Nightmare Magazine, Issue 45 (June 2016)

Home , Alyssa Wong, Dale Bailey, Erotic horror, Horror icon, John Joseph Adams, Marc Laidlaw

TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 45, June 2016

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial

FICTION Great Black Wave David Tallerman Things of Which We Do Not Speak Lucy Taylor The Finest, Fullest Flowering Marc Laidlaw Ruminations Rena Mason

NONFICTION The H Word: Monsters and Metaphors Dale Bailey Interview: Joyce Carol Oates The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS David Tallerman Lucy Taylor Marc Laidlaw Rena Mason

MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Stay Connected Subscriptions and Ebooks About the Nightmare Team Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue forty-five of Nightmare! We have original fiction from David Tallerman (“Great Black Wave”) and Marc Laidlaw (“The Finest, Fullest Flowering”), along with reprints by Lucy Taylor (“Things Of Which We Do Not Speak”) and Rena Mason (“Ruminations”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors and a feature interview with legendary author Joyce Carol Oates.

Nebula and Stoker Awards Results We’re thrilled to report that Alyssa Wong’s story, “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers,” from the Queers Destroy Horror! special issue of Nightmare (Oct. 2015), won the Nebula Award for best short story! Congrats to Alyssa and to all of the other winners. You can find a full list of the winners at SFWA.org/nebula-awards. Our sister-magazine, Lightspeed’s, streak of losing Nebula Awards has remained intact, and is now at fourteen- in-a-row and counting. Condolences (and another round of congratulations) to Amal El- Mohtar and Brooke Bolander who were also nominated this year for their stories in Lightspeed. “Hungry Daughters” was also up for the Stoker Award, but, alas, it was not able to claim a rare Nebula-Stoker double-victory. For a full list of the winners, visit horror.org.

Locus Awards Finalists Announced In other awards news, the Locus Awards finalists have now been announced, and we’re pleased to announce that that upstart story, “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” is also a finalist for the Locus Award—as are its Nebula Award co-nominees, Amal El- Mohtar (“Madeleine,” Lightspeed, June 2015) and Brooke Bolander (“And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead,” Lightspeed, February 2015). And last but not least, yours truly is a finalist in the Best Editor category. Congratulations to Alyssa, Amal, and Brooke, and to all of the other finalists, and thanks to all who voted for them (and me). You’ll find a complete list of the finalists, and instructions for voting, at locusmag.com.

• • • •

It’s another great month for nightmares, so thanks for reading!

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, a new SF/Fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & 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 and forthcoming projects include: 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 nominated ten 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. FICTION Great Black Wave David Tallerman | 4002 words

Staff Sergeant Walker steps away from the Ridgeback, wipes sweat from his eyes with a dust-grimed bandana, and tries to make sense of the scene before him. The heat has grown punishing. For a moment it twists the air, so that grey walls and desiccated bushes and sun-scorched faces above dark shalwar kameez all shiver unsettlingly. Walker wipes his eyes again and gradually the shimmering steadies. Yet still, the prospect doesn’t quite add up. Buildings that barely look like buildings; parapets of concrete, of heaped stone, but both an identical shade to the ground beneath and the cliff face behind. The whole place looks like it could be drawn back into the earth at any moment, like it has extracted itself only by some architectural force of will. “This has a definite air of bullshit,” says Sergeant Ravu from Walker’s shoulder—but he’s careful to keep his voice low. He has surely seen, as Walker has, the group of black-clad figures in the far background, where the village peters to meet the cliffs. There, a wide opening cleaves the rock: a tunnel evidently closed off until recently by gates of wire mesh and which now stand open. The men around the tunnel entrance are conspicuous in their sombre outfits, their wrap-around shades, their expensively light-weight body armour. Outside of what remains of the Afghan National Army, most of the boots on the ground these days belong to military contractors: professional soldiers in the narrowest of senses. But though there are a few private bomb-disposal outfits, their numbers are nowhere near sufficient to handle even the relatively unambitious revival of operations that has brought a diminished NATO force back to this land it swore, so recently and so adamantly, it had seen the back of. Making a snap decision, Walker starts towards them, motioning Ravu to follow and for the rest to remain with the Ridgeback. He doesn’t try to speak to the locals, who are watching impassively from shadowed alleyways and doorways. Behind him he can hear their translator, Aalem, making tentative greetings on his behalf. Walker catches Aalem’s “As-salamu alaykum,” and the customary echo, “Waalaikum as-salaam”—words every soldier in Afghanistan quickly learns. Peace be with you. And peace to you also. The first time he’d been told the meaning, long ago, it had struck Walker as painfully ironic. After a few weeks, when he’d seen more of what Afghanistan could do to bodies and souls, it had seemed merely sad. These days, the words barely register at all. He has said them, heard them, too many times, and still there’s no sign of peace. The news calls this the second Afghanistan War—or, in more crass moments, Afghan Two—but all that shows is how little they understand the country’s endlessly troubled history. Walker is no expert, but he knows he’d need more than his own two hands to tally every conflict this country has seen. Walker picks a path through the centre of the village, trying to absorb an impression of his surroundings without appearing to. Drawing closer to the contractors, he holds off from speaking, knowing whoever’s in command will identify themselves without needing to be asked. Sure enough, when he and Ravu are half a dozen paces away, one man steps forward. He’s older than the others; there’s grey about his temples and his eyes are that bit harder. “Denard,” the man says. He doesn’t offer to shake hands or, of course, salute. “I’m Staff Sergeant Walker. This here is Sergeant Ravu. We got your ten-liner.” The man, Denard, just nods. “What’re we looking at?” Walker prompts. “We’ve been tracking a group of insurgents. We think they’re operating from somewhere nearby. Word is, Forensics have traced a bomb factory to around this area too.” Denard motions towards the cave. “In there . . . we’re getting noise off the Vallon, just inside the entrance.” He indicates the metal detector propped against the cliff side, as though to corroborate his story. But Walker recognises the model, knows it’s a leftover from the last war. Odds are, it wouldn’t have delivered anything meaningful that close to the wire-mesh gates. In any case, he doubts the contractors checked at all; better to call it in, get paid to sit around for a few hours and then let someone else take the risks. “Okay,” he says. “We’ll take a look.” He’s already turning away when Denard says, “Only, there’s a problem.” Walker pauses. “Yeah?” “The locals.” Walker can see maybe a dozen figures from where he’s standing, all of them men and all of them watching. Yet there’s nothing hostile in their scrutiny and there are no guns on display, as there so easily could be. “What about the locals?” Denard gives a half shrug. “They say we can’t go in. That it’s forbidden.” He looks to one of his men, who Walker assumes is their translator. “Yeah,” the man says. “Forbidden.” He looks uncomfortable at the word. Walker understands. There are plenty of reasons that the locals might not want Denard and his men snooping about in their cave—but to forbid it is something altogether different. Standing orders are to approach anything religious, anything cultural, with the utmost sensitivity. If Denard thinks that’s what this is, of course he would want to make it somebody else’s problem. Walker notices only then that there are chains on the ground near to one of the gates, which presumably the contractors have cut away. The chains are in good condition, as are the gates; better, in fact, than anything else he’s seen since they arrived. From the way they were cut, it’s clear they were securing the gates from the outside. “All right,” Walker says. “We’ll talk to them.” • • • •

“What did I tell you?” Ravu says. “All sorts of bullshit.” Walker, deep in thought, only grunts his agreement. He has never seen anywhere that looked less like a bomb factory in his life. But there’s something going on, all right. He picked it up as they first walked through the village, and now it’s unmistakable. The atmospherics are all off. In Afghanistan, you learned fast to watch for the small details. No matter how many tours you had, you could never hope to gain the gut instincts of the locals—and so rather than watch for danger, you watched them instead. If there were kids playing, people working, chances were you were okay. But when the chatter died, when the people melted away . . . then you knew something was wrong. Here, something is wrong. There are too many eyes on them, not enough movement. Moreover, they’re vulnerable, no support for miles around; the nearest town is Jabal Saraj, but even Jabal Saraj is hardly near. If something goes down, can he rely on Denard? Yet it’s a futile question. If he could rely on Denard then the man would be with them here, right now, instead of hanging around that goddamned cave he’s so preoccupied with. Ahead, Walker is glad to see that Pieterson had moved the Ridgeback from the centre of the road, pulled it close to one of the larger houses. The rest of Walker’s team— Brimstone 60—are loitering around the entrance, and it’s apparent that somewhere along the line, negotiations have been conducted for them to make this building their temporary headquarters. Walker approves; it has few windows, access to a parapeted roof space and another low wall around its front and side. In other words, it’s defensible—should it come to that. To Pieterson, Walker asks, “Anything happening?” Pieterson grins. “Not a thing, Sarge. Deader than disco.” Walker glances around for their translator, not seeing him asks, “Where’s Aalem?” Pieterson motions towards the doorway. “He’s talking to the local guvnor.” “Okay.” To all of them, Walker says, “Make yourselves comfy. But stay sharp.” He indicates with the slightest motion of his eyes the nearest local, perfectly still in the shadows between two ramshackle houses. “Eyes on, all right?” They don’t need telling. They’ve been in situations like this a hundred times before. Every one of them knows how quickly and how entirely things can go south in Afghanistan. But they’re also short-handed, so a little extra caution can’t be a bad thing. Inside, the room is simply furnished. There’s a woven mat and a few cushions on the floor, a table and chair in one corner, a stove opposite that. Aalem and another man— dressed much like those silent observers outside, with no obvious mark of authority—are seated upon the mat, deep in conversation. Seeing them enter, Aalem gets to his feet and says, “This man is named Karzai, and he’s chief here.” Walker and the man, Karzai, exchange greetings. Karzai is in his forties, maybe, but his face is so weathered, so devoid of expression, that it’s difficult to judge. He seems tense, though, in fact radiates tension—and so, for that matter, does Aalem. Walker addresses the translator in English. “You’ve explained why we’re here?” Aalem nods uncomfortably. “Yes. But he says—no one goes in the cave. Nothing goes in. No man. No animal. Nothing . . .” He struggles for the right words. “Nothing that thinks.” Nothing that thinks? Ravu’s prediction is growing more accurate by the minute. “Did he explain why?” Walker asks. Aalem shrugs. “He won’t.” “Won’t?” Another shrug. “He says he can’t.” A part of Walker wants to argue. This is some superstition, clearly, or else a failure of translation; either way, he could do without it. Whatever his instincts say, perhaps the cave is being used for building bombs. Or as an arms stash, maybe, or for storing opium ready for transit across the border. Then again, maybe Islam has somehow failed to penetrate to this obscure mountain outpost, and they’re about to defile the holy site of some religion he’s never even heard of. Walker turns to Ravu. “We’ll send in the Birdeater,” he decides. Ravu chuckles; nothing about this situation seems to be fazing him. “Are you kidding? That thing’s smarter than half the people in this room.” Walker smiles; but he knows Ravu isn’t altogether joking. The Hollier EOD-90 Birdeater represents the very cutting edge of robotic bomb disposal. They are on strict instructions to give the machine a work-out in the field, on equally strict instructions to return it without so much as a scratch. Then again, the Birdeater is hard to scratch. He’s seen one take a direct hit from a twenty kilogram device and walk away; blow a Birdeater up and it might bounce around, but chances are it will not break. However, all the new wave of bomb-disposal robots can take a punch; what sets the Birdeater apart, what Ravu is referring to, is not what it can withstand but what it can do. The first time Walker saw it in action was the first time he realised he might one day be looking for a new career. That was the day he watched a robot detect and dispose of three EODs of varying design in a little over thirty minutes, with no human intervention whatsoever. So, yes, the Birdeater is smart. But not, he likes to think, quite as smart as he himself. At any rate, he won’t be using it in that capacity today; in user-operated mode it’s only a tool, though still an extraordinary one. “Go get it,” Walker tells Ravu. “I want him to see it.” Ravu steps out and a minute later is easing through the narrow doorway, his silhouette bulked by the odd-shaped pack he’s now wearing and the thing like a particularly ugly briefcase he carries in one hand. Ravu puts the briefcase on the table, carefully shrugs off the backpack and lays it on the ground. Immediately, with a whisper of servers, the backpack gets up. Now it has eight spindly legs, which have unfolded from beneath it. It looks less like a spider than its name implies, but still more insect than machine. Walker clicks a latch on the briefcase and flips its lid up, revealing a screen and keyboard. As he does so, the screen flickers to life, and abruptly he can see a crystal-clear view of his own back, the table and the console, the image diminishing in endless repetition: the view from the Birdeater’s camera. He turns back to Aalem and to Karzai, who’s watching the contraption that squats in the centre of the room with unabashed horror. “Explain to him that it’s a robot,” Walker says. “Explain that we won’t step foot inside without their permission. We just want to have a look around; check there’s nothing going on here that shouldn’t be.” Aalem rattles off a half-dozen sentences, using conspicuously more words than Walker did—and then fielding objections, one after another. After a couple of minutes, seizing on a lull in the debate, Walker adds, “Make sure he understands that either the robot goes in or we do.” Aalem hesitates, and then nods. When he speaks again, he does so only briefly, and the tone of his voice has changed. Karzai’s response is equally concise. Then Aalem says to Walker, “He asks—this is a machine?” Walker sighs inwardly. Has it really taken five minutes to establish so little? “And you told him, yes.” “I did,” Aalem agrees. “Then he asks—it can’t think?” “It’s a machine,” Walker emphasises. Yet something about the half-truth snags at his conscience. “Then,” Aalem says, “he agrees. But just the machine.” “Just the machine,” Walker confirms. Then to Ravu, “Go get it ready.” Ravu hoists the Birdeater by its straps, hauls it onto his back; the legs fold back into their inactive positions and once again the robot is a shapeless mass of metal and plastic. Ten minutes later—time in which the three of them stand in uncomfortable silence—Ravu is back. “Ready to go,” he declares. Walker wants to be glad. An hour more and maybe they’ll be done here. If there’s nothing inside, or if it isn’t explosives, Denard and his men can take over and Brimstone 60’s part is played. Yet the doubt hasn’t gone away. It can’t think? An absurd question, and his reply was such a small lie, hardly untrue at all. However, as Walker turns back to the screen—which now shows a slightly pixelated representation of the cave mouth, the sunlight barely softening its darkness—he finds that it still troubles him.

• • • •

There is metal inside the tunnel entrance. But it isn’t mines. The objects are each about a foot tall, black under the Birdeater’s flashlight—and when Walker eventually manages to manoeuvre it to a position from which he can see their fronts, utterly grotesque. With their design of faces piled one upon another, some human, some animal, all flowing into each other, they make him think of miniature totem poles. They’re evidently carved from stone, but perhaps there’s metal in the charms draped about their necks, enough to set off the Birdeater’s sensitive detectors. Walker looks to Karzai, sees that he too is watching the screen. His face remains expressionless. So Walker was right: a religious site, some ancient holdover surviving in this isolated place. No wonder they’re so secretive. He would like to leave this here, to respect these peoples’ wishes. Then again, there’s still the slender chance that this is all a clever bluff. If only for the sake of the report he’ll have to write, he needs to be sure. Walker turns the Birdeater around, careful to stay well clear of any of the statues. Ahead the tunnel contracts, and after a minute he finds himself wondering how a human could even navigate it. At the very least, they would have to crawl on hands and knees. Yet there’s clear evidence that the passage was manmade, dints and scratches in the stone that might be chisel marks and, occasionally, wooden props. Walker is careful to steer around those too, lest he inadvertently cause a cave-in. The Birdeater is agile but not fast. Time ticks by slowly, seconds to minutes. The passage must be very long. Walker’s eyes ache with the effort of concentration. He has almost convinced himself that there’s no end when finally he reaches it: when the tunnel opens without warning into a cave. The space is small, smaller than the room they’re in. He thinks at first that the only exit is the one the Birdeater arrived by, until he tilts the camera and sees the well at the centre. Its perimeter, a ring of weathered stone, is flush with the sandy ground. There are symbols carved there, unlike anything Walker has seen: loops and whorls and scratches that hint at meaning. Karzai says something. Long seconds pass before Aalem translates. Then he murmurs, “He says, you’ve seen enough. Now you go.” Walker ignores them both. This isn’t about his report anymore; he needs to know. He walks the Birdeater to the very edge of the well, flinching at the transmitted tip-tap of its segmented legs upon the stone. Then he tilts the camera further. The well must be very deep. The Birdeater’s high-powered torch can’t probe to its bottom, barely infringes on the darkness there. The darkness . . . The darkness moves. Karzai speaks. Aalem translates. “He says—the wave. The black wave.” Aalem scrunches his features, perplexed, afraid. “That’s what he says.” The darkness is rising. It moves in fits and starts. When it’s motionless, it’s hard to believe that it’s there at all. Karzai speaks again. This time Aalem makes no effort to interpret. The darkness is close to the Birdeater’s camera now. It has no shape. Then it does. A face—something animal. It forms and then unforms. It moves closer—moves very close. Another face, black against black. It is a dog. It is a snake. It’s a locust. A sheep. Then something Walker doesn’t recognise. A fish. A camel. A mix of both. Snake-dog. Insect- sheep. Nothing he has ever seen or ever wants to see again. A rat. A fly. A human face. His own? Yes. He’s looking into a black mirror. He doesn’t like what he sees there. Walker thinks that maybe he could keep looking at the image on the screen forever, that he might never tear his eyes away. But then he realises something is happening in the room. Something crucial has changed. The atmospherics . . . the atmospherics are all off. When Walker drags his gaze from the screen, the man, Karzai, has a gun in his hand: a pistol, antique-looking, maybe something the Russians left behind. Bizarrely, he’s pointing the gun not at Walker, not at Ravu or Aalem, but at the console. He is repeating words that Walker can’t understand. Walker puts his hands in the air. It’s a show for Ravu and Aalem as much as for Karzai. It’s meant to say, let’s everyone keep calm. “Tell him there’s no need for this,” he says to Aalem. But Aalem is close to panic. Walker tries his best to catch his eyes and hold them. “Tell him,” he says again. “Tell him we can talk. Tell him, I want to understand.” Aalem speaks, then Karzai, not moving the gun at all. Aalem begins to translate before Karzai has even finished, so that abruptly the two of them are speaking in tandem: “He says, you don’t need to understand. You’ve seen. Now you know. Now you have to leave. This is their duty, not yours. The time isn’t yet. You must leave and not come back.” Walker wants to look back at the screen. He doesn’t like to think what might be happening there, out of his field of vision. “We can’t just . . .” “He says, you go. Go now. Take your machine. Never come back.” “No, listen,” Walker insists. “It’s not so simple. We can’t just . . .” Then the gun goes off. Walker sees it and he hears it, the explosion so loud that it seems to suck the very air from the room; silence follows in its wake. He closes his eyes—for just a moment, it seems. He opens them again and time has passed. He’s on the ground, he realises, on hands and knees, but he can’t say why. Slowly the silence is dissolving, first into a static hum and then to other sounds. There’s shouting. Some of it is inside the room and some, he thinks, is coming from outside. There’s another shot, the rattle of small arms fire, the sudden, unmistakable roar of the Ridgeback’s heavy machine gun. Walker looks for Karzai. He’s on the ground, and Ravu is standing over him, and there’s blood in splashes and smears across the wall and floor. Walker looks at the screen. The Birdeater is moving. It shouldn’t be, can’t be, but it is. It’s moving back through the passage, and he knows that the half circle of yellow before it represents the tunnel mouth. Yet it’s hard to make out distinctly, because something—like flies, like fog—is swirling about it. He gets to his feet. Ravu is saying something to him, but he can’t hear it. He walks out of the doorway. He sees Anders first: dead, the whole side of his head demolished, its contents flowering across one flank of the Ridgeback. Dent is cowering in the corner where the walls meet, his eyes gigantic with fear. Pieterson is firing over the parapet wall: short, controlled bursts, just like they’re taught. But she looks around when she hears Walker behind her, and mouths words. Walker ignores her. He steps out into the street. Perhaps the firefight has lulled or perhaps the bullets simply choose not to strike him. Walker doesn’t know which, or care. He needs to see—to understand. There before him is the tunnel mouth. There, crouched on its periphery, is the Birdeater. And all around, like fog, like tar, what has come with it. And there are Denard and his men. They are on the ground, but they’re moving. Not like people moving, though; it’s as if they are puppets and something is tugging, without order or reason, at their strings. Denard is first to his feet. He hoists himself up, and through every instant it looks as though he’ll tumble back. But moment by moment, his confidence grows, his motions grow surer. At first, Walker mistakes the black depths of his eyes for sunglasses, until he sees the shades in the dirt, cleanly snapped in two. There is no way there could be an expression in that swirling darkness, yet Walker thinks he sees pride: pride in making arms and legs work as arms and legs should. A part of him wants to run. Another part understands how futile that would be. He knows the truth now, sees it clearly, as though the permutations of that whirling tenebrosity are a code that he can now read. Soon, very soon, there will be nowhere to run to. The black wave, still for a thousand, thousand years, has risen. Now it begins to fall. Instead, Walker waits—for Denard, for what lives in him. And as he waits, Walker’s mouth forms silently around a greeting: As-salamu alaykum. For here, now, peace has come.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR David Tallerman is the author of the comic fantasy novels Giant Thief, Crown Thief and Prince Thief, the absurdist steampunk graphic novel Endangered Weapon B: Mechanimal Science and the forthcoming The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories, a collection of pulp-styled horror and dark fantasy fiction. His short fantasy, science fiction, horror and crime stories have appeared in or are due in around eighty markets, including Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and his genre-bending debut novella Patchwerk was released by Tor.com in early 2016. David can be found online at davidtallerman.co.uk.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight Things of Which We Do Not Speak Lucy Taylor | 4589 words

“Hit me,” said Elaine. I thought I hadn’t heard her right. “Hit me,” she repeated. I stopped in mid-stroke. She might as well have said the sheets were on fire. My penis slithered out of her like a clubbed snake. Rolling off her, I stared at the cracked plaster and wondered why ceilings weren’t routinely decorated with some groin-enlivening mural—Delacroix’s Rape of the Sabines, maybe, or some nice nineteenth century Japanese porn—something to provide spent males, or prematurely limp ones, some focus for contemplation other than their own untimely detumescence. “Why did you say that?” “That was Little Elaine.” “Oh, Christ, not that inner child crap.” I flopped onto my side, willing myself not to say anything else. I mean, I loved this woman. Even if I’d only known her for a few months, I loved her passion and her energy and the way she craved sex like some kind of cock-junkie, but sometimes her incessant psycho-babble, pop-psychology, Survivors of Shitty Childhoods Anonymous, or whatever crap the shrinks on the bestseller list were hyping these days, really got old. After all, nobody has a perfect childhood, right? But you grow up and you forget about the bike you didn’t get for Christmas or the dog that got hit by a car. You get down to the business of being a grown-up and you leave your childhood behind. I stole a glance at Elaine. She appeared to be meditating on the area between her eyebrows. “I asked you to hit me.” “That doesn’t turn me on. I care about you. I want to kiss you and caress you.” “You don’t get it, do you?” “Evidently not. Care to enlighten me?” “I don’t want you to hurt me. Getting rough during sex doesn’t have to mean anything sexist or sinister. It just adds to the rush, like going over the top of a rollercoaster. My therapist says it’s really Little Elaine, my inner child, who wants to be slapped. Little Elaine grew up with lots of yelling and screaming and hitting. She’s addicted to chaos.” “Do you have any idea how stupid you sound when you talk about yourself in the third person? I feel like I’m in a ménage à trois, and one of us is underage.” “Fuck you, Matthew. You’re just being a prick because you lost your hard-on.” She flung the sheets aside and leaped out of the bed. Suddenly I felt very alone. “I wish you wouldn’t go.” My pecker wished it, too. Elaine was a dancer and part-time fitness trainer. Her body radiated a fierce, androgynous energy. Riding Elaine, it was like making love to a lust- struck python. Now she stormed about the bedroom, gathering up items of her clothing that had been cast about in a frenzy of libido that, given the present circumstances, now seemed sad and ludicrous. “Elaine, I’m sorry.” “Look, I won’t ask you again to do anything you’re not up for—” She realized what she’d said, and we both laughed. At least it broke the tension, but she didn’t stop getting dressed. “I have to leave anyway. Cory’s probably sweet-talked the sitter into letting him stay up to play video games all night.” “Hey, tell Cory I got that backgammon set he wanted.” “That was sweet of you, Matthew. I will.”

• • • •

After Elaine left, I lay on the damp, sex-scented sheets, feeling angry and confused, marveling at the peculiar masochism of people who seemed to relish the rehashing of their traumatic pasts. I had always avoided thinking of my own family. Yet now, perversely, the memories came, each with its own distinctive sting, like an angry acupuncturist jabbing in the needles. My father had died in ’98, and Mom lived with my sister RuthAnn in Illinois. I called occasionally, but the mere sound of their voices was like hearing the language of a foreign land where one was once held prisoner. I had no wish to ever revisit it. If Elaine’s family had been drunken and violent, mine had been the opposite: quiet, pious, restrained. Grace before meals, Mass on Sunday. No alcohol, no swearing, no voices raised in either rage or exultation. Boundaries were rigidly observed and privacies respected. Dad taught high school chemistry and coached football. RuthAnn, two years my senior, was a high school track star. I was a “brain” who could master trig but blundered about in gym class like a lobotomized brontosaurus, a timid tourist in my skin to whom the language of the body seemed as alien as Sanskrit. Football was Dad’s great passion. A winning team meant conversation at the supper table, a losing one evoked grim silence. Sometimes I couldn’t help but wonder how he felt, coaching other people’s athletic, strapping sons, then staring across the table at his own pimply, uncoordinated progeny. Freddy Burton was a year ahead of me, a sixteen-year-old junior, and even pudgier and less athletic than I was. For that reason, I suppose, I tried to be his buddy. I’d invite Freddy over for dinner and watch him scarf down two desserts and hope Dad noticed how truly disgusting Freddy was, how his gut lopped over his trousers and his chins jiggled. I figured if I couldn’t make Dad proud of me, at least I’d make him less ashamed. Like that time I dislocated my shoulder in a sledding accident, and Dad drove me to the hospital. He didn’t comfort me, but only said he hoped I wasn’t going to cry. I nearly bit my tongue in half not crying. I was thinking of that ride to the hospital when I fell asleep, and the old nightmare surfaced in all its terrible clarity: my throat feels like I’ve gargled with Drano. The school nurse has diagnosed strep throat and sent me home. Now I stand at the foot of the stairs, looking up at my father, thinking maybe he’s come home for lunch. He holds one hand out like a traffic cop and says, “Don’t come up here.” But my room is upstairs and my bed and my books. I have a sudden, urgent need to be there. To crawl into bed with a book and escape into a jungle of squiggly black bug tracks on a cream-colored page. I start up the stairs. “No!” commands Dad. A fierce heat radiates from above. My eyelashes feel scorched, my forehead burns. At first I think it’s fever. But suddenly I understand—our house must be on fire! And Mom and RuthAnn! Where are they? Now I remember a story I read about a boy who saved his family from a burning building. How I longed to be that boy, to be a hero better than any football star. To see the pride and gratitude in Dad’s eyes, to be someone who mattered. I rush up the stairs, oblivious to danger, determined to rescue Mom and RuthAnne, to make Dad proud. Dad blocks my path. No! He grips my shoulders, forces me to meet his eyes. They gleam like pale, ice- encrusted stones. He says, “Some things we do not speak of.” This was the nightmare from my youth, with Dad saying those words I always thought I had imagined, until the night Elaine asked me to hit her. After that, it seemed as if I heard Dad’s voice every time I closed my eyes.

• • • •

On Saturday, Elaine couldn’t get a babysitter for Cory, so I took the Lexington #6 train over to 8th Street and walked up to Avenue A, stopping at the corner market to pick up steaks and a bottle of Chianti, some Orange Crush for Cory. When I left the store in the early twilight, the neighborhood was already acrawl with people who looked as though, a few hours from now, they’d be filling up the local emergency room, psych ward, and drunk tank. A shopping bag hag waddled past me, spewing gibberish with the panache of a Pentecostal speaking in tongues. A slant-eyed hooker—some exotic mix of Chinese, Hispanic and black—leaned a leather-clad hip in a doorway. Rap blatted from an open window. Across the street, a couple stood on the porch of a dilapidated walk-up, bickering in some dialect that sounded like corn popping. I could smell weed, hear obscenities shouted, taste the grit and the swill of the city. Dammit, how could Elaine raise her son in such a pit? Once the neighborhood had held hopes for gentrification, but tonight the little ragged clumps of street people, the pairs of sullen hookers, fouled it like the droppings of a thousand diarrhetic pigeons. “Hey, Mister!” They were on me before I realized what was happening. A tribe of them, four half- naked boys, their complexions varying shades of brown and black and sickly alabaster. They sauntered over from a doorway, all sinews and skin, like scrawny wolves wearing tight jeans and sneers. “You party, Mister?” The tattooed boy who spoke surveyed me with the black, predatory eyes of some wild, nocturnal raptor. His skin looked the color of dusk, all soot and smoke, and his neck was way too supple and long and unblemished to belong to a boy. His face bore a mocking smirk that I longed to rearrange with my fist. “You talk, man?” said another. I glimpsed gold teeth, heard gum pop. I elbowed my way past them, clutching my parcels. “What you like, man? Blow-job? Hand-job? You like it in the ass?” I reminded myself these were just kids trying to shock. Their high-pitched laughter sounded like Cory’s the time I took him to a PG-13 movie and, to my embarrassment, every other word was a four-letter one. “Fuck you then. You ain’t from this neighborhood. What is it? You a cop?” I shifted the shopping bags to one arm and shoved the boy who blocked my way. He lost his balance and stumbled off the curb. A stream of curses flew at me like darts. I reached Elaine’s building and hurled myself through the door. I didn’t mention the encounter on the street, but when Elaine asked me to go back to the store for salad dressing, I pleaded fatigue. While she made a salad in the kitchen, Cory and I played backgammon on the set I’d bought him. He was a bright boy, quick to learn. I watched him concentrate on his next move, brows furrowing, a small black mole on his left cheek accentuating the pallor of his skin. The whiteness, the fragility of that skin made me think suddenly of the vermin I’d encountered on my way here. A sudden appalling image: Cory, a few years older, posturing and smirking, eyes bright with dope and menace, thumbs thrust into the pockets of his too-tight jeans, fingers angling down to form a “V”. “Cory, does anyone ever bother you?” He looked up, surprised. “You mean at school?” “Or here in the neighborhood. You know, older kids.” “You mean like drug pushers? Pervs? We took a course in that last year in school —‘How to Be Street Smart and Safe.’” “But do you feel safe around here?” I made my move. Too fast, a blunder so obvious Cory had to think I was deliberately throwing the game. “C’mon Matthew. You can do better than that.” His move. “Hey, look, I know this ain’t—this isn’t Fifth Avenue, and people get mugged here and all. But I can look out for me and Mom.” He glanced behind him to make sure Elaine wasn’t looking, then dug into his school bag and produced a set of nunchucks. “Cory, you’ve got no business— “ But at once I saw in Cory’s face the fear that I’d tell his mother. I knew that such a betrayal would mean a sure rupture in the friendship the boy and I were forming. So I nodded, respecting the trust he’d placed in me by protecting his secret. Later, though, helping Elaine do the dishes, I voiced some general concern. “You really ought to move. It isn’t safe to raise a child in this neighborhood.” “Cory’s a tough kid. You should have heard what he said to the panhandler who cussed at me the other day. He’s a tiger.” “He’s only twelve years old, Elaine. He needs protection.” “From what?” “Christ, Elaine, don’t tell me you don’t see the kind of hoodlums that hang out around this neighborhood? Why, just tonight on my way here, there was a gang of toughs who . . .” But then the implications of what I was about to tell her struck me, and a queasy, seasick feeling roiled liquidly in my gut. What if there was some significance in the fact that the young thugs had chosen me to waylay? What if the street kids had sensed something in me that even I was unaware of? Elaine was staring at me strangely. “What happened, Matthew? You look sick.” “There was a younger kid, that’s all,” I quickly lied. “They roughed him up a bit. I put a stop to it.” Later, after Cory was tucked in bed and we’d made love, we lay with only our fingertips touching, letting the sweat dry off our bodies. Elaine’s bedroom was stuffy, airless. A ceiling fan turning dissolutely overhead stirred air that seemed the temperature and consistency of tepid porridge. She stroked my hand. “Cory likes you. You’re good with him.” “Cory makes it easy. He’s bright and well-behaved. I don’t know how I’d be if he were a brat.” Elaine turned on her side, pressed against me. Her skin felt hot and slick. She smoothed the damp hair off my face, then let her fingers trail along the inside of my thigh. A dangerous heat radiated off her. She rubbed against me, her belly muscles flexing. She was wet when I pushed inside her. “Matthew? Did you hear me?” She’d murmured something in her “naughty” voice, her Little Elaine voice, but I hadn’t been listening. “Suppose I was a brat . . .?” Her words knifed through the sex-trance. “. . . and I’d been bad?” I tried to get into the spirit of this without losing my concentration, without letting my mind leave its dark, preverbal rapture. “I’d cancel the cable TV.” “I mean really bad.” “Put you up for adoption on Craig’s List?” “Matthew, please.” She stopped moving, but her internal muscles were at work, pumping, milking. “Punish me.” “You haven’t done anything wrong.” “Pretend.” I wasn’t good at fantasy. Whatever the appeal of make-believe, I’d tried to leave it behind in childhood. “Elaine, I can’t get into this.” “Of course you can.” (I mustn’t.) “I don’t know what you want.” “You do.” (I do.) She gazed up at me, hungry-eyed. “Hit me,” cooed Elaine, all honey and heat. “Elaine, this scares me.” My erection was diminishing like a Popsicle thrust toward a flame. I tried to reconnect with sensuality by pinching her nipples and swirling my tongue along the curve of her neck. All for naught. She sucked my lower lip between her teeth and bit down hard. The pain was like an icepick up the ass, unprecedented, scalding. I tasted blood. “Christ!” She lunged at me. I fended her off, pinning her arms above her head, but it felt like she had twice as many joints as an ordinary woman and three times the strength. She broke my grip on her wrists and flailed at me with long acrylic nails. I knew this was Elaine’s idea of a game, but suddenly I felt terrified, like I was battling for my life. I did what she wanted. A timid blow at best. Yet a smile of both relief and lust and yes, even childish triumph, spread across her features. God help me, I wanted to hit her again. Not just hit her, but pound her face until her nose shattered, until her eyes were fleshy slits echoing the larger wound between her legs, her cheekbones like crushed eggshells, and then I’d work her over down below, starting with her penis— Penis? Shame flayed me. I muttered “Damn you,” got out of bed, and headed for the bathroom, where I knelt before the toilet, my dinner perilously close to retracing its original route. The hand with which I’d struck Elaine still tingled. Elaine tapped on the door. “Matthew? Matthew, listen. You didn’t hurt me. Matthew, are you okay? What’s wrong?” But how could I answer her, when I truly wasn’t sure? And how could I go to sleep, when I knew what I would dream?

• • • •

I’ve left school early, sent home with a sore throat. Dad’s Olds is in the driveway, but he isn’t in the kitchen or the den, so I start up the stairs to look for him. This time Dad doesn’t stop me. A cold dread ices my stomach, and I try desperately to wake myself up, but it’s as if I’m trapped in the dream, drowning in it, and I have to go on. On the threshold of my parents’ room, I hesitate. I’ve never intruded here, not even when I was five years old and woke up screaming, convinced the silhouette of the neighbor’s cat outside my window was a bloody-fingered corpse, freshly self-exhumed, scratching at me outside the glass. I give a timid knock before entering, but the room is empty. Isn’t it? From the bathroom that adjoins their room, I hear sounds. The door’s half open, so I peek inside. And almost blurt out “excuse me”, because isn’t that what you say when you catch someone on the commode, except the toilet seat Dad’s sitting on is down, and Freddy Burton’s head is bobbing up-down, down-up on his lap. Dad looks at me, but doesn’t disengage. It’s as if the head is growing out of my father’s crotch, a gross and bloated cancer complete with jug ears, sprouting from his genitals. “You bastard!” I shout. “You bastard, I’m going to tell!” I shut the door and run. Outside, a light snow’s falling. I run until my lungs hitch. Then I walk until I’m able to run some more. It goes like that, until I’m numb in every part of me except my heart, the part that hurts the most and that I cannot deaden. Anger keeps me going long past the time my lungs and muscles scream to quit. What brings me home at last, though, is something else, that most exhausting of emotions, shame. I feel that I will choke on shame, because, as the anger recedes, what’s left stranded on the shore of my soul isn’t disgust or rage or revulsion, but something much more terrifying: black envy of the boy my father’s used. Envy and, God help me, desire. Part of me would like to die, to be found frozen in the snow, my corpse mute accusation far worse than any words. Instead, of course, I opt for warmth over melodrama. I hide out at the Mall until it closes, then slink home. Mom and Dad and RuthAnn are finishing supper. Mom looks up and says, “Thank God! We were about to call the police,” but I know that’s just to scare me. Then Dad takes me into the den and unbuckles his belt. I know this ritual well, know what’s expected. I lower my jeans and briefs, brace myself against Dad’s desk. My testicles curl up so tight I can feel them press my kidneys. “Say it,” says my father. I can’t. My throat feels cauterized. “Say it!” The belt hisses down, strikes the desk chair. “What do you want? Say it or I’ll make it worse.” The words dribble out of me like tears. “Hit me.” “So I can hear you!” “Hit me!” I have to say it each time, before each stroke, even when I’m crying too hard to get the words out in any coherent form. After it’s over, my father says, “There are things that decent people never speak about, Matthew. And if you ever threaten me again, I’ll make it worse for you. Much worse.” And that is all he says about it. Ever.

• • • •

I knew I shouldn’t go back to Elaine’s apartment, not with the weight of those memories. But on the phone, she purred and promised enticements so seductive my cock lifted like a charmed snake, while in the background, I could hear Cory urging me to come over so he could beat me again at backgammon. A humid drizzle was falling, leaving the streets sodden, rain-slicked as I came up out of the subway. Before I even saw them, I heard their voices. The sharp, mocking chatter of parrots, curse words in English that were interspersed with bright, harsh snaps of Spanish. Three of them were huddled under the rain-sagging awning of a fruit stand. Eyes glittery and feral, voices like little shards of glass, snipping at arteries. “Where’re your groceries tonight, man?” Snickers, hoots. The skinny one canted a hip. Batting of lashes, slicking of tongue. “Hey, man, whatchoo want?” I wanted to bounce their skulls off the sidewalk and watch them splat open like dropped melons. They were evil boys who singled decent people out for prey, who imagined others shared their vile desires. By the time I reached Elaine’s door, I burned with indignation. I would call the police, report the hooligans for prostitution, harassment. Elaine greeted me wearing a little see-through teddy with cut-outs in strategic places. “What’s wrong?” she said. “Those damned boys out on the street. They’re dangerous. I’m going to call the cops.” “Matthew, calm down. Can’t it wait?” She took my hand and kissed the knuckles, the inside of the wrist. Her palms felt hot, as though she’d warmed them over a stove. “I sent Cory to the store,” she said and led me toward the bedroom, where we made love with all the fervor of the first time, or maybe Elaine made love and I just fucked, I couldn’t tell. I only knew I didn’t want to look at her, that every time I closed my eyes I saw the sneering faces of the street hustlers. Elaine clutched at me. “Hit me, Matthew. I’ve been bad.” She bucked beneath me. Our bellies slapped together, sang of sex. She moaned, “I can’t . . . come . . . if you don’t . . .” “Then don’t fucking come.” “Damn you. Do it!” “No.” I can’t. I won’t. I want to. Elaine stopped moving. We were suddenly no longer joined. The urgent, hormonal energy that a moment earlier had galvanized my penis simply vanished, and with it went my hard-on. “Jesus, Matthew, not again.” “So understanding, aren’t you?” “Okay, you’ve got a problem.” “Yes, I do.” She got out of bed, grabbed her robe. I came around the bed to intercept her. “Elaine, I don’t want to . . .” hit you “Maybe you’d better leave.” But I did. I did what she had wanted all along. Suddenly she became small and light, almost weightless. My blow was open-handed but she flew backward, struck the wall, did not slide down, but blinked, astonished, hurt, and after that first time, it was easy, fun, like so many evil things, and the next blow spun her in another direction, against another wall. “Matthew, no. Stop!” This time she didn’t rise so fast. Her mouth was bleeding. I grabbed her by the hair, flung her across the bed. Straddled her. Her eyes took on a bright, uncomprehending terror. The next blow made her scream. My fist rose up, as powerful and potent as I wished my cock to be, but I didn’t hit her. Something smashed my ear, my neck. Raked my ribs from the other direction. “Let her go!” I tore my hand lose from Elaine’s frantic grip, whirled and caught Cory’s wrist. The nunchucks clattered to the floor. I threw him down and pinned him. In the dim light, I could see anguish on his young boy’s face, the skin so pale, like marble, eyes black and fierce with rage. A lovely face, the pink mouth opening like the sweetest of promises. Then the room exploded as Elaine grabbed the bedside lamp and swung the metal base against my head. Neon pain, Times-Square on New Year’s Eve inside my skull. Elaine and Cory fleeing. I heard the lock turn inside the bathroom door, got up and stumbled toward it. “Matthew, go away! If you try to break the door down, I’ll scream ‘Fire’! Everyone in the building will come running.” “But I . . . it shouldn’t end like this. Elaine? Cory. Cory, talk to me.” “Go to hell, motherfucker!” Elaine shushed him. “Don’t make him mad. He’s crazy.” Then, to me, “Just go. You’ve terrorized me and my son enough.” I leaned my head against the door. It felt like I was standing outside that other bathroom door again, the door behind which Freddy Burton knelt between my father’s feet, head bouncing up and down, and I wished it had been me. Me. I knew I wasn’t supposed to cry, but I couldn’t remember why not. Before I left Elaine’s apartment, I found Cory’s nunchucks on the floor and took them with me. He was too young to have such a dangerous possession anyway. Then I went looking. I didn’t have to go far. Two of them were lounging up against the wall of Elaine’s building. Passing a bagged bottle back and forth, stoned and sultry-eyed as heat-struck snakes. I motioned to the one with the curvaceous white throat and the blank, executioner eyes. “Still want to party?” The worst part was he didn’t look surprised. I let him lead me to a room in a squalid walk-up used by hustlers and heroin addicts. There were just the three of us tonight, though, me and the boy and Cory’s nunchucks. He wasn’t shocked by what I said I wanted him to do. Perhaps he’d played this role before. Perhaps other men had asked such things of him, men who cherished the seductiveness of pain, the cleansing power of suffering. After I gave him his instructions, he stood behind me, in the shadows, while I braced myself against the wall. But I could sense the bunching of his muscles, the gauging of the force he’d use on that first downward blow. My dick stiffened in remembrance of that place I once thought I’d escaped forever, my childhood. And the words came like a long-forgotten prayer: “Hit me.” ©1994 by Lucy Taylor. Originally published in Deadly After Dark, edited by Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Lucy Taylor is the author of five collections and seven novels, including the Stoker Award winning The Safety of Unknown Cities. Her most recent work includes the collection Fatal Journeys, the novelette “A Respite for the Dead”, and the Tor.com short story “In the Cave of the Delicate Singers”, which was selected for Richard Thomas’s Ten Best Short Stories 2015. Her upcoming work will appear in the anthologies Peeling Back the Skin, Fright Mares, Axes of Evil 2, Extreme Horror, and Nightmare Magazine. Taylor lives in the high desert outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, with five wonderful felines and (currently) a kangaroo rat inhabiting the futon in her office.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight The Finest, Fullest Flowering Marc Laidlaw | 2674 words

A sour note shrieked from the limousine’s speakers, making Milston’s fingers curl in his lap. He took a moment to compose himself before rapping precisely, and with a now steady hand, on the glass separating him from the driver. The tone had droned into a hum that tunelessly dreamt of someday becoming hypnotic. “What is this we are listening to, and is there any way to turn it off?” “Down, sir, but not off, I’m afraid.” The driver lowered the volume to a level barely audible; this was in some respects even more annoying. “Part of the colony’s ambiance, sir. Part of the design. Won’t be much longer though, sir. We’re almost there.” “There” turned out to be a pale brown stucco bungalow, unremarkable except for the roof of green ceramic tile. From overhead, you might not see it among the trees. Everything here—from the hidden runway to the matte and muted colors of the limousine —bespoke discretion, if not outright camouflage. As he stepped from the car, and the driver came around to retrieve his single suitcase and worn black valise from the trunk, he heard the volume of the music increase again, and he realized it was everywhere, moaning from speakers in the trees. There was no turning it down. The sour notes, still plentiful, were also now unavoidable. His luggage was placed on a cart. “Your bags will be waiting for you in your suite. But first, sir, your tour.” The driver bowed, ducked back into the limousine, and executed a turn that took the car back toward the airfield. Milston looked about, waiting for a word or direction from the plump older man who stood watchfully by the cart, presumably a concierge. “Am I to meet my patron here?” he asked finally. “Mr. Milston, it is my great pleasure. Like you, I delight in anonymity. In fact, it has become essential to my survival. Without it, I could never travel—although at this point I rarely leave the island. All my needs are more than met here . . . as I hope they will be for you. Shall we begin?” Milston took the proffered hand, found it dry, uncalloused, possessed of a faint tremor. “What am I to call you?” he asked. “Patron would be perfect. I think you will find me worthy of the title. Nothing would please me more than to support your work. I understand you will need convincing, but surely you have already looked into my ability to fulfill my promises?” A young woman in a dun uniform emerged from the bungalow to retrieve the cart. The men walked into the trees. They soon came out on a terrace overlooking hectares of manicured parkland. There were more jade roofed bungalows, but no buildings taller than three stories—nothing that stood above the trees. From the plane, as it descended out of blinding tropical clouds, he had seen breakers and beach on the far side of the island. Plenty of room for the Patron’s playground. “Everywhere you wander—and I assure you there is no place off limits—you will come across beauties and wonders. My aim is to provide them in endless profusion. Of course, we are only a decade into the garden by now—barely out of the planning stages.” A small silver car awaited them, an electric capsule mounted on a buried track. The Patron urged him in, and once they were seated, the tiny car glided down the sloped terrace. The ubiquitous drone of the music had modulated into something like a faintly complaining whine. The car sped through sculpture gardens and groves where avant- garde topiary trimmers had been at work. “I will not attempt to impress you with the names of my gardeners. As with many I’ve hired, the best practitioners are known by name only to the connoisseur. I rely on cognoscenti to advise me in all things. Which is of course how you came to my attention. Your work is the finest in the field, and you are approaching the height of your expressive powers. I hope to provide the opportunity to explore avenues you might never have dared believe could open to you.” The car rolled to a stop at another low, earth-colored villa, this one overlooking a lake. Fans of spray wavered against a backdrop of palms. The air was just warm enough to make the breeze delicious. Inside the house, the music was muted to whatever managed to filter in from outside. “A home of this sort is what we provide initially,” the Patron explained. “With time, architectural variety is expected to arise, and you would be encouraged to help design your own ideal accommodations. A great deal of what you see is blank slate, unmolded clay . . . whatever medium suits you.” They had come out into a room of several stories’ depth. The ceiling was all glass, flooded with sunlight, the cavernous space below filled with scaffolding. The center of all activity, suspended in the pit, was an enormous black stone over which dozens of artisans scrambled, busy with torches, chisels, drills. “A single iron meteorite, brought here at my expense, that Samira Potocki might pursue her inspiration. It is the heaviest single object ever lifted by air transport. I first had to commission and build a plane powerful enough to carry it. But expense has never hindered me. I liberate my artists to dream as big as they like . . . or as small. I just completed a STEM lab, for the whim of another resident who works at the level of the electron. Few will ever see the work he creates—but that is no longer the point of art, if it ever was. If the audience is properly appreciative, can it matter to the artist if that audience numbers only one? Ah, Samira! Meet our latest prospective colonist!” She was a small dark woman in dusty coveralls, with sharp features and bright eyes. “There is nothing so radiant as an artist fulfilled,” the Patron said, and her smile supported his statement. “Delighted,” she said. “I hope we will soon be neighbors.” “What are you working on?” he asked to be polite. “I’m not working on, I’m working toward.” “I offer all my artists the space and resources they need to explore without worrying about arriving anywhere. For Samira, a meteorite . . . for you, I wonder? I hope to learn what I can offer, beyond the obvious supplies.” Milston inclined his head, squeezed the sculptor’s hand briefly, and was ushered forward. Beyond the space full of scaffolding, outside again, another car waited to carry them deeper into jungle. “You can of course walk, drive or be driven, or request any manner of conveyance,” the Patron assured him. “For some, the incubatory process is stimulated by aimless driving, so we have started on construction of a self-contained highway system. There are creative solutions to every need, when you have access to sufficient resources. Also, I detected perhaps a bit of a mutual spark between you and Samira? Let me assure you that privacy will be respected and promoted in a way the outside can never approach. My guests can explore any type of relationships they wish, without censure. Whatever limits you wish to impose on your own tastes, I leave you to set for yourself. I hazard no guess as to your predilections. Now . . . from the visual arts, to the audible.” The building they next approached was a thin spire among the trees, itself a treehouse sheathed in translucent resin mesh. It was awkwardly placed in a scene of such balanced beauty. “One of our earliest residents,” the Patron said. “As you can see, he had a hand in his home’s design—and while his natural talents are many, in styling himself an architect I fear he might have finally overreached. Still, I do not like to inhibit my artists. This is all part of his growth.” They rode a small cylindrical lift up the trunk of the tower, stepping out onto a circular loft that gave a view through the trees of distant shore and a misty estuary. Wide white birds glided toward the waves. Seated before the vista, as if controlling it from a vast console of sliders and keys, was a man with long, thinning grey hair. The squonking of the island’s ongoing soundtrack grew aggrieved. “Our resident composer,” said the Patron. “Why are you disturbing me? Have I not asked you repeatedly to leave me off your tour?” The composer would not turn around. He treated them to a view of his bald, spotty pate, and that was all. “In most cases, I have respected that wish,” said the Patron. “But I felt an exception was necessary.” The Patron turned to Milston with an apologetic expression. “From time to time I may insist on a patron’s privilege. I trust I know better than to abuse it. Consider that we only come to admire the view.” “Well you’ve seen it. Now be off!” “I have been enjoying your latest compositions very much, I should mention,” said the Patron with apparent sincerity. The bony white fingers paused on the keyboard. “I am told that in certain of the residences, speakers have been disabled!” The air trembled with an extended note not quite of melancholy . . . not quite of anything specific enough to characterize. Milston found himself staring at the poorly manicured fingers, the ragged, bitten nails, like visual equivalents of the sounds that had accompanied his tour. “A pleasure meeting you,” he said, but there was no verbal reply from the composer, just another misplaced warble, a sonic non sequitur that sent the birds from the trees. From the treehouse they proceeded to a vast kitchen complex, where chefs with names he almost recognized ordered about kitchen staff of only slightly lesser celebrity. Lunch was served above the waves, on an enclosed pier from which he could look back toward the island or out toward the undisturbed horizon. Each dish was a revelation. “Imagine such miracles at every meal,” the Patron said. “And in every aspect of your life and work. Does it tempt you? There is much more still to see, but I wonder what you think so far?” “You are persuasive,” Milston allowed himself to say. “Well, it is not I alone . . . it is the enterprise. What we have here is a place that allows the fullest, finest flowering of human endeavor, in all its variety. The arts are permitted come into their own. What I get out of all this is something I cannot describe. To be patron . . . there is no greater honor or pleasure. Now, shall we go? There are others to meet. A tiny portion of our residents, but it should give you a taste of all you’ll have access to. Ultimately, our greatest resource is the community we’re gathering.” “Before we continue, I just want to clarify the one stipulation that I’m sure has been a sticking point for many before me. The fact that . . .” “You can never leave?” “That one, yes.” “Our residents find security in certainty. I can bring anything I like here, to the island, but nothing gets out. Nothing, and no one. A prison, some have called it, but one that allows for utter freedom of expression. I should think you especially would find this liberating, given that your own work has been so restricted, curtailed, and banned outright.” “What about the rest of the world? Don’t you wonder if you’re robbing them of something essential? Something they might miss?” “Does the world deserve them, Mr. Milston? Would that world miss you?” Milston, sitting very still, said nothing more. “Shall we?” They rose and walked along the pier, once more back to a silent silver capsule. The rest of the day was spent in the company of an extraordinary variety of extraordinary people—poets, painters, planners, programmers. At sunset they joined a party being held in a plaza by the sea. Milston mingled and the Patron disappeared, but Samira soon found him and introduced him to still more of the colony’s residents. The composer did not attend the fete, but he was there in spirit with a brooding score that made them all laugh, eliciting frequent snide remarks. “Please tell me you are a new composer,” said an elderly woman with reflective pupils, but then she stopped his mouth with a finger. “No, don’t! For now, let us leave some mystery. There is little enough of that here, though each new arrival brings the hope of it.” And she gave him a wine-soaked kiss, with an expertly placed but feeble grasp at his crotch, which cost him nothing to endure. It was full tropic dark but still early when the Patron found him in the crowd, and pulled him aside once more. “Mr. Milston, I have given you a full day of my time. This is all I can offer a prospective resident, I’m afraid. In the morning, we either put you on a plane and you never hear from me again, or you wake to begin your new life here. If the former, I very much enjoyed meeting you, and I regret but respect your decision. If the latter, then you may sleep in as late as you wish. There will be plenty of time for further orientation, and I promise you, I will enjoy following your work, and look forward to learning from the master. Now, your suite is ready if you are.” They rode a silver car in silence through a landscape of artfully illuminated fountains and pools. Guests walked among the trees, watching the car pass, as if wondering what choice he had reached. But there had never really been any choice to make. When the car stopped before the bungalow where the day’s tour had begun, he shook the Patron’s hand and said, “I appear to be jet-lagged, apologies if I have not quite been myself. I’m sure I’ll feel better after a night’s rest. Can we meet again sometime tomorrow afternoon?” “Perfect,” said the Patron. “I’ll leave instructions that you are not to be disturbed. Good night. And welcome. You’ve made a splendid choice.” The silver car whispered away. The house was small, but it had all the comforts and conveniences. He unpacked his suitcases and put his clothes away; found a bottle of very old whisky and a box of very young cigars, but these were not what tempted him. He went out onto the terrace and gazed over the gardens. He was braced and waiting for the aimless soundtrack to make one more offensive squawk when, suddenly, it stopped. The sounds of island night crept in. It was bliss. The landscape was sparingly painted with light, evocative as a dream. He saw hints of buildings through the trees, the glow of ornamental ponds, white coral pillars, miles and miles of gardens. A distant spire that must have belonged to the composer, now retired for the night. In the absence of music he felt he could finally think, could finally imagine what might take its place, what this garden truly needed. “The finest, fullest flowering,” the Patron had stated, and indeed it was true. The place was in full bloom. But every garden needed pruning, and a blossom deserved to be lopped before its prime had passed, before its petals fell. He set his black bag on the table, thinking of tools he had always wanted but never bothered to acquire, never daring to think he might get to use them. But that could come later. For now, he had all he needed to get started. He took out his prize set of shears, edges gleaming, of pristine surgical steel. I’ll begin with that composer’s horrible, hideous, ragged-nailed fingers, he thought, looking off toward the dark house of sound, imagining notes that were very sweet indeed.

©2016 by Marc Laidlaw. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Marc Laidlaw is the author of six novels, including the International Horror Guild Award winner, The 37th Mandala. His short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies since the 1970s. In 1997, he joined Valve Software, and over the next nearly two decades, worked as lead writer on the popular Half-Life and Dota 2 franchises. In 2016, he retired to resume writing his own stories. Recent publications include a novella, White Spawn, available as a chapbook and ebook from PS Publishing. Updates and other things may be found at his website, www.marclaidlaw.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight Ruminations Rena Mason | 5340 words

Running late to catch the bus, Luisa kicked a raised part of the sidewalk toes first. “Mierda!” She winced but managed to keep her balance. She stopped, raised her leg, and massaged her big toe through her canvas work shoes. Relieved to feel no broken bones, she lowered her foot, ignored the pain, and hurried to the bus stop. She shouldn’t have tripped, but that’s what happens when you’re not paying attention. After walking the same way to work for the past eight months, she’d memorized every crack and weed in the three hundred eighty-six square concrete slabs from her apartment building to the covered bench where she sat and waited most days. Today, she woke up late after dreaming of the warring city, and keeping to a strict daily routine had been what saved her. The bus driver, a friendly middle-aged man named Toby, had waited for her with the door open. “Thank you,” she gasped. Toby smiled. “Saw you coming. How’s your foot?” “It’s okay. Thanks.” “Good.” He closed the door behind her and pulled away from the curb. She went to her usual spot on the bus, always empty an hour before sunrise. Nine rows back, opposite from where Toby sat, Luisa sidestepped her way to the window seat and plopped down. She pulled her hurt foot out of the shoe and examined the stubbed toe. Dark purplish blood spread out underneath most of the nail bed in the shape of a cloud. She shook her head, knowing the dead nail would eventually peel off on its own, leaving her with a raw, fragile toe. Luisa looked to the right at her reflection in the glass. “See what you made me do?” she whispered. Four months ago, Luisa noticed a girl who mimicked her every move in the window. The reflection looked much like her own, only younger, a girl in her late twenties maybe. She had a bleak expression and fear in her eyes. It took two weeks of experimenting to convince herself the anomaly was real and not a trick of her mind or wishful thinking. She’d taken a mirrored compact from her purse and looked into it, glanced at the bus window and back again. The reflected images differed from one another. In her compact, she saw herself as she should be: a 48-year-old widow from Guatemala, lucky to get a job at her age for financial support. A woman with two sons, both adults in constant trouble with the law and presently serving time in the California prison system. For her own good and sanity, she didn’t keep in touch, disappeared from their lives. Life would’ve been different if she’d had a daughter. Sadness showed on her face, but didn’t compare to the young girl in the window. That girl’s eyes expressed a fear she hadn’t felt since first arriving in America. All the horrors Luisa had suffered through, she’d left behind in the jungle villages of the old country. The bus screeched and hissed. It had been still for ten seconds before Toby yelled back: “Your stop. Number twenty-two.” Her stop had come too quickly. She shoved her foot into the shoe and glanced at the reflection before rising. “This is your fault, too.” At this rate, she might end up late to work, and that wouldn’t be good. Too many others wanted her job. She passed Toby and thanked him. “You sure you’re all right?” he said. “I think that’s the first time I’ve ever had to—” “Yes, I’m fine.” Luisa hurried off the bus. It would be another twenty-minute walk to the Motel 8 off I-5 near Old Sacramento. Instead of thinking about the younger Luisa, she tried counting cracks in the sidewalk. After five hundred, she gave up and jog-walked the rest of the way. This must stop. The girl in the window, I won’t look at her anymore. Luisa arrived ten minutes after seven, late for the first time since she got the job. Jan, the shift supervisor, gave her a disappointed look when she handed over the color-coded rooms schedule. Luisa glimpsed the green circular sticker on the upper right corner of the paper and held back a groan. Floors seven through ten, where they checked in most of the families with small children. “Thank you,” Luisa said, but she didn’t mean it. “If anyone finishes early, I’ll send them up.” Luisa nodded and headed for the service elevator, knowing no one would come. Everyone stalled to avoid helping clean the family rooms. The coveted blue rooms schedule, where single businesspeople checked in, would be sorely missed today. They tended to be the neatest, with short stays, and on the first three floors. Sometimes, the beds hadn’t even been slept in. After loading up with supplies, she grabbed a vacuum and pushed the heavy cart down the hall to her first room. The door opened to a disaster area. Fast food containers with spilled contents lay strewn everywhere. Pasta noodles littered the floor next to the beds, some of them stepped on and smeared into the carpet. On average, it took thirty minutes to clean a blue room. Forty minutes into cleaning the green room, spending most of the time on her hands and knees, Luisa swore she’d never be late again. While running the vacuum over the carpet, now clear of items too soft or wet for the machine, something black darted across the front of the window to the corner of the room. She jumped a little but kept her balance with a firm grip on the vacuum’s rubber handle and continued to work. Ghost shadows often moved past her periphery in the hotel. If she ignored them, they’d go away. The other girls often told stories about people who’d died in the hotel’s rooms and scary things they saw at work during their lunches and over breaks. Luisa didn’t listen to them. She kept to herself and stayed away from the gossip. Knowing too much might frighten her and she needed the job. Being isolated from their conversations came with a price, though. Other employees took it the wrong way and stopped inviting her to potlucks and parties. Sometimes, she wished they’d ask her again. Pushing the vacuum back and forth, she could tell the black thing hadn’t moved. A knot of discomfort tightened her gut. The temperature dropped, sending chills down her spine. Maybe if she glanced at it, the ghost would be satisfied and disappear. She backed toward the door with the vacuum in front of her and looked up. It stood in the corner and pointed at the window. Luisa crossed herself, shook her head, and prayed in Spanish. The black thing had a human body. It took a step forward then motioned its other hand for Luisa to come.

• • • •

Ottaya attempted several sleeping positions while bombs exploded far off to the north of the city. Their decoy transport had worked again, but how long would their luck continue until the rebels caught on? The old woman who’d been coming at night to join the transport caravans for shelter needed Ottaya’s help, but also slowed her down. Then every morning she’d be gone again. Ottaya didn’t mind showing her the way, even though she didn’t quite understand why. Anybody else she might have let fall behind, but something about this woman reminded her of an important thing she couldn’t explain. When the time came to move again by day, the same woman could be seen, but only in the window glass. Ottaya thought in earlier times a different person might have looked back at her, someone younger, more familiar, but the memory remained clouded. A lot of war had happened since then, and the glass was always broken now or missing. Recently, she’d made it a point to sit in seats with more intact windows so she might learn more about the woman. But the older lady stared and said nothing. A loud crash shattered her sleep. The transport went over something that lifted her out of the seat and she banged her head against the metal frame. She rubbed her temple and opened her eyes. The older woman looked at her from a glass shard. How does she get there? Warm blood trickled down the side of Ottaya’s face, which she wiped with her filthy jacket sleeve. “This is because of you.” “Who are you talking to?” a burly man said from the aisle, hunched over because he was too tall for the transport. “No one,” she said. Then she shouted to the driver. “What is it, Deegan?” “Road block. They’re coming on.” Ottaya rolled her eyes and pushed up her sleeve while the tall man went back to where he’d been sitting. A tattooed barcode appeared on her wrist with the numbers 12-21-9- 19-1 imprinted underneath the lines—her resistance identification. Four armed, uniformed men boarded the transport and moved through the rows, checking each passenger. One soldier used a handheld scanner to inspect the barcodes, while the other three had their guns aimed at passengers. Ottaya knew the men wouldn’t hesitate to fire if the reader failed to verify a code, even if it was a momentary glitch in the system. She’d seen many innocents of the resistance die this way. When they got to her, she recognized one of them. “It’s good to see you’re still alive,” he said to her. She nodded. “Don’t move,” he said. The scanner’s laser beam read her identification. Ottaya held her breath and stared into his weapon’s muzzle. If something happened, she knew he’d make it quick. When the green light came on, she exhaled. “You never know,” the soldier said, and shrugged—a reminder of how they’d all become indifferent to life and death. The men moved to the next person. On their way back, the familiar soldier stood next to her and shouted at the driver. “Road bombs ahead. We’ll send two cycles in front of you.” Someone in the back groaned. “I know it doesn’t always work, but if the riders stay tight and move fast enough, they could trip a bomb, ride past it and clear the way. It’s all we can do,” the soldier said. He looked down at Ottaya and smiled. “Try to keep alive.” “Where is the decoy traveling tonight?” “You know I can’t tell you.” She did, but it never hurt to ask. “You’ll be safe,” he said and gripped her shoulder. “We need you in one piece for the genetics module transfer.” The soldier released his hold and exited the transport. My father’s memories and knowledge, broken down and injected into my brain. It would happen soon. Ottaya had been mentally preparing for it. Her mind would be a jumbled mess for a day or two, but then she’d have all the knowledge to create the genetic weapons her father had worked on before the rebels eliminated him. The rebels and resistance had warred for millennia. They’d destroyed many places and then moved on and ruined more. Her father had discovered a way to infect the enemy on a genetic level. A way to break down the chemicals that made them up. Ottaya looked at the woman in the glass. “My revenge. It’s coming.” Engines rattled and shook the transport as the driver put them back in gear. They’d soon be crossing terrain with hidden mines. She shifted in the seat, feeling anxious and warm. An enormous shadow surrounded them and loomed overhead. Some of the others strained their necks to the side and leaned their heads to look up. An air convoy hovered in the sky above. • • • •

Luisa trembled, unable to move, as she stared wide-eyed at the black thing. Her focus remained on its face, and the features became more familiar—the girl from her reflection. But why was she at the motel? What happened to her? “Vas,” Luisa said. “Go.” The girl from the warring city motioned again for her to come forward. The blackness covering her had once been skin. She had been burned. The char split apart like hard- caked desert floor. Red showed between the cracks—bloody raw flesh. Luisa winced. Perhaps the girl wanted to tell her what happened. Luisa’s foot resisted stepping forward. Tears welled in her eyes and she shook her head. No. The girl didn’t leave. Luisa took several deep breaths, trying to compose herself. Maybe she would pass out and the vision would go away. After several minutes of feeling nothing but dizziness and nausea, she looked down at the carpet to avoid seeing the girl. Luisa continued to shake, but keeping her focus elsewhere helped. Only then did her body allow her to step toward the window. Burnt feet and legs filled her periphery. She lifted her head and stopped. The girl pointed to the window. Luisa felt her body rise from the floor and float closer. Her body came to rest inches from the window with her feet on the carpet. Reflections moved in the glass, but not the same way they did outside. The images differed. Cars sped across I-5 in the distance, but up close, what she saw in the window confused her. Luisa shifted her focus back and forth between the two scenes, and they didn’t make sense. The reflected landscape had been destroyed; she recognized it now—the warring city. Charred bodies and remnants of an exploded bus littered a road. A large shadow blanketed the scene. A rectangular airplane, like a floating semitrailer, hovered above the carnage. Luisa moved closer, pressed her forehead against the glass. One of the burnt people came into focus and Luisa gasped. The eyes! They’d been removed, but after the body had been burned. The sockets were nothing but dark caverns surrounded by bloody rims, their empty depths extended to the back of the girl’s skull. Her brain, everything . . . gone. Something covered in soot and hardly distinguishable had melded into the palm of the charred woman’s hand—a black bag with white stars drawn on it. “Como?” she said, turning to the burnt woman for an answer. No one stood in the corner.

• • • •

“They’ve sent an air convoy to protect us,” Ottaya said. Two men up front turned around and looked at her. The man in the back, who’d groaned earlier about the cycles, spoke up. “Oh yeah, I’m sure it’s here for me because I dig trenches. Most valuable member of the resistance.” He laughed. His glare bore into her, but Ottaya kept quiet. Yorn had always been a disagreeable bastard, but she didn’t feel like getting up and kicking his ass. She rolled her eyes at the others and they grinned, then returned to what they’d been doing. A sudden forward lurch, then back, and the transport traveled on. Air convoys tended to be inaudible stalking shadows, loaded with weapons, explosives, and soldiers on the ready. The cycles, stripped down for speed, made a high- pitched whirring sound, but so far ahead, they’d be silent. Cyclists had one weapon—a reaper caplet—to be taken if caught by the rebels. Everything remained quiet except for the transport, which needed a new suspension and bounced and squeaked over the bumpy terrain. A dull pop sounded from the road ahead. The transport jerked to a stop. Everyone stood and looked forward. Plumes of smoke had shot into the air. The air convoy moved forward to investigate. Deeg, the transport driver, turned up his signal receiver. Loud static, then a voice, “Cyclists triggered mine. Sped past. Both unharmed.” Everyone clapped and cheered. The tall man looked at Ottaya and winked. “Stop it,” Deegan shouted. “I need the numbers.” When it quieted, the air convoy’s navigator relayed land coordinates for Deeg to follow in order to avoid the massive road hole left by the bomb. All fifteen passengers scrambled to find openings to look through when they went around the exploded mess. Shadows made by the transport stretched farther across the road and crept onto the land. Soon it would be dark. Ottaya knew she’d come—the woman who reminded her of something she did not understand. Her mother had died giving birth; her father disappeared into the laboratories after that. Raised by soldiers, and other members of the resistance who cared for her while her father found a way to destroy the rebels, she knew nothing else. At the first transport stop, and final checkpoint before leaving again for a safe place to spend the night, Ottaya saw the woman in line. She had something clutched to her chest and a look of fear on her face. The people in front of her had rolled up their sleeves, ready to be scanned. Before the woman moved, Ottaya approached. The stranger turned to her and spoke in an unfamiliar language. Ottaya took the foreigner by the arm, leaned in, and shushed her. The woman nodded. Together, they walked away from the end of the line to an isolated area around the side of the checkpoint. The woman whispered gibberish and reached into the bag she had a death grip on earlier. Ottaya paused, and the stranger recognized her hesitation, stopped talking, and smiled. She took something Ottaya had never seen before from a carryall—yellow, long, and curved. The woman pulled the top back and Ottaya jumped a little. This made the stranger giggle, but Ottaya didn’t think it funny and would’ve snapped the woman’s neck if she thought her dangerous. The woman peeled the sides down and took a bite, chewed, smiled again, and handed the thing over. Ottaya took the yellow thing out of respect, smelling it. Slow and cautious at first, she took a few bites, and a pasty sweetness of exotic flavor filled her mouth. Then she devoured the yellow thing with ravenous fervor. The foreigner smiled and appeared satisfied. Ottaya reached into her black carryall. She’d used white stones found roadside during one of her transport trips to decorate it with stars. Drawing had always been one of her favorite things to do. Many people of the resistance had complimented her on the beautiful sketches she’d created from the ashes of the ruined cities. The woman watched and inspected the bag. A soldier startled both women. He’d been the familiar one. Ottaya didn’t know his name, didn’t want to. She’d seen too many soldiers disappear from her life, and she liked this one. “What are you doing over here?” he said. “Helping this woman.” “What is in your hand?” “The skin of something I ate.” Ottaya let it drop to the ground. “It’s time to go.” “Can you get us both on the transport?” “Of course.” Ottaya looked up at the soldier in the most seductive way she knew how. “Without going through the line, I mean.” “But—” “Please, I’m begging you. It’s important. She’s with me.” The woman stood silent and unmoving, waiting, as if she had done this before. “You know I can’t.” “Then I’ll stay here.” “Dammit! You’re stubborn.” Ottaya smiled. “Come on, then.” The soldier escorted them to the bus with his weapon pointed ahead. “You look very official,” Ottaya said. “What’s your name?” “I’ve seen you for years and now you ask me my name?” “You’re helping me. Yes, I’m asking your name?” “Vinto.” “I like it. Thank you for helping us, Vinto.” “Who is she?” Vinto nodded to the old woman. “No questions. Maybe I’ll tell you after the module injection.” “You might forget.” “Then I forget. Maybe you should, too.” None of the other soldiers questioned Vinto when he escorted the two women onto the transport. Ottaya took a seat next to some window glass. No reflection appeared. Maybe because of the darkness, maybe because she’s here. The foreigner sat next to her and smiled. An hour into the ride, the woman’s head rested against her shoulder. She’d fallen asleep, and eventually Ottaya did the same.

• • • •

Yorn eyed the two from the back and wondered about the strange woman Ottaya had picked up at the checkpoint. For the last few weeks, he’d noticed she had come and gone like a ghost. Perhaps the woman had been sent to further protect Ottaya. He wondered what weapons she carried.

• • • •

It took Luisa into overtime to finish cleaning the green rooms. No one helped, not even Jan. During lunch, the other women kept to themselves. Luisa spent the entire day working slower than normal and thinking of the young girl. Why had she been burnt, killed— whether or not she came to warn her—or if she’d lost her mind and imagined it all? With thoughts of the girl on her mind, Luisa almost walked past the bus stop. The deafening rattling of the engine snapped her out of the daze. The late afternoon bus drivers changed every other day. She slid her pass and chose a different seat than normal, but it didn’t matter. Moments later, the younger version of the woman appeared in the glass, uncharred and undamaged. She looked happier. Luisa wondered what made her smile, and knew it wasn’t her own reflection. Smiles didn’t come often. Happiness was far away, perhaps in a distant past; exhaustion, for sure, but not happiness. When she got home, Luisa reheated leftovers and ate with the television on, then showered and went to bed. Sleep came late, even though she’d been tired and would’ve passed out before dinner had it not been for the beeping microwave. The warring city exploded into her dreams. Bombs and gunfire in the distance. Ruined places. Luisa waiting in line. The girl took Luisa by the arm and walked her to the side of a building. Soldiers scanned the arms of those at the front of the line. Luisa knew she wouldn’t pass. She tried to explain about seeing her burnt ghost, and thank the young doppelganger for protecting her, but in her dreams Luisa spoke Spanish. The people of the warring city spoke a language she’d never heard before. For the first time in her dreams, Luisa brought her purse. The girl looked thin and hungry, so she’d reached in and found a banana. The girl jumped as Luisa peeled it, which made her laugh. The girl carried a bag, too, but it looked like a backpack for school: black, with white, hand drawn, childlike stars. Luisa somehow knew this girl had been deprived of a childhood, and she wanted to make it right—the chance to have a daughter —even if only in her dreams. One of the soldiers approached and startled them. Luisa could tell he liked the girl, and maybe the girl had felt something for the soldier, too. He helped them bypass the line and onto an old bus with boarded windows and torn seats. In the back, a strange man watched the young girl. Luisa didn’t like the way he stared. Blaring electronic sounds jolted Luisa upright. The dream-world dissolved as she opened her eyes. She turned off her alarm clock, then started her daily routine. For the first time since her husband had died, looking around and counting were far from her mind as she made her way to the bus stop. The man at the back of the bus occupied her thoughts—the last bit of dream she remembered. His expression disturbed her. “You sure you’re okay?” Toby said, looking concerned. Luisa slid her pass and a wave of vertigo forced her to grab the metal handrail. “Give me a minute.” Luisa recovered and went to her seat, hoping to see the girl. Stars from the vertigo blurred her vision of the window. Stars! The backpack. The girl dies. “Aye, mija,” she whispered to the glass. Tears welled and rolled down her cheeks. The thought of losing her dream daughter . . . She touched the cool window. Where could you be? She’d been asleep on that old bus before Luisa woke up. If only she could go back and warn her. Luisa arrived at work before anyone else. Jan had still been working on the rooms schedule when Luisa went into her office. “You’re early,” Jan said. “Making up for yesterday.” “Nice job on the green rooms, by the way.” “Thank you.” Jan handed her the blue rooms schedule. “Here you go. Early bird gets the worm.” Luisa smiled, but felt disrespected that Jan likened her to a bird eating a worm. She shook her head and left the office. Every time she’d unlocked one of the doors, Luisa looked in the windows for signs of the girl. All day she worked and saw nothing. Then, in the last room, she pulled the sheer curtains together and saw the girl in the reflection. The scene was the same as before. A total massacre of blackened, twisted metal, an enormous blast scar toward the back of the old bus—she recognized it now—and her burnt dream daughter with her eyes and everything inside her skull removed. The image horrified Luisa. She crossed herself and looked away. The sky rained soldiers. They fell from the floating tractor-trailer. As soon as they touched ground, one of them ran to the young girl’s body. He dropped to his knees and hid his tears from the other men. His face was familiar, even through the grimace: the soldier who had helped Luisa and the girl get on the old bus. He took a vial from his pocket and popped off the lid, then poured a liquid over the charred body. She glowed bright green from head to toe, then crumpled to ash. Luisa crossed herself again. Her knees buckled and gave way. She fell to the floor and wailed.

• • • •

The memories transfer injection went well. Ottaya remained groggy and couldn’t recall much about the ordeal. She’d been attached to a mess of wires, while science team members spoke over one another and shined bright lights in her eyes. Even though a part of her father had been injected into her, she felt no closer to him than she had before. The disconnection made her sad, and melancholy followed her as she drifted off to sleep. She remembered Vinto smiling down at her, telling her everything would be all right. Ottaya sensed him nearby. She forced her eyes open to the shadow of the air convoy above. She picked up on Vinto, but perceived nothing from her father’s memories. She would be happy to see the older woman again, but knew she needed rest before her arrival to help her get on the transport. Ottaya looked forward to the warmth of her body sitting next to her. The foreign woman comforted Ottaya and made her feel safe. The next time she woke, they’d stopped at a checkpoint. Ottaya got off the bus and looked around. Relief coursed through her, and she smiled when she saw the older woman waiting at the side of the building. Ottaya neared, and the foreigner approached her with happiness. She opened her arms and wrapped them around Ottaya. Ottaya didn’t understand the physical greeting. Then a look of dread came across the woman’s face. As they walked back to the side of the building, the woman’s incessant gibberish intensified. Ottaya stopped, placed her hands on the woman’s shoulders, and in a calm, clear voice, told her everything would be all right. The foreigner relaxed, then reached into her bag and took out another one of those yellow things. Ottaya accepted and wolfed it down. Once more, Vinto escorted them onto the transport. The old woman nudged Ottaya forward so she walked next to him. “How long will it take to get to the lab?” Ottaya asked. “Not long. Two moons.” “Why not suns?” “Suns, moons, same thing.” Ottaya smiled at him. “How are you feeling?” he said. “Good.” “Are you ready to end this?” “Endings also mean beginnings.” Vinto leaned over and kissed her cheek. Ottaya turned around. The old woman had a big smile across her face. Ottaya felt weak as soon as they sat in the transport. Vinto loaded up into the air convoy after walking them to their seats. The old woman held Ottaya close as the transport moved on. An explosion jarred Ottaya from sleep. Chaos had erupted on the transport. The old woman stood her upright, pushed her into the aisle, shoving her to the front. Frightened, Ottaya grabbed the rails. She got caught among others fleeing the transport. Deegan’s throat had been slit; blood spray covered everything. Forceful hands pushed her toward the door. The old woman was no longer behind her. Ottaya grabbed the handrail, dug her boots into the rubber padding on the floor and held her ground. The old woman struggled with Yorn. He held a blade and brought it down into her chest. Ottaya screamed. The old woman looked back, yelled at Ottaya, and then pulled at something in Yorn’s coat. The tall man back shouted, “He’s got mines!” Everyone pushed in a wave. Ottaya lost her grip and flew out the doorway.

• • • •

Luisa didn’t trust the man in the back of the bus. She’d awakened before the crash and saw him kill the driver. She pretended to be asleep like everyone else. He hurried back to his seat and waited for the bus to hit something and cause a commotion. Luisa knew he wanted to hurt the young girl, take her eyes and brain. She couldn’t let it happen. As soon as the bus crashed, Luisa got the girl up and pushed her into the moving crowd. Then ran to the back and tackled the man, hoping he’d hit his head and get knocked out. That didn’t happen. While Luisa fought him, she felt things under his coat. They reminded her of grenades she’d seen government forces use during her country’s civil war. Then the man stabbed. Adrenaline pumped so hard through her body, the pain distant. Luisa thought of the young girl. She saw her and shouted, “Te amo, mi hija.” and pulled a pin from one of the devices in the man’s jacket. His eyes widened. Luisa pulled him close, forcing the knife deeper into her chest. She held him with a strength she’d never known. Then all went silent before bright light swallowed—

• • • •

Ottaya awoke on something soft but itchy green. She sat up and moved her palm across the tips and they tickled her skin. She rolled over and saw the old woman’s carryall. Ottaya lay there, admiring a blue sky that was familiar, and yet . . . not quite. She wondered if it might be one of her father’s memories. Tall buildings surrounded her, still intact and new: concrete flesh instead of steel and brick skeletons she’d been more accustomed to seeing. Dark shadows took shape and descended from the clouds in a formation she recognized. Rebel air convoys filled the sky. Ottaya rose and ran with the old woman’s bag clutched in her hands. She needed to find safety, and a lab where she could wait for the resistance, and Vinto—they would help her. The memories of her father would save this world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Rena Mason is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Evolutionist and East End Girls, as well as a finalist in the 2014 Stage 32 + The Blood List’s “Search for New Blood” Screenwriting Contest. A longtime fan of horror, sci-fi, science, history, historical fiction, mysteries, and thrillers, she began writing to mash up those genres in stories revolving around everyday life. She is a member of the Horror Writers Association, Mystery Writers of America, International Thriller Writers, The International Screenwriters’ Association, and Stage 32. She writes the “Recently Born of Horrific Minds” column for the HWA Monthly Newsletter, as well as occasional articles. An active volunteer and event planner, she’s Event Co-Chair for StokerCon2016 at the Flamingo hotel in Las Vegas. An R.N. and avid scuba diver, she has traveled the world and incorporates the experiences into her stories. She currently resides in Reno, Nevada with her family.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight NONFICTION The H Word: Monsters and Metaphors Dale Bailey | 1033 words

Way back in February of 2013, in this same space, I argued that horror didn’t scare me anymore—hadn’t really since I was a kid. In light of Orrin Grey’s recent essay “But Is It Scary?” (Nightmare, March 2016), I’ve been forced to reconsider—and refine—that position. What I meant then was that cowering-under-the-covers kind of terror that seems to be uniquely the province of children. I haven’t felt that way in years and doubt that I ever will in the years to come, but there are other kinds of fear that good horror fiction gets at all the time—the lingering anxieties associated with the adult world, among them the fears that Grey names when he writes in his closing paragraph: “The things that really scare me aren’t that interesting. They’re banal, boring, and quotidian. Like most people, I’m afraid of failure, of financial hardship, of getting sick, of letting my loved ones down. The really scary things in life don’t put your heart in your throat and get your blood pumping . . . Those are the things that scare me, but I sure as hell don’t want to write about them. I’d rather write about monsters.” It’s hard to argue with a lot of that paragraph. Suffering financial hardship, getting sick, failing family, friends, and lovers, not to mention half a hundred other disasters, are the terrifying dimensions of adult life. And if Grey finds them “banal” and “boring” that’s entirely okay, too—horror certainly has other dimensions. But I would argue that those “banal” fears are in fact, in many cases, the monsters, and that we love them because, as much as anything else, they are metaphors. When I read Pet Sematary as a kid, it was a bed-wetting tale of supernatural evil. I lived a lot closer to the line between reality and fantasy then, and my power to discern the difference between the two was pretty easily confused. When I closed the book and turned out the light, I believed that Louis Creed’s resurrected son stood behind my half- open closet door, with murderous intent. As an adult, however, I don’t find much to be scared of in the pet cemetery’s power to endow dead flesh with a kind of horrific half- life, though I do find real pleasure in the artful way King unfolds this conventional trope. But the book still scares the hell out of me, because as a parent I know too well the reality of the highway where two-year-old Gage Creed is run down by a tractor-trailer. My daughter turned seventeen not long ago—she’s made it a lot further than two—but every time I turn a page in King’s novel I am reminded of just how deadly our roads can be— and how often I hand her the car keys and watch her cruise off into a world where I am powerless to protect her. There are dozens of such examples. The Amityville Horror might be a crap movie—and the book even worse—but as Stephen King notes in Danse Macbre, it’s all too easy to read it as a tale of financial dissolution, in which the Lutz family buys more house than they can easily afford, and their unwise investment dismantles their lives piece by piece. Indeed, houses are a particularly rich field to mine for metaphor. If you’ve ever worried about keeping up with the Joneses—and who hasn’t?—Anne Rivers Siddons’s The House Next Door can be a harrowing experience. And—to return to Stephen King—the Overlook Hotel is a grand and capacious metaphor indeed. The Shining is, at one level, a powerful indictment of the horrors of American history, at another, an excoriation of the destructive potential of the American Dream, and at still another, a brutal portrait of a man slipping into alcoholism and madness. If anybody ever let his family down, it was Jack Torrance. One could go on. You give me The Exorcist, I give you a story of disease, the loss of a beloved child, fear of female sexuality, and the existential horror of religious doubt. Show me recent Sundance sensation The Witch, and I’ll show you, well, mostly the same stuff as I showed you in The Exorcist. Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Fear of a communist fifth column, of Eisenhower-era pressure to conform. At which point you ask me to reconsider my point of view. After all, it’s been a long time since we worried about communists, but we continue to pump out remakes of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. We do the same thing for Dracula, too, and when was the last time anybody found that guy scary? To which I would respond, the 1890s, when Stoker’s tale embodied the Victorian terror of empowered female sexuality, of the explosion of technology and the decline of traditional faith, of aristocratic power, and the imperial project in Ireland (and elsewhere)—adult fears, for sure, but also largely dead ones. Dracula himself lingers on, though, a beloved horror icon who has taken on a nostalgic place in the genre. Frankenstein and his monster have, too, not to mention the rest of the Universal Studios canon. Those creatures hardly scare us at all anymore, and even if they sometimes rise from the grave to bare their fangs—Let the Right One In is a pretty terrifying vampire movie about childhood sexual abuse, among other things—they are mostly exhausted metaphors for fears that have been swept away by cultural change. In short, there are plenty of reasons to love horror that don’t involve fear, nostalgia among them, but the terrors of the adult world continue to have their place. The next time you think about losing your loved ones—and we always lose them in the end—take a look at The Babadook. There’s nothing banal, boring, or quotidian about it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dale Bailey’s new collection, The End of the End of Everything: Stories, came out in the spring. A novel, The Subterranean Season, will follow this fall. He has published three previous novels, The Fallen, House of Bones, and Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay, Jr.), and one previous collection of short fiction, The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories. His work has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the Nebula Award, among others, and he won the International Horror Guild Award for his novelette “Death and Suffrage,” later adapted for Showtime Television’s Masters of Horror. He lives in North Carolina with his family. Interview: Joyce Carol Oates The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy | 7007 words

Joyce Carol Oates is the author more than seventy books, including the national best sellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde. Among her many honors are the PEN/Malamud award for excellence in short fiction and the National Book Award. Her latest book is The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror. This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by David Barr Kirtley and produced by John Joseph Adams. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the interview or other episodes.

Your new book is called The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror. Tell us a bit about the story behind this book and how it came about.

The stories have been written over a period of time, and I have an ongoing relationship with Otto Penlzer, at the Mysterious Press, so he’s published a number of my novellas and short story collections. I tend to write stories that accrue around certain themes or certain types of genre. I’m very drawn to the surreal, not exactly fantasy, but the kind of fiction that bleeds into another dimension, so to speak. It has a firmly realistic foundation, and then it eases and morphs into this other dimension. So, all the stories are in that genre.

That’s definitely something that we like here—the surreal and creepy sort of stories like that. You said you have this relationship with Otto Penzler and Mysterious Press? Say a little more about Mysterious Press because this is associated with his bookstore, right?

I don’t think it’s necessarily just depending on the bookstore. Otto has done a lot of editing. He edits anthologies and mysteries and suspense fiction. It’s not terribly distinctive in terms of being these categories. Otto is very friendly to writing that is surreal or may verge upon gothic or horror. I don’t believe that he’s thinking in terms of specific genres like mystery or detective fiction. The psychological suspense fiction tends to be somewhat horrific. That psychological suspense depends upon there being something at stake of significance, and so I think one of the primary motives for writing this kind of fiction also drove Edgar Allan Poe, who supposedly invented the first detective story. But Poe is basically interested, I believe, in testing the limits and [trajectory] of sanity. Where does sanity change or evolve or devolve into something else? So, mystery detective fiction is one expression of these questions, and then the gothic and horror and speculative science fiction is another extreme. Otto Penzler is friendly to all this kind of writing, but he’s more associated with mystery and detective fiction.

Let’s talk about your first story “Mystery, Inc.” It says it was originally published in the Mysterious Bookshop’s Bibliomystery series. So, tell us about that.

Yes, Otto Penzler has a series that has been going on for years now. There must be thirty or forty or maybe more titles, and they’re by people who are usually mystery writers or detective fiction writers, so Otto asks them to write mystery stories set in a bookstore or focus on books, so mine is focused on books and it’s in a bookstore.

I really, really enjoyed the protagonist in this story. Could you talk a little bit about how you came up with this character?

Well, let’s see. The person, actually, is visiting Otto Penzler. The bookstore that he visits is not exactly Otto Penzler’s bookstore. It’s kind of a dream bookstore that Otto might have liked. On the top floor, he’s selling rare books, and limited editions, and books of art. Strange artifacts are for sale on the top floor, which I don’t think is actually the case with The Mysterious Bookshop. Some of the first editions and the prices of things of these classical and famous novels I didn’t check with Otto. My research was based upon Otto, some of his own knowledge and his holdings in his bookstore. So, the character, who is the bookstore owner, is based on Otto Penzler, but it is fiction. I have to say it is a story that’s really completely fiction. I wouldn’t have written the story except Otto had requested that, and it took me years to find out how I could write about something that I would find interesting. That’s sort of a challange for a writer, to find something that you yourself are interested in writing, and then the protagonist is a fictitious character. That’s all I can say, really.

Would you describe the protagonist as a sociopath? Because he’s kind of likeable in a way, but he’s very emotionally detached from the consequences of his actions.

Yes, he is a psychopath, I would say. And the bookstore owner even more is a psychopath. The psychopath is doing what he’s doing because he wants to acquire this bookstore, and he wants to take over. He’s jealous and so forth. But the bookstore owner turns out to be somebody who commits evil, or murder, for no reason. He says to the protagonist, “Well, why do you need a reason to do this?” So, the genre of mystery and detective fiction turns upon murder of different kinds, murder with or without motives, so the story or the novella, since it’s fairly long, is kind of a good natured critique of the phenomenon of the mystery detective genre that always depends upon people being killed whether it’s an Agatha Christie novel or something like Michael Connolly. You know, or there’s Raymond Chandler, or whomever. It all depends upon someone being killed so there’s always some person who has to be sacrificed for the sake of the work of art.

Right, and the way you describe this bookstore, you make it sound so charming, and it makes me kind of sad because it seems like bookstores like this are kind of a dying breed. I think I actually saw Otto Penzler on a panel last year and he was talking about how I think his store is the only dedicated mystery bookstore in New York still. What do you think about that?

I’m sure. Well, it’s very sad. Otto does most of his business online. He has for years. So, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the book business is not doing well, the mystery books. He means that the actual, physical store is sort of dying away, which is really sad. Somebody might disagree. Somebody might say, “Well, maybe there are new stores opening up in different places.” I’m in Berkeley right now and there are many, many bookstores in Berkeley, actually.

I also really want to ask you about this story “Equatorial,” which is set in the Galapagos Islands. I was just wondering what kind of research you’ve done on the Galapagos did you do?

Have you been there?

No, unfortunately, I have not.

Reading the story will tell you what it’s like. I also have another story called “The Bereaved” that came out in The Yale Review, and that’s another story about the Galapagos. My husband and I went in December 2014, so the research is very minute. I was taking notes all the time, not just about where we were, but the kind of people that you meet, and what you’re doing on the ship, and the kind of guide that you would have. It’s quite a unique place, and I’m really glad I went. We were there about a week.

Did you have the idea for the story before you went on the trip, or after?

I also write about things that I’ve experienced particularly if they have unusual locations. Those stories the setting is very specifically the Galapagos. One story is a gothic story, and the other story is a psychologically realistic story in The Yale Review. It’s kind of interesting to look at the two stories—for me anyway—to stay in the setting and see how the genre determines how it’s written, what the language is like, the pacing and so forth. The other story is a very realistic portrait of a marriage, while the story that’s in The Doll-Master is a suspense mystery story where you don’t exactly know what the motives for the husband’s behavior is, and you don’t exactly know what’s going to happen. When you’re in a place like that, and when you’re on a ship where you’re outside the jurisdiction of the United States, you’re in this sort of Never-Never Land. American laws don’t apply when you’re on the high seas. You’re in some other zone. Many people don’t know that when you’re on cruises. Once you get on these waters, women have been raped, people have been robbed, things have happened to people, and they have no recourse. You can’t go to a police officer. There isn’t any. You can’t go to a ministry. You can’t go anywhere. You’re onboard a ship. And, there isn’t any law; so anyway, it’s complicated, and I found that fascinating to think about and write about.

Did you find yourself on the ship or on the steps, looking around thinking, “Oh, this would be a good place to kill somebody”?

I’m thinking about a story. It’s more like, what are the characters in the story? The woman who’s trying survive, she’s made a marriage that maybe is a mistake, but she really loves, or feels strong emotion for this man, but she’s become frightened of him. Maybe he could easily kill her. She doesn’t really know. So, it’s more toward genre, in the realistic story that I wrote for The Yale Review, a husband and wife go on essentially the same trip, but their relationship is a more realistic relationship in the sense that they’ve been married a while, and they’ve lost a daughter. A daughter has died. And their relationship comes to a kind of crisis in the Galapagos. The Galapagos is all about survival, and every lecture that you hear, or you go out with a guide, and you’re hiking around on these islands, these lava islands, and all the lectures are really about survival species, and many, many species that have become extinct. So, you start thinking in terms of human beings and Homo sapiens, and start thinking about your own self as a specimen. Those are thoughts that you enhance maybe at home, but you do think about these things in the Galapagos.

One element in the story that really struck me is that you describe these incredibly poisonous apples called “the little apples of death.” Is that a real thing?

Oh yes. Yes, and our Indian guide said, “I can touch these leaves, but you can’t.” But he couldn’t eat the food. Through many, many centuries, a millennia, he has some genetic ability. But the tribe to which he belonged was actually mostly destroyed by genocide by the Spanish. That’s not in this story that you read, I think. I talk about the genocidal history of the Spaniards who conquered this part of the world, and how they decimated or almost completely wiped out indigenous people. But, anyway, European-descended people don’t have the genetic ability to even touch this tree it’s so poisonous. So, the white people, the Caucasians who are upper middle class and have money, they’re sort of in this place where they’re only protected by the fact that they have money. If they were left on the island they would die in like forty-eight hours. We’re in such an ironic situation where you come to these places (my husband will be going to Antarctica), places where we could not survive at all, but because we have money, and we’re Americans, we sort of go into these starkly existential parts of the world, which if you think about them, are sort of frightening. But they’re very evocative for writing.

One thing that really struck me about this story and a couple other stories in this book, too, is that they end just before the moment where presumably something really terrible is about to happen. Do you think that’s the best way to tell a story like this, and do you ever go back and forth about whether you should actually show the awful thing happening at the end of the story or not?

Oh no, I would never do that. I wouldn’t consider that artistic. I would consider that too explicit. No. Also, it’s something for children and young people. No, I think adult fiction is much more suggestive and impressionistic. It should be more poetic in the sense that when we read a poem, we may read a poem five or six times, or with Emily Dickinson, you could read a poem like a hundred times, and it suggests meanings and sub- textual themes that are disturbing and powerful so that we’re made to think about it. If you spell everything out for the reader—or the viewer, say in a movie—if everything is just spelled out, there’s nothing left to think about. My models were Hemingway or Faulkner; when I was in high school, particularly Hemingway. Hemingway is a great artist of that which is left unsaid. He’s a great artist of minimalism, understatement, because you can read a beautiful Hemingway story that’s two pages long, and you can just be thinking about it, and if you’re teaching it to students, you have a discussion going on for hours because it’s such a work of art. But, if it were a story by somebody else that had a beginning, middle, and end with an explicit ending, there’s very little to talk about. Maybe that’s what popular art or culture is. Very sort of blatant and doesn’t deal with sub-textual themes.

Two other stories in this book are “Gun Accident” and “Big Momma.” Both have teenage girls as protagonists; one story is set in 1961, and the other is set in the present day. What do you think about when you’re writing teenage girl protagonists today versus in that time period? Oh, I’m not sure if I’m thinking anything specific. I do write a lot about adolescence, sometimes boys, but usually girls. I write about people in their twenties, and I write about people of every age, actually, so these are just two examples of teenage girls. Both of them are girls who are very insecure, and in “Gun Accident” the girl is a really good student, and she has a relationship with her teacher. And then the other story, the girl doesn’t have a father, and her mother is not always home when she comes home from school, so she’s sort of drifting off into another world where she’s taken up by this other family. It’s sort of a cautionary tale, sort of like a horrific fairy tale.

The character in “Gun Accident” felt kind of naïve and innocent to me in a way that the character in “Big Momma” didn’t. To what extent was that the time period, and to what extent it was just those characters?

I don’t think the girl in “Big Momma” is anything other than naïve. She’s innocent in the sense of . . . she’s quite innocent. She gets befriended by this other girl in the class, and then drawn into this family. It’s like a false family where they’re going to use her in some horrible way, but she doesn’t know that. And she has her mother who is not really a loving mother to her. I would call it a malevolent fairy tale. A dark fairy tale, sort of a dark fantasy. “Gun Accident” is more of a realistic story, and “Big Momma” is moving into dark fantasy.

The sense that I had in “Big Momma” is that the character did know that something bad was going to happen to her, but for whatever reason she went along with it.

Well, at the very end, she becomes passive. I think she’s just drawn to this family. She’s lonely. She has a girlfriend, she thinks. The father, there is this, again, a darkly malevolent fairy tale father who seems so warm and friendly, and she doesn’t have her own father. Her father has just more or less abandoned her. So, it’s not that she doesn’t care. I think that she’s a victim.

Right, and then I also wanted to ask you about your story “Soldier.” It really reminds me a lot of real life crime cases like George Zimmerman and Bernhard Goetz.

Yes, particularly both of them. Yes, Bernhard Goetz and Zimmerman. I don’t remember what happened with Bernhard Goetz. I think maybe, was he acquitted also? They’re interesting phenomena. I mean, it’s a very political sort of look at the situation in which some individual is expressing the will or the wish of the collective. Bernhard Goetz was somebody who imagined himself like a soldier, and George Zimmerman also had a white nationalism where you’re fighting back against these encroaching evil people who have skins darker than your own, and there’s a kind of climate of paranoia in some parts of the United States. Not everywhere and not universally.

What really struck me about “Soldier” is just this idea that there are these stories about what’s happened, and you, if you weren’t there, you never really know what happened. You might have your suspicions, but if you were to ever know the truth it might turn out to be much, much worse than you had imagined.

I think that’s always been true, especially with police related violence against the powerless or mentally ill people or black people. But, now we have videos so we can see what they’re doing, which is really pretty awful. The way that police will beat-up unarmed people, even shoot them in the back. But, before that, there was just testimony, and since the person who is murdered couldn’t give any testimony, it was just the police officer who would testify that he was going for his gun, or he made a threatening gesture toward me, and I had to protect myself. So, it’s basically the story that you get in the media and what really happened is probably always pretty different.

Right, but one thing that’s really striking right now with these body cameras on the police is that we have video of these really terrible things, and then they still don’t get convicted.

They still don’t get convicted some of the time, but I think it’s a deterrent. Maybe. And, they don’t always not get convicted. I mean, a lot of it is going on. On Twitter, I follow AnonCopWatch, so every day, if you’re interested—and it’s very depressing—every day you’ll get some postings of what the police are doing all over the country and also in Canada. Basically they are victimizing powerless people, so I mean, sometimes there is a video and you can see a black woman being thrown down on the ground. People getting out of their cars with their hands in the air who are thrown down and eight police officers jump at him or her. This goes on all the time. But, The New York Times, for instance, would not give you a write-up on all these cases. A whole newspaper would be filled with it. Basically, the media can’t deal with all the things that are going on, like George Zimmerman events that are going on around the country or in North America. The mainstream media can’t really deal with it. So, I think online, and particularly Twitter, is good at revealing these things to people who didn’t know anything about it. Now, at the time of Bernhard Goetz, we didn’t have the internet. Bernhard Goetz would have been a natural as a hero for many people around the country. He would have had a website. He would have had a defense fund. He may have had a defense fund anyway, but I think George Zimmerman got many, many thousands from that. So, the story is based on that, and based on a person who’s speaking in his own voice, and how this happened to him, and what this does to his ego, and how in some strange way, he himself is a victim. How he gets the gun from his uncle, and one thing leads to another.

I know that you’ve been teaching writing classes in prison. Has that changed the way that you think about crime or write about crime?

Well, not really. My husband and I both have volunteer-taught at San Quentin, and I went out to San Quentin about five times and did workshops with another teacher; basically it’s helping the young—well they’re not necessarily young—but helping writer inmates learn to write and to communicate clearly. It’s put on an elementary level. I’m also teaching at U.C. Berkeley right now, so it’s not the same kind of writing, and I teach at NYU graduate school. So, those people are maybe already published. For them, it’s a matter of fine-tuning how they write. Prison writing is on another level. It would be more like maybe high school writing. They may have stories to tell, but they need help just with sentences and on that level. I think there’s a high number of prisoners in the United States who are functionally illiterate. Something like seventy percent. It’s very high.

Have any of those stories that you’ve heard from inmates really stuck with you?

No. Not really. I also edited a book called Prison Noir, and those are finished and polished stories that were written by prisoners all around the country. There’s one from San Quentin, but they’re from all over. Those stories, now, I would say are real stories. There are three by women. There are not very many stories by women prisoners because there are not as many women prisoners at all compared to men. So, the stories are realistic, and none of them are gothic or fantasy or science fiction at all. It’s kind of interesting. The prisoners write about their own experiences in prison and how they got there. Very often they write about what they did that got them in prison and all the different circumstances that led to it. It’s the great mystery of their lives. Somebody who is intelligent realizes he is in prison, and maybe for life, so they start thinking, and they want to write about it. It’s obsessive. The stories in Prison Noir are mostly autobiographical, and they’re all quite good. I’d say they’re almost all autobiographical. The women’s stories are so heartrending because these are women—particularly in one case from Michigan, she killed an insanely abusive husband. So abusive to her, and so threatening to her and her children. She basically had to kill this person, and she did, so she’s in prison. She’s somebody who should have been a teacher. She’s very intelligent and writes very well, but she married the wrong man. He was not a crude person. He was actually a lawyer. He would start to strangle her. He would threaten the children. She shot him. She killed him, really, in self-defense. So, anyway, that’s the kind of story that could definitely influence another writer, but my teaching at San Quentin was not really on that level. The stories that I received from the student inmates were not anything like polished stories, just maybe beginnings. I did write a story called “San Quentin,” which is truly fiction. My husband was teaching a biology course in which they dissected sheep brains, so that’s in my story, but I never had that experience.

So, the title story in this collection is called “The Doll-Master,” and it’s dedicated to horror editor Ellen Datlow. Could you talk about why you dedicated that story to her?

The story was originally written for Ellen. I have a book [here] that Ellen edited; it’s called The Doll Collection. Do you know this book?

I have a copy of it, yeah.

My story is obviously in there. I’ve written a lot of stories for Ellen Datlow over the years, going way, way back to the 1980s or something. I got a letter from someone named Ellen Datlow that said, “Would you like to write a story to a certain theme?” I said I’d like to try. So, I’ve always done that. And Ellen has asked me a number of times to be in many, many of her anthologies. She’s got these different, weird ideas, but this is, I think, possibly her best book, with the pictures and interesting photographs. I think maybe some of them are her own. I’ve dedicated at least one book to Ellen. Now I’m looking at [the] “also edited by Ellen Datlow” [page]. Oh my God, she’s edited so many anthologies. Wow. I mean all sorts of things like Black Heart, Ivory Bone; I think I might be in that. Black Swan, White Raven. Lovecraft Unbound—I think I’m in that. I’m in a number of these anthologies. It’s very impressive. She did a number of them with Terri Windling. Some of them I’ve never seen, but I would be interested in. She sometimes asked me to do things when I wasn’t able to, but they seem really interesting. And she has a new anthology that will be out next year called Black Feather. She said it’s all about birds. I did have an idea because where I live in Princeton, we live on a lake, and there are great blue herons around the lake, and there’s almost, like, prehistoric looking birds. They’re strangely awkward, but beautiful, and they’re real predators. If you’re out in the country, and you’re in the marshland, you might see these great blue herons. They fly by, and they look really prehistoric. They have very, very long beaks, long necks. Their wings are quite wide. They’re quite large. Then their legs hang down, and you see them skimming low over a creek or a river in the marshland. They’re hunting, and they hunt alone. So, anyway, I wanted to write about that, so the whole story is generated by living there and being fascinated by the birds. These predator birds are so big and rather beautiful, and then Ellen’s invitation . . . it just kind of all came together. It starts off as a pretty realistic story and then it goes into that other zone and it becomes something that’s surreal. We’re not exactly sure if this woman is losing her mind or whether these things are really happening. I said at the beginning of our conversation that the great theme of Edgar Allan Poe, I think, is testing the limits of sanity. A lot of his stories deal with the terror of losing one’s mind. “The Tell-Tale Heart,” for instance, is a story about a man who goes mad and he tells us why, really. It’s a beautiful story. A beautifully cadenced and paced story of insanity, but Poe has a number of stories like that.

You wrote a Poe story called “The Fabled Light-House of Vina del Mar,” and that’s definitely about someone losing his mind.

Well, he was in this place that to survive he would have to become like an animal. And Poe himself was in this nineteenth century romantic gothic tradition where nobody had any bodies. He talks about women as very pale and with beautiful long hair. There’s never any actual bodies. And the men don’t have any bodies. He doesn’t write in a realistic way, like say, John Updike. So, I wanted to take that idea of a non-physical, romantic gothic . . . and put that person in a really real physical universe where he would have to survive by eating these horrible animals. Nobody eats anything in Poe. No one ever has a sandwich or says, “I’ll drink some milk” or something. All these things that we take for granted in our daily lives don’t exist in gothic literature or in tragedy. We never see Hamlet putting on his socks. We never see Ophelia curling her hair. Nobody is doing any laundry. Nobody goes to the bathroom. Nobody takes a shower. Nobody gets his hair cut. All these things belong to what we call realistic fiction, and they don’t exist in gothic fiction. So the horror for a gothic personality would be to have to be in that real world where to survive you have to eat, and you have to eat some horrible looking turtle, or something with one eye in the middle of its forehead. So, it was for me kind of an experimental thing that takes a sensibility of the nineteenth century gothic and subjects it to what would be absolutely horrific for them: to be in a physical world.

That’s really interesting. A minute ago you mentioned Ellen Datlow’s Lovecraft Unbound anthology, and I read your story “Commencement,” which was in that anthology. I was wondering if you could talk about how you came up with that story.

“Commencement” is a story that’s based on my receiving honorary doctorates and going to the commencement ceremonies, which last a long time, and you’re sitting in a robe, and often sitting in the sun, and all these people come across the stage getting their degrees. And so, it just seemed to me, a natural next step would be to tie it in with these ancient Aztec ritual religious executions where people’s hearts are torn out. So I sort of melded the realistic experience of receiving an honorary doctorate from colleges and universities with the fantastic and the dark fantasy of the Aztec ritual.

So, you’re saying, because the ceremonies are so unbearable to sit through that when you actually turn it into a literal human sacrifice that’s just kind of communicating the same idea in even more elevated terms?

Well, I don’t know that they’re that awful to sit through. I mean, it’s really not like having your heart torn out. It’s more that you’re sitting there and so your mind is wandering. I’ve sat for a couple of hours at these ceremonies, and you have to be thinking of something; you can’t read. Some people, some professors, probably try to read, but if you’re an honorary doctorate then you’re sitting right in the front, and you have to stand up and give a little commencement speech. So, you basically sit there and the people come across the stage, and there’s music, and there’s a prayer, and this goes on for a long, long time. So, if you have an active imagination, you just take the situation and try to invent something so when I was finished with it, I could go home and write a story. I’m sure that Stephen King has had experiences like this where he imagines something because of a certain situation that he’s in. A writer has these somewhat horrific situations where they have to be operated on, or they’re having chemotherapy, or an x-ray, or women having an abortion, you know one or the other of all these different things where you’re trapped in some place, but your mind is not trapped, so your mind starts to amuse itself.

Why did you think that that story was appropriate to link with H.P. Lovecraft?

I’m not sure. I may have sent Ellen a couple of stories. It may have been that Ellen made the choice. I don’t remember exactly. I’ve done so many stories with Ellen that she may have made a choice personally.

You are interested in Lovecraft, right? Because you edited a collection of Lovecraft’s writings called Tales of H.P. Lovecraft.

Yeah, I have another story. I thought my Lovecraft story was a different story. I thought it was called “Shadows of the Evening,” but you were talking about “Commencement.”

“Commencement” was in Lovecraft Unbound. I don’t know if maybe you had a story in a different Lovecraft anthology? Yeah, there’s another one called “Shadows of the Evening,” which is much more of a Lovecraft story than “Commencement.” “Shadows of the Evening” is based upon a Lovecraft story—I can’t remember the title of the Lovecraft story, but one of his early stories. One of his more realistic stories where somebody is playing an instrument.

Oh, “The Music of Eric Zann.”

Yeah, that was it. So, my story, “The Shadows of the Evening” is not about that really; it’s about somebody who hears someone singing at a distance. She hears a voice singing, and she’s drawn out of her house, and goes into the city, and goes into a strange place, maybe like a church, and she discovers who’s singing, so it definitely was evolved from the Lovecraft story.

I’ll definitely check that out. I didn’t know you had other Lovecraftian stories, so now I’m curious to read that. But moving on: A good friend of mine in New York is Matthew Kressel; he had a story in Lightspeed Magazine called “The Sounds of Old Earth,” and you said very nice things about it on Twitter, so I just wanted to thank you for that because I know Matt really appreciated it.

Oh, good! Good. I use Twitter to recommend things quite often. My own writing strays across a number of genres, so I think people have difficult time trying to categorize my writing, or classify it. If you like John Updike’s writing or Anne Tyler, they’re basically domestic realists. They write about domestic life, often about marriage and family, in a realistic way. It’s not very melodramatic. It’s not tragic. It’s kind of realism, you know? I’ve sometimes written domestic realism, which I like very much, but my next book could be completely surreal and unpredictable. It could have vampires in it. And then my next novel after that could be completely realistic. Or, I could do a historical novel set some time ago. All my writing is somewhat unclassifiable, so it’s really hard for an average reader to figure out what I was doing.

I really enjoyed The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror. A lot of short story collections and anthologies, it’s kind of hit or miss with the stories, but there are six stories in this book, and I thought they were all just really, really good. So, I would encourage people to go check it out. Do you have any other projects you want to mention, or anything else you want to mention here?

My next novel is a very realistic novel, and it’s purely realism. It’s not really like The Doll-Master. [It] is about the issue of division in America between people who are pro- life, anti-abortion, people who aren’t very liberal or pro-choice, and the way America is today, it seems to me almost like a nightmare of these divisions. People who are passionately pro-Trump, and people who are passionately for Bernie Sanders, and it’s like they’re living in the same country, but they’re in different dimensions. It’s like a nightmare almost. It’s almost sort of scary that there are so many pro-Trump people. They don’t seem to look at him. They don’t seem to see him the way we see him. They see him literally as some kind of a savior. He’s going to bring jobs back and help them. These are poor people who haven’t even worked in years, some of them. They really think that Donald Trump is going to bring back their factory job in Indiana or some place. I guess they really believe that. Then Bernie Sanders people may have some idealistic notions. Maybe they’re not so realistic either. I’m much more Bernie Sanders than I am Donald Trump. But, it’s kind of interesting that America is impassioned by these two poles that are so far apart.

I mean, they’re far apart in a way, but they’re also very similar in a lot of ways because they’re both promising to upend the established system, and for people who have not been served well by the established system, that’s very appealing.

In what way is Trump going to upend the system? He’s not going to get rid of capitalism. He’s a capitalist. He wants lower taxes for billionaires. He’s basically saying the same thing that is somehow deceiving people. I don’t even think he’s really a racist. He sounds as if he’s a racist, and that makes some people excited because they’re racists, but when it comes down to it, he’s a New Yorker. He’s lived with all sorts of people. I don’t think he really is a racist. He sounds like a racist, and he may be a misogynist, or sexist, but his daughter and some women seem to like him. Basically, he said, “I’ll make America great again and bring back jobs.” He has no way of doing that. There’s no way he can do that. It’s just sort of talk. Bernie Sanders could actually—if he were president; he could do something about taxes, and he’s going to get rid of this and that. He has been in congress for many, many years. I mean, Trump has no experience in government, which is all about compromise and making deals. He doesn’t understand the way he would have to make deals with somebody like Clinton or Sanders. Anyway, my novel is sort of about America as this nightmare place where people are living near together, but they’re in different zones of consciousness, which I see as something tragic.

It seems like technology has played a huge role in that because it’s allowed people to immerse themselves in media cocoons that just echo their opinions back at them, and they never have to be confronted with contrary opinions.

Exactly. You’re exactly right. They immerse themselves in media cocoons. They only go to certain websites. They have their Twitter feed or whatever. They only read certain things, and they watch Fox News, or they listen to Rush Limbaugh. They would never dream of watching Larry Wilmore or Jon Stewart in the past. You’re quite right. They would never dream of reading The New York Times. Anyway, my novel is about that, and what it’s like to be in families on both sides of that issue. The families who are very religious, and the families who are very liberal.

Right, so why don’t you tell us again, what’s the name of that novel? And when will it be out?

The novel is coming out, I think, in January or February. It’s called A Book of American Martyrs. But, like I said, it’s a very realistic novel, so I did research into abortion providers, and the assassinations of abortion workers and Planned Parenthood workers, and sabotage against them. But, it’s also from the point of view from the people who really, really believe in pro-life. I mean, they’re not just malicious, awful people. They’re very religious. They’re fundamentalist Christians. But then I also write about the people who are very liberal and agnostic perhaps, but they believe that women should control their own bodies. It’s an ideological difference that has led to many tragic misunderstandings, and I don’t see any way to resolve it in the near future.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is produced by John Joseph Adams and hosted by: David Barr Kirtley, who is the author of thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, in books such as Armored, The Living Dead, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He lives in New York. AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Author Spotlight: David Tallerman E.C. Myers | 1195 words

“Great Black Wave” is set in Afghanistan during another war in a future that feels so near, it may as well be today. Without spoiling too much, it’s easy to see this as a timely commentary on uninvited outsiders inserting themselves into a private conflict and making the situation so much worse. What inspired the story?

It’s funny; stories never seem to start from the kind of place you’d expect them to. In this case, “Great Black Wave” began with the ending, and nothing like its final form. All of the wider context, the bomb disposal team, the robot, the Afghanistan setting, grew out of that. In that sense—and I suppose this is always the case to some extent—the particular themes and background were a combination of pragmatism and my own preoccupations. A bomb disposal robot and rural Afghanistan as a location were an interesting way into the tale I wanted to tell; but in turn they offered an opportunity to look through a different lens at the subject of one culture forcibly intervening in the affairs of another with predictably disastrous results.

This is an interesting horror story in that the speculative element must compete with, or complement, very real horrors soldiers and civilians live with every day. Did you hope the ending would seem so strangely optimistic? Or at least not as dark as one might expect?

It is a strangely optimistic ending, isn’t it? I certainly didn’t plan it that way. I think that’s something that grew out of the research; it’s hard to come away from any reading on the subject of conflict in the so-called Greater Middle East with a sense of optimism, and Afghanistan in particular has suffered such extraordinary and sustained levels of violence over the decades. So I suppose that by the time I got to the end of “Great Black Wave,” the notion of a threat that nevertheless would bring peace and equality didn’t seem quite as awful as it might have otherwise.

The setting is so vivid and the military details seem realistic, but readers’ impressions of Afghanistan have also been shaped by news, television, and films, which shockingly may not be the best representations! Have you been to Afghanistan or have any combat experience—or did you consult anyone who has? How did you research this story to get it to feel authentic?

I have a little bit of insider knowledge in that I worked for the Ministry of Defence for a number of years, but mostly my research consisted of reading Bomb Hunters by Sean Rayment to get a feel for what being on a bomb disposal team was like, and sections of Jason Burke’s On the Road to Kandahar for general atmosphere. That, and a fair bit of hunting around on the internet; sometimes just scouring photos can be a great way into a setting.

As I read “Great Black Wave,” I had the podcast Serial in the back of my mind; season two, which recently ended, has been about Bowe Bergdahl and his capture by the Taliban. Have you been following the podcast or the case?

I’m not familiar with either, I’m afraid. I’m shamefully ignorant of current affairs; I don’t watch TV or read the news, so I tend to be the last one to hear about anything!

You have been incredibly prolific in the last decade, beginning with a flurry of short story sales in 2007, and publishing consistently and fluidly across different genres and formats. Can you talk about your path to publication? How long had you been writing before your first sale, and did something change or “click” that led to such a strong debut?

I think that when you’re writing seriously, things are always changing and clicking. You’re always challenging yourself, and sometimes those challenges pay off and you level up a little bit. Certainly, it’s easy to look back over the last few years and see a series of plateaus, where I figured something new out and got noticeably better all of a sudden. If there was a shift all those years ago, though, it was perhaps more to do with admitting that I wanted to write genre fiction, and that I didn’t need to feel bad about that; I’d wasted a few years in noodling at would-be literary things that I never dared send off. But much more even than that, I think it was to do with deciding that writing was what I wanted to do, and that I was ready to put in the time and work to make that happen.

For the last year, you’ve been subjecting yourself to anime from the 1990s and blogging about the experience. (I’m hoping you’ll eventually get to one of my favorite shows, The Irresponsible Captain Tylor!) What has most surprised you about this experiment? Have you discovered any new favorites? And has any of it seeped into or influenced your own fiction?

The Irresponsible Captain Tylor is on my wanted list! I think that if one thing has surprised me, it’s how much anime developed within a single decade. It’s quite extraordinary the way the medium flourished and developed in such a relatively tiny period, and the way that animation techniques advanced. I’ve discovered many new favourites, but I don’t want to discourage people too much from reading the blog posts! So I’ll just mention Armitage III, which has become something of a comfort watch, if only for Hiroyuki Namba’s brilliant soundtrack, and Orguss 02, which is a real under-seen classic that’s not too hard to find. As for influences, absolutely. Though I haven’t been blogging about it so much, I’ve also been catching up on the last decade and a half of anime, and altogether that’s been having a big effect on the work I’ve been producing over the last few months. Hopefully, it mostly shows through in subtle ways that maybe only I would spot, but it’s definitely there.

What other work do you have out now or forthcoming?

In terms of recent stuff, my debut novella Patchwerk came out at the start of the year from Tor.com, and soon after that there was my first collection of short fiction, The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories; that’s mostly horror and dark fantasy, so anyone who enjoyed “Great Black Wave” might want to give it a look. Coming up, and if all goes to plan, the back end of the year should see the release of my fourth novel, as well as at least one issue of mine and Anthony Summey’s comic book miniseries, C21st Gods, due from Rosarium.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER E.C. Myers was assembled in the U.S. from Korean and German parts and raised by a single mother and the public library in Yonkers, New York. He is the author of numerous short stories and three young adult books: the Andre Norton Award–winning Fair Coin, Quantum Coin, and The Silence of Six. His next novel, Against All Silence, a thriller about teenage hacktivists investigating a vast conspiracy, is scheduled to appear next spring from Adaptive Books. E.C. currently lives with his wife, son, and three doofy pets in Pennsylvania. You can find traces of him all over the internet, but especially at ecmyers.net and on Twitter @ecmyers. Author Spotlight: Lucy Taylor Lisa Nohealani Morton | 897 words

Tell us a little bit about “Things of Which We Do Not Speak.” How did you come to write it?

“Things of Which We Do Not Speak” was written during a period of my writing life when I focused more on real world horror and less on the supernatural. That has changed somewhat now, but I’ve always been intrigued by the dynamics of dominant/submissive relationships and the fear and distaste some profess for this type of sex play. So I started with the idea of a woman who asks to be “abused” as part of a sex game, while her male partner reacts very negatively and judgmentally to the idea. Then my next question was why would this character, Matthew, who seems to be into Elaine, why does he react this way? What I came up with, of course, is the dark secret Matthew is hiding, even from himself. So while on the surface, it might appear that he is reacting to a sexual kink of Elaine’s, his true fears and desires run much deeper and are almost totally repressed, a dynamic that certainly occurs in real life. The person who “protests too much,” saying, “Oh but I could never do that, that wouldn’t be very loving, would it?” is sometimes the most dangerous partner, since they’re clueless as to what really lies within their own minds and hearts.

Do we fear in ourselves what we condemn in others? Is that why horror movie characters are so frequently “punished” for social or character infractions, for example?

As far as fearing in ourselves what we condemn in others, look at all the sanctimonious politicians and religious “leaders” who get caught doing the very thing they’ve labeled as evil, illegal, immoral, whatever. No better way to draw attention from one’s own activities than to lead a crusade against that same behavior. Until they get caught, of course. As far as characters in movies, etc. the “woman as victim” theme obviously appeals to some male viewers on a number of levels, misogyny being one element of that. I also think there’s a subtext aimed at keeping female behavior within societal “norms,” e.g. if you’re promiscuous or kinky or whatever you are, you’ll end up fed into a wood chipper or worse. Our culture definitely threatens a terrible fate for women who deviate from the norm. Even our language reflects this. The word “slut” gets bandied about very freely, but what term do we use for a virile and sexually active male—why, “stud,” of course, a badge of honor. No sexism in that, right? Overall, I’d say there’s the fear of our own sexual proclivities combined with a societal fear of sexually adventurous women.

You’ve been called the “Queen of Erotic Horror.” What is it about sex that scares us so much?

Stan Tal, who published some of my early work, gave me that title, because at the time I wrote almost exclusively erotic horror. And yes, I do think sex scares a lot of people, because it’s primal and, to be any good, really requires giving up control, which is scary in itself. There’s a lot of self-judgment— am I good enough? Am I doing this right? Am I being too sexual or not sexual enough? People tend to be performance-oriented rather than pleasure-oriented, and pleasure is the whole idea. Our culture has us in a kind of double bind—it’s sex, sex, sex wherever you look, and yet there’s this fear of diving in, of doing more than dipping our toes into sexual splendor and bliss. So the act becomes more mechanical, a kind of obligation or test. Much as with food—food ads everywhere but God help us if we gain weight. On a deeper level, we inhabit animal bodies, which is disturbing to those who want to believe we are “above” that. But sex—great sex, I mean, not perfunctory sex—arises from our animal selves, our primal selves, which is beautiful and carnal, but which some people reject. So it makes for all sorts of misery, projection, and unnecessary guilt and frustration.

What are you working on these days? Any upcoming publications or existing projects readers should keep an eye out for?

Currently, I’m finishing up a short story which has somehow morphed into a novella, a post-apocalyptic piece involving a young woman who struggles to choose between following her own feral appetites or fleeing inland with her lover, away from the ever- encroaching ocean. I’m also looking forward to Grey Matter Press’s publication of the anthology Peel Back the Skin, which includes my story “Moth Frenzy.” And later this year, The Overlook Connection Press will be publishing an illustrated edition of my erotic horror novel, The Safety of Unknown Cities, with art by fabulous horror artist Glenn Chadbourne.

If you could be any supernatural monster, what would you be?

Hmmm, I think I would be a succubus to the man of my choice, becoming both his most desired erotic fantasy and his most dreaded nightmare. (Though I probably wouldn’t advocate using this description on a dating profile.).

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Born and raised in Honolulu, Lisa Nohealani Morton lives in Washington, DC. By day she is a mild-mannered database wrangler, computer programmer, and all-around data geek, and by night she writes science fiction, fantasy, and combinations of the two. Her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, and the anthology Hellebore and Rue. She can be found on Twitter as @lnmorton. Author Spotlight: Marc Laidlaw Jude Griffin | 431 words

What was the inspiration for this story?

I wish I could remember. I suspect it had its origin in thinking about the latest versions of the venerable patron system . . . from the newer crowdsourced variety represented by something like Patreon, to the more old-fashioned version where billionaires like Branson or Allen invite their favorite artists and celebrities to hang out on their private islands or go on exclusive cruises.

I did not see that excellent ending coming—engaged as I was by other unsettling elements and where I thought they’d lead. Can you talk about how you laid the seeds for the ending without giving it away?

Images are introduced early in the story, then repeated, developed, given in variations, and hopefully come together at the end. This is a deliberate technical process but hopefully it’s something a reader barely notices, as a sense that all the elements of the story are in harmony with each other, until suddenly they are not. Motifs are common elements of any good story, but it’s rare that mine are so musical.

There are a lot of interesting worldbuilding details in this story—did you have to leave some aside in order to sharpen the focus?

Sure. The story could have gone on longer, with at least a few more exemplary artists working in various media. Giving myself the constraint of a single day helped me limit the number of examples and give a sense that time was passing and a decision loomed. I did a lot more research into the details of Samira’s project but decided that the details wouldn’t do anything to advance the story, so I left them out.

Are you a fan of alliteration or other variations on an echo in a line? A number of your sentences stood out to me for rhythmic repetition of sounds, but not necessarily the first letter.

It’s a fine line between poetic effects that work and those that are merely silly. I enjoy treading that line. This title is really full of itself, and at least for me, there’s a little game going on with it which is meaningful in the story, but I doubt anyone else will pick up on it. Any news or projects you want to tell us about?

I retired from Valve earlier this year, so I’m trying to get a little more serious and disciplined about writing again. So far, I remain fairly undisciplined.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon. Author Spotlight: Rena Mason Sandra Odell | 675 words

“Ruminations” is a story of intimate horrors. Can you share what inspired the tale?

It began with the owner/editor of Written Backwards, Michael Bailey, who focuses a lot of his themes on chirality, which I’d never given much direct thought to. That got me ruminating (no pun intended) ideas and I started writing. The primary root of the story comes from the adage: What have you done with your life? There’s a fear many people have, including myself, that they may not accomplish anything significant in their lifetime; leave some kind of a mark behind to be remembered by. Then I aimed to write a story that focused on the primary root with a duality of extremes that also ran parallel.

What struck me about the opening of “Ruminations” were the mundane doubts and fears of Luisa’s life and how they heighten the similarities between Luisa and Ottaya. Yes, the unknown is terrifying, but so is the reality of losing her job and ending up homeless on the street. Such personal fears forge a connection between reader and character, drawing the reader further into the story. How conscious are you of establishing such a connection early in a story? Is it a deliberate effort, or one that you allow to flow naturally from the narrative?

When running through story ideas, I do make a conscious effort to establish some kind of a connection a reader might relate to early on, although it doesn’t always turn out that way. It’s meant to be deliberate but when that doesn’t work, I end up looking for an opening that will get readers to keep reading, hoping they’ll connect in some way at some point if they continue. Once I get the beginning I’m looking for, I tend to let the rest of the story flow naturally.

Luisa and Ottaya are not heroes; they are survivors, each with their own personal struggles. What is it about the stories of ordinary people trapped in extraordinary circumstances that speaks to you as a writer?

As a reader, these are my favorite types of stories. It’s why I read and what drives my own writing. I can relate much more to an everyday character who has to react to a situation or situations that is/are out of their control. Whether they’re fantastical instances or extreme real life ones aren’t necessarily that important to me. It’s the people, the characters, and how they handle these “wingers” (an attacking player in soccer), as I like to call them, that makes a more gripping and relatable story in my opinion. You have an impressive bibliography and often explore some of the more modern facets of horror in your writing. When you sit down to write, how much of Rena Mason ends up on the page?

Thank you. A lot of me actually ends up in my writing in one way or another. I can’t help it. Writing is an outlet where I can experience things I’ve only dreamed/dream of and retrace and relay experiences I’ve had into stories, in the hope of entertaining others. Which I think is absolutely cool.

The horror genre is more accepting of women writers than other genres, yet women continue to struggle for acceptance and the recognition of their works. How do you feel writers’ organizations such as the HWA, SFWA, and International Thriller Writers can better support the voices and careers of women writers?

One way is to highlight them and their works. Whether it’s through posting an interview like this one, book reviews, or promoting their new releases or upcoming ones —or even their blogs on organizational websites then promoting those through social media outlets; it all helps. I think offering writing scholarships like the HWA’s Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Scholarship are also extremely helpful, supportive, and encouraging.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Sandra Odell is a forty-seven-year old, happily married mother of two, an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, Daily Science Fiction, Crosssed Genres, Pseudopod, and The Drabblecast. She is hard at work plotting her second novel or world domination. Whichever comes first. MISCELLANY Coming Attractions The Editors | 97 words

Coming up in July, in Nightmare . . . We have original fiction from Gavin Pate (“Red House”) and writing team Rachel Swirsky and An Owomoyela (“Whose Drowned Face Sleeps”), along with reprints by Nick Mamatas (“Der Kommissar’s in Town”) and Seanan McGuire (“Anthony’s Vampire”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, and a feature interview. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Nightmare. Thanks for reading! 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:

Magazine Website www.nightmare-magazine.com

Destroy Projects Website www.destroysf.com

Newsletter www.nightmare-magazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed www.nightmare-magazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed www.nightmare-magazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter www.twitter.com/nightmaremag

Facebook www.facebook.com/NightmareMagazine

Subscribe www.nightmare-magazine.com/subscribe Subscriptions and Ebooks The Editors

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. You can subscribe directly from our website, via Weightless Books, or via Amazon.com. For more information, visit nightmare-magazine.com/subscribe. 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. About the Nightmare Team The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief John Joseph Adams

Managing/Associate Editor Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher Robert Barton Bland

Reprint Editor John Langan

Podcast Producer Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor Jim Freund

Podcast Host Jack Kincaid

Art Director Cory Skerry

Assistant Editors Erika Holt E.C. Myers Editorial Assistant Lisa Nohealani Morton

Copy Editor Melissa V. Hofelich

Proofreaders C. Liddle Devin Marcus

Webmaster Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios Also Edited by John Joseph Adams The Editors

If you enjoy reading Nightmare, you might also enjoy these anthologies edited (or co- edited) by John Joseph Adams.

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 & Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill) Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 [forthcoming Oct. 2016] Brave New Worlds By Blood We Live Dead Man’s Hand 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) 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 The Way Of The Wizard What the #@&% Is That? (with Douglas Cohen) [forthcoming Aug. 2016]

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above. Each project also has a mini-site devoted to it specifically, where you’ll find free fiction, interviews, and more.