TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 81, June 2019

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial: June 2019

FICTION The Night Princes Megan Arkenberg In a Cavern, in a Canyon Laird Barron The Taurids Branch Alanna J. Faelan Strange Scenes from an Unfinished Film Gary McMahon

BOOK EXCERPTS Claiming T-Mo Eugen Bacon

NONFICTION The H Word: Exploring the Unknown Christopher Golden Book Reviews: June 2019 Terence Taylor

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Meghan Arkenberg Alanna J. Faelan

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

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

Editorial: June 2019 John Joseph Adams | 176 words

Welcome to issue eighty-one of Nightmare! One of the things we believe here at Nightmare is that stories have a tremendous power. They can help us explore new ideas. They can inspire us, and in terrible situations, they can encourage and even comfort us. This month, original story “The Night Princes” (from Megan Arkenberg) takes us to a war zone, where a potter and a group of scared children spend a long night telling stories. In her new story “The Taurids Branch,” Alanna J. Faelan also tackles the way we use stories in hard times, exploring the nature of truth and lies in a terrifying apocalypse. We also have reprints from Laird Barron (“In a Cavern, In a Canyon”) and Gary McMahon (“Strange Scenes from an Unfinished Film”). Our nonfiction team brings us the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” with author Christopher Golden digging into the dark connections between archaeology and horror. Plus, we’ve got author spotlights with our authors, and book reviews from Terence Taylor.

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

The Night Princes Megan Arkenberg | 4774 words

“I’m going to tell you a story,” she says. “And when the story is finished, this will all be over.” There are four of them huddled on the floor of her living room: Francisco, like the saint; Michael, like the angel; Jerome, like the translator; and her, Batul, like the queen of heaven. The apartment—a second-story walkup above a music shop, low-ceilinged, smelling faintly of clove and lemon—looks very much like what it is, the home of a twenty-four-year-old woman who makes a fair wage at a pottery factory. A number of brightly glazed mugs, sunbursts and peonies and beetles and birds, dangle from a rod above her stove. There are beer bottles in the wastebasket and cigarette stubs in a flat enameled tray on the end table, but not too many of either. A star made of leaded glass hangs in the front window, but it’s invisible now. The window is hidden behind her mattress, stripped and pushed up on one end, curtains drawn behind it to muffle the rattle of bullets, the clamor of young men barking orders. Overnight, unpleasant sounds had risen from the music shop: angry voices, thuds, one sharp scream, and the twang of piano strings severing. Then the sounds moved back into the street, and the four in the apartment stole a few hours of uneasy sleep on the couch cushions. The boys are eleven, twelve, and fourteen. Just yesterday morning— or the day before, it must have been—Batul had watched them kick a rag ball around the empty lot across the street, shouting juvenile vulgarities when the ball rolled out of bounds. They are quiet now, the saint resting his head on the angel’s shoulder, the translator worrying at the glossy pages of a fashion magazine. The kitchen counter is littered with empty jam jars and cracker sleeves. On the table, white beans soften in a bowl of water. They should last another day, Batul thinks, if they use the small bowls, use their eyes to trick their stomachs. “One story,” she says. Her voice sounds strange to her—flat, lacking its almost perpetual hint of a deep, melodic laugh. Men who spoke with her used to fall in love with that laugh long before they heard it. She touches the memory lightly, as though it were about a dead woman. No. Not a dead woman. Not yet. “Listen,” she says. “Just close your eyes and listen.”

• • • •

Once upon a time, in a land bordered by the desert and the ocean, Death fell in love with a prince. She had come to collect an old man, a music teacher who lived on the outskirts of a small, peaceful village, but the old man was late, having overstayed at tea and cards with a few of his friends. Rather than seek him out, Death sat on the stone steps of his shop and looked down into the nearby ball court, where a group of young people ran and jostled in the hot light of noon. It was there that she saw the prince, his beard as black as coal, his lips as sweet as mango. And the space in her chest where mortals carry their hearts became filled with something for which she had no name—thick as oil, hot as sunlight, bitter as untilled earth. The prince, however, did not fall in love with her. Many princes in their time have courted Death, but he was not one of them. He reverenced her when she made herself known, bowing gracefully and touching his lips to her wrist. With time, she would even feel something like regret behind his courteous kisses. But reverence is not yearning, and regret is no promise. Even in pain and longing, Death was wise. She had watched mortals with care, and she knew no mortal could be tricked into falling in love. So she challenged the prince to a ball game, of which the winner would be granted a single request by the one who lost. When she won—as she inevitably did, for Death wins any game she deigns to play—she did not demand the prince’s love. Instead, she asked for him to be lowered to the bottom of a deep, dry well. He tried to escape, of course. The wall was smooth and sheer, and he lost his grip while climbing. When he landed, he broke his skull and died. And so he became hers forever. Is that the end? No, no, this isn’t that kind of story, where Death outwits a foolish mortal. No, this can’t be the end, because when this story ends the waiting will be over, and she can still hear the soldiers shouting in the street. So the story goes on. Whatever he had felt for Death when he was a living man, the prince’s feelings changed when he died. He had known her to be beautiful, dark and soft as grave dirt. Now he wanted to look at nothing but her. He had known her to be wise, more observant than any scholar, more cautious than any counselor, more learned than all the books in his royal schoolroom. Now he wanted to listen to nothing but her. He had known her to be tender as the opening bud, and brutal as the spring rain, and sharp as the frost. Now he wanted to touch nothing but her. In time, Death and her husband brought forth three children, each as lovely and wise and courageous as their parents. They were called the Night Princes.

• • • •

Once upon a time, a woman who shared a name with the queen of heaven lived in an apartment above a music shop. She had large hands and a pretty voice, and when she came home from her job at a pottery shop she liked to drink dark beer and smoke thin clove cigarettes. One day a man whom she no longer loved, who had black tattoos on his hands and a beard as dark as chocolate, followed her home from work. He stood screaming at the top of her stairwell: if she did not learn to love him again, he declared, he would kill himself. Leap into one of the deep, dry wells at the edge of the town, break his skull open and haunt her forever. “Go right ahead,” she said, and slammed the door in his face.

• • • • Everything began on the day the Night Princes left home, for all children who are not orphaned or abandoned must one day leave their parents. Death knew this. But she was not happy to see them go, for in all her years—from the moment the first woman plucked fruit from a tree to the moment you opened your eyes this morning—Death had never bore any child but these. The eldest, Francisco, had inherited his mother’s loveliness, her plump cheeks and round arms, her saffron-yellow eyes. The middle child, a daughter named Michael, had inherited her mother’s wisdom: a quick ear, a slow tongue, a memory like engraved stone. And the youngest, Jerome, had inherited his mother’s passion, her violence and her gentleness, so that one moment he was slicing his palm on a thorn or prying open the shells of mysterious sea-things, and the next he was lying in the cool twilight, watching snails emerge from the damp or infant birds peep their heads from the nest. It was Jerome who first decided to leave, although he was the youngest. When he announced his intention, Francisco and Michael vowed to go with him, for they had never lived apart. None wanted to dwell alone in Death’s mansion, which had no windows and no music. So they went without their mother’s blessing. They had journeyed only a day or two when they came upon a vast river, deep as a lake and swift as wild horses, which they could not agree how to cross. “I will swim,” said Francisco. “I will raft,” said Michael. “I will walk along the bank,” said Jerome, “until I find a bridge across.” What happened, do you suppose? Could they all have crossed the river in their ways, and met upon the other shore? There would be little to this story if it were that simple. Francisco went down to the water and lay his pack and his sandals on the shore, and loosened his strong shoulders, and filled his lungs with air. None of it was enough. He made it only a quarter of the way across when the current caught him and dragged him to the muddy depths, where he fought and gasped and drowned. But as his spirit floated to the ocean, leaving his beautiful body behind on the riverbed, he called out to the water creatures, begging them not to return him to Death his mother. The water creatures agreed. Gathering up his body, they hid it in the stomach of a whale that only came up for air once every ten years—it was that big. This way his mother would not find him, for what we call Death is the death of land creatures only, and not of the water creatures, which have their own gods. With his body hidden, Francisco’s spirit drifted on the current, dazzled by all the life he saw below the sea: the reefs of coral, the sparkling schools of tuna and glassfish, the crabs as red as burnt clay— Yes, I hear them. Gunshots. Keep your eyes closed and listen.

• • • •

Once upon a time, before she lived in an apartment above a music shop, the girl had lived with her mother in a house on the edge of the desert. There was a story she didn’t like to repeat: a story that her mother had once kept a man at that house, but one day he wasn’t there anymore. A few weeks later the villagers found him in a ravine some two miles out into the desert. His body had been savaged by coyotes. All this happened, if it really did happen, a little less than a year before Batul was born. That was an unusually dry year, the year her mother’s man may or may not have gotten lost in the desert. Ever since, the spring rains have filled the ravines. Batul remembers how impatient her mother would be, waiting for the rain: how she’d draw back the living room curtain and stare at the sky, her arms folded in the wide sleeves of a silk robe, her hair wet from her bath. Was she waiting eagerly, as for the return of an old friend? Or was she afraid? Batul could never tell. Then one year the soldiers came instead of rain, and Batul moved into the village, taking a job at the pottery factory. Her mother is still in that house, as far as she knows. Perhaps the soldiers who gather on her land at the edge of the desert still tell each other stories about ravines and coyotes, and what happens to the corpses of beautiful men when nature has its way.

• • • •

While her brother waded down into the frigid water, Michael took her axe and bow from her pack and headed into the forest. She gathered up tree limbs that were wide and straight and lay them on the ground. She killed a pair of small, quick deer, wrapped their sinews around the logs, and left the raft to dry in the sun. While it was drying, she fashioned a paddle, a long, dark thing like a spoon, strengthened over a low fire. When all these things were ready, she rowed herself across the river. There, on the other shore, she saw a terrible sight. What she had taken for low hills were in fact the temples and palaces of a city, their stone faces ornamented with splashes of blue and green paint. But not one living thing stirred in the streets, except for a coyote Michael caught nosing at a pile of rags. Whatever had happened had come swiftly, while merchants bustled between their market stalls and young people played in the ball court and grandparents sat on the steps in front of their houses, shelling beans and sipping tea. Michael saw stacks of pottery and desiccated flowers in the empty market, and rubber balls in the empty courts, and bowls of rotted vegetables on the empty doorsteps. But of the people, there was no sign. Only that fat coyote and an overpowering stink, like sulfur and burning meat. The smell alone would have turned most mortals away, but Michael was one of the Night Princes, a daughter of Death, and her curiosity was stronger than any man’s repulsion. She wandered farther and farther into the abandoned city. She passed pools full of tadpoles and exotic flowers; elegant wagons and rickshaws, covered in streamers and brightly painted signs in a language she had only read in books; and here and there, the bones of something small, a dog or rat, limbs curled beneath its body. She saw the coyote several times, its bloated white stomach hanging between brown limbs, its eyes a hazy blue. The third or fourth time she met that clouded gaze, a rock came flying out of a house—over her shoulder, whistling past her ear—catching the animal in the neck. It screamed and barked like a man cursing after a slap, then took off at a lopsided run. Michael turned and saw a young woman standing in a doorway. Her skin was gray as stone, her stomach bloated like the coyote’s, and blood had dried on her chin. “There was a sickness,” the woman explained. “Then hunger. Those who were strong enough fled down the river. The rest are dead.” Michael stared in wonder at the woman. She had never seen sickness before. “Why are you still here?” she asked. “I was spared,” the woman said. “When Death came to me, she said she would let me live if I would carry a message.” “What message? To whom?” “To whoever came through. I am to say that Death is angry because her children have abandoned her.” “Is that so?” Michael said thoughtfully. “There’s more.” The woman stepped out of the doorway, into the light, and Michael saw that her eyes were as hazy as the carrion-eater’s. “I am sorry, but the sickness comes upon anyone who breathes it.” “Is that so?” For the first time, Michael felt fear. It was a cold, empty feeling, like something had been drained from her, like her bones were caving in. Curious, she thought. But since there was nothing else to do, Michael invited the woman to accompany her out of the city. Together, they would find a way to escape Death.

• • • •

Once upon a time, Batul worked hard in a pottery factory, and when she came home at the end of a shift her hands were dry and cracked and coated with gray dust, and her arms were speckled with blue and green glaze. But every month she paid her rent on the apartment above the music shop, and she filled the apartment with beautiful things. She ate well and sometimes had money left over to buy a movie ticket or a fashion magazine. During that time, Batul loved a man with black tattoos on his hands. He lived with her in her apartment of beautiful things. When she came home from work he would turn on the radio in her kitchen, and they would dance together and smoke cigarettes before the open window. But they became unhappy. One day he hit her. She kicked him out, and she changed the locks, and she went on dancing and smoking by herself. Then one day, the man she no longer loved appeared in her stairwell with a knife in his beautiful hands. He screamed at her and cursed at her. She thought that he was going to kill her. She knew in that moment that all her joys and agonies, all her labor and her dreams might end there on her concrete steps. And she wanted to be calm and courageous, but she was terribly afraid.

• • • •

The gunshots have fallen silent. One of the boys’ stomachs rumbles, and Batul goes to check on the beans. They are still small and hard. Drying her hand on her shirt, Batul hopes that she’ll be able to light the stove this evening. There’s not much in this apartment that they can eat without a fire. Even her tea comes in firm black lumps, difficult to coax without a heavy boil. Whatever the soldiers are here for, she wishes they would hurry. She doesn’t know who they are, whether they’re the same boys stationed on her mother’s land or something new: scouts from some hostile territory, or even a rich man’s mercenaries. She doesn’t know if they are passing through, all those heavy wheels crunching and thudding over streets made for sandals and bicycles, or if whatever they’re looking for is hidden in her village. Batul tells a short, calming story to the mugs above her stove: Once upon a time, a boy joined a group of soldiers in hope of finding adventure. They walked through many villages and caused no harm. There. Isn’t that nice? There’s a cartoon of juice in the ice box, nearly empty. She loops her fingers through the handles of three mugs and carries them into the living room.

• • • •

For many days, Michael and the woman from the plague-stricken city wandered throughout the kingdom, searching for a cure. They crawled and stumbled through the tangled jungle, the soft sweet-smelling coils of vines and variegated flowers, murky water swirling about their hips, until they came to a golden palace raised on stilts. Beautiful music filled their ears and beautiful faces stared at them from the netted windows; but no one would speak to them, nor even throw a scrap of food down from the gilded piers. They trudged across the desert, where the red earth was cracked and naked even of sand, until they reached a low white palace built over the mouth of a cavern. Inside the cavern was a library, scroll upon ancient scroll wrapped in leather against the damp. But there too they were shunned and sent away, without even a chance to moisten their lips in the subterranean fountains. As the days passed they grew weaker and weaker. The disease thickened their lungs and tightened their joints, so that each step became grinding agony. Her companion sweated and cried out in her sleep, and Michael came to know not only sickness, but also pain and weariness and worry. At last they had gone as far as they could. They had no more land to wander; they stood upon the shore, and the gray sand was thick and cold beneath their feet. Michael heard the seabirds call to each other about the strange creatures that had appeared in their domain. Soon the cries were taken up by the crabs and the sea-snails, and then by the hungry fish— And so word reached Francisco, who drifted on the ocean currents and listened to the wisdom of the water creatures. In an instant he appeared to his sister, surfacing from a tide pool in a horrible and gorgeous display, like a statue shaped in living water. The reunion of the Night Princes was as joyful as you can imagine; yet Michael sensed a wariness in her brother when he cast his awful liquid gaze over her companion. “My dear sister,” he said quietly, as the sky grew dark overhead, “I will learn the cure for this sickness that afflicts you. But I will tell it to you and you alone. Come to me in the morning, but leave your companion behind.” And he kissed her farewell with lips made of saltwater. Storm clouds thickened above them, and Michael and her companion took shelter in a shallow cave in the cliff above the beach. They slept fitfully, and while they slept, a furious tempest broke upon the shore. Cold waves and bitter hail lashed the spit of sand. In the morning Michael returned to the tide pool, but its borders had been broken, scattered by the raging water. Francisco’s spirit was nowhere to be seen. Then her companion came running to her with a look of horror. Michael followed the woman about a mile down the shore, and there she saw an awful sight: a whale as large as a mountain, stranded upon the sand. Its monstrous mouth gaped, the ragged baleen stinking and dripping, and inside lay Francisco’s body. His eyes were frozen open, his hands rigid. Michael cried out and grasped her brother’s arms, but there was no response. He lay as still as the beached whale; for Death had come in the night and reclaimed her eldest son. Michael lay in the sand and wept until her eyes were dry as bone. But there was nothing more to be done for Francisco. In the mouth of the whale, he had as grand and fearful a tomb as any king. So Michael closed her brother’s eyes and eased his hands upon his chest, and she and her companion walked again. They turned inland, following the valley scored by a swift and powerful river. After three days and three nights, they came to a stone bridge. The stone was masterfully carved with animals as sinuous as living creatures, serpents coiling on the rails, lizards creeping over the columns. On the other side stood a beautiful city, twin to the one that had fallen to the plague. Once again Michael gazed upon markets and ball courts, gardens and doorsteps—but now all of them were loud and bustling and bloated with life. They had walked only a short distance beyond the city gate when they heard a cry of delight. In the door of an apothecary shop, arms laden with jars of chamomile and valerian, stood Jerome. He had followed the shore of the river while his brother and sister attempted to cross, and he had come to the stone bridge, and in the city on the other side he found work as a healer. All this time he had been studying the secrets of banishing sickness and preserving life. Now Jerome’s face was grim, for he looked on Michael’s companion and saw her for what she was: their own mother, Death. He said nothing of this to his sister, however. He embraced her, clucking like a mother hen over her wan, haggard appearance, and sent her to his house in the city, where his lover served her hot soup and wrapped her in warm furs. Now, Jerome had always been daring, quick to calculate and brave in risk. In the city with the serpent-carved bridge there had lived, many years before, a gifted sorcerer, and this sorcerer had a daughter whom he loved better than all the world. When the girl was born, he built a cage from iron and adamant and bone—a cage strong enough to hold Death herself. For no one, he declared, not even Death, would touch the girl against her desire. This, of course, had not ended well for the sorcerer. While his daughter was still very young, she came to an almost unbearable sorrow and welcomed Death with her own hand. Not long after, the sorcerer drowned himself in the river, leaving all his riches and his inventions to gather dust. And so Jerome had found the cage in the dead man’s warehouse. Now he led his mother to it; and before she realized that he had seen through her disguise, he trapped her within the bars of bone and iron and diamond. “Oh, my clever son,” she said, baring her teeth. “Oh, my brave, daring, clever son!” He looked upon his mother, his face gaunt with sorrow. “I offer you a choice,” he said. “Renounce your claims to my brother and sister and restore both of them to me, safe and whole.” “Or?” Death whispered. “Or I will leave you in your cage,” he said. “Humankind will become immortal, and for all of time this city will be known as the home of the man who overcame Death.” He stood before her, tall and trembling, and tears glistened in his eyes. Death looked upon her son and laughed.

• • • •

One more story. Just close your eyes and listen. Once upon a time, a woman met Death in her stairwell. She felt cold and empty, like her bones were caving in, like everything she loved had been drained from her. She knew in that moment that Death could not be escaped, could not be outwitted. And although Death did not claim the woman then, she felt ever after that she was pursued. Oh, she could forget, forget for hours at a time, glazing mugs at her factory bench or dancing in her kitchen, standing on her doorstep and watching the village boys play ball. And then the violence came again, the men. She told stories to convince herself that Death was fair and gentle, but all of her stories got away from her. She could no longer believe them unless they ended badly.

• • • •

Just one more story, one more story I’m going to tell you, and then it will all be over. The gunshots have resumed, the shouting; in the street below, someone sobs as though his heart is broken. The taste of orange juice is sour on the back of her teeth. And she doesn’t believe it anymore, what she whispers to the boys on her living room floor, but it’s easier than admitting what she does believe. All she knows is that she does not want to die.

• • • •

Death raised her hands, and all of her children stood before her: Francisco cold and serene, Michael shaking with weariness, and Jerome weeping soundlessly. “Foolish children,” she said in her deep, musical voice. “You do not understand what a mercy I am to those who are lost, or sick, or tired, or in pain. You speak to me as though I am an evil, a calamity. But I am comfort. I am peace. I am the end of fear and affliction.” The Night Princes turned to each other and held out their arms and embraced. The only sound was Michael’s ragged breath, the scuff of Jerome’s shoes on the bare floor. At last they released each other and looked upon their mother. “Be that as it may,” they said, “we do not want to die.” And so Death restored Francisco to life and cured Michael with a kiss. Jerome released her from the cage of bone and adamant, and she returned alone to her house without windows. And the three Night Princes lived together in that beautiful city on the river: Francisco, who had died; Michael, who had traveled with Death; and Jerome, who fought against her. Did they live forever? No. But they lived happily, and for a very long time.

• • • •

Closer, closer, the guns and the shouting. Batul’s voice wavers as her story draws to an end. The boys have fallen asleep on the cushion-strewn floor, lulled by her voice and the chamomile and valerian syrup at the bottom of their mugs—all except for Jerome, who murmured the question. She answers him, laying her hand upon his shoulder, and he too goes to sleep. She sits in the middle of her living room floor and listens. Her eyes are closed, but they fly open with every gunshot. It’s like trying to wake from a nightmare. Maybe she’ll open her eyes and it will never have happened. Open her eyes and it will all be over; she’ll be sitting on her bed with a book, reading the story, not living it. Open her eyes now, and it will all be over. Open your eyes.

©2019 by Megan Arkenberg.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Megan Arkenberg’s work has appeared in over fifty magazines and anthologies, including Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, and Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year. She has edited the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance since 2008. She currently lives in Northern California, where she’s pursuing a Ph.D. in English literature. Visit her online at http://www.meganarkenberg.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight In a Cavern, in a Canyon Laird Barron | 8107 words

Husband number one fondly referred to me as the Good Samaritan. Anything from a kid lost in the neighborhood to a countywide search- and-rescue effort, I got involved. If we drove past a fender-bender, I had to stop and lend a hand or snap a few pictures, maybe do a walk-around of the scene. A major crash? Forget about it—I’d haunt the site until the cows came home or the cops shooed me away. Took the better part of a decade for the light bulb to flash over my hubby’s bald head. He realized I wasn’t a Samaritan so much as a fetishist. Wore him down in the end and he bailed. I’m still melancholy over that one. Lucky for him he didn’t suffer through my stint with the Park Service in Alaska. After college and the first kid, I finagled my way onto the government payroll and volunteered for every missing person, lost climber, downed plane, or wrecked boat scenario. I hiked and camped on the side. Left my compass and maps at home. I wanted to disappear. Longest I managed was four days. The feds were suspicious enough to send me to a shrink who knew his business. The boys upstairs gave me a generous severance check and said to not let the door hit me in the ass on the way out. Basically the beginning of a long downward slide in my life. Husband number three divorced me for my fifty-fourth birthday. I pawned everything that wouldn’t fit into a van and drove from Ohio back home to Alaska. I rented a doublewide at the Cottonwood Point Trailer Park near Moose Pass, two miles along the bucolic and winding Seward Highway from Cassie, my youngest daughter. A spruce forest crowds the back door. Moose nibble the rhododendron hedging the yard. Most folks tuck in for the night by the time Colbert is delivering his monologue. Cassie drops off my infant granddaughter, Vera, two or three times a week or whenever she can’t find a sitter. Single and working two jobs (hardware cashier by day, graveyard security at the Port of Seward Wednesday and Friday), Cassie avoided the inevitability of divorce by not getting married in the first place. She kept the dumb, virile fisherman who knocked her up as baby-daddy and strictly part time squeeze. Wish I’d thought of that. Once I realized that my nanny gig was a regular thing, I ordered a crib and inveigled the handsome (and generally drunken, alas) fellow at 213 to set it up in my bedroom. On the nanny evenings, I feed Vera her bottle and watch westerns on cable. “Get you started right,” I say to her as Bronson ventilates Fonda beneath a glaring sun, or when a cowboy rides into the red-and-gold distance as the credits roll. She’ll be a tomboy like her gram if I have any influence. The classic stars were my heroes once upon a time—Stewart, Van Cleef, Wayne, and Marvin. During my youth, I utterly revered Eastwood. I crushed big time on The Man with No Name and Dirty Harry. Kept a poster from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly on my bedroom wall. So young, both of us. So innocent. Except for the shooting and murdering, and my lustful thoughts, but you know. Around midnight, I wake from a nap on the couch to Vera’s plaintive cry. She’s in the bedroom crib, awake and pissed for her bottle. The last act of High Plains Drifter plays in scratchy 1970s Technicolor. It’s the part where the Stranger finally gets around to exacting righteous vengeance. Doesn’t matter that I’ve missed two rapes, a horsewhipping, Lago painted red and renamed HELL . . . all those images are imprinted upon my hindbrain. I get the impression the scenes are always rolling down there against the screen of my subconscious. I am depressed to recognize a cold fact in this instant. The love affair with bad boy Clint ended years and years ago, even if I haven’t fully accepted the reality. Eyes gummed with sleep, I sit for a few seconds, mesmerized by the stricken faces of the townspeople who are caught between a vicious outlaw gang and a stranger hell-bent on retribution. The Stranger’s whip slithers through the saloon window and garrotes an outlaw. I’ve watched that scene on a dozen occasions. My hands shake and I can’t zap it with the remote fast enough. That solves one problem. I take the formula from the fridge and pop it into the fancy warmer Cassie obtained during a clearance sale. The LED numerals are counting down to nothing when it occurs to me that I don’t watch the baby on Sundays.

• • • •

The night in 1977 that my father disappeared, he, Uncle Ned, and I drove north along Midnight Road, searching for Tony Orlando. Dad crept the Fleetwood at a walking pace. My younger siblings, Doug, Shauna, and Artemis, remained at home. Doug was ostensibly keeping an eye on our invalid grandmother, but I figured he was probably glued to the television with the others. That autumn sticks in my memory like mud to a Wellington. We were sixteen, fourteen, eleven, and ten. Babes in the wilderness. Uncle Ned and I took turns yelling out the window. Whenever Orlando pulled this stunt, Dad swore it would be the last expedition he mounted to retrieve the “damned mutt.” I guess he really meant it. Middle-school classmate Nancy Albrecht once asked me what the hell kind of name was that for a dog, and I said Mom and Dad screwed on the second date to “Halfway to Paradise,” and if you laugh I’ll smack your teeth down your throat. I have a few scars on my knuckles, for damn sure. Way back then, we lived in Eagle Talon, Alaska, an isolated port about seventy miles southwest of Anchorage. Cruise ships bloated the town with tourists during spring, and it dried up to around three hundred resident souls come autumn. Eastern settlers had carved a hamlet from wilderness during the 1920s; plunked it down in a forgotten vale populated by eagles, bears, drunk Teamsters and drunker fishermen. Mountains and dense forest on three sides formed a deep-water harbor. The channel curved around the flank of Eagle Mountain and eventually let into Prince William Sound. Roads were gravel or dirt. We had the cruise ships and barges. We also had the railroad. You couldn’t make a move without stepping in seagull shit. Most of us townies lived in a fourteen-story apartment complex called the Frazier Estate. We kids shortened it to Fate. Terra incognita began where the sodium lamplight grew fuzzy. At night, wolves howled in the nearby hills. Definitely not the dream hometown of a sixteen-year-old girl. As a grown woman, I recall it with a bittersweet fondness. Upon commencing the hunt for Orlando, whom my little brother Doug had stupidly set free from the leash only to watch in mortification as the dog trotted into the sunset, tail furled with rebellious intent, Dad faced a choice—head west along the road, or troll the beach where the family pet sometimes mined for rotten salmon carcasses. We picked the road because it wound into the woods and our shepherd-husky mix hankered after the red squirrels that swarmed during the fall. Dad didn’t want to walk if he could avoid it. “Marched goddamned plenty in the Crotch,” he said. It had required a major effort for him to descend to the parking garage and get the wagon started and pointed in the general direction of our search route. Two bad knees, pain pills for said knees, and a half-pack-a-day habit had all but done him in. Too bad for Uncle Ned and me, Midnight Road petered out in the foothills. Moose trails went every which way from the little clearing where we’d parked next to an abandoned Winnebago with a raggedy tarp covering the front end and black garbage bags over the windows. Hobos and druggies occasionally used the Winnebago as a fort until Sheriff Lockhart came along to roust them. “Goddamned railroad,” Dad would say, despite the fact that if not for the railroad (for which he performed part-time labor to supplement his military checks) and the cruise ships and barges, there wouldn’t be any call for Eagle Talon whatsoever. Uncle Ned lifted himself from the back seat and accompanied me as I shined the flashlight and hollered for Orlando. Dad remained in the station wagon with the engine running and the lights on. He honked the horn every couple of minutes. “He’s gonna keep doing that, huh?” Uncle Ned wasn’t exactly addressing me, more like an actor musing to himself on the stage. “Just gonna keep leanin’ on that horn every ten seconds—” The horn blared again. Farther off and dim—we’d come a ways already. Birch and alder were broken by stands of furry black spruce that muffled sounds from the outside world. The black, green, and gray webbing is basically the Spanish moss of the Arctic. Uncle Ned chuckled and shook his head. Two years Dad’s junior and a major league stoner, he’d managed to keep it together when it counted. He taught me how to tie a knot, paddle a canoe, and gave me a lifetime supply of dirty jokes. He’d also explained that contrary to Dad’s Cro-Magnon take on teenage dating, boys were okay to fool around with so long as I ducked the bad ones and avoided getting knocked up. Which ones were bad? I wondered. Most of them, according to the Book of Ned, but keep it to fooling around and all would be well. He also clued me in to the fact that Dad’s vow to blast any would-be suitor’s pecker off with his twelve- gauge was an idle threat. My old man couldn’t shoot worth spit even when sober. The trail forked. One path climbed into the hills where the undergrowth thinned. The other path curved deeper into the creepy spruce where somebody had strung blue reflective tape among the branches—a haphazard mess like the time Dad got lit up and tried to decorate the Christmas tree. “Let’s not go in there,” Uncle Ned said. Ominous, although not entirely unusual as he often said that kind of thing with a similar, laconic dryness. That bar looks rough, let’s try the next one over. That woman looks like my ex-wife, I’m not gonna dance with her, uh-uh. That box has got to be heavy. Let’s get a beer and think on it. “Maybe he’s at the beach rolling in crap,” I said. Orlando loved bear turds and rotten salmon guts with a true passion. There’d be plenty of both near the big water, and as I squinted into the forbidding shadows, I increasingly wished we’d driven there instead. Uncle Ned pulled his coat tighter and lit a cigarette. The air had dampened. I yelled “Orlando!” a few more times. Then we stood there for a while in the silence. It was like listening through the lid of a coffin. Dad had stopped leaning on the horn. The woodland critters weren’t making their usual fuss. Clouds drifted in and the darkness was so complete it wrapped us in a cocoon. “Think Orlando’s at the beach?” I said. “Well, I dunno. He ain’t here.” “Orlando, you stupid jerk!” I shouted to the night in general. “Let’s boogie,” Uncle Ned said. The cherry of his cigarette floated in mid-air and gave his narrowed eyes a feral glint. Like Dad, he was middling tall and rangy. Sharp-featured and often wry. He turned and moved the way we’d come, head lowered, trailing a streamer of Pall Mall smoke. Typical of my uncle. Once he made a decision, he acted. “Damn it, Orlando.” I gave up and followed, sick to my gut with worry. Fool dog would be the death of me, or so I suspected. He’d tangled with a porcupine the summer before and I’d spent hours picking quills from his swollen snout because Dad refused to take him in to see Doc Green. There were worse things than porcupines in these woods— black bears, angry moose, wolves—and I feared my precious idiot would run into one of them. Halfway back to the car, I glimpsed a patch of white to my left amidst the heavy brush. I took it for a birch stump with holes rotted into the heartwood. No, it was a man lying on his side, matted black hair framing his pale face. By pale, I mean bone-white and bloodless. The face you see on the corpse of an outlaw in those old-timey Wild West photographs. “Help me,” he whispered. I trained my light on the injured man; he had to be hurt because of the limp, contorted angle of his body, his shocking paleness. He seemed familiar. The lamp beam broke around his body like a stream splits around a large stone. The shadows turned slowly, fracturing and changing him. He might’ve been weirdo Floyd who swept the Caribou after last call, or that degenerate trapper, Bob-something, who lived in a shack in the hills with a bunch of stuffed moose heads and mangy beaver hides. Or it might’ve been as I first thought—a tree stump lent a man’s shape by my lying eyes. The more I stared, the less certain I became that it was a person at all. Except I’d heard him speak, raspy and high-pitched from pain; almost a falsetto. Twenty-five feet, give or take, between me and the stranger. I didn’t see his arm move. Move it did, however. The shadows shifted again and his hand grasped futilely, thin and gnarled as a tree branch. His misery radiated into me, caused my eyes to well with tears of empathy. I felt terrible, just terrible, I wanted to mother him, and took a step toward him. “Hortense. Come here.” Uncle Ned said my name the way Dad described talking to his wounded buddies in ’Nam. The ones who’d gotten hit by a grenade or a stray bullet. Quiet, calm, and reassuring was the ticket—and I bet his tone would’ve worked its magic if my insides had happened to be splashed on the ground and the angels were singing me home. In this case, Uncle Ned’s unnatural calmness scared me, woke me from a dream where I heroically tended a hapless stranger, got a parade and a key to the village, my father’s grudging approval. “Hortense, please.” “There’s a guy in the bushes,” I said. “I think he’s hurt.” Uncle Ned grabbed my hand like he used to when I was a little girl, and towed me along at a brisk pace. “Naw, kid. That’s a tree stump. I saw it when we went past earlier. Keep movin’.” I didn’t ask why we were in such a hurry. It worried me how easy it seemed for him and Dad to slip into warrior mode at the drop of a hat. He muttered something about branches snapping and that black bears roamed the area as they fattened up for winter and he regretted leaving his guns at his house. House is sort of a grand term; Uncle Ned lived in a mobile home on the edge of the village. The Estate didn’t appeal to his loner sensibilities. We got to walking so fast along that narrow trail that I twisted my ankle on a root and nearly went for a header. Uncle Ned didn’t miss a beat. He took most of my weight upon his shoulder. Pretty much dragged me back to the Fleetwood. The engine ran and the driver side door was ajar. I assumed Dad had gone behind a tree to take a leak. As the minutes passed and we called for him, I began to understand that he’d left. Those were the days when men abandoned their families by saying they needed to grab a pack of cigarettes and beating it for the high timber. He’d threatened to do it during his frequent arguments with Mom. She’d beaten him to the punch and jumped ship with a traveling salesman, leaving us to fend for ourselves. Maybe, just maybe, it was Dad’s turn to bail on us kids. Meanwhile, Orlando had jumped in through the open door and curled into a ball in the passenger seat. Leaves, twigs, and dirt plastered him. A pig digging for China wouldn’t have been any filthier. Damned old dog pretended to sleep. His thumping tail gave away the show, though. Uncle Ned rousted him and tried to put him on Dad’s trail. Nothing doing. Orlando whined and hung his head. He refused to budge despite Uncle Ned’s exhortations. Finally, the dog yelped and scrambled back into the car, trailing a stream of piss. That was our cue to depart.

• • • •

Uncle Ned drove back to the Frazier Estate. He called Deputy Clausen (everybody called him Claws) and explained the situation. Claws agreed to gather a few men and do a walkthrough of the area. He theorized that Dad had gotten drunk and wandered into the hills and collapsed somewhere. Such events weren’t rare. Meanwhile, I checked in on Grandma, who’d occupied the master bedroom since she’d suffered the aneurysm. Next, I herded Orlando into the bathroom and soaked him in the tub. I was really hurting by then. When I thanked Uncle Ned, he nodded curtly and avoided meeting my eye. “Lock the door,” he said. “Why? The JWs aren’t allowed out of the compound after dark.” Whenever I got scared, I cracked wise. “Don’t be a smartass. Lock the fuckin’ door.” “Something fishy in Denmark,” I said to Orlando, who leaned against my leg as I threw the deadbolt. Mrs. Wells had assigned Hamlet, Julius Caesar, and Titus Andronicus for summer reading. “And it’s the Ides of August, too.” My brother and sisters sprawled in the living room front of the TV, watching a vampire flick. Christopher Lee wordlessly seduced a buxom chick who was practically falling out of her peasant blouse. Lee angled for a bite. Then he saw, nestled in the woman’s cleavage, the teeny elegant crucifix her archaeologist boyfriend had given her for luck. Lee’s eyes went buggy with rage and fear. The vampire equivalent to blue balls, I guess. I took over Dad’s La-Z-Boy and kicked back with a bottle of Coke (the last one, as noted by the venomous glares of my siblings) and a bag of ice on my puffy ankle. The movie ended and I clapped my hands and sent the kids packing. At three bedrooms, our apartment qualified as an imperial suite. Poor Dad sacked out on the couch. Doug and Artemis shared the smallest, crappiest room. I bunked with Shauna, the princess of jibber-jabber. She loved and feared me and that made tight quarters a bit easier because she knew I’d sock her in the arm if she sassed me too much or pestered me with one too many goober questions. Often, she’d natter on while I piped Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin through a set of gigantic yellow earphones. That self-isolation spared us a few violent and teary scenes, I’m sure. Amid the grumbles and the rush for the toilet, I almost confessed the weird events of the evening to Doug. My kid brother had an open mind when it came to the unknown. He wouldn’t necessarily laugh me out of the room without giving the matter some real thought. Instead, I smacked the back of his head and told him not to be such a dumbass with Orlando. Nobody remarked on Dad’s absence. I’m sure they figured he’d pitched camp at the Caribou like he did so many nights. Later, I lay awake and listened to my siblings snore. Orlando whined as he dreamed of the chase, or of being chased. From the bedroom, Gram said in a fragile, sing-song tone, “In a cavern, in a canyon, excavatin’ for a mine, dwelt a miner forty-niner and his daughter Clementine. In a cavern, in a canyon. In a cavern, in a canyon. In a cavern, in a canyon. Clementine, Clementine. Clementine? Clementine?”

• • • •

Of the four Shaw siblings, I’m the eldest, tallest, and surliest. According to Mom, Dad had desperately wanted a boy for his firstborn. He descended from a lineage that adhered to a pseudo- medieval mindset. The noble chauvinist, the virtuous warrior, the honorable fighter of rearguard actions. Quaint when viewed through a historical lens; a real pain in the ass in the modern world. I was a disappointment. As a daughter, what else could I be? He got used to it. The Shaws have a long, long history of losing. We own that shit. Go down fighting would’ve been our family motto, with a snake biting the heel that crushed its skull as our crest. As some consolation, I was always a tomboy and tougher than either of my brothers—a heap tougher than most of the boys in our hick town, and tougher than at least a few of the grown men. Toughness isn’t always measured by how hard you punch. Sometimes, most of the time, it’s simply the set of a girl’s jaw. I shot my mouth off with the best of them. If nothing else, I dutifully struck at the heels of my oppressors. Know where I got this grit? Sure as hell not from Dad. Oh, yeah, he threw a nasty left hook, and he’d scragged a few guys in the wars. But until Mom had flown the coop she ruled our roost with an iron fist that would’ve made Khrushchev think twice before crossing her. Yep, the meanness in my soul is pure-D Mom. Dad had all the homespun apothegms. He often said, Never try to beat a man at what he does. What Dad did best was drink. He treated it as a competitive event. In addition to chugging Molson Export, Wild Turkey, and Absolut, Dad also smoked the hell out of cannabis whenever he could get his hands on some. He preferred the heavy-hitting bud from Mexico courtesy of Uncle Ned. I got my hands on a bag those old boys stashed in a rolled-up sock in a number-ten coffee can. That stuff sent you, all right. Although, judging by the wildness of Dad’s eyes, the way they started and stared at the corners of the room after he’d had a few hits, his destination was way different than mine. Even so, the Acapulco Gold gave me a peek through the keyhole into Dad’s soul in a way booze couldn’t. Some blood memory got activated. It might’ve been our sole point of commonality. He would’ve beaten me to a pulp if he’d known. For my own good, natch. Main thing I took from growing up the daughter of an alcoholic? Lots of notions compete for the top spot—the easiest way to get vomit and blood out of fabric, the best apologies, the precise amount of heed to pay a drunken diatribe, when to duck flung bottles, how to balance a checkbook and cook a family meal between homework, dog-walking, and giving sponge baths to Gram. But above all, my essential takeaway was that I’d never go down the rabbit hole to an eternal happy hour. I indulged in a beer here and there, toked some Mary Jane to reward myself for serving as Mom, Dad, Chief Cook and Bottle Washer pro-tem. Nothing heavy, though. I resolved to leave the heavy lifting to Dad, Uncle Ned, and their buddies at the Caribou Tavern. Randal Shaw retired from the USMC in 1974 after twenty years of active service. Retirement didn’t agree with him. To wit: the beer, bourbon, and weed, and the sullen hurling of empties. It didn’t agree with Mom either, obviously. My grandmother, Harriet Shaw, suffered a brain aneurysm that very autumn. Granddad passed away the previous winter and Gram moved into our apartment. By day, she slumped in a special medical recliner we bought from the Eagle Talon Emergency Trauma Center. Vivian from upstairs sat with her while I was at school. Gram’s awareness came and went like a bad radio signal. Sometimes she’d make a feeble attempt to play cards with Vivian. Occasionally, she asked about my grades and what cute boys I’d met, or she’d watch TV and chuckle at the soaps in that rueful way she laughed at so many ridiculous things. The clarity became rare. Usually she stared out the window at the harbor or at the framed Georgia O’Keeffe knockoff print of a sunflower above the dresser. Hours passed and we’d shoo away the mosquitos while she tunelessly hummed “In a cavern, in a canyon, excavatin’ for a mine” on a loop. There may as well have been a VACANCY sign blinking above her head. After school, and twice daily on weekends, Doug helped bundle Gram into the crappy fold-up chair and I pushed her around the village; took her down to the wharf to watch the seagulls, or parked her in front of the general store while I bought Dad a pack of smokes (and another for myself). By night, Dad or I pushed the button and let the air out and she lay with her eyes fixed on the dented ceiling of the bedroom. She’d sigh heavily and say, “Nighty-night, nighty-night,” like a parrot. It shames me to remember her that way. But then, most of my childhood is a black hole.

• • • •

The search party found neither hide nor hair of Dad. Deputy Clausen liked Uncle Ned well enough and agreed to do a bigger sweep in the afternoon. The deputy wasn’t enthused. Old Harmon Snodgrass, a trapper from Kobuk, isolated footprints in the soft dirt along the edge of the road. The tracks matched Dad’s boots and were headed toward town. Snodgrass lost them after a couple hundred yards. In Deputy Clausen’s professional opinion, Randal Shaw had doubled back and flown the coop to parts unknown, as a certain kind of man is wont to do when the going gets tough. Uncle Ned socked him (the Shaw answer to critics) and Claws would’ve had his ass in a cell for a good long time, except Stu Herring, the mayor of our tiny burg, and Kyle Lomax were on hand to break up the festivities and soothe bruised egos. Herring sent Uncle Ned home with a go and sin no more scowl. “How’s Mom?” Uncle Ned stared at Gram staring at a spot on the wall. He sipped the vilest black coffee on the face of the earth. My specialty. I’d almost tripped over him in the hallway on my way to take Orlando for his morning stroll. He’d spent the latter portion of the night curled near our door, a combat knife in his fist. Normally, one might consider that loony behavior. You had to know Uncle Ned. “She’s groovy, as ever. Why are you lurking?” The others were still zonked, thank God. I hadn’t an inkling of how to break the news of Dad’s defection to them. I packed more ice onto my ankle. My foot had swollen to the point where it wouldn’t fit into my sneaker. It really and truly hurt. “Ow.” “Let’s go. Hospital time.” He stood abruptly and went in and woke Doug, told him, “Drop your cock and grab your socks. You’re man of the house for an hour. Orlando needs a walk—for the love of God, keep him on a leash, will ya?” Then he nabbed Dad’s keys and took me straightaway to the Eagle Clinic. Mrs. Cooper, a geriatric hypochondriac, saw the RN, Sally Mackey, ahead of us and we knew from experience that it would be a hell of a wait. So Uncle Ned and I settled into hard plastic waiting room chairs. He lit a cigarette, and another for me, and said, “Okay, I got a story. Don’t tell your old man I told you, or he’ll kick my ass and then I’ll kick yours. Yeah?” I figured it would be a story of his hippie escapades or some raunchy bullshit Dad got up to in Vietnam. A tale to cheer me up and take my mind off my troubles. Uh-uh. He surprised me by talking about the Good Friday Earthquake of ’64. “You were, what? Two, three? You guys lived in that trailer park in Anchorage. The quake hits and your Dad’s been shipped to ’Nam. My job was to look over you and your mom. Meanwhile, I’m visiting a little honey out in the Valley. Girl had a cabin on a lake. We just came in off the ice for a mug of hot cocoa and BOOM! Looked like dynamite churned up the bottom muck. Shit flew off the shelves, the earth moved in waves like the sea. Spruce trees bent all the way over and slapped their tops on the ground. Sounded like a train runnin’ through the living room. Tried callin’ your mom, but the phone lines were down. “I jumped in my truck and headed for Anchorage. Got part way there and had to stop. Highway was too fucked up to drive on. Pavement cracked open, bridges collapsed. I got stuck in a traffic jam on the Flats. Some cars were squashed under a collapsed overpass and a half-dozen more kinda piled on. It was nine or ten at night and pitch black. Accidents everywhere. The temperature dropped into the twenties and mist rolled in from the water. Road flares and headlights and flashing hazards made the scene extra spooky. I could taste hysteria in the air. Me and a couple of Hells Angels from Wasilla got together and made sure people weren’t trapped or hurt too bad. Then we started pushing cars off the road to get ready for the emergency crews. “We were taking a smoke break when one of the bikers said to shut up a minute. A big, pot-bellied Viking, at least twice the size of me and his younger pal. Fuckin’ enormous. He cocked his head and asked us if we’d heard it too—somebody moaning for help down on the flats. He didn’t hang around for an answer. Hopped over the guardrail and was gone. Man on a mission. Guy didn’t come back after a few minutes. Me and the younger biker climbed down the embankment and went into the pucker-brush. Shouted ourselves hoarse and not a damned reply. Mist was oozin’ off the water and this weird, low tide reek hit me. A cross between green gas from inside a blown moose carcass and somethin’ sweet, like fireweed. I heard a noise, reminded me of water and air bubbles gurglin’ through a hose. Grace a God I happened to shine my light on a boot stickin’ out a the scrub. The skinny biker yelled his buddy’s name and ran over there.” Uncle Ned had gotten worked up during the narration of his story. He lit another cigarette and paced to the coffee machine and back. Bernice Monson, the receptionist, glared over her glasses. She didn’t say anything. In ’77 most folks kept their mouths shut when confronted by foamy Vietnam vets. Bernice, like everybody else, assumed Uncle Ned did a jungle tour as a government employee. He certainly resembled the part with his haggard expression, brooding demeanor, and a partialness for camouflage pants. Truth was, while many young men were blasting away at each other in Southeast Asia, he’d backpacked across Canada, Europe, and Mexico. Or, went humping foreign broads and scrawling doggerel, as my dad put it. Uncle Ned’s eyes were red as a cockscomb. He slapped the coffee machine. “I didn’t have a perfect position and my light was weak, but I saw plenty. The Viking laid on top of somebody. This somebody was super skinny and super pale. Lots of wild hair. Their arms and legs were tangled so’s you couldn’t make sense of what was goin’ on. I thought he had him a woman there in the weeds and they was fuckin’. Their faces were stuck together. The young biker leaned over his buddy and then yelped and stumbled backward. The skinny, pale one shot out from under the Viking and into the darkness. Didn’t stand, didn’t crouch, didn’t even flip over—know how a mechanic rolls from under a car on his board? Kinda that way, except jittery. Moved like an insect scuttling for cover, best I can describe it. A couple seconds later, the huge biker shuddered and went belly-crawling after the skinny fellow. What I thought I was seeing him do, anyhow. His arms and legs flopped, although his head never lifted, not completely. He just skidded away, Superman style, his face planted in the dirt. “Meanwhile, the young biker hauled ass toward the road, shriekin’ the whole way. My flashlight died. I stood there, in the dark, heart poundin’, scared shitless, tryin’ to get my brain outta neutral. I wanted to split, hell yeah. No fuckin’ way I was gonna tramp around on those flats by myself. I’m a hunter, though. Those instincts kicked in and I decided to play it cool. Your dad always pegged me for a peacenik hippie because I didn’t do ’Nam. I’m smarter, is the thing. Got a knife in my pocket and half the time I’m packin’ heat too. Had me skinning knife, and lemme say, I kept it handy as I felt my way through the bushes and the brambles. Got most of the way to where I could see the lights of the cars on the road. Somebody whispered, “Help me.” Real close and on my flank. Scared me, sure. I probably jumped three feet straight up. And yet, it was the saddest voice I can remember. Woeful, like a lost child, or a wounded woman, or a fawn, or some combination of those cries. “I might a turned around and walked into the night, except a state trooper hit me with a light. He’d come over the hill lookin’ after the biker went bugshit. I think the cop thought the three of us were involved in a drug deal. He sure as hell didn’t give a lick about a missing Hells Angel. He led me back to the clusterfuck on the highway and I spent the rest of the night shivering in my car while the bulldozers and dump trucks did their work.” He punched the coffee machine. “Easy, killer!” I said and gave an apologetic smile to the increasingly agitated Bernice. I patted the seat next to me until he came over and sat. “What happened to the biker? The big guy.” Uncle Ned had sliced his knuckles. He clenched his fist and watched the blood drip onto the tiles. “Cops found him that summer in the water. Not enough left for an autopsy. The current and the fish had taken him apart. Accidental death, they decided. I saw the younger biker at the Gold Digger. Must a been five or six years after the Good Friday Quake. He acted like he’d forgotten what happened to his partner until I bought him the fifth or sixth tequila. He got a real close look at what happened. Said that to him, the gurglin’ was more of a slurpin’. An animal lappin’ up a gory supper. Then he looked me in the eye and said his buddy got snatched into the darkness by his own guts. They were comin’ out a his mouth and whatever it was out there gathered’ em up and reeled him in.” “Holy shit, Uncle Ned.” Goose pimples covered my arms. “That’s nuts. Who do you think was out there?” “The boogeyman. Whatever it is that kids think is hidin’ under their bed.” “You tell Dad? Probably not, huh? He’s a stick in the mud. He’d never buy it.” “Well, you don’t either. Guess that makes you a stick in the mud too.” “The apple, the tree, gravity . . .” “Maybe you’d be surprised what your old man knows.” Uncle Ned’s expression was shrewd. “I been all over this planet. Between ’66 and ’74, I roamed. Passed the peace pipe with the Lakota; ate peyote with the Mexicans; drank wine with the Italians; and smoked excellent bud with a whole lot of other folks. I get bombed enough, or stoned enough, I ask if anybody else has heard of the Help Me Monster. What I call it. The Help Me Monster.” The description evoked images of Sesame Street and plush toys dancing on wires. “Grover the Psycho Killer!” I said, hoping he’d at least crack a smile. I also hoped my uncle hadn’t gone around the bend. He didn’t smile. We sat there in one of those long, awkward silences while Bernice coughed her annoyance and shuffled papers. I was relieved when Sally Mackey finally stuck her head into the room and called my name. The nurse wanted to send me to Anchorage for X-rays. No way would Dad authorize that expense. No veterinarians and no doctors; those were ironclad rules. When he discovered Uncle Ned took me to the clinic, he’d surely blow his top. I wheedled a bottle of prescription- strength aspirin, and a set of cheapo crutches on the house, and called it square. A mild ankle sprain meant I’d be on the crutches for days. I added it to the tab of Shaw family dues. Dad never came home. I cried, the kids cried. Bit by bit, we moved on. Some of us more than others.

• • • •

I won’t bore you with the nightmares that got worse and worse with time. You can draw your own conclusions. That strange figure in the woods, Dad’s vanishing act, and Uncle Ned’s horrifying tale coalesced into a witch’s brew that beguiled me and became a serious obsession. Life is messy and it’s mysterious. Had my father walked away from his family or had he been taken? If the latter, then why Dad and not me or Uncle Ned? I didn’t crack the case, didn’t get any sense of closure. No medicine man or antiquarian popped up to give me the scoop on some ancient enemy that dwells in the shadows and dines upon the blood and innards of good Samaritans and hapless passersby. Closest I came to solving the enigma was during my courtship with husband number two. He said a friend of a friend was a student biologist on a research expedition in Canada. His team and local authorities responded to a massive train derailment near a small town. Rescuers spent three days clearing out the survivors. On day four, they swept the scattered wreckage for bodies. This student, who happened to be Spanish, and three fellow countrymen were way out in a field after dark, poking around with sticks. One of them heard a voice moaning for help. Of course, they scrambled to find this wretched soul. Late to the scene, a military search- and-rescue helicopter flew overhead, very low, its searchlight blazing. When the chopper had gone, all fell silent. The cries didn’t repeat. Weird part, according to the Spaniard, was that in the few minutes they’d frantically tried to locate the injured person, his voice kept moving around in some bizarre acoustical illusion. The survivor switched from French, to English, and finally to Spanish. The biologist claimed he had nightmares of the incident for years afterward. He dreamed of his buddies separated in a dark field, each crying for help, and he’d stumble across their desiccated corpses, one by one. He attributed it to the guilt of leaving someone to die on the tundra. My husband-to-be told me that story while high on coke and didn’t mention it again. I wonder if that’s why I married the sorry sonofabitch. Just for that single moment of connectedness, a tiny and inconstant flicker of light in the wilderness.

• • • •

High noon on a Sunday night. Going on thirty-eight haunted years, I’ve expected this, or something like this, even though the entity represents, with its very jack-in-the-box manifestation, a deep, dark mystery of the universe. What has drawn it to me is equally inexplicable. I’ve considered the fanciful notion that the Shaws are cursed and Mr. Help Me is the instrument of vengeance. Doesn’t feel right. I’ve also prayed to Mr. Help Me as if he, or it, is a death god watching over us cattle. Perhaps it is. The old gods wanted blood, didn’t they? Blood and offerings of flesh. That feels more on the mark. Or, it could be the simplest answer of them all—Mr. Help Me is an exotic animal whose biology and behavior defy scientific classification. The need for sustenance is the least of all possible mysteries. I can fathom that need, at least. A window must be open in my bedroom. Cool night air dries the sweat on my cheeks as I stand in the darkened hall. The air smells vaguely of spoiled meat and perfume. A black, emaciated shape lies prone on the floor, halfway across the bedroom threshold. Long, skinny arms are extended in a swimmer’s pose. Its face is a smudge of white and tilted slightly upward to regard me. It is possible that these impressions aren’t accurate, that my eyes are interpreting as best they can. I slap a switch. The light flickers on, but doesn’t illuminate the hall or the figure sprawled almost directly beneath the fixture. Instead, the glow bends at a right angle and gathers on the paneled wall in a diffuse cone. “Help me,” the figure says. The murmur is so soft it might’ve originated in my own head. I’m made of sterner stuff than my sixteen-year-old self. I resist the powerful compulsion to approach, to lend maternal comfort. My legs go numb. I stagger and slide down the wall into a seated position. Everybody has had the nightmare. The one where you are perfectly aware and paralyzed and an unseen enemy looms over your shoulder. Difference is, I can see my nemesis, or at least its outline, at the opposite end of the hall. I can see it coming for me. It doesn’t visibly move except when I blink, and then it’s magically two or three feet closer. My mind is in overdrive. What keeps going through my mind is that predator insects seldom stir until the killing strike. “Oh my darlin’, oh my darling, oh my darlin’ Clementine. You are lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry Clementine.” I hum tunelessly, like Gram used to after her brain softened into mush. I’m reverting to childhood, to a time when Dad or Uncle Ned might burst through the door and save the day with a blast of double-aught buckshot. It finally dawns upon me that I’m bleeding, am sitting in a puddle of blood. Where the blood is leaking from, I’ve not the foggiest notion. Silly me, that’s why I’m dead from the waist down. My immobility isn’t a function of terror, pheromones, or the occult powers of an evil spirit. I’ve been pricked and envenomed. Nature’s predators carry barbs and stings. Those stings deliver anesthetics and anticoagulants. Have venom, will travel. I chuckle. My lips are cold. “Help me,” it whispers as it plucks my toes, testing my resistance. Even this close, it’s an indistinct blob of shadowy appendages. “I have one question.” I enunciate carefully, the way I do after one too many shots of Jager. “Did you take my dad on August 15th, 1977? Or did that bastard skip out? Me and my brother got a steak dinner riding on this.” “Help me.” The pleading tone descends into a lower timbre. A satisfied purr. One final trick up my sleeve, or in my pocket. Recently, while browsing a hardware store for a few odds and ends, I’d come across a relic of my youth—a black light. Cost a ten spot, on special in a clearance bin. First it made me smile as I recalled how all my childhood friends illuminated their funkadelic posters, kids as gleeful as if we’d rediscovered alchemy. Later, in college, black light made a comeback on campus and at the parties we attended. It struck a chord, got me thinking, wondering . . . Any creature adapted to distort common light sources might be susceptible to uncommon sources. Say infrared or black light. I hazard a guess that my untutored intuition is on the money and that thousands of years of evolution hasn’t accounted for a twenty-dollar device used to find cat piss stains in the carpet. I raise the box with the black light filter in my left hand and thumb the toggle. For an instant, I behold the intruder in all its malevolent glory. It recoils from my flashlight, a segmented hunter of soft prey retreating into its burrow. A dresser crashes in the bedroom, glass shatters, and the trailer rocks slightly, and then it’s quiet again. The moment has passed, except for the fresh hell slowly blooming in my head. The black light surprised it and nothing more. Surprised and amused it. The creature’s impossibly broad grin imparted a universe of corrupt wisdom that will scar my mind for whatever time I have left. Mr. Help Me’s susurrating chuckle lingers like a psychic stain. Sometimes the spider cuts the fly from its web. Sometimes nature doesn’t sink in those red fangs; sometimes it chooses not to rend with its red claws. A reprieve isn’t necessarily the same weight as a pardon. Inscrutability isn’t mercy. We Shaws are tough as shoe leather. Doubtless, I’ve enough juice left in me to crawl for the phone and signal the cavalry. A quart or two of type-O and I’ll be fighting fit with a story to curl your toes. The conundrum is whether I really want to make that crawl, or whether I should close my eyes and fall asleep. Did you take my father? I’ve spent most of my life waiting to ask that question. Is Dad out there in the dark? What about those hunters and hikers and kids who walk through the door and onto the crime pages every year? I don’t want to die, truly I don’t. I’m also afraid to go on living. I’ve seen the true, unspeakable face of the universe; a face that reflects my lowly place in its scheme. And the answer is yes. Yes, there are hells, and in some you are burned or boiled or digested in the belly of a monster for eternity. Yes, what’s left of Dad abides with a hideous mystery. He’s far from alone. What would Clint Eastwood do? Well, he would’ve plugged the fucker with a .44 Magnum, for starters. I shake myself. Mid-fifties is too late to turn into a mope. I roll onto my belly, suck in a breath, and begin the agonizing journey toward the coffee table where I left my purse and salvation. Hand over hand, I drag my scrawny self. It isn’t lost on me what I resemble as I slather a red trail across the floor. Laughing hurts. Hard not to, though. I begin to sing the refrain from “Help.” Over and over and over.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Laird Barron spent his early years in Alaska. He is the author of several books, including The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, and Swift to Chase, and Blood Standard. His work has also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. Barron currently resides in the Rondout Valley writing stories about the evil that men do. The Taurids Branch Alanna J. Faelan | 3244 words

I wanted to tell you the truth, before the end. I’m sorry it took this long, and I’m sorry I’m too cowardly to tell you to your face, but I don’t think I could ever get it right, saying it all out loud. I hope you don’t hate me, but you might. I hope you can at least understand, even if you can’t feel the same about me after. It’s okay if you can’t. It had been three weeks and Ray still hadn’t come back. He was never an audacious man. His inflexibility, his aversion to risk or conflict of any sort, was the raw spot at the center of our relationship. But I liked him for that reason, too. He felt like a home. Solid. I wanted to be held by him, covered by him, pressed into the ground by the weight of his body. But put a burning girl inside a house and it will burn too, I guess. No. I won’t take the blame. I was so good during the pregnancy, and mostly good after. I was twenty-nine, and we were growing apart. A few weeks into our relationship, he said, “When I’m a dad,”—so quick to apply the title to himself, so comfortable under the weight of it. And so I quietly set the timer in my mind, the expiration date on our relationship ticking down, second after second, until I would be forced to pick between my own autonomy and this man and his immense, gentle tenderness. I imagine most other people would have kept Ray at arm’s length, but I threw all of myself into the endeavor of us. I told myself a lot of things: that it was okay that this was going to end, all things end eventually, enjoy him while you have him and then let go. I also told myself, quieter, never in words, just in an opaque white hope that pulsed softly at the center of me, barely material, that if I made him love me enough he would choose me over his children, who didn’t even exist. I see now how stupid it sounds. I should have told you. You would have talked sense into me. But then, the thought of losing him . . . no, not that. The thought of being alone terrified me. You might have said I would have had you, but it would have been a different sort of “have.” I could never demand from you the amount of attention I need to feel calm. I would have become a burden, and you would have started to resent me. So I needed to keep him. We were together four years when he started drifting. He stopped tying me up in bed, then stopped fucking me at all, then replaced our conversation with movies I had no interest in and was not consulted about. He endured my presence on the couch like one tolerates a needy dog. In bed one night, he turned out the lights and rolled over without a word, and I imagined being in that bed alone, the great expanse of darkness around me. I reached out and pressed my palm flat between his shoulder blades. “Let’s have a baby,” I whispered. He looked over his shoulder at me. Saw me for the first time in months.

• • • •

The baby just refused to stop gumming. He tore my nipples to shreds. After he was done feeding I would sit in bed, sobbing, with ice cubes on my areolas, little pink rivulets of blood all down my front, and Ray still didn’t want me to stop breastfeeding. He made me feel horrible about it. “It’s completely up to you. I know how bad it hurts. We can stop—it’s your choice. I just think that, with all the science we have now about how essential breastmilk is to immune system development and the microbiome . . . I just think we should only stop if it’s the absolute last option.” If you want to be a bad mother, it’s your choice. I white-knuckled through it for a while, but the night we found out about the comet—the president’s speech turned up loud over the baby’s screaming—Ray offered to go get formula. I thought it was a peace offering. The baby was six weeks, at the height of his colic. That night, he screamed for twelve hours straight. He screamed until his face was blue, until he burst veins in the whites of his eyes, until his fists were purple little stones. Even with the monitor off and the door to the nursery closed, it filled up the entire apartment with this electric noise. At first, I just wanted to comfort him. I just wanted to make it okay. I needed to make it okay, but I kept failing, and failing, and here was this tiny, helpless creature that I was responsible for, screaming at me louder than my father ever did. My whole life, I couldn’t be in the same room as a fucking blender without having a panic attack, and here I was holding the sonic equivalent of three of them, on high and full of nails. It took until sunrise for me to notice Ray never came back.

• • • •

The baby’s colic worsened. He stopped screaming only to sleep, and never for longer than two hours, three at most. Listening to him cry was like listening to someone who had been mortally wounded—the sound consumed me with terror. Nothing I did worked. Nothing in the books, on the web, on the mommy vlogs. The noise was going to give me a nervous breakdown. I couldn’t keep doing it. The urge to shake him was so strong I couldn’t trust myself not to, so I put him down. And I didn’t want to miss the news, in case Ray was in the suicide report. I had read so many things saying not to do this, but my father always said “just let them cry it out,”—it’s the only parenting advice he ever gave me. Most of his generation did it, and we were fine, so what was so different about this baby? I shut the nursery door, curled up on the sectional with my laptop, and put on my noise-cancelling headphones. The shrieking that had haunted my every waking hour dimmed to a mild buzz . . . I noticed, only then, that I was holding my entire body rigid—my shoulders around my ears, my stomach clenched like a fist—and was able to let it all go in the quiet. A little over a month after we found out about the comet, nine weeks after the baby was born, the countdown was at six hundred and eighty- eight days. It was back when people first started going missing, when they were still reporting the identity of suicides on the local news to help clear out the morgues, back when folks still thought burying people was worth the time or money. I always hated local news. What a farce, hopscotching from tragedy to absurd mundanity with no self- consciousness whatsoever. But then, knowing everything was going to end, and so soon . . . it was nice to feel like all over, people were hearing the same voices, the same information, living in the same world that I was, up there on the thirteenth floor of an apartment building I hadn’t left since I came home from the hospital. The power stuttered, the lights guttering out for a few long seconds before blinking back to brightness. It was happening more and more frequently. I knew the baby needed to eat soon and my tits were getting uncomfortable, so I attached the breast pumps under my shirt. Taking my shirt off made me imagine how I must have looked sitting there naked, rolls of fat spilling over the band of my yoga pants, two vacuums sucking milk out of my sagging tits. It made me feel like a heifer. In a final fuck you from Ray, I was too scared to leave for formula. Homicide was becoming commonplace. The news was obsessed with it. Most of the victim’s faces were women—the prey of men with violent fantasies and a long-term moral incentive that no longer existed, with certain death less than two years from the horizon. Ray still wasn’t dead, by his own hand or anyone else’s, so I took my headphones off, trading the parade of death for the screaming. That’s when you texted me again. I’m so sorry I ignored you for so long. I didn’t know what to say. I felt like, if I could just stay in the apartment, if my life was just Ray and the baby and the apartment, it wouldn’t really be . . . happening. If I talked to you, if we acknowledged it in any way, then it would be real. Your dad was livid that you refused to live with him and your grandma in the bunker. He was convinced the three of you could wait out the end together, furious at your apparent death wish. But you knew what you wanted right away. It’s one of the things I love about you, how sure you’ve always been. You were going to stay and face the end, and you wanted to do it with me. Bring Ray and the baby, you said. The farm produces enough for all of us, and it’s out of the way enough no one will bother us. Let’s do the end of the world together, in the sun, with dirt underneath our fingernails. Something scratched in the hallway and I froze, listening for Ray’s footfalls, his quiet sniffing from the cold, the sound of his keys clacking against their plastic fob. But it was Mrs. Brennan’s door that opened and shut. My body continually humiliated me, still aroused into the straining attentiveness of a dog at the slightest door-sound, even three weeks after he was gone. I walked to the baby’s room and rested my forehead against the door jamb. I didn’t like opening the door. When I opened the door, I was an animal under the baby’s spell. In his crib, he writhed and screamed, tried to flip himself over, his head the color of a small turnip. When he saw me, his crying went up a pitch, and I snatched him from the crib, laying him not ungently on the changing table. One of his mittens had fallen off; red scratches streaked across his face like comet tails. His diaper was ungodly—it may have been half a day since I changed it. Maybe a full day. When I pulled it off, he kicked out an angry raisin foot, sending up a spray of excrement that landed in a slice from the crook of my neck down to my stomach. I stopped. I closed my eyes. I timed my breathing to my heartbeat: inhale five beats, hold two beats, exhale nine, like my therapist taught me. I grabbed him by the ankles, removed the diaper, and placed it in the trash. His entire lower body was covered in shit. I used the last of the baby wipes getting it off, and had to dry him with a paper towel, which pitched his screaming up again. I fit him back inside his dirty pajamas, all the rest being as dirty or worse, and put the pacifier in his mouth. He resisted me, stiffening and thrashing, but I followed his mouth with it, keeping it inside until it was more comfortable to latch on than to keep fighting me. From the window, I watched the empty street far below. The room was a deep blue—the curtains let in only a slice of dusk. The baby was solid and warm against my body. I breathed in his hair. I stroked the curve of his cheek, his gold-filament eyelashes. When a branch of the Taurids meteor stream obliterates all life on earth, the baby will be two years and three weeks old. Down on the street, a mandorla of orange flame parted the blue twilight. Inside it was a woman who was not screaming. She wandered down the empty street as if lost before sinking to her knees. It was a long, long time until the fire spent itself. A half-dozen souls trickled over to make a wary ring around her body, keeping vigil. A fire truck arrived so comically long after it was needed it made me laugh, which set the baby wailing again. This was also funny. I laughed until I was crying too, until we were crying together, a piteous pair. I closed my eyes and pressed my lids against the baby’s soft, downy skull, and I knew what to do all at once. In the kitchen, I looked through our knives. Ray had something of a fetish for them, obsessed with their maintenance, always oiling and sharpening even though he could barely butcher a roast chicken. I slid the Wüsthofs from their block one by one, savoring the hiss and suck of the steel against the oiled wood as I pulled them free and laid them on the granite countertop. I touched them all, but the bird’s beak was always my favorite, and it gave the most control anyway. I remembered how my dad taught me to shoot a gun: take a deep breath, then let it out, slow and steady, and when it’s all gone, squeeze, don’t pull. I closed my eyes. I took a breath, and let it out, long. I slid the knife into and down the flesh of my palm, just below my pinkie finger. It cut clean, like a potato. I let myself holler. The baby matched my pitch and then overtook me, not to be outdone. The wound didn’t hurt as long as I didn’t look at it, but every time I caught a glimpse of the blood, my head swam and I could feel my heart throbbing in the cut. I wrapped it in a white linen dish towel and waited until it was completely saturated with blood to go across the hall. The baby’s screams disappeared behind our sturdy front door. Mrs. Brennan hadn’t removed the Christmas wreath on her door since her husband died. Before, she had one for every obscure holiday. National Cat Day. Ice Cream Day. Arbor Day. Two snowmen fixed me with their beady black eyes as I banged on the door, desperate but not frightening. Mrs. Brennan’s slipper-shod feet shuffled to the foyer. There was a pause, then the sound of the lock, the deadbolt, and the chain coming off. “Jesus wept, what happened?” she asked, already ushering me inside. “Keep it up, keep it elevated, above your heart.” I blinked back tears— the shock had worn off, and the meat of my palm was throbbing. She led me through the dark house, past Mr. Brennan’s empty hospital bed, into the kitchen. Dozens of Precious Moments figurines kept vigil from atop the cabinetry. Cats flitted in and out of view, about their own business. “I was peeling potatoes, I slipped.” Mrs. Brennan sucked her teeth but nodded. “Can’t guess you’re getting much sleep with that child, always screaming. Let me look at it,” she said. She peeled the sodden towel off and hissed. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. I’m going to have to stitch you up. Run it under cold water.” She disappeared into the bowels of the apartment and I did as I was told. “Come in here,” she barked from the living room. A minister in a red stole led a sermon on the cathode TV. “Now is the time to repent. God’s cleansing fire is coming, and only the worthy will ascend—” Mrs. Brennan was threading a sewing needle in a plastic-covered wingback chair. She carefully sterilized it with vodka. On the table, a small, milky glass vial of morphine sat next to a syringe. She dragged a folding chair between her legs and nodded for me to sit. “I used to be a nurse, so I know what I’m doing. Give me your arm here . . .” She plunged the syringe into the bottle, drawing up a few millimeters of the clear drug, and sunk it easily into a vein on my arm, first try. The world went soft at the edges. When she sewed me up, it felt like I was watching her mend a toy. She was wearing a thin cotton muumuu printed with little pink roses. Her hair was grey and wiry, her skin pillowy and dry. “Do you miss your husband?” I asked. She didn’t look up. “He was a drunk and an asshole. And now that he’s dead, I have no idea what to do with myself. I guess I won’t have to wonder much longer.” She let out a laugh of genuine mirth, like an ill-conceived plan of hers had gone better than she could have imagined. “You keep that clean, change the dressing every night, and you should be fine.” I looked down at my hand, and it was bandaged neatly. “Take this tape and gauze, tell me if it gives you any more trouble.” “Can I have something for the pain?” I nodded toward the vial of morphine. She frowned and scrutinized me a moment, assessing my constitution, looking for any tendency towards the melancholic. When she handed it over, I couldn’t tell if she found me an unlikely suicide or thought it kind to offer me a gentler way out. I like to think that she knew. I think if I told her everything, she would have still given it to me. I think she would have understood. When I got back to the apartment, the baby was still screaming. The burned woman was being scooped into a body bag. I grasped the baby’s cheeks with my thumb and forefinger, his mouth a dark hole drinking the light. I moved his face to the right, to the left. He was undoubtedly mine, my double—my cleft chin, my apple cheeks, my red-blonde hair. Mine. I put ocean sounds on the speaker. I surrounded him with his favorite things: an odd-eyed lavender sheep, two fleece starfish, a rattle shaped like the moon. I pulled his swaddle down, exposing the creamy swell of his thigh, and administered the shot, like I had seen the doctor do so many times. I tucked him in. His screaming broke to hiccups, to coos. When I showed up in your dirt driveway, alone, I was going to tell you, but you shrieked and grabbed me, already weeping. We sank to the floor together, tangled in each other’s hair. You brought me inside, and the moment to ask the question came and went. Whatever it was, it was black and heavy. You made me a great batch of fried rice with egg and soy sauce and chives, with strong black tea. You knew I’d tell you in my own time. In the time we had left, we would grow old together, like we always planned to.

©2019 by Alanna J. Faelan.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Alanna J. Faelan is a queer, genderfluid, working class writer and visual artist from South Philadelphia. She is a 2018 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and has attended the Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop in 2016 and 2017. You can find her on Twitter @AlannaFaelan or at alannafaelan.com. She currently makes her living as a Marketing Specialist for the nonprofit Literary Arts in Portland, Oregon.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight Strange Scenes from an Unfinished Film Gary McMahon | 3082 words

The sticky label had peeled off the videocassette, leaving behind only thin ragged scraps of dirty white paper. I peered at the stains on the paper, trying to make out what had once been written there, but could make no sense of the faint striations which remained. The wind moved heavily across the walls, pressing against the outside of the house. The window creaked, the glass shifting fractionally in old frames. I glanced outside, across the jagged tops of the trees in the park opposite, and towards the brightly lit expanse of the city. “It’s a third generation copy,” the man in the pub had promised me. “One of Reef’s last short films, made before he died.” I fingered the spools, turning one of them with my thumb jammed into the gap. The plastic groaned; the tape encased within the slim box whispered as it wound around its inner cogs. “It doesn’t have a title, not that I can find. It’s just a short show reel, meant as a teaser to attract finance for a longer project he wanted to direct.” The man’s face had been covered in acne scars; his big square hands swallowed the pint glass I’d brought him from the bar. I didn’t know the man’s name, but we’d been introduced by a petty criminal named Billy Talbot, a mutual friend and fellow cinema enthusiast. Billy and I shared a love of obscure horror films, if not much else, and Derek Reef was one of the few directors we both admired— although my own admiration for the oddball director far outweighed Talbot’s own. For the uninitiated, Reef had made a handful of films in the 1970s, and had been assassinated in New York before even having the chance to make a name for himself with his short body of work. After the renegade director’s death, there had been a small groundswell of interest in his output: a few independent cinemas ran retrospective seasons, a documentary was funded by the BBC but never shown because of unquoted legal reasons, and various film magazines ran one-page features on his debauched lifestyle rather than the films he left behind. None of that interested me to any great degree; I simply wanted to see the films. None of them were particularly great in the conventional sense, but they were at least technically proficient. My favorite was Flowers For Flora’s Grave, which had been based on a cult novel by a pulp horror writer (also dead), but even that suffered from a lack of budget and the inability of the director to extract decent performances from anyone but his voluptuous star and sometimes lover, the infamous Vanna St. Clair. My own interest in the films was due mainly to the fact that my late father had appeared as an extra in one of Reef’s early mainstream shorts, and after I found a copy of it when sorting through his particulars after his death, I became intrigued by the somewhat cheesy and certainly controversial films subsequently made by Reef. The tape given to me by the man in the pub was allegedly one of the few copies in circulation of a ten-minute sequence Reef had put together a few weeks before his murder by a mumbling vagrant with an obscure axe to grind. I’d read about the rumored existence of the film, but had given up any hope of actually seeing it until Billy Talbot rang me, drunk and breathless, one evening to tell me that he’d tracked down a copy. The conversation had been stilted; Billy was obviously stoned on something, and judging by the background noise he was calling from a party or somewhere equally as chaotic. He was a strange and often dangerous man, but for some reason our relationship had lasted a number of years. I vicariously enjoyed the risky nature of his subculture lifestyle; he liked to be associated with a nerd, just to give him what he always called “layers.” I crouched before the old VHS machine I kept wired to the television in my bedroom. I hadn’t used the thing in over a year, and wasn’t even sure if it was still in working order. Everything worthwhile was available on DVD these days, usually downloaded and converted from the Internet. Pressing the power button, I experienced a brief and oddly enjoyable moment of panic when nothing happened . . . but then the green light came on and I hit eject. The shelf shuddered out of the front of the machine, and I slipped in the tape. “Okay, Reef. Let’s see what you’ve got.” I moved to the armchair in the center of the room, cracked open the can of lager I’d brought up from the fridge, and settled down in front of a screen full of grizzled static. Lifting the remote control, I pressed play, and waited to be disappointed. I wasn’t quite prepared to believe that this was actually what the man in the pub had claimed it to be; not for the relatively measly sum of one hundred pounds and a few pints of bitter. If this were the real thing, it would be worth several times that sum on the Internet, sold to a private collector. But the man had been adamant that he was not in it for the money: he wanted the recording to go to someone who would appreciate it, and apparently Billy Talbot had vouched for me in that capacity. The static began to clear. I narrowed my eyes in the dark room and struggled to make out a picture. After a short while, a scene resolved on the screen. A young bearded man sat in an armchair at the center of a grubby room. There was a television before him, but it was impossible to make out what he was watching—to me, it looked like a reflection of himself, or perhaps another scene featuring a similar figure in an armchair, but this one slovenly and unkempt. The man stared at the screen, sipping something from a glass. I took a drink of my beer. On the screen the man seemed nervous, almost pensive. His face was blurred, but he seemed to be frowning. I leaned forward, eager to see more. The man on the screen leaned forward. I experienced then a moment of déjà vu tinged with acute vertigo, as if I were falling through a space I’d once dreamed of, and knew that what waited for me at the bottom would possess a familiar face. Suddenly, as if speakers had just been turned on, the film’s badly overdubbed soundtrack came into play. Through a storm of static, I heard what sounded like loud clapping but soon realized was, in fact, the beating of huge wings. The young man left his chair and went to the window. The bare boards he trod upon were stained and worn; the peeling walls of the room were angled inwards, patches of plaster showing signs of dampness and decay. When he reached the window the man stretched out and unlatched the clasp, then slid the sash upward. The sound grew louder; whatever was making it was outside, and drawing near. The camera swung around fluidly, a vertiginous precursor to modern jerky shooting techniques, and I was able to see over the man’s shoulder and out of the window. The trees in the park opposite shuddered and the lights of the city beyond were smeared, like a bad oil painting done by the hand of a madman. Something was approaching. It flew low, gliding for a moment just above the level of the trees, and although it was far away, it grew larger as it closed in on the young man in the window. He clutched the wooden frame, rotten wood splintering and breaking off in his hands. Then, panicking, he pulled down the sash and retreated, backing into the center of the room. His backside collided with the raggedy armchair and he stopped. The camera then offered another view of the window, but this time the sky was empty of everything but the stars and the seedy reflected lights from the city below. Even the trees had vanished, leaving behind an emptiness that seemed somehow pregnant with meaning. I sat in my chair and stared at the small gray screen, attempting to make sense of what I’d seen. Was it some kind of elaborate joke concocted by Billy Talbot, perhaps as revenge for some imaginary hurt? But Billy possessed neither the imagination nor the funds for such an ambitious enterprise; he was currently out of work (legal or otherwise), claiming benefits, and could barely put together enough cash for a couple of pints in the local pub. “The man?” What about him? The nameless scarface who’d sold me the tape. I stood, went to the window, and looked out at the view. The sky was dark: gossamer scraps of clouds bled across a flat gray canvas. In the distance, just about visible, a dark speck hung on the horizon. As I watched, I could imagine that speck was drawing closer, as if borne by great leathery wings. I put on my coat and left the house. The pub was still open—it never closed, not since the drinking laws had changed to allow all-day service. The cold air hit me like a slap in the face as I made my way past crumbling blocks of empty flats, burned-out warehouses and the remains of shops closed down years ago. The council regeneration program had not yet reached my district; we were still waiting for the work to be done. My surroundings consisted mainly of crumbling brickwork, steel security shutters and exposed concrete foundations. The man was standing at the bar when I entered the pub, his big hands resting on the scarred wooden surface. An empty glass stood before him, but he made no move to have it refilled. I approached him without speaking. He glanced at me, and then returned his apathetic gaze to the empty glass. “Two pints,” I said to the barman—a fat man who rarely ever spoke, yet still managed to attract a regular crowd to his premises. Perhaps his lack of chitchat was the main draw. “Have you watched it?” The barman served our drinks and retreated to the far end of the bar, where he stared at the repeat of an earlier football match on a tiny wall- mounted TV. “Yes. I’ve just sat through it.” “Good,” said the man, before taking a drink. “That’ll save us a lot of pointless discussion.” I watched his hands. They moved slowly, but with little finesse. The knuckles were badly damaged, covered in small cuts and swellings, as if he’d been in a fight. “What is it?” I waited for him to answer. “It’s a film. Just a bit of film.” His swollen lips writhed across the lower half of his face; a thick band of shadow lengthened his chin, making it look as if his head were too large for his stocky body. “Yes, I know that. But what is it?” He turned to me then, finally gracing me with his full attention. There were tears in his eyes and his forehead was freshly scabbed. Fresh blood was smeared across one eyebrow, mingling with the dark hairs. “I don’t know. I haven’t even watched it. The people I got it from told me not to: they said it only works on one person, and I wasn’t fit to be exposed to its glory. Fucking nutters.” He looked away, blinking. “Who were they, these people?” “Religious types. Met them at a film fair in Cleveland. I was selling homemade porn and they had all these DVDs supposed to be a recording of angels. Bullshit. All I saw was a few retarded children in a Romanian orphanage dressed up in paper fairy costumes.” He paused to take another drink. “I bought a job lot of other crap off them, though. A load of old horror films, some rare stuff I already had a customer for, and the thing I sold you. That Reef thing.” I licked my lips. Behind me, the door opened and heavy footsteps entered the bar, pausing at my back; when I turned to look, there was no one there and the door was closed to keep out the night. “How can I contact these people? Do you have an address, a telephone number? Anything. I would make it worth your while.” Again he turned to face me, a look of fear in those wide, wet eyes. “They came to see me earlier this evening, after I gave you the tape. They said they were watching me, and that if I ever tried to contact them, they’d kill me.” He raised his hand, opened his fist to show me the marks I’d noticed earlier. “I’m a hard man, but they were harder. They showed me photographs of the last person who crossed them.” He picked up his pint glass and drained it, not a flicker of distaste crossing his face. I thought about Billy Talbot, and how he’d been involved with certain groups in the past—neo-Nazis, right wing protest parties, obscure pseudo-religious cults. I’d thought he’d put all that behind him, but perhaps I was wrong. Was I the money-shot finale to some insane ritual, or maybe a debt owed by Billy to a crowd he should not have messed with—people far more dangerous than he had expected? None of this seemed real. It was like the plot of one of the films I loved. When I left the pub I felt as if I were being followed. Shadows stirred in every corner, sounds came from each dark doorway I passed. Whenever I looked up at the sky, I expected to catch sight of something gliding down towards me, reaching for me like a bird of prey claiming a field mouse. I locked myself indoors, climbed the stairs, and knelt before the VCR, once more pressing the eject button. The tape was not inside. I’d left it there when I returned to the pub, but now it was gone. I should have expected it, really: I’m not a stupid man. I tried to eat a sandwich but it tasted like cardboard. Water from the tap had a coppery bite. I drank whisky, lots of it: my only recourse was to get blindingly drunk. Perhaps that way I would be unable to see whatever it was when finally it came for me . . . Finally, I return to the armchair in my upstairs room to stare at the dead television screen. The whisky is dwindling, but I cannot get drunk enough to turn off my mind. The screen flares up suddenly, a bright light accompanied by a faint popping sound. Despite the lack of a videocassette, the picture is almost the same as before: a young man sitting in a filthy armchair, a drink in his hand. I raise my glass; the man raises his glass. I sit forward; the man shuffles forward in his chair. “No.” We speak the dialogue in unison, twin performers on a darkened set. “Please.” Then, eventually, the sound of great flapping wings approaches, unhindered by the layer of glass and the thin walls of my/his dwelling. We—the actor and I—stand and run to the window. The thing is closer now, and I can see that it is gaunt and leathery, like a corpse whose skin has dried out and adhered to yellowed bone. Its head is massive, like the skull of a skinned lion, and its eye sockets are filled with a glow that burns like the bulbs from a set of arc lights in the film of my destruction. But the whole thing resembles a shoddy costume, a lazy special effect. Its details are shabby. I can almost see the stitches holding together the frayed seams of its outline. For some reason I find this idea even more disturbing than if the creature looked real. I turn to the television screen; my counterpart turns his back on me. Then, horrified, I watch the screen as the thing crashes soundlessly through the window, grasping the man’s back, and begins to tear at his head and upturned face. He throws up his hands, trying to bat it away, but it is far too powerful and pins him easily to the dusty boards, its lolloping, oversized head lowering over his screaming features. It is over in seconds: the beast drags the bloody remains to the window and carries them away, perhaps to some terrible nest located far off, in another place, made up of discarded scraps of celluloid. I turn stiffly to the window, but there is nothing to be seen. Like a coming attraction, what I have witnessed on the screen is merely a precursor, a clip of what is meant to happen next. I step to the window. The night beyond is completely black, like a cinema screen between shows. Then, one by one, tiny lights flash on in the darkness, and I am shocked by the sight of a million television screens flickering like childhood nightlights. “Why me? Why choose me?” There is no answer but the gentle pulsing of television light. I once again have the sense that I am being watched, or perhaps maneuvered by hidden personalities: writer and director, linking up for a final collaboration, something that will eventually reach out across the cosmos towards a brand new audience . . . “I’m not important. I have nothing to offer . . . I have no story to tell.” My words break off into the darkness, a trail of confusion I will soon follow towards my annihilation. These words, I now realize, are no longer part of the shooting script. I stare at the screens that are really eyes; they are suspended in the void, hung from unseen stars and the tails of strange comets that remain invisible to my eyes. I turn around and grab the armchair, hauling it across to the window, where I sit and stare out at the digital congregation, waiting for the often-tricky third act to unspool. Calmly, I wonder which of the screens will be big enough to contain my soul. ©2009 by Gary McMahon. Originally published in Cern Zoo. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Gary McMahon is the author of nine novels and several short story collections and novellas. His latest book release is the award-nominated novella “The Grieving Stones”. His acclaimed short fiction has been reprinted in various “Year’s Best” volumes. Gary lives with his family in West Yorkshire, where he trains in Shotokan karate and obsesses over the minutiae of life in search of stories to tell. Website: www.garymcmahon.com BOOK EXCERPTS EXCERPT: Claiming T-Mo (Meerkat Press) Eugen Bacon | 6851 words

In this lush interplanetary tale, Novic is an immortal Sayneth priest who flouts the conventions of a matriarchal society by choosing a name for his child. This act initiates chaos that splits the boy in two, unleashing a Jekyll-and-Hyde child upon the universe. Named T-Mo by his mother and Odysseus by his father, the story spans the boy’s lifetime —from his early years with his mother Silhouette on planet Grovea to his travels to Earth where he meets and marries Salem, and together they bear a hybrid named Myra. The story unfolds through the eyes of these three distinctive women: Silhouette, Salem and Myra. As they confront their fears and navigate the treacherous paths to love and accept T- Mo/Odysseus and themselves, the darkness in Odysseus urges them to unbearable choices that threaten their very existence.

Coming 8.13.19 from Meerkat Press.

Chapter 5

I was betrothed between chants when a Sayneth priest, immortal, came to bless the new birth in a home at the edge of Bruthen. Unlike the other ten children, I was different, not just for being a girl. Unable to lift my own head in a cot, a baby, eleventh baby, eleventh blessing, I was betrothed. It was an honor. Ma Space in her own quiet way, without doggedness, reminded me when I was older and older. I was betrothed to be the first wife in a plural marriage to a Sayneth priest. By the time I was old enough to understand, I liked the sound of his name. Novic. N. The sound was nasal. Teeth, lips apart, tongue pushing. The sound vibrated my throat. And he was a Sayneth priest. S, like for snake. What-am-a-say? Makes a sing-song sound when I say this. What-am- a-say. I liked him. There was not a mutinous streak in my bones, any bone that shaped me, when I found myself a wife at eleven. Ma Space, she took me from my room, my dear room with its pale moonshine through the window. When the door handle turned and she entered, something about her face told me it was time. I wanted to step on my bed, lift the hand-painted frame of rainbows from the wall behind, lift it and take it with me. The frame was a gift from a midwife the day I was born, Ma Space said, years ago. I had no memory of the midwife, but the story of her gift was a memory, something told. The frame was real. It was the one thing I owned, one thing. Eleventh child— what do you expect? Maybe two things: the room felt like mine. My brothers did not share it. They slept in bunks in a dormitory down in the basement. My room was in the attic and the in-between belonged to Ma Space. But she said no to the rainbows. Ma Space, she said: “We go light, my chile. Everything you need is there.” She took my hand and we stole into dusk like thieves. It didn’t occur to me to wish the boys goodbye. Farewell was unlikely to impress them, and I could not wait to get away from the kings. They liked to think they were monarchs in their grand dormitory with its high walls and bright lights and locked cupboards. Bring me, give me, fetch me, said the kings. Sod off, said the kings. Dash, Kit and Hedge were the worst, such swagger they had. Blaze was the angry one, but he never hit me or showed rage on his face. I remember the day, without provocation or deep resentment, he put an elbow around Tiny’s neck, throat punched him, pressed the boy’s head in the toilet bowl. Gave him a royal flush. Footloose was always outdoors. He was so big, horses would run away if he wanted to ride them. But he didn’t need horses. He was always doing donuts on the ground with a cart he had built, horn helmet on his head. “He’ll put holes in the lawn, Ma Space,” I said. “If he put hole in it,” she said, “it not end of the world to fix it.” “But Ma—” “Where him? Happy.” What-am-a-say? I gave up, could not be bothered to protect what Ma Space didn’t need protecting from her boys. Bluey—mouth like a shriveled apricot—was sometimes kind, until the younger troublemakers Boxer and Donzo came along. One moment, Bluey was a complete stranger at the dinner table beside me. The next, as Ma Space asked the boys, “What dessert you want?” in her absent- minded way, he had scribbled something, pushed the paper toward me, and the scrawl said: “I have lost the will to live.” Another time he glanced at Ma Space’s platter of oat pancakes, said: “This doesn’t look safe.” But he gobbled his whole lot, rolled his tongue around the bowl and then wrote: “Three visits to the toilet, I think I know where this is going.” That is how I knew he too wanted to get away, that Ma Space failed him entirely. But it was Rusty—I liked to think of him as a terrible hollow— who surprised us all when he swung a coat on his shoulder and left to take work in the mines in Lockwood down south. Then he married a girl in Mount Bright up north. The day she took me, Ma Space, we walked swiftly, furtively, as if toward a secret. We strode into a mist where tussocks of weed caught my toe, but Ma Space urged me forth until we found a waterfront. The span of her silence was a canvas, as was the water surface with its sparkle of moonshine. On occasion, I tugged Ma Space’s elbow but she said nothing, just walked. She was never one for fluffy feather talk. She who had tried to learn me a few things, like how to scrub my brothers’ dorm until it shone like a lantern, and I learnt those things well, she had no last words as she tugged me to the one to whom I was betrothed. I went along without rebellion. The wind was gasping when we arrived. Perhaps I was exhausted from the walk. We reached a sweep of lawns, curving pathways. Novic was waiting. His lips on my forehead were cold as a mother-in-law’s kiss. Inside his house, a mansion built like a cathedral, its embellishments scaling and branching across three main towers and a rear expanse, I did not regret that lack of rebellion. I gazed at the oval face of the mansion’s front, the gilded tips and pediments at the end of the roofs. The doors and doors, some shut, some ajar, others thrown wide open. There were doors everywhere, walls sparkling like mirrors. Room after room there was exuberance of light and shade, form and intensity. Everything about Novic’s mansion spoke of rhetoric, of theater. I looked at the opulence, at Novic’s achievement, and understood it was mine to own with him, shape with him, first wife in a plural marriage. An honor. The coupling did not happen straight after we wed. Novic waited. Every third week in her inobtrusive way Ma Space slipped into the mansion, come to visit. But her intention was distinct. Each time she found moment to put a finger just below my collarbone. “Stop it, Ma Space.” “It don’ hurt, my chile.” In her absent way, she brought random botanicals from home during those visits. One minute she was in the back garden patting soil around baby herbs unstitched from a petticoat where she had sewn them, sprinkling crushed potato water over them and gently massaging their sprouting leaves; next she was poking my collarbone. Resisting was no use. “Why a petticoat for the herblings?” I sought to distract her. “Chase away bad luck. No homesick.” Truly, I never missed home as I knew it. I did not miss my brothers; just my room with its yellow moonshine and my frame of rainbows. I put to use everything Ma Space had learnt me, like how to put a knotted bag of sand and willow seeds at the bottom of a wooden chest to keep laundered clothes from getting damp in winter. Like how to fade burn taste in stew with a dollop and stir of black bee honey. Like how to fill a hole in the wall with soap and unclog a blocked drain with the right mix of scalding water and vinegar concentrate. But I refused to stoop to her strange ways, like how she never let a black lizard cross her path. If one did, Ma Space recrossed its path three times and spat in the direction its tail had vanished, all to chase away bad luck. One day inside the year of my marriage Ma Space found what she was looking for: the budding node of fertility. I stood tiny in that opulent kitchen, hands dipped in scorching water, plucking feathers off a fowl, when, with a scoop of arms, strong arms, he claimed me. In the bed, despite my unknowing body, a whole body tingling without discernment to his fondling, I stayed fascinated with the bedhead. My fingers ran along the contours of its face as he took me. I missed my room with its pale moonlight, my hand-painted frame of rainbows. But I did not miss the cold in the old house—layers and layers on my chest and feet to keep warm, but still the cold in the old house. Novic’s house was warm, I thought, as my head bump bump bumped against the bedhead over and over until his eagerness finished. Then Ma Space’s visits altogether stopped. It was not the bumping that stayed with me, the things Novic did when he took me; it was the things he didn’t do. He didn’t run his fingers on my skin or whisper tender words as I thought a curious husband might. There was just a sense of rush . . . and release. That became his pattern: stalking me in the throes of domesticity. Then an abrupt scoop into arms, naked lust, hungry fingers stealing into folds of my loose dress. Noiseless stalking, noiseless thrill—that was Novic. I too had a pattern: discussion with the bed chamber all during the taking. I would notice as if for the first time objects. Like the velvet coating the buttons on the bedhead. Like the handcrafted leather shelling our chest of drawers. Like the thread pattern in Duchess curtains covering the tall window, or the Duke carpeting on the floor. Like the sovereign tallboy, the v-shaped pillow, the studded sofa, the beaded lamp with its legs angled like an elegant woman posing. Like the seamlessness of pure satin in soft gold in the quilt we had just soiled. My examining the bed, the chamber, outlasted his terrible desire. I lay still long after Novic was gone, my fingers still racing along the artisan bedhead that had mutely witnessed my sacrifice to whatever Novic’s desire prescribed. I never really came into my own. A look. That was all it took. Not the full weight of his shoulder behind the slap, because lovemaking always followed that. The coupling, what do you expect? Novic, he . . . loved me. Mad, but he loved me— past tense. I remember those emery hands, stroking the soft in my hair until it shimmered like his mane. Those leathery lips so strong, they buttered mine. Shadows dancing in those eyes old as Jacob, in that contained look that drew secrets from my longing. His skin furrowed into itself with age, clinging to bone, but there was nothing old in his taking. When he pulled back my head and, like a grown beast, bit my neck in mating, his face looked like death. But his hair! It was a magical mane that fell to his waist. Pitch-black, polished like metal. So soft, even now the tresses of it bounce in my words. Pitch . . . Peach. Same, different. My hair was always peach, a spiral curtain that twirled down my shoulders to my bottom. Kept it long so Novic could touch it. How he loved to touch it. After the look, I shore it, then it grew back all maroon.

Chapter 6

My mother’s easing me into the marriage did not prepare me for that gut wrench. Novic bedded me soon as Ma Space confirmed my coming of age. So she was integral to this partnership. It was only natural then that she was at the birthing, in her own preoccupied way. Present by my bedside were a bunch of Grovean midwives. Best of them. There was Nene, eyes full of sand; Corio, dimples on her pensive face; Anakie, pep in her step; Blanket, leaned toward me in an intimate way, hushed tone like she was sharing a secret; Norlane, like a low-priced engine: low gear, high talk; and Ma Space, the youngest of them, with her dark liquid eyes, long face and tight curls. Hers was a distracted kind of beauty you sometimes forgot, sometimes remembered. A woman without means was fortunate to get one midwife at her birthing. Sometimes, if her husband was not near, she would snip her own baby’s umbilical cord to disconnect it from her body. But I . . . I had six midwives. I was, after all, the first wife of a Sayneth priest. An honor. Birthing T-Mo was . . . like someone grabbed my gut, wrenched it out of my stomach and it came out with a baby. Not sure what I expected . . . What does a girl-bride who has never seen birth expect? A baby crawling out of a hole or something, its crown glistering with body sweat? Or something. It was Nene that shoved a fist inside to grab and turn the head, that yanked him out. Tssk, the sound that pushed out from between my legs, or was it p-pop? Sometimes I remember it like shfffff. But my birthing hips were still in formation and the pain was too loud, I don’t recollect too well that yank-out sound. Anakie snipped the umbilical cord. Baby’s arms and legs were all bent up close to his body, fingers clenched. He was a scream, literally. Opened that mouth and shook the room. I remember the birthing chamber: cathedral walls, mustard color. Or was it custard? By the time he unfolded from his fetal position to tug at my tit, my gut felt already whole. They say babies come out face all squished, looking a mess. Not mine. He came out face all beautiful: big brows, full lips, smooth skin—softest ever; looking at it made you feel at home. Blanket leaned toward me, intimate, baby in her arms all swaddled already, and said, “What’s his name?” “His poppy decides,” said Nene. “Novic? Why he got to decide?” said Corio. “Take all my souls if a woman don’ name her own chile,” said Anakie. “Yes, we matriarchal.” “But Novic, he a Sayneth priest.” “Jus’ cos he a priest don’ mean he take our rights.” “No he don’. We matriarchal.” “What mother she be if she don’ name her own chile?” “Baby look like a Jules or a Wally,” said Ma Space, absently. “An Avon or a Brooke to me,” Anakie. Names ping-ponged back and forth like balls in a game but all I was thinking was not how the child didn’t crawl out like I thought he might, or how he pulled out tssk, p-pop or shfffff. Didn’t even think about the pain. I just thought what a dream, most gorgeous baby ever. “What’s his name?” Blanket in my face. I looked at the midwives, scouring their faces one by one for a muse. What-am-a-call-him? Staggered myself with the choice I came up with: “T-Mo.” “T-what?” “His name is T-Mo.” I smiled. T, I liked the sound it made, quiet-like, no pull on the voice. I wanted to put my hand on the throat and say T, T, T, but instead reached and took him from Blanket, who was so stunned at my naming of the child, she nearly dropped him. Looking at him, I said it over and over in my head: T, my throat does not move. Not always a soft or a light sound, depends on how you say it. You trap air with your tongue against the roof of your mouth, release the tongue downward. M, I press my lips together and make a circle to start the rest. Mo, air comes out to finish the sound. The midwives looked at me as if I had tied empty tins to my ankles. “His name is T-Mo,” I said firmly. “Say who?” “Name her son a syllable.” “Two syllable, not one.” “If T is what you want name him Transfix.” “Or Trap.” “Or Tell.” “Pops out baby one time and her brain goes all over.” “A muscle-head like her da,” said Corio, her face all flat, her scorn close enough to touch. Even her dimples vanished. “Dropped eleven babies and my head not muscle,” said Ma Space. But she was random as always. “T-Mo” defied them all. “I think I like it.” The look in the rest of the midwives’ eyes confirmed she was crazy too. Crazy, foolish, or both. Novic. He took one look at the baby, stood straight as a board and contradicted us all. “His name is Odysseus. The traveling one.” The hush that fell . . . everyone knew it was a curse. Sayneth priest meant nothing—only a mother could name her chile.

Chapter 7

Same one—two people. That is what Novic created. Was it tunnel vision, or insight? What caused Novic to do the deed that brought this chaos? My stomach took his contradiction very seriously—in a matriarchal society, a mother names her child. My belly took such offense, it curled up. And although I still ran fingers along the bedhead, discovered anew my bedroom, Novic saw no more babies. Not from me, he didn’t. What he created was an enigma that was weird, electrifying and heartbreaking. T-Mo. Odysseus. It mattered which side of him you saw. It was T-Mo that closed his baby eyes as he fed, closed them like there was heavenly flavor in my milk, angels pissing nectar on his tongue. When I touched his palms, fat fingers clasped me back. He sucked and sucked, grew like a magic bean. He sneezed, he hiccupped, he kicked— like when I carried him in my belly—but he also sucked sucked sucked like it was life and death. Dropped his guts often, no wonder. When I strapped him to my breast in his carry sack, I never for one moment felt the cling, the soft lean of baby hair against my neck, the quest for comfort. T-Mo was always an independent baby, but so was Odysseus. The main difference is how Odysseus hated touch, shrugged to get loose from my clutch way before he could crawl. He frothed like he was being strangled when I tried to pick him up, but showed little range of emotions most times. He didn’t respond if someone cooed or clucked at him. He did not stretch out fat arms and say “ah-ah” or “ooh-ooh.” He ignored people or looked at them with flat eyes, unless he wanted something. Even then, when he wanted something, he reached and snatched the object (a ball, a fruit, a pebble . . .) without babbling, but with a flash of triumph in his eyes. At first, I thought he was deaf and could not hear sounds to echo them. But he responded to sound, like the slam of door—not with startle, just a glance in the direction. And he did make a sound early on, it was a giggle, almost a belly laugh, the sound he made when he rolled onto a moth down the hallway and crushed it. The only times I heard him giggle again like that were when he was with Novic. It was T-Mo that grunted and squeaked, baby-talk-like. He wasn’t a fussy baby, not a whisper of colic. His smile, when he learnt it, was wide as a rainbow, poems in his eyes. Loved the sun—soon as he could toddle, raced out the house at daybreak to find soil or a rock, sprawled himself tongue out, lapped up heat like a reptile. But it was Odysseus that Novic knew, reared. The boy picked his father’s powers, walked through doors. T-Mo I could hold close and cuddle; Odysseus I couldn’t draw near. He was cunning, greedy. Nothing like the child that lay in a cot following objects with his eyes, stretching, kicking on his back, exploring with his hands and mouth, rolling both ways, gleeful, when for the first time he raised his chest from a stomach position. With Novic, the child was grown and strong and dark, even as an infant. Toddler T-Mo and I walked hand-in-hand, marveling at Grovea. His eyes mirrored the city: diamond stars in the jeweled sky before the moon turned bloodred. Charcoal pebbles along Turtle Cove. Amethyst sand from waves on the great reef at Rocky Point. I watched as down the esplanade of the inner city, Bruthen, he chased fireflies that glowed crimson, yellow or lime. “Tell me about Nana Space,” he asked when he was breathless, a Vulcan eagle—gold breasted—on his arm. “What about her? She was a midwife.” He would give me a look. She had ten brothers named Hook, True, Bone, Fever, Pretty, Cute, Lantern, Comet, Code and Rush. T-Mo looked at me until I mellowed: “Her mother was an enchantress, her grandmother also an enchantress but her great-grandmother was a midwife.” “Tell me about Grandpa,” guiding the eagle’s flight from the tip of his hand into the sky. “What about him? He was a migrant.” The look. Folk nicknamed my father Runaway. I relented: “He was a guard from the land of Shiva who, during prisoner transfer and a stopover for supplies, absconded after he fell in love with a local girl, the daughter of an enchantress born in a family where women became midwives or witches and it ran for generations.” Finding himself stripped of the familiarity of Shiva and all its harshness, and rewarded with the jeweled sky of Grovea, its red moon and fauna, marked the start of his impairment. Rather than adore his new world, Runaway could not bring himself to imagine life without fear. The tangent life he lived was removed from normality. A recessive mutation incited an allergy on his skin; it formed what looked like all-over body acne, a condition that later manifested itself in its wildest form in T-Mo. But most about Runaway, I remembered his roar. He roared at everything, the bellow a derivative of fear. “Why did Grandpa leave Shiva?” “People move on all the time.” The look. Shiva was a harsh place only guards, prisoners or exiles could inhabit. It was a place of rationed food and water, even air, labor in plenty. Everywhere were steel fortresses whose walls were spiked with a battalion of metal. I relented: “Your grandpa was a deserter who traded his laser gun for the love of a woman.” He lived in fear that somebody might one day recognize him and betray him and he’d be carted back to Shiva to face execution for desertion, and he was craven to his death. “Why did he trade his laser gun?” T-Mo loved those questions: why, how, when, from where? But he never asked about Novic or his family. Novic was so ancient that nobody understood anything of his past, what brought him from the land of Sayneth all alone to Grovea. I never understood his future either, or his hang-ups. All I know is that the obsessions weren’t there at the start. But after T-Mo—no, Odysseus—everything about me except amorous activity was a problem to Novic. A single hair out of place, a missing ladle in a gravy bowl, whatever thing that was nothing, it could bring on a slap.

Chapter 8

T-Mo loved centuries—the color of history. Hues along our strolls charmed him. He stayed in awe at the rainbow of street music, the blackness of the printer’s ink, the lemons and blood oranges of the market, anything grass green or snowy or cerulean or antique. Before you got to Cozy Place, there was this herbarium of exotic plants. I remember T-Mo’s fascination with the ornamental conifer, the withered olive that was the habitat of the paper-making spider, the sweet daisy species, the temple of winds shrubbery, the knotted pond-leaf, the flowering elm . . . all brought as seedlings from other worlds. So strong their scents, you could smell the plants from blocks away. That is where I found Weed. Weed’s mother worked in the herbarium. Hers was more than a green thumb; she was a Botan, gifted with nature. Loaned us her son Weed, a tall, thin boy always wearing a red scarf around his neck and a jacket. He had all over black hair going north, east, west but not at will. He brought along a half-jar of Lycopod spores that grew into dwarf plants with soft, single-veined leaves. Three times a week, he came to the garden to stroke the branching stems. The plants were simple in their forms but they carried presence. He kept them fragrant and flowering all seasons, through winter, spring, summer, into autumn. He watered them sparingly, removed dead leaves and tenderly buried them. Weed knew everything about plants, made sure our garden wore plenty of color. He knew how to get the space right between seeds for maximum growth and spread, understood which plants needed the soil to warm them up and bring out their explosion of pigmentation, call the birds and the bees. He knew which ones mushroomed and rainbowed, flowered and flowered best and without pause when he wrapped their roots in ice. He was friendly enough with T-Mo but cautious with Odysseus. Weed, perhaps the Botan in him, was one of the early ones to distinguish between T-Mo and Odysseus. Easy for a mother to tell difference, but in time more people could tell. Eyes told the boys apart: T-Mo’s carried poems in them; Odysseus and his eyes stayed flat. And smiles: T-Mo’s smile was wide as a rainbow; Odysseus had none—just a movement of lips that did not reach his eyes. Later clothing, hair and how the boys interacted with people enhanced difference. Down Cozy Place to Chirnside and away from Mead Street, as T-Mo and I walked, I pointed out the trading part of the city where you would find Jarvis the blacksmith who was also a goldsmith and a tinsmith, all muscled and wiry; Moriac who sold candles, lanterns and soaps, face like he was born in a wrecking yard; Autry the foundry man who spun metal into anything but was infamous for his bummed-out moods; Berchill who owned a drapery store—the place I bought baby wear and linen for T-Mo when he was a tot, before I could yarn them myself after Ma Space resumed her visits and remembered to learn me. T-Mo loved best Miss Lill’s sweet shop between the grocer and the post office. His favorite was the fish licorice that tasted of honey and vegetable and fish, and held a texture of oatmeal, chicken and liver. I liked the pepper and mint drops, nothing shy in those flavors, real kicks. Miss Lill, she was a golden woman with sun in her hair, happy lipstick on her lips and laughter in her walk. She never asked T-Mo what he wanted; she just saw us and gladly cried out: “Little Poetry come to visit, bless those eyes,” in her sing-sing way, all cultured-like. She spoke good sounds; I could listen to Miss Lill all day. Ultra slender for one who sold confectionery, she would ease the lid off the fish licorice jar, scoop the boy a handful—never charged him what it was worth. “Manners all impeccable, my little Poetry, remembers to say please and thank you,” she would markedly exclaim to her cap-headed helper named Warun. He was a boy with one lazy eye, lanky arms sprinkled with baby hair and a shop pet named Mate—a yappy but harmless tail- wagger two-feet tall. By the time the door swung back at Miss Lill’s, Mate yap yap yapping, T-Mo had gobbled all lollies. Then his eyes would gobble the city, a place not split into domains—it just flowed. It didn’t matter whether you sauntered along the avenues of commerce, where folk peddled aloud their wares, or you strolled in the suburbs on a person-wide track that bordered the elbows of a racing river and fingers of a fattening brush, where a nudge could plunge you into the wet churn: the flow was still there, that sense of seamlessness. Tradesfolk in Bruthen were friendly, nobody littered the street. Further down, shores were pristine, not bird- pooped, and wild things and micro things showered the coastline. But back home, once we reached the doors of the manor or the Temple, T-Mo became uneasy or edgy and then Odysseus would appear. In quiet mourning, I would watch him disappear with Novic into the incense room, and I wondered how one so sacred, a Sayneth priest, could breed something so ugly. Novic was the homeschooling kind, nobody but him worthy of coaching his son. What-am-a-think? Guess it was okay. The little I understood—carelessly revealed when a priest from the planet of 180C gave homily at our wedding—was that Novic was an itinerant scholar, one who traveled the galaxy, learnt new worlds. Mastered natural medicine at Stillwell, cosmo sciences at Abacus, political science at Panada, cosmology at Greenberg in the land of Vernis. Apparently he had relatives. An uncle named Deimos: scorched almond eyes alert with observing folk, prisoners more than normal folk, prisoners who stood chained, compliant, sometimes standing in parade or crawling ass up on their knees (in neat rows) upon command. Deimos was commander at Shiva, same penal colony my father Runaway deserted. A cousin named Surrimon who cast herself to the ground in a sudden loss of mind, confined in a madhouse in the land of Sayneth. A nephew named Blizzard, a robber, whose palm was cold, the stare of his good eye appraising—one eye was steel, the other dead as stone. Blizzard had found a fortune, or robbed someone of it, and now reveled in a life of aristocracy on 180C. Besides homeschooling in the incense room, I often heard their play, the child’s squeal of mirth so loud it could break your ears. But when he emerged after spending time with Novic, his eyes were like pinpoints. And then he was dominating, opinionated, deceitful, manipulating, prone to boredom, even cruelty. He was nothing like the infant that Nene, Corio, Anakie, Blanket, Norlane and Ma Space helped pop out of my belly. Odysseus was cruel to Novic’s new wives—Yaris, Vara, Xinnia, Clarin —when they arrived in their separate timelines. But T-Mo, fastest being ever, raced around in play with the new wives’ offspring. He liked best of all little Cassius, nestled in his mother’s arms, gold coin eyes and a mutiny of amethyst hair. But Odysseus brought Yaris to tears with his unkindness to her child. Pinched it, snatched food or toys away from it. Always like that, mean. Odysseus did things that shook or dismayed everyone—but never Novic. Odysseus, he would vanish for hours, lie about where he had been, show no remorse for my anxiety. He was secretive in his zippings in and out of the house, finding his true nature. “Where have you been?” I asked when he came home. “Nowhere.” “Nowhere has no distance.” I waited a moment to see if he would answer and was about to give up when he answered: “Has an end.” “Seemed a long time coming,” foolishly I persisted. “You can’t just vanish like that.” “Says who?” “How about me.” Odysseus cracked my smudge of hope with two words and a soft glow in his eyes: “From when?” I looked at him and wept. Nene, Corio, Anakie, Blanket, Norlane and Ma Space would have wept as well had they been around. But Ma Space was long in the ground. Blanket had opened a restaurant and, when she cooked, you tasted history in her dishes. Corio had migrated with her husband to newfound lands on 180C—who wouldn’t, if the family was going? There, picturesque islands encapsulated themselves and people initiated escapades and brand new ways of having fun. Norlane—don’t know what happened to her. Only Anakie and Nene were still birthing, but they were spending much time catching babies, too busy with midwifery to notice how my baby had turned out. While I understood that Odysseus was right—from when did I start having a say about Odysseus?—still I questioned. What is a mother to do? One day something triggered him in some way and he vanished in some other way. In palpable fashion, his absence that day filled me with a sense of dread, the reasons for the tingling in my fingers, the twist in my gut, the itch in my body . . . completely unclear. My body was still unsettled when he returned. His arrival home and my bewildered questioning were just moments apart when the story broke. It was Weed the garden boy who told me: “Odysseus, he do something real bad.” Odysseus had gone to Miss Lill’s and pulled out with bare hands a fistful of heart from howl howl howling Mate. He then flung himself on Warun, swinging over and over at his head a sock full of amethyst rock. Would have smashed Miss Lill’s head too when she dashed to help Warun had Jarvis—the blacksmith who was also a goldsmith and a tinsmith—not heard the screams. But it took four men—Jarvis, Moriac, Berchill and Autry—to pry Odysseus, foaming at the mouth, away. Four grown men to rip him from savagery, and he was just four years old. A grenade went off in my heart that day. There was no more feeling but deep sorrow and, for the second time for him, I wept. I saw with great insight that my son was a herald of death, perhaps the very father of death, reincarnated across worlds, across centuries. And I remembered the curse of his naming. That was the only time I saw Novic show rage at the child, but it was not the striking rage that closes a slap to the cheek. This one moved inside like a pot of simmering soup. If you looked closely in his eyes you could see it. He took Odysseus to the incense room and this time there was no laughter. When Odysseus burst out it was with eyes turned inward. As for Novic’s gaze, it did not touch me. He stared straight ahead. It took three whole nights for my T-Mo to emerge. But when he surfaced, his twinkle for me was back, his eyes full of poems. Smile lines filled his face but his voice was broken when he clasped my hand and said, “Walk with me, Mamma, let’s walk.” I took his hand and together we walked and walked to the end of time. Miss Lill, she sold up. There was too much randomness in a child she had once thought precious, it broke her belief. Chapter 9

I calmed Novic’s madness. Other than the laughter in the incense room, I never knew what he and Odysseus held common, what they talked about. If I walked into them, Novic slunk off mid-sentence and I knew when night came he would hit me. Even then, when he struck me, I did not cry out but lay in submission, the weight of his slap not losing its sting. Wasn’t long before he crouched beside me, his mane to my face and he would pull back my head to bite my neck in mating. I stayed loving him, even when bit by bit he turned my T-Mo into Odysseus. I calmed Novic with mundane words, things spoken quietly after the mating. “The kitchen sink needs fixing.” That very night he would fix it: the sink, a table leg, a cabinet handle. Then he would slink alone outside and prowl the house. Round and round, the entire circumference of the mansion, pacing and pacing, sometimes leaping like something had agitated him. Often, the sight of Odysseus would calm the madness. The next day Novic was like quince: acid when he woke up fresh in the morning, soft and tender in daylight. I would have stayed with Novic, cherishing the times when T-Mo emerged. Didn’t I stay after his attacks took on a new viciousness and he put magic to dinosaur my skin? Didn’t I stay when a red-hot poker rod, not magic, broke my eye? But a look made me pause and think and say: what-am-a-stay-here-for? When Novic gave me that look, it was not an evil eye or something. It was not the rage that boiled from your big toe to finish at your palm behind a strike. This one came with curiosity hinged so steep, it was a measured look. It was like something small had shifted inside Novic, and it was swirling and swirling into something bigger inside him, forming a decision. The look that sent me packing was the kind you gave a gnat you were plotting to kill. I walked through the spread of lawns and its rows and fencing of flowers, shrubs and trees. A little bird perched on the branch of a low- leafed tree stopped preening its blue feathers, silver-tipped, and crooked its head to look at me. It was a native bird, not a seasonal migrant like the long-legged, slim-bodied glow-bird, upright and elegant when it perched, often at dusk. Weed was out in the garden and did not turn his head when I ruffled his all over hair as I walked past. But one of the dwarf plants crept all the way after me until I was level with the gate. Its soft stem wrapped gently around my ankle and it hugged me for a moment before uncurling and returning to the garden. What-am-a-know? Weed was a plant whisperer. At the gateway, I looked back and saw through the liquid in my good eye my sister wives gazing at me from their bedroom windows in the oval face of the mansion, their hands waving quiet goodbyes. The sun was beginning to sink. It was T-Mo not Odysseus who stood hand pressed against his window in one of the three towers of the mansion. He refused to wave but surely he knew—how could I claim him while Odysseus lived? I turned with a boulder in my heart and put one leg in front of the other, leg leg away away . . . Some of the little children ran behind me a long way before their feet could take no more running. Then I was alone with dusk. For the first time in my life I wanted to take that boulder in my heart, find Novic and bring it down smash on his head. I left one soul behind to watch over T-Mo when he could step out of Odysseus, who was growing bolder and more domineering. I knew I had done the unthinkable: left my own behind in a place where a child belongs to his ma. I argued with myself over and over that this child understood. Years later it was T-Mo not Odysseus who took the same path I took, leg leg away away . . . leaving behind Novic and roaming the world. He was eleven then, same age as I was wedded. Tssk. I like this sound. I did not see fit to say goodbye to Ma Space where she lay, a headstone marking her spot near the northern gate of Creek Point cemetery with the words: Herein lies a distracted beauty, no will to riot. Why no goodbye? Perhaps I was fearful that—even in her grave—she might treat my departure with the caliber of levity capable in a person named Space, raised in a houseful of boys named Hook, True, Bone, Fever, Pretty, Cute, Lantern, Comet, Code and Rush.

© 2019 by Eugen Bacon. Excerpted from Claiming T-Mo by Eugen Bacon. Published by permission of the author and Meerkat Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Eugen Bacon is a computer scientist mentally re-engineered into creative writing. She has published over one hundred short stories and articles, together with anthologies. Her stories have won, been shortlisted and commended in international awards, including the Bridport Prize, L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest, Copyright Agency Prize and Fellowship of Australian Writers National Literary Awards. Her creative work has appeared in literary and speculative fiction publications worldwide, including Award Winning Australian Writing, AntipodeanSF, Andromeda, Aurealis, Bards and Sages Quarterly, and New Writing (Routledge). Eugen’s latest books: Writing Speculative Fiction: Creative and Critical Approaches from Macmillan International, May 2019, and her debut novel, Claiming T-Mo, from Meerkat Press, Aug. 2019. She can be found at eugenbacon.com.

The H Word: Exploring the Unknown Christopher Golden | 1224 words

It would be easy to blame Indiana Jones. I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark in the movie theater five times upon its initial release, and I’ve viewed it dozens of times since then, introducing my children to the dangers and joys of action-archaeology. But to suggest that my interest in digging up the past—or more accurately, digging into the past and uncovering ancient terrors best left buried—didn’t start with Harrison Ford. The motif is broader than that, and goes back much earlier. Was it the dreadful 1956 film The Mole People, in which scientists find a lost, underground city of mutant creatures? Almost certainly not, though sequences from that film do linger in the back of my consciousness. (As an aside, there’s a direct connection from my love of all of this subterranean lore to my adoration for Jennifer Toth’s remarkable non-fiction book The Mole People, about people living beneath the streets of New York City). At a certain age, I sought out all sorts of stories in various mediums that had to do with archaeology, underground mysteries, terrifying discoveries. In those days, local television channels packaged their old horror and science-fiction films under the umbrella titles Creature Feature and Creature Double Feature. You never knew what you were going to get, whether the film would be awful or wonderful, or some blissful combination of the two. What is it about such stories that speaks not only to me, but to so many of us? Horror and adventure stories are the two sides of the double helix in my DNA, and I’m not alone, but why do these tales resonate so deeply? To answer that question, I turn to one of my favorite films and one of the greatest feats of cinema, the original version of King Kong. In 1933, when the film was first released, the suspension of disbelief required of the audience would have been only a tiny fraction of what’s required today. The idea that explorers going off the routine shipping lanes might encounter a mist-enshrouded secret island previously unknown to “civilized man,” and that this island might be home to otherwise extinct dinosaurs, giant insects, and towering ape-gods, would have seemed fantastical, but perhaps not so far-fetched. Traveling further backward along our pop culture timeline, we find one of the clear inspirations for Kong’s Skull Island in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 publication of The Lost World, and a host of other tales about explorers venturing into dark jungles and deep caves to discover dangers and wonders they had never before imagined. Tales of Egyptian tombs, legends of lost cities, long-buried evils unleashed anew . . . they speak to our need for mystery, for wonder and awe. More than that, at their core these tales resonate with our innate yearning to explore the unknown, to shine light into the shadows. John W. Campbell’s seminal tale “Who Goes There?” was the source for both Howard Hawks’ The Thing from Another World and John Carpenter’s The Thing, and each iteration must be deemed science fiction. But these are also adventure stories, and horror stories, tales of mysteries being dug up from the ice in parts of the world ordinary people perceive as near-mythical and certainly unknown. H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountain of Madness does the same. An entire volume could be written tracing the history of such stories, but what intrigues me the most is the shrinking of the unknown world. As time has passed, little of our planet remains unexplored or uninhabited, requiring authors and other storytellers to work a bit harder to achieve the suspension of disbelief that came much easier eighty years ago. Often, authors resort to period settings for that reason, partly as a way to trick the sensibilities of the reader—to lull their modern skepticism—but also to put us in a world without cell phones, without the internet, a world with a much greater sense of isolation and danger. (Or, perhaps I should say, a different sort of isolation and a different kind of danger.) Fortunately, there are still mysteries in this world and beyond it, still things that are unknown, still caves to be explored. Just within the past few years, the world’s longest cave system was discovered. Within the past few months, archaeologists in Egypt have made new discoveries of tombs and the remains of pharaohs. Regardless of what popular thought would have us believe, there are still remote, uninhabited islands. Beyond that, there are other mysteries, other unknowns that inspire us to adventure and terror. The universe awaits exploration, and endless suspense, thrills, and scares may be found in fiction or in reality beyond our planet. The ocean depths still hold many secrets. There are ancient histories that archaeologists have yet to discover, just waiting for us to discover—or invent—them. A sobering thought, however: much of the unknown that simmers around us springs from the changes our planet is enduring. Whatever we think we understand about Earth, its caves, and its oceans, all of it is changing. Geography will change. Retreating ice pack will reveal secrets and dangers. Uninhabitable lands may become habitable, while, terrifyingly, the opposite is also true. As frightening as this reality may be, it also provides extraordinary fodder for fiction. So many great horror and adventure stories begin with someone digging up something they should have left buried. I think we need these stories to remind ourselves that we don’t know everything, that it is dangerous folly to assume otherwise. Also, though . . . the kid in me says “they’re just cool,” and they really are. The magic of The Mummy and Journey to the Center of the Earth still resonates with me. The Lost World and King Kong and Raiders of the Lost Ark are inextricably imprinted on my imagination, and are major ingredients in my own creative stew, into which I dip the ladle every time I come up with a new story idea. Of the modern novelists who’ve inspired me with tales of digging too deeply and uncovering the unknown, the ones who spring most readily to mind include Preston & Child, James Rollins, Scott Smith (with his terrifying The Ruins), and Anne Rice, in her novel The Mummy, or, Ramses the Damned). In my new novel, The Pandora Room, I get to delve into some of history’s greatest mysteries, mix them up with archaeology, strange-but- true geology, ancient civilizations, twisted rituals, ghosts, and a modern socio-political powder keg . . . all wonderful ingredients from the author’s brain-stew. As I write this, I’m in the midst of writing the TV bible and the pilot episode for Ben Walker, a television series based on several of my novels, including Ararat, The Pandora Room, The Ocean Dark, and next year’s brand new novel in the series, Red Hands. The little boy who loved digging up the past, the kid who embraced Doc Savage, Indiana Jones, and The Thing from another World, has grown up now. And he’s loving every minute of this adventure.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Christopher Golden is the New York Times bestselling, Bram Stoker Award- winning author of such novels as Ararat, Snowblind, Wildwood Road, and The Pandora Room. With Mike Mignola, he is the co-creator of two cult favorite comic book series, Baltimore and Joe Golem: Occult Detective. As an editor, he has worked on the short story anthologies Seize the Night, Dark Cities, and The New Dead, among others, and he has also written and co-written comic books, video games, and screenplays. Golden co-hosts the podcasts Three Guys with Beards and Defenders Dialogue. In 2015 he founded the popular Merrimack Valley Halloween Book Festival. His work has been nominated for the British Fantasy Award, the Eisner Award, and multiple Shirley Jackson Awards. For the Bram Stoker Awards, Golden has been nominated eight times in eight different categories. His original novels have been published in more than fifteen languages in countries around the world. Please visit him at www.christophergolden.com. Book Reviews: June 2019 Terence Taylor | 2046 words

Read This! Volume 9: June 2019

Once I finished reading the second of my selections for this column, I found myself wondering if a common thread or theme that bound them would come to me, as it has so often in past columns. I was settling into my bedtime ritual, with sleep creeping closer, when it suddenly came to me. Both are related by the concept of the Looming Doom, a theme fully familiar to horror readers. In stories driven by the Looming Doom, the source of dread isn’t articulated as clearly as the effect it has on the protagonists. Like a black hole, until the very end we know the thing itself only by witnessing what it does to those around it. From The Wicker Man to Get Out and Hereditary, we’ve watched or read about heroes or heroines who walk blindly into an awful unknown, only to be overcome or consumed by it. Sometimes the consumption is literal as something otherworldly actually eats them, but it’s more often internal, as the pull of the object of fear draws its victims into itself, and transforms them physically or mentally. It’s always a story of slowly mounting dread, with the protagonist often only learning the truth of the doom they face in the brief moments just before it finally overtakes them. I’ve always thought, like others, that genre fiction, whether in print, film, television, and now online, reflects the zeitgeist of its age, and these two books seem to validate that notion. We live in an era of Looming Doom, haunted by the subliminal static of impending death or destruction by gun violence, crushing debt, untreatable illnesses, economic collapse, climate change, military intervention, or having your brain implode as you try to make sense of the news each day. No matter what side of the political fence you stand on, the view looks grim and seems to be slowly, consistently, worsening. We move through our lives day by day, power still on, food still available, our world still functioning, even if we have the sneaking suspicion as we watch riots, earthquakes and fires in other countries, that all is not well and whatever is out there is coming for us. I think that’s at the heart of the current immigration panic, the hope that all the danger is “out there,” and that if we lock our doors and seal our windows, it won’t get us. A Quiet Place and The Silence, recent films released a year apart, both posit a world in which predatory monsters have wiped out most of the population, and survivors live by being as unnoticeable as possible. That seems to be an apt metaphor for putting our heads in the sand until the danger passes as so many seem inclined to do. In these novels the protagonists respond to their own Looming Doom in a variety of ways, from denial to obsession, some more effectively than others. There are two things that make a Looming Doom story work for me —one is a plausible build-up of growing unease that rises as realistically as it would in life, and the other is the effective reveal of “what it all really means,” the “Ah ha!” moment that makes the long build up worth the wait. In these two books the denouement is less a bombastic reveal than the grim slam of a coffin lid, but both are still worth the wait.

Triangulum Masande Ntshanga ISBN: 978-1937512774 Paperback / Ebook Two Dollar Radio, May 14, 2019, 367 pages

When the seventeen-year-old narrator of Triangulum falls asleep, something that she calls The Machine goes into motion. It fills her room with alien technology, invades her body and mind for reasons unknown to her. Girls her age are disappearing in provincial South African townships around her, and her father, Tata, is slowly succumbing to a consumptive disease. Since her mother’s mysterious disappearance, the girl has been on a constantly changing host of anti-depressants to control what the adults around her view as hallucinations. Seeking answers about the missing girls, with odd clues from a package mailed to a missing friend, she takes part in an enigmatic study that only adds to her growing sense of disconnection to the everyday world and traditional time. Though marketed as science fiction, Triangulum trades in the kind of creeping dread that takes it into horror territory as well. Most of the action takes place in the years right after the end of apartheid, when South Africa was going through changes as significant as those of a teenager’s mind and body, the same conflicts and confusion. Seeing it through her eyes gives it an added sense of loss and yearning. Whether what she experienced as a teenager is real or not haunts her into adult life in 2025, when she’s caught up in an underground eco- terrorist organization working to break down corporate mental manipulation of a sheep-like populace. The company she works for transfers her to a special project with terrifying potential to escalate that end, at the same time D., a young woman artist who becomes her lover and co-conspirator, recruits her into a shadowy subculture. Their relationship in both leads to her ultimate understanding of The Machine, her mother’s disappearance, and the greater nature of the universe we live in. The book is purported to be an edited manuscript released in 2043 as an organized accumulation of recordings and printed pages written from 1999 to 2025, organized by Dr. Naomi Buthelezi, a science fiction writer approached by the scientist who held the material in 2038. Delivered anonymously to the South African National Space Agency, the documents warn of the total extinction of Earth in 2050. After a recent bombing, the collection’s now taken more seriously as a potential threat, as the same eco-terrorist group the author described were said to have planted the explosives in 2026. Naomi works with the scientist to determine their veracity. After his death she presents the public with this book, the results of a five-year study of the apocalyptic message sent, a warning ignored by scientists and politicians. To that degree the book becomes a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. In unraveling the threads of its intricacies we are led back to ourselves. Like Frankenstein in Baghdad and Infidel, reviewed in previous columns, Ntshanga effectively uses a work of genre fiction to reveal meaning in our own world. Everyday events in a changing twentieth century South Africa and its potential future is used as background to a larger story of our own frail and fallible human nature, written in quietly beautiful language that is poetic, yet conversational and engaging enough to ground its unreal events.

Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell Nathan Ballingrud ISBN:9781534449930 Hardcover / Paperback / Ebook Gallery/Saga Press, April 9, 2019, 288 Pages

“The Atlas of Hell,” the first story in this collection, introduces us to Jack, a bookseller in New Orleans who’s in thrall to Eugene, a local gangster with a new demand. Fascinated by old books, Jack went into apprenticeship when young to an aging bookbinder that turned out to be a necromancer. He quickly learned there was more money to be made stealing and selling books of more than merely dubious provenance, works from the literature of the damned. After a bloody battle with a death cult over an ancient scroll, Jack starts stealing more supernatural books for Eugene. His boss recently received the thighbone of his dead son, retrieved from Hell by Tobias, another one of his thralls. He used the atlas to do it and Eugene wants Jack to bring it to him. Even Jack knows providing Eugene with a gateway to Hell is a bad idea, but Patrick, Eugene’s armed and dangerous muscle, offers him no other options. Jack travels with the thug into the depths of the swamps to find Tobias. He’s a low-level crook who feels despised by Eugene, only to discover he’s actually beneath his notice. Even worse. Sending Eugene his son’s bone (which strangely regenerates into a shrieking homunculus by the end of the story), was meant to be an act of defiance, but it backfires as the trip goes as far south as one can in New Orleans. This story kicks off an anthology that reads as if written by the love child of Ray Bradbury in dark mode and Clive Barker . . . lyrically chilling as The October Country or Something Wicked This Way Comes and grotesquely beautiful as The Books of Blood or The Great and Secret Show. The stories are related by the world they inhabit, on the literal border of Hell, in both the past and now, depicted consistently throughout the anthology as feckless humans venture in and its horrific inhabitants skitter or stampede out. “The Diabolist” and “Skullpocket” are told from the point of view of imps and ghouls brought into contact with humanity by means both deliberate and accidental. It’s oddly easy to feel sympathy for them when you see things from their perspectives, even if the values expressed are somewhat antithetical to our survival. Even if their games include kickball with human heads, and their diet includes us . . . “The Maw” follows up on the climax of “The Diabolist,” where imps were summoned from Hell in the town of Angel’s Rest by a theomancer who sought to bring back his dead wife by ripping holes in time and space. They’re unleashed after his death by an angry abandoned young daughter who tries to do the same for him, and her horrors have now spilled into neighboring communities. “The Maw” takes us on a rescue mission into an abandoned town nicknamed the Hollow City. Its Hellish occupants, the demonic Surgeons and Wagoneers, have cored all the old structures to make room for their new construction; assemblages shaped from the bones and weirdly still living flesh from once human inhabitants who didn’t evacuate in time. “The Visible Filth” takes us back to New Orleans for a lost pink cellphone that sends strange and increasingly frightening text messages to the bartender who finds it—from someone who may have been killed or worse. It leads him and his live-in girlfriend down a rabbit hole to a secret cult that may be committing sins that exceed mere murder. It builds step by step, as we watch the normal moral lives of its characters slowly stripped away as the truth behind it all—well—consumes them, in ways described at the start of this column. I won’t spoil it by telling you which or where it leaves them. No great surprise that it’s already been adapted into a horror film. The collection closes with a Lovecraftian elegy, the grimly glorious tale of “The Butcher’s Table,” that incorporates almost every one of the ingredients of a good Grand Guignol theater piece. It also brings the collection full circle, with the creation of a key element in the first story, the titular atlas of Hell, which can give you anything you want. As anyone who encounters it learns, it’s best to just say no. As we feel the oppressive force of our own Looming Dooms, these two books offer a look at how much worse things could be. In that, they offer some hope we can survive ours better than these characters do. In any event, at least our horrors are only of our own making, so we can hope that should make them that much easier to overcome than the horrors of a literal Hell or an alien intrusion . . . right? We shall see.

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

Author Spotlight: Megan Arkenberg Setsu Uzumé | 1028 words

When did this story introduce itself to you?

Like most stories, “The Night Princes” came together from a heap of disparate scraps. The title occurred to me while I was assisting with summer classes at a middle school near my university over 2011 or 2012, and I found myself supervising the basketball court at recess (although why my students struck me as royalty of the nocturnal variety, I don’t recall anymore). Later that year, still in my student teaching, I experienced my first school lockdown, and that experience—waiting in a small space for who-knows-what, surrounded by the familiar objects of my classroom while startling and unfamiliar noises sounded in the hallway—ultimately shaped the frame story of Batul in her apartment. Ever since writing “Lessons from a Clockwork Queen,” I’d been gathering ideas for another series of fairy tales, this time a riff on Somerset Maugham, about Death and the mortals she outwits; the first story was going to be about the man Death fell in love with and trapped in a well . . . At some point over the years, I realized all these fragments were part of one text.

The character parallels between the apartment and the tale of the Princes is clear, but are the stories meant to intersect in other places? For example, the fat coyote on the far shore of the Prince’s story might be one of the ones that ate the man in the ravine before Batul was born.

I don’t know that the storyworlds intersect quite so literally, but there are definitely connections. Batul is weaving stories out of her own life— sometimes out of concrete details, as you note with the coyote, but more often out of a kind of emotional coloring. For example, the fear Michael feels when she discovers she’s contracted the sickness in the plague city is the same fear Batul feels in her stairwell, when she thinks she’s about to be murdered.

You mentioned in another spotlight that you take an interest in the way tropes and themes change in the slush pile. Are there any tropes or themes that have been particularly dear or troubling in your own work that you’ve changed your mind about?

That’s a great question. Like many writers, I think, a lot of what I write is in search of how I feel about something, so I’m still drawn to themes I’ve always had questions about. It’s not so much that I’ve changed my mind as that I’m still looking for an answer in the first place. One trope that seems to put me out-of-step with a bit of the SF/F/H short fiction community (and the queer SF/F/H community in particular) is my fascination with characters who don’t find their “home” by the end of the story, whether that’s a place or a found family or a way of living. I feel increasingly turned off by the tidy ending that says: “No matter how weird or special you are, there’s a place for you.” It’s not that I don’t think this is true, or should be true—but I think most kinds of belonging demand a sacrifice of another kind, and the trend towards happy endings and hopeful stories in speculative fiction seems reluctant to grapple with what has to be given up in exchange. That may be why I’ve found myself writing more and more horror and dark fantasy; these genres seem more willing to accept untidy endings, or at least to accept that some of what we give up in exchange for a happy ending still deserves to be mourned. Looking at my recent work, I also notice an increasing concern with how we make sense of or assign meaning to the sometimes sickly ironic turns our lives can take. (“The Oracle and the Sea” in Beneath Ceaseless Skies and “A Nearly Beautiful Thing” in Syntax & Salt are two recent examples.) Perhaps this comes from the same impulse as my rejection of homecoming stories. As a fiction writer by vocation and a scholar of narrative by profession, I guess what I really want to know is: What about all the turns and junctures in our lives that stories don’t prepare us for? Or, what if being able to tell a story about something that’s happened to us winds up making that thing feel uglier and less meaningful? If we genuinely believe stories are powerful—powerful enough to heal or give hope—then I think we need to accept that they can also cause injury and despair. And I find that utterly fascinating.

Did this story challenge you in a way you didn’t expect? How close was the final version to what you initially pictured?

Surprisingly, for a story that took me at least seven years to write, the final version and my initial vision—a woman trapped in her apartment while a battle rages outside, telling stories about Death—are quite close. The part I wasn’t sure about when I started, and which took me a few years to figure out, is exactly where those stories would bring Batul. I wanted her to achieve that new and satisfying understanding of Death, an image of Death as a friend and companion; but it ultimately seemed wrong to tell a story about a victim of violence who learns to accept violence as inevitable. Yet I couldn’t imagine a satisfying alternative. It took me a while to accept that the lack of closure in the story—the sense of a storyteller defeated by her own material—may be the only just way to conclude.

What can we look forward to next from you?

I have several new stories about violence, belonging, and using fiction to make sense of our lives forthcoming in Kaleidotrope, The Dark, and Asimov’s. Readers can check my website for updates at meganarkenberg.com.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Setsu grew up in New York, and spent their formative years in and out of dojos. They like swords, raspberries, justice, the smell of pine forests after rain, and shooting arrows from horseback. They do not like peanut butter and chocolate in the same bite. Their work has appeared in PodCastle and Grimdark Magazine. Find them on Twitter @KatanaPen. Author Spotlight: Alanna J. Faelan Sandra Odell | 995 words

“The Taurids Branch” was a slow burn, one that promised to build on itself to a dark, fine point, and it did not disappoint. Tell us something of the inspiration behind the tale.

I was thinking a lot about motherhood and relationships. I’m turning twenty-eight soon, and I’ve never wanted children, but I’ve been interrogating that desire—is it trauma from caregivers that led me to that conclusion? The fear of losing my autonomy to a child? The mistrust of the nuclear family structure, which is still the prevailing narrative of what family “should” look like in the US? These are all questions that came out in the story. I was also thinking about how women are taught very young that it is our duty to change ourselves for others. We are also taught that the crowning achievement of being alive is finding a monogamous spouse and having or adopting children with them. This is something many women I know think deeply and critically about—having a family—but most men I know do not. It’s a yes or no question for many of them, rarely more complicated than a matter of preference. When it comes to children, our society leaves women with the bill. We like to think we’ve become more egalitarian, but most women I grew up with still felt that heavy pressure. I think most cis men have no real expectations pushed upon them to form critical insight into what it takes to be a parent. It’s easier for them to opt out.

When readers think of horror, they often envision one type of horror for a given work, yet “The Taurids Branch” unapologetically dances with a number of different sorts: the fear of being alone; the end of the world; self-hate; suicide; violence against women; postpartum depression. I feel that this only strengthened the story, driving home a different sort of horror—that life and pain are more than we can ever hope to understand. What do you see as the true horror here?

The real horror for me was the idea of waking up one morning to hear that you only have so much time left, and realizing you are not who you want to be. Or worse, that you aren’t you because you’ve been playing a different version of yourself for someone else. Trauma has turned me into a bit of a people-pleaser, so I’ve always lived with that fear of getting trapped by other people’s expectations of me, or by my own fear of being alone. It’s an impulse I have to guard very closely against. And then there’s the violence that marginalized people have to contend with every day, which I experience as a sort of background noise. Things I am always aware of, but are so suffused into my everyday experience that I rarely take notice until it comes into sharp focus—violence against women, mental illness exacerbated by systemic inequality, rising fascist violence all over the world, and climate change, which is looking more and more like it may be the period at the end of humanity’s sentence.

On the flip side, many of the horrors in the story have been called “women’s horror,” and are unknowable to men who don’t share the same biological or social issues. While I don’t personally agree with such views, some readers might consider them valid. What are your thoughts? Is horror so specifically gendered that a broader audience can’t identify with a given theme?

The short answer to that is that I don’t really care if someone is uninterested in this sort of work because they don’t think it applies to them. I don’t think about that at all when I am writing. The long answer, though, is that of course it applies to them—we are communal creatures. All of us are part of a community. My hope is that it may have the power to make someone stop and ask, “Have I done this? Can I change my behavior?” I do not believe there are good people and bad people, and it’s not my goal to make that delineation in my work, but I do hope my work can hold space for people, particularly men, to interrogate themselves.

You have participated in the Tin House Summer Writer Workshops and recently attended the Clarion Writer’s Workshop. What first sparked your interest in writing?

This story came out of week two of Clarion, and I don’t know if I could have produced it without being inside the Clarion pressure cooker —huge thanks to Holly Black for helping me realize what my point of telling was and Clarion ’18 for their generous feedback. I started reading to survive. If books didn’t show me that other worlds and other ways of being were possible, I don’t know that I would have. And when I saw that, in fiction, authors gained the power to say whatever they wanted, be whoever they wanted, I started to think I could have that power too. Writing feels like a way of speaking my life into existence in a world that taught me my story and my body and my feelings taking up space is wrong.

What’s next for Alanna Faelan? What can eager readers look forward to in 2019?

I’m currently working on a piece about queer girls at summer camp, spooky trauma-ghosts, and some very scary goats, so hopefully that will be out in the world somewhere soon. I’m also working on a visual project, creating little illustrations to go along with short stories I love. I do freelance book cover and graphic design so if you’re in need of that, contact me at [email protected] or on twitter @AlannaFaelan.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Sandra Odell lives in Washington state with her husband, sons, and an Albanian miniature moose disguised as a dog. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s Universe, Daily Science Fiction, Crossed Genres, Pseudopod, and Cast of Wonders. She is a Clarion West 2010 graduate, and an active member of the SFWA. Find out more at writerodell.com or follow her on Twitter at @WriterOdell.

Coming Attractions The Editors | 125 words

Coming up in July, in Nightmare . . . We have original fiction from Simon Strantzas (“Antripuu”) and Isabel Cañas (“No Other Life”), along with reprints by Seanan McGuire (“Threnody for Little Girl, with Tuna, at the End of the World”) and Cody Goodfellow (“At the Riding School”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, and a book review from Adam-Troy Castro. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Nightmare. Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got new fiction on the way from Kurt Fawver, Senaa Ahmad, and A. Merc Rustad. Thanks for reading! Stay Connected The Editors

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

Magazine Website www.nightmare-magazine.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the Nightmare Team The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief John Joseph Adams

Managing/Associate Editor Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher Robert Barton Bland

Reprint Editor John Langan

Podcast Producer Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor Jim Freund

Podcast Host Jack Kincaid

Art Director Christie Yant Assistant Editors Erika Holt Lisa Nohealani Morton

Reviewers Adam-Troy Castro Terence Taylor

Copy Editor Melissa V. Hofelich

Proofreader Devin Marcus

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

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

ANTHOLOGIES

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

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

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

Armored

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

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

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

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

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

Brave New Worlds By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers

Dead Man’s Hand

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

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

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

Epic: Legends of Fantasy

Federations

The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

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

Lightspeed: Year One

The Living Dead

The Living Dead 2

Loosed Upon the World

The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination

Operation Arcana Other Worlds Than These

Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen)

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

Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Seeds of Change

Under the Moons of Mars

Wastelands

Wastelands 2

Wastelands: The New Apocalypse [June 2019]

The Way of the Wizard

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

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn

Sand by Hugh Howey

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

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty

The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn

The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette

In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

Gather the Fortunes by Bryan L. Camp

Reentry by Peter Cawdron

Half Way Home by Hugh Howey

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear

Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer

A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker

The Conductors by Nicole Glover The Chosen One by Veronica Roth

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