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TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 90, March 2020

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial: March 2020

FICTION A Study in Shadows Benjamin Percy Kim Nicole D. Sconiers Flashlight Man Merc Fenn Wolfmoor There and Back Again

NONFICTION The H Word: The Melancholy Beauty of Terror Paul Jessup Book Reviews: March 2020 Terence Taylor

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Benjamin Percy Merc Fenn Wolfmoor MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Stay Connected Subscriptions and Ebooks Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard About the Team Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2020 Nightmare Magazine Cover by Patila / Adobe Stock Art www.nightmare-magazine.com

Editorial: March 2020 John Joseph Adams | 109 words

Welcome to issue ninety of Nightmare! We kick off this month’s original with a brand-new short from Benjamin Percy (“A Study in Shadows”) that’s about ethics in science—or what happens when scientists forget about them. Merc Fenn Wolfmoor dives into of the with their new short story “Flashlight Man.” We also have reprints by Nicole D. Sconiers (“Kim”) and Carmen Maria Machado (“There and Back Again”). In the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” Paul Jessup whispers to us about . Plus, there are author spotlights with our authors and a book review from Terence Taylor.

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

A Study in Shadows Benjamin Percy | 2159 words

A year-long study—on the belief in the invisible—was conducted by Dr. Brandon Harrow, an Associate Professor of Psychology at Shadewood University. These are some of his raw findings.

• • • •

One of Dr. Harrow’s survey groups included a church known as The Dawn Triumphant. The congregation believes we are living in a time of punishing darkness. Half of them were told to sit in a bright room for an hour and speak to their gods. The other half were told to sit in a dark room and do the same. After a month, every single member of the latter group reported hearing a voice. They called out to Him and received His word in return. When asked by Dr. Harrow to describe the experience, they provided descriptions: “ was less like a sound and more like an undersound,” and “It hurt to hear. I felt like my ears were bleeding,” and “It was like fifty voices all babbling at once but crushed into one voice,” and “It didn’t sound like anything. But it felt like something. It felt like the air does when a train rumbles by or a big dog growls.” If you talk to the dark, Dr. Harrow concluded, the dark talks back.

• • • •

Dr. Harrow visited his hometown of Hemlock Haven, Indiana, a place that was unexceptional except for its stained history. This was where Phineas Hook grew up. He was a pale boy with white hair and pink eyes and skin so thin, you could see the blue creeks of his veins running beneath it. The other children teased him for his appearance. They called him a . On October 31st, he proved them right and killed them with a hunting knife he carried around in his candy bucket. One child after another had their throat or belly slit. Their bodies were abandoned on sidewalks and porches, thirty of them altogether, before Phineas was apprehended by the police in the town square while sitting on a bench and eating a bag of Red Vines. Ten years later, Dr. Harrow enlisted the help of some local parents. He told them to tell their children that Halloween was canceled. Because Phineas Hook had escaped from the psychiatric ward outside of town. On the anniversary of his killing spree. The police were looking for Phineas—that’s what the parents were supposed to tell their children—and they would certainly find him. But for now, everyone needed to stay home. The night would still be fun, the parents should promise their children. They invited over all of the neighbors and they gathered in their costumes in the basement of the Meyerson’s home, where they danced to the “Monster Mash” and ate candy and bobbed for apples and shoved their hands into a cold bowl of spaghetti and pretended it was guts. But then something happened. A terrible boom sounded as the door at the top of the stairs swung open and hit the wall. Everyone went quiet. From above came a creak of shifted weight. And then a rasping sound that could have been breathing or could have been a knife drawn from its sheath. And then a doom, doom, doom, doom sounded as someone slowly and heavily descended the stairs. When the Pale Man—Phineas Hook himself, with his wild white hair and blood-red eyes—lurched into view with a in hand, all the children began screaming at once. The children did not notice that the adults were laughing, that they were saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay—it’s just a joke.” The children did not understand that the pale man was in fact Dr. Harrow, his skin smeared with white makeup. One girl leapt into a toy chest and pulled down the lid on her hand so hard, it severed the fingers. Another pissed himself and began babbling in tongues. Another fainted and gashed her head on the corner of the coffee table. And another ripped open the sliding glass door and ran off into the night, never to be seen again. That is the horror of belief, a term Dr. Harrow employed as a central thesis. There are no or or or boogeymen. There is only the mind and its many stains and weaknesses. Any horror without is a mere reflection of the horror within. A human horror. • • • •

Here is a story Dr. Harrow enjoyed telling his students. A mother walks into the bedroom to wish her daughter goodnight. But she finds the girl pale and shivering. “Whatever is the matter?” the mother asks, and the daughter says, in a whisper, “I think there’s something under my bed.” The mother says, “I’m sure that’s not the case,” but nonetheless indulges the girl by getting down on her knees and lifting the dust ruffle and peering beneath the box spring. And it is here, in the shadows beneath the bed, that she spies a face. A pale and shivering face that seems to belong to her daughter, who says, in a whisper, “I think there’s something in my bed.” The wonderful thing about the story, Dr. Harrow says, is its duplicity and moral confusion. Is this the victim? And that the predator? Or . . . Are they both the monster?

• • • •

Every corner of the country has its own . The witches of . The aliens of Area 51. The Sasquatch of the Pacific Northwest. Dr. Harrow wondered if he could create a somewhere and observe its subsequent evolution. In this , The Roof People were born. The Roof People were souls lost to a kind of purgatory, and they inhabited the roofs and attics and fire escapes of homes, spying spitefully on the living. They looked like people in the same way that a page of newspaper resembled itself when wet. Smeary, torn, translucent. He only needed to find the right subjects in the right neighborhoods, and he felt certain that the story would catch like a hungry fire.

• • • •

This is the mirror test. Every day for a month, Dr. Harrow asked people to step into the bathroom and stand before the mirror and knock at it five times. One focus group was asked to conduct the experiment with the lights on— the other, with the lights off. The focus group with the lights on indicated no response. But among the focus group with the lights off, the following curiosities were reported: Three responsive knocks that shook the very house and made plaster dust rain down from the ceiling. A sudden crack in the mirror that wept blood. A message written in what appeared to be the fog of a fading breath that read, “DARK DARK SO DARK IN HERE.” The appearance of a specter in the mirror has been described as a hag clothed in gray and bloody rags. Her hair was like dirty cobwebs and her mouth was a moist gash, and when she opened it, worms and centipedes twisted out. Three members of this focus group offered no response, because they have gone missing.

• • • •

A colleague—Dr. Claude Horner in the English Department at Shadewood University—offered up his own children as test subjects. He fondly described his son Jack as a “little sadist” and his daughter Jenny as “scared of her own shadow.” The two of them, on a nearly daily basis, were engaged in a kind of war. Jack would leap out of a closet while wearing a . Or Jack would sneak into his sister’s room and rearrange her dolls and supply them with notes that read, for example, “BAD .” And Jenny would then run crying to the nearest parent. She slept with the light on. And she wrapped her cotton sheets tightly around her, mummifying her body, the only opening a blowhole for her mouth. They seemed an ideal pairing. In the living room of their home, Dr. Harrow kindled a fire in the hearth and turned off the lamps and asked the children to gather near, and in the uncertain light, he shared with them the story of the Roof People. Then he waited. And watched.

• • • • Dr. Harrow investigated further the Dawn Triumphant. One of their churches burned to the ground with the congregation still inside. In the ashes of the pulpit a bible was discovered. The cover was molten and rippled leather. The pages were a cancerous yellow crisped to charcoal at the edges. And the script inside had changed, as if refined by the hellish heat. Everyone referred to it as the Black Book, and it is now considered a sacred text. All hail Mammon. And if you read it, you will die. All hail Astaroth. Was it because the book itself is stained? Or that it possesses a particular, spell-like arrangement of letters? Would you still die if you read its reflection in a mirror? Would you die if you merely heard its contents spoken aloud? All hail Eligos. These were some of the questions Dr. Harrow set out to answer. All hail Legion.

• • • •

One night, Jenny Horner heard a scraping and a mewling at her window. And she threw aside her sheets and leapt up and ran down the hall and found her brother breathless. The air in the room was cold, and she concluded that he had done it. That he had climbed out on the roof, had clambered over to her window, had scratched the screen and whimpered like a sad animal, before racing back this way. “No,” he said. “It wasn’t me. I swear. It was . . .” (and here he paused dramatically and pitched his voice low) “. . . the Roof People.” “I hate you,” she said, and threw her stuffed animal (Beary Bear) at him. The next night the same scenario played out. Jenny heard a howl and a thump at the window. She rose from her bed and marched down the hall, calling out her brother’s name in a fury. But when she pushed open the door to his bedroom, she found the bed empty except for the impression of his head on the pillow. The window was open and the curtain fluttered with the chill air. “Jack, I know you did it. I know you’re the Roof People.” She waited, but the night gave nothing back. “Jack?” She called for her parents then—and the boy was found in the garden below, his leg twisted the wrong way and his neck broken from the fall. Since that time, every night in the window, Jenny claims to see a smeary version of his face. He is watching her sadly and covetously, because the horror he tried to conjure claimed him.

• • • •

It wasn’t long ago that the janitorial staff at Shadewood University discovered Dr. Harrow at his office desk. The cause of death is unknown, but his charcoal hair had turned white and fallen out in a messy halo around his head. And his teeth, torn from the roots, were arranged in a ciphered design. Before him, on a pad of paper, the following was written in a shaky, spidery script: The peer-reviewed journal, the Monmouth Quarterly, to which I submitted my latest findings indicated my work was lacking something essential. Personal responsibility. My disconnect from the fieldwork indicated an absence of risk, a cavity in my scholarship I had to remedy. So I entered the men’s restroom on this floor and checked the stalls to make certain I was alone. I turned off the light. I took a deep breath and knocked four times on the mirror, hesitating before I brought my knuckles down for the fifth and last time. I instantly felt a vertiginous sensation that reminded me of an occasion from my childhood. On a winter’s night, I was traveling with my parents when the station wagon hit a patch of ice. I was asleep at the time, but I awoke as the car spun into the ditch with a terrible lurching. Just like that, upon knocking at the mirror for the fifth time, I had suddenly no sense of up or down or left or right. I only knew I was someplace else, and the someplace else was wrong. When I finally found my focus and my balance, this is what I saw. An inversion. A backwards, inside out, upside-downness. The place where the mirror hung was now a square patch of wall. And everything else had become the mirror. So when I looked around, I could see a million different versions of my face, all of them screaming, “Forgive me, forgive me.” ©2020 by Benjamin Percy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Benjamin Percy is the author of four novels—most recently, The Dark Net—three story collections—including Suicide Woods—and a book of essays titled Thrill Me that is widely taught in creative writing classrooms. His sci-fi trilogy—The Comet Cycle—will be published in 2021 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and has been optioned by the Russo brothers (Avengers: Endgame). He is part of the new Dawn of -Men at Marvel and writes both and X-Force. He has also written for DC Comics and and is known for his celebrated runs on , , , and . His fiction and nonfiction have been published in Esquire (where he was a contributing editor), GQ, Time, Men’s Journal, Outside, the Wall Street Journal, , Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Ploughshares, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and the Paris Review. He wrote two seasons of the audio drama—Wolverine—produced by Marvel and Stitcher. The first season, “Wolverine: The Long Night,” was listed as one of the top 15 podcasts of the year by Apple and won the iHeartRadio Award for Best Scripted Podcast. His other honors include the Whiting Award, an NEA fellowship, the Whiting Award, the Plimpton Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories, 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, and Best American Comics.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight Kim Nicole D. Sconiers | 7066 words

She looked like she wandered away from a Mennonite farm, like she belonged to those women who gave bags of hand-me-downs to my mom. Her gingham dress hung to her ankles. It was a sly blue color, like a robin’s egg in which a baby vulture slept. No prayer covering weighed down her hair, which swirled around her face in jagged wisps. Unlike those well-meaning Mennonite ladies, she held no bag filled with castoffs for needy black kids. She came that summer bearing nothing in her hands and she left with the bones of our dreams. I saw her first. We were practicing our lyrics in the underpass off Johnson Highway. Me, Trina, Vanessa and D. The Cherry Street Crew. Few cars traversed that old bridge, on the side of which someone misspelled HYPNOTIZE in chunky red graffiti. Back then, when we were girls, the underpass was our impromptu studio. No one bothered us as we recited our rhymes. Our voices echoed off the walls of the bridge. Pure. Steady. Our sneakers pounded gravel, dodging concrete that had fallen from the ceiling and bits of broken glass. I wasn’t the best dancer in the group. I often stood off to the side, watching the feet of my girls, trying to learn the routines. That’s when I looked up and saw her there, at the mouth of the underpass. Watching. With nothing in her hands. It was June 1982 when she came. The summer after all those black kids were killed in Atlanta. I was fourteen then. Although we lived in Wing, Pennsylvania, a mill town some 800 miles north of the murders, we weren’t allowed to walk to the store or ride our bikes alone. Too much blood had been spilled. If we wanted to play outside, we had to travel in groups. Most days after school, I hung out with Vanessa, Trina and D. We were all the same age, except for Vanessa, who was a year older. Her nickname was Vee-Money. She did everybody’s hair on the block, charging five dollars for cornrows or a press. The four of us walked up and down the streets. Restless. We were girls, so there wasn’t much to do besides jumping rope or going to the store. A few years earlier, they played the first rap song on the radio. “Rappers Delight” by the Sugar Hill Gang. You couldn’t pass a stoop or barber shop that wasn’t blasting that song from the speakers. I felt special because I carried my brother’s boombox, a black Magnavox with removable speakers. Even though we were just walking up and down the block, past lopsided row houses, past men lounging on stoops (“Hey, Redbone. Can I walk with you?”), blasting Sugar Hill on our portable stereo, we felt like we were going somewhere. Trina started rapping first. She was soft-spoken, a pretty brown-skinned girl who slicked down her baby hair with black gel. One Saturday when we were heading to the corner store, she surprised us all when she began to rhyme:

standing on the corner yellin’ young girl/yo girl always on the go girl you too old to hit on us tryna feel me up when I’m at your sister’s house hands all up my blouse like what . . .

She spit those verses really quick too, as if she had been holding it in for a while. D added a few lyrics of her own:

young girl/yo girl why you gotta go, girl? how you grow up so fast what you doin’ with all that ass . . .

D wasn’t the brightest one in the group, but she was able to laugh at herself, which made her smarter than a lot of girls I knew. Her real name was Dorethia. I don’t know what her mom was thinking to give a girl such a heavy name—a grown woman’s name. I didn’t know we could rap. Well, I knew we could but I didn’t know we were allowed to. All the voices barking through the speakers of my brother’s Magnavox were loud, cocky. And male. Pretty soon, my friends and I started rapping on our daily trips up the block. We knew we were emcees; we just needed a name to make it official. We lived on Cherry Street, although there wasn’t a fruit-bearing tree anywhere on our block. Naturally, we called ourselves the Cherry Street Crew. By the spring of 1982, we weren’t some wack girls reciting lame lyrics. We were really good. So good our neighbor, Miss Iris, stopped us on our way home from school and asked us to perform at the block party she was organizing at the end of August. We were thrilled. Someone was requesting us to perform. Vee-Money said she could see us onstage one day. The first female rappers. This was way before the Real Roxanne, before Jazzy Joyce, before MC Lyte and Salt-n-Pepa ever blessed a mic. She came a few months later. A hot June afternoon that wilted my curls and slammed crickets into silence. I never saw her approach. I just looked up and she was standing there at the lip of the underpass. The other girls stopped dancing and turned to see what had my attention, taking in the stranger with her old-timey clothes. Vee-Money, the unofficial leader of our group, lowered the volume on the boombox and addressed the stranger. “What you want?” Our visitor didn’t respond. Instead, she fingered the collar of her dress. Her black-laced shoes made circles in the gravel. D tried a different tack. “Who is you?” she said, her voice echoing off the walls. “Kim,” came the reply. It seemed as if the wind carried that one syllable across centuries to our ears. Although Kim didn’t look much older than us, her voice held none of the marrow of youth. She seemed shy, but it was the shyness of perverts who ask young girls for directions from the window of their van. “What you want?” Vee-Money repeated. She moved out of the shadows to get a closer look at the stranger. The sun glinted off the silver dog tag chain she always wore. The girl looked up as we approached and I noticed her eyes. They were the same blue as her dress. Bottomless, the way I imagined manholes to be when you slid away the cover. You descended that airless playground of shadows and knew when you emerged—if you emerged—you’d never be the same. “Nothing,” she said. “Just wanted to watch.” “Take a picture. It’ll last longer,” I said. Vee-Money touched my arm. “Cool out, Crystal,” she said. She looked the white girl up and down. Deciding. Finally, she said, “You can watch, but you can’t get on the mic.” Vee-Money returned to our makeshift studio. Kim settled outside on a nearby rock. We should have ran her off then, but we didn’t. My friends thought Kim was harmless. I knew she wasn’t. Long before the carnage at the underpass, I sensed it, some malevolence in the off-beat tapping of her feet, in the curve of her empty hands.

• • • •

As summer wore on, Kim became a fixture at the bridge. Because I couldn’t dance and often hung back while my friends practiced their moves, I wound up standing near her. During those times, Kim would try to coax me into conversation. “Why are you unable to dance as well as the others?” she asked. “Not every black person has rhythm, you know.” “Ah, but you could if you tried.” “Who says I haven’t?” I said, growing annoyed. “Dance, Crystal.” Who is this white girl talking to? I faced her, ready to roll my eyes, and found myself staring into her bottomless blue ones. Heard the slow clatter as the manhole cover was dragged away, a clanging invitation to the shadowland beneath. (Dance, little one) Had she given that command, or was I hearing things? From this distance, I got a better look at the pale teen who infiltrated my crew. Scalp gleamed through her brown hair. Deep lines were etched beneath her eyes and in her forehead, furrows that belonged on the face of a much older woman. “What you sweatin’ for, Crystal?” Vee-Money appeared at my side. I felt relieved at the bigger girl’s presence. “Ain’t like you was over there jammin’ with us.” “What is jamming?” Kim asked. I caught Vee-Money’s glance. Shot her a warning look. Don’t let her in, Vee. But Vee-Money was amused at the strange girl’s proper speech. “Jamming is dancin’.” She showed off a quick move. “You know, gettin’ down.” Kim smiled then, the first smile I noticed since she appeared more than a month ago. “Crystal was about to practice ‘jamming’ with you.’’ “Quit lying.” My hand itched to slap her. The next thing I knew, D and Trina were standing beside me. I doubt they heard the heat in my voice over the blaring boombox, so they must have sensed the tension. The white girl stood up, wiping dust from her dress. “I’ll show you,” she said. “I don’t need lessons,” I said. “Especially not from you.” “Are you afraid, Crystal, that I can jam better than you?” Kim’s soft smile mocked my insecurity. D whistled at the taunt and Trina craned her neck at me. My friends expected me to put the white girl in her place or even initiate some b-girl battle. But I didn’t want to battle Kim. I didn’t know how to swing my hips on beat or move my feet in a complex choreographed rhythm. Hell, I had even gotten kicked off the junior choir because I didn’t know how to sway. Vee-Money returned to the boombox and rewound the Afrika Bambaataa instrumental they’d been dancing to. As I watched my friends make room for the stranger in the darkness of the underpass, in our spot, my face burned with some emotion I couldn’t name. It seared my throat and settled like coal in my stomach. Even though she wore clunky shoes, Kim moved with grace. She swayed to the music. On beat. Her shoes kicked gravel as she danced with a perverse familiarity the steps I struggled to learn all summer. My girls stared as she undulated with some ancient rhythm, both and divine. As my friends cheered her on, I tasted heat in my throat, and at once understood the nameless emotion churning in my gut. It was envy.

• • • •

A rift grew between me and my girls but I didn’t know how to mend it. Most afternoons, I found myself sitting on the rock, sullen, as my friends danced with Kim. They were so easily impressed by the white girl. It felt like a violation to hear them joke with her about ashy legs or their “kitchen,” which swelled in the summer heat. She didn’t earn the right to laugh with us. The more I resented the white girl, the more she blossomed. Kim no longer wore the old-timey gingham dress she had on when I first spotted her. She and Trina were around the same size, so Trina gave her a trash bag full of old clothes. Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and oversized tops. It felt as if their roles had switched. Kim was the needy Mennonite girl and they were the benevolent black kids on a mission to save her.

• • • •

The final rupture in my circle wasn’t caused by white chick. It came from Vee-Money. She knocked on my door one day to borrow cherry Kool-Aid to dye her hair. “We don’t have any red.” I stood behind the screen door, trying to decide if I should let her in. “What flavor y’all got?” she asked. “Purple, I think.” “That’ll work.” When I didn’t move, Vee-Money stared at me through the screen. “What’s wrong with you, Crystal? Oh, I can’t come in now?” With a sigh, I opened the door. She followed me to the kitchen. My mom was at work, and my brother was out shooting hoops with his buddies. I rummaged through the drawer next to the stove until I found a packet of the powdered drink. As I turned to hand the makeshift hair dye to my friend, I almost dropped it in shock. Vee-Money was going bald. On most days, her red-stained tresses were nicely pressed, hanging down to her shoulders in a mushroom or swooped back in a trendy feathered style. Now swathes of scalp gleamed through her normally thick mane. I clenched the packet. “I don’t think you should use this stuff anymore, Vee.” She frowned. “Why not?” “It’s breaking your hair off.” “Girl, ain’t nothing wrong with my head.” She reached for the package, but I tossed it in the trash. “You been actin’ real shady lately, Crystal.” Vee-Money threw up her hand in a dismissive wave. “I’m not the shady one,” I said. “Why don’t you go borrow some Kool-Aid from Kim since she loves your naps so much?” I knew I had hurled the ultimate insult. Back then, talking about somebody’s “naps” was akin to calling them “black.” Vee-Money glared at me, then stormed out of the kitchen. She paused at the screen door, her back to me. “You just got dismissed from the Cherry Street Crew,” she said. I froze a few inches from her. “You’re kicking me out? I’m the best emcee in the group.” “You wish.” I touched Vee-Money’s arm. “Don’t be like this, Vee.” I hated the whine that crept into my voice. “We’re going to be the first female rappers.” “We still are.” “But what about me?” Vee-Money turned to me with a smirk. “Work on your moves, Crystal. You a lightweight. You let a white girl show you up.” I dropped my hand, hurt. Vee-Money opened the door and headed out into the street.

• • • •

I stopped hanging out at the bridge and started writing lyrics in my bedroom. It’s one thing for a teen girl to choose to be a loner, to cherish the solitude of her room among her books and DeBarge posters. It’s another thing entirely to feel isolated. That’s what happened after my blowup with Vee-Money. My friends stopped accepting my calls, stopped yelling through my screen door to see if I wanted to walk to the pizza joint for a slice. More than the isolation, I feared something sinister was happening to my girls. Although Vee-Money could be bossy, she had never been deliberately cruel before. It was as if she had lost her compassion along with her hair. I would soon learn that Vee- Money’s sudden baldness was a small thing compared to what befell Trina. I missed Trina’s friendship the most. She was soft-spoken and introverted like me, so she understood the struggle of trying to fit in. Trina was also the one who started rapping first, who showed me that girls could rock the mic. I needed to talk to her. Trina lived exactly ten houses away, but I didn’t want to knock on her front door. I walked down the back alley to avoid the stares of the neighborhood kids who had probably heard about the dissolution of the Cherry Street Crew. Trina stood in her yard, her back to me, wearing a brim hat as she swept the narrow driveway. I paused as I approached, puzzled by the pants and long- sleeved shirt she wore, clothes that were much too hot for the summer day. “Hey, Trina.” She looked around quickly, as if she’d been caught doing something obscene. My hand, raised in greeting, hesitated mid-air. Trina’s skin was turning white. Even with the straw hat shielding her face, the gruesome transformation was hard to hide. Her normally smooth dark skin, which had not suffered the curse of teen pimples like mine, was riddled with large pale blotches. Trina turned away, sweeping harder. “Are you okay?” I walked around to face her. Concerned. “What happened to your skin?” “I’m fine.” “You don’t look fine. You look sick.” She raised her head, challenging me with a look. Her eyes were as lifeless as the broom in her hand. “Your face didn’t look like that a few weeks ago. Maybe you should go—” “No, maybe you should go, Crystal.” She lifted her broom, as if to strike. I wasn’t scared. Just sad and confused. Trina had never raised her voice or anything else at me. I backed out of the driveway, haunted by her sneer and fading skin.

• • • •

I didn’t have anyone to talk to about my . Summer, once sweet and full of harmony, dragged on like some wounded animal too ornery to die. I rode my Huffy up and down the streets, looking for a distraction. What I found one afternoon as I cruised past the basketball court stunned me. It was a rinky-dink court on Arch Street in the “rough” part of town, as if the entire town of Wing wasn’t rough, wasn’t scalloped by slanting rowhouses and shabby storefronts. In spite of its location, the basketball court was the informal community center. Sweaty boys in nylon shorts flexed on the macadam, showing off their jump shot. Girls in miniskirts and jelly shoes stood around talking to their friends, trying not to be impressed. As I rode past the court, I saw something that almost knocked me off my Huffy. Kim rested against the chain-link fence that enclosed the basketball court. She was talking to Manuel and Luther, two brothers who we considered the finest boys on the block, with dark skin and hazel eyes. I slowed my bike to get a better look. I was so used to seeing the white girl beneath the bridge, it was as if she lived there. The sight of her out in the open, in my community, unnerved me. She lounged confidently against the fence as she flirted with the neighborhood boys. Her slim hips were encased in Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. A halter and Filas completed the look. Trina’s cast-offs. Kim’s once brittle brown hair was thick and curled into a sleek mushroom style. Not the look worn on Charlie’s , but the style a neighborhood girl would rock, with asymmetrical angels. But for her pale skin, Kim could have been one of us. Anger flooded my chest. As if sensing my , Kim looked up, locking eyes with me. She was no longer a mousy Mennonite girl who had wandered into our lives. She was alluring. She gave me a knowing look, tinged with cockiness and something darker. Assurance, maybe. I glared at her as I tried to swallow the rancor burning my throat. It was then that I noticed something shimmering around her neck. It was Vee-Money’s dog tag.

• • • •

Miss Iris was hanging wash on the clothesline in her yard when I walked my bike down the back alley that led to my house. I felt hot and defeated. “Afternoon, Crystal,” Miss Iris called when she spotted me. Several wooden clothespins were clipped to her blouse. “How you enjoying summer vacation?” “Fine.” Noticing my glum look, she said, “School ain’t starting tomorrow. You got a few more weeks yet.” I liked Miss Iris. Although she was in her mid-forties, she had a youthful laugh. Her long ponytail hung to the middle of her back, fastened with a purple ribbon. Miss Iris didn’t socialize with the other ladies on the block. She was a loner in her own right, quilting on the front stoop or tending the flowers she grew in her backyard. Miss Iris glanced around. “Where are your girlfriends?” I shrugged. “I don’t know.” “Y’all ain’t had a falling out, have you? The block party is right around the corner.” “I won’t be there. I got kicked out of the Cherry Street Crew,” I said. Miss Iris slung a pair of jeans on the line and pinned them. Then she sat on a bench near her garden and patted the spot next to her. I joined her. “Sorry to hear that, Crystal,” she said. “You got talent. That’s why I asked you to rap at the block party.” Her words made me smile, in spite of my weariness. But then I remembered the source of my sorrow. “My friends are changing, Miss Iris.” “They’re at that age, sweetie. It’s called growing up.” “No, this feels wrong.” I told her everything, about the pale girl named Kim who appeared at the beginning of summer like some strange bird who carried corruption beneath her wing. Miss Iris nodded as I began my tale. Then the color drained from her face when I described Vee-Money’s thinning hair and Trina’s palsied skin. She stared into the distance when I finished, toying with her long braid. When Miss Iris finally spoke again, her voice was just above a whisper. “She came back.” I tilted my head. Puzzled at the that suddenly gripped my older neighbor. “Who came back?” “Kim. But she wasn’t calling herself that in 1952, when I was your age. Back then, her name was Madeleine.” “Madeleine? How old was she?” I asked, skeptical. “She looked to be about fifteen. Same age I was.” I did some quick calculations in my head. “If Kim—Madeleine—was fifteen in 1952, she’d be forty-five now,” I said. “No disrespect, Miss Iris, but the girl I know doesn’t look like an old woman.” “That’s because she’s not an old woman. She’s not a woman at all. Or a girl.” “What is she?” Miss Iris gazed at me, trying to decide if I could handle the weight of her next words. “A leech. A soul gobbler,” she said. “Long before that bridge was built on Johnson Highway, it was a clearing. We used to hang out there when we was kids. Back then, it was in the woods where we could go to dance and sing. Be free.” My neighbor closed her eyes in remembrance. “Our parents were real strict. We couldn’t go to parties. At least not the girls. We went to a Mennonite camp every summer, learning how to quilt, make preserves. Be good wives.” I thought of the blue gingham dress Kim wore when she first appeared, the black laced shoes. The costume of holiness. “In ’52, they showed kids dancing on TV for the first time. A program called Bandstand,” Miss Iris said. “Bandstand was a bunch of white kids doing the jitterbug. The Lindy. They didn’t let black kids in the . They was playing our music and dancing to our songs, but they wouldn’t let us on TV. Some white kids even asked black kids to teach them new steps. Then, when they got the moves down, they would go right back and tape that show and act like they came up with those dances.” “What does that have to do with Kim—Madeleine?” I didn’t want to interrupt the older woman, but her rambling made me wonder if she had a screw loose. “Like I said, we used to sneak off to the clearing to dance. Me and my three friends—Annie, Beverly and Gail. We made up our own steps. They didn’t have any names.” Miss Iris smiled to herself. “After school, the other kids would gather around and ask us to perform. We was doing something new.” According to Miss Iris, her crew’s plan was to integrate Bandstand. The four girls were going to sneak down to Philly for a taping and do their bold new dances in the street outside the studio until someone turned a camera on them. But they never got the chance. “One day, when we was rehearsing in the clearing, I looked up, and there she was. Madeleine. I never heard her coming. She just appeared. Wearing a dress down to her ankles. All that blue walking out from behind the trees, like she was the police or something. Scared us something terrible. We stopped dancing, but she told us to keep on. Said she just wanted to watch.” As hot as the August afternoon was, my hands felt cold. I rubbed them on my shorts, trying to warm them, as I listened to Miss Iris’ haunting tale. “She hung out there with us. Learning our dances. I didn’t trust her. She didn’t act like no Mennonite girl I ever knew. Her hands was as smooth as a baby’s, like she wasn’t used to no hard work—milking, canning, quilting. My friends thought I was just jealous. ‘What’s the harm in letting her watch?’ Annie used to ask. Sweet Annie. She was the best dancer out of all of us. Would have been a star if . . .” Her voice trailed off. That “if” chilled me. I suddenly grew fearful for my own friends. “What happened to your friends, Miss Iris?” I asked. “Madeleine happened. Killed ’em.” The words lingered in the air for a few moments, competing with the musky scent of her marigolds. “Oh, I can’t prove it,” she said, “but she did. They was healthy teenage girls. Strong as an ox. But the longer she hung around, the weaker they got. Hair falling out. Skin spotty. One day, I looked for them in the clearing, and they was gone. Some people thought they ran off because their folks was too strict.” “But you didn’t believe it.” “Do lightning bugs glow in the daytime?” Miss Iris gave a sharp laugh, twisting her ponytail around a finger. “I think there are three graves back there in that clearing.” Why three graves and not four? I wondered. As if sensing the unasked question, the older woman said, “She would have killed me too, but I put a freezer spell on her.” “A what?” “A freezer spell. It gets rid of your enemies. My grandma Hattie was a conjure woman. I learned about spells from her.” She lowered her voice. “I shouldn’t even be telling you this. Folks think it’s .” I sat in silence, trying to digest my neighbor’s bizarre revelation. Maybe Kim was a leech, like Miss Iris said. A soul gobbler. Some wicked entity that returned to the clearing every thirty years in search of new blood. Black girl blood. Not blood, necessarily. Rhythm. A carefree cadence. Whatever she was, I had to stop her before the same fate befell the Cherry Street Crew. “Show me how to make the freezer spell, Miss Iris.” The older woman smiled sadly. “Maybe,” she said. “Lot of good it did me. Thought Madeleine was gone for good, but you can’t out-trick the trickster. One day I looked up, and she was on Bandstand, smiling in the camera, doing our dances. The ones with no names. My girls were gone. Annie, Bev and Gail. Not even a bone remained.”

• • • •

As soon as Miss Iris finished her story, my mom pulled into our driveway, home from work. She looked surprised to see me sitting in our neighbor’s yard because I didn’t talk much with the older women on our block. Figuring I was being a nuisance, she called me inside to start dinner. I stood at the sink soaking chicken liver in milk, mulling over my plan. Miss Iris told me to come by the next day and she would write the freezer spell instructions for me. I was desperate. I needed something that would banish Kim back to the vulture’s egg she hatched from. (Little one) I froze. My mom stood behind me, phone in hand. I hadn’t even heard it ring. “It’s D,” she said. “I’ll take it in your room,” I said, trying to keep my voice from trembling. I bounded up the stairs to my mother’s bedroom. D and I hadn’t spoken in several weeks. Maybe she had come to her senses. Hopefully, she would believe me when I told her what I learned about Kim. I grabbed the phone from my mom’s nightstand. “D! I’m so glad you called, girl.” “What’s up, Crystal?” My friend didn’t sound like herself. Her voice was muffled and thick. “We need to talk about Kim.” “What about her?” “She’s not who she says she is.” “Really? Who is she?” I gripped the cord, staring down the dark hallway. “I can’t talk right now,” I said. “Can you come over tomorrow?” “I can meet tonight. Come out to our spot.” Our spot? I hadn’t been to the underpass in awhile and it certainly didn’t feel like home anymore. “What time?” I asked. “Nine.” I frowned. There were no street lights near the underpass. We were still living in the shadow of the murdered Atlanta kids. D knew my mom didn’t want me walking by myself after dark. Miss Iris’ words rang in my ear: You can’t out-trick the trickster. ”Stop trippin’, Doreena,” I said. “You know my mom won’t let me go out by myself that late.” “Sneak out then,” came the reply. “This isn’t D,” I said, feeling sick. “Not the D I know. Her name is Dorethia, not Doreena.” There was a hissing sound on the other end. I held the phone away from my ear. “I know your name!” I said. Downstairs, I heard my mom rise from the sofa. “Everything alright up there, Crys?” she called. The voice on the other end laughed. “Who am I?” “Madeleine,” I said, slamming down the phone.

• • • •

FREEZER SPELL

Mason jar Paper Water Salt Black candle

Write your enemy’s name on the paper. Fold paper three times.

Fill Mason jar with water. Add three heaping tablespoons salt. Place paper in the jar of salt water.

Seal the jar and drip black wax on the lid. Place jar in freezer and DON’T REMOVE. Imagine your enemy disappearing from your life.

The spell seemed simple enough, not the sorcery I expected that included chanting and the blood of animals. “Most important, you got to believe it will work,” Miss Iris said when I went over to get the instructions. “Ain’t no hoodoo on earth will work if you don’t believe.” When I stepped out of her back door and headed home, I felt older. As if I had aged ten years at her kitchen counter. The feeling followed me down the back stairs of my rowhouse and into the basement, where I plucked a Mason jar off the shelf. Standing at the sink, I filled the jar with water, pouring in three tablespoons of salt until the crystals swirled in the glass. Upstairs in my bedroom, I tore a sheet of paper from my notebook, the one I used to write lyrics in. With a magic marker, I wrote KIM in big black letters on one side. For good measure, I wrote MADELEINE on the other side. Then I folded the paper three times and dropped it into the salt water. As I lit the black candle, I felt a chill. It was noon. A breezeless day in late August. My mom and brother were at work. I was alone. I closed my bedroom door and locked it. I stared into the full-length mirror hanging on the back of my door, at the girl holding the candle, looking as if she were on her way to some dark mass. As the candle burned, I tilted it, dripping wax like black tears on the lid of the jar. I suddenly had the urge to chant, to say some magic words. The spell didn’t mention chanting, and I wanted to follow the instructions to the letter. I didn’t want her to come back. Kim. Madeleine. But I needed to give her a proper send off, the Cherry Street Crew way.

My name is Crystal But they call meC-Magic Like a Make a wish and Poof . . . I appear Crystal clear Straight to hell below I’m sending all foes Bitin’ off me and my friends Especially this leech named Kim . . .

The bedroom door blew open, shattering the mirror behind it. Shards of glass sprayed the room, pricking my arm. I screamed, dropping the Mason jar. Liquid sloshed as the jar hit the carpet and rolled beneath my bed. A wind seemed to swell from inside the room. It billowed, blowing out the candle. The notebook fell open, pages rippling. “You can’t take my songs,” I shouted above the tempest raging in my tiny bedroom, a churning that whipped my hair back from my face. I tried to sound brave, but I was terrified. “You got to believe it will work,” Miss Iris had said. “Ain’t no hoodoo on earth will work for you if you don’t believe.” The freezer spell said to imagine your enemy disappearing from your life. I grabbed the jar of salt water from beneath the bed as if it were a buoy in a dark and roiling sea. Clutching it to my chest, I closed my eyes and imagined Kim. Not with her B-girl clothes and trendy hairstyle. I imagined her as she looked the first time she appeared beneath the bridge. Frail. Thinning hair. Draped in a gingham dress. I focused on the strong wind in my bedroom. I saw it whipping through the passageway where we used to rap. It kicked up gravel in the white girl’s face, blowing her around like a doll. She tried to hold on to the walls of the underpass, her nails scraping the concrete until they were bloody, but she was no match for the wind. It swept her down the road and up, up, over the trees. Out of our lives. The room fell silent. The curtain fluttered, as if waving goodbye to an unseen presence. Then the wind abated. I looked out the window. Trina, D and Vee-Money were riding their bikes up Cherry Street. I knew of only one place they could be headed. “Wait up, y’all!” I called out the window. “Wait for me.”

• • • •

I hopped on my Huffy, pedaling up the block. My girls were back. Something happened in my bedroom to free them from Kim’s grip. I was sure of it. I whistled as I rode up Johnson Highway, passing two boys walking on the shoulder carrying fishing rods. It seemed like just another summer’s day in Wing. I cruised down the pebbly path that led to the underpass. It used to be a clearing, Miss Iris said, but it became a burial ground for black girls who dared to be free. young girl/yo girl why you gotta go, girl? I heard my friends before I saw them. I pedaled faster, eager for a reunion. I parked my bike a few feet from the underpass, engaging the kickstand. The gesture seemed like an announcement. I’m home. Trina, D and Vee-Money held hands in a circle, as if playing some ring game. I glanced around, expecting to see her. Kim. No one else was there. “What’s up, ladies?” I said. My voice echoed off the walls. I paused. Something didn’t feel right. My friends continued to stand in the circle as if they hadn’t heard me. “Y’all still mad?” I wanted to venture further into the underpass but I couldn’t move. I gazed at my three friends as they huddled, then down at their feet. My eyes widened. Four shadows slanted on the ground. young girl/yo girl young girl/yo girl young girl/yo girl . . . The girls chanted robotically. I backed away from the entrance. Shaken. A breeze rippled inside the underpass, surging through the circle. My friends collapsed, seeming to disintegrate before my eyes like mannequins in a furnace. One minute, they were hunched together, holding hands. The next minute, their clothes were crumpled in a heap in the dirt. (little one) I cried out, losing my balance, and landed on my butt. Kim loomed at the opposite end of the underpass. She was clad in her blue gingham dress, bigger than ever. “Are you ready to dance?” she said, gliding across the gravel. Her hair coiled around her head like a nest of snakes. I pushed myself backwards in the dirt, away from bearing down on me. Kim crossed a span of thirty feet in seconds. She hovered over me, a bird of prey diving from a precipice. Her face was lineless, like a young girl’s. Her blue eyes were wide with lust. “Dance, little one.” My knees locked together as my body rose against my will. Kim would get her wish after all. Deep sadness engulfed me. Not only would I die at the hands of the soul gobbler, but I’d be forced to perform for her before she killed me. I don’t know why the story “The Valley of Dry Bones” came to me at that moment. Maybe it was the sound of my knees snapping to attention at the white girl’s command. Although I had gotten kicked out of youth choir because I didn’t know how to sway, I still remembered that biblical story from the Book of Ezekiel: “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” Before my mind could process what I was doing, I called out, “Annie. Beverly. Gail. Come forth.” Kim looked uncertain, surprised at the sudden boldness that replaced my cowering. Then her face shook with fury. Her normally pale skin pulsed with crimson. “Annie. Beverly. Gail. Rise up!” I said. No, commanded. “Rise up. Do your dance.” My words seemed to hang in the air. Powerless as dust. Then the clothes once worn by Trina, D and Vee-Money shuddered on the ground. Jeans and oversized tops ballooned, then legs and arms appeared in the openings. The air in front of me vibrated, as if stretching to accommodate this bizarre rebirth. The bodies sat up suddenly. I didn’t recognize the faces of the teens, who wore pompadours and old-timey hairdos, but I knew they were Miss Iris’ slain friends. Kim watched the resurrection. Incredulous. Her blue eyes narrowed with rage. But beneath the anger, I detected a gleam of fear. I dragged myself backwards to a tree, struggling to rise. Unseen fingers still had a grip on my legs. “Let me go!” I shouted at Kim. “No,” she said. “I collected you. All of you.” The girls still sat in the dust, a blank look on their faces as if wondering why they had been summoned from the sleep of three decades. “I know what you are. A soul gobbler. But you’ll never steal mine,” I said to Kim. Turning to Annie, Beverly and Gail, I said, “Rise up. Do your dance.” I felt like an emcee at a party, trying to move a stubborn crowd. As the teens rose shakily to their feet, the invisible rope around my legs snapped. Kim howled in fury as the girls began to sway. The wind kicked up harder than before, ripping out my hoop earring. Dirt stung my eyes but I held on to the tree. It was my power against Kim’s power. My conjuring against hers. I had brought something back to life, something she had stolen and ruined. As the ground hummed beneath the leaping feet of Miss Iris’ friends, I knew I had won. Maybe it was my defiance or the sight of the dancing dead girls that finally destroyed Kim. As I watched, sickened, she began to melt. Her eyes receded into their sockets. Her youthful skin cracked and peeled in long strips. Her lustrous hair thinned, until scalp was visible, a decaying field of pink. Her blue dress began to smoke at the hem, growing into an that consumed her, until she was nothing but ashes on the wind. The area once known as the clearing fell quiet. A thudding sound startled me. The dead teens had disappeared. There was nothing left but a pile of bones and discarded clothes. I limped down the passageway, hesitant at first, then walking faster as I regained strength in my legs. Something glittered atop the mound of clothing. Vee-Money’s dog tag. My eyes filled with tears as I picked up the chain once worn by my friend, leader of the Cherry Street Crew. My girls would never know the feeling of standing on stage at sold-out arenas, of captivating crowds with words. Maybe one day I would. I fastened the dog tag around my neck and then set about the long task of collecting the bones.

©2017 by Nicole D. Sconiers. Originally published in Sycorax’s Daughters, edited by Kinitra Brooks, PhD, Linda D. Addison & Susana Morris, PhD. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Nicole D. Sconiers is an author hailing from the sunny jungle of Los Angeles. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University, where she began experimenting with womanist and horror. She is the author of Escape from Beckyville: Tales of Race, Hair and Rage. Her short story “Kim” was published in Sycorax’s Daughters, a black woman’s horror anthology that was recently nominated for a award. Most recently, her short story “The Stiffening” appeared on an episode of Nightlight, the black women’s . Her short story “The Eye of Heaven” appeared in the anthology Black from the : A Collection of Black Speculative Writing, published February 2019 by BLF Press. Flashlight Man Merc Fenn Wolfmoor | 1861 words

Don’t play this game. I’ll tell you about it as a warning, but you must not play it. Please. It’s not worth the risk.

• • • •

The legend of Flashlight Man began in the upper Midwestern United States, grounded in rural areas. A variation on mirror summoning, it went like this: you lie on your back in bed, your face turned toward the nearest wall, then shut your eyes and whisper, “Flashlight Man, Flashlight Man, comes with a click, see me if you can.” Repeat three times. Then you fall asleep. The tricky part in verifying who encounters Flashlight Man is that it happens during cycles, so you’re on your honor to accurately report how long you last. If you followed the steps correctly—keep facing the wall, say the words aloud, don’t open your eyes until after you’ve fallen asleep—at some point, Flashlight Man will appear. You’re obviously asleep at this point. You’ll hear a click, and you’ll have the vivid impression of a tall, shadowy man holding a heavy silver flashlight in his left hand. He’s standing by the wall. The dread begins immediately. In your peripheral vision you’ll see the bright circular light of the flashlight beam bouncing off the wall near your feet. Shut your eyes. Count the seconds. Use the method “one Mississippi, two Mississippi,” etc. He’ll get closer, moving the light slowly up your body toward your head. The goal is to jerk yourself awake when you can’t handle it anymore, but before the light reaches your face. The record is eight seconds, by Bethany McNeil, who died in a car accident three months later. When you wake up, you’ll be facing away from the wall. If you lasted more than three seconds, you’ll have the after image of a light in your eyes, like if you stare into a bright bulb directly. Your heartbeat should be rapid, you should be wide awake and full of adrenaline, and you should remember how many seconds you lasted. Going back to sleep is a challenge, but it’s doable. Just be absolutely sure you don’t repeat the game that same night, because if you do, you don’t get to start at one second: your current count continues at double the speed. Or so people say. There’s a story that a kid tried it twice; got to four the first time, and then on the second time she barely had a chance to jerk awake at the count of seven. Her hair started falling out afterward and never re-grew. According to legend, if Flashlight Man’s beam reaches your face, you’ll see what he looks like. And then you’ll die in your sleep.

• • • •

Again, I’m telling you this as a warning. We were kids at the time, and Elliot and Todd and me. Ten years old, having a summer sleepover at Elliot’s house. Playing the Flashlight Man game was his idea. “This is stupid,” I said, because I was the new kid in the group, and had just moved last year from Minneapolis to this hick town of Deerborn, MN, even farther north than Aikin. I didn’t believe in dumb legends. But I really wanted to stay friends because Elliot and Todd were the first guys to let me hang out with them and I didn’t want to be a loner again, and school didn’t start for another month and everyone knew everyone else, so I stuck out even more and it sucked. “You chicken?” Todd said. “No,” I snapped, “but what’s the point of this game? What do you win?” Billy rolled his eyes. “Fame, dumbass. Everyone respects you if you make it to seven seconds. Girls will think you’re hot.” “Eww,” Todd said, and Elliot made a fake gagging sound. “How can you prove it, though?” I demanded. All three of them stared at me like I was an idiot. “You can’t lie about Flashlight Man, dude,” Billy said. Todd and Elliot nodded. “If you do, the game never works for you again,” Todd added. “So what?” I didn’t want to admit I was spooked. “That’s like, total social suicide,” Elliot said, shaking his head. “No one respects a guy who loses the Flashlight Man game.” “Seriously?” They all stared at me like I had just transformed into some rat-headed mutant. Or a tick, since for some disgusting reason, this town was obsessed with wood ticks. It was so gross. “Dude,” Billy said, “you don’t wanna lie about Flashlight Man.” He was dead serious now, and Billy was the of the group. “Fine, whatever,” I grumbled. I didn’t really get it, but I didn’t want them to ditch me, either. Who else could I talk to? Our internet sucked, and mom wouldn’t let me have my own cell phone. “Okay, you guys ready?” Elliot asked. We all nodded. We were in the half-finished basement, the partially underground kind, and the patio doors looked like a black hole leading to the back yard. We chose one of the unpainted sheetrock walls as our camp. We each had a sleeping bag and pillow, and our chip bags and empty soda cans were scattered on the floor. Elliot got up and flipped off the ceiling light, leaving the fan on. “Here we go.” We all lay down, Elliot closest to the stairwell and me at the end, by the doors. Billy and Todd were snickering, their heads closest together and their sleeping bags in the middle of the wall. Billy’s feet were lined up with mine and Todd’s with Elliot’s so none of us had anyone’s stinky feet in our faces. The others shut their eyes and started whispering the chant: “Flashlight Man, Flashlight Man, comes with a click, see me if you can.” I muttered the words too, but I kept my eyes open. The only sound beside the fan blades humming was our collective breathing. I wasn’t tired, due to a mix of caffeine and sugar and nerves. I’d refused to tell my friends I’d never been to a sleepover before. I missed my bed. Pretty soon I heard soft snores from Billy, and Todd’s nasal breathing, and nothing from Elliot. And here’s where it got fucked. When I was sure they were all asleep, I sat up, pulled my sleeping bag away from the wall into the middle of the basement, and watched. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t want to sleep, and I could always say I’d only gotten to like, the count of two, and would just fake it. Who cared about social standing in this backwoods town anyway? Billy woke first, jolting upright with a gasp. He pawed at his hair with both hands like he was afraid it was going to fall out. He squinted. The moon had come out by now, and lit up the basement pretty bright. “Dude, shit,” he whispered, his eyes wide. He looked at me and I shrugged. “Two,” I said, and tried to look embarrassed. Billy nodded. “Four,” he said, and then grinned. “Personal best, oh yeah.” He scooted his sleeping bag over to mine and we sat there watching Todd and Elliot. Todd woke up next, sweating like crazy, his eyes bloodshot. “Fuck me . . .” Todd stared at us for a long moment. “Five,” he said. He looked shaken, pale, and didn’t seem to like admitting that. “Dude, awesome!” Billy whispered. He reached over and high-fived Todd, who weakly slapped his hand. We all stared at Elliot. “He’s gotta be at six,” Billy said. “How would you know?” I asked. Time is different in dreams; I knew that much, because I’d had enough freaking to wish otherwise. Todd shivered. “I’m not playing this again.” “Why not?” I asked. Todd shot me a glare so vicious I leaned back, scared he was going to lose his shit and punch me. “Five. Fucking. Seconds.” I held up my hands in defense. “Okay, man. Jesus, sorry.” Billy patted my shoulder. “Give him a break, Todd, he’s still new.” I shook Billy’s hand off. We were all silent again. Elliot’s chest moved up and down in a steady rhythm, and his hair wasn’t falling out in clumps or anything wild like that. Todd was still sweating, rocking back and forth. I looked at Billy. Something was really wrong. Elliot was still asleep. “Do we wake him up?” I asked Billy. He shook his head. “That’s against the rules.” We kept waiting. I don’t know what time it was, because I didn’t have a watch and there were no clocks, and besides, I wasn’t paying attention. But we all heard the “click” loud and clear. Just a simple click, the kind those old-fashioned aluminum flashlights with heavy on/off switches made. My dad used to hoard those things for our camping trips that inevitably never happened. He had a whole plastic tote full of them. We all held our breath. Billy’s eyes were huge. Todd clapped his hands over his mouth. I swear on my life, none of us had any kind of light or cellphone or anything like that with us. But we saw it: a round beam of light moved up Elliot’s body, from his feet to his head, and settled on his face. And then his face just . . . disappeared. Where his features should have been was a stretch of bland white skin, flattened out like a halved grapefruit. No nose, no mouth, no eyes. The flashlight beam clicked off.

• • • •

My mom and I moved back to the city a month later. I’ve never played the game and I’m telling you: don’t. I know the trend is starting to gain traction—I see occasional posts about it on forums or social media. Like any urban legend, it has its detractors and hardcore fans, but I’m telling you, this shit is bad. Don’t play the Flashlight Man game. I can’t sleep facing a wall anymore. I’m afraid I might unconsciously say the words, acid-etched in my brain. I can’t not think them every night, even if I don’t speak aloud. The police didn’t believe us, of course, but they couldn’t accuse us of murder since they had no way to prove how we’d done it. I never spoke to Billy or Todd again. I’m pretty sure the sheriff pulled some strings to make sure the unexplained death of ten-year-old Elliot Mason never made it to the mainstream. If you google it, you’ll find that the official cause of death was cardiorespiratory failure. It was a closed-casket funeral.

• • • •

There are no longer any pictures of Elliot in which you can see his face.

©2020 by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Merc Fenn Wolfmoor is a queer non-binary writer who lives in Minnesota and is a Nebula Awards finalist. Their stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Fireside, Apex, Uncanny, Nightmare, and several Year’s Best anthologies. You can find Merc on Twitter @Merc_Rustad or their website: mercfennwolfmoor.com. Their debut short story collection, So You Want To Be A Robot, was published by Lethe Press (May 2017).

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight There and Back Again Carmen Maria Machado | 1563 words

My mother used to love the corpse reviver. She called it the perfect cocktail. “The thing that sends you away, brings you back,” she’d say as she laid out the ingredients on the dining room table before she went out for the evening. “There is only one door,” she clarified once, when I looked at her in confusion. “You can go out and you can come in, but you always have to pass through the same door to get there.” I was too young to understand hair-of-the-dog as a concept, much less as an idiom, but there was some sort of clear alchemy happening on that table: the martini glass clear of smudges, the burnished aluminum shaker, the arrangement of bottles and their mysterious liquids, maraschino cherries floating in a pickling jar at the end of the row. It was understood that I was not to touch this arrangement (“None of this is for little girls”), and she would know: my fingerprints on the glass would give me away. This didn’t stop me from inverting the jar to watch the cherries rise like so many jellyfish, and then wiping it clean on my nightgown. But I’d only do that after she left. And she did leave, once a week. A kiss dropped somewhere in my hair, and she’d walk out the front door and into the humid, mottled darkness. I’d wait for her. The house felt strange when she was gone; like it’d been shucked from the thing that gave it purpose. The air hummed with her many ghosts: skin cells, perfume, the cobwebs she’d ignored from when we first moved in. I listened for hours for the sound of tires, of the front door opening, of her inky voice exchanging murmurs with a stranger. The men and women she brought home were beautiful. The women were always dark-haired and curvy—her type. The men looked like they’d been dragged through a dewy meadow. My mother would always offer them a drink, then she’d walk past the stairs to see if I was waiting. Then her footsteps would cut a path toward the kitchen. “On the rocks?” she’d call. My cue. I’d step into the living room and walk slowly to the body, slumped loosely on the loveseat. Their gaze was always focused on the kitchen doorway through which my mother had disappeared. I could feel them listening to the comforting sounds of ice striking glass, hope stirring through the haze of alcohol. They were easy to eat when they were like that. Soft. Fermented, almost. And when I was done, she would collect me and take me upstairs, and we would sleep two heavy, parallel sleeps: her besotted with alcohol, me with blood and bone. The next morning, I’d always find her sitting at the table, rolling a silky glaze of absinthe around the inside of the martini glass and staring at the place where the sunlight struck the floorboards. It was that way for many years, the two of us. And then she died and I was alone.

• • • •

Learning to feed myself was hard. I’ve never been good with people. Perhaps that seems like a bit of a joke, but I imagine it’s how certain men see the world, too: if all you want is a body, it’s difficult to confront the animated spirit within. Even when I wasn’t hungry—even when I’d just eaten—it was hard to focus on the ethereal, flickering qualities that made humans individual: a smile, for example, or a voice. They were like crows—I’d been told of their intelligence, their distinctiveness, but couldn’t quite bring myself to believe it. So I was lucky that I was beautiful, that people let me come home with them even after I’d spent a date barely looking them in the eye. Which is how, a year after my mother died, I ended up at Alma’s place. I didn’t mean to follow her home. That is, I tried to invite her to my place, but she’d sweetly refused, and I found myself paying closer attention to her than I had to anyone in a very long time. “My house is closer,” I said. She smiled shyly and shook her head. I hadn’t been drinking much, but she had, and every tip of her—nose, ears, cheekbones—were slightly flushed. “I’d just feel better if we were at my place,” she said. “More, um, comfortable?” In the cab she sat close to me, and a few blocks from the bar she opened up my fist—I didn’t know I’d been making a fist—and gently stroked her fingers over my palm. The sensation was so intimate I nearly threw myself out the door and into the street, but then we were in front of her building, and then we were upstairs, and she sat me down on the couch by clumsily pressing both hands on my shoulders. I was still unnerved from the feeling of her fingers in my palm; I so rarely touched people with anything but my teeth, my throat. The apartment had a curio-cabinet charm, with stone figurines and candles and intricate, draped fabrics. A preserved crocodile head sat on the bookshelf, and the smell of incense—familiar, somehow—lingered in the air. She came out of the kitchen with something amber-gold in a tumbler. I started; I’d been planning on doing it when she’d been there, but I’d been distracted. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d lost focus like this. As a child, maybe. I drank deeply. I hated seeing this apartment, the corners and tendrils of her life. I wanted to eat and then I wanted to leave. “I hope this is all right,” she said. “The drink, I mean. I didn’t mean to assume, I just—I don’t do this very much. Well, ever.” “It’s fine. I mean, it’s good. My mom used to make really complicated cocktails when I was a kid, and I took secret sips out of a few of them. Never liked them much. This is easier.” “What would she make?” “Um, there was this one called a corpse reviver. Like, a hair-of-the-dog cocktail? Just, lots of booze with a cherry dropped in. Oh, and you had to coat the glass with absinthe, first. Really complicated. I don’t even know where she learned it.” I drained my glass to the ice and set it down into darkness.

• • • •

When I opened my eyes again, the ceiling rocked gently above me, like a boat bobbing against the tide. Alma’s face swam into view. “I didn’t actually know if that would work,” she said. “But there you are.” She stood up and stepped over me, and her voice sounded like it was coming from the end of a long tunnel. “Do you know who I am?” I struggled to make words. “G-girlfriend of a missing person.” “Good guess,” she said. “Sister of a missing person.” He’d had the smell of incense on his clothes. I remembered, now. He’d been early on, when I talked to them too much, learned too much. I didn’t remember his name, but he’d talked about his older sister, whom he adored. “He was living with me,” Alma said. “Trying to get his life back on track after a bad breakup. Lonely, you know? Wanted to go on some dates. And then he went out one night and never came back.” “Loneliness is a door,” I said. “You—” I turned and retched over the carpet. “You look like an animal,” she said. “Loneliness is a door,” I said again. “You can go out and you can come in, but you always have to pass through loneliness to get there.” “What do I have to do?” she said. “Stake through the heart? Silver bullet? What the hell are you? Where is his body?” “What sends you away will bring you back,” I said. “I ate your brother. Every part of him.” “Do I have to eat you?” she said. Her voice was low and sad. “Hunger is a door. You can go out and you can come in, but you always have to pass through hunger to get there.” She knelt down over me. She was holding a chef’s knife in her hand, both of which were trembling. “I just want my brother back.” I grabbed her shirt and pulled her down close to my face. Through my disorientation, I opened my mouth wide enough, so she could see. So she could really see. “Vengeance is a door,” I said, my voice rippling through cities of teeth, forests of muscle, miles of esophagus. “You can go out and you can come in, but you always have to pass through vengeance to get there.” I reached up and circled the knife’s blade with my hand. “So pick your door.”

• • • •

She left me, alive, in an alley in a neighboring city, upright next to a dumpster. “There are always windows,” she said as she got back into her car, but I couldn’t tell if she was talking to herself, or to me.

©2017 by Carmen Maria Machado. Originally published in Mixed Up: Cocktail Recipes (and Flash Fiction) for the Discerning Drinker (and Reader), edited by Nick Mamatas and Molly Tanzer. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the story collection Her Body and Other Parties and the memoir House in Indiana, both from Graywolf Press. She is a fiction writer, critic, and essayist whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Guernica, Electric Literature, AGNI, NPR, Gulf Coast, Los Angeles Review of Books, VICE, and elsewhere. Her stories have been reprinted in Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year, Year’s Best , and Best Women’s Erotica, and she holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the Artist in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

The H Word: The Melancholy Beauty of Terror Paul Jessup | 1040 words

For the longest time, I’d searched for a proper definition of horror. That whole, “defined by emotional response” never sat well for me, and felt lacking as a descriptor. Mostly because people think that emotion should be fear or fright, but at the same time the word horror doesn’t automatically mean fear, does it? Something can be horrible, and yet not scary. Add to the fact that some of the best horror digs in under the skin and does something else, something far more disturbing than simple fear. Maybe it’s another emotion, then. Maybe it’s disgust? But at the same time, what of the gothic? What of the creeping dread of classic horror? Stories where there may not be any disgust at all, but only a bright terror that changes you? Not fear per se, but rather this sense of wrongness in the world. So, is horror as a indescribable? Is it something that can’t be boxed up and placed into a simple descriptor? I was never a fan of the whole, “It’s like , I’ll know it when I see it” definition of the genre. I’ve always felt that this wasn’t helpful to anyone at all, and allowed the person making the statement to define horror according to their own personal whims. That’s great for a singular reader, but as a classification for a genre? Not so much. I felt the need to codify genre in a non-subjective way. I knew what I considered horror, and I knew that sometimes what I considered horror didn’t match up to what other people considered horror. My kind of horror might be too gothic or creepy, their kind of horror may be too nihilistic or violent. I kept trying to cover all these disparate works under the label horror. What a broad umbrella of a genre! And what a colossal undertaking, indeed. For what could possibly combine the classic with the contemporary? How could one match punk and 80’s sleaze horror with MR James and Machen? How do Poe and Hitchcock fit into all of this? Is Silence of the Lambs horror? So many people seem to think so, and why is that? What could possibly unite all of these things together? And then, dear reader, it struck me. Peering over each and every text, through Poe to Kathe Koja to to . Even from Daphne du Maurier to to to and beyond. Machen? Yes. Charlotte Perkins Gilman? Most certainly. Death was at the center of it all, death like a beating heart in the wooly darkness, death, death, death. Horror at its core is all about death. The fear of death, the celebration of death, laughing at death, and loving death. Even when the horror in a story is caused by the unknown and uncanny, it’s still about death, for what greater unknown is there than the pale lands beyond the veil? And what’s more uncanny than the uncanny valley of a corpse? Death makes haunted dolls of us all. Horror finds a melancholy beauty in that terror, a bittersweet kind of thing, embracing the rot and ruin of the world. Look on my Works, Ye mighty and despair! For we are all transient and suffering in the heart of a dying universe. Entropy slowly eroding and decaying, sending us into a long, slow death spiral with no escape. Horror embraces this death, shoves death in our faces, forces us to consider it in all of its facets and discovers splendor in the transient nature of time. Here is the terror and the art at the core of every good horror story. Every phobia it delves into is just the fear of death wearing a mask. The fear of heights? The fear of spiders? The fear of home invasion, the fear of crowds and the fear of germs? All simply the fear of death and dying wearing a mask and parading around in front of us in the shape of a story. And horror does not sugar coat our impending demise. It does not lighten the blow, or offer hope, or give us an escape hatch to the great beyond. In horror, death carries weight, fear carries weight, and that weight results in terror and beauty. This is how we can transcend the fear, by confronting it and not shying away, but instead going through the fire and out into the other side. That other side, where only unknown shadows wait beyond dying, with a hoarse whisper of rot and echoes. But horror shows us that there is something to this whole experience, to these fears and these moments and the ache and pain of being alive. Here is a truth that no other form of media can speak, that no other genre can claim to get as right as the horror genre gets right. That we were all real once upon a time, and that we ached, and we were hurt, and once loved with a burning love. That this bit of dirt here contained the bones of a human, and they lived. They lived. Through pain and sorrow and memory and night, they lived. Even if for only a short while, and even though they would be forgotten, they lived. And in the end, that quick death and long forgotten hours made it somehow worthwhile. And that the shortness of our lives added to the fleeting beauty of the universe. That is how I define horror as a genre, love it or leave it, ignore it or press it against your flesh. Death is the crux and crucible of it all, for better or for worse. Death and the melancholy terror it brings. See the loveliness in despair? See the gorgeous horror that awaits us all? There is a tantalizing call to shake off this skin and bone and ache of living. And horror just simply asks what if . . . What if we were to answer that call? Oh, how beautiful that would be.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Paul Jessup is a critically acclaimed/award winning author of strange and slippery fiction. With a career spanning over ten years in the field, he’s had works published in so many magazines he’s lost count and three or four books published in the small press, with the latest being Close Your Eyes, available from Apex Books. Book Reviews: March 2020 Terence Taylor | 2409 words

Read This! Volume 12

Bad memories or mistakes can haunt us all; events or people in our past that stick in the mind and affect all we say or do, even against our best interests. The degree to which we let those voices go silent and stop guiding us is usually how we measure psychological success. It’s the persistence and lure of the regrettable past that make stories so compellingly familiar. We sense the truth of a good haunting, even if we don’t believe in its aspects. How spirits of the dead are represented can change from story to story, but there are usually elements in common . . . That only some people can see or hear them; that they are physically intangible, but occasionally audible or visible; that they exist because something binds them to Earth and their old lives, whether unfinished business or the circumstances of their . I find it amusing that “ghosting” has come to mean that someone has stopped responding to your texts or calls, when traditional ghosts are just the opposite, an intimate presence you can’t dispel. This column’s subjects are both stories that handle ghosts in different ways; with one thing in common . . . the dead will not leave until they are satisfied.

The Sun Down Motel Simone St. James Hardcover ISBN: 978-0440000174 Berkley, February 18, 2020, 336 pages

One of the of the writing life is that it leaves you precious little time for recreational reading. Most of what you devour is grist for the mill, real world research to make your own fictional worlds feel realer. Then comes reading the work of favorite authors or friends, sometimes one and the same, or manuscripts offered up for critique from those select few you’re willing to assist pre-publication. When I find a writer whose work I don’t know that offers me a reading experience I want to have again, I’m almost annoyed, because it means that there’s now something else I need to make room for in my limited time left on Earth. One less night I can binge video adaptations of favorite comic books, streaming or broadcast. One less hour spent on research, or the latest Tananarive Due or N.K. Jemisin. It means that I’ve read something I enjoyed enough that I’m willing to sacrifice something else to read more. So I’m highly annoyed with Simone St. James, because her novel The Sun Down Motel makes me wonder if the rest of her damned books are as enjoyable, knowing full well I will have to find out. It begins in 1982 with bad girl Viv. She tells her divorced mom and younger sister that she’s headed to New York, but she’s really just running away from a troubled life at home. Her bus takes a detour into Pennsylvania, so she hitchhikes to get back on course. When a driver starts to take her in the wrong direction, she makes him drop her off at a rundown motel in a small town called Fell. With her last twenty bucks, she goes to get a room from the woman who owns the place, working the desk because her night clerk quit. Viv soon agrees to save her money and work the desk that night in exchange for a free bed. The next day she keeps the job and finds a cheap shared apartment in town. New York was just an excuse to leave, and Fell seemed as good a place for her to find direction as any. The motel was built to take advantage of business from a theme park that never happened, but as Viv soon discovers, it’s haunted by more than its failed dream. Viv starts to see the ghosts inhabiting the isolated location and is slowly compelled to investigate their deaths and the lives that led them there. A beautiful woman in a flowered dress, her body found on the construction site before the motel was completed; a young boy who cracked his skull in the swimming pool in back, closed after his death; the scent of cigarette smoke from the desk clerk who called in the accident, then died of a heart attack at his desk six months later. It’s the desk Viv sits at each night, smelling his phantom cigarette smoke drifting in from the doorway. Her nights are far from alone, between the ghosts and the motel’s eclectic nightly regulars; a local alcoholic, an adulterous couple, a hippyish pot dealer, and a traveling salesman. Fell is a sleepy little town, and as Viv settles in and talks to people, she hears its dark history. It’s not the kind of place where you’d expect even one brutal murder, so the deaths of three women in almost as many years are already local legend. As Viv finds out more about the victims she begins to connect the deaths, and soon suspects that there’s one man behind them all. Her suspicions deepen, and, much to her growing horror, she finds herself on his trail as he stalks his next victim, while Viv desperately looks for a way to save her. In 2017, her niece Carly is a young woman haunted by her aunt’s disappearance years before she was born. She goes to the scene of what may or may not have been a crime, looking for answers that her late mother never got before dying of cancer. She arrives at the same motel Viv worked at, a little more rundown, but otherwise unchanged, except that the son of the owner works behind the desk instead of his mother, and they still need a night clerk. Carly asks him questions, looking for loose threads to tug at in her aunt’s mystery. Instead, she ends up taking the job abandoned by her aunt when she vanished so long ago. Like Viv, Carly finds a room in town to share and as the novel progresses the two women carry on parallel investigations into the same series of crimes. Viv’s story is told in third person from her point of view, while Carly is in first person, immediate and very much in the now. The ghosts seen by Viv are still at the motel for Carly to see, but also to listen to as her aunt did, both women deciphering the clues left by each appearance as they work their ways to separate solutions. The real pleasure in the reading is the gradual build to Viv’s disappearance, watching her dig deeper into a mystery everyone warns her away from, and in following Carly as she finds the same people in present day, now warning her off. We’re given clues as to what really happened to Viv, and to what might happen to Carly, if she keeps digging up dirt in a town that likes to keep its secrets. St. Simone builds a slow boil of a supernatural suspense story, terrifying by its end, with ghosts that not only feel plausible, but inevitable, given the circumstances. That the niece would share her aunt’s fey talent for seeing spirits is never directly addressed, but flows smoothly into a narrative sadly layered with familial failings, some unseen until the very end. Both women make friends and allies . . . Viv with a black woman who photographs adulterous motel clients for a divorce lawyer, and the town’s one lady cop, forced to work the night shift by her chief. Carly finds sympathy from a craggy but handsome stranger with a tragic past. As a boy he escaped unhurt while his father murdered his brother. He’s back in town to face his own demons while he helps Carly dig up hers. Her roommate also takes an interest in her mystery, and rounds out her team as researcher. The stories play out in parallel paths, and by the end one story rolls neatly into the other for an explosive climax. Blending the hunt for a with the ghosts of his victims made it more a horror story than merely a mystery, and the author’s characters nicely engaged me enough to care about their fates. That’s what makes all good writing work for me, regardless of genre. As I am forced by this reading to seek out her other novels, I’ll soon discover if this blend of mystery and the mystical is her particular terrain or a single exploration. I look forward to finding out.

Remembered Yvonne Battle-Felton Hardcover / Paperback ISBN: 978-1982627126 Blackstone Publishing, February 4, 2020, 240 pages

The shadow of slavery always horrifies me. Not just its existence, but its consequences. That the institution was justified by dehumanizing its victims is the worst of it for me, as it allowed anything done after. The impact of it on American society and psychology has never been fully processed or dealt with, so we all stumble forward as best we can, into what we hope becomes a better brighter future for everyone, however slowly, with occasional backsliding. Remembered is not a traditional horror novel, though I found it listed under that category. Like Colton Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, the nature of its subject matter can’t help but inspire the same feelings in the reader. The novel begins in 1910, objectively a worse time than now for most African- Americans, with a trolley accident that may or may not have been deliberately caused by Edward, a young black man who repairs the powerful vehicles. It’s a time of rising unions, embattled employers, and the increasing conflicts between them used methods more associated with mob wars than business. The question everyone is asking is whether Edward was trying to start a labor riot or prevent an accident caused by union sabotage. Spring, Edward’s mother, was born into slavery and lived under it until freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, not long after Edward’s birth. Like Carly, she’s haunted by a departed relative, but for Spring it’s not just a dim memory and a mystery, but the hyperactive ghost of her dead sister, Tempe. She’s always manifested each time a family member is about to pass, and she makes a fresh appearance while news of the crash spreads through the black community. Spring rushes to the hospital looking for Edward, praying that he’s not next on Death’s list, that her sister’s ghost has come to summon someone else. Once she quietly fights her way to his bedside, over the objections of nurses and law enforcement, Spring talks to him and her sister, as she pulls out a scrapbook of clippings that she uses to guide him through a history of their family and times. Cutting between her vigil and her past, Spring tells the story of the end days of slavery, taking Edward from her youth through the years after the Emancipation Proclamation, as she finds a new life in a country fighting its way back from the Civil War. Battle-Felton tells a tale of transition, with all the attendant difficulties for the country and her characters. As we learn why Tempe is so concerned with Edward’s fate, how Spring left the South and made her way north, and the fates of all the people around her, , we travel from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. It is a long, difficult road, and while Tempe is the only actual ghost we meet, it is a world haunted by its recent past and an uncertain future. The book’s depiction of life under slavery is told with prosaic events in the daily lives of its characters that take us from the abduction of a young free black girl into forced servitude, hidden far from her family, to the dissolution of the Confederacy and start of the migration of freed slaves that was to change the nation. The way is filled with the tragic ways that its characters survive, from blighting their master’s farm until he is sure it is cursed, to the subtle horror of suffocating any infant born in slavery. It is a land that bears no fruit, but the curse isn’t supernatural so much as vengeful. The story reminds us that there’s always a way for even the most oppressed to strike back, in subtle but effectively subversive ways that can’t be detected. Spring is a simple, honest soul, and the telling of her tale is earnest and open in its language and progression. It’s revealed early on that Edward is really her late sister Tempe’s son, but discovering the circumstances of her life and death, the fate of the farm, and following Spring’s odyssey to Philadelphia to raise him as her own is what kept me reading. Along the way I learned things about their era as they did, which included a reminder for me that The Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in rebel states . . . I’d started listening to a New York Times podcast on the history of slavery, and it had begun with Lincoln’s plan to end the war by freeing slaves in the south to cripple their workforce. He had also included a plan to deport all freed , regardless of their birthplace, here or abroad. Had that provision been kept, my life would be significantly different today. The Thirteenth Amendment followed soon after, but it was a grim reminder of how slowly slavery was released. The complexities of the past, the legacies of our ancestors that bind us, all make great grist for the writer’s mill, even when handled in radically different ways, as in these two novels. We are haunted by everything that came before us, and if these two stories told me anything, it was the value of letting them all go, and making our own way forward.

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

Author Spotlight: Benjamin Percy Sandra Odell | 504 words

I love the fragmented, tenuous nature of “A Study In Shadows,” how the snippets are loosely woven together until tightened like a garrote at the end. Could you tell us something about what inspired the story?

I’ve always loved modular narratives. Like Susan Minot’s “Lust” or Evan Connell’s Mrs. Bridge. The individual units piece together like a kind of mosaic. The audience is forced to lean forward and become more active in solving the narrative, and because of that, they’re more emotionally involved and complicit in the story. “A Study in Shadows” is presented almost like an inchoate data set. You’re studying what the professor is studying and ultimately arriving at a conclusion that he could not.

There is a dark, delicious meta of “the nature of fear versus horror” running through the story, which is very similar to the shorter works of Bloch, Lovecraft, and Gaiman. What is the value in being afraid, in exploring the shadows that lurk just out of sight? Why do you think readers seek out works of fiction?

You’ve seen the creature crawling on the ceiling before, out of focus, just over the shoulder of a character. You’ve heard the pitchfork dragged screeching across the concrete floor. You’re acquainted with the character who hears a noise and approaches a closet and reaches a hand for the knob . . . and finds nothing but a cat inside—only to turn around to face an attack from the monster. I could keep going. There are certain tricks to horror we grow overly familiar and bored with. I’m always trying to find a new way in, a soft spot for the knife to go. Going meta was my attempt to find a new way in. By making the story about the nature of horror—the scholarship of horror—I tried to show that by staring into the abyss, too hard, too long, you can become infected by its darkness. You have a varied body of work under your belt, everything from comics to novels to screenplays and short stories. Are there any writing projects you’d like to try, something new you’ve never done before?

I’d love to continue to work in podcasts. I’ve written the first two seasons of the Wolverine audio drama, which you can stream for free wherever you listen, and that experience broke my brain and gave me a whole new storytelling arsenal. I think the medium is ideally suited to horror and I’d like to lean into that. I’ve been lucky enough to sell several features—but nothing (so far) has been made. That’s my dream: creating someone else’s nightmare: making a horror .

What scares Benjamin Percy? What fears follow you to sleep?

I sure don’t like clowns, sharks, or dentists. But the only thing that truly scares me is something harmful happening to my kids.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Sandra Odell lives in Washington state with her husband, sons, and an Albanian miniature moose disguised as a dog. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s Universe, Daily Science Fiction, Crossed , Pseudopod, and Cast of Wonders. She is a Clarion West 2010 graduate, and an active member of the SFWA. Find out more at writerodell.com or follow her on Twitter at @WriterOdell. Author Spotlight: Merc Fenn Wolfmoor Setsu Uzumé | 1171 words

The chiaroscuro is quite literal in this piece! How do you set up your workspace to write a story? Did this one come out of specific environment or idea?

I begin to think most of my horror ideas are the product of dreams, haha. In this case (a little like “Sweet Dreams Are Made of You”), this was inspired by a dream, in which someone was telling me about the Flashlight Man game. My dreams have always trended towards vivid, WTF, and wildly inventive, so whenever I can mine those for (let’s hope coherent!) fiction, I love it. My writing space, unfortunately, is much more scattered—I have a desk, but because I don’t have a locked-down, consistent writing schedule, it really depends on whether I’m writing while my kitten, Tater Tot, rampages across the desk, or writing on the couch with Tater Tot curled up on my lap, or sitting in bed, with Tater Tot attacking my feet. You might say the only consistent element is my small chaotic boy who tries so hard to be “helpful” when I write.

The instructions in the opening are vivid and visceral without being particularly threatening in and of themselves—face that way, observe this, close your eyes. But then the spotlight appears. How does seeing or being seen go from neutral to horror?

A lot of this draws on the idea that when you don’t see the monster, it can be more terrifying—what isn’t shown often ratchets up the tension and horror because the reader/viewer is imagining things. And let’s face it; the unknown has always been a threshold for things humans fear (sadly). I suppose it also slides along the adjacent “knowledge is power” axiom, to some degree? When you know what the monster is, then you have some idea of how to defeat it. By not knowing what hunts you, it makes defense and offense all the more difficult, which is then its own stressor. I’ve always liked how mundane things can turn into horror—except maybe dolls, dolls have always been and always will be haunted. But stuff like photographs or innocuous toys or a blank wall . . . when things get weird, the more mundane it is, somehow the creepier it gets. Staircases in the middle of nowhere; haunted pictures; a game that will kill you.

Are most of your around the same age? Does the voice come from their circumstances or do the circumstances create their voice?

My protagonists’ ages tend to wildly vary, depending on the story. I’ve written child protags and ageless entities and probably everywhere in between at some point! The voice grows a lot from the circumstances and how the character’s brain works. Not being neurotypical myself, it’s often hard to figure out if the voice “matches” a social construct of age as accepted by the narrative —so stuff set in our world is trickier for me, because I’m juggling how much age and background and brain-weird the characters are and how that will, obviously, influence the voice. Sometimes, the voice comes first and I infer elements about the character from how the voice sounds. (It’s always difficult for me because my accepted age and how I think of myself in terms of age are wildly different; it confuses me further when a lot of my IRL neurotypical friends espouse about age-related problems and I am like ???? because age and linear time are just not concepts that make a particularly lot of sense to me most days.)

You’ve got this incredible breadth to your work, across time, space, and genre. Are there any authors whose work you read and think, I wish I could do that?

Oh wow, yeah, so many—my list is long and always growing because there are just so many amazing writers, and I get such a thrill out of finding someone new to me to eagerly follow. (I may be weird in that I don’t necessarily think in terms of “I wish I could do that,” but more like “Ooh, that is so good, how can I adopt elements in my own stuff?”—because I am much more satisfied when I can figure out how a thing works.) For time constraint reasons, here are a few authors will happily yell about: Nibedita Sen, for her luscious prose, the delicious dark thrills of her horror writing, and the sheer joy and delight I always find in her work; R.B. Lemberg’s stunning, vast, gorgeous world-building (check out their Birdverse stories) and beautiful prose that just sings; Ada Hoffmann, who bounces around so many cool ranges, from surrealist to Lovecraftian horror, poetry and prose, and always gives you a big batch of Feels for her characters; John Wiswell, because he can always make me laugh, and his stories are just so delightful and funny; Nino Cipri for their always fabulous stories (read “Finna”!) and who, in my opinion, has such a masterful handle on structure and experimental frameworks; Gemma Files, who can creep me the fuck out with her stories no matter the length, and I hella admire the rich, wonderfully meta world of her film-horror stories (check out ); Aliette de Bodard, for her incredible, stunning prose and amazing world-building and fantastic characters; Leigh Harlan, who writes horror so creepy and gripping and fucked-up, their stories just make me yell with delight; Sarah Gailey, because they always have such precision prose, needle-bright characters, and satisfying endings to each story; Rivers Solomon, for their utterly gripping narratives and wrenching emotional prose; Emma Osborne, who tells stories so rich with imagery and emotions, you just want to inhale each word; JY Yang, for their knock-your-socks-off cool stories (read their novellas!); Cassandra Khaw, who makes horror so tasty and her work is just filled with utterly delightful creepiness; Izzy Wasserstein, for how much emotion she can pack into small stories, and she is also a fantastic crafter of cool structure and razor-keen prose; Sam J. Miller, who continually guts me with the emotionally charged stories and especially endings; Darcie Little Badger, who has a brilliant range and can rock the horror and humor spectrums with equal measure. . . . and I am going to feel awful that I have not included everyone so I’m going to stop for now, but seriously, there are so many amazing authors out there, creating incredible work, expanding the horizons of genre. I love how many bright, brilliant, beautiful writers are working in the field these days. It’s so exciting!

What can we look forward to next from you?

I’ve recently turned in a handful of stories solicited for anthologies, so hopefully later this year I’ll be able to shout about the projects on social media and share links.

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

Coming Attractions The Editors | 98 words

Coming up in April, in Nightmare . . . We have original fiction from Ben Peek (“See You on a Dark Night”) and Millie Ho (“A Moonlit Savagery”), along with reprints by Dan Stintzi (“Surrogate”) and A.C. Wise (“And the Carnival Leaves Town”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, and a media review from Adam-Troy Castro. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Nightmare. Thanks for reading! Stay Connected The Editors

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank You! If you’ve read this far, thanks so much. We hope you’ll consider becoming a backer on Patreon. That URL again is patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams. Thanks in advance for your time. We look forward to hopefully being able to make the magazines—and my other publishing endeavors—even better with the support of people like you. About the Nightmare Team The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief John Joseph Adams

Managing/Senior Editor Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Editor Arley Sorg

Podcast Producer Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor Jim Freund

Podcast Host Jack Kincaid

Art Director Christie Yant

Assistant Editors Lisa Nohealani Morton Sandra Odell

Editorial Assistant Alex Puncekar Reviewers Adam-Troy Castro Terence Taylor

Copy Editor Melissa V. Hofelich

Proofreader Devin Marcus

Webmaster Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher Barton Bland Also Edited by John Joseph Adams The Editors

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

ANTHOLOGIES

THE APOC​ALYPSE TRIP​TYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with )

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

THE APOC​ALYPSE TRIP​TYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey)

Armored

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (with )

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (with )

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

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

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (with Carmen Maria Machado)

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

Brave New Worlds By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers

Dead Man’s Hand

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

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

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

Epic: Legends of Fantasy

Federations

The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

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

Lightspeed: Year One

The Living Dead

The Living Dead 2

Loosed Upon the World

The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination

Operation Arcana

Other Worlds Than These Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen)

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

Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Seeds of Change

Under the Moons of Mars

Wastelands

Wastelands 2

Wastelands: The New Apocalypse

The Way of the Wizard

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

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

Bannerless by Vaughn

Sand by Hugh Howey

Retrograde by Peter Cawdron

Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

The of Gotham by Todd McAulty

The Wild Dead by

The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette

In the Night Wood by

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

Gather the Fortunes by Bryan L. Camp

Reentry by Peter Cawdron

Half Way Home by Hugh Howey

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear [forthcoming]

Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer [forthcoming]

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

The Conductors by Nicole Glover [forthcoming]

Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth [forthcoming]

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