TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 84, September 2019

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial: September 2019

FICTION Beyond the High Altar Ray Nayler The Tiger Nina Allan Sweet Dreams Are Made of You Merc Fenn Wolfmoor Wilderness Letitia Trent

NONFICTION The H Word: You Really Don’t Want to Do This Lisa Morton Book Reviews: September 2019 Terence Taylor

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Ray Nayler Merc Fenn Wolfmoor

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

© 2019 Nightmare Magazine Cover by Chorazin / Fotolia www.nightmare-magazine.com

Editorial: September 2019 John Joseph Adams | 116 words

Welcome to issue eighty-four of Nightmare! This month we have a new short horror story from Ray Nayler (“Beyond the High Altar”) that will take us into the cold peaks of nineteenth century Afghanistan and leave us with chills. Merc Fenn Wolfmoor’s new short, “Sweet Dreams are Made of You,” spins obsession and video games into an unsettling read. We also have reprints by Nina Allan (“The Tiger”) and Letitia Trent (“Wilderness”). If you’re starting to plan your Halloween adventures, Lisa Morton talks about extreme haunts in the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word.” Plus we have author spotlights with our authors, and book reviews from Terence Taylor.

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

Beyond the High Altar Ray Nayler | 5946 words

A note to the reader: I purchased these letters at the bazaar outside the gates of the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan in 2006. I was working that winter for a humanitarian organization in Kabul. The bazaar was a row of shipping containers and battered tarpaulins along the road to the base’s fortified gates. Military vehicles rumbled past, splattering sleet and mud. Inside the containers, merchants warmed their chapped hands before makeshift propane heaters and haggled over cold piles of misappropriated objects: Enfield rifles abandoned by fleeing British armies, Soviet tank helmets abandoned by fleeing Soviet armies, the military surplus contraband which surfaces in the markets of any country where America is fighting a war, and many stranger curiosities. In those piles, I found hundred-year-old pocket watches engraved to long-dead sweethearts, and even a water-damaged copy of Where the Wild Things Are—which I thought might be the strangest thing anyone had ever discovered at a roadside bazaar during a war, until I came across these letters. The letters were in a leather portfolio, itself enclosed in a weathered oilcloth bag. The letters are undated, though paper, ink, and contents indicate they are from the late nineteenth century. They are signed only “M.” Enclosed along with the letters is a page of rough pencil sketches of a geared object which bears, I believe, similarity to the Antikythera mechanism—though I am a layman, and the sketches are hurried and incomplete. Perhaps the device referenced by M will surface from among the flotsam of human conflict in some other war bazaar someday. Until then, we have only speculation. Based upon the scant geographical details provided, I believe the area referred to in the letters is the Afghan side of the Wakhan corridor. The nomad guides referred to in the letters are most certainly from a Kyrgyz tribe, though they appear to be a splinter group, long isolated from their fellow Kyrgyz. I have failed to turn up any reliable clue as to the identity of M, or of her husband Richard, or any record of the expedition described. Perhaps publishing the letters will bring someone forward who can establish to whom the correspondence belongs. Or perhaps, by sharing them, I simply hope to rid myself of the power they have held over me since I first read them, lying awake by electric lantern in my narrow cot in Kabul, accompanied only by the hiss of my propane heater and the purr of snow against the windowpanes.

• • • •

Dearest Emily, After months of travel (by turns a fascinating adventure and a miserable slog) we are here. By “here,” I mean the middle of nowhere, in the loneliest place imaginable. For weeks now I have been surrounded by people with whom I can hardly communicate. I can say “Ova” and “Jok” (yes and no) and a smattering of other things; but mostly I just flail my hands about like an idiot while the women of the tribe make signs until I understand they want me to drink a cup of horrible butter, salt and flour- laden tea or eat yet more mutton. Richard, at least, is pleased. As our guides promised (lured by a few crowns, and the promise of more once we return to Qabul) they have led us to The High Altar. This is where all the threads have led to, beginning with Richard’s purchase at auction of a traveler’s unpublished manuscript, and winding through Paris, Istanbul, Qabul, and over the mountain passes. I, however, am worried: lately our guides have been demanding more money. Even now, as I write, there is an argument going on outside the iurt between Jyrgal and Richard. The place: we are high up in a small mountain valley. We reached it last morning, by ascending from a larger valley through a narrow canyon mouth, almost like a gate between two cliffs. The defile beyond was narrow, with black, wet stone on all sides, running for miles with barely enough room for the horses and carts between. Then suddenly it opened up to this magical place—a diamond-shaped field of mountain grass, flanked by cliffs on all sides, with a waterfall sliding thinly down the stones behind the altar. We have pitched three iurts here—the one they have lent to Richard and myself, and the two iurts of our “guides”—one for Taalai and his wife and two sons, and one for Jyrgal. Jyrgal is the younger brother of Taalai, Richard tells me Jyrgal’s wife died last year, and left him grieving, with no children. Perhaps this is why he is causing so much trouble for us. The High Altar is a chunk of white marble, run through with veins of crimson. It was hewn from its place, dragged here at heaven knows what effort, and chiseled into its current rough rectangular shape. A gnarled evergreen, stunted by altitude, overhangs it. The tree’s branches are knotted with fragments of cloth tied to it as offerings. Some are bright and recent, others faded by the seasons. Most extraordinary, though, are the skulls; piled around the altar are hundreds of Marco Polo ram skulls with their great, occult yards of spiraling horn. The skulls are stacked in pyramids taller than a person. Their empty eye sockets stare south over the green diamond of the valley. The altar is no unused artifact. The path leading to it across the grass is well worn. Beyond, another path—so dreadfully faint it almost seems an illusion—leads further into the mountains. Tomorrow they will make their offering. Richard is coming into the iurt. I will break off here. I love you dearly. There is nowhere I would rather be than with you on your picket lines. When I return to England, I am going to stand beside you on those lines. I know this will surprise you. I will explain in my next letter. For now I remain your devoted sister M

• • • • Dearest Emily, Our guides are abandoning us. They tell us they will go down the mountain after making their offering. Richard is in a cold fury at their broken promises. The faint trace of a trail leading beyond the altar has convinced him we are near our goal. After the argument, he came into the iurt, loaded both his Webley revolvers, and sat on the trunk, mumbling “damn it all” over and over again. For a moment I thought he was going to walk out and gun them all down—starting with Jyrgal, who has been a continual thorn in his side. After sitting there for some time, however, he holstered the two guns, wrapped them in their oilcloths, and put them in his satchel. He got a fire lit and tea going, bringing me mine in the enameled cup you gave to me. Watching him, I was again struck by the fact that here, lighting fires and making tea in the least comfortable of conditions, he is in his element. Gone is clumsy, shy Richard—the Richard that avoids dancing like the plague and will turn his horse off the road into the forest if he sees an acquaintance riding toward him. He is no longer the office-bound academic scribbler either, with his piles of papers, his reading glasses, and his stuffed marmot with its fur singed from when he dropped it in the fireplace trying to get a better look at the structure of its forepaws. There is something rather heroic about him, here. That is, if you put aside the fact that, in order to make tea for me, he put his reading glasses on again, and is measuring the tea with a tiny scale and the water in the kettle with a thermometer. Even in this, however, there is an adventurer’s logic: from the boiling point of the water he has been determining our altitude. Sister, this trip has finally brought me round to your position on the state of women in this world. I promised I will try to explain, so here it is, as well as I can put it: Richard is an ideal husband for a woman who wants to be treated as an equal. He is kind, and takes me seriously. After all, he agreed (with some convincing) to take me on this difficult trip with him. He encourages my writing. He listens to me when I speak. He tries to include me in his work . . . But I am not his equal. Richard is an ethnographer, an archaeologist, and a linguist. He has sharpened his intelligence until it was a finely bladed instrument he may use for most anything. He is brilliant, yes. But who should be surprised? He always had the encouragement of his parents. He had money, schooling, and a tweedy assurance of success— even if he was a bit odd, and a disappointment on the cricket pitch. Since he set out in life, he has had clouds of pipe-smoking men at his back delivering the right impressed grunts and back-slaps and handshakes, nudging him along to his rightful slot in society and their clubs. And as for me? Every time I expressed interest in something scientific, I was guided away from it. I remember so many instances. Taken all together, what they amount to is a pruning, just as Mrs. Wollstonecraft described: every time an unruly branch emerged on the rosebush of my self, it was clipped away. And so I was made ornamental: a superfluous person—a thing for admiring china patterns and playing the pianoforte. I had been looking for a man who was an oppressor: a beast I thought your viewpoint demanded. If I found one, I thought, I would be convinced things were as dreadful as you said. Instead, men just seemed to plod along, generally affable, sometimes boorish, but always ignorant of the damage their behavior was doing. In fact, it was often women who were the enforcers of the rules. For example, I think father would have liked me to be a scientist or an explorer: he would have found it all rather scandalous and amusing. It was mother who energetically labored to shape me into a lady. Our world has made me a know-nothing who soaks her hands in bowls of milk, and it has made Richard lonelier than he deserves to be. It has denied us the equal partnership we deserve. But I see now that there is no man who is the oppressor. No. What stamps us out into these prisons is our quiet, green-lawned little world. It is a machine. Set running long ago, it needs no constant master. People are its automatons: they do the work of shaping others unknowingly. In our family only you have had the courage to resist this machine. Well, no longer. When I return I will devote myself, as you have, to the cause. After the tea, Richard went out again. There was another terrible row. When he returned, he told me he had purchased the two horses we have been riding, as well as use of the iurt. Our guides, in turn, have agreed to meet us in the lower valley in a week’s time—and to wait for us there for one month in case of delay. This service has cost us another crown. Their thinking is alien to me, as closed a mechanism as one could imagine. I know we are alien to them as well: I see it in the eyes of the women every time they come in to bring wood for the fire, staring at me as if I might vanish into smoke. But we must rely on them. We have no choice: if they do not wait for us in the lower valley, I fear we may not survive the hard road back to Qabul alone. There has been a general commotion all morning, with the women shouting at the men, and the men at one another. They killed the sheep and boiled it in a great pot. Then Richard and I watched as they presented parts of the boiled sheep at the altar, as well as a good deal of rice in sheep stomach bags, a large sheepskin robe made by turning the fur inward, and two more horned ram skulls to add to the great piles. After all of this, done with a minimum of ceremony, Jyrgal put his fingers into his mouth and whistled loudly, directing the sound into the mountains beyond the altar, where it echoed for what seemed like minutes. Then they turned and, with many a remorseful backward look from the women, went back through the canyon gates with the skeletons of their dismantled iurts piled high on their carts, and left us alone. This evening it is very cold. For the first time I saw my own breath inside our lone iurt. I write by oil lamp. Richard is outside, where I can hear him speaking gently to the horses. He has a blackout lantern with him, and one of the Webley revolvers. He will wait for the spirit of the mountain to come and claim its offering. Will I have the strength to wait with him? I have had a headache now for three days, and am weak. I have come all this way, but now I want nothing more than to sleep. Is this all nonsense? The infectious superstition of a people we do not understand, and our own need to believe in something strange beyond our neat, dull world? I suppose we shall soon see. Your M

• • • •

Dear Emily, What seemed like light-headedness due to the altitude has turned to fever. I write this with a weak hand, propped up under a mass of sheepskin blankets, chilled to the marrow. You will therefore please excuse the rather slurred handwriting. I am awake in the early dawn. Richard has returned, having been gone the entire night, and sleeps soundly under his own great pile of skins. Before he collapsed, he told me the most incredible of stories, which I must recount to you here. As I was feeling ill, I retired to the iurt and, taking some of the aspirin we brought with us, collapsed into a fitful and feverish sleep. Richard maintained his vigil at a distance from the altar. However, after hours with no sign of the supernatural or anything else, Richard too fell asleep. When he awoke, it was near midnight. Approaching the altar, he found the offering gone—not torn by animals or scattered, but neatly removed. In a sliver of light from his blackout lantern, Richard saw a footprint—of a leather-soled shoe like those worn by our guides. There were a few further prints leading away from the stone. Here, then, was our answer. Casting aside earlier hopes of discovery, Richard decided we were the victims of a hoax. Our hosts had left us earlier in the day, then returned by some circuitous route to remove the offering themselves. Angry at having been fooled, Richard followed the faint trail as it climbed beyond the black trickle of falls into a narrow cleft of gnarled scrub and stunted trees deformed by weather and altitude. It is good I was asleep, as I would have attempted to convince him to turn back and wait until dawn—and he might have, and then never have forgiven me. As it was, I tossed with fever here, unknowing, while he climbed that scar in darkness toward he knew not what. It was a perfect demonstration of the courage expected of him: he could have acted in no other way. Keeping the lantern covered as much as possible, only lighting his way with the thinnest blade of light when absolutely necessary, he ascended. After a long scramble, he glimpsed a light; a flicker high up in the face of a steep granite incline. He worked his way up the incline toward the light. Reaching it, he discovered a lintel and frame cut into the stone of the mountain, and a thick wooden door hung in the rock. From cracks between the planks bled the dim orange flicker Richard had spotted from below. Thinking to surprise our guides hidden inside, Richard pushed through the door almost without hesitation. What he describes to me next I can scarce believe, though it comes from a man I love and trust. Inside was a small room, not much larger than our iurt. There was a narrow entry space near the door, holding a few pairs of boots, and a dark wooden chest which doubled as a sort of seat. Beyond, the main space looked to have been a natural cave once, but it had been cut further into the rock, roughly square, with a sleeping niche high in one wall, to which a ladder led. The floor had been leveled, and a fire pit constructed in the room’s center. Here a low fire burned, the smoke drawn upward through a natural vent in the stone. The room was warm despite the cold night. The walls were hung with rugs and tapestries, darkened by smoke and age. Around the room were more trunks, of varying make, two long jezail rifles leaned against the wall, and a number of other objects Richard did not immediately identify, as he was distracted by the man sitting alone by the fire. The man appeared to be roughly Richard’s age—thirty-five to forty- five, in the time of life when it is difficult to identify age with exactness. He was pale, with dark hair and a scarred face. He was dressed much like our guides, but by his European features he was clearly of a different people—and the room, while it contained much from the culture of the nomads who led us here, had much else in it as well, including a number of leather-bound books. The man was calmly eating the mutton which had been left on the altar. The sheepskin robe from the sacrifice was folded in a corner, along with the bags of rice. Richard tried to communicate to me the strangeness of the moment: meeting, in this place high above human habitation, at the close of summer, this lone man who appeared to live there permanently, far from all civilized contact, eating food which had been left upon a sacrificial altar. The man looked up from his meal with a perfect calm, and gestured for Richard to seat himself beside the fire. Richard noticed then that the man was missing two fingers on his right hand. Richard sat down. The man continued eating for a minute or so more, finishing what was on his plate and setting it to one side. Then he spoke, using the language of our guides; but with an accent, and in a strange version Richard could follow only with difficulty. There were many words, Richard said, not from that language, but from Persian or other tongues Richard did not immediately recognize. “I have not seen,” the man said calmly, “a person clothed quite like you before. Where did you come from?” “From England,” Richard replied. “It is . . .” “It is a very long way away,” the man stated. “I have not been there, though in older times I think some ships did travel there. Pytheas wrote of it, though some did not believe his stories. Later the Romans ruled it. I hear soldiers have come from there to here, in recent times.” This much confused Richard, but before he could ask more, the man continued. “Do you seek something here?” “I had heard,” Richard said, “Of a group of nomads in these mountains who had broken from the religion of their fathers and ceased to worship Allah. Because of this they were shunned by the nomads who used to be their brothers. I had heard that they had turned to the worship of another being. That they had raised an altar to a being who lived deep in the mountains, where none were permitted to go. That they monthly went to this altar, even in the dead of winter, to make offerings of food and clothing. I had heard—most recently from a drunk man in Qabul who claimed to have accompanied them to a sacrifice—that this being had the form of a man, and the offerings were always taken. And this being, though a man in shape, did not die. The worship of him began ten generations ago, and has continued to this day.” “I do not think,” the man said, “it has been so long. Though it has been a long time.” I had to break off my narrative to you here, sister. There was a commotion outside. Jyrgal had returned, demanding Richard and I leave this place immediately and return to the lower valley. He had a rifle with him, and began waving it about when Richard refused. I watched from the tent flap with the Webley in hand while Richard argued calmly with him (sister, I am frightened—I am so weak I can barely stand. What is happening to me?) I think I could have shot Jyrgal, though, weak as I am. I do. Luckily, I was not forced to find out. Finally Richard agreed we will not stay a week, but will leave in two days. I do not know if this satisfied Jyrgal, who seemed angry and frightened as he mounted his horse and rode off again through the stone gate. Afterwards (how shameful!) I fainted. I came to with Richard nursing me, a cool cloth on my forehead. He says it is the altitude. He says it is no matter about Jyrgal—we must descend anyway, tomorrow, and get me to safety. Briefly, holding that Webley, I felt something heroic rise in me. But no. I am every inch the weak creature I feared I was. I wonder sometimes what the world has lost in me—and in all the souls it has crippled. How much heroism died among us women, told to keep our delicate faces hidden from the sun? I can barely lift the pen, and must rest. Yours in sisterhood, M.

• • • •

Emily dearest, Richard went up the path again last night. He took one of the Webleys, leaving the other here with me, loaded, with strict instructions I was to fire upon anyone who attempted the iurt’s door (roped firmly shut) without previously giving an owl call. I am a coward. In England it gave one a little thrill to imagine wolves in the dark. Here we have heard the wolves lift their voices in the night. It is not at all romantic. It is dreadful. We have seen their paw prints at the springs, and the animals they have torn. Richard took a copy of Darwin, of his Pali Dhammapada, and of Homer in the original. He also brought some of the tinned food, the compass we purchased from the outfitters in London, and his clever sword stick. Quite a selection of objects, indeed. And so I write to you, feverish in the flickering light of the lamp. Where, dearest, did I break off my narrative when Jyrgal interrupted, waving his rifle? Ah, yes—“I do not think it has been so long,” the man said, “Though it has been a long time. And profitable to me—previously, it was much harder, here in the mountains, and I was afraid I would starve.” “Afraid you would starve?” Richard cried. “What can you mean?” “It was more than two hundred years ago when I first came to this place.” Here the man stood, and went to a trunk in the corner, from where he withdrew a scroll, and began to read from it. He did not read in the language he had been speaking to Richard before, but in Greek. And Richard said the Greek was very strange, using some words not used for a thousand or more years, but also words from periods long after. It was a patchwork Greek, a chaotic mosaic of the Greek of Byzantium, Bactria, and Trebizond, and of some sort of—Richard insisted—Western colony of the ancient Greeks. And Richard would know: his love of all things Hellene is what carried him through the dark days of Eton, when the boys half-drowned him in dirty bathwater, and he was once hit in the face with a cricket bat while he slept. “Yes, here,” said the man, pointing at the scroll. “It was in the summer of 1655. Skirmishes with a neighboring tribe had driven us off our land. Then the plague took my wife and my sons. I had thought it would take me as well. I lay for days in my own sweat. When I finally crawled, half dead, from the iurt, I gathered what I could, and I went into the mountains.” He was speaking to himself, but here Richard replied, in the Homeric, quoting from the Odyssey: “Of all creatures which breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred which is weaker than man.” The man looked up, and something new came into his eyes. “There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.” (This also was from the Odyssey, though Richard says the quote was corrupted, like something half-remembered, and the dialect was wrong). The man re- rolled the scroll, and replaced it in the trunk. “Come again tomorrow night. We will talk of many things. You will tell me of your England. But I am tired now.” Richard slept much of the next day. When he was not sleeping, he was nursemaid to me. Now, with Richard gone again in the night, my very life seems to dangle from this thread of connection to you. And there is darkness, sister, all around. M

• • • •

My dearest Emily, Surely if there can be proof of a thing, this device is proof. I know Richard is deeply disappointed, as any man of science would be. He spent hours attempting to convince the man to descend with us to Qabul, to return with us to England—to no avail. But Richard has made a trade, and has obtained, I think, an object which will, if it does not silence all doubters, suffice to further his career beyond even his expectations. Again he climbed in the dark, this time finding a red-stained lantern at the door to mark its location. The man was by the fire, as Richard reports, “calmly waiting for me, with his scrolls next to him.” And what followed, Richard feels, was what he can only call proof. For hours they sat and talked, in Greek, about what the man could remember of his life. The man referred constantly to the scrolls, recounting from them the wonders of Trebizond, of Bactria, of Merv and Samarqand. They spoke not only in Greek, but in the Chagatai language of the Central Asian Khans, and in the Pali and Sanskrit of the Buddhists with whom, Richard insists, this man himself conversed. Gently, Richard probed the man’s story, looking for fraud. He found none. Richard tells me the man remembers little himself from more than a few hundred years ago: his memory fades beyond a dark horizon. This rings true: think of how our own memories become ever more flawed as they bend toward childhood. How much do we even remember of our days a decade ago? But the scrolls the man carries are the treasure house of his memory: a record of his life and travels, winding back to Trebizond. Trebizond is where the record begins, though those early scrolls suggest the man has lived even longer, and that the earliest records of his life are lost. Perhaps it is the fever, but I believe it. I believe we have found a man who somehow defies death—whose life is a thread leading through time’s labyrinth, back to the very early days of civilization. Richard marvels at the wisdom the man must have: a man who was decades at a monastery in Bactria among Buddhist monks, who was in Merv and Koyne-Urgench with the Muslim astronomers, mathematicians and poets. Richard examined the scrolls closely, and found there a mixture of Greek, Chagatai, Arabic and Persian. All of it was consistent with what must be the most extraordinary tale ever told—a tale which will change everything when we tell it back in England. The man gave Richard the object in trade for the Homer, the Pali Dhamaphadda, the Darwin, and the sword stick which he very much admired. Richard pled with him to come with us, but he would not go. “I have lived, Richard, among men for too long to love them anymore.” “Surely they have changed.” “I am tired,” the man replied. “Tired of wandering through the delusions and failures of mankind.” Then, in good Pali, he said: “Should a seeker not find a companion who is better or equal, let him pursue a solitary course; there is no fellowship with the fool.” Pressing the object into Richard’s hands, he bid him farewell. We sat for at least an hour after Richard’s return, admiring the object in its wooden box of polished walnut, the finely cut and polished bronze gears and dials which, Richard explains, were filed eight hundred years ago by this man, and whose dozens of tiny, hand-cut gears will predict lunar and solar eclipses and the movements of the planets for yet another hundred years. It contains a knowledge of the movements of the planets equaling our own. It is, quite simply, the most marvelous object I have ever seen. Richard has been seated by the door, sketching the object. I feel myself a simpleton even pondering its complexity. Even if the man has refused to return with us, this mechanism must convince the doubters. I am glad to have the mechanism for proof, and I admit I am glad the man will not accompany us: I fear him. He has seen cities burned, caravans destroyed, those dearest to him dying by inches. He has seen plague, superstition, terrible cruelty. He has seen the armies of Genghis Khan, and many khans before and after him. What has he done to survive? I do not share Richard’s opinion of his wisdom. No. I do not think he is wise, in the way Richard does. I think he must be ruthless and cruel in order to match the cruelty of the world. I think his knowledge is of a kind we should be happy to escape from with our lives. I imagine what this world has done to me and the people I know, over their short lives—and then I imagine the damage it could do to us in a thousand years, or two thousand. And I shudder. How long would it take for this world to make a monster of someone? Our guides must fear him as well. Why else would they abandon us? Why return and tell us we must also leave? We will take this instrument down with us to civilization, but I think it is too stupendous a thing for our nation’s narrow minds. I fear the arguments and attacks Richard will endure. But Richard already schemes at mounting another expedition, bringing other scientists here. I am not so sure this is a good idea. Is it what the man would want? I will work to convince him that would not be wise. There is time always Your loving sister M • • • •

Richard is dead. When we reached the lower valley, our guides were gone. Behind them, they left cooking implements and housewares, one burned yurt and the raw mound of a grave—the older brother Taalai’s, as we deduced from his bloodied shirt wrapped around its marker. As if on cue, the snow began out of a darkening sky. I despaired of finding our way down from this place alone. Richard began to strip all unnecessary things from our horses’ backs, throwing away even his precious tea scale. We kept our rations, our bed rolls, the smallest tent, the precious mechanism, Richard’s papers, my letters, and the revolvers. Richard moved with an efficiency I had rarely seen in him. “They have had some family argument,” Richard said. “I knew Jyrgal was dangerous. Now he has murdered his brother, and left us.” I turned to look at Richard then. Richard, with his face like a painting of a doomed English hero—just as soulful, and naïve. “No, my love. I do not think that is what happened.” I took the Webleys from their oilcloth bags, pressing one into his hand. “We must move quickly, and far.” We were fording a stream a few miles below the valley when it happened. Richard was dead before I heard the crack of the rifle—dead and falling already from his horse, his face destroyed. What was left of him crashed into the rocky stream. Above us, among the stones, I saw a thread of smoke, and a man in a niche between boulders, the barrel of his long jezail catching the light as he raised it once more. And I swear that his skin was pale, and his right hand mutilated. Driven by pure anger and reflex, I drew the revolver from my belt and fired at the man three times. One of the bullets appeared to strike him, and he fell backwards out of sight. Then my horse bolted, following Richard’s riderless stallion down the valley as I held on for dear life. The horses plunged ahead in terror for what seemed like hours as I clung, weak from fever but strong from fear, to my stallion’s back. Finally the horses came to rest in a narrow defile, miles away, where grass clings to the canyon walls, and the river runs slower. Here, they drank and ate themselves calm. Here, numb and calm as the horses, I made a fire. Numbly, I made tea, numbly cut open a can. Numbly ate what was inside. I slept for perhaps an hour, lying on the grass in the cold. I feel as if I never had a fever: all of this has pushed it away. I write you now because I must write. I must not keep these things inside. What a hateful mechanism the human brain is: it will not stop to grieve when threat looms. I cannot yet mourn for Richard, but I already feel pride. I took action. I struck back when threatened. That ability to strike back is something I will carry with me forever—carry with me back to England. I suppose I am a hero, after all. There is a hardness at the core of me, a will that the machine of our time and traditions cannot crush. As I write this, some part of my brain begins to plan. If the man is badly wounded or killed and was alone, I am safe. If he is not wounded, but does not have a horse, I will be safe at least for a while. The horses took me far from the threat. I have time. I will take the letters and the mechanism to Qabul. Richard will not have died for nothing. This is what I must do. I must simply follow the stream, and hope when I reach my fellow man, he will do what is right, and protect me. Yours in love and sisterhood, M

©2019 by Ray Nayler.

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

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight The Tiger Nina Allan | 7784 words

There is a bed, a wardrobe with a large oval mirror, a built-in cupboard to one side of the chimney breast. The boards are bare, stained black. There is a greyish cast to everything. Croft guesses the room has not been used in quite some time. “It’s not much, I’m afraid,” the woman says. Her name is Sandra. Symes has told him everyone including her husband calls her Sandy, but Croft has decided already that he will never do this, that it is ugly, that he likes Sandra better. “I’ve been meaning to paint it, but there hasn’t been time.” She is too thin, he thinks, with scrawny hips and narrow little birdy hands. Her mousy hair, pulled back in a ponytail, has started to come free of its elastic band. Croft cannot help noticing how tired she looks. “Don’t worry,” he says. “If you can let me have the paint, I’ll do it myself.” “Oh,” she says. She seems flustered. “I suppose we could take something off the rent money. In exchange, I mean.” “There’s no need,” Croft says. “I’d like to do it. Something to keep me out of mischief.” He smiles, hoping to give her reassurance, but she takes a step backwards, just a small one, but still a step, and Croft sees he has made a mistake already, that the word mischief isn’t funny, not from him, not now, not yet. He will have to be more careful with what he says. He wonders if this is the way things will be for him from now on. “Well, if you’re sure,” Sandra says. She glances at him quickly, then looks down at the floor. “It would brighten up the walls a bit, at least.” She leaves him soon afterwards. Croft listens to her footsteps as she goes downstairs, past the entrance to the first floor flat where she and Angus McNiece and their young son live, and into the pub where she works ten hours each day behind the bar. Once he feels sure she won’t come back again, Croft lifts his luggage—a canvas holdall—from where he has placed it just inside the door and puts it down on the bed. As he tugs open the zip, an aroma arises, the scent of musty bedsheets and floor disinfectant, a smell he recognises instantly as the smell of the prison, a smell he has grown so used to that he would have said, if he’d been asked, that the prison didn’t have a smell at all. No smell, and no texture. Being outside is like being spun inside a centrifuge. He keeps feeling it, the enthralling pressure on his ribs and abdomen, the quickfire jolts to his brain as he tries to accustom himself to the fact that he is once more his own private property. Just walking from the station to the pub—the long, straight rafter of Burnt Ash Road, the blasted concrete triangle that is Lee Green—gave him a feeling of exhilaration so strong, so bolt upright, it still buzzes in his veins like neat whisky, like vertigo. The pub is called The Old Tiger’s Head. Croft has read it was once a coaching halt, a watering hole for soldiers on their way to the Battle of Waterloo. More recently it was a tram stop, where trams on their way down from Lewisham Junction would switch from the central conduit to overhead power. Photographs of Lee Green in the early 1900s show the place when it was still a village, a busy crossroads between Lewisham and Eltham, creased all along its corners, faded, precious. He begins to remove his clothes and books from the canvas holdall. The clothes will go in the wardrobe. He tries the door to the built-in cupboard, but it appears to be locked. Croft wishes the woman, Sandra, had felt able to stay with him in the room for just a few minutes longer. Why would she, though? What is he to her, other than the sixty pounds each week she will get from him in rent money? Croft wonders what, if anything, she has heard or read or been told about his case. The child, Rebecca Riding, lived less than two miles from the place where he is now standing. A decade has passed since she died. In an alternate world, she would now be a young woman. Instead, she went to pick flowers in Manor Park on a certain day, and that was that. Abducted and raped, then murdered. Her name had joined the register of the lost. Did Croft kill Rebecca Riding? The papers said he had, for a while they did anyway. He has served a ten-year prison sentence for her murder. Even now that the charges have been overturned, the time he has spent living as a guilty man is still a part of reality. He is free, but is he truly innocent? Croft cannot say yet. There are too many things about that day that he cannot remember.

• • • •

His first meeting with Symes consists mainly of Symes cross- examining him on the subject of how things are going. “Did you manage to sign on okay?” As if penetrating the offices of the Lewisham DSS was a significant accomplishment, like shooting Niagara Falls in a barrel, or scaling Everest. Perhaps for some it is. Croft thinks of the faces, the closed and hostile faces of free people who through their freedom were unpredictable and therefore threatening. In prison, you became used to people doing the same thing, day after day. Even insane actions came to make sense within that context. In the offices of the Lewisham DSS, even getting up to fetch a cup of water from the cooler might turn out to be a prelude to insurrection. All the people he encounters make him nervous. He tells Symes everything is fine. “It was lucky about the room,” he adds, as a sweetener. “I’m grateful to you.” The room at The Old Tiger’s Head was Symes’s idea. He knows Angus McNiece, apparently. Croft dislikes Symes intensely without knowing why. In prison, you come to know a man’s crime by the scent he gives off, and to Croft, Richard Symes has about him the same moist and fuggy aroma as the pathetically scheming lowlifes who always sat together in the prison canteen because no one else would sit near them, suffering badly from acne and talking with their mouths full. Symes wears a lavender-coloured, crew-necked jersey and loose brown corduroys. He looks like an art teacher. That Symes has been assigned to him by the probation service to help him “re-orientate” seems to Croft like a joke that isn’t funny. Symes is telling Croft about a group he runs, once a week at his home, for newly released offenders. “It’s very informal,” Symes says. “I think you’d enjoy it.” Offenders, Croft thinks. That’s what we are to people. We offend. The idea of being in Symes’s house is distasteful to him, but he is afraid that if he refuses, Symes will see it as a sign of maladjustment and use it against him. Croft says yes, he would like to attend, of course. It would be good to meet people. “Here’s my address,” Symes says. He writes it down on one of the scraps of paper that litter his desk and hands it across. “It’s in Forest Hill. Can you manage the bus?” “I think so,” Croft says. For a moment, he imagines how good it would feel to punch Symes in the face, even though Croft isn’t used to fighting. He hasn’t hit anyone since he was fifteen and had a dust-up in the schoolyard with Roger Burke by name, Burke by nature. Croft has forgotten what it was about now, but everyone had cheered. He imagines the blood spurting from Symes’s nose the way it had from Roger Burke’s nose, the red coating the grooves of his knuckles, the outrage splayed across his face (how fucking dare you, you little turd), the pain and surprise. Symes is finally getting ready to dismiss him. “Tuesday at eight, then. Are you sure you don’t want me to email you directions?” “There’s no need.” Croft isn’t online yet, anyway, but he doesn’t tell Symes that. “I’m sure I can find you.”

• • • •

“I’m just popping to Sainsbury’s,” Sandra says. “Can I fetch you anything?” The supermarket is only across the road. Croft can see the car park from his window. Sandra knows Croft could easily go himself, if he needed to, but she asks anyway because she’s like that, kind, so different from her husband, McNiece, who hasn’t addressed a single word to Croft since he moved in. Sandra has her boy with her, Alexander. He gazes around Croft’s room with widening eyes. “You’re painting,” the boy says. White, Sandra bought. A five-litre can of matt emulsion and a can of hi-shine gloss for the woodwork. The smell of it: bright, chemical, clean, the scent of new. It reminds Croft of the smell of the fixative in his old darkroom. “That’s right,” Croft says. “Do you like it?” The boy stares at him, open-mouthed. “Don’t bother Mr. Croft, Alex,” Sandra says. “He’s busy.” “It’s no bother,” Croft says. “And it’s Dennis.” The presence of the boy in his room makes him more than ever certain that Sandra McNiece does not know what Croft was in prison for. If she knew, she would not have brought her son up here. If she knew, she would not have allowed Croft within a mile of the building. She will know soon though, because someone will tell her, someone is bound to. Croft is surprised this hasn’t happened already. Once she knows, she will want to throw him out, though Croft has a feeling Angus McNiece won’t let her, he won’t want to lose the extra income. “I could do with some tea bags,” he says to Sandra. “If it’s really no trouble.”

• • • •

“Were you really in prison?” the boy says. Alexander. He sits on the edge of Croft’s bed, swinging his legs back and forth as if he were sitting on a tree branch, somewhere high up, in Oxleas Woods perhaps (do kids still go there?), where it is said you can hear the ghosts of hanged highwaymen, galloping along the side of the Dover Road in the autumnal dusk. “Yes,” Croft says. “I was. But I’m out now.” “What were you in for?” “Does your mother know you’re up here?” Croft replies. The idea that she might not know, that the boy is here in his room and that nobody has given their permission, makes Croft feel queasy. Or perhaps it is just the smell of the hardening gloss paint. “Yes,” the boy says, though Croft can tell at once that he is lying, that the child has sneaked upstairs to see the prisoner, that in the boy’s mind this is the bravest and most daring feat he has ever performed. Croft wonders if Sandra realises she has given her son the same name as her own. Perhaps she does, perhaps the boy was named after her. Alexander the Great. Alexander Graham Bell. Alexander Pushkin. In Russian, the shortened form of Alexander (and Alexandra) is not Alex, but Sasha. Pushkin was shot in a duel. He died two days later in some agony from a ruptured spleen. He was thirty-eight years old. “Shouldn’t you be in bed?” Croft says. The boy looks at him with scorn. How old is he, exactly? Six, seven, eight? “What did you do before you were in prison?” “I took photographs,” Croft says. “That was my job.” “Would you take one of me?” “I might,” Croft says. “But I don’t have a camera.” The boy reminds him of someone, the lad who betrayed him perhaps. The boy is younger, of course, but he has the same bright knowingness, the same hopeful aura of trust as the lad who seemed to become his friend and then called him a murderer. Croft wonders what his Judas— Kip?—is doing now. Has he become a photographer himself, as he intended, or is he cooped up in some office, serving time?

• • • • Croft never dreamed in prison. The air of the place was sterile, an imagic vacuum. The outside air is different, teeming with live bacteria, primed to blossom into monstrosities as soon as he sleeps. In his dreams of Rebecca Riding, he begins to remember the way her hair felt, under his hand, the soft jersey fabric of her vest and underpants. “Will you take me home now?” she says. Croft always says yes, though when he wakes, sweating with horror, he can’t remember if this really happened or if it’s just in his dream. There’s cum on the bedsheet, still tacky. He steps out of bed and goes across to the window. Outside and below him, Lee Green lies hazy in the light of the streetlamps. In the hours between two and four, there is little traffic. His legs are still shaking. If he waits until five o’clock, a new day will begin. Croft opens the window to let in the air, which is crisp, tinged with frost, the leading edge of autumn, easing itself inside him like a dagger. The orange, rakish light of Lee Green at night reflects itself back at him from the oval mirror on the front of the wardrobe. Croft wishes he had a camera. If he cannot have a camera, he wishes he could sleep.

• • • •

The bus to Forest Hill is the 122. They run every fifteen minutes, approximately. There’s a stop more or less opposite the pub, at the bottom end of Lee High Road. It’s the early part of the evening, after the main rush hour but still fairly busy. When Croft gets on, the bus is half empty, but after the stop at Lewisham Station, it’s almost full again. Croft moves upstairs, to the top deck. He does not mind the bus being packed, as Symes seemed to think he would. The crush of people, the sheer weight of them, makes him feel less observed. None of them know who he is, or where he is going. Friends of his from before, police officers and journalists living north of the river (Queen’s Park and Kilburn, Ealing and Hammersmith, Camden Town) liked to joke about southeast London as a badlands, a no-man’s-land of scabby takeaways and boarded-up squats. Croft looks out at the criss-crossing streets, the lit-up intersections and slow-moving traffic queues. Curry houses and fish-and-chip shops and eight-till-late supermarkets, people returning from work, plonking themselves down in front of a cop show, cooking supper. All the things that, once you are removed from them, take on an aspect of the marvellous. He feels southeast London enfold him in the darkness like a tatty anorak, like an old army blanket. Khaki-coloured, smelling of spilled beer and antifreeze, benzene and tar, ripped in several places but still warm enough to save your life on a freezing night. The sky is mauve, shading to indigo, shading to black, and as they pass through Honor Oak Park, Croft thinks of Steven Jepsom, who once lived not far from here, in a grubby basement flat on the Brownhill Road. It was Jepsom they arrested first, but a lack of real evidence meant they had to let him go again. Whereas in Croft’s case, there were the photographs. It was the photographs, much more than Kip, that had testified against him. Now, it seemed, Steven Jepsom had been Rebecca Riding’s killer all along. Croft remembered Symes’s first visit to the prison, Symes telling him about Jepsom being re-arrested, almost a year before he, Croft, had been set free. “It won’t be long now,” Symes had said. He gave Croft a look, and Croft thought it was almost as if he were trying to send him a signal of some kind, to claim the credit for Croft’s good luck. “Is there new evidence, then?” Croft asked. “Plenty. A new witness has come forward, apparently. It’s strange, how often that happens. There’s no time limit on the truth, Dennis.” Croft dislikes Symes’s insistence on using his first name. Using a first name implies familiarity, or liking, and for Symes he feels neither. He has always tried not to call Symes anything. He tries not to think of Steven Jepsom, who is now in prison instead of him. A guilty man for an innocent one. Straight swap. Richard Symes lives on Sydenham Park Road, a residential street leading off Dartmouth Road, where the station is, ten minutes’ walk from the bus stop at most. The house is unremarkable, a 1950s semi with an ancient Morris Minor parked in the drive. The porch lights are on. As he approaches the door, Croft thinks about turning around and heading back to the bus stop. There is no law that says he has to be here—the group is voluntary. But Symes won’t like it if he doesn’t attend. He will like it even less if he finds out that Croft turned up at his house and then went away again. He will see it as a mark against him, a sign of instability perhaps, an unwillingness to reintegrate himself into normal society. Could Symes report him for that? Perhaps. That would mean more meetings, more reports, more conversations. More time until he’s off Symes’s hook. Croft decides it is better just to go through with it. It is an hour of his time, that is all, and he’s here now, anyway. It’s almost more trouble to leave than it is to stay. He rings the bell. Someone comes to the door almost at once, a balding, fortyish man in a purple tank top and bottle-glass spectacles. “You’re exactly on time,” he says. He steps aside to let Croft enter the hallway. Croft notices that, in spite of it being November and chilly, the man is wearing leather sandals, the kind Croft used to wear for school in the summer term and that used to be called Jesus sandals. Croft feels surprise that you can still buy them. The Jesus man has a front tooth missing. The light of the hallway is sharp, bright orange. Croft follows the Jesus man along the corridor and through a door at the end. By contrast with the garish hallway, the room beyond is dim. The only illumination, such that it is, appears to be coming from a selection of low-wattage table lamps and alcove lights, making it difficult for Croft to find his bearings. He estimates that there are eight, perhaps ten people in the room, sitting in armchairs and on sofas. They fall silent as he enters. He looks around for Symes, but cannot see him. “Our mentor is in the kitchen,” says the man in the sandals. “He’s making more drinks.” He has an odd way of speaking, not a lisp exactly, but something like it. Perhaps it’s his adenoids. Each time he opens his mouth, Croft finds himself focussing on the missing front tooth. Its absence makes the man look grotesquely young. Our mentor? Does he mean Symes? He guesses it’s just the man’s attempt at a joke. A moment later, Symes himself appears. He is carrying a plastic tray, stacked with an assortment of mugs and glasses. Croft can smell blackcurrant juice, Ribena. For some reason this cloying scent, so reminiscent of children’s birthday parties, disturbs him. “Dennis, good to see you,” Symes says. “Take this for me, would you please, Bryan?” He eases the tray into the hands of the Jesus man, who seems about to overbalance. “What are you drinking?” “Do you have a beer?” Croft says. His eyes are on the Jesus man, who has recovered himself enough to place the laden tray on a low wooden bench. The thought of the Ribena or even coffee in this place fills him with an empty dread he cannot explain. A beer would at least be tolerable. It might even help. “Coming right up,” Symes says. The baggy cords are gone and he is wearing jeans, teamed with a hooded sweatshirt, which has some sort of band logo on the front. His wrists protrude awkwardly from the too- short arms. He’s dressed himself up as a kid, Croft thinks, and the idea, like the thought of the Ribena, is for some reason awful. Symes tells him to find himself a seat, but all the sofas and armchairs appear to be taken. In the end he finds an upright dining chair close to the door. The chair’s single cushion slides about uncomfortably on the hard wooden seat. Croft looks around. He sees there are more people in the room than he thought at first, fifteen or twenty of them at least, many of them now talking quietly amongst themselves. Immediately opposite him, an obese woman in a brightly coloured smock dress lolls in a chintz-covered armchair. She has shoulder-length, lank-looking hair. Her forehead is shiny with grease, or perhaps it is sweat. Her small hands lie crossed in her lap. The hands, which are surprisingly pretty, are adorned with rings. The woman smiles at him nervously. Quite unexpectedly, Croft feels a rush of pity for her, a sensation more intense than any he has experienced since leaving the prison. He had not expected to see women here. “Hi,” Croft says. He wonders if the woman can understand him, even. There is a blankness in her eyes, and Croft wonders if she’s on drugs, not street drugs but prescription medicine, Valium or Prozac or Ativan. There was a guy Croft knew in prison who was always on about how the prescription meds—the bennies, as he called them—were deadlier than heroin. “They eat your fucking mind, man.” Fourboys, his name was, Douglas Fourboys, eight years for arson. Croft had liked him better than anyone, mainly because of the books he read, which he didn’t mind lending to Croft, once he had finished them. He had an enthusiasm for Russian literature, Dostoevsky especially. Douglas Fourboys was a lifelong Marxist, but at some point during the six months leading up to Croft’s release, he had found God. He claimed he’d been sent the gift of prophecy, though Croft suspected this probably had more to do with the dope Fourboys’s girlfriend occasionally managed to smuggle past the security than with any genuine aptitude for seeing the future. “You’ve got to be careful, man,” Fourboys had said to him, just a couple of days before his release. “They’re waiting for you out there, I can see them, circling like sharks.” Fourboys had definitely been stoned when he said that. He’d reached out and clutched Croft’s hand, then tilted to one side and fallen asleep. Croft misses Fourboys; he is the only person from inside that he does miss. He supposes he should visit him. “We know who you are,” the woman says suddenly. “You’re going to help us speak with the master. We’ve seen your pictures.” She smiles, her thin lips slick with spittle. Her words send a chill through Croft, though there is no real meaning to them that he can fathom. The woman is obviously vulnerable, mentally challenged. Clearly she needs protection. Croft feels anger at Symes for allowing her to be here unsupervised. Suddenly Symes is there, standing behind him. He pushes something cold into Croft’s hand, and Croft sees that it’s a bottle of Budweiser. The thought of the beer entering his mouth makes Croft start salivating. He raises the bottle to his lips. The liquid is icy, familiar, heavenly. Croft feels numbness settle over him, an almost-contentment. Whatever is happening here need not concern him. It is only an hour. “I see you’ve met Ashley,” Symes says. He squats down next to the armchair, leaning in towards the fat woman and taking her hand. He presses his fingers into the flesh of her wrist as if to restrain her, as if she is something dangerous that needs to be managed. The woman shifts slightly in her seat, and Croft sees that her eyes, which appeared so dull, are now bright and alive. He cannot decide if it is wariness he sees in them, or cunning. She doesn’t like Symes, though, this seems clear to him. Join the club. “Ashley is my wife,” Symes says. He grins into the face of the woman, a smile of such transparent artifice it is as if both he and she are playing a practical joke at Croft’s expense. Suddenly, in the overheated room, Croft feels chilled to the bone. Is Symes serious? Snatches of words and images play themselves across his brain like a series of film stills: Symes’s grin, the woman’s slack features, the sticky word wife. You’re wondering if they fuck, Croft thinks. Is that all it is, though? He takes another swig of the beer and the thoughts recede. “Would you excuse me, just for a moment?” Symes says. “There’s a phone call I need to make. I’ll be right back.” He stands and walks away. The woman in the armchair looks after him for a second, then strains forward in her seat and puts her hand on Croft’s knee. Croft can smell her breath, a sickening combination of peppermints and something else that might be tuna fish. “You know him,” the woman says, and for a moment Croft imagines she’s talking about Symes, though the words that follow make his supposition seem impossible. “Even though you don’t know it yet, you know him. He’ll steep all his children in agony. Not just the agony of knowing him, but true pain.” She tightens her grip on his knee, and Croft realises that she is strong, much stronger than she appears, or than he would have believed. The mad are always strong, Croft thinks. He does not know how he knows this, but he knows it is true. “Who are you talking about?” Croft says quietly. “Who is the master?” The woman leans towards him. Her face is now so close to his that her features seem blurred, and Croft thinks for a confused moment that she is about to kiss him. He sees himself straddling her. Her mounded flesh is pale as rice pudding. “He is the tiger,” she says. She grins, and her grin is like Symes’s grin, only, just like the Jesus man, she has a tooth missing. The sight of the missing tooth fills him with horror. “I need to get out of here,” he says. “I mean, I need to use the bathroom.” The room feels unbearably hot suddenly, stifling with the scent of unwashed bodies. He places his half-drunk beer on the coffee table, and as he makes his way back to the hallway, he finds himself wondering if the woman will take advantage of his absence to taste the alcohol. He imagines her thin lips, clamping themselves around the mouth of the bottle in a wet, round “o.” He can hear Symes’s voice, talking softly off in another room somewhere, but Croft ignores it. The staircase leads upwards to a square landing, with four doors leading off it, all of them closed. Croft tries one at random, not through any logical process of deduction but because it is closest. By a stroke of luck, the room behind it turns out to be the bathroom after all. Croft steps hurriedly inside and locks the door. He sits down on the closed toilet seat, covering his face with both hands. The room feels like it’s rocking, slowly, back and forth, like a ship in a swell, though Croft knows this is only the beer, which he is unused to. He has barely touched a drop of alcohol since leaving prison. He presses his fingertips against his eyelids, savouring the darkness. After a minute or so, he opens his eyes again and stands up. He lifts the toilet seat, pisses in an arcing gush into the avocado toilet bowl. He washes his hands at the sink. His face, in the mirror above, looks pale and slightly dazed but otherwise normal. It is only when he goes out on the landing again that he sees the photographs. There are six of them in all. They are arranged in two groups of three, mounted on the blank area of wall at the far end of the landing and directly opposite the bathroom door. He had his back to them before, Croft realises, which is why he didn’t see them when he first came upstairs. He recognises them at once. He thinks it would be impossible for an artist not to recognise his own work. One of the photos is of Murphy, or rather Murphy’s hands, secured behind his back with a twist of barbed wire. The Kennington case. Four of the other photos are also work shots, all photos he took for the Met in the course of his twenty- year career as a forensic photographer. Lilian Beckworth, a car crash victim. The Hallam Crescent flat, gutted by fire. The underpass near Nunhead Station where the Cobb kid was found. The sixth photo, not a work one, is of Rebecca Riding. The police believed it had been taken less than thirty minutes before her death. Croft told his lawyer and the police that the photos they found at his house were not taken by him. His camera had been stolen, he said, and then later returned, placed on his front doorstep, wrapped carefully in a Tesco bag. Whoever left it there had not rung the bell. When Croft later developed the film, he found pictures he remembered taking at various sites around Lewisham and Manor Park. He also found the photos of Rebecca Riding. “The photos are good though, aren’t they, Dennis?” the cop kept saying. “They’re no amateur job. You’re a professional. You remember taking these, surely?” Croft said he didn’t, and kept saying it. In the end, he could hardly remember, one way or the other. It was true that they were very fine photographs. He’d spent some time working on them in his darkroom. The excellence of the results surprised even him. Croft turns away from the photographs and goes back downstairs. In the stuffy living room, they are all waiting, and for a moment, as he returns to his place near the doorway, Croft gets the feeling that he has been lured there on false pretences. He brushes the thought away, sits down on the uncomfortable wooden chair. The hour passes, and at the end of it, Croft cannot remember a single thing that has been said. People are standing, going out into the hallway, pulling on coats. As Croft moves to join them, he feels a hand on his arm. It is Richard Symes. “Some of us have clubbed together to buy you this,” he says. “Your work means a great deal to us here. We’re hoping this will help you find your feet again.” He hands Croft a package, a small but heavy something in a red-and- white bag. Croft knows without having to be told that it contains a camera. The gift is so unexpected that he cannot speak. Symes is smiling but it looks like a snarl, and finally it comes to Croft that he has been drugged, that this is what has been wrong all along, it would account for everything. Drugs in the Bud. Bennies in the beer. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Fourboys was right. Outside, he feels better. The air is cold, bright as a knife. The sensations of nausea and unreality begin to recede. Croft walks smartly away, away from the house, along Sydenham Park Road and all the way to the junction with Dartmouth Road. He stands there, watching the traffic, wondering how much of the past hour was actually real.

• • • •

The camera is a Canon, a top-of-the-range digital. It is not a hobby camera. Whoever chose it knew exactly what they were getting. He has given up asking himself why this has been done for him. Having the camera in his hands is like coming alive again. He remembers the dream he had before he was in prison, his idea of giving up the police stuff and going freelance. He has been taking photographs of the boy, Alexander. They are in the old Leegate shopping precinct just over the road. The boy is in a t-shirt and clean jeans, it is all perfectly harmless. When Croft returns the boy to the pub afterwards, Sandra is behind the bar. There is a complicated bruise on her upper arm, three blotches in a line, like careless fingerprints. Croft has a bank account now, with his dole money in. He has filled in a couple of application forms for jobs. One is for a cleaning job with Lewisham Council, the other is for a shelf-stacking job at Sainsbury’s. He can afford to buy a drink at the bar. “Why is the pub called The Old Tiger’s Head?” he asks Sandra McNiece. “It’s from when it was a coaching inn,” says Sandra. “Tiger used to be a slang word, for footman. Because of the bright costumes they wore.” “Is that right?” Croft says. Croft briefly imagines a life in which he asks Sandra McNiece to run away with him. They will travel to Scotland, to Ireland, wherever she wants. He will take photos and the boy will go to school. He does not dare to take the daydream any further, but it is sweet, all the same, it is overwhelming. “That’s boring,” Alex says. “I think it’s because they once found a tiger’s head inside the wardrobe. A mad king killed him and brought him to London, all the way from India.” Sandra laughs and ruffles his hair. “What funny ideas boys have,” she says. “What are you doing in here, anyway? You should be upstairs.”

• • • •

Croft buys a small folding table from the junk shop at the end of Lee Road that sells used furniture. He places objects on the table—an empty milk carton, two apples, a Robinson’s jam jar filled with old pennies he found at the back of the wardrobe—and photographs them, sometimes singly, sometimes in different combinations. He places the table in front of the wardrobe, so the objects are shown reflected in the oval mirror. Croft experiments with taking shots that omit the objects themselves and show only their reflections. At first glance, they look like any of the other photos Croft has taken of the objects on the table. They’re not, though; they’re pictures of nothing. Croft finds this idea compelling. He remembers how when Douglas Fourboys was stoned he became terrified of mirrors and refused to go near them. “There are demons on the other side, you know,” he said. “They’re looking for a way through.” “A way through what?” “Into our world. Mirrors are weak spots in the fabric of reality. Borges knew it, so did Lovecraft. You have to be careful.” “You don’t really believe this stuff, do you?” Croft knew he shouldn’t encourage Fourboys, but he couldn’t help it; his stories were so entertaining. “I believe some of it,” Fourboys said. “You would too, if you knew what I know. There are people who are trying to help the demons to break through. They believe in the rule of chaos, of enlightenment through pain, you know, like the stuff in Hellraiser and in that French film, Martyrs. They call themselves Satan’s Tigers.” Fourboys took a coin out of his pocket and began swivelling it back and forth between his fingers. “If you knew how many of those sickos were on the loose, it would freak you out.” The next time the boy comes to visit him in his room, Croft shows him how to set up a shot, then lets him take some photographs of the Robinson’s jam jar. Afterwards, Croft takes some photos of Alex’s reflection. He has him sit on the edge of the bed in front of the mirror. “Try and make yourself small,” Croft says. “Pretend you’re sitting inside a cupboard, or in a very cramped space.” The boy lifts both his feet up on to the duvet and then hugs his knees. In the mirror shots, he looks pale, paler than he does in real life. It’s as if the mirror has drained away some of his colour. “What’s in there?” Alex says. He’s staring at the chimney alcove, at the built-in cupboard that Croft has been unable to open. “I don’t know,” Croft says. “It’s locked.” “Perhaps it’s treasure,” says the boy. “If you can find out where the key is, we can have a look.” “I know what it’ll be.” Alex grins, and Croft sees he has a tooth missing. “It’ll be the tiger’s head.” He throws himself backwards on the bed and makes a growling noise. “I bet that’s where they’ve hidden it.” “Isn’t it time for your tea yet?” Croft says. “I’m scared of tigers,” the boy says. “If they come on the TV, I have to switch off.” That night, Croft dreams of Richard Symes. There has been a break-in at Symes’s house and there are cops everywhere. They’re trying to work out if any valuables have been stolen. Symes’s throat has been cut. There is no sign of Ashley Symes, or anyone else.

• • • •

At his next meeting with Symes, Croft is able to tell him he’s been offered the shelf-stacking job. Symes seems pleased. “When do you start?” he says. “Next Monday.” He wonders if Symes will say anything to him about a burglary at his home, but he doesn’t. Instead, Symes asks him how he’s getting on with his new camera. “It’s great to use,” Croft says. “The best I’ve had.” “Why don’t you bring some of your work with you to show us when you come on Tuesday? I know Ashley would love that. Bring the boy with you, too, if you like.” How does Symes know about Alex? For a moment, Croft feels panic begin to rise up inside him. Then he remembers Symes knows the McNieces, that it was Symes who found him his room. “I couldn’t,” Croft says. “He’s only eight. His mother wouldn’t allow it.” “What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her. It would be an adventure for him. All boys love adventures.” Croft says he’ll think about it. He thinks about himself and Alex, walking down the road like father and son. On his way back to London Bridge station, Croft buys Alex a present from one of the gift shops jammed in under the railway arches near Borough Market, a brightly coloured clockwork tiger with a large, looped key in its side. It is made of tin plate, MADE IN CHINA. The journey from London Bridge to Lee takes seventeen minutes. As he mounts the stairs to his room, he meets Sandra coming down. “I’ve just been trying to find you,” she says. “I found this. Alex said you were looking for it.” She holds something out to him, and Croft sees it is a key. “It’s for that cupboard in the chimney alcove,” she says. “We’ve not opened it since we’ve been here, so God knows what’s in there. Just chuck out anything you don’t need.” “That’s very good of you,” Croft says. He searches her face, for tiredness or bruises, anything he can hate McNiece with, but today he finds nothing. He thinks about asking her to come up for a coffee but is worried that his offer might be misconstrued. He closes his fingers around the key. Its hard, irregular shape forms a core of iron at the heart of his hand. It is some time before he opens the cupboard. He tells himself this is because he has things to do, but in reality it is because he is afraid of what he might find inside. Late afternoon shadows pour out of the oval mirror and rush to hide themselves in the corners and beneath the bed. As the room begins to fill up with darkness, Croft finds he can already imagine the stuffed tiger’s head, the mummified, shrunken body of a child, the jam jar full of flies or human teeth. When he finally opens the cupboard it is empty. The inside smells faintly sour, an aroma Croft quickly recognises as very old wallpaper paste. The wallpaper inside the cupboard is a faded green colour. It is peeling away from the walls, and in one place right at the back it has fallen down completely. The wooden panel behind is cracked, and when Croft puts his fingers over the gap he can feel a faint susurrus of air, a thin breeze, trapped between the wooden back of the cupboard and the interior brickwork. Croft puts his whole head inside the cupboard and presses his opened mouth to the draughty hole. He tastes brick dust, cool air, the smell of damp earth and old pennies. He closes his eyes and then breathes in. The cold, metallic air tastes delicious and somehow rare, like the air inside a cave. He exhales, pushing his own air back through the gap, and it is if he and the building are breathing together, slowly in and out. It is then that he feels the thing pass into him, something old that has been waiting in the building’s foundations, in the ancient sewer tunnels beneath the street, or somewhere deeper down even than that. Its face is a hideous ruin, and as Croft takes it into himself, he is at last granted the knowledge he has been fumbling for, the truth of who he is and what he has done. Strange lights flicker across the backs of his closed eyelids, yellow stripes, like the markings on the metal tiger he bought for the boy near Borough Market. You are ready now, says a voice inside his head. Croft realises it is the voice of Ashley Symes.

• • • •

And in the end, it is easy. Both McNieces are downstairs, working the bar. Alex is alone in the living room of the first floor flat. The carpet is a battleground, strewn with Transformers toys and model soldiers. The tin- plate tiger is surrounded by aggressive forces. The TV is playing quietly in the background. When Croft sticks his head around the door and asks if Alex would like to come on an assignment with him, the boy says yes at once. The boy knows the word assignment has to do with photography because Croft has told him so. “Where are we going?” Alex says. It is getting on towards his bedtime, but the unexpectedness of what they are doing has filled him with energy. Croft knows that unless he is very unlucky, the boy’s absence will not be noticed for at least three hours. “To visit some people I know,” Croft says. “They keep a tiger in their back garden.” The boy’s eyes grow large. “You’re joking me,” he says. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.” The boy laughs delightedly, and Croft takes his hand. The journey passes uneventfully. The boy seems captivated by every small thing—the pale mist rising up from the streets, the lit-up shop fronts, the endlessly streaming car headlights, yellow as cats’ eyes. The only glances they encounter seem benign. When they arrive at Symes’s house, Alex rushes up the driveway to the front door and rings the bell. “And who is this young man?” Symes says, bending down. “Dennis says you’ve got a tiger, but I don’t believe him,” says the child. He is beginning to flag now, Croft senses, just a little. He is overexcited. The slightest thing could have him in tears. “We’ll have to have a look, then, won’t we?” Symes says. He places a hand on the boy’s head. Croft steps forward out of the shadows and towards the door. Once he is inside, he knows, it will begin. He and Ashley Symes will kill the child. The rest will watch. “You have done well,” Symes says to Croft, quietly. “This won’t take long.” “Will there be cookies?” Alex says. Croft stands still. He can feel the thing moving inside him, twisting in his guts like a cancer. He wants to vomit. Croft gasps for breath, sucking in the blunt, smoky air, the scent of macadam, of the hushed, damp trees at the roadsides and spreading along all the railway lines of southeast London. The fleet rails humming with life, an antidote to ruin. He smells the timeswept, irredeemable city and it is like waking up. Above him, bright stars throw up their hands in surprise. “Come here to me, Sasha,” Croft says. He is amazed at how steady his voice sounds. “There’s no time now. We have to go.” “But the tiger,” the child whimpers. He looks relieved. “There are no tigers here,” Croft says. “Mr. Symes was joking. Come on.” The boy’s hand is once again in his and he grips it tightly. “Will we be home soon?” says the boy. “I hope so,” Croft replies. “We should be, if a bus comes quickly.” He does not look back.

©2013 by Nina Allan. Originally published in Terror Tales of London, edited by Paul French. Reprinted by permission of the author. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Nina Allan is a novelist and critic. Her story cycle on the theme of parallel universes, The Silver Wind, was awarded the Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire, and her second novel The Rift won the British Science Fiction Award and the Kitschies Red Tentacle. Her novelette recounting the story of an abortive mission to Mars, “The Art of Space Travel”, was a Hugo finalist in 2017. Her most recent novel The Dollmaker will be published in the US by Other Press in October 2019. She lives and works on the Isle of Bute, off the west coast of Scotland. Sweet Dreams Are Made of You Merc Fenn Wolfmoor | 2417 words

The girl has no name. As often as internet forums try to dub one for her, nothing ever sticks. One week there will be a consensus for a name befitting a drowned girl, an agglomeration of classic and cult horror tropes of long- haired, white-dressed dead women, and soon after there is no trace of what it was. No one remembered. Any posts or recordings mentioning the postulated name will have blank spaces where that name should have been.

She is only the girl. —from the Wiki post about Dream Your Game, Inc.

• • • •

The game is played in dreams. It’s called Vore, and it requires two people. Find a partner. Bring your spouse or significant other. It’s best if there is a strong connection between you. Our studies show this enhances the experience. You each determine what you want to feel: fear, excitement, sexual pleasure, oblivion. You sign the release waivers and lie down, each of you in a separate capsule. Your biometrics will be monitored to ensure your safety in the simulation. All your data is private and will not be shared with other companies.

• • • •

Started by a small independent company that focused on VR (virtual reality) gaming, Dream Your Game, Inc. hit massive commercial success with the introduction of Vore.

It tapped into an unexpected cultural zeitgeist: a simulation in which each user—simultaneously, no matter how many people are using it at a time—are devoured by an unnamed young woman. It didn’t seem to matter whether the user was straight, gay, ace or other, nor did gender skew in any particular direction. Seemingly overnight, mobile “hubs” popped up all over the country like a chain coffee shop. Vore wasn’t downloadable: part of the experience was physically entering the hub, lying down in one of the sterilized, memory-foam-lined pods, and being connected via a soft diode-studded cap over the cranium. All hubs were ADA compliant and had assistive devices and ramps as needed.

Sessions lasted between fifteen and thirty minutes. —from the Wiki post

• • • •

From the dictionary definition: –vore is a combining form meaning “one that eats.” From the urban dictionary: “vore” is described as a fetish in which one is eaten alive. Vore: (capitalized) an interactive VR experience from Dream Your Game, Inc., in which an unnamed person, most commonly thought to be a young woman in a white dress with dark hair covering the face, consensually devours the player in unrealistic ways.

• • • •

The game begins: There’s a girl with long hair, wet from drowning, and a white dress stained at the hem by mud. She smiles. You can’t see her face, but you know she smiles. “Do you want to play Vore?” she asks. “Do you want to play? Do you?” This is the last chance for you to terminate the experience. If one of you says no, you’re woken up and given a refund. You will not be allowed to be partnered together in any future attempts to play. Say yes. She will gently eat your faces, pushing her mouth of vacuum into your skull cavity, sucking you clean until there’s just a ring of bone and hair at the back of your head. Don’t worry: you can still see. It’s exhilarating, being eaten into facelessness. You are made anonymous, unburdened of all your shame and responsibility and social expectations. She ties your bodies together with wire. She’s just begun. “Pick a spot,” she says, holding up two wooden clothespins. It’s not important where you choose: a nose (somehow there again), your pinkie finger, maybe a toe, a nipple, a love handle, a pinched buttock. Remember, there’s no shame here, so be as intimate as you want. She marks the spot you each choose with her clothespins, then she cuts off or scoops out this flesh with her fingers and chews thoughtfully. You shiver in unwinding satisfaction as her teeth masticate you, reduce you, and finally swallow you. It’s like a tiny reverse birth. Your pieces settle in her belly and mingle together, molecules intertwined. You’re always delicious. She unties you, and the wire has mapped your flesh in new lines, constellations imprinted in metal on skin. “Lie down,” she says, and of course you do. She flattens you out, rolls you into a paper-thin facsimile of a body. There’s no pain, only soothing pressure: squishing, compression, the redistribution of mass. But then you are so light and airy and oh! Now she’s using a scissors to trim the unsightly edges of your shape. She nibbles the carvings, slurping down your excised waste. You’re warm in her throat: an undulating wave of pressure and release as she swallows you, and you feel every inch of yourself sliding inside her.

• • • •

Dream Your Game, Inc. has social media presences on all platforms, and the website (dreamyourgame.com) is routinely updated with new locations, news, FAQ, and updates to the customer loyalty program, Vore-yers.

There is currently no “single player” option. Based on the premise that two users can share a unique experience while also maintaining individual reactions, each Vore session must be run with two adult participants. No one under age eighteen is allowed. —“Sweet Dreams Are Made of You,” a TIMES op-ed article on the phenomenon of Vore

• • • •

Who is the girl? We designed her to be anonymous; a simulacrum for a universal experience. She was not supposed to have a name, or a face, or a will. She was a simulation. She was just the girl.

• • • •

When you finish your session of Vore, you’re rejuvenated. It’s as if the crusted edges of exhaustion and stress and anxiety have been smoothed away. You feel whole. Alive. You recommend the game to your friends, and each referral gets you points to spend at your next session. Yes, there are viral stories about people who, having once played Vore, try to mimic the game in physical reality. Stories of the carnage and horror that follows when there is only pain and not release. There are people who will always try something once. We are not liable for these individuals’ actions, as stated in our TOS and the waiver all customers sign before beginning a game of Vore.

• • • •

Vore has swept the nation, garnering criticism from religious institutions to psychologists to local governmental jurisdictions. It also sparked millions of discussions on every social media platform. Hashtags #Vore and #Voregame trended for weeks. The Twitter account for the company, @dreamyourgame, hit six million followers within a month. Participants in Vore sessions were interviewed in local papers and on TV news, although the founders and technicians were never captured on camera or audio recording.

Despite protests against Dream Your Game, Inc., no legal action was ever finalized. Campaigns against Vore and the company’s thousands of “hubs”—trailer sized mobile clinics—fizzled before any repercussions could be enacted.

Local police departments claim that reports of dead bodies being found “eaten away,” with no sign of external violence, to be untrue. An undisclosed source, however, implied that more than seventy unexplained deaths have occurred in Madison, WI, where the hubs were first introduced.

University of Johnston’s Professor Dane Romberg, who teaches sociology, commented that Vore “Is like crude oil spilled into the water.” He continued: “It coats everything but is incredibly difficult to clean up, and it’s indifferent to humanity’s wishes to govern it.”

Professor Romberg would not comment if he had tried Vore. —from the article “Sweet Dreams Are Made of You”

• • • •

You may file a complaint, or expound on your concerns, but understand that if you dream about the girl, if you dream about the game outside our facilities, there is nothing we can do. Some people find the experience so intoxicating they become addicted. No, of course not you.

• • • •

A local resident, who wished to remain anonymous, voices a common sentiment with the national craze called Vore: “It’s like . . . you get out of Vore and you remember for, like, a few days and ride the buzz, but then it’s hard to think about it, you know? I don’t have the receipt on my credit account, man, and I can’t even remember which hub I went to. Yeah, I’d check my Vore-yer account, but I can’t remember my login info. It’s weird, man.”

For as prominent in our shared experience with this fad is, citizens have concerns about the long-term memory effects the game may have. Many people have reported that they are unable to recall where they played Vore.

At this time, we could find no information on the company that produces the game. —from the 5pm local news hour, station KYWR • • • •

The site you are looking for, dreamyourgame.com, cannot be found.

• • • •

A week passes, but you find yourself distracted at work, the university’s halls dull and drab, and you’re equally unsatisfied at home, itching and longing for something you can’t quite describe. What’s one more session? You’re not an addict. You hold out. Students in your class have been absent. Several of your close friends aren’t returning texts or emails. Cars parked along your streets haven’t moved in days, even though your neighbors should be at work. One more session of Vore will do you good. It will satiate that itch. Your wife will want to join you, of course, since she’s complained of being unable to sleep well. She’s irritable all the time. You haven’t heard from your kids in a week, but that’s hardly new. Juniors in college, the twins are sporadic at best when it comes to keeping in touch with you. Just one more session, you decide. Except you can’t find the hubs anymore. The website is down. We deleted our social media profiles and we don’t answer the phones. The panic is normal. You’re not the only one who sees her.

• • • •

The user @dreamyourgame does not exist.

• • • •

The girl was never supposed to be real. We gave her power, but tempered her with rules. She was anonymous so users wouldn’t grow attached to her. Nameless so we couldn’t be sued by persons living or dead. The girl was never supposed to be.

• • • •

You’ll never know that your twin children were some of the first to try Vore. They didn’t tell you. They thought you would disapprove or wouldn’t “get it.” That’s a shame; it would have given you a topic of interest to chat about over the inevitable, uncomfortable Thanksgiving dinner. When you get a call from the Madison police two days from now, asking you to identify a pair of bodies, you won’t be able to answer. You will have fallen asleep.

• • • •

It’s not your fault. It’s ours. We gave her too much hunger; we gave her perpetually drowning looks and an appetite unsuited for waking times. At first, we brushed off the reports that clients saw her in their homes. Wishful afterimages, our PR team assured us. If you find yourself needing another session, repeat customers get a discount. But we were wrong to doubt your claims. She is too hungry to keep confined. Forgive us: we made her and shackled her with legal consent. She will appear in your dreams, anywhere you sleep, and ask, “Do you want to play Vore?” If you refuse, you will wake sweating and shaky. Go back to bed. She will still be there. She won’t leave until you say yes, but it must be your choice. You will try sleeping pills and alcohol and exhaustion, but she will always be there. If you say yes, she will do what she always has always done: she will eat you slow while you sleep. It doesn’t hurt. You won’t wake because of blood loss. It doesn’t hurt. Your wife will not have to discover your body, because your wife, too, is playing Vore. You thought it would be cheaper than couples’ therapy, and you were right. Our rates are very reasonable per session. We are exploring methods to stay awake. To drive our bodies to the limit of physical endurance. The rumors of suicides, those who don’t want to sleep, are unfounded. It’s just a game. It’s just a game.

• • • •

Search results for “Dream Your Game, Inc.”: 0 . Search results for “Vore game”: 0. Sorry, the Wiki topic “Dream Your Game, Inc.” doesn’t exist. Would you like to create it?

• • • •

If you say no, she will wait. She is not bound by singularity. She can be everywhere, with all of you. With all of us. You can try and find our buildings, but they will be empty. We are already inside her. She ate us slow. Refuse if you must. She will wait. When you fall asleep, and you will, she will be there to ask: Do you want to play Vore? Do you want to play? Do you?

©2019 by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor.

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

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight Wilderness Letitia Trent | 5898 words

The airport was small, squat like a compound, its walls interrupted in regular intervals by tall, shaded windows. When Krista looked out the windows, the sky seemed slate-gray and heavy, but when the front doors opened, she remembered that it was really blue and cloudless outside. She was early for her flight back to New Haven. She liked to arrive at the very earliest time the flight website recommended. She was prepared to wait, liked it even. It was calming to have nothing to do and nowhere she had to be. She had brought a book about the history of wilderness and America, something left over from college that she had never read. She liked the cover, a picture of a Pilgrim family, small and sickly, their clothes black and heavy on their bony bodies, facing an expanse of trees so tall and green you could see nothing beyond them. She underlined phrases in the book out of old college habit: Wilderness remained a place of evil and spiritual catharsis. Any place in which a person feels stripped, lost, or perplexed, might be called a wilderness. She shared a red plush armrest with a large woman who had almost incandescent butter-blonde hair. Her skin was so tan that it reminded Krista of a stain. Coffee on blonde wood. The blonde had apparently just come from a trip to Maine. She told an older woman next to her—an even larger woman with tight pin-curls and wire-rimmed glasses, wearing those boxy, pleated shorts that middle-aged women often wear on holidays—about her trip. The blonde had stayed in the cutest hotel. Her entire room had been done up all nautical. The other woman nodded in agreement with everything the blonde said, as if she had had an identical experience. Krista watched the airport attendants and one airport policeman patrol the area. They sometimes stepped into the waiting room and observed the crowd with what appeared to be either worry or constipation (they pressed their lips together, their hands on their hips, and blew the air from their mouths as if making silent raspberries). They had a vague air of agitation. She watched them carefully for signs of what might be wrong, but they revealed nothing in their pacing. Nobody else seemed to notice. On Krista’s left, opposite the blonde, was a family, a mother and two children separated from her by one seat. The mother was thin and loud and wore shorts with many utilitarian pockets and a simple tank shirt without a bra. She seemed infinitely capable, as if she ran her own business or perhaps even managed some kind of sports team. Krista admired thin, efficient women like this, women who wore comfortable, rubber-soled sandals and clothing with enough functional pockets. The woman and her children all spoke on their individual cell phones, all telling somebody variations on the news that they would arrive soon, that it was only thirty minutes until boarding. An announcement crackled over the loudspeakers, the sound delivered in one chunk of indiscernible static. Krista looked around the room, hoping for the scraps of somebody else’s conversation to explain what had just been said. Plane’s delayed for an hour, the blonde said to her husband, who had also missed it. Storms down in Boston. A general grumble rose. People shifted in their seats and took out their recently stowed cell phones. The blonde woman called her husband’s name, which Krista immediately forgot. Phone me up a pizza, she told him. I won’t eat that shit from the vending machine.

• • • •

As it grew darker in the waiting room, Krista struggled to make out the print of her book. The primary row of fluorescent lights hadn’t been turned on, but nobody else had complained about the dark yet. She wouldn’t be the first. She read until she had to squint in the darkness at the small, cramped words. As she tried to concentrate on the increasingly turgid prose of her book (pages and pages about national forests, conservationists, things that Krista wasn’t particularly interested in, though she knew that she should be), the blonde woman spoke energetically about her two dachshunds, Buckeye and Alexis. They liked to eat the carpet, she said, so she had soaked the edges of the carpet in Tabasco sauce, which was, incidentally, the same color as the carpet. The pin-curled woman asked how they managed to walk on the carpet if it was soaked with Tabasco sauce. The blonde shrugged, as if this were a mystery to her as well, though a boring one that she had no interest in pursuing. Krista gave up on her book. The mother and her children slept on the carpet below their chairs, their bookbags slung up on the seats above them, the fabric of their bulky Plymouth Rock sweatshirts bunched under their heads as pillows. Krista wished that she could step outside and occupy herself with a cell phone, as many others did, but she didn’t have a cell phone (she had canceled it when she’d left her job) and had nobody to call. Nobody was waiting to meet her in New Haven, and nobody was worried that her flight was late. She stood up and let the cheese cracker crumbs gathered in the folds of her t-shirt fall to the carpet.

• • • •

Krista stood in the fluorescent lights of the bathroom, listening for shuffling feet, a toilet paper roll spinning. She was alone. Her stall door wouldn’t shut completely (how did doors come unlined from their frames? She didn’t understand what would cause it, other than a fundamental shifting of the floor), so she kept one hand on the door as she pulled down her underwear. A bumper sticker on the inside of the door said REPUBLICANS FOR VOLDEMORT. She had never seen a Harry Potter movie or read one of the books, but she vaguely knew who Voldemort was. She was in on the joke. She put her hand on the sticker and tried to keep the door closed as she eased her jeans and underwear down. It was just as she’d thought— in the middle of the bone-colored strip of fabric, a slight red stain. She peeked out her door into the empty bathroom: no machines. Krista stuffed a ball of toilet paper between her legs and pulled her pants back up, letting the door open slightly, as she needed both hands. As she did this, just as the door swung open and she saw a middle-aged woman in the bathroom mirror carefully applying liquid eyeliner, the bathroom lights cut out. Nothing hummed or whirred and she could hear people in the hallway shuffling and speaking. She buttoned her pants in the darkness and stepped into the bathroom, lit only by the dusky light seeping through the high, small window above the sinks. The woman applying eyeliner hissed shit and left, slamming her purse or hip into the plastic trash barrel as she left. Before Krista even had time to panic or feel anything but mild interest, the electricity came back on again. The fluorescents above her buzzed with the effort and her blue-lit face appeared in the mirror. She was alone again. She washed her hands and pressed her wet palms over her face.

• • • •

Ladies and gentlemen, a police officer said, shaking the flashlight in his hand in time with the syllables, sorry for the inconvenience. He and one of the nervous attendants stood before the check-in desk. It’s only a temporary outage, the officer assured them. Nothing serious. Krista made her way back to the waiting room, stepping over legs and bookbags. The news drifted into the main room, where Krista’s jacket was twisted around one leg of her chair, her carry-on bag placed on her seat to save it. The blonde next to her watched the progress of her bag as she removed it and sat down again. She knew that she shouldn’t leave her bags unattended—signs on every wall said so in bold red letters. All she had in the bag were dirty clothes, a brochure about Maine blueberries that her mother had given her, and a business card from her father’s company with a telephone number scrawled on the back. Nothing she was afraid of losing. Her parents wanted her to come back home to Maine. She hadn’t told them yet that she wouldn’t. She was jobless now, that was true, but it wasn’t as they feared—she wasn’t beyond help. She had skills. She imagined herself combing through the classifieds in a coffee shop, circling job after job, making cheerful telephone inquiries, putting more action words in her resume (implemented, facilitated, utilized). The idea didn’t scare her. It seemed liberating. Fun, even. She remembered several cheerful montages from romantic comedies that included these very scenes. They had to have happened to somebody. Did you hear what he said back there? the blonde demanded. It was a rhetorical question, since she obviously knew. Krista nodded and told her anyway. So what’s the problem? the blonde asked. She was suspicious, if not of Krista, then at least of the policeman’s words. Storms. Storms are the problem, Krista repeated. The woman sniffed and shook her head, kicking off her pink flip- flops. Storms. I bet.

• • • •

It was completely dark out now. Somebody had put the lights on in the main room, so Krista could no longer see the parking lot and tree- heavy outskirts from the window. The pizza delivery car had taken forty- five minutes to reach the airport. He had reported heavy wind and rain somewhere close and coming toward them. The woman and her husband ate an entire large pizza all by themselves. Krista didn’t want any of their pizza, but she found it rude for people to eat in the presence of others who were not eating. She couldn’t concentrate on her book. She put it away and tucked her luggage under her seat. She stood up, feeling the blood rush back into her legs. She’d go outside—the air in here was stuffy, full of the smells of powdered cheese and industrial cleaning liquid. The glass doors folded away instantly for her, as if she had bid them to do so. Outside it was still, but the streets were slick, as if it had recently rained, though she had seen no rain. A group of men stood by the doorway, talking about a sports team that she didn’t know. He could really fucking get that ball across the field, he said. That boy was something else. This was from an airport attendant, one she had not seen before, a young man with a slightly fat, womanish body—large hips and a round ass. The other men nodded in unison. They made brief eye contact with Krista and nodded in turn, as if she were a visiting dignitary, somebody who needed at least a modicum of acknowledgement. She smiled and looked down, the proper response. The streetlights reflected back against the cloud-covered sky, giving it a uniform orangey, sick tinge. Shallow puddles of water collected at the edges of the lot. The entire parking lot was lit by rows and rows of light. Out beyond the parking lot, Krista saw a paved footpath from the airport to a big, empty industrial complex next door. The flight, according to her blonde neighbor, was delayed for another hour. She had time for a walk. She set off across the lot, hoping that the men on the steps were watching. She didn’t want to be stranded if the plane happened to arrive early and everybody boarded without her. She imagined coming back to find the waiting room empty, her piece of luggage the only sign left that the place had once been inhabited. The air was humid but cool. A cold sweat gathered on her bare throat and forehead as she pumped her arms and walked fast to reach the walkway. She wanted to be far away from the airport, to be able to see it from a distance. As a child, she had often fantasized about opening the car door and just running into the woods that lined the highways in Maine, disappearing from her parents and never arriving at whatever place they’d intended to take her. She often had a desire for literal distance from places, to see them in perspective to the sky or horizon. It calmed her to see something that made her afraid or unhappy small against a forest or cloudbank. She crossed the wooded median and broke through to the parking lot of the complex. She turned around. The airport looked small in comparison to the huge building next to her, which had at least a dozen stories and was completely made of glass. A light swiveled continually from the airport’s roof. From a distance, she could see the people inside the building below the fluorescent lights. The blonde chewed a piece of crust. One of the men outside lit a cigarette. The match flamed in his hands and then disappeared. She sat down on a bench facing the airport, and then rested her head on the slats. She was tired, she realized, and the swampy air increased the feeling. She would only close her eyes for a while.

• • • •

Ma’am. Ma’am! The voice woke Krista immediately. A flashlight bobbed around her face. She tried to speak, but only a low moan came out. Are you hurt? Are you all right, ma’am? The policeman (Krista could see his badge and recognized his slick black hair from the airport) flashed his light into her eyes. She sneezed, then sat up, wiping her nose on the back of her hand. I’m fine, she said. Is something the matter? The policeman stood up from his crouching position. He towered over her as she sat, stood too close. Her nose was level with the brass button on his pants. She stood up. I’m supposed to get everybody back to the airport. Storm coming. The flight is delayed for another hour. He jerked his head toward the airport. The men over there said you’d walked out thisaway and I came to get you. The policeman turned and started back toward the airport, so Krista followed. I’m sorry to trouble you, she said to his back. She hadn’t imagined somebody would come to get her—why would he do that? Had he been watching her? His shoulders were very broad. She liked how every policeman called every woman ma’am, even if the woman was clearly younger than he was. The policeman shook his head. No trouble. He didn’t turn to look at her. Krista wondered when the storm would come. The sky was still a strange, flat, orange-black.

• • • •

When Krista entered the room, the blonde woman and her husband looked away. Found the last one, the policeman announced to the airport attendant. Go ahead and take a seat, he told her. It seemed to her that the whole room watched as she walked to her seat, removed her luggage, and sat down. Some of them didn’t take their eyes from her even as the airport attendant began to speak. She looked at the floor. It looks like we’ll be keeping you for another hour, ladies and gentlemen, he said. The airport attendant looked around the room nervously, his hand resting on the top of his walkie-talkie. He wanted to leave, Krista could tell. He placed one foot behind him, ready to pivot him away. The flight is having minor technical difficulties, which should be resolved within the hour. He took a breath. But we got one request from the local authorities—you all must stay inside until the airplane lands. At the word authorities, the room’s temperature changed. The blonde’s husband sat up straight in his seat and began to protest, as did several other men. The children looked at their mothers. The mothers pulled their children close. What authorities, exactly? a few voices asked, stepping closer to the front counter. Krista watched the airport attendant’s face. He put his hand up and grimaced. I don’t have any information beyond what I have given you. Safe from what? What kind of danger, exactly, might we be in? A balding man in khaki pants stepped forward. He stood with two children —a boy and a girl of seemingly equal age, both thin and uncannily poised, their hair long and neat and pulled away from their faces. They looked just like him, tall and thin with large, bony elbows and hands. The attendant shook his head. Sir, I only know what I’ve been told. All I know is that you are not in any immediate danger, as long as you stay in the airport. Krista felt her stomach pang. She’d been outside. Was she in danger? Or was it only right now that the outdoors was dangerous? She turned and tried to see outside the windows, but she could only see the reflection of the group on the glass. Listen, another man said, we need to know—but the attendant’s walkie-talkie crackled and he held his hand up, pressing it against his face. He spoke into it, a series of yeses and nos. The attendant held up one finger to the crowd, indicating just a minute, and returned to the gated doors that separated the waiting room from the security check. When he left, people looked around, dazed. Some began to speak to each other, to people they would not otherwise speak to. Fear, Krista saw, made them trust each other with their own fear. They turned to each other and said plainly I am afraid. Not in those words, but in other words and in the angles of their bodies, in how much closer they leaned, how much more quickly they spoke. The skinny mother with many-pocketed pants called hey, hey in Krista’s direction, and she gradually realized that the woman was speaking to her. Did you see anything while you were outside? Krista felt the attention of the room turned to her. She shook her head. Nothing. I didn’t see anything. It was completely calm. The blonde’s husband snorted. Calm, he repeated. Krista looked at him, not sure what he meant. Did he think she was lying? Did you see any people out there? the woman asked, her eyes darting around Krista’s head. No, nobody but the policeman. Krista didn’t like the way they watched her. Their eyes narrowed as if they couldn’t quite get her into focus. • • • •

The police arrived thirty minutes later. She could see their squad cars’ headlights momentarily illuminate the otherwise black parking lot. They did not have their sirens on, but when they emerged from the squad cars, they were wearing masks. It was difficult to see exactly what kind of masks (she had only the light from their headlights to see by), but they seemed to be gas masks—a thick tube like an elephant tusk hung down from each policeman’s mouth and nose. One of the children said His mask is scary. He pointed, and they all looked out the window, some running up to press their hands and faces to the glass. The entire window was covered with people trying to see through it. Krista remained seated. She’d seen the masks and didn’t know how it would help to see more. She could also feel that she was bleeding and was afraid to stand up. Fuck this, said a young man, one of the people pressed against the glass. He was handsome in a slim, well-groomed way that made Krista nervous. Men like this didn’t notice her unless she was doing something for them—putting their call through at her office, for instance (her former office, she reminded herself), or reminding them to sign a form. They might reply thank you, while looking right through her. This man was dark-haired and wore a t-shirt of a solid, rich color—a brownish brick. He looked as if he’d stepped from an Eddie Bauer catalog. Krista’s mother got an Eddie Bauer catalog every month. She remembered admiring those outdoorsy people, thirtysomething, financially stable, wearing primary colors and sturdy shoes. They had formed her idea of what it meant to be a happy adult. I’m going to see what’s going on here, he told the room. People around him nodded, even the mothers, who Krista thought might be offended by the fact that he had just said fuck, but maybe they excused the language in an emergency situation. The man walked up to the glass accordion doors. Before, they had immediately opened when anyone stepped close to them. Now, they didn’t open. They must have cut the power to the doors. For the first time that night, she began to understand why everybody else was so frightened. It had taken her longer, she thought, because she only had herself to be afraid for. The Eddie Bauer man pounded lightly on the glass doors, which shook under his fists. They were not very solid. He could have broken them if he wanted to. Give us some fucking information! he screamed at the plastic seal in the middle of the door. Krista had an urge to laugh, but she turned it into a cough. She didn’t want to offend the man, who had done nothing to warrant unkindness. It must be chemicals. Some kind of chemicals outside, the blonde said. Then she repeated it, looking around the room for somebody to tell. It must be chemicals. We’ve been attacked with chemicals and we’re stuck here. Her husband nodded. Some of the men, older ones with children, went to look for the airport attendant and the policeman, who had all disappeared during the half hour before the police in gas masks had arrived. Did you smell any gas out there? The blonde turned to Krista. This is important. Did you smell anything? She wanted to help the woman. She tried to remember smells. The hedges smelled like pine. The bed of flowers around the industrial complex smelled like fresh manure and maple syrup. No, I didn’t smell anything unusual. Krista shifted in her seat and felt her stomach heave and salt at the back of her throat. She was going to be sick. But she couldn’t be sick here, not with then all looking at her, thinking she’d been poisoned. The blonde shook her head and turned from Krista, done with her. I don’t want to die in the goddamn place. I don’t want to die. Her husband gathered her in his arms and pulled her away from Krista. He shot her a look of mild anger, as if it were her fault that the woman was upset. Krista stood up, hoping to leave the room for a while, to go to the bathroom and rest her cheek against the cool stall door and be away from the constant noise, the questions. Mommy! A girl raced down the hallway, almost colliding with Krista as she ran. Mommy, the water hurt me! The little girl’s mouth was red with blood. It smeared her lips like lipstick. At first Krista thought it was lipstick, but it was wet on her hands, too, which she held out before her. What did you do, baby? What happened? This wasn’t the many- pocketed mother, but a more frantic mother, one who wore a jumper and a headband. She was as upset as the child. What hurt you, baby? Krista stood in the hallway watching, like everyone else, waiting to hear what was wrong. She stood perfectly still, afraid that moving would collide her with whatever had hurt the child. The child sniffled and hiccupped, but eventually, she managed to get something out. She had only taken a drink from the water fountain. It had cut her, and she had come back here to tell her mother about it. As the mother wiped the child’s mouth clean with a napkin from her purse, they heard a rustle from the front of the room—the security door opened and the attendant stepped out, his walkie-talkie crackling. Good, you’re all here, the airport attendant said, surveying the group. He did not seem to notice that they were gathered together strangely, turned toward the mother and child in the middle. You might have noticed the police presence, he said. They are here to secure the airport. He held up his hand when somebody spoke, the tone angry, though they were not able to get out a word. The plane is scheduled to leave in thirty minutes, it has just landed. We’ve put a plastic tunnel from the door to the plane so you don’t have to go outside when you board, just as a precaution—understand? He paused and looked at the bulky, digital face of his watch. The blonde jumped in, ignoring his still-raised hand. What’s going on? Have we been attacked? She held a paper towel to her eyes and dabbed beneath them where her eyeliner bled. The attendant shook his head. No ma’am, no evidence of that. The FBI determines that. You’ll know as soon as I know. The man nodded at them all, and, as the questions began, as the mother with the bloody- mouthed child tried to bring the child forward, a paper-towel held against the girl’s still lips, the man walked fast—almost jogged—back to the gated security area, slid through the smallest possible sliver of open door, and then locked the door behind him. The crowd was still for what seemed like a very long time to Krista, though she knew it was probably only a few seconds. Then, the Eddie Bauer man ran up the slight slope to the locked entrance and shook the gate like somebody in a prison movie or a primate behind old-fashioned zoo bars. We’ve got a kid bleeding in here. We want to speak to somebody in charge. His voice echoed in the empty security area and bounced back down to the crowd. The mother held her daughter and began to cry. The child was dry- eyed. Everyone was speaking but Krista. Unlike the others, she was uncoupled, without a child or a traveling companion. In Victorian novels, women always went with traveling companions, maiden aunts or cousins to keep them safe from the influence of crowds and sinister men. They also served another purpose, one which Krista had not thought of before —they were for company, somebody to be with, a buffer against loneliness beyond the everyday loneliness of being in one’s own head. She usually enjoyed her own company, but her aloneness oppressed her here. Even now, people did not usually travel alone, at least not the way she was, aimlessly and with nowhere to go, no one to care if she arrived or not. She imagined that the others sometimes looked at her sideways, never directly. Krista wasn’t sure if she was exaggerating their glances—her mother said that she tended to suspect dislike where it wasn’t present. You were always a fussy, fearful child, she’d said during her latest visit, after Krista had explained what had happened at her job, with her boss, how she had been shamed into leaving, how he had never called her again. I’m sure it would have blown over if you’d just waited. If you’d just been a little more goddamn calm about it. Being fearful makes people want to hurt you, her mother had said. When you shrink away, people want to give you a reason to shrink. Krista tried to breathe deeply to calm herself. She opened her bag and took out her book. She had read only one half-sentence (Wild animals added danger to the American wilderness and here, too, the element of the unknown intensified feelings) before she felt her stomach tighten. She had the urge to stretch out on the floor until the sickness passed, but she couldn’t. She put her book away and rose. As she stood up, the blonde, now sitting with her head between her hands, the empty pizza box occupying the seat next to her, turned to watch. Are you sick or something? The woman looked at Krista, though she kept her head in her hands. I’m okay, Krista said. Just had too much water. Her mother had always called her period her monthly friend, and Krista had been encouraged to adopt similar euphemisms for bodily functions. Going number two. Making water. Making wind. She couldn’t imagine answering the woman’s question truthfully. The woman pursed her lips and nodded, but turned to Krista again, her face still blank. Sure you didn’t pick up something from outside? You went farther out than any of us. As she said this, the woman weeping on her bleeding child’s blonde head looked up. Did you drink out of the water fountain? Did you get something from outside on the fountain? Krista shook her head, rising again. No, no. I have my own water. I swear, there’s nothing wrong with me. Nothing was wrong outside when I was out there. She looked at the two women, both staring at her, their mouths hardened, their teeth not showing. Excuse me, she told them, as if ducking away from a dinner party. I have to use the restroom.

• • • •

In the bathroom, Krista leaned her warm forehead against the bathroom stall, then thought better of it and pulled away. She didn’t know it was safe to touch. Maybe she was getting poison on everything she touched. The woman’s fear was convincing. In the stall, she knelt and rested her head in her hands. Her head ached dully. She couldn’t take one of the Tylenol she’d brought in her carry-on bags—she didn’t have any water left in her bottle. She knelt until the sickness passed. But she had to go back. She couldn’t hide. Before she left the bathroom, she caught a flash of light in the small window above her eye level. They were just outside, the men in masks. Krista wondered if she could see anything—maybe something she could tell the others about, gain their favor with—through the small, rectangular window in the bathroom. She turned over the bathroom’s metal trash can and climbed on it, holding the wall for balance, until she could see outside. The window looked out into the front lawn of the airport. She saw three figures in jumpsuits gliding their flashlights along the lawn. One seemed to be examining the grass. Another seemed to be looking at the edge of the building, where the foundation met the ground. Another was farther off, sweeping his light in the little stand of trees between the airport and the industrial complex. Their motions seemed cursory, almost mocking, as if they were only putting on a show of searching, and not even a very convincing one. Looking for someone you know? A man’s voice surprised her, and Krista turned on the trash can, almost falling. It was the blonde’s husband. He wasn’t wearing his baseball cap and his reddish, curly hair was flat and greasy against his head like a stack of smashed bread. You scared me, she said, not sure how to understand the man’s presence in the women’s room. Is something wrong with the men’s room? The man shook his head. I just came to make sure you were all right. You were taking so long. His voice was wrong; it didn’t match his words. He smiled at Krista and motioned for her to join him. Come on back out here. We’ve all got some questions. Krista nodded, though she didn’t understand what he was saying. Questions for her? When she entered the waiting room, she saw that her baggage had been opened. The Eddie Bauer man had her book in his hands. He wore rubber gloves (Krista wondered where he had gotten them—did he pack rubber gloves whenever he traveled?). What are you doing? The people around him looked up at her. They had all let him do this, she could see. They all approved. We found this, the blonde said, pointing at Krista’s seat. The red seat was stained black in a neat, tea saucer-sized circle. You’re bleeding. Why didn’t you tell us? They think I’m sick, she thought. It isn’t—she began, but the woman with the many pockets interrupted her. You haven’t spoken, and you’re traveling here alone, he said. You go outside right before the attack. You visit the restroom five or six times after. You don’t call anyone to let them know what happened. You don’t ask any questions, and you don’t seem to be fazed by what’s happening here. The woman held her hands up, palms to the sky. What are we supposed to think? Listening to the woman, Krista almost felt convinced of her own suspicious behavior. She was vaguely afraid that they would find her out. But there’s nothing to find, she soothed herself, there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m only alone. There’s nothing wrong with that. You can’t do this to me, she said instead, the words surprising her. How dare you do this to me? The words seemed familiar, like something she had seen on television, and they made her feel powerful. She wanted to hit the Eddie Bauer man and take back her book back. She wanted to make the blonde stop smiling or smirking or whatever she was doing with her mouth. What, do you think you are some kind of important person? That you’re better than the rest of us? This was from the blonde. She crossed her arms over her chest. Krista imagined that this was the way she stood when scolding her children. I am important, she told them, not sure what she was trying to say. Tell them about your monthly friend, she told herself and almost laughed out loud. I’m as important as— She stopped when the lights went out. A few of the children screamed and the mothers hissed words of comfort. Krista didn’t move. It seemed safer to stay where she was. No need to drag it out. No need to make things harder on everyone. Though it was dark, she could hear the rustle of someone moving toward her.

©2015 by Letitia Trent. Originally published in Exigencies: A Neo-Noir Anthology, edited by Richard Thomas. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR TK

The H Word: You Really Don’t Want to Do This Lisa Morton | 2298 words

Extreme Haunts and the Boundaries of Horror

Summertown, Tennessee, seems like a nice place to live. Located about an hour southwest of Nashville, it’s a town of less than 1,000 people. Rural two-lane blacktops wind past corn fields and wooded glens. New houses—each on its own acre of green land—can be had for under $250,000. The town has a Buddhist commune (Turtle Hill Sangha), and Wheelin in the Country, an off-road park. Summertown is, in other words, the kind of place that horror writers love to use in their works: a seemingly placid, typical small American town. Even the name is ironic in that context; what writer of dark fiction wouldn’t want to have some eldritch terror descend on a place that so richly contrasts with the nightmares visited upon it? But that’s just fiction . . . or it was, until July 7, 2017, when a real-life horror plopped right down in idyllic Summertown. The name of that horror is McKamey Manor. If you’re a fan of Halloween haunts, or if you’ve watched the Netflix docuseries Dark Tourist, you may already be familiar with McKamey Manor. The name suggests something quaint—maybe Phantom Manor, the Paris Disneyland’s version of the Haunted Mansion—but be forewarned that McKamey Manor is definitely not quaint. Currently offering up an experience called “Desolation,” McKamey Manor’s slogan (which they’ve plastered on t-shirts and tote bags) is, “You really don’t want to do this.” McKamey Manor is at the crest of the “extreme haunts” wave, which also includes The Victim Experience, Hvrting, Catharsis Horror, and The Asylum’s Hellth (sic) Clinic. Blackout, which started in 2006 and features full nudity and simulated (or are they?) sexual situations, claims to be the first of the extreme haunts, although it also refers to itself as “immersive theater” (the word “immersive” turns up a lot in the promo for extreme haunts). The simplest explanation as to what separates these venues from old-fashioned haunts is that the actors can touch you . . . and more than that, they can brutalize you, to the extent that guests leave some of these haunts with minor injuries and bruises. This level of realism surely begs the question: is this still within the purview of artful horror, which seeks to frighten and disturb but doesn’t typically involve actual physical contact? Are these extreme haunts an extension of the thrills sought by horror fans, or do they represent something else altogether? To answer these questions, we need to first look back at the history of haunted attractions, which have mirrored the overall history of the horror genre. Although Halloween haunts could be thought of as cousins of the dark ride—those clunky little cars or boats that take riders past rickety, macabre scenes—the real progenitors of the modern haunt can be found in children’s parties of the 1930s and ’40s . . . the same time, in other words, that readers were relishing the delicious, relatively innocent pulp fiction of Weird Tales and moviegoers eagerly sought out each new Universal monster. The first haunts were either found outdoors, where they were usually called “Trails of Terror,” or they resided in dark basements and might involve stunts like having kids thrust their hands into a bowl of peeled grapes that they’d been told were eyeballs (see Ray Bradbury’s classic 1948 story “The October Game”). By the ’70s, horror was on the bestseller lists, movies were becoming more gruesome, and non-profit organizations like the Jaycees found they could add to their coffers by staging walk-through Halloween attractions that were more elaborate and bloodier than mere “Trails of Terror.” By the end of the twentieth century, horror came to be identified with the violent set pieces of movies like Saw and Hostel, and the haunted attractions industry exploded in popularity, becoming a billion-dollar business. While over 3,000 professional haunts dotted the American map every October, new advances in manufacturing and technology also allowed home haunters to terrify trick-or-treaters right in their own front yards. Haunted attractions all operated on more or less the same premise: patrons made their way through a maze as “monsters” (haunt lingo for the actors) leapt out from carefully-hidden spots. There was an unspoken rule that the monsters could never touch the guests, although that probably had as much to do with legal liability as aesthetics. Still, the traditional haunt, which might run anywhere from ten to forty-five minutes, provided guests with a built-in safety net: they knew they wouldn’t actually be touched. It was only natural that haunts would evolve in the new millennium, as professional haunters sought new ways to stand apart from the competition. Some haunts explored bigger, more complex storylines; some employed Hollywood special effects technicians (who were losing movie work thanks to the advent of computer graphics); others expanded to operate beyond October. And some decided to do away with the no-touching rule. These haunts have gotten past issues of liability by making visitors sign a waiver before entering (McKamey Manor also makes guests undergo hours of pre-experience questioning); potential guests may also be vetted via interviews or questionnaires. In contrast to regular haunts, where groups are the norm, visitors to extreme haunts are frequently required to undergo the experience alone. Once the performance begins, the visitor may be blindfolded, gagged, restrained and shoved around in a simulated kidnapping; have various substances poured onto them or be submerged (if it’s not technically waterboarding, it’s a near cousin); interact with a variety of actors who may whip them, slap them, or cut their hair; be forced to observe unclad actors simulating sex or rape; have live insects, arachnids, and snakes placed on their skin; or be ordered to place an arm in a filthy toilet of vomit and feces. “For two hours, we own you and you will not have your cellphones,” said Darren Bousman, director of both several films in the Saw series and some extreme haunts. “We will push you the entire time to do things that you consider dangerous, and when you leave, there is that rush of adrenaline that you feel because you have done something that is not every day in your life.” That “rush of adrenaline” is often cited in reference to extreme haunts, as is a positive sense of accomplishment that some attendees say lasts long after the haunt. There’s even some empirical research to back this up: Margee Kerr is a sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh who has set up a lab at The Basement, the extreme part of the ScareHouse haunted attraction in Pittsburgh. By interviewing guests both before and after they experience The Basement, Kerr has shown that production of neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins are activated. In other words, experiencing an extreme haunt is a natural high. So, are you ready to rush out right now and book your extreme haunt travel package? Not so fast. Because there is another side to this, in case you hadn’t seen that coming. First, let’s look at the work of a colleague of Kerr’s, another academic who is building a career studying why we’re afraid of scary things: Mathias Clasen is an associate professor in literature and media at Denmark’s Aarhus University who has also done a great deal of study into the processes of fear. Clasen has written papers, a book (Why Horror Seduces, Oxford University Press, 2017), and even given an entertaining, witty TEDx talk on the subject (just search Clasen’s name on YouTube). For his 2018 paper “Horror, Personality, and Threat Simulation: A Survey on the Psychology of Scary Media,” Clasen surveyed over a thousand media consumers. More than half indicated that they enjoyed horror media (thus establishing that horror is most definitely not a niche market), three-quarters preferred moderately-to- highly frightening horror, but only 5.6% reported feeling less scared after viewing or reading horror. “This question was intended to test the catharsis effect hypothesis,” the report notes. “If the catharsis hypothesis had been correct, most respondents would presumably have reported being less scared after horror exposure, but we found the opposite result.” In other words, most of us don’t get a blissful high after finishing either a frightening book or an extreme haunt. So, how do we reconcile Clasen’s findings that people do not necessarily experience a rush of positive feelings after watching or reading horror with Kerr’s reports that a majority of attendees to extreme haunts report positive responses? I posed this question to Clasen, along with the central conundrum of extreme haunts: are these actually horror experiences, or do they cross the boundaries of genre and become something else entirely? Clasen pointed me to a recent study he and two colleagues published in which they surveyed those visiting a haunted attraction. They found that visitors split almost evenly into two categories, which they called “white-knucklers” and “adrenaline junkies”; the former are those who seek to minimize the horror, while the latter maximize. In our correspondence, Clasen theorized that “extreme haunts attract only or mainly adrenaline junkies.” There also seems to be some cross-over between those who enjoy extreme haunts and athletes who participate in high-risk sports. Michael Bardo, a psychologist who has analyzed the neurochemistry of sensation- seeking, believes that adrenaline junkies are actually getting high off dopamine, a pleasure-giving chemical that their brains may be genetically wired to produce more of. As Mathias Clasen told me, “Extreme haunts do push the boundaries of horror, but in doing so, they inch into a qualitatively different terrain—a terrain that offers not the safe play with fear that regular haunts do, but an experience more akin to base-jumping than to reading Pet Sematary.” None of this is to imply that extreme haunts are as risky as extreme sports; they can, in fact, even be surprisingly progressive. Margee Kerr isn’t just a sociologist studying haunts, she also designs them, but with specific ethical rules in mind. There is physical contact in Kerr’s haunts, involving actors who are partly unclothed, but she defends this choice against charges of sexual assault. “The closeness and lack of personal space in The Basement is a challenging social phobia,” Kerr noted in one interview. She is strictly opposed to sexual or domestic violence, degradation of women, using insults or shaming, and language that is racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic. The difference between extreme haunts and regular haunts, then, can perhaps be compared to the difference between the horror and thriller literary genres. Thriller readers want that pleasurable rush, while horror lovers desire to explore hard-wired fears—the ones our more hirsute ancestors felt, like the fear of being eaten, or of what waited on the other side of death. Horror readers don’t expect happy endings. Where does all this leave the extreme extreme haunts, then, the ones that—unlike Kerr’s The Basement—will leave visitors with genuine bruises and cuts? McKamey Manor extends past both regular and extreme haunts. Madelon Hoedt, a senior lecturer in drama at the U.K.’s University of Huddersfield who is preparing a monograph on horror in performance, calls Russ McKamey, the proprietor of the Manor, “absolutely an outlier, both within the scare industry, and among extreme scarers.” It seems wrong to call McKamey Manor a “haunt” at all. It eschews many of the standard devices of haunted attractions—it has no complex storyline, no Hollywood-level special effects, no scenes deliberately intended to provide a laugh between all the screams—in favor of torture and humiliation. When Dark Tourist’s David Farrier attempted McKamey Manor, he ended his experiencing by exclaiming, “There’s just nothing in it that’s a slightly good thing . . . I don’t understand people who come here.” Granted, Farrier never even made it into the Manor itself; he balked at being strapped into a straitjacket, blindfolded, and ordered to say, “I’m a little baby,” while his mouth was grotesquely stretched by a dental cheek retractor. McKamey Manor’s own website shows guests finishing their experiences sobbing, shaking, or barely mumbling past what looks like shock. No one seems to be riding a dopamine high. In literary terms, McKamey Manor is neither horror nor thriller; perhaps it can only be compared to unclassifiable avant garde prose. One element of horror—or at least of the genre’s best—that the psychologists and sociologists seem to leave out of their studies is this: when it’s working, horror gives us that peek behind the curtain into something cosmic. While it frightens us, it also inspires awe and wonder. It assures us that there’s more to life than our everyday mundane existence, even if what we glimpse is dark and terrible. The best haunts understand this, and function like the best horror stories, creating complete, detailed worlds that leave us open-mouthed in astonishment. It’s hard to do that when the haunt actors are busy shoving your head under water or pressing their naked flesh against you. Ironically, the best understanding of what happens when a haunt goes extreme may have been provided by an author who wrote a century before haunts were born. The great Ann Radcliffe, the finest purveyor of the Gothic novel, wrote in the 1826 piece “On the Supernatural in Poetry”: “Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.” While the word “horror” has come to mean something different in our time, Radcliffe surely would have agreed with McKamey Manor’s neighbors in sleepy Summertown, Tennessee, that something very wicked indeed had their way come.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of non-fiction books, and award-winning prose writer whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening”. She is the author of four novels and more than 130 short stories, a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award®, and a world-class Halloween expert who has been interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Real Simple Magazine, and The History Channel (for The Real Story of Halloween). She co-edited (with Ellen Datlow) the anthology Haunted Nights, which received a starred review in Publishers Weekly; other recent releases include Ghosts: A Haunted History and the collection The Samhanach and Other Halloween Treats. Lisa lives in the San Fernando Valley and online at lisamorton.com. Book Reviews: September 2019 Terence Taylor | 2297 words

Read This! Volume 10

Childhood is a time of both wonder and horror. We experience the most ecstatic of emotions in our youth, but the dark ones are deeper and more dangerous than they can ever be in adulthood. Even the everyday can be terrifying. Clothes flung over a chair become a lurking monster once the lights are out. The slightest stray sound can be imbued with deepest dread. We worry that an absent parent might never return, or that a barking dog could attack at any moment. Even random rainstorms can provoke terror with every flash and roll of thunder, as Steven Spielberg portrayed so brilliantly in Poltergeist, a moment utterly lost in the remake. Fear lives side by side with safety and security. Stories about childhood horrors always remind me of that time in my own life, back when my imagination was more powerful than facts, when I could scare myself silly over things adults around me dismissed. In horror films and literature, children always see lurking danger more clearly than grownups around them. There’s clarity in our youth that’s suppressed as we’re taught limits on life by our parents and teachers. Their rules and regulations rein in the impossible and tell us that the world works the way they say it does, not the way we say. Even when we’re right. Sometimes those fears don’t fade with youth. They dig deep, and shadow our days with dimly recalled dread that lurks beneath the surface, waiting for a chance to leap out and remind us we aren’t always in control of our feelings or our lives. Those are the experiences not easily forgotten or resolved, dragged behind us like a dead dog on a leash we can’t release.

Hellish Beasts Brian Carmody Paperback ISBN: 978-1684333356 Black Rose Writing, September 12, 2019, 294 pages

Hellish Beasts explores the impact childhood trauma has on us long after we enter adulthood. It says some scars don’t heal, whether of the mind or body. Trent and his friend Mike Kripke are buddied up on a sixth grade school field trip to Colonial Williamsburg, a “living museum.” Trent insists they go to a cabin where candles are made. Inside, the boys encounter a hulking maniac who plunges Mike’s hand into a cauldron of hot wax when he mocks the man’s mediocre candle- making skills. It is a moment to remember, and one that defines both their lives. While his best friend screams, Trent flees, as he tells himself that he’s going for help, but knows he’s driven by pure uncut terror. The guilt of abandoning Mike, even though he did return with aid, has haunted Trent all the way to Los Angeles, where at twenty-nine, he’s a midlevel scriptwriter working in television, pitching projects, making a decent living, but no real impact. While doing research at the library, Trent meets a man wearing one black glove. It’s obvious to the reader, if not immediately to him, that the man is his old friend Mike Kripke, burned hand kept covered. Their initial conversation consists of conceptual acrobatics as his companion plays with words and ideas in ways that confuse Trent, interrupted only when they hear an injured cat cry out in agony. They look for it in the stacks, only to find a desiccated corpse, long dead, swarming with bees. This is the beginning of a surreal series of increasingly eerie events that drag the reunited friends into an underworld of madmen and monsters ruled over by the enigmatic King of Wax. After a brief encounter with him at work, Trent’s new bartender girlfriend, Lilith, describes the King as a cross between an effete literary giant—Truman Capote—and a WWE wrestler, The Undertaker. It’s another of the oddly disturbing contradictions that surround him. In time, Trent and Mike discover the King’s connection to the mad chandler at Williamsburg who burned Mike’s hand when they were nine. That encounter turns out to have been the first domino to fall, and it triggered a seemingly random series of events that put them on the King’s trail far earlier than they realized. Their search takes them through a murky Hollywood underground where nothing is what it seems, from a posh private club for psychiatrists to an ill-fated winery in the country, until they find who and what they’ve been looking for—much to their regret. I spent the nineties writing animation in L.A., and met a lot of Trents in that decade, at Starbucks while they worked on screenplays at laptops, or on studio back lots as they searched for a staff job to put down roots, a way to stay. They were part of why I ran back to New York after 9/11 . . . A city recovering from the worst terrorist attack in our nation’s history was preferable to staying in Hollywood yet another year and turning into one of them. The Trents survive, but they don’t thrive. They’re minor gears that keep the Hollywood machine moving between blockbusters, essential to its operation, but easily and cheaply replaced. Low budget television shows, original web series, minor movies, commercials, all the places writers and directors rise from if they’re lucky enough to come up with the right project or make the right contact. They serve a purpose, and if they do their job well enough they get stuck in it, a reliable element that serves the system well where it is, even if the job burns them out. In Hollywood, there are always new parts for the machine. Carmody does a great job of taking us into his hapless hero’s head, either because he is a Trent after years of pitching scripts in L.A. and making indie horror films, or because he’s met enough of them in his time there to create a character that rings true. Like Quentin Tarantino and his auteur obsessed ilk, Trent fills his running monologue with movie and TV trivia, cites scenes from movies both real and perversely imaginary, like one where Madonna plays a succubus that I’d hoped was real. Replaceable part or not, Trent’s likable enough for us to listen to his tale of terror and woe, without giving him more sympathy than he’s due. Told in first person past tense, there’s a presumption of his survival, which sadly protects none of those surrounding him, from the bartender he just met, Lilith, a tattooed Cuban-American Trump-supporter who served up the green drink garnished with an eyeball that dragged him into his mystery, to his old friend Mike Kripke, or the cute, perky, but weirdly disturbing blonde girl who comes on to Trent in the worst possible ways at the worst possible times. Carmody has captured a deer in the headlights vision of Hollywood’s sinister underbelly. Trent’s eyes are opened by events he can’t explain. He suddenly sees a predatory force beneath the glitzy glamour that fuels and then frustrates dreams until they slide into nightmares it can feed on. It’s the world of Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust and Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard; beautiful, but broken, tiny, almost imperceptible cracks in the painted porcelain the only hint that all’s not perfect in paradise. A writer in Los Angeles once described Hollywood to me as the only place you can die of hope. I saw it time and again in writers and directors past any possibility of success, due to age or obscurity. Watched them cling to a dead dream and stay on past their welcome, fade a little more each day into phantoms, sure tomorrow would bring a life changing deal, if only an option to keep them alive until the big score. Trent’s Los Angeles is a haunted city filled with hellish beasts of all sorts, human and inhuman, natural and supernatural, but still very much like the one I felt I was trying to escape. His book, both satirical and scary, is very much the kind I would write about the town, a large part of my enjoyment while reading. By the end, all is horrifically revealed in blood and fire, but much like life, not everything is resolved, which promises the possibility of a return of the King of Wax and his literally mad minions. As daunting as that might be in real life, as a reader it would not be unwelcome.

Tinfoil Butterfly: A Novel Rachel Eve Moulton Paperback / Ebook ISBN: 978-0374538309 Publisher: MCD x FSG Originals, September 10, 2019, 272 pages I couldn’t help but picture a ragged Billie Eilish in the role of eighteen-year-old Emma as I read the opening chapter of Tinfoil Butterfly. The book has the same darkly engaging atonal poetry her songs have for me; lyrical, but drifting off center from where you expect them to go. That sense of startling spontaneity may fade after a national tour and the release of a graffiti clothing line, but if she’s looking for a debut movie role, she couldn’t find a better character fit. Told in the first person like Hellish Beasts, this tale is also in present tense, which makes its unfolding events that much more immediate and unpredictable. We meet Moulton’s heroine as she’s hitchhiking to The Badlands, on a mysterious mission she shared with her suicidal stepbrother, Ray. She’s found a ride with Lowell, a shaggy young hunk in a beat up Volkswagen van that she christens Veronica and vows to rescue. He’s either on his way to a happy reunion with his ex-wife and child before he goes to join a carnival as a contortionist, or plans to kill her and abduct their offspring. It’s the sort of casual ambiguity in motives the author plays with throughout the book, with all her characters. Even as Emma lies about her identity and real reason for getting to The Badlands, everyone around her is equally cagey about who they are and what they want. He handcuffs her after she falls asleep, and lets her loose only when she wakes and seduces him into freeing her for sex. When she realizes that they’re driving through the Black Hills, already past The Badlands, and that Lowell has no intention of letting her out where she wants to go, or at all, there’s a confrontation. He’s seen her in the news and knows police want to question her about her stepbrother Ray’s death, and makes the mistake of thinking that gives him an advantage. The fight ends when she shoots him in the leg with his own gun after he attacks her with a knife. She leaves him wounded on the road and drives off in Veronica. On the run again and almost out of gas, she rolls into the parking lot of Earlene’s Diner. It looks abandoned, except for big black crows everywhere in the trees around it. Soon she finds Earl, an eight-year-old boy in a tinfoil butterfly mask he made to cover his burned face and things go severely south. The deep hole Emma had dug herself into suddenly gets deeper and darker. She’s forced to unearth Earl’s secrets before he’ll tell her where to find gas, including those of his dead mother and missing father. As a threatened blizzard rumbles closer, she slowly unravels the mystery of a nearby ghost town, and how Earl’s family thought they’d turn it into a lucrative tourist attraction, and how that became yet another failed American dream. On the way, Moulton shows us that dreams don’t just die, they take their dreamers down with them, and Emma’s still being chased by the ruined remains of her own. While she peels away the layers to reveal Earl’s past, she recalls and re-evaluates her own . . . A forbidden love between her and her stepbrother, the circumstances of his death and nearly her own, the pact they made that she’s trying to fulfill, even as Emma realizes it’s all pointless. Like Earl, she’s trapped in the tangles of someone else’s dead dream, lost in what’s now a shared nightmare. Moulton’s Emma reminds us that the protagonists of tragedies aren’t necessarily tragic figures. More often they rage on, resist the path they must inevitably follow, as they slowly realize how complicit they are with it at every step. There’s a growing claustrophobia in both these novels that can only be found in vast desolate spaces or crowded anonymous cities, where the feeling of being trapped, constricted, is your head and heart closing in on you, not walls. Emma and Trent seek as much salvation as they can find in worlds that offer precious little. In their struggles to survive, they find new truths and new purpose in lives they see with fresh clarity, no matter how grim, with sufficient vision to move forward, no matter how difficult their next steps. In that regard, they take a journey that would do us all good.

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

Author Spotlight: Ray Nayler Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali | 1996 words

What was the inspiration behind this story?

First of all, thank you for this opportunity to talk a bit about my work with you and with Nightmare’s readers: I truly appreciate it, and am grateful to you for your time. The inspiration for this story: In the winter of 2006, I was living in Almaty, Kazakhstan, working for a company that specialized in educational exchange programs in the former Soviet Union. They had recently expanded their operations into Afghanistan, and they asked me to go down and help out there for the winter with recruiting participants for their programs. I jumped at the chance: I grew up in Fremont, California, which has a large community of refugees from Afghanistan. Our neighbors when I was very young were from there, and we were quite close for a time. I also had students who were refugees from Afghanistan when I was a Peace Corps volunteer teaching in Turkmenistan. I knew the culture and history well, and had always wanted to go. So I got on a plane in Almaty, and I went. I got stuck in Baku, Azerbaijan for three days along the way, and then we flew into Kabul in an old Soviet plane, in a fog with the airport control tower out, but that journey is another story. That year was a transitional year in Afghanistan. The initial American war had ended, but the Taliban had just begun to use suicide bombing as a technique, and the insurgency was about to begin in full force. There was a winter lull in the fighting, due to the mountain passes being closed by snow. Our little, underfunded operation had no real security, and nobody to tell us what we could and could not do. I lived above our office, with a deadly little propane heater in my room for warmth, and a double-barreled shotgun propped in the corner of the room, issued to me by the company’s country director as a “weapon of last resort.” There were three of us Americans working in the office, and half a dozen local staff. We did whatever we wanted to: We walked the streets of Kabul at night to get pizza, and we drove to Bamyan and to Jalalabad on recruiting trips to interview high school students with our Pashtun driver and our Tajik recruiting assistant in an old Soviet Lada. We wandered around the shattered buildings of the former Soviet Embassy, ate at local kebab houses, went shopping in local bazaars. We were too young and naïve to be worried about our safety. The bazaars were full of the history of Afghan resistance to colonial occupation: British Enfield rifles likely dropped by the retreating army in 1842 (which only one military man survived), as well as Soviet equipment, black and white photographs, U.S. Army surplus, discarded pocket and wrist watches—a strange assortment of detritus left behind by layer after layer of occupying forces. I even found a copy of Where the Wild Things Are among the debris. And of course, I had so many conversations with the people of Afghanistan. I was there to recruit for exchange programs, so my main job was talking to people. I was able to meet dozens, maybe hundreds, of students and teachers and aid workers and other people. Along the way I even met Rory Stewart, author of The Places in Between, and had a conversation with the Bookseller of Kabul, Shah Muhammad Rais. The mark that trip left on me was indelible, but I didn’t write much about it, except for a few poems, and short travel pieces. A few years later, in 2008 and 2009, I was living in Tajikistan, and had a chance to travel (also for recruiting) to the Pamir Plateau and the Wakhan Corridor. There I met Kyrgyz shepherds still living as nomads, and Badakhshanis from both sides of the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border. I also visited, on that trip and others, dozens of animist altars scattered across the Pamir Plateau and the Wakhan. I think it’s around that time that I started to get the germ of the idea for “Beyond the High Altar.” I was also inspired by Newby’s a Short Walk in the Hindu Kush—a book I recommend to anyone who will listen. When I start thinking about it, really, there were so many threads—too many to list here. That is one of the joys of being a writer: you weave your stories from your life experience and what you read, and the stories others tell you. The warp and weft of a story can mesh slowly in the mind over years or emerge almost spontaneously. In this case, it was a slow process.

What made you decide to write this in epistolary format? Was this the first form you decided to go with for this story?

It was. I really wanted to write a story in the Victorian British ghost/adventure story style. In those days, they loved framing devices— found manuscripts, sheaves of letters. I chose this framing device (my finding the letters at the Bagram Air Base bazaar) because it allowed me to link the story to the present day. The epistolary style gave me a chance to give the narrator and protagonist, M, full narrative control and a strong voice. Since “Beyond the High Altar” is, on one of its levels, a story about nineteenth century gender roles and M’s increasing awareness of how they function and resistance to them, I wanted her to be able to tell her own story. I began to feel, as I wrote, that she was very much a real person, someone I had a responsibility to. I wanted to make my readers feel her presence, and hear the story in her voice. The letters allowed me to do that.

So, I checked out your website, and you’re quite an accomplished author. What really impressed me though, is your work as a Foreign Service Officer and the many languages you speak, including Russian and Albanian. You sort of sound like a spy. Tell us about your work and how it informs your writing.

So—you’re not the first person to say I seem like a spy: I think there are some people in my family, even, who are absolutely sure I’m not who I say I am. Nothing will convince them otherwise. Especially since, if I was a spy, I certainly wouldn’t admit it. I guess that’s the Catch-22. The truth is, though, I would never want to be a spy. My real job is much more fulfilling. I’m a Public Affairs Officer for the Foreign Service. Instead of sneaking around, I get to go out and talk to people from all walks of life. I get to help build bridges between our country and theirs. I get to do amazing stuff like organizing a hip-hop group’s tour of Kyrgyzstan, bringing together U.S. and Kyrgyz folk singers to play and compose music together, or working with U.S. scientists to teach kids in Vietnam how to document endangered species on their native islands. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg: I love my work. And learning the language of the country I am going to work in is key: language is culture. It is the viewpoint from which we see the world. I’m very grateful for the opportunity I’ve been given to learn so many languages by my Peace Corps experience, by my work in international assistance, and by the Foreign Service. This absolutely informs my writing. Since 2003, I have only lived in the United States for three years. The rest of the time, I’ve been in Turkmenistan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Azerbaijan—and now Kosovo. Living outside the U.S., in so many different places, has given me a very different view of U.S. culture, and of human culture in general. I think all that experience shows up on the page, somewhere—even if it isn’t explicit. Living overseas and speaking another language, trying to navigate a new culture, makes you humble. You make constant mistakes, you embarrass yourself, you can’t communicate your ideas clearly at times. You aren’t the accomplished person you thought you were in your own country; you are a child. You learn to speak less. You learn to listen more carefully. From this experience, I also learned a greater respect for all the people here in the U.S. who are dealing with living in another language and culture—and for exiles, immigrants, stateless persons and wanderers everywhere. And I learned that the way I grew up framing and understanding the world is arbitrary: there are many ways to live on this planet. And there is value to be found in all of them. As for being an accomplished author—that’s kind of you to say, but I don’t really feel that way. I feel like I’m still waiting for a breakthrough. I’ve been lucky to have some consistent, small successes. I’ve always written, ever since I was a little kid, in many genres. I’ve managed to publish steadily, for the most part. But I feel like real success is something that lies in the future for me, if it is going to happen at all. What’s most important to me is the act of writing itself—sorting the material of the world, and building something new from it. Communicating with people. That’s the core of it.

Do you do anything special to set the mood for the stories you’re writing? Playlists? Video gaming? Reading or watching something that inspires and gets the juices going?

Reading sparks ideas for me: I read a good deal of science writing, especially in the fields of semiotics, neuroscience and the study of consciousness. My undergraduate work was largely centered on semiotics. Specifically, recently, biosemiotics has been of huge interest to me. I also read a lot of history—mostly of the regions where I work. And their folk tales, which are another key to understanding people better. Music is an enormous influence as well. It always has been: I was a musician in rock, punk, and rockabilly bands when I was younger (I played bass guitar and upright bass, and sang). My parents had a very ecumenical record collection, so I grew up listening to a wide variety of music. That’s a habit that has followed me my whole life. I listen to a ton of different things, depending on my mood: from heavier stuff like Sleep and Om and Pelican to ambient electronica and jazz. Lately, I’ve been kind of obsessed with Turkish Psychedelic Folk Rock from the ’60s and ’70s. Here’s a great place to start if you would like to hear some of that, by the way: (bit.ly/2LFY93T). It’s mind-blowing.

Do you have any special projects coming up?

I do. Tons of projects. But I never talk about upcoming plans. I guess I’m superstitious—afraid of the Evil Eye. However, there is something I would like to share: “Beyond the High Altar” has a prequel. That story, “Do Not Forget Me,” was published in Asimov’s in March of 2016. You can read it on my website (bit.ly/2ygDKcQ). I strongly recommend you read it only after reading “Beyond the High Altar,” as it is full of spoilers. But if you read it afterwards, I think you will find it rewarding. The two stories are pieces of one puzzle. Thank you again, Khaalidah, for this opportunity, and for the great questions. I hope Nightmare’s readers enjoy the story.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali is a writer, editor and narrator. Her publications include Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, Fiyah Magazine and others. Her fiction has been featured in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 12 edited by Jonathan Strahan and The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Three edited by Neil Clarke. Khaalidah is a proud World Fantasy Award nominee for her work at PodCastle.org, where she was co-editor from 2017-2019. You can hear her narrations at any of the four Escape Artists podcasts, Far Fetched Fables, and Strange Horizons. Of her alter ego, K from the planet Vega, it is rumored that she owns a time machine and knows the secret to immortality. She can be found online at khaalidah.com. Author Spotlight: Merc Fenn Wolfmoor Setsu Uzumé | 1003 words

What have you been up to? How did this tale come to be?

This story is based on a nightmare I had a while back; one of those weirdly creepy dreams where the imagery was so distinct (including the Girl, the weird Vore sessions, and the ending lines) that when I woke up, after my pulse slowed a bit, I was like, “Damn, I need to write this down.” I jotted the bulk of the draft into a notes app on my phone while on the bus to work, and then worked on fleshing it out and making it connect in creepypasta logic. I love strange, dream related horror stories —I entirely dig all the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, for example, even if Jason from F13 is my slasher boy fav—and I also love how virtual reality can be mined for potential horror. I’ve always had a wide range of bizarre pattern dreams and nightmares (another dream that turned into a story is “Thread” (bit.ly/2Ltb6xU) and I dig them. (It is entirely my goal to eventually defeat all my nightmare nemeses. I’m close to beating the current one, the “Demon Cat” [bit.ly/2O4qYJf]. BRING IT ON, SUBCONSCIOUS.) VR has that undeniable essence of dreamscapes or lucid dreaming: the mind thinks it’s real, and in the moment, you don’t know any other reality.

There were interesting moments around consent throughout the story. For example, either partner refusing during a session then cannot partner with that person in future games. The Girl requires consent to participate, but won’t leave if the answer is no. In a genre where subversion and transgression thrive, how do you choose which kind of suffering is allowable?

I’ve always had a fascination with the fictional rules of possession: what laws govern this? What are the loopholes? Why is there so much vomit? There is usually (if a victim) no consent for the entity to possess a host, which is part of the horror. More broadly, I’m fascinated by the rules that constrain the monsters or people in horror. So like, choosing to watch a video you have been warned is haunted suggests consent. Forcing someone to watch that same video so they will be cursed entails no consent, and is violence. So where are the lines drawn for accidental glimpses of this haunted thing? For being exposed to it by malicious intent? For curiosity or scientific experimentation? I love this stuff. I wanted to keep the horror and suffering free of violence that requires the victim to meet a criteria such as gender, morality, religion, etc. So it really doesn’t matter who you are: if you play Vore, you meet the Girl and . . . welp. There is that initial element of choosing to play, which then gets entirely twisted, because the consequences are not made explicit to the participants at the onset. You can’t force someone to play Vore, though.

Are there other stories or films based on creepypasta that are close to your heart? What do you think makes or breaks an idea based on a meme?

What’s so awesome about this age of internets is all the delightful creepypasta you can find. Some of my favorites are the sleep experiment ones, anything with haunted or random staircases/doors where they don’t belong, and video game related horror (which can include VR). I enjoyed the Channel Zero (bit.ly/2Soej0T) adaptations of creepypasta mythos (I really liked “No-End House,” in particular). I absolutely love anything with haunted films/movies: frex, Sinister (2012) impressed hard on my brain; also Shutter (2008), which is amazing; The Ring delights me; and many found-footage films like REC and REC2, The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, Unfriended, Creep, Afflicted, Night Shot, The Bay, etc. Stories like Gemma Files & Stephen J. Barringer’s “each thing i show you is a piece of my death” (Apex, bit.ly/2TcBPhH) or Michael Wehunt’s The Pine Arch Collection” (The Dark, bit.ly/2Lutx4Y), and Gemma Files’ novel Experimental Film. (As of this interview, I’ve started playing Layers of Fear 2, which has the premise of a movie set aboard a cruise ship, and it’s wonderful. While I’m hopelessly bad at playing it, I’ve also enjoyed watching Outlast—which is definitely in the camp of horrifying found footage.) As to what makes or breaks an idea, I honestly don’t know—some of the best ones, I think, tend to have underpinnings of fundamental human needs turned into fears: shelter (haunted houses/creepy nature), food (eat or be eaten), community (cults, mobs), sleep (dreams and imagination). When you take a thing humans are conditioned to accept as necessary and normal and then twist it somehow, it messes with us. I remember reading somewhere about why clowns are scary: the face paint is a distorted idea of human futures, and the brain is like OH HELL NO. Clearly, there are things brains are right about.

What are you working on now? What can we look forward to next?

Still working on the space opera novel, two different novellas, and short stories—all in various stages of completion! The first half of the year was a bit of a horror show in terms of work and health, but I’m optimistic. I keep plugging away. If all goes well, I will have a couple stories in anthologies out in 2020. Fingers crossed! (Your own, ideally.)

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

Coming Attractions The Editors | 95 words

Coming up in October, in Nightmare . . . We have original fiction from Carlie St. George (“Some Kind of Blood-Soaked Future”) and Rich Larson (“Growing and Growing”), along with reprints by Nathan Ballingrud (“The Maw”) and Gemma Files (“Grave Goods”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, and a book review from Adam-Troy Castro. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Nightmare. Thanks for reading! Stay Connected The Editors

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

Magazine Website www.nightmare-magazine.com

Destroy Projects Website www.destroysf.com

Newsletter www.nightmare-magazine.com/newsletter

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

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

Twitter www.twitter.com/nightmaremag

Facebook www.facebook.com/NightmareMagazine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the Nightmare Team The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief John Joseph Adams

Managing/Senior Editor Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Editor Arley Sorg

Podcast Producer Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor Jim Freund

Podcast Host Jack Kincaid

Art Director Christie Yant

Assistant Editors Lisa Nohealani Morton Sandra Odell

Editorial Assistant Alex Puncekar

Reviewers Adam-Troy Castro Terence Taylor

Copy Editor Melissa V. Hofelich

Proofreader Devin Marcus

Webmaster Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects Christie Yant

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

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

ANTHOLOGIES

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

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

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

Armored

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

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

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

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

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (with Carmen Maria Machado) [Forthcoming Oct. 2019]

Brave New Worlds By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers

Dead Man’s Hand

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

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

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

Epic: Legends of Fantasy

Federations

The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

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

Lightspeed: Year One

The Living Dead

The Living Dead 2

Loosed Upon the World

The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination

Operation Arcana Other Worlds Than These

Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen)

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

Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Seeds of Change

Under the Moons of Mars

Wastelands

Wastelands 2

Wastelands: The New Apocalypse

The Way of the Wizard

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

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn

Sand by Hugh Howey

Retrograde by Peter Cawdron Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty

The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn

The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette

In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

Gather the Fortunes by Bryan L. Camp

Reentry by Peter Cawdron

Half Way Home by Hugh Howey [forthcoming]

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear [forthcoming]

Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer [forthcoming]

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

The Conductors by Nicole Glover [forthcoming] The Chosen One by Veronica Roth [forthcoming]

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