Nightmare Magazine, Issue 96 (September 2020)

TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 96, September 2020

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial: September 2020

FICTION Outside of Omaha Ray Nayler The Night Has No Eyes Kivel Carson Tea with the Earl of Twilight Sonya Taaffe My Boy Builds Coffins Gary McMahon

BOOK EXCERPTS The Cipher Kathe Koja

NONFICTION The H Word: Universal Scare, Local Fear Suyi Davies Okungbowa Book Reviews: September 2020 Terence Taylor

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

Editorial: September 2020 John Joseph Adams | 134 words

Welcome to issue ninety-six of Nightmare! Our original fiction this month is deeply grounded in place. We’re taking you on a witchy trip to the prairie in Ray Nayler’s new story “Outside of Omaha,” and we let Sonya Taaffe immerse us in the canals of Boston in “Tea with the Earl of Twilight.” Our reprints are from Kivel Carson (“The Night Has No Eyes”) and Gary McMahon (“My Boy Builds Coffins”). On the nonfiction front, Suyi Davies Okungbowa talks about the differences between Nigerian and American horror in our “The H Word” column. Plus, Terence Taylor reviews some excellent new reads, and of course we have author spotlights with our authors. Our ebook readers will enjoy an excerpt from the reissue of Kathe Koja’s classic novel, The Cipher.

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

Outside of Omaha Ray Nayler | 4121 words

You would have hated your funeral reception. Potato-nosed husbands clomping around our parlor in their cheap suits, stinking of naphtha and condolences. Wives with sweat- streaked powder caked in the creases of their necks, like flour-sacks brought to life by a pair of magic dentures. That’s what I kept staring at: dentures, bridges loose over gray gums, gold-mottled molars gleaming in the wells of mouths. If there is a God, why would he make us with teeth that rot in our jaws while we still live? All these sunburned yokels with cavities full of casserole and clichés. I saw the priest’s wife fingering the webwork of your doilies enviously, clamping the intricacy of your antimacassars between thumb and forefinger while her husband cornered me in our kitchen, soughing psalms at me between mouthfuls of scalloped potato:

One day within your dwelling Is better than a thousand elsewhere. The threshold of the house of God I prefer to the dwellings of the wicked.

“Dwellings of the wicked?” I wanted to ask. “What are you trying to imply?” But I said nothing. I just stared out the window at the rectangle of turned earth, and watched the wind agitate the autumn leaves of the quaking aspen over your grave. You would have liked the weather, at least, when they lowered your coffin into the ground. A Nebraska morning, drear and flat, with the harvest in and nothing but the wingwhirl of gleaning birds over the stubble field, the grain elevator nine miles distant on the march. You always said you could see the curvature of the Earth. I still cannot. It all just looks flat to me. Perhaps flatter now, as if with your passing even the little rises that struggled to give the landscape character had sunk. Now the neighbors are gone. Nothing left of them but their muddy boot-smears on the porch, their greasy fingerprints on the sideboard, an icebox full of dishes I will have to return the next time I can drag myself to church. Now is the real funeral. Ours, alone. I find myself thinking of the last time we went into town. It had been another such morning. I had lingered on the porch, watching you descend the pebbled pathway in your Sunday dress, your lacy collar, your heeled and pinching boots. We hadn’t even left yet, and I was already strangling in my starched collar, strings of hair painted to my scalp. Well, I’d thought—at least we ain’t headed to church. So we drove the Ford in to Omaha and at the studio they froze our faces for the future. I had thought it a strange request—you wanting to go to town at all, much less to have our picture taken. Had you sensed your going then? Wanted to leave a trace? After they got done pointing their lens at us we had lunch at the hash house. I wouldn’t more than glance at the picture. On the way back from town you stopped us at an abandoned farmhouse. Upstairs, a blue bottle fly buzzed on the windowsill in the heat. “I’ve gone old and ugly,” I said. You unbuttoned my collar, tossed it on the floor, ground it under your heel. I never cared for pictures. I have plenty in my head without needing those colorless rectangles to remind me. Pictures are just a diagram of how light falls on things. But I remember angles in my balded box no camera lens can see. Watching the aspen shudder over your grave, I remember the early days, when I cast myself out to this place and raised up that little house of sod we use now for a shed. I remember writing out my stammering wifing letter to you by lantern, penned to an address in upstate New York from an ad I’d sliced out of the paper with a razor blade: Get Married! Any lady or gent wishing to marry send age and description to us. We will introduce you to our members by mail; 10,000 pretty, respectable and wealthy ladies and honorable gentlemen anxious to marry; strictly confidential. Send stamp for particulars. I remember the picture I had of you, then. A picture I’d made up in my mind: a good blonde German girl, rosy and somehow always white-dressed in this Nebraska mud. Then came you from the train: small, weird of accent, wreathed with the Eastern city dark of coal smoke and narrow lane—but not the East of this country. No. Another East across the sea, where Europe exhausted itself. A crooked town of stone in gloaming, at the moss-foot of mountains from which horse-hooves sounded in the night. You came with everything you owned in a jacquard bag. You barely spoke, those first weeks. But we found a rhythm. Like a country dance in a lanterned barn, we found a language—the way you speak to a partner you burn for with a lingering palm, the twitch of a fingertip during the Allemande left. I would get up from the couch where I’d slept, splash my face and hands clean at the yard pump, cook ham and eggs, bake the day’s bread. You’d come down from the bedroom, wrapped in your shawl, and eat. I would talk idly about the day, as if to myself. Things I was going to do, lists of tasks for myself. I asked you nothing. When I took the bread from the oven, you broke it into pieces with your hands and put each one into your mouth, contemplating it as if it were something stranger or more precious than just the product of my labor in the fields. If you dropped a piece on the floor you picked it up and touched it to your forehead before placing it between your lips. Later you would sit in the parlor with your bobbins, pillow, straight pins, and thread, making lace. I found any excuse I could to watch you, watch the white web of silk grow, pattern locked into pattern into pattern like memory itself. Or sometimes you would go out and wander our farm. I would come upon you during my work: lying in the grass under the sky, or trailing a yearling through the pasture, or gazing into the stillness of the well. In the evening we would sit on the porch—near one another, but not touching. Me with my pipe and you with nothing at all, watching birds cross the setting sun. We had lived in that silence two weeks when the neighbors first came calling. They drew up in their wagon at the end of the drive, just after we had finished a breakfast. Wife and husband, in the door of our home almost before I could invite them, with a pie and a noisy welcome. Who told them? Someone at the station perhaps—but news here seems to travel of its own accord, without people moving it along at all. The husband and I stood on the porch trading the mercies of small talk and pipe smoke. With the free part of my mind I listened to her in there calling you “dear” and squealing over your lacework while you stumbled your short, thickly accented responses. When we men came in the two of you were in the kitchen. You had somehow made her tea on a stove I had never seen you touch, with a pot I did not think you knew existed. She was happily chattering away over a tin of biscuits. ‘You will never believe, Harold,” she addressed to her husband, “The things this young lady can make with her hands. Such lace! The finest I’ve ever seen.” And then she had to add, to me: “And so quiet and polite. You’ve found yourself a real old-country bride.” You held your cup in front of your mouth like a shield. And our eyes met, and I saw the glimmer in yours of hatred for these folks, and knew then we would be together, you and I. Against everyone. After they left you took up the broom—the first time you had touched it. You swept out the kitchen, swept the porch clean. It was a good, fat pie she had baked us, filling the kitchen with the scent of apple and cinnamon. You picked it up and walked out of the house. I followed at a distance as you marched with that pie in your hands, down to where our drive met the county road, then further. Watched you turn the pie tin upside down over the ditch, then drop the tin beside it. Then you marched back. I stood out in the yard a bit, pretending to busy myself with the well chain. When I came inside you were at the kitchen sink, washing the teapot and your cup. Hers was still on the table. “Rotten pie?” I asked. “Rotten person,” you said, without turning around. “Take tea cup out and throw it in ditch too.” And just like that, it began. Our real marriage. You started to do a few things around the place, here and there, though for the most part it was me who worked—and I never resented it, being the kind that likes busyness. You took to your lace with an added passion. And you began, that day, to knit for us a life as well: a circumscription patterned of your disregard for the world, an intricacy that was just us two and ended at the place our drive met the road. On the days I went to town I felt as if, as my mule stepped out onto the country road, I was crossing a barrier beyond which was another place, not our own. Inside, our world was bright and cunning as a painted Persian box, where I lived in lacquer with someone strange and stranger than myself. And I would unlid for no-one what was inside. That is why I write it here. It must come out of me, but when I am finished, I will bury this in the ground where none will find it. That was the night you came and took me by the hand to the bedroom. I remember that as well: how you blended to me at the root, the cleft, the sweat and wanting on your lip. How you leaned up and hissed that lullaby in my ear: Mother dear, mother heart unlock the pearls from round my throat, the Kaiser will come riding here, and God forbid he want me . . .

• • • •

That winter we rode in to see 1900 come in with fireworks over Omaha. You held me by the arm, but went stiff when the rockets cracked and thundered, and I saw you were frightened: that the sound and fire brought back things you did not want to remember.

the Kaiser will come riding here, and God forbid he want me . . .

So we rode home early. We turned the century on our porch, just us two. And about midnight we waltzed on the lawn to music in our own heads. The next Sunday, you insisted we go to church. I had never been for it, preferring to spend my Sundays on the porch with a pipe and Mr. Milton or Shakespeare—folks you could read over and over and never really know, permanent friends of a sort. But you said: “They have already begun to talk.” So we went to that Sabbath prison, and mumbled hymns and were stared at and wondered about. They might have left us alone—just another couple made strange by the prairies and the struggle of life. But then one Sunday after the service our friendly pie-baking neighbor clasped your hand when you weren’t expecting it. You recoiled and bared a square of teeth at her that was nothing like a smile. Though you recovered quick, it was too late: I think she was from the old country too, though she’d had a longer time here than you to smother the old accent and “cheer up American” as I call it, learning that grin folks think is optimism but is really a kind of violence. After that I watched for months as she glanced sidewise at you. To see what? If you droned the hymns right, stood where you were supposed to? If your lips moved during prayer? But you and I are smart: we do what we must to hide. We were coming down the drive one Sunday when you got the fits. It was just as we hit the county road, crossing that line between our world and theirs: of a sudden I looked over and saw you twist and writhe. I brought the mule up quick and had you in my arms, but I couldn’t stop you shaking and foaming at the mouth. It stopped by itself once I lay you on the porch. You came to after a while. You were steady enough for me to get the cart in its shed and return to you where you were wrapped in a quilt on the couch, nurse you with tea and whiskey. The next Sunday it happened again, just as we turned on the drive. One moment you were fine, and the next you were choking, heaped up and shaking. You would have fallen from the cart if I had not gotten hold of you. But this time you wouldn’t let me stay. “Go to the church,” you said. “I am fine now. Go and let them see you.” I did go, and they saw me, and our neighbor came up to me after: “Where is that lovely old-country bride of yours?” She asked. I saw a few of the other ladies were watching. Thinking they were sly, standing off at a distance. “She caught a chill, is all,” I said. Then I raised my head and addressed the other ladies too, taking pleasure in the shame that washed over their faces. “She sends you all her greetings. And will be back soon enough.” With that I tipped my hat and smiled and shook the men’s hands and left. I don’t know why I noticed it, as I turned up the drive. Usually I am so distracted by that time, so eager to be home to you, that I don’t notice much at all. But maybe this time I was angry, and glaring around at everything, wanting to hit out at the world. Maybe that was why I saw it: a patch, just there by the road, where the earth had been disturbed. I put the wagon away but did not come into the house. Instead I got the shovel, went down, and dug. I dug carefully, and about six inches down the blade clinked. A bottle. It was made of cloudy, sky-tinted glass, corked and sealed with wax. When I held it up to the light, I could see fluid inside, and the shapes of other things. I walked down the road a bit, then twisted the cork off. The liquid inside was piss—that was clear right off. And when I smashed the bottle in the ditch I saw nails, pins, and needles, wrapped in a bundle with a red thread. I ground the bundle under my bootheel, kicked dirt over the pieces of it all. When I got to the house you were standing on the porch wrapped in a quilt I’d made you, with a red in your cheeks that looked like fever at first. You stopped me before I could step on the porch. “Go and get a bucket from the well pump. Wash your boots and your hands out in the road.” I did so, and when I came back in the house I found you in the kitchen. You had a copybook of mine where I scribbled, some days, lines that came into my head. Not quite a poem, but when you read it back to me out loud it sounded like one:

“The ’Brasky prairie land was right for us, And knew that its possessors come To make our parcel of this samey plain A kind-of-Eden. Here we reign secure. Americans would sow a row of corn in hell, As long as it was free and to the West. So I guess we are Americans, after all.”

You paused on that line, repeated it. “It’s just stuff,” I mumbled. “Some kind of dream-stuff I wrote out one morning.” “No,” you said, looking up at me. Then I saw the blush was not fever, but happiness. “It is us you put down here. ‘A kind-of-Eden.’ Yes. ‘Here we reign secure.’ Yes.” Before I knew what I was doing, I had my arms around you, kissing the lightning bolt that parted the dark coils of your hair. “Are you well?” “Always,” you said. “Always, in this place.”

• • • •

You can hold two opposite things in the mind at once. They say a person has logic in the mind, a guide that tells them what is true and what is false, like a little homunculus that lives in your head. I don’t believe that to be so. I think we are a mix of many thoughts that oppose one another directly, and which we hold to be true anyhow. Think of anything, and you will see your thoughts are in contradiction. America. Take that example: we know what we have done here, in this land. Murdered the folks this place belonged to, tricked the English with our hocus-pocus about the inalienable rights of men while we held the black man as property, and held women inferior because of their shape. You can hold two opposite things in the mind, you see. Anyone can do it. It’s no trick at all: it is how we keep from tilting off forever into madness. A murderer can be a good man— can be all the world to someone else, a whole universe of good, though behind him trails a seam of slaughter. We all think we are good. Or someday will be good. And because we think so, sometimes we are good. So if you want to know if I knew the truth of you, the truth of which we never spoke, and how I lived with it, I’ll tell you this: I knew, and yet I kept myself from knowing.

• • • •

I woke up in the middle of the night to find you gone from our bed. It was a strange night, with the warmth of a second summer in the air. What my mother used to call St. Martin’s Summer, before she coughed her life out. What my father used to call babye leto—the “old woman’s summer,” before he was crushed to death beneath the coal. I had not heard you go, nor sensed it in any way. I could not say why I had woken, but I knew, somehow, that you were not in the house. I put my boots on, lit the bullseye lantern and went out. The crickets sang still, in the grass, though a frost had come and silenced some of the choir the week before. In the barn the mule stood staring into the gloom with his glossy eyes and huffed when I came in with my light. I walked up the little ridge, the Nebraska nothing of a rise we call a hill, to that copse of quaking aspen. There, at the foot of one of the trees, I found it. You had folded it neatly, like the precious thing it was. I dared not disturb it, though I crouched down next to it and played the light of my lantern across every detail. Your skin. I stroked a finger along an eyelash, on a lid that opened on nothing at all. I ran my palm over the glossy surface of your hair, neatly bound with ribbon over hands like empty gloves, each whorl of every finger pad unique to you. Then I stood and went back into the house. I opened the bedroom window so I could hear the night, and I lay there, waiting. Everything we know is surrounded by darkness. We scry things out by the light of weakest torches pushing back at the abyss. I once was at a night-fair and looked through the lens of a telescope at the moon—and there were mountains there, and what looked like seas. Whole mountains, out there in the emptiness turning around our Earth to no purpose. And just like they took that picture of us in Omaha, the astronomers have been taking pictures of stars, out there in the void. They even break the light into pieces, and learn from those pieces what elements a star is made of. But what do we know, here where we live? When we live? Nothing more than superstition, and a glimmer thrown here and there by science against the night. That is all. And I do not believe we will know much more in one hundred years, or in a thousand: we can build the greatest of bonfires, turn science into a cult akin to church, but I think darkness will remain the substance of the world, illumination the exception. Sometimes I think all the light will do, in the end, is show us the sides of the well we are trapped in. I lay there and was afraid. But not of what you may think. No. I was afraid you would not come back. When I heard your footstep on the stair, I felt nothing but joy. I lay quiet, as if I had been asleep, and let you get into bed. You smelled of the air when lightning has struck nearby. In the dark you lay a palm on my chest, and whispered: A kind-of-Eden.

• • • •

They found them far out in the fields. Husband and wife, in different spots. No-one had touched them, but behind each of them was a trail of pumpkins, from their own garden, smashed in the furrows as if dropped from a great height. And every piece of glass—every jar, every lantern, every window—in their house had been blown to powder. The next day, we got ourselves dressed up and went to church, laced and booted tight as armor. We shook hands and chatted and nodded at the right times. We leaned into one another on the wagon the whole way home, just us two, with you singing to me in a language I would never know. There would be stares over the years. Whispers. But what could they prove? We kept our secrets. Us from them. You from me. Me from you. I never spoke to you of what I found that night. But then I never spoke of my Colt revolver rusting in a tin box, smothered under three feet of earth by the shed. And I never spoke of those I killed with it, before I came here: most of them bad men, but some just near me in my rage. And one nothing but a boy. After all the casserole-carriers had gone, I got the Omaha picture down off the mantle, and looked at it for a while. Plain old crone in a cloche, gangle of a man with a clotted razor nick above the paper-collared throat. Two laced-up relics made awkward standing still and wondering what unborn eyes will make of them. One day someone will see that picture, and think they know the summing of these worn- out folks. As if, like those pictures of stars, they could break the light of us to pieces and learn what we are made of. But they cannot. We have kept our night hours to ourselves. Once I am gone none will know what once was outside of Omaha. What answered my wifing letter. What ancient loneliness arrived in the shape of you, to take up here your lacework, your songs, your never-ending hatred of the world. But I know. And knowing, I’d still ride to Omaha to hand you down from the train.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ray has lived and worked in Russia, Central Asia, Afghanistan, and the Caucasus for well over a decade. He is a Foreign Service Officer, and was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Turkmenistan. He speaks Russian, Albanian, and Azerbaijani Turkish. Ray’s most recent foreign assignment was as Press Attaché in Baku, Azerbaijan, and he is currently headed to Pristina, Kosovo, where he will manage Cultural Affairs for the U.S. Embassy. His work has appeared in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Cemetery Dance, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Crimewave, The Beloit Poetry Review, and many other journals and collections. His story “Winter Timeshare” was recently included in The Very Best of The Best: 35 years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois. You can follow him at raynayler.net.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight The Night Has No Eyes Kivel Carson | 2782 words

They came at night. And brought with them the trauma and fear of all the babies ripped from their mothers’ arms, beings made less than human in the face of violence and humiliation, brightness turned to darkness and hurt. They came as the embodiment of all that unspent pain, and refused to die, made invincible by the same willful instinct that makes a dying man kick his feet in a last death rattle. I can’t explain it, but when I first saw them, I thought of chickens— the ordinary bird domesticated for slaughter and producing eggs that would never mature to a life. How they come home to roost. What they look like with their heads tilted to the side when their necks are broken. Their blood in the old hoodoo ways that conjured the impossible. The Sankofa bird on my rib, and my auntie’s voice when she asked why I tattooed a chicken on my body. I had a tightness in my chest as I moved through the night on the shadowy road where my tire blew. I knew where I was. There were signifiers that stood high as warnings— Confederate flags that dotted lawns, place names celebrating a glorious past and the future it produced, the absence of us. I walked alone, an imposing dark figure in the moonlight, shrouded by gray cotton that revealed only the shadow of my face and the locs spilling out of it. An unknown could emerge from the tall trees lining the highway and test the strength of the outstretched branches with my weight. Death could sit high behind headlights, barreling toward me from the nothingness. Flashes of red and blue could illuminate the night and splash over me, bury me where I stood. Fear is a funny thing, who feels it and who yields its power. I should’ve felt relief to see the glow of light in the distance, a sign of life, but I only felt more dread. Life, perhaps, but not life for me. Only more danger, waiting. Their eyes fell heavy on me when the dangling bell on the screen door tolled to announce my presence. It’s incredible to be pierced with eyes that can never quite meet your own, and to be watched without really being seen. Adrenaline flushed my bloodstream as hairs stood up on my skin and I clenched my jaw, deadened my eyes, readied my mask. Red splotched across their faces and necks and I almost felt the heat from where I stood. One behind the counter with a wall of cigarettes lining the backdrop like wallpaper. Two seated to the left with Styrofoam takeout plates. A fourth further in the corner with a newspaper and tall bottle of beer. My eyes scanned and met the clerk’s. “My car got a flat and I have no service, I just need to use the phone,” I said. “Phone’s for paying customers,” he said back, folding his arms. I saw him assessing my form, trying to find a box to place me in, looking for hairs on my chin or a sign of femininity beneath my hoodie. I tossed a pack of gum on the counter and pulled my credit card from my pocket. “Five dollar minimum for cards, and I’ll have to see some ID.” “I have to pay five dollars to use the phone, and show ID to spend five dollars?” “Or you can not use the phone and walk back to your flat tire, sir.” My blood boiled, but I was frozen by the voice of my mother telling me to be careful as the door slammed behind me. At seven going to ride my bike. At twelve going to explore the park in my neighborhood. At sixteen going to a pool party with my friends across town. At seventeen walking to the store down the street in the rain to buy snacks. At twenty-two driving the empty road back to campus after a long weekend. I swallowed the rage making a lump in my throat and turned to peruse the closest aisle for $5 worth of junk food. The bell on the door ratted again and I prepared for the confrontation—the buddy they called to teach me a lesson, the cop with his gun drawn, the white woman I would make feel unsafe. Instead, everything went quiet. Even the screams were quiet at first, muffled by the white noise between my own ears, until they pierced through and flooded the entire place. I dropped to my knees behind a shelf and took cover. There was a throaty grumbling spliced between the screams and sounds of flesh being thrashed and pulled from bone. I sucked air deep in my lungs and whispered prayers through the exhales. I peeked around the endcap and couldn’t process what my eyes were reading. There was an image with no context, so I just thought of chickens, and how they come home to roost, and what that even means, two generations removed from the farm. There had been reports of attacks, in the night, by animals, deranged addicts, or a Satanist cult. Nothing verified, nothing concrete linking the sporadic deaths that seemed to have started near the eastern North Carolina-Virginia line and thinly dotted the map in a southwestern swing. There were only carnage and questions and fear. Fear for others who didn’t have so many realities to fear daily, and had the privilege of hypothetical fears to keep them awake instead. When I saw their black bodies, covered in a white ash that falls over the elders before they pass on, I felt a strange peace that I took to be resignation. I rested the back of my head against the shelf and sat with the calm, waiting for death. Her sudden presence above me broke through the haze. Another dark body, vibrant with life, falling curls about her head and shoulders, a deep brown aura. She floated in a calmness, too, awestruck, unable to breathe while watching from the bathroom doorway. I pulled her by her hand into a crouch beside me and covered my lips with a finger. I heard the swishing that fabric makes when it moves through the air and felt a coldness creep over me. She gripped my hand, or maybe I was gripping hers. A stout woman with a resolute face, and a wrap snugly tied around her head like a high cotton crown, rounded the corner and stared down at us. A rusting rifle hung from her shoulder in a sling. No one breathed. Her hollow, cloudy eyes fixed on me and I felt my entire body get warm and electric, transfixed by the power. It felt like I would levitate but for the other woman’s hand on mine, grounding me. It all must have happened in only a moment, then the figure was gone, along with the others like her and the gnashing and screams. We remained. The silence returned. There was blood and flesh and bone everywhere, painted on the walls and floors. It hollowed me out, but a drive inside me took over. “Is your car outside?” She nodded. “We have to get out of here.” She nodded again, still silent, as we rushed through the door and heard the bell for the last time. A siren was faint in the distance. “I had a flat about a mile back. Can—” “Get in,” she said. Her pale knuckles gripped the steering wheel as she stared straight ahead in a daze. She drove down the road in the opposite direction of my car, but neither of us could speak or process at the moment. I let the dotted yellow lines of the road and the bass and synth of the mix playing through her speakers hypnotize me. “Zora.” At some point, my voice broke through the silence in a deep, smooth tone that didn’t match the rapid thumping in my chest. “Huh?” she replied, descending from her fog. “I’m Zora.” “Simone,” she said faintly. “I just stopped to use the bathroom, and . . .” She shook her head in disbelief. “That happened, right? There’s blood on my shoe,” I said. She glanced at me, as if to make sure I was real. “You had a flat?” she asked. “I heard you, but I didn’t hear you. I just started driving.” “It’s cool, I appreciate you taking on a stowaway.” “Do you have a spare?” “Yeah, it was low too.” “I have one that should be good, and you can just get it back to me when you get your tire straight,” she said. “Where am I going?” “You can just hit 561 and it’ll take you back around.” She looked over at me again and back to the road. “You have no idea where that is, do you?” I asked. “Not at all.” “I could tell by your voice you weren’t from around here,” I said, trying to distract myself from the reality of what just happened. “Where are you from?” “Gary, Indiana.” “Like Michael Jackson?” “Kind of like Michael Jackson,” she said with a smile. “Like here, but colder, and fewer country ass bugs.” “Hang a right,” I said, pointing at a road ahead. “How did you end up down here?” “Each One Teach One.” “You’re a teacher? You don’t look like a teacher. You have a bull ring.” Her laugh showed nearly all of her teeth. “What do I look like?” “Some kind of edgy photographer. Or a lost grad student.” She laughed harder, until it made me laugh. And then there were tears on her cheek. “What the fuck just happened?” she whispered. Her tone was sober again. “What were they?” “I don’t know,” I said, letting the reality push its way back in. “They were people, right? They were us,” she continued, still looking for words. “And the way she looked at us, like she knew us. I felt something. I just need someone else to tell me they saw what they were.” “Who they were,” I mumbled. “Yeah, I saw it too.” I had seen them before, in their flowing linens, in films about the pre-war south, dotting cotton fields like ornaments, and in old sepia photos with fraught looks, that only told the half of it. But, I had never seen them as they were, as alive as me, or something like it, now. “And they didn’t touch us,” she said wrinkling her forehead. “Only them.” “561’s just up here.” The road curved. “Take this right.” I paused for a moment. “My great grandmother used to talk about Zonbis,” I said, remembering. “She was Gullah Geechie and old, and people just thought she was talking. But, she talked about them like a prophecy, like other people talk about Jesus coming back. They weren’t The Walking Dead kind. ‘ZON-bee’ is how she would call them with her thick accent. She said their souls couldn’t rest, they couldn’t return home until they finished some purpose, and Samedi could come and bring their peace, lead them back. They’re conjured by the ones that know, when it’s time, the ones who have the special sight. When she was dying, she used to chant in this whisper that scared me when I was young. And my grandma did the same thing before she died. My mom told me it wasn’t just chanting, it was a conjuring, to give peace to the ones left behind, and curse the ones who cursed us in life.” The road grew darker as we got closer to my car. “But you know, just old stories,” I said. “Your grandmother was from here?” “South Carolina. But, I’m from here, born and raised. And returned.” “What brought you back?” “A lot, but I’m still figuring that out . . . Samedi, maybe,” I continued with a laugh. “I came back when my grandma was dying, and I just saw the need. I saw what was happening in my community and what the kids were going through here, and I remembered being that kid, and I just couldn’t leave it how I found it. I run a little community garden for the kids now, and teach them art and culture through the land. And, I remodel houses during the day to pay the bills—hanging dry wall, adding fixtures, painting inside and out.” “How did you know this is what you were supposed to be doing?” “My spirit or gut or whatever you want to call it didn’t give me a choice. It didn’t let me rest or eat or see anything else until I listened.” “Teaching here was like that for me. I was never supposed to end up here. It wasn’t in any of my plans. But, somehow I had to.” The road opened up as we came closer to the point where we started. “My car’s up here on the left, just after the tree line starts,” I said. A flickering orange glow dimly backlit the trees ahead. “Wait, slow down.” I squinted my eyes and tried to make out what was in the distance. “You see it too?” she asked. “What is that?” “I think something’s on fire back there.” She let down her window to smell for smoke, and crept slowly along the road. There was a low melodic moan. “Do you hear that?” I asked. “I know that sound. I can’t explain it.” She pulled off the road and parked in the grass overlooking a clearing in the trees. We both got out without a word, both knowing better. “Do you think it’s a cross burning?” she whispered. The light gleamed more brightly and the grumbling sound turned to a chant. She climbed onto the hood of her car, then the roof. I followed instinctively, as if my own feet didn’t carry me. My eyes widened and my breath caught in my lungs. I collapsed into a seat, with my feet dangling over the side of the car. She eased down beside me in silence. The black figures moved around a central glowing fire, like they were floating, falling lightly on their feet. Their cotton clothes spun with them like linens blowing in the wind on a clothesline. They chanted the song in throaty grumbles, a harrowing melancholy spiritual mixed with the joy of release. Tears streamed down both of our faces as we watched them dance in the firelight, unable to contain ourselves. I don’t know how long we were there, suspended in the almost ethereal trance, watching. We watched until their fire went out and they disappeared into the trees. I drove home in the dead of night with flashes of the woman with the rifle slung over her shoulder in my head, and Simone, and the bodies moving around the fire. That night, I couldn’t sleep, but I dreamt of murky water, and freedom. I was standing in my bedroom in the darkness, sipping a cup of hot tea, smoking papers, peering into the darkness. Something beyond my door pulled at my legs and played tricks on my eyes, making someone move before me and beckon me with an unseen finger. My feet moved across the cool grass to the edge of water, buried deep in the woods. There was calmness over it, a stagnant film, until a body thrust from beneath and moved toward me on the bank. It was the woman from the store, alive and full of color, in her own time, climbing from the water with the rifle on her back. Bodies sprung up behind her from the swamp, water dripping from their heads and clothes. I backed away from the water as they marched forward, until the woman stood in front of me toe to toe with her hand outstretched, and there was nowhere left to retreat. She pointed with a sharp, bony index finger, grazed it against my chest, and plunged it into my heart. I fell to my knees in a scream. But, it wasn’t pain, more like a declaration. A soldier being marked for battle. When I sprung up from my bed, gasping for air, I was soaked in sweat. And I thought of chickens. What they sound like when they crow in the morning in the garden to begin the day, and how they come home to roost, and their blood spilled in the old hoodoo rituals to conjure the impossible.

©2019 by Kivel Carson. Originally published in Black From the Future: A Collection of Black Speculative Writing, edited by Stephanie Andrea Allen and Lauren Cherelle. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kivel Carson is an emerging writer concerned with social justice, Black liberation, and representation through art and storytelling, particularly in the genres of literary fiction and Afrofuturism. Carson’s work examines human relationships, identity, and the unique ways in which Black women and queer folks experience the world around them. She has roots in the Midwest and US Virgin Islands, and works now in the Blackbelt as a writer and organizer. In addition to publishing fiction, she has published creative non-fiction as a journalist, including in-depth reporting on the HIV/ AIDS crisis in Kenya through Indiana University’s media school. She is a winner of NC Press Association Awards for storytelling and investigative reporting. Tea with the Earl of Twilight Sonya Taaffe | 5108 words

For the first week, she thought he belonged to the power plant; after that she knew better. She had read the obituaries. She saw him first as a silhouette, one more line of the industrial geometries overhanging the boardwalk of Broad Canal. It had been a wet, dispiriting winter full of gusts and mists, but with January the water had finally hardened into a thick pane of cormorant-black ice, chipped and glossed with refreezing like volcanic glass; it was pond-green at the edges of the channel where the stubs of older piers stood up like snags, but the snow lying over the floating dock of the canoe launch could still pretend to seasonal pallor if the fanned brown branches of the trees along the old towpath could not. Decades after the coal barges of the Cambridge Electric Company, she had been vaguely surprised that there were still girder- framed docks and doors at canal-height, but a sodium light burned above one recessed portal and the greenish silver of mercury vapor above the other and someone had put out a wheelie bin on one of the rust-sketched catwalks, just as if a landfill-bound tugboat might still chug by. On the other, a slender man in black was smoking. More than features or expression, she registered the pose: slouched lankily over the caution-yellow pipes of the handrail as if he had a view of something better than pilings, pedestrians’ feet, the algae-marked and iron- stained masonry on the other side of the canal. Whatever she saw of his face was pale and pointed, his hair rumpled dustily. He wore no coat in the cold, but she had been caught wrong-footed by climate change herself. He did not glance up at her as she passed, hard- heeled with her hands in the pockets of her pale raincoat; she was not sure afterward why she had thought he should. If the biscuit-colored blocks and towers of the Kendall Cogeneration Station looked like a space-age set from the ’70s, Sid Eilerstein could not help thinking of the frictionless stack of glass cubes that housed her latest temp job as the apocalypse according to Ballard, all aquarium-windowed open-plan just waiting for the waters to rise. At least it left her full name off her ID badge, which spared her having to explain the kind of parents who named their daughter Siddony like the second coming of the pre-Raphaelites and got instead a two- time grad-school drop-out with a lavender-grey undercut and tattoos just far enough up her sleeves to pass as an acceptable office drone; she could take the bus on days when the Red Line preferred not to and she walked quickly enough to spend most of her lunch breaks by the Charles, the traffic humming across the metal decking of the disused drawbridge’s leaves. Daniel referred to all of her employers interchangeably as Veridian Dynamics. She reminded him that his radical queer game design brought in approximately enough to cover the cost of internet in Spring Hill, even on the third floor of a former Philadelphia-style so haphazardly converted that one of Daniel’s boyfriends had not entirely joked about raccoons falling through the ceiling while they fucked. It was better than medical transcription and waiting tables; she tried not to fall into hoping that it would last through the spring. She hurried with the rest of the nine-to-fivers through mornings as grey as salt-streaked concrete, dusks as drowned blue as a harbor’s underside, and sometimes she saw the man on the loading dock above the canal, smoking next to the sign that read PRIVATE PROPERTY. He looked more like an art student than a utility worker in his thin black sweater and dark corduroys, his hair ashy in the mercury light; a match-flare lit him from underneath like a storyteller at Halloween. After the third or fourth sighting, she wondered if he was watching people in his own covert way, or merely the motionless water. In hindsight, she liked to pretend everything would have been different if she had actually gone out with Torrey that weekend night, but they were coughing their way through some kind of post-conference hell-cold and in the end she was just as happy to do nothing more strenuous than make skillet-griddled grilled cheese and curl up to read. Looks like your industrial sort of thing, Daniel appended the link with a name she did not recognize in the title; he was only at the other end of the couch, sharing the other half of the amorphous sage- colored throw against the perpetual draft from the windows, but Sid had learned within weeks of their friendship that her housemate would never read a sentence aloud when a swipe and click would do. Geoffrey Axtell, portraitist of Boston’s waterways, dead at 79, read the headline on Universal Hub. The details in the Globe obituary were sparing, the accompanying headshot showed a sharp-faced man in salt-and-pepper middle age grinning at the camera, no tormented artist even with a half-finished canvas behind his shoulder. It looked blocky, architectural; all his paintings as she scrolled through a search had the same almost metallic crispness, bright flat pastels or unmixed oils sharpened the one degree past photorealism that made the Brutalist bricks of City Hall Plaza or the tumbling bronze dolphins of the old New England Aquarium seem to scratch their way off the screen. He painted the tideless chop of the Charles like steel-cut scales, the spill of sunset under the Lechmere Viaduct like cranberry glass; sunlight cross-hatched through the rusting trusses of the Northern Avenue Bridge as if it were being rolled and stamped hot. Human figures moved through his city like afterthoughts, brushstrokes for scale—an Esplanade dog-walker, Hull ferry commuters, the smoker by the factory-ripple of a canal. Slack-jawed as a teen in some stupid found footage, Sid heard herself say, “Oh, shit,” so distinctly that Daniel mid-podcast gave her a quizzical frown. Between the hard blue planes of the water and the dirty orange static of sodium light, the figure in loose-jointed lines of black paint leaned on the rail where the reflection of the power station scattered in green and dun and sulfur, not yet shadowed by a boardwalk. The saffron ember of a cigarette smoldered in one hand. She read the title first, The Earl of Twilight, and then the date of completion, 1981, and she closed the profile or interview or gallery archive so fast, the rest of her tabs went with it. Her hands felt as cold as if she had fallen through the canal’s ice. For a moment she wanted to scream at Daniel, his ears obliviously stopped with eldritch horrors that could never be worse than fiction, but it passed, like the raw tin taste in her mouth, and after another moment she opened the picture again. It must have been twilight, that lowering ghost- blue air. She knew even then, as with every real haunting, it had always been too late.

• • • • Soberly before a close-cropped angle on the Charles River Dam, the locks slanting away from the viewer in stripes of sheared grey and dimpled olivine, Torrey said, “It’s not a retro style at all, is the thing. It’s exactly the assumed nostalgia of Axtell’s neo-Precisionism that gives his work its disjunct charge, like a subliminal double exposure, as if his subjects were trying to project themselves forward into a past they’d already lived—or been built too late for in the first place,” and they squeezed Sid’s sweating hand. She had known she would not be able to manage the show at 249 A Street alone, not when she had spent a week avoiding even the trains over the river in case she should glance back and catch, beyond the Strauss-trunnion and counterweight sentinels of the drawbridges that had not been raised since her childhood, the impassable waters of Broad Canal, but she had dreamed of the paintings too often to stay away. Absurdly and reasonably, in person they did not shift behind her back, the black-sweatered smoker flicking from canvas to canvas like stop-motion film, leaving only a spoor of dissipating nicotine behind as each bright-figured scene of Castle Island or Chelsea Creek sank inexorably into shadow like sea-rise, just as the crowd at the opening reception had more than the one snapshot of a face, even if a few of them were of an age to have shared co-op space with Axtell since his move to Boston, she gathered from the short biography on the wall, in 1981. Neither had she had a lover with her in the dreams, their tattooed fingers twined between hers like a grounding wire, improvising with deadpan expertise on a subject she knew for a fact they cared less about than Magic cards—she found it difficult to imagine a plainer declaration of unconditional love from Torrey Marcial than the willingness to attend a memorial exhibition of dead white cishet dude art, but they looked every inch the confident patron in their glitter-threaded blazer and peacock-sheen hair, saying in front of the brown dockworkers’ brick of Southie’s Our Lady of Good Voyage, “That so many of his locations are unrecognizable today—torn down, redeveloped, Boston consuming itself in the sterile alchemical cycle of an insensate ouroboros—only pulls the work further into a spectral modernity, the once and never city.” She muttered out of the side of her mouth, “Tell me you’re recording this.” Round-faced and razor-sharp, Torrey grinned and addressed themselves to the weathered oak of the fender piers under the Congress Street Bridge. After half an hour surrounded by strangers with plastic cups of white wine and cheese plates, Sid could not quite relax into Navigating: The Memory of Geoffrey Axtell, but she had stopped flinching every time she stopped before a new painting, some as neatly miniaturized as tilt-shift photography, others as panoramic as skylines. Any body of water within city limits seemed to have been fair game for his explorations, from the marshes of Belle Isle to the still water of Cow Island Pond, but Axtell had returned most often to Boston’s urban waterways, dams and bridges, vestigial spurs of canals, the Lost Half-Mile. The Charles and the Mystic, Boston Harbor and the horizon-string of its islands. He had even painted the co-op itself, the long industrial block of the one-time Regal Lithograph Company cutting diagonally into view like the prow of an ocean liner, its burnt rose bricks glowing against a late sky caught over and over in its tall granite-silled windows, inlays of Bristol blue glass. The date was 2009, right on the cusp of the glass-shelled Seaport boom. She looked at Charlestown High Bridge, 1993, Rowes Wharf, 2000. The factual titles puzzled her even as some of the compositions approached abstraction and she drank a cup of wine from the refreshments table, never mind that anything less tannic than Shiraz always tasted to her like the smell of old keys. Torrey was still lazily playing cultural studies docent, Dante’s Virgil as distraction, when they stepped around a white-walled partition and said in their own voice, “Sid, it’s here.” She had no idea why she had expected The Earl of Twilight to be life-sized, except that she had seen him and he was; it was about the dimensions of the lower sash of a window and it soaked all the light in the gallery into itself, vibrating even more deeply blue than she remembered from staring into her screen as if trying to memorize the picture, desensitize herself to it. She could almost hear the sodium buzzing, its seedy light the color of dead bugs and baby aspirin. The wet smell of the canal was stronger than the brassy tang of the wine. Close enough to the canvas to make out the grain of the paint, the smoker’s face was still a sallow blur, the struts and grates and cinderblocks that backed him more pristinely rendered, the night-reflections crinkled at his feet. “He painted that for his brother.” Sid felt Torrey’s hand jump in hers. The nightmare recollection of the escaped figure went through her like nausea, but when she turned, the old-school Boston contralto belonged to one of the artists she had seen milling around the official end of the reception—a glam grandmother in a loose white T-shirt and denim cargo pants, short white hair dip-dyed the same brilliant faience blue as her nails and the glass beads of the heavy necklace she wore like a gorget, all tangled silver wire and chips of nacre and the parhelion flash of labradorite. Her glasses were flattened octagons. Torrey said immediately, “You look spectacular,” and the woman smiled in appreciative return. “Sheila Francis,” she introduced herself; her handshake was dry and wiry, her other hand occupied with a bottle of Harpoon IPA. She gestured toward the painting with it, a motion a little like a salute. “You know, I thought of Geoff for years as the one that got away, but I couldn’t have told you from or with what. Maybe that was it. You know about his brother?” Braced for a tidal flood of raconterie, Sid realized the woman was actually waiting for an answer; she must have managed, “No,” because Sheila Francis nodded, not judging and not surprised. “He didn’t talk that much about it. I don’t know that he’d even have told me, except I’d seen the photographs. He was born in Bradford. In the UK, not in Haverill. You could hear the accent to the end of his life,” and Sid thought fleetingly of the difference between a Boston artist and a Boston artist, when she had been born like Jonathan Richman by the Fenway and never felt like a native Bostonian at all. “Hilary was maybe eight, ten years younger. They were both artists. Geoff went to the Slade, had his velvet waistcoat paisley period—eminent blackmail material, once the psychedelia wore off. His style was different then, a lot more fells and watercolors, like all he wanted to do was make up for Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious and all the rest of those autochthonous war artists being dead. Hilary dropped out of the Bradford College of Art, got himself a studio in a derelict mill that sounded more like a squat, and started making sculptures out of local scrap. That’s what I saw the photos of. Just a couple of Polaroids, I think that was all Geoff had kept. Vivid, angry little things. You couldn’t tell if they had screws or bones. Some of them had names, Geoff said, like he was building his own little retinue of demons, but either he didn’t remember or didn’t want to tell me what they were. I didn’t push. His brother was murdered.” She said it flatly, an anti-punch line. What happened? Sid knew she was supposed to be asking, but the canal was at her back and twilight outside the windows and the nausea was making the taste of well-thumbed metal worse. She heard Torrey clear their throat and ask, mock lecturer to real audience in another of their seamless, not effortless code-switches. “Queer-bashed, probably. He was funny and delicate and I don’t know if he was gay or not, but Geoff thought so, even if he never met any of his boyfriends. He was found—there isn’t a canal through Bradford anymore, Geoff told me, but there’s a kind of crossroads where the start of it used to be, a winding hole. He was in it, but he hadn’t drowned. Geoff had to identify him. He didn’t talk about that at all.” Behind the silver angles of her glasses, Sheila Francis did not look ghoulish, just sad, as if she might have liked the chance to know Hilary Axtell, too. “He moved here about a year later. He painted that picture. And then he painted water, everywhere in Boston, until he had the second stroke. It was quick after that.” In the silence that was no such thing with the rest of the reception chatting or condoling around them, she drank from her beer as if to both of their memories. At least she had not been told that Geoffrey Axtell had been dredged out of the remains of the last canal in East Cambridge where he had painted his brother, or his brother’s demon, or whatever his art had made of both of them: Sid swallowed the last of the acrid white wine and said, “We didn’t know any of that. Thank you.” Sheila Francis shrugged; the track lighting glinted off her ear-cuffs, more silver and pinpricks of blue. An avatar of winter mornings, fragile ice at the top of the world. “Geoff wasn’t big on memorabilia. I won’t be around forever. There’s not much of him left now, just that painting and his sculptures if he ever sold them and a police file in a box somewhere. Somebody should know.” Out on the ice-plated asphalt of A Street, the wind came blasting off the channel like sandpaper below zero, but it was better than standing for another second in the co-op’s gallery, trapped between the gaze of something Sid could not trust to stay in indistinct paint and the friendly attention of a woman who had handed her a dead man’s memory like a party favor, as if she was not haunted enough. Maybe it was fury twisting her stomach after all, the hot-wired tremor in her hands as she fumbled with her scarf and her mackintosh and finally butted through the door with her coat flapping open, swallowed in the cold like a bloom of molten glass. The sky above the frontages of brick was bluer still than black, its crescent fleck of moon all but lost in the wing of seagulls lifting from the former Necco warehouse like a fountain of blown white paper, wheeling and drifting in the dusk. She heard their cries as distantly as something she had forgotten about. Past hipsters and ghost signs, she made it as far as the overpass with its roof of netted fairy lights—the eye-blurring blue of LEDs— before Torrey caught hold of her, let her gasp out the dry crack of breath that was not a sob on their smaller, stronger shoulder and then kissed her, cold-gloved, warm-lipped, as real as any urbex horror show. “He fucking transplanted him. He must have known. All that water and industry, all that brick and steel, all the things his brother loved until they killed him, it can’t have been an accident. I can’t be the only one who’s seen him. Oh, my God, Sheila, does she know he’s there? Is that why she told me the story? Am I supposed to fucking exorcise him now?” Her voice scraped and caromed off the underside of the bridge, a pigeon’s blundering wings; she was shivering in the circle of Torrey’s arms, the skunky leather of their back- patched bomber jacket and the white musk and red fruits of one of their antique perfumes. Their face in the mixed light looked as sculpted as Corinthian bronze and she shivered harder, thinking of Hilary Axtell’s art. In their rough-brushed, not entirely tenor voice, they were saying, “I don’t think you could see him till his brother died. I don’t think anyone could. I don’t know if you can exorcise him, either, if he was painted that deeply into the city, but I don’t think Axtell did it on purpose. It’s just that one picture. There’d be more if he’d made a spell of them,” as reasonably as if the question were algebra or anniversary restaurants, and Sid laughed suddenly, ribcage compressed with cold and love. Above their heads, the huff and squeal of brakes meant the 7 bus was taking the same straight shot toward the Summer Street Bridge as Car 393 of the Boston Elevated Railway, more than a drowned hundred of years ago. Ghosts traced over ghosts, gentrification over projects, nineteenth-century fill of gravel and cellar earth under their feet and the sea rising to reclaim its stolen flats and bays. As close as she could get to Torrey’s academic voice, Sid asked, “The author has always been dead, but was the artist ever alive?” Someone threw a bottle from the top of the overpass and they ran on up the catwalk stairs, swearing, into the salt-black night.

• • • •

In the afternoon on Broad Canal, the only smokers in view were a couple of young professionals on different levels of the plaza’s granite steps, like a stock photo. Coming around the corner from Main Street with a sixteen-ounce of matcha latte and a pistachio cherry tart, Sid had not really expected anything else, but the vacancy of the scene still struck her without reassurance, sharp as pencil lines under the clarity of winter sun. The water beneath the span of the First Street Bridge shivered with reflection, mantis-green and sandstone-gold. Steam glittered like crumpled foil from the power plant. Her shadow flattening over the old stone blocks of the canal wall was black as absence, a stalker or a faceless conscience matching her pace behind a grill of shadow railing, between the frames of shadow light poles. Carefully as a confidence trick, she watched the pale bricks and the chimneys, the stratospheric blue of the sky. She saw the sodium light still burning, daylit as memory. Until 1965, the canal had run as far inland as Portland Street, into the nascent heart of Tech Square with its MAC and CCA and IBM, the wave of the silicon future where an older wave of docks and wharves and factories had broken and dragged back—Torrey’s once and never city laid down in the littoral of time, and Sid allowed herself a moment between bites of marzipan crust to wonder what year it was where Hilary Axtell gazed out over twilit water, or whether the right question for a dead man in a painting nearly forty years old was how many. She had seen the maps to overlay office parks with ironworks, soap flakes intermingled with pharma R&D; it was an easier double vision than trying to keep an eye on both docks at once, like bones of bare stages where a wheelie bin and a frazzle of nylon rope were the props waiting for the one-man show. It still took an extra gulp of matcha to turn her back on them, her heart hammering faster than the green-earth bitterness under the steamed sweet milk. The dull steel railing chilled through her coat’s sleeves, her face and her fingers were already stiffening in the ice-clear air. She said aloud, as if she had not practiced the words in nightmares, “Why did he call you that? “The Earl of Twilight. That’s the part I keep wondering about. Was it a nickname? An in- joke? One of your pieces to begin with? There’s nothing about them online, incidentally. No photos, no descriptions, no mentions even in local retrospectives. I looked,” with Torrey in their sleeveless black sleep shirt nestled against her side, double- and triple-checking every possible lead until the search strings spun off into crimes she had never wanted to know were committed in West Yorkshire and even Daniel, disappeared into one of his deadlines so that Sid saw him almost exclusively at late hours when he ran downstairs to pick up his traditional marathon food of chicken tikka pizza, rattled his fingers on the door and stuck his head in, the classic undersunned geek with two or three piercings and a wing of Comet-green hair, to make sure she was all right. “Did your brother destroy them? His friend said he only kept a couple of snapshots. Did something”—she was not sure how paranoid she wanted to sound, even to a haunting—”happen to them? I couldn’t even find a picture of you. I can’t even be sure you really lived or died.” She said it deliberately, offensively, and nothing answered her beyond the turbines and condensers of the Kendall Cogeneration Station, the rumble-strip bump and rush of cars out on the Cambridge Parkway. Staring so hard into the Impressionist mirror of the water that it blurred without wind: “I think you did.” Two days ago she had walked eastward over the Longfellow, not slowing or speeding even when her shoulders hunched like a blow against the slush-colored overcast; she had returned just as steadily, looking nowhere but straight down the track of the bridge where the Red Line racketed back and forth from the earth, and she had reached the turnstiles at Kendall sweat-soaked with the effort of not breaking into a run. I knew they were chasing me, she had tried to explain to Torrey afterward, hands wrapped hard around small hot cups of tea while the dan dan noodles she was still too jumpy to eat cooled between them, just like I knew the sun was setting and any second it would start to snow. I couldn’t outrun them, but I knew I had to try. I kept thinking the bridge was shorter, there couldn’t be much further to go . . . He didn’t even die here, it’s stupid, but he had brought his death with him as surely as Geoffrey Axtell had brought his memory and now none of them could be separated any more than I-93 could be unwoven from the Zakim or Government Center peeled off the scouring of Scollay Square. She dreamed of bricks and machineries overlaid like double exposures, different waters reflecting from the same angle. Sid had always wanted to get to the bottom of her city, but until she woke she could not remember which one. It was all the same to Axtell, both of them: a ghost that might only have been one man’s grief with another’s face. When the dams failed at last and the tide rolled up the Charles, would he still be there on his dock of weeds and heavy metals, his cigarette glowing under the dusk-blue water like a phantom light? She thought of cubicles of brackish salt, bridges skimming the storm-surge. The beacons of the dead like bioluminescence in the waves. The scratch of the match-strike was so brisk and dry, she almost could not place it; then she smelled the smoke coiling on the sunlit air. She did not imagine for a second that she was hallucinating, watching Hilary Axtell flick a spent paper match over the rail of the boardwalk as if he had never heard of the EPA. His slouch and his black sweater were indelible, but his brother’s brush had never dressed him in that secondhand-looking navy duffel coat, looped a heather-red scarf around his neck and stuffed a black woolen hat in his pocket and left him bare-headed to the wind, his hair the silvering tousle of beech bark; even on clear evenings, she had never been able to look full into that tired, whimsical face. It was younger than hers, dented hungrily around the cheekbones, a glint under his hair that she realized was an earring of silver or steel. He looked pensive and windblown, the tip of his nose reddening prosaically in the cold. She could have drawn every loose-limbed line of him from memory. Close enough to be lapped in his envelope of old nicotine and rosin solder, she watched a man who had never been alive in the city of his death drag on his cigarette, exhale a stream of smoke that might have been warm as breath or merely ashes; she was not surprised, finally, which did not mean she was not terrified, when he rested his hand on the rail and looked over curiously at her. His eyes were not filled with time, or twilight, or the trapped and restless water of lost canals; they were grey and Sid thought he might have needed glasses if he had lived. She had a sudden flash of his face behind a welding mask, metal-fleshed as any of his creations. How much of him are you? she wanted to ask. How much more or less if he had grown around an armature of iron instead of a shell of paint? As steadily as she had watched warehouses knocked to bricks and high tide curling through the streets of the Seaport, she made herself hold his dead man’s gaze and not think of a bridge half-recalled in snow and sunset, the night colors of a canvas that had made a city into a spell. His eyes narrowed a little, with the wind or astigmatism, but they widened in a surprise as candid as a clown’s as she reached over and took the cigarette from his hand. She wanted to remember afterward if she had expected its paper to smear like turpentine or drowned rust between her fingers, if after everything she had still believed in a canal that could be restored to innocent emptiness like brownfields turned back to neighborhoods or a sea not yet swelled by the Anthropocene or if she had known even as she felt her heart beat faster than panic and keep on beating that all she might free him from was his stasis of paint. Lying awake in Torrey’s arms, Sid remembered only the iridescence of ice and oil, the canyon-shadows of old and young brick, the quick crease of laughter lightening a cold- pinched face while the traffic out on the drawbridges hissed like acetylene. She might have heard glass breaking, like a fever. All she had felt between her fingers was ash. She would never quite know, she thought, what she had unbound into her endlessly building, sea- dredged, sinking city, not unless she met him again under the water, in the twilight of the harbor or the river’s scrap-silted bed. She imagined him in mirror of his brother’s art, constructing the skeletal maps of Boston to come. No matter the innovations it boasted, she would not look for them in the district off Broad Canal. She knew the future had always been too late.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sonya Taaffe (https://sonyataaffe.com/)] reads dead languages and tells living stories. Her short fiction and Rhysling Award-winning poetry have been collected most recently in the Lambda-nominated Forget the Sleepless Shores and previously in Singing Innocence and Experience, Postcards from the Province of Hyphens, A Mayse-Bikhl, and Ghost Signs. She lives with her husband and two cats in Somerville, Massachusetts, where she writes about film for Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/sovay) and remains proud of naming a Kuiper belt object.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight My Boy Builds Coffins Gary McMahon | 5551 words

Susan found the first one when she was tidying his room. Chris was at school, and she’d been sprucing up the house before popping off to collect him after the afternoon session. The ground floor was done; the lounge was spick-and-span (as her mother had loved to say) and the kitchen was so clean it belonged in a show home. The downstairs bathroom was clean enough for a royal inspection. The en-suite would do, she supposed, and her and Dan’s bedroom was the best it could be considering they both liked to dump their dirty clothes all over the floor and the furniture. Now it was time to tackle Chris’s room, which was about as messy as any eight-year-old could hope to achieve. She pushed open the door, holding her breath, and walked into the chaos. His blow-up punch bag had been moved into the centre of the room and left there. The floor was littered with books, magazines, Top Trumps playing cards, rogue counters from board games, art supplies, and—oddly—old cardboard toilet roll holders. “Jesus, Chris . . .” She tiptoed across the room to the window, trying not to step on anything that might break. When she got there, she pushed open the window to let in some fresh air. The room smelled stale, as if it hadn’t been lived in for months. “Okay,” she murmured. “Let’s get this shit sorted.” First she tackled the floor. Patiently, she picked up everything and put it away where it belonged—or at least where she thought it belonged, or where it looked like it belonged. After twenty minutes the room was already looking much better. At least she could move around without fear of treading on something. Next she tidied up the top of his desk—where she found old DVDs without cases, more playing cards, flakes of dried modelling clay, small stones from the garden, bits and pieces of magic tricks, and other sundry boy-items. The desk was almost clear, and she was looking for a drawer into which she could squeeze yet more art supplies, when she found the coffin. It was in the bottom drawer, where at one time Chris had kept his football shirts—one a year, from birth, because his dad supported Manchester United. She stood silently and stared into the drawer. It was empty but for the coffin. It was made out of what looked to be a fine grade timber—pale and with a neat wood grained pattern. The wood was unpainted and untreated; it was bare, nude, but smooth, as if it had been sanded. Attached to the lid of the coffin was a small brass plate with the word “Daddy” engraved across it in a neat, delicate script. For a moment Susan felt as if someone else had entered the room behind her. She resisted the urge to turn and look, but she felt a presence there. She knew it was nonsense, there was no one there, but all the same she sensed it. Standing right behind her, perhaps even peering over her shoulder. At the coffin. She moved to her knees and looked closer. The coffin was small. It was probably the right size to hold an Action Man doll (“It isn’t a doll,” Chris always protested, “It’s an action figure!”) and she wondered if that was indeed what the casket contained. Carefully, she reached into the drawer and placed her hands on the sides of the coffin. She lifted the coffin out of the drawer, stood, and carried it over to the bed. She put it down and thought about what she was going to do. Then, on impulse that wasn’t really an impulse because she’d been planning it all along, she reached down and lifted the lid off the coffin. Inside was a thin layer of dirt. She ran her fingers through the dirt, feeling its gritty reality. It felt soft and slightly damp, like soil from the garden. “What the hell is this?” Part of her tensed in anticipation of a reply from that unseen figure: the one that wasn’t there, oh no, not really there at all. Because she was all alone in her son’s room, wasn’t she?

She broached the subject over dinner that evening. Chris was tucking into his chicken, gravy smeared across his lips and his cheeks: the boy couldn’t eat anything without wearing it. Dan was reading a computer printout at the table as he nibbled at his own meal, taking small, delicate bites. She was so sick of asking him not to read at the table that she’d stopped saying it over a month ago. “Chris.” The boy looked up from his meal. He smiled. “Yes, Mummy.” His teeth were covered in gravy, too. “I tidied your room today.” “Sorry, Mummy. I meant to do it, but I forgot.” She sighed. “Yes, I know . . . just like you forget everything, except sweets and comics and DVDs.” He grinned. “Can I watch a DVD tonight?” “No,” said Dan, putting down his printout. “It’s a school night. That’s a weekend treat.” Chris began to pout. He picked at his chicken with his fork. The tines scraped against the plate, making Susan wince. He’d stopped having the tantrums over a month ago, but there was always the risk that he’d go off on one again. “Listen, Chris . . . about your room.” “Yeah.” He didn’t look up—he was sulking. “I found something. In a drawer.” Dan glanced at her, raising his eyebrows in a question. She shook her head: she would deal with this. “Mummy found something . . . a little bit strange.” Chris looked up from his food. He was frowning. “What was it?” “Let me show you.” She stood and pushed her chair away from the table. She crossed the room and took the coffin out of the cupboard where she’d put it for safekeeping. She carried it back to the table, cleared the condiments out of the way, and set it down in front of her family. It felt ritualistic, like the beginning of some obscure rite. She pushed the thought away. It wasn’t helpful. “This is what I found.” Dan stared at the coffin. His face wasn’t sure what expression to form. Chris smiled at her. “Do you know what this is, Chris?” Dan glanced at his son, remaining silent for now. “Yes. It’s a box.” The boy reached out for the coffin, but she moved it across the table and out of his way, as if it might infect him or something. “Where did you get it, darling?” She was trying to keep things light, but a strange mood had begun to descend upon the dining table. It felt as if a shadow had entered the room, dimming the lights, and the temperature had dropped by a few degrees. “Well, Chris. Where did you get this . . . box? Where did it come from?” “I made it, Mummy. I made it for Daddy.” He turned to face Dan, his small face beaming, his eyes large and expectant, as if he’d done something miraculous and was due a large reward. Some sweets, perhaps. Or a new DVD. “I . . .” Dan looked from her to the boy, and then back again. “Thank you,” he said, absurdly. Then he looked at Susan again, searching for help. “Did you make it at school?” “No. Here. At home.” Chris’s smile dropped. His small face seemed to crumple inwards. He was clearly making a concerted effort not to lose his temper, despite the odd situation, and she loved him for it. “Well who taught you how to make it? I mean, someone must have helped you?” The boy shook his head. Refusing to say anything more. “Well?” He shook his head again. Susan intervened before things became more fractious: “Okay, you pop off and get your jim-jams on, and after you’ve done your teeth I’ll read to you for a while before you go to sleep.” Dan walked away, obviously troubled. Chris dragged his feet as he slowly left the room.

III

“So what the hell’s going on here?” Dan was pacing the floor and drinking whisky. He looked harried. His hair was a mess from where he’d been running his fingers through it— like he always did when he was stressed. His face was pale and his shirt was hanging out of the waistband of his trousers. “I mean, this isn’t . . . normal. It isn’t normal behaviour, is it?” “Just calm down a minute. Let’s think this through.” “That’s easy for you to say,” he said, his shoulders slumping. “He didn’t build you a coffin.” “He’s eight years old, Dan. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He probably saw it in a magazine, or something. Or on the telly. I bet he thought he was doing something nice for you.” Dan laughed: a single barking sound. “Fucking hell, Susan.” He only ever called her that when he was anxious, usually it was Sue. “Maybe we should call someone. A doctor . . . or a psychiatrist. Get him seen to again. Maybe this is to do with the old trouble.” “Don’t be silly. You’re overreacting. We don’t need anyone. He’s over all that anger business. This is . . . different. Something we can cope with ourselves.” Dan did not seem convinced. “You saw the craftsmanship on that thing. Look at it.” He strode across the room and picked up the coffin. His mouth twisted into an unconscious grimace, as if he were touching something rotten. “Look at it. The perfectly mitred joints, the smooth finish . . . this is beautiful work.” The way he said that word, he gave it the opposite effect to what it really meant. “An eight-year-old kid can’t do this kind of work . . .” He sat down in the armchair, looking tired and defeated. He still held the coffin, but loosely. He didn’t seem to want to let it go. “I don’t pretend to understand this, either, honey, but I think we need to tread carefully . . . just in case it triggers an episode, or something.” He was rubbing the side of the coffin with his thumb. “It’s got dirt inside . . . grave dirt.” “Don’t be silly.” “Grave dirt,” he said again, as if repetition might diminish the power of the words. “My grave . . .” “It’s soil from the garden.” She got up and walked over to him, snatched away the coffin. She moved over to the fireplace and put the coffin down on the mantelpiece, next to last year’s school photo: Chris smiled at her from inside the frame, his hair neatly combed, his shirt collars sticking out from the neck of his grey school sweater, his cheeks shining from the heat of the photographer’s lights. He looked like a typical small boy, but underneath it all he’d been a mess of conflicting emotions, a child governed by an inexplicable rage. “Okay,” said Dan, behind her. “So we tread softly.” He sounded more relaxed, less wound up. She turned around. He was still seated and pouring another large shot of whisky into the glass. “Could I have one of those?” She held out her own glass, but made no move to approach him. “I could really use it.” She smiled. He nodded. She walked over, but instead of waiting for him to pour she knelt down before him and ran her hands across his thighs. “It’ll be okay. He’s just a kid. He had no idea of the effect something like this might have.” “But the workmanship . . .” Dan’s face was pleading. It made him look years younger, almost like a child himself. “I know . . . it’s weird, I’ll admit that. But that’s all it is—weird and unusual. There’s nothing to worry about. I promise. We’ll deal with it, as a family. No more pills and doctors.”

IV A few days later she found the second coffin. This one had been left on her bed. It was a Saturday and Dan was out playing five-a-side football, making cross-field runs and dirty tackles just to relax. She was hanging up some clothes, and when she turned around from the wardrobe to face the room, the coffin was there, on her pillow. The brass plate on this one read “Mummy.” It hadn’t been there when she entered the room. She was sure. She would have noticed. “Chris?” There was no reply. The house was quiet. Outside, she could hear traffic on the nearby main road, some kids shouting on another street, and the sound of someone mowing their lawn. They were real noises, the sounds that connected you to reality. There was nothing to fear here, in this friendly little neighbourhood. “Are you there, baby?” She heard a shuffling sound in the hall. For a moment, she was afraid to cross the room and look through the doorway. Some unreasonable fear held her there, afraid of her own home. Her own son. The noises outside now seemed as if they were miles away, part of some other, safer world. She recalled the worst of his rages, not that long ago. He’d left her battered and bruised, but the worst pain was in knowing that someone created from her own flesh and blood was capable of losing control to such a startling degree. But that was over now. He was better. They’d worked things out, with the help of a good child psychologist and some medication. There was no need to go back, to return to any of that. This time was different. “Chris!” She used the strength of her resolve to fuel her, and moved quickly to the door. When she looked outside, the landing was empty. Sunlight lanced through the landing window, capturing the dust motes in the air like flecks of epidermis suspended in fluid. She went back inside the room and sat down on the bed. She stared at the coffin on the pillow. Outside, the sound of the lawn mower cut out. The screaming kids moved away and their din began to fade. The traffic noises seemed to quieten. Susan reached out and lifted up the lid of the coffin. As she’d expected, inside was a thin layer of soil. She picked up the coffin and shook it, disturbing the loose particles of earth. As she watched, something was uncovered. She reached inside with her forefinger and thumb, pushing aside the soil, and picked out an object. It was her wedding ring. She looked at her hand—at her wedding finger—and saw a pale band of flesh, a tan line where the ring should have been. This was new. There had been nothing but dirt in Dan’s coffin. Her stomach tightened; her head began to throb dully. She couldn’t remember taking off her wedding ring. In fact, she hardly ever did so, not even in the bath or the shower. She was superstitious; she liked to keep it on, so as not to tempt fate. She remembered an old friend who’d lost her wedding ring, and three months later her husband had dropped down dead from a sudden heart attack. Nonsense, she realised, but still . . . you just never could tell. Things like this were symbolic. Things like wedding rings. And coffins. She glanced up, looking at the doorway. There was no sound. No movement. Just dead air, empty space. She put the lid back on the coffin and backed away from the bed, as if it were some kind of ferocious animal that had come into the room. She picked up her mobile phone from the bedside table, and then she wondered who the hell she was thinking of calling anyway. Dan? Her mother? The fucking police? This was stupid. It was insane. Her boy built coffins—that was all. There was nothing wrong with that, not really. It was just a bit strange, a little offbeat. No harm done; nobody was getting hurt. At least he was taking an interest in arts and crafts. Susan stifled a mad giggle. She put down the phone and left the room, leaving the coffin in there. Chris’s room was just along the hall. She could see from where she was standing that his door was shut. She walked along the landing and stood outside, listening. She couldn’t hear a thing from inside his room, not even his television or his music playing. She reached out and grabbed the door handle, turned it, pushed open the door. Chris was sitting on his bed reading a book. He glanced up as she stepped inside. He smiled. He looked entirely normal; he was the same as always, her beautiful little boy. He wasn’t a monster. He hadn’t been taken over by some alien force. He was her boy. He built coffins. “Everything okay, son?” He nodded. “I’m reading.” He held up his book, cover facing outwards, for her to see. “Moshi Monsters,” he said. “I love them.” He turned his attention back to the book; his face became serious as he continued to read. “Chris?” “Yeah.” He was distracted. He didn’t want to talk. He wanted to read. He’d always loved books, even when he was being a brat. He was a good little reader—top of the class in English. Maths, too. A clever boy. A good kid. A reader. A builder of coffins. “Did you put something in Mummy’s room earlier? When I was hanging up the clothes. Did you bring me a present?” “Yes.” He nodded. “I built you a box. Just like Daddy’s.” She swallowed. Her throat was dry. “Why, baby? Why did you build Mummy a box?” It was the first time the question had been asked. She and Dan had agreed to approach the situation with caution, in case they said the wrong thing or pushed too hard. They’d been monitoring Chris—his moods, his speech, everything they could think of. He’d been just the same as always . . . their bright young son, mended now. Nothing was different. He was acting the same as always. Apart from this, she thought. Apart from the coffins. And the thought made her admit that they were lying to each other. Chris was acting different, and they were both too confused and afraid to confront these changes in their boy. His rages might be over, but something else had replaced them. These days he was . . . secretive. He kept things from them. Things like this: the origins of his coffin-making. “I thought you’d like one.” Still, he didn’t look up from his book. “Why’s that, baby?” She took another step inside the room, letting the door shut to behind her. “Dunno. Just thought you would.” He looked up, smiling. “Where did you get the soil, baby? The soil you put in the . . . boxes.” “Out of the hole.” The world seemed to compress around her, threatening to crush her. “What hole?” “The one outside, in the garden. The magic hole, down beside the back wall.” As if in a dream, she moved across the room and stood at the window. She looked down at the garden to the rear of the house, taking in the expansive lawn, the trees that grew alongside the dividing fence, and the small water feature Dan had put in three summers ago. There was a dry stone wall at the bottom boundary, separating their garden from the field beyond. The grass and bushes there were overgrown; Dan had neglected the area because he said he liked it to look wild, like the countryside. Wild. Untamed. “Where’s this hole, baby? Tell Mummy where the magic hole is.” He was still on the bed. Still reading. He seemed utterly unconcerned. “Down there . . . at the bottom of the garden. Right next to where we buried Mr. Jump last year.” Mr. Jump was Chris’s pet rabbit. He’d frozen to death the previous winter, and they’d conducted a small family funeral involving an old shoe box, a children’s bible, and two flimsy wooden lolly sticks glued together in a cruciform pattern to make a grave marker. “Okay, baby. Thank you. Thanks for making me the box.” She turned away and left the room, walking back along the landing and down the stairs. She counted the stairs as she descended, just to help herself remain calm. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to be frightened of, but she was terrified. It was like being a child again, fearful of the dark but not knowing why: scared of the unknown. She sat down in the kitchen and waited for the kettle to boil, then she made a pot of tea and waited for Dan to come home, rubbing at her bare wedding finger with the ball of her thumb.

They waited until Chris was asleep. They didn’t want to disturb him, and if he saw them digging around out there he might start to feed off their fear. They were sure of nothing, but they knew that they didn’t want to give their son any cause for further confusion. It crossed Susan’s mind that this is what they did in every horror film she’s ever seen: they waited for darkness before making their move. It always ended badly. “What the hell do you think we’re going to find out there?” Dan was standing by the back door, bathed in the light from the kitchen. He was holding a shovel and wearing his gardening clothes—torn jeans, a baggy sweater, and thick leather gloves. Susan held the torch. “I have no idea, but we have to take a look. Don’t we?” She realised that she wanted him to say no. She was desperate for him to put the brakes on the situation and make them both return indoors. She didn’t want to make the decisions; she wanted him to step up and take control. “I suppose you’re right.” She waited for a moment, looking up at the sky, searching for inspiration. It was black, the stars were tiny, and the moon was nothing but a pale, undistinguished saucer amid the wispy clouds. “I’m scared,” she said. Dan took a few steps towards her, paused, and then came the rest of the way. He rested the shovel against the wall and put his arms around her, drawing her close. “I know . . . but this is our son we’re talking about. We have to find out what’s going on. What choice do we have?” She nodded against his shoulder, saying nothing. This wasn’t a horror film; it was real life. Even if things got messy, she and Dan would sort it all out. It’s what people did, in real life. “Who the hell are we meant to turn to for help? We don’t even know what’s going on.” Her voice was strained. Dan pressed against her. “We’ll think about that when we have some facts.” She nodded again, closed her eyes and sniffed at him. She’d always loved how he smelled; his aroma was a comfort. Whenever he was away on business, she slept with his football shirt on her pillow, just so she could smell him in the night. “Let’s go,” she whispered. He pulled away and grabbed the shovel. She followed him across the grass, along the fence line, to the bottom of the garden, pointing the jittery torch beam ahead of them. They kicked at the weeds, looking for anything that might be called a hole. At first they didn’t see a thing, but after a short while Susan stumbled, almost twisting her ankle as she stepped on the edge of the hole. “Here,” she whispered. “I’ve found it.” She reached down and rubbed at her ankle. “Why are you whispering? “I have no fucking idea.” It was a funny moment, she supposed, but neither of them laughed. Dan started pulling at the weeds, tearing them out and throwing them against the dry stone wall. She put down the torch and bent down to help him, peering into the hole. It was small— about the same diameter as her soup pan at home—but it looked deep. It was too dark to tell exactly how deep, but she couldn’t see the bottom, even when she shone the torch’s beam directly into the hole. Before long they’d cleared away the weeds and the overgrown grass from around the hole. It was remarkably neat and round, as if it had been bored into the ground by a machine. Susan knelt down at the side of the hole and bent over it, trying again to judge its depth. “Here,” said Dan. “Drop this down.” He handed her a small, smooth stone. She dropped the stone down the hole. Waited. Didn’t hear it hit bottom. Picking up the torch again, she shone the light down the hole, but it was swallowed by the darkness down there. “What the fuck?” said Dan. She turned and looked at him. He was nothing but a dark silhouette standing against the sky; he had no face. He was form without substance. “Let’s just cover it over,” she said. “Fill it in and forget about it.” “No,” said Dan. “I have to know.” “Have to know what?” He leaned down towards her. For once, she failed to detect his comforting smell. “I don’t know.” Dan started digging. She moved out of the way, staying well back to give him some room. He dug the hole wider, creating a circular pit roughly two feet in diameter. The pit tapered inwards, down towards the original hole, which sat at its centre, black and threatening. “You can’t just keep digging,” she said. “What if you never reach the end?” Dan paused in his labour, wiping the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. “What else can I do?” He resumed digging, hunched over the shovel like an old man. Susan glanced up at Chris’s bedroom window. The curtains were closed and the lights were off, but she was certain that she could make out the shape of someone standing there, perhaps watching them. She closed her eyes, wishing it away, but when she opened them again the shape was still there. She stared at it for a long time, and eventually it blended into the background, becoming less clear, a stain on the fabric of night. Perhaps there had been nothing there all along. “Shit,” said Dan. She looked over at him. He stopped digging, and glanced up at her, looking into her eyes. Slowly, Dan bent down and moved something around with his fingers in the ditch. He straightened up, holding whatever it was in his hands. He leaned forward, into the light, and held out his hands to show her what he’d found. Dan was holding what Susan supposed must be some of Mr. Jump’s bones. But there was something wrong with them: they were twisted, distorted, as if proximity to the hole had warped them, pulled them out of shape. The skull was elongated, weasel-like; the ribs were fused together, like white armour, and the forelegs were crooked, ending in grasping, claw- like bony paws. Dan threw away the bones, scattering them into the darkness. A look of intense distaste crossed his face, and then he picked up the shovel and continued with his task. It wasn’t long before the shovel scraped against something solid. “What is it?” “I think . . . I think it’s a coffin.” “Another one?” He shook his head. “This one’s bigger.” She stood and helped him clear away the earth from the coffin. It looked exactly the same as the others, except it was much larger. It was made from the same fine timber, possessed a similar hand-rubbed finish, and had a brass plate attached to the lid. When Susan shone the torch onto the coffin lid, the word she saw etched onto the plate made her go cold. It said Son. By the time they’d unearthed the coffin in its entirety, the sun was starting to rise. The sky in the east was smeared with red; the clouds there looked painted on. It took both of them to man-handle the coffin out of the hole, but still it wasn’t too heavy. “Shall we . . .” “Open it?” Susan nodded. She knew there would be nothing in there, except perhaps some more dirt. It wasn’t heavy enough to have anything more substantial inside. But they had to be sure. They could leave nothing to chance. Dan used the shovel to wedge open the lid. He slid the sharp end of the shovel’s blade into the joint and stepped on the handle. The lid popped open with the sound of splintering wood; it jerked to one side, revealing a glimpse of the interior. Dan bent down and heaved the lid across the coffin, shoving it onto the ground at the side of the hole. The coffin was filled almost to the top with torn scraps of paper, like the cheap packaging that came with items sent through the post. “I don’t want to see.” She took a step backwards, away from the coffin. Dan ignored her. He reached down and began to push the paper out of the way, scattering some of the scraps across the ground. Susan held her breath. She saw a flash of colour: pale pink, like the petals of the roses in her garden. It was skin. Human skin. Dan kept clearing away the paper, and she knew what she was going to see even before it was uncovered. She tried to deny the sight, but she couldn’t. She wished herself blind, but it didn’t work. Son Lying in repose, with his hands crossed neatly over his chest, was Chris. He was naked. His shallow chest had sunken slightly; his forearms were unbearably thin. His face was narrow, like that of an old man. He looked like he’d been dead for a long time, but not long enough for his body to rot. It was as if something were keeping him that way, cold and lifeless, yet pristine: like the sanctified remains of a saint. “Dan . . . Oh, Dan. What the hell is it?” Dan fell down onto his knees and lifted the corpse partially out of the coffin. The body was obviously light; Dan lifted it with ease and stumbled slightly. The arms slid away from the chest, the head tilted to one side, the dark hair falling wispily across the thin white face, the bony legs bent and the knees came up, as if it were trying to stand. “No,” said Dan, as if he couldn’t quite accept what he was seeing, what he was holding. “Oh, no . . . fuck no. Not this.” Susan looked up at Chris’s bedroom window. The figure was still there, but now the curtains were open. The figure was small—much smaller and thinner than their son. The figure’s hands looked unnaturally long and seemed to wriggle too many fingers as they reached up to twitch the curtains further apart. As it flapped limply forward, pressing its dark, smooth face up against the glass, she was reminded of a crudely fashioned doll or a puppet—something animated, but clumsily; a thing that should never have been given life, a hastily assembled imitation of the human form. She turned back to her husband and sank to the ground. He was sitting on the ground, rocking and wailing as he clasped their pale son to his breast. “He’s too light . . . there’s nothing left inside him . . .” Dan looked up and turned their boy’s face towards her. It was oddly blank, as if waiting for an expression to be carved there. His body looked light, empty, just as much of a puppet as the thing now capering inside his room. “. . . nothing left inside . . .” Dazed, afraid, confused to the point of idiocy, Susan rose slowly and awkwardly to her feet and started walking stiffly towards the house. Whatever was in there—whatever had taken the essence of her son; her wonderful son who’d built such fine, fine coffins—she would find it and she would kill it. Before she lost her sanity completely, she would make it pay. Susan dropped the torch. She would not need light where she was going. It might, in fact, be better to work in darkness. As she became more surefooted and began to run, she made herself a promise: before this day was done, she would force whatever had replaced Chris into a tiny coffin of its own, and dance upon its grave.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Gary McMahon is the author of nine novels and several short story collections and novellas. His latest book release is the award-nominated novella “The Grieving Stones”. His acclaimed short fiction has been reprinted in various “Year’s Best” volumes. Gary lives with his family in West Yorkshire, where he trains in Shotokan karate and obsesses over the minutiae of life in search of stories to tell. Website: www.garymcmahon.com BOOK EXCERPTS The Cipher Kathe Koja | 4880 words

Winner of the Bram Stoker Award and Locus Award, finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, and named one of io9.com’s “Top 10 Debut Science Fiction Novels That Took the World By Storm.” With a new afterword by Maryse Meijer, author of Heartbreaker and Rag. “Black. Pure black and the sense of pulsation, especially when you look at it too closely, the sense of something not living but alive.” When a strange hole materializes in a storage room, would-be poet Nicholas and his feral lover Nakota allow their curiosity to lead them into the depths of terror. “Wouldn’t it be wild to go down there?” says Nakota. Nicholas says, “We’re not.” But no one is in control, and their experiments lead to obsession, violence, and a very final transformation for everyone who gets too close to the Funhole.

Coming September 15, 2020 from Meerkat Press.

Nakota, who saw it first: long spider legs drawn up beneath her ugly skirt, wise mouth pursed into nothing like a smile. Sitting in my dreary third-floor flat, on a dreary thrift shop chair, the window light behind her dull and gray as dirty fur and she alive, giving off her dark continuous sparks. Around us the remains of this day’s argument, squashed beer cans, stolen bar ashtray sloped full. “You know it,” she said, “the black-hole thing, right? In space? Big dark butthole,” and she laughed, showing those tiny teeth, fox teeth, not white and not ivory yellow either like most people’s, almost bluish as if with some undreamed-of decay beneath them. Nakota would rot differently from other people; she would be the first to admit it. She lit a cigarette. She was the only one of my friends who still smoked, without defiance or a guilty flourish, smoked like she breathed but not as often. Black cigarettes, and sweetened mineral water. “So. You gonna touch it today?” “No.” Another unsmile. “Wiener.” I shrugged. “Not really.” “Nicholas Wiener.” So I didn’t answer her. Back to the kitchen. Get your own mineral water. The beer was almost too cold, it hurt going down. When I came back to the living room, what passed for it —big windows, small floor space, couch, bed and bad chair—she smiled at me, the real thing this time. Sometimes I thought I was the only one who ever saw that she was beautiful, who ever had. God knows there wasn’t much, but I had eyes for it all. “Let’s go look at it,” she said. The one argument there was no resisting. Quietly, we had learned to do it quietly, down the stairs, turn right on the first landing (second floor to you), past the new graffiti that advised LEESA IS A HORE (no phone number, naturally; thanks a lot assholes) and the unhealthy patina of aging slurs, down the hall to what seemed, might be, some sort of storage room. Detergent bottles, tools, when you opened the door, jumble of crap on the floor, and beyond that a place, a space, the dust around it pale and easily dispersed. Behold the Funhole. “Shit,” Nakota said, as she always did, her prayer of wonder. She knelt, bending low and supporting herself on straight-stiff arms, closer than I ever did, staring at it. Into it. It was as if she could kneel there all day, painful position but you knew she didn’t feel it, looking and looking. I took my spot, a little behind her, to the left, my own prayer silence: what to say before the unspeakable? Black. Not darkness, not the absence of light but living black. Maybe a foot in diameter, maybe a little more. Pure black and the sense of pulsation, especially when you looked at it too closely, the sense of something not living but alive, not even something but some— process. Rabbithole, some strange motherfucking wonderland, you bet. Get somebody named Alice, tie a string to her . . . We’d discussed it all, would discuss it again, probably tonight, and Nakota would sit as she always did, straight-backed as a priestess, me getting ripped and ripping into poetry, writing shit that was worse than unreadable in the morning, when I would wake—more properly afternoon, and she long gone, off to her job, unsmiling barmaid at Club 22, and me late again for the video store. She might not come again for days, or a day, one day maybe never. I knew: friends, yeah, but it was the Funhole she wanted. You can know something and never think about it, if you’re any good at it. Me, now, I’ve been avoiding so much for so long that the real trick becomes thinking straight. Beside me, her whisper: “Look at it.” I sometimes thought it had a smell, that negative place; we’d made the expected nervous fart jokes, the name itself—well, you can guess. But there was some kind of smell, not bad, not even remotely identifiable, but there, oh my yes. I would know that smell forever, know it in the dark (ho-ho) from a city block away. I couldn’t forget something that weird. For the millionth time: “Wouldn’t it be wild to go down there?” And me, on cue and by rote, “Yeah. But we’re not.” Its edges were downhill and smooth. They asked for touch. Not me, said the little red hen, the little chicken, uh-uh. Smell rising around me, it did that sometimes, Nakota insisted she could almost catch the scent at its strongest (which meant nothing, she was a nose-drop addict, she couldn’t smell her own shit which she claimed didn’t stink anyway) rising humid as a steam cloud but who knew from what fluid, what wetness, its humidity had birth? A moist center? Things, inside? That was Nakota’s guess, but I knew, absolutely knew that it was the Funhole itself, the black fact of it, sending up that tangible liquidy smell. How long, tonight? An hour? Twenty minutes? No telling till we got back to my flat, checked the clock; it was time to do that. Rising, more reluctant, her hair in the dusty half- dark as black as the Funhole, short chop swinging around those fierce cheekbones, elbows bending as she sat straight and then stood; my knees cracked, we both jumped, then smiled on a breath, got out. Up the stairs, down my hall. “You coming in?” Stopping before we reached my door, her headshake. “No.” “Got your smokes?” She patted her skirt pocket, she liked those stupid ugly resale-shop skirts, fake fifties poodle skirts with poodles that she restitched into gargoyles, fanged lizards worthy of the most hideous touristy fake kimonos. That, and T-shirts of bands so obscure even I’d never heard of them. God. Half the time she looked like a bag of rags someone’d left out for the Salvation Army. Or the garbage man. “How ‘bout your nose drops?” You know, you should shut up, I advised myself, but not fast enough to miss her scorn: “My mother’s dead, thanks, I look after myself now.” Then a grave glance, the closest she came to kindly. “I’ll see you,” she said, squeezed my elbow— her signature goodbye—and left, that graceful trudge, puke-colored skirt swinging around thin hips. What, me disappointed? I used to know those hips, yeah, felt the pointy midge of those bones, bony back, small small tits, I once compared them to SuperBalls and she laughed through her fury; she couldn’t help it, she always did like my jokes. The last time we’d made love, measure it in years, it had been at my drunken insistence and bad, oh, was it bad? It was so bad that halfway into it, and her, I knew in sudden bright horror that she was actually being nice to me. This was so disorienting that I crawled off her, away, into the bathroom where I sat hunched among the towels heaped wet and dirty on the wet and dirty floor, close by the toilet, shaking my head. She appeared, naked and thin as a ruler, stood in the diffused light of the bedroom and observed that she had never actually made a man sick before. I think it was her smile, all teeth, that made me finally barf. But: that cold grin, Nakota, I wanted her still, always, in the dreamy way you want to dive the Marianas trench, or walk in space: you know you never will, so it’s okay to moon over it. Like mooning over the Funhole, only not quite. Long ago she had made it plain that those days were over, her deliberate graft of a scab over the ridiculous wound of my love, or something equally stupid but just as painful; a romantic, me, in my own sick wistful way. I can take a hint, but I can’t live with it. Inside I cranked shut the windows I’d opened for her cigarette stink, leaving the one by the couchbed open; I’d always liked night air, especially when I was a kid and was told it was bad for me. Shut that window! You’ll get pneumonia! Very cool outside tonight, maybe even kissing forty; stupid Nakota, no jacket. You’ll get pneumonia. Hunger headache, in the mirror my sallow face pale. Okay, what’s to eat. I hated to shop, it all turned into shit eventually anyway, so as a result there was usually very little to eat and none of it very good. Or fresh, but I was inured to mold, I could eat anything and keep it down. Beer kills the germs, I told people. Tonight it was cracker-and-peanut-butter sandwiches, the peanut butter cheap and thick, the consistency, I told myself as the crackers broke and crumbled, of actual shit. Though of course I had never eaten any, not that I remembered, and that’s the sort of thing you would remember, isn’t it? What would happen if you stuck food down the Funhole? “God, stop it,” mumbling aloud around a mouthful of sludge like some derelict in the park, shut up, shut up, drink some beer, read the paper. Ann Landers, my boyfriend wants to secrete stuff in my root cellar, I’m only eleven so what the hell? City Funds New Sewage Plant. Imagine that. Two new movies opening, one about sex and one not. Won’t see either, I get enough movies at work. Video Hut, Assistant Manager speaking, may I help you? The screens going every open hour of the day, pushing this movie, that movie, trailer after trailer until we can all, even the dumbest of us, recite them word for word. Once in despair I tried to melt my Video Hut name badge in the microwave: stylized red popcorn box, kernels round as breasts popping voluptuously free above my misspelled name, the whole lurid thing nearly three inches wide. Wouldn’t melt, either. I don’t know what it did to the microwave. I took a beer to bed with me, along with a new old copy of Wise Blood. Flannery O’Connor, God I love her. She died before I was born. I have everything she’s ever written. That night, knees up under the fraying red quilt, I didn’t read so much as flip, skipping around to my favorite parts, I could recite them but at least they were worth recitation. I was feeling okay from the beer, halfway reading and halfway thinking of Nakota, flabby little halfway erection, cool night air turning cold on my cheek. Was the air from the Funhole cool, too, if you put your face by it? Directly above it, say? nice and close? Would there be a sensation of vacuum? suction, gentle pull like a lover’s tug to bed? “Stop it,” alarmed, pulling myself upright, scared, yeah, wouldn’t anyone be? No. Nakota wouldn’t. She’d go like a zombie, sleepwalking down into the lip, so soft, opened like a kiss, black kiss to suck you down, suck you off, yeah stupid tentpole dick and where are you going, you fucking dummy? I was shaking, I put everything down, got up fast and turned on the stereo, loud, rude-boy reggae. I did not like this, I did not like any of this at all, do they call it a siren song because it cuts through everything else? Beer. Beer cures everything, maybe even this. Standing at the refrigerator, oblivious of its stored-cooler scent, can burning cold into my hand, I do not want to go in there, in the dark, I don’t even want to think about seeing the, seeing it, drink, drink and fall asleep, and I did. Woke up with a headache that moved immediately to my stomach in a slow barrel roll of nausea as soon as I sat up, but there were no voices in my head but my own and I was glad, glad as I cursed my way into the shower, glad as I drove breakfastless to work beneath trees bare as telephone poles and signs for things I never did or would. In my pocket, hasty hidden crush like pornography, the bad poem (poems?) I had written in my fear; I would not read them, I was ashamed to throw them away. At a red light I dared to pull one out, unroll it: the first thing I saw was the word “nacht,” and next to it something scribbled out so ferociously the paper was bent outward. Or inward. Depending on your bent.

• • •

Long spin of the workday, coworkers joking in humors I never felt, dreaming over my register, watching customers thread the aisles like rats in a maze: good rat, here’s your titty video. I had started there, Video Hut, some months before, and by virtue of being the employee least likely to say no, became assistant manager. Shitty pay but I bet you knew that; really, my needs were even smaller than my check. Making no living as a card-carrying poet had accustomed me to a philosophy that made minimalism seem lavish, I had lived like a cockroach for so long that a full tank, a full refrigerator were no longer even desirable: I mean, what would I do with it all? So: my squalor: third-floor flat, one small room and two smaller, couchbed and shitty furniture, real good stereo and even better prints—Klee and Bacon and Bosch predominant, the best ones clipped from back issues of Smithsonian that I got free from the throwaway pile at the library—and my favorite, a black-and-white photograph of Nakota, wrapped in rags like cerements, rising from the tomb of my bathtub, in my other, seedier place, though God knows this one was pretty seedy. At least I never cared when it got wrecked during a party. It was at one of my parties that we found the Funhole, not, I think now, by accident but by secret true design; I understand why they call it looking for trouble. Did I say wrecked? Especially that night: detritus smeared all over, puddles of spilled beer and toppled ashtrays and some crusted cheeselike stain on the shower curtain that even I, drunk as I was (and I was), couldn’t bear to look at. Nobody was left but me and Nakota, and some girl whose name I still don’t know, she openmouthed, as dead-looking as any live person can be, her skin a special color and her wingback hair stiff with gel and still sprightly, as if, ignoring its comatose platform, it was ready for more fun. “Any more beer left?” I could hardly talk, but I was skimming, yeah, I felt good. Nakota, snorting some weird concoction she got from this guy in Southfield, nostrils rimmed in alarming pink, shook her head to let me know she disapproved of my addiction while coddling hers. I don’t know, now, how we got into the second-floor hall, but I recall the still, dank basement-air, the way it smelled; I have a thing for smells, you must have noticed. Nakota was the one who opened the door: I definitely remember that, and her hand as she pulled me inside. Terrier instinct for the Big Bad, that’s what I think now, but then? who knows, maybe I thought I was going to get laid or something. Lucky me. Dark inside, and so drunk I almost fell—can you imagine?—right across it, right into it maybe; she grabbed my sleeve, ripped it to the cuff. Her voice, her growl: “Look,” pointing me, “look at that.” Just as it is, no bigger or smaller, and we stood there so long I began to believe I was hallucinating, not only the Funhole but everything around me; it was that strange. The coarse dark of the room itself, the mashed cleanser boxes and the coiled piles of rags, Nakota’s breathing like a runaway train, and that, it, before me, defying disbelief. You always think you’d like it if the Twilight Zone came true. You can forget that shit. “Shit,” said Nakota. I don’t remember getting back to my flat, don’t remember anything though I would love to now. Waking to the urgent need to piss and vomit, with luck not simultaneously, noticing in passing that the passed-out hair-girl was gone and Nakota, sitting up, awake, yeah, probably hadn’t even been to sleep yet. She gave me a nod as I stumbled past her, another on my slower, more painful way back. “Let’s go,” she said, for the first time, “look at it.” She named it, of course, it was the kind of thing she was best at. Named it and claimed it, although I wasn’t about to fight her for mineral rights. Frankly I was scared of it, not as much then as I am now, but scared as any reasonably normal person would be. “Who knows what the hell it is?” arguing over instant coffee (me) and sluggish mineral water (her). The flat reeked of smoke; we’d been fighting, slow and tense, for hours already. Never questioning it, even then, never a shred of doubt, just the birth of the eternal disagreement. Because how could we, how could anyone deny that calm black fact, stationed there on the floor in a crummy unused storage room in a crummier building on a street no developer would ever claim? No romance about this, not at least to me: is romance possible, with a cast, a slant, this painfully oblique? Speculation, sure. Where’d it come from, where—Nakota’s first, still most passionate concern—did it lead to? “If you went down there,” her eyes all shine. “If you went down there.” “Oh yeah.” “That’s what I’m afraid of.” Wouldn’t you be? Had someone somehow put it there? She scoffed, and I had to agree; it was of no one’s making, not a thing like that. Did it just grow there? She, enamored, proffered that theory and had it embellished past baroque before I could even say yes or no: what strange seed, she came back to that idea over and over, what could have the beginnings necessary for the making of something like that? “It’s alive.” Her ominous smile. “It is not,” knowing we were both wrong but not able to say how. “It’s not even an it, Nakota, it’s a, it’s—” “A what? A place? A condition?” What a sneer, exquisite as a skeleton’s bony glare, cigarette hanging out of her thin mouth, black against her sallow skin. “You don’t know any more than I do.” She was right about that, though we did our best to find out. Strange that I never went without her, never checked it out on my own. Was I afraid? Sure, but not for the reasons you’d think. From the first she was first, me hanging a little behind, her idea to wield the flashlight (no good), her idea to throw something down it (an asphalt rock plucked from the parking lot, not too big and not too small; it made no sound, no sound at all, can you imagine how spooky that is?). An empty glass: nothing, though the glass was warm when it came back, the heavy string that held it warm too. A camera, my single idea, but we never did, couldn’t figure out how to make it work, and we couldn’t afford one that would shoot by itself. A piece of paper, her idea (that should have been mine, some poet I am) but nothing still. Talking it over, and over and over, theories abundant, her eyes slitted and hands not so much expressive as martial, me with my hesitancy and my beer, building fences for her to jump. Just like now, today, the phone with its irritable little buzz: “Video Hut, howmaylhelpyou.” “Hey Nicholas.” Over the phone she sounded colder than normal, but for her that was normal, just her phone voice, she would have made a great Inquisitor. “I’m coming over tonight.” “Yeah?” She wasn’t coming to savor my presence, which gave me the right to fuck with her, a little and in a joshing way. “I was planning on going out tonight. Maybe tomorrow.” “I’ll be there after work.” She was, too, still in her barmaid outfit, which looked better than her regular clothes; at least everything was the same color, a decent black. She had something in a medium-sized paper bag; she held it like it was heavy. Seeing it made me nervous, I didn’t know why, but with Nakota you never knew anyway, you never got any warning. “What’s that?” I said. “You’ll see. Ready?” She was. In fact almost jittery, which made me more nervous still. But I’m stupid. I go along with stuff. “Let’s go,” I said. Careful and quiet as always; still it was a wonder no one ever saw us, or that we never saw anyone. Maybe everybody in the building was in on our little secret. It wasn’t the kind of thing you’d talk about, none of us ever talked to each other anyway, I couldn’t identify half of my neighbors by sight. I only knew the ones who were close by or obnoxious. Just like life itself. When we got into the room Nakota did a weird thing: she looked for a lock, swore when there was none. Carefully she set the bag down. “What’re you going to do?” I said, standing a little farther back than usual. ‘Tie me up and throw me in?” She looked almost sorry she hadn’t thought of that herself. “Good thinking, but no. It is an experiment, though,” and she reached for the bag, pulled it down and away. “Something we haven’t tried before.” A big pickle jar, gallon jar, filled with bugs. All kinds of bugs: flies and roaches and beetles and mosquitoes, even a couple of dragonflies. It was beautiful, kind of, and kind of nauseating too. “Why aren’t they eating each other?” I asked, and realized I was whispering. Nakota whispered too. “I sprayed some shit in there,” and, declining to elaborate, pushed the jar, nearer and nearer the Funhole, till it sat at the lip itself, far closer than we had ever dared to go. “Now what?” “Now we wait awhile.” Her voice was shaking, she was so excited. “See what happens.” We waited quite a while, there in the dark, my back against the unlocked door, Nakota for once at my side. Her scent was higher, her breath never slowed; she tried to smoke but I told her no, not in that airless firetrap, firm whisper, as firm as I ever got with her anyway, and she gave in. The insects jumbled, up and down, fighting the barrier they couldn’t see, then, “Look,” her sharp whisper but I was looking already, staring, watching as the bugs, one by one, began to drop, dying, to the floor of the jar, to whir in minute contortions, to, oh Jesus, to change: an extra pair of wings, a spare head, two spare heads, colors beyond the real, Nakota was breathing like a steam engine, I heard that hoarseness in my ear, smelled her hot stale-cigarette breath, saw a roach grow legs like a spider’s, saw a dragonfly split down the middle and turn into something else that was no kind of insect at all. Finally they were all dead, stayed dead for a long time, or maybe it only felt long. I got courage enough to reach for the jar but Nakota cut me off: what instinct told her that? “Wait,” she said, hand on my arm, voice very very dry. And they boiled up, glass-bound airborne convulsion of wings and legs and shiny bodies and dead colors, mashed together like food in a blender, round and round so fast that the jar rocked on the floor, tiny polka till it finally spun still and stayed. My mouth was open. It took effort to shut it. Nakota said, “Now.” I did not want to touch that jar. It was hot, I snatched my hand away, more cautiously used the front of my T-shirt to twist off the lid. “Aw shit,” and just looking made me miserable, I had to turn my head away. Nakota took the jar carefully into her lap and, to my disgust, began picking through its contents. “Nakota—” “Shut up,” mildly, then, “Look at this.” “No.” I sat back down, head canted back against the door, eyes closed as she went through her nauseating autopsy, listening to her small murmurs of surprise. Finally I heard the lid screw on, felt her hand on my shoulder. “Nicholas. Look. It’s not that bad.” “I don’t want to.” But of course I did. It really wasn’t that bad, if you had a strong stomach. She had handpicked the best pieces, the strangest I should say: tiniest heads on double-jointed necks, a little splay of wings, four to the bunch, the half-intact body of the cockroach with the long spiderlegs. Her trophies, plucked from the underworld, displayed on a dusty floor. She was smiling, she touched my arm. “Aren’t they beautiful?” “No,” I said, and they weren’t, not to me. I had no desire to touch them but I did: to please her, yeah. Stupid reason, I know. Chances are she couldn’t have cared less. Balancing the least objectionable, the four-leaf-clover wings, admiring despite myself their crazed patterning, so delicate, etched and slanted glyphs in a language I could never hope to master. All at once I had a horrifying urge to eat those wings, stick them in my mouth, crunch their altered sweetness and I thrust them away, literally, pushed my arms out at Nakota; the wings fell gently to the floor. “Take it easy,” angrily, rescuing them in one cradling hand. After a moment she said, “I need a bag or something.” All the way upstairs I fought the image, mutant bodies whirling in blind hurricane, came back with an empty plastic bread bag that said “Nature’s Wheat.” She filled it with her prizes, all the care of a researcher with difficult data, knotted the bag with meticulous ease. “So.” I wouldn’t look at it, nodding to indicate the horrible mess in the jar. “What’re you going to do with that?” She shrugged. “Throw it away, I guess.” “In the dumpster?” “Why not?” Why not? I insisted on wrapping it back in its paper bag, I wanted to make her carry it but I knew she wouldn’t. Careful down the stairs, holding it as far away from me as I could. “I have never,” I said, “understood the word ‘gruesome’ before.” “It’s not that bad.” Lots of trash in the dumpster. Worried, I perched on the shaky ledge of a rusty black Toyota, rearranging junk, slick snotty-feeling trash bags, the better to stuff you into oblivion my dear. I made a joke about disposing the bodies, turned and saw no one. Bitch. Took her bugs and went home. The Toyota creaked, I jumped down, went upstairs. No chance of eating, uh-uh, and when I slept it was to dreams of pain, infestation of tiny vengeance and no matter how frantically I waved my arms, they found a way in anyway.

Copyright © 2020 by Kathe Koja. Original text copyright © 1991. First printing 1991. Excerpted from Cipher by Kathe Koja. Published by permission of the author and Meerkat Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kathe Koja writes novels and short fiction, and creates and produces immersive fiction performances, both solo and with a rotating ensemble of artists. Her work crosses and combines genres, and her books have won awards, been multiply translated, and optioned for film and performance. She is based in Detroit and thinks globally. She can be found at kathekoja.com.

The H Word: Universal Scare, Local Fear Suyi Davies Okungbowa | 1589 words

My earliest memory of fear comes from an old Nollywood film whose name I no longer remember. In one scene, two old women greet each other by “shaking hands” with their feet after running into one another on an evening stroll. Any half-decent Nigerian would immediately interpret this, as I did back then, to mean that these two women were witches interacting with a secret code. And as a child of said society, the idea of witchcraft and all I understood it to stand for—unrepentant harm, loss of control, dispossession, possession, death—terrified me to no end. So, regardless of the fact that the women on screen had simply executed a strange foot-shake, my child’s mind “recognised” the promise of harm. I felt a creeping, foreboding dread rise in my chest. I remember shutting my eyes and turning away. I will point out that, by this time, I had already sat through The Evil Dead (1981) (bit.ly/30xCAYf) twice, and not once turned away. Two “witches” greeting with their feet shouldn’t be more frightening than awakened demons attacking vacationing folks in an isolated cabin in the woods, right? And yet, there I was, stricken. Yes, The Evil Dead was quite frightful and jump-scary, but I left that movie without any deep-seated fear of those demons. Over time, I’ve come to realise the reasons for that were three simple things: I had never been to/seen a “cabin in the woods” (I grew up in a small but modern-ish city), I had never seen/read/been told tales of any “book of the dead,” and most of all, every single character in that film (White and American, demons included) was nothing like me (Black and Nigerian). But guess what I’d heard tons of stories about—stories of demise so regular and close to home that they’d already happened to relatives and neighbours and friends? That’s right: witchcraft.

How collective fears birth the personal

While witchcraft, the occult and the supernatural arouse fear everywhere, they held a particular weight in 1990s Nigeria, in which I was raised. Nigeria in the ’90s had just bounced back from a bloody civil war, and was attempting to transition from a turbulent period of military rule into a democratic government. This period of huge economic uncertainty, freewheeling oppression and ethnic distrust made it effortless to suspect one’s neighbour—or “village people” in Nigerian parlance—of having an occult hand in one’s degeneration, rather than unpack the complex sociopolitical and socioeconomic forces affecting most people’s life opportunities. It didn’t help that the good/evil dichotomy of colonial Christianity and the rise of prosperity-gospel churches at the time banded together to pile on the blame. Anxiety reigned, and pointing fingers became a coping mechanism. Filmmakers knew this, and thus began Nollywood’s ’90s horror era, which consisted largely of films featuring the occult. Richard Spurling, in an article for Fiction Factor (bit.ly/2OJHdsv) about why horror scares us, describes true horror as emotional disturbance. “The disturbance is inside you, in your own emotions,” he says. “The writer must gain access to your own secret centre.” That disturbance in the secret centre, though, comes from the fears of the society one is raised within. Alex Ago, a director at the USC School of Cinematic Arts points out (bit.ly/3fQqkZ4), “Horror as a genre is an expression of the collective anxieties of a society at the time . . . they allow us to collectively get a sense of catharsis by the vanquishing of these fears.” I haven’t immersed myself into enough of horror culture elsewhere, especially Hollywood’s ubiquitous offerings, to understand its social aspects. But “Dreadful Delights,” a DirectTV study that sampled American horror movie watchers, managed to put together some statistics (soc.att.com/3jWw4mz) about what kinds of horror films have left the biggest impressions. It was revealing that the Paranormal (Ghosts and Spirits, Demonic, Possessions, Witches and Occult) still stood at the top of all data lists. Right below Paranormal on the scare-enjoyability scale, we get subgenres like Slasher, Phobias/Isolation, Zombies, Madness/Paranoia and Home Invasion (others fall far below these). What struck me about these results is that, save for the recent pandemic that brought many across the globe to terms with the reality of enforced isolation, I could bet that many Nigerians like me would be little moved by films in the above-named subgenres. The fears prevalent in them are simply lower in the pecking order than those prevalent in the daily reality of a Nigerian existence. Slashers? No one can cut you down harder than the Nigerian police. Home Invasion? Well, they have to be worse than the armed robbery, kidnapping and terrorist gangs that have plagued Nigerians for decades. Unless the fears a horror story taps into somehow upend the equilibrium of an individual’s daily existence in a significant way, even evoking a few scares is hopeful. This is all to say that until a horror story, in whatever form it comes, engages with the specific psychological horrors one harbours within the self—a self cultivated by the collective consciousness of existing as a part of a community—it’d be challenging to tap into deep-seated fear, no matter how universal the scare tactics employed may be.

How cultural distance influences (dis)belief

Nigerian literature has not produced much horror authorship compared to its global counterparts. Literary scholar Zahrah Nesbitt-Ahmed traces the history of Nigerian horror literature to about fifty-five years ago (bit.ly/3fOfjHX), starting with D.O. Fagunwa’s Forest of a Thousand Daemons (1939) and Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954) to today’s Ben Okri (bit.ly/2ZOBxDT), Helen Oyeyemi (bit.ly/39ev34s) and Nuzo Onoh (bbc.in/3jrRwQ7). Recently, we’ve had authors like Lelsey Nneka Arimah (bit.ly/3eP9w3l) and ’Pemi Aguda (bit.ly/3eIxIo8) coming out of the works too, as well as platforms like The Naked Convos, who curated yearly Lights Out anthologies (bit.ly/2ZOn3Ef) featuring dark stories from newer Nigerian writers. One thing is clear, though: you will be hard-pressed to horrify the average Nigerian with a book. Put it into film, though, and your chances increase exponentially. The reason here is one of distance influencing belief. An understanding of the cultural nitty-gritties that underpin a story and its manner of delivery to a certain people are both critical to belief in that story, and belief is the soil from which fear grows. Take this case in point: a significant portion of the Nigerian populace possesses low literacy. Horror literature has therefore gained little hold within these communities, finding more purchase elsewhere. Film is therefore a more impactful medium for telling horror stories to these communities, since it presents a lower barrier to entry. Literacy levels become a culturally distancing factor without even trying. Throw in the fact that Nigerian horror literature has also tended to shift away from directly propagating the occult into broader interpretations of the supernatural, and this distance increases. These seemingly progressive stories are perceived as more fictional by said communities than those that unashamedly emphasize the occult. Suspension of disbelief, which is required for horror to be effective, is suddenly significantly lower for literature than it is for film. Even when the exact same story moves between media, the results usually remain consistent (as seen with Nnedi Okorafor’s short story, “Hello, Moto,” [bit.ly/2ZMEHYL] adapted for film as Hello Rain by C.J. Obasi [bit.ly/2CV7zoZ]). This is just one way cultural distance plays a big role in telling effective horror stories. Tapping into a society’s perceived threats requires a deep understanding of the machinations of said society. It means understanding how close or removed the community feels to those threats and how confident they feel about curtailing them. One must first access the collective and bridge whatever cultural distances exist in order to sow belief from which fear can be grown. I often think about those old Nollywood women when I write. Effective horror stories, I’ve come to realise, are not always those that employ well-worn scare tactics, like characters struggling to survive a midnight attack at a cabin in the woods. Horror is truly about the loss of control and the vulnerability that follows. It’s about apprehension over the undetected and emotional disturbance over the unfathomable. To tell an effective horror story is to gently allude to intimate fears harboured by a certain people and threats deemed inescapable by them. Sometimes, all it takes to do that is a little foot-shake on an evening stroll.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Suyi Davies Okungbowa is the Nigerian speculative fiction author of the godpunk novel, David Mogo, Godhunter (Abaddon, 2019). His internationally published fiction and nonfiction have appeared at Tor.com, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Fireside, Apex, Podcastle, The Dark, and other periodicals and anthologies. He lives between Lagos, Nigeria and Tucson, Arizona, where he teaches writing to undergrads and is completing his MFA in Creative Writing. He tweets at @IAmSuyiDavies and is @suyidavies everywhere else. Learn more at suyidavies.com. Book Reviews: September 2020 Terence Taylor | 3020 words

Read This! Volume 14

Hate and rage are kissing cousins. Usually born at the same time, they are two possible responses to the same stimuli. Equally powerful, they’re not identical, but one is often mistaken for the other, as they keep such close company. As a child I had a father who’d been raised on forms of corporal punishment too often taken for granted in Black communities. He meted it out to me for the same perceived misdeeds he’d committed in his youth—mostly not doing what you’re told in the exacting way you’re told to do it. Belt whippings and the river of belittling comments he used to erode my self-esteem were among the methods used to keep Blacks in line during slavery. The ways we were managed under that fine institution, the forms of punishment we were subjected to, became means we used to control our children. They were the only lessons we learned about discipline, any better parental models from Africa lost over generations. Many white people I’ve known were shocked when they first heard about Black children being whipped with belts and emotionally abused to keep them in line, because they weren’t raised that way. “How could they do that?” they ask, even those who’d been spanked by hand, meaning “how can you Black folks be so cruel to your kids?” They don’t understand that the roots of our cultural dysfunction in that area lie, like so many, in the soil of slavery. Much of the persistence of police violence against Blacks comes from the police’s historic origins as a service provided to capture runaway slaves. It’s an organization that still sees a large part of its job as keeping recalcitrant negroes in line for any infractions, no matter how minor, with maximum force. It took ten years in therapy for me to sort out the tangled mess of my feelings toward my father and to realize that while I was justifiably angry at him, I did not hate him. In the many years of sessions with my therapist I grew to understand him, what made him who he was, why he did what he did, and how he tried to pass that conditioned response on to me. With that understanding I was free to release my anger, to learn to love him. I put down the burden he’d borne for so long and had tried to hand off to me, resolved not to treat others as I had been. Today we have a loving relationship we both worked for decades to achieve. Americans have never taken that kind of time to honestly discuss our conflicts over the many obvious iniquities in race relations. It’s a lengthy path to understanding and acceptance that our nation has never walked, no matter how often we talk about it. In the last four years we’ve seen how much hate and rage has been buried beneath the surface of American life around those issues, simmering, waiting to be unleashed on all sides. Both too often inspire violence and can literally burn down all they touch. They feed on the fears of both sides, show us how weak we are when we try to stop them. They often seem out of our control, as only haters can reduce the hate, only the enraged can stop the rage, except that they’re too filled with their perceived power over us to try. The two novels I review this month effectively illustrate the destructive effects of both hate and rage, but also carefully distinguish them from each other. Their protagonists offer us options, potential solutions to the depredations of both.

Ring Shout P. Djèlí Clark Hardcover / Ebook ISBN: 978-1250767028 Tor.com, October 13, 2020, 176 pages

Blacks and especially Black writers are often accused of always bringing up slavery and other forms of institutionalized racism, which irritates the hell out of me. From what I’ve read, it’s far from the only thing we write about, but until all that’s been held back for so long has been said, that dialogue should and must continue. Honest communication can be as revelatory as it is liberating, and I think anyone would agree with that. Unless you take it personally. Oddly enough, I’ve never thought racist Southerners back in the day who lynched Black people really hated them, not when it began. I was sure that the violence started as perceived retribution, rising acts of rage at the loss of their old status as overseers, Earth’s dominant species holding dominion over their lessers. I believe the blind fury over that first generation’s loss was distilled down into an instinctive hatred passed down from then to now, a bloody legacy that evolved over time until their successors could no longer remember the real reasons for its origin. If there’s a thin line between love and hate, as the old song says, the one between hate and rage is even thinner. P. Djèlí Clark’s novel explores that narrow terrain in a novel that is at times terrifying, but at others tickled me with the wickedly satiric way he explores serious issues. In this world, the original Klan was organized by evil Southern sorcerers, including Confederate leaders. They used the supernatural to further their own goals, in league with far worse than the Devil. When the Klans fell after the Confederacy failed, books, pamphlets and propaganda weren’t enough to revive it fast enough. A new enchantment was cast in the form of an epic film, the 1915 release of D.W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation, that reached the minds of millions by means of the still-new silver screen. Griffith is depicted as colluding with Thomas Dixon Jr., the author of the two books the movie’s based on, The Clansman and The Leopard’s Spots. Dixon’s father was a slave owner and Klansman, and his son wrote and published as a conjuring to revive the Klan. The books reached too few readers to make enough of a difference, but reimagined in the form of an inspiring film, their magic was electrifying, and stirred up cold embers of hate and rage in White audiences. Set in Macon, Georgia in 1922, less than a decade after the movie’s premiere, Ring Shout opens on a group of armed Black women on a rooftop. They watch a well-attended Ku Klux Klan parade march down the town’s main street, cheered on by their families and others enjoying picnics alongside. The Black women aren’t there to snipe at Klansmen on parade, but to hunt those among them who’ve been possessed by demonic mutated creatures called Ku Kluxes. While most see them as human, those with the gift of a special sight see them as hideous, malformed, Lovecraftian monstrosities nourished by hate and dead flesh. Two of them leave the crowd to sniff out the rotting corpse of a dead dog planted in an alley by the women, who can see these creatures as they really are while they feed—then find out how much harder they’ve become to kill. The leader of the women warrior’s group, and narrator of their adventures, is a young woman named Maryse, the sole survivor of a Ku Klux attack on her family when she was a girl. By the end of that night she was forced from her childhood, forged into the fighter she is now. Her team dispatches the damnable things with unexpected difficulty, as they realize their enemy is quickly mutating, getting stronger to adapt to our world as their new home. Part of a resistance as large and organized as the Klan they fight, the team gathers the remains for study, although they’re still unaware of the true nature of their enemy. After the Civil war and the collapse of the first Klan, so-called “Jim Crow” laws did their job to keep free Blacks segregated and in line. As resistance to that system slowly grew, a new Klan sprang up to deal with those who resisted. They were inspired by Griffith’s immensely popular epic, publicly praised by then-President Woodrow Wilson as “like writing history with lightning.” By the nineteen twenties the Klan had risen again in popularity and numbers enough to be unabashed in their public displays of white solidarity, eventually marching proudly in 1925, thousands strong, to celebrate their primacy in Washington, D.C. This is the malignant world our heroes and heroines inhabit, one filled with enemies both mortal and mystical. The resistance has their own Conjure Woman to defend them against the latter, Nana Jean, and her scientist of sorts, Molly. She can’t see the Ku Klux body parts in their true demonic form, but can still analyze what they bring back to increase their knowledge of the real enemy, to find better ways to defeat the monsters. She arms the women with bullets and explosives made of silver and iron that will wound or kill the Ku Kluxers, defenses backed up by their own magic in the titular Shout. A rhythmic ritual carried down from before slavery, drums, feet, and voices in a ring stamp and sing in a call and response prayer that powers up Maryse’s supernatural sword. It glows brightly when it manifests, a gift from powerful spirit guides who appear to her in dreams in the guise of three churchgoing Aunties. Maryse meets the bloody Butcher Clyde in her dreams as well, a monstrous man who’s much more than that. He—or really, it—acts as her introduction to the larger forces behind the scenes carefully moving everyone, Black and White, into place. They have plans for Maryse, too, and the slaughter of her family was only a first step to their domination of the world, by honing her to be their champion . . . The number of players in the game, both human and inhuman, increase, and the story builds to a final confrontation between good and evil at the base of Stone Mountain. At a massive public screening of Birth of a Nation, the combined hate of its White audience will be used to open an inter-dimensional door to an early apocalypse, with Maryse and her crew all that can stop it. Ring Shout is told in the first person present tense, which can be difficult to pull off effectively, but is handled here so smoothly that it took me a few chapters to even realize it. Clark’s characters have a casual realism in their relationships that made me feel at home and invested, his supernatural elements made it all the more fun. Making the monstrous nature of the Klan literal and offering a deeper, more twisted explanation for its horrific excesses doesn’t excuse anything, but gives us a way to re-examine the issues their actions raise at a safer, if strangely more sinister, distance. By the end, Clark stands firmly in Lovecraft territory, his survivors primed for a visit to Provincetown to meet the man himself, and I hope that next novel is already in the works. One of the great ironies of Lovecraft’s now notorious views on race and religion has been watching modern writers of all backgrounds use his tropes to make social commentaries that would have appalled him, but thrill me—from Victor LaSalle’s highly lauded Black Tom, and Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country (now an HBO series), to N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became. I even find myself adapting his mythos as well in writing Past Life, the final novel of my vampire trilogy. The plot of Ring Shout is based on the idea that hate serves as food for horrific beings who would otherwise view us as beneath their notice. Its story, however, is about the boundaries of our hate, how it can destroy, but also how it can fail. Clark offers a valuable distinction between hate and rage in a timely and entertaining lesson we need today more than ever.

The Blade Between Sam J. Miller Hardcover / Ebook ISBN: 978-0062969828 Publisher: Ecco, December 1, 2020, 384 pages

For others, home is where the hate is. Ronan Szepessy wakes up on a train headed up the Hudson River Line from Manhattan, unsure where he is or why he’s there. It doesn’t seem to be because he relapsed into a crystal meth addiction only recently abandoned, like an unfaithful banished lover who could return at any time. From the camera bag at his feet and a brief entry on his phone’s calendar, Ronan pieces together that he’s going there to meet Katch, a beautiful young man from his hometown who asked to model for him. Ronan truly deeply hates the town of Hudson, where he grew up hounded for being gay, miserable, misunderstood by everyone but his suicidal mother. Ronan has finally returned to his childhood home as a successful fashion photographer, but finds it empty. He locates his father in town instead, standing like a dazed ghost inside the trendy antique shop that took over his old butcher shop. Gentrification has slowly erased the other established businesses around his. A billionaire web czar, Jark, founder of a sort of artsier barter-based Etsy, is running for mayor, and planning a massive new luxury complex that will seal the end of Hudson’s old community. After losing his shop, Ronan’s father is now the last holdout who refuses to sell his home, the only obstacle left in the way of perceived progress. The first sign I noticed that something’s not right in Hudson, beyond the recent multiple suicides, is when Ronan hears the local late night DJ announce the time and play a song that seems tailored for him and his mood. Then, at his friends Dominick and Attalah’s house (both Black, which allows Miller to bring in additional issues organically) she announces the same time on the radio, but plays a different song that means something to them. It’s the first subtle cue that beneath a surface being roiled by the rigors of change lies something stranger and scarier in Hudson than hipsters and antique shops. Perceptions slowly become personalized, until everyone in town sees only what they want to see, hears and believes only what they want to hear, as their social media is manufactured by magic to destroy their spirits. It takes longer than I expected for Ronan to finally look at the funeral photo on his friends’ fridge and discover that his appointment in Hudson is with a young man who committed suicide before Ronan met him. The book is full of moments of slowly rising dread that end in shocking revelations, all of them building to a nightmarish town festival where the growing horror finally reveals its true face and intent. Ronan teams with Attalah, the wife of his high school lover, Dom, to start a campaign to undermine the coming mayoral election and the development. He offers his father’s house up for sale and pretends to side with Jark, the web czar, while Attalah starts an online whisper campaign, like digital poison pen letters, to undermine Jark’s takeover of the town as they enlist others to their covert cause. “You are hated” is the campaign that Ronan and Attalah devise to unite the townies, aimed at newcomers and tourists, expressed at first in billboards and buttons, then with acts of vandalism that rise to terrorism. They spark the coming conflagration by fanning local embers of hate into a hot blaze that rapidly burns out of control. Reality slips away for everyone in town as Ronan realizes that he’s the one who lit the match to the fuse—almost too late, long after he feels he has any chance to snuff it out. Tom Minniq, a bisexual stud Ronan invents for dating services to harvest dirt on everyone in town for blackmail, mysteriously appears in the flesh to give his victims sadistic and destructive orders. When Ronan tells people that he’s been eating and drinking at old familiar bars and restaurants he’s told they closed decades ago, and wonders where he really spent that time. Dead Katch comes and goes, and gradually confirms Ronan’s worst fear that it’s only his own deep and abiding loathing for Hudson that makes this living nightmare possible. Like Ring Shout, the real menace in Hudson is otherworldly, the ghosts of murdered whales from the town’s whaling past, hunted down for profit. They’ve evolved into vengeful, godlike beings that have manifested to keep Hudson trapped in an entropic past they control rather than an affluent future. Along the way, Miller deals in depth with the social issues of gentrification on local communities, not with dry invective, but by artfully illustrating the pressure it puts on individuals of all races and classes. Miller offers us another alternative to hate in his ending, and his own way to defuse it. Both books tell us clearly that there are more ways to eliminate injustices than obliteration. It has been said many times, in many cultures, in many ways, that the reed that bends in strong winds stays standing when the mighty oak falls. Change is always possible, we just have to be willing to pay the price for it. Miller and Clark tell us that we still can.

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 Fantastic Stories of the Imagination. Terence is also author of the first two novels of his Vampire Testaments trilogy, Bite Marks and Blood Pressure. He is currently writing the conclusion, Past Life. Follow him on Twitter @vamptestaments.

Author Spotlight: Ray Nayler Setsu Uzumé | 1228 words

The opening of the story paints a sharp contrast between life and death, angles and mush. Was there a particular moment or image that sowed the seed for this story?

First of all, thank you for taking the time to interview me. I very much appreciate it. And as a warning to readers, I want to say: read the story first. This interview will be like one of those terrible introductions to a classic book—you know, the ones that assume everyone has read this book, and ruin the ending for you. The story “Outside of Omaha” was written based on a poem I wrote by the same title. The poem is a monologue about the photograph the couple take together in Omaha, and how it cannot possibly represent the complexities of their personalities, their relationship with one another, and their personal histories. It is implied, in the poem, that the narrative voice is that of a widower, and the monologue is a threnody for his deceased wife. So—the poem was inspired by an actual photograph of a turn-of-the-century couple in Nebraska, and the story was “inspired” by the poem. But the poem, which I will post at my website (bit.ly/3eHkPKR) for readers, does not have any supernatural elements in it at all. The supernatural elements came from somewhere else, and to be honest, I’m not sure where. They just kind of appeared and attached themselves to the poem. I think I had been reading something somewhere about the discovery of a “witch’s jar” in the U.S., and my hyperactive mind began thinking along some strange lines from there.

Can you talk a bit about the setting? What were some of the world events that informed the characters’ decisions and responses?

My great-great-grandfather on my maternal side (the grandfather of my mother’s father) immigrated to the United States from Germany in the late nineteenth century and died several years later in a coal mine outside of Omaha. That’s where the title of the story comes from, and the idea for telling a story about the immigrants of that time. I’ve also traveled a decent amount myself in the Great Plains and always wanted to set a story there. Anyone who has seen the Great Plains knows the immensity and uncanniness of their solitudes. I wanted to capture that feeling in this story—both of how the Great Plains are extraordinarily isolating, and how that isolation can become a place, for some, of refuge. So long as they are willing to fight for it.

This might be a distinction without a difference, but would you say the “you,” the wife, thinks of herself as an immigrant or a refugee? Something else?

I think there is a difference, but that immigrant/refugee is not a binary, but rather an entanglement. All immigrants are, in some sense, refugees: everyone immigrating to a place is emigrating from a place, and has a reason for leaving that place, ranging from concrete reasons of self-preservation to personal reasons of self-fulfillment. Of course, there is an enormous difference between running from war, running away from an economic depression, and simply leaving to find better opportunities elsewhere, but I would argue that (especially when talking about immigrants in the nineteenth century) we “modern” people would consider the vast majority of them to be refugees. Their immigration is also an extraordinary leap which it is difficult for us to comprehend from our increasingly globalized present scene. When they leave their home countries, they know that the likelihood is they will never see their homes again, and never speak to or see the relatives they leave behind. Their separation is total, or as near to total as we could imagine, and they must remake themselves completely in a new place. Immigration these days seems to allow for much more “global,” hybrid identities. I think of my own dual citizenship, and the dual citizenship of my partner, and our daughter who, at one year old, hears English, Russian, and Albanian every day. On the other hand, my French-Canadian ancestors went to a land that would swallow their lives forever. They would never see France again. Many would likely never get a letter from a person they left behind. It’s astounding to really put oneself in their place. That’s a long way of saying that the “you,” in the story, the wife, would think of herself as a refugee, but call herself an immigrant. And she would be surrounded by other refugees calling themselves immigrants. And the narrator is most certainly a refugee, from a previous existence he has sought to put behind him. I think one can be a refugee from one’s own past as well, without ever leaving a country.

The paragraph that begins, “You can hold two opposite things in the mind, you see,” was so resonant. What about this story surprised you while you were writing it?

This is, of course, a horror story and a story of the uncanny, but I also think it is another kind of story: it is a story of redemption. For me, redemption is the central theme of “Outside of Omaha.” In my work I deal a lot with the idea of monstrosity—of how people can be monstrous to one another, or to themselves, and how they encounter and deal with monstrousness in the world. It’s been a consistent theme since my early writing in the crime and noir genres. This story is about two monsters who find one another, make a home together, and defend it from those who would destroy it. The concept of being able to hold two opposite things in the mind is precisely about this concept: You don’t have to be good to do good. Goodness isn’t inherent: it comes from what you can tell yourself, from the story you weave about who you want to be, and the actions you take to get there. So here in “Outside of Omaha,” we have a very bad man who marries something most would likely consider evil. And they (and here it is, the spoiler: I warned you at the top) live happily together, for as long as their lives last. What can we look forward to next from you?

I have a superstition about the evil eye that comes from having lived too long in Russia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus, so I never talk about the things I am working on. But I will talk about what is completed, and sold. I have a story, “The Shadow of His Wings,” coming up in Analog sometime in 2021. And I have a story (another one about monstrosity, in fact) coming up in the new magazine Dark Matter in January of 2021. I also have a story, “Architecture,” coming up in Queen’s Quarterly, a Canadian lit mag. And anyone who wants to keep track can follow me on Twitter or at Raynayler.net Thanks again! I hope everyone enjoyed “Outside of Omaha” and did not read this interview first.

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 Grimdark Magazine. Find them on Twitter @KatanaPen. Author Spotlight: Sonya Taaffe Devin Marcus | 1681 words

There’s a lot of historical context to “Tea with the Earl of Twilight,” but the most front- and-center is that of the city of Boston itself. It feels like the city is its own character at times. What made you want to center this story in Boston?

It couldn’t have been set anywhere else. A few years ago, I was asked for one of those five-question memes that circulate on social media, “What’s something you know about the Boston area that you don’t think a lot of other people have noticed?” I ended up talking about how strange it is to me that most people don’t think of Boston as a city of water. Not just a seaport or a city with a river looping through it, but a city that could have been planned as an object lesson in the hubris of human industry that thought nothing of leveling hills and filling in coves and damming a river’s tides all to offer an ever-growing metropolis more and more land to stretch itself out onto, and yet could never imagine that the same cavalier terraforming enacted on a planetary scale would bring the sea flooding back, rising into the neighborhoods and parks and commercial districts and universities that were water when Boston was founded almost four centuries ago, a slender-necked peninsula surrounded by tidal flats, marshes, and bays. It’s not secret knowledge. There was a very nice exhibit about it in the Boston Museum of Science, which I used to visit when I was small. As an adult, I went about unsystematically cataloguing its traces until I was finally introduced last year to the seminal study on the subject, Nancy S. Seasholes’ Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston (2003). But it doesn’t seem to be common knowledge, even as we seriously discuss linking the harbor islands into a system of seawalls and don’t really discuss the fact that the Charles River went through two flood-control dams in less than a century, and might need a third any high tide now. I still can’t quite believe the Ballardian glitter of the Seaport was undertaken in the last decade, when we are officially nineteen feet above sea level and everyone must have known the sidewalks would flood with the first good storm surge. It’s such an American thing to do, rewrite the landscape and assume that’s the end of it. It’s not confined to the nineteenth century. It was only 1958 when the working-class, immigrant neighborhood of the West End was razed as flat as Pemberton Hill or Mount Vernon, 1962 when the always something doing of Scollay Square was brutalized into the brick waste of Government Center. I live in Somerville, where the promise of the Green Line Extension has been raising the rents for years like a poker game where the tenants always fold first. In the middle of a plague year, we’re still seeing condos flipping all over the place. Cities are always reconstructing themselves, but Boston was recently ranked the third most gentrified city in the United States, and that’s a contest nobody wins except structural inequality. At the same time, I know that time can’t be glued in place or stripped off like paint, and when people try to treat nostalgia like sympathetic magic, very bad things—like nationalism—happen. The important thing is to be here, and now, and aware of what’s under your feet. Sometimes it’s the sea. Sometimes it’s bones. My normal levels of flânerie have been severely curtailed thanks to COVID-19, but I spent years walking as much of Boston and its surrounding and interwoven cities as I could: it was how I found my way into a region where I was born and have spent most of my life and for a very long time did not feel at home. In January of this year, which feels like a historical snapshot now, I began exploring the area around Broad Canal, because in a lifetime of riding the Red Line across the Charles I had somehow never particularly noticed the ex-drawbridges on First Street and Edwin H. Land Boulevard, and neither had I understood the one-time extent of the canal system in East Cambridge. There it was again, that city of water hiding in plain sight. Mattie Joiner gave me the title for this story and everything else funneled right into it.

The industrial history of Boston, specifically the bridges and waterways, plays a key role in constructing the mood here. I notice that a lot of your story collections focus on water, crossings, and the decrepit. What is it about these elements that compel you?

They’re all liminal. Spatially or temporally, they are points of transition, transformation, or just plain more than one thing at once. They make me hungry. Sometimes they make me feel at home. In the foreword of A Rainbow Thread: An Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts from the First Century to 1969 (2019), Noam Sienna writes beautifully about the scholarly concepts of “shared contemporaneity,” “queer futurity,” and “eternal contemporaneity,” all of which involve the interrelation of past, present, and future. I recognized in them the same kind of touching through time that informs both my creative and critical writing, my ritual life, and my relationship with my city—I draw comfort from it, but I also know it’s a significant engine of horror and weird fiction: residual hauntings, ghosts as scars on time, places imprinted so deeply by history that on some level it is always still happening. The present echoing with the past still implies a kind of linear continuity, though, and so there is something especially uncanny about a haunting that really dislocates time, a future event reverberating backward, a coin in a field that was never there until all of a sudden it always was. The week after I had finished this story, I had a moment of extremely peculiar double vision walking down Broad Canal. I knew I wasn’t going to see anything, but I had spent so much time visualizing the thing that wasn’t there, it was still strange to see its absence. It felt less wrong to consider the possibility of having channeled a ghost than having created one. I have not done as much with that kind of haunting as I would like, but I hope there’s some of it in Torrey’s jumbled, rear-projected, once and never city. The incompleteness of the past—narratives, artifacts—fascinates me almost as much as its persistence. It makes the present unstable, founded on false or fragmentary notions of what came before. The future is something we’re always catching up to, but do we only recognize it because we’ve been told what to expect? I sort of backed into hauntology and psychogeography by natural bent; I love these ambiguities of place and time and perception as much as I do physical ruins or sea-change. I know it is the earth that holds memory in so many stories of this nature, but I have always linked water and time.

Queerness is a vital part of this story, voiced through the main character, her roommate Daniel, and Hilary. The final line, “She knew the future had always been too late” reads to me in part as a meditation on the myriad fates and lives of these characters. Could you talk a little bit about the inclusion of LGBT themes in this work?

Don’t forget Torrey! I am afraid the queer themes in this work have the most prosaic explanation possible: I am queer, and so are many of the people I love as well as the people I just happen to know, and since this story was taking place in the Somerville, Cambridge, Boston of my lived experience, why shouldn’t the same hold true of the people in it? It was a default more than it was a decision, although they seemed to match the story once they’d shown up. I hope they are as recognizable as the cities they inhabit. The last line is more hauntological than anything else to me, but I admit the future is a more difficult prospect at the moment than it was at the beginning of this year.

Along with being an exemplary writer, you are also a well-renowned poet, historian, and astral body namer (for unaware readers, Sonya provided the name for the anti-Pluto trans-Neptunian satellite Vanth). You have many talents, but what specifically jumps out here is the beautiful language of the story. To what degree do writing poetry and writing short fiction influence each other in your work?

I don’t know that they do, except that I think about language much the same way whichever mode I’m writing in. The weight of the words always matters, their rhythms and textures, the ways they fit against or abrade one another, and I like the echoes of meanings as much as their definitions. I think my poetry has become sparer over the years while my prose remains relatively dense, but I know that figurative language is impossible to strain out of either. As many senses as need to be engaged, or it all feels thin. And thank you!

What can we look forward to next from you?

I am cagey about talking about work in progress because I don’t want my brain to decide the story’s already been told, but I have new poetry forthcoming in Vastarien: A Literary Journal, Climbing Lightly Through Forests: A Poetry Anthology Honoring Ursula K. Le Guin (ed. Lisa Bradley and R.B. Lemberg), and new fiction in Weird Whispers. One comes from fifth-century Babylon, one from the far future of the planet Gethen, another from the recent past of the country of Orsinia, and one from nineteenth-century New Bedford.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Devin Marcus is a freelance proofreader and editor living in Portland, Oregon. Outside of his day job proofreading and printing at a golf scorecard company, you can find him at Aphelion Webzine, where he’s the resident Short Story Editor. Additionally, you can send him cool horror-related stuff on Twitter @DubbleOhDevin.

Coming Attractions The Editors | 119 words

Coming up in October, in Nightmare . . . We have original fiction from David Tallerman (“Not Us”) and Kurt Fawver (“Introduction to the Horror Story, Day 1”), along with reprints by Kaaron Warren (“Furtherest”) and A.C. Wise (“The Secret of Flight”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, and a review from Adam-Troy Castro. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Nightmare. Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got new fiction on the way from Caspian Gray, Benjamin Peek, Maria Dahvana Headley, and Marc Laidlaw. Thanks for reading! Stay Connected The Editors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief John Joseph Adams

Managing/Senior Editor Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Editor Arley Sorg

Podcast Producer Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor Jim Freund

Podcast Host Jack Kincaid

Art Director Christie Yant

Assistant Editors Lisa Nohealani Morton Sandra Odell

Editorial Assistant Alex Puncekar

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

Proofreader Devin Marcus

Webmaster Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects Christie Yant

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

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

ANTHOLOGIES

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

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

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

Armored

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers

Dead Man’s Hand

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

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: Burn the Ashes (with Hugh Howey) [Forthcoming 2020] THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: Or Else the Light (with Hugh Howey) [Forthcoming 2020]

Epic: Legends of Fantasy

Federations

The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

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

Lightspeed: Year One

The Living Dead

The Living Dead 2

Loosed Upon the World

The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination

Operation Arcana

Other Worlds Than These

Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen)

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

Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Seeds of Change

Under the Moons of Mars

Wastelands

Wastelands 2

Wastelands: The New Apocalypse

The Way of the Wizard What the #@&% is That? (with Douglas Cohen)

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn

Sand by Hugh Howey

Retrograde by Peter Cawdron

Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty

The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn

The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette

In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

Gather the Fortunes by Bryan L. Camp

Reentry by Peter Cawdron

Half Way Home by Hugh Howey

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear [forthcoming] Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer [forthcoming]

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

The Conductors by Nicole Glover [forthcoming]

Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth [forthcoming]

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