Nightmare Magazine Issue 08

Home , Ben Templesmith, Mine (novel), Neverwhere, Robert Aickman, The Ocean at the End

Nightmare Magazine Issue 8, May 2013

Table of Contents

Editorial, May 2013 Centipede Heartbeat—Caspian Gray Houses Under the Sea—Caitlin R. Kiernan Doll Re Me—Tanith Lee Feminine Endings—Neil Gaiman The H Word: “Domestic Horror”—Nathan Ballingrud Artist Gallery: Benjamin König Artist Spotlight: Benjamin König Interview: Steve Niles Author Spotlight: Caspian Gray Author Spotlight: Caitlin R. Kiernan Author Spotlight: Tanith Lee Author Spotlight: Neil Gaiman Coming Attractions

Welcome to issue eight of Nightmare! This month, we have original fiction from Caspian Gray (“Centipede Heartbeat”) and Tanith Lee (“Doll Re Me”), along with reprints by Caitlín R. Kiernan (“Houses Under the Sea”) and Neil Gaiman (“Feminine Endings”). We’ll also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview with acclaimed comics writer Steve Niles. That’s about all I have for you this month, but before I step out of your way and let you get to the fiction, 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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John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Nightmare (and its sister magazine, Lightspeed), is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Oz Reimagined, Epic: Legends of Fantasy, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. He is a six-time finalist for the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award. He is also the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

Centipede Heartbeat Caspian Gray

Each time Lisa rested her head against Joette’s breasts, she heard the centipedes. In between heartbeats there was the tiny sound of hundreds of chitinous footsteps against bone, of miniature mandibles tearing at organs. Joette refused to admit to it, or maybe she didn’t know. “It’s hot,” Joette announced. Lisa refused to take the hint. She tried to memorize the feel of Joette’s body tangled with her own: prickly shins, downy calves, the warmth of Joette’s stomach, the tight swell of the small breasts on which Lisa was resting her head. “It’s hot,” Joette repeated. Their bed was stripped to only one thin sheet, but the July air, thick with humidity, made it almost too much to bear. Joette pulled away, leaving a gulf of mattress between them. “What are you reading?” Lisa asked. Joette held up her thin paperback just long enough for Lisa to make out a cover dominated by shapes and primary colors. The kind of cover that told her nothing about the book, except that probably it was for people too smart to need that one precious picture to illustrate all the words inside. “Is it good?” asked Lisa. “It’s okay.” Joette paused. “I’m really tired,” she added. “It’s been such a long day.” “Oh.” Lisa bent her body under the sheet. Her knees crept toward Joette’s, one last sally for even the feeblest contact. Joette rolled further away, until the arm holding her book was hanging off the edge of the bed. Lisa retreated. The centipedes were ruining everything.

Joette did not mind the idea of centipedes in their home. “They’re good for the house. You know, like spiders. They eat other bugs. We won’t have to worry about silverfish or earwigs.” “We should just call an exterminator,” Lisa replied. “Then we don’t have to worry about any kinds of bugs.” “That’s horrible!” Joette gave her a look of such sincere disgust that Lisa felt embarrassment creep up the back of her neck. “We’re not going to commit genocide against a bunch of little guys who are just here to help us keep our house clean.” Except for the occasional order of chicken vindaloo, Joette was a vegetarian. She opposed genocide on even a bacterial level. “They’re not here to help us,” said Lisa. “They’re here to commit insect cannibalism and poop inside the walls. I don’t think that calling an exterminator would be unreasonable.” Joette did think it would be unreasonable. No exterminator was called. This was Lisa’s first failure to eliminate the enemy.

The problem with centipedes was that Lisa did not know how to lure them. She tried, first with bowls of sugar water as if for ants, then with bowls of saltwater, as if for slugs. Centipedes, she discovered slowly, were not that kind of bug. Like most predators, they preferred live prey. On the internet, some people defended house centipedes. Those bodies in many shades of brown, with their feathery legs and long antennae sprouting from either end of the abdomen, had their admirers. To Lisa, they looked more like fugitives from some extraterrestrial coral reef than common household pests. Each flitting movement suggested flight, despite their closeness to the ground. Some people even sold boxes of scutigera coleoptrata to be released in the home, that they might eradicate less innocuous insect populations. In the face of such incredible ignorance and casual evil, Lisa did not know how to explain that all insects were less innocuous than centipedes. The idea of trying and failing to save each hapless eBay customer was overwhelming, especially in the face of the seller’s long pages of positive feedback. So Lisa did what she could, which was to concentrate on the war at home before it was too late.

“Yeah,” said the exterminator, peering behind the couch. “We take care of centipedes all the time.” “Mh,” said Lisa. “Well, I’m also worried about preventing them from coming back, once you get rid of them.” “The two main things you can do,” said the man, “are to make sure that your house doesn’t have any other infestations, since those’ll just feed the centipedes. You gotta starve ‘em out.” He pointed at an old spiderweb near the ceiling, then offered her a tenuous smile. “Also, you gotta eliminate damp spots in the house. If any of your pipes leak, or if you’ve got cracks in your foundation, or if you’ve ever had a water main break, it needs to be fixed. Pretty much anything that’ll give ’em moisture. If you can dry your house out, you can clear up your centipede problem. I’d be happy to look around for any trouble spots, but it’ll be easier at night. Centipedes, they like the dark.” Lisa nodded, trying to steer him to the front door. Guilt nibbled at her. Moronta Pest Solutions was the only place in town that offered free estimates, and the man had driven at least twenty minutes to get here. The exterminator ignored her edging him toward the door and headed down into the basement. Lisa followed, clicking on the light. “Wow,” he said. Lisa looked over his shoulder. “You’ve got quite an infestation here.” She could see only the basement. “There.” He pointed to a lumpy shadow cast by a pile of boxes she and Joette had never unpacked. “See right there?” Lisa squinted. There was movement, as if the shadow was alive, testing the edges of the light. “No offense, ma’am, but this place is crawling.” Lisa felt sick. The questions she wanted to ask the exterminator were not questions he could answer. No exterminator would know how to dry out a human body without killing the main occupant. He could only make sure that the centipedes within her didn’t have more sinister confederates hiding under cupboards and between walls, waiting. “I’m so sorry,” said Lisa. “I really have to consult with my husband before I can make you an offer.” The exterminator blinked. “I haven’t given you an estimate yet.” “I’m so sorry,” said Lisa, herding him up the stairs and toward the front door. “If it was that infestation comment,” he said, “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to be rude—” Lisa shut the door behind him. An exterminator was not enough.

When Joette came home from work, her red hair plastered to her scalp with sweat, Lisa was waiting by the door to ambush her. “I think that I have lice,” she announced. “Lice,” repeated Joette, bending down slowly to take off her shoes. “Where would you have gotten lice?” “I don’t know.” Lisa shrugged. “Maybe at the store, trying on a hat.” “Oh,” said Joette. Not when was the last time you left the house? or I have never seen you wear a hat. She put her work shoes against the wall, next to her single pair of dress shoes and her worn summer sandals. “Did you actually see the lice?” “I found an eggstring.” Lisa fiddled with her left earring. “So, you know. If one of us has lice, probably both of us have lice. I thought, if you buy some lice shampoo, I’ll do all the laundry to make sure they don’t spread.” Joette shook her head. “I really don’t think I have lice.” She took a few steps forward. “You know what, let me take a look at your scalp. Let me make sure.” “No.” Lisa ran a hand over her hair. “It’s embarrassing. I don’t want you looking at me like this. It’s gross.” Joette reached out, almost close enough to brush Lisa’s face with her fingers, then withdrew. “I could never think you’re gross.” The quiet moment that followed was devastating. It was hard to believe in the centipedes at all when Joette was so much herself. Lisa wanted to make her understand. She wanted to say, I have to starve the centipedes out somehow. “I’m sorry,” she offered instead. “Don’t be sorry,” said Joette. “But can I buy the lice shampoo tomorrow? It’s been a long day.” “Sure. There’s no hurry. The lice can wait,” said Lisa, all her words tumbling over each other. “I made dinner, it’ll be out of the oven in a minute. I made your favorite lemon cookies, too.” Joette’s expressions flickered over her face too fast for Lisa to read them. “Do you mind if I have a lemon cookie now? Or do you want me to wait ’til after dinner?” “Have one now,” said Lisa. “Have a couple if you want. Please.”

Lisa and Joette played school nurse with the lice shampoo, picking carefully through each other’s hair for lice and nits. “You know,” said Joette. “When I was a kid, it always took a couple washes to wipe the lice completely out.” “Hm,” said Lisa. She had grown up without lice. It was not the kind of thing that children at her school passed around. “Maybe this is a better brand.” “It’s the same one. I figured that if RID worked then, it’d work now. And I guess it does, just better.” “It’s been a while since you were a kid. They must’ve improved the formula.” “They must’ve.” Joette’s voice almost wasn’t skeptical. The centipedes were not disturbed by the lice shampoo. Whatever they were eating, it did not come from outside Joette’s skin. Lisa no longer only heard them, on those rare nights when she and Joette still touched each other. She was beginning to see them, perpetually scuttling out of range of her vision. These were not house centipedes, which suddenly seemed benign by comparison. They wore dark bodies, coiled tightly with the promise of tensile strength. The centipedes were growing.

Scolopendra gigantea [scol’o*pen”dra jahy-gan-tee-uh]: the Amazonian Giant Centipede. The largest extant breed of centipede, it can grow over a foot long, and is capable of pulling down bats in mid-flight. Unlike most other types of centipede, Scolopendra gigantean is a carnivore, not an insectivore. Other insects—even other Amazonian breeds, grown by the tropical heat to monstrous size—are not large enough to feed its hunger. In insectariums, Scolopendra gigantea are fed infant mice, much like snakes, and are known for being particularly cruel to their prey.

Lisa spent hours on the internet, looking for new solutions. There was a whole family of antihelminthics, toxins meant to kill parasitic worms that were safe—in mild doses—for humans to eat. There were abortifacients, from pennyroyal to tansy, to be brewed into tea. If it was impossible to starve the centipedes out, she would have to kill them. The poison she eventually settled on wasn’t a poison at all, but a desiccant. The promotional material was what convinced her:

Drione Dust is a white, low odor dust that works as a desiccant on insects. Once sprinkled on the insects’ bodies, Drione Dust cuts away at the exoskeleton and then robs household pests of vital moisture. This unique formulation will last over a year, and, because Drione Dust works by dehydrating insects rather than chemically poisoning them, is among the safest insecticides available. Perfect for homes with pets and young children!

Lisa liked the word “safe.” She also liked that, because it was not a poison, she did not have to sign for it when the UPS man delivered it. “Low odor,” she discovered, actually meant “no odor.” Still, she imagined that she could smell its grit, its very whiteness. That night, after Joette went to sleep, Lisa poured the rest of the lice shampoo into the tub and pulled herself a bath. The submersion was painful, and the tender parts of her body carried a little sting for days afterward. It was one more tiny thing that might keep the centipedes away.

Joette’s sickness started with diarrhea, which Lisa didn’t learn about until one morning when she heard a pause in Joette’s usual preparation for work. The shower stopped. Instead of the immediate buzz of the hairdryer through the closed door, she heard nothing. Then—clear and quiet—retching. Lisa got out of bed and went to stand outside the bathroom door. The dots did not connect. She thought, first, that most horrible thought: morning sickness. Joette was seeing someone else; the centipedes had reversed even that most integral part of her. No. Even invasive centipedes could not change a person so much, not in the less than six months they had made Joette’s body their home. Joette opened the bathroom door, then took a rapid step back at seeing Lisa standing so close. Her breath smelled like vomit. “Are you okay?” asked Lisa. “I don’t know,” said Joette. “I mean, there was some blood.” Lisa’s heart stopped, then reanimated in double-time. “Where?” “I puked,” said Joette. “There was blood.” Lisa thought, The drione dust. Lisa thought, It was supposed to be safe. Then, worst of all, one final thought: This means that it’s working. “Has this happened before?” she asked. “I mean, the blood.” “Of course not.” “Maybe I did something wrong with the quiche. Maybe I didn’t cook the eggs all the way through.” Joette shook her head. “If it was the eggs, you’d be sick, too. Maybe it was the graham crackers I had before bed.” “Do you want to go to the hospital?” Lisa asked, the air in her lungs thick with anticipation. “No.” Joette reached out one hand and leaned heavily against the doorframe. Lisa stood her ground. The vomit on her breath was not so bad. “I just want to brush my teeth and go to work.” “Do you want me to make you something to eat? If you still have enough time, I can make you a good hot breakfast. It’ll be better for your stomach than cold milk and cereal. No eggs, this time.” Joette’s expression was sympathetic, which didn’t make sense, since she was the one who was sick. “Sure,” she said. “Make me breakfast.” Lisa stumbled through flipping pancakes and squeezing orange juice, soft things to keep from hurting Joette’s insides. She sprinkled the syrup only lightly with drione dust, then ate some of the pancakes herself. If the drione dust was working, she needed some of it, too. Once Joette’s body became a hostile environment, the centipedes would need a new home. Lisa was only a little surprised. Mixed with syrup, the drione dust tasted exactly as white as it smelled.

The hospital called in the middle of the afternoon, when Lisa was napping. She was dreaming one of those domestic half-dreams that came when she was almost awake; in this one she was boiling pasta to make spinach manicotti for dinner. Every time she tried to add the pasta, the box was mysteriously back in the kitchen cabinet, too high up for her to reach without pulling out a chair. “Is this Lisa Sucharski?” asked the voice on the other end of the phone. It was a harsh voice, particularly when contrasted with the susurrus of boiling water from her dream. “Yes,” said Lisa. The word rose up her throat like a bubble through olive oil. “You’re listed as next of kin to,” the voice paused, “Joette Lehman. We regret to inform you—” Lisa stopped breathing. “—that Ms. Lehman has been hospitalized.” The woman kept talking as Lisa opened her mouth to speak. The words died in her throat and she hung up. It took a while to find her keys buried in the loose change bowl. Then there were cardboard boxes balanced on top of her car that needed to be moved. The car started easily, and the shift didn’t stick when she switched gears. There was plenty of gas. Lisa pulled out of the garage and into the driveway, then idled there. She sat for a long time, switching radio stations every time a song came on so that there were only commercials to listen to. Surely it wouldn’t take listening to too many commercials to finally inspire her to start driving. Eventually, darkness fell. Eventually, Lisa pulled back into the garage and carefully stacked the cardboard boxes back over the hot hood.

Alberto, a friend of Joette’s from college, drove her home from the hospital. He sat on the front steps with her, not saying much. The two of them went through half a pack of cigarettes with Lisa watching from the window before she went out to join them. “Welcome home,” she croaked. Joette took a drag on her cigarette. Either she looked skinnier or she didn’t, but Lisa thought she did. It had only been a few days. “Thanks,” said Lisa to Alberto. He vacillated between lighting a new cigarette and pocketing his matches. “No problem,” he said finally. “Happy to help.” Lisa looked from Joette to him and back again. “Did they fix you?” “I should go,” said Alberto. Joette reached over and squeezed his hand as he passed. “Thanks.” He murmured something back, too quiet for Lisa to hear. Joette watched his retreating back rather than meeting Lisa’s eyes. “I wish you’d come to the hospital,” Joette said. “I’m sorry.” Lisa plucked a pill off the front of her sweater. “I tried.” Her sweater was covered in pills. There were so many it was hard to decide which ones most needed her attention. “Are you okay now?” “Kind of.” Joette sighed. “The office suite next to ours had some kind of infestation, and they brought in exterminators to deal with it. There was a memo sent to the whole building. Anyway, the weird thing was that nobody else seemed to be having bug problems. The hospital thinks that’s what got me sick.” “Bug chemicals,” said Lisa. “You were poisoned.” “I guess. Well, not really.” They looked at each other. Lisa reached across the space between them to cover Joette’s hand with her own. “Why are you wearing that sweater?” Joette asked. “It’s so hot out here.” Lisa looked away. “But you’ll be okay now?” “I assume so.” Joette sighed. “I called my boss and told him what was wrong, and I guess he’s gonna have our cubicles tested to make sure nobody else gets sick. I got better pretty quick at the hospital; they think I just needed to be away from the exposure.” “Well, it’s good you’re home, then. Do you have to go back to work tomorrow?” “Nah. Apparently passing out at the office gave Mike one hell of an insurance scare, so I’ve got all the time off I need.” She smiled. “It’ll be nice to relax for a little while.” “It’ll be nice to take care of you.” “It’ll be nice to be taken care of.”

Lisa cut the dosage of drione dust in half. She couldn’t stop and admit defeat, anymore than she could watch Joette shrivel up just like the centipedes inside her. She just needed to slow them down, to buy the time until she could find a cure. The other centipedes were everywhere. They had the grace to melt into tiny cracks and crevices when Joette came home, but when Lisa was alone, they tormented her. She could not comb her hair without finding them in her brush, could not pour cereal without pouring their segmented bodies into the bowl, could not open the washing machine without finding them scurrying among her wet clothes. She began to talk to them. She had talked to them all along, muttering curses and threats that she did not know how to carry out. For the first time, the scope of this one- sided conversation broadened. She began asking questions, even offering advice, in place of her old orders and declarations. The centipedes did not reply in words. “Why are you doing this?” she asked, braiding her hair so they had fewer places to hide within it. Knocked to the floor by the brush, they scurried away from her crushing feet. “Why Joette?” she asked, pouring her bowl of cereal, uneaten, into the sink. The centipedes tried and failed to escape the roar of the garbage disposal; it was a small disappointment that they did not scream when they died. The slurry of their bodies was so thick she had to pull it out of the drain with her hands and drop it in the trash. “How can I defeat you?” she asked, adding bleach to the laundry though she wasn’t washing whites, then starting the cycle over again, though these clothes were clean. For just a moment, there was the scrabbling of their hundreds of clicking feet against the metal walls of the washing machine. Then, just the flood of water. The centipedes had nothing to say.

Joette went back to the hospital just over a week later. This time, Lisa called the ambulance herself. “It’s so strange,” said Joette. “No one else at the office got sick. Mike brought people in. The whole place was clean.” Lisa put down the telephone, though the 911 operator wasn’t finished speaking, to take a napkin and wipe a thin, bloody string of vomit off Joette’s chin. “I don’t know,” said Lisa. “Maybe they could come check out the house. Maybe one of the neighbors did something.” “Then you’d be sick, too.” Joette closed her bleary eyes. Lisa would not have said that Joette was crying, but slow tears were leaking down her cheeks. “I just don’t know what’s wrong with me.” I know what’s wrong with you, Lisa wanted to say. The centipedes are fighting their hardest fight. All the hope she had been holding back bubbled up. And we are going to beat them. “Do you have any gum?” Joette asked. “I don’t want the paramedics to have to deal with my puke breath.” “They’ve dealt with worse,” said Lisa. “God. I don’t want to have to go back to the hospital.” “I’ll come visit you,” Lisa lied. “Alberto will come visit you. The hospital will make you better.” Lisa tried not to resent the hospital for failing to do just that. Their tests were worthless if they missed the centipedes. The doctors were not clever enough to fight them. “Seriously,” said Joette. “I want some gum.” Lisa went to the kitchen, digging around the anything drawer for a stick of Juicy Fruit or Doublemint. She went back to the front porch. “No gum.” Lisa sat there holding Joette’s hand while they waited for the ambulance to arrive.

Lisa hid the small tub of drione dust in the garage. On television, whenever the police executed a search warrant, something went wrong. Either they found evidence in a car or garage even though the warrant hadn’t said they could search there, or they just didn’t search those places at all and everything turned out fine. In real life, the police were more competent than that. They arrested her on the back porch. Lisa slid into the backseat, understanding for the first time why policemen were always carefully guiding the heads of the arrested into their cars. It had been a long time since she’d left the house.

Euphoberia, the king of centipedes, dragged its bulk across the Earth some 430 million years ago, and could reach almost four feet in length. Euphoberia fed mostly on fish and invertebrates; scientists believe that they missed the opportunity to dine on mammals by almost 200 million years. No one is sure exactly when they went extinct.

“No,” said Lisa again. “I wasn’t trying to kill her. If I wanted to kill Joette, I would have used poison. I used the desiccant because the label said it was safe.” “Mh-hm,” said Detective Phó. “And what exactly does a desiccant do, Ms. Sucharski?” Lisa closed her eyes. “It dries out arthropods’ exoskeletons, and then they die of dehydration.” “And,” continued Detective Phó in that calm voice, “you never imagined that a chemical compound designed to kill insects would have a harmful effect on the human body?” “It’s not chemicals,” said Lisa. “Tell me, how have you and Joette been getting along lately? Is there any financial trouble that’s been worrying you?” She paused. “If you think that Joette might be cheating on you, for instance, that’s the sort of thing it would be very helpful for me to know.” Lisa wanted to stand up and walk out. She wanted to go home. “Joette and I love each other very much,” she said, instead of: I miss her. She works too much. We haven’t had sex or a real conversation in months. Most of all, she didn’t say anything about the centipedes. Lisa did not want to go to the kinds of places where they put people who talked about centipedes possessing their loved ones. She meant to be cool for the entire interview, to impress them with her sang-froid. Instead, by the end of the first hour, she had stopped talking at all except to demand a lawyer. Detective Phó seemed disgusted as she led Lisa back to her cell. Joette did not take long to come to her. Detective Phó let them meet in an interrogation room instead of leaving bars between them. Perhaps it was meant as kindness, but Lisa could only think of television cops tricking confessions out of people. She had already all but confessed. “Are you feeling better?” Lisa asked. Joette shook her head. “Jesus, Lisa. Jesus.” She was still for a moment, and then all of her words burst forth like tiny arrows. “What the hell is wrong with you? Why did you do this to me?” Lisa moved her hands. The scrape of her handcuffs against the table was louder than the echoes of Joette’s outrage. “I was trying to save you.” Lisa tried to get Joette to meet her eyes. “You know that.” “I know,” she said, looking almost ashamed. “I just. . . I don’t know why you did this. I don’t know what’s wrong with you.” “But you know what’s wrong with you,” said Lisa. “We both know what’s wrong with you.” She looked around the tiny room. Detective Phó stood in the corner next to the door, her hands folded casually over her crotch as if she had testicles to protect. Lisa wondered, almost idly, who was faster. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Joette. Lisa leaned closer to her. Detective Phó took a step forward, then leaned back against the wall. Under the bright lights, the shadows of the centipedes moving behind Joette’s eyes were so clear. “Lean forward,” said Lisa, looking past Joette’s eyes and into the insects inside. Joette did. “Open your mouth.” Joette did. Detective Phó abandoned the wall and stepped closer again. Lisa waited until the centipede shadows disappeared, then sprang forward. She hadn’t counted on the heaviness of the cuffs. They clicked against Joette’s teeth and knocked her head back. There. From underneath Joette’s tongue. A single centipede. Detective Phó put two hands on Lisa’s shoulder and tried to pull her back. Lisa knocked her off and sprang at Joette. She threw the centipede to the ground, where it skittered toward the wall. Joette screamed, and Detective Phó recoiled. There was so little time.

© 2013 Caspian Gray. Caspian Gray currently lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he shares an apartment with a tall man and a small dachshund. He is a funeral director's apprentice whose work has previously appeared in magazines such as ChiZine, Interzone, and Odyssey. Houses Under The Sea Caitlín R. Kiernan

When I close my eyes, I see Jacova Angevine. I close my eyes, and there she is, standing alone at the end of the breakwater, standing with the foghorn as the choppy sea shatters itself to foam against a jumble of gray boulders. The October wind is making something wild of her hair, and her back’s turned to me. The boats are coming in. I close my eyes, and she’s standing in the surf at Moss Landing, gazing out into the bay, staring towards the place where the continental shelf narrows down to a sliver and drops away to the black abyss of Monterey Canyon. There are gulls, and her hair is tied back in a ponytail. I close my eyes, and we’re walking together down Cannery Row, heading south towards the aquarium. She’s wearing a gingham dress and a battered pair of Doc Martens that she must have had for fifteen years. I say something inconsequential, but she doesn’t hear me, too busy scowling at the tourists, at the sterile, cheery absurdities of the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company and Mackerel Jack’s Trading Post. “That used to be a whorehouse,” she says, nodding in the direction of Mackerel Jack’s. “The Lone Star Cafe, but Steinbeck called it the Bear Flag. Everything burned. Nothing here’s the way it used to be.” She says that like she remembers, and I close my eyes. And she’s on television again, out on the old pier at Moss Point, the day they launched the ROV Tiburon II. And she’s at the Pierce Street warehouse in Monterey; men and women in white robes are listening to every word she says. They hang on every syllable, her every breath, their many eyes like the bulging eyes of deep-sea fish encountering sunlight for the first time. Dazed, terrified, enraptured, lost. All of them lost. I close my eyes, and she’s leading them into the bay. Those creatures jumped the barricades And have headed for the sea All these divided moments, disconnected, or connected so many different ways, that I’ll never be able to pull them apart and find a coherent narrative. That’s my folly, my conceit, that I can make a mere story of what has happened. Even if I could, it’s nothing anyone would ever want to read, nothing I could sell. CNN and Newsweek and The New York Times, Rolling Stone and Harper’s, everyone already knows what they think about Jacova Angevine. Everybody already knows as much as they want to know. Or as little. In those minds, she’s already earned her spot in the death-cult hall of fame, sandwiched firmly in between Jim Jones and Heaven’s Gate. I close my eyes, and “Fire from the sky, fire on the water,” she says and smiles; I know that this time she’s talking about the fire of September 14, 1924, the day lightning struck one of the 55,000-gallon storage tanks belonging to the Associated Oil Company and a burning river flowed into the sea. Billowing black clouds hide the sun, and the fire has the voice of a hurricane as it bears down on the canneries, a voice of demons, and she stops to tie her shoes. I sit here in this dark motel room, staring at the screen of my laptop, the clean liquid-crystal light, typing irrelevant words to build meandering sentences, waiting, waiting, waiting, and I don’t know what it is that I’m waiting for. Or I’m only afraid to admit that I know exactly what I’m waiting for. She has become my ghost, my private haunting, and haunted things are forever waiting. “In the mansions of Poseidon, she will prepare halls from coral and glass and the bones of whales,” she says, and the crowd in the warehouse breathes in and out as a single, astonished organism, their assembled bodies lesser than the momentary whole they have made. “Down there, you will know nothing but peace, in her mansions, in the endless night of her coils.” “Tiburon is Spanish for shark,” she says, and I tell her I didn’t know that, that I had two years of Spanish in high school, but that was a thousand years ago, and all I remember is sí and por favor. What is that noise now? What is the wind doing? I close my eyes again. The sea has many voices. Many gods and many voices. “November 5, 1936,” she says, and this is the first night we had sex, the long night we spent together in a seedy Moss Point hotel, the sort of place the fishermen take their hookers, the same place she was still staying when she died. “The Del Mar Canning Company burned to the ground. No one ever tried to blame lightning for that one.” There’s moonlight through the drapes, and I imagine for a moment that her skin has become iridescent, mother- of-pearl, the shimmering motley of an oil slick. I reach out and touch her naked thigh, and she lights a cigarette. The smoke hangs thick in the air, like fog or forgetfulness. My fingertips against her flesh, and she stands and walks to the window. “Do you see something out there?” I ask, and she shakes her head very slowly. I close my eyes. In the moonlight, I can make out the puckered, circular scars on both her shoulder blades and running halfway down her spine. Two dozen or more of them, but I never bothered to count exactly. Some are no larger than a dime, but several are at least two inches across. “When I’m gone,” she says, “when I’m done here, they’ll ask you questions about me. What will you tell them?” “That depends what they ask,” I reply and laugh, still thinking it was all one of her strange jokes, the talk of leaving, and I lie down and stare at the shadows on the ceiling. “They’ll ask you everything,” she whispers. “Sooner or later, I expect they’ll ask you everything.” Which they did. I close my eyes, and I see her, Jacova Angevine, the lunatic prophet from Salinas, pearls that were her eyes, cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o, and she’s kneeling in the sand. The sun is rising behind her and I hear people coming through the dunes. “I’ll tell them you were a good fuck,” I say, and she takes another drag off her cigarette and continues staring at the night outside the motel windows. “Yes,” she says. “I expect you will.”

The first time that I saw Jacova Angevine—I mean, the first time I saw her in person—I’d just come back from Pakistan and had flown up to Monterey to try and clear my head. A photographer friend had an apartment there and he was on assignment in Tokyo, so I figured I could lay low for a couple of weeks, a whole month maybe, stay drunk and decompress. My clothes, my luggage, my skin, everything about me still smelled like Islamabad. I’d spent more than six months overseas, ferreting about for real and imagined connections between Muslim extremists, European middlemen, and Pakistan’s leaky nuclear arms program, trying to gauge the damage done by the enterprising Abdul Qadeer Khan, rogue father of the Pakistani bomb, trying to determine exactly what he’d sold and to whom. Everyone already knew—or at least thought they knew—about North Korea, Libya, and Iran, and American officials suspected that al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups belonged somewhere on his list of customers, as well, despite assurances to the contrary from Major-General Shaukat Sultan. I’d come back with a head full of apocalypse and Urdu, anti-India propaganda and Mushaikh poetry, and I was determined to empty my mind of everything except scotch and the smell of the sea. It was a bright Wednesday afternoon, a warm day for November in Monterey County, and I decided to come up for air. I showered for the first time in a week and had a late lunch at the Sardine Factory on Wave Street— Dungeness crab rémoulade, fresh oysters with horseradish, and grilled sanddabs in a lemon sauce that was a little heavy on the thyme—then decided to visit the aquarium and walk it all off. When I was a kid in Brooklyn, I spent a lot of my time at the aquarium on Coney Island, and, three decades later, there were few things a man could do sober that relaxed me as quickly and completely. I put the check on my MasterCard and followed Wave Street south and east to Prescott, then turned back down Cannery Row, the glittering bay on my right, the pale blue autumn sky stretched out overhead like oil on canvas. I close my eyes, and that afternoon isn’t something that happened three years ago, something I’m making sound like a goddamn travelogue. I close my eyes, and it’s happening now, for the first time, and there she is, sitting alone on a long bench in front of the kelp forest exhibit, her thin face turned up to the high, swaying canopy behind the glass, the dapple of fish and seaweed shadows drifting back and forth across her features. I recognize her, and that surprises me, because I’ve only seen her face on television and in magazine photos and on the dust jacket of the book she wrote before she lost the job at Berkeley. She turns her head and smiles at me, the familiar way you smile at a friend, the way you smile at someone you’ve known all your life. “You’re in luck,” she says. “It’s almost time for them to feed the fish.” And Jacova Angevine pats the bench next to her, indicating that I should sit down. “I read your book,” I say, taking a seat because I’m still too surprised to do anything else. “Did you? Did you really?” and now she looks like she doesn’t believe me, like I’m only saying that I’ve read her book to be polite, and from her expression I can tell that she thinks it’s a little odd, that anyone would ever bother to try and flatter her. “Yes,” I tell her, trying too hard to sound sincere. “I did really. In fact, I read some of it twice.” “And why would you do a thing like that?” “Truthfully?” “Yes, truthfully.” Her eyes are the same color as the water trapped behind the thick panes of aquarium glass, the color of the November sunlight filtered through saltwater and kelp blades. There are fine lines at the corners of her mouth and beneath her eyes that make her look several years older than she is. “Last summer, I was flying from New York to London, and there was a three-hour layover in Shannon. Your book was all I’d brought to read.” “That’s terrible,” she says, still smiling, and turns to face the big tank again. “Do you want your money back?” “It was a gift,” I reply, which isn’t true and I have no idea why I’m lying to her. “An ex-girlfriend gave it to me for my birthday.” “Is that why you left her?” “No, I left her because she thought I drank too much and I thought she drank too little.” “Are you an alcoholic?” Jacova Angevine asks, as casually as if she were asking me whether I liked milk in my coffee or if I took it black. “Well, some people say I’m headed in that direction,” I tell her. “But I did enjoy the book, honest. It’s hard to believe they fired you for writing it. I mean, that people get fired for writing books.” But I know that’s a lie, too; I’m not half that naïve, and it’s not at all difficult to understand how or why Waking Leviathan ended Jacova Angevine’s career as an academic. A reviewer for Nature called it “the most confused and preposterous example of bad history wedding bad science since the Velikovsky affair.” “They didn’t fire me for writing it,” she says. “They politely asked me to resign because I’d seen fit to publish it.” “Why didn’t you fight them?” Her smile fades a little, and the lines around her mouth seem to grow the slightest bit more pronounced. “I don’t come here to talk about the book, or my unfortunate employment history,” she says. I apologize, and she tells me not to worry about it. A diver enters the tank, matte-black neoprene trailing a rush of silver bubbles, and most of the fish rise expectantly to meet him or her, a riot of kelp bass and sleek leopard sharks, sheephead and rockfish and species I don’t recognize. She doesn’t say anything else, too busy watching the feeding, and I sit there beside her, at the bottom of a pretend ocean. I open my eyes. There are only the words on the screen in front of me. I didn’t see her again for the better part of a year. During that time, as my work sent me back to Pakistan, and then to Germany and Israel, I reread her book. I also read some of the articles and reviews, and a brief online interview that she’d given Whitley Strieber’s Unknown Country website. Then I tracked down an article on Inuit archaeology that she’d written for Fate and wondered at what point Jacova Angevine had decided that there was no going back, nothing left to lose and so no reason not to allow herself to become part of the murky, strident world of fringe believers and UFO buffs, conspiracy theorists and paranormal “investigators” that seemed so eager to embrace her as one of its own. And I wondered, too, if perhaps she might have been one of them from the start.

I woke up this morning from a long dream of storms and drowning and lay in bed, very still, sizing up my hangover and staring at the sagging, water-stained ceiling of my motel room. And I finally admitted to myself that this isn’t going to be what the paper has hired me to write. I don’t think I’m even trying to write it for them anymore. They want the dirt, of course, and I’ve never been shy about digging holes. I’ve spent the last twenty years as a shovel-for-hire. I don’t think it matters that I may have loved her, or that a lot of this dirt is mine. I can’t pretend that I’m acting out of nobility of soul or loyalty or even some selfish, belated concern for my own dingy reputation. I would write exactly what they want me to write if I could. If I knew how. I need the money. I haven’t worked for the last five months and my savings are almost gone. But if I’m not writing it for them, if I’ve abandoned all hope of a paycheck at the other end of this thing, why the hell then am I still sitting here typing? Am I making a confession? Bless me, Father, I can’t forget? Do I believe it’s something I can puke up like a sour belly full of whiskey, that writing it all down will make the nightmares stop or make it any easier for me to get through the days? I sincerely hope I’m not as big a fool as that. Whatever else I may be, I like to think that I’m not an idiot. I don’t know why I’m writing this, whatever this turns out to be. Maybe it’s only a very long-winded suicide note. Last night I watched the tape again. I have all three versions with me—the cut that’s still being hawked over the internet, the one that ends right after the ROV was hit, before the lights came back on; the cut that MBARI released to the press and the scientific community in response to the version circulating online; and I have the “raw” footage, the copy I bought from a robotics technician who claimed to have been aboard the R/V Western Flyer the day that the incident occurred. I paid him two thousand dollars for it and the kid swore to both its completeness and authenticity. I knew that I wasn’t the first person to whom he’d sold the tape. I’d heard about it from a contact in the chemistry department at UC Irvine. I was never sure exactly how she’d caught wind of it, but I gathered that the tech was turning a handsome little profit peddling his contraband to anyone willing to pony up the cash. We met at a Motel 6 in El Cajon, and I played it all the way through before I handed him the money. He sat with his back to the television while I watched the tape, rewound and started it over again. “What the hell are you doing?” he asked, literally wringing his hands and gazing anxiously at the heavy drapes. I’d pulled them shut after hooking up the rented VCR that I’d brought with me, but a bright sliver of afternoon sunlight slipped in between them and divided his face down the middle. “Jesus, man. You think it’s not gonna be the exact same thing every time? You think if you keep playing it over and over it’s gonna come out any different?” I’ve watched the tape more times than I can count, a couple hundred, at least, and I still think that’s a good goddamned question. “So why didn’t MBARI release this?” I asked the kid, and he laughed and shook his head. “Why the fuck do you think?” he replied. He took my money, reminded me again that we’d never met and that he’d deny everything if I attempted to finger him as my source. Then he got back into his ancient, wheezy VW Microbus and drove off, leaving me sitting there with an hour and a half of unedited color video recorded somewhere along the bottom of the Monterey Canyon. Everything the ROV Tiburon II’s starboard camera had seen (the port pan-and-tilt unit was malfunctioning that day), twenty miles out and three kilometers down, and from the start I understood it was the closest I was ever likely to come to an answer, and that it was also only a different and far more terrible sort of question. Last night I got drunk, more so than usual, a lot more so than usual, and watched it for the first time in almost a month. But I turned the sound on the television down all the way and left the lights burning. Even drunk, I’m still a coward. The ocean floor starkly illuminated by the ROV’s six 480-watt HMI lights, revealing a velvet carpet of gray- brown sediment washed out from Elkhorn Slough and all the other sloughs and rivers emptying into the bay. And even at this depth, there are signs of life: brittlestars and crabs cling to the shit-colored rocks, sponges and sea cucumbers, the sinuous, smooth bodies of big-eyed rattails. Here and there, dark outcroppings jut from the ooze like bone from the decaying flesh of a leper. My asshole editor would laugh out loud at that last simile, would probably take one look at it and laugh and then say something like, “If I’d wanted fucking purple I’d have bought a goddamn pot of violets.” But my asshole editor hasn’t seen the tape I bought from the tech. My asshole editor never met Jacova Angevine, never listened to her talk, never fucked her, never saw the scars on her back or the fear in her eyes. The ROV comes to a rocky place where the seafloor drops away suddenly, and it hesitates, responding to commands from the control room of the R/V Western Flyer. A moment or two later, the steady fall of marine snow becomes so heavy that it’s difficult to see much of anything through the light reflecting off the whitish particles of sinking detritus. And sitting there on the floor between the foot of the bed and the television, I almost reached out and touched the screen. Almost. “It’s a little bit of everything,” I heard Jacova say, though she never actually said anything of the sort to me. “Silt, phytoplankton and zooplankton, soot, mucus, diatoms, fecal pellets, dust, grains of sand and clay, radioactive fallout, pollen, sewage. Some of it’s even interplanetary dust particles. Some of it fell from the stars.” And Tiburon II lurches and glides forward a few feet, then slips cautiously over the precipice, beginning the slow descent into this new and unexpected abyss. “We’d been over that stretch more than a dozen times, at least,” Natalie Billington, chief ROV pilot for Tiburon II, told a CNN correspondent after the internet version of the tape first made the news. “But that drop-off wasn’t on any of the charts. We’d always missed it somehow. I know that isn’t a very satisfying answer, but it’s a big place down there. The canyon is over two hundred miles long. You miss things.” For a while—exactly 15.34 seconds—there’s only the darkness and marine snow and a few curious or startled fish. According to MBARI, the ROV’s vertical speed during this part of the dive is about thirty-five meters per minute, so by the time it finds the bottom again, depth has increased by some five hundred and twenty-five feet. The seafloor comes into view again, and there’s not so much loose sediment here, just a jumble of broken boulders, and it’s startling how clean they are, almost completely free of the usual encrustations and muck. There are no sponges or sea cucumbers to be seen, no starfish, and even the omnipresent marine snow has tapered off to only a few stray, drifting flecks. And then the wide, flat rock that is usually referred to as “the Delta stone” comes into view. And this isn’t like the face on Mars or Von Daniken seeing ancient astronauts on Mayan artifacts. The lowercase “d” carved into the slab is unmistakable. The edges are so sharp, so clean that it might have been done yesterday. The Tiburon II hovers above the Delta stone, spilling light into this lightless place, and I know what’s coming next, so I sit very still and count off the seconds in my head. When I’ve counted to thirty-eight, the view from the ROV’s camera pans violently to the right, signaling the portside impact, and an instant later there’s only static, white noise, the twelve-second gap in the tape during which the camera was still running, but no longer recording. I counted to eleven before I switched off the television, and then sat listening to the wind, and the waves breaking against the beach, waiting for my heart to stop racing and the sweat on my face and palms to dry. When I was sure that I wasn’t going to be sick, I pressed eject and the VCR spat out the tape. I returned it to its navy-blue plastic case and sat smoking and drinking, helpless to think of anything but Jacova.

Jacova Angevine was born and grew up in her father’s big Victorian house in Salinas, only a couple of blocks from the birthplace of John Steinbeck. Her mother died when she was eight. Jacova had no siblings, and her closest kin, paternal and maternal, were all back east in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and Maryland. In 1960, her parents relocated to California, just a few months after they were married, and her father took a job teaching high-school English in Castroville. After six months, he quit that job and took another, with only slightly better pay, in the town of Soledad. Though he’d earned a doctorate in comparative literature from Columbia, Theo Angevine seemed to have no particular academic ambitions. He’d written several novels while in college, though none of them had managed to find a publisher. In 1969, his wife five months pregnant with their daughter, he resigned from his position at Soledad High and moved north to Salinas, where he bought the old house on Howard Street with a bank loan and the advance from his first book sale, a mystery novel titled The Man Who Laughed at Funerals (Random House; New York). To date, none of the three books that have been published about Jacova, the Open Door of Night sect, and the mass drownings off Moss Landing State Beach, have made more than a passing mention of Theo Angevine’s novels. Elenore Ellis-Lincoln, in Closing the Door: Anatomy of Hysteria (Simon and Schuster; New York), for example, devotes only a single paragraph to them, though she gives Jacova’s childhood an entire chapter. “Mr. Angevine’s works received little critical attention, one way or the other, and his income from them was meager,” Ellis-Lincoln writes. “Of the seventeen novels he published between 1969 and 1985, only two—The Man Who Laughed for Funerals [sic] and Seven at Sunset—are still in print. It is notable that the overall tone of the novels becomes significantly darker following his wife’s death, but the books themselves never seem to have been more to the author than a sort of hobby. Upon his death, his daughter became the executor of his literary estate, such as it was.” Likewise, in Lemming Cult (The Overlook Press; New York), William L. West writes, “Her father’s steady output of mystery and suspense potboilers must surely have been a curiosity of Jacova’s childhood, but were never once mentioned in her own writings, including the five private journals found in a cardboard box in her bedroom closet. The books themselves were entirely unremarkable, so far as I’ve been able to ascertain. Almost all are out of print and very difficult to find today. Even the catalog of the Salinas Public Library includes only a single copy each of The Man Who Laughed at Funerals, Pretoria, and Seven at Sunset.” During the two years I knew her, Jacova only mentioned her father’s writing once that I can recall, and then only in passing, but she had copies of all his novels, a fact that I’ve never seen mentioned anywhere in print. I suppose it doesn’t seem very significant, if you haven’t bothered to read Theo Angevine’s books. Since Jacova’s death, I’ve read every one of them. It took me less than a month to track down copies of all seventeen, thanks largely to online booksellers, and even less time to read them. While William West was certainly justified in calling the novels “entirely unremarkable,” even a casual examination reveals some distinctly remarkable parallels between the fiction of the father and the reality of the daughter.

I’ve spent the whole afternoon, the better part of the past five hours, on the preceding four paragraphs, trying to fool myself into believing that I can actually write about her as a journalist would write about her. That I can bring any degree of detachment or objectivity to bear. Of course, I’m wasting my time. After seeing the tape again, after almost allowing myself to watch all of it again, I think I’m desperate to put distance between myself and the memory of her. I should call New York and tell them that I can’t do this, that they should find someone else, but after the mess I made of the Musharraf story, the agency would probably never offer me another assignment. For the moment, that still matters. It might not in another day or two, but it does for now. Her father wrote books, books that were never very popular, and though they’re neither particularly accomplished nor enjoyable, they might hold clues to Jacova’s motivation and to her fate. And they might not. It’s as simple and contradictory as that. Like everything surrounding the “Lemming Cult”—as the Open Door of Night has come to be known, as it has been labeled by people who find it easier to deal with tragedy and horror if there is an attendant note of the absurd—like everything else about her, what seems meaningful one moment will seem irrelevant the next. Or maybe that’s only the way it appears to me. Maybe I’m asking too much of the clues.

Excerpt from Pretoria, pp. 164-165; Ballantine Books, 1979: Edward Horton smiled and tapped the ash from his cigar into the large glass ashtray on the table. “I don’t like the sea,” he said and nodded at the window. “Frankly, I can’t even stand the sound of it. Gives me nightmares.” I listened to the breakers, not taking my eyes off the fat man and the thick gray curlicues of smoke arranging and rearranging themselves around his face. I’d always found the sound of waves to have a welcomed tranquilizing effect upon my nerves and wondered which one of Horton’s innumerable secrets was responsible for his loathing of the sea. I knew he’d done a stint in the Navy during Korea, but I was also pretty sure he’d never seen combat. “How’d you sleep last night?” I asked, and he shook his head. “For shit,” he replied and sucked on his cigar. “Then maybe you should think about getting a room farther inland.” Horton coughed and jabbed a pudgy finger at the window of the bungalow. “Don’t think I wouldn’t, if the choice were mine to make. But she wants me here. She wants me sitting right here, waiting on her, night and day. She knows I hate the ocean.” “What the hell,” I said, reaching for my hat, tired of his company and the stink of his smoldering Macanudo. “You know where to reach me, if you change your mind. Don’t let the bad dreams get you down. They ain’t nothing but that, bad dreams.” “That’s not enough?” he asked, and I could tell from his expression that Horton wished I’d stay a little longer, but I knew he’d never admit it. “Last night, goddamn people marching into the sea, marching over the sand in rows like the goddamn infantry. Must of been a million of them. What you think a dream like that means, anyway?” “Horton, a dream like that don’t mean jack shit,” I replied. “Except maybe you need to lay off the spicy food before bedtime.” “You’re always gonna be an asshole,” he said, and I was forced to agree. He puffed his cigar, and I left the bungalow and stepped out into the salty Santa Barbara night.

Excerpt from What the Cat Dragged In, p. 231; Ballantine Books, 1980: Vicky had never told anyone about the dreams, just like she’d never told anyone about Mr. Barker or the yellow Corvette. The dreams were her secret, whether she wanted them or not. Sometimes they seemed almost wicked, shameful, sinful, like something she’d done that was against God, or at least against the law. She’d almost told Mr. Barker once, a year or so before she left Los Angeles. She’d gone so far as to broach the subject of mermaids, and then he’d snorted and laughed, so she’d thought better of it. “You got some strange notions in that head of yours,” he’d said. “Someday, you’re gonna have to grow out of crap like that, if you want people round here to start taking you seriously.” So she kept it all to herself. Whatever the dreams meant or didn’t mean, it wasn’t anything she would ever be able to explain or confess. Sometimes, nights when she couldn’t sleep, she lay in bed staring at the ceiling, thinking about the ruined castles beneath the waves and beautiful, drowned girls with seaweed tangled in their hair.

Excerpt from The Last Loan Shark of Bodega Bay, pp. 57-59; Bantam Books, 1982: “This was way the hell back in the fifties,” Foster said and lit another cigarette. His hands were shaking and he kept looking over his shoulder. “Fifty-eight, right, or maybe early fifty-nine. I know Eisenhower was still president, though I ain’t precisely sure of the year. But I was still stuck in Honolulu, right, still hauling lousy tourists around the islands in the Saint Chris so they could fish and snap pictures of goddamn Kilauea and what have you. The boat was on its last leg, but she’d still get you where you were goin’, if you knew how to slap her around.” “What’s this got to do with Winkie Anderson and the girl?” I asked, making no effort to hide my impatience. “Jesus, Frank, I’m getting to it. You want to hear this thing or not? I swear, you come around here asking the big questions, expecting the what’s-what, you can at least keep your trap shut and listen.” “I don’t have all night, that’s all.” “Yeah, well, who the hell does, why don’t you tell me that? Anyway, like I was saying, back about fifty-nine, and we was out somewhere off the north shore of Molokai. Old Coop was fishing the thousand fathom line, and Jerry—you remember Jerry O’Neil, right?” “No,” I said, eying the clock above the bar. “Well, whatever. Jerry O’Neil was mouthing off about a twelve-hundred pounder, this big-ass marlin some Mexican businessman from Tijuana had up and hooked just a few weeks before. Fish even made the damn papers, right. Anyway, Jerry said the Mexican was bad news and we should keep a sharp eye out for him. Said he was a regular Jonah.” “But you just said he caught a twelve-hundred pound marlin.” “Yeah, sure. He could haul in the fish, this chunt son of a bitch, but he was into some sort of Spanish voodoo shit and had these gold coins he’d toss over the side of the boat every five or ten minutes. Like goddamn clockwork, he’d check his watch and toss out a coin. Gold doubloons or some shit, I don’t know what they were. It was driving Coop crazy, ‘cause it wasn’t enough the Mexican had to do this thing with the coins, he was mumbling some sort of shit non-stop. Coop kept telling him to shut the hell up, people was trying to fish, but this guy, he just keeps mumbling and tossing coins and pulling in the fish. I finally got a look at one of those doubloons, and it had something stamped on one side looked like a damn octopus, and on the other side was this star like a pentagram. You know, those things witches and warlocks use.” “Foster, this is crazy bullshit. I have to be in San Francisco at seven-thirty in the morning.” I waved to the bartender and put two crumpled fives and a one on the bar in front of me. “You ever head of the Momma Hydra, Frank? That’s who this chunt said he was praying to.” “Call me when you run out of bullshit,” I said. “And I don’t have to tell you, Detective Burke won’t be half as understanding as I am.” “Jesus, Frank. Hold up a goddamn second. It’s just the way I tell stories, right. You know that. I start at the beginning. I don’t leave stuff out.”

These are only a few examples of what anyone will find, if he or she should take the time to look. There are many more, I assure you. The pages of my copies of Theo Angevine’s novels are scarred throughout with yellow highlighter. And everything leaves more questions than answers. You make of it what you will. Or you don’t. I suppose that a Freudian might have a proper field day with this stuff. Whatever I knew about Freud I forgot before I was even out of college. It would be comforting, I suppose, if I could dismiss Jacova’s fate as the end result of some overwhelming Oedipal hysteria, the ocean cast here as that Great Ur-Mother savior-being who finally opens up to offer release and forgiveness in death and dissolution.

I begin to walk down some particular, perhaps promising, avenue and then, inevitably, I turn and run, tail tucked firmly between my legs. My memories. The MBARI video. Jacova and her father’s whodunits. I scratch the surface and then pull my hand back to be sure that I haven’t lost a fucking finger. I mix metaphors the way I’ve been mixing tequila and scotch. If, as William Burroughs wrote, “Language is a virus from outer space,” then what the holy hell were you supposed to be, Jacova? An epidemic of the collective unconscious. The black plague of belief. A vaccine for cultural amnesia, she might have said. And so we’re right back to Velikovsky, who wrote “Human beings, rising from some catastrophe, bereft of memory of what had happened, regarded themselves as created from the dust of the earth. All knowledge about the ancestors, who they were and in what interstellar space they lived, was wiped away from the memory of the few survivors.” I’m drunk, and I’m not making any sense at all. Or merely much too little sense to matter. Anyway, you’ll want to pay attention to this part. It’s sort of like the ghost story within the ghost story within the ghost story, the hard nugget at the unreachable heart of my heart’s infinitely regressing babooshka, matryoshka, matrioska, matreshka, babushka. It might even be the final straw that breaks the camel of my mind. Remember, I am wasted, and so that last inexcusable paragraph may be forgiven. Or it may not. “When I become death, death is the seed from which I grow.” Burroughs said that, too. Jacova, you will be an orchard. You will be a swaying kelp forest. There’s a log in the hole in the bottom of the sea with your name on it. Yesterday afternoon, puking sick of looking at these four dingy fucking walls, I drove down to Monterey, to the warehouse on Pierce Street. The last time I was there, the cops still hadn’t taken down all the yellow crime scene-do not cross tape. Now there’s only a great big for- sale sign and an even bigger no-trespassing sign. I wrote the name and number of the realty company on the back of a book of matches. I want to ask them what they’ll be telling prospective buyers about the building’s history. Word is the whole block is due to be rezoned next year and soon those empty buildings will be converted to lofts and condos. Gentrification abhors a void. I parked in an empty lot down the street from the warehouse, hoping that no one happening by would notice me, hoping, in particular, that any passing police would not notice me. I walked quickly, without running, because running is suspicious and inevitably draws the attention of those who watch for suspicious things. I was not so drunk as I might have been, not even so drunk as I should have been, and I tried to keep my mind occupied by noting the less significant details of the street, the sky, the weather. The litter caught in the weeds and gravel— cigarette butts, plastic soft-drink bottles (I recall Pepsi, Coke, and Mountain Dew), paper bags and cups from fast-food restaurants (McDonalds, Del Taco, KFC), broken glass, unrecognizable bits of metal, a rusted Oregon license plate. The sky was painfully blue, the blue of nausea, with only very high cirrus clouds to spoil that suffocating pastel heaven. There were no other cars parked along the street, and no living things that I noticed. There were a couple of garbage dumpsters, a stop sign, and a great pile of cardboard boxes that had been soaked by rain enough times it was difficult to tell exactly where one ended and another began. There was a hubcap. When I finally reached the warehouse—the warehouse become a temple to half-remembered gods become a crime scene, now on its way to becoming something else—I ducked down the narrow alley that separates it from the abandoned Monterey Peninsula Shipping and Storage Building (established 1924). There’d been a door around that way with an unreliable lock. If I was lucky, I thought, no one would have noticed, or if they had noticed, wouldn’t have bothered fixing it. My heart was racing and I was dizzy (I tried hard to blame that on the sickening color of the sky) and there was a metallic taste in the back of my mouth, like a freshly filled tooth. It was colder in the alley than it had been out on Pierce, the sun having already dropped low enough in the west that the alley must have been in shadow for some time. Perhaps it is always in shadow and never truly warm there. I found the side door exactly as I’d hoped to find it, and three or four minutes of jiggling about with the wobbly brass knob was enough to coax it open. Inside, the warehouse was dark and even colder than the alley, and the air stank of mould and dust, bad memories and vacancy. I stood in the doorway a moment or two, thinking of hungry rats and drunken bums, delirious crack addicts wielding lead pipes, the webs of poisonous spiders. Then I took a deep breath and stepped across the threshold, out of the shadows and into a more decided blackness, a more definitive chill, and all those mundane threats dissolved. Everything slipped from my mind except Jacova Angevine, and her followers (if that’s what you’d call them) dressed all in white, and the thing I’d seen on the altar the one time I’d come here when this had been a temple of the Open Door of Night. I asked her about that thing once, a few weeks before the end, the last night that we spent together. I asked where it had come from, who had made it, and she lay very still for a while, listening to the surf or only trying to decide which answer would satisfy me. In the moonlight through the hotel window, I thought she might have been smiling, but I wasn’t sure. “It’s very old,” she said, eventually. By then I’d almost drifted off to sleep and had to shake myself awake again. “No one alive remembers who made it,” Jacova continued. “But I don’t think that matters, only that it was made.” “It’s fucking hideous,” I mumbled sleepily. “You know that, don’t you?” “Yeah, but so is the Crucifixion. So are bleeding statues of the Virgin Mary and images of Kali. So are the animal-headed gods of the Egyptians.” “Yeah, well, I don’t bow down to any of them, either,” I replied, or something to that effect. “The divine is always abominable,” she whispered and rolled over, turning her back to me. Just a moment ago I was in the warehouse on Pierce Street, wasn’t I? And now I’m in bed with the Prophet from Salinas. But I will not despair, for there is no need here to stay focused, to adhere to some restrictive illusion of the linear narrative. It’s coming. It’s been coming all along. As Job Foster said in Chapter Four of The Last Loan Shark of Bodega Bay, “It’s just the way I tell stories, right. You know that. I start at the beginning. I don’t leave stuff out.” That’s horseshit, of course. I suspect luckless Job Foster knew it was horseshit, and I suspect that I know it’s horseshit, too. It is not the task of the writer to “tell all,” or even to decide what to leave in, but to decide what to leave out. Whatever remains, that meager sum of this profane division, that’s the bastard chimera we call a “story.” I am not building, but cutting away. And all stories, whether advertised as truth or admitted falsehoods, are fictions, cleft from any objective facts by the aforementioned action of cutting away. A pound of flesh. A pile of sawdust. Discarded chips of Carrara marble. And what’s left over. A damned man in an empty warehouse. I left the door standing open, because I hadn’t the nerve to shut myself up in that place. And I’d already taken a few steps inside, my shoes crunching loudly on shards of glass from a broken window, grinding glass to dust, when I remembered the Maglite hidden inside my jacket. But the glare of the flashlight did nothing much to make the darkness any less stifling, nothing much at all but remind me of the blinding white beam of Tiburon II’s big HMI rig, shining out across the silt at the bottom of the canyon. Now, I thought, at least I can see anything, if there’s anything to see, and immediately some other, less familiar thought-voice demanded to know why the hell I’d want to. The door had opened into a narrow corridor, mint-green concrete walls and a low concrete ceiling, and I followed it a short distance to its end—no more than thirty feet, thirty feet at the most—past empty rooms that might once have been offices, to an unlocked steel door marked in faded orange letters, employees only. “It’s an empty warehouse,” I whispered, breathing the words aloud. “That’s all, an empty warehouse.” I knew it wasn’t the truth, not anymore, not by a long sight, but I thought that maybe a lie could be more comforting than the comfortless illumination of the Maglite in my hand. Joseph Campbell wrote, “Draw a circle around a stone and the stone will become an incarnation of mystery.” Something like that. Or it was someone else said it and I’m misremembering. The point is, I knew that Jacova had drawn a circle around that place, just as she’d drawn a circle about herself, just as her father had somehow drawn a circle about her— Just as she’d drawn a circle around me. The door wasn’t locked, and beyond it lay the vast, deserted belly of the building, a flat plain of cement marked off with steel support beams. There was a little sunlight coming in through the many small windows along the east and west walls, though not as much as I’d expected, and it seemed weakened, diluted by the musty air. I played the Maglite back and forth across the floor at my feet and saw that someone had painted over all the elaborate, colorful designs put there by the Open Door of Night. A thick gray latex wash to cover the intricate interweave of lines, the lines that she believed would form a bridge, a conduit—that was the word that she’d used. Everyone’s seen photographs of that floor, although I’ve yet to see any that do it justice. A yantra. A labyrinth. A writhing, tangled mass of sea creatures straining for a distant black sun. Hindi and Mayan and Chinook symbols. The precise contour lines of a topographic map of Monterey Canyon. Each of these things and all of these things, simultaneously. I’ve heard that there’s an anthropologist at Berkeley who’s writing a book about that floor. Perhaps she will publish photographs that manage to communicate its awful magnificence. Perhaps it would be better if she doesn’t. Perhaps someone should put a bullet through her head. People said the same thing about Jacova Angevine. But assassination is almost always unthinkable to moral, thinking men until after a holocaust has come and gone. I left that door open, as well, and walked slowly towards the center of the empty warehouse, towards the place where the altar had been, the spot where that divine abomination of Jacova’s had rested on folds of velvet the color of a massacre. I held the Maglite gripped so tightly that the fingers of my right hand had begun to go numb. Behind me, there was a scuffling, gritty sort of noise that might have been footsteps, and I spun about, tangling my feet and almost falling on my ass, almost dropping the flashlight. The child was standing maybe ten or fifteen feet away from me, and I could see that the door leading back to the alley had been closed. She couldn’t have been more than nine or ten years old, dressed in ragged jeans and a T-shirt smeared with mud, or what looked like mud in the half light of the warehouse. Her short hair might have been blonde, or light brown, it was hard to tell. Most of her face was lost in the shadows. “You’re too late,” she said. “Jesus Christ, kid, you almost scared the holy shit out of me.” “You’re too late,” she said again. “Too late for what? Did you follow me in here?” “The gates are shut now. They won’t open again, for you or anyone else.” I looked past her at the door I’d left open, and she looked back that way, too. “Did you close that door?” I asked her. “Did it ever occur to you that I might have left it open for a reason?” “I waited as long I dared,” she replied, as though that answered my question, and turned to face me again. I took one step towards her, then, or maybe two, and stopped. And at that moment, I experienced the sensation or sensations that mystery and horror writers, from Poe on down to Theo Angevine, have labored to convey—the almost painful prickling as the hairs on the back of my neck and along my arms and legs stood erect, the cold knot in the pit of my stomach, the goose across my grave, a loosening in my bowels and bladder, the tightening of my scrotum. My blood ran cold. Drag out all the fucking clichés and there’s still nothing that comes within a mile of what I felt standing there, looking down at that girl, her looking up at me, the feeble light from the windows glinting off her eyes. Looking into her face, I felt dread as I’d never felt it before. Not in war zones with air-raid sirens blaring, not during interviews conducted with the muzzle of a pistol pressed to my temple or the small of my back. Not waiting for the results of a biopsy after the discovery of a peculiar mole. Not even the day she led them into the sea and I sat watching it all on fucking CNN from a bar in Brooklyn. And suddenly I knew that the girl hadn’t followed me in from the alley, or closed the door, that she’d been here all along. I also knew that a hundred coats of paint wouldn’t be enough to undo Jacova’s labyrinth. “You shouldn’t be here,” the girl said, her minotaur’s voice lost and faraway and regretful. “Then where should I be?” I asked, and my breath fogged in air gone as frigid as the dead of winter, or the bottom of the sea. “All the answers were here,” she replied. “Everything that you’re asking yourself, the things that keep you awake, that are driving you insane. All the questions you’re putting into that computer of yours. I offered all of it to you.” And now there was a sound like water breaking against stone, and something heavy and soft and wet, dragging itself across the concrete floor, and I thought of the thing from the altar, Jacova’s Mother Hydra, that corrupt and bloated Madonna of the abyss, its tentacles and anemone tendrils and black, bulging squid eyes, the tubeworm proboscis snaking from one of the holes where its face should have been. Mighty, undying daughter of Typhaôn and serpentine Ecidna—Urda Lernaia, gluttonous whore of all the lightless worlds, bitch bride and concubine of Father Dagon, Father Kraken — I smelled rot and mud, saltwater and dying fish. “You have to go now,” the child said urgently, and she held out a hand as though she meant to show me the way. Even in the gloom, I could see the barnacles and sea lice nestled in the raw flesh of her palm. “You are a splinter in my soul, always. And she would drag you down to finish my own darkness.” And then the girl was gone. She did not vanish, she was simply not there anymore. And those other sounds and odors had gone with her. There was nothing left behind but the silence and stink of any abandoned building, and the wind brushing against the windows and around the corners of the warehouse, and the traffic along roads in the world waiting somewhere beyond those walls.

I know exactly how all this shit sounds. Don’t think that I don’t. It’s just that I’ve finally ceased to care.

Yesterday, two days after my trip to the warehouse, I watched the MBARI tape again. This time, when it reached the twelve-second gap, when I’d counted down to eleven, I continued on to twelve, and I didn’t switch the television off, and I didn’t look away. Surely, I’ve come too far to allow myself that luxury. I’ve seen so goddamn much—I’ve seen so much that there’s no reasonable excuse for looking away, because there can’t be anything left that’s more terrible than what has come before. And, besides, it was nothing that I hadn’t seen already. Orpheus’ mistake wasn’t that he turned and looked back towards Eurydice and Hell, but that he ever thought he could escape. Same with Lot’s wife. Averting our eyes does not change the fact that we are marked. After the static, the picture comes back and at first it’s just those boulders, same as before, those boulders that ought to be covered with silt and living things—the remains of living things, at least—but aren’t. Those strange, clean boulders. And the lines and angles carved deeply into them that cannot be the result of any natural geological or biological process, the lines and angles that can be nothing but what Jacova said they were. I think of fragments of the Parthenon, or some other shattered Greek or Roman temple, the chiseled ornament of an entablature or pediment. I’m seeing something that was done, something that was consciously fashioned, not something that simply happened. The Tiburon II moves forward very slowly, because the blow before the gap has taken out a couple of the port thrusters. It creeps forward tentatively, floating a few feet above the seafloor, and now the ROV’s lights have begun to dim and flicker. After the gap, I know that there’s only 52.2 seconds of video remaining before the starboard camera shuts down for good. Less than a minute, and I sit there on the floor of my hotel room, counting—one-one thousand, two-two thousand—and I don’t take my eyes off the screen. The MBARI robotics tech is dead, the nervous man who sold me—and whoever else was buying—his black- market dub of the videotape. The story made the Channel 46 evening news last night and was second page in the Monterey Herald this morning. The coroner’s office is calling it a suicide. I don’t know what else they would call it. He was found hanging from the lowest limb of a sycamore tree, not far from the Moss Landing docks, both his wrists slashed nearly to the bone. He was wearing a necklace of Loligo squid strung on baling wire. A family member has told the press that he had a history of depression. Twenty-three seconds to go. Almost two miles down, Tiburon II is listing badly to starboard, and then the ROV bumps against one of the boulders and the lights stop flickering and seem to grow a little brighter. The vehicle appears to pause, as though considering its next move. The day he sold me the tape, the MBARI tech said that a part of the toolsled had wedged itself into the rubble. He told me it took the crew of the R/V Western Flyer more than two hours to maneuver the sub free. Two hours of total darkness at the bottom of the canyon, after the lights and the cameras died. Eighteen seconds. Sixteen. This time it’ll be different, I think, like a child trying to wish away a beating. This time, I’ll see the trick of it, the secret interplay of light and shadow, the hows and whys of a simple optical illusion— Twelve. Ten. And the first time, I thought that I was only seeing something carved into the stone or part of a broken sculpture. The gentle curve of a hip, the tapering line of a leg, the twin swellings of small breasts. A nipple the color of granite. Eight. But there’s her face—and there’s no denying that it’s her face—Jacova Angevine, her face at the bottom the sea, turned up towards the surface, towards the sky and Heaven beyond the weight of all that black, black water. Four. I bite my lip so hard that I taste blood. It doesn’t taste so different from the ocean. Two. She opens her eyes, and they are not her eyes, but the eyes of some marine creature adapted to that perpetual night. The soulless eyes of an anglerfish or gulper eel, eyes like matching pools of ink, and something darts from her parted lips — And then there’s only static, and I sit staring into the salt-and-pepper roar. All the answers were here. Everything that you’re asking yourself . . . I offered all of it to you. Later—an hour or only five minutes—I pressed eject and the cassette slid obediently from the VCR. I read the label, aloud, in case I’d read it wrong every single time before, in case the timestamp on the video might have been mistaken. But it was the same as always, the day before Jacova waited on the beach at Moss Landing for the supplicants of the Open Door of Night. The day before she led them into the sea. The day before she drowned.

I close my eyes. And she’s here again, as though she never left. She whispers something dirty in my ear, and her breath smells like sage and toothpaste. The protestors are demanding that the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) end its ongoing exploration of the submarine canyon immediately. The twenty-five mile long canyon, they claim, is a sacred site that is being desecrated by scientists. Jacova Angevine, former Berkeley professor and leader of the controversial Open Door of Night cult, compares the launching of the new submersible Tiburon II to the ransacking of the Egyptian pyramids by grave robbers. (San Francisco Chronicle) I tell her that I have to go to New York, that I have to take this assignment, and she replies that maybe it’s for the best. I don’t ask her what she means; I can’t imagine that it’s important. And she kisses me. Later, when we’re done and I’m too exhausted to sleep, I lie awake, listening to the sea and the small, anxious sounds she makes in her dreams. The bodies of fifty-three men and women, all of whom may have been part of a religious group known as the Open Door of Night, have been recovered following Wednesday’s drownings near Moss Landing, CA. Deputies have described the deaths as a mass suicide. The victims were all reported to be between twenty-two and thirty-six years old. Authorities fear that at least two dozen more may have died in the bizarre episode and recovery efforts continue along the coast of Monterey County. (CNN.com) I close my eyes, and I’m in the old warehouse on Pierce Street again; Jacova’s voice thunders from the PA speakers mounted high on the walls around the cavernous room. I’m standing in the shadows all the way at the back, apart from the true believers, apart from the other reporters and photographers and camera men who have been invited here. Jacova leans into the microphone, angry and ecstatic and beautiful—terrible, I think—and that hideous carving is squatting there on its altar beside her. There are candles and smoldering incense and bouquets of dried seaweed, conch shells and dead fish, carefully arranged about the base of the statue. “We can’t remember where it began,” she says, “where we began,” and they all seem to lean into her words like small boats pushing against a violent wind. “We can’t remember, of course we can’t remember, and they don’t want us to even try. They’re afraid, and in their fear they cling desperately to the darkness of their ignorance. They would have us do the same, and then we would never recall the garden nor the gate, would never look upon the faces of the great fathers and mothers who have returned to the deep.” None of it seems the least bit real, not the ridiculous things that she’s saying, or all the people dressed in white, or the television crews. This scene is not even as substantial as a nightmare. It’s very hot in the warehouse, and I feel dizzy and sick and wonder if I can reach an exit before I vomit. I close my eyes and I’m sitting in a bar in Brooklyn, watching them wade into the sea, and I’m thinking, Some son of a bitch is standing right there taping this and no one’s trying to stop them, no one’s lifting a goddamn finger. I blink, and I’m sitting in an office in Manhattan, and the people who write my checks are asking me questions I can’t answer. “Good god, you were fucking the woman, for Christ’s sake, and you’re sitting there telling me you had no idea whatsoever that she was planning this?” “Come on. You had to have known something.” “They all worshiped some sort of prehistoric fish god, that’s what I heard. No one’s going to buy that you didn’t see this coming—” “People have a right to know. You still believe that, don’t you?” Answers are scarce in the mass suicide of a California cult, but investigators are finding clues to the deaths by logging onto the Internet and Web sites run by the cult’s members. What they’re finding is a dark and confusing side of the Internet, a place where bizarre ideas and beliefs are exchanged and gain currency. Police said they have gathered a considerable amount of information on the background of the group, known as the Open Door of Night, but that it may be many weeks before the true nature of the group is finally understood. (CNN.com) And my clumsy hands move uncertainly across her bare shoulders, my fingertips brushing the chaos of scar tissue there, and she smiles for me. On my knees in an alley, my head spinning, and the night air stinks of puke and saltwater. “Okay, so I first heard about this from a woman I interviewed who knew the family,” the man in the Radiohead T-shirt says. We’re sitting on the patio of a bar in Pacific Grove, and the sun is hot and glimmers white off the bay. His name isn’t important, and neither is the name of the bar. He’s a student from LA, writing a book about the Open Door of Night, and he got my e-mail address from someone in New York. He has bad teeth and smiles too much. “This happened back in ‘76, the year before Jacova’s mother died. Her father, he’d take them down to the beach at Moss Landing two or three times every summer. He got a lot of his writing done out there. Anyway, apparently the kid was a great swimmer, like a duck to water, but her mother never let her to go very far out at that beach because there are these bad rip currents. Lots of people drown out there, surfers and shit.” He pauses and takes a couple of swallow of beer, then wipes the sweat from his forehead. “One day, her mother’s not watching and Jacova swims too far out and gets pulled down. By the time the lifeguards get her back to shore, she’s stopped breathing. The kid’s turning blue, but they keep up the mouth-to- mouth and CPR and she finally comes around. They get Jacova to the hospital up in Watsonville and the doctors say she’s fine, but they keep her for a few days anyhow, just for observation.” “She drowned,” I say, staring at my own beer. I haven’t taken a single sip. Beads of condensation cling to the bottle and sparkle like diamonds. “Technically, yeah. She wasn’t breathing. Her heart had stopped. But that’s not the fucked-up part. While she’s in Watsonville, she keeps telling her mother some crazy story about mermaids and sea monsters and demons, about these things trying to drag her down to the bottom of the sea and drown her and how it wasn’t an undertow at all. She’s terrified, convinced that they’re still after her, these monsters. Her mother wants to call in a shrink, but her father says no, fuck that, the kid’s just had a bad shock, she’ll be fine. Then, the second night she’s in the hospital, these two nurses turn up dead. A janitor found them in a closet just down the hall from Jacova’s room. And here’s the thing you’re not gonna believe, but I’ve seen the death certificates and the autopsy reports and I swear to you this is the God’s honest truth.” Whatever’s coming next, I don’t want to hear it. I know that I don’t need to hear it. I turn my head and watch a sailboat out on the bay, bobbing about like a toy. “They’d drowned, both of them. Their lungs were full of saltwater. Five miles from the goddamn ocean, but these two women drowned right there in a broom closet.” “And you’re going to put this in your book?” I ask him, not taking my eyes of the bay and the little boat. “Hell yeah,” he replies. “I am. It fucking happened, man, just like I said, and I can prove it.” I close my eyes, shutting out the dazzling, bright day, and wish I’d never agreed to meet with him. I close my eyes. “Down there,” Jacova whispers, “you will know nothing but peace, in her mansions, in the endless night of her coils.” We would be warm below the storm In our little hideaway beneath the waves I close my eyes. Oh god, I’ve closed my eyes. She wraps her strong, suntanned arms tightly around me and takes me down, down, down, like the lifeless body of a child caught in an undertow. And I’d go with her, like a flash I’d go, if this were anything more than a dream, anything more than an infidel’s sour regret, anything more than eleven thousand words cast like a handful of sand across the face of the ocean. I would go with her, because, like a stone that has become an incarnation of mystery, she has drawn a circle around me.

Caitlín R. Kiernan is the author of several novels, including World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson award-nominated The Red Tree and the Nebula and Bram Stoker award-nominated The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. She is a very prolific short-story author, and her stories have been collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores; To Charles Fort, With Love; Alabaster; A is for Alien; The Ammonite Violin & Others; Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart; and the forthcoming The Ape’s Wife and Others. Subterranean Press has released Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One), with a second volume planned for 2014. Kiernan was recently proclaimed “one of our essential dark fantasy authors” by the New York Times. Her current projects include the next novel, Red Delicious and her critically acclaimed Dark Horse comic, Alabaster. She lives with her partner in Providence, Rhode Island. Doll Re Mi Tanith Lee

Folscyvio saw the Thing in a small cramped shop off the Via Silvia. In fact, he almost passed it by. He had just come from the Laguna, climbed the forty mildewy, green- velveted steps to the Ponte Louro, and crossed over to the elevated arcades of the Nuova. Then he glanced down, and spotted Giavetti, who owed him money, creeping by below through the ancient alleys. Having called and not been heard—or been ignored—Folscyvio descended quickly. But on entering the alley he saw Giavetti was gone (or had hidden). Irritated, Folscyvio walked the alley, clicking his teeth together. And something with a rich wild colour slid by his right eye. At first his attention was not captured. But then, having walked a few more steps, Folscyvio’s mind, as he would have put it, tapped him on the shoulder: Look back, Maestro. And there behind the flawed and watery window-glass, hung about by old, plum-coloured bannerets and thick cobwebs, was the peculiar Thing. He stood and stared at it for quite five minutes before going into the shop.

He was, Folscyvio, of medium height, but seemed taller due to his extreme leanness. His was a handsome face, aquiline, and reminiscent, as was more genuinely much of the city, of The Past. His hair was very long, very dark and thick and heavily if naturally curled. His eyes, long- lashed and bright, were narrow and of an alluring, or curious—or repellent—grayish-mauve. No one was immediately attendant in the shop. Folscyvio poised for some while inside the open window- space, staring at the Thing. In the end he stepped near and examined a paper which had been pinned directly beneath. Not many words were on the paper, these written old- fashionedly by hand, and in black ink: Vio-Sera. A vio- sirenalino. From the Century Seventeen. A rare example. Attributable, perhaps, to the Messers Stradivari. Folscyvio scowled. He did not for an instant credit this. Yet the Thing did indeed seem antique. Certainly, it was a sort of violin. But—but . . . The form was that of a woman, from the crown of the head to her hips, the area just between the naval and the feminine pudenda. After which, rather than legs, she possessed the tail of a fish. She was made of glowing auburn wood—he was unsure of its type. All told the figure, including the tail, was not much more than half a metre in length. It had a face, quite beautiful in a stark and static kind of way, and huge eyes, each of which had been set with white enamel, and then, at the iris, with a definitely fake emerald, having a black enamel pupil. Its mouth was also enameled, pomegranate red. The image had breasts too, full and proud of themselves, with small strawberry enamel nipples. In the layers of the carved tail had been placed tiny discs of greenish, semi-opaque crystal. Some were missing, inevitably. Even if not a product of the Stradivari, nor quite so mature as the 1600s, this piece had been around for some time. The two oddest features were firstly, of course, the strings that ran from the finger board of the Piscean tail, across the gilded bridge to the string-clasper, which lay behind a gilded shell at the doll’s throat; while the nut and tuning pegs made up part of the tail’s finishing fan. Secondly what was odd was the hair, this not carved nor enameled, but a fluid lank heavy mass, like dead brown silk, that flowed from the wooden scalp and meandered down, ending level, since the doll was currently upright, where, had the tail constituted legs, its knees might have been. A grotesque and rather awful object. A fright, and a sham too, as it must be incapable of making music. For the third freakish aspect was, obviously, at the moment the doll was upright, but when the instrument—if such were even possible—was played,what then? Aside from the impediment of its slightness yet encumberedness, the welter of hair—perhaps once that of a living woman, now a hundred years at least dead?—would slide, when the doll was upside-down, into everything, tangling with the strings and their tuning, the player’s hands and fingers— his throat even, the bow itself. Thinking this, Folscyvio abruptly noted there were also omissions from the creature, for she, this unplayable mermaid-violin, this circus-puppet, this con-trick, had herself neither arms nor hands. A mythic cripple. Just as he had thought she might render her player. Another man, he thought, would already loathe her, and be on his way out of the shop. But it went without saying Folscyvio was of a different sort. Folscyvio was unique. Just then, a thin stooped fellow came crouching out of some lair at the back of the premises. “Ah, Signore. How may I help you?”

“That Thing,” said Folscyvio, in a flat and slightly sneering tone. “Thing . . . Ah. The vio-sera, Signore?” “That.” Folscyvio paused, frowning, yet fastidiously amused. “It’s a joke, yes?” “No, Signore.” “No? What else can it be but a joke? Ugly. Malformed. And such a claim! My God. The Stradivari. How is it ever to be played?” The stooped man, who had seemed very old and perhaps was not, necessarily, gazed gently at this handsome un-customer. “At dusk, Signore.” Even Folscyvio was arrested. “What? At dusk—what do you mean?” “As the fanciful abbreviation has it—vio-sera—a violin for evening, to be played when shadows fall. The Silver Hour between the reality of day and the mysterious mask of night. The hour when ghosts are seen.” Folscyvio laughed harshly, mockingly, but his brain was already working the idea over. A concert, one of so many he had given, displaying his genius before the multitude of adoring fanatics—sunset, dusk—the tension honeyed and palpable—chewable as rose-petal lakoum —“Oh then,” he said. Generously contemptuous: “Very well. We’ll let that go. But surely, whoever botched this rubbish up, it was never the Famiglia Stradivarius.” “I don’t know, Signore. The legend has it, it was a son of that family.” “Insanity.” “She was, allegedly, one of three such models, our vio-sirenalino. But there is no proof of this, or the maker, you will understand, Signore. Save for one or two secret marks still visible about her, which I might show you. They are in any case, Masonic. You might not recognize them.” “Oh, you think not?” “Then, perhaps you might.” “Why anyway,” said Folscyvio, “would you think me at all seriously interested?” The stooped old-young man waited mildly. He had whitish, longish hair. His eyes were dark and unreadable. “Well,” said Folscyvio, grinning, “just to entertain me, tell me what price you ask for the Thing? If you do ask one. A curiosity, not an instrument—perhaps it’s only some adornment of your shop.” And for the very first he glanced about. Something rather bizarre then. Dusty cobwebs or lack of light seemed to close off much of the emporium from his gaze. He could not be certain of what he now squinted at (with his gelid, gray-mauve eyes). Was it a collection of mere oddities—or of other instruments? Over there, for example, a piano . . . or was it a street-organ? Or there, a peculiar vari-coloured railing —or a line of flutes . . . Folscyvio took half a step forward to investigate. Then stopped. Did this white-haired imbecile know who the caller was? Very likely. Folscyvio was not unfamous, nor his face unknown. A redoubtable musician, a talent far beyond the usual. Fireworks and falling stars, as a prestigious publication had, not ten weeks before, described his performance both in concert halls and via Teleterra. Suddenly Folscyvio could not recall what he had said last to the old-young mental deficient. Had he asked a price? Or—what was it? When confused or thrown out of his depth, Folscyvio could become unreasonable, unpleasant. Several persons had found this out, over the past eighteen years. His prowess as a virtuoso was such that, generally, excuses were made for him and police bribed, or else clever and well-paid lawyers would subtly usher things away. He stared at the ridiculous auburn wood and green glass of the fish-tail, at the pegs of brass and ivory adhering to the glaucous tail-fan. He said, with a slow and velvety emphasis, “I’m not saying I want to buy this piece of crap off you. But I’d better warn you, if I did want, I’d get it. And for a—shall I say—very reasonable price. Sometimes people even give me things, as a present. You see? A diamond the size of my thumb-nail—quite recently, that. Or some genuine gold Roman coins, Circa Tiberio. Just given, as I said. A gift. I have to add, my dear old gentleman, that when people upset me, I myself know certain . . . other people, who really dislike the notion that I’m unhappy. They then, I’m afraid, do these unfortunate things—a broken window—oh, steelglass doesn’t stop them—a little fire somewhere. The occasional, very occasional, broken . . . bone. Just from care of me, you’ll understand. Such kind sympathy. Do you know who I am?” The slightest pause. “No, Signore.” “Folscyvio.” “Yes, Signore?” “Yes.” Oh, the old dolt was acting, affecting ignorance. Or maybe he was blind and half-deaf as well as stooped. “So. How fucking much?” “For the vio-sirenalino?” “For what fucking else, in this hell-hall of junk?” Folscyvio was shouting now. It surprised him slightly. Why did he care? Some itch to try, and to conquer, this stupid toy eyesore—Besides, he could afford millions of libra-eura. (Folscyvio did not know he was a miser of sorts; he did not know he was potentially criminally violent, an abusive and trustless, perhaps an evil man. Talent he had, great talent, but it was the flare and flame of a cunning stage magician. He could play instruments both stringed and keyed, with incredible virtuosity—but also utter emotional dryness. His greatest performances lacked all soul—they were fire and lightning, glamour and glitter, sound and fury. Signifying nothing? No, Folscyvio did not know any of that either. Or . . . he thought he did not, for from where, otherwise, the groundless meanness, the lashing out, the rage?) Unusually, the stooping man did not seem unduly alarmed. “Since the need is so urgent,” he said, “naturally, the vio-sera is yours. At least,” a gentle hesitation, “for now.” “Forget ‘for now,’” shouted Folscyvio. “You won’t get the Thing back. How much?” “Uno lib’euro.” Everything settled to a titanic silence. In the silence Folscyvio took the single and insignificant note from his wallet, and let it flutter down, like a pink-green leaf, into the dust of the floor.

The enormous lamp-blazing stadium, fretted by goldleafery and marble pillars, with a roof seemingly hundreds of metres high, and rock-caved with acoustic- enhancing spoons and ridges, roared and rang like a golden bell. It had been a vast success, the concert. But they always were. The cheapest ticket would have cost two thousand. Probably half a million people, crushed luxuriously onto their velvet perches like bejeweled starlings, during the performance rapt or sometimes crying out in near orgasmic joy, were now exploding in a final release that had less to do with music than . . . frankly, with release. One could not sit for three hours in such a temple and before such a god as Folscyvio, and not require, ultimately, some personal eruption. They were of all ages. The young mingled freely with those of middle years, and those who were quite old. All, of course, were rich, or incredibly rich. One did not afford a Folscyviana unless one was. Otherwise, there were the disks, sound- only as a rule, each of which would play for three hours, disgorging the genius pyrotechnics of Folscyvio’s hands, all those singing and swirling strings of notes, pearl drops of piano keys. Sometimes, even included on a disk, since a feature, often, of the show, the closing auction, and the sacrifice. The notes of that, (though they were not notes) faultlessly reproduced: the stream-like ripple, the flicker of a holy awakening, the other music, and then the other roar, the dissimilar applause, very unlike, if analysed, the bravos and excelsiors that were rendered earlier. Oddly though, these perfect disk recordings did not ever, completely, (for anyone) capture the thrill of being present, of watching Folscyvio, as he played. Even the very rare, and authorized, visuals did not. If anything, such records seemed rather—flat. Rather—soulless. Indeed, only the bargaining and sacrifice that occasionally concluded the proceedings truly came across as fully exciting. Strange. Other artists were capturable. Why not the magnificent Folscyvio? But naturally, his powers were elusive, unique. There was none like him. For those in the stadium, they were not considering disks, or anything at all. They knew, as the concert was over, there was every likelihood of that second show. Look, see now, Folscyvio was raising his hand to hush them. And in his arm still he held the little vioncello, the very last instrument he had performed upon . . . tonight. Colossal quiet fell like a curtain. Beyond the golden stadium and its environs, hidden by its windowlessness, the edges of the metropolis lay, and the Laguna staring silver at the moonlit sea. But in here, another world. Religious, yet sadistic. Sacred, yet— as some critic had coined it—savage as the most ancient rites of prehistory. Then the words, so well known. Folscyvio: “Shall we have the auction, my friends?” And a roiling cheer, unmatched to any noise before, shot high into the acoustic caves. The Bidding For began at two thousand—the cheapest Seat-price. The Bidding Against sprang immediately to four thousand. After this the bids flew swift and fierce, carried by the tiny microphones that attended each plushy perch. For almost half an hour the factions warred. The Yes vote rose to a million scuta-euri. The No vote flagged. And then the Maestro stilled them all again. He told them, with what the journals would describe as his “wicked lilt” of a smile, that after all, he had decided perhaps it should not be tonight. No, no, my friends, my children, (as the vociferous and more affluent Yeses trumpeted disappointment) not this time, not now. This time—is out of joint. Perhaps, next time. This night we will have a stay of execution. And then, in a further tempest of frustrated disagreement and adoring hosannas, Folscyvio, still carrying the vioncello, left the stage.

“But what are you doing there, Folscy-mio?” Uccello the agent’s voice was laden with only the softest reproach. He knew well to be careful of his prime client; so many of Folscyvio’s best agents had been fired, and one or two—one heard—received coincidental injuries. Yet Folscyvio seemed in a calm and good-humoured mood. “I came to the coast, dear Ucci, to learn to play.” “To—to learn? You? The Maestro—but you know everything there is to—” “Yes, yes.” One found Folscyvio could become impatient with compliments, too. One must be careful even there. “I mean the new Thing.” “Ah,” said Uccello, racking his brains. Which new thing? Was it a piano? No—some sort of violin, was it not. “The—mermaid,” he said cautiously. “Well done, Ucci. Just so. The ugly nasty wrongly- sized little upside-down mermaid doll. She is quite difficult, but I find ways to handle her.” Uccello beamed through the communicating connection. Folscyvio, he knew, found ways often to cope with females. (Uccello could not help a fleeting sidelong memory of buying off two young women that Folscyvio had “slapped around,” in fact rather severely. Not to mention the brunette who claimed he had raped her, and who meant to sue him, before—quite astonishingly—she disappeared.) “Anyway, Ucci, I must go now. Ciao alla parte.” And the connection was no more. Well, Uccello told himself, pouring another ultra strong coffee, whatever Folscyvio did with the weird violin, it would make them all lots of money. Sometimes he wished Folscyvio did not make so much money. Then it would be easier to let go of him, to escape from him. Forever.

He had found the way to deal with her infuriating hair. Of course he could have cut it off or pulled it out. But it was so indigenous to her flamboyant grotesquerie he had decided to retain it if at all possible. In the end the coping strategy came clear. He drew all the hair up to the top of the wooden scalp, and there secured it firmly with a narrow titanium ring. This kept every fibre away from his hands, and the bow, once he had upended her and tossed the full cascade back over his left shoulder, well out of his way. Soon others, at his terse instruction, had covered the titanium in thick fake gold, smooth and non-irritant. Only then did he have made for her a bow. It was choice. What else, being for his use. As for the contact-point, it had been established thus: her right shoulder rested between his neck and jaw. Now he could control her, he might begin. By then she had been carefully checked, the strings found to be new and suitable and well-tended, resilient. He himself tuned them. To his momentary interest they had a sheer and dulcet sound, a little higher than expected, while from the inner body a feral resonance might be coaxed. She was so much better than Folscyvio had anticipated. After all this, he adapted to his normal routine when breaking in a novel piece. He rose early and took a swim in the villa pool, breakfasted on local delicacies, then set to work alone in the quartet of rooms maintained solely for the purpose. Here he worked until lunch, and after siesta resumed working in the evening. The house lay close to the sea, shut off from the town, an outpost of the city. In the dusk, as in the past, he would have gone down to the shore and taken a second swim in the water, blue as syrup of cobalt. But now he did not. However pleased with, or aggravated by the mermaid he might have become, at twilight he would always play her. He had not, it seemed, been entirely immune to the magical idea that she was a vio-sera, a violin of the Silver Hour. It was true. She did have a fascination for him. He had known this, he thought, from the moment he glimpsed her in the sordid little shop off the Via Silvia. He had become fascinated by instruments before in this manner, as, very occasionally, by girls. It happened less now, but was exciting, both in rediscovery, and its power. For as with all such affairs of his, involving music, or the romantic lusts of the body, he would be the only Master. And at the finish of the flirtation, the destroyer also. By night, after a light dinner, he slept consistently soundly.

The Maestro dreamed. He was walking on the pale shore beside the sea, the waves black now and edged only by a thin sickle moon. At spaces along the beach, tall, gas-fired cressets burned, ostensibly to mimic Ancient Roma. Folscyvio was indifferently aware that, due to these things, he moved between the four elements: earth and water, fire and air. Then he grew conscious of a figure loitering at the sea’s border, not far from him. In waking life, Folscyvio would have kept clear of others on a solitary walk—which anyway, despite its wished-for aloneness, always saw, in a spot like this, one of his bodyguards trailing about twenty metres behind him. Now, however, no guard paced in tow. And an immediate interest in the loiterer made Folscyvio alter course. He idled down to the unraveling fringes of the tideless waves, and when the figure turned to him, it was as if this meeting had been planned for weeks. No greeting, even so, was exchanged. Aside from which, Folscyvio could not quite make out who—even, really, what—the figure was. Not very tall, either bowed or bundled down into a sort of dark hooded coat, the face hidden, perhaps even by some kind of webby veil. Most preposterously, none of this unnerved Folscyvio. Rather, it seemed all correct, exactly right, like recognizing, say, a building or tract of land never before visited, though often regarded in a book of pictures. Then the figure spoke. “Giavetti is dead.” “Ah, good. Yes, I was expecting that. Has the debt been recovered?” “No,” said the figure. It was a gentle, ashy voice. Neither male nor female, just as the form of it seemed quite asexual. “Well, it hardly matters,” said Folscyvio who, in the waking world, would have been extremely put out. “But the death,” said the figure, “all deaths that have been deliberately caused, they do matter.” “Yes, yes, of course,” Folscyvio agreed, unconcerned yet amenable to the logic of it. “Even,” said the figure, “the death of things.” Folscyvio was intrigued. “Truly? How diverting. Why?” “All things are constructed,” the figure calmly said, and now, just for a second, there showed the most lucent and mellifluous gleam of eyes, “constructed, that is, from the same universal, partly psychic material. A tree, a man, a lion, a wall—we are all the same, in that way.” “I see,” said Folscyvio, nodding. They were walking on together, over the shore, the waves melting in about their feet, and every so often a fiery cresset passing, as if it walked in the other direction, casting out splinters of volcanic tangerine glass on the wrinkles of the water. “You are an animist,” said the figure. “You do not understand this in yourself, but you sense a life-force in every instrument on which you set your hands. And being sufficiently clever to recognize the superior life in them, you are jealous, envious and vengeful.” There was no disapproval, no anger in the voice, despite what it had said, or now said. “To a human who is not a murderer, the destruction of life is crucially terrible, whether the life of a man, a woman, or a beast. To an animist these events are also terrible, but, too, the slaughter of so-called objects is equally a horror, an abomination—a tree, a wall —and especially those objects which can speak or sing. And worse still, which have spoken and sung—for the one who kills them. A piano. A violin.” “A violin,” repeated Folscyvio, and a warm and stimulating pleasure surged up in him, reminiscent, though physically unlike, the sparkle of erotic arousal. “A violin.” Then he noticed they had reached the end of the shoreline. How strange: nothing lay beyond, only the gigantic sky, scattered with stars, and open as the sea had seemed to be moments before. Although the sea, evidently, had been contained by a horizon. As this was not.

Folscyvio worked with the doll-mermaid-violin, mostly sticking to his routine, where departing from it then compensating with a fuller labour in the day or night which followed. (During this time he discovered no secret marks, Masonic or otherwise, on its surface. But of course, the shop-keeper had lied.) Three, then four months passed. The weather-control that operated along the coast maintained blissful weather, only permitting some rain now, at the evening hour of the Aperitivo. He ordered Uccello to cancel a single concert he had been due to give in the city. Uccello was appalled. “Oh never fear, they’ll forgive me. Change the venue of my next one, to make room for those worshipers who missed out.” Folscyvio knew he would be forgiven. He was a genius. One must allow him room to act as he wished. Only those who hated and despised him ever muttered anything to the contrary. And they—and Folscyvio knew this also well—would be careful what they said, and where. It was well known, Folscyvio’s fanatics did not take kindly to his defamation.

Without a doubt, beyond all question, he had mastered her. It was the beginning of the fifth month. He stood in front of a wide mirror (his habitual act prior to a performance) and put himself, in slow-motion, through his various flourishes, emotives, intensities, particularly those that were intrinsic to the new and extraordinary instrument. Already he had formulated the plan for her deployment and display before he should—finally,—and after prevarication—take hold of her. She was to preside, to start with, at the off-centre front stage. She would then be upright, that way the doll appearance of her would be the most obvious. Her hair would pour from the gold tiara, carefully arranged about and over her breasts, her face smooth and glowing from preparatory days of polishing, her emerald eyes, (also polished) shining and her pomegranate lips inviting. She would be standing on her aquatic tail, in which all the missing scales by now were replaced. The fan-tail base of it would balance on a velvet cushion of the darkest green. Magnetic beams would hold her infallibly in position. (The insurance paid for this, not to mention the threats issued, both legal and otherwise, would make certain all was well.) After posing and scrutinizing all his moves and postures, Folscyvio played to the mirror the selected pieces on the vio-sera, as he proposed to at the forthcoming concert now only two weeks away. Everything went faultlessly, of course. Sometimes he would be assisted, during a concert, by an accompanying band, comprising percussion, certain stringed instruments, a small horn section, and so on. All these accoutrements were robotic; he never employed human musicians. The Maestro himself always checked the ensemble over, tuned and—as a favourable critic had expressed it—“exalted” them for a show. However, on this occasion, when he reached the moment that he accessed the vio-sirenalino, (the Mermaid, as she had been billed) the exquisite little robot band would fall quite silent. At which, being non-human, no flicker of envy would disturb any morsel of it. Then, and only then, at a signal from the Maestro, ultra protective rays would spin the mermaid violin, whirling her to her true position, upside down. Folscyvio, amid the crowd’s predicted applause and uproar, would lift her free. Like a heroine in some swooning novel of the nineteenth, twentieth, or early twenty-first Century, she would lie back upon his shoulder, her hair drifting in a single silken, burnt-sienna wing down his back (the hair had been refurbished, too). In this fainting and acquiescent subjection of hers he would hold her, and bring the slender bow to bear upon her uptilted, supine body, stroking, spangling, making love to her, breasts to tail. In the wide mirror he could see now, even if he had already known, the eroticism of this act. How gorgeously perverse. How sublime. How they would love it. And oh, the music she could make— For her tones were beautiful. They were—unique. And only he, master of his art, had brought her to this. Even that dolt Uccello, hearing a brief example, a shred of Couperin, a skein of Vivaldi, and of Strarobini, played, recorded and audioed through the speaker, had exclaimed, “But—Folscy-mio—never did I hear you play anything— with quite this vividity. What enchantment. Folscyvio, you have found your true voice at last!” And at this, unseen since the viewer was not switched on, the Maestro had scornfully smiled. The concert was quite sold out. Beyond even the capacity of the concert stadium. Herds had paid, therefore, also to stand and listen in the gardens outside, where huge screens and vocaliani were to be rigged. It was to be a night of nights, the Night of the Mermaid. And after that night? Well. She was a doll. A toy. An aberration and a game— which he had played and won. One night for her, then, the best night of her little wooden life. That would be enough. Live her dream. Who should aim at more?

The venue for the concert was two miles inland of the city and the Laguna, up in the hills. This stadium was modern, a curious sounding-board of glazing, its supporting masonry embedded with acoustic speakers. The half-rings of seats hung gazing down to the hollow stage. They would be packed. Every place taken, the billionaire front rows to the craning upper roosts equipped with magnifying glasses. Amid the pines and cypresses outside, the huge screens clustered. Throughout the city too others would be peering at the Teleterra, watching, listening. And beyond the Laguna, the city, in many other regions all across the teeming and disassembled self- absorption of the planet, they too, whoever was able and had a mind to, they too glued to the relay of this performance. Unusually the concert was to begin rather early, the nineteenth hour of that light-enduring mechanically- extended summer night. Sunset would commence just before twenty-one. And the dusk, prolonged by aerial gadgets, would last nearly until the twenty-second hour. Almost everyone had learned about the new and special instrument—though not its nature. A mermaid? They could barely wait. Speculation had been rife in the media for weeks. So they entered the stadium. And when first they saw —it—during that vast in-gathering, startled curses and bouts of laughter ran round the hall. What was it? Was it hideous or divine, barbaric or obscene? Unplayable, how not. Some joke. Eventually the illumination sank and the general noise changed to that wild ovation always given the Maestro Folscyvio. And out he came, impeccably clad, his lush dark hair and handsome face, his slender, strong hands, looking at least a third of a metre taller than he was due to his lean elegance, and the lifts in his shoes. Hushing them benignly, he said only this, “Yes. As you see. But you must wait to hear. And now, we begin.” From the nineteenth almost to the twentieth hour, just as, muted and channeled through the venue’s glassy top, the sun westered, Folscyvio performed at his full pitch of stunningly brilliant (and heartless) mastery. As ever, the audience were stirred, shaken, opened out like fans—actual fans, not fanatics gasping, weeping, tranced slaves caught in the blinding blitzkrieg of his glare; they slumped or sat rigid until the interval. And after it, fueled by drink, legal drugs, and chat, they slunk back nearly bonelessly for another heavenly beating. And Folscyvio played on, assisted by his little robot orchestra. He took to him a piano, a mandolino. But all the while, the mermaid doll stood upright on her green cushion, with her green tail, her green eyes, her smallness—dumb. Obscure and . . . waiting. Some twenty minutes before twenty-one, the sunset swelled, then faded. The ghostly dusk ashed down. It was the Silver Hour, when the shadows fell. And tonight, here, it would last an hour. The penultimate acts of the show were done. The orchestra stopped like a clock. Folscyvio put aside the mandolin. Then, stepping forward quite briskly, he gave the signal, and the mermaid was whirled upside-down— whereupon he seized her. And as the crowd faintly mooed in suspense he settled her, in a few well-practiced moves, her head upon his shoulder, the hair flowing down his back like a wing. He lifted the bow out of its sword-like sheath, which until then had been hidden in a cleverly- spun chiascuro. Silences had occurred in history. The city knew silences. This silence however was thicker than amalgamating concrete. In a solid silver block it cased the concert hall. Folscyvio played to them, within this case, the mermaid violin. High and burningly sweet, the tone of the strings. Pelt-deep and throbbing with contralto darkness, the tone of the strings. A vibrato like lava under the earth, a supreme up-draught like a flying nightingale. A bitter pulsing, amber. A platinum upper register that pierced—a needle to conjure an inner note, some sound known only at the dawn of time, or at its ending. Consoling sorrow, aching agony of joy. Never, never had they heard, nor anyone ever conceivably, such music. Even they could not miss it. Even he—even Folscyvio—could not. He had not mastered the instrument. It had mastered him. It played him. And somehow, far within the clotted blindness and deafness of his costive ego—he knew. The Maestro, mastered. Perhaps he had dubiously guessed when practising, when planning out this ultimate scene upon his rostrum of pride. Or perhaps even, at that watershed, he had managed to conceal the facts from himself. For truth did not always set men free. Truth could imprison, too. Truth could kill. On and on. Passing from one perfect piece to the next, seamless as cloth-of-Paradise, Folscyvio the faultless instrument, and the violin played him. All through that Silver Hour. Until the shadows had closed together and not a mote of light was left, except where he still poised, the violin gleaming in his grip, the bow fluttering and swooping, a bird of prey, a descending angel. But all-light melted away and all-quiet came back. The recital was over. How empty, that place.—As though the world had sunk below the horizon as already the sun’s orb had done. The artificial lights returned like fireflies. There he stood, straight and motionless, frowning as if he did not, for a second or so, grasp where he was, let alone where he had been during the previous hour. But the audience, trained and dutiful, stumbled to its feet. And then, as if recollecting what must come next, began to screech and bellow applause, stamping, hurling jewels down on to the stage. (It had happened before. Folscyvio had even, in the past, graciously kept some of them; the more valuable ones.) After the bliss of the music, this acclaiming sound was quite disgusting. A stampede of trampling, trumpeting things—that had glimpsed the Infinite, and could neither make head nor tail of it, nor see what should be done to honour it. Seemingly unceasing, this crescendo. Until it wore itself out upon itself. The hands scalded from clapping, the voices cracked with over-use. Back into their seats they crumbled, abruptly old, even the youngest among them. Drained. Mistaken. Baffled. Inevitably, afterwards, there would be talk of a drug —illegal and pernicious—infiltrated into the stadium, affecting everyone there. But that rumour was for later, blown in like a dead leaf on the dying sigh of a hurricane.

Probably Folscyvio did suspect he was not quite himself. Some minor ailment, perhaps. A virus, flimsy and unimportant. Nevertheless he felt irritated, dissatisfied, although realizing he had played superbly. But then,—he always did. Nothing had changed. Now he would swiftly draw this spectacle to a close. And in the favourite way: theirs. His. He said, very coldly, (was he aware how cold?) “We will finish.” No one any more made a noise. Sobered and puzzled, they hung there before him, all their ridiculous tiers of plush seats, like bits of rubbish, he thought, piled up in rows along gilded and curving shelves, in the Godforsaken fucking cupboard of this mindless arena. He must have hesitated a fraction too long. Then, only then, a scatter of feeble voices called out for the auction. Folscyvio smiled, “wintry and fastidious” as it was later described by an hysterical critic. “No. We will not bother with the auction. Not tonight. Fate is already decided. We will go directly to the sacrifice.” For once some of them—a handful among the masses there—set up loud howls for mercy. But he was adamantine, not even looking towards them. When the wailing left off, he said, “She has had her night. That is enough. Who should aim for more.” And after this, knowing the cue, the stadium operatives crushed the lights down to a repulsive redness. And on to the stage ran the automatic trolley which, when all this had begun for those years ago, had been designed for the Maestro by his subordinates. Again, afterwards, so much would be recalled, accurately or incorrectly, of what came next. All was examined minutely. But it did no good, of course. They had, the bulk of this audience, witnessed “The Sacrifice” before. The sacrifice, if unfailingly previously coming after an auction, when invariably the majority of the crowd bayed for death, and put in bids for it, (the cash from which Folscyvio would later accommodate) was well known. It had been detailed endlessly in journals, on electronic sites, in poems, paintings and recreated photo- imagery. Even those who had never attended a Folscyvio concert, let alone a sacrifice, knew the method, its execution and inevitable result. The Maestro burned his instruments. Sometimes after years of service. Now and then, as on this night, following a single performance. Pianos and chitarras, such larger pieces, would tend to sing, to shriek, to call out in apparent voices, and to drum like exploding hearts in the torment of the fires. But the vio-sirenalino—what sound could she make, that miniature Thing, that doll-mermaid of glass, enamel and burnished wood and hair? Despite everything, many of them were on the seats’ edges to find out. She leaned now, again upright in the supporting rays of the magnetic beams. When he poured the gasoline, like a rare and treacly wine, in a broad circle all about her, saturating the green cushion, but not splashing her once, a sort of rumbling rose in the auditorium. Then died away. Folscyvio moved back to a prudent distance. He looked steadily at the mermaid violin, and offered to her a solitary mockery of a salute. And struck the tinder-trigger on the elongate metal match. Without a doubt there was a flaw in the apparatus. Either that, or some jealous villain had rigged the heavily security-provided podium. Or else—could it be—too fast somehow for any of them to work out what he did—did he, Folscyvio, somehow reverse the action? As if, maybe, perceiving that never in his life after that hour would he play again in that way, like a god, he wished to vacate the stage forever. The flame burst out like a crimson ribbon from the end of the mechanical match. But the mermaid violin did not catch fire. No, no. It was Folscyvio who did that. Up in a tower of gold and scarlet, blue and black, taller even than he had been—or seemed—when alive, the Maestro flared, and was lost at once to view. He gave no sound either, as perhaps the violin would not have done. Was there just no space for him to scream? Or was it that, being himself very small, and cramped and hollow and empty, there was no proper crying possible to him? In a litter of streaming and luminous instants he was obliterated, to dust, a shatter of black bones, a column of stinking smoke. And yet—had any been able to see it?— last of all to be incinerated were his eyes. Narrow, long- lashed, gray-mauve, and—for the final and first time in Folscyvio’s existence—full of fire.

Tanith Lee was born in 1947, in London, England. Slightly dyslexic, she failed to learn to read until almost eight years old (when her father taught her). At nine she began to write and hasn’t stopped since. In 1975, DAW Books published her epic fantasy novel The Birthgrave and so rescued Lee from lots of silly jobs at which she was extravagantly bad. Since then, she’s written more than ninety novels and collections and more than 300 short stories. She has also written for BBC TV and radio. She has won or been nominated for twelve major awards. She lives on the S.E. coast of England with her husband, writer/artist John Kaiine, in a house full of books and plants, under the firm claw of two cats. Feminine Endings Neil Gaiman

My darling, Let us begin this letter, this prelude to an encounter, formally, as a declaration, in the old-fashioned way: I love you. You do not know me (although you have seen me, smiled at me, placed coins in the palm of my hand). I know you (although not so well as I would like. I want to be there when your eyes flutter open in the morning, and you see me, and you smile. Surely this would be paradise enough?). So I do declare myself to you now, with pen set to paper. I declare it again: I love you. I write this in English, your language, a language I also speak. My English is good. I was for many years ago in England and in Scotland. I spent a whole summer standing in Covent Garden, except for the month of Edinburgh Festival, when I am in Edinburgh. People who put money in my box in Edinburgh included Mr. Kevin Spacey the actor, and Mr. Jerry Springer the American television star who was in Edinburgh for an opera about his life. I have put off writing this for so long, although I have wanted to, although I have composed it many times in my head. Shall I write about you? About me? First you. I love your hair, long and red. The first time I saw you I believed you to be a dancer, and I still believe that you have a dancer’s body. The legs, and the posture, head up and back. It was your smile that told me you were a foreigner, before ever I heard you speak. In my country we smile in bursts, like the sun coming out and illuminating the fields and then retreating again behind a cloud too soon. Smiles are valuable here. But you smiled all the time, as if everything you saw delighted you. You smiled the first time you saw me, even wider than before. You smiled and I was lost, like a small child in a great forest, never to find its way home again. I learned when young that the eyes give too much away. Some in my profession adopt dark spectacles, or even (and these I scorn with bitter laughter as amateurs) masks that cover the whole face. What good is a mask? My solution is that of full-sclera theatrical contact lenses, purchased from an American website for a little under 500 Euros, which cover the whole eye. They are dark gray, or course, and look like stone. They have made me more than €500, paid for themselves over and over. You may think, given my profession, that I must be poor, but you would be wrong. Indeed, I fancy that you will be surprised by how much I have collected. My needs have been small and my earnings always very good. Except when it rains. Sometimes even when it rains. The others as perhaps you have observed, my love, retreat when it rains, raise umbrellas, run away. I remain where I am. Always. I simply wait, unmoving. It all adds to the conviction of the performance. And it is a performance, as much as when I was a theatrical actor, a magician’s assistant, even a dancer. (That is how I am so familiar with the bodies of dancers.) Always, I was aware of the audience as individuals. I have found this with all actors and all dancers, except the short-sighted ones for whom the audience is a blur. My eyesight is good, even through the contact lenses. “Did you see the man with the moustache in the third row?” we would say. “He is staring at Minou with lustful glances.” And Minou would reply, “Ah yes. But the woman on the aisle, who looks like the German Chancellor, she is now fighting to stay awake.” If one person falls asleep, you can lose the whole audience, so we play the rest of the evening to a middle-aged woman who wishes only to succumb to drowsiness. The second time you stood near me you were so close I could smell your shampoo. It smelled like flowers and fruit. I imagine America as being a whole continent full of women who smell of flowers and fruit. You were talking to a young man from the university. You were complaining about the difficulties of our language for an American. “I understand what gives a man or a woman gender,” you were saying. “But what makes a chair masculine or a pigeon feminine? Why should a statue have a feminine ending?” The young man laughed and pointed straight at me, then. But truly, if you are walking through the square, you can tell nothing about me. The robes look like old marble, water-stained and time-worn and lichened. The skin could be granite. Until I move I am stone and old bronze, and I do not move if I do not want to. I simply stand. Some people wait in the square for much too long, even in the rain, to see what I will do. They are uncomfortable not knowing, only happy once they have assured themselves that I am natural, not artificial. It is the uncertainty that traps people, like a mouse in a glue- trap. I am writing about myself too much. I know that this is a letter of introduction as much as it is a love letter. But I should write about you. Your smile. Your eyes so green. (You do not know the true colour of my eyes. I will tell you. They are brown.) You like classical music, but you have also Abba and Kid Loco on your iPod Nano. You wear no perfume. Your underwear is, for the most part, faded and comfortable, although you have a single set of red-lace bra and panties which you wear for special occasions. People watch me in the square, but the eye is only attracted by motion. I have perfected the tiny movement, so tiny that the passer can scarcely tell if it is something he saw or not. Yes? Too often people will not see what does not move. The eyes see it but do not see it, they discount it. I am human-shaped, but I am not human. So in order to make them see me, to make them look at me, to stop their eyes from sliding off me and paying me no attention, I am forced to make the tiniest motions, to draw their eyes to me. Then, and only then, do they see me. But they do not always know what they have seen. I see you as a code to be broken, or as a puzzle to be cracked. Or a jig-saw puzzle, to be put together. I walk through your life, and I stand motionless at the edge of of my own life. My own gestures, statuesque, precise, are too often misinterpreted. I love you. I do not doubt this. You have a younger sister. She has a Myspace account, and a Facebook account. We talk sometimes. All too often people assume that a medieval statue exists only in the fifteenth century. This is not so true: I have a room, I have a laptop. My computer is passworded. I practice safe computing. Your password is your first name. That is not safe. Anyone could read your email, look at your photographs, reconstruct your interests from your web history. Someone who was interested and who cared could spend endless hours building up a complex schematic of your life, matching the people in the photographs to the names in the emails, for example. It would not be hard reconstructing a life from a computer, or from cellphone messages, like a crossword puzzle. I remember when I actually admitted to myself that you had taken to watching me, and only me, on your way across the square. You paused. You admired me. You saw me move once, for a child, and you told a friend, loud enough to be heard, that I might be a real statue. I take it as the highest compliment. I have many different styles of movement, of course—I can move like clockwork, in a set of tiny jerks and stutters, I can move like a robot or an automaton. I can move like a statue coming to life after hundreds of years of being stone. Within my hearing you have spoken of the beauty of this small city. How standing inside the stained-glass confection of the old church was like being imprisoned inside a kaleidoscope of jewels. It was like being in the heart of the sun. You are concerned about your mother’s illness. When you were an undergraduate you worked as a cook, and your fingertips are covered with the scar-marks of a thousand tiny knife-cuts. I love you, and it is my love for you that drives me to know all about you. The more I know the closer I am to you. You were to come to my country with a young man, but he broke your heart, and you came here to spite him, and still you smiled. I close my eyes and I can see you smiling. I close my eyes and I see you striding across the town square in a clatter of pigeons. The women of this country do not stride. They move diffidently, unless they are dancers. And when you sleep your eyelashes flutter. The way your cheek touches the pillow. The way you dream. I dream of dragons. When I was a small child, at the home, they told me that there was a dragon beneath the old city. I pictured the dragon wreathing like black smoke beneath the buildings, inhabiting the cracks between the cellars, insubstantial and yet always present. That is how I think of the dragon, and how I think of the past, now. A black dragon made of smoke. When I perform I have been eaten by the dragon and have become part of the past. I am, truly, seven hundred years old. Kings may come and kings may go. Armies arrive and are absorbed or return home again, leaving only damage and bastard children behind them, but the statues remain, and the dragon of smoke, and the past. I say this, although the statue that I emulate is not from this town at all. It stands in front of a church in southern Italy, where it is believed either to represent the sister of John the Baptist, or a local lord who endowed the church to celebrate not dying of the plague, or the angel of death. I had imagined you perfectly chaste, my love, yet one time the red lace panties were pushed to the bottom of your laundry hamper, and upon close examination I was able to assure myself that you had, unquestionably, been unchaste the previous evening. Only you know who with, for you did not talk of the incident in your letters home, or allude to it in your online journal. A small girl looked up at me once, and turned to her mother, and said “Why is she so unhappy?” (I translate into English for you, obviously. The girl was referring to me as a statue and thus she used the feminine ending.) “Why do you believe her to be unhappy?” “Why else would people make themselves into statues?” Her mother smiled. “Perhaps she is unhappy in love,” she said. I was not unhappy in love. I was prepared to wait until everything was ready, something very different. There is time. There is always time. It is the gift I took from being a statue. One of the gifts, I should say. You have walked past me and looked at me and smiled, and you have walked past me and barely noticed me as anything other than an object. Truly, it is remarkable how little regard you, or any human, gives to something that remains completely motionless. You have woken in the night, got up, walked to the little toilet, peed and walked back to bed. You would not notice something perfectly still, would you? Something in the shadows? If I could I would have made the paper for this letter for you out of my body. I thought about mixing in with the ink my blood or spittle, but no. There is such a thing as overstatement. Yet great loves demand grand gestures, yes? I am unused to grand gestures. I am more practised in the tiny gestures. I made a small boy scream once, simply by smiling at him when he had convinced himself that I was made of marble. It is the smallest gestures that will never be forgotten. I love you. Soon, I hope, you will know this for yourself. And then we will never part. It will be time, in a moment, to turn around, put down the letter. I am with you, even now, in these old apartments with the Iranian carpets on the walls. You have walked past me too many times. No more. I am here with you. I am here now. When you put down this letter. When you turn and look across this old room, your eyes sweeping it with relief or with joy or even with terror . . . Then I will move. Move, just a fraction. And, finally, you will see me.

Neil Gaiman’s most recent novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, is scheduled to publish in June 2013. His previous novel, the international bestseller The Graveyard Book, won the prestigious Newbery and Carnegie medals, making him the first author to win both for the same book. Other novels include American Gods, Coraline, Stardust, Neverwhere, and Anansi Boys, among many others. In addition to his novel-writing, Gaiman also created and scripted the popular comic book series Sandman. Most of Gaiman’s short work has been collected in the volumes Smoke and Mirrors, Fragile Things, and M is for Magic. He is the winner of four Hugos, two Nebulas, four Stokers, the Carnegie Medal, the World Fantasy Award, and seventeen Locus Awards, among many other honors. The H Word: Domestic Horror Nathan Ballingrud

I read my first real horror story when I was in elementary school. I don’t remember what grade I was in, but I ordered an anthology with a title like Chilling Tales or Scary Stories from one of those little book catalogues they used to hand out to students once or twice a year. It was like Christmas for me: perusing this list of hundreds of titles and checking the boxes of the six or seven I would be allowed to order. Spooky books were always at the top of my list. Most of the contents of this particular one are lost to me. Well, they all are, except one. Almost assuredly it was stocked with the toothless fare some editor deemed safe for middle- to lower-grade kids: condensed retellings of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” maybe, or the haunted lantern-bearer in Charles Dickens’ “The Signal-Man.” Things that gave my little heart a pleasant shiver, and worked to sow the seeds which would dictate the color of my life many years down the line. But there was one story that disturbed me in the more complicated way I would only later come to realize as a hallmark of the true genius of horror fiction. While the other stories left me with a kind of moonlit Halloween glow, this one put a spade into my settled earth and overturned it. I felt weirdly sick after reading it. I felt injured in some obscure way, as though it had betrayed a trust. The story was “The Monkey’s Paw,” by W.W. Jacobs. True to its purpose, the story gave me the chilly thrill I wanted and expected of it, but it did something more than that, too—something deeper. It introduced a terrible sadness into the mix, a human bereavement that put a very nasty edge on the story’s ghoulish element. Unlike the headless horseman or the unlucky signal-man, the weight of this story achieves its terrible velocity from the grief of a family which has lost its son to a war. The wish which summons the monster on the other side of the door is borne of a love misshapen by despair and longing; and the wish which sends it away again, which banishes their own son to the grave, is also borne of love. I was too young to appreciate the story’s perfect beauty. What I knew was that it complicated the spooky joy of reading about something returning from the dead and knocking on a door with a feeling of terrible loss. I didn’t think I liked the story—it didn’t even let me see the monster!—but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It made me uncomfortable and sad, uneasy in my own skin. Like I said: it was my first real horror story. I’ve been reaping its harvest ever since.

Horror fiction is currently enjoying its latest renaissance. It seems to cycle into and out of popularity, and its current state of grace is due in large part to a crop of highly literate, artistically serious writers who treat the writing of it as something akin to a spiritual calling. That some of them, like Laird Barron and Conrad Williams, are legitimate prose stylists, gives the new work some genuine literary clout. My only misgiving about the newest wave is the predominance of what is known as “cosmic horror.” To forestall the inevitable chorus of dissent, let me be clear that I’m speaking in the broadest terms here. There are scores of exceptions. I just find this to be the predominant theme. Cosmic horror, in the vein of Lovecraft and Chambers, is the focus on the hostility of the universe to the concerns, or even the continued survival, of mankind. It’s a rich and generous vein, and much great work has come from it. Its concerns are philosophical. The epiphanies of its protagonists are spiritual. This is entirely appropriate for horror fiction. Horror, like crime fiction (which is its close cousin), is perfectly evolved to interrogate our moral and theological assumptions. It’s an antagonistic literature, and therefore a fundamentally necessary literature. That it should undermine our sense of spiritual smugness, especially in this age of ideological rigidity, is both healthy and needed. My misgiving is entirely personal: it feels too distant in its intent to unsettle me the way I want horror to unsettle me. The unease is intellectual in nature. It doesn’t trouble my heart the way “The Monkey’s Paw” continues to do. And like any true masochist, I’m always chasing the original pain.

The worst sound I know is the sound of somebody crying in another room. It sounds like dissolution to me. It sounds like entropy, the slide of life into meaningless ruin. It’s the sound of termites in the walls. It’s also the most intimate of sounds. When you’re a child, and you hear your parent weeping behind a closed door, you get your first taste of real fear. By the time you hear your child doing the same thing, you’ve already been well seasoned by fear, and what you feel is the knowledge of all the unavoidable pain that’s waiting for her, of all the things you cannot protect her from. You fear what you know is coming. As a reader and as a writer, this is what really affects me. The horror that comes from within the family—we can call it domestic horror for the sake of this essay—is far more personal and therefore more immediate than anything that swims toward us from another star. It’s one of the reasons the vampire and the zombie are such powerful cultural touchstones: the monsters wear the faces of our loved ones. We can see in these monsters symbols of lovers who have turned against us for reasons we can’t fathom, of family members whose personalities are subsumed by mental illness, so that we find ourselves sharing a home or a bed with a personality we no longer recognize. The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty, is one of the most frightening horror stories of my lifetime. Despite the fact that the entity threatening Regan MacNeil and her mother fits very comfortably under the rubric of cosmic horror, the actual horror of the story comes from the terrifying transformation of a little girl into a desecrated vessel, and a home for the Devil. The mother watches her daughter transform into a living blasphemy. The story is profoundly harrowing, and when it’s over, it’s not Pazuzu that we remember. It’s the filth that the creature has made of our domestic dream. The Exorcist, and other stories in the vein of domestic horror, are effective because they are personal. They hurt. Like “The Monkey’s Paw,” these are the stories that linger.

We at Nightmare Magazine like discussions. Please use the comments feature to give us your thoughts on whether the H brand is an albatross or worth holding on to. Print may be dead, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be old school and have a good, old-fashioned letters page.

Nathan Ballingrud was born in Massachusetts but spent most of his life in the Deep South. He has worked as a bartender in New Orleans and a cook on offshore oil rigs; currently he’s a waiter in a fancy restaurant. His stories have appeared in several anthologies and year’s best collections. He won the Shirley Jackson Award for his short story “The Monsters of Heaven.” His first book, North American Lake Monsters: Stories, is due from Small Beer Press in 2013. He lives in Asheville, NC, with his daughter. Artist Gallery: Benjamin König

Artist Spotlight: Benjamin König Julia Sevin

Born in 1976, Benjamin König has been enamored with drawing and painting since his earliest years, when countless beautifully and creepily illustrated children's books led a trail of breadcrumbs to his passion. Despite attempting several other professions (audio engineer, conservator, etc.), Benjamin always returned to his first love: drawing. He is now a freelance illustrator in Upper Bavaria, near Munich.

What is your artistic background?

I have no particular artistic background. Although I went to a school of arts – some kind of technical college – I never learned any relevant stuff there.

What is your medium? Your method? I typically have a good eye for distinguishing digital painting from traditional but the entirety of your rustic, nearly organic catalog leaves me utterly nonplussed. What am I looking at? You're looking at a mixture of traditional and digital painting. I guess that's the reason why you can't specify it exactly. Digital painting makes it a lot easier when it comes to commissions. Concerning amendments, modifications, etc. . . Furthermore I can work faster, which is important for the pricing.

Why do you create? And why create this sort of work?

I create because this is some kind of calling. I feel strong bonds to the magic of fairy tales, (old) children's books, myths and almost everything that "grabs into the depth", touching a certain intuitiveness within one's heart. It is a passion, a liaison between old and new. Unfortunately not many books/paintings have a deeper esprit nowadays. I don't want to say "things aren't what they used to be", but in some cases things used to be better back then. There was more tactfulness in it. Today a lot of illustrations are loud, with shiny armor, big weapons, stunning effects, glossiness, shrillness, much BOOOM and a lot of WOOOSHHH, etc. . . Same goes for movies, music and the games industry. But mostly they are soulless. Of course one can find very beautiful illustrations today. But in the mainstream there's too much junk around.

Can you name some of your influences?

I am a child of the 70s and early 80s. So are my influences mainly. Artists like Franz Josef Tripp, Reinhard Michl, Graham Ward, Gary Kelley, Susan Gallagher, Herbert Holzing (and many more) are great influences. And of course my own view on things and inspiring moments.

Do you draw ideas from fiction? If so, which authors do you find inspiring?

Again and again I get inspired by fictions. Some authors I can mention are Ottfried Preussler, Michael Ende, Hans Bemmann, Eberhard Alexander-Burgh . . .and some well- known Authors from the Gothic period (~1790 – 1920).

Your paintings - and, additionally, your photographs - frequently depict hillocks and forests, citadels and villages, and the monsters which may lurk in each. What do these settings signify to you?

I think that someone's homeland is a big influence on how she/he is reflecting things. I was born in Upper Bavaria somewhere between the Alps and Munich. Very rural. And still living there. From my point of view it is a landscape which is predestinated for gloomy tales and myths. More broadly, that’s the old European culture at large. Of course someone should have the ability to feel the deeper atmosphere that a certain region breathes. Plus I try to mix my view with some smooth humor here and there. I love taking a closer look to the world. For this purpose photography is a great stylistic device.

My googling shows me that you recently illustrated a book of fairy tales, Troldeskoven, for a Danish author, Anne Mølgård Nielsen, is that right? How did that come about and what was the experience like?

Oh, she is just a private person. Writing tales for her niece. She came up to me and asked for certain illustrations. I felt that there is a true deep-routed mind, influenced by her homeland, as well. Relating to Denmark and Scandinavian culture in general. Which I adore, too.

Americans are plenty fixated on telling, retelling, and warping our fairy tales, but our fairy tales are fairly sanitized. European tales, especially German, have a reputation for being more violent, grotesque, and grim (including many that are totally unfamiliar to us). Do you think this is true?

I don't know American fairy tales. Thus I hardly can't give a statement about it. But I know that the old fairy tales from Germany used to be even more brutal in ancient times. They were warped by telling and retelling, as well. But some kind of core kept the same. Oh, the German psyche. . . hard to say because nowadays the inhabitants are moving and developing much faster. Especially the youth. Which I don't think of negatively in general. But there still is some kind of German psyche. A mixture between morbidity/melancholy and tightness. Germans like to lament and to dwell on sorrows. And they like to be clear, tight and organized at the same time. Both mannerisms can be found in old German fairy tales. And our relation to nature is important, too. "The German and his forest." Maybe it is still given that we are a nation of poets and thinkers. Here and there. . . at least.

It seems like such a natural fit for you to illustrate for fairy tales. Were they a great influence on your work?

Yes. Blessedly, I was told lots of fairy tales in my very early childhood. For sure this had – and still has – a huge impact on me. And I have read a lot of books with wonderful illustrations. And I still have all these old books in my bookcase.

The original role of fairy tales, arguably, was to normalize death and morbidity in the minds of children who were bound to experience both, and constantly. Do these subjects feel normal to you?

Death is normal because it is part of life. Of course in the past death had a more direct effect on daily grind. Overall I think that fairy tales also have the message that light/good wins. If not by now. . . but in the end. It is some kind of "church service" for the normal population. And of course there's so much more in it. . . concerning spirits, afterworld, etc... What are you working on right now?

On illustrations for a rather modern children's book. But it's nice. The author is Hilde Vandermeeren from Belgium. In the past I used to work a lot for music labels and bands. But I reduced it to almost zero because you have a lot of work and very little return.

What’s your dream illustration job?

To illustrate books. And hopefully books with lot of fantasy and magic in it. Books for children and adults. But maybe also some aesthetic board/computer games. . . whatsoever, I am open for lots of ideas.

Originally hailing from Northern California, Julia Sevin is a transplant flourishing in the fecund delta silts of New Orleans. Together with husband RJ Sevin, she owns and edits Creeping Hemlock Press, specializing in limited special editions of genre literature and, most recently, zombie novels. She is an autodidact pixelpusher who spends her days as the art director for a print brokerage, designing branding and print pieces for assorted political bigwigs, which makes her feel like an accomplice in the calculated plunder of America. Under the cover of darkness (like Batman in more ways than she can enumerate), she redeems herself through pro bono design, sordid illustration, and baking the world’s best pies. She is available for contract design/illustration, including book layouts and websites. See more of her work at juliasevin.com or follow her at facebook.com/juliasevindesign. Interview: Steve Niles Lisa Morton

Steve Niles is the undisputed crown prince of modern horror comics. Building (knowingly) on the tradition of the EC classics like Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror, Niles most famously re-claimed vampires with 30 Days of Night, which took them back from the realm of the romantic and made them fast, cunning, bloodthirsty monsters that attacked a small Alaskan town in the Arctic Circle. He’s also worked as a screenwriter (he was involved with the screenplay for the movie of 30 Days of Night), and his series of Cal McDonald stories—about the adventures of a hard-living paranormal private dick in Los Angeles—have shown he’s a fine prose writer with a flair for noirish style. Although his horror comics have explored everything from horror-movie hosts to the Frankenstein monster, his most recent graphic novel returns to vampires: Transfusion collects a three-issue series from 2012 that pits bloodsuckers against robots in a post-apocalyptic landscape. Niles is an affable man who travels frequently, and although he was raised in the suburbs of Washington D.C. he currently resides just north of Los Angeles. I know you’ve stated before that as a kid you grew up making monster movies with a Super 8 camera—did you ever write your own comics, though? How about horror stories?

I didn’t start writing stories until I was twelve or thirteen. Before that I just made these little Super 8 horror films. I read comics my whole life but it never occurred to me to try and make my own until my late teens.

You once said, “There’s a true innocence about monsters.” Is there something innocent about the monsters (vampires) in 30 Days of Night?

In a way, I suppose. They are very pure and honorable among their own kind. They have about as much respect for us as we do cows, so killing humans doesn’t make them any less innocent than us for eating cows and chickens. I think animals and children under two years old are the only innocents left in this world. Monsters are often treated like animals, so . . .

What were your inspirations for 30 Days of Night? I wondered if the name of your main vampire— Marlow—was a tip of the hat to Salem’s Lot, in which the vampire is named Barlow.

The name was definitely a tip of the hat to Salem’s Lot, both book and TV movie. The TV movie scared the crap out of me when I was a kid, the window scene. So creepy. I think my other inspirations are fairly obvious, The Thing, Carpenter’s version and the original, and Night of the Living Dead. I love films where people are isolated and attacked, I guess.

Ben Templesmith’s art in the original 30 Days of Night created an unusual image for the vampires, with faces that were distorted and stylized. How much did you work with him in crafting that look?

Ben and I agreed when we started we wanted different vampires. My first description I wrote called them “Land Sharks” and Ben took that and ran with it. He made them vicious and stylish at the same time without making them look like they shopped at Hot Topic. I think Ben’s art is what made the comic really stand out. To me, he set the bar for what a horror comic should look like. You’ve commented before on how you believe that vampires represent our fear of disease and of something invading our family . . . but don’t they also represent our fear of sexuality?

I think fear of sex and fear of disease are related. One certainly can lead to another. I realize the popular notion is that vampires represent sex, but I think it’s silly to ignore the other things they represent to us, and fear of invasion and disease are right up there with sex.

You also worked on the screenplay for the film adaptation of 30 Days of Night—was it a strange experience to re-imagine your work for a different medium? Or is working in film not that different from scripting a comic?

Ugh. Honestly, that wasn’t the best experience for me. I loved working with Raimi and Tapert but unfortunately there were fifteen other producers whose ideas I tried to incorporate. That was my first gig, and I learned the hard way that it’s impossible to make everybody happy. Technically writing a screenplay isn’t that much different than a comic. The biggest difference is in comics you freeze your moment and in a screenplay you move right through it.

Do you approach writing about an existing character —say, Batman, or DC’s The Creeper—differently from writing an original work?

Very different. When I get to work on a character like Batman, most of the work is done already, the world and all the characters exist, the toys are already there so all I have to do is come up with a new way to arrange the toys. When I do a new book I have to establish the world and characters, and that takes time.

With the Cal McDonald stories, you not only proved you could write prose, but that you had a real love affair with noir style, too. Where did Cal’s hardboiled side come from?

Cal started with me just plain ripping off Raymond Chandler. I wrote a few stories and they seemed really dated so I added drugs and monsters and he’s been writing himself ever since. I have so much fun with him because he’s so cynical and I get to see the world through those eyes. He’s a dick, but sometimes it’s fun to be the dick, ya know?

One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about the Cal McDonald stories is that they really capture L.A. . . . as a seething home for ghouls, junkies and monsters, that is. Are these stories at all a deliberate comment on Southern California?

Oh yeah. Definitely. Cal is from the East Coast so he has some very grim attitudes about the silliness of the Hollywood lifestyle.

In 2008 you said you were writing “John Carpenter’s next movie”—can you talk about what happened to that? Any chance it’ll still see the light of day?

You might see the film but I doubt John and I will be involved. I butted heads with an idiot producer and got myself fired for mouthing off. I have very little patience for non-creatives giving creative notes. I’m working on that. Too bad too, because John and I had something good brewing. It would have been a scary one for sure. Carpenter and I got along great. Really too bad people couldn’t trust us to come up with something scary. And how about the Wake the Dead movie—what stage is it at now?

That just stalled out. We have the script, director, and WETA on board. We just never found the financing. We haven’t quit. We’re still trying to find a home for it. Jay Russell and I are still out there shopping it around. I have new reps. Who knows? Maybe someday we’ll see it happen. This is one reason I love comics. At least they come out. I hate that about Hollywood. Way too much good stuff sitting on shelves while we get Captain Underpants Part 5 in 3D.

You once said, “Romero in general was a real inspiration for me. Not only did he make the best horror movies, he also did them his way. He’s the original DIY guy.” Yet you haven’t really tackled zombies yet. Is that still coming?

I wrote Remains, which was made into a TV movie for Chiller. That was my one big zombie thing. It was more about the relationship between characters, but there were lots and lots of zombies. DIY is incredibly important to me. I came up in the Washington D.C. music scene and we did everything ourselves, put out records, books, shows and tours. We never even thought about going to some corporate bullshit label. Something happened and I found myself sitting around waiting for DC to give me work, and I guess you could say I woke up again. I think DIY will save books, comics, and film. It’s the only way we’ll ever hear a creator’s voice as we head into a world owned by Disney. It’s vital that creators in all arts learn how to deal direct and make their art themselves. Do not sit and wait for anybody.

This April will see the publication of Transfusion, which collects the three issues of your horror/science fiction hybrid comic. Transfusion seems different from most of your earlier work, using not only science fiction tropes but a more terse style, with sparse text and dialogue. Was it a deliberate attempt to explore something new?

The artist, Menton3, inspired the style of writing, to be honest. I always try to match the art and for me Transfusion is an incredibly grim story so the sparse dialogue and captions seemed to fit. And yes, it was extremely deliberate. I love to experiment. I fall flat on my face a lot but when it works, man, that’s the best. Transfusion is a post-apocalyptic story that features both blood-drinking robots and vampires. These vampires seem quite different from the ones in 30 Days of Night—how intentional was that?

Very intentional. I wanted to steer clear of the 30 Days types of vampires, not only to avoid ripping myself off, but also to try something new. The vampires in Transfusion are much more traditional, and since I don’t have much experience with those types it felt very new to me.

You’ve written graphic novels, screenplays, and short fiction—will we see a full length novel from you at some point?

Yes. I am done with the rough draft of my novel A World of Hurt. I’m doing rewrites right now and working on something very different for that as well. Can’t wait to show that one off.

Lastly: Have you really received hate mail from Twilight fans? Just when we did the Sparkles for Blood Drive where people could turn in their Twilight novels and exchange them for 30 Days of Night. I got some of the most awful, venomous emails . . . followed very quickly by the sweetest apologies in the world.

Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of nonfiction books, award-winning prose writer, and Halloween expert whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” Her short fiction has appeared in dozens of anthologies and magazines, including The Mammoth Book of Dracula, Dark Delicacies, The Museum of Horrors, and Cemetery Dance, and in 2010 her first novel, The Castle of Los Angeles, received the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel. Recent books include the graphic novel Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Times (co-written with Rocky Wood, illustrated by Greg Chapman), and Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween. Forthcoming in 2013 are the novellas Summer’s End and Smog, and the novel Malediction. A lifelong Californian, she lives in North Hollywood, and can be found online at www.lisamorton.com. Author Spotlight: Caspian Gray Seamus Bayne

What is the origin of “Centipede Heartbeat”?

I was briefly involved with a man who worked at an entomology lab, and one day when I went to meet him for lunch he was feeding pinkies to their Amazonian giant centipedes. Even though centipedes don’t have the brain capacity for cruelty, the way they fed looked cruel. The centipedes would attack, inject their prey with venom, and then withdraw while the pinkies convulsed. This would be repeated two or three times before the centipedes finally started eating. This is a perfectly viable feeding strategy if what you’re trying to kill can fight back, but with helpless infants it looked like these centipedes were deliberately drawing out the process, and then stepping back to admire their prey’s agony. I suppose centipedes have stuck with me as rather menacing little creatures ever since.

Lisa appears to be agoraphobic, but we never learn why. Why doesn’t she want to leave the house? My imaginary background for this story is that Lisa has suffered from mental health problems throughout she and Joette’s relationship, and that Joette was finally on the brink of leaving her—some of her things are still packed up in the garage—when Lisa had a breakdown that convinced her to stay. So not only is Lisa motivated by psychosis (or, if you’re so inclined, an actual invisible centipede invasion), but she’s also found a way to keep Joette forever if the poison kills her.

This story taps into a primal fear of insects. Is that a personal fear of yours?

Not really. One of my very first acid trips went bad, and I became convinced that my body was a spaceship being piloted at very high speeds by centipedes that wanted me and all of humankind to suffer terribly and die. In retrospect that’s hilarious, but at the time it was quite distressing. Snakes and insects are such common unpleasant hallucinations that I do believe we’re hardwired to respond negatively to them, and for that reason they play a large role in our collective unconscious. Personally I don’t mind insects, though I prefer that they not be crawling all over me. Lisa’s actions and the question of whether she’s imagining her partner’s condition or if it is really happening, drive the horror of this narrative. As the writer, did you ever decide if what Lisa was experiencing was real or just a paranoid delusion?

For me, this is a story about a crazy person, but I had readers who preferred it if the centipedes were really there. One of the joys of reading can be interpreting a work without regard for the author’s intent, so I don’t think my preference really matters here.

What else do you have coming up?

I’ll have a piece called “Flock,” about a woman kidnapped by giants, coming out in Kaleidotrope this summer. I also write non-fantastical fiction under a different pseudonym, and as that guy I have a short story forthcoming from the New England Review.

Seamus Bayne got his start writing during the ‘90s working in the roleplaying game industry. In 2010, he attended the Viable Paradise writer’s workshop. Seamus is the co-founder and host of the Paradise Lost writing retreat held annually in Texas. You can learn more about him, and his writing at www.seamusbayne.net. Author Spotlight: Caitlín R. Kiernan E.C. Myers

I loved “Houses Under the Sea.” You’ve mentioned that it was inspired by R.E.M.’s song “Belong,” which you briefly quote in the story. Could you tell us a little more about the genesis of the idea and how it evolved from that initial inspiration?

Sometimes . . . often, really . . . I’ll hear a lyric, a line or two from a song, and it’ll lodge itself in my consciousness, where it sits and ferments. Which is what happened with “Belong.” I’m a great fan of R.E.M. I have been since the eighties. When the album Out of Time was released in 1991 and I first heard “Belong,” that one line—“Those creatures jumped the barricades and have headed for the sea”—I heard it and immediately saw the image of people walking into the sea. I have no idea what the band meant, but that’s what I saw. Those lines, they struck me as simultaneously beautiful, sorrowful, filled with awe, somehow terrifying, but also joyful. And the image stayed with me for years. That was actually back years before my career as an author began, but it stuck. It didn’t coalesce into a story until 2004, but it was always, always there, germinating for those thirteen years. So, yeah. I doubt the story would ever have happened had I not been inspired by the band. Actually, R.E.M. have often inspired me. Their lyrics taught me a lot about writing.

I was surprised and pleased to see this story was partially set on Cannery Row. What kind of an influence has John Steinbeck had on your work?

Steinbeck was actually a tremendous formative influence. I began reading him in high school, and he was one of those eye-opening authors for me. He’s one of the writers who taught me invaluable lessons about characterization; that stories, novels, are not about events. They’re about people. When they stop being about people, you’re writing shit. Steinbeck also introduced me to the importance of profoundly flawed characters and their importance to literature. Lennie and George in Of Mice and Men, for example, or the cast of Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. These aren’t characters many people would see as heroic or virtuous or strong, because too often readers are, I think, too afraid of their own weaknesses to sympathize or empathize with characters they deem “unsympathetic.” In the two Cannery Row books, Steinbeck gives us bums, whores, and a marine biologist who exists outside academia. Beautiful, beautiful people. And, I don’t know, years and years ago, I was looking through a book of photographs of Cannery Row before it was essentially turned into the Disneyland attraction it is today. That exquisite, weathered, decaying desolation, what it became after the sardines were overfished and poverty set in and all the people moved on, leaving behind that shell. As with the line from the R.E.M. song, I filed those images away, knowing I’d need them someday. And when I finally found the story of Jacova Angevine, I knew the Row was the perfect setting. It exists—or at least once existed—as man’s fragile interface with the ocean. It exists in “Houses Under the Sea” as a parable of man’s simultaneous ruthless exploitation and awe of the sea, and, too, of humanity’s constant, idiotic romanticization of the past. The characters are not truly walking along Cannery Row. They’re walking along a theme-park zombie that once was the Row.

What research did you do for this story? Did you reread any Lovecraft stories before or while you wrote it?

When I’m writing, research is always a combination of what I already have in my head—which is sort of a disorganized encyclopedia—and on-the-fly research. In this case, I think that hard part was getting the science and technology concerning deep-sea submersibles as right as I possibly could without going to Monterey and climbing aboard the ships. Now, that’s how the story should have been researched, yes, but there aren’t many authors who have the luxury of that sort of thing, and I’m sorry to say that, Mr. Hemingway. So, I don’t know how many hours I must have spent studying ROV schematics and specs and whatnot, but a lot of hours. That, I would say, was the bulk of the research done immediately before and as I wrote the story. As to Lovecraft, no, I didn’t read any of his stories while I was writing “Houses Under the Sea,” but I’d already read every bit of fiction he ever wrote, over and over again. I live in fear of pastiche, so if an author or authors—in this case Lovecraft, also Steinbeck—serves as an inspiration, I avoid reading them while I write the story they’ve inspired. Lovecraft’s Innsmouth, his Deep Ones and Dagon, and especially Mother Hydra, they were all jumping off points—as were Steinbeck and R.E.M.— but I also wanted the story to be its own thing, not just some “mythos” tale. By the way, Lovecraft wrote virtually nothing about Mother Hydra, which is one reason I’ve used that deity repeatedly. She’s really nothing more than a shadow in his work, a force he hints at. Makes her a lot more interesting to me than, say, Cthulhu. Also, it’s an opportunity to feminize the Weird. “Houses Under the Sea” is a tale of goddess cult gone . . . maybe gone wrong. Maybe gone exactly right. Probably, the story could have ended no way except the mass drowning. Willing sacrifice to that which is vastly greater than humanity. Or, conversely, it’s about mass hysteria and the danger of charismatic personalities. Regardless, “Mother Hydra” becomes a metaphor for, a personification of, the sea.

When you write stories like this that include pieces of news reports and found documents, do you start with them first, add them as you go, or construct them at the end after discovering where the plot takes you? How do you strike the right tone with each fragment?

I don’t know I’m going to need them until I get to that part of the story. Well, usually not. Here, our narrator is a journalist, so I had a pretty good idea those snippets were coming. But I didn’t write them or sketch them out before hand. I don’t use outlines, anything like that, when I write. But when I reached, say the CNN clip, I had to stop and spend a day or so reading CNN reports to get the feel of the voice down, because if I’m going to employ that sort of device, it absolutely has to be authentic. Same with those excerpts from Theo Angevine’s novels, and that was actually much more difficult than the news reports. I had to pause to create the voice of an author who isn’t me, whose work isn’t mine. Otherwise, I’ve failed. And I have to be able to sustain that voice across more than one excerpt, so they appear to have been written by the same author. This was something I had to do extensively in The Red Tree. Truthfully, this is one of the things I love to do, creating “found” artifacts within stories and novels— found film, books, paintings, whatever. It’s a fascinating device, and one I expect I’ll employ for many years to come.

We see the Open Door of Night cult again in your Tiptree-Award-winning novel, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, and meet someone else whose life it has changed. Did this story inspire the novel, or did the link between them grow in the writing?

No. The story didn’t inspire the novel. I didn’t even see the connection until I was very deep into writing The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. Then, well, it was just obvious to me. I don’t want to say too much about that, though, because I don’t want to spoil the novel for anyone who hasn’t read it, and, too, the Open Door of Night is, I think, a fairly minor element in the novel. By the way, the cult also makes an appearance in a story I wrote with Sonya Taaffe, “In the Praying Window.” It might crop up in still other stories, as well. I can’t recall offhand.

What can readers expect to see from you next?

At the moment, I’m finishing up the second Siobhan Quinn novel, Red Delicious, the sequel to Blood Oranges. These three novels came about after writing The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, because I was emotionally exhausted, and I needed to do something fun. So, I decided to poke fun at the mess “paranormal romance” and “shifter” porn has made of urban fantasy, to rip apart those conventions, deconstruct and disembowel them. So, yeah . . . I’ll finish Red Delicious this spring, and then write the last book in that trilogy, Cherry Bomb, this summer. Also, I’m scripting Alabaster, a series for Dark Horse Comics, a reboot of my Dancy Flammarion character who first appeared—in a rather different incarnation—in my second novel, Threshold. Subterranean Press will be releasing my ninth short fiction collection, The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories, this summer, or maybe this autumn, so I’ve been editing that. And I think that’s quite enough for one year.

E.C. Myers was assembled in the U.S. from Korean and German parts and raised by a single mother and a public library in Yonkers, New York. He has published short fiction in a variety of print and online magazines and anthologies, and his young adult novels, Fair Coin and Quantum Coin, are available now from Pyr Books. He currently lives with his wife, two doofy cats, and a mild-mannered dog in Philadelphia and shares way too much information about his personal life at ecmyers.net and on Twitter @ecmyers. Author Spotlight: Tanith Lee Erika Holt

Did you draw upon any particular myth or lore about mermaids for “Doll Re Me”?

Not at all. For me it was just the complementary shapes —violin, woman with fish-tail.

Your parents were dancers—did you hear a lot of classical music growing up? Are you a classical music fan? Do you play any instruments?

My gorgeous parents weren’t classical dancers—but very able and graceful exponents of Ballroom and Latin American. However, they both loved classical music. So yes, I heard lots, and fell in love with it too. I did try to learn the piano as a child—I could compose on it, but stayed useless as a pianist. (Same with the guitar, later). Both my parents could play well.

What is the significance of the dream sequence? Who is the figure with the webby veil? A reader will undoubtedly decide for themselves in both cases. There may be many answers, and most of them correct.

Do you see “Doll Re Me” as a story about punishment for hubris?

No, I see it as the punishment for wasteful cruelty, which the main character so lavishly displays towards both people and things.

What scares you? Who are your favorite horror authors?

In books what scares me is usually rather less the subject matter than how it is handled. Among my favourite writers here are R.L. Stevenson and M.R. James. Individual books: I’d cite John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot—the only example of a work that truly, if temporarily, made me afraid of vampires. While William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is, I think, one of the most frightening novels of any sort ever written. What are you working on now?

I’m working on a weird contemporary novel (my contemporary stuff is generally even more odd than my fantasy) called Turquoiselle. I shall never think of a garden shed the same way again!!

Erika Holt lives in the cold, white North (i.e. Calgary, Canada), where she writes and edits speculative fiction. Her stories appear in Shelter of Daylight issue six, Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead, and Tesseracts Fifteen: A Case of Quite Curious Tales. She has co-edited two anthologies: Rigor Amortis, about sexy, amorous zombies, and Broken Time Blues, featuring 1920s alien burlesque dancers and bootlegging chickens. Author Spotlight: Neil Gaiman Kat Howard

In “Feminine Endings,” much of the story focuses on the idea of seeing and being seen. You write a lot about that here, that idea of what is noticed, yet the horror in the story is that constant observation, the unending looking; so I was wondering if you think that one of the keys to horror is the idea of exaggeration?

I don’t know that it’s exaggeration. I mean, in that story, the moment of horror, people just sort of chug along with the story, and then the first moment they become uncomfortable is the moment that they realize that the observation has gone beyond simply the observation of somebody standing and having an unrequited love. The moment they realize that the person talking has been in your room, has been looking on your computer, the moment in that letter where the narrator, the letter writer starts talking about “Your password is . . .” and people realize Oh my god, you’ve read all their emails. The moment that he’s talking or she’s talking, because you never know the gender of the narrator, the moment you know that the observer has been going through her laundry, her dirty laundry—it’s an absolute visceral moment of horror. Because boundaries have certainly been transgressed. It is okay to observe and be observed, but it’s not okay to actively move in, and then the creeping horror starts to come as you realize that actually, the line about getting up in the night and micturating, and walking past and not being seen, and you’re going, “Oh my god, there could be somebody in my house. Somebody so still that I never see them.”

This is an epistolary short story, and the nature of a letter is that it is one-sided: it is not a dialogue, it is not a conversation. How much did the form influence the content? Or did you know what kind of story you wanted to tell, and—

You couldn’t have told that story without it being epistolary. Because (a) It has to be a monologue, and (b) it’s leading up to that final moment of “I’m talking to you, and you’d better look round this room because I’m here somewhere.” And that came straight from the prompt, that came from getting an email that said, “Would you like to write a love letter”? And I’ve always liked writing love letters [ . . . ] I’ve written at least one other in the Who Killed Amanda Palmer book. There’s a photo of a 1950s Amanda with her head in an oven, and I wrote a love letter in which you gradually realize that the person writing the love letter plans to own her and destroy her and crush her into this sort of 1950s box, and you absolutely understand why this woman has put her head in the gas oven—from something that is nothing more than a protestation of undying love and an exploration of this person will want for nothing, and will need to do nothing ever again.

You were talking about the ending of the story, where you know that the statue is there, and you start to have this just absolutely horrifying reaction, “Oh my god, someone has been here,” and the thing is that the statue says, “You’re not going to notice me until I move which I find that I have to move just a little bit to make you notice, to make you see.” Which is the statue stepping outside of the essence of what it means to be a statue, and so completely transgressing that idea, you’ve got this tension between being something you are and being a counterfeit version of that, and so I was hoping you could say a little bit about where the horror inherent in that tension comes from.

The one element in that that is true-ish—but moves into fantasy—is the idea that somebody would be so still you would take them for an object. That mere stillness means that you do not see somebody, and that a tiny movement will actually allow you to see them. Which is all fictional —those things are not really true; human beings are never perfectly still, even human statues (if you ever stand and watch them, they’re never perfectly still, and also our eyes are perfectly capable of taking in information from objects that are completely still, even in the dark). What’s nice is you set that up early in the story, as the person simply says, “You know, people will walk past me as a statue, I need to make tiny movements in order that they will see me.” And so you just establish something that is not actually true, as true in this fictional world and true in a way that then creeps over and blends into reality because it feels true-ish enough that it could be real. So you’re heading toward that inevitable ending, where the person says, “I’m going to move.” When you’ve finished reading this and you turn around, I’ll move, and then you’ll see me. And that is the essence of horror—it’s the knowledge that there is an invader here, and they’re about to reveal themselves to you, and there’s also [the question] of why: Why are they going to reveal themselves to you? And the person who’s doing it [is] kind of hoping you’re going to react with love and with delight, but they— Are they really hoping that?

That’s definitely one of the options that they list.

[Laughter] That was not the question that I asked you!

I think it is definitely assumed that the reaction may be, and probably will be, significantly less impressed.

There is both the idea of not being seen, and the idea of being falsely seen, which the statue talks about: I’ve reconstructed your entire life; I know your email and your MySpace accounts; I follow you; I know all these things about you. But that is going to be a false reconstruction: You’re not going to get to know the real person from that. So which is worse: Being seen as someone else’s idea of you, or not being seen at all?

You’re always being seen as somebody else’s idea of you. And most of us are never seen at all. And are surprised to be seen. What actually is very off-putting these days is that people see more than you think they do, and see you when you do not believe yourself to be under observation; that in itself is peculiar. I will occasionally be taken aback —and I’ve lived much of my life relatively publicly— [when] somebody I don’t know in a strange city will wander over to me and say, “So, uh, how’s Princess doing? She must be pretty old these days.” And I go, “Aaaah!” And then I [think], “Well, I post photos of Princess, I talked about the fact she’s twenty-one . . . stuff is out there in the world, why should I be freaked out that a complete stranger has gone, ‘This is Neil Gaiman, I will start a conversation about something. I am slightly socially awkward, I will try and break the ice, let me talk about—’” and you know, they will go straight in, they won’t even go, “Oh, hello, I read your blog when I was —.” It’s just “How’s Princess? She must be pretty old,” and suddenly it’s just like: [talks in faux paranoid voice], “Are you following me?

Since Nightmare is a horror magazine, do you want to mention a few people who scare you? Writers. Preferably. Not generally scary people.

Robert Aickman. Robert Aickman, of all of the horror writers that ever were, Aickman wasn’t one of them. Occasionally he was accidentally one of them. He wrote things he called strange stories, and they’re about people who get destroyed a lot of the time, or people who have eruptions of the strange into their life. The least successful Aickman stories tend to be the ones that actually belong to the recognizable world of horror or ghost stories, the rules that we understand from the world of horror or ghost stories. The most successful ones are the ones where you went, “I don’t really know what happened.” Because the eruptions of what—for purposes of this interview, we’ll call the supernatural—into one’s life are always by definition inexplicable.

[Editor’s Note: This was an interview conducted over lunch while Neil was the Guest of Honor at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA). After the last question above, he had to run to his next event, but he offered by email the following list of other writers of scary stories that he would have recommended, and that he would have spoken about, had he had time: Ramsey Campbell, Shirley Jackson, Lisa Tuttle, Joe Hill, and Stephen King.]

Kat Howard’s short fiction has appeared in magazines such as Apex, Subterranean, and Lightspeed, and in the anthology Oz Reimagined. She is the content editor at Fantasy-Matters.com, and spends far too much time on twitter as @KatWithSword. Coming Attractions

Coming up in June, in Nightmare . . . We’ll have original fiction from Lynda E. Rucker (“The House on Cobb Street”) and Carrie Vaughn (“Fishwife”), along with reprints by Laird Barron (“Shiva, Open Your Eye”) and Joe R. Lansdale (“God of the Razor”). We’ll also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with all of our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Nightmare. Thanks for reading!