Cecil Baldwin the Geek’S Guide to the Galaxy

TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 24, September 2014

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, September 2014 John Joseph Adams

FICTION Singing with All My Skin and Bone Sunny Moraine Old Friends Charles L. Grant Animal Daniel José Older The Man in the Ditch Lisa Tuttle

NOVEL EXCERPTS It Waits Below Eric Red Buster Voodoo Mason James Cole

NONFICTION The H Word: Horror and Halloween Lesley Bannatyne Artist Gallery Sam Guay Artist Spotlight: Sam Guay Marina J. Lostetter Interview: Cecil Baldwin The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Sunny Moraine Charles L. Grant Daniel José Older Lisa Tuttle

MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Stay Connected Subscriptions & Ebooks About the Editor

Welcome to issue twenty-four of Nightmare! Good news, everyone: Lightspeed won a Hugo! The 2014 Hugo Awards were presented at Worldcon in London last month. Prior to this year, it’s been my great honor to have been nominated for six Hugo Awards for editing: three for Lightspeed in the Semiprozine category and three for myself personally in the Best Editor (Short Form) category. Up until now, both Lightspeed and myself had each been 0-3 in our respective categories. If you’re reading this editorial then you probably already know that this year both Lightspeed and I were again nominated in the two aforementioned categories. But now THE STREAK HAS BEEN BROKEN: Lightspeed won the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine! I immediately started a new losing streak by losing the Best Editor (Short Form) award to Ellen Datlow, but naturally I’m thrilled that Lightspeed took home the prize. And honestly if I’d had to choose which of the two categories I would win, I would definitely have chosen Lightspeed winning Best Semiprozine, so I’m not even a little bit sad. I wasn’t able to be in London for Worldcon this year to accept the award in person, but Lightspeed’s (and Nightmare’s!) Podcast Producer, Stefan Rudnicki, was there and accepted on behalf of the magazine. Thanks again so much to everyone who reads and who voted for Lightspeed, and to all of the authors and editors who have helped make it possible!

• • • •

In other happy news, Nightmare is now available as a subscription via Amazon.com! The Kindle Periodicals division has been closed to new magazines for quite a while now (and has been since before Nightmare launched), but by employing some witchcraft we were able to get the doors unlocked just long enough for us to slip into the castle. Amazon subscriptions are billed monthly, at $1.99 per issue, and are available now. Speaking of subscriptions, we’ve also made a change to the way our nightmare-magazine.com ebookstore subscriptions work. We’re discontinuing the bill-you-every-month subscription option in favor of a more traditional type of magazine subscription; now when you subscribe, you’ll sign up for a six ($11.94), twelve ($23.88), or twenty-four ($47.76) month subscription and then will only be billed once per subscription term. This change is going to make it a lot easier for us to process subscriptions and should help improve our cashflow, which of course we’ll use to make Nightmare even more awesome. If you’re a current subscriber, you don’t need to do anything; when your current subscription runs out, we’ll just send you an email to remind you to renew and then you’ll be presented with the new subscription options at that time. To learn more about these and our other subscription options, please visit nightmare-magazine.com/subscribe.

• • • •

In anthology news, the next installment of The Apocalypse Triptych—the apocalyptic anthology series I’m co-editing with Hugh Howey—is now available. The new volume, The End is Now, focuses on life during the apocalypse. The first volume, The End is Nigh (about life before the apocalypse) is on sale now. If you’d like a free preview of the anthology, pop over to Lightspeed and read Tananarive Due’s The End is Now story, “Herd Immunity.” For more information, visit johnjosephadams.com/apocalypse- triptych.

• • • •

With our announcements out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month: We have original fiction from Sunny Moraine (“Singing with All My Skin and Bone”) and Daniel José Older (“Animal”). For reprints, we have work from Charles Grant (“Old Friends”) and Lisa Tuttle (“The Man in the Ditch”). In the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” Lesley Bannatyne will be examining the history of horror and horror’s favorite holiday, Halloween. We’ve also got author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview with Welcome to Night Vale’s Cecil Baldwin. That’s about all I have for you this month. Thanks for reading!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Nightmare, is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. New projects coming out in 2014 and 2015 include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Operation Arcana, Wastelands 2, 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 winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated eight times) and is a six-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 Singing with All My Skin and Bone Sunny Moraine

I’m telling you this so you know: I don’t remember when I started eating myself. You should remember something like that. It should be a moment, one of those that you carry around forever, a line that you cut across your life to mark before, when everything was one way, and after, when everything was different. I don’t remember discovering it like a secret formula or an equation that explained the universe. I don’t remember discovering it at all. I’m not sure it was discovery. I think maybe it was something that grew, that asserted itself, learning without meaning to learn, like walking or speech. You’re made of things you can take to pieces, and those pieces can be eaten. The truth is that you’re made of meat. I do remember what I did with it. When I realized there was something to be done. I remember that very well. There’s a world with someone in it, and a world without them. If it happens right in front of you, that’s sort of hard to miss. I carry these things around with me. I’ve been trying to say them for years, so if you don’t mind. There are all kinds of things you don’t hear.

• • • •

What you need to understand is that this kind of magic persists because it works. It doesn’t work in large ways, in obvious ways; it’s not showy and it’s not out to impress anyone. This kind of magic is like a path through the night or tunnels beneath an occupied city, supply lines for resistance and the movement of agents. This kind of magic is the slender, fragile reclamation of power. When it’s done right no one notices it’s there. I’ve gotten very good at hiding it. But I was very clumsy, then, and even if it worked people saw too much of it, and that blunted its power. It takes years of practice to know just how to destroy yourself. Just how much to pick away. Just how much to gnaw off. Just how much to cut. What you need to understand is that I can’t change anything. I couldn’t protect myself then and I can’t now. What you need to understand is that this has never been about anything but the sheer pleasure of survival.

• • • •

Here’s what might have been the moment. It could have been any way, any time, somewhere between the number five and the number nine; it could have happened like this. There’s a healing scratch; the unevenness of it is pleasant, and the realization that fingernails slide so very neatly under its surface. It takes almost nothing to pull it away, and the blood wells up like liquid garnets, and it’s so pretty, and there’s something that washes over you then like slipping into a warm bath, and your breath comes easier, and you sag against everything. And it comes to you that there’s power in this, because just as you slip down, you slip sideways, and you see things you didn’t see before. There are bones under the world, and now they’re in front of you, and they rattle and dance. Grasses are deep jungles, streams are mighty rivers, here is the broken ground by a creek, and it’s a massive gorge through which that river flows. Everything small is abruptly enormous and dramatic, and you can lose yourself in it. The sky flips sideways. Gods lurk in the branches and concrete and in all the machines, and polished stones whisper stories from when their melted hearts cooled, and they tell you everything they learned from their shaping rivers. You see everything that might be. You see the filthy, churning story factories. You see the eyes in the storm drains. Fuck your city-beneath- the-city bullshit, your vampire private detectives and your werewolves tending bar, because I’ve seen it. You dig and dig, and suddenly there’s a hole in you through which your spirit pours. You eat of your own flesh and drink of your own blood, and it’s the deepest kind of communion. And if they see you, they wait after school until you’re ten minutes from home, and they pelt you with stones. What you’ve found can’t protect you. But it seems like it just might be worth it. • • • •

So there was that day when he followed me home from school, backed me into a corner of the afternoon, using his chest like a battering ram pulled back and ready to break through. Put yourself here. See. It’s amazing how everyone just disappears at moments like that. Crowded neighborhood full of kids headed toward home, but then the part of space you occupy is sealed off and it’s just you and him, and you’re bargaining, begging, dragging down the sleeves of your shirt, remembering that he came after you on the playground and feigned a kick to make you flinch, that he laughed and leered in your face, that you looked up at him and thought about the scabs on you like dinosaur scales. You thought about peeling it all away and revealing claws and pebbled lizard skin, and you thought about tearing his belly open with your toes and spilling his guts on the blacktop and screaming at the overcast sky while everyone else took their turn to run and the useless lunch monitors vomited against the wall of the gym. Just a note: That was a spell that never worked. I did try. Don’t think for a second that I didn’t try. Even magic spun from torn flesh has its limits. You make bargains in moments like that. I think we’ve all been there. For weeks, trying a variety of ways home, creeping along like a deer heading for water, ears and tail pricked. Never the same way two days in a row, but he found me, and I didn’t understand exactly why it was so terrifying, being alone and small in that blocked-off space with him, but I offered him secrets. Never mind what they were. Secrets are powerful. That’s one thing I’m sure as hell not telling you. He wasn’t the only one, the first or the last, and when I talk about him I’m talking about them all, some of whom I remember and many of whom I’ve forgotten, but I’ve never forgotten what he said. That’s not enough.

• • • •

Let’s leave him for a moment. Let’s take some inventory. Match-heads work well. Just blow them out, press them against the inside of your arm—it’s exquisite, though you don’t get the satisfaction of feeding on the burns until after they’ve scabbed over. There’s a pulse in the world, and you can watch it spread outward from those red, glowing spots, encasing you in a translucent shell. It never lasts, but it’s better than nothing. Unfolded paperclips work wonderfully, more slowly; the face of a wound parts like a smile and drools blood and clear plasma, and in that world that only you can see it steams like incense offered to a god. Gods respond to that kind of offering, and they gather silks and beautifully dyed wool around your heart. Clippers for nails, cuticles—these are delicate tools, a little too delicate and also a little too easy, because no magic ever comes without effort. They can make openings, beginnings, but then other things have to take over. No needles or knives. They are too sharp, too clean. The best tools for this kind of work have edges that are ever-so-slightly blunted, that require commitment to use. Of course, fingernails are the best. They’re always the best, ever-present and reliable, the claws I was born with even if they aren’t the claws I wanted. I’m telling you this so you know, but I’m not expecting you to be able to use this information. I can reach through this membrane and touch you, but I don’t think you can really touch me. These are only scars to you, and all you ever saw was a strange little child who walked like a ghost through the world, looking for something without having the slightest idea what it was. More and less real both at once by virtue of spilled blood. Ghosts don’t bleed. I do.

• • • •

They used to burn witches, didn’t they?

• • • •

There’s something about skin, something supernatural. Not to say that it’s magical or ghostly—though it is both of those things—or that it contains a power in and of itself, and that power magnifies when removed from a body —though it does. Skin is supernatural in that it connects, like a thin tendon, to everything part of but also above the natural. Skin is cells, hair, sweat, the potential of blood. Skin is sensation, an experience of what is. Skin is a lightning-spark network of a sensory organ, explicable and yet not at all. Remove skin and see what’s beneath. See how it all fits together. Understand the structure of something when that structure breaks down, and follow its slashing power lines to their source. I spun my first magic from the stuff of what I was, torn away because I could spare it. But I began because, like all of us, I had something I was trying to get away from. Then I found other reasons.

• • • •

Let me tell you what I wish I could have said, when they saw the blood and the pits in my flesh and tried to get me to stop, because everyone knows little kids shouldn’t do this shit to themselves. Let me tell you that when you discover a direct line into the fabric of the universe, it’s very difficult to just leave that alone. Let me tell you what it’s like to wear every mark like a secret ornament that only you find lovely, and to hate them at the same time because of what they’ll mean to everyone else, so you hide them as best you can with long sleeves and shadows, but they always see in the end. Let me tell you what it’s like to make blood magic, real magic, because packed under your fingernails the world loses its power to hurt you anymore. Let me tell you what it’s like to run pain through a complex refinement process that makes it chocolate and warm sheets and dappled summer sunlight. Let me tell you what it’s like to select your instruments of sorcery according to their sharpness and keen edges. Let me tell you what it’s like to be a witch in junior high school. Let me tell you. Shut up and let me talk.

• • • •

I wish I could get this into words. None of them are coming out quite right. I want to tell you what it’s like to have magic in your skin. Sit down beside me and let me illuminate all my scars, let me tell you all my many early names. No, they weren’t bestowed like honorable titles, and they hurt worse than the actual wounds, but they dug into me just like everything else, and I have them still. Not all scars are the kinds you can see. Not all scars are beautiful. A changing body is a dangerous thing; a body that can be changed is more dangerous still. All these little bodies, all this potential, and imagine if they all found out how to take hold of it all at once. Every single beaten-down body, rising in angry flames. God, we would have been terrifying. Can you imagine? Can you just imagine that? There’s a reason why we send children off to war.

• • • •

Here’s one for the spell books: the potential of blood is sometimes more powerful than its presence. It’s a fine line, drawn between intention and desire, but it’s there if you know how to look. If you know how to walk along it, careful not to tip one way or the other. That moment before the capillaries rupture, before the pale flush of the fighter cells and the stacking of the platelets. Then there is a cycle of rebuilding, destruction, and rebuilding again. Bodies are very persistent. They don’t take no for an answer. If you can grab hold of that, it’s like getting a tiger by the tail and teaching it to bring you the hearts of tender lambs.

• • • •

That’s not enough. Okay, motherfucker, I’m enough. You know what? I’m enough. I’m the baddest bitch around, there’s razorwire in my blood, I can clap my hands and summon an army of ravenous corpses from the cracks in the pavement, I can throw my tennis shoes over the telephone wires and turn them into a murder of hungry crows. I can spread my hands and break the world open, release one hundred thousand-eyed seraphs to see your soul to ruins. I have a wolf’s bite; I have a pack at my heels. My mothers were harpies and furies, my sisters were the Morrigan, my daughter will be fucking Kali. My grandmothers burned but saw me to birth in centuries of ash, and it doesn’t matter that I always run away, and it doesn’t matter that I’m trying to drive a devil’s bargain with a grunting, sweating fifth grader, and it doesn’t matter that you made me cry all those times before, because you think I’m not enough? You piece of shit? I can roll up my sleeves and tear off my skin and make you fucking cease to exist. That could have happened. It could have. I’m telling you this so you know.

• • • •

What I won’t tell you is whether or not they ever found him. I won’t tell you if it happened all at once or little by little, slowly enough for him to scream as he lost his limbs, his heart, his tongue. I won’t tell you whether I cried at what was happening or just watched, impassive, or whether I laughed and clapped my hands. I certainly won’t tell you whether or not I ran away. I certainly won’t tell you if I bargained in the end. I won’t tell you if it all failed, if I can only look back and rage, if I’m just lying to myself even now and all I have left is stories and those lies and where my feet could take me. We’re always making bargains, is the thing. We forget them, but they happen. Secrets for life. Flesh for power. Blood for knowing. No one had to teach me these things. I learned them from being in the world. But even if you don’t ask for something like that, it has a price.

• • • •

I don’t curse crops. I don’t cause children to be born sickly or deformed. I don’t bring plagues of rats. I’ve never stolen the breath of a baby while it slept. I can’t travel in chill night winds. I can’t give you a potion to catch the heart of your true love. I can’t read the stars, and I have no idea what’s going to happen next. There are all kinds of things I can’t do. I count my marks and take stock of my little magic, my flesh-and-blood magic, and I think I only have so much of both to give. And I’ve given a lot to get this far. But I’m still here. And I’m telling you this so you know.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sunny Moraine's short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed and Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, among other places. They are also responsible for the novels Line and Orbit (cowritten with Lisa Soem) and the Casting the Bones trilogy, as well as A Brief History of the Future: collected essays. In addition to authoring, Sunny is a doctoral candidate in sociology and a sometimes college instructor; that last may or may not have been a good move on the part of their department. They unfortunately live just outside Washington DC in a creepy house with two cats and a very long-suffering husband.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight. Old Friends Charles L. Grant

David told himself there was nothing to be afraid of, nothing at all. It was, of course, only the delicious sense of anticipation he was feeling and not the fear that he could be mistaken. No. After all these years, all that pain, all that twisting of what he thought he knew . . . mistaken. No. No, it wasn’t that at all. He was not afraid. He knew he wasn’t. And yet, in spite of what he knew, he vacillated between the very real danger of disobeying his mother and running inside, now, away from the sun. Crazy, he thought. God, if I’m wrong, I’m crazy. But are you really crazy if you think you’re crazy? He grinned broadly, almost laughing aloud, realizing that he sounded like any one of a hundred different characters on a hundred different channels at two o’clock in the morning. Am I really nuts, Doc? I can take it. Let me have it straight. This time he did laugh, shaking his head slowly at his own dark whimsy. Nevertheless, the thought remained. And he sighed at the unfairness of it all. Of a life fully nineteen years long that not once moved from a place called Oxrun Station; of a search that could have ended years before if only he had had the wit, the brains, the pure and simple imagination to pursue it; of a girl like all girls and unlike any other he would have to leave behind. If, that is, he was not crazy. Vagrant spears of melancholy light pierced the heavy November overcast and repulsed him, convinced him completely that he was physically agonized. Obsidian eyes squinted, fighting the dim glow that seemed determined to sear from what remained of his soul the memories of shadow—delightful shadow, enticing shadow, shadow that writhed away from the sun, silently screaming. He glared at the sky and despised the way that sun, in behind a gray veil, disregarded his pale, almost ivory skin, reddening it, puckering it, sloughing it off like a leprous serpent and twisting it into a mocking dark brown. He shrank from the light as often as he could, as best he could. But there were his instructions. And to get what he wanted—after all these years, all this pain—to get what he wanted now, he had to endure. Another glance heavenward, and he decided to be grateful for the clouds, whispering a brief and undirected prayer for the added comfort of a light and steady rain. That, however, was icing on the cake. He had his instructions, and he was determined to obey them. And to wait. The time had come. He believed it now; he knew it. The time had come indeed, and there would be no more thwarting the reunion with his friends. Stoically resigned then, he covered as much of himself, of his very long and very thin frame, as he could and huddled by the door on the front porch. He shaded his eyes with a palm when there were no shadows to protect him and grimaced at the occasional brightness of that Saturday afternoon. While he waited he told himself repeatedly—in a liturgical monotone very much like a chant—that it was and it would be worth the small pains, the pricks, the tiny slashes. His mother had been in a remarkably fine mood for some days now, and he did not want her to lose it just when he was drawing so tantalizingly near. “I won’t be very long, dear,” she had told him that morning before driving away. “I’m only going down to Centre Street to do a little shopping. You just be a good boy and keep an eye on the house while I’m gone. All right, dear?” She had smiled her beautiful snake smile, then, and added, “It’s been quite a while, hasn’t it, Davey?” He knew that. She did not have to make such a poisonous point of reminding him. But he was pleased that she had because it meant he would probably be able to get it down that night. Or, though he dared not think about it, sooner. She had kissed his forehead, patted his cheek, and he had squirmed with impatience to see her leave so she might return. She had laughed then, like a jackal, and he had pretended to grin. And if she knew he was hating her, she never said a word. So he waited on the porch that faced Chancellor Avenue and allowed himself to daydream a little, plan a little, until he finally relaxed and let the day die around him. He did not mind the damp wooden flooring that was so long unpainted the neighbors were whispering (and a few of them outright complaining), nor the splinters that now and then found their way through his black trousers into his calves and thighs. The small jabs, the momentary stings, were nothing, nothing at all . . . and he concentrated on looking, and listening, and once in a while smiling a death’s-head grin. Ah, Mother, he thought, I can’t wait for you to meet all my old friends. He stifled a short laugh with his fingers, blinked, squinted, and decided that today it was beautiful in the place they called the Station. There was autumn grass slowly browning under brightly dying leaves; the brittle cold air that seemed to make the pavement crisp under the feet of the passers-by who were hurrying to the college’s stadium where the high school games were played; the languid haze of burning piles of leaves; a ragged cloud of starlings that swooped silently toward the scent of popcorn and candy; the clouds. David half-smiled and answered the waves from the cars that sped past with bicolored pompons swinging in time to riders’ cheers and the off-the- beat blasts of horns and whistles. He found the nerve, the quiet and timid nerve, to nod when the principal walked by with his young podgy wife; and he grinned when a covey of girls giggled loudly as they closed ranks against the swaggering pride of boys who followed. A few of them called to him, and he called back, and they disappeared around his neighbor’s hedge without stopping. He was not disappointed. They never stopped. In school it was because of the load of books he carried; downtown it was because of the way he kept close to the buildings; and today it was football. He could smell it, taste it, feel it in the dull yellow leaf he crushed absently in his hand. And regret. It was the season’s last game, and he had to watch the house. The one cloudy Saturday afternoon of the entire season, practically of the entire year, and his mother had told him he had better watch the house. But as soon as bile rose angrily to his throat, he swallowed it with a stern reminder that it had been his choice, after all. He could have easily drifted off to the game with the rest of them and, after a fashion, perhaps even enjoyed himself. It would have been nice. The last game. But in the light—he grinned—of his mother’s unspoken promise and the gathering at last of the nerve and the knowledge, the regret became an unimportant thing. A little thing. Inconsequential. He soon ignored it, and soon it passed. Hate was much better, and the distant scent of power. He shifted, feeling the onset of a cramp in his left foot. He knew he was growing anxious. The afternoon’s voice had faded into the restless rustling of the few last leaves. The shadow of the old house—that might have been called a Victorian had it held a sense of history—the shadow stretched to merge with the trees and the shrubs. The temperature fell. He shivered then and decided to take a short walk to kill the time moving now in a slow-motion race toward a gray and bleak sunset. He stretched carefully to relieve the stiffness that had settled in his arms and legs, bent at the waist to loosen his back. Then he vaulted the railing, wishing Claire had walked by to see him sailing. The ground was damp and pillow-soft; he leaned over to see if it were really as black as he imagined. It was. He smiled. He moved deliberately, with small measured steps, staring up at each window, envisioning each room huddling beyond, all of them unchanged and most of them unused for as long as he could remember. A late-leaving sparrow was playing in a rusted, canted gutter, knocking frail twigs and clumps of dirt over the side. David ducked away from one of the harmless bombs and laughed. Little bird, he thought, would you come with me if you knew? Probably not. Birds don’t have emotions, and especially they don’t hate. Halfway to the back he stopped involuntarily at one window heavily curtained and streaked with an accumulation of dust-turned-grime. The top half was covered by a screen that was torn and laced with debris the wind had thrown. It was his father’s study. He closed his eyes for a moment to search for a reminder of the time when the family was three, but nothing came to him, not even a voice. He shrugged the effort away. It wasn’t important enough to worry about. For all he knew, the man was little more than a bedtime myth. Or he might be dead. Or he might have run away when he had gotten to know his wife. Or he might be locked in a padded room. Or he might be dead. Might be . . . David shrugged again. Somewhere down the street a telephone shrilled and a woman shouted shrilly. In the backyard he spotted the dull green throw rug from his mother’s sitting room draped limply over the clothesline. It made him think of spring, of grass, of trees . . . of the sun. He stepped up to it and reached out timidly to stroke the worn tasseled fringe. “Hello, Mother,” he whispered. The rug hung there until a sudden gust of rain-promising wind shoved it firmly against him. He stumbled back with one arm upraised. “Hey, Mother,” he said, less softly. Then he turned away quickly before the rug could move again, and as he passed the plants in the garden he was not allowed to touch, he muttered, “Wait, Mother. Wait.” And he thought about the plan, and was cheered. Thought about his old friends, and smiled. Twice, then, and three times he circled the house; twice and three times he huddled on the porch, taking all the comfort he could from the shadows, trying to crouch away from the rising wind’s rush as it hummed through the railing and dragged dark clouds closer. Up again, and this time he stopped in front of the slanting, double cellar doors with the rusted combination lock forced through the latch. His hands were bunched in his pockets, his shoulders stooped. Playmate, he thought, come out and play with me. His hair fell blackly against his face and scattered, alternately blinding him and freeing his vision while he worked at a game:

a little boy inside there, down there in the dark, pale and raven-haired, breaking a fruit juice glass, spilling his ration of milk over a shabby kitchen tablecloth. Often. Too often. A flurry of cloths from the scratched and stained porcelain sink, or an artificial sponge from the cabinet beneath. A storm of yelling, shrieking, commandments to be damned, and his mother who said she loved him would grab his shoulders with strong lovely hands that gripped like talons and squeezed for blood . . . strong lovely hands that would lead him and push him and shove him and guide him to the stairs that led into the empty coal bin, barren woodpile, grumbling furnace, damp concrete cellar floor. He would stumble down the steps through his I’m- sorry-I’m-sorry tears, and her words, and the door, would slam shut and lock solidly behind him. always. for as long as he could remember. for as long as memory would allow him to go back. home late from his first real date alone with a girl and the smear of lipstick on his chin. the shrieking and the commandments and the cellar door locked solidly behind him. always; for as long as he could remember. longer. little Davey would scream . . . while darkness would entrap him in a thick barless cage and blind him; Davey would whimper . . . while the darkness would blacken to blot out the thin crack of kitchen-light that escaped to outline the door and hide the rickety rotting stairs and the coal bin and the woodpile and the shovels and the brooms and the empty preserve jars and the musty cartons and the cyclopean glow of the grumbling furnace fire; David would weep in frustration and rage . . . and the darkness would blacken . . .

. . . and everywhere he went there would be light so bright it would shame the summer sun. “Imagine that,” he whispered to the double doors, with a memory smile as wide as his face. “Imagine me acting like that.” “Acting like what?” He spun around, terrified, excuses tumbling over themselves to his lips until he collided with the girl who had crept up behind him. She stood with her arms folded loosely over her chest, her face partially hidden in a billowing golden fur collar. He laughed easily, relievedly, and shook his head slowly. “Just remembering some times I had when I was a kid, Claire. That’s all. It really wasn’t very important.” “When you were a kid, huh?” she said, grinning. “You that close to retiring, old man?” They stared at each other without awkwardness, without shifting their feet, without clearing their throats. Then they walked to the front without speaking. As they did, David watched her from the corner of his eye—and the hint of soft rose at her high cheeks, the growing pink at the tip of her stubby nose, made him doubt for the first time the wish behind the plan. He stood silently, facing the sidewalk, while she sat on the bottom porch step and hugged her knees, watching him measure the crawl of the hedge’s shadow into the deserted street. There was the scent of rain in the air. Would it be the same, he wondered; would Claire be the same if she . . . would she be the same? When he had been fourteen and she was living across the street in the English Tudor with the leaded bow window, he had trusted her so much that he’d confided in her what he now understood was an extraordinarily abnormal fear of the dark. He gave her none of the reasons; he just told her it was the dark. She had listened intently, and she had laughed—not at him, however, and that was why he had permitted himself to love her. “My father,” she had said, “used to tell me—nuts, he still does—but he told me that I had to study and understand and then be kind of like a friend to whatever it was I was afraid of. You know, like snakes and spiders and big dogs and things like that. If you know what they are and how they work and what they can do, you can get rid of . . . well, whatever it was that made you afraid in the first place. Except I still hate spiders.” She had shuddered, then frowned. “Did that make any sense, Davey?” He had laughed, too, but he had not forgotten. He spent a long time thinking about what she had said and about the cellar doors and what lay down there, and the next night he deliberately smashed a plate while washing the supper dishes—and it was bad in the dark, so bad he used Claire’s name as the worst obscenity he knew. Two nights later, while his mother was watching him from her place at the table, smiling her smile and filing her nails, he broke another—again it was bad, but the screaming was gone. He hefted a rock, waited, and tossed it through the living-room window— the crying dried to sobs. The fourth time—a jam jar, grape, whose stains were still on the floor— was an accident—but now he understood, and now he knew his friends. Claire, he had discovered, only knew part of the answer. “Davey?” Thank you, Claire, he had said each time he greeted the cellar and its masque. She called him Ghost because of his skin; he called her Spot because of her freckles. “Davey!” But would it be the same? “Well, damnit, if you’re not going to talk to me, David Sinclair Hancock, maybe I’ll just go on home and wait for Eddie Price to call. At least he has a civil tongue.” She had moved to stand directly in front of him, was glaring into his unseeing eyes. He blinked when he saw her, and shrugged an apology. “Daydreaming again,” he muttered, and slid an arm around her waist. She tensed—just to show him that she could not be bought—but let him pull her close enough for him to kiss her forehead. “When’ll you pick me up?” “Seven-thirty,” he answered without thinking. “I probably can get the car tonight. I don’t know for sure. Probably.” “Well, I’ll be damned and this ain’t hell,” she said, slapping his shoulder. “The man gets his prize for being so persistent. A girl does get tired of walking all the time, you know. And don’t you think I’m so terribly delicate? Don’t you think so, Davey? Don’t you think I’m ever so delicate?” She pressed into his embrace, and he forced his laugh to merge with hers. The sun was almost down, and he was growing nervous. When she poked his ribs, hard, he laughed again and squeezed. “You know,” she said then, slowly, as if she were not at all sure she should be speaking, “I’m really surprised your mother’s letting you out like this. It’s weird sometimes, Davey. The way she keeps hold of you . . .” She shook her head. “You ever take that Psych course with Bromley? You should, you know. I’ll bet he’d be able to—” The explosive roar of a racing engine broke them apart, but not, he knew, before his mother had seen them. She slid gracefully out from behind the wheel, a large bag of groceries cradled in one arm. She was tall and blonde and warmly lovely, and David’s eyes hardened when he saw her smile. Snakelike. Luring. Claire muttered something under her breath and was already across the lawn and on the sidewalk before his mother reached the porch. “Interesting,” she purred as she waited for him to hurry ahead and open the door. “You must come inside and tell me all about it, dear.” She was dressed in black, David’s favorite color. “You will tell me about her, won’t you, Davey?” He did. Sitting at the kitchen table, his hands moist and pulling nervously at the bottom of his sweater, he recited a detailed account of his passing of the afternoon. He said nothing about missing the last game of the season, however, and nothing about the rug. He tried to keep sight of her eyes, to read them, to anticipate them, but she only smiled and murmured “how nice” every few minutes. Only once did she frown—when he mentioned the temptation to leave the house and wander toward the football stadium. But the moment passed, and all he could do now was wait. They dined, and the sun went down. In the corners of the room warmed by the oven, the shadows hovered and shrank away from the light. The clouds shredded and vanished. The stars rose on the train of the moon. The refrigerator hummed, slightly out of tune. The clouds returned. The rain returned. A single bulb hung unshaded over the table, and the shadows were warm and loving on David’s stiff back. Finally, when he thought he was going to have to beg her like a child, his mother rose and stood by the cellar door, a large iron key resting in her palm. He licked at his lips in spite of himself and gripped the edge of the table as tightly as he could to prevent himself from lunging. Rain pelted the windows. He did not hear it. Claire, he thought, would you come if you knew? “Well, now, Davey.” The voice was soft, sleek, deceptively gentle. “Well, do you think you’ve done well enough these past few days to deserve it, dear?” He felt himself nodding as though in a trance. “I wonder,” she said then, “if we might truthfully call this an addiction. You know, dear, like drugs and things.” She pursed her lips, considered, rejected with a toss of her hair. “Oh, well, no matter. Come on, Davey, do you deserve it?” He swallowed. “Yes, Mother.” His voice was years away, to the first time she had discovered he liked the darkness, preferred it. Her laugh, then, and the snake’s glint in her eyes. There was a silence. Only the rain. Finally she nodded her agreement and opened the door. “Davey?” He rose, and for a long moment dared not release the table. When he did, he moved quickly, brushing past her and taking the first step down, waiting in terror for her to summon him back the way she did when he appeared too anxious, eager, desperate, laughing at him with her eyes closed and the key catching the light, and warning him that he would never escape her as the dream-father had done. He glanced up at her and was delighted to see her look startled when he grinned suddenly, broadly, completely without mirth. “Good-bye, Mother,” he said calmly, and he yanked the door from her hand and slammed it shut. The furnace was out. Below him there was . . . nothing. He made his way down and stood in the center of the floor, perspiration gathering in ice-runs along his spine, his sides, the inner sweep of his thighs. For so very long he had waited, prayed, planned, and dreamed—and now, suddenly, he wondered. Crazy. If I’m wrong, I’m crazy. And if I’m right ...... no more football or sleigh rides or holding hands; no more gropings on the porch or the urgings of his loins; no more Oxrun; no more tests to fail because he would rather talk to the dark than read a book; no more sunlight; no more . . . Crazy. Unless . . . Slowly, not quite fearfully, he stripped off his clothes and shivered in the clammy sheath that rose through him from the soles of his feet. No more teachers who yelled . . . He swallowed. He listened. And when he finally understood that he wasn’t crazy after all, that he knew he really knew and it wasn’t so bad not to be crazy . . . when he understood it and believed it, he lifted his arms wide to feel the warming black air, smiling, loosening every muscle and nerve and cell and thought and dream and prayer and sight and scream; he believed, and he believed and felt himself drifting, sailing, floating . . . felt himself grow and shrink and lift and swirl. No . . . more . . . Mother. And in time, in a very long time that was no time at all, he learned at last how the shadows in attics and cellars and dark empty closets were born and survived. He studied his clothes lying in a pile on the damp concrete floor. He learned the difference between a nightmare and a wish, a death and a dying, November gray and December black. He learned that his old friends were true friends indeed. He learned that Claire, despite her teaching, was no friend at all. So . . . he waited. And in time, in a very long time that was no time at all, the door at the top of the stairs opened. The light still burned in the kitchen, and he saw from every dark angle the dark figure at the threshold. “Davey?” A snake-word. He felt himself smiling, and wondered if he could. “Davey, that little girl is here to see you.” The voice was clear, was light, was diamond hard and serpent hissing. “She says you were supposed to pick her up this evening.” A breath. “You didn’t tell me about that, Davey.” A sigh. “You’ll have to come out now, dear.” She waited. “Come out, David, you have a visitor.” Claire, he thought then, it’ll only take a minute. “David!” His mother hesitated a moment longer before following her elongated shadow down the stairs, paused before leaving the path of dim light and hurrying toward the furnace at the far side of the room. Her heels struck the floor like the burr of a rattler. “Hey, Davey,” Claire whispered from the kitchen. “David, you can come out now, dear,” his mother said sweetly. “We’ve had quite enough of your games, your little friend and I.” No friend at all. The silence. Not even the rain. “Hello . . . Mother.” She spun around just in time to see the darkness gather to blacken the light and bury the stairs. “David?” To swallow the coal bin, the woodpile, the furnace, the door. “David?” “Good-bye . . . Mother.” Her scream was cut off before it reached her blackening lips; her eyes were closed before she dissolved. A pause. A . . . breathing. “Davey?” Claire called from the head of the stairs. “Davey, it’s spooky down there. Mrs. Hancock? Davey? Come up here, please, Davey? Please?” She knew, he thought, and there was always the chance that she might remember. The darkness moved, and the kitchen light died. A whisper: “Davey?” A smile: “Hello, Claire.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Charles Grant (1942-2006) was the author of numerous novels and short stories, both under his own name and a variety of pseudonyms. During his career, he appeared frequently on awards lists as a nominee and won a number of awards, including multiple turns as a winner of the Nebula, the World Fantasy Award, and the Bram Stoker Award. He also edited over twenty anthologies, including the long-running Shadows series, which in 1979 won the World Fantasy Award for best anthology. His website can be found at charlesgrant.novelhost.net. To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight. Animal Daniel José Older

Here’s everything that happened just before the thud in the basement: Kendra took a snort of blow off the counter and said: “Did you guys know that pet store workers have the highest rate of drug use in the retail industry?” “That’s such a load of horseshit,” Telly said. Kendra leaned all the way back, blinking a thousand times a second, mouth open. Telly and I just watched; she looked like a bear rearing up to full height. Would she sneeze? Eat us? It was anyone’s guess. “No pun,” she said when she was done blinking. “No pun,” Telly agreed. “But if it was, it’d be a double-pun, which gives you extra points. You want some, George?” “George doesn’t snort,” Kendra said. “She smokes.” Telly raised an eyebrow at me. I nodded, pulled a joint out of the cigarette case in my inside pocket of my denim jacket, smiled. Telly flicked his lighter about fifteen times in front of my face before it lit. “Slick,” Kendra snorted. “Shut it.” I inhaled, released. Telly put his face on the counter, pulled deep. “Time you in tomorrow?” Kendra asked. “I’m not,” I said. “Megaplex?” “Ayche-oh-dee.” I let out a smoke ring with each letter and I won’t lie, I felt pretty cool. I have these huge glasses I wear, grandma glasses some hipster boy called them one time. I think he was flirting with me. But they really were my abuela’s and my uncle still had them cuz he doesn’t throw anything out, and I’m like bat-blind, so I found them floating around the general debris of the house and I kept them. “Indeed,” Kendra said. H.O.D. stands for House of Death, this video game Kendra and I take turns whupping the fellas at. We’ve beaten all eighteen levels and recently started playing with various handicaps to make it more interesting: one handed, eyes opened and closed for alternating five second intervals, that kinda shit. Mostly we do it to irritate the guys even more because how dare we, girls, defeat them with such ease on their own turf, right? Right. And besides: Zombie blasting. Fucking yes. “What’s H.O.D?” Telly asked when he came back from staring at nothing for a few seconds. “Mind your business,” Kendra said. “Shut up, Martha.” Martha Gainsborough is a six-hundred pound white lady that lives in a shack on the edge of Drapeston. Kendra’s white and she’s pretty large, but nowhere near Martha large. Kendra’s tall and has a smallish head; she was a bowling pin one year for Halloween and . . . it worked out pretty well. “You shut up, Charlie fucking Chan.” “Charlie Chan was Chinese, I’m Vietnamese, fuckmonster. And George is Vietnamese too, so you’re outnumbered.” “I’m Mexican,” I said and punctuated it with a curt, “jackass.” “Then why isn’t your name Jorge? Anyway, you look Vietnamese.” The thud comes as Kendra is reaching across the counter to swat Telly. I don’t even know why she was hitting him, she just doesn’t like when people say shit to me, even if it’s not all that bad. I do kinda look Vietnamese, I guess. Whatever that means. The thud is so loud we all flinch. Kendra stops, swathand a few inches from Telly’s arm. The next thing that happens is all the birds go bonkers, squawking and carrying on. Kendra and I look at each other. Telly says, “What the fuck was that?” The birds get all quiet, which is almost weirder than them going batshit in the first place. Not a peep. “Is Bravefart still here?” I ask. Brad Fruevart owns Pet City. He’s a dickhole, but basically harmless. Kendra shakes her head. “Hasn’t been in all day. I think Mrs. Bravefart is supposed to drop Baby Bravefart today; he’s probably at Memorial South with her.” “Well then I repeat, what the fuck was that?” Telly sounds really and truly scared, which surprises me. Maybe it’s the blow. He’s not usually such a spaz. I admit the thud startled me, but c’mon. It’s a pet store. We’re in Drapeston, Connecticut; our chief export is dickholes like Bravefart and the biggest mess to happen to us happened three towns over and eight years ago, and it was a murder-suicide. Yawn. “Go find out,” I say, punching Telly in the shoulder. Kendra pours out another little mountain of blow and starts organizing it into a line. “Yeah, man, go find out.” “You’re the shift supervisor, you go.” Kendra shakes her head, leans over the blow with the bill. “That’s not how it works. I’m the shift-supervisor ergo therefore, I supervise shit, including you. Now go the fuck downstairs and find the fuck out what the fuck happened. ‘kay? Consider yourself supervised.” She snorts hard, too hard I think for a second as her eyes disappear back into her head and she slow-mo rears back, hands spread to either side. Strands of her blonde hair shimmer in the fading afternoon light, wavering gracefully like seaweed or tiny underwater ballerinas, and then I remember I’m pretty high myself. “And don’t forget to check the safe,” Kendra says. “What’s the combo, boss-lady?” “By check I mean make sure it’s locked. That’s it.” “Fine.” Telly pauses at the doorway to the basement. “But I get blowjobs when I get back.” I spit out an ice-cube I’d been chewing on. “I’ll wake up the guinea pigs.” “Fuck y’all.” And then he’s gone.

• • • •

It’s not that I hate the town of Drapeston itself; I just hate the people in it. Hate is a strong word, I know. I’m cool with that. There’s a few people I don’t hate: Kendra. A couple of the other Poblanos on my block are cool— Mario, Raymundo and Hector—or at least not quite hate-worthy. My tío Jesus is bearable, but only barely, he almost never speaks, got all fucked up during the dirty wars, tortured I heard. And Telly is just all right. There was a solid year of my life when I wanted to die. My body’s never really felt like it belonged to me—I’m not graceful or smooth; it doesn’t do what I tell it to—but suddenly it felt like someone else’s entirely. An invisible chain sagged my shoulders; my gaze always found the floor and stayed there. Whenever I was alone in my room, which was pretty close to whenever I wasn’t here at fuckass Pet City or fuckass Drapeston High, it was like a man made entirely of emptiness was sitting on my bed beside me. And he was hungry and I was food, and no matter what I did, no matter what music I listened to, he wanted to consume me, become me, envelop me in that shroud of emptiness. And I wanted it too, I wanted it like a lung wants air when you hold your breath for too long and the world becomes a hazy, headachey mess of blue and gray. I tried once, one of the half-assed attempts that guidance counselors and ER doctors call a cry for help—took a bunch of pills in the house and came out with a wicked bellyache, vomited them a few hours later and probably fucked the hell out of my liver. Tío Jesus was too deep in his PTSD and comic books to notice, and my mom and dad still live in Puebla; I send them part of my check and a letter saying everything’s okay, I’m getting good grades. All that shit. And then one day the empty man was gone and I was even more alone. Felt sadness instead of the heady weight of gravity pulling me toward death. All around me were boys that wanted to call me Pocahontas and girls that didn’t want to talk to me and silent Tío Jesus and Kendra. And then the sadness eased and the haze lifted, and I’d somehow managed to hold onto my job at Pet City even though I was a high school dropout and essentially pointless at age seventeen. Things are, in a sense, just beginning to feel real again. I still drag my feet along and you’ll never see me smile, but I’m alive. And even if getting high with Kendra and shaming boys with my zombie-killing skills at the megaplex is all I got, it feels like something. I don’t know how I crawled out of the pit, but I did. And I think the earth is gradually reappearing under my feet again, and sometimes I think I might design video games one day because . . . I’m here, right? And I kill at them, so why not? It would mean going back to school, getting my GED maybe, but I could do that if it’s in the service of some larger purpose and that larger purpose involves digital zombies. Right now though, the quietness of the birds is bothering me more than thoughts of the future and past. That and the fact that Telly has been down there for what feels like a half-hour, but I really have no idea; my whole sense of time is fogged. “The funny thing,” Kendra says without looking up from her gamer mag, “is I don’t even have the code to the walk-in safe. Bravefart won’t give it up.” “I’m checking on the birds,” I say. Kendra nods. Pet City has three parrots, eighteen parakeets, two cockatoos, and about eighty of those stupid little fat yellow things that aren’t parakeets but might as well be. They come in handy when we run out of snake food. Right now, every single one of the birds is huddled in the topmost corners of their cages, the corners furthest from the back of the store, which is where the basement stairwell is. And they’re all shivering. “Kendra,” I say. But then the door swings open, setting off the customer alert robot voice; it blurts out: “Hello! And welcome to Pet City! Your one stop shop for all pet needs in Drapeston!” “Where is he?” a woman’s voice says. I can’t see her because I’m behind the hamster aisle, but I’m guessing it’s Mrs. Bravefart. Betty? Barbara? I don’t know. Her voice is raspy like she’s holding back tears. “Who are you looking for, Marlene?” Kendra’s probably playing dumb because it’s pretty obvious who Marlene is talking about. Then I hear a baby gurgle. I start walking down the aisle toward the front of the store. “You know goddamn well who the fuck I mean,” Mrs. Bravefart hisses. “Don’t play with me, Kendra.” She’s tall and white, though not as tall as Kendra. Her blonde hair’s pulled back into a loose ponytail, and she’s wearing a bloodstained nightgown over a pair of sweat pants. Winter has been creeping along toward us, and it’s too cold to be wearing so damn little, even for a batshit white lady. She must be in serious trouble. Then I look at the baby. He’s adorable, sleeping peacefully in her arms. And he’s brown. Not like a tan shade of white brown, not ambiguously maybe kinda-sorta brown. The kid is straight up without a doubt one of us brown brown. He looks like my little cousin Antonio did when he had just popped out. “The fuck . . .” I say before I can stop myself. Marlene looks up at me and instead of cursing me out she bursts into tears. “That’s what Brad said,” she moans. “But who . . .” “Raymundo,” she sniffles, “that’s who. Raymundo the fucking groundskeeper at the university I teach at. That’s fucking who. Okay?” “Okay,” I whisper. I know Raymundo; he’s one of the guys on my block that says hi every time I see him and smiles like he means it. Not in the creepy way either. He’s one of the few I don’t hate. His wife and kids still live in Puebla, not far from my parents. Marlene shakes her head and sniffles. “He’s . . . dead.” “Raymundo?” I say. She nods. “It was Brad. When he saw the baby he . . . he lost his mind. I’ve never seen him like that and . . . and . . . he found Ray and . . .” Her bottom lip quivers. Raymundo is dead. I barely knew him but still: the knowledge is cold water down my spine. I want to take the baby out of Marlene’s hands. She looks like she might shatter at any moment, and I don’t want any shards of her to hit the little guy. He stirs in his sleep but keeps those tiny eyes closed. I take a step toward her. “No!” Marlene hisses. “Tell me if Brad’s here.” “Hasn’t been here all day,” Kendra says. “Open the safe.” There’s something off about this woman. Besides the bloodstained hospital gown and expanding domestic tragedy, I mean. Her skin’s almost green and her fingers seem unusually long, wrapped around that little bundle. There’s an extra flap of skin reaching across her elbow pit, like a few generations back her family may have had wings. Or maybe that’s the chronic jacking my vision. “Open the safe,” she says again. And then we hear another thump from the basement, and I remember we sent Telly down there to find out what the first thump was. It seems like an entire lifetime ago that all that happened. And then we hear Telly screaming.

• • • •

The screaming gets louder and footsteps clamor up the stairs. They’re too fast and then there’s a crash—Telly must’ve tripped. The basement door busts open and Telly’s standing there, but instead of two normal, healthy arms, his left one is just a shredded, bleeding mass that ends in wispy, dripping strands of flesh. He bolts down the aisle toward us, says “Hrughhhhnnnnnnn!” and then drops next to the guinea pig shavings aisle, a few feet from me. “Jesus, he’s here,” Marlene says. I crouch where Telly’s collapsed. He’s normally a pleasant golden brown, but right now he’s paler than Kendra. “We have to call fucking 911,” Kendra says. I’m holding Telly. His blood is already covering me. It’s not really gushing out, just sloshing around and dripping everywhere. I pull off my jacket and wrap it around his arm. When I look up, Marlene has placed the baby on the counter and is digging through her purse. “You’ll do no such thing.” “But, Telly,” Kendra says, the phone in her hand. “You’ll do,” Marlene growls and pulls a small revolver from her purse. “No such motherfucking thing.” She levels it at Kendra. It’s the kind spies give their girlfriends in movies to keep hidden just in case, a slim, sexy little thing. Marlene wields it like an axe, though. No couth at all. Her hands shake, but her eyes say she’s not fucking around. Kendra puts the phone down next to the baby. “You little bitches don’t understand a single thing about what’s going on here.” She turns the gun toward me. I mean, she’s right about that much. Telly’s stopped squirming. His eyes are closed and his skin is cold, but I can feel his rapid breath against my body. “You don’t know what Brad is.” “He killed Raymundo,” I say. It seems like a stupid thing to mention; it’s just that the truth of it is finally settling in now that Telly is probably dying in my arms. “Both of you. Down in the basement.” “Down in the . . . what?” Kendra says. “Are you fucking crazy?” “Go!” Marlene screams. “Now!” Kendra puts her hands up and walks down the aisle toward me. I ease Telly to the floor and stand up. “You’re just gonna leave the baby there?” Marlene sighs and shoots a glance at the big storefront window. The street outside is deserted—fuckass Drapeston really doesn’t have shit going on at seven on a chilly October night. Telly’s mostly out of sight behind the huge bags of guinea pig shavings, but a passerby might be curious about the bundle on the counter. “Get the baby.” “And Telly?” “Leave him. Move.” The child is the same shade of brown I am, and he has about eight chins. He looks like a tiny little old man. He’s warm against my chest; stirs slightly and then settles back into those untainted newborn dreams. Marlene waves us ahead of her with the gun. Kendra and I exchange nervous glances, but there’s nothing to be done. The birds are still cowering in the topmost corners of their cages. The boring-ass fish just glide along like nothing’s happening, and for them, I guess it isn’t. We pass the canned food aisle and the toys. I trace the splatter-paint dot design Telly’s blood made as he ran. Kendra takes a few steps down the stairwell, looks back. “Go on,” Marlene whispers behind me. The basement is pretty well organized thanks to Kendra actually being a fairly competent supervisor. Stacks of overstock kibble and kitty litter cover all the walls. A few file cabinets sit in the far corner. There’s a bathroom— great for getting high during store hours because the ventilator is grade A excellent—and next to that is the walk-in safe. Don’t ask me why a pet store needs a walk-in safe. I never thought that hard about it because frankly I just don’t give a shit. But it’s always been there, and we joke about what might be inside but never bother trying to enter. On the floor in front of the walk-in is a pool of Telly’s blood. At least, I think it’s Telly’s. The walk-in door is ajar. “Bradley?” Marlene says. Her voice quivers, as if this shit isn’t horror movieish enough. And me being brown, I’m sure Imma be the first to get ate. Well, second, counting Telly’s arm. I look down at the beautiful bundle in my arms, still fast asleep. “Bradley. Come out. We can talk this out. You don’t have to . . . you don’t have to do this.” We’re standing in a semi-circle around the safe, Marlene in the center and back a little. I see Kendra’s eyes darting around, probably looking for something to use as a weapon but the place is tidy. Her effective ass has one of us clean up down here at least twice a week. The door creaks open. Brad’s in there all right, but it’s not quite him either. It’s like if Brad had had a baby with some demon scorpion bat creature. His jaw is too long, his open mouth hangs halfway down his hunched over body and creases up to his pointed ears. Scales stretch across his arms, which reach to either side and end in foot-long claws. He has a mane of bushy black hair that halos his scrunched up face and then covers his otherwise naked torso. Three horns dot the crown of his hairless head. Brad has always worn hats but I figured it was just some bald guy insecure thing. He’s panting and drooling, and those beady little eyes—that part isn’t so different than normal human Brad—keep looking back and forth between me, Kendra, and Marlene. “Holy fucking shit,” Kendra says. Marlene sighs. “You didn’t have to . . . Oh, Bradley.” I’m holding Baby Bravefart close to my chest, holding him so tight I’m afraid I might crush him when I realize it. I take a step back, and then there’s a blur of movement. In three long strides, Marlene has crossed the basement. She shrieks—it sounds like those videos of bleating goats they have on the internet, the ones that sound like they’re almost trying to be human—and then hurls herself into Brad. Something happens as she moves: her arms stretch long and a row of spines breaks out along her back, shredding the bloodstained nightgown. Brad hisses and then they collide, a horrible clattering of tearing flesh and screeches. Kendra is close to the door. With just a tap, they’d be trapped inside. But when I look over at her, she’s frozen, her eyes glazed over. I try to get her attention with eye contact, but I’m afraid if I move too much they’ll come for me. “I said I was sorry,” Marlene hisses. Her voice has a gurgle to it now, like she’s speaking from the bottom of a cup of watery ice. “Bitch,” I hear Brad roar amidst the sound of thrashing and screams. Brad was always weird, but he was the polite kind of weird. “I knew you didn’t have it in you to understand. And don’t you see we’re all we have?” Marlene raises a clawed hand above her head. She’s on top and has Brad pinned beneath her. Three sharp horns protrude from her forehead too, poking through what I now realize is a wig. Brad shrieks and then gurgles as his wife’s claw comes down on him once, then again. Then with a snarl she leans in and tears what’s left of his throat out with her massive jaw. For a few seconds all we hear is the gnashing of those long, thin teeth on flesh. “We’re all we had,” Marlene whimpers between bites. “Don’t you see?” The gun. It’s like a little ping goes off in my subconscious. Marlene must’ve dropped it when she went flying across the room. Ever so slowly, I turn my head. It’s on the ground a few feet from me. Marlene looks up, her beady eyes meet mine. “Don’t even . . .” she starts to say, crawling off her husband’s carcass. Cradling the baby against my chest, I throw myself across the floor. She’s scattering toward me and I’m just shy of the gun. I hear a dull thud and Marlene says, “Ugh!” and clatters to the ground. Kendra still has her arm out when I look up: a flawless clothesline. It’s all the time I need. I crawl a few feet further, snatch up Marlene’s revolver and aim it at her face, which is suddenly way too close to mine. “Back the fuck up.” It comes out real steady, and I feel proud of myself because inside I’m a quivering ball of shit. I say it again, not loudly but with a little more growl. Marlene retreats a few steps without taking her eyes off me or, eerily, changing her body position from the crouch she’d fallen into. She moves something like a wounded crab. “Come now,” Marlene says, smiling way too broadly. “Come, come.” “Get in the safe,” I say. The baby in my arms coos and stirs against me. “Let’s be reasonable,” Marlene says. A string of drool dangles from her too-long jaw. Pieces of her husband’s throatflesh are still caught between her teeth. “I was in a dire situation. You saw it. You both saw it.” She backs up a few more steps, shoots a pleading look at Kendra. Kendra shakes her head. “We’re sisters. We have to have each other’s backs, right? We’re . . . we’re sisters. He would’ve killed me! And he hurt your little friend. And he killed . . . he killed Ray . . . Raymond.” “Raymundo,” I say, cold as fucking ice. “And you’re not my fucking sister.” Marlene’s squinting eyes widen. She tenses and I know she’s about to pounce. “Give me my baby, you brown bitch.” She leaps and I fire. I’ll be honest, I was aiming for her head. The crack is deafening. I’m off by a good couple inches, big-ass jaw and everything, and the bullet clips her shoulder. It’s enough to throw her back on the ground. “You animal!” Marlene screams. Dark purplish blood streams from a hole in her scaly flesh. The baby in my arms paws his little hands against my breast and coos. I don’t look down, can’t take my eyes off Marlene, but I know he’s fully awake now. “Try again,” I say. “Come on. I want you to.” “You don’t know what,” Marlene’s voice still gurgles with that awful fluidy sound. She takes a long, raspy breath. “The fuck. You’re getting . . .” Another breath. “. . . Into. Bitch.” “The safe,” I say. “Now. Marlene limps backwards, eyes glued to mine. When she crosses the threshold, I nod at Kendra and she pushes the door. Marlene lets out a raspy, high-pitched howl that’s cut off by the heavy slamming of the door.

• • • •

Every cell of my body wants to collapse, but I have a tiny, brand new being in one arm and a pistol in the other, and both are shaking now that it’s all over. I put the gun down and lean my back against the wall. I’m about to release the tidal wave of a sob that’s welling up inside of me when the little guy I’m holding does it first. It’s a righteous wail, maybe his very first since being born. He paws a tiny hand across my breast again. “He’s hungry,” Kendra says. She hasn’t moved. I can almost see the shock fade slightly from her body as she takes in the carnage around her and the little brown baby in the midst of it. “I . . . What are we going to do?” I say. “I don’t know.” I almost burst out laughing. Then I almost break down crying. Kendra’s face does a few contortions that let me know she’s feeling about the same. “There must be . . . a tunnel in there.” “In the safe?” I hadn’t even considered it. “Unless Bravefart was here this morning when we came in. He had to get in somehow. And if he killed Raymundo like she said then he wasn’t here . . . and he didn’t come in the front.” “Have you ever been in there?” Kendra shakes her head. “Told you, I don’t have the combination.” The baby’s still crying. “What are we going to do?” I say, not knowing which of the five hundred different fucked up situations I’m referring to. “Fuck,” Kendra says suddenly. I look up at her. “Telly!” She bolts past me and up the stairs.

• • • •

Everything is very peaceful, like we’re underwater. For the first time in my life, I feel like my body knows exactly how to move. With precision, grace even, I look down and lock eyes with the baby in my arms. He’s still crying— long, outrageous wails that feel like they come from inside me as well. And he’s beautiful and brown like me. I take his little hat off. Three lumps stare up at me from the top of his head. I close my eyes, open them again. The lumps are still there. He paws at my breast again and wails. I don’t mean to smile—I’m standing in a pool of blood and I just shot a homicidal half-human death creature and my friend probably doesn’t have an arm and I saw someone get his throat ripped out, even if he was a demon whatever creature too it was fucked up—but the smile breaks out across my face anyway. I know a thing or two about keeping things hidden. I know how to smile at the frowning world when a maelstrom rages in my heart. I know what I have to do. There will be explanations and lies to come up with, but I’m no stranger to that. Kendra’s one of the deftest bullshitters I know. And Telly’s explanations, if he lives, will be chalked up to traumatized ravings. With one hand I lift my shirt. Tiny lips find my nipple and close around it. There’s no teeth, just a soft, urgent pulling. I think I’ll call him Raymundo after his father. I doubt there’s any milk in there, but the gentle glow that Raymundo emits as he nuzzles his face against my breast tells me all I need to know.

© 2014 by Daniel José Older. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Daniel José Older is the author of the upcoming young adult novel Shadowshaper (Arthur A. Levine Books, 2015) and the Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series, which begins in January 2015 with Half Resurrection Blues from Penguin’s Roc imprint. Publishers Weekly hailed him as a “rising star of the genre” after the publication of his debut ghost noir collection, Salsa Nocturna. He co-edited the anthology Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History and guest edited the music issue of Crossed Genres. His short stories and essays have appeared in Tor.com, Salon, BuzzFeed, New Haven Review, PANK, Apex, and Strange Horizons and the anthologies Subversion and Mothership: Tales of Afrofuturism and Beyond. Daniel’s band Ghost Star gigs regularly around New York, and he facilitates workshops on storytelling from an anti- oppressive power analysis. You can find his thoughts on writing, read dispatches from his decade- long career as an NYC paramedic, and hear his music at ghoststar.net and @djolder on Twitter.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight. The Man in the Ditch Lisa Tuttle

There was nothing to look at once they were away from the town, only a long road stretching ahead, bare fields on either side, beneath a lowering gray sky. It was very flat and empty out here on the edge of the fens, and dull winter light leeched all colour from the uninspiring landscape. Occasionally there was a ruined windmill in the distance, a knackered old horse gazing sadly over a fence, a few recumbent cows, a dead man in a ditch— Linzi screamed when she saw it, an ear-piercing screech that might, had J.D. been a less-practiced driver, have caused a nasty accident. If there was nothing else out here, there were still plenty of vehicles travelling fast and close, both front and back. “What the fuck?” She saw how red his face had gone, the vein that throbbed in his temple, and felt bad, but she hadn’t screamed for nothing. “Jay, there was a dead body in the ditch back there—a person!” “Don’t be stupid.” His hands tightened on the wheel, and his eyes darted between the mirror and the road, not sparing her a glance. “I saw it! We have to—” “What? What do we have to do?” “I—I don’t know. Go back?” With every passing second the distance grew. “And why should we do that? Do you see anywhere to turn? And then, even if you could tell me where to stop, there’s nowhere to pull over without going right into the ditch. And why? So you can see that what you thought was a dead body was really a load of fly-tipped rubbish?” She worried at her lip as she tried to recall precise details of what she had seen—a withered, brownish, naked man, lying curled on his side—but she didn’t believe it had been an optical illusion. “It was a man’s body. I’m sorry I startled you, but anyone would’ve yelled, to see a corpse like that.” J.D. sighed and moved his head around, easing the tension in his neck. “All right, my lovely. It’s over now. A dead body doesn’t need our help.” “But—we ought to tell someone?” “Tell who?” “The police?” He flinched, and she shut her eyes, as if his response to the word had been a slap in the face. She opened them again when she heard him put on the indicator. “If you really saw it, other people did, too,” he said calmly. Then he turned left, onto a sign-posted road, and then, very soon, took another left onto an unmarked road; a narrow, single-track lane. They were now travelling parallel to the main road, back in the direction from which they had come. With a nervous flutter of anticipation low in her belly, Linzi realized he must be responding to her request, taking her back to the spot where she’d seen the body. From here, the main road was easily visible as a steady stream of traffic; only a short stretch of empty land separated the track they were on from the drainage ditch, even though she couldn’t see it. But then she hadn’t noticed this road from the other side. She couldn’t guess how far they’d gone after her sighting, but she had faith that J.D. knew: he was a professional driver. Linzi caught hold of her elbows and gave herself a small hug. Wasn’t it just like him to grumble and pretend he wasn’t doing what she wanted? Not that she wanted to see the horrible old dead thing again . . . and, in fact, as the car slowed and then stopped when the track ran out, she prayed to whatever powers there might be that J.D. was right, and she’d been scared by an abandoned, stolen shop-window mannequin or a crash-test dummy. “Here we are,” he said. “What do you think?” She looked at his proud smile and remembered what the dead man had pushed out of her mind. “Come on,” he said, not waiting for her reply. “Let me show you round our new home.” He hopped out and, with the courtliness that had won her heart, opened her door for her. She fixed a pleased smile on her face, but he must have picked up a hint of her true feelings because he said, sounding defensive, “Of course it doesn’t look like much now, but use your imagination. Think of all the stuff you can plant. Landscape the holy shit out of it. Whatever you like; I’ll pay.” Tentatively, she tried to explain her unease: “I thought we’d have neighbours . . .” “Who the fuck wants neighbours? You said you wanted a house in the country.” “Yes, yes, I did; I do. But I didn’t think it would be so far away from everything—” “It’s the country. And it’s not far—what, twenty minutes from Norwich? You must have seen the village sign-posted, two miles that way for post office, pub, and primary school.” At that reminder of the children they’d have someday, she melted against him. “Oh, honey, I’m not complaining! How could I, when I’ve got you? I was just surprised. I was imagining a new development.” “You know I hate those ticky-tacky estates.” He relaxed in her embrace. “Would Madam like the grand tour?” They walked over land that was rough but not boggy as the fields had appeared from the car window. She saw the boundary markers—poles sporting fluorescent orange plastic tags—and then came upon a pile of rubble and a concrete slab. “What’s this?” “What’s left of the house that used to be here. Why’d you think we’ve got planning permission to build a new one?” “What happened to the old house?” “I think it burnt down. I don’t know, twenty years ago. Before that there were cottages. People have always lived here. You might not think to look at it, but it’s actually on a rise, higher than the marshes out there. And the soil is a different composition, not boggy, so we can plant what we like. And we’re never going to have to worry about other houses going up either side, because who’d build on a bog? We won’t have noisy neighbours, or nosy ones, popping over every five minutes, complaining that our leylandii is blocking their view, wanting to borrow the hedge-trimmer, giving you the eye . . .” As he worked himself up into a rant she had heard before, staring out at the bleak, blank, featureless plain where the only other life to be seen was in the cars and lorries thundering past, Linzi felt a tremor of doubt. Those things he complained about were leftovers from his past in the suburbs with “that cheating bitch.” Did their life have to be defined always in reaction to his first marriage? “Are you cold?” Noticing her sadness, J.D. became tender. He took his coat off and wrapped it around her. “That wind has teeth. We’ll have to plant a line of trees over there, as a wind-break, and a hedge on that side, to screen us from nosy buggers staring out their windows as they drive past. Come on, back to the car now.”

• • • •

Going back, she couldn’t see anything unusual in the ditch. There was nothing in the local news the next day about a body being found, and the next time they drove out east on the A47 she couldn’t even identify the spot where she’d thought she’d seen it. Building soon got started, and a few weeks later, J.D. stopped by the property one evening and took pictures with his phone, sharing them with Linzi when he got home. She made admiring noises until the final picture, when the sound stuck in her throat. “What—what’s that?” “A side view—” “I mean down in front, the left-hand corner, that thing.” He peered at the screen. “What are you talking about?” “It looks like—” But she found she didn’t want to say it looked like a dead body, a wizened naked man lying on his side, so she just pointed. “There.” “Oh. Not sure. Pile of sticks and some weeds, maybe. The light was going. Waste of space, that one.” With the touch of a button, he deleted it.

• • • •

A few days later, Linzi accompanied her husband to the building site. She was surprised by how quickly everything had changed, how different the space looked now that there was the frame of a house at the centre of it. She was also a little taken aback by how much clutter there was everywhere. Much of it was equipment and building material, or the discarded packaging for those things, but there were also food wrappings, plastic bottles, beer cans, even the odd item of clothing—a white tee shirt, a single shoe— suggesting the workers considered the space outside the house a dumping ground. It was easy to imagine some accumulation of trash appearing in dim light like a body, and she abandoned her plan to search for the object that had created such a disturbing impression in the picture and instead clung to her husband’s arm and listened to his description of how the work was progressing.

• • • •

At one time Linzi had made good money dancing in a club—it was where she had met J.D.—but he couldn’t stand the thought of other men seeing her naked, so now she worked at Tesco. It wouldn’t be too bad as a part-time job when her kids were in school, she thought, but a year into her marriage she still wasn’t pregnant, and she was getting impatient. The doctor said there was no obvious reason why she shouldn’t conceive in due course, but if she wasn’t content to wait and see, the next step would be to check her husband’s sperm count. Well able to imagine how J.D. would respond to that suggestion, Linzi decided to explore other options first. She’d heard there was a woman in Lowestoft who had studied all the old traditional ways to increase fertility. First, she read your cards, then she’d advise on the most propitious times for conception and would make up a special herbal tea or a list of vitamin and mineral food supplements based on what the cards revealed. So Linzi made an appointment and drove down there on her next afternoon off. The address was in one of the rundown terraced houses across the road from the big parking lot on the seafront. The woman’s name was Maeve, and she had a blousy, sun-tanned, gypsyish look: Celtic motif tattoos, hennaed hair, big silver jewellery. She took twenty quid off Linzi before leading her in to a cramped, over-furnished sitting room that smelt of cats and sandalwood incense, where they sat facing each other across a small table. “You want a baby,” Maeve announced. “You have been trying and failing to fall pregnant. Your husband . . . no, don’t tell me, darling . . . is older than you. You are his second . . . third . . . wife. Don’t tell me, I will tell you. You are very keen to start a family, but he, perhaps . . . no, he is also keen. But his children . . . no, no, of course, he has no children. I see that. But the reason . . . Let’s see what the cards have to say.” She opened a wooden box, removed a velvet bag from it, and a deck of cards from that, which she shuffled. She told Linzi to take three cards from the deck and lay them out face up. These were not the brightly coloured tarot cards Linzi had expected. Instead, each one offered a murky, black and white image like a bad reproduction of a very old photograph, and it was hard to make any sense of them at first glance. One card showed a dancer, a man who was naked except for a belt tied loosely around his waist and a close-fitting cap on his head, caught mid- pirouette, balancing on one pointed foot, the other leg bent at the knee, arms folded behind his back. His eyes were closed and he was calmly smiling. The second card had a picture of a woman with a dog’s body—or a pregnant bitch with a woman’s head. The female face was fixed in a blank, upwards stare, mouth gaping open as if to swallow the object of her gaze, a large, silver egg suspended just above her head. The third card involved a great number of knives and a bleeding body. Before she could make out anything more, Maeve had scooped up all three and returned them to the deck which she cut and shuffled feverishly, muttering, “That’s bad. Very bad.” “Shall I try again?” Linzi asked meekly. The woman shot her a venomous glare. “He won’t give you a baby.” “You mean J.D.? “ “Don’t let him trick you.” “Are you talking about my husband?” “You shouldn’t have married him if you weren’t prepared to be faithful.” “I am faithful!” She stared at the fortune-teller, outraged. “I haven’t slept with anyone but J.D., not since our very first date!” “‘Slept with.’ So oral sex doesn’t count.” The woman sneered at her. “You can’t lie to me. You’ve been unfaithful to your man once, and the cards show it happening again.” She felt the blood drain from her head and saw little starry spots in the darkness. The bad thing. How did she know? “I didn’t . . . I wasn’t . . . I wasn’t cheating on him. Do the cards tell you why?” Maeve put the cards away. “I don’t care why. That’s your problem. But I see what’s coming, and it’s not good. It would be very bad for you to cheat on your husband, especially with that one.” “I’m not going to cheat on J.D.—I love him! I came here because I thought you were going to help us have a baby. Can’t you make me some tea, prescribe some herbs and vitamins?” Maeve stood up and began to move towards the door. “I won’t help you with fertility until you sort out this problem with your husband. You’ll have to decide what you want: this marriage, or something else.” Linzi remained stubbornly in her seat, twisting around to face the other woman. “I want this marriage. And a baby. Are you saying I can’t? Not have J.D.’s baby? That he’s sterile? Please, you have to tell me. I have a right to know.” Maeve sighed and stopped in the doorway, playing with one of the heavy silver chains hanging from her neck. “Your husband won’t give you a baby. And the other one can’t.” “What ‘other one’? There is no man in my life but J.D. I swear.” The woman responded with a hard, contemptuous stare. “You have to leave now. “ Linzi’s feeling of shock had faded, and now she just felt indignant. Twenty quid for that! Not a proper reading, one little incident, taken out of context, misunderstood . . . it was an insult. Maeve might have some kind of psychic talent, to have picked up something, but she’d got it completely wrong. The bad thing. She thought about it again as she waited for a gap in the traffic that would allow her to cross the street. They never talked about it, but it had cast a shadow over their relationship and haunted J.D., a ghost roused every time he had a flash of jealousy over some harmless incident. But he had no right to feel jealous. Maeve had misunderstood, but J.D. knew perfectly well she hadn’t been cheating on him—she’d only sucked that cop’s dick so J.D. wouldn’t lose his license. She’d felt his desperation; she knew as well as he what it would mean. So, a quick, wordless transaction: I’ll do you, and you won’t do him. He could have stopped it with a word, or a look, but he hadn’t. And he had been grateful, at least until his gratitude had soured into resentment. She didn’t expect thanks—she would have preferred they pretend it never happened—but why couldn’t he understand that when you loved someone as she loved him, no sacrifice was too great?

• • • •

In her dream Linzi plaited narrow strips of leather into a strong, flexible cord, which became a noose around the tanned and weathered neck of a man who wore nothing else except a soft cap made of animal hide, and a flat leather belt loose around his middle. She woke up with the image vivid in her mind, understanding that the “dancer” she’d seen on the fortune teller’s card was the hanged man.

• • • •

As the house drew closer to completion, Linzi felt more and more unhappy about the prospect of moving into it. Although the house itself was not the problem—that was turning out to be even better than she’d dared to imagine; you’d have to be crazy to prefer any of the flats she’d ever occupied, or the small, end-of-terrace ex-council house that she’d grown up in. She didn’t think she was crazy. She hadn’t seen anything that looked like a dead body for months, but the creepy black and white picture on the fortune teller’s card had merged in her memory with the body she’d seen in the ditch and became an ominous presence that she sensed lying in wait for her, just out of sight, every time they took the turning off the A47 and headed for what J.D. already called their home. It was impossible to tell him she didn’t want to live there, especially not when he was looking forward to it so much and had put so much money and effort into it. So they moved in, and she told herself she would soon get used to it. The first week in the new house was something like a second honeymoon. J.D. took a week off work so they could take their time settling in. They hardly went anywhere, except to the village for supplies, or meals in the pub; the days passed in a pleasurable round of companionable work as they sanded and painted and moved things around, and their nights were filled with sex both vigorous and tender. Linzi had never seen her husband so completely happy. He thought she was only nervy because pregnancy still eluded her and kept encouraging her to relax. Mostly, as long as J.D. was around, Linzi did manage to relax. She felt safe enough in their new house, looking inward, happiest when the curtains shut out any sight of the featureless marshes that surrounded them, and she left all the outdoor chores to her husband, having found that no matter what direction she was facing, she was plagued by the uncomfortable sensation that someone was creeping up on her from behind. And at night, she dreamed about the hanged man. Sometimes she was plaiting the noose; sometimes she fitted it around his unresisting neck, before or after bestowing a kiss upon his motionless mouth. At other times she was not so immediately involved, but stood huddled at the back of a solemn crowd and watched him die, his legs kicking, feet dancing on air, semen spurting a final blessing on the barren ground below.

• • • •

After J.D. had gone back to work, Linzi invited her mother over for lunch. It was her first visit to the new house. “So much light in this room,” said her mother, approvingly. “In all the rooms, in fact. I love the big windows. What a great view.” Standing slightly behind her mother, Linzi peeked over her shoulder at the long, flat, treeless expanse stretching away beneath the blue sky. Although more attractive now in summer colours, she still found it a sinister sight. “You think so?” “You don’t?” Her mother turned to give her a searching look. “Is something wrong, Linz?” She shrugged. “I just think it’s sort of bleak. Come outside,” she added quickly. “Into the garden. Not that it is anything like a garden yet, but . . . I’d like to know what you think.” Her mother took the request seriously and examined the land from every side. She even got down on her knees and dug into the soil with her hands. Linzi, meanwhile, put her back against a wall of the house and watched her mother closely for any signs that she felt an invasive, invisible presence, but if she did nothing showed. They went back inside and ate quiche and salad while Linzi’s mother made a list of plants her daughter might want to consider and sketched out two possible plans for landscaping. “It won’t look so bleak once you’ve planted a few shrubs. Maybe, while you’re waiting for things to take hold, you could put out a few pots and some garden furniture, just things for your eye to rest on.” She put her pencil down. “Now why don’t you tell me what you really wanted to talk to me about.” “Did you feel anything . . . anything wrong . . . out there?” “No, I told you, the soil looks very rich and good; not boggy as I’d expect. Whoever lived here in the past must have tended it well.” “I don’t mean that.” Linzi drew a deep breath. “Do you remember, when I was really little, you were going to leave me and Tilda with a child-minder, and we went to her house—and then walked straight out again? You said there was no way . . . you felt something wrong in the place and weren’t surprised at all when we heard a few months later that her boyfriend was arrested for being a paedo?” “Of course I remember.” “You sensed something wrong in her house. Something bad, dangerous, even though there was nothing to see. I want to know if you sense anything here.” Alarm flickered in her eyes. “Linzi, honey, you can come home with me now, stay as long as you like; if you decide—” “What? No!” Tears sprang to her eyes and she stared, open-mouthed. “Why would you think—You want me to leave J.D., don’t you? I knew it! You never liked him.” Her mother threw up her hands. “I didn’t say anything! You’re the one who brought up that horrible—” “I was talking about the way you sensed something wrong. That’s what you said, that as soon as you walked through the door, you just knew. So I wondered—” “—if I sensed something here? No. But why should you expect me to, if everything’s rosy?” “I’ve felt something. Not about J.D. This place is haunted. The land.” It came tumbling out: the dead man in the ditch, the deleted photograph, her feelings, her dreams . . . “I think—no, I’m sure—a man was killed here a long time ago, hanged and then buried as some kind of sacrifice. I think it’s his spirit I sense.” Her mother sighed, shifted in her chair, shot a glance at the clock on the oven. “Why ask me about it? I’ve never seen a ghost in my life.” “But you’re sensitive to atmospheres. You knew Tilda and I wouldn’t be safe with that woman—you sensed evil—you even said so, later!” “Yes. I did. She seemed all right on the phone, and she had good references, but the moment I walked into her house—” She stopped. “There was just something about her. But she was a person; alive. How can a dead man hurt you? Whether he was good or evil in his life, after he’s dead, he can’t do anything.” “You don’t believe in ghosts?” It was a challenge her mother deflected. “I’m not saying that. I don’t know what you saw. I will say this: I never heard of anyone being killed by a ghost. I’d be more afraid of the living.” “So you think it’s safe to stay here?” “What does J.D. think?” She turned to look at the clock. “He never saw it.” Her mother stood up, and Linzi rose, too, saying half-heartedly, “You should stay . . . and say hello to J.D.” “No, I have to get back. I’ve got a meeting this evening. Linzi, whatever you’re worried about—” “I just told you.” “Well, share it with J.D. That’s my advice. I know, neither of my marriages worked out, but I do know that what troubles one partner is bound to affect the other. You’ll only make things worse if you keep it to yourself.”

• • • •

Although she ignored her advice to tell J.D., Linzi took heart from her mother’s remark that the dead couldn’t hurt the living. She didn’t want J.D. to feel haunted as she did. His obliviousness was her bulwark. One evening as she passed the kitchen window she caught sight of an unpleasantly familiar shape on the ground, just behind a pile of gravel waiting to be spread, and the shock brought her to a halt and made her lean towards the glass, peering out intently, just as J.D. came up behind her. “What are you looking at?” “Oh! I don’t know what it is—there, behind the gravel, can you see it?” “What sort of something? Big or little?” She opened her arms. “Big.” “I don’t see anything.” And as he spoke, it was gone. But the sense of a sinister, lurking presence remained and intensified as the days began to grow shorter. She was aware of it, like an assassin waiting to jump out at her, every time she came home, from the moment she stepped out of her car, until, nerves taut and vibrating with fear, she managed to scurry into the house and shut the door. Only then did she dare to relax, a little. That her husband was unable to see the dead man, that he was seemingly immune to any sense of its presence, reassured her. She thought his blindness kept her safe when he was home, and the one thing she was dreading was the first time she’d have to spend the night alone. It would happen very soon. Once a fortnight his scheduled delivery rounds included an overnight stay—mandatory when further driving would push him over the safety limits for hours behind the wheel. Drivers broke those limits all the time, of course, including J.D., but after a recent high-profile fatal accident his company was cracking down. She was trying to be cool about it, but knew that he’d picked up on her nervousness. The day before he was to leave, as she was coming back from shopping, as she glanced across the emptiness to their house, she saw his van, at least an hour before she’d expected him, and called to let him know she was on her way. “I’ve been shopping, too,” he said. “I bought a surprise—well, it’s for the house, but I think it will make you happy.” She felt happy as she pulled in to park beside his van, until she saw something that gripped her heart with a nameless dread: the front door to the house was wide open. Leaving her purse, phone, bags, everything in the car, she galloped inside, calling his name, in a panic. “What’s wrong?” He was in the kitchen, a carton, packaging, tools on the counter. “You left the door open!” “Jesus, Linz, so what? We can’t let a little air in? I heard you slam it hard enough!” She stood with jaw clenched, hands in fists, and tried to regain control. He came over and held her. “What’s wrong? You didn’t bash into my van?” “No, no, it’s fine. I’m fine. I just—I just saw the door and thought— thought someone might—might be inside.” “So? You knew I was here; I talked to you a minute ago.” She could think of no plausible explanation and was determined not to speak her fear aloud, her terror that the dead man she had seen in the ditch and then closer on the ground outside was now inside the house with them. But she knew it was true. She could feel that the tenuous safety of their home had been breached by that old ghost. “Are you going to tell me what happened?” His voice was gentle; he didn’t sound angry at all. “I don’t know,” she said, her voice tiny as she clung to him. “But when I saw the door hanging open, I got scared.” “Wow. I definitely made the right choice of what to buy you today.” She was still trying to summon sufficient interest to ask what it was when he said, “But I’ll show you after we’ve searched the house and you see we’re alone here.” It was obvious as they walked through the large, light, and still sparsely furnished rooms that there were few places a man might hide, but Linzi knew the intruder she feared could hide in plain sight. She didn’t know why she’d been cursed with the ability to see him and found herself wishing J.D. would see the dead man, just once. Then he’d know what she’d been going through, and they could talk about how they were going to deal with the fact that the ghost of an ancient sacrifice now inhabited their home. But neither of them saw anything that did not belong, and Linzi had to pretend to be comforted by J.D.’s present to her of a CCTV system. With the cameras mounted outside, she could monitor the property, all approaches to the house, from the TV set in the bedroom. Thus, if she heard spooky noises from outside while he was away, she could check them out without even having to show herself at the window, and find out if it was a fox, or a gust of wind, or even a couple of kids from the village looking for somewhere to take drugs and have sex. She thanked him as ardently as she could, because he had meant well; he couldn’t know modern technology was utterly useless against the thing she feared. But he must have picked up the fact that she was not as reassured as she pretended, because he suggested she invite her mother to stay over while he was away. Considering his prickly relationship with her, the suggestion was staggeringly generous. But she turned it down. “And then go through this whole rigamarole again in two weeks? No, I have to get used to a night on my own some time. Might as well be tonight,” she told him before she hugged and kissed him goodbye.

• • • •

The day passed peacefully enough, soundtrack supplied by Radio One, as she painted the upstairs room they’d designated as the nursery. The light, buttery yellow would be a good choice for a child of either sex, although she still thought about wallpaper for one wall, pattern to be chosen when she knew she was expecting. She talked to J.D. around eight, assured him she was coping. He said he’d try to phone her back later, but if he hadn’t, she should phone him at bedtime. She agreed, although she wasn’t sure what counted as bedtime when they were apart. She was quite tired by ten, but the thought of going to bed alone made her linger downstairs, drinking the rest of a bottle of wine and watching some rubbish film until she nearly fell asleep on the couch. Then she staggered upstairs, fell into bed and a light, woozy sleep. A sound, something her sleeping mind recognized without alarm, brought her awake, not frightened, but utterly bewildered. What time was it, and what night? She could feel the still, solid presence of the man sleeping beside her. But if J.D. was home, whose was the key in the door downstairs? Laying one hand on a sheeted shoulder she whispered, “J.D.! Honey, wake up!” From downstairs came the familiar sequence of beeps that meant the alarm system was being disarmed. But who else knew their code? Maybe somebody from the security company, but . . . “Honey?” Still more confused than frightened, she fumbled for the light- switch on the hanging cord and heard someone mounting the stairs. “J.D!” She said his name, loud and urgent, as the light came on, and she sat up, shutting her eyes briefly against the flare of light as she tugged at the sheet which he’d pulled up over his head. “Honey, wake up.” Then she saw what was lying next to her, curled on his side in an almost foetal position, naked brown skin like ancient leather, face beneath the close- fitting cap serenely smiling in death, and the terrified scream that rose in her throat strangled her, cutting off not only sound but breath. In the instant before she blacked out, she saw her husband standing in the doorway, staring at the bed—but not at her. Mere seconds later, when she came to, that’s when she screamed out loud. Recoiling in horror, she jerked convulsively up and out of the bed before she noticed that it was empty. She stopped in the doorway, clutching at the doorframe for support, and looked again. Not only was the bed empty, the bedclothes were disturbed only on the side where she had been. There was no depression to indicate that any other head had rested on J.D.’s pillows since she’d plumped them up after making the bed that morning. But J.D. had seen him—she had seen the direction of his gaze and, more importantly, the look on his face—a look she knew she would never forget. “J.D.?” She tried to call, but her voice was little more than a whisper. Where was he? Her husband had disappeared as utterly as the ghastly corpse. She had to ask herself if the whole experience had been a nightmare from which she had only now awakened. Stepping into the dark hall, she felt an unexpected draught. Putting on the light, she looked down the stairs and saw the front door was wide open. Descending, she heard the sound of a motor starting, the easily recognizable, throaty note of J.D.’s van, shifting hard into reverse, flinging up gravel, then driving off at speed.

• • • •

Uselessly, she called her husband’s name, ran down the stairs and then back up again for her phone, seeing in her mind’s eye the dark, angry flush on his face, the vein throbbing in his temple, tears in his fixed, furious eyes as he pressed harder on the accelerator, as if by going faster he could outpace his own jealous rage. He thought he’d seen another man in bed with her. Why hadn’t he stayed to be sure, stayed to curse her, stayed to fight? She had to reach him, had to tell him the truth, had to make him understand . . . But his phone went straight to voice mail. She was listening impatiently to the mechanical instructions for leaving a message when she heard the scream of tortured brakes, the slam of metal against metal, the final, shattering sound of a car crash up on the main road. Heart in her throat, she grabbed her keys and ran for her car, barefoot and in her nightgown, unable to think of anything but the necessity of reaching him, imagining there must be something she could do to help him, to save him, clinging to that belief right up to the moment when she reached the site of the accident and saw her husband lying where he’d been thrown through the windscreen when his van went off the road, half curled on his side, neck broken, already dead in the ditch.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Lisa Tuttle was born and raised in the United States, spent ten years in London, and now lives in a remote part of the Scottish highlands. She began writing while still at school, sold her first stories at university, and won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Writer of the year in 1974. Her first novel, Windhaven, was a collaboration with George R. R. Martin published in 1981; her most recent is the contemporary fantasy The Silver Bough, and she has written at least a hundred short stories, as well as essays, reviews, nonfiction, and books for children.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight. NOVEL EXCERPTS Samhain Publishing Presents: It Waits Below (novel excerpt) Eric Red

Please enjoy the following excerpt of the new novel It Waits Below by Eric Red, coming this month from Samhain Publishing:

In the 1800s, an asteroid carrying an extraterrestrial life form crashed to earth and sunk a Spanish treasure ship. Now, a trio of salvage experts dives a three-man sub to the deepest part of the ocean to recover the sunken gold. There, they confront a nightmarish alien organism beyond comprehension, which has waited for over a century to get to the surface. It finally has its chance. As their support ship on the surface is ambushed by deadly modern-day pirates, the crew of the stranded sub battles for their very lives against a monster no one on Earth has seen before.

Deep Submersive Vehicle (DSV) Neptune. Ocean floor. Depth 10,703 meters. Monday, July 30, 1.57 p.m. Miles down in the submersible, an uptight Polidori ignored the harassing transmissions from the surface, stalling for time. His unwavering gaze was fixed on the monitor from Enright’s helmet cam searching the moldering bowels of the shipwreck for the treasure. It was a gloomy view of murk. “Neptune, do you read? Over.” Clark caught Polidori’s gaze and mouthed you’ve got to respond to them. The Russian grudgingly nodded and spoke irritably into the UQC. “The captain says he’s fine. He’s just a few meters from the gold. Over.” Clark pulled Polidori aside. “Maybe Roy’s right. That ship is unstable. We can regroup and do another dive.” Glowering, the pilot bit his tongue. Clark got on the underwater telephone connected to the diving suit. “Captain, Roy wants you to get out of there and come back to the sub right now.” On the video screen, the helmet cam presented a shaky and grainy washed-out image of a shadowy galleon bulkhead doorway. “Over,” she finished. Enright’s voice came over the UQC. “Negative. Tell him I’m almost at the treasure. Over.” Another disturbance appeared on the monitor screens as things moved and fell in the darkness. Polidori took the microphone from Clark. “Surface, the captain wants to press on with the salvage. Over.” The topside voice was apoplectic. “Dammit! That stubborn son of a bitch. Over.” The captain’s chuckle was audible. “Tell my brother to have a Coke and a smile and shut the fuck up. Everything’s fine. I’m almost there.” Passing through the doorway, the camera view revealed mounds and mounds of sandy silt, then something large and metallic gleaming in the searchlight on the diving suit. “Found it.” Closer, step-by-step, the object was revealed to be an ancient treasure chest with a huge padlock that had rusted off. Gloved hands reached for it. Polidori punched the wall. “That’s it! That’s it!” “Oh my God!” Clark laughed. The captain’s voice was jubilant. “Mission accomplished. I’m coming in.”

• • • •

The soaking, decrepit, barnacle-and-plankton-covered ruin of a treasure chest sat on the floor inside the sub. The ecstatic Enright, out of his diving suit, huddled around it with Polidori. Clark circled with the video camera. The close, rounded steel walls of the personnel sphere encircling them seemed to thrum and vibrate with the electricity of their charged excitement in the air. A smear of frigid seawater was pooling around the wet treasure chest on the floor—each successive drip from the wooden lid sounding to Enright like a deafening splash in the reverential hush of almost religious silence as he and the others were struck speechless by what they beheld. This is what discovering El Dorado felt like. The captain’s mind reeled. He had it in his hands. After all these years, all the work, all the expense, the impossible mission had finally recovered the near mythic, long lost treasure that would make him richer than the Pharaohs, wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. This was the kind of fortune that drove men mad, and now he understood why. His heart pinballed in his chest and he felt dizzy, more from excitement than from the effects of depressurization since he ingressed the Neptune fifteen minutes ago. He had it in his hands! Enright cleared his throat. He couldn’t speak. “After all this work, the booty better be here.” The captain sputtered. Gazing at the closed lid of the salvaged trunk, he experienced a paralyzing jolt of dread. What if the gold wasn’t there? What if there was nothing inside the rotted, waterlogged strongbox but sand? What if the clandestine information they had bribed from the Spanish was false? What if the Corona had been a decoy, loaded with a treasure chest full of lead while the real treasure had been transported on another ship, as was commonplace in the nineteenth century? It was totally irrational, but the grip of apprehension was freezing him into inaction, and he almost didn’t want to open the chest. “Captain?” Enright snapped out of it, seeing Polidori and Clark’s expectant faces watching him, breathless anxiety or anticipation or both etching their features. They were waiting for him to give the order to breach the trunk and discover its fabled contents. He had to be the one to give the go ahead. “Shall we?” whispered Enright, voice hoarse and tight. He picked up a hammer and Polidori lifted a crowbar, each attacking the lock with surgical precision. Care that was hardly necessary. The lock broke right off. Hit the steel floor with a clunk. The men brushed off the clasp, which crumbled to rust, and threw open the chest lid. It was there. Sebastian Enright couldn’t believe his eyes. It was a fucking miracle. Inside the strongbox were hundreds of gold doubloons, the corroded coins worth an incalculable fortune! Freshly minted 150 years ago, the coins were rough and sea-weathered, but the pure gold shone in the argonauts’ eyes with a heavenly gleam. There were piles upon piles of it, some coins loose, others fused together in golden chunks. The captain’s skull felt like it was about to explode with excitement—it was more money that they could all spend in ten lifetimes. He laughed, running his hands through the gunked up treasure, rich beyond all measure. “It’s all here. Just like it was supposed to be.” Loose coins spilled through his fingers. They began to giggle, then laugh, one by one, unable to stop. “It’s a fortune,” Clark gasped. “Hey, I changed my mind, I want a share!” The men eyeballed her. Seriously? “Just kidding,” the woman said. Enright handed her a coin magnanimously, just to be a dick. “Spend it in good health.” Polidori clapped his hands. “We’re rich! Suddenly, the bouillon moved. Something alive popped out of the piled gold coins and the crew jumped back, startled. A tiny creature dropped out of the treasure chest and scuttled away across the cockpit floor!

• • • •

It was warm here. Not like the cold the alien had always known, in outer space, at the bottom of the sea. So were the three hosts it felt the heat of in the warm place with it. They were warm, too. A fight or flight reflex programmed in the genetic code of the interstellar creature chose flight. For now.

• • • •

“Oh my God.” Clark recognized the Neptune’s new occupant right away as it skittled between her feet and escaped—it was one of the sea parasites riding like an alien jockey on the back of a crab that had got inside of the sub. A stowaway inside the treasure chest. Now it was running loose. The critter didn’t scare her at all, but she saw the blood rush out of Enright’s and Polidori’s faces as they jumped back in alarm. “What the hell is that?” Polidori shuddered, the young woman thinking it was the first time she had ever heard fear in his voice. “Holy shit!” Enright gasped, involuntarily moving over to the treasure chest as if to protect it from the interloper. “Relax, boys. We’re bigger than it is.” Clark smiled. Wherever it was. She looked around inside the submersible sphere, but couldn’t find it. All three crew members stood frozen in place—the woman simply because she didn’t want to step on and kill it. Their eyes traveled the circumference of the sphere, but nothing moved and they couldn’t spot the little creature. “Where the fuck did it go?” Enright squirmed. “Find it and kill it. That thing may bite.” “It must have hid somewhere.” Polidori was perspiring. “I don’t see it.” Clark shrugged, confused. “Look for it!” Clark got down on her hands and knees and started searching the tiny quarters of the submersible—it wasn’t like there were a lot of places to hide in fifteen feet of space. Her attention went to the three pillowcases containing their gear. As she did, the woman was amused how grossed out the two grown-ass men were as they squeamishly hunted for the tiny, probably harmless intruder. They looked like two of the Three Stooges with a case of the heebie-jeebies. Clark stifled a laugh, already giddy and a bit unhinged from the gold fever of a few moments before—it always tickled her how squeamish most grown men were compared to her, how the sight of blood or shit or anything icky freaked them out. Clark may have been petrified of drowning, but wasn’t scared of a little crab critter. Now, if she could just find the little fucker. Come out, come out, wherever you are. Shuffling around on her knees, she groped around under the few pieces of cargo and went through the pillowcases with their stowed gear. As she was about to reach into Polidori’s pillowcase, the Russian suddenly snatched it from her grasp in sudden alarm. “Give me that! I got it,” he snapped. He felt inside the sack, then shook his head, stowing the pillowcase with his gear safely beside his station. Nothing. Picking up a long screwdriver, Enright was poking the head behind the oxygen tanks and CO2 filters, a look of terror on his face as he nervously probed around for the intruder. Clark smelled the body odor of fear in the personnel sphere as she checked under the floor pads. Behind her back, Enright and Polidori’s nervous voices interrupted one another. “—Look under the instrument panel—” “—Not under there, just checked—. “—Use the flashlight—” “—Maybe it crawled back in the treasure chest—” “—Better put on gloves—” “—Good idea—” Pussies, Clark thought to herself, feeling around barehanded under the transponder unit. For the first time on the dive, she felt superior to the boys. Her fingers touched nothing but smooth flat steel—wherever the strange crab organism was, it wasn’t there. So she stood up. And saw both men looking right at her, eyes wide as saucers. “Clark, don’t move.” Enright whispered tensely. That’s when she felt it. A tickle in the hair on the top of her head. Her eyes rolled slowly up toward the rounded ceiling of the vessel, tilting her chin just enough to see it. The crab, with its bizarre, insectlike driver, was suctioned to the roof directly above her head, a few strands of her hair caught in one of its claws. “Clark, don’t!” Polidori put his hands out to stop her. Clark captured it easily. “Easy, little guy,” she coaxed. After carefully retrieving the crab and its spooky unwelcome passenger, the apprentice pilot placed both organisms onto a steel tray and positioned them gingerly with her bare fingers. The pilot and captain watched as the woman did a manual examination of the odd sea creature and the crab it had latched on to. “Interesting.” “Be careful,” Enright warned. “That may bite.” Clark held out one hand. “Give me the ultrasound unit.” The men were more interested in the gold and turned back to the treasure. Enright waved her off. “Listen, Clark, I appreciate you enjoying your crispy critter, but you don’t mind if Polidori and me get back to our booty.” “Work with me here, will you? Just give me the ultrasound, then you can get back to your filthy riches.” “Sure.” The captain picked up the portable electronic device and handed it over to the young woman. Clark placed the organism under the ultrasound stethoscope beam that displayed a see-through anatomical readout on the monitor of the device. “What are we looking at?” Enright asked. The parasite was clearly visible, like a second invasive endoskeleton inside the crab. A cartilage hook from the nasty creature’s beak impaled the crustacean’s brain stem, the wiry tendril branches of the strange sea parasite inserted down the legs and claws of the crab, driving the crustacean this way and controlling its host completely. “It’s like this organism is tapping into the nervous system of its host by remote control,” Clark observed, fascinated. “Kind of like a puppeteer and a marionette.” Polidori was having none of it. “Get rid of that thing. It may be poisonous.” Clark persisted. “Obviously not to the crab here, because it’s still alive. I think the goal of the creature is not to kill its host, but to live off it and control it.” It made for a disturbing visual on the ultrasound. They all exchanged glances, considering the nature of the sinister organism they were looking at, and shared a group shudder. Clark’s eyes grew wide in wonder, the woman and adventurer in her inspired. “It looks like we’ve discovered a new life form.” “I said get rid of it. It gives me willies,” the Soviet growled. “We don’t know what kind of bacteria it has or what infection we could get.” “He has a point,” Enright agreed. Clark took a glass specimen bottle, uncapped it, and dropped both the crab and the parasite inside, screwing the lid. She observed the icky creature through the bottle. “Now it can’t hurt anybody.” “You’ll probably want this, then.” The captain held something in the palm of his hand out to her. It was a small fragment of the glowing green rock. She took it and turned the eerie piece of stone over in her fingers, amazed. “Wow.” “Keep it as a souvenir of our dive.” he smiled. “Thanks,” the woman said, slipping the meteorite fragment into the front pockets of her shorts. A gust of current shimmied the sub. They all looked queasily out the portholes to observe the floor of the shelf crawling with countless parasites fastened to the shells of scuttling hapless crabs. Polidori nodded to Enright and Clark. “We got what we came for. Let’s get out of here.” The captain nodded back. “Take us up. Mission’s over.” The apprentice pilot manned her station. The pilot nudged his jaw at her. Getting behind the controls, he hit a switch that emptied the ballast tanks, initiating their ascent. “Ballast purge commenced.” All at once, the Neptune was jolted by a powerful underwater current that heaved the sub sideways. “Look out!” Enright cried. The monitors showed the DSV being swept out of control in the surge of current toward the hull of shipwreck. THUD! The sub smashed hard into the ancient vessel, knocking the crew off their feet. Clark screamed. Through the portholes, the ruined, sodden pirate ship collapsed onto the sub. The ground the boat rested on crumbled in a small avalanche on top of the DSV. The external cameras and AUV monitors showed a multi-screen panorama of the catastrophe from every possible angle. A heavy mast crashed on top of the sub like a felled tree, smashing against the hull, doing visible damage, causing debris to fly off and float in the headlights. The weight of the toppling shipwreck caused a partial collapse of the plateau by the cliff, burying the DSV under a mountain of rocks that pounded the hull and smothered the submersible under the crushing weight of rubble as everything went black.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Eric Red is a Los Angeles based motion picture screenwriter and director whose films include The Hitcher, Near Dark, Cohen and Tate, and Body Parts. He's currently writing and directing the film version of New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Maberry's bestselling zombie novel Dead of Night. His first novel, Don't Stand So Close,is published in hardcover and trade paperback by SST Publications. His second novel, The Guns of Santa Sangre, is published by Samhain Publishing. Recent published short stories have been in Weird Tales Magazine, Cemetery Dance Magazine, Shroud Magazine, and the Dark Delicacies III: Haunted anthology. He created and wrote the comic series and graphic novel Containment for IDW Publishing and the upcoming comic series Wild Work from Antarctic Press. Permuted Press Presents: Buster Voodoo (novel excerpt) Mason James Cole

Please enjoy the following excerpt of the new novel Buster Voodoo by Mason James Cole, coming this month from Permuted Press:

Dixon Green is no stranger to fear. As the child of a Voodoo priestess in a poor black neighborhood in 1940s New Orleans, he witnesses brutality, desperation, and death. When children start to disappear in the Tremé, word spreads that a terrifying legend is to blame . . .

Buster Voodoo is back, and Dixon's sister is missing.

Sixty years later, Dixon is a custodian at a second-rate theme park, watching the clock wind down with a bottle in his hand. Life is devoid of the magic and mystery of Dixon's childhood until it comes to his attention that children are disappearing into the shadows of the run-down dark ride known as “Marie Laveau’s Zombie Nightmare.” As he begins to question his sanity, a deadly force looms on the horizon that is far more powerful than any boogeyman: Hurricane Katrina.

In two gripping interlaced narratives that build to a devastating climax, Dixon uncovers the terrible realities behind his sister’s disappearance—and his mother’s dark secrets—as he struggles to endure the savage days following in the storm’s wake.

Mason James Cole, author of the cult hit Pray to Stay Dead, returns with a chilling novel that contrasts the horrors of the imagination with the horrors of the real world. Suspenseful and heartrending, Buster Voodoo is a fever-dream that reads like Stephen King by way of Flannery O’Connor—a glimpse into a sad world on the brink of disaster and the story of one man’s struggle to unravel the haunting mystery of his childhood.

One

Dixon Green snuck out of the house while his sister read in her room and their mama helped rich white women with love potions or prosperity spells or something. It was a little after five in the evening. The September air was cool and damp. There weren’t any kids out, and the few grownups who saw Dixon told him to get his scrawny little ass home, where it was safe. Over the past two months, six kids had vanished from the Faubourg Tremé. All of them were colored, which meant that the police weren’t breaking their backs trying to find out what was going on. Dixon had probably seen the other five kids around the neighborhood or down at Lincoln Beach, but he hadn’t really known them. Wynton Trevigne, the most recent child to disappear from the neighborhood, lived a few houses down from Dixon. They were good friends even though Dixon was nine and Wynton was twelve. They played ball together in the empty lot at the end of the block and sometimes they walked down to St. Philip Street and dared each other to throw rocks at Empty House. No one really messed with Empty House. They might stand on the sidewalk bouncing rocks in their palms, but none of Empty House’s windows were broken. Kids in the neighborhood liked to talk about how the place was haunted, but kids weren’t the only ones—everyone believed the place was bad. Dixon’s mama most of all. “Don’t go playing around Empty House,” she warned him more than once, but here he was, in the shadow of Empty House, looking up at its narrow gray face, with St. Peter Claver Church to his back, pointing at God. Over the past few days, he’d come to believe that Wynton and the other kids were trapped inside. He thought about telling his mama, but he knew what she would say—that he was imagining things, that Empty House was dangerous and that he had to leave it be. But he couldn’t leave it be. If his friend was there, Dixon had to help him. By the time he reached the place, there wasn’t anybody around. Just him and Empty House and the empty houses around it. It looked like every other house in the neighborhood, empty or otherwise—one story, long and narrow —a weathered shotgun shack, named such because you could shoot a shotgun at the back of the house and kill someone coming through the front door. He stepped up onto the porch, looked around, and wrapped his fingers around the doorknob. The door was either locked or nailed shut, but that wasn’t going to stop him. He checked out the side of the house and found a window that wobbled in its frame. He dragged an old trash can over to the house, flipped it over, and hopped up onto it. The window was not hard to open. He crawled in and fell onto the floor, kicking up a cloud of dust. He sneezed once and got up. The place smelled bad. Not nasty like something was dead or maybe someone had been using one of the rooms as a toilet— just bad and stale, like he imagined the air must be in a tomb long after the bodies inside had shed their last leathery scraps of flesh. He didn’t have trouble seeing because none of the windows were boarded up. The walls of the first room were painted dark blue, the window frame outlined in canary yellow. The floor was exposed wood covered in nicks and gouges, old smears of grout and dirty tile shards. The fireplace was empty, blackened with fires long dead. A cluster of wires hung from a hole in the ceiling, seemed to reach down toward his face. “Hello?” he said, and of course no one responded because no one was there. He had been wrong. Wynton was not in this place. Neither were any of the other kids. But he was here—and there was no sense in leaving without at least taking a look around. He’d done what the other kids had only lied about doing: he was inside. The front door, also trimmed in yellow, was locked, not nailed shut. He thought about unlocking it, then decided not to. He could go out like he’d come in. He stepped into the second room and looked around. The walls were green. The window and doorframe were trimmed in bright red. It made his eyes feel funny to look at the place where the green touched the red—the doorframe seemed to jitter in place. The room was empty save for a wooden liquor cabinet in the far corner. It wasn’t as nice as the furniture his family used to make, but it was too nice to have been abandoned here without reason. He walked over to it and traced a finger through the furry skin of dust, revealing the richly varnished wood grain beneath. He stared at the line in the dust and then he turned it into a D and spelled out his first name. Worried that someone might see it and know he’d been here, he considered wiping it away and then changed his mind—let it be. No one would ever move into Empty House, and his name would remain there until it was erased by more dust. He wiped his finger on his shirt and eased the cabinet doors open. It was empty. He closed the cabinet doors and noticed a scattering of dark splotches across them. He palmed away more dust, sneezed three times, and leaned in close. The stains were old and dark and flaky atop the thick varnish. “Oh, Lord,” he said, wiping his hand on his shirt, as if some of the old blood had actually gotten onto him. He turned around, took two steps, and stopped. There was a chalk line across the windowsill in this room. His heart hammering in his small chest, he ran into the first room. His scalp tightened. There was a blurry and broken chalk line across the sill of the window through which he’d just come. He tugged his shirt forward, saw the powdery smear across the dark fabric above his stomach. The window rattled in its frame. “Oh, Mama,” Dixon said, taking a few steps backward into the second room. “I messed up real good.” Blues in the air and the tink of glass on glass behind him. He spun around. A short, round-faced colored man wearing a rumpled purple zoot suit stood in front of the liquor cabinet, looking a little like a child wearing his father’s clothes. He turned around with a shot glass in each hand, held one out. “I’m sorry, sir, I thought that this . .” Dixon said, but the man did not see him. Something fluttered like a moth behind Dixon’s forehead and his eyes watered and burned like he’d gotten a face full of stinging black smoke. He rubbed his eyes and stepped backward. His back touched the wall and he slowly peeled his hands from his eyes. “You wanna tell me what happened tonight?” the short, thick man said, knocking back his drink and placing the empty glass atop the liquor cabinet, which was now lined with glass bottles bearing fancy, colorful labels. The room was different somehow, though it hurt Dixon’s eyes to look at anything but the man, who with his ratty beard and his boneless face and his bloodshot eyes appeared solid enough to touch. Everything else, including the form that stood holding the other shot glass before the little man, was sketchy. There and not there. The sketchy form standing before the old man gesticulated, said something, its voice a faraway whisper. “That right?” the man said, sliding out of his oversized jacket and tossing it onto an unseen chair. The armpits of his puffy shirt were dark with sweat. He pushed his sleeves back to reveal thick, muscled forearms marked with barely-discernible tattoos. The somber blues number wilted into silence quickly filled by cheers and applause. The thin gold chain that hung from the pockets of the little man’s high-waist pants glinted in electric light that was not there. “Yeah, well, you can’t do that.” The form said something, brought the glass to its lips. Sipped. “’Cause I said you can’t. That’s why.” The short man smiled, shook his head, and stepped forward. Drove his right fist forward. The shot glass clattered across the floor and the sketchy form crumpled. “Bitch, I fuckin’ tell you when you done workin’ f’me.” Tears streamed down Dixon’s face and he fought to hold back the scream that grew in his chest. His heart pounded in his throat now. His hands were cold and numb. He eased himself toward the door leading into the blue room. The window was so close. Dixon pulled his attention from the man, tried to see who the other form was, what it looked like, but the moth flapped its wings behind his eyes again and he had to look away. The little man in the lumpy suit leaned forward and slapped the form upside the head, pulled it to its feet. It was a head taller than he was, but he was strong. He leveled a finger at its face. “Now you listen to me right now, honey,” the man said, and he was no longer smiling. His eyes were black. “You try this shit one more time, and—” The little man gasped and stumbled forward into the sketchy form. It shoved him away, and he crashed into the liquor cabinet. Bottles of whiskey and gin wobbled and bumped into one another like drunks, and the little man in the zoot suit gasped and gurgled, his hands pressed to his throat, slick with blood. The form surged toward the man, its right arm rising and falling, rising and falling, and the little man’s sweaty white shirt went red like a bouquet of roses and you don’t ever put your filthy fucking hands on me see what happens when you do? “Jesus,” Dixon said, pulling away from the wall, and spun into the first room. The man in the zoot suit stood before the window with the broken chalk line, holding his hands out like a man warming himself in front of a fire. He was unmarked. He wore his lumpy, big-shouldered jacket. Still open, the window rattled in its frame. Now the little man saw Dixon, who screamed and turned to run, tripped on his own feet, and toppled to the floor in the second room, which was empty except for the dusty liquor cabinet. Standing in the front room, the man in the zoot suit stared down at Dixon, who threw his forearms across his face. “Help me, Lord,” he said, gasping, trying to find the words his mother would have him speak. “Help me, Mama Laveau. Help me, Mother Mary. Make this man go away. Make him go.” He peeled his arms from his face, opened his eyes. The man was still there. He’d returned his attention to the window, which seemed to be trying to rip itself from the wall. The short man’s large suit rippled around his body as if buffeted by a great wind. He reached for the window, touched its wooden frame. He winced and pulled his hand to his chest. Dixon clambered to his feet and ran deeper into the house. The third room had been the kitchen. The walls were orange. The cabinets were gone. Pipes jutted from the wall beneath two windows, both of which had been painted shut in thick, careless globs. There were symbols written in chalk on the wall beneath each window. He looked back down the length of the house. The man in the suit had not moved from the window. Toward the back of the house, a short hallway fronted a small lavatory with a black hole in the floor where a flushing toilet had once been. In the fourth room, the walls were dark red and the trim was white. There was a large bed with an ornate wooden head-board and a bloodstained mattress heaped with bloody sheets. The stains were old and brown. Meaning to climb onto the bed and attempt to open the window above it, Dixon stepped deeper into the room. He looked back—the man was once more reaching for the rattling window. Dixon took one more step toward the bed, and a pretty white woman in a billowing white nightgown brushed past him. She giggled, hand in hand with a shirtless young colored man, who she led to the bed. They stood, kissing, their hands sliding over one another’s body. The woman seemed older than the man. She grunted and pressed her body against his, sucking his bottom lip into her mouth. His face growing hot, Dixon drew in a deep breath and looked back. The man in the baggy purple suit was gone. Dixon looked back in time to see the young man lift the nightgown over the woman’s head and toss it onto the bed, where it concealed much of the dried blood. She was naked. The couple spun slowly in place, kissing and groping and nibbling, their knees bumping into the bed, and Dixon tried to take her all in—her heavy, pale breasts, her large nipples. The curve of her full stomach and her large, dimpled ass. The long hair down her back. The thick dark hair between her legs, which tapered in a thin line up to her deep bellybutton. The man grabbed hold of one of the woman’s breasts and squeezed it out of shape, pressed his face to it, sucked the nipple into his mouth. His other hand slid down between her legs, and Dixon had to adjust himself. He wasn’t a dumb kid—his Mama made sure he and his sister knew about the world, and he knew just what he was seeing here. He’d seen pictures of people doing this—Wynton had a few black and white photos of people making love stashed under his mattress—but he’d never actually seen it with his own eyes. He remembered to breathe. His knees weakened, and he steadied himself against the wall as the woman slid to her knees before the man, kissing his chest and his flat, dark stomach. She unbuckled his pants, tugged them down, and the man’s rigid penis dropped forward, came to rest against the woman’s face. They laughed, and then the woman seized the man’s thing and slid it into her mouth. “Gah,” the man said, and Dixon slid down the wall and sat watching as the man lowered himself to the bed and the woman’s head rose and fell, rose and fell. There were a series of moles between her shoulder blades. The bottoms of her feet were dirty. Her ass was pointed directly at Dixon. He stared at her privates through a hot rush of shame, wonder, and revulsion. “God,” the man said, moaning, balling his fists in the woman’s dark hair. “God, baby.” He squeezed his eyes shut and drew his lips back from his clenched teeth in an expression that seemed almost animal to Dixon. The thrumming behind Dixon’s eyes returned, intensified, and there was only rage and hurt and pain and you fucking lying dog don’t even look at me you dirty white bitch— The white woman leaned against the bed, weeping, feebly attempting to conceal her nakedness while holding one hand out before her like an equally feeble shield. The man moved to stand up—don’t move—and the white woman screamed and begged and there were two muted pops and two holes appeared in her chest and began to sputter blood like freckles onto her breasts. She fell to her side, gasping, sicking up a bright red gout of blood, and the man leapt to his feet once more. There was another pop, and the young man stumbled to his knees, clutching his stomach. Blood poured down over his flaccid penis. A sketchy form rushed over to where he knelt, struck him across the face, cursed his name with words Dixon felt and did not hear. Out front, the yellow-framed window rattled and rattled. Wailing, Dixon scurried into the last room of the house. Behind him, the man said something about being sorry, and there was a final distant pop. There was no furniture in the last room. The walls were sweaty and slick and, along with the ceiling, had been painted black. Names and words he didn’t understand were scrawled in red chalk along the crown molding on all four walls. Three horseshoes hung on the back wall. They were lumpy and uneven, like they were caked in dried clay, and they were upside down. The windows were opaque with moisture. He stared at the horseshoes, wondering what they meant and who could have hung them there, and then, grit crunching beneath his right foot, he turned to face the doorway. The shirtless man stood there. His pants were still on and he had not been shot. To his back, sketchy forms churned and writhed. The window out front rattled and rattled, and Dixon’s knees gave out one final time. Black splotches blotted out his field of vision, and the shirtless man walked over to where he sat and knelt before him. Took one of his small hands in both of his. The man’s hands were rough, and Dixon tried to look him in the eye. The man smiled. “You let go of him right now,” his mama said, and Dixon spun into darkness. He opened his eyes and sat up and he was on the front porch of Empty House, his head buzzing. It was almost dark now. Pale light glowed in the windows of the houses across the street. A nasty smell clung to his face and there was a sickly taste in his mouth. He crawled over to the edge of the porch and threw up. The front door opened and his mother emerged from Empty House, bringing with her the pungency of incense. She had on the clothes she wore when she went helping folks keep their dicks up or get revenge on an unfaithful spouse or maybe make sure a horse won a race: her prettiest green dress, the scarf on her head. By daylight, the scarf seemed to have been spun from gold. By this light, it was little more than a fading hint of yellow atop the dark oval of her face. She whispered something in French and held her eyes shut, and her face tightened with pain, like she was kneeling on broken glass. There was a piece of chalk in her left hand. She slid it into a small pouch at her waist and looked down at him. “Mama, I . . .” Seconds dragged into minutes, and Mama stared at him, her face like murder. Dixon’s heart returned to something like normal, the sky darkened, and his mama sighed. She looked a bit like she wanted to collapse right there. “What did I tell you?” “Mama, I’m—” “Stop.” She pulled a key from a pouch at her waist. She locked the door, and when she looked at Dixon he wanted to ask her why she had a key to Empty House. He wanted to but he didn’t because the look in her eyes told him she was thinking about whipping his ass real good. “Just shut up for a minute,” she said, sitting on the porch steps. She slid the key into the pouch and produced a hand-rolled cigarette, brought it to her lips, and lit up. It smelled funny, not like a regular cigarette—he’d smelled it before, drifting into his room after he’d gone to bed sometimes. She took a few deep drags and then stood up, looked back at him. “What did you see?” “Uh.” “What did you see?” “I . . .” he said, trying to make sense of what had just happened to him. Everything was slower. His body was heavy. “It was bad, Mama.” “This place is no good. I told you that. Here.” She held the cigarette out to him. “I—” “Take it.” He did. He brought the cigarette to his lips. “Fill your mouth first. Let the smoke cool.” He stared at her with his cheeks puffed up and his eyes wide. “Breathe in.” The smoke burned his lungs and he coughed, his eyes watering, his mouth filling with drool. Mama took the cigarette from him and smashed its fiery tip out on the flecked and peeling surface of the porch. She slid what was left into her pouch. “That’ll help. The air inside this place is sick. It makes you think things, baby. Makes you see things.” “Mama, I feel funny.” “I gave you some medicine,” she said, walking down the steps and onto the sidewalk. “Come on.” He stood up and watched her leave, and the world seemed slower somehow. She didn’t look back, and then she was out of his sight, having slipped into the deepening shadows. To his back, Empty House groaned. “Mama, wait,” he said, running down the steps and catching up to her. “I’m sorry, Mama. I—” “Shut up.” He walked home a few feet behind her, his arms and legs tingling, his head in a fog. The house on Dumaine Street had been in their family since his great grandfather, three times over, had bought himself out of slavery and built it with his own hands. He’d started a furniture-making business, and it had been the family business until six years ago, in 1942, when Dixon’s mother sold it. Inside, his sister stood at the foot of the stairs, arms crossed, a disappointed look on her face, her hair an unkempt black cloud above her head. She was twelve, and already on her way to being every bit as beautiful as their mother. “What the hell were you thinking?” Marie asked. “Well,” Dixon said, wobbling in place, head spinning. “You were supposed to be watching me.” Marie’s eyes turned to perfect dark circles. She took a step toward him, and then Mama got between them. “Leave him alone,” Mama said, leading Dixon to the stairs and giving him a nudge. “Go to bed.” It seemed like it took forever to get up the stairs. He stood at his bedroom door, not wanting to open it. The shirtless colored man and the white woman would be there, writhing and groping, or maybe the man in the purple suit, gasping and bleeding. His room was empty. He changed his clothes and sat on the edge of his bed and his mama stepped into his room, her massive skirt rustling. She held out a small cup filled with something that smelled rotten. “Drink it,” she said. He did, gagging. “Now lay back,” she said, and he did. She took his hand in hers. “Oh, my baby boy.” “Mama, I’m so sorry.” “I know you are, Dixie. I think I have an idea of what you might have seen in there, but I want you to know that—” “Feels like I’m falling.” “It’s the medicine, baby. It’s going to help you to sleep.” “It was so scary, Mama,” he said. “I need you let go and fall asleep now, Dixie, you understand me?” “Uh-huh.” “You had a bad dream, honey, but that’s all it was. A bad dream. Now sleep.” He did.

• • • •

Three days after he’d ventured into Empty House, a child’s body was found in a vacant lot a few blocks away. The child—identified as eight-year- old Pierre Autin—had been torn to pieces, and though the official cause was deemed an animal attack, folks in the Tremé talked. Folks whispered. They came to Dixon’s mama and asked for spells against evil, bought charms and candles from her, and asked that she come and cleanse their houses. When asked, she kept quiet as stone, offering no opinion about what might have happened to the children. When another of the missing kids turned up at a construction site in Metairie, and in the same pitiful condition, whispers spread like a sickness, the name coming up from hitching throats like deepest bile and twice as bitter. This was no animal attack—this was the work of Buster Voodoo.

Two

“You don’t believe in Buster Voodoo?” Marie asked. She looked pretty in her light blue dress. They’d gone to Sunday Mass with their Mama not long after breakfast. Dixon had changed out of his suit as soon as they’d gotten home. It was itchy and uncomfortable, and he wasn’t sure why he couldn’t go to Church in his regular clothes. Marie, on the other hand—if Mama let her, she’d wear her pretty blue dress until it fell apart. “Be quiet and read,” Dixon said, shooting his sister a dismissive glance. Their Mama had some things to do after Church, and they were staying at the Glapion house until she returned. She usually trusted them while she was away, but Dixon’s trip into Empty House had changed things. She’d walked them to the Glapions with their daily reading assignments. This month, Mama had Marie reading The Confessions of St. Augustine. Marie hated it, and she hated Dixon because he’d fared so much better this time around—he’d gotten Treasure Island. Marie enjoyed scaring her baby brother. It didn’t work as well as it used to, but she could be relentless. He knew exactly where this was going. He pretended to be caught up in his book, but he was really just waiting for her to open her mouth. She wasn’t done. “You think he took Wynton?” she said, staring at him until he looked up. Her big brown eyes were somehow bigger, and he couldn’t tell if she was really afraid or if she was just setting him up. “Think Buster ate him?” “Why you wanna be like that?” he asked. “Mama says we should be praying for him, not talking foolish.” “I’m just saying,” she said, and now he could tell for sure—she was having fun. “Y’all two spent a lot of time together. What if Wynton had your smell on him? You think maybe Buster Voodoo can smell you out like a bloodhound?” “You ain’t right at all.” “Stop talkin’ low, Dixie,” she said. “Mama ain’t here, and you’re talkin’ low, too, so shut up.” “What you think he looks like?” Dixon had heard one of the older boys in the neighborhood talking about Buster Voodoo when he was five or six, and the story had frightened him to tears. He’d heard the story countless times since, and though there were always variations, the key details remained. Buster was a massive Creole man who’d lived in the Tremé with his frail little wife, Aldena. She’d learned Voodoo under Marie Laveau herself and had danced the trance in Congo Square, and Buster had fawned over her, giving her everything she desired. She bore eight children, all boys, and when the oldest boy, Buster’s favorite, was nine years old, Buster learned a horrible truth: None of the children had belonged to him. He was big and stupid, and Aldena did not want stupid children. In a rage, Buster attacked his wife. Over the years, he’d secretly become quite the conjure man, and the two of them had lobbed curse after curse at one another, until Buster could get close enough to close his large hands around her scrawny neck. He killed her, but not before she’d cast one final curse, stealing his face. He’d escaped into the night, with nothing but a black hole for a face—it was at this point in the older boy’s narrative that Dixon had begun to cry— and it was said that he could steal the face of anyone or anything he desired and wear it like a mask. He stole the face of a wolf and, one by one, devoured the sons who were not his own, saving the firstborn, his favorite, for last. He became the most powerful conjure man ever to curse the earth with his footsteps. Unable to defeat him, the people of the Tremé could only drive him out. Like all good legends, he supposedly vowed to return. Some even said that he’d never left, that he walked on all fours in the shape of a wolf and that he waited in the shadows between houses and under beds and within closets. Dixon knew better, thanks to his Mama. “Ain’t no such thing.” “Mama believes in him. You don’t think Mama knows what she’s talking about?” “Mama knows a lot,” he said, looking down at his book and wishing she’d just shut up. He shrugged. “And Mama said that Buster Voodoo was a crazy man that killed his wife and kids and got himself shot dead in the street by some policemen. That’s all. He ain’t no ghost, and he ain’t no roogaroo— and you know that.” “You don’t think he might be real?” she asked, and now she sounded a little hopeful and a little pleased with herself. She was frightened, sure, but she was also enjoying trying to frighten him. “He ain’t real,” Dixon said, drawing his brows together and trying to stare her down. “And even if he were real, ain’t nothing out there touching you and me. Not with Mama around. They know better. Even if he is real, I ain’t afraid of him.” This wasn’t entirely true. His foolish trip into Empty House had pulled new fears to light. Buster Voodoo or not, there were things out there that could hurt him. They knew better than to mess with Mama La Roux, but what if they caught him when she wasn’t around? “What do you think killed all them kids?” By that point, only two bodies had been discovered, but everyone knew the other kids were dead, even if they didn’t say so. He could pray all he wanted and light as many candles as Mama told him to, but he wasn’t going to see Wynton again. He tried to remember his friend’s face and saw a wolf with the hands of a man clutching Wynton by his skinny shoulders and gently easing the boy’s head into its gaping mouth. “Shut up.” If she kept running her mouth, he’d wind up thinking about Buster Voodoo all damn night—what he might look like, what face he could be wearing—and next he’d be thinking of what he’d seen in Empty House, and if that happened he’d punch his stupid sister in the mouth. “Shut up before Mama gets back.” After Church, every Sunday and without fail, Mama paid visits to several clients, most of them rich and white, folks who still believed there were secrets to be discovered through Voodoo—a Voodoo that, she told her kids countless times, didn’t sound much like the Voodoo she’d grown up with. “These white people, they want their palms read and their fortunes told,” she’d said, just before leaving them to attend their daily reading lessons. “Like I’m some gypsy from one of their fool-headed picture shows.” “I ain’t kidding,” Marie said. “What you think took all them kids?” “The Wolfman,” he said. They looked at one another for a few seconds, and then they both laughed. His Mama had taken them to Canal Street to see a double feature of I Walked With a Zombie and The Wolfman a few months back, and afterwards, on the walk home, she’d told them about the roogaroo, about how one of her brothers had seen one when they were kids, about how the Wolfman in the movie had been a roogaroo. She explained that it was a French word, and that there were several ways to say it, even though it all came down to the exact same thing—a skin-changer. A wolfman. “You kids should settle down and get to reading,” Mister Glapion said, standing in the doorway and looking down at them, making them jump. He was a skinny old white man who supposedly had some Haitian blood somewhere down the line. Folks in the neighborhood liked to talk about him behind his back—and sometimes to his face—but Dixon liked him just fine, and their Mama told them not to pay his color any mind, said he wasn’t at all like the white folks who made them use the bathroom on the side of the road and hung them from trees. “Sorry, Mister Glapion,” Marie said. “Naw, naw,” he said. “It ain’t nothing. I just don’t want you to get into no trouble.” “Yes, sir,” Dixon said. The old man shuffled out of sight. A second later, he popped his head back into view. “The Wolfman was a good picture,” he said, smiling a toothless grin, “but I liked Frankenstein more,” and then he was gone. They looked at one another until the sound of his slippers dragging across the floor faded. Dixon got three sentences into the next paragraph. “You think silver can kill a roogaroo?” Marie asked. “I’m reading my book now,” he said, and there must have been something in the look on his face. She closed her mouth and shot him some daggers and went back to her book. Their Mama picked them up and took them home a little after twelve- thirty and asked both of them about the chapters they’d read—she’d read every book in their home library and knew them well—and then she went into the kitchen and prepared a late lunch. They’d just said grace when Mrs. Glapion came by looking pale and sick. Their Mama told them to leave—she needed a few minutes with Mrs. Glapion. Dixon and Marie marched right up to their rooms, but the house was old and they were children, so naturally they got as quiet as possible and listened as hard as they could. Another of the missing kids had been found, this one beneath an empty house six blocks over. One of the girls. Her throat had been torn open. Her head had been connected to her body by a thin strand of meat. The police said it looked like another animal attack. Their Mama and Mrs. Glapion lit candles and said a few prayers and cried a little. Mrs. Glapion left, sniffling and still muttering prayers, and then their Mama called them down and gathered them in her arms and told them to get packed for the beach.

• • • •

They left their plates on the table, the food untouched, and caught a bus to Lincoln Beach, a coloreds only swimming facility located on the southern shore of Lake Pontchartrain. It took nearly an hour to get there—they had to change buses three times, riding at the back of each of them, and by the time they got to Lincoln Beach the only white face on the bus belonged to the driver. The bus rocked along, and Dixon stared out the window, his sister beside him. Their Mama sat across from them, a cigarette pressed between her lips, the bag containing their swimsuits on her lap. She hadn’t changed out of her colorful Sunday dress, though she’d added a black silk scarf to the emerald sash around her waist. “Babies?” she said, and Dixon barely heard her. He was thinking about the kids they’d found, about how they’d been torn to pieces. Dogs were always catching stray cats in the neighborhood and fighting over them until they didn’t look like cats anymore. He’d seen two this year already, bloody, furry tangles buzzing with flies, and he tried not to think about what Wynton must look like at that moment, with his throat gone and his head turned around, maybe ripped off entirely and staring up at the sky, but there it was—he could see the ants trailing in and out of his friend’s mouth and nose. “Dixon?” Marie elbowed him and he looked at his Mama, blinking. There were tears in his eyes. “Y’all heard what Mrs. Glapion had to say I guess.” “Yes, Mama,” they said, and their Mama half smiled, though her eyes were sad. The tip of her cigarette flared up, and she let the smoke drift from her nostrils. “Now, I’m not mad,” she said, “kids are curious, and you two are about as curious a couple of kids as I’ve ever known, but this is bad. This is Godless and awful, but I need you to not worry about it. You both hear me?” “Yes, Mama,” Marie said, and Dixon sat there with his mouth open, unsure of what to say and fighting back images of the kids all bloodied and twisted, images of Wynton. He couldn’t even remember what the last thing he’d said to Wynton had been. “Dixon Henry Green, are you listening to your Mama?” “I am,” he said. “I’m just . . .” “You’re afraid, and that’s okay. I am, too,” she said, and her eyes were a little wild. “I’m afraid for the other children out there, but nothing is going to happen to either of you. Nothing can touch you. Not while I’m here.” “Mama?” Marie said. “Yes, honey?” “Is it—” Marie looked at Dixon for a second, and he saw now that the fear in her eyes was not feigned. “Is it Buster Voodoo?” “This foolishness has got to stop,” Mama said, eyes wide. “I know the kids in the neighborhood like to talk, and they’re all scared, but I need you both to pay no mind to what they’re saying, okay? Now, I’ve seen a lot of things and I’ve talked with the dead and heard them talk back, but you have to trust me when I tell you that Buster Voodoo can’t hurt anyone, and he isn’t doing this.” “But—” “But nothing. I told you to leave it be.” “But Mama?” She sighed and closed her eyes for a few seconds, opened them, and smiled. “But what, Marie Claire?” “What if it’s a roogaroo?” “Jesus, girl—you won’t let up, will you?” “You said Uncle Whit saw one back when y’all was kids, and now you’re saying that we ain’t got to be worried.” “Don’t, baby—don’t. I’m saying that you don’t have to worry.” “But—” Dixon said, clearing his throat. “But is it real?” “My brother said he saw one, and my brother was not a man to lie. Something is taking those kids and killing them, and it really doesn’t matter what or who it is, because I’m going to protect my babies.” “Who was it, Mama,” Dixon said. “The girl?” “Her name doesn’t matter, hon. Ya’ll didn’t know her, but her people were good people, and Saint Gertrude has already taken her by the hand and walked her into the presence of God.” She reached out and knocked three times on the window—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. She mashed her cigarette on the bottom of her shoe and tossed it out the window. That was probably true about the girl, but Dixon figured that maybe Pierre hadn’t been so lucky—the kid had been mean, and Dixon would not miss him. He kept that thought to himself, and after a few more words, they fell silent. Ten minutes later, they were at Lincoln Beach. It was May so the place was jumping. It seemed like everyone knew their Mama, and Dixon almost felt like royalty on their walk to the bathhouse. The air was thick with the smell of barbecue—there was a large grill sizzling with various thick cuts of meat, greens boiling in pots, and a modest-sized hog on a spit, going round and round, turning black and crackling and dripping hot fat onto the coals. They changed in the bathhouse, and Mama sat on an unoccupied bench away from the action and told them to run along and play in the lake. Their daddy had been dead since Dixon was four years old, and though she rarely brought men around, he knew that his Mama had boyfriends. Wherever she went, she turned heads, black and white alike, and Lincoln Beach was no different. Today was different, though—Dixon could tell. His Mama needed to be alone, but she also needed to get her kids out of the Tremé for a little while, out beneath the sun and the clouds. Dixon found some kids to play with. He splashed around for a little while, tossing an inflatable ball back and forth with a skinny boy with crazy Buckwheat hair. They talked a bit, but the boy’s Mississippi patois was thick and he didn’t have anything interesting to say, anyway, so Dixon drifted away in search of his sister. Marie was at the other end of the beach, talking to a boy. She was filling out her swimsuit in all the nice ways that girls do when they become women, and as Dixon got closer, he could tell that the boy was probably older than Marie, fifteen or sixteen. He looked really amused, and so did his two friends, who hovered behind him, watching him make his moves. Dixon stopped behind his sister, catching the end of her conversation with the older boy. “Really?” the boy asked, taking a step toward Marie, looking down at her. He was a full head taller than she, his arms and chest thick. Water glistened in beads on his dark brown skin. “Yes,” Marie said, and she did not sound happy. She took a step back, and the older boy took another step toward her. “Aw,” he said, laughing and looking back at his friends. “I think you playin’ around, girl. I think you know just what you want.” “I ain’t playing,” Marie said. “Especially not with your foolish ass. You need to get the hell on down this beach.” The older boy laughed, and so did his friends. “Naw, naw—I got what you want right here.” He grabbed his thing through his trunks and circled Marie, looked down at her ass, and shook his head, “Damn.” Dixon thought of the man and the woman he’d seen—or thought he’d seen—in Empty House and his face grew warm. The older boy noticed him. “Looking at something? She mine, so your skinny little ass can leave.” “Dixon,” Marie said, stepping toward her brother. “You all right?” Dixon asked. “Aw, shit,” the older boy said, nudging past her and standing over Dixon, looking him in the eye. “This your little brother?” “What are you trying to do?” Dixon asked. It was one of his mom’s questions, usually reserved for when he was doing something exceptionally foolish. “What I’m doing?” he said, laughing, “I’m doing what I want to do.” He placed his large hand over Dixon’s face and pushed him onto the sand, and then he grabbed Marie by the wrist and pulled her toward him, pressed his body against hers. She tried to get away but he was bigger and stronger. Dixon’s right hand seemed to find the rock on its own, and then he was on his feet. It was a nice size—fit comfortably into his palm, and it was light enough to throw and sharp enough to hurt. It bounced off the back of the older boy’s head, and Dixon had a moment in which to see that he’d drawn blood. “Leave her alone,” he said, and the older boy was on him. He landed a few feeble punches to the older boy’s stomach, and then the big kid drove a fist into Dixon’s belly, pushing the wind from his lungs. He collapsed, gasping. The older boy’s friends laughed, and Marie threw herself onto his back. Their Mama was fast. She was there before Dixon could blink the tears from his eyes, let alone get to his feet. Someone squealed and cried, high- pitched and girlish, and Dixon thought for a second that Marie had been hurt. He got to his knees, and saw his mother standing behind the older boy, the thumb and forefinger of her right hand gripping the back of his neck. Tears streamed down his cheeks, and his friends were nowhere to be found. A crowd gathered, and as Dixon got to his feet a massive woman in a bright pink bathing suit and swimming cap pushed through them and stomped toward Dixon’s Mama. “What the hell’s going on?” “Mama,” the older boy screamed. “Mama, this woman gone—” The large woman slapped her son across the face, and the sound of it was sharp and flat in the silence that had fallen over Lincoln Beach. The older boy fell to his knees, weeping, and his mother slapped the side of his head. “What the hell you doing to this nice lady’s children, you dumb ass piece of shit?” The large woman sounded afraid, and Dixon knew that this was the other side of the coin. The people who knew his Mama loved her. The people who knew of her feared her, because she was a Voodoo. The big woman raised her hand again, and Dixon’s Mama covered it with her own hand, guided it to the woman’s side. “Enough,” she said, and looked down at the boy, who gazed up in terror. “Get up and apologize to my daughter.” He did, and Dixon’s Mama inspected the back of his head—the cut was shallow—and soon things were as they should be. There was good music and good food, and Dixon found himself once more listening to the kid with the crazy hair mumble. “Thanks, Dixie,” Marie said as they waited in line for a slice of grilled hog. Two weeks later, she vanished.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mason James Cole’s first novel, Pray to Stay Dead, was called “a revelation” by Badass Digest and is available through Permuted Press. He’s currently hard at work on several new projects, among them a series of science fiction adventures aimed at young adult readers, and an epic post- apocalyptic neo-noir. He lives for Halloween and spent five years in the theme park/Haunt industry. He will one day have a functional version of Marie Laveau’s Zombie Nightmare in his backyard. He wanders the New Orleans night in search of stories. Sometimes, he finds them— other times, they find him. He doesn’t believe in ghosts, but he sees them all the time. NONFICTION The H Word: Horror and Halloween Lesley Bannatyne

Steve Schlozman, a psychiatry professor (known as “the zombie doc” for his Zombie Autopsies: Secret Notebooks from the Apocalypse), did an experiment to try to understand exactly why people enjoy horror, neurologically. He showed them a picture of a puppy. Then he showed them the image with cat’s eyes Photoshopped onto the puppy. It changed everything, he says. Two recognizable patterns that don’t belong in the same picture freaks people out. This is what horror, and Halloween to some extent, can do that’s so appealing—upend the world order and make us work to put it back together. Help us find where the edges are. Halloween—old Halloween of folklore, I mean—was tied to the quickening dark, to seasonal change, to death, to the movement of mythical beings (fairies, witches, dead souls) through the night. These facets, too, are the playing fields of horror in film, art, and literature. You’d think Halloween and horror would have made perfect bedfellows from the beginning. But the Halloween we know now has been invented and reinvented many times over the past few hundred years. It’s always been spooky and otherworldly, but until fairly recently, it had little to do with horror. It began slowly. 1930s and ’40s radio shows such as “Inner Sanctum” and “Lights Out” had Halloween offerings, and comics issued creepy tales at Halloween to satisfy young and hungry-for-scares kids like the young Steven Spielberg and Stephen King. In literature, there were only a few mentions of the holiday until well into the second half of the twentieth-century. One of the most collected pieces in early Halloween-themed books (say, 1919 on) was Poe’s “Black Cat,” a short story that doesn’t mention the holiday at all. Charles Williams’s All Hallow’s Eve (1945), the first fantasy/horror novel to use those words in a title, seems to be more about the church’s All Hallows (All Saint’s) than our Halloween. Poe and Lovecraft each gave Halloween enough thought for a poem: “Ulalume” (1847) for Poe; “Halloween in a Suburb” (1926) for Lovecraft. Even in movies, Halloween and horror were on different tracks: Compare Two Thousand Maniacs (1964), one of a trilogy of splatter films by Herschell Gordon Lewis, or Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968), about satanic cults and madness, with the decade’s iconic Halloween movie: It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966). Halloween wasn’t mined for horror because, up until around forty years ago, it was still seen as a children’s holiday. Then things began to shift. A glut of violent horror films unleashed by the end of the Hollywood production code in 1964, plus real-life horror—graphic images from the war in Vietnam for one—meant that America had to cope with a darker set of images, a more visually dangerous world. Halloween, which always responds to cultural movements, became riddled with rumors about poisoned treats, satanic rituals, kidnapped kids, and strangled black cats. Hoaxes or misunderstandings, most of them, but the celebration of Halloween was transformed by the notion that kids were in danger. It wasn’t all bad news. For those who love horror—and it turns out there are quite a few of us—the uptick in bloody visuals in popular culture helped create a new market for Halloween terrortainment. I asked my friends this: if you draw a circle around horror, and one around Halloween, where do they overlap? My most literal friend mentioned the letter “O.” But the majority said haunted houses, October-only dark entertainments that thirty-one million Americans sought out last year. Charity haunts grew popular in the 1970s, along with the first October horror-themed theme park attractions. These dark entertainments and horror films use the same characters and scenarios (hillbilly cannibals, chainsaws, clowns, butcher shops). They’re also both narrative, which gives us a way to hook into what’s happened and find a place for it in our heads, savor it. And why not? If adults who grew up in the ’50s and ’60s have preserved trick or treating so their children can enjoy Halloween, those who grew up in the ’70s with heavy metal, slasher movies, and the fear of razor blades in their apples might feel a bit of nostalgia for a more terrifying Halloween. We want an experience that rises above the visual chatter that surrounds us. Both horror film and dark entertainment create tribes. In movies we watch people drawn together to fight for or against something. In haunts, there’s group terror—people come together as bands of warriors for the experience. As my haunt-owner friends say, no one goes to a haunted house alone. It was a fluke, though, that nailed horror to Halloween forever. John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) was supposed to be released as The Babysitter Murders, but producer Irwin Yablans changed the title, and, with one stroke, Halloween (the movie) tied Halloween (the holiday) to violent death and unimaginable evil because it used the holiday as a title, theme, and setting. The original trailer went like this: medium shot of a smiling jack-o’-lantern next to bold letters spelling “Halloween.” Midway through is a shot of the same jack-o’-lantern, grinning on a nightstand next to a bed where a splayed body lies murdered. The final image is the jack-o’-lantern, the boldface “Halloween,” and that creepy, 5/4-time theme music that gets under your skin. Halloween took the most innocuous of symbols, the most childlike and innocent—a pumpkin—and subverted it. Was anything safe anymore? Halloween played on the same fear that the myth of the razor-blades-in- apples did—something evil is lurking under the ordinary. The enormous box office success of Halloween let loose a flood of 1980s slasher films, many with references to Halloween, the dead returning, Satan, and even Samhain, Halloween’s Old World predecessor. To complicate things further, practitioners of modern day witchcraft—an earth-based spirituality—spoke out about their own celebration of October 31st, and fundamentalist churches began to rail against its “Satanist” origins. The American public was confused: Where did all this evil come from? When did Halloween become so bloody? It’s not the celebration of Halloween that’s violent, menacing, morally ambiguous, or evil. We are. We’ve always been fascinated by gore: Marie Antoinette’s head rolling into a basket, the Zapruder film of Kennedy’s assassination, photos of Nicole Simpson’s bloody neck. We rarely look away. Halloween, dark fiction, horror film, they all sift through our terrors and taboos and hand them back to us as entertainment or art. Horror films infused the celebration of Halloween with a more extreme visual palette, which bolstered the haunt industry (which has really caught fire in recent years; haunt owners say there are somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 attractions in America today). Horror also brought teenagers and young adults back to the celebration of Halloween. (And we’re not just talking boys here—the majority of horror movie audiences are women, and haunts report that their patrons are split fifty-fifty.) Halloween, in turn, legitimized horror, nudging the genre from subculture to mainstream. It’s okay to stock your local Walgreens with corpses and bloody axes in October (or September, or even August) because Halloween is a fun American holiday. And Halloween also appears more in contemporary horror literature. Now that we’ve unearthed Halloween’s darker side, horror writers, visual artists, and filmmakers have plumbed its imagery—ancient and modern—for theme, plot, or atmosphere. (I’m thinking about the groundbreaking 2000 publication of October Dreams with its collection of Halloween-centric horror by Peter Straub, Poppy Z. Brite, Dean Koontz, and so many others.) There’s more horror in Halloween now, and more Halloween in horror. They overlap, intersect, and feed off each other, not just because they come from the same root, but because they respond to the same human curiosities. The boundary between the world we live in and the underground realm of rot and madness is thin and brittle; what makes Halloween and horror so enthralling is that they let us travel back and forth to the land of the dead, the unknown, and the mind-bendingly awful, without consequence. We make it out alive.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Lesley Bannatyne is an author with five books on Halloween. She is also a freelance journalist, covering stories ranging from local druids to relief aid in Bolivia. Bannatyne has shared her knowledge on television specials for Nickelodeon and The History Channel (“The Haunted History of Halloween” and “The Real Story of Halloween”), with Time Magazine, Slate, National Geographic, and she contributed the Halloween article to World Book Encyclopedia. Artist Gallery Sam Guay

Sam Guay is a freelance illustrator working and wandering in New England. Dreams, folktales, and bits of her woodland haunts weave themselves into the visuals and narratives of her watercolors. Between paintings she can be found fortune-telling, voraciously reading, and having tea parties with her corvid kin, the local flora, and her beloved feline companion. You can find her work at samguay.com.

[To view the gallery, turn the page.]

Artist Spotlight: Sam Guay Marina J. Lostetter

First off I’d like to ask you a question in the spirit of Nightmare: What scares you the most?

Fragility of the human body. The way the wind howls during the winter. Cardiology offices. There was a cardiology center I used to clean at night and I had some very unsettling experiences taking the trash out, but that’s a story for another time.

A lot of your work centers on bold female forms. What is it about these strong women that appeals to you?

So many of my ideas stem from nature. Often people like to see it as beautiful, but it’s much more than that. It possesses frightening power; even small and lovely things can be dangerous, and despite our reign on this Earth, there is so much that we haven’t explored. Nature is something to be reckoned with, and I see these qualities reflected in the women that inspire me, the women that have shared their stories with me, and the women I’m lucky enough to call my friends. I want these figures to engage the viewer, to set that person on edge and make them wonder what that woman’s story might be.

What inspired “Spioraid,” the image appearing as the cover of this month’s Nightmare?

I spent a while going to school on the west coast of Ireland, where many dark faery stories take place. This piece was loosely based on the folktale Spioraid Na MBearnan (as I heard it from storyteller Eddie Lenihan). In this tale a woman murders her husband (hiding his chopped up bits all about) but is caught and sentenced to death. She is refused entrance to heaven and is made to go back to Barna as a spirit until some brave soul speaks to her and gets the better of her. After much strangling, shapeshifting, and holy water, her spirit is banished from Barna only to return after she completes three impossible tasks.

What do you envision the woman in “Spioraid” is thinking?

I imagine she’s waiting those two-hundred years for that brave soul, and she’s got a whole lot longer to ponder those three tasks.

One of my favorite pieces in your gallery is entitled “Oneironaut’s Box” [image #2 in the gallery]—the blue and yellow palette is very alluring, and the figures present a lot of depth. What inspired this image, and how does the concept of “Oneironautics” (dream navigation) fit into its world?

Somewhere in my vast collection of reference pictures I have these three images I took in a museum of an artifact that completely captivated me. Tucked away with the rest of the Arabic art was this curious metal box covered in all these little dials, knobs, and charts. The description said that it was used to divine the future by interpreting a pattern of dots produced by turning the dials. On this box is a poem, an excerpt reads: “I am the silent speaker . . . the judicious one hides his secret thoughts but I disclose them as if hearts were created as my parts.” How can you not be inspired by this instrument? As for oneironautics, I’ve always been interested in dreams, and I taught myself how to lucid dream which has made for some wild experiences. The world that’s hinted at in this piece is still being developed, so I can’t give you a definitive answer, but you might be seeing more art about it in the future . . . and maybe even some stories.

When you illustrate, do you have any little rituals? For example, is there a certain kind of music you like to listen to, or certain type of beverage or food you like to have on hand?

There’s a little apothecary style tea shop in Portland, Maine, and the woman there makes the absolute best herbal brews. There’s a good chance I have a closet full of her tisanes that I make pots of to sip on while I work. And even better, I do a bit of beekeeping with my mother and have delicious honey to sweeten my drinks with.

What made you and your mother decide to become beekeepers?

Keeping bees is beneficial for several reasons: it aids the dwindling bee population, it aids the process of pollination for the surrounding gardens, farms, and ecosystems, plus you get honey! Personally, I enjoy when people ask me questions and I get a chance to educate them about these little insects. All the credit for beekeeping goes to my mother; she does all of the hard work.

What is your favorite medium to work with and why?

Watercolor is my favorite. For a long time I thought I would only work digitally, but during college I started experimenting with some watercolor I had and ended up converting to it because of its tactile nature. Having a big bowl of water (which I can collect from rain, rivers, the ocean, or the convenient tap) on my desk is calming, especially all the noise it makes when I swish my brush around in it. Of course, there’s something a bit unruly and challenging about the medium, and that makes it all the more fun.

You commonly use color palettes that are very soft and earthy. What is it about these colors that speaks to you?

I grew up spending a lot of time alone in the woods and napping in fields. The colors that surrounded me in the autumn and winter all veiled in mist were serene and eerie. I frequently tap into those visuals when deciding on my color palettes.

What made you want to become an artist? Can you remember a defining moment where you knew this was what you wanted to do?

There was no strong defining moment for me. I’d leaned towards the arts as a child and over time refined my goals. I’m glad that I’ve persisted and can do what I love.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Marina J. Lostetter’s short fiction has appeared in venues such as InterGalactic Medicine Show, Galaxy’s Edge, and Writers of the Future. Her most recent publications include a tie-in novelette for the Star Citizen game universe, which was serialized over the first four months of 2014. Originally from Oregon, Marina now lives in Arkansas with her husband, Alex. She tweets as @MarinaLostetter. Please visit her homepage at lostetter.net. Interview: Cecil Baldwin The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Actor Cecil Baldwin is the voice of the wildly popular podcast Welcome to Night Vale, written by Joseph Fink and Jeffery Cranor. Cecil plays Cecil Palmer, a radio host who reports on the strange goings-on in Night Vale, a desert community where monsters and conspiracies are just daily occurrences. This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by David Barr Kirtley and produced by John Joseph Adams. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the hosts discuss various geeky topics.

Why don’t you start out and tell us how you first got involved with Welcome to Night Vale?

Well, I am working for a theater company called The New York Neo- Futurists. We do a weekly show in the East Village called “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind,” and I had written a short play in which I was commiserating not being able to find any voice-over work even though people have told me pretty much my entire adult life that I have a “radio announcer voice.” There was a writer, a friend of mine, who was in the audience that day, and he was like, “Yes, you do have a great voice. Maybe I will utilize that in some way.” That was Joseph Fink, and he went on to create Welcome to Night Vale. He asked me, after he’d written the pilot episode, if I would like to record it, and I said yes!

Yeah, you do have a great voice, so why were you not finding work doing voice-overs?

Well, I find that I have a relatively old-fashioned voice. It’s very 1960s radio announcer. Because of what the market is looking for nowadays in commercials and radio—oftentimes they want an everyman kind of voice, sort of like Paul Rudd or someone like that, and I just didn’t really fit into that commercial box.

You mentioned that you’re with an acting troupe called the Neo- Futurists. Since this is a science fiction show, we’re really interested in Futurism. Does Neo-Futurism have anything to do with the sort of Futurism that we would do on the show?

It’s not necessarily the future as in science fiction future; it’s more of a borrowed idea from the Italian Futurists, who had this idea that art should be temporary, and disposable, and we shouldn’t hold onto our art and worship it and put it on a pedestal; that art should be immediate, and present, and once it is done, should be thrown away. As the Neo-Futurists, which was started twenty-five years ago in Chicago, we do a lot of work that is ephemeral and immediate. We are constantly cutting plays, never to be performed again, and writing new material. We do a lot of living newspaper, autobiographical, things like that. I can’t write about something that happened to me twenty years ago and pretend like it’s still happening. Everything has to be honest and immediate.

That aside, do you have any interest in science fiction or that sort of Futurism?

I’ve definitely read a lot of the classic science fiction novels. My dad was a huge science fiction enthusiast, and I’ve taken a couple of his books with me. I think Stranger in a Strange Land was the last one that I read. I really enjoyed that.

The format of Welcome to Night Vale is sort of like a community radio show. Where did that idea come from? Do you guys have any background in community radio?

I don’t think any of us have a background in community radio. I believe for Joseph, it was something that reflected the late-night radio he listened to as a child growing up in California, mixed together with driving across the country and finding these small radio shows throughout the Southwest. He decided to take that format and add this fantasy/dark humor/horror twist to it.

Have you ever gone back and listened to any community radio like that, to model your performance after it?

I’ve not, actually. I know it’s out there, and I’ve heard a couple of examples, but I didn’t do a lot of research on it before I got started. I understood the genre of community radio, and we just kind of ran with it. The writing can be very existential, funny, and scary, which you don’t really get as much in traditional community radio shows, so it freed me up to make artistic choices in the performance as I was going along.

I thought I heard you say in an interview that you had worked for a public access TV show or something like that?

Yes. When I was in high school, some friends of mine had a public access comedy show. It was similar to Saturday Night Live. But that was very brief, and it was really just a bunch of teenagers getting up in front of a camera once a week and being silly and ridiculous.

Since I’m a podcaster as well, I’m always curious how people do their podcasts, in terms of the equipment, software, and practical stuff like that. How do you put together Welcome to Night Vale?

Night Vale is actually very low tech! I have a relatively inexpensive Snowball microphone that I bought on Amazon for, I think, seventy dollars, and I use Garage Band, which is the free software through Mac. I record the episodes in bits and pieces and send it off to Joseph, who mixes it all together with music and sound effects. It’s very much a home grown project, which, to me, typifies where podcasting is at right now—the idea that anybody with moderate technological skills can put together a podcast and broadcast themselves worldwide. We’ve been fortunate that a lot of people have discovered us and appreciated the work that we do.

Now that you guys have hit the big time, do you think you might upgrade to an eighty-dollar microphone?

I might. I’m definitely considering it. I record out of my apartment in New York, which is relatively loud and not conducive to getting a good sound quality all the time, but I’m moving soon to a much quieter neighborhood and actually have a side office that I can control the sound a little better in.

Yeah, I think I can hear like a garbage truck or something in the background right now.

Yes. Recording an episode of Night Vale is fraught with garbage trucks, ice cream trucks, neighborhood schoolchildren, banging of doors, all of that. I find it’s better to record in longer stretches to maintain the artistic integrity of the show. It’s a lot of stopping. A door will slam and I’ll start again. [Rumbling noise.] If you just heard that—

Yeah.

I live right off of Broadway, so it’s a little bit loud.

So where are you moving to?

I’m moving to Brooklyn. I found a nice, quiet neighborhood in Brooklyn that is a little bit better for working out of my home. Do you have any idea what kind of software Joseph uses to mix the show? Where does he get all the sound effects and stuff like that?

I actually do not know what he uses to mix the show. I think it’s relatively simple—free software would be my guess. I think a lot of the sound effects he finds are through a free sound effects website. I couldn’t tell you the name of it, though. It’s a lot of people who have just made sound effects and then put them out on the internet for anyone to use, which is amazing.

We have an unusually high number of listener questions for you, so I’ll try to sprinkle those in throughout this discussion. We have one from Greg Bern. He wants to know, “Do you have any influence on the writing process?”

I have no direct influence on the writing process. Any influence I have is generally at the bar over a beer. I will mention to Joseph or Jeffrey “Hey, it’d be cool if . . .” and then they either take my idea or they don’t, but it’s always very informal. I don’t directly influence the writing. However, I have noticed that based on certain choices I make in performance, they will take an idea that came out in the recording of an episode and follow that. I believe the Cecil/Carlos romance plotline was somewhat based in the performance of those episodes.

That’s interesting. Did you guys start out with the idea that the show was going to have a gay relationship as a prominent part of it, or was that complete happenstance?

It definitely was not our plan to have that be the main relationship in the show. Carlos was mentioned in the very first episode. His role in the story was that of the outsider. He was the scientist who comes to Night Vale and is trying to explain the unexplainable, or at least figure out the unexplainable. From the way that I performed the character Cecil talking about Carlos, this idea of a relationship came out of that. Another listener question from Rhododendron W. on this subject: “Since he’s a queer role model to some of us, who were his queer role models growing up?”

Oh, man. There’s quite a few. In the world of acting, I always looked up to people like Ian McKellen and Alan Cumming, who were very much aware of their sexuality and did not shy away from their sexuality, and yet still produced extremely high quality performances—regardless of gay or straight or bisexual—were able to be taken seriously whether they were playing Macbeth or if they were playing a gay magazine producer or something like that. I really respected that and I wanted to make a career that was based on those ideas—that it didn’t matter if the actor himself is gay or straight or bisexual, what mattered was the performance of the character. One of my favorite filmmakers growing up was Derek German, and I think the first time I saw Edward the Second, that film just completely blew my mind. I think it was the first time I ever understood postmodern film. The idea of taking a classical text and using modern imagery to expand on that and to make that story relevant—that was a huge influence to me growing up.

Certainly, it seems that many young people are really inspired by the relationship between Cecil and Carlos. What sort of things do fans say to you about it?

It’s amazing how people are ready for the idea that there can be two men or two women in a relationship that is one of the central themes of a story without being the entirety of the story. There’s plenty of gay independent film and theater and writing, but oftentimes, the gay aspect of it has a tendency to overshadow everything else and to inform everything else, rather than being a singular aspect of a larger picture. And I think we’re ready for that as a society—to include gay, lesbian, transgendered, queer characters without letting their sexuality completely define who they are.

We might have some drama here. Hal Lublin asks, “Do you secretly love Steve Carlsberg? Asking for a friend.”

Of course I love Steve Carlsberg! Hal is an amazing actor and I cherish every time I get to work with him on stage, especially. He is hilarious, and he is so funny and so giving as an actor. It allows me to take a character that I’ve created, which is normally very calm, and maybe a little warm and giving to every character in Night Vale with the exception of Steve Carlsberg. Getting to play Cecil in relationship to Steve is a lot of fun because it just gives me a chance to do something different.

Juhan Raud says, “How much is Night Vale influenced by the Cthulhu mythos?” He wants to know if you’re familiar with Arkham Horror, Roger Zelazny’s A Night in the Lonesome October, or Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s anthology The Weird.

The idea of the unexplained horror is definitely present in Night Vale. I know that Joseph has read some Lovecraft, and actually, through his publishing house, Commonplace Books, has written solicited short stories based on the unused ideas of H.P. Lovecraft, but I think what we’re trying to do with Night Vale is something very different. It’s something a little more modern, it has more of a modern perspective and more of a worldly perspective than Lovecraft was writing about. I am not as familiar with the other artists that you mentioned. I definitely enjoy horror as a genre—it’s probably one of my favorite film genres—but I often don’t get a chance to read either novels or graphic novels related to that as much as I would like, so I’m always looking for good book suggestions.

What would be some of your favorite recent horror films?

Oh man! I really enjoyed Byzantium. I thought it was a beautiful movie that sort of took the vampire myth and found a really amazing way to update it and keep it relevant in a way that was smart, and sexy, and just incredibly well-made and well-written and well-acted and well-directed. I do enjoy my schlocky, throwback horror as well. I’m a big fan of 1970s Italian horror, Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, things like that. I enjoy a lot of the 1980s zombie movies. I’ve seen a lot of stuff. I find that the difficulty with loving a genre so specifically is that, after a while, you have tendency to run out of new material. When I’m confronted with my Netflix queue, it’s always, “Shall I watch Night of the Living Dead or pick a Cronenberg film? Shall I watch it for the fiftieth time or shall I try to branch out and experience newer work?” It’s kind of a give and take, where you’re not going to discover anything new that you love, but you do have to wade through a lot of crap in order to get to the good stuff.

It’s interesting that you mention this Lovecraft anthology that Joseph edited. I swear, a couple years ago I went to an event at the Word Bookstore in Brooklyn where I was with some guys and they had that exact same thing. It was a Lovecraft anthology where they had randomly assigned ideas from this list of unused Lovecraft ideas. I wonder if it was the same guys. I don’t know how many anthologies along those lines there could be.

Oh, I don’t know!

Next time you see Joseph, ask him if he ever did any events at Word Bookstore, I’d be curious.

I will.

I saw an interview where he said he actually actively dislikes Lovecraft.

I think he does. Lovecraft was writing from a very specific time and place, and the world was much smaller. A lot of Lovecraft’s work, I think, is influenced by this sort of fear of the unknown, and unfortunately, a lot of the world itself was unknown and a lot of humanity, so a lot of his underlying themes developed sexism and racism as part of this idea of fear of the unknown. It’s 2014 and I think we’re a little bit beyond that now.

That was a really interesting point, where you guys were talking about, in the modern world we deal with information overload. Night Vale expresses that in the sense that the most outrageous things are just passé to us now, almost.

Exactly! The idea of a community of people where angels, and conspiracy theories, and shadowy government figures, and dinosaurs randomly appearing in the middle of PTA meetings can be something that is completely commonplace—can be something that is just your average Tuesday afternoon —adds to a great deal of the comedy. I think what makes Night Vale particularly scary or provocative is that idea that we don’t spend a lot of time describing the horrible things that happen to the citizens of Night Vale. We leave a lot of that up to the audience’s imagination. Again, the podcast format for this is amazing, because it is a disembodied voice that gets pumped in through your computer or your headphones and it forces the listener to create the horror for themselves. To me, as an actor and as a storyteller, this throws back to the idea of the campfire ghost story, where whatever is unexplainable and whatever is unknown are some of the scariest things. If you go into too much detail, if you do all the work for the listener, then they have a tendency to become disengaged by the story, because you’re providing all the answers for them. I find a lot of the classic suspense films, things like that, do an excellent job of giving you just enough information to raise the hair on the back of your neck without becoming exploitative or being too in-your-face. It allows the listener to come to the story, rather than the other way around.

There’s all this creepy stuff in Night Vale that I think most listeners just think is kind of fun, but there are definitely people out there who believe in all these sorts of conspiracy theories. Do they ever write to you and say, “Hey, man, you’re more right than you even know”? As far as I know, we have not received any conspiracy theory enthusiasts who have validated anything we have written on Night Vale. I would be really interested to see that email, if we ever get it, though.

How about feedback from listeners in general? The podcast is so popular. What do people say? What reasons do people give you when they write to you about why they love the podcast so much?

For me, being a gay actor, I do get a lot of younger people who have told me that having a central relationship that is two men is incredibly empowering for them and it makes them feel like they’re not alone out there. Because of the fact that Night Vale is something that is relatively PG—we don’t go into a lot of gory details, we don’t use a lot of harsh language—it’s also something that families can listen to together, and I have met quite a few young gay, lesbian, and transgendered listeners who have listened to the show with their parents and used that as a gateway to help their parents understand where they are coming from. I find that amazing, because then you have multiple generations of listeners, and you also have families and friends who are taking something that is very individual and turning it into something that is very community-based. I find that amazing. I also find that a lot of people have written to tell me that, because Night Vale is very beautifully scripted, and my performance of it is oftentimes very calm and soothing, a lot of people with anxiety disorders will use the show to help calm them down and get to sleep when their brains are racing and they have a hard time focusing. That is something that I did not expect, but I find incredibly amazing—that I can help people out who have a problem—that a piece of art that I help create can help them in their everyday life.

Do people ever write to you and gripe about stuff? Are there areas of the show that you want to try to do even better?

People gripe to us all the time, about everything that could possibly be talked about. It’s one of those things where, we have been making this podcast for two years, we’re independent artists, we make this podcast out of our respective homes, and we have no corporate sponsorship, so we are in the position to create the art that we want to create. Admittedly, feedback from fans is always lovely, whether it’s good or bad, but it also gives us an opportunity to examine what we’ve been doing and say, “Well, this person may have a valid point, but that’s not where we’re taking the show,” or, “This person seems to be a bit of a crackpot,” or to examine each letter as it has been given.

Are you comfortable saying what any of those crackpot kind of things are?

Sometimes it’s better just to delete rather than get yourself angry over someone, but a lot of things involving the introduction to the podcast is too long, and could you edit it down so it’s shorter? To that, we always just kind of look at each other and say, “Well, it’s a free podcast. We’re self-producing this. You have a fast-forward button, I suggest you use it.” But, of course, it’s sometimes better not to say those things out loud and engage in a rather heated back-and-forth discussion with people than it is to just keep it as professional as possible.

You mention that there’s this great power in the audio format that people use their imaginations to fill everything in. Could you talk about the fan art/cosplay aspect of Welcome to Night Vale?

The fan art was actually one of the first things that I noticed when we started to gain listenership. I find it amazing! I think it’s really fascinating how people on Tumblr and all these other various websites have taken something that is very minutely described, characters who have very little description, and have assigned physical descriptors to those characters. Sometimes there is a consensus to what a character looks like. Oftentimes, there’s as many different views of what a character can look like as there are artists creating art, which I find amazing. That way, there’s no bounds of ethnicity or gender assigned to these characters, so it allows people to use their own imaginations. I’ve even noticed art where the character of Cecil and various other characters aren’t even human, and all of that is valid. All of that is acceptable because it is that person’s interpretation of what they are receiving from the show and what they want to create in their own right.

What characters have the least amount of consensus and the most amount of consensus over what they look like?

I think characters like the Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home, Hiram McDaniels, these seem to be the characters that are pretty universally accepted as what they are. Characters like Tamika Flynn and Carlos, who we’ve all but stated their specific ethnicity, a lot of people have latched onto that and really run with that and used the clues that have been written into the show. The character Cecil is deliberately not described in great physical detail. This means that a lot of the ideas of what Cecil looks like have been developed by the fans. The ideas of the third eye, the purple vest, the sleeve tattoos, things like that, are never mentioned in the show and have developed from the imaginations of the fans. In regards to the ethnicity of Cecil, there’s a lot of very different ideas of what that is, and I think all of them are acceptable and valid. A lot of people have a tendency to depict him as sort of a dapper, 1960s, Mad Men-style radio announcer who is white and blond haired, and that is great. There’s a lot of people who depict Cecil as African American or Native American or Asian, and that is great. I have also seen Welcome to Night Vale/Cecil fanart where Cecil is a moth who sits on a microphone, and that, as well, is great, because it allows the artist to bring themselves to the show and take the ideas and process it for themselves. I have found that there’s a definite need for people, especially younger people, to run to the creators of work in order to find the “right answers.” We are a little bit prickly, in that we don’t necessarily have the right answers to give. We have taken these ideas and we’ve fleshed out characters, and the characters are defined by how they relate to each other, not by what they look like. I find it fascinating when fans write me or Joseph or Jeffery and ask us, “What is the right answer for, ‘What does Cecil look like?’” and our answer is always, “What do you think he looks like?” because ultimately, these characters exist only in the minds of the listeners.

I saw an appearance you guys did where, in Welcome to Night Vale, there’s this cat, Khoshekh, who floats at the bathroom at the radio station. As it developed there are odd details about this cat, like it has a spiny ridge and makes kind of a roaring sound and stuff like that. A girl asked, “Well, obviously this isn’t a cat. What is it? Can you tell us what it really is?” Joseph was like “No! No, I’m not going to tell you that.”

This is part of the fun of it! It is spoken word, it’s storytelling. If we were making a TV show based on Welcome to Night Vale, it would be very different. The actors playing the various different characters, and the locations, and the props, and everything else that comes along with creating a piece of visual entertainment would then become what those characters are. But for us, because it exists in the mind of the listeners, it allows that freedom for people to decide for themselves. Talking about Khoshekh the floating cat, some people have imagined it as a very normal-looking cat, some people have imagined it as having wings, and some people really get the SF aspect of this creature who may or may not be a cat but has definite non-feline features, and they run with that as well. All of those are great ideas, and they’re meant to tantalize the listener and spark their own imagination.

Do you think there ever will be a Welcome to Night Vale TV show or graphic novel or some other visual thing like that?

I don’t know yet. I know that Joseph and Jeffery are working very hard on creating a novel first, which will come out in fall of 2015. Once the novel is out, that will inform any future iterations of Night Vale in a different medium. We’ve already started doing a lot more touring, but when we tour, and when we do live shows, we do it in such a way that it is very much based on radio theater, where we don’t wear costumes, we’re not trying to transport the audience and make them suspend their disbelief. It’s very clearly actors standing in front of microphones with scripts in their hands, in order to keep that idea that this world exists in the minds of the listeners, whether it’s from their computer, or if it’s happening live, directly in front of them.

I just want to let people know that your previous live shows are available online. They’re called “The Debate” and “Condos.” Will you be performing those stories at future live shows?

We have a different script. We try to maintain the idea that every time we go to a new city, we bring a script that they’ve never heard before. Currently we have a touring script, called “The Librarian,” which is about what happens when the librarians of Night Vale get . . . loose, shall we say? We take that script to as many different cities as we possibly can without repeating. Once we have toured that script as much as we can, we release a recording of it. That way, if Night Vale ever comes to your city, you are getting an experience that is always different. You get this script that has never been performed before in your city. That way, we hope, people will come back and see us when we return.

It’s funny that you mentioned the librarians. One of the things that really struck me about Welcome to Night Vale is that it takes all the most banal, harmless aspects of a small town and turns them into something sinister. There’s a summer reading club and all these harmless things. I was wondering, do you have a list of actual small-town activities or something? You just go through it and think, “Here’s a sinister spin we could put on this one and this one?”

When we first started the show, I was talking with Joseph and Jeffrey about the idea of what exactly a small town community radio show would include. It has a lot of the things we’ve incorporated into the show, things like local sports teams, especially high school sports teams, PTA meetings, traffic reports, weather reports, community calendars, spotlights on local government officials, things like that, which seem to be the bulk of what small town communities are concerned with. We just take the idea that the average and mundane can be mysterious and horrifying, and the mysterious and horrifying can be average and mundane. We swap those out, and it creates this lovely dichotomy that creates both humor and can also create a sense of suspense and terror.

I understand that the reason Welcome to Night Vale really blew up was because of this Tumblr community. Do you know if people were sharing the actual episodes on Tumblr, or if they were just showing the fan art, or something else that contributed to people going and listening to the show?

I think it was the fan art mixed with people telling their friends that they found something and that their friends should start listening to it. Because Night Vale is released for free, it’s very easy to find on iTunes and various other podcasting services, so it’s not difficult to find the material on the internet. Early on, we noticed that a lot. There were these mushroom areas where all of a sudden, in the middle of Australia, we would have this unusually large amount of listeners. I’m convinced that it’s due almost entirely to word of mouth. When it comes to the fan art on Tumblr, things like that website are so good about allowing artists to create something and share it with a very broad cross section of other Tumblr users who may be on the other side of the world. If you’re a photographer or an artist or a writer, and you create work that resonates with someone who lives a thousand miles away, you still have a way to share your art with those people. I think a lot of the images of the characters and the makeup of Night Vale itself have been greatly benefited by that technology.

I’ve also heard a lot of people say that they’ve started following the Night Vale Twitter feed for a long time before even realizing that there was a podcast associated with it. Absolutely. Joseph and Jeffrey manage the Twitter feed. I think of them as these strange fortune cookies that appear on Twitter every once in a while. But a lot of people started following the Twitter feed because they were so funny, these strange little zen jokes that they would create, and then later find that there was a larger show that it was attached to. I know a lot of people on Twitter also follow Welcome to Night Vale, and myself, and Joseph, and Jeffrey to get updates on live shows, or Comic-Con conventions, or things like that. We try to use social media in a way that is both informative and entertaining.

Speaking of events, I saw that you guys went to the L.A. Podcasting Festival.

Yes.

What’s it like, getting into the podcasting scene, meeting other podcasters, and stuff like that?

We had a really great time! We definitely noticed that we do something that is slightly different than what a lot of podcasts are based on. Certainly, at the L.A. Podfest there were a lot of amazing comedians who, their show is an extension of their on-stage routine. It involves them riffing off of certain subjects or interviewing other people, and that’s not what we do. We do a scripted show where a lot of time and effort has been taken into writing, recording, and producing the show. I find that most podcasts fall into informative or educational, or they go in the opposite direction, which is entertainment, and while we’re definitely in the entertainment side of things, it’s just very different than what a lot of other people are doing. It’s really nice to expand people’s horizons—to say, “This is the potential for what a podcast could be.” As well, getting to go to something like the L.A. Podfest, and meeting people who are starting out, or who have an idea but don’t necessarily know how to develop it, and talking to them about how our show is very low-tech, and is very simply produced, and the idea that if you create a show that is entertaining and interesting to you, then you will find the listeners, rather than the other way around. I find a lot of people in this day and age are worried about demographics and, “How do we create a viral something.” Of course the answer is if you’re trying to create something that will go viral, chances are it probably won’t because you’re trying so incredibly hard that most people will just sort of roll their eyes and be like, “Okay, that was something interesting.” People would rather find new and interesting ideas so they can say, “Hey, I found this new thing. It’s part of me now, and it is something that I can claim as my own.”

Do you know of any new podcasts that took a look at Welcome to Night Vale and said, “I want to do something in that vein,” or, “Oh! I didn’t know you could do something so out there. I’m gonna do something so out there now”?

I’ve not really seen a lot of imitators or copycats or things like that, but I think the idea of radio drama—this idea is nothing new; we’re not doing anything spectacularly unprecedented. The idea of radio drama has been around as long as there’s been radio. It’s just the idea that, if you make a quality product, and you put your heart and your soul into it, then other people will look at this format that I’m sure most people would have said was dead and gone, but you breathe new life into it. We did an interview with CBC in Canada and the idea that radio drama is something that can be appreciated by many different generations, but had all but died, and we’re helping to bring it back and interest much younger audiences in something that is a non-visual medium.

Speaking of non-visual media, is there anything else you can say about the Welcome to Night Vale novel?

I am not involved in the writing of it. I know very little about it, and I’m okay with that because I want Joseph and Jeffery to really make that novel their own and put their own ideas into it. Admittedly, I hope that once they do finish it, I am one of the first people who gets to read the advance copy of it and enjoy it just as much as any fan would.

A bunch of the episodes have been written or co-written by other authors. Since your audience is mostly book readers, do any of those authors have books that people should check out?

I think the Glen David Gold episode was probably one of the best guest writers that we had. It was a really amazing episode, and, as a performer, I definitely felt the fresh air of having a guest writer doing an episode. It was a lot of fun. The language he uses is so intricate and carefully structured—it was just a lot of fun to perform. It reminded me a lot of performing Shakespeare or classical theater because every detail was so nuanced and added to the overall picture of what was happening. That was a really great one.

And he has some books that people could go check out?

Carter Beats the Devil is an amazing novel. It’s on my bookshelf right now. It’s really great.

Speaking of Shakespeare, we had a listener question from Maggie Lou Young. She says, “What is your favorite Shakespeare play, and who is your favorite Shakespeare character?”

That’s a tough one. I don’t know if I can narrow it down to just one. I think, if I’m gonna pick a comedy, a tragedy, and a history, it would be A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, and Henry IV Part One. I’ve been fortunate enough to be in all three of those, in various productions, and they’re just amazing, and beautiful to watch and to listen to, in a very similar way that Night Vale is. When Shakespeare was writing in Elizabethan England, you did not go see a play. You went to go hear a play. All of the language that Shakespeare uses is made to build upon imagery that exists only in your mind. This is evident in the way the plays were staged, in the structure of the Globe theater, the fact that it was performed outdoors during natural daylight, in front of a crowd of people that included people selling concessions, and lords, and ladies, and prostitutes, and merchants, and children, and animals, and all of this added to this love of life that is reflected in Shakespeare’s work. When it comes to a favorite character, that’s tough. I definitely have a bucket list of Shakespeare characters that I would like to play before I die. I’ve always wanted to play Oberon. It’s an amazing, fun, slightly malevolent but also slightly loving character. Oh, man. I think it would be a lot of fun to get to play a character like Iago, who is an amazing villain. It would be great to play Edmond in King Lear. Obviously, you can tell, I’m drawn to the villains, but it’s only because, when working in classical theater, I have a tendency to fall somewhere in between the villain and the fool. In a lot of Shakespearean theaters that I’ve worked for, the casting director will look at me and go, “You’re obviously a villain,” and then another casting director will look at me and say, “You’re obviously the comedic relief,” and there’s no convincing them otherwise. I would love to play Trinculo or Speed or someone like that. I think it would be a great comedic role as well.

If people want to see you on the stage, how do they go about that? Do you have anything else theater-related coming up?

Outside of the world of Night Vale, I perform with the New York Neo- Futurists. We do a weekly show in the East Village called, “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind.” We have about fifteen different cast members, and we rotate those cast members out. If you go to their website, nynf.org, it’ll have a list of who’s in the cast that week. Like I said, it’s all autobiographical theater. It’s all very present and relevant to the immediate performance, and you’ll definitely see me, Cecil Baldwin the actor, standing up in front of you and telling you stories about my life and stories about the world that we inhabit together, rather than taking on an imaginary persona. It’s a lot of fun, and it’s a lot of audience interaction. I’ve heard audience members say the craziest things in front a hundred people on a Friday or Saturday night. It’s always different, and it’s a good time.

The segments that you’ve written—could you just give us an idea of what kinds of things you talk about?

I’ve talked about everything from the fact that my parents are getting older and love to go on cruises. I’ve talked about relationships I’ve been in . . . Oh man. I’ve taken filmmakers’ work who I’ve appreciated and tried to find a way to let their style influence other aspects of my own personal life. I did a play called Neo-Polanski Apartment Trilogy, which was in the style of three different Roman Polanski films, taken and written in monologue form, that reflected New Yorkers’ relationships with their apartments, and their neighbors, and what it’s like to listen to your neighbors fighting next door, and not knowing how you should interact with them, and all of that, which I find was very present in films like Repulsion and The Tenant and Rosemary’s Baby. It’s always different! A lot of times it’s very political. I wrote a play which was based upon the “Kill the Gays” bill in Uganda, because there was an American religious figure who would go over to Uganda and stir up anti- gay sentiments in an effort to allow the Ugandan government to kill anyone who was out of the closet as gay, lesbian, or transgendered. So, I wrote a play reflecting that. It runs the breadth of my own personal experience. I’m allowed to take those ideas and put them on stage every weekend.

Maybe soon you can write a play about what it’s like to live in a quiet apartment for a change.

Oh dear God, I hope so.

Rhododendron W. says that the recent Welcome to Night Vale episode “The Company Picnic” was the first episode without you in it. How did it feel to listen to an episode that you weren’t involved in recording? It was a blast! I had the opportunity to wait until the fifteenth and listen to the episode with completely fresh ears. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I didn’t know what Kevin and Lauren were doing from a performance aspect. I knew very little about the episode, so it gave me that thrill of excitement when you are extremely and intimately close to this cast of characters, but you get a chance to experience an episode with a fresh viewpoint. Having said that, I cannot wait to return to Night Vale in the very near future.

Tweet Acceptance says, “Do you think your character would ever die on the show?” Which I guess raises the question, if you’re not involved in an episode, you might listen to it and find that they’ve killed you off.

I hope not. I hope my character never dies, because then I would be out of a job, and that would be really unfortunate. But no, in all seriousness, I think that the character of Cecil is definitely beloved by the fans, and the creators as well. Even if the story keeps expanding, there’s no reason for Cecil not to be in the mix.

How much of a time commitment is it, playing Cecil? If you got cast as the lead in Hamlet or something, would you still have time to do Cecil on the side?

Absolutely! Again, one of the great things about podcasting is that if you have a microphone and some basic computer technology, I can record this in my apartment. I can record it from the road, which we’ve done before when we were on tour. I can record it internationally, and through the magic of email, we just need to upload it and then send it out to the fans. For a time commitment, I mean, it definitely takes a little bit of time, because I’m a perfectionist as a performer, and I’m also a director and a writer in various other projects, so I’m constantly trying to use my outside eye to say “Well, this is what the audience is expecting. How can I give them something different, or something new, or expand upon a character that people feel like they know extremely well?” I think it’s been very successful so far. When I go back and listen to a lot of the earlier episodes, it was very much based in community radio. Everything was a little bit more serious. It was a little bit more flat. As the character progressed, I realized that the more humanity I brought to the role, the more exciting the story became. One of the ways that I prepare to do each episode is I go back and listen to the last episode that was released, and I try to think, “If that episode was particularly funny, or political, or scary, how can I take a different look at the new material?” Then, I’ll try and respect the words of Joseph and Jeffery to the best of my ability, and also throw in some surprises. That way, it keeps everyone on their toes.

I heard you guys say that in the early days, you had tons of material already written, and that as it’s gone on, that buffer has shrunk and shrunk, especially now with the live shows. How much longer do you think you can keep to the every two week schedule? Is there any chance that you might have to go on a hiatus or anything like that?

I certainly hope not. One of the reasons people have kept listening to our show is the fact that we try to be as consistent as possible. We release on the first and fifteenth of every month. It’s always new material. We try to give people something new and interesting to listen to. If our reputation was a little more spotty, where a month or two would go by and we didn’t release anything, people would start to lose interest, because you don’t get the chance to catch up with these characters that you feel like you know so well. Having said that, Joseph and Jeffrey are writing a novel, we’re touring for months at a time, there’s a good possibility that I’m going to be performing with the Neo-Futurists at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland, so the calendar of work that we have set up definitely has wiggle room, or room for adjustment, but we do try to keep ahead of the curve as much as possible. God bless Joseph and Jeffrey, because they’re writing a novel that’s going to be released a year from now, while at the same time writing material that will performed a month from now, and writing material that will be performed two weeks from now. ABOUT THE AUTHOR The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is produced by John Joseph Adams and hosted by David Barr Kirtley, who is the author of thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, in books such as Armored, The Living Dead, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He lives in New York. AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Author Spotlight: Sunny Moraine Lisa Nohealani Morton

Can you give us some background for “Singing with All My Skin and Bone”? What inspired you to write it?

The core of it is a decision I came to around this past New Year’s, which was to finally get brave enough to dig down into the core of what makes me frightened and angry and sad and drag it out and make words out of it. One of my favorite books on writing is Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, and one of the points she stresses is the importance of doing that, that those painful, shameful things are where a lot of your most honest and powerful work can come from. So this story was a direct result of wanting to attempt that. On a more practical level, it comes from my experience with an impulse control disorder called dermatophagia, which involves the picking/gouging and eating of one’s own skin; it’s basically compulsive self-injury. It’s a very stigmatized disorder, to the extent that people even know about it—obviously, because it’s often quite disturbing to see its effects—and I had a rough time with it as a kid, because kids are cruel about things like that. I’ve struggled for years with talking about it openly, and turning it into a story seemed important. It’s an incredibly autobiographical story, and it was terrifying but oddly healing to write. On a side note, one of the terms for people with dermatophagia is “wolf biter.” I sort of love that.

You recently published a collection of essays. Care to tell us a little about it?

It was mostly a whim. I’ve been writing nonfiction in a more academic sense for a couple of years now—I’m a regular contributor to a sociology blog called Cyborgology, and I’ve also written for The New Inquiry—and I’ve produced some stuff I’m pretty proud of. Often I write about society and technology, but also frequently about video games as well as the social process of storytelling and the place of fiction in how we understand our experience of reality. At the same time I’ve been wondering what was involved in the process of putting together a self-published book, the nuts and bolts of designing the interior and whatnot, and I wanted to see if I could do it and not completely fail at it or hate myself. Turns out it was bearable, and the result—A Brief History of the Future—came into the world this past July. I’m pretty pleased with it.

You’re pursuing a doctorate in sociology. How do your academic studies influence your fiction?

Often the influence is very indirect, but it’s almost always there to some degree. I’d say it consists of both how I think through an idea—how I look for ways to draw connections between elements that may not be obvious or intuitive—and also what I want my fiction to do. I’m a sociologist with a strong social justice orientation, and I try to be aware of the degree to which my writing includes people we don’t see or hear from very much, or that says and does things that are important but under-examined. It also means that I try to be aware of screw-ups: am I representing this person fairly and richly? Am I doing this group of people justice? Am I reproducing tropes or other story elements that I shouldn’t be? Is this even my story to tell? I’m in a position of considerable privilege so I’ve obviously made false steps in the past and I’m sure I will in the future, but it’s something I’m always trying to work on.

What are you working on lately? Any upcoming publications to watch for?

I’ve been finishing up a trilogy of dark fantasy novels—Casting the Bones, from Masque Books (Prime’s digital imprint)—and the third book will hopefully have gotten a release this October (if I’ve finished it in time, shhhhhh). I’m excited about it; it has some very odd worldbuilding going on, as well as multiple queer characters, which is always fun and gratifying to write. Besides that, I have “What Glistens Back,” a story in Lightspeed about an astronaut in freefall who’s spending the last moments of his life saying goodbye to his husband via radio, though I’m not sure yet when that’s getting posted. And I have a novel coming in January from Samhain Publishing —Labyrinthian—which is a queer retelling of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur in spaaaaaaaaaace. It’s very goofy but it was so fun to write and I can’t wait for it to get released.

If you were the hero of a horror movie, how would you end up destroying the monster?

I wouldn’t. I would be consumed alive. My horror stories never end well. Unless you’re a monster.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Born and raised in Honolulu, Lisa Nohealani Morton lives in Washington, DC. By day she is a mild-mannered database wrangler, computer programmer, and all-around data geek, and by night she writes science fiction, fantasy, and combinations of the two. Her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, and the anthology Heiresses of Russ 2012. She can be found on Twitter as @lnmorton. Author Spotlight: Charles L. Grant Thomas L. McDonald

There are still moments—less frequent as time and age do their work of erosion—when I find myself reading or watching something and thinking, “I gotta call Charlie. He’ll love this.” And then I realize he’s not there anymore. It’s hard to lose a friend. It’s harder still when he was also someone whose work you admired from a young age. I first found Charlie in the Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural, a popular collection republished by the Quality Paperback Book Club in the early 1980s. No doubt it—along with King’s Danse Macbre—introduced many young horror fans to the big names that would make that era a golden age of horror fiction, with Charlie near the top of the list. I was still in high-school when I learned he lived in my home state and decided, one day, to just show up on his doorstep to ask him to sign some books. He was gracious and invited me in, talked to me a for a time, and gave me copies of books I’d had trouble finding. We became friends and stayed friends until the end. Watching him decline with COPD over the course of years, and then losing him just when he seemed to be doing a bit better, was a hard thing for all of us close to him. Charlie wrote in an amazing variety of styles, but the books that capture his personality the best are his humorous works: B-movie sensibility, groan- inducing wordplay, and outright silliness. His pseudonyms Lionel Fenn and Geoffrey Marsh are more Charlie than “Charles L. Grant.” But then the question immediately arises: Are they really? Obviously, a man who devoted such craft (and he was a tireless craftsman, working and reworking things endlessly) to dark fiction was tapping something from within which he rarely let show: a deeply personal sense of emotional fear. What strikes me in re-reading “Old Friends” for the first time in many years is how perfectly it encapsulates his approach and style. The first story I read of his in that Arbor House collection was the oft-reprinted classic “If Damon Comes,” which has stylistic and thematic elements that are similar to “Old Friends.” I remember pressing it on friends (we’re talking 8th graders here) who just didn’t get it, and couldn’t dial in to the emotional unease and elliptical style of the story. It was a style that came at its horrors from an angle just out of view: you could glimpse it, but when you look directly at, it flitted away. It creates a remarkable sense of tension that, in the best examples, builds to an emotional crescendo. Charlie was most vocal in his criticism of “cosmic horror”: horror that comes from outside. “Old Friends” shows what he preferred in its place. There is an element of psychological horror to the story, but it is unquestionably a supernatural horror story. This subtle ability to capture psychological states and moods and then supercharge them with the uncanny is one of his defining characteristics. The horror in these stories emerges from the psyche of individual. It grows in our being, nourished by our shattered hopes and dark dreams, and then bursts into the world, with horrifying consequences.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Thomas L. McDonald is Editor-at-Large of Games Magazine. Author Spotlight: Daniel José Older Britt Gettys

Your story, “Animal,” features a female protagonist with a strong, edgy voice. Where did that voice come from?

Most of my characters come from some crude mix of elements of people I’ve known and my own shit. George is partly an old college friend, partly some kids I’ve taught over the years, partly teenage me. The origin of the story is the line in the first paragraph—the bit about how high rates of drug abuse are for pet store workers. A friend of mine that worked at a pet store told me about that in high school and it always stayed with me for some reason—the idea of all these cynical, high teenagers taking care of small animals and being friendly to customers, or not, just demanded a story. But I didn’t have the framework for it until last year when I started thinking about counter-narratives to Lovecraft’s racist ass and Mikki Kendall’s (@Karnythia) hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, which is where Marlene’s manipulative use of the word “sisters” and brisk return to racism comes from.

The narrative arc of “Animal” focuses more on the feelings of the protagonist and the themes of life and compassion as opposed to the shock-value of an unexplained, horrific, supernatural occurrence. Do you think it’s important that the fantastical aspects of speculative fiction serve to highlight the human? If so, how does a writer best achieve this?

I think there has to be a balance—ideally, the seemingly disparate elements strengthen each other and make the story deeper with their contrast. If a monster just shows up and eats people, I don’t care; there’s no basis for me to give a damn about any of the characters or deeper truths of the story. Same goes if all we get are generic, bland characters going through the same motions of their generic, bland lives. Oh no, they got eaten. It’s flat. The best horror gives us complexity and depth on the human level so that the disruption resonates. So, that’s what I strived for with this story. I wanted to setup a context of humanity—complex people struggling with their lives in real ways, no easy answers—and then introduce an element of awfulness to that mix that was rooted somewhat in the story being told.

In an interview with Tananarive Due you said that flow is what you focus on more than other, more technical aspects of craft. How did this story flow for you?

This story really came right out of me. Probably because, as I said, I’d been pondering the idea of pet stores and drug use for waaaay too long, so once the other pieces clicked into place, the whole thing just happened on the page. As with most pieces I write, I knew vaguely where I was going—a bloody showdown in a pet store basement and then a disarmingly tender maternal moment—and the characters came to life very quickly. Once there’s a starting point, characters, and an ending point, the in between tends to move smooth.

You’ve spoken a lot about what it’s like, and what it means, to be a speculative fiction writer of color, but what has your experience been in regards to writing characters of color? How have readers reacted to your protagonists?

Reactions have run the gamut. I think overall there’s a great hunger out there to both see ourselves in speculative literature and for stories that are about more than just “getting the girl” or “killing the bad guy.” Diversity is about equitable representation in characters and authors, yes, but it’s also about a diversity of story craft, of voice, of narrative structure and flow. With this story in particular, I’ve noticed a sharp difference in how audiences react. An almost all white audience stared at me wide-eyed for the duration. I could tell they were invested in it, at one point I stopped because my time was running out and they demanded I finish it, but they made barely a peep. Then I read it to a mostly of-color audience here in Brooklyn and folks were on the floor laughing. This kind of thing is fascinating from a narrative and voice perspective and speaks to the need to undo homogeny in all aspects of the industry. Race and culture affect our perspective—I’m writing this shit cracking up, come to find out it reads as straight horror to one audience, humor to another.

You’re also a composer. How does your creative process for music differ from your writing process? Does music influence your writing, and vice- versa?

I learned how to write music because there are times when words don’t cut it. When I write, there’s always an underlying music to the piece. Stories have rhythm and movement just like songs; they flush forward then hesitate; they play with tension and release, silence, climax. Generally, when I’m working on a story at the idea stage, I’m walking around, maybe dancing; my headphones are in and I’m moving along to whatever beat’s blasting through them. When I say I’m concerned with the flow of a story, that’s a musical element—how does one sentence lead to the next? How do they build a cohesive movement that leads you to the end of the paragraph? Where’s the source of gravity strongest and how do the words get us there? Music holds it all together.

Are there any current projects you’re working on, and if so could you tell us a bit about them?

Yes! My first novel, Half-Resurrection Blues, comes out from Penguin’s Roc imprint in January. Next summer my first young adult book, Shadowshaper, comes out from Scholastic’s Arthur A. Levine Books. Meanwhile, I edited an anthology with Rose Fox, Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, that’s been doing big things since it came out in May. Also: I’ve decided to become a YouTube superstar, so hopefully that’ll happen in the next couple decades or so. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Britt Gettys is a recent graduate from Pratt Institute where she earned her BFA in Creative Writing. She was the editor of Pratt Success, a student run blog, sponsored by Pratt’s Center for Career and Professional Development, which reviews the work of current Pratt students and alumni. Additionally, she illustrates graphic novels and her work has been featured in three Pratt sponsored exhibitions. An Editorial Contributor at Lightspeed and Nightmare Magazine, Britt hails from Seattle, Washington where she spends her time writing, cosplaying, and watching anime. Author Spotlight: Lisa Tuttle E.C. Myers

“The Man in the Ditch” first appeared in A Book of Horror (ed. Stephen Jones, 2011, Jo Fletcher Books). What inspired it?

The original inspiration was the photograph of one of the “bog bodies”— ancient, mummified corpses found in a Danish peat-bog. I don’t know much about them, although there have been books written about them, but my memory of it is that there were different theories about how they came to be there—some thought they were ritual sacrifices, others that they’d been executed for some crime and then dumped in the bog, where the effect of minerals in the soil kept them in an amazing state of preservation for centuries. Anyway, I just imagined how spooky it would be to be haunted by a similar-looking corpse.

You’re a very prolific author. What is your writing process like? How did “The Man in the Ditch” develop from inspiration to publication?

I don’t think of myself as that prolific compared to many other writers— but I guess if you stick around long enough and keep writing, eventually the accumulated output may give someone that impression! Not sure how to answer the question in general about my writing process, but I can be specific about “The Man in the Ditch”—which took considerably longer to finish than most of my stories do. I began writing a draft of it many years ago—I’m not sure of the exact year, but it was before I had a computer because I wrote it on my old IBM Selectric (which was pretty high-tech to me, in the 1970s). But the story kept getting longer, and somehow I never managed to finish it to my satisfaction (even though I had an ending in mind), so I put it aside. Yet the urge to write this story never went away. Finally, more than thirty years later, travelling by car from Scotland to England for a funeral, driving through the flat, bleak, winter landscape of the Norfolk fens, I found myself remembering that long-ago idea . . . as it struck me that this place, probably not dissimilar to the Danish bogs where those mummified corpses were found, was the background setting I needed. And so, when I got home, I sat down to write the story—and at that point it went very smoothly from start to finish.

In this story, Linzi and J.D.’s flaws are apparent to the reader, and it can be difficult to sympathize with either of them. Do you like your characters when you’re writing a horror story, or is some amount of judgment necessary in order to punish them?

In many of my stories I identify very strongly with a main character (or narrator), but not in this case; although I hope I didn’t come across as too “judgmental” about Linzi or J.D., because that isn’t how I felt, or what I intended . . . I did feel sympathetic to Linzi, and I don’t think either of them were horrible people; just, as you say, flawed. There is a type of horror fiction in which the main character is depicted deliberately as very unlikeable or even outright evil so the reader can get some vicarious pleasure from his or her destruction—I have to say, that’s not my preference, neither as a reader or as a writer, but sometimes it just works out that way. But, to me, the horror of a story is even more powerful when the reader can feel “it could have happened to me” rather than “well, he got what he deserved!”

In the introduction to your collection Objects in Dreams: Imaginings Book 4 (2013, NewCon Press), in which this story also appears, you state that your stories “are not generally pleasant, and rarely have happy endings; in fact, they are usually nightmares.” What attracts you to dark fiction and horror?

Well, that’s the big question, isn’t it? I really don’t know—it goes back a long way. Do you know what attracts you to it? I enjoy the unsettling nature of horror stories and how often the confrontation of dark, supernatural experiences can force the protagonist— and readers—to confront their own fears and dark instincts. But when the story is over, you’re still safe and sound!

What work do you have out now or forthcoming, and what are you writing now?

I am about halfway through a novel set in 1890s London, about a pair of detectives who get involved with psychic phenomena while attempting to solve the mystery of why a number of mediums have disappeared. The characters—Jasper Jesperson and Miss Lane—previously appeared in two published stories, the most recent being “The Curious Affair of the Dead Wives” in Rogues, edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, published in June by Bantam.

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

Coming up in October, in Nightmare . . . We’re presenting Women Destroy Horror!, our special double-issue celebration of women writing and editing horror. Guest editor Ellen Datlow has selected original fiction from Gemma Files (“This Is Not for You”), Livia Llewellyn (“It Feels Better Biting Down”), Pat Cadigan (“Unfair Exchange”), Katherine Crighton (“The Inside and the Outside”), and Catherine MacLeod (“Sideshow”). We’re also sharing reprints by Joyce Carol Oates (“Martyrdom”), Tanith Lee (“Black and White Sky”), and A.R. Morlan (“. . . Warmer”). Our WDH nonfiction editor, Lisa Morton, has a line-up of terrific pieces —a feature interview with American Horror Story’s producer, Jessica Sharzer; a roundtable interview with acclaimed writers Linda Addison, Kate Jonez, Helen Marshall, and Rena Mason; a feature interview with award- winning author Joyce Carol Oates; and insightful essays from Maria Alexander, Lucy A. Snyder, and Chesya Burke. 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 Maria Dahvana Headley, Kat Howard, David Sklar, Tim Lebbon, and Seras Nikita. Thanks for reading! Stay Connected

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:

Website www.nightmare-magazine.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 & Ebooks

If you enjoy reading Nightmare, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. You can subscribe directly from our website, via Weightless Books, or via Amazon.com. For more information, visit nightmare-magazine.com/subscribe.

We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors, and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Nightmare ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! Buying a Bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. Buying either of the half-year Bundles saves you $3 (so you’re basically getting one issue for free), or if you spring for the Year One Bundle, you’ll save $11 off the cover price. So if you need to catch up on Nightmare, that’s a great way to do so. Visit nightmare-magazine.com/store for more information. About the Editor

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Nightmare, is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. New projects coming out in 2014 and 2015 include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Operation Arcana, Wastelands 2, 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 winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated eight times) and is a six-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.