed to respond to that, and so he smiled at her, and she smiled back, and that all seemed to work well enough. Afterwards Julian asked whether he could smoke. Karen said he might. He offered Karen a cigarette, and she hesitated, and then said she would like that. So Julian got up, and went around the table, and lit one for her. Julian tried very hard to smoke in the correct way, but it still kept coming out girlishly. But Karen didn’t seem to mind; indeed, she positively imitated him, she puffed smoke from the corner of her mouth and made it all look very pretty. And even now they didn’t talk, and Julian realised he didn’t mind. There was no awkwardness to it. It was companionable. It was a shared understanding.

• • • •

Julian was invited to three more dinners. After the fourth, Mr. Davison called Mr. Morris, and told him that a proposal of marriage to his daughter would not be unacceptable. Mr. Morris was very pleased, and Mrs. Morris took Julian to her bedroom and had him go through her jewellery box to pick out a ring he could give his fiancée, and Julian marvelled, he had never seen such beautiful things. Julian didn’t meet Mr. Davison until the wedding day, whereupon the man clapped him on the back as if they were old friends, and told him he was proud to call him his son. Mr. Morris clapped Julian on the back too; even Julian’s brothers were at it. And Julian marvelled at how he had been transformed into a man by dint of a simple service and signed certificate. Neither of his brothers had married yet, he had beaten them to the punch, and was there jealousy in that back clapping? They called Julian a lucky dog, that his bride was quite the catch. And so, Julian felt, she was; on her day of glory she did nothing but beam with smiles, and there was no trace of her customary truculence. She was charming, even witty, and Julian wondered why she had chosen to hide these qualities from him—had she recognised that it would have made him scared of her? Had she been shy and hard just to win his heart? Julian thought this might be so, and in that belief discovered that he did love her, he loved her after all—and maybe, in spite of everything, the marriage might just work out. For a wedding present, the families had bought them a house in Chelsea. It was small, but perfectly situated, and they could always upgrade when they had children. As an extra present, Mr. Davison had bought his daughter a doll —a bit of a monstrosity, really, about the size of a fat infant, with blonde curly hair and red lips as thick as a darkie’s, and wearing its own imitation wedding dress. Karen seemed pleased with it. Julian thought little about it at the time.

• • • •

They honeymooned in Venice for two weeks, in a comfortable hotel near the Rialto. Karen didn’t show much interest in Venice. No, that wasn’t true; she said she was fascinated by Venice. But she preferred to read about it in her guidebook. Outside there was noise, and people, and stink; she could better experience the city indoors. Julian offered to stay with her, but she told him he was free to do as he liked. So in the daytime he’d leave her, and he’d go and visit St. Mark’s Square, climb the basilica, take a gondola ride. In the evening he’d return, and over dinner he’d try to tell her all about it. She’d frown, and say there was no need to explain, she’d already read it all in her Baedeker. Then they would eat in silence. On the first night, he’d been tired from travel. On the second, from sightseeing. On the third night, Karen told her husband that there were certain manly duties he was expected to perform. Her father was wanting a grandson; for her part, she wanted lots of daughters. Julian said he would do his very best, and drank half a bottle of claret to give him courage. She stripped off, and he found her body interesting, and even attractive, but not in the least arousing. He stripped off too. “Oh!” she said. “But you have hardly any hair! I’ve got more hair than you!” And it was true, there was a faint buzz of fur over her skin, and over his next to nothing—just the odd clump where Nature had started work, rethought the matter, given up. Karen laughed, but it was not unkind. She ran her fingers over his body. “It’s so smooth, how did you get it so smooth? “Wait a moment,” she then said, and hurried to the bathroom. She was excited. Julian had never seen his wife excited. She returned with a razor. “Let’s make you perfect,” she said. She soaped him down, and shaved his body bald. She only cut him twice, and that wasn’t her fault, that was because he’d moved. She left him only the hairs on his head. And even there, she plucked the eyebrows, and trimmed his fine wavy hair into a neat bob. “There,” she said, and looked over her handiwork proudly, and ran her hands all over him, and this time there was nothing that got in their way. And at that, he tried to kiss her, and she laughed again, and pushed him away. “No, no,” she said. “Your duties can wait until we’re in England. We’re on holiday.” So he started going out at night as well, with her blessing. He saw how romantic Venice could be by moonlight. He didn’t know Italian well, and so could barely understand what the ragazzi said to him, but it didn’t matter, they were very accommodating. And by the time he returned to his wife’s side, she was always asleep.

• • • •

The house in Chelsea had been done up for them, ready for their return. He asked her whether she’d like him to carry her over the threshold. She looked surprised at that, and said he could try. She lay back in his arms, and he was expecting her to be quite heavy, but it went all right really, and he got her through the doorway without doing anything to disgrace himself. As far as he’d been aware, Karen had never been to the house before. But she knew exactly where to go, walking straight to the study, and to the wooden desk inside, and to the third drawer down. “I have a present for you,” she said, and from the drawer she took a gun. “It was my brother’s,” she said. “Oh. Really?” “It may not have been his. But it’s what they gave us anyway.” She handed it to Julian. Julian weighed it in his hands. Like his wife, it was lighter than he’d expected. “You’re the man of the house now,” Karen said. There was no nanny to fetch them dinner. Julian said he didn’t mind cooking. He fixed them some eggs. He liked eggs. After they’d eaten, and Julian had rinsed the plates and left them to dry, Karen said that they should inspect the bedroom. And Julian agreed. They’d inspected the rest of the house; that room, quite deliberately, both had left as yet unexplored. The first impression that Julian got as he pushed open the door was pink, that everything was pink; the bedroom was unapologetically feminine, that blazed out from the soft pink carpet and the wallpaper of pink rose on pink background, And there was a perfume to it too, the perfume of Karen herself, and he still didn’t much care for it. That was before he saw the bed. He was startled, and gasped, and then laughed at himself for gasping. The bed was covered with dolls. There were at least a dozen of them, all pale plastic skin and curls and lips that were ruby red, and some were wearing pretty little hats, and some carrying pretty little nosegays, all of them in pretty dresses. In the centre of them, in pride of place, was the doll Karen’s father had given as a wedding present—resplendent in her wedding dress, still fat, her facial features smoothed away beneath that fat, sitting amongst the others like a queen. And all of them were smiling. And all of them were looking at him, expectantly, as if they’d been waiting to see who it was they’d heard climb the stairs, as if they’d been waiting for him all this time. Julian said, “Well! Well. Well, we won’t be able to get much sleep with that lot crowding about us!” He chuckled. “I mean, I won’t know which is which! Which one is just a doll, and which one my pretty wife!” He chuckled. “Well.” Karen said, “Gifts from my father. I’ve had some since I was a little girl. Some of them have been hanging about for years.” Julian nodded. Karen said, “But I’m yours now.” Julian nodded again. He wondered whether he should put his arms around her. He didn’t quite like to, not with all the dolls staring. “I love you,” said Karen. “Or rather, I’m trying. I need you to know, I’m trying very hard.” And for a moment Julian thought she was going to cry, but then he saw her blink back the tears, her face was hard again. “But I can’t love you fully, not whilst I’m loving them. You have to get rid of them for me.” “Well, yes,” said Julian. “I mean. If you’re sure that’s what you want.” Karen nodded grimly. “It’s time. And long overdue.”

• • • •

She put on her woollen coat then, she said it would be cold out there in the dark. And she bundled up the dolls too, each and every one of them, and began putting them into Julian’s arms. “There’s too many,” he said, “I’ll drop them,” but Karen didn’t stop, and soon there were arms and legs poking into his chest, he felt the hair of his wife’s daughters scratching under his chin. Karen carried just one doll herself, her new doll. She also carried the gun. It had been a warm summer’s evening, not quite yet dark. When they stepped outside, it was pitch, only the moonlight providing some small relief, and that grudging. The wind bit. And Chelsea, the city bustle, the pavements, the pedestrians, the traffic—Chelsea had gone, and all that was left was the house. Just the house, and the woods ahead of them. Julian wanted to run then, but there was nowhere to run to. He tried to drop the dolls. But the dolls refused to let go, they clung on to him, he could feel their little plastic fingers tightening around his coat, his shirt buttons, his skin, his own skin. “Follow me,” said Karen. The branches stuck out at weird angles, impossible angles, Julian couldn’t see any way to climb through them. But Karen knew where to tread and where to duck, and she didn’t hesitate, she moved at speed—and Julian followed her every step, he struggled to catch up, he lost sight of her once or twice and thought he was lost for good, but the dolls, the dolls showed him the way. The clearing was a perfect circle, and the moon shone down upon it like a spotlight on a stage. “Put them down,” said Karen. He did so. She arranged the dolls on the browning grass, set them in one long neat line. Julian tried to help; he put the new doll in her wedding dress beside them, and Karen rescued her. “It’s not her time yet,” she said. “But she needs to see what will one day happen to her.” “And what is going to happen?” Her reply came as if the daughters themselves had asked. Her voice rang loud, with a confidence Julian had never heard from her before. “Chloe. Barbara. Mary-Sue. Mary-Jo. Suki. Delilah. Wendy. Prue. Annabelle. Mary- Ann. Natasha. Jill. You have been sentenced to death.” “But why?” said Julian. He wanted to grab her, shake her by the shoulders. He wanted to. She was his wife, that’s what he was supposed to do. He couldn’t even touch her. He couldn’t even go near. “Why? What have they done?” “Love,” said Karen. She turned to him. “Oh, yes, they know what they’ve done.” She saluted them. “And you,” she said to Julian, “you must salute them too. No. Not like that. That’s not a salute. Hand steady. Like me. Yes. Yes.” She gave him the gun. The dolls all had their backs to him, at least he didn’t have to see their faces. He thought of his father. He thought of his brothers. Then, he didn’t think of anything. He fired into the crowd. He’d never fired a gun before, but it was easy, there was nothing to it. He ran out of bullets, so Karen reloaded the gun. He fired into the crowd again. He thought there might be screams. There were no screams. He thought there might be blood . . . and the brown of the grass seemed fresher and wetter and seemed to pool out lazily towards him. And Karen reloaded his gun. And he fired into the crowd, just once more, please, God, just one last time. Let them be still. Let them stop twitching. The twitching stopped. “It’s over,” said Karen. “Yes,” he said. He tried to hand her back the gun, but she wouldn’t take it— it’s yours now, you’re the man of the house. “Yes,” he said again. He began to cry. He didn’t make a sound. “Don’t,” said Karen. “If you cry, the deaths won’t be clean.” And he tried to stop, but now the tears found a voice, he bawled like a little girl. She said, “I will not have you dishonour them.” She left him then. She picked up her one surviving doll, and went, and left him all alone in the woods. He didn’t try to follow her. He stared at the bodies in the clearing, wondered if he should clear them up, make things tidier. He didn’t. He clutched the gun, waited it for to cool, and eventually it did. And when he thought to turn about, he didn’t know where to go, he didn’t know he’d be able to find his way back. But the branches parted for him easily, as if ushering him fast on his way, as if they didn’t want him either.

• • • •

“I’m sorry,” he said. He hadn’t taken a key. He’d had to ring his own doorbell. When his wife answered, he felt an absurd urge to explain who he was. He’d stopped crying, but his face was still red and puffy. He held out his gun to her, and she hesitated, then at last took it from him. “Sorry,” he said again. “You did your best,” she said. “I’m sorry too. But next time it’ll be different.” “Yes,” he said. “Next time.” “Won’t you come in?” she said politely, and he thanked her, and did. She took him upstairs. The doll was sitting on the bed, watching. She moved it to the dressing table. She stripped her husband. She ran her fingers over his soft smooth body, she’d kept it neat and shaved. “I’m sorry,” he said one more time; and then, as if it were the same thing, “I love you.” And she said nothing to that, but smiled kindly. And she took him then, and before he knew what he was about, he was inside her, and he knew he ought to feel something, and he knew he ought to be doing something to help. He tried to gyrate a little. “No, no,” she said, “I’ll do it,” and so he let her be. He let her do all the work, and he looked up at her face and searched for any sign of passion there, or tenderness, but it was so hard—and he turned to the side, and there was the fat doll, and it was smiling, and its eyes were twinkling, and there, there, on that greasy plastic face, there was all the tenderness he could ask for. Eventually she rolled off. He thought he should hug her. He put his arms around her, felt how strong she was. He felt like crying again. He supposed that would be a bad idea. “I love you,” she said. “I am very patient. I have learned to love you.” She fetched a hairbrush. She played at his hair. “My sweetheart,” she said, “my angel cake.” She turned him over, spanked his bottom hard with the brush until the cheeks were red as rouge. “My big baby doll.” And this time he did cry, it was as if she’d given him permission. And it felt so good. He looked across at the doll, still smiling at him, and he hated her, and he wanted to hurt her, he wanted to take his gun and shove the barrel right inside her mouth and blast a hole through the back of her head. He wanted to take his gun and bludgeon with it, blow after blow, and he knew how good that would feel, the skull smashing, the wetness. And this time he wouldn’t cry. He would be a real man. “I love you,” she said again. “With all my heart.” She pulled back from him, and looked him in the face, sizing him up, as she had that first time they’d met. She gave him a salute. He giggled at that, he tried to raise his own arm to salute back, but it wouldn’t do it, he was so very silly. There was a blur of something brown at the foot of the bed; something just out of the corner of his eye, and the blur seemed to still, and the brown looked like a jacket maybe, trousers, a uniform. He tried to cry out—in fear, or at least in surprise?—but there was no air left in him. There was the smell of mud, so much mud. Who’d known mud could smell? And a voice to the blur, a voice in spite of all. “Is it time?” He didn’t see his wife’s reaction, nor hear her reply. His head jerked, and he was looking at the doll again, and she was the queen doll, the best doll, so pretty in her wedding dress. She was his queen. And he thought she was smiling even wider, and that she was pleased he was offering her such sweet tribute.

©2013 by Robert Shearman. Originally published in Psycho-Mania!, edited by . Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Robert Shearman has written five short story collections, and collectively they have won the World Fantasy Award, the , the Edge Hill Readers’ Prize and three British Fantasy Awards. He began his career in theatre, both as playwright and director, and his work has won the Sunday Times Playwriting Award, the Sophie Winter Memorial Trust Award, and the Guinness Award for Ingenuity in association with the Royal National Theatre. His interactive series for BBC Radio Four, The Chain Gang, ran for three seasons and won two Sony Awards. However, he may be best known as a writer for , reintroducing the for its BAFTA winning first series in an episode nominated for a Hugo Award.

The H Word: Formative Frights Ian McDowell | 3578 words

Weird Fiction Writers on What Scared Them as Kids

I like to ask people about their childhood fears because I was a fearful child. At five, I avoided the TV room for a week after glimpsing something with a face like gobs of wet clay groping its way up a staircase. Only years and nightmares later did I learn this was Martin Landau’s entirely sympathetic mutant in the Outer Limits episode “The Man Who Was Never Born.” When I was nine, I was freaked out by faces more awful than Landau’s lumpy one. Created in pen and ink rather than latex, they lacked lips and at least one eye, and their tattered flesh looked like my grandfather’s beef jerky. By then I loved the classic Universal horrors and avidly read Famous of Filmland. But beside it on the Rexall rack lurked Creepy, Eerie and their cruder but grislier imitator Weird. I didn’t want to pick up each new issue and thumb through it, knowing I’d see a face to keep me awake that night. I didn’t want to, but always did. Fortunately, I never saw any faces like that in real life. Nine-year-old Edith wasn’t so lucky. She loved mummies, or at least her neatly-wrapped friends under glass in the British museum. Traveling with her mother and sister through France in 1867, she insisted on seeing the ones in a Bordeaux crypt. Before leading the women and girl into the vault, the guide explained that these were natural mummies, preserved (more or less) by “the peculiar earth of the churchyard where they were buried.” “’Round three sides of the room ran a railing, and behind it—standing against the wall, with a ghastly look of life in death—were about two hundred skeletons. Not white clean skeletons, hung on wires, like the ones you see at the doctor’s, but skeletons with the flesh hardened on their bones, with their long dry hair hanging on each side of their brown faces, where the skin in drying had drawn itself back from their gleaming teeth and empty eye-sockets. Skeletons draped in mouldering shreds of shrouds and grave-clothes, their lean fingers still clothed with dry skin, seemed to reach out towards me. There they stood, men, women, and children, knee-deep in loose bones collected from the other vaults of the church, and heaped round them. On the wall near the door I saw the dried body of a little child hung up by its hair.” The future E. Nesbit included this gruesome anecdote in her otherwise charming memoir “‘My School-Days,” serialized in Girl’s Own Paper in 1896- 1897. As anyone who’s read “Man-Size in Marble” knows, the Fabian and feminist whom biographer Julia Briggs called “the first modern writer for children” also wrote terrific for adults. The tradition of writers describing what frightened them as children is almost as old as that of telling stories while taking shelter from a plague. I’ve written several articles on this theme over the years, beginning with “My First Fright” in Gothic.net in 1999. For that, told me about being taken to Madame Tussauds (no apostrophe) Chamber of Horrors as a child, expecting to see his old pals Dracula and the . Instead he encountered “horrid, dull people who had, mostly, killed their parents or children or spouses, and sold the bodies ‘to anatomy’ for pennies, or shillings.” And the terrifically neo-noir novelist Christa Faust, then known for short horror fiction, told me about being traumatized by an early viewing of A Hard Day’s Night. “It started off with scenes of these crushing hordes of young girls whipping themselves up into a frenzied, voodoo-like trance, shaking, eyes rolling up into their heads and screaming as if possessed. Then they smashed through some kind of barrier and went running madly after the fleeing musicians. The whole time I was watching, all I could think of was what might happen if they were caught. They would be torn apart, eaten alive, kissed and kissed and kissed until they were dead. To this day that kind of ravenous, unhinged fan behavior —especially when it involves large crowds—really creeps me out.” Twenty-one years after my first article about first frights, I’m still fascinated by these reports from childhood. Who doesn’t wonder what made a horror writer write horror? I’ve reached out to ten established and upcoming authors, many of them Nightmare contributors, to find out. Let’s start with this dazzling mini-essay by Lambda finalist Sonya Taaffe, who has appeared twice in Lightspeed and whose “Tea with the Earl of Twilight” is forthcoming in Nightmare. She also officially named Vanth, moon of the trans-Neptunian object 90482 Orcus. “I can’t remember my oldest childhood fear. I know that I was never afraid of the dark, but I couldn’t fall asleep in a room that was only mostly dark, where you could never quite see what might or might not be there in that half- light with you; I disliked rooms with half-open doors. I was not afraid of ghosts, but I was afraid of bodies. I loved fossils as pieces of time, but the bituminous stained bones that were dredged out of tar pits were unspeakable to me. And I was afraid of masks. Costumes were dress-up, they came on and off, but I knew absolutely that to put on a mask was to become whatever it represented, instantly, irrevocably, and no longer myself. (In first or second grade, I read for the first time about rituals whose human participants assumed the masks of gods in order to be assumed in turn by the gods themselves, and I knew I had been right to be afraid.) My parents, in a compassionate gesture of demystification, bought me a mask-making kit, but I could barely endure to have it in my room, haunted by the image of the blank white mask-mold with its sealed lips and its sightless eyes, a death mask of the never-born. I never made a mask from it. I hid it at the back of my closet. If it wasn’t thrown out when we moved a few years later, it might be at the back of a closet today. I could take it out and look at it, flimsy thin plastic, child-sized. In my memory, it is still the tangible uncanny—imago, larva, the terrifying false face of the dead.” Gwendolyn Kiste was terrified by something most masks lack. You might think the author of “The Eight People Who Murdered Me (Excerpt from Lucy Westenra’s Diary)” feared bloody fangs or bloodier stakes, but it was as incongruous yet insightful as Christa Faust’s reaction to Beatlemania. “The song ‘Hungry Eyes’ by Eric Carmen was the stuff my childhood nightmares were made of. These were not your usual eyes, not so far as I was concerned. These were eyes with jagged teeth, eyes that stalked through the cover of night to devour anything—or anyone—in their path. I can still remember being in my booster seat in the backseat of my parents’ car— probably our beloved little red Escort—when the song would come on the radio. That distinctive 80s intro would cut through the air, and I would start wheezing with terror. “Hungry eyes!” I’d scream, as my parents would fumble with the radio dial, desperately trying to turn it to another station. At the time, they assured me over and over again that the eyes were neither hungry in the way that I thought, nor were these eyes anywhere in our vicinity. However, years later, I learned the song was recorded in Beachwood, Ohio, not much more than an hour’s drive away from where I grew up. Had I only known how local those hungry eyes really were, I might never have slept a wink my whole childhood.” Kiste’s imagination was scaring her long before she scared readers. But she was not the only kid to frighten herself. Iconic horror master let one memory blossom into a terror worse than what a famous meant to inspire. “I think the childhood event most crucial to my career was seeing an issue of in a shop window when I was seven years old or so. The cover showed a terrified avian creature (though not, I thought, an actual bird) paralysed by the approach of two monsters with enormous human skulls for heads and minute scuttling skeletal bodies. I craved it, but wasn’t allowed to buy it, and as I approached teenage, I began to collect the magazine. It wasn’t until ten years later that I found the issue I’d been searching for. It’s the November 1952 issue, and the cover shows a vulture possibly alarmed by a couple of skeletons (bit.ly/2JSsk4T). It seems to me that when I originally saw it, my mind wanted something weirder and created it for me. Maybe that principle is the core of my career.” Gemma Files, whose “Grave Goods” was reprinted in Nightmare’s October 2019 issue, understands that. Her response about a 1979 novel reminded me of how, devoid of context, I was terrified by my childhood interpretation of Martin Landau’s ugly but sensitive Andro. “This would probably have been around when I was eight, which was when my mother and father separated; it’s not that I wasn’t afraid of things before that—cosmic horror had already entered my life in the shape of a gigantic Byzantine angel from the Toronto Planetarium’s Christmas show, looming over me in duplicate, one for either side of the viewing dome—but after their divorce things got steadily more unstable, especially since my Dad eventually moved back to Australia, which was around the time that I became afraid of essentially everything. “My worst scares, however, all came out of the fact that imagination is a double-edged tool at best . . . probably single-edged when you’re a kid with a slippery sense of self, at the mercy of undiagnosed neuroatypicality and guilt that children of divorce always carry. When your image of the world is completely solipsistic, how can you ever believe that things as world- shaking as the relationship between two adult humans whose minds and hearts you have absolutely no power over aren’t secretly all your fault? I was already innately attracted to the darker side of things, to stories about magic and folklore, to horror, but my imagination would stomach-punch me any time I sought that stuff out, especially when it was from “adult” sources. “So here I am, dawdling behind my Mom as she waits to check out in the line at the grocery store, and I start reading the back-cover copy of James Herbert’s The Survivor (1976). What first attracted me to it? Probably the china doll-head on the front, deftly broken at the neck, its blue eyes goggling. (I seem to recall a drop of blood at the corner of rosebud lips, but I might be confusing it with ’s Salem’s Lot—‘the high, sweet laughter of a child . . . and the sucking sounds.’) On the back, it promised a plane crash that killed over 300 people and sparked off a supernatural incursion in a tiny British town: creeping dread, dead faces at the windows, dolls talking to a little girl, murmuring bad things in her ears, moving around on their own. I couldn’t stand to look inside it, but in a way, I didn’t need to. Because what I made up inside my head that night, in the dark of my bedroom, was definitely worse than anything Herbert could have possibly come up with. (And having read the book since then, I’ve since confirmed that I am very definitely right, on that score.)” His chapter on James Herbert is a highlight of Grady Hendrix’s hilarious and nostalgic from Hell. But the author, whose novel about a haunted Scandinavian furniture store was selected as an NPR Best Book of 2014 (Horrorstör), shared an entirely serious memory, one that begins with rats, but is far more M.R. James than James Herbert. “When my family moved to London for a year, I was six and nothing made sense. The private school I attended didn’t have a playground, just an asphalt lot surrounded by barbed wire with a view of a gorge overflowing with rubbish. The handyman’s job was to repair the heat, catch students who went over the fence, and kill rats. He did this with a hammer, then drove a staple through their tails and hung them from his shed door until he reached his quota for the day. Then he’d sling them over the fence into the garbage gorge where, over the next few weeks, they’d melt into the stew of rusted appliances and used nappies. “The house we rented was a massive, creaking Victorian pile with a photographer boarding in the attic and a hippie living in the basement. They had a library, and way up on a top shelf I found a volume of English folklore. It had a black cover with a stylized gold face embossed on the fake leather cover. Inside, it was loaded with woodcuts and prints with an emphasis on the gruesome: pictures of witches being burned, heretics having their hands bound to the clappers of ringing bells, and howling banshees prowling drafty manor house halls and blasted heaths. Suddenly, everything made sense. When my dad insisted on stuffing us all into our Volkswagen camper and driving us into the cold countryside every weekend to get culture, I could stare out the rain- streaked windows and see the vanished gibbets with their desiccated corpses swinging back and forth over the bleak landscapes now hacked into highway roundabouts, the hollow-eyed ghosts staring out at us from dreary council estate windows, the creaking carts full of witches hauled by emaciated horses past shuttered village shops on their way to Hangman’s Hill. That book taught me that the world made sense, but only if you were looking at it with the correct number of ghosts in your field of view.” The handsome, lithe and dapper Edward Austin Hall (a friend who’ll be amused by my objectifying him like so many woman writers have been by male ones in the past), reminded me of something from a classic film that also disturbed me as a kid. “Surely, I cannot be the lone person who found nightmarish Scout’s costumed walk in her . . . what? Pumpkin? Gourd? Vegetal tumor? I first saw To Kill a Mockingbird on television in the 1960s, and the combination of powerlessness and limited vision as she’s attacked while wearing this . . . hideousness . . . mixed horror (What happened to her? [I was young enough to see Scout as transformed, not disguised]), terror (What’s happening to her?), and dread (What will happen to her?) like nothing else I know, even now.” LC von Hessen’s fiction has appeared in Pickman’s Gallery, Machinations and Mesmerism: Tales Inspired by ETA Hoffmann, and Nox Pareidolia, with more upcoming in Nightscript VI, Vastarien, and Would but Time Await: An Anthology of New England Folk Horror. They gave me another creepy anecdote about a seemingly innocuous thing (perhaps a theme is emerging): “The first tangible Thing that ever scared me was a ceramic piggy bank of mid-century vintage that someone, probably my mother, had placed on my bedroom shelf as a toddler. The pig sat up on its haunches, inexplicably wearing red-and-white-striped long johns like an off-brand Porky Pig, and was —worst of all—winking in a manner I interpreted as deeply sinister (and which I recall now as being oddly lascivious). The pig heightened my fear of the dark, as I was afraid that it would Get Me when the lights went out: that even if I turned its face to the wall, it would spin around with an evil grin and do something awful to me that I couldn’t even imagine in my two- or three- year-old’s limited experience of the world. “Three decades later, while going through my old belongings in my parents’ basement prior to their move into a retirement home, I couldn’t find the little pig. I’m inclined to think it escaped.” While von Hessen’s nightmares came from a winking ceramic pig, Natasha Pavlitsevits was traumatized by one of the darkest works in the Western canon. Pavlitsevits, who was born Greece but lives in Sweden, has only one English language publication so far, a short story in Vol.7, issue 3 of Lamplight. But her first novel “Κάπου Αλλού” (Somewhere Else) is another bestseller for Εγκαίνια BELL, the Athens-based publisher that brought Stephen King, , and to Greece. Here’s the mini-memoir of an author who’s creating overseas buzz, and whose work I hope will soon be available in English: “I dipped my toes in the pool of horror way too young. Scary books and movies were an integral part of my childhood. My first real fright, however, came later, when I was around eleven. I saw Goya’s painting of ‘Saturn devouring his son.’ The violent image imprinted on my mind in a way that nothing had until then, and my blanket was not helping me block the fear out this time. Even when I calmed down the next day, those eyes returned at night. I confessed to my mother and she found a solution, like a mother usually does . . . “Read about it, learn the painting’s history, and it will stop bothering you.” So, I did. To this day, I remember everything about the mythology around Saturn, Goya’s biography, even the techniques used in oil paintings. To this day that painting freaks me out. You never forget your first.” You also never forget your first Sasquatch. The award-winning , author of two novels, three collections, and fiction and nonfiction for Nightmare, was terrified by his early television exposure to the Wild Carnivorous Sasquatch. “One of my most traumatizing childhood memories is of the introduction of the Bigfoot character in the old Six-Million-Dollar Man series. Although the Sasquatch would ultimately be revealed to be a sympathetic character, I never saw that episode. Instead, all I saw was the episode in which Bigfoot was introduced, and in that, he was enormous and terrifying, a who tore off Steve Austin’s bionic arm at the climax of the episode. On one side of the house in which I grew up, there were two rows of evergreens planted very close together, which formed a dim space my brother and I called the cave. Our bedroom was at this end of the house, and at night, as I lay in bed, I would hear noises outside our windows and be sure it was the Sasquatch, escaped from the television and roaming about next to the house.” The final memory is from Nadia Bulkin. While some of her fiction is rooted in her Indonesian heritage, for this article, she evocatively remembers finding childhood horror in an icon of American popular culture: “When I was about three years old, I saw this Sesame Street skit that involved a talking chair. It was a cartoon armchair with cartoon face, to be clear—probably the most innocuous type of talking chair—but it horrified me so much that I had to hide behind (ironically) the sofa. The only thing I can remember feeling is that it was “wrong.” I’d get the same feeling with mascots too—like they were people that were not people. I’m sure that’s why the unusual movement of ghosts in modern J-horror movies gets to me, too: it looks “wrong.” That’s a very primal fear, by the way, part of the ‘fear of the unnatural’ bucket. I think I read once that it’s meant to protect us from coming into contact with diseased organisms (or maybe predators in disguise?). Years later, my mother told me that I’d had a similar, earlier reaction to a Sesame Street skit that I didn’t even remember—as in, I blocked it out—that one was about a talking hand.” As with several of the preceding anecdotes, my own earliest-recalled childhood trauma transformed its source. When I watched “The Man Who Was Never Born” on the Outer Limits Season One Blu-Ray, I freeze-framed a better look at Andro’s hands. While lumpy and gnarled, they’re not the huge, pale, doughy catcher’s mitts five-year-old me “saw” before fleeing the room. For weeks afterwards, I dreamed of the character I thought some lurching, clutching monster. Once, he stood over my bed and reached down with soft pale hands bigger than my face. When I told my mother, whom some neighbor kids thought a witch, about him, she made a lumpy man-shaped cookie with oversized hands and told me to bite off his head. I never dreamed of him again. Fifty-seven years later, I’m using that in a story. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ian McDowell is the author of the novels Mordred’s Curse and Merlin’s Gift. His fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Weird Tales, Cemetery Dance and the anthologies Love in Vein, October Dreams 2 and the Science Fiction Book Club’s Best Short Novels 2005. He grew up in Fayetteville, NC, and currently lives in Greensboro, NC. In February of 2020, he won first prize in investigative journalism at the North Carolina Press Association Awards for his coverage of the case of Marcus Deon Smith, an African-American man fatally hogtied by the Greensboro police during the 2018 NC Folk Festival. That same month, his Alphabestiary: 26 Poems and Drawings for Easily Alarmed Children and the Adults Who Like to Alarm Them, was published by AM INK. Book Reviews: June 2020 Terence Taylor | 2839 words

Read This! Volume 13

For me, the biggest difference between a review and a critique is spoilers. A review should offer readers an opinion on whether or not a book is worth reading and why, without revealing too many of the delights to be found inside. Critique is meant to deep dive into the mechanisms that carry the story forward, the how and why of it, broken down for all to see, as I did with Samuel R. Delaney’s purportedly enigmatic Dhalgren in the June 2016 issue of Lightspeed Magazine, “Doing Dhalgren” (bit.ly/35jKGpb). There I could explain in detail exactly what I was referring to and what it meant. In this column about books that I enjoyed reading, I perpetually dance on the edge of ruining what makes a book a good read in my enthusiasm to recommend it. The two books I read for this column share aspects I would love to examine in greater detail than a review allows, but to do so would expose too many of the workings of beautifully constructed puzzle boxes. Still, I can address a common theme before I tell you more about each. Then at least I can discuss their good usage of the malignant feminine. I grew up with a darker Disney, when Walt was still developing the essential elements of telling a story that would carry his company through today, using my generation as guinea pigs to gauge the effects. Back then, he thought nothing of killing off family or friends if it raised the emotional stakes for the characters and audience. Bambi’s murdered mom aside, I’d forgotten just how dark he could get until I recently rewatched a clip from the ending of Snow White. The evil queen, in her old witch disguise, tries to crush the seven dwarves pursuing her by leveraging a boulder down on them. She uses a long stick that attracts a burst of lightning to shatter the ledge she’s on. The witch plummets, followed by loosened debris, the large boulder, and two vultures who have watched the whole thing. They smile at each other slyly, then glide down to feed on what’s left of her. The poor dwarves stare in horror over the edge of the cliff at a sight Disney spares us, in true Hitchcock fashion, her fate made far worse by our own young imaginations. It’s a hideous, if deserved, death that stands with the worst in Game of Thrones. For children. Aside from his surgical use of mortality, what I remember most about Disney movies are his glamorous villainesses; the evil queen in Snow White, the stepmother in Cinderella, and my favorite (and childhood role model), Maleficent. Any representation of villainous females in film or fiction is rife with dangers. The worst result is to leave the reader with the impression that all women are predatory, unless they’re sun-drenched, apple-cheeked virgins. It’s no coincidence that all of Disney’s wicked women were “exotically” erotic, their sensual surfaces ample evidence of their wickedness and the easiest way to identify and avoid them. Demonizing female sexuality is as old as the Bible. According to legend, Lilith, the first woman God created, demanded equality with Adam and got the boot instead. Afterwards, she was rumored to spawn monsters, or worse, abducted our babies, unable to have her own. I prefer the other reason given for her banishment — that she wanted to be on top during sex. Her real sin was daring to own her desires, a quality subsequently assigned solely to bad girls and branded as evil. I tend to think that, at their best, wicked women in genre fiction represent examples of gender equality that puts them on a par with, if not above, their male counterparts. Their motives tend to be more complex than men’s mere power games, their methods more Machiavellian. In the recent movie Ragnarok, as a villain Hela is far more compelling with more depth of motivation in her one feature turn than Loki has been in six. This month’s column presents you with two supernatural antagonists with very different motives, but strangely similar approaches. Technically, both are women in concept only—one is the physical manifestation of an animal , and the other a gender fluid shapeshifter that uses any form necessary to seduce its prey. Nonetheless, their feminine form affects how they’re perceived and dealt with by others, and that’s where the pertinent issues of abuse arise. Their deadly responses to it are folded into each story slowly and deliberately, in a slow boil from mildly disturbing to horrific, with no relief in sight until the end, if then . . . I’m not telling. The Only Good Indians Stephen Graham Jones Hardcover ISBN: 978-1982136451 Gallery/Saga Press, July 14, 2020, 320 pages

Throughout the novel, Jones toys with the titular proverb, “the only good Indian is a dead Indian,” and the childhood rhyme Ten Little Indians . . . They’re repeated as verbal leitmotifs at key moments in the story, as its four main characters are pulled back to an unfortunate night ten years ago that literally starts to haunt them. When the first of them dies drunk outside a bar, his fate is too ambiguous for it to warn the others. He’d gone outside for a piss when he saw a massive elk appear in the parking lot and crash among the cars, causing damage with horns and hooves. He’s blamed for the destruction when redneck owners come out angry and ignore his protests of innocence. He’s already been condemned by virtue of his skin color, and his fatal beating is regarded by surviving friends as just another random racist killing in a brutal life filled with them. It soon becomes substantially more significant and personal. Jones deftly plays with the inability of people faced with seemingly impossible events to be sure of what they’re seeing, or even what’s really happening. Applying Occam’s Razor to find the simplest explanation for the unnatural only leaves them with Sherlock Holmes’ dictum that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. That leaves the novel’s second “little Indian” in a slow free fall into psychosis, the first of them to act on what he knows must be true, no matter how insane it seems. The price he pays for following his intuition leads him down the right road, but in the wrong direction, with shocking consequences. As the book progresses, its focus leaps from one survivor to another, until it lands in the head of the horror at hand, the vengeful spirit of a pregnant elk killed in a clandestine hunting party that was punished by the law, but not by nature. Once the avenging animal’s consciousness has grown strong enough to take over the reins of the narrative to tell her own story, even if only in grimly lyrical bursts, we follow a creature born of ancient traditions adapted to modern times to an inexorable confrontation between past and present. Jones’s use of a conversational, matter-of-fact style slides you from a world of real world problems, personal and cultural, into mythic surreality before you know it. He’s constructed a chilling tale of ghostly vengeance, but also a masterful portrayal of Native American communities in crisis that reminded me of familiar issues in similar Black communities. With each protagonist’s death, we see how much deeper we’ve been pulled into the book’s quicksand as the four friends’ impulse to hold on to the old ways comes into conflict with their need to grasp the new. That disconnect is expressed most clearly in the relationship of Gabe and his teenage daughter, Denorah. She was meant to be named Deborah, but her dad scrawled it illegibly on her birth certificate, an introduction that perfectly sums up a relationship rife with errors. Her love for him, against her divorced mother’s wishes, eventually makes her a target for the shape-changing Elk Head Woman pursuing him and his friends, but also the instrument of at least one redemption. Gabe’s older daughter had already escaped the confines of their community with a basketball scholarship, her fastest way out. Denorah, the younger, is the real deal, an intuitive athlete that lives the game and could do even better than her sister. Her father’s inability to avoid the failures of his fellows, alcoholism and instability, both economic and emotional, serves as sufficient motivation for her to get out the same way—but her innate ability to quickly understand the true nature of a tradition-based threat is what carries the story to its climax. She becomes a bridge between the two worlds, and the lesson offered by the book’s end is not that we can never go home again, but that we can never leave it. Where we came from and how it shaped us can’t be forgotten or erased. It must be seen clearly and accepted as the root of who we are. The four men’s denial that their illicit actions betrayed their heritage, choosing instead to believe in a modern world that says there aren’t any consequences for trampling on tradition, is ultimately their downfall and their tragedy.

The Wise Friend Ramsey Campbell Hardcover ISBN: 978-1787584044 Flame Tree Press; Reprint edition, April 23, 2020, 256 pages Periodically I like to check in on the current work of well-established authors who influenced my writing. by Daylight hit me when it came out in 1972 as strongly as Clive Barker’s collections did when I found them in a London bookstore in 1986, collections coincidently championed by Campbell. The opportunity to read his latest work was irresistible. Even if I didn’t specifically recall the old stories and couldn’t find my hardcover copy to refresh my memory, I remembered the fever they’d fired in me as a struggling young writer. Over the course of a career, writers either settle into a steady and successful formula, as recognizable as a Roy Lichtenstein halftone painting, or they continue to evolve and grow. The Ramsey Campbell I found in the new book isn’t the Lovecraftian horrorist of his first work, or the echo of Vladimir Nabakov he used in Demons by Daylight. Masters of the art of writing become invisible in their work because the story’s so involving and the characters feel so real, you almost forget someone wrote it. You begin to believe the writer busy behind the curtain, pulling set pieces into place and giving everyone their cues. The voice I found, instead of the Campbell I expected, is that of Patrick, the novel’s middle-aged academic protagonist, as believable an example of British intelligentsia as Jones’s characters are to his milieu. Like the previous novel, A Wise Friend begins with the prosaic minutiae of ordinary lives. The protagonist’s teenaged son, Roy, is spending time with his father while on summer holiday from school. Patrick’s a professor living in an apartment overlooking a train station, correcting papers and working out his next lesson plan. He eventually settles on having his students find the supernatural elements in mainstream fiction, just as an ancient magic re-enters his life. Roy, bored and at odds with his father, becomes interested in a series of portraits down a hallway by his late Great-Aunt Thelma, paintings of his father over the years as he grew up. He reads through his collection of books about her highly regarded paintings, and in his search for more, Roy finds an enigmatic diary bound in black. Nearly forgotten by Patrick, reading its contents sparks dim and disturbing memories of his aunt and her unfortunate end, but he dismisses them. Despite that, Roy’s soon curious to know more, especially after he finds out that her mysterious demise was a deadly drop from the roof of a nearby residential tower. Was it suicide? Or possibly violence at the hand of an elusive paramour? Desperate to connect with his adolescent son, Patrick agrees to take him there and to some of the sites listed in the diary, places depicted in her paintings. When he feels a strange chill and unseen presence at the first, he encourages his son to abandon his and go to a show of her work at the Tate gallery instead of the next site. Like an appointment in Samarra, by trying to steer Roy away from the influences that led to his aunt’s death, he brings them both face to face with Bella. She’s a seemingly innocent young woman, an avowed and knowledgeable fan of his aunt’s art, who quickly becomes the embodiment and engineer of Patrick’s worst fears. The novel bounces casually between the present and a past where Patrick is his son’s age and his aunt is alive to fill in gaps in his understanding of her. There’s tension in the family about her recent divorce and Abel, a new love in her life. Patrick overheard everything, and in present day begins to remember a family strife that turns out to be at the root of the horror ahead. Patrick’s son pulls them, and then Bella, down the same twisted roads his aunt walked, seeking the inspiration that led her to something greater, older, something that took her down its own path into the thick mystical woods behind her house. The forest primeval is an ever present backdrop to the action; deep green, trees so thick and lush with moss and leaves, Patrick feels it’s a living entity that watches him when he’s there and changes the landscape to obscure his way, to keep him from escaping its depths. He begins to glimpse in the leaves flashes of a phantom face that only children can see, the same face Roy saw peering over a fence at him when he was young, one Patrick had seen too when younger, in a different form. The new danger in his life is one he’s met before, but no one believes him as it sets its sights on his son. The nature of the monster and what it wants is what Patrick has to unravel before he comes apart at the seams . . . The more he insists something’s inexplicably wrong, the crazier he looks. By the time he’s answered all his questions and faces a fierce force of nature determined to find its freedom, he has no allies left and must battle alone to save his son’s soul. As in The Only Good Indian, Campbell’s antagonist appears to be a human woman, but that’s only a lure or camouflage. In “reality,” both are undying forces of nature, magical beings called into existence by the selfish needs of men who don’t care about the consequences of setting powerful forces like them in motion. In that, there is an echo of the #MeToo movement in both novels, with their antagonists seeking male accountability for wrongs done to them. It’s not hard to understand the reasons for the Elk Head Woman’s desire for revenge on the men who killed her and her unborn calf . . . but as Patrick digs deeper into his mystery, Bella begins to look like she has far less noble motives. Patrick looks for the reasons why his son and his new girlfriend are gathering samples of earth from assorted occult sites, as his aunt did with Abel, who may be Bella’s father, or worse, simply another face worn by whatever Bella really is to achieve its goals. As Patrick follows them and researches the places they visit, he pieces together a terrifying truth he can barely believe, but must confront and defeat to save his broken family and his sanity. The two authors find entirely different ways to approach a related premise, and while the two novels make a fine pairing, they in no way resemble each other. Ultimately, these are not so much stories of scary women as they are about male hubris, masculine fear of feminine power, whether in women or other men, and the lengths some of them will go to subvert it. How well they succeed, I leave you to read for yourself.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Terence Taylor (terencetaylor.com) is an award-winning children’s television writer whose work has appeared on PBS, Nickelodeon, and Disney, among many others. After years of comforting tiny tots with TV, he turned to scaring their parents. His first published short story, “Plaything”, appeared in Dark Dreams, the first horror/suspense anthology of African- American authors. He was included in the next two volumes, and his short stories and non- fiction have appeared in Lightspeed and Stories of the Imagination. Terence is also author of the first two novels of his Testaments trilogy, Bite Marks and Blood Pressure. He is currently writing the conclusion, Past Life. Follow him on Twitter @vamptestaments.

Author Spotlight: G.V. Anderson Setsu Uzumé | 997 words

Devils, pagan gods, cuckoldry: the Ooser represents many things to many people. How did you come across this object, and what drew you to spin it into this story?

I’ve always taken an interest in British, and especially local, folklore. One of my favourite TV shows as a teenager was Robin of Sherwood (on DVD, since it was slightly before my time), because my family comes from a village whose church is said to have been where Maid Marian married Robin Hood. The folklore of that region fascinates me, and has encouraged me to find similar closer to home. One of my favourites from the south-west of England is the saying that if a hare runs down a village street, a fire will break out nearby. There are accounts of such hares turning back into women afterwards. Another favourite is the origin of the phrase “hag-ridden”—that there’s a hag who comes and sits on your chest at night and torments you with evil dreams. When I came across the Ooser, the mystery of its disappearance immediately drew me in. Although a replica is on display in Dorchester, nothing quite comes close to the grainy black-and-white photos we have of the original. Of course, British cinema is rich with folk horror, from The Wicker Man right up to The Witch, so in hindsight it’s no surprise I went in that direction with the Ooser. Considering it used to be worn as a punishment, it made sense to me that it would be a story about guilt and penance, although it was a while before I settled on the 1930s setting.

Dot’s a writer who seems to struggle with finding value in her own stories vs. collecting firsthand accounts of wartime or folk practices. There’s a lot of pressure to get the research right in order to enhance a fictional work, but is the reverse true as well? What service does fiction provide for fact?

A considerable amount of contemporary writing about WWI was by women —Vera Brittain and Mary Ward are two writers that come to mind—and it’s interesting to consider the responsibility that they must have felt towards the loved ones they’d lost, to tell their stories in a way that was both authentic and uplifting (not always compatible traits where war’s concerned). I was struck especially by Brittain’s choice to include extracts of her late fiancé’s poetry in her beautiful memoir, Testament of Youth. Roland Leighton is posthumously famous because of that decision (flowers are left at his grave in Louvencourt), and yet he had no say in whether to share his work, or the contents of his letters, with the public. I think in Dot’s case, she’s mostly concerned with imposing some kind of structural and artistic license upon material which is often ugly and disordered by nature. Folklore is generally not intended to be written down and catalogued, and in that way she misunderstands it, in the same way she misunderstands her responsibility towards her cousin, John, and all the men who trust her with their stories after the war. As with Testament of Youth, fictionalisation can provide context, especially emotional context or closure— by writing about him from her perspective, Brittain was able to give her fiancé’s life and death some higher meaning—but I think “We, the Folk” draws the line between fictionalisation that serves fact and fictionalisation that serves the author. Dot, in using such material, was very much thinking of her own ambitions as a writer in what would have been a crowded war-memoir market.

Edith seems to be at the center of events even though she isn’t the main character. She knows, warns, and then watches . . . is she the antagonist here, or one of many?

You can’t have folk horror without the creepy locals! The horror of the Ooser comes from without, so it was important to me to have a character who could fulfil that role from within the community of Crewkerne, who could watch Dot’s downfall at the end and give the reader a lingering, eerie sense of complicity. I thought she would also make a great counterpoint for Dot—they are both chased down and chastised by the Ooser because of their transgressions. Those transgressions, while opportunistic, are ultimately their attempts to survive and thrive as women of two different classes, and I’ve always found that a compelling theme. I like writing about difficult, sometimes unpleasant characters, and “We, the Folk” is no different.

Dot’s response to creeping fear and dread, in the end, is to write. How much of her process is your process?

Not much! (For the record, I’m answering this during the coronavirus lockdown in the UK, where there’s plenty of fear and dread and very little writing getting done.) However, I do identify with the fact that what prompted her to start writing something new was a change of scenery; nature. At one point, she says it’s good to get away and breathe unfamiliar air, to learn what it’s like to be you, and I find I write best after a walk where I can kind of forget myself. She didn’t always pick up a pen in the last scene. That image came very late in the drafting process. But it occurred to me that writers are nothing if not persistent, and at that point, Dot really, really wants to prove—to herself as well as the Ooser—that she’s changed.

What are can we look forward to next from you?

I have a contemporary called “Hearts in the Hard Ground” forthcoming in Tor.com! It’ll be available for free online and as an e-book in September.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Setsu grew up in New York, and spent their formative years in and out of dojos. They like swords, raspberries, justice, the smell of pine forests after rain, and shooting arrows from horseback. They do not like peanut butter and chocolate in the same bite. Their work has appeared in PodCastle and Magazine. Find them on Twitter @KatanaPen. Author Spotlight: Ashley Deng Wendy N. Wagner | 805 words

This story is about a population of fungal people living secretly within our human society. I love the trope of a “secret race amongst us”—how did you come up with this particular take on it?

Full disclosure, I was scrolling through Instagram when I came across a Bon Appétit post of a mushroom pasta recipe. It was captioned with something about “we’ll turn you into a mushroom person—no, not someone who’s half mushroom, but someone who really likes mushrooms” and I thought, “Well, why not half mushroom?” Everything sort of spiralled from there, haha.

The humans the main character encounters are all so good at casual cruelty. How did you find your way to writing these characters?

A lot of those characters are sort of condensed versions of people I encountered growing up. Thank you for that term, “casual cruelty”! I don’t think I’ve ever been able to quite verbalize it before. I drew a lot on my own experiences of being on the autism spectrum just enough that there were tensions and a lot of confusion interacting with people as a kid. Those characters were written through a lot of trawling through and verbalizing the people I’ve met throughout my life and stringing them together into something coherent.

The voice in this story is second-person, with occasional parenthetical asides that, while still in second-person, are more internal than the primary voice. What did you do to select and develop this voice?

The second-person narration came somewhat as an impulsive choice, where I wanted to tell the story of mushroom people being connected to our world but in an adjacent way. First-person and third-person didn’t quite feel right for that decision, with the former being almost too personal and the latter being too distant. The parenthetical asides developed as the story developed, when I decided that I wanted a story where the narrator is talking to herself rather than the reader, interjecting advice and wisdom that she only later gained and wanting to present it to her younger self. It’s kind of the voice you get when you come to the realization in hindsight and you’re in the shower, telling yourself how that interaction could’ve gone better.

From the 1954 classic The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet to David Walton’s Campbell-winning thriller The Genius Plague all the way to Jeff VanderMeer’s complete works, SF/F has a powerful legacy of fiction about fungi and fungal people. What’s your favorite fungal fiction? And do you see your story being in conversation with any other fungal works?

Oh, I’m not sure! I think I was engaging primarily with the traditions of using fungi as body horror in visual media, like art and video games. In those, though, fungi kind of work as a shorthand for decay sprouting on the undead or otherwise-living things in a very quick way to elicit that “gross” response from the viewer. I was instead interested in taking that and turning it into an extension of life rather than death, where the mushrooms are perfectly edible, so why not share? I found myself drawing a lot from the conversation of the sort of #ownvoices depiction being the “other” as being “monstrous,” but instead here you’re just a quiet mushroom person who dabbles in autocannibalism from time to time. I think fungi occupy an interesting space in that conversation; they’re not quite animal, not quite plant, and turn decay into something full of life, just as something can be strange and difficult to comprehend for people, but still carry on living, given the capacity.

It has to be asked: Do you like eating mushrooms? If so, what are some of your favorite mushroom dishes?

I love them! I dump them in everything from button mushrooms in creamy pastas to wood ear and enoki mushrooms in hot and sour soup to straw mushrooms in . . . well, anything where they can soak up brothy goodness. I’m particularly fond of wood ear mushroom salad, which is a lovely, crunchy, vinegary dish with a bit of a kick. Enoki mushrooms in Sichuan-style hotpot? Also delicious.

Where can our readers find more of your works? And what are you working on right now?

My current project is a secondary-world dark fantasy/horror novel about the destructive pursuit of power, the sinister side of academia, and the exploited rising up against their oppressors. You can find more of my work over at Fireside Fiction and the Queen of Swords Press anthology, Scourge of the Seas of Time (and Space).

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Wendy N. Wagner is the author of the SF thriller An Oath of Dogs. Her other work includes two novels for the Pathfinder Tales series and more than forty short stories. She serves as the managing/senior editor of Lightspeed and Nightmare magazines. She is also the non-fiction editor of Women Destroy Science Fiction!, which was named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014, and the guest editor of Queers Destroy Horror! A gaming and gardening geek, she lives in Oregon with her very understanding family.

Coming Attractions The Editors | 119 words

Coming up in July, in Nightmare . . . We have original fiction from Carlie St. George (“ Season, Fire Season”) and Adam R. Shannon (“We Came Home From Hunting Mushrooms”), along with reprints by Joe R. Lansdale (“The Folding Man”) and XXXX (“XXXX ”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, and a book review from Adam-Troy Castro. 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 Caspian Gray, Vajra Chandrasekera, and Claire Wrenwood. Thanks for reading! Stay Connected The Editors

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

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

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

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 )

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 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

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

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

The 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.