Nightmare Magazine, Issue 74 (November 2018)

TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 74, November 2018

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial: November 2018

FICTION Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung [Part 1] Usman Malik Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung [Part 2] Usman Malik Better You Believe Carole Johnstone Nikishi Lucy Taylor

NONFICTION The H Word: Mother Knows Best A.C. Wise Book Reviews: November 2018 Terence Taylor

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

Welcome to issue seventy-four of Nightmare! This month, we have an original novelette from Usman Malik (“Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung”) that we’ll be serializing over two weeks. Our reprints are by Carole Johnstone (“Better You Believe”) and Lucy Taylor (“Nikishi”). In the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” A.C. Wise examines the roles mothers play in horror. Plus, we have an author spotlight with Usman Malik and a book review from Terence Taylor.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Nightmare, is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, an science fiction and fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, including The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent projects include: Cosmic Powers, What the #@&% Is That?, Operation Arcana, Loosed Upon the World, Wastelands 2, Press Start to Play, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a two- time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been a finalist eleven times) and is a seven-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams. FICTION Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung [Part 1] Usman Malik | 5298 words

Editor’s Note: Instead of two original horror short stories this month, we have for you a single novelette (presented in two parts) by Usman Malik, which is about twice the length of a regular Nightmare story. So, although you are getting one original story instead of two this month, you’re still getting about the same amount of fiction. We hope you enjoy this minor deviation from our usual offerings, and rest assured we will return to our regularly scheduled programming next month. —eds

Jee Inspector Sahib, he came looking for a missing girl in Lahore Park one evening in the summer of 2013, this man known as Hakim Shafi. It was a summer to blanch the marrow of all summers. Heat rose coiling like a snake from the ground. Gusts of evil loo winds swept across Lahore from the west, shrinking the hides of man and beast alike, and Hakim Shafi went from bench to bench, stepping over needles rusting in bleached June grass, and showed the heroinchies a picture. Have you seen this girl, he said. For all his starched kurta shalwar and that brown waistcoat, his air was neither prideful nor wary. He was a very tall, bony man with stooped shoulders, a ratlike face, and thick whiskers. His eyes were sinkholes that bubbled occasionally, and when we said no, we hadn’t seen that girl, Shafi’s gaze drifted away from the benches, the park, the night sky. We distrusted him. This lost stranger—we had no doubt he was lost— we watched him wander the park for weeks. Each Friday he came after Juma prayers, that colored eight-by-six photo clasped between his palms, as if the girl in the floral-patterned shalwar kameez and his prayers were intertwined. Before I knew that they were, I laughed along with the others at his inquiries. It was amusing to see this well dressed gentleman court our company, eyes full of hope, that faded picture in his hands. In his absence we speculated. He looked in his fifties, maybe early sixties. Perhaps the girl was his runaway daughter. As we injected the queen into our veins, as we gave ourselves up to dreaming in her orbit, we argued whether the rich-born pretty girl with her sad eyes and smooth skin was roughing it with lowlifes, while her father searched for her in shadows. We giggled when we thought of that. You understand how our life is, sahib, don’t you? We heroinchies are the children of the white queen; a tribe unto ourselves. We do not share company with the outside, our years pass differently in her presence. Hers is a shadow that enwombs us: It nurtures us as it suffocates—it is a bit like being slowly, sinuously lowered into an endless grave and watching that dome of light shrink until its memory becomes hateful. You fall in love with the descent. With Hakim Shafi things might have gone on that way—he on his insoluble quest and we daytiming when we could—but Mustafa, our dealer, he got greedy and fucked up everything. I have wished upon my dead father’s name many times since then for that bastard to rot in hell. Had he not ruined it for all of us, I would not be sitting here tonight with you and the sub-inspector sahib in this skeleton of a police station with its shadow-draped oil lamps and broken windows and sweat-slick bars. In this stench of metal and piss and— No, sahib, it’s not like that. Just saying greed is the most dangerous of beasts, as my old Dada used to say, and Mustafa’s stupid greed dragged us into the darkness that finally showed its teeth tonight.

• • • •

So this is what happened with that son of a whore Mustafa. Before he came along, we used to get our masala behind the flower market in Liberty. A paan-and-cigarette stall owner was our man. His crop was fresh and as pure as any Lahori queen has ever been. It was expensive, but we made do by rummaging through garbage for sellables, snatching cellphones, stealing manhole covers, hubcaps, and begging. Most of us could snag two or three hits a week. Wasn’t much, but was enough to keep the nighttime at bay. Then came news that Afghan police had set hundreds of thousands of poppy fields ablaze in Kunar. Overnight, opium supply dropped. As the Pakistani army’s battle against militants up north intensified, prices shot up, and we found every door shut and bolted on us with nothing but the habit to keep us company. Such desperate times that many of us became cotton shooters and fluffers. Chicken shit, I know, but what could you do? There was only so much queen to go around. “I know a man who knows a man,” said Yasin one day. Five of us were crouched around a bench under the oldest peepal tree in the park, and Yasin, a scrawny lizard-like heroinchi who had recently turned to fluffing, sat grinding milk-sugar and a laxative he stole from a dispensary to bulk up our meager supply. “He can get us cheap masala.” “Nothing is cheap,” someone said, and gawked at the blue velvet of the evening sky. “It’s that or we are dry. I’m completely out.” Nothing we could say to this. Enter Shani, Yasin’s man’s man. He was a fidgety midget with a wispy mustache wider than his face and he offered to help us ride the queen cheap. Word was, he had made deals with police stations in Model Town and Kot Lakhpat for confiscated masala, and knew how to tap into the army’s black market— Yes, sahib, of course. You’re right. He was likely lying all along, the bastard. Suffice to say he knew people, and so we eagerly accepted. I was among those who stopped going to the flower market and trusted this fiend for my needs. As you can see, that was a mistake. My dying is ample evidence of that.

• • • •

It happened on a Thursday evening. (I remember because one of the heroinchies went to Data Sahib’s shrine to pay his respects.) After the park guard made his rounds to collect bhatta for letting us use the benches, most of my group left to polish-wipe cars and beg at chowks and traffic lights. Seemed as good a time as any to retrieve the plastic- wrapped masala I had squirreled away weeks ago. I pulled out the packet and rolled up my sleeves and, under the swaying elms and peepal, I slipped the queen into my blood. (Yes, sub-Inspector sahib, that cigarette is most welcome. Thank you for the light. This close, the flame hurts my eyes a bit, but my hands are shaking and I cannot chase the dragon at this hour.) Sahib, we sit here today in this gloomy thana. I can plainly see the shadows squirm by the door, the oak and eucalyptus boughs moving in the wind. Hear that whistle in the dark outside. Watch the way your fingers wind the ends of your mustache, your eyes half-lidded as you listen to my story. I smell the ash falling to the floor from the tip of my cigarette. See water bead on the plastic sheet over that ice block the sub- inspector wheeled in earlier, should I prove less than cooperative—and I swear on my mother’s name, this is how clearly I saw my dead son under those wheezing trees that night. Heroinchies die twice, they say, and we can all tell the story of our first death. My son is mine. He was twelve when I beat him black and blue on his birthday. He wanted to enroll in school again. I wanted him to train as a mechanic’s apprentice. He was thirteen when he ran away and fifteen when they found him in a gunnysack behind a dumpster at Lakshmi Chowk. His face was swollen and discolored in a dozen places. His lips were torn. Blood had clotted in the corners. His throat— His throat was— I died the day they found him, sahib, and I died again that night in the park after I injected the masala. And in this fresh death when my son came to me he was smooth and untouched. Angelic was my boy. He bent over me and I thought he had forgotten, that he had forgiven. His eyes were kind. He smiled at me, changing, and it wasn’t his face but a piss- colored full moon shining at me. The eyes were red stars, the darkness between them whipped out and licked my cheeks. The white queen was in a mood, she rose with the tide of my blood, and I saw a giant golden snake tower above me. Its hood pulsated wider than the night sky until it seemed the heavens stood on its flared head, and I knew, I was sure, that its basilisk gaze would be my end. The world shivered then and came apart. A gaunt man with a bristling mustache leaned across the bench, his hands poised above my chest. He lowered his face, breath afoul with onion, garlic, something else, and said, Are you all right? I was. Later, Hakim Shafi would tell me that I was gone. When he found me, head lolling off the bench, my mouth frothed and my eyes were glazed. The left side of my body twitched. When he found no pulse, he pumped my chest and continued for nearly fifteen minutes. That was how long I was dead, he said. I believed him. How else could I have seen my son in that gloaming? Hakim Shafi saved my life that night. A medical man present at that hour in a corner of a park haunted by heroinchies—some might call that a divine act. Maybe it was, but I wonder. Sometimes I think life is like a junkie’s flesh, crisscrossed where kismet injects other souls into our lives. Souls lost as we are. Who knows if the perpetrator of such accidents is God or the devil? Whatever force it was, it bound my life to Hakim Shafi’s forever. “I’m fine,” I said, but he brought me to his small, neat clinic in Old Lahore anyway. Here, he drew my blood and took a pinch of the leftover masala for testing. We sat on a moss-colored couch and watched the powder bubble and hiss in a glass vial when Hakim poured acid on it. “Look at the bottom,” he said. I looked. Molten black residue, like tar, stuck to the glass. “Your dealer’s been shortchanging you,” he said. “I’d guess for a while, too. This heroin has more cut in it than any I have seen. Elephant tranquilizer. It was just a matter of time before something happened.” I nodded, and it occurred to me I was a bit disappointed. I had been courting my demise for a long while. “You inject.” It wasn’t a question. I nodded again. He pushed back the spectacles he had put on inside the clinic. They made him look confused. He dragged his knuckles back and forth on the oak desk. “You get your blood tested?” “No.” “You know how to chase the dragon?” I laughed. He smiled. “Right.” His gray eyes went inward. When he spoke, he might’ve been talking to himself, “Maybe that’s the way to go if you can’t kick the habit.” “What makes you think I want to kick anything?” Hakim Shafi pulled out a drawer and brought out four tiny vials. He picked up the syringe cocked with my blood, dropped some in each vial. My mind was fogged up from my death. I wanted to rise and flee to the park, but Hakim’s eyes were fixed on me. Restless, I scanned the room and saw a framed picture on the desk. I pointed. “That your daughter?” Hakim’s fingers whitened around the vial. He shook it vigorously. “Did you eat today?” “I’ve seen you take that picture around the park. I know everyone’s told you she was never there.” Hakim flicked a finger against the glass. The yellow liquid turned red, golden. “I’ll set up some intravenous saline for you.” His lips were pressed into a line. “Your blood is thick from fluid loss.” He helped me onto the couch and gave me a concoction to drink. When my eyelids grew heavy, he pulled a crisp white sheet over me. It smelled of hospital. “Sleep well. It’s the only way most of us can dream.” He paused, and in the silence a drowsy moth thunked against the room’s window. I muttered something. Somewhere in the night a baby cried, and its mother shushed it and began to hum. The moth thunked again. I looked, and outside the window, a small boy-shape pressed its face against the glass, mouthing words at me. “Hakim sahib,” I said, voice thick and sticky. “Who’s that? Shafi turned. The shape was gone.

• • • •

In a room at the back of the clinic, Hakim Shafi showed me snake skins. “This is how I make my living.” “By killing snakes?” He smiled. “By using venom to heal. Similia Similibus Curantur.” He swept a hand around him at the hundreds of glass vials, filled with pills the size of sugar cubes, arranged on dusty shelves. “Like cures like. Poison will kill poison.” He knuckled the diamond-patterned leathery skin. “My suppliers send me tokens every year. Skins, fangs, vertebra. Keeps up the clinic’s image. Helps the business.” I scratched the stubble on my chin. “How does snake venom heal? I thought the only thing it was useful for was killing dumb assholes who mess around with creatures they don’t understand.” “It’s one of the oldest cures. My ancestors have used it for centuries.” “You’re pulling my chain, aren’t you, Hakim sahib?” Shafi studied me. “We’re so besieged by newness we forget old diseases haunt us for a reason. Did you know snake venom is being researched at big universities these days? Dementia, palsy, heart attacks— it has a role in curing all of them.” He went to a cupboard and pulled down a large rosewood box from the top shelf. He set it on the table next to a gleaming row of vials and tubes. “For my medicines, I mix most of the substrate myself. The venom varies between species. Some is toxic to human nerves, some to blood, some to tissues and organs. A pinch of the wrong sample, and you’d be dead in seconds.” He opened the rosewood box. Inside were dozens of matchbook-sized tins. He pulled on a pair of gloves and carefully removed the lids of two. They were filled with tiny snow-colored pellets. “This,” Hakim picked up a pellet with a pair of tweezers, “is the venom of the common krait. It paralyzes the breathing muscles. If you get bitten by a krait during sleep, you’d scratch the spot, thinking it was a bug bite, and doze off. You’d never wake again.” Hakim replaced the pellet in the tin. “I use it for patients with lockjaw and neck spasms. A millionth portion in goat milk. Highly effective.” He tapped another tin with the edge of his tweezers. “A couple bring their nine-year-old girl to me every month. She has thin blood. A genetic condition. Bleeds for hours from her gums if she brushes her teeth too vigorously. A knee scrape would be fatal. Most children like her don’t survive childhood. My Koriwala viper venom has kept her alive for seven years.” I shuddered. My third day at the clinic, and the shakes were beginning to hit me. My skin itched with strange life. I felt it in the bunching of my bowels, at the back of my eyes. The absence of the queen was becoming loud and insistent. I licked my lips. “Got anything to help my nerves, Hakim sahib?” Shafi tipped his neck and watched me. He plucked a vial filled with russet-colored liquid from the shelf. “Cobra in laudanum. It will help the diarrhea and muscle aches.” When I eyed it warily, he laughed. “Diluted. Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing.” He shook the vial, dipped a glass pipette into the frothing liquid, and retrieved some. I opened my mouth and he squeezed three drops onto my tongue. “Easy,” he said when I rolled my tongue around. “Let it settle into your tissues.” Already, the fire in my body was sputtering, calming down. It wasn’t the queen’s embrace, but it was something. When I closed my eyes, a fog rose and surrounded me, whispering me into a lull.

• • • •

By now, sahib, you must be wondering why I was still at the clinic with the good hakim; why I stayed for weeks and didn’t steal his medicines, his laudanum, or his money. After all, I had done nothing but steal, steal, steal for years since my boy died and my wife ran away with a shakarkandi vendor. Hubcaps, tin sheets, tools from a garage where I worked briefly, an old beggar’s wheelchair. You name it. Before I became a thief I used to work in a dispensary—a tiny roadside stall in Qila Gujjar Singh run by a compounder named Ram Lal. He mixed tonics for common illnesses. Occasionally, a certified government doctor would check in, but mostly Ram Lal was free to do as he pleased. He was a good compounder, even though he did not have a medical degree. He helped the locals and earned a good name for himself with his gentle manner and willingness to subsidize his prescriptions. I helped him run the dispensary. I attended seven grades before I dropped out of school, and could read labels written in English on pill bottles. My job was to grind pills with a mortar and pestle and wrap them in squares of newspaper to make medicinal puris. We did well and it was a good life. Until my son disappeared. I suppose being in a similar environment with Hakim Shafi brought back those memories. For years I lived in that park—scabies-infested, filthy, often hungry. I had grown addicted to the darkness, but I suppose I was ready for it to end when I overdosed. Shafi came along, saved me, and cleaned me up, and I guess I was just too tired of myself to rob him. I don’t know, maybe every heroinchi also wants one story with a happy ending. Shafi helped me through the next week. Quitting cold turkey was like being cooked on a spit. I ground my teeth, sometimes I writhed and screamed; but his tinctures helped. I suspect he could have done more, but I think he knew this was my battle and would only go so far in steering. The ship and its course were mine and mine alone. Like cures like, he’d said.

• • • •

On the seventh day, when I had more strength, Shafi showed me the terrariums. His clinic was located in Old Lahore. Squeezed between a shoemaker’s shop and a cloth merchant’s, it was more like Ram Lal’s dispensary than a real clinic. His patients came in lines of worn, sickly faces, most of them women and children. They crowded into the dingy waiting room up front where whorls of Quranic calligraphy draped the walls and the smell of formalin and bitter salts hung in the air. Once I had enough vigor to navigate past the front hall to the backyard, the fierce, sudden beauty of it shocked me. A statuary of ceramic children laughing and kneeling in the mud stood in the center of a lush zoysia grass patch. Creepers hung from trestles arrayed across carrot patches, weaving between the half-dozen mango and orange trees that circled the statuary. Exquisitely kept and trimmed, the yard smelled of citrus and honeysuckle. I whistled when Shafi told me he did the landscaping himself. “That’s hard work.” He nodded. “My wife helped me do it. She was a wonder.” “Was?” “Yes.” I turned to a row of empty glass tanks in a corner of the yard. “What are those?” “Terrariums.” He crouched and ran a hairy hand over them. Monsoon season was upon us, and night drizzle had left the glass shiny and clean. It twinkled in the afternoon light, slanting red shadows across the grass. “You kept snakes?” “My wife did. She was a herpetologist at the University of Punjab. Russell vipers, sand boas, Indian kraits, striped keelbacks—she kept them, fed them like babies.” He showed me cracks, little spiderwebs, in the glass. “This is where her cobras tried to bite us.” “What happened?” I said. Shafi yanked a tall weed poking its head from between the cages. We both knew I wasn’t asking about snakes. “I sold them,” he said. “Couldn’t bear to look at them anymore.” A thought hit me, a realization that must have shown in my face; when Shafi looked up, his eyes changed. He rose and went inside the house, his footsteps impressing upon the muddy banks of the flowerbeds, a trail leading into his past. I got up to follow, stopped, and went to the back wall. I bent down and fingered the human footprint under the windowsill. It was fresh and clear and a child’s. The toe prints were filled with rainwater. As I watched, a worm snaked its way out of a toe print and began wriggling madly in the rain pool.

• • • •

The girl in the picture was not Hakim Shafi’s daughter. It was his wife—his child bride. Shafi said nothing when I voiced my conclusion. I ran my fingers across the picture, across the large black eyes gazing out at the world, nose proud, chin firm and defiant. The girl, probably in her early twenties, sat sidelong, a half-smile covered by a hennaed hand. With the nose ring, her broad forehead and that chin, she reminded me of those desert women from Thal and Rajasthan who meander with their tribe across the wasteland, grazing cattle-stock. I said as much to Hakim. He flicked at the end of his nose. “Eighteen years ago, I was in Hyderabad for a relative’s funeral. I bought her from a band of gypsies who camped at the outskirts of the city. She was eight at the time.” “Eight.” I wasn’t shocked. I come from a family of moonshiners and shanty-dwellers, sahib. My father ran errands for a pimp most of his life. I knew how some old customs work. “You raised your wife,” I said to him. “Yes.” I stared at the picture. “Where is she now?” Hakim polished a row of bottles with a rag. “Why do you keep returning to the park?” His voice was low. “Maliha loved the park. She used to feed those stupid ducks at the pond. Loved their ugly dirt-colored feathers. She said they reminded her of the desert. I used to laugh at that.” He yanked out a drawer and removed a brown pouch, its top cinched by leather thongs. He tugged at the drawstring, removed a wrapped sheet of paper from it, withdrew a necklace strung with three large stones from the sheet. They were cracked and yellow. “These here are the bones of her childhood.” “What?” “Desert pearls. Sandstone baked by heat for years. Maliha didn’t remember much of her early life. Her parents were dead, which is why her tribe wanted to sell her to someone willing to take care of her. But she said she remembered her mother giving her these. Her Ma told her they had magical powers and would protect her from jinns.” He smiled. “My Maliha believed it ’til the day she disappeared.” “When’d she disappear?” “Two years ago.” “How old was she?” “Twenty-six.” “You loved her?” It was a stupid question, sahib, I know, but asking it came so naturally, it surprised me. Maybe it was a bond of understanding between sinners. I could see his love for her nestled in the crowfeet around his eyes, I could see his entire life in those eyes: feeding her, clothing her, raising her, falling in love with her, sending her to college. But he had bought her with rupee. Her heart then—did he win it, or chain it with need? Hakim held the necklace. “Yes, I loved her.” “You didn’t have children?” “We were barren. I was.” “Why’d she run away?” I didn’t mean to say what I said next, but I said it, “A younger lover?” His fingers pressed the stones as if telling beads on a rosary. “She loved me. It might have been a mixed kind of love, but she did. I’ve always known that. She went away because she was looking for something. A dream. Something she heard when she was a child.” He brought the necklace close, until it brushed against his chin. “Many times, I thought she didn’t know what she was looking for, but she was a precocious girl—always had been—and I trusted her.” We were sitting at the table in the clinic’s little kitchenette. Hakim got up and poured us green tea from a boiling pot. The scent of it drifted between us, sweet, spectral, ephemeral. “Sometimes I can feel her in the house, breathe her perfume. She left this necklace behind, you know.” “And that has you convinced she’ll return?” Shafi sipped tea. “What was the dream she chased?” “I don’t know. It’s a little insane, if I’m to be honest.” “What was it?” He put the cup down, shook his head. “Not now. Another day, perhaps.” Sahib, you might wonder why was he telling me all this. Why a respectable man like him would open his heart to a stranger, a heroinchi? I wondered the same, so I asked him. He wrapped the necklace with the sheet and paper and placed it in the pouch. When he turned, his face was inscrutable. It comes out at last, I thought. No one is so good, so pious, so righteous they’ll pick up a dying needler from the garbage and take him home. “I want your help,” Hakim said. His gray eyes were feverish. “I want you to help me find my wife.” “How can I? I haven’t left that park in years.” “Maliha disappeared from that park. I know it in my gut.” I watched him. If his wife did visit her precious duck pond, I never saw her. Then again, in the darkness in which we thrived, she could have danced around us naked and we might have missed her. He persisted, “I want you to ask your friends. They won’t tell me anything, but they will tell you. Someone must have seen her.” His hand trembled and tea spilled on the table. He wiped it with his sleeve. “I’ve looked for her for two years now. I have talked to the police, and they’ve done nothing. They—” He stopped, clenched his fingers. “Will you ask your friends? Please?” I took another look at his face and I relented, sahib. God help me, I told him I would. There are days when I wonder if I should have refused, if I should have got up and left his clinic and walked away fast as I could. In the end, I didn’t. Not because he saved my life—I owe him no debt for that; he saved me to answer his own needs, I think—but because I had nothing to go back to. The world is big, yes, but I had my own ghosts chasing me, and if I left, they’d just catch up sooner. Also, Hakim’s love was naked and trembling, pinned to the wall. He was asking me to help him take it down, and I couldn’t refuse. I told him I’d ask around.

• • • •

When I began the inquiry, my friend Yasin—I believe I mentioned him before—directed me to some of the heroinchies who kept an eye out on the goings-on in the park. One of them told me that two years ago, around the time Hakim Shafi’s wife disappeared, the qawwals were in town. Every year, a band of musicians comes to Lahore Park to take part in a qawwali festival. They’re led by a maestro named Tariq Khan. Yasin has a stereo he salvaged from a junkyard. When he shot up, he would often listen to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, his head thrashing to the alaap and raagas. Occasionally I’d join him. Khan sahib’s love songs are great, but we especially adored those that lauded the merits of sin. And whenever the qawwals came to town, we tried to attend the free performances in the park square. I have never heard Tariq Khan sing, but legend says, when he was a young man, he was visited by the legendary Tansen in a dream and trained by him. That, at the peak of his prowess, Tariq Khan once set a dozen candles alight just with his singing. “I saw her twice,” said Yasin’s heroinchi confidante. “A young woman hovering around the maestro Tariq Khan. Lovely girl. Beautiful dark eyes.” When I prodded, his description of the girl matched Maliha’s. The coincidence was too big to ignore. I asked Yasin to talk to the festival organizers, and he returned and told me that after each performance in Lahore, the qawwals left for Panjnad in southern Punjab. Perhaps Hakim Shafi could learn more if he visited the area? I talked to Shafi. At first he was incredulous, then his eyes widened. “Ya Allah.” He wheeled and, ignoring my startled face, ran to his room and locked the door. I waited in the kitchenette for nearly an hour before he emerged. “I know where she is,” he said. “What? How?” Shafi wiped a callused hand across his pale face. His fingers were grimy. “Her family, her people—they were gypsy singers. They came from a lineage who were once known as ‘professional mourners’: Folks who’d come at the bidding of rich families to wail at funerals. To add glamor to their dead, so outsiders would think the departed was dearly beloved. Maliha would feel right at home with qawwals and their lyrical lamentations.” Shafi turned and stared out the window. “At first I thought she went looking for her people. But she wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t leave me for her folks. They sold her. She hated them for it. She’d never say it out loud—she wasn’t one for self-pity—but I knew it.” His forehead creased and he talked in a low voice, as if to himself, “No, she went looking for naag mani. That’s the only explanation.” “Naag Mani?” “She’s gone looking for her childhood.” Shafi turned his strange- colored eyes on me. Nightfall was at hand, behind him the window was darkening, and I thought I saw something pale and glistening peer in. Hakim coughed and threw something across the table. I looked down. It was his wife’s necklace with the three desert stones. “She’s gone to Panjnad,” Shafi said, “looking for the mythical serpent pearl.”

[End of Part 1]

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Usman Malik is a Pakistani writer of strange stories resident in Florida. His work has appeared in several Year’s Best collections, won the British Fantasy and Bram Stoker awards, and been nominated for the Nebula. He likes running and occasional long hikes. You can find him on Twitter @usmantm. Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung [Part 2] Usman Malik | 7405 words

This is how Hakim Shafi gave away his life: First, he closed his shop. Next, he sold his house. “What in the name of God are you doing?” I said. Shafi grinned. That grin raised the hackles on my neck, sahib. “Burning bridges,” he said. I looked at him closely. In the four weeks since I’d told him about the qawwals, he had shaved his thick mustache and lost ten kilos. He was always thin, but now he looked like a needler at the end of his days. His temples were wasted, the flesh of his face pulled taut across the blades of his bones. His eyes discomfited me the most: the gray in them swirled madly, like smoke from charred moths after they crash into candles and explode into flame. It was as if a light had flicked on inside Shafi’s head, bathing his body in an otherworldly glow whose secrets only he understood. To be honest, I was becoming rather afraid of this skeletal man, sahib. I decided it was time for me to return to my world, leave the clinic and run to the park— Which was when I discovered the true extent of the damage that motherfucker Mustafa, Yasin’s dealer, had wrought. We’d thought Mustafa had cut heroin deals with police stations only. Turned out he’d gone a lot further than that. He had swindled the Poison Men themselves. I don’t know who came up with that name. When the opium fields up north were razed, many folk lost a lot of money. Folk other than the militants, with connections outside the country. To whom many body bags in Lahore and Karachi were attributed. Mustafa had been heavily scrounging the white queen from these people. In his greed to set up a drug cartel in Lahore, he lied and told the Poison Men his clientele was the city’s elite; that we, the park heroinchies, were suppliers for children of bureaucrats and feudal lords. Cunningly, he plotted it all out so that we became the swindlers and betrayers. As they say, though, no one plots better than God. The Poison Men discovered that Mustafa was lying. He had been selling the queen and its substrate masala to their direct competitors in the international market. Mustafa and his affiliates went missing. Five of my friends paid the price for their greed as well. Yasin was among them. Their bodies were found floating in the pond near the banyan trees in the park, throats cut from ear to ear, rusted needles jammed inside their penises. Their fish-nibbled fingers—what few were left—were trapped in tree roots. Word was that I was on their kill list as well. They were looking for me and a few others. We were condemned. Dead men walking. So . . . I resolved to stay missing. Hakim Shafi had made preparations to journey to the town of Uch, close to Panjnad, where, he had learned, the qawwals had gone. I begged to join him, and he was happy to have my company. He was expecting me to go with him all along, he said.

• • • •

At noon, we got off the train at Bahawalpur Station and Hakim rented a taxi that would take us to Uch—a three-hour road trip. On the way, he told me how he finally realized his wife’s destination. “When she was eleven or twelve, Maliha used to talk about a mythical stone. She called it naag mani, the serpent pearl. A precious stone gifted by the Serpent King, who rules the underworld, to his queen.” I stared at him. He didn’t look like he was joking. “And you think your wife went after this magic rock a snake gave his begum as a wedding present?” Hakim guffawed as if it were the funniest thing in the world. His eyes were too bright. “Why wouldn’t she?” He chewed at his lip. “Her people came from the desert. Her mother gave her that sandstone necklace and told her it would keep jinns away. There are stories of such stones in every culture. It hardly matters what I think. It’s her assumptions that have brought us here.” “Hakim sahib, that is insane. I thought she was an educated woman.” He lifted his chin and stroked his throat. “I have been thinking about this for a while, you know. In her mind, she probably came up with rational reasons to look for the stone. I believe she talked herself into looking for it. You’re still sniffing and shaking your head.” He reached into his pocket, brought out his wife’s necklace pouch, withdrew the wrapped necklace. He unfolded the sheet of paper. “I should have thought of it much sooner, but . . . this is a copy of a letter she wrote to a herpetologist in America.” I took the note and tried to read it. It was in English, sahib. Hakim saw me squinting at the writing and took it back. He read it and translated it for me. Incidentally, it is the same note, sahib, that you retrieved from the rosewood box later. There, sub-Inspector sahib, that’s the one. If you like, you can read it yourself. No? I see. It is to be part of my testimony. Well, I will tell you what I remember.

• • • •

(Item #13 pertaining to Case 546D3: Copy of letter from one Maliha Shafi, Evidence Collection Lab, Lahore)

Dear Professor Hensoldt, I have read with great interest your article about the Cobra Stone in the New York Times and was fascinated by your description of the hours you spent watching cobras catch fireflies in the grass. You state that the female lampyridae has rudimentary wings and is too large to fly; that it sits in the grass quietly, emitting a green light stronger than the males’. The light flickers intermittently, and if watched for a long time, “a steady current of male insects will be observed flying toward it and alighting in close proximity” for mating. You state that little pebbles of chlorophane emit a similar greenish light in the dark. It is possible, you say, that thousands of years ago, the cobra chanced upon such a stone in a riverbed and, thinking it a glowworm, swallowed it. It then discovered it could be used to lure male fireflies. That, over millennia, the cobra has come to use the stone as decoy in the grass, and when the male insect weaves its way toward the stone’s light, the snake lunges and catches it. Because of this evolutionary advantage, you claim, the cobra carries the stone in a fleshy pocket in its head to prevent others of its species from seizing and monopolizing it. Thus through accident and race memory, you say, this behavior is exhibited and the cobra learns to treasure this precious natural decoy. My issue is with this last statement. I have studied snakes in the Punjab area of Pakistan. I have also travelled to the desert of Thal, looking for such “naag manis” (for that is what the locals call the Cobra Stone), where nomadic tribesman claim to have seen giant snakes fighting over these pebbles. The only gems I found which emit green light are calcium fluorite crystals, which are easily fractured. Cobra Stones found by Berlin mineralogist Gustave Schubert in Mongolia’s Tavan Bogd mountains, however, are reported to have been so resistant to breakage that diamond-tipped tools cracked before their strength. Gustave found these in a nest of Ophiophagus hannah—the King Cobra. Which is why, I have concluded that none of the gems I found are Cobra Stones. Furthermore, I propose that none of the “natural” fluorite crystals found near the habitat of the cobra are the mythical serpent stones. That the real Cobra Stone is a compound formed of cholorophane and unidentified biologically active substances in the glands of the Ophiophagus hannah; the snake might use for it for evolutionary or other advantages, but the process of its formation is entirely within the serpent’s body, much as gallstones form in man and other species. This conclusion is enthralling and in some ways wistful for me. The “geo-natural” samples I recovered, which are breakable fluorite, have been deposited with the University of Punjab, and I am again in search of the real mythical stone. (You might be surprised to hear there are Indian and Pakistani herpetologists who have looked for it for decades. We really are a secret society!) Putting all flippancy aside, I have heard gossip among fellow seekers that the Panjnad area in southern Punjab (where all five Pakistani rivers come together) has an alluvial riverbed upon which sightings of these stones have occurred with astonishing frequency. Residents of a small desert town called Uch claim to have found and sold many such stones to tourists and local homeopaths. The report has piqued my interest, and I find myself wondering if I should make a visit to the area to further my studies. Again, thank you for writing this gem of an article (you’ll excuse the pun). It was a pleasure speculating on the possibilities such scenarios offer. Sincerely,

Maliha Shafi, PhD Associate Professor of Herpetology University of Punjab, Pakistan

• • • •

I raised my eyebrows. Shafi smiled. “Still think I’m a fool for coming here?” he said. “She came to Uch in search of the Cobra Stone,” I said, piecing it all together. “Probably with the qawwals, since they knew the area. Why wouldn’t she tell you before she left?” “She used to do this kind of thing all the time. Go on these ‘research trips’ without telling me.” His lips twitched. “My Maliha was a wild one. You can take the girl out of the desert, I suppose, but you can’t—” His gray eyes wandered, found the horizon, settled on it. “I thought she’d outgrow it, you know,” he said. “I thought a day would come when she’d settle down. We would adopt children. We’d grow old together.” A salt- and-pepper stubble had grown on his cheeks. He rubbed it vigorously. “Maybe something happened to her. God forbid, an accident perhaps. Otherwise, I know she would have returned home.” I nodded. The letter seemed to be carefully worded. Maliha came across as thoughtful and practical. Imaginative, but calm and collected. Maybe something had happened to her. “Tell me more about this stone,” I said. “Myth and speculation more than anything else. She was full of stories from her tribal days. She would laugh when she narrated them, watching my face as if she expected me to laugh at her.” “Did you?” When he said nothing, I asked, “What stories?” “Her favorite was the tale of the Serpent King and his Queen.” Hakim rubbed his fingers together. “The Sheesh Naag, king of serpents, ruler of the underworld, asked his wife what she wanted for her hundredth name-day. The Serpent Queen, having grown tired of time’s ravages upon her body, asked the King to grant her youth and immortal beauty. The Sheesh Naag told her he couldn’t reverse time, but he would grant her immortality via metamorphosis. By virtue of the stone’s magic, she would turn into a beautiful woman, a snake-nymph with skin smooth and white as polished marble. “The Queen agreed. Since that day, on the lunar fourteenth when the moon is at it brightest, she rises from the underworld in human form and gazes upon our world, sighing at time’s cruelty. Those who have seen her claim she wears the serpent pearl on her forehead.” He tapped his own. “It is said that this serpent stone is a gateway to other worlds than ours. That the possessor of the pearl shall rule animals and birds, be immune to all the venom in the world. Even become immortal.” Hakim shook his head. “Oh, Maliha could tell these stories so dramatically.” “Yeah, it’s dramatic all right.” “Isn’t it?” He smiled without mirth. “And to think we’re in the middle of it, traveling to find a woman who thinks this gem really exists.” “Although to be fair, her interest seems academic.” “Like I said, my wife rationalized well. By the way, want to guess which species of snake the Serpent King is according to legend?” “Which?” When Hakim grinned, I knew. “Ophiophagus hannah,” I cried out. “The King Cobra.” He laughed, and for the first time in weeks it was open-throated and heartfelt. “By Allah, that’s it. Driver, what is it?” The taxi driver had braked and stopped the car. Now he was getting out, muttering under his breath. “Fallen branches, sahib,” he said. “Probably from a dust storm. They said one passed through here a few days back. I’ll take care of them.” We peered out. Two large branches lay across the road. Something large and white lay curled near them under a swarm of flies. “What’s that?” Hakim called. A couple of vultures hopped back, hunching their shoulders as the driver approached, their yellow beady eyes fixed on him. “Hussshhh,” yelled the taxi driver and waved his arms at them. “Get out of here.” The vultures jerked their way to the gravel roadside, where they paused and waited. The taxi driver called over his shoulder. “Roadkill, sahib.” My gaze went to the whirling blowflies, then to the carcass. Afternoon was dissolving into dusk, and I couldn’t quite make out what it was. The driver lifted the second branch and heaved it at the vultures. They scattered, casting venomous looks at the intruder. When the driver slipped behind the wheel and turned the ignition, Hakim tapped him on the shoulder. “What was it? Raccoon?” “Nah, sahib.” The driver looked at us in the rearview mirror. “Just a dead snake.” Hakim looked at me, eyes wide, and laughed. I wouldn’t say anything. My heart thudded in my chest. Just beyond the tree line on our left stood a boy, arms crossed and hugging his chest. The woods were dark and, though he was too far for me to make out his features, I was sure it was the child I had seen at Hakim’s clinic peering in from the window. As I gripped the edge of the rolled down window, the boy turned and disappeared into the woods.

• • • •

The qawwals are in town, indeed, and tonight they will sing, said the owner of the guesthouse we were staying at. A large musical mehfil was planned for the evening. Hundreds of people would gather at the shrine of Bibi Farida, a female mystic who died centuries ago. The qawwals would sing the nostalgic folklore of her life and the tireless work she did for Uch’s children during a fatal dysentery epidemic. “Who was she?” I asked. The guesthouse owner, an elderly man with no teeth, shivered with reverence. “An angel, sahib. Personification of Allah’s mercy and glory,” he said in a voice garbled by toothlessness. “Our elders used to say her goodness migrated into her skin. Her forehead shone with Allah’s light. On dark nights, it could be seen for miles.” “Who built the shrine?” “An Irani prince who fell in love with her, they say. In the Mughal days this was a common route for Persian princes and amirs to travel on their way to East Indian cities. The prince wanted to marry her, but Bibi Farida declined, choosing her orphan paupers over the prince.” It was our second day at the guesthouse, a small bungalow on the outskirts of Uch. The owner had situated it on the banks of the Panjnad River, offering his guests a glorious waterfront view from the porch that ran around the back. You could sit there and drink tea and gaze into the night-darkened river. Hakim had no interest in tea or scenic beauty. His agitation was visible. For the first time in two years, he was close to finding out what had happened to his wife, and the anticipation was gnawing at him. He rubbed his forehead, muttered prayers, and gripped his rosewood box— the one with the snake venom tin boxes—as if he’d never let go. “Why’d you bring that?” I said. His fingers drummed on the steel flip-lock. “It was a present to her from my mother. Maliha used it for her trinkets before she went to the University. The venoms are mine, but the box was always hers.” “And what exactly do you plan to do with it?” He didn’t answer. A thought occurred to me. “The venom you gave me for the shakes—does that cause visions? Hallucinations?” “No.” His eyebrows knotted. “Why?” “No reason,” I said, staring over his shoulders. The window was empty. I went to change into something comfortable. We left at dusk. Following our landlord’s recommendation, we took the trail that ran along the Panjnad River, a two-mile hike to the shrine. The river breathed in and out, a shimmery line trembling below the mud bank. Rocks crouched amid wind-hissing reeds and apluda grass, like men prostrated before a dark deity, their mineral-gleaming humps desolate. They made me think of the floating bodies of my friends murdered by the Poison Men. Water birds cooed and flapped above us. The landscape of sand and mud sprawled and tilted into the water, and I saw someone standing motionless in the distance, a dark speck haunting the liquid loneliness. “No respite for the seeker,” murmured Hakim. I looked at him sharply, but he was staring at the ground, where mica and water- smoothed pebbles gleamed. As he walked, the rosewood box rattled in his backpack. “Are you all right?” He gave me a tired smile, a sickly man with sunken eyes. “Never better.” “What are we going to ask the qawwals? You know, when we get there?” He shrugged and shifted the backpack to the other shoulder. “Whether a lady researcher came here with them.” “What if they say no?” “Then we ask others.” His smile was gone. “Every fiber of my heart tells me she’s here. Somewhere in this town.” How can you be sure, I wanted to ask, but I held my tongue. What use disrupting any man’s illusions? Hakim would leave no stone unturned in his search for his beloved, for it was clear to me that the man was maddened by love and had been for a long time. What kind of love, I didn’t dare ponder. What does it take to raise a child bride, what transformative alchemy must happen between a man and a girl as age eats innocence and the infatuation evolves into its adult counterpart? I didn’t know, didn’t want to think about it. The prospects were too disturbing. We turned from the river to follow a winding trail leading up to Uch Lake, an artificial canal created by the dam at Panjnad head. That was where the shrine was located, the guesthouse owner had said. “She once told me she loved snakes” Hakim said, “because when they shed their skins, they live anew. She said snakes are lovelier than butterflies, for a cocoon hides a butterfly’s ugly childhood, while snakes don’t worry about the artifice of beauty.” Then we were nearing the shrine, and Hakim stopped. My heart lurched a little as we stood there, gazing at the towering structure in front of us. “Holy heart of God,” Hakim murmured, his face full of awe. The shrine was spectacular, a dazzling three-tiered octagonal building erected close to the lake on a sand base. The top tier lifted the marble dome, while eight towers of carved timber supported the base tier. The exterior was patterned by many shades of blue and white mosaic tiles, themselves covered with coils of extraordinary calligraphy in cyan and gold. “This is where the qawwals come every year.” I exhaled a shuddering sigh. “No wonder.” It was a building of heartbreaking beauty, a glittering fortress in the arid landscape around it. It made me feel lonelier than ever. It made me want to flee from it. Hakim’s lips had tightened. His eyes glowed in a shaft of bleeding sunlight. “Should we go in?” I said gently. He nodded, his eyes fixed on the dome. We joined the throng of visitors come for the great musical event. We passed under the arched gateway into the courtyard and crossed a sandy yard broken by rows of cemented graves of sinners wanting the sacred proximity of Bibi Farida. The qawwals were gathered in front of the shrine proper, its entrance locked and bolted at this hour. A boisterous bunch, they chattered happily, their glances roaming but inevitably wandering back to their leader, a squat, morbidly obese, bald man, who waddled his way around the courtyard, greeting acquaintances with a wide smile under his handlebar mustache. “That’s him. Tariq Khan,” I whispered to Hakim. I lifted my chin and nodded at the maestro as he passed by us. Hakim found us two empty plastic chairs five rows down from the stage and we sat. “Do you want to talk to him now?” I said. Hakim’s eyes scanned the crowd, his fingers futilely trying to find the phantom ends of the mustache he had shaved. “After.” The carpeted stage was adorned with four teakwood tablas, microphone pedestals, rolled silk pillows, and red-velveted bolster cushions for the singers. A harmonium fronted the tablas near a large tray filled with small paan-daans and filigreed spit utensils for the lead singer’s betel-chewing and spitting pleasure. Hakim leaned over. “You see the harmonium?” I glanced at it, then at him. “Yes?” “Look closer.” I peered at it again. It was a beautiful hand-pumped instrument crafted from rosewood, its white teeth gleaming in the spotlight. I could see nothing strange about it. “What?” Hakim’s hand reached out, took hold of my chin, directed my gaze. “Look at its right corner.” I did. Even from the fifth row, the large white-and-gold symbol was visible against the dark mahogany: Twin snakes coiled around a ruby emitting rays of light.

• • • •

Sahib, my throat is dry. May I have some water? Thank you for the shawl, sub-Inspector sahib. The weather must be changing. Your station is so cold. I don’t know how you get any work done. Although, I suppose, this chill is ideal for what you do here. Must be more efficient to torture and break a freezing body. Are they still standing out there, Inspector sahib? The Poison Men? Come now, sahib, you can tell me. We both know I’m not leaving this station for a courtroom. All right, sahib. As you wish. About the music mehfil.

• • • •

The shrine rang with the qawwals’ music. Dholki thumped, harmonium dueled with the vocal alaap, the background chorus clapped their hands to the thrumming tablas. The lead singer, a chubby, red-jowled man, screamed loudly, his ululating falsetto soaring high in the night. Hakim was not impressed. “I think my head’s going to explode,” he whispered. “Where is he?” I shrugged. The maestro Tariq Khan hadn’t made an appearance, cameo or otherwise. Hakim rose. “I’m going to look for him.” Before I could so much as open my mouth in protest, he turned and disappeared between the aisles of chairs and standing bodies. I labored to my feet and combed the crowd: farmers, carpenters, shoemakers, and shopkeepers. They swayed to the music. A strong earthy odor exuded from them, mixing with the sweet smell of the cannabis they smoked. Some had bowls of bhang, which they downed like lassi. Mesmerized by the music, some old men and women had begun the dhamaal, that mystical dance in which the audience aspires to become the music. They jittered and whirled, faster and faster, eyes glazed. A burly man, naked except for a dhoti, looked at me, a beatific smile on his face. He rolled up his sleeve and began to inject a pale liquid into his arm. I turned away. It had been months since I’d had anything to do with the white queen, but still the vision of that needle dimpling and piercing his skin left me shaky. My head pounded with the tabla beat, my flesh bunched up in gooseflesh. Men laughed. Someone thrust a cup of bhang into my head. Another clapped my back, whispering. I chugged the liquid. The crowd spun, the sky wheeled, and I glimpsed Hakim. He was slipping through a knot of hard-faced white-turbaned laborers at the back of the crowd. I weaved my way after him, ignoring the listless mutterings in Saraiki and Punjabi. By the time I reached the laborers, Hakim was gone. I don’t know how long I looked. Could have been hours or minutes. The smell of bhang, cannabis, and the white queen wrapped around me. The migrainous music swelled and abated, the dancers danced, the colors of the evening changed. My heart fluttered, and little pale children flitted between the legs of the surging audience. At some point I stumbled from the grasping hands of the multitude to a narrow, uneven gravel path twisting through the shrine’s outer towers. Night deepened and shadows swiveled, pirouetting to the drumbeat, and I found myself in front of an arched postern door. A large padlock hung open from its latch like a broken jaw. I gazed at it. The keyhole stirred. A black threadlike snake nosed its head out, slithered down the door, and disappeared into the gravel. I pushed the door open. Beyond was a black gullet softened by gleams of distant green light. I went in.

• • • •

The corridor meandered. It came at me with drunken angles, or perhaps I was drunk with the bhang from the mehfil. The qawwali music receded and a strained silence took its place. I lurched toward the green light’s source in this unnerving quiet. Even the earth dreams and murmurs in its sleep, but here I was benighted by the claustrophobic endlessness of that corridor jolting, tilting, and looping back on itself. A burst of emerald light drew me out into a vast space. I sensed it more than saw, because my eyes had closed. I blinked rapidly and slitted them. Acid-green flickered in the periphery of my vision. The stone floor felt uneven. The dip and rise of the high ceiling, the damp feel of the granite wall I ran my hand across—this was a natural chamber of some sort. Perhaps a cavern under the shrine. Again I blinked against the pulsing light, a verdant web that receded and expanded with my breathing. Something moved in the web’s center. I raised a hand and plunged forward. The source of the light materialized: It was the top of a large marble slab. A gravestone. Hakim Shafi loomed over it. He stood by the grave. His shirt was torn, the rosewood box lay discarded at his feet. He had his back to me, a scarecrow’s relief in the green light, as the portly maestro Tariq Khan leaned and whispered in his ears. I stopped. The maestro didn’t turn to look at me. His thick lips puckered like fat slugs near Hakim’s earlobes, his chubby fingers gripping Hakim’s wrist. A strange humming came from him. Something was clearly, horribly wrong here. But my legs wouldn’t move. Maybe it was the bhang, maybe terror—a bristle that migrated up and down my flesh. My feet were magnetized to the rough stone floor. I leaned forward, straining to hear what the maestro murmured to Hakim, and found that he was singing. Sahib, I swear on my mother’s grave, I have never been more horrified, more enthralled in my life. The paunchy qawwal’s stomach heaved in jellylike movements as he whisper-sang strange tunes into Hakim Shafi’s ears. Melodies jerked and slithered in swift tenor across the thrashing web of light. A gurgling song made entirely from vowels, a deep vibrato alaap that lunged and rose and pitched, as if the maestro intended to gut the cavern walls. I put out my arms, intending to run and shove Tariq Khan’s massive bulk off my friend. Before I could move, the maestro dropped Shafi’s wrist and withdrew his lips from his ears. Shafi shuddered and let out a sigh. The maestro threw his head back and began to sing at the ceiling. The emerald light blazed. A torrential luminescence that spun in circles and fIooded my vision. The gravestone was shaking and the light source shook with it, throwing juddering shadows of the two men across the ground, stretching them like tar. Hakim shook, as if in the throes of a seizure, then turned around, smacking his lips. His tongue drifted out and receded. His gray eyes shone like moonstones. “My darling,” I thought he said. In the inhuman wails from Tariq Khan I couldn’t be sure. The maestro sang and stepped back, sang and back-trotted, until he stood at the far end of the cavern, his woeful music lapping across the stony distance. It made my head pound, turned my blood viscous. Something shimmered at Hakim’s feet. A child. No, a woman, with hair like moonbeams, crouching. She rose and stood silently as Hakim gazed at her in awe, at the clearness of her marble skin, the perfection of her nose, her softly moving lips. She smiled at him and drew herself tall and Hakim grinned back. She reached, plucked the glowing stone from the grave slab, and placed it on her forehead where it shone, the brightest star there ever was. She whispered. The sound was like insects rubbing their legs together, or lonely reeds sighing on cold alien shores, or hundreds of serpents— “You could have just asked me to join you. Why make me suffer?” Hakim said, and laughed heartily at the intensified buzzing that came from her. Did he think she was his wife? In the throbbing light, the woman’s features blurred, softened, became a child’s, and for a moment they were so terribly familiar that sweat broke out on my forehead. Carefully, I retreated into the dark. The woman’s hissing came again, loud and clear, and I realized I could understand it. Words were buried inside its peculiar cadence. Rhythmical words, like a monstrous lullaby, or a soothing self-annihilating qawwali. Tariq Khan was gone. Sometime between the woman’s apparition and her whispering, the maestro’s song had stopped. The cavern was quiet, except when she murmured; her bone-white hands rose and settled on Shafi’s shoulders, drawing him close, and she was taller than he now. “Anything for you, my love,” Shafi was saying, his arms encircling her waist even as she lowered her face to his, her pale skin glistening in the light. Drool fell from the corner of her mouth, snaked down Shafi’s cheeks, inflaming them. Hakim grinned wider and licked his lips. “Anything,” he said. She wrapped herself around him, her arms, then legs, rising and coiling. Her weight staggered him for a moment, but he recovered and stood swaying as she hung from him, a giant spider, or a leech planted on his flesh. Her eyes burned, her lips never stopped moving. The light cascaded around their conjoined bodies, and I thought of giant cobras in sprawling fields playing with fireflies. I must have cried out, for she lifted her head and gazed at me. Her eyes were green, like squeezed summer grass. Like strange planets roaming across a vast black cosmos reflecting light from dying suns. Like the sparkling jade-colored dress a king might have gifted his queen, come another spring. She smiled dreamily at me, this marble-skinned woman, showing her fangs, and the terror in my heart was so great that I began to shake. Deranged thoughts raced through my mind: this is the queen the true white queen and up till now whatever we imagined about the world our world their world was a mote of dust licking its own tail in the tiniest sliver of light unaware of the biting dark stretched endless around it. The pale woman jerked her head away. The spell broke. I wobbled and fell to the floor, hugging my chest. The Lady of the Stone kissed Shafi’s neck. Her lips parted and a torrent of sharp teeth, like nails from a nail gun, drove into his flesh. Shafi never uttered a sound. Instead he closed his eyes, sighed, and began to pant. He never stopped panting. Even as his skin gurgled and fell away; as the venom softened him, reshaped his flesh, melted his face. As her legs fused at his back and her skin began to shed, a diamond-patterned second skin emerged from beneath. Her fingernails flailed, tore at Shafi, flayed him, unhooking his flesh from its burdensome wrapping, as the toxin congealed his blood and plugged the gashes. Her teeth and fingers roved and split, peeled and stretched, so that, when she was done, Hakim Shafi was a pillar of clotted blood and liquefied bone pulsating with each beat of his encased heart. The snakewoman paused. She examined her handiwork, angled her head, and opened her jaws. Wide, wider, stretch, expand, until her maw was a black gullet around which flared her spectacled, ribbed hood. Her mouth crackled and thrust and wrapped around Hakim’s bubbling head. His eyelids were gone, his pupils dull, and I saw he was still trying to smile. Sahib, I . . . I cannot go on. I need to breathe. I cannot breathe.

• • • •

Inspector sahib, you sit there, smug. You’re thinking to yourself that, at last beyond any shred of doubt, you know that this junkie, this peddler, this heroinchi, is mad. A raving lunatic who murdered Hakim Shafi and secreted his body someplace so you never found it. You say to yourself, a little more, just a little more nonsense out of him for the Poison Men, and you can wrap it up and call it a night. Cold iron bars for the maniac with rats and vermin for company, and a warm bed for you and the sub-Inspector, with perhaps your wives pressing your sore legs before you fall asleep. You are wrong. I know this now, sahib: Our world is not our own, it is borrowed. Sometimes it is shared and occasionally it’s taken and reshaped against the will of its possessors, but always briefly. We heroinchies were mistaken. We are neither lovers nor children of the white queen. The real children of the true white queen are hidden, a tribe of men and women who have infiltrated our puny civilization. They lurk in shadows and come forth only at the call of their mistress. Which is why I did what I did. Why I didn’t flee when they came out from the darkness that night, although I was terrified and half out of my mind. As the spawn of the white queen surged from the depths of that cavern, a tide of venomous children rushing toward the smoking pillar of blood that used to be Hakim Shafi, it came together in my head, and I realized my true purpose at last. I understood why God or whatever force it was saved me the night I died in the park. The snakewoman’s translucent children licked and ripped and gorged on the lower half of Hakim Shafi; he was already waist-deep inside their mother’s maw. As his blood steamed, they chased the crimson smoke with their spade-shaped mouths and muzzles. They followed the blood vapors with their snouts and lapped the condensate. Their smacking, slurping sounds filled the green-lit cave and they pulled and dragged Hakim away, their mother still riding his head. It took all my will to creep forward and grab the rosewood box when they were gone. It was slick with blood and slime. I tottered and nearly fell across the yards of snakeskin molted across the cavern’s floor: a squamous, gory, leathery thing that twitched like a lizard’s tail. Trembling, I reached out and fingered its coiled edges. As the green light from the gravestone fell on it, the snakeskin blossomed, and etchings suddenly burst onto its surface: strange geometric patterns, jagged whorls, spiraling curlicues and scripts. An enchanted map borne of the white queen’s inhuman flesh. A primeval cosmos unfurled like a lotus dipped in blood. How the light made those secrets glow! Their mysteries burned into my eyes so everywhere I looked the universe was naked and serpentine, the light of the snake pearl limning those mysteries; and when I looked down, I saw the minuscule particles of my own skin shedding as I became something new and never known before. I gasped at the enchantment, trying to understand it. The light twitched and the snakewoman’s hum wrapped around me. Love me, it said, Love me. Stay with me. I shall show you sights beauteous and teach you ways of embracing your astonishment. Worship me and you shall never want again, dream again, fear again. Not even your little boy. And then there were too many faces in the cavern. They dripped from the ceiling, they draped the floor, they licked with blackened tongues the wounded skin of their mother. They poured down, and I dropped the snakeskin. They swarmed around me, dead and lolling, and I screamed. Clutching the rosewood box, I whirled and ran. Back the way I came, up the dark corridor leading into this den of quietus, the domain of the Lady of the Stone with her green gem shining like a murderous beacon. Before I fled into the tunnel, I turned for one last look and saw what I had thought was a cave was really an ossuary. The walls were lined with skulls and bones, and the wetness of the granite was damp moss flourishing on snakeskins tautened across this ossified legion.

• • • •

A yellow moon sickled the night clouds when I stumbled out from the postern door. Somewhere a cock crowed. I gripped Hakim’s box and ran across the brick path through the shrine’s towers. The qawwals and their audience were gone. Brass bowls, bottles, used needles, and crushed joints lay scattered where the stage was. I lurched between the cemented graves filled with sinners, my eyes aching with what I had seen. My stomach heaved. I think at one point I vomited on a grave, yanking at weeds and cemetery dandelions to wipe my mouth. Then I got up and labored onward, onward, until my lungs were on fire, and I collapsed on the banks of Uch Lake. I must have lain there for hours. I dozed and dreamed, and in my dreams the river and the lake and all the oceans of the world were nothing but giant blue snakes wrapped around the earth. The moon and the sun were their alien eyes, the horizon the burning mottled flare of their hood supporting the heavens. Like the towers that raised the dome of Bibi Farida. I thought of the maestro Tariq Khan and his band of qawwals and the town of Uch and the townsfolk. I thought of the little pale children I had seen at Hakim’s house and on my journey into the queen’s realm. Who watched Hakim? Who watched us all? I lay curled like a fetus and dreamed fetal dreams; and at some point I woke and went to the water and drank and opened the rosewood box. From it I took Shafi’s venom boxes, mixed the powders, and tossed fistfuls of them into the docile lake. Coppery-red and black smoke drifted in the wind, blown across the lake’s surface, and I thought again of Shafi’s steaming offal billowing from the pillar of his petrified blood. When the tins were empty, I looked inside the box and saw the sandstone necklace Shafi’s wife had left behind. I counted the stones and flung them into the lake as well. I went back to the guesthouse, where I gathered Shafi’s things, called a taxi, and left the wretched town of Uch. I had enough money to be taken to Sangchoor, a nearby town, and there, in a shabby motel, I hid and waited. Two days later, news came that a hundred people, including a band of qawwals, had sickened from a mysterious epidemic in Uch. Five days later, the papers said, traces of potent poisons were found in the blood of some who died. Foul play was suspected. A week later, the children of the white queen came for me. It was a river of faces that flowed inside the walls of my motel room. I glimpsed them in the ceiling cracks, heard their chatter in the eaves, felt them thump against the windowpane. One night the torrent rushed at the glass, hit, and broke into a million poisonous children; tiny-limbed, gelid, and familiar. They exhaled fog on the glass. They wore faces that dissolved and reemerged. Last night, they came for me again, and . . . and sahib, I was done. I was utterly exhausted. Which was why, I finally decided to come to your police station.

• • • •

This is my story, sahib. Of a heroinchi courting a third death. I see by both your and the sub-Inspector’s eyes that you don’t know which part to believe. That I am mad and tried to murder a hundred people, half of them children, or that under the shrine of Babi Farida, there breathes a different life. The paradox of my insanity doesn’t nullify either truth. I am so cold, sahib. So cold. Just look at my arms; have you ever seen such hideous discoloration, such scales? I know what Hakim Shafi would say: I touched his poisons with my bare hands, but that is not it. Already I can feel my fingers shriveling, the skin becoming thick and cracked above the knuckles. Sometimes I have difficulty chewing, as if my jaws have become too big for my meals. My teeth feel so pointed they appear suited for entirely different purposes now. I would go to a doctor, but which antidote would they give me? I handled hundreds of those poisons, I handled her dead skin, and, well, only like can heal like. Her skin. One was a hidden treasure that needed to be discovered. A goddess returned to her people. I see your eyes. You think I killed them both, Shafi and her. You’re standing up. Of course. You have to hand me over to the Poison Men. I do wonder how they found me this quickly. Perhaps a phone call from you? But how did you know I was wanted by them? How did the Police Inspector of Sangchoor know gangland members from the big cities wanted me? I also wonder why their shadows look bloated and misshaped when they pass the window. Why they seem to be holding some kind of drum under their arms. It almost looks like a tabla. In my mind, it’s so difficult to keep everything in order. I keep returning to the song the Serpent Queen sang. It warbles in my head, it whips my bones. Perhaps, I shall hear it when they slice my throat. Her words—they come to me in my dreams, buried in that hissing cacophony. Magic words, ancient words, shards of glass in an ambrosial meal:

“I live in your soul’s crevices. I have lived forever there. Like a moth to dancing light you’ll come; I will prepare to skewer you with my arrow, to noose my hair locks flung. I’ll whip out my tresses, grin and show: dead lovers on each blade hung.”

Maybe true Maybe not true Better you believe —Old Sherpa Saying

It’s all downhill on a descent. The oldest climbing joke of the lot, but only because it’s true. If I like any bit of it at all, it could never be that slow, painful climb down from the highs of before and the bone-deep exhaustion of after. People make mistakes on a descent because everything’s against them: altitude, time, their bodies. And always their mind. No one gets excited about survival—not like they do about standing on the top of the world. And no one gets a good write-up in Nat Geo or Time for managing to get back down a bloody mountain in one piece. Unless they’re Jean-Christophe Lafaille, I guess. The air is raw, thin, dry. Acke Holmberg’s cough is worse; when ice walls throw up rare shelter, I can hear it rattle up from his lungs hard enough to start doing damage. Nick likes to tell me about the gross stuff when we’re in bed, warm and lazy, blissed out. One guy he climbed with ruptured his esophagus on Nanga Parbat, a few thousand feet above base camp. The blood spray froze in mid-air, Nick said with a grin, before pulling me back under the covers and him. The wind is a demented banshee. Only fifty k, Nick said maybe twelve hours ago; on the summit it beat around our heads so hard, we had to crouch. Some of the Swedes were convinced they were going to be yanked off into the swirling white void. As if they’d be fuckin’ wheeched off, Nick said with usual scorn. As if it had never happened, when I know just how many dozens of times it has on this peak alone. But he’s earned the right to be scathing, I guess. Until today, Annapurna was the only eight-thousander he hadn’t summited. But things are different now—I know that without being able to either see or hear him, somewhere further down the Lafaille line and attached to the same fixed rope. It’s dark and growing darker. It’s too late—much too late—I can barely see the low sun beyond Gangapurna’s peak, some 7,000 meters above the Marsyangdi River. The weather is moving. And the mountain is getting jittery; I feel its hackles under my frozen feet, like we’re ticks that just won’t quit. We’ve been inside the Death Zone for too long, but we’re too slow, too tired, and have too far to go. Bad Things, I think, in Nick’s lesser spotted concerned voice, as I battle on down through the white and the wind, putting one boot in front of the other in the kind of trance that’s both helpful and dangerous. Bad Things are about to happen.

• • • •

By the time they do, I’ve managed to convince myself they won’t. The wind has died again; the flag cloud west of the summit tilts up and sharp against the dying sun. Up is good, flat is bad, down is fucked. I remember the big poster tacked alongside prayer flags in the med tent, and Nick laughing with one of the American doctors that it was a far more reliable indicator than any other base camp forecast. The mountains make their own weather, and it’s rarely kind. Even though I’m still descending through the French Couloirs, the snowpack is harder, the incline less steep. I’m surprisingly warm, but I know much of that is a cocktail of O and illusion—I last felt my feet at Camp IV. I don’t feel bad, I don’t feel good. I don’t feel much of anything at all. Not even afraid. There’s a subtle but sudden shift in the air around me, like a hush, a breath too close to my ear; my heart stutters a little to feel it through my hood and balaclava. And then Jakub Hornik appears from the gloom behind and above—maybe ten feet east, no more—face-first and flat on his belly, anchored to nothing. He doesn’t flail or shout as he slides down the snowfield; he makes no sound at all save the fast friction of his suit against ice. And he makes no attempt at self-arrest either, even though he’s holding his ice axe up like any moment he’s going to let it fall. His eyes are wild. They find my light and grow wilder, wider—holding onto it right up to the moment that the gloom swallows him back down and I’m left alone, literally frozen, the dropping wind washing out my mouth. There’s a tug on the rope from below. Nick. Are you alright? Not really, not at all, but what use is there in saying so; in being either one or the other up here? I’ll still be up here. I’ll still be needing to get down fucking there. A big shudder goes through me, it cricks my neck and finds a home in my belly. It’s never a good idea to puke more than halfway up a mountain. I think of Jakub’s eyes, his silent slide. I remember Kate renaming him The Horn, after he spent the whole first month at base camp trying to hit on her. My belly squeezes hard again. Bad Things. Because they’re never ever singular.

• • • •

The last Bad Thing was Felix Garcia. There are always deaths on a climb. Climbing seasons are short, summit windows shorter; at any one time, there can be dozens of teams within a few hundred meters of each other. But the threat of actually seeing someone die is surprisingly low, as easily dismissed as the threat of dying yourself. You hear about them, on the short wave or the satellite phone, or when you reach a camp: falls, accidents, strokes, disappearances. People go crazy. People get the shitty end of the stick. People just die. There are lots of ways to do it. And pretty soon those muttered summations become nearly routine, like all the frozen landmarks and trig points that used to be people. Red Legs. Green Boots. North Col. Felix was different. Mountains attract arseholes; eight-thousanders attract Olympic-level arseholes. He and Nick clashed before we even left Everest base camp. Felix was a solo-climber, and that’s pretty hard to do on a mountain as rammed as Everest. Nick doesn’t like taking them on because they’re glory hounds and crappy team players, but he’s had to get a lot less picky now that he’s competing with Nepali companies for business. It was to be my third summit, Nick’s seventh, but we didn’t even get close before the weather doubled down and Pasang advised Nick to turn us all back and fast. Felix suffered the final indignity of being geared up with me and three Koreans on the snow fields at the foot of the Lhotse Face as we scrambled over crevasses on shrieking ladders, a snow storm blinding us, deafening us, making us stupid. By the time I heard his scream, I was already being dragged so fast along the ice I couldn’t get my axe free. Our belaying had been too clumsy, the Koreans behind too quick, the rope too slack—Felix plummeted so hard and so fast down the hidden crevasse that by the time anyone managed to arrest our screaming progress along the glacier, I was flying over its edge too. The pain I didn’t feel. The horror of all that silent blue dark after howling white space, I did. I looked down at a still screaming Felix and didn’t see him, only the hard tight swing of the rope between us vanishing into black. The air prickled against my skin like blunted pins. I looked up at the shouting beyond the ice-rimmed circle of white, and I thought, they can’t hold us both. They can’t save us both. And they didn’t. I feel another yank on my harness. I’ve been standing still for too long; the fixed rope is taut, impatient. The wind has grown high again. The darkening sky looks heavy with snow, and when I squint west, I can’t see the flag cloud any more. I start moving. Nick won’t have told the other Slovaks about Jakub. They were last to leave the summit, despite Nick and Pasang’s warnings about the time. They’re far too far behind us to attempt any kind of rescue, but they’d want us to try because the four of them were tight: Jakub and Hasan were as close as brothers. They wouldn’t accept that there’s no point; that at the edge of this snowfield is a short rock buttress and then a drop of over a thousand feet. I don’t want to think about that: about Jakub’s wild eyes staring at my light as he slid away from me toward the plummet of black, empty space that he must have known was coming. Jakub’s silence; Felix’s high screams. Dark, cold yawns of nothing. What it feels like to fall, to be alone, to feel it coming, to know. I can’t think about shit like that. We’re still nearly a thousand feet inside the Death Zone—thinking about shit like that is for messy Khukri rum nights in Pokhara or Kathmandu. Or if you’re Nick, never. Easier just to pretend things didn’t happen at all.

• • • •

The snow starts heavy and doesn’t stop. It slows my efforts to catch up to Nick. Even though I know he’s already got his hands full with the Chinese couple who arrived at The Sanctuary with no equipment at all, and the always determined Tomie Nà from Hong Kong, who started showing signs of altitude sickness as low as Camp II. And Kate, of course. Following him around like a bad smell. Nick always does the babysitting, while Pasang rounds up the stragglers, the hardcore just- another-five-minuters. It’s always been this way, even though Pasang is the tolerant one, and Nick couldn’t be patient if he tried. But Pasang is the better climber too; certainly, he’s the better guide. Nick is the guy in charge, the guy people write the checks to, and even if that’s the kind of responsibility he’d sooner shirk than have to suffer, it lets him climb mountains. For that, he’d babysit an entire busload of Sunday hikers and Olympic-level arseholes. I wonder what he’ll tell Jakub’s family. I remember an evening in The Sanctuary, one of those rare pre-climb nights of excitement and camaraderie not yet spoiled by the reality of weeks of acclimatizing in close, cold quarters. Pavol and Hasan were drunk and red-cheeked, laughing about Jakub’s wife, and how pissed off she’d be when she found out how much their trip was costing. That Nick will be the one to tell her what has happened, I have no doubt, but he won’t say how it really was: how long Jakub suffered knowing he was going to die on that hard, fast slide; that we were all still on that mountain, but he was already lost, already gone before he was gone. Climbers have their own rules, their own language, their own religion. And these take years to earn, to learn, to understand. Climbers believe in dreams, as long as those dreams have a purpose, a summit. They believe in God, if God is a mountain, because they worship nothing but the climb—the endless, soulless, merciless demand of it. They believe in trying to help, in trying to save, until they can’t. Until they don’t. They believe in the individual: in their own strength, their own will, their own survival. And they also believe that mountains can hate, that the weather can be cajoled, that the spirits of those long dead can provide comfort to the dying and lead the living to safety. Even Nick believes—scornful, pragmatic, ever practical Nick—like a liar crossing his fingers, or a fisherman never setting sail on a Friday, or like Pasang leaving offerings to the mountain at the end of every day, while muttering low to the friends whom he has lost. I trip on a rock under growing drifts of snow and stumble against the fixed line. It’s too much snow too fast. Anything over an inch an hour is bad news, and this is much, much more. Visibility is getting worse: I can no longer see the setting sun at all, and my headlight shines through a kaleidoscope of dense monochrome. I’m starting to wonder if we’ll make it back down to Camp IV today at all, and that is bad—worse than bad. Bivouacking in the Death Zone is never a good idea, but on the South Face of Annapurna, it’s pretty much suicide. I try not to think of all the stats that Nick—and so many other climbers—take such solemn glee in. The summit-to-death ratio on Everest is one in twenty-six. On Annapurna, he said, sliding a cool palm down my naked back and along my flank, making me shiver even though then I was warm, it’s one in three. The first stirrings of real fear find me then, and it’s followed by a strange, slow sense of unreality. I should already be frightened. I should have been frightened when the Slovaks weren’t ready to leave Camp IV at midnight, or when we finally summited at five p.m. instead of three. I should have been frightened when Nick started moving folk back down the mountain so fast there was barely any time to celebrate our victory; when Acke started sounding like he was coughing up a lung; when the wind, then the night, then the snow started closing in, the mountain began trying to buck us off, and our descent became a disordered, scattered scramble. And I should have been shitting myself when Jakub slid past me on the way to his silent death. Denial. A mountain climber’s best and worst friend. Acke, I think. Acke should be behind me, higher up, but not so far that I can’t hear him. Only I can’t remember the last time I did hear him; the last time I remembered that I should be able to hear him. “Acke?” The wind screams back at me. “Acke! Are you there?” Maybe I hear him, I don’t know. Something hits my face: a stone or some ice carried on the rising wind, and when I press a glove against my cheek, it hurts; the balaclava sticks warm and wet to my skin. “Acke!” Though I don’t want to, I start back up. Not far, I won’t go far. Just far enough to ascertain that he’s still there, still alive, still descending. In this direction, the wind batters at me hard enough to nearly drop me to my knees. “Acke!” There are different kinds of numb in the Death Zone, and denial is only one. Is my heart rate and breathing fast because of altitude or fear? Or because of cerebral oedema? Are my actions, my responses still rational? Do I think they are? Climbing above 7,500 meters is the same slow asphyxiation suffered in the Nightmare-Age of heavy-curtained four-poster beds. When we climb, we have night terrors, paranoia, depression. When we descend, the euphoria of returning oxygen levels can just as quickly cause psychosis. We’re not supposed to function up here; we’re not designed to function up here. Nick once saw a man launch himself off the Hillary Step like he was dive-bombing the deep end of a swimming pool. I nearly stumble over Acke before I see him. He’s sitting in the snow, legs splayed out, trying to take off his gloves. “Don’t!” He stills, lifts up his face, winces against the wind and flying debris, but what he says is in Swedish; the only word I recognize is allena. Alone. “You can’t stop. You have to get up. Where’s Bosse? Is he still behind you? Acke!” I’m shouting hard enough to hurt my throat now. “We can’t stay here.” He shakes his head, resumes the removal of his gloves, and once he’s done that, his frostbitten fingers move to the carabiner connecting him to the fixed line. “Acke, no!” He pays me no mind. There’s a ring of blood around his mouth like old lipstick, and a brighter slash of it running into his frozen beard. And if he already has pulmonary oedema, then he’s probably not too far behind dive-bombing the deep end of a swimming pool either. Because disengaging from the line in a snowstorm is what you do if you’re crazy. It’s what you do if you want to die. He grins and his teeth are bloody. “Stay with me,” he says. Shouts. But he’s not looking at me, he’s looking all around me—at the stone, the snow, the nearly night sky. And then I hear it. The worst Bad Thing. The thing I’ve been trying the hardest not to think about on our painfully slow descent down this 2,500 meter gulley in a snowstorm; this funnel for spindrift and debris and worse. By the time Acke hears it, I’m already turned around and running. Trying to run. The noise is terrific. My heart thunders in my ears, as I try to seek out somewhere—anywhere—to hide. But there’s nothing, nowhere. Because there never is. You’re fucked or you’re lucky, and that’s it. I know when it’s about to hit me because Acke screams high and short, and I feel a cold wall of air rushing against my back, shoving me forward with invisible hands. An impossibly high shadow that eclipses even my own light. I think of Jakub. Dark, cold yawns of nothing. I think of Nick. And then the avalanche steals away any sense I have left.

• • • •

Climbing is lonely. You think it won’t be. You imagine that the endeavor will be mutually achieved, an ordeal always shared, but the truth is, on some sections, particularly on a disorganized descent, you can go a whole day without setting eyes on another soul. I’ve learned if not to love, then to appreciate the stark, stripped isolation of those days. The very opposite of the long, crowded intimacy of lower camp life, or the breath-stealing wonder of the summit—whether your vista is the golden curve of Earth and low, white mountain peaks in a sea of clouds, or a whiteout of raging wind and snow. But that other isolation—that other allena—is what you dread while never allowing yourself to think of it. It’s the realization that you’re fucked. Like Jakub. That you’re still alive, still on the mountain, but suddenly you’re on the other side of a two-way mirror and you won’t ever be coming back. That is the worst Bad Thing. The only one. Whichever way it happens. When I open my eyes, I think I’m inside that terrible crevasse again; the horror of all that silent blue dark after howling white space. Blunted pins and the hard tight swing of the rope vanishing into black. An echo of they can’t hold us both. They can’t save us both. The cold is too cold to feel. I’m not in the crevasse because I can’t move. My limbs are folded tight and trapped; my lungs struggle to find space enough to breathe. Too much weight presses down on me. Panic starts crushing me from the inside out. Not this. Not this. The circle of my arms around my head has allowed for a small air pocket, but it won’t last long. My wrist strap has snapped; my ice axe has gone. I think of Nick’s face: the dimple in his left cheek, the chip in his right incisor, the always paler circles of skin around his eyes. I think of his weight on me, pressing me down, filling me up, and it calms me a little. It calms me enough. I breathe. I breathe. And then I spit. It dribbles down my cheek along the length of my right eyebrow. Upside down. Maybe 160, 170 degrees. I don’t know how deep I am, and the small space I have left isn’t enough to find out. Slowly, slowly, I burrow my hands down toward my torso. The snow is like cement. By the time my knuckles bump against the axe, I’m already hyperventilating again. I have cobalt blue boots, I think. The legs of my suit are black with red stripes. I make myself remember the night we first met in a dark tavern off the main Kathmandu drag in Thamel. Me, pissed on Mustang Coffee and home-brewed Raksi, dancing among dozens of other sweaty gap year tits just like me. And Nick, sitting in a darker corner, disinterested, his mouth curled into a routine sneer until I asked him if he’d dance with me too. The first time we fucked, he gripped me tight enough to leave bruises and told me that he’d never come so hard in his life. The first time we summited—close to the end of the season on the Northeast Ridge of Everest—he swung me up to that golden curve of Earth and told me that he loved me; laughed when I said I was on top of the world. I make myself think of the warm flat of his hands against my skin; the low and steady timbre of his voice, whether he’s talking about clove hitches and belay points, or about those spirits that save only people like us: explorers on the edge of the world. Stroking my hair and reading aloud from Ernest Shackleton’s South: the treacherous glaciers, icy slopes, and snow fields of his doomed Trans-Antarctic expedition; the fog, the dark, the blank map; the exhaustion, starvation, hopelessness. And the spirit—the voiceless, faceless Third Man—that had led him down to the safety of the whaling station on Stromness. Nick’s solemn eyes, his slow smile; quoting T.S. Eliot in a tickling whisper against my ear— Who is the third who walks always beside you? Where is my third? I wonder now, and my eyes sting. Where the hell is the bloody spirit that’s going to lead me down to safety? My tears feel hot and my throat tries to close up. I stop trying to think of anything at all. Me. Just me. My own strength, my own will. I am all that can save me. Slowly, slowly, I manage to turn around now, to bring the axe around. At first I can only twist and shimmy it against the hard-packed snow; I choke and try to turn my face away from what little I manage to hollow out. I feel panic rising again. I don’t want to be on the other side of that mirror. I don’t want to be a frozen landmark. A trig point. I don’t want people to take selfies next to my frozen corpse. My cobalt blue boots. My red-striped suit. When the way becomes abruptly easier, I nearly sob with relief. I choke more as my axe excavates more, but now I don’t care. I’m reaching out of that dark blue echoing silence, up toward that ice-rimmed circle of white. I can nearly taste the mountain’s thin air; see its clear, starry sky. But in the instant before I break through—in the instant before I know I’m going to break through, I hear Acke’s scream. No longer high and short, but long and horrified. And oh God, so, so much deeper. I have enough room now to clasp my left hand hard over my mouth. I can’t feel the press of its glove against my lips, my skin, my teeth. And then I’m free. The snowstorm has died. My headlight is dead. The only remaining light comes from a half-crescent moon, hanging low over the Nilgiri Himal range to the northwest. I shuffle onto my knees, pushing away from my already collapsing escape shaft. After moving no more than ten feet, I look down at the hard-packed snow between my hands and knees. Acke. Acke. I don’t shout his name, don’t even say it out loud. If he hears me, he might think that I can save him. Two months ago, in a trekkers’ lodge close to the edge of The Sanctuary, he laughed and sang along to Fernando while mixing terrible Brännvin cocktails. He had a boyfriend in the Swedish navy who’d bought him a house, but wouldn’t tell anyone he existed. He struggled to grow a beard, always trying: every morning he’d roll his eyes and tug on it, still sexy ass fluff, my friends. So I stay. In the disorientating white-dark, I kneel in the snow over where I think Acke is, and I keep him silent company. I hear him coughing again. Maybe he’ll drown instead of suffocate; which is worse, I don’t know—don’t want to know. I reach round for my O. I don’t know when I last drank or ate something either. These are the things you must fight: numbness, confusion, lethargy. Mercy. What good will staying here do? How can Acke know he’s not allena, and what does it matter if he does? But I think of him shouting stay with me to the mountain, the snow, the sky, and so I stay. I’m always exactly where I’m supposed to be.

• • • • It’s no longer snowing. It’s no longer gloomy either. It’s dark. Night. I can’t hear Acke anymore. I wonder how long he fought. How long he pretended. If he’s pretending even now. Because denial has to be better than acceptance, if one side of the coin—the mirror—is death and nothing else. I shudder hard enough to again crick my neck. When I try to get up, it feels as if I no longer exist below my waist. It takes too long to locate and change out my headlight, and the reward does not justify the effort: the thin revived glow casts only slow and frightening shadows. The drifts are high, unwieldy; the terrain is entirely changed, as if I haven’t made it back through the mirror at all. The couloirs are gone, their scars and fissures hidden under the weight of so much new snow. I shine my light down on my harness. Its main carabiner is bent and twisted out of shape, probably when the avalanche wrenched me free of the line. It takes another long time to replace it with a spare; my fingers are slow, my mind slower. Finally, I move the light wider, over smooth swathes of black and white, searching for the way down. It takes the longest time of all for the truth to sink in. The fixed ropes are gone. My panic is too slow. There’s even something close to relief in it. The thin air whistles around me like I’m an obstacle, a rock in a stream. Now I’m fucked, there’s no way I’m not. How can I ever negotiate my way out of the Death Zone alone and with no fixed lines? This is my worst Bad Thing. After years of dread, of anticipation, this, here, is how it happens. This is the way it happens for me. “Sarah? Why you here?” I swing around, slow like an astronaut; at the same time assuming the voice is inside my head. It’s a not unfamiliar question. Pasang is standing less than ten feet away, looking none the worse for wear at all. He’s half-crouched, as if readying himself for a starter’s gun. He doesn’t look afraid or fucked—more startled. Because he never expected me to make it this far? I feel the pinch of familiar resentment when I should only be feeling relief. Pasang will help me. He has to. “Jakub Hornik and Acke Holmberg are dead,” I say, and my voice sounds strange, thin, like the air. It’s very quiet, I realize. Nearly silent. After the storm and the avalanche, it’s still enough that I wonder if I’d hear one of those blunted pins drop. Pasang doesn’t react. Chongba isn’t with him, so he must have left him behind with the Slovaks, while he’s come down the mountain to see how bad it is; if they can still make it down without having to bivy or call for an evac that’ll probably never come. How long did I stay kneeling in the snow waiting for Acke to die? It must have been hours. Pasang’s eyes scan the terrain ahead and then he looks back at the mountain behind. He never wears goggles and he never carries O. I sometimes wonder if he even needs to eat, shit, or fuck either. He asks, “Who was higher than them?” “Holmberg means Island Mountain. Did you know that?” I feel numb, but I no longer know which kind of numb. Something tugs at my mind, puckers my skin. Makes me remember to be afraid. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing here. He blinks. “Sarah. Who was higher than them?” I know why he’s asking. It’s because I’m the first person he’s seen. And everyone else between us is gone. “Bosse. Benoit and Savane. The Australians, I think. I don’t know.” Pasang curses. This will be the end of the 8000er Experience, I think, and I feel a guilty spark of hope that must show in my eyes, because Pasang straightaway narrows his. “Why you here?” “What the fuck does that mean?” I look down at the snow under my boots, my crampons. Already my escape route has filled in as if it never was. “You hate the mountains. Always.” His voice is not cold, though his words are. They sound angry. “Why you come back, every time?” I swallow because even if I understand the question, I don’t understand why he’d ask it now. “You don’t belong here.” His gaze grows softer. “You never belong here.” But I don’t want to argue with him, because he’ll never understand. He’s never understood why any of us keep coming back, not really. Most of the time he manages to hide his contempt. Just about. “You know why. I’m here for Nick.”

• • • •

The way is treacherous, of course. I’m clunky, a functional climber, Nick has always said, though I’ve never taken offense. It’s true. But now, clambering down barely settled snow, with no protection beyond my own gear, my own judgment, I wish that I loved it, I wish that I felt it. I wish that I could reach Nick by sheer force of want, of will. Instead my descent is anything but functional: I stumble and I fall and I fuck up my handholds, my footholds. My rope snags and burns; my overhangs and hitches and anchors are poor—I move too slowly because I have as much confidence in my abilities as I do in the new ground beneath me. I only have the distant lights of Camp IV and Pasang’s directions to guide me, and I keep thinking of that cold, blue space and blunted pins, but I’m still doing it. I am doing it. And whether that’s down to his help or his scorn, I suppose hardly matters. I knew Pasang would never come with me, but when he turned back to the dark shadow of the mountain, my belly clenched all the same, and I wanted to beg him to stop. Though I didn’t. His job is to look after the Slovaks. The fucking Slovaks who didn’t manage to get out of their fucking sleeping bags until two a.m. He has to trust that I can look after myself, and that Nick can look after his group. Alone. Just as I have to trust that Pasang will be okay, even if that suffocating dread behind thick, heavy curtains suspects better. Nick. He’s all I can think about now. Not me or Pasang, Jakub, Bosse, the French Canadians, the Australians—not even Acke. Except to wonder if Nick has suffered the same terrible fate. I don’t think about the others in his group either. I don’t care about any of them—these idiots with too much money and too little of everything else. In that, I understand Pasang’s contempt. If my reasons for being here are stupid, then theirs are moronic. Nick despairs of their inexperience: their lack of knowledge, training, equipment; their sheer bloody self-entitlement. They’ve paid Nick and Pasang to get them to the summit and back, and nothing less will do. They haven’t paid for any kind of Experience at all. They’ve paid for a photo-op, a flag; Nick even prints them out a certificate. When Tomie Nà refused to stop after the docs at Camp II told him he could die if he climbed any higher, Nick rubbed his hands through his hair, spat into the snow, and then carried on preparing for the next section. For all his faults—and I’m aware of them all, despite what everyone, including Pasang, believes—Nick loves these few places high above the rest of the world with a passion that could never be faked. And that’s why he’s here too. That’s why he puts up with everything else, all the other shit that he hates. Because he has as much choice as I do.

• • • •

But it isn’t Nick I find first. It’s Kate. Her sobs creep up through the darkness like the wind around ice pillars; I only realize it’s her when I see headlights less than fifty yards below. I don’t know how long I’ve been descending now, or how much longer before I leave the Death Zone behind me. The lights of Camp IV look hardly closer, though the moon has moved far enough to disorientate me completely. I’m struggling to breathe, and my O is getting too low. That slow, creeping paralysis is back; a numbness inside and out that’s nearly seductive. It makes me want to stop asking myself if I’m about to dive-bomb the deep end of a swimming pool. It makes me not want to care if the answer is yes. Kate’s sobs are nearly hysterical. I shout, but she doesn’t hear, doesn’t stop, barely draws breath. I try not to move too quickly as I edge down over still-shifting snow. The drifts are higher here, creating precarious peaks of their own, but overall the terrain is flatter, more glacial. Here is where most of the avalanche came to rest, I think. Here is where deep, dark crevasses will be hiding, waiting, beneath all that treacherous new snow. I try not to hesitate, to stop, to look for Nick, to waste precious breath of my own in more shouting. Instead, I carry on descending, descending, fucking descending, and praying a little too, for good measure. He has to be alright. “We can’t go! How can we fucking go?” After an avalanche, mountain air gets thicker and sounds flatter; Kate’s voice is a hysterical monotone. “What about Tomie and—” “Tomie, Jìng, and Lì are already gone, and you know it.” I allow myself the luxury of stopping, of staring at the second headlight. His voice still echoes. Nick. “Jesus, how can you be so cold?” “We’re both pretty cold, Kate. And getting pretty fucking colder. It’s not them you care about. It’s the fucking serac between us and fucking freedom, and I can’t help you with that.” By the time I reach them, I’m close to collapse. I can’t feel my legs, but I know it all the same. I feel hot when I should feel cold—or nothing at all. And all I can see is Nick. He’s hunkered down under a high overhang of rock, head low, gloved hands dangling between his legs. Kate sits close alongside him, and I try—and fail—not to care about that. They’ve been there too long, I care more about that; about the stiff, tired threat in their bodies, their voices. “We can’t free-solo around a fucking serac with fuck knows how many tons of snow weighing down on it!” Kate’s digging in. Her voice is calmer, stronger. Once she makes her mind up about something, that’s usually it. “We need to stay here, wait for an evac. You’ve phoned our position in. We can’t—” “We’re still in the Death Zone. No one will be coming for us.” Nick’s voice is just as calm, as confident, but I know he’s horrified. I know he’s blaming himself. Even though it’s the fault of the bloody Slovaks. “We can’t—” “I will leave you behind, Kate,” he says. “You’re a bastard.” “No,” I say. “He’s what’ll keep you alive.” Kate gasps, looks in my direction, and her breath catches formless in the air. I wonder if she can read something in my expression that I’m usually better at hiding. I’ve been free-soloing since Acke, but it would be pretty petty to say so. Though I want badly to bask in Nick’s uncommon approval. Nick’s head drops further between his knees, and I hear only his chattering teeth. Still none of us move. Up here, we’re statues: half- frozen, half-thawed; half-numb, half-crazy. Half-alive, half-dead. It’s a miracle we feel anything at all. Nick gets back on his feet with grunted effort. He swears again; coughs. The latter rattles down inside his chest. “Let’s go.”

• • • •

The serac is a block of glacial ice as big as a three-story townhouse. Near to the start of our summit ascent, the route alongside was lit by flare lamps and set with fixed ropes. Now, its threat is magnified by darkness and formless new terrain. And all the death and weight that we’ve brought back down the mountain with us. Nick wedges a metal nut into one of the rocks close to the serac’s beginning. He clips a quickdraw to the wire, threading the rope through it and his own carabiner before feeding it backwards in generous loops. “We’re not decking out, okay? Not fucking today.” Some color has returned to Kate’s cheeks. She picks up the rope, locks into the belay. I do the same—muscle memory triggering too many other less welcome memories: me and Nick, Kate and James climbing rock faces, ice pillars, mountains. Trekking and hiking and camping all over the world. Getting shit-faced in dodgy bars and on deserted beaches. At James’ funeral, Kate clung to Nick as if he was the only anchor on a Grade V vertical climb. She and I had been friends since high school, but she never again dragged me to karaoke bars or treated me to spa weekends in wanky Essex hotels, as if she’d lost me over the same sheer cliff as her husband. When I asked Nick how I could help her, he told me I’d be best leaving her alone until she came to me. And she never did.

• • • • The serac radiates a different kind of cold than the mountain. It’s breathless, sharp, and thin. Fragile. Silent blue dark looking up into an icy white space and sky. Endless shadow. Nick edges along the base of the serac too slowly. The ledge is narrow —less than a foot across in some places—and the drop on the other side is big; even in the dark it has the power to squeeze my stomach, water my eyes. And it’s always been Nick’s cautiousness that frightens me, never his selfish recklessness. He feeds back more rope in slow turning loops, but he doesn’t look around. “Don’t stop,” he says. Close to the halfway point, Kate falters, one gloved hand getting caught in the gear as she tries to navigate Nick’s hastily improvised line. I dilute my impatience with the memory of the couloirs, the dread and relief of now I’m fucked, there’s no way I’m not when the avalanche stole the fixed lines. It’s too easy to stop thinking past doctored routes, too easy to start shitting yourself whenever you have to unhook from their security for even a few seconds. Kate goes on fumbling, hesitating, trying and failing to free herself, to move. Powdered snow falls through the gap between us. The serac was never stable, but now fuck knows how many tons of avalanche threaten to overload it to the point of collapse. And if that happens, it doesn’t matter how careful and slow we’re being; how many ropes and anchors we do or don’t have. “I’m scared,” Kate whimpers, and her hands still, shoulders hunch. Nick is far enough ahead to be nearly out of sight, so she can only be talking to me. I remember the puja twelve hours before we left base camp: a Lama and two skinny monks bent over a stone altar, the smell of juniper reminding me of the gins from the night before; equipment spread around us and waiting to be blessed: harnesses, crampons, ice- axes, and helmets, even our expedition flag. Pasang chanting alongside the monks, placating the spirits, making his offerings of yak milk and chocolate and rice as the Lama talked to the mountain, asked it to let us climb to its summit. Kate, hungover and dull-eyed, her smile scornful as she stifled a yawn: Mountain says no. She doesn’t know I hate her. She doesn’t know that less than six months after James’ funeral, Nick got down on his knees and told me how many times they’d fucked; that he held onto me so tightly, I was nearly glad that they had. She doesn’t know that he would never leave me. She doesn’t know him. “It’ll be alright,” I say, and her shoulders drop, she finally tugs her glove free, clips back into the line. And at the halfway point, I start to think it might be. That maybe— just maybe—the sheer number of Bad Things that have already happened are enough. But then I feel it: the air changing just like it did before Jakub came sliding out of the gloom on the other side of that mirror—a hush, a breath too close to my ear—and I know that I’m wrong. Again. I unclip myself from the line, and I’m no longer slow, no longer afraid. My crampons find little purchase; my left foot slips off the ledge into dark space more than once, but I keep on going, faster, faster. Until I reach Kate. “Go!” I push her so hard she shrieks—but either she can sense the danger in my voice or in the slow deadly shifts of the wall of ice against us, because she immediately obeys, abandoning the fixed line even as Nick is screwing in another anchor up ahead. “Go!” I scream again. “Nick! Go!” He turns just as my headlight finds him, his face slack and pale, and then he looks up at the serac in the very moment that it starts to scream. We run. And run. And the world collapses around us.

• • • •

Kate is who I hear first. She’s sobbing again, but she can’t catch enough breath—the result is an oddly comforting squeak. She only stops to shout Nick’s name, and a sob comes out of me too when, finally, he answers in a hoarse shout. I sit up, struggle to get to my knees. When I look back, the line is gone, the ledge is gone, the serac is gone. I’m finding it hard to breathe myself—I hear the thin air wheeze through my lungs—but my O is gone too. I stand up and sway, but there’s nothing to hold onto. When Nick struggles to his feet a few meters further down, his headlight glancing off Kate’s helmet, her suit, I see a long streak of blood running from his temple to his jaw. “Oh my God, Nick,” she says. She sounds exhilarated and broken at the same time. “Oh my God.” He doesn’t answer, just keeps staring up at all the destruction behind us, eyes still wide and wild and black. And I stare back, but even though we’re the closest we’ve been since the summit, I know I can’t reach any closer. My dread is exhausted, heartbroken. He’s safe. He’s alive. But it isn’t enough. “You felt her too, right?” Kate grabs hold of his upper arms. “I know you fucking did. She was there! She was—” “Don’t touch me,” he says, but he’s already shrugged her off, already backed away. He keeps on looking, looking, looking, and something in him finally breaks as he drops to his knees, as he howls into the black, the vast ocean of white. I look away from Nick and back at the summit. The low moon throws light and shadow against the rock, the snow, the ridges and fissures, the pillars and gullies. I think of Jakub and Acke and all the others who’ll be left on this mountain, frozen in time and in place; disappeared, or dragged away from the path to become a landmark, a trig point, a cautionary tale. I think of Pasang and Chongba and the Slovaks trapped inside the Death Zone with no fixed lines, and an avalanche and collapsed serac between them and Camp IV. They may as well be on that moon. And I think of them all sitting around that stone altar, laughing and eating. Smearing grey sampa flour on their faces; the promise that they would live to see each other become old and grey. Mountain says no. Because the view from the other side of the mirror can so often look the same. Even when you know exactly what it feels like to fall, to be alone. Even when you know—as you look up out of silent blue dark into howling white light and life; as the air prickles against your skin like blunted pins—that it’s already too late. Like a slow-suffocating nightmare inside thick, heavy curtains. A leaving that never feels like going anywhere at all. To be gone, but not gone. They can’t hold us both. They can’t save us both. And they didn’t. The shocking agony of plunging into that silent blue dark, Felix’s weight pulling me down faster, harder, the snapped rope showering snow. To feel it coming, to know. A breath, barely long enough to scream, but stretching out into infinity. Denial: a mountain climber’s best and worst friend. Better to believe. Except we never do—those of us already on the other side of that coin, that mirror. Because then there really is no going back at all. Nick still howls even as the wind picks up again and the night gets colder. But he’ll come back. He’ll always come back. Because this is where Nick lives. Not in our shitty Catford maisonette. Not even in base camps or trekking lodges. Only up here, in the clouds and violent snowstorms and hurricane-force winds; on the rock faces and ice fields and stony summits; in the gullies and crevasses, the ridges and jet winds and dancing tails of white snow. Up here, where people can’t survive; where we start dying faster the moment we start to climb. This is Nick’s home. And mine. Because what I told Pasang will always be true. I think of Acke shouting stay with me to the stone, the snow, the sky. I am here because Nick needs me to be here. And so I stay. I will always walk beside him. It’s the only reason I’ve ever climbed any mountain at all.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR British Fantasy Award winning Carole Johnstone is a Scottish writer, currently living in Essex, England. Her short fiction has been published widely, and has been reprinted in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year and Salt Publishing’s Best British Fantasy series. Her debut short story collection, The Bright Day is Done, and her novella, Cold Turkey, were both shortlisted for a 2015 British Fantasy Award. For more information on the author, see carolejohnstone.com. Nikishi Lucy Taylor | 5374 words

Seasick and shivering, Thomas Blacksburg peered out from beneath the orange life boat canopy, watching helplessly as the powerful Benguela current swept him north up the coast of Namibia. For hours, he’d been within sight of the Skeleton Coast, that savage, wave-battered portion of the West African shore stretching between Angola to the north and Swakopmund to the south. Through ghostly filaments of fog that drifted around the boat, Blacksburg could make out the distant shore and the camel’s back outline of towering, buff-colored dunes. To his horror, the land appeared to be receding. Having been brought tantalizingly close to salvation, the current was now tugging him back out into the fierce Atlantic. A leviathan wave powered up under the boat, permitting Blacksburg a view of houses strung out like pastel-colored beads. Impossible, he thought. This far north, there was nothing but the vast, inhospitable terrain of the Namib desert, an undulating dunescape stretching inland all the way to the flat, sun-blasted wasteland of the Etosha Pan. Blacksburg calculated his options and found them few. So suddenly and fiercely had the storm struck the night before that no distress call had gone out from the ill-fated yacht Obimi. With the captain knocked overboard and the boat taking on water, Blacksburg and his employer, Horace DeGroot, had been too busy trying to launch the life boat to radio for help. The Obimi wasn’t expected in Angola until the following Friday. No one was looking yet. When they did look, there would be nothing to find. He was the sole survivor. The settlement in the dunes appeared to be his only chance. Checking to make sure the leather pouch strapped across his chest was still secure, he dove into the water.

• • • •

Hours passed before finally he hauled himself ashore and collapsed, half-dead, onto the sand. The fog had lifted, revealing a narrow beach hemmed in between two vast oceans—to the west, the wild Atlantic and, to the east, an unbroken sea of dunes that rose in undulating waves of buff and ochre and gold. Silence reigned. The hiss and thunder of the surf was punctuated only the cries of cormorants and the plaintive lamentations of gulls. Believing that he’d overshot the settlement he’d glimpsed from the boat, Blacksburg trudged south. Fatigue dogged him and acted on his brain like a psychedelic drug. Retinues of ghost crabs, fleet translucent carrion-eaters with eyes on stalks, seemed to scurry in his footprints with malevolent intent. Once he thought he glimpsed a spidery-limbed figure traversing the high dunes, but the image passed so quickly across his retina that it might have been anything, strands of kelp animated by the incessant wind or a small, swirling maelstrom of sand that his exhausted mind assigned a vaguely human form. The hyena slinking toward him, though, was no trickery of vision. A sloping, muscular beast with furrowed lips and seething, tarry eyes, it angled languidly down the duneface, its brown and black fur hackled high, its hot gaze raw and lurid. Blacksburg took in the clamping power of those formidable jaws, and dread threaded through him like razor wire. He bent and scooped up a stone. “Bugger off!” he shouted—or tried to shout. What emerged from his parched throat was a wretched, sandpapery croak, the sound a mummy entombed for thousands of years might make if resurrected. The hyena edged closer. Blacksburg hurled the rock. It struck the hyena with a muted thunk, laying open a bloody gash on the tufted ear. The hyena’s lips curled back and it uttered a high pitched whooping sound so eerie and wild that the temperature on the windswept beach seemed to go ten degrees colder. He heard what sounded like a Range Rover trying to start on a low battery, but this false rescue was only the guttural cough out of the spotted hyena’s broad muzzle. With a final saw- toothed snarl, the pot-bellied creature—which was seventy kilos if it was ten—wheeled around and loped back into the dunes that had spawned it.

• • • •

Exhaustion had so blunted Blacksburg’s senses that he almost sleepwalked past the grey, wind-scoured facade of a two-story house whose empty window frames and doorway stared down from atop a dune like empty eye sockets above a toothless mouth. Climbing up to investigate, he found a gutted shell, the bare interior carpeted with serpentines of sand, roof beams collapsed inward to reveal a square of azure sky. Gannets nested in the eaves. On the floor, a black tarantula held court atop a shattered chandelier. Spurred by a terrible intuition, he struggled up another dune until he could look down at the entire town—a pathetic row of derelict abodes, a sand-blasted gazebo where lovers might have lingered once, a church whose steeple had toppled off, the rusted carcass of a Citroen from some forgotten era. The hoped for sanctuary was a ghost town. A graveyard of rubble and stones. Stunned, despairing, he roamed amid the wreckage. The wind shifted suddenly, and he inhaled the mouth-watering aroma of cooking meat. The hot, heady aroma banged through his blood stream like heroin. Saliva flooded his mouth. Half-dead synapses danced. Stumbling toward the scent, he crested another dune and looked down upon the beach to see a sinewy, dark-skinned old man using a stick to stir the enormous cast-iron potije that rested atop a fire. The old fellow wore frayed trousers, a yellow ball cap, and a short-sleeved pink shirt. His left hand did the stirring. The right one, flopping by his side, was lacking all its fingers. Behind him, a girl in her late teens or early twenties was pulling a bottle of water from a canvas backpack on the ground. She uncapped the bottle and poured it into the potije. She wore an ankle-length tan skirt, battered high-tops, and a billowy red blouse. A brown bandanna around her head held back a crown of windblown dreads. An old scar zigzagged like a lightning bolt between her upper lip and the corner of one eye. With feigned heartiness, Blacksburg slid and trotted down the dune, crying out, “Uhala po”. It meant good afternoon in the Oshiwambo tongue, but judging from the old man’s reaction, it might as well have been a threat to lop off his remaining fingers. The old man’s eyes bulged and he let loose a shriek of mortal fear. The woman had considerably more sang-froid. She held her ground, but snatched up a sharpened stick. “My name is Blacksburg,” he croaked, holding up his hands to show he meant no harm. “I need help.” The old man commenced a frenzied jabbering. The woman chattered back, and an animated exchange took place, virtually none of which Blacksburg understood. Finally the old man fell silent, but he continued to appraise Blacksburg like a disgruntled wildebeest. “Excuse my uncle,” the woman said, in meticulous, school book English. “You frightened him. He thought you were an evil spirit come to kill us.” “No, just a poor lost wretch.” He gestured at the empty water bottle. “You wouldn’t have another of those, would you?” The woman took another bottle of water from the backpack and handed it to Blacksburg, who gulped greedily before eyeing the potije. “Fine smelling stew there,” he said. “What is it, some kind of wild game, stock, chutney, maybe an oxtail or two?” Using her stick, she speared a dripping slab of wild meat. Blacksburg fell upon it like a wolf. The meat was tough and stringy as a jackal’s hide, but, in his depleted state, he found it feastworthy. Between mouthfuls, he gave a version of his plight, detailing the sinking of the Obimi and the loss of her captain, but speaking only vaguely of the one who had chartered the boat, his boss Horace DeGroot. The woman told him that her name was Aamu, that she and the old man were from an Owambo village to the east. “We’ll take you there tomorrow. A tour bus stops by twice a week. You can get a ride to Windhoek.” DeGroot’s largest diamond store was in Windhoek. Blacksburg had no intention of showing his face there. “But what are you doing in a ghost town cooking up a feast,” he said to redirect the conversation. “Did you know that I was coming? What are you, witches?” The girl snorted a bitter laugh. “If I were a witch, I’d turn myself into a cormorant and fly up to Algiers or Gibraltar. I’d never come back.” Something in her vehemence intrigued Blacksburg, who was no stranger to restlessness and discontent. “Why do you stay?” The bite in her voice was like that of a duststorm. “Do my uncle and I look rich to you? We live in a tiny village where the people raise cattle and goats. A good year means we get almost enough to eat. A bad year . . .” Blacksburg saw no evidence of food shortage in the overflowing potije, but saw no need to point that out. With greasy fingers, he gestured toward the forlorn remnants of the town. “This place, what is it? What was it?” Aamu foraged deeper inside the backpack, bringing out a couple of Windhoek Lagers. “No ice,” she said. “You drink it warm?” He grinned. “I’ll manage.” “Come walk with me. I’ll tell you about the town.” She took off at a brisk pace, high-tops churning up small clouds of sand, hips fetchingly asway. Walking was the last thing he wanted to do, but Blacksburg wiped his hands on his trousers and headed up the dune behind her. It was a star dune, one of those sandy forms created by wind blowing from all directions, and it had Blacksburg’s eye. Suddenly, with an agility and vigor that caught him by surprise, the old man lunged and seized his biceps in a fierce, one-handed grip, babbling wildly while pumping his mutilated hand. “Nikishi!” he repeated urgently. Blacksburg, a head taller and twenty kilos heavier, shook him off like a gnat. “What’s wrong with him?” he asked, catching up to Aamu. “He’s warning you about the evil spirits, the ones that take animal and human form. They like to call people by name to lure them out and kill them.” She rolled her eyes. “My uncle’s yampy. In our village, people laugh at him. Last week he grabbed a tourist lady’s iPod and stomped it in the dirt, because he thought that evil spirits called his name from the earbuds.” She took a swig of Lager, grimaced. “Can’t stand this stuff warm.” She took off abruptly again, climbing nimbly while Blacksburg labored to keep up. They navigated a surreal dunescape, where decaying buildings pillaged by time and the unceasing wind stood like remnants of a bombing. The larger buildings, the ones the desert hadn’t yet reclaimed entirely, indicated a degree of bourgeois prosperity that must have, in its heyday, seemed incongruous, perched as the town was on the edge of nothing, caught between the hostile Namib Desert and the pounding surf. Aamu must have read his thoughts. “Forty years ago,” she said, “this was a busy diamond town called Wilhelmskopf. Water was trucked in once a week. There was a hospital, a school, plans for a community center, even a bowling alley. Everybody lived here—Afrikaners, Germans, Damara and Owambo tribesmen.” “What happened?” Blacksburg said, although he could guess. Many of the smaller diamond towns had petered out by the middle of the previous century, eclipsed by the huge discovery of diamonds in Oranjemund to the south. Of these, Kolmanskopf, a ghost town just outside Luderitz, and now a major tourist attraction, was the most well-known. Aamu’s answer shocked him. “In the late 60s, there were a lot of violent deaths, people found with their throats ripped out, torn apart by animals.” Blacksburg thought of the hyena that had menaced him on the beach. “Hyenas? Jackals?” “Certainly. But fear spread that a nikishi and its offspring lived among these Wilhelmskopf people, changing into animal form at night to prey on them. A few superstitious fools panicked and turned on one another, accusing each other of sorcery. Eventually the town was abandoned. Can you believe such bosh? Now it belongs to the ghost crabs and the hyenas.” Blacksburg finished off his beer and flung the empty bottle across the threshold of a faded cobalt house with sand piled inside up to the turquoise wainscoting. Lizards stern and still as ancient gods stared down from a piano’s gutted innards and perched atop a cracked and broken set of shelves. A shiver rustled his spine. He looked away. Down below, in the purpling twilight, he could see the old man reaching into the potije with his stick, stabbing slabs of bloody meat and flinging them out across the sand. “Hey, he’s throwing away the food!” Aamu looked away, embarrassed. “I told you he’s mad. Years ago, my uncle was here collecting driftwood after a storm when he was attacked by what he thought was a nikishi. He claims it called his name, and when he answered, it bit his fingers off and ate them while he begged for mercy. His mind hasn’t been right since. He says the nikishi told him he must come here after every storm and make a spirit offering of meat and beer. To thank the nikishi for not eating all his fingers.” “Waste of good food,” scoffed Blacksburg. “This transforming rot, you believe it, too?” She looked affronted. “Of course not. I’m educated. I was sent to Swakopmund Girls’ School. I studied German and English, some science, learned about the world. That’s why it’s hard for me to live in an Owambo village. I know something bigger’s out there.” Blacksburg bit back a sarcastic jibe. What would someone who considered schooling in Swakopmund to be a cosmopolitan experience know about the wider world? This Owambo girl inhabited the most barren region of one of Africa’s least populated countries. In Blacksburg’s view, she was a half-step above savagery. “How did you and your uncle get here? Trek across the desert?” She arched a kohl-black brow. “No, we rode our camels. Look!” Grabbing his hand, she pulled him along a passageway between a debris- strewn house and a derelict pavilion and laughed. For a second he almost expected to see two tethered dromedaries. But it was a black Toyota Hilux, sand-caked and mud-splattered, that was angled on the slope behind the buildings. Blacksburg gave the Hilux a covetous once-over. “Nice-looking camel, this. Where do you gas it up?” “There’s a petrol station for people going to the Etosha Pan about forty kilometers from here. And the safari companies that fly rich tourists in from Cape Town and Windhoek, they have way stations through the desert. Before he became ill, my uncle used to guide for one. That’s how he got the Jeep.” “I need to get to Angola,” Blacksburg said. “What say I buy it from you?” She eyed him scornfully, his ragged, salt-caked clothes, bare feet, disheveled hair. “And use what for money? Shark’s teeth? Ghost crabs?” “No need to mock me. Let me explain . . .” He felt a sudden, irresistible urge to touch her, as though some electrical energy pulsed inside her skin that his own body required for its sustenance. A few strands of hair had whipped loose from under the bandanna and he used that as an excuse, reaching out to tuck the hair back into place. To his dismay, she flinched as though he’d struck her. “Sorry.” He held up his hands, contrite. “Look, about the Jeep, I can pay you well.” “The Jeep isn’t mine. It belongs to the village.” “Loan it to me then. Go with me as far as Luanda. After that, I’m on my own.” “But why should I help you?” “A fair question that I’d expect of you, a graduate of Swakopmund Girl’s School. Here, let me show you something,” His smile was confident, but his stomach corkscrewed at what he was about to do— betting everything on this girl’s gullibility and greed. “You say you want to see the wider world. What if I told you you could go anywhere you wanted and live like a movie star? What would you say to that?” “I’d say maybe you swallowed too much seawater, Blacksburg. That you’re as crazy as my uncle.” “Crazy, huh? Look here.” With a showman’s flair, he reached inside his shirt, unhooked some clasps and pulled out a leather wallet protector. Unzipping it, he produced two plastic baggies. “Cup your hands.” He unzipped one baggy and spilled into her palms a treasure trove of uncut stones. Even in the dimming light, they glittered like a fairy king’s ransom. Aamu’s breath caught. She cradled the diamonds as though she held a beating heart. Her voice, when she finally spoke, was a reverential whisper. “Ongeypi? What are you, a jewel thief?” “I’m a diamond dealer,” he corrected brusquely. “I was transporting these to a buyer in Luanda.” He scooped the stones back into the baggy and opened up the next. These were a few museum quality pieces from DeGroot’s private collection, several of which had been loaned out over the years to South African celebrities headed to New York and Cannes. Enjoying himself now, warming to his role, he plucked out a dazzling yellow diamond on a platinum chain. When he held it up, the sunlight put on a fire show, the facets blazed. Aamu’s dark eyes widened as he fastened it around her neck. In her inky irises were gold glints, a few grains of sand out of the Namib desert. “It must be worth a fortune!” “A bit more than a used Jeep, I imagine. If you get me to Luanda, it’s yours to sell. Do we have an arrangement?” She frowned and chewed her lower lip. “What about my uncle? We can’t let him go back to the village. Everyone will know I took the Jeep and went off with an oshilumbu.” Blacksburg cringed a little at being called “white man,” and looked down onto the beach, where the flames under the potije still danced. The old man paced a furious circle around the pot, raising his arms in wild supplication to whatever dark gods fueled his imagination. Silhouetted against the blood red sun, the mutilated hand looked like a misshapen club. He took Aamu’s hand and brought her fingers to his lips, tasting the meat and salt under the nails. “Right then, let’s leave your uncle to his demons.” She laughed and pulled away, trotting along an alleyway between a half-dozen tumbled-down buildings, beckoning him to follow. When he caught up with her, she was framed in the empty doorway of a small stone house where, with a dancer’s grace and the lewdness of a seasoned whore, she slowly peeled off the scarlet top and beige skirt. “At the school in Swakopmund,” she said, letting the blouse fall, “the priest said I was too wild—too hungry for excitement, for boys and beer, for freedom. He said it’s wrong to want too much, that it’s a sin to be too hungry.” In the fading light, her black eyes made promises both heartfelt and indecent. “What about you, Blacksburg? Are you too hungry?” For the first time in months, Blacksburg permitted himself a laugh of real delight. For a giddy moment, he actually romanced the notion of the two of them leaving Namibia together, a fantasy that Aamu’s reckless passion only fueled. She rode him with a mad abandon Blacksburg had experienced in only a few women—and then always prostitutes high on serious street drugs. If it was sex she’d been talking about when she asked him if it was a sin to be too hungry, then both were surely hellbound. Their rutting was as much attack as ardour. Blacksburg, glorying in pain both given and received, devoured her. Past and future fell away, until all that remained was her thrashing body and feral moans, the sea- salt scent of her, and the fierce and biting sweetness of her teeth and tongue. He drank in the musky sweat that ran between her breasts and down her prominent ribs and tangled his hands in the lush snarls of her dread-locked mane. And when they rested, panting, sated, Blacksburg knew only that he wanted more. Later, she spooned her limber body around his and chuckled in his ear, “Where will you go after you sell your diamonds? Don’t lie to me. I know you’re running. You wouldn’t be so quick to trade a diamond for a Jeep if you weren’t a desperate man.” He was surprised when truth slipped out. “England, maybe. My mother always said we had relatives in Cornwall. I might go there.” “Cornwall.” She pronounced the word like one uttering an incantation. “Maybe I’ll go with you, my handsome Blacksburg.” And, for a few ecstatic moments, the idea of an impromptu adventure with this exotic woman moved Blacksburg deeply, fed into his desire to see himself as noble, heroic even, a survivor conquering the world by dint of ruthlessness and valor and self-will. The man he truly was, rich and powerful like DeGroot. Later, as he drifted toward sleep, he saw filaments of moonlight slant through the empty window and spill across her face. She was lovely, even with the scar, but what mesmerized him, what he could not tear his eyes from, was how the yellow diamond glimmered around that dark as bitter-chocolate throat. Blacksburg dreamed about his mother. She stood outside the cottage in Cornwall before a running stream that he had seen in photographs. No longer gaunt, used-up and grey as he remembered her, but young and spirited. Her voice was high and lilting, clear as birdsong, infused with a calm serenity that in her life he’d never known her to possess. She called to him, not in the sharp haranguing style that in life had been her nature, but with a serenity and sweetness. Blacksburg almost loved her then, an alien emotion he had seldom felt for her in life, for this woman who had been an Afrikaner whore. He woke up to the unholy cackling of hyenas and the taste of charred meat on his tongue. Aamu was gone. For a second panic gripped him. But the diamonds, still secure in their plastic baggies, were undisturbed. He pulled his pants on and went outside into a night no longer flecked with stars, but murky, swimming with long, damp tresses of fog. He felt like a diver floating along the bottom of the sea, enveloped in an endless, choking school of pale grey, tubular fish. Peering down onto the beach, he tried to spot the old man’s fire and thought he glimpsed the orange flare of a few remaining embers, but no sooner had he started to descend the dune, than a low, contralto rumbling halted him. The sound came from a dozen yards away, where the fog- swathed columns of the pavilion jutted from the gloom like a ghostly Parthenon. As he approached, he saw a nest of shadows, low to the ground, diverge and reconfigure, then caught a glimpse of a pink shirt and let himself exhale. The old man was asleep in the pavilion, the noise he’d heard undoubtedly was snoring. More movement—undulating, languid. He saw what looked to his uncertain eyes to be a wild crown of Medusa dreads whipped back and forth—a host of unwelcome images besieged his mind—but it was the hyena’s glaring eyes and not its mane-like, ruffled tail that finally made the scene before him recognizable. The hyena’s eyes flashed, then vanished into the fog only to reappear a few feet away. The grumbling, growling intensified. Blacksburg, shocked motionless, counted five sets of eyes. A frightful snarling commenced as two of the hyenas, snapping wildly, fought over a choice morsel. Bits of skin and gristle flew. Blacksburg glimpsed a ragged nub of bone attached to a scrap of pink cloth. His breath caught in a stifled gasp. A hyena’s head jerked up, and it raised its gory snout to test the wind. Blacksburg shoved away from the pavilion and plunged headlong into the fog. He tried to remember the location of the Jeep, thinking he might be able to lock himself inside, but the drifting mist cast a surreal opaqueness across the dunescape. Nothing that he saw was recognizable, the blank facades of the buildings as alike as weathered tombstones. Ahead, the murky outline of a crumbling two-story building floated up out of the fog. An empty window gaped. He hurled himself through it, tripped, and landed atop the piano he’d seen earlier—its ancient keys produced a wheezing bleat. Behind him, a sagging door led into a low hallway. The darkness was crypt black. He groped his way along, stumbling over obstacles—a plank, an empty drum of some kind—until he half fell into a small enclosed space, a storage room or closet. He huddled there, heart galloping, listening for the murderous whoops of the converging pack. Blacksburg? His own name sounded suddenly as alien and frightful as a curse. It floated on the hissing wind, at once as distant as the moon and close as his own breath, Aamu’s voice, or maybe just the scrape of windswept sand. He cleared his throat to answer and found that he was mute. They call people by name to lure them out. Although never in his life had Blacksburg been superstitious, now some atavistic fear crawled out of his reptilian brain and commandeered all else. He tried to tell himself his frantic mind was playing tricks, but an older knowledge told him what he feared the most, that what called to him was no hyena but a shape shifter, a nikishi, that would split him open like the old man, from groin to sternum, and feed while he lay dying. Blacksburg! The piano suddenly coughed out a great, discordant cacophony, as though four clawed feet had leaped onto the keyboard and bounded off. The door he’d come through creaked, and then a single animal sent forth its infernal wail into the hollow building. At once a clan of hyenas, some inside, others beyond the walls, took up the ungodly cry. Knowing he was seconds from being found and trapped, he bolted from his hiding place, raced up the hallway and hurled himself through a window that was partially intact, crashing to the sand amidst a biting drizzle of shattered glass. Without pause, he got up and pounded down the duneface, arms pinwheeling, skidding wildly. The hyenas converged around him. The largest, boldest of the beasts feinted once before going for his throat. Its teeth snagged his shirt, taking with the fabric a strip of flesh from Blacksburg’s ribs. He fell to one knee, one arm up to guard his jugular, the other to protect the pouch across his chest—even knowing, beyond all doubt, that both were lost to him. The ecstatic yips of the hyenas were suddenly drowned out by the roar of an approaching motor. The Hilux teetered at the top of the dune, then careened straight down the face, sand spewing out behind the tires, high beams punching through the fog. It slammed onto beach, suspension screaming, bounced off the ground, and veered toward the hyenas. The pack scattered. Blacksburg staggered to his feet, as the Jeep skidded to a halt beside him. “Get in!” Aamu flung the door wide, and Blacksburg launched himself inside, the Jeep lurching into motion while his legs still dangled out the door. A hyena leaped, jaws snapping. He screamed and kicked out. The hyena twisted in mid-air and fell away. Blacksburg muscled the door closed. Aamu gunned the engine and the Jeep tore away through the fog. She drove like a witch, outdistancing the pack by many miles, before she turned to Blacksburg and said gravely, “I looked for you on foot at first. I called your name. I knew you were close by, but you didn’t answer.” “I didn’t hear you,” Blacksburg lied, shame making him curt, resentful of her. They both knew he’d been afraid to answer, that in that desperate moment, rationality had failed him. He’d believed the hyena pack to be nikishis and one of them was mimicking her voice. He was a fool and a coward, just as all along he knew his boss DeGroot had judged him privately to be. In that moment, when he felt as though she’d seen into his soul and found him wanting, he made a harsh decision. He told her to stop the vehicle and switch places. He would drive.

• • • •

Later, when the midday sun was high and blazingly hot, Blacksburg decided they’d come far enough. He’d been driving for hours while Aamu slept. Now he halted the Hilux in the middle of a sun-blasted stretch of desert bleak and desolate as a medieval rendition of hell, shook her by the shoulder, and said, “Get out.” She sat up, blinking groggily. “What . . . what are you talking about?” “It’s simple. End of the line. Get out.” “I don’t understand.” She looked around at the miles of barren, retina-searing whiteness. “Is this a joke?” He barked a bitter laugh. “Did you really think I was taking you with me? I can get to Angola on my own.” “But . . . I’ll die out here.” “Yes, I imagine so.” For a woman contemplating her very short future, she appeared strangely unmoved. “But we are going to Luanda.” “One of us. Not you.” He held his hand out. “And by the way, I want my diamond back.” “Then take it and be damned!” Before Blacksburg could stop her, she yanked the diamond from around her neck and hurled it out the window as casually as if she were discarding a wad of gum. He swore and struck her across the head. The bandanna came off. He saw the dried blood in her hair, and the fresh blood flowing from the wound at the top of her ear. He stared at his hand, where her blood stained it. She dragged a finger pensively along the scar that ran along her cheek. “You know how I got this? My uncle cut me with a knife. But I was merciful and let him live. Last night I was merciful again. I killed him before I fed his flesh to the hyenas.” Using sheer force of will, Blacksburg hauled himself back from the brink of panic. “You think you scare me? You’re crazier than your uncle was. If I can kick my old boss out of a dingy and into the sea, I can damn sure get rid of you. Now get the hell out of my Jeep.” She didn’t budge. Wild hunger, wanton and insatiable, raged in her eyes. Her lips curled in a soulless smile. “Yesterday I could have killed you on the beach, but I was curious about what kind of man you were, about what was in your heart. Now I know. And now, you know me.” Her voice was lush with malice. Her face, as she commenced her changing, was radiant with cruelty. “See me as I am,” shrilled the nikishi. At once, her slashing teeth cleaved the soft, white folds of his belly. She thrust her muzzle inside the wound, foraging for what was tastiest. The salty entrails were gobbled first, then the tender meat inside the bones, his life devoured in agonizing increments. Hours later, a hyena pup following a set of Jeep tracks came across a human skull. It seized the trophy in its strong young jaws and headed back denward to gnaw the prize at leisure. ©2012 by Lucy Taylor. Originally published in Exotic Gothic 4 (Postscripts #28/29). Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Lucy Taylor is the award-winning author of seven novels, including the Stoker Award-winning The Safety of Unknown Cities, six collections, and over a hundred short stories. Her work has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, German, and Chinese. Her most recent short fiction can be found in the anthologies The Beauty of Death: Death by Water (Independent Legions Publishing), Tales of the Lake Volume 5 (Chrystal Lake Publishing), Endless Apocalypse (Flame Tree Publishing), Monsters of Any Kind (Independent Legions Press) and A Fist Full of Dinosaurs (Charles Anderson Books). A new collection, Spree and Other Stories, was published in February 2018 by Independent Legions Publishing. Her short story “Wingless Beasts” is included in Ellen Datlow’s The Best of the Best Horror of the Year, to be published in late 2018. Lost Eye Films, a UK-based, independent production company, has purchased the rights for a film version of “In the Cave of the Delicate Singers” (Tor.com). Taylor lives in the high desert outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. NONFICTION The H Word: Mother Knows Best A.C. Wise | 1453 words

As a child, when something frightens you—a bad dream, or a monster under the bed—what do you do? You call for the ultimate protection: your mother. But what happens when mothers themselves are monstrous, and what makes them so? Mothers, like women in horror fiction generally, don’t tend to fare well. They suffer from the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” problem, becoming a source of terror for being too motherly, or not motherly enough. The monstrous mothers of horror have their roots in myth and fairy tales, with the evil stepmothers of stories like Snow White as the classic example. The Brothers Grimm popularized the archetype, but in many of the original tales they retold, the evil stepmothers were mothers. The typical pattern of these tales saw the mother/stepmother growing jealous of her daughter’s youth and beauty, and seeking to punish or destroy her for it. In the most extreme cases, this would also involve cannibalism. As the Grimms shifted from mothers to stepmothers, they created a useful dichotomy. On one side, the evil, jealous stepmother; on the other the pure, loving mother who is flawless by virtue of being dead. This dichotomy appears in Lucy Clifford’s “The New Mother,” a horror tale published in 1882. The story centers on two young girls, Blue- Eyes and the Turkey, who are tricked into being naughty by a strange girl in the woods. Their mother warns that bad behavior will force her to leave forever and send a new mother in her place, one with glass eyes and a wooden tail. The children ignore the warning, and their sweet, kind mother vanishes, leaving the eerie new mother in her place. The story ends before we learn whether the new mother is monstrous in more than appearance, though from Blue-Eyes and the Turkey’s perspective, she certainly is, and the moral to them is clear—be good and listen to your mother, or a monster will get you. Neil Gaiman points to “The New Mother” as an inspiration for his novella, Coraline, whose wicked Other Mother has button eyes in a direct nod to the New Mother’s glass eyes. Unlike the New Mother, the Other Mother’s wickedness is directly on the page. She collects children, sews buttons over their eyes, and drains them of life. Even so, she still straddles the line between too much mothering and not enough. The Other Mother lures Coraline into her world by being a little too perfect— more fun than her real mother, cooking her favorite foods, and spoiling her rotten. However, once she has the children she collects in her clutches, she quickly becomes bored, and her love turns to neglect, leaving them to waste away. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho offers an interesting example of another mother straddling the line between too much mothering and not enough, though what makes Mrs. Bates so interesting is—spoiler alert for a sixty year old movie—during the timeframe of the movie, she doesn’t exist. The real Mrs. Bates is dead before the film opens; she is a motivating factor for horror, but throughout the movie, Norman acts as his own mother figure. Norman murdered Mrs. Bates and her lover, then exhumed her corpse and reinvented her as his own perfect ideal—a smothering, overprotective mother willing to kill in order to keep him her perfect little boy. We can surmise that the real Mrs. Bates may have been ready to move on to a new stage in her life—one without Norman at its center. In Norman’s eyes, this made her a bad mother, a monstrous one, thus his twisted reimagining goes to the opposite extreme. As “Mother,” Norman brutally murders a series of beautiful women who represent sexual temptation, thus keeping himself childlike and pure. He keeps himself innocent of death as well, pretending his mother is still alive and he hasn’t killed her, and shifting the blame for his murders onto her. As a result, Mrs. Bates-via-Norman becomes both the fairy tale wicked stepmother, hunting young women, and the sainted dead mother protecting her little boy. In Friday the 13th (part 1), we have a real-life version of Norman Bates’ fantasy mother. When Jason Voorhees drowns due to neglectful camp counselors who are too busy getting it on, Mrs. Voorhees goes on a killing spree to avenge him. In a deranged way, she’s protecting future campers too, trying to ensure Camp Crystal Lake never reopens. Of course, her plan fails, and she transforms from overprotective mother, to mother-as-motivating-factor-for-horror. Just as Mrs. Bates motivates Norman, Mrs. Voorhees’ death motivates the surprise-he-isn’t-really-dead killing spree in Friday the 13th Part 2. Like Norman keeping his mother’s mummified corpse in the basement, Jason keeps his mother’s severed head in a makeshift shrine, undertaking his killings in her name. Another aspect of the “too much mothering” horror trope is the monstrousness of female fertility. Being an empty vessel for Satan’s seed is one thing, but choosing when, where, and how often to procreate is a big no no. Take the xenomorphs of the Alien franchise. Their desire to propagate and determination to ensure the survival of their young is the source of their monstrousness. The ultimate embodiment is the Alien Queen, the ur-mother of the xenomorph hive, and the source of all those eggs scientists can’t seem to resist hovering their huggable faces directly over. Similarly, H.P. Lovecraft’s Shub-Niggurath, one of few Great Old Ones of his mythos explicitly named as female, is associated with fertility and frequently linked to The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, either as the same being, or as his consort. Even as a consort, however, one can assume she is at least partially responsible for those thousand young, and thus a source of monstrousness. On the other side of the coin, we have too little mothering—neglectful and outright cruel mothers once again hearkening back to fairy tale roots. In the film Carrie, the first instance of motherly abuse shown onscreen is directly related to Carrie’s fertility, as heralded by her first period. Unlike Snow White’s stepmother, Carrie’s mother doesn’t seem fearful of Carrie replacing her so much as simply growing up and living a life of her own. In addition to being a horrifying figure in her own right, Carrie’s mother heralds monstrosity as well. When Carrie goes nuclear, her mother’s abuse is just as responsible—if not more so—as the abuse she faces from her peers. Unlike Carrie’s mother, Regan’s mother in The Exorcist isn’t monstrous in her own right, but she causes monstrosity by not being motherly enough. Instead of her life revolving around her daughter, she has the audacity to be a single mother interested in her own career, and having friends, all the while neglecting her daughter’s spiritual upbringing. As the movie demonstrates, that kind of unmotherly behavior—to paraphrase the television series Archer—is how you get demons. Another mother who straddles the line between saintly as wicked is the titular creature in the film Mama. As a living woman, she commits murder and causes her own accidental death along with the death of her child. In death, however, she dedicates herself to caring for two little girls —Lilly and Victoria—whose own mother is brutally murdered, and saves them from the same fate. Mama is monstrous to other adults, but to the girls she is a protector, and in Lilly’s case, the only mother she’s ever really known. The possibility of Mama’s wicked nature is only introduced into the girls’ lives by a third mother figure, along with a new father figure. The girls’ uncle rescues them after years with Mama, and he and his girlfriend take them into their home. Mama turns vicious, but only against those she sees as threats to “her” children. The movie ends with Lilly’s death in Mama’s arms, but it is depicted as a happy reunion, while Victoria is shown on the path to healing with her newly- rediscovered family. In this way, Mama may be a rare example of a horror movie offering multiple positive mother figures. If there’s an ultimate lesson here, it’s that mothers—like women in general in horror—can’t win. If there’s another lesson, it is this—if you find yourself in a horror story, don’t call for your mother when something goes bump in the night. Just pull the covers over your head, pretend it isn’t there, and wait until dawn.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR A.C. Wise’s fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Shimmer, Tor.com, and the Year’s Best Horror Volume 10, among other places. She has two collections published with Lethe Press, and a novella forthcoming from Broken Eye Books. In addition to her fiction, she contributes a monthly review column to Apex Magazine, and the Women to Read and Non-Binary Authors to Read series to The Book Smugglers. Find her online at www.acwise.net and on twitter as @ac_wise. Book Reviews: November 2018 Terence Taylor | 3076 words

Read This! Volume 7 New Horror Writing You Should Know

Years ago, I had a nightmare. I sat in an armchair in a low-lit room watching television. On the screen was a close-up color image of the American flag waving in the wind. I watched in silence, filled with the same dread I would now feel seeing the Nazi or Confederate flag victoriously on display. That was all, but the deep feeling of nameless horror stayed with me long after I woke. It seemed unimaginable at the time, but today the dream feels more than a little prescient. As I work on my third vampire novel, set in a dystopian future only ten years away, I’ve been slowed by the conundrum of whether it’s even possible to conceive and write imaginary horrors while living in a present so beset by real ones. It’s not just Trump remaking our country in his image as his raging howl of endless ego drowns out any last vestige of reasoned discourse, what little is left after years of squabbling TV commentators. It’s the increasingly casual worldwide genocides that go uncontested or punished. That anti-Semitism is rising again, along with growing intolerance of differences in gender, religion, culture, race or even country of origin. We’re controlled by leaders of an international economy built on a conceptual house of cards that threatens to fall at any negative opinion about its worth. Students bold enough to seek a higher education leave college as wage slaves with six-figure debts hanging over their heads. They’re forced to take any work they can to maintain monthly payments without penalties, while the same banks consume any inheritance that might save them with predatory reverse mortgages to their parents and grandparents. As King George croons in “You’ll Be Back” from Hamilton, “Oceans rise, empires fall . . .” Should we pay any attention to the past, we’d see ample evidence of that truth in melting ice poles and the bankruptcy of what remained of the once-mighty nation of Greece. My early passion for the horror genre was fueled by a search for freedom from fear in my erratic young life. The stories I read and movies I watched then were basic battles between good and evil with endings that always dispelled the darkness. Heroes overcame monstrous forces, or wicked protagonists were punished in true EC Comics style. Either left me with a satisfied sense that even if what scared me remained in my life, I could tell myself that it had an eventual end, and that one day I could rise above my current circumstances. It was only later that Lovecraft and Poe led me into a less benign world of the weird, one with no assured exit. When horror movies rose in popularity in the 80s, began to spawn sequels that rolled into series, the defeat of their villains became less assured. By the time of Freddy Krueger, Chucky, and Jason Voorhees, it was even in question if the audience were rooting for them or their victims. The bad guys got all the good lines or best moves. It took more years than I liked for movies to go back to killing monsters to satisfy the cathartic urges of the audience, even if they returned in the next film to further the franchise. While we couldn’t be assured of a peaceful future, at least there could be a break between catastrophes. Less so now. 9/11 woke up America to what the rest of the world already knew after decades of terrorist bombings: There is no safety; any day can be your last, for no other reason than You Are Here. Once that lid is lifted, the rest of Pandora’s box comes tumbling out, from fears of pandemics and the bodily betrayal of cancer, to killer robot cars and lightning-struck plane engines, home invasions, electrical fires, bad club drugs, shoddy construction . . . the list of ways we can die at any moment is literally endless. How does an author scare anyone when everything around us has become so damnably terrifying? What is the place for horror fiction in today’s chaotic world? More importantly, why watch movies from The Grudge to The Last Exorcist, The Babadook to Hereditary, and a host of others that, at best, tell us we can only keep our demons at bay, at worst, that they will consume all we are? Is there any reason to engage in “entertainment” that only validates the view that life is hopeless, filled only with terror and pain, inevitably ending in a death that, at best, is one we don’t see coming? How do we escape from our own fear if even our fictions cannot? Do our lives have value, or are we bound by Samuel Beckett’s words in his 1953 novel, The Unnamable, “The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue.” Do we sustain the daily horror of life only long enough to find the right means to end it all?

The Conspiracy against the Human Race Thomas Ligotti Paperback / Ebook ISBN: 9780143133148 Penguin Publishing Group, October 02, 2018, 272 pages

I looked for answers in Stoker winner Thomas Ligotti’s non-fiction collection of related essays, The Conspiracy against the Human Race, named after a similar text written by one of his fictional characters. That version is described as “based on the nonexistence, the imaginary nature, of everything we believe ourselves to be.” That’s a fair estimation of what Ligotti does here, in addition to defining our view of what that horror fiction is, what it does for us, and how it works. We seek sources of supernatural fear greater than our own, and want to see them defeated to give us hope. We are frightened by the unnatural as perceived in landscapes or the life-like, in puppets or dolls, the same terrain as the “uncanny valley” of disbelief in CGI animation that makes something slightly less than utterly real seem deeply disturbing. I found those passages a great reminder of why we write horror, especially as I plunge back into my novel—which makes it a convenient tome to add to any genre writer’s reference stack, next to your Elements of Style. Ligotti breaks his thesis into six concise parts that examine aspects of identity, mortality, and horror fiction with insight and wry humor, often in its darkest discussions. The majority of the work is devoted to the debate over the intrinsic value of the self-awareness of humans. On one hand, understanding has led us to develop culture and civilization, art and architecture, science and religion. On the other, it was all created to stave off our fear of the daily nightmare of struggling to stay alive, with the full awareness of our inevitable death making it all seem pointless. Ligotti cites a wide range of sources I was previously unfamiliar with to defend the latter opinion: Tsanoff, Bahnsen, Zapffe, Michelstaeder, Mainlander, and many more, who form a pantheon of pessimism, assuring us that the most destructive aspect of consciousness is that we are able to imagine the worst that can be. We hold it ahead of us like a decaying carrot that nonetheless offers no deterrent to continuing on, beaten forward by the stick of survival. They tell us that our lifelong fear of death is far worse than death itself—since once it actually occurs, we no longer care about anything—barring an equally complex afterlife that no departed loved ones have cared to come back to torment us with. For the relative handful of philosophers who stand in stark contrast to the optimistic majority who claim life is good, to know that “no one gets out of here alive,” as Jim Morrison put it, is enough to kill the party. It was all summed up rather nicely by the late Douglas Adams, who wrote, “In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” Instead of facing up to the monstrous reality of the most basic fact that life sucks, philosophical pessimists say most of us do our best to deny it. We fall for promises of a fruitful afterlife, study scientific ways to avert or delay death, or bury our fears in sybaritic enjoyment to distract us from our inevitable ends. If you agree with the interpretation that Beckett’s The Unnamable is literary sleight of hand, that the narrator may only live and exist in the words we read on the page, as he conjectures (which he does), The Conspiracy against the Human Race reflects a parallel point of view that all we are and all we know of ourselves is equally fictional, mutually agreed upon to obscure the horror of existence and death’s impending inevitability. Like Beckett’s protagonist, we are only what we say we are. There is no individual identity, simply a construct created to reassure us that we have value. In this context, the only point to existence is the perpetual justification of it, whether in financial, social, spiritual, or ethical terms. We are rich, popular, pious, or good, but that means we are. Ligotti covers the death of self as a goal of Buddhism, to let go of the notion that we are anything but a series of responses to stimuli, the most habitual of which make up what we refer to as our personality. The popular aphorism, “I can’t change who I am,” becomes impossible when you face the fact that all that’s required to change is a choice—to not be like this, or do that. If we invent ourselves, there is no reason we can’t reinvent. As Captain James T. Kirk told warring factions, even if you insist you are killers because you always have been, you can decide not to kill—today. And repeat. I disagree with Ligotti that Buddhism is a form of pessimism. I see it more as pragmatism, as is the idea that dukkha, human suffering, arises only when we don’t get what we want, or things don’t go “our way.” When our reactions are about us, our needs, not the world. To see things as they are, to react to the now as animals instinctually do, Buddhism says can lead to an easier existence. That could lead to a stance that the only meaning to be found in life is life, a fair challenge in and of itself, and that our time is better spent living it than trying to wonder why it is. I think the majority of us who think about such things are more practical than optimists or pessimists. We know life has good and bad in it and ideally respond to either appropriately, knowing death is ahead, but not dwelling on something that hasn’t happened yet. That attitude would simply be another form of denial to Ligotti’s pantheon. There was a time when I would have agreed. Through decades of depression from high school through my thirties I called myself a pessimist, saw the world as cold and unyielding, until ten years of therapy left me with the realization that inside every pessimist is an idealist who really wants the world to be a far better place, doomed to endless disappointment that it can never live up to their high standard. For philosophers who see life as time spent waiting for and dreading death, the end should be viewed as a welcome relief, even if most of us would never consider taking advantage of its relatively easy availability. Many of Ligotti’s citations who survived their conclusions seem only to have deferred their final solution to remain with us long enough to shake the finger of meaninglessness in all our faces, until we feel as resolutely hopeless about humanity’s lot as they do. Yet, I cannot despise my questing mind, even after the many years it weighed me down with depression that would have made many of Ligotti’s citations more appealing then than they are to me now. The ability to explore the thoughts in this book, and agree or disagree, debate, consider and learn, all require being aware. Experience is a bell curve, and consciousness may make me feel the bad times more keenly when they are here, but also lets me remember the good. I can anticipate an end to pain as well as I can dread future horrors. So while I must go with the middle range majority of humanity on this one, diving deeper into the mechanics of how we see the world, remembering that we all live in subjective ones of our own making, is a fascinating journey worth taking. Despite the seemingly morbid subject, the book isn’t at all dark or depressing, and well worth re-reading to fully absorb.

Infidel Pornsak Pichetshote (Author), Aaron Campbell (Artist), Jose Villarrubia (Artist), Jeff Powell (Letterer) (Artist) Paperback / Ebook ISBN: 978-1534308367 Image Comics, October 2, 2018, 168 pages

I almost always enjoy effective transformative reboots of old tropes, like Get Out, which recently revived the “sinister small town/things are not what they seem” movie thriller. Author Pornsak Pichetshote has nicely found a way to make the haunted house convention terrifying again, in a five-part graphic novel that effectively raises more monsters than it puts to rest. Aisha is living with her mother-in-law in a building being rebuilt after an accidental bombing. She is a brown Muslim, Leslie is a white Christian, and according to her son, no matter how nice his mother acts, she’s manipulative and deceitful. It’s obvious Tom’s had issues with his mother for some time, but it’s also our first cue that nothing is as it seems, no one can be trusted. We meet Aisha in mid-nightmare, under assault by a demonic form that begins to slip into her waking view. Half a dozen people died in the explosion downstairs, and despite the rent reduction that motivates the survivors to stay while the damaged floors are reconstructed, it has become the kind of sinister space described by Ligotti, off-kilter, wrong, and unnatural. Aisha’s friend Medina, who she grew up with, moved in to take advantage of the low rent and support her friend, but won’t believe anything weird is wrong there. Tom leaves for a shoot in upstate New York that will take him off the grid for a week. Aisha is left alone with his mother and daughter, with only Medina to ground her. There are all the classic warning signs— quick flashes of demonic faces, fresh food suddenly rotten and fly- ridden, a knife that is suddenly bloody and then not. As the phantoms grow stronger, stay longer, they vent hate-filled rants—towelhead, whore, killer, trash, terrorist, and worse. As is the norm in this genre, Aisha is left trying to explain something no one else can see . . . until they do. By then it is too late. Events rapidly build to a pitch as Leslie is thrown down the stairs to her death by either a devil or her daughter-in-law. A white blonde neighbor swears she saw no one but Aisha on the landing, but her view of things soon seems colored by the same innate intolerance exhibited by Leslie when Aisha arrived. As Aisha lies in a coma, Medina and her friends gather and start trying to unravel what is really happening. What follows descends rapidly into deep horror as the illusion that everything is all right gets torn away. Without revealing the intricate and enjoyable plot, suffice to say that the rigors of the convention are fully fulfilled as we’re dragged into the same nightmare as the characters, one beautifully evoked in the art team’s atmospheric images that roll effortlessly from moody realism to chillingly surreal as the spirits of the dead come back to settle their grudges. In the end it is unclear if an amateur terrorist stockpiling homemade explosives caused the bombing that sets off events, or hate-filled neighbors determined to find fault in him snooping through his things. The story weaves in the widely disparate attitudes of all its characters, their beliefs slowly shifting as the story progresses. What makes it new is that it’s not just a series of cheap scares designed to shock and appall . . . The horror lies not only in death and the supernatural, it’s in our hearts and heads. In the classic words of the comic strip Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Stripped of their supernatural trappings, the story could play out every bit as sadly chilling, just following the path of prejudice and the pain it causes, set in the familiar world that we live in. I think that’s the true test of any really effective horror story—that the humanity of it could survive without the supernatural. The quest for answers to my literary crisis found some resolution in these readings. We are only what we believe ourselves to be, and the world is only as good or bad as we see it. No matter how bad it seems, we are always capable, thanks to the curse of consciousness, of imagining worse. To find effective horror in fiction, I must uncover the unnatural in the ordinary, whatever that may be now, seek out the darkness in our hearts, and bring it all to the surface, into the light for examination and understanding. It’s also remembering that writing, like life, is about the journey, and not the destination. So set sail, fully aware, and enjoy the trip, wherever the sea takes you. It really does beat the alternative.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Terence Taylor (terencetaylor.com) is an award-winning children’s television writer whose work has appeared on PBS, Nickelodeon, and Disney, among many others. After years of comforting tiny tots with TV, he turned to scaring their parents. His first published short story, “Plaything”, appeared in Dark Dreams, the first horror/suspense anthology of African-American authors. He was included in the next two volumes, and his short stories and non-fiction have appeared in Lightspeed and Fantastic Stories of the Imagination. Terence is also author of the first two novels of his Vampire Testaments trilogy, Bite Marks and Blood Pressure. He is currently writing the conclusion, Past Life. Follow him on Twitter @vamptestaments. AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Author Spotlight: Usman Malik Wendy N. Wagner | 690 words

Let’s start with an easy question: How do you know so much about snakes?

When I was ten or eleven I read this series of children’s books in Urdu featuring a boy who travels with snake charmers and has a pet snake. He and his snake have many adventures. Subsequently I dreamed about becoming besties with a snake or two for years. I’ve been fascinated by them ever since. The Indian subcontinent, of course, has many myths about snakes who assume human shape after a hundred years. I wanted to write a story about that. The research and details naturally followed.

It sounds like this story took a long time to get from its inspiration to Nightmare. Can you tell us a little about how that happened?

Between April 2012 and December 2013 I was on fire in terms of creative output. Sometimes I wrote a story a week; most were junk and eventually trashed. However when I applied for a spot at the Clarion West Writers Workshop in end 2012. I specifically wrote nine to ten stories for my submission sample. An early draft of “Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung” was one of them. It was too long to be useful for workshop submission and I ended up putting it away for months, but eventually I returned to it in 2014 and after minor revisions began submitting it. I believe three or four markets turned it down which disheartened me, newish writer all, so I trunked it. For whatever reason, four years or so later I was about to go to turn in for the night when, suddenly, I remembered a scene from the story. I got up, pulled it up on the computer, and in a fit of inspiration, changed the title and began cleaning it up. Four hours later, at one or two in the morning, I was done and the story was submitted. This time the first market—Nightmare Magazine— picked it up. Funny how these things work.

This story does a tremendous job balancing the mythic—it really seems to draw on folklore—and thriller elements, like the heroinchie subculture. How did you decide to mash those together, and did you struggle to keep the two elements from overpowering each other?

I started with a character and a vague idea of the theme: a drug addict drawn into a mythic world. Everything else sort of came together. While the story took several rounds of cleaning, the central drivers and characters remained the same. I honestly don’t remember how the balance, if any, was achieved.

This story feels both very modern and yet somehow classical. In particular, to me the ending, with its apparent victory unhappily eroded by evil, has a definite Lovecraftian or Blackwoodian flavor. Did you set out to write something that fit that turn-of-the-century Weird vibe? Is that an era of horror that speaks to you?

I’m influenced by a lot of writers in how I write stories. I think it’s fair to say this story likely does borrow tools from the gaslamp era of macabre stories; yet I imagine most of the influence really is from subcontinental and Urdu literature rife with shapeshifting snakes and back alleys filled with drug addicts. Side note: I have always believed Blackwood to be vastly superior writer to HPL when it comes to generating unease and the feeling of otherworldly terror. He continues to be a vastly under-read and underappreciated writer.

Is there anything else you’d like to share about this story? Do you have anything coming out that we should be keeping watch for? I hope your readers like it. I’m especially interested in seeing the desi reaction to the story. Subcontinental readers will recognize many elements and hopefully enjoy the mishmash I’ve created here. Alas, I’m not the most prolific of writers and have nothing else coming out at the moment, but you never know. Perhaps next year I’ll write a line or two . . .

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Wendy N. Wagner is the author of the SF thriller An Oath of Dogs. Her other work includes two novels for the Pathfinder Tales series and more than forty short stories. She serves as the managing/associate editor of Lightspeed and Nightmare magazines. She is also the non-fiction editor of Women Destroy Science Fiction!, which was named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014, and the guest editor of Queers Destroy Horror! A gaming and gardening geek, she lives in Oregon with her very understanding family. MISCELLANY Coming Attractions The Editors | 121 words

Coming up in December, in Nightmare . . . We have original fiction from Adam-Troy Castro (“The Ten Things She Said While Dying (An Annotation)”) and Carrie Vaughn (“The Island of Beasts”), along with reprints by Gemma Files (“Nanny Grey”) and Stephen Graham Jones (“Universal Horror”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, and a review column from Adam-Troy Castro. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Nightmare. Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got new fiction on the way from Natalia Theodoridou, Rafeeat Aliyu, and Cadwell Turnbull. 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. Support Us on Patreon or Drip, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard The Editors

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

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

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

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

Thank You! If you’ve read this far, thanks so much. We hope you’ll consider becoming a backer on Patreon or Drip. Those URLs again are d.rip/john- joseph-adams and patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams. Thanks in advance for your time. We look forward to hopefully being able to make the magazines—and my other publishing endeavors—even better with the support of people like you.

About the Nightmare Team The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief John Joseph Adams

Managing/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 Christie Yant Assistant Editors Erika Holt Lisa Nohealani Morton

Reviewers Adam-Troy Castro Terence Taylor

Copy Editor Melissa V. Hofelich

Proofreader Devin Marcus

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

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

ANTHOLOGIES

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

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

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

Armored

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

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

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

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

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live Cosmic Powers

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)

A People’s Future of the United States (with Victor LaValle) [Feb. 2019]

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)

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn

Sand by Hugh Howey

Retrograde by Peter Cawdron

Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty

The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn

The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

Gather the Fortunes by Bryan L. Camp

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear

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