Nightmare Magazine Issue 11, August 2013

Table of Contents

Editorial, August 2013 How Far to Englishman’s Bay—Matthew Cheney Nightcrawlers—Robert McCammon All My Princes Are Gone—Jennifer Giesbrecht Lost Souls—Clive Barker The H Word: “Nightmare Horror”—Richard Gavin Artist Gallery: Lena Yuk Artist Spotlight: Lena Yuk Interview: Joe Hill (Part 2) Author Spotlight: Matthew Cheney Author Spotlight: Robert McCammon Author Spotlight: Jennifer Giesbrecht Author Spotlight: Clive Barker Coming Attractions

2 Editorial, August 2013 John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue eleven of Nightmare! If you’re a fan of horror movies as well as horror fiction, you might want to check out your humble editor’s podcast, The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy. We did a couple of recent episodes that may be of interest to horror aficionados; the first was Episode 85, which featured our interview with Joe Hill (a two-part transcript of which you can find in this month’s and last month’s issues of Nightmare) along with an in-depth discussion of recent horror movies. Then, in Episode 89, we interview Lauren Beukes, whose new novel is about a time-traveling serial killer, and we follow up that chat with a panel discussion on “psycho killers” in fiction and film. You can learn more about the podcast, and find those episodes, at geeksguideshow.com.

And now onto this month’s issue . . . For our August offerings, we have original fiction from Matthew Cheney (“How Far to Englishman’s Bay”) and Jennifer Giesbrecht (“All My Princes Are Gone”), along with reprints by living legends Robert McCammon (“Nightcrawlers”) and Clive Barker (“Lost Souls”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with all of our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and part two of our two-part feature interview with bestselling author Joe Hill. (Part one can be found in our July issue and on our website). That’s about all I have for you this month, but before I step out of your way and let you get to the fiction, here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Nightmare:

Website: www.nightmare-magazine.com Newsletter: www.nightmare-magazine.com/newsletter RSS feed: www.nightmare-magazine.com/rss-2 Podcast feed: www.nightmare-magazine.com/itunes-rss Twitter: @nightmaremag Facebook: www.facebook.com/NightmareMagazine Subscribe: www.nightmare-magazine.com/subscribe

Before I go, just a reminder: Our custom-built Nightmare ebookstore is now up and running. So if you’d like to purchase an ebook issue, or if you’d like to subscribe, please visit nightmare- magazine.com/store. All purchases from the Nightmare store are provided in both epub and mobi format. And don’t worry—all of our other purchasing options are still available, of course; this is just one more way you can buy the magazine or subscribe. You can, for instance, still subscribe via our friends at Weightless Books. Visit nightmare-magazine.com/subscribe to learn more about all of our current and future subscription options. Thanks for reading!

3 John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Nightmare (and its sister magazine, Lightspeed), is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Oz Reimagined, Epic: Legends of Fantasy, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. He is a six-time finalist for the Hugo Award and a four-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. He is also the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

4 How Far to Englishman’s Bay Matthew Cheney

Max had made the decision that April morning to close up the bookshop and go away for once and for all, but he hadn’t told anyone yet, and he needed somebody to take the cat, so it was a good thing Jeffrey showed up an hour before closing. “I think Carmilla wants to go home with you,” Max said, watching Jeffrey roam, as always, through the military books. Jeffrey didn’t reply. He took a tattered Shooter’s Bible off the top shelf and held it up. “Do you really think this is worth ten bucks?” “Yes,” Max said. “But you can have it for free. And the cat.” “The cat?” “Carmilla.” “For free?” “Book and cat. Hell, take anything else you want, too.” “Are you feeling okay?” “Just fine.” “I hate cats.” “It would do you good to have something to care for, something to be responsible for. And she needs a home.” “But she lives here.” “Well . . . ” Max sighed. If he had to tell somebody, it might as well be crazy old Jeffrey. They’d known each other since high school—thirty-five years now. Off and on, of course, as their lives took them in different directions, until they both ended up back here in the center of New Hampshire, the middle of nowhere, back where it all began. In school, Jeffrey had been an avowed socialist, class valedictorian, and a pretty good football player, but a knee injury his first year at Duke had ended everything. He left school and wandered through the Midwest for a while, doing occasional work so he’d have enough money for pot, and then somehow or other he ended up back in New Hampshire, landing a job at a machine shop in Rochester, a job he still had. He’d stopped smoking pot a long time ago, and for twenty years now he’d spent every spare cent he had on guns, ammunition, knives, and body armor. Once Max opened the bookstore, he kept his eyes out for books Jeffrey might like, just to make sure he’d come by now and then, just to make sure he’d have someone to talk to. “I’m going away,” Max said. “A vacation?” Jeffrey strolled an index finger across some bindings. “No. Permanent.” Now Jeffrey was listening. Max said, “I need somebody to take the cat. I can’t take her with me.” “What do you mean permanent?” “Today’s my birthday,” Max said. “Happy birthday. But—” “I’m fifty years old.” “No.” “I am.”

5 “No, I mean, you can’t. Happy fucking birthday, buddy, but you’re not going to do it.” “I am,” Max said. “I don’t honestly feel like I have any choice. It’s hard to explain. I feel awful leaving you behind, though. I do.” “No.” “Please take the cat.” Jeffrey threw the Shooter’s Bible to the ground and ran out the front door.

Max’s apartment sat above the bookstore, a rambling series of small rooms that had been built sometime around the end of the nineteenth century. He’d bought the whole building with the inheritance he got after his parents died on Christmas Eve twenty-two years ago, when a drunk drove a pickup truck straight into their little Volkswagen Golf on their way home from church. “They’re in a better place now,” the priest told Max at the funeral. Max somehow resisted the overwhelming urge to punch the sanctimonious ass in the face. He clenched his fists, but didn’t raise them; instead, he replied, “They’re not anywhere. They’re dead,” then turned and walked into the cold night and never set foot in a church again. When he first bought the building, he’d been excited to work on it, to repair the fixtures and paint the walls and design the bookstore, which he named The Dusty Cover because he thought any used bookstore worth visiting ought not to set people’s expectations of cleanliness too high. He took great care with the few rare and valuable books that came through, but they didn’t interest him as much as the ordinary volumes did, the stray paperbacks and battered Book Club Edition hardcovers—the books that had truly been used. Loved, even. Within a few years, the store and his apartment both had a sagging, lived-in feel to them, and he had never quite finished painting or retrofitting very much of it. Now the ceilings were cracked and in some places crumbling; the walls looked like a coffee stain; the floors were scratched and soiled; and the air itself seemed to hail from another era. It was all he could have hoped for: a temple of entropy, a bell jar, a tomb. The fluorescent light in the kitchen ceiling had long ago lost its globe. When he turned it on, the light buzzed and flickered. Max opened the refrigerator: a bottle of ketchup, a jar of Dijon mustard, two different bottles of salad dressing, a few slices of turkey, a gallon of milk, a lemon. He closed the fridge door and opened a cupboard: a box of Ritz crackers, a bag of chocolate chip cookies, a granola bar. He put them all on the counter, found a plastic bag from a stash under the sink, and packed the crackers, cookies, and granola bar into the bag. A few cans of Coke sat on top of the refrigerator, and he grabbed those, too. He liked Coke warm. It hurt his teeth less. Much as he wanted to leave right away, he hated driving at night, so it would be best to wait till morning. In the square little living room, he turned on the TV and sat on the couch. The cushions were thin and desperately needed to be reupholstered, or—better yet—sent to the dump. The couch had been in the house he grew up in. It was one of the few things he’d salvaged from there. It had been a good, solid piece of furniture. He’d gotten a cover for it at Wal-Mart a couple years ago because he finally couldn’t stand to look at its pattern of brown and yellow lines. It was better with the drab gray cover. On the TV, the President was giving a speech. Max turned it off. From the battered coffee table, he picked up an issue of The New Yorker. His subscription had run out months ago, but he was so far behind in reading them that it didn’t matter. The phone rang. He walked to the kitchen and looked at the caller ID. He answered: “Hello, Jeffrey.” “You can’t go. I won’t let you.”

6 “You’ll be fine,” Max said. “I’ll leave the front door of the shop open. Do whatever you want with the place. There’s a little bit of money in the cash register. And please look after the cat. I really can’t take her with me.” “This is the stupidest fucking thing you’ve ever done.” “That may be true. But I’m still going.” “Bring me with you.” “I can’t do that.” “What’ve I got here?” “You’ve got your job. You’ve got . . . your guns. What about all the things you’ve wanted to do?” “But I don’t. I don’t want anything. I just want it all to stay the same.” “No, I don’t believe that.” Max hesitated, but then said what he’d long been thinking: “You want somebody to break into your apartment and you want to shoot them. This is what you dream about, isn’t it? Or maybe that’s not what you dream about—” “It’s not—you fuck—I don’t dream about—” “Maybe what you dream about is being somewhere in public and somebody, some criminal, starts threatening people, and you whip out that pistol you always have on your belt, and you blow them away and save everybody’s life. That’s what you dream about, don’t you? Being big and strong, saving the day? The hero of violence and power?” “Fuck you.” “No shame in it,” Max said. “We all want to be a hero. Somehow.” “Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you!” “Good night, Jeffrey.” Max hung up. He picked up The New Yorker, but none of the words made any sense, so he tossed it back on the coffee table. He stared at the TV and thought about turning it on. No point in that. He got up and opened the door to a walk-in closet where he kept boxes of LPs. He flipped through a bunch he didn’t care much about, albums that had seemed interesting when he was young but which he hadn’t listened to for ages and would never listen to again. (Had he really once spent money on an Air Supply record?) A few guitar chords had been haunting him all day, and he’d only just remembered what they were from. There it was—one of the first albums he ever bought: Pink Floyd’s Animals. He hadn’t listened to it for a long time, but he’d played it so many times in the last years of high school and beginning of college that it was permanently seared in his memory. He’d bought it because he liked the cover, the picture of a pig floating between smokestacks. When he first listened to it, he didn’t know what to make of it. The sounds were like nothing he’d heard before, and his ears didn’t know how to shape sense from them, but he knew there was something there, and as he kept listening it drew him back and back until certain strains wrapped around the world, and late at night, alone in his room, headphones on, he would fall asleep thinking he was somewhere, anywhere other than in his bed in his parents’ house in the middle of nowhere. He put the record on the turntable, then lay down on the couch. He closed his eyes. The cat startled him when she jumped up on his chest. He hadn’t heard her come upstairs. He should probably feed her. Later.

Carmilla’s whining yowls pierced his sleep. For the first time in months, he didn’t remember a dream of ocean waves falling against a rocky shore. He didn’t remember dreaming of anything. Max’s back, shoulders, and neck ached from spending the night on the couch. “I can’t feed you

7 or you’ll puke in the car,” he said to the cat as he walked to the bathroom. Later, after a shower and a change of clothes, he let Carmilla lap the milk left in the bowl from his Cheerios. While she was distracted, he grabbed the cat carrier from the storage room at the far end of the apartment. He closed the door in the living room so she wouldn’t be able to run off and disappear, scooped her up, and dropped her down into the plastic box. She moaned deeply as he carried her downstairs and out to his car, a ten-year-old Subaru parked in the narrow driveway next to the building. She yowled during the entire three-mile drive to Jeffrey’s apartment. As he carried the cat up the front steps, Max noticed the police officer standing in the entranceway. “Do you live here, sir?” the police officer asked when Max stepped inside. “I’m bringing a cat to a friend who lives here. Why?” “The building’s closed except to residents right now.” “What happened? I need to bring the cat in.” “Who are you visiting, sir?” “Why? What’s happened?” “Which apartment did you want to go to?” “Apartment four. Jeffrey James. Can’t I just drop the cat—” “How do you know Mr. James, sir?” “We’re friends. What’s happened? Can I please just—” “I’m sorry, sir. There’s been an incident.” “Incident? What do you mean incident?” But he knew. Visions filled Max’s mind: Jeffrey with his Sig Sauer and his AK-47. Jeffrey with his shooter’s vest packed with ammo and extra magazines, hundreds and hundreds of rounds, enough for a war—enough for an apocalypse. Going from apartment to apartment, kicking in doors as if he were a Ranger in Iraq, firing at any movement. Bang, bang, bang. You’re dead. “Jeffrey James, sir. I’m afraid it looks like suicide.” “Oh,” Max said, setting the cat carrier down on the floor. Carmilla had stopped moaning, apparently reconciled to her current reality. “How many other people? Did he . . . ?” “Himself only. I’m afraid I can’t say anymore. Can I have your phone number, sir, so we can contact you? We’re still sorting things out.” “What time did he . . . ?” “Last night. A neighbor heard the gunshot and called it in.” “Yesterday was my birthday.” “I’m truly sorry, sir. If I could have your name and phone number . . . ” “Of course,” he said, and spoke the words and numbers automatically, numbers that would ring a phone in the bookstore, a phone Max would never answer again. He thanked the officer, picked up Carmilla in her carrier, and walked back to his car. After nearly two hours of driving, his mind blank, Carmilla silent in the carrier on the passenger seat, Max realized he’d forgotten his snacks and his Coke at home. He needed gas anyway, so he stopped at a gas station and convenience store just over the Maine border, filled up, and bought some oatmeal raisin cookies, a Snickers bar, a couple of twelve-ounce bottles of Coke, a gallon of water, a bag of cat food, and a package of red plastic bowls. In the car, he let Carmilla out of the carrier and poured water into one bowl and food into another. He was sure he could find somebody who liked cats along the way. He wasn’t on any timetable. He just needed to get to the farthest shore and let whatever peace was there wash over him.

8 He opened a bottle of Coke for himself and quickly ate two cookies. Cookies, Karen had said, would be the death of him. In childhood and even up through his mid-twenties he’d been trim and almost scrawny, but now he had the figure of a person who’d been pregnant for a while. He’d tried to stay healthy when he’d been with Karen, but even she had said more than once that he was getting a good gut. That was a long time ago. After she left, he stopped caring. He’d last been to the doctor eight or nine years ago, and the doctor had told him he should exercise and pay attention to his blood pressure and his cholesterol. Max nodded and did his best to look like he took it all seriously, much as he did during those last months and weeks with Karen, when she said that she worried about him, when she cried and screamed and pounded his chest and said nobody could not care about losing a child, when she told him she’d been sleeping with one of the waiters at the Thai restaurant on the corner of Main Street, when she said she was leaving, finally, for real this time. It didn’t matter. Carmilla, content, curled up on the back seat. When Max started the car, she perked her head up, but she seemed to have grown used to the movement, and now she let herself fall asleep as Max drove them toward the edge of the world.

Most of the winter snow had melted, trees and lawns were beginning to green, the last vestiges of mud season giving way to spring. Maine seemed somehow more alive than New Hampshire had been, more vibrant in its shedding of the cold months, its skies more blue than gray. Perhaps this was just a particularly sunny afternoon, Max thought. He hadn’t ever driven a lot in Maine, just some trips to estate auctions and big library sales, and he always lost his way. But there was no great pressure of time right now, so it didn’t matter if he meandered off of Route 1, a road he hated purely because he’d gotten trapped in summer traffic a few times. There wasn’t much traffic today, but nonetheless, he didn’t want to drive Route 1, and so he sought out the smaller roads, ones bumpy with cracks and potholes after the frost heaves had retreated. He stopped at some woods near Sebago Lake and let the cat out so she could relieve herself. He demonstrated for her by peeing on a tree. She was mostly terrified of this new place and its strange sounds and scents, but eventually she did what she needed to do. Max half hoped she’d dash away and he would then have a reason to be rid of her, but she didn’t stray far from him. After half an hour or so, they got back in the car and headed off, traveling back roads until, by late afternoon, Max saw signs to Brunswick and turned in that direction, hoping to find a place where he might get a good sandwich. There were open parking spaces in front of a little diner in town, so he parked the car, told Carmilla he’d only be a little while, and went inside. He found a booth and squeezed himself into it. A waitress, probably of high school age, with black hair and radiant blue eyes, handed him a menu, said her name was Melissa, and asked him if he’d like something to drink. “Coffee,” he said. When she brought it, he ordered a club sandwich with turkey, not toasted because, though he very much liked toasted club sandwiches, inevitably they cut his gums all to hell. She brought the sandwich quickly. It was divine. He handed Melissa a twenty dollar bill and told her to keep the change. She smiled, apparently at a loss for words, not at all used to a 100% tip. He asked if she liked cats. “Sure,” she said. “But I don’t have one.” “I have a cat in my car that needs a home. She’s eight years old and very friendly, used to being

9 around people in the bookstore that I once owned. If you’d like to take her, she’s yours.” Melissa followed him to the car and peered through the window at Carmilla. “Are you sure?” Melissa asked. “I can’t take her where I’m going,” Max said. He opened the door, careful not to let Carmilla slip away. He took her in his hands, but she hissed and scratched and howled. He’d never seen her so enraged, even at the vet’s office. She fought with her claws and teeth as he forced her into the carrier. “She hates the box,” Max said, meekly, as he brought it out and handed it to Melissa. “I’m sure she’ll be fine,” Melissa said. “Once she gets settled,” Max said. “She’s a good cat.” “Thank you,” Melissa said, “for everything.” “My pleasure.” Max went to the driver’s side, opened the door, and climbed in. “Just keep going north,” Melissa said as Max closed the door. He couldn’t quite hear what she said next, but it sounded like, “Go to Englishman’s Bay.” He rolled down the passenger’s side window to ask her what she was talking about, but she was gone.

The woods grew deeper, darker, wilder as Max drove on and twilight fell. He put a CD into the player, a recent Bonnie Raitt album, to try to keep himself from thinking about Jeffrey, but it didn’t work for long. He stopped hearing the music, his mind straying to speculations about where in the little apartment Jeffrey had killed himself, Had he slumped on the futon in the main room? Had he sat on the twin bed in the tiny bedroom? Had he stood in the kitchen area or the bathroom? Which gun had he used? One of the pistols? The utterly illegal sawed-off pump-action shotgun he was so proud of having made? Probably that, yes. Max then thought of all the mess, the blood and brains scattered everywhere. Who would clean it up? The police? Probably not. The landlord would have to call in some sort of cleaners. He’d have to bring in painters and even perhaps carpenters, people to fix whatever the shot had ruined. It would take time. People would have to wonder what this Jeffrey James had been like, what had driven him to this point, this decision. Who had loved him? Who had cared? Max shook his head and gritted his teeth. Beyond the car’s headlights, the world was dark now. The trees loomed among shadows. Soon, though, he found his way to the shore road where the trees were few, and the smell of the ocean filled the car. Now and then the sound of a particularly large wave crashing against the rocks made its way in between the music and the noise of the engine. Fifty years old. What a meaningless concept, he thought. He didn’t feel any different today than he had a week ago. A pointless number, fifty. Not even old, really, not these days, when plenty of people lived to be ninety or 100. He didn’t feel any better about it, though. He feared nothing so much as age. Or, rather, he didn’t fear it; it disgusted him. The slow failures of the body. The creeping feebleness and dementia. He remembered his grandparents, their homes and bodies giving off a thick scent he forever afterward associated with growing old—a scent redolent of rotting fruit. In the store, he struggled to remain civil with elderly customers. Their eyes and minds were failing, what did they want with books? How could they possibly get any enjoyment from them? In his last year with Karen, some weeks after Melody died after only one day of life, Karen’s parents came to visit and help with things. Max got blind drunk on Jim Beam. He cursed her parents for their age, for their doddering around his house, for their oh-so-loving concern that seemed, he said, to be nothing more than senility, and swore he wouldn’t pay for them when they ended up in a nursing home, shitting their beds, mewling and puking. Karen’s parents left, and

10 implored her to come with them, to escape Max, but she stayed a while longer. “I didn’t mean it,” Max said in the morning, once he remembered a bit of what he’d said. Karen nodded. She believed him. “You never really mean anything, do you?” she said. He shrugged. It was often true, but not that time. Gas stations had become rare this far north, so Max stopped at the first one he saw when he was down to a quarter tank. He went inside the store, used the bathroom, bought a bottle of Coke, a bottle of iced tea, a bag of chocolate chip cookies, and a Snickers. A blonde young man stood behind the counter. “How far to Englishman’s Bay?” Max asked, after getting his change. “Another hour or so. Stay on Route 1 toward Machias, then head down to Roque Bluffs. Someone will find you there.” “Someone will what?” “Someone will find you there.” “What are you talking about?” “Don’t worry about it, old man.” “Hey,” Max said, “who do you think—” “You should go. It’s very dark tonight, and you could have trouble finding your way.” Max stared at the boy’s cold blue eyes and decided not to press the point. He’d always thought people in Maine were strange, and the farther north you went, the stranger they got. They were isolated, suspicious, stubborn—as if their lives were carved from rock. The boy was right, though. It was very dark tonight.

Max stayed on Route 1 until somewhere near Machias, but must have missed a turn, because the road became narrower, bumpier, and then turned to dirt for a while. He didn’t think he was anywhere near what might be a town. He had always had a pretty good sense of direction, though, and his hunch that he was driving toward the ocean paid off soon enough when he reached the shore road again. He followed it down until it ended at a spot of rough grass and gravel, the driveway of a stone cabin with a few small, square windows, a roof of wooden beams, and a hand-painted sign above the door: La Maison Ravissante. The heavy wooden front door was open, and Max stepped into a warm, softly-lit room that smelled of wood smoke and baked apples. A small girl, maybe ten years old, with auburn hair and bright blue eyes, stood with her back to a fireplace at the opposite end of the room. “Excuse me,” Max said. “Are your parents here?” “No,” the girl said, smiling to reveal a missing front tooth. “I mean the people who own this place.” From behind him, a soft voice said, “Hello.” Max turned to see a tall, rugged young man, black-haired and bearded, dressed in jeans and a gray flannel shirt. “I’m just trying to find Roque Bluffs. Am I anywhere near there?” “Near enough.” “Well, that’s a relief. If I go back to the road, where do I need to turn?” “The night is dark.” “Yes, I know, believe me. But I need to get to Roque Bluffs.” “No you don’t,” the young man said. “Come in. Sit down. Warm up by the fire. You’re where you need to be.”

11 The little girl pulled a leather easy chair up near the fireplace and gestured for Max to sit down. “I think I’m supposed to go to Roque Bluffs.” “No,” the young man said, placing his strong hand on Max’s shoulder. “Tonight, you need to be with us.” Gently, the young man pushed Max toward the chair. “We’ll take care of you. Let me bring you some dinner. You must be starving.” Max wanted to say something, wanted to ask them who they were and what this place was, wanted to say that no, he wasn’t hungry, he wasn’t thirsty, he wasn’t cold—but he was very tired, and he didn’t have the stamina to say any of that. He found his way to the chair and sat down, and the warm fire was, indeed, comforting. Suddenly he was quite hungry and ravishingly thirsty. The man brought him a tray with a large glass of water and a wooden bowl filled with thick beef stew. Max ate. It was the most flavorful stew he’d ever tasted. The meat was so tender it seemed to melt on his tongue. “My name’s Melanie,” the little girl said. “Hello,” Max said between slurping bites of stew. “You’re old,” Melanie said. “Older than you, yes,” Max said. He gulped water. “You smell old,” Melanie said. Just as Max thought of something to say to that, he forgot what it was. The little girl laughed at him, then ran around a corner and disappeared. Max lifted the glass of water, but it fell out of his hands and spilled all over him. He reached for the bowl of stew, pulling it closer, but it slipped in his fingers and poured across his chest. “Come along,” the young man said from behind Max. “I’ll clean you up and put you to bed.” The man lifted Max in his arms like a firefighter come to rescue him. He carried Max upstairs to a pool of warm water and soap, then to a bed in a dark room. When Max woke in the middle of the night, a bright moon shining onto his face through a window above the bed, he vaguely remembered his arms and legs fitting into manacles on iron chains. He laughed at the strange memory, then turned onto his side. The chains reached from his wrists and ankles to heavy bolts in the floor. He screamed through the night, until his voice was dust, but he couldn’t help falling back to sleep again.

He woke to music. Bright morning sunlight stung his eyes. Somewhere outside, a chorus sang. The voices were high, ethereal. Max sat up. He was naked, with no sheet or blanket on the bed. He was not cold, though— indeed, the room’s heat was almost choking. He lifted one arm. His flesh was bruised and red where the chains bound him. The chain on his left leg was not quite long enough for him to swing himself into a sitting position on the bed. “Hello . . . ?” he called, his voice rasping. Some moments later, the door opened and Melanie, dressed all in white, walked in. “Good morning,” she said. “What are they doing to me?” Max said. “Cleaning you up,” she said. She hopped from foot to foot and chanted, “You’re a mess, you’re a mess, you’re a mess.” She giggled. “Please help me,” Max said.

12 Melanie ran to him and planted a kiss on his lips. “Help me help me help me help me help!” she screamed, then fell down on the floor laughing. A figure appeared outside the door. “Melanie, leave the old man alone.” Melanie walked out of the room. A woman—perhaps twenty years old—stepped inside and closed the door behind herself. Her hair was long and a very light brown, almost blonde. Her breasts were large, the nipples vaguely visible through the soft white fabric of her dress. She knelt down beside Max. Her hand rubbed his stomach, then her fingers slowly, gently moved lower. Without even knowing what he was doing, Max swung his arm and hit her across the face, the iron manacle on his wrist slicing her lip open. The force knocked her to the floor. She held a hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry,” Max said. “But—you can’t—I don’t know why I’m here and you—” The woman stood up. Blood had fallen onto her dress. She opened the door and walked outside. A few minutes later, the bearded young man came into the room. His clothes were made of fur and the skins of animals. “Why did you hurt Merissa?” he said. “She wanted to give you pleasure. She pities you.” “What are you doing to me?” Max said. “You came to us.” “But why are these chains—why am I—what am I doing here?” “It sometimes happens.” “I had dreams of the ocean. I knew I had to get away. I knew I was . . . ” “Yes?” What were the words? He couldn’t remember. Other words came to him: “Getting old.” “Yes.” “Is that why I’m here?” “Perhaps,” the man said. “It sometimes happens.” He walked out of the room and closed the door behind. Later, a pale young man with sharp, uneven features and matted, yellow hair brought a bowl of fish chowder to Max and fed him with a wooden spoon. Max didn’t speak, merely let the young man feed him, and said nothing when the young man’s lips touched his, the tongue wiping away some last bits of chowder. For the first time in many years, and against whatever remained of his will, Max found himself aroused. There was, in his nakedness, no hiding it. The young man seemed not to notice. He set a large porcelain chamber pot under Max and waited until he could take away the wastes. Days passed, and every few hours (judging by the sun), the young man came in and fed Max the most delicious food he had ever eaten—stews and chowders and soups at first, then hardboiled eggs and cheese, then larger and larger pieces of beef and pork. Now and then Melanie peeked in the door and giggled, but no one else visited him. The young man washed him with hot water, soap, and a plump, yellow sponge. He provided a porcelain chamber pot and waited while Max shat and pissed. The young man was attentive, always ready for Max to release his wastes, always careful to clean every bit of his body. And then, on what seemed to Max to be perhaps the eighth or ninth morning, Melanie woke him by running into the room and jumping up onto the bed while screaming, “It’s the big day! It’s the big day!” The tall, young man who wore the furs and animal skins quickly entered, swept Melanie into

13 his arms as she bounced, and stole her out of the room. The silent young man with matted, yellow hair then came in, carrying a wooden pail from which he fed Max a particularly large meal of pork, ham, mashed potato, carrots, turnips, and rice. “Please stop,” Max said as the young man pushed more food into Max’s mouth with the wooden spoon, but the boy did not seem to hear him, or did not care, and the feeding went on and on until Max was certain he would vomit. From a stone pitcher, the young man poured thick buttermilk into Max’s mouth. Max coughed and nearly choked on it. The buttermilk splashed all over his face, even into his eyes. The young man carried the pail and pitcher out, then returned a few minutes later with a bucket of hot water, soap, cloths, and a sponge. He spent even more time than usual cleaning Max, wiping away the remnants of the meal with the cloths, and then, with the sponge, attending to every inch of his skin. The cleaning was slow and sensuous, once again arousing Max, and this time the young man noticed, letting his hand and the sponge provide pleasure, forcing Max to close his eyes, to try to think of something else, but the food had relaxed him, and the washing had calmed him, and he could not distract himself from the gentle, rhythmic pleasure. Afterward, the boy continued to clean him, then, finally satisfied with his work, he kissed Max gently on the lips and departed. The tall young man came in and unlocked the manacles around Max’s wrists and ankles. “Try standing up,” the man said. “Use me for support.” Max slung his arm around the man’s shoulders and together they tried to heave him up. His muscles were weak, making his legs feel like liquid. His stomach was larger than ever before, and as he tried to stand he realized he didn’t quite know what to do with such a belly—its weight was unfamiliar to him, skewing his perception of his own center of gravity. If the young man hadn’t been holding him, Max would have fallen forward onto his face. He chuckled as the image entered his mind: himself, tipping over, rolling onto the now-massive cushion of his front. “Hans!” the young man called, and the pale boy—He has a name, Max thought—entered. “Take the other side,” the man said. Together, they helped Max out into the hall, where Merissa waited with a white sheet that she carefully wrapped Max in. He felt some shame in his nudity, his immense stomach, his weakness, but more shame when he saw Merissa’s bruised face and thick, slit lip. He had done that. “I’m sorry,” he whispered as she wrapped him in the sheet. She did not look into his eyes. Everyone, even Melanie, helped get him down the stairs, with a few people below and few people behind, shuttling him like a large piece of furniture. He tried to distract himself from the pain in his hands and feet, tried to remember a song or two, something, anything to get his mind off of where he was now. (How had his stomach grown so immense and his muscles so useless in such a short time? It had only been eleven or twelve, maybe thirteen days, he was certain.) He couldn’t remember any songs. He couldn’t remember even quite how he’d gotten here, or where exactly here was. At the bottom of the stairs, they helped him back onto his feet, and he did his best to balance and to walk. The front door of La Maison Ravissante opened, revealing a warm and sunny world. He squeezed through the door. A few feet from the front of the building stood a large chair, a rustic throne made from heavy, dark, knotted wood. Hands jostled Max, spinning him around until he was placed just right, then pushed him down into the chair. Someone put a crown of evergreen branches on his head. It shed needles onto his forehead and down the back of his neck. People had gathered around him—new people, all young, mostly blonde, mostly blue-eyed, dressed either in the simple white clothes he’d seen so often or some sort of animal skins. They

14 took hold of the bottom of the chair and hoisted him above their shoulders. They carried him around to a staircase leading down to the sea. “Where are we going?” Max said, his voice sounding odd to him, small and willowy. “What’s going on?” Melanie skipped along beside. He called out to her. “What is going to happen?” She giggled and bounced and stuck her tongue out at him. More people waited down on the rocky beach. Men and women, all, it seemed to Max, in their early twenties or so, all wearing animal skins and carrying tools of some sort: knives, gaffs, axes. Little fires set in cairns dotted the beach. The chair lowered to the ground. Water tickled Max’s toes. Ocean spray scratched his eyes. Sand and salt flared his wounds. “The old man has arrived!” someone said. “He’s better than the last one,” someone said. “This one was all bloody when he got here.” “We cleaned him up, though.” “He needs to be here.” “We need him,” someone said. A knife flashed, cutting below Max’s eye. Instinctively, he raised his hand to defend himself. Another knife sliced his palm. “What are you doing to me!” he screamed, but his voice was little more than a whisper, a flash of air in the wind. Laughter all around. Hans stepped forward, pulled down his white pants, and sprayed a stream of warm piss into Max’s face. Melanie bounced around behind everyone, singing out, “The old man is here, the old man is here, the old, old, old, old man is here!” Merissa pressed herself against Max’s left side. She unbuttoned her shirt, bared a breast, pressed the nipple to his lips. The crowd cheered her on, voices calling out: “Is that what you want, old man?” and “Is that what you miss?” He closed his eyes. He could not feel the fingers in his injured hand. His brain exploded in light. Someone had hit him in the back of the head with something hard, a piece of wood or stone. He tried to turn to see, but his skull didn’t want to do what his mind commanded. Everyone stood back. Clouds writhed across the sky. Larger and larger waves smashed onto the beach. Melanie waded forward and climbed onto the chair with Max. She wrapped her arms around his neck, then whispered in his ear: “Remember, forever and ever and ever. You are our savior. We love you. I love you.” Her tongue tickled his ear. Her teeth tore at the lobe. He tried to raise his arms to get her off of himself, but he didn’t have the strength. She bit deeper. The pain was hot. Her breath in his ear turned to a splash, then a high-pitched ringing that spread misery across his forehead and through his eyes and throat and heart. Melanie knelt in the water beside him and smiled, half his ear displayed between her teeth. The other people ran in, their tools raised high, their laughter and screams louder than the growing noise of the waves. For a moment, Max feared Melanie might be trampled, but she easily got out of the way, bounding back toward the stairs leading up to the house. His skin was slashed, his bones battered. Hans took a carving knife to Max’s genitals. It was all pain and all nothing. The world turned red and then black when they thumbed out his eyes. They left him his tongue, a fact that, somewhere in the far recess of his consciousness, provoked surprise.

15 He could not see the care they took when cutting open his stomach, the reverence with which they held his viscera, the gentleness with which they placed these parts of him in each flaming cairn along the shore. He did not know that a wave knocked him from his chair and splayed him on the beach. He did not hear the people leave him, nor feel the tongues of the cats that licked his wounds. He did not know where he was, did not perceive the cold or night. For longer than anyone expected, nearly into morning, the wind carried the sound of his singing.

Matthew Cheney's work has been published by Weird Tales, One Story, Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Failbetter, Interfictions, Rain Taxi, Locus, and SF Site, among other places. He is the former series editor for the Best American Fantasy anthologies, and co-editor of the occasional online magazine The Revelator (revelatormagazine.com). He currently lives in New Hampshire.

16 Nightcrawlers Robert McCammon

“Hard rain coming down,” Cheryl said, and I nodded in agreement. Through the diner’s plate-glass windows, a dense curtain of rain flapped across the Gulf gas pumps and continued across the parking lot. It hit Big Bob’s with a force that made the glass rattle like uneasy bones. The red neon sign that said BIG BOB’S! DIESEL FUEL! EATS! sat on top of a high steel pole above the diner so the truckers on the interstate could see it. Out in the night, the red-tinted rain thrashed in torrents across my old pickup truck and Cheryl’s baby-blue Volkswagen. “Well,” I said, “I suppose that storm’ll either wash some folks in off the interstate or we can just about hang it up.” The curtain of rain parted for an instant, and I could see the treetops whipping back and forth in the woods on the other side of Highway 47. Wind whined around the front door like an animal trying to claw its way in. I glanced at the electric clock on the wall behind the counter. Twenty minutes before nine. We usually closed up at ten, but tonight—with tornado warnings in the weather forecast—I was tempted to turn the lock a little early. “Tell you what,” I said. “If we’re empty at nine, we skedaddle. ’Kay?” “No argument here,” she said. She watched the storm for a moment longer, then continued putting newly washed coffee cups, saucers, and plates away on the stainless-steel shelves. Lightning flared from west to east like the strike of a burning bullwhip. The diner’s lights flickered, then came back to normal. A shudder of thunder seemed to come right up through my shoes. Late March is the beginning of tornado season in south Alabama, and we’ve had some whoppers spin past here in the last few years. I knew that Alma was at home, and she understood to get into the root cellar right quick if she spotted a twister, like that one we saw in ’82 dancing through the woods about two miles from our farm. “You got any love-ins planned this weekend, hippie?” I asked Cheryl, mostly to get my mind off the storm and to rib her too. She was in her late thirties, but I swear that when she grinned she could’ve passed for a kid. “Wouldn’t you like to know, redneck?” she answered; she replied the same way to all my digs at her. Cheryl Lovesong—and I know that couldn’t have been her real name—was a mighty able waitress, and she had hands that were no strangers to hard work. But I didn’t care that she wore her long silvery-blond hair in Indian braids with hippie headbands, or came to work in tie-dyed overalls. She was the best waitress who’d ever worked for me, and she got along with everybody just fine—even us rednecks. That’s what I am, and proud of it: I drink Rebel Yell whiskey straight, and my favorite songs are about good women gone bad and trains on the long track to nowhere. I keep my wife happy. I’ve raised my two boys to pray to God and to salute the flag, and if anybody don’t like it he can go a few rounds with Big Bob Clayton. Cheryl would come right out and tell you she used to live in San Francisco in the late sixties, and that she went to love-ins and peace marches and all that stuff. When I reminded her it was 1984 and Ronnie Reagan was president, she’d look at me like I was walking cow-flop. I always figured she’d start thinking straight when all that hippie-dust blew out of her head. Alma said my tail was going to get burnt if I ever took a shine to Cheryl, but I’m a fifty-five-

17 year-old redneck who stopped sowing his wild seed when he met the woman he married, more than thirty years ago. Lightning crisscrossed the turbulent sky, followed by a boom of thunder. Cheryl said, “Wow! Look at that light show!” “Light show, my ass,” I muttered. The diner was as solid as the Good Book, so I wasn’t too worried about the storm. But on a wild night like this, stuck out in the countryside like Big Bob’s was, you had a feeling of being a long way off from civilization—though Mobile was only twenty- seven miles south. On a wild night like this, you had a feeling that anything could happen, as quick as a streak of lightning out of the darkness. I picked up a copy of the Mobile Press-Register that the last customer—a trucker on his way to Texas—had left on the counter a half-hour before, and I started plowing through the news, most of it bad: those A-rab countries were still squabbling like Hatfields and McCoys in white robes; two men had robbed a Qwik-Mart in Mobile and been killed by the police in a shoot-out; cops were investigating a massacre at a motel near Daytona Beach; an infant had been stolen from a maternity ward in Birmingham. The only good things on the front page were stories that said the economy was up and that Reagan swore we’d show the Commies who was boss in El Salvador and Lebanon. The diner shook under a blast of thunder, and I looked up from the paper as a pair of headlights emerged from the rain into my parking lot.

The headlights were attached to an Alabama state-trooper car. “Half-alive, hold the onion, extra brown the buns.” Cheryl was already writing on her pad in expectation of the order. I pushed the paper aside and went to the fridge for the hamburger meat. When the door opened, a windblown spray of rain swept in and stung like buckshot. “Howdy, folks!” Dennis Wells peeled off his gray rain slicker and hung it on the rack next to the door. Over his Smokey the Bear trooper hat was a protective plastic covering, beaded with raindrops. He took off his hat, exposing the thinning blond hair on his pale scalp, as he approached the counter and sat on his usual stool, right next to the cash register. “Cup of black coffee and a rare—” Cheryl was already sliding the coffee in front of him, and the burger sizzled on the griddle. “Ya’ll are on the ball tonight!” Dennis said; he said the same thing when he came in, which was almost every night. Funny the kind of habits you fall into, without realizing it. “Kinda wild out there, ain’t it?” I asked as I flipped the burger over. “Lordy, yes! Wind just about flipped my car over three, four miles down the interstate. Thought I was gonna be eatin’ a little pavement tonight.” Dennis was a husky young man in his early thirties, with thick blond brows over deep-set light brown eyes. He had a wife and three kids, and he was fast to flash a walletful of their pictures. “Don’t reckon I’ll be chasin’ any speeders tonight, but there’ll probably be a load of accidents. Cheryl, you sure look pretty this evenin’.” “Still the same old me.” Cheryl never wore a speck of makeup, though one day she’d come to work with glitter on her cheeks. She had a place a few miles away, and I guessed she was farming that funny weed up there. “Any trucks moving?” “Seen a few, but not many. Truckers ain’t fools. Gonna get worse before it gets better, the radio says.” He sipped at his coffee and grimaced. “Lordy, that’s strong enough to jump out of the cup and dance a jig, darlin’!”

18 I fixed the burger the way Dennis liked it, put it on a platter with some fries, and served it. “Bobby, how’s the wife treatin’ you?” he asked. “No complaints.” “Good to hear. I’ll tell you, a fine woman is worth her weight in gold. Hey, Cheryl! How’d you like a handsome young man for a husband?” Cheryl smiled, knowing what was coming. “The man I’m looking for hasn’t been made yet.” “Yeah, but you ain’t met Cecil yet, either! He asks me about you every time I see him, and I keep tellin’ him I’m doin’ everything I can to get you two together.” Cecil was Dennis’ brother-in- law and owned a Chevy dealership in Bay Minette. Dennis had been ribbing Cheryl about going on a date with Cecil for the past four months. “You’d like him,” Dennis promised. “He’s got a lot of my qualities.” “Well, that’s different. In that case, I’m certain I don’t want to meet him.” Dennis winced. “Oh, you’re a cruel woman! That’s what smokin’ banana peels does to you— turns you mean. Anybody readin’ this rag?” He reached over for the newspaper. “Waitin’ here just for you,” I said. Thunder rumbled, closer to the diner. The lights flickered briefly once . . . then again before they returned to normal. Cheryl busied herself by fixing a fresh pot of coffee, and I watched the rain whipping against the windows. When the lightning flashed, I could see the trees swaying so hard they looked about to snap. Dennis read and ate his hamburger. “Boy,” he said after a few minutes, “the world’s in some shape, huh? Those A-rab pig-stickers are itchin’ for war. Mobile metro boys had a little gunplay last night. Good for them.” He paused and frowned, then tapped the paper with one thick finger. “This I can’t figure.” “What’s that?” “Thing in Florida couple of nights ago. Six people killed at the Pines Haven Motor Inn, near Daytona Beach. Motel was set off in the woods. Only a couple of cinder-block houses in the area, and nobody heard any gunshots. Says here one old man saw what he thought was a bright white star falling over the motel, and that was it. Funny, huh?” “A UFO,” Cheryl offered. “Maybe he saw a UFO.” “Yeah, and I’m a little green man from Mars,” Dennis scoffed. “I’m serious. This is weird. The motel was so blown full of holes it looked like a war had been going on. Everybody was dead— even a dog and a canary that belonged to the manager. The cars out in front of the rooms were blasted to pieces. The sound of one of them explodin’ was what woke up the people in those houses, I reckon.” He skimmed the story again. “Two bodies were out in the parkin’ lot, one was holed up in a bathroom, one had crawled under a bed, and two had dragged every piece of furniture in the room over to block the door. Didn’t seem to help ’em any, though.” I grunted. “Guess not.” “No motive, no witnesses. You better believe those Florida cops are shakin’ the bushes for some kind of dangerous maniac—or maybe more than one, it says here.” He shoved the paper away and patted the service revolver holstered at his hip. “If I ever got hold of him—or them— he’d find out not to mess with a ’Bama trooper.” He glanced quickly over at Cheryl and smiled mischievously. “Probably some crazy hippie who’d been smokin’ his tennis shoes.” “Don’t knock it,” she said sweetly, “until you’ve tried it.” She looked past him, out the window into the storm. “Car’s pullin’ in, Bobby.” Headlights glared briefly off the wet windows. It was a station wagon with wood-grained panels on the sides; it veered around the gas pumps and parked next to Dennis’ trooper car. On the

19 front bumper was a personalized license plate that said: Ray & Lindy. The headlights died, and all the doors opened at once. Out of the wagon came a whole family: a man and woman, a little girl and boy about eight or nine. Dennis got up and opened the diner door as they hurried inside from the rain. All of them had gotten pretty well soaked between the station wagon and the diner, and they wore the dazed expressions of people who’d been on the road a long time. The man wore glasses and had curly gray hair, the woman was slim and dark-haired and pretty. The kids were sleepy- eyed. All of them were well-dressed, the man in a yellow sweater with one of those alligators on the chest. They had vacation tans, and I figured they were tourists heading north from the beach after spring break. “Come on in and take a seat,” I said. “Thank you,” the man said. They squeezed into one of the booths near the windows. “We saw your sign from the interstate.” “Bad night to be on the highway,” Dennis told them. “Tornado warnings are out all over the place.” “We heard it on the radio,” the woman—Lindy, if the license was right—said. “We’re on our way to Birmingham, and we thought we could drive right through the storm. We should’ve stopped at that Holiday Inn we passed about fifteen miles ago.” “That would’ve been smart,” Dennis agreed. “No sense in pushin’ your luck.” He returned to his stool. The new arrivals ordered hamburgers, fries, and Cokes. Cheryl and I went to work. Lightning made the diner’s lights flicker again, and the sound of thunder caused the kids to jump. When the food was ready and Cheryl served them, Dennis said, “Tell you what. You folks finish your dinners and I’ll escort you back to the Holiday Inn. Then you can head out in the morning. How about that?” “Fine,” Ray said gratefully. “I don’t think we could’ve gotten very much further, anyway.” He turned his attention to his food. “Well,” Cheryl said quietly, standing beside me, “I don’t guess we get home early, do we?” “I guess not. Sorry.” She shrugged. “Goes with the job, right? Anyway, I can think of worse places to be stuck.” I figured that Alma might be worried about me, so I went over to the pay phone to call her. I dropped a quarter in—and the dial tone sounded like a cat being stepped on. I hung up and tried again. The cat scream continued. “Damn!” I muttered. “Lines must be screwed up.” “Ought to get yourself a place closer to town, Bobby,” Dennis said. “Never could figure out why you wanted a joint in the sticks. At least you’d get better phone service and good lights if you were nearer to Mo—” He was interrupted by the sound of wet and shrieking brakes, and he swiveled around on his stool. I looked up as a car hurtled into the parking lot, the tires swerving, throwing up plumes of water. For a few seconds I thought it was going to keep coming, right through the window into the diner—but then the brakes caught and the car almost grazed the side of my pickup as it jerked to a stop. In the neon’s red glow I could tell it was a beat-up old Ford Fairlane, either gray or a dingy beige. Steam was rising off the crumpled hood. The headlights stayed on for perhaps a minute before they winked off. A figure got out of the car and walked slowly—with a limp—toward the diner.

20 We watched the figure approach. Dennis’ body looked like a coiled spring ready to be triggered. “We got us a live one, Bobby boy,” he said. The door opened, and in a stinging gust of wind and rain a man who looked like walking death stepped into my diner.

He was so wet he might well have been driving with his windows down. He was a skinny guy, maybe weighed all of a hundred and twenty pounds, even soaking wet. His unruly dark hair was plastered to his head, and he had gone a week or more without a shave. In his gaunt, pallid face his eyes were startlingly blue; his gaze flicked around the diner, lingered for a few seconds on Dennis. Then he limped on down to the far end of the counter and took a seat. He wiped the rain out of his eyes as Cheryl took a menu to him. Dennis stared at the man. When he spoke, his voice bristled with authority. “Hey, fella.” The man didn’t look up from the menu. “Hey, I’m talkin’ to you.” The man pushed the menu away and pulled a damp packet of Kools out of the breast pocket of his patched Army fatigue jacket. “I can hear you,” he said; his voice was deep and husky, and didn’t go with his less-than-robust physical appearance. “Drivin’ kinda fast in this weather, don’t you think?” The man flicked a cigarette lighter a few times before he got a flame, then lit one of his smokes and inhaled deeply. “Yeah,” he replied. “I was. Sorry. I saw the sign, and I was in a hurry to get here. Miss? I’d just like a cup of coffee, please. Hot and real strong, okay?” Cheryl nodded and turned away from him, almost bumping into me as I strolled down behind the counter to check him out. “That kind of hurry’ll get you killed,” Dennis cautioned. “Right. Sorry.” He shivered and pushed the tangled hair back from his forehead with one hand. Up close, I could see deep cracks around his mouth and the corners of his eyes and I figured him to be in his late thirties or early forties. His wrists were as thin as a woman’s; he looked like he hadn’t eaten a good meal for more than a month. He stared at his hands through bloodshot eyes. Probably on drugs, I thought. The fella gave me the creeps. Then he looked at me with those eyes —so pale blue they were almost white—and I felt like I’d been nailed to the floor. “Something wrong?” he asked—not rudely, just curiously. “Nope.” I shook my head. Cheryl gave him his coffee and then went over to give Ray and Lindy their check. The man didn’t use either cream or sugar. The coffee was steaming, but he drank half of it down like mother’s milk. “That’s good,” he said. “Keep me awake, won’t it?” “More than likely.” Over the breast pocket of his jacket was the faint outline of the name that had been sewn there once. I think it was Price, but I could’ve been wrong. “That’s what I want. To stay awake as long as I can.” He finished the coffee. “Can I have another cup, please?” I poured it for him. He drank that one down just as fast,” then rubbed his eyes wearily. “Been on the road a long time, huh?” Price nodded. “Day and night. I don’t know which is more tired, my mind or my butt.” He lifted his gaze to me again. “Have you got anything else to drink? How about beer?”

21 “No, sorry. Couldn’t get a liquor license.” He sighed. “Just as well. It might make me sleepy. But I sure could go for a beer right now. One sip, to clean my mouth out.” He picked up his coffee cup, and I smiled and started to turn away. But then he wasn’t holding a cup. He was holding a Budweiser can, and for an instant I could smell the tang of a newly popped beer. The mirage was there for only maybe two seconds. I blinked, and Price was holding a cup again. “Just as well,” he said, and put it down. I glanced over at Cheryl, then at Dennis. Neither one was paying attention. Damn! I thought. I’m too young to be losin’ either my eyesight or my senses! “Uh . . . ” I said, or some other stupid noise. “One more cup?” Price asked. “Then I’d better hit the road again.” My hand was shaking as I picked it up, but if Price noticed, he didn’t say anything. “Want anything to eat?” Cheryl asked him. “How about a bowl of beef stew?” He shook his head. “No, thanks. The sooner I get back on the road, the better it’ll be.” Suddenly Dennis swiveled toward him, giving him a cold stare that only cops and drill sergeants can muster. “Back on the road?” He snorted. “Fella, you ever been in a tornado before? I’m gonna escort those nice people to the Holiday Inn about fifteen miles back. If you’re smart, that’s where you’ll spend the night too. No use in tryin’ to—” “No.” Price’s voice was rock-steady. “I’ll be spending the night behind the wheel.” Dennis’ eyes narrowed. “How come you’re in such a hurry? Not runnin’ from anybody, are you?” “Nightcrawlers,” Cheryl said. Price turned toward her like he’d been slapped across the face, and I saw what might’ve been a spark of fear in his eyes. Cheryl motioned toward the lighter Price had laid on the counter, beside the pack of Kools. It was a beat-up silver Zippo, and inscribed across it was NIGHTCRAWLERS with the symbol of two crossed rifles beneath it. “Sorry,” she said. “I just noticed that, and I wondered what it was.” Price put the lighter away. “I was in ’Nam,” he told her. “Everybody in my unit got one.” “Hey.” There was suddenly new respect in Dennis’ voice. “You a vet?” Price paused so long I didn’t think he was going to answer. In the quiet, I heard the little girl tell her mother that the fries were “ucky.” Price said, “Yes.” “How about that! Hey, I wanted to go myself, but I got a high number and things were windin’ down about that time anyway. Did you see any action?” A faint, bitter smile passed over Price’s mouth. “Too much.” “What? Infantry? Marines? Rangers?” Price picked up his third cup of coffee, swallowed some, and put it down. He closed his eyes for a few seconds, and when they opened they were vacant and fixed on nothing. “Nightcrawlers,” he said quietly. “Special unit. Deployed to recon Charlie positions in questionable villages.” He said it like he was reciting from a manual. “We did a lot of crawling through rice paddies and jungles in the dark.” “Bet you laid a few of them Vietcong out, didn’t you?” Dennis got up and came over to sit a few places away from the man. “Man, I was behind you guys all the way. I wanted you to stay in there and fight it out!” Price was silent. Thunder echoed over the diner. The lights weakened for a few seconds; when

22 they came back on, they seemed to have lost some of their wattage. The place was dimmer than before. Price’s head slowly turned toward Dennis, with the inexorable motion of a machine. I was thankful I didn’t have to take the full force of Price’s dead blue eyes, and I saw Dennis wince. “I should’ve stayed,” he said. “I should be there right now, buried in the mud of a rice paddy with the eight other men in my patrol.” “Oh.” Dennis blinked. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to—” “I came home,” Price continued calmly, “by stepping on the bodies of my friends. Do you want to know what that’s like, Mr. Trooper?” “The war’s over,” I told him. “No need to bring it back.” Price smiled grimly, but his gaze remained fixed on Dennis. “Some say it’s over. I say it came back with the men who were there. Like me. Especially like me.” Price paused. The wind howled around the door, and the lightning illuminated for an instant the thrashing woods across the highway. “The mud was up to our knees, Mr. Trooper,” he said. “We were moving across a rice paddy in the dark, being real careful not to step on the bamboo stakes we figured were planted there. Then the first shots started: pop pop pop—like firecrackers going off. One of the Nightcrawlers fired off a flare, and we saw the Cong ringing us. We’d walked right into hell, Mr. Trooper. Somebody shouted, ‘Charlie’s in the light!’ and we started firing, trying to punch a hole through them. But they were everywhere. As soon as one went down, three more took his place. Grenades were going off, and more flares, and people were screaming as they got hit. I took a bullet in the thigh and another through the hand. I lost my rifle, and somebody fell on top of me with half his head missing.” “Uh . . . listen,” I said. “You don’t have to—” “I want to, friend.” He glanced quickly at me, then back to Dennis. I think I cringed when his gaze pierced me. “I want to tell it all. They were fighting and screaming and dying all around me, and I felt the bullets tug at my clothes as they passed through. I know I was screaming too, but what was coming out of my mouth sounded bestial. I ran. The only way I could save my own life was to step on their bodies and drive them down into the mud. I heard some of them choke and blubber as I put my boot on their faces. I knew all those guys like brothers . . . but at that moment they were only pieces of meat. I ran. A gunship chopper came over the paddy and laid down some fire, and that’s how I got out. Alone.” He bent his face closer toward the other man’s. “And you’d better believe I’m in that rice paddy in ’Nam every time I close my eyes. You’d better believe the men I left back there don’t rest easy. So you keep your opinions about ’Nam and being ‘behind you guys’ to yourself, Mr. Trooper. I don’t want to hear that bullshit. Got it?” Dennis sat very still. He wasn’t used to being talked to like that, not even from a ’Nam vet, and I saw the shadow of anger pass over his face. Price’s hands were trembling as he brought a little bottle out of his jeans pocket. He shook two blue-and-orange capsules out onto the counter, took them both with a swallow of coffee, and then recapped the bottle and put it away. The flesh of his face looked almost ashen in the dim light. “I know you boys had a rough time,” Dennis said, “but that’s no call to show disrespect to the law.” “The law,” Price repeated. “Yeah. Right. Bullshit.” “There are women and children present,” I reminded him. “Watch your language.” Price rose from his seat. He looked like a skeleton with just a little extra skin on the bones. “Mister, I haven’t slept for more than thirty-six hours. My nerves are shot. I don’t mean to cause trouble, but when some fool says he understands, I feel like kicking his teeth down his throat— because no one who wasn’t there can pretend to understand.” He glanced at Ray, Lindy, and the

23 kids. “Sorry, folks. Don’t mean to disturb you. Friend, how much do I owe?” He started digging for his wallet. Dennis slid slowly from his seat and stood with his hands on his hips. “Hold it.” He used his trooper’s voice again. “If you think I’m lettin’ you walk out of here high on pills and needin’ sleep, you’re crazy. I don’t want to be scrapin’ you off the highway.” Price paid him no attention. He took a couple of dollars from his wallet and put them on the counter. I didn’t touch them. “Those pills will help keep me awake,” Price said. “Once I get on the road, I’ll be fine.” “Fella, I wouldn’t let you go if it was high noon and not a cloud in the sky. I sure as hell don’t want to clean up after the accident you’re gonna have. Now, why don’t you come along to the Holiday Inn and—” Price laughed grimly. “Mr. Trooper, the last place you want me staying is at a motel.” He cocked his head to one side. “I was in a motel in Florida a couple of nights ago, and I think I left my room a little untidy. Step aside and let me pass.” “A motel in Florida?” Dennis nervously licked his lower lip. “What the hell you talkin’ about?” “Nightmares and reality, Mr. Trooper. The point where they cross. A couple of nights ago, they crossed at a motel. I wasn’t going to let myself sleep. I was just going to rest for a little while, but I didn’t know they’d come so fast.” A mocking smile played at the edges of his mouth, but his eyes were tortured. “You don’t want me staying at that Holiday Inn, Mr. Trooper. You really don’t. Now, step aside.” I saw Dennis’ hand settle on the butt of his revolver. His fingers unsnapped the fold of leather that secured the gun in the holster. I stared at him numbly. My God, I thought. What’s goin’ on? My heart had started pounding so hard I was sure everybody could hear it. Ray and Lindy were watching, and Cheryl was backing away behind the counter. Price and Dennis faced each other for a moment, as the rain whipped against the windows and thunder boomed like shellfire. Then Price sighed, as if resigning himself to something. He said, “I think I want a T-bone steak. Extra rare. How ’bout it?” He looked at me. “A steak?” My voice was shaking. “We don’t have any T-bone—” Price’s gaze shifted to the counter right in front of me. I heard a sizzle. The aroma of cooking meat drifted up to me. “Oh . . . wow,” Cheryl whispered. A large T-bone steak lay on the countertop, pink and oozing blood. You could’ve fanned a menu in my face and I would’ve keeled over. Wisps of smoke were rising from the steak. The steak began to fade, until it was only an outline on the counter. The lines of oozing blood vanished. After the mirage was gone, I could still smell the meat—and that’s how I knew I wasn’t crazy. Dennis’ mouth hung open. Ray had stood up from the booth to look, and his wife’s face was the color of spoiled milk. The whole world seemed to be balanced on a point of silence—until the wail of the wind jarred me back to my senses. “I’m getting good at it,” Price said softly. “I’m getting very, very good. Didn’t start happening to me until about a year ago. I’ve found four other ’Nam vets who can do the same thing. What’s in your head comes true—as simple as that. Of course, the images only last for a few seconds—as long as I’m awake, I mean. I’ve found out that those other men were drenched by a chemical spray we called Howdy Doody—because it made you stiffen up and jerk like you were hanging on

24 strings. I got hit with it near Khe Sahn. That shit almost suffocated me. It felt like black tar, and it burned the land down to a paved parking lot.” He stared at Dennis. “You don’t want me around here, Mr. Trooper. Not with the body count I’ve still got in my head.” “You . . . were at . . . that motel, near Daytona Beach?” Price closed his eyes. A vein had begun beating at his right temple, royal blue against the pallor of his flesh. “Oh, Jesus,” he whispered. “I fell asleep, and I couldn’t wake myself up. I was having the nightmare. The same one. I was locked in it, and I was trying to scream myself awake.” He shuddered, and two tears ran slowly down his cheeks. “Oh,” he said, and flinched as if remembering something horrible. “They . . . they were coming through the door when I woke up. Tearing the door right off its hinges. I woke up . . . just as one of them was pointing his rifle at me. And I saw his face. I saw his muddy, misshapen face.” His eyes suddenly jerked open. “I didn’t know they’d come so fast.” “Who?” I asked him. “Who came so fast?” “The Nightcrawlers,” Price said, his face devoid of expression, masklike. “Dear God . . . maybe if I’d stayed asleep a second more. But I ran again, and I left those people dead in that motel.” “You’re gonna come with me.” Dennis started pulling his gun from the holster. Price’s head snapped toward him. “I don’t know what kinda fool game you’re—” He stopped, staring at the gun he held. It wasn’t a gun anymore. It was an oozing mass of hot rubber. Dennis cried out and slung the thing from his hand. The molten mess hit the floor with a pulpy splat. “I’m leaving now.” Price’s voice was calm. “Thank you for the coffee.” He walked past Dennis, toward the door. Dennis grasped a bottle of ketchup from the counter. Cheryl cried out, “Don’t!” but it was too late. Dennis was already swinging the bottle. It hit the back of Price’s skull and burst open, spewing ketchup everywhere. Price staggered forward, his knees buckling. When he went down, his skull hit the floor with a noise like a watermelon being dropped. His body began jerking involuntarily. “Got him!” Dennis shouted triumphantly. “Got that crazy bastard, didn’t I?” Lindy was holding the little girl in her arms. The boy craned his neck to see. Ray said nervously, “You didn’t kill him, did you?” “He’s not dead,” I told him. I looked over at the gun; it was solid again. Dennis scooped it up and aimed it at Price, whose body continued to jerk. Just like Howdy Doody, I thought. Then Price stopped moving. “He’s dead!” Cheryl’s voice was near-frantic. “Oh God, you killed him, Dennis!” Dennis prodded the body with the toe of his boot, then bent down. “Naw. His eyes are movin’ back and forth behind the lids.” Dennis touched his wrist to check the pulse, then abruptly pulled his own hand away. “Jesus Christ! He’s as cold as a meat locker!” He took Price’s pulse and whistled. “Goin’ like a racehorse at the Derby.” I touched the place on the counter where the mirage steak had been. My fingers came away slightly greasy, and I could smell the cooked meat on them. At that instant Price twitched. Dennis scuttled away from him like a crab. Price made a gasping, choking noise. “What’d he say?” Cheryl asked. “He said something!” “No he didn’t.” Dennis stuck him in the ribs with his pistol. “Come on. Get up.” “Get him out of here,” I said. “I don’t want him—”

25 Cheryl shushed me. “Listen. Can you hear that?” I heard only the roar and crash of the storm. “Don’t you hear it?” she asked me. Her eyes were getting scared and glassy. “Yes!” Ray said. “Yes! Listen!” Then I did hear something, over the noise of the keening wind. It was a distant chuk-chuk- chuk, steadily growing louder and closer. The wind covered the noise for a minute, then it came back: CHUK-CHUK-CHUK, almost overhead. “It’s a helicopter!” Ray peered through the window. “Somebody’s got a helicopter out there!” “Ain’t nobody can fly a chopper in a storm!” Dennis told him. The noise of rotors swelled and faded, swelled and faded . . . and stopped. On the floor, Price shivered and began to contort into a fetal position. His mouth opened; his face twisted in what appeared to be agony. Thunder spoke. A red fireball rose up from the woods across the road and hung lazily in the sky for a few seconds before it descended toward the diner. As it fell, the fireball exploded soundlessly into a white, glaring eye of light that almost blinded me. Price said something in a garbled, panicked voice. His eyes were tightly closed, and he had squeezed up with his arms around his knees. Dennis rose to his feet; he squinted as the eye of light fell toward the parking lot and winked out in a puddle of water. Another fireball floated up from the woods, and again blossomed into painful glare. Dennis turned toward me. “I heard him.” His voice was raspy. “He said . . . ‘Charlie’s in the light.’” As the second flare fell to the ground and illuminated the parking lot, I thought I saw figures crossing the road. They walked stiff-legged, in an eerie cadence. The flare went out. “Wake him up,” I heard myself whisper. “Dennis . . . dear God . . . wake him up.”

Dennis stared stupidly at me, and I started to jump across the counter to get to Price myself. A gout of flame leapt in the parking lot. Sparks marched across the concrete. I shouted, “Get down!” and twisted around to push Cheryl back behind the shelter of the counter. “What the hell—” Dennis said. He didn’t finish. There was the metallic thumping of bullets hitting the gas pumps and the cars. I knew if that gas blew we were all dead. My truck shuddered with the impact of slugs, and I saw the whole thing explode as I ducked behind the counter. Then the windows blew inward with a god-awful crash, and the diner was full of flying glass, swirling wind, and sheets of rain. I heard Lindy scream, and both the kids were crying, and I think I was shouting something myself. The lights had gone out, and the only illumination was the reflection of red neon off the concrete and the glow of the fluorescents over the gas pumps. Bullets whacked into the wall, and crockery shattered as if it had been hit with a hammer. Napkins and sugar packets were flying everywhere. Cheryl was holding on to me as if her fingers were nails sunk to my bones. Her eyes were wide and dazed, and she kept trying to speak. Her mouth was working, but nothing came out. There was another explosion as one of the other cars blew. The whole place shook, and I

26 almost puked with fear. Another hail of bullets hit the wall. They were tracers, and they jumped and ricocheted like white-hot cigarette butts. One of them sang off the edge of a shelf and fell to the floor about three feet away from me. The glowing slug began to fade, like the beer can and the mirage steak. I put my hand out to find it, but all I felt was splinters of glass and crockery. A phantom bullet, I thought. Real enough to cause damage and death—and then gone. You don’t want me around here, Mr. Trooper, Price had warned. Not with the body count I’ve got in my head. The firing stopped. I got free of Cheryl and said, “You stay right here.” Then I looked up over the counter and saw my truck and the station wagon on fire, the flames being whipped by the wind. Rain slapped me across the face as it swept in where the window glass used to be. I saw Price lying still huddled on the floor, with pieces of glass all around him. His hands were clawing the air, and in the flickering red neon his face was contorted, his eyes still closed. The pool of ketchup around his head made him look like his skull had been split open. He was peering into hell, and I averted my eyes before I lost my own mind. Ray and Lindy and the two children had huddled under the table of their booth. The woman was sobbing brokenly. I looked at Dennis, lying a few feet from Price: he was sprawled on his face, and there were four holes punched through his back. It was not ketchup that ran in rivulets around Dennis’ body. His right arm was outflung, and the fingers twitched around the gun he gripped. Another flare sailed up from the woods like a Fourth of July sparkler. When the light brightened, I saw them: at least five figures, maybe more. They were crouched over, coming across the parking lot—but slowly, the speed of nightmares. Their clothes flapped and hung around them, and the flare’s light glanced off their helmets. They were carrying weapons —rifles, I guessed. I couldn’t see their faces, and that was for the best. On the floor, Price moaned. I heard him say “light . . . in the light . . . ” The flare hung right over the diner. And then I knew what was going on. We were in the light. We were all caught in Price’s nightmare, and the Nightcrawlers that Price had left in the mud were fighting the battle again—the same way it had been fought at the Pines Haven Motor Inn. The Nightcrawlers had come back to life, powered by Price’s guilt and whatever that Howdy Doody shit had done to him. And we were in the light, where Charlie had been out in that rice paddy. There was a noise like castanets clicking. Dots of fire arced through the broken windows and thudded into the counter. The stools squealed as they were hit and spun. The cash register rang and the drawer popped open, and then the entire register blew apart and bills and coins scattered. I ducked my head, but a wasp of fire—I don’t, know what, a bit of metal or glass maybe—sliced my left cheek open from ear to upper lip. I fell to the floor behind the counter with blood running down my face. A blast shook the rest of the cups, saucers, plates, and glasses off the shelves. The whole roof buckled inward, throwing loose ceiling tiles, light fixtures, and pieces of metal framework. We were all going to die. I knew it, right then. Those things were going to destroy us. But I thought of the pistol in Dennis’ hand, and of Price lying near the door. If we were caught in Price’s nightmare and the blow from the ketchup bottle had broken something in his skull, then the only way to stop his dream was to kill him. I’m no hero. I was about to piss in my pants, but I knew I was the only one who could move. I

27 jumped up and scrambled over the counter, falling beside Dennis and wrenching at that pistol. Even in death, Dennis had a strong grip. Another blast came, along the wall to my right. The heat of it scorched me, and the shock wave skidded me across the floor through glass and rain and blood. But I had that pistol in my hand. I heard Ray shout, “Look out!” In the doorway, silhouetted by flames, was a skeletal thing wearing muddy green rags. It wore a dented-in helmet and carried a corroded, slime-covered rifle. Its face was gaunt and shadowy, the features hidden behind a scum of rice-paddy muck. It began to lift the rifle to fire at me— slowly, slowly . . . I got the safety off the pistol and fired twice, without aiming. A spark leapt off the helmet as one of the bullets was deflected, but the figure staggered backward and into the conflagration of the station wagon, where it seemed to melt into ooze before it vanished. More tracers were coming in. Cheryl’s Volkswagen shuddered, the tires blowing out almost in unison. The state-trooper car was already bullet-riddled and sitting on flats. Another Nightcrawler, this one without a helmet and with slime covering the skull where the hair had been, rose up beyond the window and fired its rifle. I heard the bullet whine past my ear, and as I took aim I saw its bony finger tightening on the trigger again. A skillet flew over my head and hit the thing’s shoulder, spoiling its aim. For an instant the skillet stuck in the Nightcrawler’s body, as if the figure itself was made out of mud. I fired once . . . twice . . . and saw pieces of matter fly from the thing’s chest. What might’ve been a mouth opened in a soundless scream, and the thing slithered out of sight. I looked around. Cheryl was standing behind the counter, weaving on her feet, her face white with shock. “Get down!” I shouted, and she ducked for cover. I crawled to Price, shook him hard. His eyes would not open. “Wake up!” I begged him. “Wake up, damn you!” And then I pressed the barrel of the pistol against Price’s head. Dear God, I didn’t want to kill anybody, but I knew I was going to have to blow the Nightcrawlers right out of his brain. I hesitated—too long. Something smashed into my left collarbone. I heard the bone snap like a broomstick being broken. The force of the shot slid me back against the counter and jammed me between two bullet- pocked stools. I lost the gun, and there was a roaring in my head that deafened me. I don’t know how long I was out. My left arm felt like dead meat. All the cars in the lot were burning, and there was a hole in the diner’s roof that a tractor-trailer truck could’ve dropped through. Rain was sweeping into my face, and when I wiped my eyes clear I saw them, standing over Price. There were eight of them. The two I thought I’d killed were back. They trailed weeds, and their boots and ragged clothes were covered with mud. They stood in silence, staring down at their living comrade. I was too tired to scream. I couldn’t even whimper. I just watched. Price’s hands lifted into the air. He reached for the Nightcrawlers, and then his eyes opened. His pupils were dead white, surrounded by scarlet. “End it,” he whispered. “End it . . . ” One of the Nightcrawlers aimed its rifle and fired. Price jerked. Another Nightcrawler fired, and then they were all firing point-blank into Price’s body. Price thrashed and clutched at his head, but there was no blood; the phantom bullets weren’t hitting him. The Nightcrawlers began to ripple and fade. I saw the flames of the burning cars through their

28 bodies. The figures became transparent, floating in vague outlines. Price had awakened too fast at the Pines Haven Motor Inn, I realized; if he had remained asleep, the creatures of his nightmares would’ve ended it there, at that Florida motel. They were killing him in front of me—or he was allowing them to end it, and I think that’s what he must’ve wanted for a long, long time. He shuddered, his mouth releasing a half-moan, half-sigh. It sounded almost like relief. The Nightcrawlers vanished. Price didn’t move anymore. I saw his face. His eyes were closed, and I think he must’ve found peace at last.

A trucker hauling lumber from Mobile to Birmingham saw the burning cars. I don’t even remember what he looked like. Ray was cut up by glass, but his wife and the kids were okay. Physically, I mean. Mentally, I couldn’t say. Cheryl went into the hospital for a while. I got a postcard from her with the Golden Gate Bridge on the front. She promised she’d write and let me know how she was doing, but I doubt if I’ll ever hear from her. She was the best waitress I ever had, and I wish her luck. The police asked me a thousand questions, and I told the story the same way every time. I found out later that no bullets or shrapnel were ever dug out of the walls or the cars or Dennis’ body—just like in the case of that motel massacre. There was no bullet in me, though my collarbone was snapped clean in two. Price had died of a massive brain hemorrhage. It looked, the police told me, as if it had exploded in his skull. I closed the diner. Farm life is fine. Alma understands, and we don’t talk about it. But I never showed the police what I found, and I don’t know exactly why not. I picked up Price’s wallet in the mess. Behind a picture of a smiling young woman holding a baby there was a folded piece of paper. On that paper were the names of four men. Beside one name, Price had written “Dangerous.” I’ve found four other ’Nam vets who can do the same thing, Price had said. I sit up at night a lot, thinking about that and looking at those names. Those men had gotten a dose of that Howdy Doody shit in a foreign place they hadn’t wanted to be, fighting a war that turned out to be one of those crossroads of nightmare and reality. I’ve changed my mind about ’Nam because I understand now that the worst of the fighting is still going on, in the battlefields of memory. A Yankee who called himself Tompkins came to my house one May morning and flashed me an ID that said he worked for a veterans’ association. He was very soft-spoken and polite, but he had deep-set eyes that were almost black, and he never blinked. He asked me all about Price, seemed real interested in picking my brain of every detail. I told him the police had the story, and I couldn’t add any more to it. Then I turned the tables and asked him about Howdy Doody. He smiled in a puzzled kind of way and said he’d never heard of any chemical defoliant called that. No such thing, he said. Like I say, he was very polite. But I know the shape of a gun tucked into a shoulder holster. Tompkins was wearing one under his seersucker coat. I never could find any veterans’ association that knew anything about him,

29 either. Maybe I should give that list of names to the police. Maybe I will. Or maybe I’ll try to find those four men myself, and try to make some sense out of what’s being hidden. I don’t think Price was evil. No. He was just scared, and who can blame a man for running from his own nightmares? I like to believe that, in the end, Price had the courage to face the Nightcrawlers, and in committing suicide he saved our lives. The newspapers, of course, never got the real story. They called Price a ’Nam vet who’d gone crazy, killed six people in a Florida motel, and then killed a state trooper in a shoot-out at Big Bob’s diner and gas stop. But I know where Price is buried. They sell little American flags at the five-and-dime in Mobile. I’m alive, and I can spare the change. And then I’ve got to find out how much courage I have.

Robert McCammon is a New York Times bestselling author and World Fantasy award winner. He is the author of twenty-one books, among them the novels Boy's Life, Swan Song, and The Five. He has won numerous awards, including the French Grand Prize of the Imagination Award for Best Foreign Novel for The Wolf's Hour. His novel The Queen Of Bedlam was nominated for the 2008 Thriller Award, and he has been published in dozens of languages around the world. He won the Bram Stoker Award for his novels Swan Song (1987), Mine (1990) and Boy's Life (1991). McCammon is currently writing a series of ten books centered around a young detective named Matthew Corbett in colonial New York in the early 1700s. The third in that series, Mister Slaughter, was published early in 2010 and the fourth, The Providence Rider, in 2012. He recently completed the fifth in the Corbett series, titled The River Of Souls, and is currently working on a large-scope science-fiction/horror novel.

30 All My Princes Are Gone Jennifer Giesbrecht

When the world was young, it was filled with monsters.

II.

He was born from the sky and I was made from the earth. I was shaped from black mud into a convex structure of dark space and hard dips. The brunt of two thick palms around my waist made a place for them to fit comfortably later. The inside of my thighs were dimpled with thumb marks; two, where he pressed just deep enough to feel the vein throb. Deep enough that my husband could trace the pulse when he pulled my legs apart. Our first child was born like this. He was born swathed in mud, his heartbeat a delicate thing that beat down the walls of his ribcage like desperation. His father held him up by one leg, crushing his ankle until the soft child-flesh bubbled up around his angry fist and turned bone white. On his tiny foot were four black claws. In his mouth, teeth that could shear; his head bore a wolf’s coarse fur to cradle him from the wind’s chill. I had given him these gifts. I had birthed him the best I could. “This is an animal,” my husband said. I asked him: “Why shouldn’t our sons have teeth and claws?” “For the same reason our daughters should not,” said he. And then he struck my child’s head against a rock and came to embrace me with his bloody hands. He marked the day with two slick handprints at the base of my spine.

III.

All of my daughters were born with teeth.

IV.

My first daughters were born together, a bloody tangle of smooth rolls, boneless fingers tugging at each other’s fat, grasping for purchase. When first I saw them I thought of two goatskins filled with water—flabby things that would change shape and burst if you held them too tightly. The first ones hid their teeth. We were not yet timid, but we were careful. Ishtar’s tooth was in her heart, and Ereškigal’s in her mind. They were every star in my sky: the brightest, the strongest, the swiftest of all my children. Ereškigal learned to be subtle early; she crawled back into the womb when she was grown enough, making her kingdom in a cradle of dirt where our power is strongest and her tooth would always be hidden. Ishtar wanted for conflict and walked beneath my husband’s sun. Ishtar wanted for the fear in a man’s eye when she cut open her chest between the second and third rib and twisted free a sharpened fang. She wanted for the way it glistened in the light. “You thought me a soft creature,” she would hiss, “You thought me dull of tooth. You thought

31 me sweet of tongue. I am an eater of meat. I crave the taste of metal.” To Ereškigal she would brag, “Weren’t they surprised.”

My husband’s new wife was born from his flesh and all of their children were born toothless.

VI.

“There is no need,” she said to me. “This world is soft,” she said. “It is soft, as fruit is soft. We don’t need fangs to taste its juice.” The way her thumb carved a shallow bruise into the fruit reminded me of my son’s head. I curled my nails against her knee and leaned over her; I licked the tangy juice from the groove beneath her lips. I found the dimpled flesh inside her thighs and rested my thumbs there, pierced the vein with loving precision and watched her eyes go black. Listened to the keening noise that fluttered inside her throat. But when I licked the tangy blood from the groove beneath my thumb, she made no sounds.

VII.

“Ishtar is careless,” Ereškigal said to me, “Ishtar is salacious. Ishtar is unsubtle. When Ishtar speaks, I claw my ears raw and bloody. Ishtar would war on mortal men. She would have them war upon each other for her amusement.” Ereškigal slept inside my ribcage and whispered such things directly into the thin skin of my lungs. “What would you have us do?” I asked, “In Ishtar’s stead, would you have us hide?” “No,” Ereškigal replied, “I have no interest in Adam’s world. I would have us do nothing at all. I would sleep until they were all dead and their rotting flesh made a blanket of filth for me to wash my feet in. They will not last.”

VIII.

So I put a tooth into the fruit.

IX.

When he found out what I had done, my husband came for me. He came for me with a hundred of his soft sons and a hundred of their spear-teeth to pierce the places where my flesh had grown hard and thorny. They pried the plates of bone and hair from my belly and found where the flesh was stretched taut over my bloated womb, spongy thin and quivering like the membrane of an egg. I lay in the dirt and laughed as my skin burst and the black blood bubbled out of me—bog-thick, sharp on the tongue—and washed over their feet.

32 X.

For I am the mother of monsters and when they split me open, weren’t they surprised.

XI.

My monsters did not hide their teeth. A tooth in the eye would turn a man to stone, feet first and then his veins. It would feel like a hard wedge of metal running along the length of his arteries, like a blunted knife sawing at the place beneath his knee. A tooth in the eye would leave Adam’s sons hollow, with dust-filled hearts. A tooth for her tongue would thirst for light and blood. She would ask, “Which does a man need more?” Adam’s sons will always choose light. A tooth in her hand would make her a trickster. She would hold it out for Adam’s sons and they would grab for her eagerly. They would make a pact with her and tear each other to strips for bloody gold. They would not see that her face was a beast’s. A tooth in her belly would spawn sons with scales and a crocodile’s maw. It would spawn sons with a deep and horrible hunger for pale flesh. A tooth in the belly would give her a hunger to swallow the world whole.

XII.

Be careless, my daughters. Be salacious. Be unsubtle. When you speak let the world claw itself bloody.

XIII.

When my womb was empty, Adam and his sons peeled the rest from me. They took the entire length of my mud skin and stripped my bones bare. “No more monsters from your poison womb,” my husband said. “From your corpse I will grow wheat to feed my children.” He took my skin and stretched it over the world like the rind of an orange.

XIV.

Ereškigal wished to sleep. She went to Ishtar and said to her, “Our mother has been killed. Our father has fed her body to his sons.” “Then I will eat his sons,” Ishtar replied. “Then you will be killed as well, and your heart will be used as kindling for their sun.” “Then I will eat their sun,” Ishtar replied. “You will burn from the inside and never stop burning.” “Then I will eat myself,” Ishtar replied. “Sister,” Ereškigal said. “Have you ever seen my tooth?”

33 “No,” Ishtar replied, “You hide it away as if you are ashamed. You would bow to Adam’s sons. You would allow them to tame our savage world as you have been tamed. You were born tamed.” Ereškigal reached behind her eye. She found the place in her skull where she hid her tooth and twisted it free with two pointed fingers. She held it up to the light and wanted for the fear in her sister’s eyes when she placed it between her lips. “A disease of the feet against your feet,” she said, and Ishtar’s feet curled into clubs and she fell to the ground. “A disease of the hand against your hands,” she said, and Ishtar’s fingers withered to ribbons. “A disease of the eye against your eyes,” she said, and Ishtar’s eyes turned black and wept blood. “A disease of the mouth against your mouth,” she said, and Ishtar fell silent. Ereškigal stroked her sister’s hair and cleaned the blood from her face. “We will sleep,” she whispered, “We will sleep until their soft bones turn to water. We will wait until their corpses make the earth a throne.”

XVI.

All my princes are gone. But my daughters. Oh, my daughters.

Jennifer Giesbrecht is a native of Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she is earning a degree in History and Methodology. She currently volunteers her talent as a dramaturge at a local theater company. This is her debut publication.

34 Lost Souls Clive Barker

Everything the blind woman had told Harry she’d seen was undeniably real. Whatever inner eye Norma Paine possessed—that extraordinary skill that allowed her to scan the island of Manhattan from the Broadway Bridge to Battery Park and yet not move an inch from her tiny room on Seventy-fifth—that eye was as sharp as any knife juggler’s. Here was the derelict house on Ridge Street, with the smoke stains besmirching the brick. Here was the dead dog that she’d described, lying on the sidewalk as though asleep, but that it lacked half its head. Here too, if Norma was to be believed, was the demon that Harry had come in search of: the shy and sublimely malignant Cha’Chat. The house was not, Harry thought, a likely place for a desperado of Cha’Chat’s elevation to be in residence. Though the infernal brethren could be a loutish lot, to be certain, it was Christian propaganda which sold them as dwellers in excrement and ice. The escaped demon was more likely to be downing fly eggs and vodka at the Waldorf-Astoria than concealing itself amongst such wretchedness. But Harry had gone to the blind clairvoyant in desperation, having failed to locate Cha’Chat by any means conventionally available to a private eye such as himself. He was, he had admitted to her, responsible for the fact that the demon was loose at all. It seemed he’d never learned, in his all too frequent encounters with the Gulf and its progeny, that Hell possessed a genius for deceit. Why else had he believed in the child that had tottered into view just as he’d leveled his gun at Cha’Chat?—A child, of course, which had evaporated into a cloud of tainted air as soon as the diversion was redundant and the demon had made its escape. Now, after almost three weeks of vain pursuit, it was almost Christmas in New York; season of goodwill and suicide. Streets thronged; the air like salt in wounds; Mammon in glory. A more perfect playground for Cha’Chat’s despite could scarcely be imagined. Harry had to find the demon quickly, before it did serious damage; find it and return it to the pit from which it had come. In extremis he would even use the binding syllables which the late Father Hesse had vouchsafed to him once, accompanying them with such dire warnings that Harry had never even written them down. Whatever it took. Just as long as Cha’Chat didn’t see Christmas Day this side of the Schism. It seemed to be colder inside the house on Ridge Street than out. Harry could feel the chill creep through both pairs of socks and start to numb his feet. He was making his way along the second landing when he heard the sigh. He turned, fully expecting to see Cha’Chat standing there, its eye cluster looking a dozen ways at once, its cropped fur rippling. But no. Instead a young woman stood at the end of the corridor. Her undernourished features suggested Puerto Rican extraction, but that—and the fact that she was heavily pregnant—was all Harry had time to grasp before she hurried away down the stairs. Listening to the girl descend, Harry knew that Norma had been wrong. If Cha’Chat had been here, such a perfect victim would not have been allowed to escape with her eyes in her head. The demon wasn’t here. Which left the rest of Manhattan to search.

The night before, something very peculiar had happened to Eddie Axel. It had begun with his staggering out of his favorite bar, which was six blocks from the grocery store he owned on Third

35 Avenue. He was drunk, and happy; and with reason. Today he had reached the age of fifty-five. He had married three times in those years; he had sired four legitimate children and a handful of bastards; and—perhaps most significantly—he’d made Axel’s Superette a highly lucrative business. All was well with the world. But Jesus, it was chilly! No chance, on a night threatening a second Ice Age, of finding a cab. He would have to walk home. He’d got maybe half a block, however, when—miracle of miracles—a cab did indeed cruise by. He’d flagged it down, eased himself in, and the weird times had begun. For one, the driver knew his name. “Home, Mr. Axel?” he’d said. Eddie hadn’t questioned the godsend. Merely mumbled, “Yes,” and assumed this was a birthday treat, courtesy of someone back at the bar. Perhaps his eyes had flickered closed; perhaps he’d even slept. Whatever, the next thing he knew the cab was driving at some speed through streets he didn’t recognize. He stirred himself from his doze. This was the Village, surely; an area Eddie kept clear of. His neighborhood was the high Nineties, close to the store. Not for him the decadence of the Village, where a shop sign offered “Ear piercing. With or without pain” and young men with suspicious hips lingered in doorways. “This isn’t the right direction,” he said, rapping on the Perspex between him and the driver. There was no word of apology or explanation forthcoming, however, until the cab made a turn toward the river, drawing up in a street of warehouses, and the ride was over. “This is your stop,” said the chauffeur. Eddie didn’t need a more explicit invitation to disembark. As he hauled himself out the cabbie pointed to the murk of an empty lot between two benighted warehouses. “She’s been waiting for you,” he said, and drove away. Eddie was left alone on the sidewalk. Common sense counseled a swift retreat, but what now caught his eye glued him to the spot. There she stood—the woman of whom the cabbie had spoken—and she was the most obese creature Eddie had ever set his sight upon. She had more chins than fingers, and her fat, which threatened at every place to spill from the light summer dress she wore, gleamed with either oil or sweat. “Eddie,” she said. Everybody seemed to know his name tonight. As she moved toward him, tides moved in the fat of her torso and along her limbs. “Who are you?” Eddie was about to inquire, but the words died when he realized the obesity’s feet weren’t touching the ground. She was floating. Had Eddie been sober he might well have taken his cue then and fled, but the drink in his system mellowed his trepidation. He stayed put. “Eddie,” she said. “Dear Eddie. I have some good news and some bad news. Which would you like first?” Eddie pondered this one for a moment. “The good,” he concluded. “You’re going to die tomorrow,” came the reply, accompanied by the tiniest of smiles. “That’s good?” he said. “Paradise awaits your immortal soul . . . ” she murmured. “Isn’t that a joy?” “So what’s the bad news?” She plunged her stubby-fingered hand into the crevasse between her gleaming tits. There came a little squeal of complaint, and she drew something out of hiding. It was a cross between a runty gecko and a sick rat, possessing the least fetching qualities of both. Its pitiful limbs pedaled at the

36 air as she held it up for Eddie’s perusal. “This,” she said, “is your immortal soul.” She was right, thought Eddie: the news was not good. “Yes,” she said. “It’s a pathetic sight, isn’t it?” The soul drooled and squirmed as she went on. “It’s undernourished. It’s weak to the point of expiring altogether. And why?” She didn’t give Eddie a chance to reply. “A paucity of good works . . . ” Eddie’s teeth had begun to chatter. “What am I supposed to do about it?” he asked. “You’ve got a little breath left. You must compensate for a lifetime of rampant profiteering—” “I don’t follow.” “Tomorrow, turn Axel’s Superette into a Temple of Charity, and you may yet put some meat on your soul’s bones.” She had begun to ascend, Eddie noticed. In the darkness above her, there was sad, sad music, which now wrapped her up in minor chords until she was entirely eclipsed.

The girl had gone by the time Harry reached the street. So had the dead dog. At a loss for options, he trudged back to Norma Paine’s apartment, more for the company than the satisfaction of telling her she had been wrong. “I’m never wrong,” she told him over the din of the five televisions and as many radios that she played perpetually. The cacophony was, she claimed, the only sure way to keep those of the spirit world from incessantly intruding upon her privacy: the babble distressed them. “I saw power in that house on Ridge Street,” she told Harry, “sure as shit.” Harry was about to argue when an image on one of the screens caught his eye. An outside news broadcast pictured a reporter standing on a sidewalk across the street from a store (“Axel’s Superette,” the sign read) from which bodies were being removed. “What is it?” Norma demanded. “Looks like a bomb went off,” Harry replied, trying to trace the reporter’s voice through the din of the various stations. “Turn up the sound,” said Norma. “I like a disaster.” It was not a bomb that had wrought such destruction, it emerged, but a riot. In the middle of the morning a fight had begun in the packed grocery store; nobody quite knew why. It had rapidly escalated into a bloodbath. A conservative estimate put the death toll at thirty, with twice as many injured. The report, with its talk of a spontaneous eruption of violence, gave fuel to a terrible suspicion in Harry. “Cha’Chat . . . ” he murmured. Despite the noise in the little room, Norma heard him speak. “What makes you so sure?” she said. Harry didn’t reply. He was listening to the reporter’s recapitulation of the events, hoping to catch the location of Axel’s Superette. And there it was. Third Avenue, between Ninety-fourth and Ninety-fifth. “Keep smiling,” he said to Norma, and left her to her brandy and the dead gossiping in the bathroom.

Linda had gone back to the house on Ridge Street as a last resort, hoping against hope that she’d find Bolo there. He was, she vaguely calculated, the likeliest candidate for father of the child she carried, but there’d been some strange men in her life at that time; men with eyes that seemed golden in certain lights; men with sudden, joyless smiles. Anyway, Bolo hadn’t been at the house,

37 and here she was—as she’d known she’d be all along-alone. All she could hope to do was lie down and die. But there was death and death. There was that extinction she prayed for nightly, to fall asleep and have the cold claim her by degrees; and there was that other death, the one she saw whenever fatigue drew her lids down. A death that had neither dignity in the going nor hope of a Hereafter; a death brought by a man in a gray suit whose face sometimes resembled a half-familiar saint, and sometimes a wall of rotting plaster. Begging as she went, she made her way uptown toward Times Square. Here, amongst the traffic of consumers, she felt safe for a while. Finding a little deli, she ordered eggs and coffee, calculating the meal so that it just fell within the begged sum. The food stirred the baby. She felt it turn in its slumber, close now to waking. Maybe she should fight on a while longer, she thought. If not for her sake, for that of the child. She lingered at the table, turning the problem over, until the mutterings of the proprietor shamed her out onto the street again. It was late afternoon, and the weather was worsening. A woman was singing nearby, in Italian; some tragic aria. Tears close, Linda turned from the pain the song carried, and set off again in no particular direction. As the crowd consumed her, a man in a gray suit slipped away from the audience that had gathered around the street-corner diva, sending the youth he was with ahead through the throng to be certain they didn’t lose their quarry. Marchetti regretted having to forsake the show. The singing much amused him. Her voice, long ago drowned in alcohol, was repeatedly that vital semitone shy of its intended target—a perfect testament to imperfectibility—rendering Verdi’s high art laughable even as it came within sight of transcendence. He would have to come back here when the beast had been dispatched. Listening to that spoiled ecstasy brought him closer to tears than he’d been for months; and he liked to weep.

Harry stood across Third Avenue from Axel’s Superette and watched the watchers. They had gathered in their hundreds in the chill of the deepening night, to see what could be seen; nor were they disappointed. The bodies kept coming out: in bags, in bundles; there was even something in a bucket. “Does anybody know exactly what happened?” Harry asked his fellow spectators. A man turned, his face ruddy with the cold. “The guy who ran the place decided to give the stuff away,” he said, grinning at this absurdity. “And the store was fuckin’ swamped. Someone got killed in the crush—” “I heard the trouble started over a can of meat,” another offered. “Somebody got beaten to death with a can of meat.” This rumor was contested by a number of others; all had versions of events. Harry was about to try and sort fact from fiction when an exchange to his right diverted him. A boy of nine or ten had buttonholed a companion. “Did you smell her?” he wanted to know. The other nodded vigorously. “Gross, huh?” the first ventured. “Smelled better shit,” came the reply, and the two dissolved into conspiratorial laughter. Harry looked across at the object of their mirth. A huge overweight woman, underdressed for the season, stood on the periphery of the crowd and watched the disaster scene with tiny, glittering eyes. Harry had forgotten the questions he was going to ask the watchers. What he remembered,

38 clear as yesterday, was the way his dreams conjured the infernal brethren. It wasn’t their curses he recalled, nor even the deformities they paraded: it was the smell off them. Of burning hair and halitosis; of veal left to rot in the sun. Ignoring the debate around him, he started in the direction of the woman. She saw him coming, the rolls of fat at her neck furrowing as she glanced across at him. It was Cha’Chat, of that Harry had no doubt. And to prove the point, the demon took off at a run, the limbs and prodigious buttocks stirred to a fandango with every step. By the time Harry had cleared his way through the crowd the demon was already turning the corner into Ninety-fifth Street, but its stolen body was not designed for speed, and Harry rapidly made up the distance between them. The lamps were out in several places along the street, and when he finally snatched at the demon, and heard the sound of tearing, the gloom disguised the vile truth for fully five seconds until he realized that Cha’Chat had somehow sloughed off its usurped flesh, leaving Harry holding a great coat of ectoplasm, which was already melting like overripe cheese. The demon, its burden shed, was away; slim as hope and twice as slippery. Harry dropped the coat of filth and gave chase, shouting Hesse’s syllables as he did so. Surprisingly, Cha’Chat stopped in its tracks, and turned to Harry. The eyes looked all ways but Heavenward; the mouth was wide and attempting laughter. It sounded like someone vomiting down an elevator shaft. “Words, D’Amour?” it said, mocking Hesse’s syllables. “You think I can be stopped with words?” “No,” said Harry, and blew a hole in Cha’Chat’s abdomen before the demon’s many eyes had even found the gun. “Bastard!” it wailed, “Cocksucker!” and fell to the ground, blood the color of piss throbbing from the hole. Harry sauntered down the street to where it lay. It was almost impossible to slay a demon of Cha’Chat’s elevation with bullets; but a scar was shame enough amongst their clan. Two, almost unbearable. “Don’t,” it begged when he pointed the gun at its head. “Not the face.” “Give me one good reason why not.” “You’ll need the bullets,” came the reply. Harry had expected bargains and threats. This answer silenced him. “There’s something going to get loose tonight, D’Amour,” Cha’Chat said. The blood that was pooling around it had begun to thicken and grow milky, like melted wax. “Something wilder than me.” “Name it,” said Harry. The demon grinned. “Who knows?” it said. “It’s a strange season, isn’t it? Long nights. Clear skies. Things get born on nights like this, don’t you find?” “Where?” said Harry, pressing the gun to Cha’Chat’s nose. “You’re a bully, D’Amour,” it said reprovingly. “You know that?” “Tell me . . . ” The thing’s eyes grew darker; its face seemed to blur. “South of here, I’d say . . . ” it replied. “A hotel . . . ” The tone of its voice was changing subtly; the features losing their solidity. Harry’s trigger finger itched to give the damned thing a wound that would keep it from a mirror for life, but it was still talking, and he couldn’t afford to interrupt its flow. “. . . on Forty-fourth,” it said. “Between Sixth . . . Sixth and Broadway.” The voice was indisputably feminine now. “Blue blinds,” it murmured. “I can see blue blinds . . . ” As it spoke the last vestiges of its true features fled, and suddenly it was Norma who was

39 bleeding on the sidewalk at Harry’s feet. “You wouldn’t shoot an old lady, would you?” she piped up. The trick lasted seconds only, but Harry’s hesitation was all that Cha’Chat needed to fold itself between one plane and the next, and flit. He’d lost the creature, for the second time in a month. And to add discomfort to distress, it had begun to snow. The small hotel that Cha’Chat had described had seen better years; even the light that burned in the lobby seemed to tremble on the brink of expiring. There was nobody at the desk. Harry was about to start up the stairs when a young man whose pate was shaved as bald as an egg, but for a single kiss curl that was oiled to his scalp, stepped out of the gloom and took hold of his arm. “There’s nobody here,” he informed Harry. In better days Harry might have cracked the egg open with his bare fists, and enjoyed doing so. Tonight he guessed he would come off the worse. So he simply said, “Well, I’ll find another hotel then, eh?” Kiss Curl seemed placated; the grip relaxed. In the next instant Harry’s hand found his gun, and the gun found Kiss Curl’s chin. An expression of bewilderment crossed the boy’s face as he fell back against the wall, spitting blood. As Harry started up the stairs, he heard the youth yell, “Darrieux!” from below. Neither the shout nor the sound of the struggle had roused any response from the rooms. The place was empty. It had been elected, Harry began to comprehend, for some purpose other than hostelry. As he started along the landing a woman’s cry, begun but never finished, came to meet him. He stopped dead. Kiss Curl was coming up the stairs behind him two or three at a time; ahead, someone was dying. This couldn’t end well, Harry suspected. Then the door at the end of the corridor opened, and suspicion became plain fact. A man in a gray suit was standing on the threshold, skinning off a pair of bloodied surgical gloves. Harry knew him vaguely; indeed had begun to sense a terrible pattern in all of this from the moment he’d heard Kiss Curl call his employer’s name. This was Darrieux Marchetti; also called the Cankerist; one of the whispered order of theological assassins whose directives came from Rome, or Hell, or both. “D’Amour,” he said. Harry had to fight the urge to be flattered that he had been remembered. “What happened here?” he demanded to know, taking a step toward the open door. “Private business,” the Cankerist insisted. “Please, no closer.” Candles burned in the little room, and by their generous light, Harry could see the bodies laid out on the bare bed. The woman from the house on Ridge Street, and her child. Both had been dispatched with Roman efficiency. “She protested,” said Marchetti, not overly concerned that Harry was viewing the results of his handiwork. “All I needed was the child.” “What was it?” Harry demanded. “A demon?” Marchetti shrugged. “We’ll never know,” he said. “But at this time of year there’s usually something that tries to get in under the wire. We like to be safe rather than sorry. Besides, there are those—I number myself amongst them—that believe there is such a thing as a surfeit of Messiahs —” “Messiahs?” said Harry. He looked again at the tiny body. “There was power there, I suspect,” said Marchetti. “But it could have gone either way. Be

40 thankful, D’Amour. Your world isn’t ready for revelation.” He looked past Harry to the youth, who was at the top of the stairs. “Patrice. Be an angel, will you, bring the car over? I’m late for Mass.” He threw the gloves back onto the bed. “You’re not above the law,” said Harry. “Oh please,” the Cankerist protested. “Let’s have no nonsense. It’s too late at night.” Harry felt a sharp pain at the base of his skull, and a trace of heat where blood was running. “Patrice thinks you should go home, D’Amour. And so do I.” The knife point was pressed a little deeper. “Yes?” said Marchetti. “Yes,” said Harry.

“He was here,” said Norma, when Harry called back at the house. “Who?” “Eddie Axel; of Axel’s Superette. He came through, clear as daylight.” “Dead?” “Of course dead. He killed himself in his cell. Asked me if I’d seen his soul.” “And what did you say?” “I’m a telephonist, Harry; I just make the connections. I don’t pretend to understand the metaphysics.” She picked up the bottle of brandy Harry had set on the table beside her chair. “How sweet of you,” she said. “Sit down. Drink.” “Another time, Norma. When I’m not so tired.” He went to the door. “By the way,” he said. “You were right. There was something on Ridge Street . . . ” “Where is it now?” “Gone . . . home.” “And Cha’Chat?” “Still out there somewhere. In a foul temper . . . ” “Manhattan’s seen worse, Harry.” It was little consolation, but Harry muttered his agreement as he closed the door. The snow was coming on more heavily all the time. He stood on the step and watched the way the flakes spiraled in the lamplight. No two, he had read somewhere, were ever alike. When such variety was available to the humble snowflake, could he be surprised that events had such unpredictable faces? Each moment was its own master, he mused, as he put his head between the blizzard’s teeth, and he would have to take whatever comfort he could find in the knowledge that between this chilly hour and dawn there were innumerable such moments—blind maybe, and wild and hungry— but all at least eager to be born.

Clive Barker is probably best known as the writer and director of the Hellraiser saga, which was based on his novella “The Hellbound Heart.” He has written and directed other films as well, such as Lord of Illusions and Nightbreed. Other works of his have been adapted to film by others, such as his short story “The Forbidden,” which was made into the film Candyman. In addition to his work in Hollywood, he is the best-selling, award-winning author of many novels, such as The Damnation Game, Weaveworld, Imajica, The Thief of Always, and Sacrament. His most recent is Absolute Midnight. His landmark short story collections, known

41 collectively as the Books of Blood, won him a World Fantasy Award and established his reputation as a master of horror. The Horror Writers Association recently named him the recipient of the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement.

42 The H Word: Nightmare Horror Richard Gavin

The horror audience runs a wide spectrum, but at either end are two extremes. These polarities are divided not so much by conflicting interests as by degree of morbidity. At one end we have people who enjoy horror where the supernatural mayhem is kept in check. Their outré quotient is relatively slim. The internal logic of a horror story must hew closely with everyday life. They take their horror as a teetotaller does honey; a mere tincture to tease the palate. On the opposite extreme is a group that regards the whole phantasmagoria of horror like an all- you-can-eat banquet. Their hunger for gruesome delicacies is insatiable. Never ones to heed the “No Trespassing” signs that have been hammered into place for their protection, these ghouls seem only too willing to step over the barbed wire fence to creep through that taboo land. And the more littered with bones it is, the more grandiose the campfire legends are surrounding the place, the happier they are. To them there is nothing more gratifying than watching the fixed laws of reason swallowed up by shadowy forces. There exists a particular type of horror that services this cabal. Not a subgenre per se, but perhaps a different “level” of horror fiction: Nightmare Horror. By “Nightmare Horror” I do not necessarily mean stories that involve characters who experience bad dreams or stumble about in a feverish haze. (Although there are certainly noble examples of those: See H.P. Lovecraft’s “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” or Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla.”) No, Nightmare Horror is any work so steeped in the uncanny and the darksome that it manages to pierce through our logical safeguards, providing us with an experience akin to our most intense nightmares. In most horror stories, the great Menace-From-Beyond sneaks into a world we recognize and are desperately afraid to see contaminated. And because some—perhaps most—readers fear a dissolution of consensus reality, there is a general preference for stories where at least one character takes up the good fight to protect an established way of life. Hence the derivative plots of pedestrian horror fiction, where the only conflict is cardboard protagonists fending off paper tigers of evil. Nightmare Horror, by contrast, cares nothing for the status quo. It defiantly snubs not just the rules of waking reality, but also the guidelines that writers customarily draw upon to create “good fiction.” It offers neither postmodern “meta-textual” playfulness nor comic relief (save only for the blackest irony or the most decadent gallows humour). Such a strong concentrate is bound to be toxic to some, ambrosia to others. If most horror truly is the literary equivalent of a roller coaster ride that ends with us being delivered to the same platform we departed from, Nightmare Horror is an elevator to Hades. Its creators offer no upward return. They simply seduce you inside, and once the doors are shut they cut the cable. In these stories even the most banal of objects radiate a numinous energy, and all the gauges we use to test a story’s believability (convincing dialogue, real-world locations, plausible character motivations, etc.) are insidiously turned against the reader. Everything sweats menace. We also find no moral-of-the-story. Nightmare Horror offers neither consolation nor closure. The normality we perpetuate has irretrievably sluiced through the sewer grates at the edges of sanity, washed away by a high tide of resurgent atavisms from a cellar of consciousness. Perhaps one of the main distinguishing traits of Nightmare Horror is its willingness to meet the

43 monstrous on its own terms, rather than employing the monstrous as a convenient metaphor for some all-too-human purpose. The armchair Freudian analyst sheds precious little light here. Any post-reading autopsies will not decipher the “meaning” behind the terrors. Some of our nightmares truly are nothing more than encrypted messages that, once decoded, provide personal insights that can make us better citizens. Other nightmares are simply . . . horrors. No point in trying to shoehorn one of these latter specimens into your self-improvement plan. Its teratisms have no regard for your ambitions. Their true value is simply the experience they offer: that rarefied state of shock and awe when the snug walls soften and the water spins the wrong way down the drain. As Charles Lamb observed in his 1821 essay “Witches and Other Night-Fears”:

“Gorgons and Hydras and Chimeras—dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies—may reproduce themselves in the brains of superstition—but they were there before. They are transcripts, types —the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us at all?”

The most potent works of Nightmare Horror are almost always shorter in length, for in order to sustain a novel-length narrative a writer must dilute the concentrate in order to spread it across a higher page-count. As an author I confess that my own creative drives are more rooted in Nightmare Horror than in any other mode of fiction. I fashion my work to convey images that carry with them a sense of the oneiric. A good number of my stories (or the abnormal images within them, at least) are drawn from my own nightmares. I have never felt the need to analyze my dreams, the lion’s share of which are decidedly Nightside in nature. Instead I pursued prose writing in order to give these dreams a vessel so that others could experience them in some way if they so desired. I believe that my fiction is less manufactured writing as it is reportage. I transcribe what I see and I make no distinction between my waking life impressions and those I experience during slumber. Consciousness, I believe, is a continuum. It is seamless. Its boundaries are only the ones we impose upon it. That being said, I respect the fact that in order to convey my dreams appropriately I must furnish them with a certain degree of narrative context. Now, which is the more important of the two—the nightmare seed or the narrative tools required to tend and hatch it—is a riddle reminiscent of the chicken or the egg. Arguably neither element is strongest on its own. Without some form of traditional narrative arc, however warbled, the nightmare remains a subjective experience. Subtract some shading of the otherworldly and fiction becomes either mimetic or dependent on shock tactics that rarely stimulate anything beyond the gag reflex. So in the end, perhaps Nightmarish Horror is made such by how wide its creators want to rend the veil. For some the mere suggestion that the universe is dark and deep is enough. And so, for them, are the horror authors who administer eeriness with an eyedropper. The rest, for whom too much is never enough, I’m confident that there will always be authors like myself, ones who are always willing to dive headlong into the abyss.

We at Nightmare Magazine like discussions. Please use the comments feature to give us your thoughts on whether the H brand is an albatross or worth holding on to. Print may be dead, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be old school and have a good, old-fashioned letters page.

44 Richard Gavin is regarded as a master of visionary horror fiction in the tradition of Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and H.P. Lovecraft. His work has appeared in The Best Horror of the Year, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the Black Wings anthologies. His books include Charnel Wine, Omens, The Darkly Splendid Realm, and At Fear’s Altar. S.T. Joshi calls Richard Gavin, “one of the bright new stars of contemporary weird fiction.” Gavin has also published criticism in venues such as Dead Reckonings and Rue Morgue, as well as esoteric essays in Starfire Journal. His column “Echoes from Hades,” featuring various Gothic musings, can be found on the acclaimed website “The Teeming Brain.” Richard’s own website is www.richardgavin.net. He lives in Ontario, Canada.

45 Artist Gallery Lena Yuk

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 Artist Spotlight: Lena Yuk Julia Sevin

Soh Yeon Yuk, born in 1988, in Seoul, South Korea, is a Southern California-based artist freelancing in concept art and character design. Find more of her work at lenayuk.com.

You’ve said you have a large, loving family back in South Korea. Why did you move to the U.S., and what do they think of your dark subject matter?

My family used to live in the U.S. until I went to college. However, as you already know, everything doesn’t work out as expected. There were some big family issues and lots of things fell apart. So everyone except for myself moved back to South Korea while I was still in college. Actually, my life was pretty good when I was growing up. I couldn’t ask for a better family. No one in the family looked at me as a weirdo for having weird taste. They always supported me and believed in me even when I was drawing all the violent and creepy stuff.

You’ve also said that you used to want to be a coroner. What happened to that dream? And does it figure into your art at all?

I moved to U.S. when I was in seventh grade, and I barely spoke a word of English. I literally wasn’t even able to read and understand Harry Potter. So obviously studying for the medical path was close to impossible. Basically, I had to let go of my dream and make compromises. I just love the human body in the general sense. How they are structured, how they move, the shapes, texture, the inside and outside. Every single part of the human body is beautiful in my eyes. I think that’s the reason why I draw lots of gory illustrations. Like many other illustrators, I simply like to draw things that I find are beautiful.

Can you name some of your influences?

The Silent Hill video games, Rembrandt, and Michael Hussar.

Do you draw ideas from fiction?

I love old fairy tales. Those stories are so cute, yet always have some extent of creepiness too. I get so much inspiration from the “pretty but creepy” concepts of old fairy tales.

You sing death metal, is that right?

Haha. It’s just a hobby. I sing death metal at karaoke, just for fun and to release my stress.

54 Can you tell me about your Howl’s Moving Castle pieces?

The Howl’s Moving Castle concept art was for a college class project. The project was based on the original Howl’s Moving Castle book with a twist of my own. For fourteen weeks, we were to develop a new set of concept art based on this.

You’re very young and yet you’ve worked professionally in quite a variety of artistic fields, from branding to storyboards and character design. Do you see yourself continuing with the illustration and painting that you’ve established here, or moving on to another creative endeavor?

Simply put, learning new things is fun for me. I’m going to continue what I’m capable of, but while I’m doing that, I also want to try different things that are new to me, such as motion graphics, 3D modeling, packaging, etc.

What are you working on right now?

I’m working on my sketchbook now, and I just started on a new concept art project for my own version of Red Riding Hood.

What is your dream project?

One day, I’d love to work on the concept art for a feature animation, based on my original story.

Originally hailing from Northern California, Julia Sevin is a transplant flourishing in the fecund delta silts of New Orleans. Together with husband RJ Sevin, she owns and edits Creeping Hemlock Press, specializing in limited special editions of genre literature and, most recently, zombie novels. She is an autodidact pixelpusher who spends her days as the art director for a print brokerage, designing branding and print pieces for assorted political bigwigs, which makes her feel like an accomplice in the calculated plunder of America. Under the cover of darkness (like Batman in more ways than she can enumerate), she redeems herself through pro bono design, sordid illustration, and baking the world’s best pies. She is available for contract design/illustration, including book layouts and websites. See more of her work at juliasevin.com or follow her at facebook.com/juliasevindesign.

55 Interview: Joe Hill (Part Two) The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Joe Hill is the author of the horror novels Heart-Shaped Box and Horns, the short story collection 20th Century Ghost, and the graphic novel series Locke & Key from IDW. His latest novel, NOS4A2, is out now. This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the hosts discuss various geeky topics.

[In case you missed it, Part One of our interview with Joe appeared in our July issue, which is available both in our ebook edition and on our website. —Eds.]

In Part One of our interview, you mentioned that you spent three years on this fantasy novel that never got published. Will we ever see that in any form or will you ever go back to epic fantasy?

I might go back to epic fantasy sometime. If I have the right idea, I’ll write anything. The only thing that I won’t write . . . I get asked a lot of times too about if I’ll ever write something that’s more mainstream, that has no element of fantasy or science fiction or horror in it. And I would, if I had the right idea, if I had an idea I was really excited about. The one thing that I won’t abandon is suspense, because I believe passionately in suspense being the engine that keeps the reader turning pages. The reader has to want to know what’s going to happen next. You can’t impose on their time and expect them to be interested in something just because you are interested in it. You have to pull them in with the hooks of suspense, and then keep them on the line. For that reason, I wouldn’t write a story about a retired editor living in Connecticut and dealing with his wife leaving him, and his children experimenting with drugs, and his existential crisis, or whatever. That doesn’t do it for me. Because I don’t see why a reader would necessarily think, “Wow, I have to find out what happens in this.” So with that element, I would totally write something with swords and wizards and dragons and elves darting out of the forest and stuff, I guess.

But that particular one is a total loss, I’m getting.

The thing is the most interesting concepts in The Fear Tree found their way into other stories. The underlying concept of The Fear Tree later became the underlying concept of an incomplete novel called, The Surrealist’s Glass which I started to write as the follow-up to Heart-Shaped Box, but I didn’t finish it because it was a terrible novel. That morphed into Horns, and Horns was my third attempt to make the underlying idea work. Basically the underlying idea was: What if you had a very limited psychic power? What if you could look into someone’s head and see their darkest secrets? Not the good stuff, not the happy memories, but what if you could just open them, and read them for what they hate and what have

56 they done that they’re ashamed of? What if you knew things about other people that the Devil knows about us? So that became the underlying concept of Horns, and in Horns I was finally able to play that idea out, and it seemed dramatically satisfying.

It seems funny that you mentioned your hypothetical story of the editor: it made me think of the first story of yours that I read which was, “Best New Horror,” about a jaded horror editor—

Who has had the divorce and who has the troubled relationship with his—

There’s a bit more to it than that, but—

Right, but the thing is, this editor has published, for years and years, a book of stories called Best New Horror. He’s published these collections, a yearly roundup of the best horror fiction, and he’s gone from being very passionate about the genre to being kind of burned out, but then he discovers this short story called, “Buttonboy: A Love Story,” that’s really upsetting. A really upsetting and terrifying piece of work written by an unknown, and he becomes fascinated by this writer and tries to track him down to acquire this short story for his collection. That turns out to be very difficult and challenging. There are clues that the reader is picking up on that maybe this writer is not someone you would want to find, but the editor is so lost in his obsession that he’s oblivious to it. It’s a bit of a meta story: it’s a horror story that’s also a commentary on horror fiction.

Part of the backstory is that a college professor has published “The Buttonboy” in his college literary magazine, and got a bit of blowback on it from the alumni, and so he’s hoping if this editor anthologized this story it would vindicate him in a way. I was just fascinated by all the ways this story explores how people see the horror field and their mixed feelings toward the editor and society, etc.

It was also at a time when I was very angry about the state of horror fiction. Horror fiction at the moment is in great shape, but there was a period in the early double ohs, in the late nineties, when horror sort of fell into an infatuation with torture porn. The Saw franchise became very big. There was a hit with Hostel. And I find most of that stuff kind of . . . yucky . . . I don’t really dig it, it’s not really my thing. I don’t think it’s really all that effective. Horror is an emotion very closely connected to empathy. Horror doesn’t work until you have characters that you love, and feel emotionally invested in, and then you see them suffer the worst. You’re flinching from it, but you want with all your heart to see them survive, and get out. I think whether you’re looking at the slasher films of the eighties, or the torture porn that came along later, you do see that sometimes horror fails when it brings on characters that are just ten pins for the bad guy to knock down. You have the slasher films from the eighties, you had the jock, the slut, the geek girl, the stoner, and these characters are not allowed to be fully-formed: they’re really just one-dimensional, one- note characters. It’s impossible to feel much of anything for them, and you wind up rooting for

57 Freddy Krueger because he has more personality. So when he wipes them out it becomes funny.

You’ve said you think that horror’s in great shape—

I do!

Do you think anything’s changed in terms of that set-up: if ever a professor were to publish a horror story in a literary magazine that it would still get that sort of hostile reaction?

I think it might receive that reaction if the story happens to be as thoroughly misogynistic as “Buttonboy” is. The editor would probably be right to get a little bit of grief about it. Freedom of speech is not freedom from responsibility. If you pledge yourself to these odious ideas, you can expect to get some blowback on it. I think that, though, if you look at horror cinema, or fantasy cinema, or science fiction, when you look at what’s happening in fiction and in publishing and comics, we’re seeing some great stuff right now. Mama was a terrific film with great leads and great scares and a great sense of atmosphere. Warm Bodies was very funny, with a great lead female character. There’s just been a whole lot of really intelligent genre filmmaking and genre writing. The era of Del Toro and Joss Whedon, with Cabin in the Woods, and the era of Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon, has been very good for people who like genre fiction.

I want to go back to “Buttonboy” for a second. Now I’m going to have to go back and reread, but do you see “Buttonboy” as a nasty story that shouldn’t have been published and shouldn’t be anthologized?

I think it’s torture porn, to a degree. I think the editor of Best New Horror is in a mood to be angry with women, because of his divorce. He’s blind to the underlying red flags in that story. There may be some nice, artistic flourishes in that story, there may be some interesting concepts in that story, but ultimately it’s also a story about female degradation, and it’s a little bit skeevy, and certainly very, very upsetting, and you’re not necessarily inclined to root for the female lead. You sort of enjoy seeing her life melt in her own hands. And while it may be genuinely scary in some ways and may have some clever, artistic flourishes, the lead editor on the story who’s an intelligent and decent man, is nevertheless not in a great place mentally as far as his relationship with the opposite sex goes, and that’s why he falls into this trap. His belief that the story is a masterpiece says more about him than it does about the story, which we only ever get secondhand. We get a summary of the story from his point of view. Our whole impression of that document is very colored by the perspective we’re getting.

Where would you draw that line? There’s certainly female degradation in NOS4A2, right?

To a degree, but I think there’s also male degradation in NOS4A2, and horrifying things happen to men, women, and children. And animals in NOS4A2. It is the nature of the good guys to face terrible pressures and violence and frightening situations. The question is: How are those

58 characters created? Is Vic a cardboard cut-out of a woman, and we’re supposed to enjoy the things she has to endure? Or do we fall in love with her and care about her and feel emotionally invested, and we want to see her fight through? We’re on her side, not the bad guy’s side. The big warning sign is: Are you being asked to enjoy what the bad guy does? Because if you are, I don’t know exactly how I feel about that story. There can be ghoulish, black humor in some of what Charlie Manx does to, say, Hicks in the hospital. There’s occasionally room in fiction for the “just desserts” moment that the awful person receives an awful cosmic punishment. Which we wouldn’t really want to see in real life, but in the safe playground of fiction is okay. I’m thinking of the James Bond film where the bad guy first falls off a crane and drops a hundred and twenty feet. Obviously, every bone in his body would be shattered, but they kept him alive to scream when the crane dropped on him. So you actually get to see him die twice. Within the world of the story, it’s kinda funny in a Three Stooges sort of way. It’s okay: there’s room for that.

In an interview I heard you say something that really struck me, that I’d never heard before. You were saying that what makes The Texas Chainsaw Massacre so scary is not that it is about a madman, but that it makes you feel like it was directed by a madman.

I can’t remember who said that. I think maybe it was Sam Raimi who said that about Tobe Hooper. He was saying the brilliance of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is in persuading you not that it’s a movie about a psychopath, but that it’s a movie directed by a psychopath. That’s not necessarily a bug—that might be a feature, that might be something to strive for. I want the readers to feel like anything could happen. That they are not just on a rollercoaster, but that they are on a rollercoaster in the dark. They don’t know which way they are about to be snapped or hung upside down or thrown. That’s moving the conversation in a different direction. That’s about genre expectations. Another way that genre stories can fail is: Something tragic happens, someone dies, and the people who care about him begin to cry. That’s fair enough, that’s a common reaction, but it’s not always that interesting. If you always go for the expected emotional response, you wind up with characters who are kind of trite and not interesting. The truth is, when you get awful news, lots of people don’t cry. Sometimes people just go numb, or they laugh because it seems so unbelievable to them. It can take a while to process your emotions. In my stories, I am trying to find an emotional response that feels true to that character, but maybe isn’t what you would expect. That’s true of plot developments: I never want to zig if that’s what the readers expecting. I’d rather zag. This goes back to something Joss Whedon said: The storyteller’s job is to figure out what the reader wants the most, and then never give it to them.

I guess how the Tobe Hooper quote connects back to the “Best New Horror” thing in my mind is that I have this conflict because I don’t like torture porn. I don’t like horror stories where the victims are tied to a chair at all, but as a writer, I feel like if the reader knows I don’t like that, knows the story isn’t going to go in that direction, I don’t like that either, because it feels too safe.

59 You don’t want the reader to ever feel safe. You don’t want the audience to ever feel safe. That’s not healthy for them. They’re there to feel unsafe. That’s why they bought the ticket. You’re supposed to feel empathy and understanding for the editor of this series who is a flawed guy, and he has a lot of anger issues, and he’s going through a tough time in his life, but he’s not basically a bad person. You can see from his memories of childhood, falling in love with the fiction of Jack Finney and Ray Bradbury, and going to black-and-white horror films. You can see that his love, in many ways, is very pure and understandable: his love of Vincent-Price-style entertainment and everything. He’s just a guy, like so many people, who’s fallen off track a little bit. He makes this speech at a horror fiction convention about how horror is about caring. Horror fiction when it works is about feeling attached to people. You have a character who’s got to face something monstrous, and you feel invested in them and want them to survive that. The story is a manifesto. It’s supposed to illustrate the principles that this guy is talking about, and, at the same time, there’s a story within a story, and that’s “Buttonboy,” and “Buttonboy” somewhat subverts or perverts my idea about what makes horror work.

I definitely have to go back and reread that story.

Maybe I do. I may have the thing completely wrong. It’s been a while since I’ve read it. Maybe “Buttonboy” is an awesome story.

You mentioned your graphic novel series, Locke & Key, earlier. Do you want to tell us what that’s about, briefly, just for folks reading this who don’t know what that is?

I started Locke & Key right around the time Heart-Shaped Box came out, and it’s finishing up this year. So, me and my collaborator, Gabriel Rodriguez, have been working on it for about five years, and actually Gabe did illustrations for NOS4A2 as well. Me and Gabe are best friends and have a very close working relationship. Locke & Key is about a New England mansion called “Key House,” and it’s filled with impossible keys. And each key unlocks a different door and activates a different power or possibility. There’s one key, for example, that unlocks the Gender Door. If you walk through this door and you’re a boy, you turn into a girl; if you’re a girl, you turn into a boy. There’s another key called the Ghost Key, and if you unlock that door, and you walk through the ghost door, your body falls dead, but your spirit can roam free. When your spirit passes back through the door, it rejoins your body. There’s dozens of these keys, and there’s one key that no one should ever use, which is called the Omega Key and opens a door in a cave called the Black Door. That’s basically the setting and plot of the story. You have a family that has inherited this house, and three kids who find themselves wrestling with the possibility in the keys and fighting off this fiendish creature named Dodge that wants the Omega Key.

In the first collection, there was a boat named after the author Kelly Link. Are you a Kelly Link fan, or what was the story behind that?

60 I love Kelly Link. I love Kelly’s fiction. You can see a lot of Kelly’s influence in my book of stories, 20th Century Ghosts. The last story, “My Father’s Mask,” that was my outright attempt to see if I couldn’t write a Kelly Link story. She’s better than almost anyone at recreating what dreams feel like in her fiction. I have this thing that I’ve done over the course of my career. Every once in a while, I’ve fallen in love with a story. Instead of reading it once, I’ll read it three times. I read it once for pleasure, a second to familiarize myself with all the elements, and then a third time to reverse-engineer it. And the third time I usually have a highlighter and a pencil in hand. I’ve done that a few times. The first time I did it was with a short story by Bernard Malamud called “The Jewbird.” As a result of examining that story, I had my first creative breakthroughs, especially with a story called “Pop Art” which is very similar to “The Jewbird.” The two make an interesting pair. A couple of years later, I read a story called “The Specialist’s Hat” by Kelly Link, and I did the same thing. I picked it apart and did a kind of anatomy on it. I haven’t done it so much with novels, although recently I’ve done it with The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell which, I think, is probably the novel that has most impressed me in the last decade.

You mentioned that you’re in the process of wrapping up Locke & Key, and you mentioned the Wraith comic that you’re working on: what other sorts of graphic projects do you have planned for the future?

Gabe and I just got approved for doing a Cape title by one of those big two comic companies. Beyond that, I’m not allowed to say because it won’t happen for a while, so it doesn’t make sense to talk about it yet. Gabe still has two and a half issues of Locke & Key left to draw, and both of those issues are thirty-two page issues, so he actually has what’s more like almost four issues left to draw. I have another secret IDW project that I’ll be doing late, late in the year. I have a new novel going, and I’ve got it about two-thirds written. I would probably finish it next month if I wasn’t going to be on the book tour for NOS4A2. My primary focus is getting that next book written.

Is there anything you could tell us about that?

The title’s The Fireman. Besides that, I can’t say anything else.

Years ago, John and I went to a horror film festival, and we saw short film adaptations of your stories “Pop Art” and “Abraham’s Boys,” which were both really good. I was just wondering what’s the story behind those, and what do you think of them?

It would be a shame if I didn’t mention that “Pop Art,” which was filmed a couple years ago, is now going to be available on the iTunes store. It’s the first time people have been able to get it, to just pay for it and buy it. “Pop Art” was something that came about before Heart-Shaped Box was published. I had had a small press edition of my first book of stories, 20th Century Ghosts, published in England. One copy of the book found its way to the hands of a woman named Amanda Boyle. She read it, and

61 was deeply, deeply, deeply into “Pop Art,” really responded to it. She wrote me the world’s nicest letter and said, “I want to do this a short film.” I said, “Go for it!” She got some work from the Henson puppeteers to create art, and she did an eleven-minute short, and it came out really well. It’s a little bit weird because my story is very American, and in her short film, you have kids playing cricket.

To give readers context, I guess we should say that the first line of the story is, “My best friend when I was twelve was inflatable.”

The plot of “Pop Art” is very straightforward. It’s about the friendship between a juvenile delinquent and Arthur Roth, an inflatable boy. Arthur is made of plastic and is filled with air, and he weighs about six ounces. If he sat on a sharpened pencil or a pair of scissors, it would kill him, but otherwise Art tries to be a fairly normal kid. He loves astronomy; he’s a book worm; and the two of them grow close. The short film is about eleven minutes, and it came out really well, and I think it’s great now people have a chance to get it. “Abraham’s Boys” was another short story in that book, and that’s the story of Abraham Van Helsing and his unpleasant relationship with his two sons. That was directed by a film school grad in California, Dorothy Street. It’s a terrific-looking piece of work. It looks like an episode of Tales from the Darkside. It has a very kind of Spielberg look to it. That’s never been commercially released. I think it’s played in a few festivals.

So what other works of yours can we expect to see adapted to film or television in the future?

There are two things in the works. The one thing that I’m really excited about, and hope it will come out well, is an adaptation of my second novel, Horns, the story of a young guy who goes on a drunken bender and wakes up the next morning with a pair of horns growing out of his head. And he discovers he’s inherited all the powers of the Devil. That’s been adapted into a movie starring Daniel Radcliffe and directed by Alexandre Aja, who did High Tension. They’ve got the film edited into rough cut, and that will be scheduled for release either the very end of this year or the beginning of the next one. I have not seen it yet, but the footage that I have seen is very powerful. The other thing is that there are still ongoing talks about Locke & Key being done as a series of films. It’s too early to say exactly what’s going to happen there. Locke & Key was adapted as a TV series for Fox, and Mark Romanek filmed the pilot episode working from a script from Josh Friedman, who was the showrunner and lead writer for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I thought the pilot was great. Fox passed over it. They decided to stick with Alcatraz and Terra Nova. Insert your own Terra Nova joke there. Maybe they made the right choice for them. I don’t know. The complaint that I heard about it was that it was too dark. I think, given the success of American Horror Story and Dexter, and Fox is going with this one with Kevin Bacon called The Following that’s a serial killer show, and now Hannibal has a series, and Bates Motel has a series, I would say that the idea that Locke & Key was too dark for television was probably a bit of a dodge, but it didn’t work out. It’s probably harder to get a successful TV show off the ground than anything else in

62 entertainment. It’s a little bit like entertainment musical chairs. All these pilots get produced. A network like Fox, they have, like, six new pilots and only two slots to put them in, so getting a chair is as much luck as anything else.

Well, Fox only has so much room on their schedule; they have a certain quota of Gordon Ramsay shows they have to have on the air at any given time.

I don’t diss Fox too hard for it. I loved that pilot, and I’m really sorry, largely for budgetary reasons, that it couldn’t get picked up on cable. We’ll see what happens. It may be that Locke & Key plays better as a series of movies, that it requires a different scale. We’ll see. [After we conducted the interview, the news broke that Universal Studios had optioned Locke & Key for film, with Star Trek (2009) producers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman attached. —ed.]

I saw that you’re going to be this year’s guest of honor at World Fantasy in Brighton. Do you attend a lot of conventions? Have you done the guest of honor thing pretty often?

I’ve never been a guest of honor anywhere. I think I was a guest of dishonor at the World Horror Convention a couple of years ago down in Austin, and that was a lot of fun, that was great. I’ve done the comic conventions and the fantasy and horror conventions, and they each have different pleasures, and can be a good time. I’m looking forward to going out to the World Fantasy Convention. I’m also looking forward to WFC because hopefully Richard Matheson will be there. I’ve never had a chance to meet him, and I revere his work, so that would be terrific.

You actually wrote a story called “Throttle” that is riffing on Matheson’s story “Duel,” right?

There was a book a few years ago called He is Legend, which was an anthology of stories based on the work of Richard Matheson, sort of riffing off his ideas. I actually collaborated with my dad on that. I’d never collaborated with my dad on anything before. We wound up writing a story together that riffed on Richard Matheson’s classic “Duel.” “Duel” is a short story about a man on the highways of California being relentlessly pursued by a faceless trucker. It was later made into a film—Steven Spielberg’s first. It was a made-for-TV film and terrifically well-executed. You can see a lot of the gambits that Spielberg employed in Jaws are on display first in Duel. It’s a terrific work of suspense. When I was a little kid, my dad had a video disc player. Not a DVD player. This was pre- DVD players. It was actually almost pre-videotape players, and the summer my dad brought home a video disc player, he also brought home three movies: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws, and Duel. We watched those three films over and over and over again. The whole experience of rewatching a film was amazing. Just this total life-changing, wow moment, but we all take it for granted now. But there was a time in my childhood when if you saw a film in the movie theaters that was probably the last time you ever saw it. So the idea that you could rewatch a film was amazing. And when we would go out for drives, we would play the Duel game. I would make

63 truck noises and pretend that we were being chased, and we would try to figure out how we would throw off the faceless trucker. So, in that way, writing the story “Throttle” was just an extension of the game we had been playing when I was a little kid.

All right, so that does it for our questions. Is there any other project or anything else you would like to mention?

No, not that I can think of. I think we’ve covered all the stuff that’s coming out, and I’m reluctant to talk about the stuff I’m working on. You start to blab about the stuff you’re working on, and it uses up all your energy to actually write it, so it’s better to sort of play things close to the vest. I’m hoping to do a little work in TV sometime in the next year. That might be fun. The only genre/form I haven’t had a chance to get into is video games, so maybe that’s next. I’ve done short stories and comics and a little screenwriting, maybe I need to get into video games. I’ll see. I don’t know. I don’t know how open video games are to a literary approach, but I do want to try.

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is hosted by:

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Lightspeed, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Oz Reimagined, Epic, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. He is a six-time finalist for the Hugo Award and a four-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Forthcoming anthologies include Wastelands 2, Dead Man’s Hand, and Robot Uprisings. He is also the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

David Barr Kirtley has published fiction in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Lightspeed, Intergalactic Medicine Show, On Spec, and Cicada, and in anthologies such as New Voices in Science Fiction, Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and The Dragon Done It. Recently he’s contributed stories to several of John Joseph Adams’s anthologies, including The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, and The Way of the Wizard. He’s attended numerous writing workshops, including Clarion, Odyssey, Viable Paradise, James Gunn’s Center for the Study of Science Fiction, and Orson Scott Card’s Writers Bootcamp, and he holds an MFA in screenwriting and fiction from the University of Southern California. He also teaches regularly at Alpha, a Pittsburgh-area science fiction workshop for young writers. He lives in New York.

64 Author Spotlight: Matthew Cheney Erika Holt

How did “How Far to Englishman’s Bay” come to be?

I wrote the first draft on Valentine’s Day, and did it in mostly one sitting. That’s not my usual practice. I usually have to strain a story out through my fingers one word at a time over the course of many days, months, years. Now and then, though, I have (quite unconsciously) had a story growing in me like a tumor. I can see in “How Far to Englishman’s Bay” traces of things I’ve been thinking about for at least a few years, but it wasn’t until that one moment that it all took form and exploded out in sentences. I wrote the first paragraph and had no idea where it was going. Lo and behold, it was a horror story. Which must mean that I associate Valentine’s Day with horror stories . . .

In the story, Max seems almost disgusted by older people, and his fiftieth birthday causes him considerable angst—it seems to be a turning point. Does he just give up?

Age is certainly something that produces fear and disgust. It’s fear of mortality, but perhaps even more than that a fear of breaking down. I have a lot of friends who are considerably older than me, and I see it in them and even in myself—our bodies betray us, no matter how well we treat them. Our lives become something other than what we planned, for better or worse. We disappoint ourselves and others. The longer you live, the more you have to regret. If you are the sort of person who dwells on lost chances and old failures, age provides you more and more material. It’s a terrible way to live. If you don’t combat it, if you don’t find pleasure and joy (or at least contentment) in the present, if you don’t simply embrace the transience that is life . . . well, then you’ve probably made a pretty rotten life for yourself. If you’ve made a pretty rotten life for yourself, then you have only a few options: continue with the rottenness, change, or die.

Can the attack on Max be seen as metaphorical in some way, such as a graphic and visceral representation of the process of aging or how society views and treats elderly people (not that Max is yet “elderly”)?

The central pleasure of the sort of horror fiction that I most enjoy results from ambiguity. Such stories exist on at least two interpretive planes at once: the concrete events of the story and then the implications of those concrete events—basically, what the details of the story provoke in a reader’s mind. Such an effect, or possibility, is present in pretty much every text, since ambiguity is inherent to language (as anybody who’s ever tried to put together some complicated object by following written instructions has experienced!), but I’m attracted to those sorts of stories that acknowledge and encourage ambiguity because they carve out the most room for our own responses, our own fears and desires. The story is not complete without the reader, and the story will be at least slightly different for each reader. It’s very difficult to write such fiction, because ambiguity can easily slip into vagueness, one of the great enemies of effective writing. The challenge is for ambiguity to be productive, for it actually to do something in a reader’s mind, to

65 open up options for interpretation without just creating blankness. The fiction that appeals to me is fiction that can’t ever be summed up. For example, Lucy Clifford’s story “The New Mother,” or Kafka’s “A Country Doctor,” or Robert Aickman’s “The Hospice” (a story that was, I think, very much on my mind as I wrote “How Far to Englishman’s Bay”). I wouldn’t presume to suggest that my story reaches their level, but it’s that style of meaning that I desire for it. As for the specific content of this story, I really feel that while a fear of aging might be unavoidable, and disgust with the aged might be some sort of primal response to our own inevitable mortality, we’re healthier as individuals and members of a society if we train ourselves to overcome that fear and disgust. We need to work to really value, even revere, people who have spent more time in life than we have. I feel like I have a richer sense of the world, and of living, because I’ve gotten to spend time with people who are significantly older than me. The United States especially is a very youth-oriented society, and in my view that’s mostly been destructive. If a reader finds my story to be meaningful as a representation of aging, fear of aging, and the social response to aging, I certainly wouldn’t object. But I also wouldn’t want the story only to be that.

What do you see as Jeffrey’s role in the story? And that of Carmilla, the cat?

They’re just the result of my trying to write about what I know. I like cats and I live in New Hampshire and grew up in a gun shop, so I have a few friends like Jeffrey, though I hope they don’t meet his fate. I should say some words about that fate. We often focus on the, of course, grotesquely high homicide rate with firearms in the U.S. while not paying enough attention to the fact that the suicide rate is higher. Statistically, gun owners are more of a threat to themselves than to other people. If you live in this country and don’t know anybody who ever shot themselves to death, you’re lucky. Because my father sold guns, occasionally someone would buy one of those guns from him, go home, and shoot themselves. One of my childhood memories is of my father cleaning a gun for a woman whose husband had used it to kill himself.

You have an amazing blog (The Mumpsimus) on subjects ranging from “Warrior Dreams and Gun Control Fantasies” to “Race and Illicit Desire in the Great Gatsby.” Why is blogging important to you?

Thank you for the kind words! I started blogging because I had pretty much failed at every other form of writing, so I figured I might as well try that. I was very lucky in my timing—in August 2003, when I started, there were various blogs out there, but not many about books or science fiction, two things I decided to write about early on. A year or two later, there were more book blogs and even SF blogs than anybody could keep up with. But because I got in at the right time, some people paid attention, and it really reinvigorated my sense of myself as a writer, opening up a world of new friends, new influences, new opportunities. These days, I keep plugging away at it (much less frequently than in the early days) partly out of habit and partly because it’s good practice—I risk writing more off-the-cuff than I do in other formats. It’s important to have some sort of outlet like that as a writer, some way to put stray thoughts down, to preserve a bit of the

66 rough draft of thinking. It doesn’t have to be public, but for me that’s part of its value. I’m a fairly introverted person who hates conflict, and so by forcing myself to say things in public that might cause people to disagree with me, I force myself away from comfort. Inhibitions are not a writer’s friend, so techniques to slay them can be useful. Additionally, I have really eclectic interests, and a blog is one way to chronicle those interests, because the blog itself is now just associated with me, not a particular topic. Early on, I was happy with it as a “book blog,” but it hasn’t been just that for a long time now. Now it’s a collection of the stray thoughts and experiences that flicker through my brain and find a way to be expelled as words.

What else are you working on?

A bunch of short stories, because I have to write at least five bad stories for any one marginally tolerable one. (As my friends and numerous editors will attest!) I’m also working, quite slowly, on an academic book about 1980s action movies and their relationship to the Reagan presidency, tentatively titled The Reagan Imaginary. Eric Schaller and I are putting together the third issue of our very occasional online magazine The Revelator (revelatormagazine.com). And this fall I’m starting as a student at the University of New Hampshire in their Ph.D. in Literature program, where I expect I’ll continue doing some work on the writings of Samuel R. Delany, among other things.

Erika Holt lives in the cold, white North (i.e. Calgary, Canada), where she writes and edits speculative fiction. Her stories appear in Shelter of Daylight issue six, Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead, Tesseracts Fifteen: A Case of Quite Curious Tales, and the forthcoming What Fates Impose. She has co-edited two anthologies: Rigor Amortis, about sexy, amorous zombies, and Broken Time Blues, featuring 1920s alien burlesque dancers and bootlegging chickens.

67 Author Spotlight: Robert McCammon Lisa Nohealani Morton

How did you come to write “Nightcrawlers”?

I don’t recall exactly how it came about, probably because it just “came together” as one of those things you think about for a while and then suddenly the lightning strikes. I wanted to do something that I thought was very Twilight Zone-ish, which would bring a number of people together in a confined space, facing a danger from outside. Then I think the idea of the veteran who was afraid to sleep and who knew his dreams would come to life just “happened.” You know, I always say writing is kind of a mystic experience because sometimes you don’t know where you’re going when you start out, but the story always leads you somewhere.

Price’s near-conjuring ability while awake reminds me a lot of hypnagogic hallucinations, where dreamlike sounds and images impinge on the consciousness of someone who’s awake. Did you have that phenomenon in mind at all while writing the story?

I didn’t have that in mind when I wrote the story, but it’s certainly happened to me when I’ve been working on a story or a book. Hope that doesn’t mean I’m a nutcase.

“Nightcrawlers” has been adapted into comic form and for television as an episode of The New Twilight Zone. Were you involved in the adaptation process for either one? How do you feel about those adaptations, or about adaptations of your work generally?

I think the adaptation for The New Twilight Zone was excellent. I wasn’t involved in any of the adaptations, but I think they’ve all come out pretty well. The adaptation for The New Twilight Zone was extremely intense and was directed by William Friedkin, who of course directed The Exorcist, and also directed Sorcerer, which is one of my favorite movies and was sadly underrated when it was first released.

In the 1990s you announced your intention to retire from publishing. What got you back in the game?

Hm. There was a lot of both professional and personal frustration going on with me at that time. I was just kind of tired of being disrespected, I guess is the short answer. I was tired of having to defend my work and fight all the time. The greatest thing to me was writing a book, but as soon as I finished it was back to the fighting and wrangling again, and I just got very weary of that and somewhat snakebit. And the politics and ego games of publishing wore me down. That’s not what I wanted to be involved in, but I never had one of those hard-driving agents who would step in and take it on the chin for you. So I was on my own to fight the battles with people who had a lot more power than I did, because I didn’t have the leverage of movies or a TV series or any of that. I just had the books. I’m a pretty mild-mannered person, but I found myself in situations that would have

68 made Harlan Ellison very proud of me . . . I did not lie down and let myself be run over. But I paid for it. Anyway, people came and went, editors changed, and of course the entire business began to change in the ‘90s. I needed a break, to recharge and think about where I wanted to go from where I was. As for what got me back, I wanted to write again. I wanted to do something that I felt was totally different and totally mine and that hadn’t been done before, and that became the Matthew Corbett series. Of course that started a whole new slew of fights and wrangling, because it wasn’t “horror” as the publishing world defined it. So . . . I’m resigned now to the fact that if I want to be a writer and live in the publishing world, I have to fight for what I believe in, and I can’t let that overcome my desire to create.

What’s changed about your writing process over the years? Are there things that have gotten easier—or harder, for that matter?

My writing process has remained the same. Come up with an idea, let it grow and test it mentally, construct some “signpost scenes” to keep you on the right track, and start writing. I want to be surprised by what happens, and I want it to speak to readers in ways that are unexpected. I want it to be meaningful and leave the reader wanting more. It’s gotten harder . . . always gets harder, because the stories become more involved and you have to keep pushing yourself. You have to keep taking chances and, of course, you have to run the risk of failure and accept that you might fail. It’s my life, for better or for worse. I have felt both blessed by it and cursed by it, but the ideas keep coming and the things I want to say are still unsaid and so I keep doing it. When I’m done and my last book is finished and I kick off, maybe God will explain some things to me I should’ve known early on. Until then, my desire to create and to speak to people through my work remains very strong, so I keep going. That’s the story.

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

69 Author Spotlight: Jennifer Giesbrecht Britt Gettys

Your story, “All My Princes Are Gone,” is fantastical and covers a variety of unusual horror and fantasy elements in a short amount of time, while also delving into Mesopotamian mythology. What lead you to meld these things together and create this world?

I’ll be honest here—I got caught in a Wikipedia spiral one night that began at “sixteenth-century Spanish Royalty” and ended at “Tzitzimitl.” Tzitzimitl are female Gods from Aztec mythology who are associated with change, said to eat the sun, and attack human beings during the eclipse. Despite their frightening qualities, however, Tzitzimitl are only considered demonic in postcolonial western interpretations. In the original context of the mythology, they are figures that play a dual role: of course change is scary, but it’s also a necessary and natural part of life. This got me thinking about the divide in how female mythological figures are represented in western, eastern, and American myth. There is a near universal synchronicity in world mythology, however, and the roles of female characters have always been a bit of a peculiar sticking point for me, especially female characters with monstrous qualities. I wanted to write a story about female monsters. I decided to use the Lilith myth because Lilith kind of straddles the distance between eastern and western religious myth, but there is also a lot of disagreement about who and what “Lilith” actually is. I chose to focus on the two extremes—Lilith, the disobedient first wife of Adam, and Lilith as a generic term for “monster.” Merging Lilith with Tiamat, mother of monsters, seemed like an obvious choice considering the wealth of shared source material between Babylonian/Sumerian myth and early Judaic writings.

The characters Ereškigal and Ishtar are wonderful opposites and provide a nice contrast in how one can view this world. But they’re also Mesopotamian goddesses. What inspired you to characterize them in this way, and even focus on these two figures specifically?

It became apparent very early on that this was a story about family and legacy. The opening scene is a birth. I wanted daughter figures to contrast against Adam’s sons. I chose Ishtar and Ereškigal because they are avatars of traditionally negative cultural artefacts—war and death—yet they are not viewed negatively in the context of their native mythology. I riffed their characterization (and some of the lines) from Ishtar’s Descent into the Underworld. I took a lot of liberties, so many so that saying, “I took a lot of liberties” is a pretty dire understatement, but I was interested in the enmity between sisters and the positioning of them as parallel opposites. My Ishtar and Ereškigal are a little more human and a lot more petty, but this is an Ereškigal and Ishtar born into Adam’s world, not their own.

There are feminist undertones to this piece, given the story’s focus on the daughters, Ereškigal and Ishtar, and their mother, as well as how they are treated by the human males. Was this intentional, and do these three female characters represent something in terms of women now, for you?

70 Feminist reinterpretations of antiquated myth and fairy tales that read problematic by modern standards are kind of their own genre at this point. I was definitely going for that angle; however I was not actually interested in a feminist critique. I wasn’t interested in the redemption of female monsters or painting them to be sympathetic heroes. I was inspired by the role that Gods like Ishtar and Kali play in their mythic cycles and I think that we overlay a lot of our own misogynistic assumptions onto these stories. I wanted to tell a story about female monsters who are still monstrous, the way that Siegfried gets to exist as a creature of pure animalistic violence, the way that Zeus commits massive atrocities and abuses, the way male gods are allowed a monstrous appearance like Hephaestus and yet they are still meant to exist as paragons. I want that for women, I want that for female characters and female myth. Yes, Adam is cruel and he is a monster to his family, but Lilith/Tiamat is a monster too. He paid for trying to cage her nature.

Do the daughters return and wake up to an earthly throne of corpses, as the ending suggests? Or, as humans still walk the earth, would you rather leave that open ended?

2013 is a little soon to tell.

Nightmare Magazine is your debut publication; can you tell us about how you discovered this magazine and what publication has been like for you?

I followed the Kickstarter and am familiar with some of John Joseph Adams’s other publications. I also have a friend who published with Nightmare previously and recommended that I submit this story in particular.

What projects are you currently working on?

Well, I’m at Clarion West currently so, uh. I’m working on that. Sorry, I can’t really say much more about it until I’ve finished the workshop!

Britt Gettys currently attends Pratt Institute where she is pursuing a BFA in Creative Writing. She is the editor of Pratt Success, a student-run blog, sponsored by Pratt’s Center for Career and Professional Development, which reviews the work of current Pratt students and alumni. Additionally, she illustrates graphic novels and her work has been featured in two Pratt sponsored exhibitions. An editorial intern at Lightspeed and Nightmare Magazine, Britt hails from Seattle, Washington where she spends her time writing, cosplaying, and painting.

71 Author Spotlight: Clive Barker R.J. Sevin

Clive Barker was not available for interview, so in lieu of our usual Author Spotlight format, instead we present you with this brief appreciation of the man’s life and career by R.J. Sevin. — eds.

During the mid-eighties, drugstore spin-racks and bookstore shelves were heavy with horror. The multi-media success of Stephen King had generated an industry, and in the world of publishing, mass market terror ruled. Many of the book covers looked the same, and the talent exhibited within ranged from laughable to sublime. The name of the Maine man was, whenever possible, emblazoned across the cover of books that had nothing to do with him: King pull-quotes—either blurbs comparing the author to King or the praise of King himself—were everywhere. And they sold books: “‘I have seen the future of horror and his name is Clive Barker’ —Stephen King.” Some folks were lucky enough to have discovered The Books of Blood during their initial publication, but most of us found out about this Clive Barker guy because of that quote, which was taken out of context anyway and eventually got whittled down to “ . . . the Future of Horror . . . ” Whether or not Barker actually was the future of horror is discussion for another time. What matters is this: King’s words tilted a spotlight upon a talent that, many would argue, was far greater than any mere genre. Considering the opening salvo that is The Books of Blood (1984-1985), it’s easy to see why one could easily assume that Clive Barker was here to redefine horror fiction. The Damnation Game (1985), Cabal (1985), The Hellbound Heart (1986)—these are violent, challenging, revolutionary pieces of fiction. The stories they tell, while rooted deeply in horror, indicate a concern on the part of the author with the mythic. There were haunted houses and there were vampires, but they were so utterly re-envisioned that they’re pretty much unrecognizable. They’re larger. They encompass more. They point to big things. Published in 1987 and bursting at the seams with horror and magic, Weaveworld—a tale of a lost civilization living within the weave of an ancient rug—firmly established Barker as an author who encompassed and defined horror while transcending it. Two years later, The Great and Secret Show transported Barker’s burgeoning narrative magic from foggy Liverpool to the heart of America, smearing horror and fantasy and science fiction together like clay. Or paint on a taut canvas. While Barker’s fiction caught on, the movies came calling. Transmutations (1985) and Rawhead Rex (1986) came and went with no impact, followed shortly by Hellraiser (1987). This was no work-for-hire screenplay. This was no half-baked adaptation of a short story. This was Clive Barker writing and directing a film version of his own novella, The Hellbound Heart. By the late eighties, horror cinema had come to be defined by franchises. And personalities. Thanks to Freddy Krueger, silent stalkers like Michael Myers or Jason Voorhes were no longer quite as exciting. Taking advantage of the zeitgeist while totally ignoring its traps and pitfalls, Barker took a background player from his novella and fashioned it into, quite simply, one of the coolest looking movie monsters. Ever.

72 Despite the artful nature of Barker’s original film, Hellraiser happened because of its franchise potential, and while other filmmakers ran pinhead into the ground, Clive Barker focused his cinematic energies elsewhere. His second film, Nightbreed (1990) had a troubled production and was not seen in its intended form until recently, when video elements thought lost enabled the assembly of Nightbreed: The Cabal Cut, a recreation of Barker’s original edit of the film. Barker’s third—and, to date, last—film was Lord of Illusions, an adaptation of his short stories, “Lost Souls” and “The Last Illusion,” that expands heavily on the source material while appropriating imagery from other stories from The Books of Blood. Leaving Bernard Rose to write and direct, Barker produced Candyman, an adaptation of “The Forbidden” (Books of Blood 5/In The Flesh). Like Hellraiser before it, Candyman rode a trend into new, deeper territory. Released a week before Dr. Giggles pretty much put the nail in the “we need a new Freddy” coffin, Candyman emerged as not only one of the most respected horror films of that era but of all time—a true work of American Gothic, and arguably the last great American horror film. Completed just before Barker moved from London to Los Angeles and released in 1991, Imajica delivered on the literary promise of all that had come before—horror, romance, passion, eroticism, lyrical prose and protean imagery: the exploration of our past, our faith, our filth, our collective dreams. It’s all there, larger than ever, and it is with Imajica that it became clear that, with each passing work, Clive Barker’s canvas was growing larger and larger. As can only be expected from a book that takes the reader into the presence of Jehovah Himself, the following novels—Sacrament, Galilee, Coldheart Canyon, Everville—were somewhat smaller in scope, though not by much. In 1992, Barker released the Thief of Always, his first children’s novel. Ten years later, he returned to YA fiction with Abarat, a sprawling adventure for all ages originally projected to encompass four volumes and growing to a projected five volumes instead. Profusely illustrated with Barker’s lavish oil paintings, the Abarat series may yet emerge as his finest work. Beyond Abarat, The Scarlet Gospels looms—a reportedly massive narrative that pits Harry D’amour, the demon-hunting P.I. from Barker’s contribution to this month’s issue, against Pinhead. “It is a complex book,” Barker recently stated on his Facebook page, “interweaving many lives, many journeys. The most controversial of those journeys will take us back to Bethlehem, on the night of the Nativity. No Biblical Testament dares recount what really happened on that night. That task falls to The Scarlet Gospels.”

Another task that falls to The Scarlet Gospels: the collision—the intermingling—of the worlds of Barker the novelist with those of Barker the filmmaker. On the pages of The Hellbound Heart, Pinhead is little more than a vague suggestion—on screen, he is commanding, indelible. He is iconic. He was born on the page but defined on the silver screen, and in the pages of The Scarlet Gospels he will make his first appearance in his father’s prose . . . and he will meet his end. (And just try to not see Scott Bakula as Harry D’Amour.) The Scarlet Gospels has no release date, and Barker has recently gone on the record to state: “The Scarlet Gospels is in large part written, but I can't find the six months it will take to complete it until I have finished with Abarat.” We needn’t wait long for a new release, though: Chiliad, a novella originally published in the little-seen anthology, Revelations (1997, edited by Douglas E. Winter), will be published in 2014 and is described by Barker as being perhaps his most intimate work. In recent years, Barker’s failing health has caused his admirers much concern. He spent eleven

73 days in a coma in February of 2012, following a dentist appointment that resulted in blood poisoning. Weathered but determined, the man himself forges ahead—recovering, writing and painting and creating; developing comic books and video games and films, interacting with his followers nearly every day on Facebook and putting the finishing touches on Abarat IV: The Prince of Dreams. “I did not enjoy my coma experience at all,” Barker recently told his readers, “so I'm going to stay in the Land of the Living for the next twenty or thirty years.”

R.J. Sevin is the co-editor of the Stoker-nominated anthology Corpse Blossoms and he currently edits Print Is Dead, the zombie- themed imprint from Creeping Hemlock Press. His nonfiction has appeared in Cemetery Dance, Dark Discoveries, Fear Zone, Famous Monsters of Filmland Online, and Tor.com.

74 Coming Attractions

Coming up in September, in Nightmare . . . We have original fiction from C.S. McMullen (“The Nest”) and Linda Nagata (“Halfway Home”), along with reprints by The Walking Dead’s Robert Kirkman (“Alone, Together”) and legendary horror scribe Peter Straub (“A Short Guide to the City”). We’ll also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Nightmare. Thanks for reading!