Nightmare Magazine Issue 1, October 2012 Table of Contents Editorial, October 2012 “Property Condemned”—Jonathan Maberry “Frontier Death Song”—Laird Barron “Good Fences”—Genevieve Valentine “Afterlife”—Sarah Langan The H Word: “The Other Scarlet Letter”—R.J. Sevin Artist Gallery: Jeff Simpson Artist Spotlight: Jeff Simpson Interview: Peter Straub Author Spotlight: Jonathan Maberry Author Spotlight: Laird Barron Author Spotlight: Genevieve Valentine Author Spotlight: Sarah Langan Coming Attractions © 2012, Nightmare Magazine Cover Art and artist gallery images by Jeff Simpson. Ebook design by Neil Clarke. www.nightmare-magazine.com Editorial, October 2012 John Joseph Adams Welcome to issue one of Nightmare! Nightmare is a new online horror and dark fantasy magazine. In our pages, you will find all kinds of horror fiction, from zombie stories and haunted house tales to visceral psychological horror. Every month we plan on bringing you a mix of originals and reprints, and featuring a variety of authors —from the bestsellers and award-winners you already know to the best new voices you haven’t heard of yet. When you read Nightmare, it is our hope that you’ll see where horror comes from, where it is now, and where it’s going. Nightmare will also include nonfiction, fiction podcasts, and Q&As with our authors that go behind-the- scenes of their stories. Our planned publication schedule each month will include two pieces of original fiction and two fiction reprints, along with a feature interview and an artist gallery showcasing our cover artist. We will publish ebook issues on the first of every month, which will be available for sale in ePub and mobi format via our website and also available in other formats such as Kindle and Nook. We will also offer subscriptions to our ebook edition in a variety of formats. Each issue’s contents will be serialized on our website throughout the month, with new features publishing on the first four Wednesdays of every month. Our goal with Nightmare, at its most basic, is to bring great horror short fiction to the masses. And with our editorial model of publishing two original stories alongside two reprints every month, I think we’ll be able to expose horror readers to a lot of great stories, both new and classic. Also, I hope to bring a more diverse audience to Nightmare, and to publish a more diverse range of authors; I’m hoping that my extensive experience in science fiction and fantasy will bring some of those readers and writers over to the dark side (and perhaps vice versa as well). As I said above, Nightmare will typically feature two original stories and two reprints in every issue. For our debut issue, however, we will be bringing you four all- new, never before published horror stories: “Property Condemned” by Jonathan Maberry, “Frontier Death Song” by Laird Barron, “Good Fences” by Genevieve Valentine, and “Afterlife” by Sarah Langan. We’ll also have author spotlights with each of our authors, as well as an in-depth feature interview with horror legend Peter Straub. And finally we’ll have the first installment of “The H Word,” a monthly column which will focus on exploring the many facets of the field of horror. So that’s our first issue; we hope you enjoy it! Future issues will contain work by bestselling and award-winning authors Ramsey Campbell, Sarah Langan (a second story!), Jeff VanderMeer, and Daniel H. Wilson. Plus, we’ll have stories from exciting newcomers such as Desirina Boskovich, Tamsyn Muir, J. B. Park, and Matt Williamson. If that lineup of forthcoming fiction sounds good to you, the best way to ensure that you never miss an issue—and the best way to support the magazine —is to subscribe. So please consider doing so, and tell a friend! Speaking of friends, thanks again to everyone who contributed to our Kickstarter campaign and showed us that crucial early support to help us get the magazine off the ground. Once again, we salute you! We hope you’ll find that your faith in us was well-placed. That’s about all I have for you this month, but before I step out of your way here and let you get to the fiction, here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Nightmare: Website: nightmare-magazine.com Newsletter: nightmare-magazine.com/newsletter RSS feed: nightmare-magazine.com/rss-2 Podcast feed: nightmare-magazine.com/itunes-rss Twitter: @nightmaremag Facebook: facebook.com/NightmareMagazine Subscribe: nightmare-magazine.com/subscribe Thanks for reading! John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Nightmare (and its sister magazine, Lightspeed), is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. He is a four-time finalist for the Hugo Award and a four-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Forthcoming anthologies include: Epic (November, Tachyon), The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (2013, Tor), and Robot Uprisings (2013, Doubleday). He is also the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams. Property Condemned: A Story of Pine Deep Jonathan Maberry -1- The house was occupied, but no one lived there. That’s how Malcolm Crow thought about it. Houses like the Croft place were never really empty. Like most of the kids in Pine Deep, Crow knew that there were ghosts. Even the tourists knew about the ghosts. It was that kind of town. All of the tourist brochures had pictures of ghosts on them. Happy, smiling, Casper the Friendly Ghost sorts of ghosts. Every store in town had a rack of books about the ghosts of Pine Deep. Crow had every one of those books. He couldn’t braille his way through a basic geometry test or recite the U.S. Presidents in any reliable order, but he knew about shades and crisis apparitions, church grims and banshees, crossroads ghosts and poltergeists. He read every story and historical account; saw every movie he could afford to see. Every once in a while, Crow would even risk one of his father’s frequent beatings to sneak out of bed and tiptoe down to the basement to watch Double Chiller Theater on the flickering old Emerson. If his dad caught him and took a belt to him, it was okay as long as Crow managed to see at least one good spook flick. Besides, beatings were nothing to Crow. At nine years old he’d had so many that they’d lost a lot of their novelty. It was the ghosts that mattered. Crow would give a lot —maybe everything he had in this world—to actually meet a ghost. That would be . well, Crow didn’t know what it would be. Not exactly. Fun didn’t seem to be the right word. Maybe what he really wanted was proof. He worried about that. About wanting proof that something existed beyond the world he knew. He believed that he believed, but he wasn’t sure that he was right about it. That he was aware of this inconsistency only tightened the knots. And fueled his need. His hunger. Ghosts mattered to Malcolm Crow because whatever they were, they clearly outlasted whatever had killed them. Disease, murder, suicide, war, brutality . abuse. The causes of their deaths were over, but they had survived. That’s why Crow wasn’t scared of ghosts. What frightened him—deep down on a level where feelings had no specific structure—was the possibility that they might not exist. That this world was all that there was. And the Croft house? That place was different. Crow had never worked up the nerve to go there. Almost nobody ever went out there. Nobody really talked about it, though everyone knew about it. Crow made a point of visiting the other well-known haunted spots—the tourist spots—hoping to see a ghost. All he wanted was a glimpse. In one of his favorite books on hauntings, the writer said that a glimpse was what most people usually got. “Ghosts are elusive,” the author had written. “You don’t form a relationship with one, you’re lucky if you catch a glimpse out of the corner of your eye; but if you do, you’ll know it for what it is. One glimpse can last you a lifetime.” So far, Crow had not seen or even heard a single ghost. Not one cold spot, not a single whisper of old breath, not a hint of something darting away out of the corner of his eye. Nothing, zilch. Nada. However, he had never gone into the Croft place. Until today. Crow touched the front pocket of his jeans to feel the outline of his lucky stone. Still there. It made him smile. Maybe now he’d finally get to see a ghost. -2- They pedaled through dappled sunlight, sometimes four abreast, sometimes single file when the trail dwindled down to a crooked deer path. Crow knew the way to the Croft place and he was always out front, though he liked it best when Val Guthrie rode beside him. As they bumped over hard-packed dirt and whispered through uncut summer grass, Crow cut frequent, covert looks at Val. Val was amazing.