TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 41, February 2016

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, February 2016

FICTION No Other Men in Mitchell Rose Hartley Inspirations Seanan McGuire Princess Dennis Etchison Where Angels Come In Adam L.G. Nevill

NOVEL EXCERPTS Bleeding Earth Kaitlin Ward

NONFICTION The H Word: Fairy Tales: The Original Horror Stories? Alison Littlewood Artist Showcase: Steven Stahlberg Marina J. Lostetter Interview: David Mitchell The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Rose Hartley Seanan McGuire Dennis Etchison Adam L.G. Nevill

MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Stay Connected Subscriptions and Ebooks About the Nightmare Team Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2016 Nightmare Magazine Cover by Steven Stahlberg www.nightmare-magazine.com FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, February 2016 John Joseph Adams | 944 words

Welcome to issue forty-one of Nightmare! We neglected to mention it in the magazine last month (whoops!), but we’re currently in the midst of crowdfunding our next Destroy project. In 2014, we asked women to destroy science fiction, and they did— spectacularly—in our first crowdfunded, all-women special issue, Women Destroy Science Fiction!. Then, in 2015, we asked queers to destroy science fiction, they did—again, spectacularly—in Queers Destroy Science Fiction! This year, we’re turning the reins over to People of Colo(u)r, with People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!, guest edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Kristine Ong Muslim. Joining Nalo and Kristine will be a team of wonderful POC creatives, including Nisi Shawl (reprint editor), Berit Ellingsen (flash fiction editor), Sunil Patel (personal essays editor), Grace Dillon (nonfiction editor), and more! We launched our Kickstarter campaign on January 18 and surpassed our original goal in just a manner of hours. Our first day’s totals surpassed that of QDSF and WDSF, and as I write this (on the evening of January 31), we’re currently at nearly $26K (518% of our original goal). Thanks so much to all of you who have supported the project thus far! Our two biggest stretch goals are the same as last year: If we receive enough pledges, we’ll not only publish POC Destroy Science Fiction!, we’ll also publish additional special issues POC Destroy Horror! (at $30K) and POC Destroy Fantasy! (at $40K). We’ve already unlocked our first four stretch goals, including a “POC sampler” anthology edited by yours truly, consisting of POC-authored stories previously selected for publication in my various projects. If you’d like to buy or renew a subscription, doing so during the campaign is a great idea because one of our stretch goals unlocked a really great bonus: If you back the Kickstarter and select a subscription reward, you’ll not only get the subscription—you’ll also all 40+ back issues of the magazine! The POC Destroy Science Fiction! Kickstarter campaign will run from January 18 – February 19. To learn more, visit destroysf.com/poc.

• • • •

In case you missed my big news recently: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, publishers of my Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy (and the rest of the Best American series), have offered me the opportunity to edit a science fiction/fantasy (and horror) novel line for them—and naturally I agreed! The line is called John Joseph Adams Books (their idea, not mine!), and will be a tightly-curated list of 7-10 titles per year. We’ll be pre-launching the line in early 2016 with new editions of three Hugh Howey novels, starting with Beacon 23 (February 9) and then in March, we’ll publish volumes II and III of the Silo trilogy, Shift and Dust (March 22)—making them all available via traditional publishing for the first time. The line will then kick things off in earnest in early 2017 with our first batch of never- before-published works. If you’re a regular reader of my magazines and/or anthologies, then you should already have a good idea of what to expect—and if you like my work as a short fiction editor, then I suspect you’ll like the novels I publish as well. The John Joseph Adams Books website is still under development, but if you bookmark johnjosephadamsbooks.com, that’ll take you to it when it’s ready. And never fear, dear readers—I’ll still be here, working to bring you your monthly dose of Nightmare(s), and I’ll also still be editing Lightspeed and anthologies as well. How (?!), you may ask. Good question—I’m not entirely sure! I will probably have to get much better at delegating! But the good news is, I got lots of practice last year serving as a judge for the National Book Award (Young People’s Literature category), where I had to consider about 300 novels while keeping up with my short fiction duties. So I think I’ll be able to fit everything into my schedule. If not, I’ll just give up some optional extracurricular activities, like sleep. Also, speaking of HMH and Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy —ICYMI, it’s now available. In it, guest editor Joe Hill and I present the top twenty stories of 2014 (ten science fiction, ten fantasy), by the following: Nathan Ballingrud, T.C. Boyle, Adam-Troy Castro, Neil Gaiman, Theodora Goss, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, Seanan McGuire, Sam J. Miller, Susan Palwick, Cat Rambo, Jess Row, Karen Russell, A. Merc Rustad, Sofia Samatar (two stories!), Kelly Sandoval, Jo Walton, and Daniel H. Wilson. Learn more at johnjosephadams.com/best- american.

• • • •

With the announcements out of the way, here’s what we have on tap this month: We have original fiction from Rose Hartley (“No Other Men in Mitchell”) and Dennis Etchison (“Princess”), along with reprints by Seanan McGuire (“Inspirations”) and Adam L. G. Nevill (“Where Angels Come In”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and an interview with award-winning author David Mitchell. It’s another great month for nightmares, so thanks for reading!

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, a new SF/Fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, as well as the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, including The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent projects include: Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, 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 nominated nine 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. FICTION No Other Men in Mitchell Rose Hartley | 5155 words

If I’m gonna tell this story, I’m gonna have to start with the men. In Queensland—right in the middle of it, bum-fuck-nowhere is the word —there’s a town called Mitchell. It has two pubs and a mechanic who services the road trains that pass through, and its only claim to fame is birthing Australia’s shortest-serving Prime Minister ever. I got to know Mitchell’s mechanic while I was driving road trains over the Warrego Highway between South Australia and Queensland. If you don’t know what road trains are, just imagine a B-double truck and whack an extra trailer or two on the end. There are only a couple of roads in Australia you can legally drive them, far away from the cities. They call these roads highways but they’re really just long, narrow strips of cracking tar surrounded by red dust that stretches into forever. Once you get up to a hundred clicks an hour it takes half a kilometre to stop a truck that weighs over a hundred tons, especially if your bastard of a supervisor overweights you. If you apply the brakes too hard, you jackknife the trailers and you’re fucked. If there’s a cow on the road, it’s fucked. If you fall asleep, you’re fucked. I hit a cow once. The sun is so dry along the Birdsville Track it almost splits open your skin like drought-struck earth, but I had my arm hanging out the window anyway. The truck sailed over a crest and the black and white lump was right there in front of me, probably lowing but I can’t remember. I twisted the wheel to the left in reflex, which is a dangerous thing to do at the best of times, and the cow hit the side of the cab and burst open like a watermelon. Red innards and grey brains came sailing in through the window and plastered the inside of the cab. I never thought of myself as a redneck before then, but I sure was after that. I had red all over me. Ever driven for ten hours with brains stuck in your hair? But I was talking about the mechanic. Barry. About a month after I quit driving trucks, Barry left his wife. I think I inspired him to leave. When I told Barry I was quitting, he had all these questions. What are you gonna do? Why are you leaving? As if he couldn’t imagine anything better than living in Mitchell. But Barry couldn’t find another woman to take him in. No surprise, ’cause he was an ugly son of a bitch with a nose like a cauliflower. He came back to Mitchell after three or four months and his wife took him back. There were no other single men in Mitchell, so it was either him or spending all her nights alone. A month later she slipped rat poison into his Four X and killed him, so maybe those nights alone were better after all. So there was him. Then there was Cam, who I’d worked with on the Beverley uranium mine a couple years before. Cam had a shaved head except for one long, winding rat’s tail that hung halfway down his back. He came into my dorm room without warning one night and caught me with a Primo Levi book in my hand. My instinct was to hide it, but we got talking and eventually he asked to borrow The Wrench and never gave it back. Good book, was all he said. Cam hung himself with his jeans from a tree branch one morning before work. I imagine him swinging softly in the breeze, neck crooked, eyes staring. His brother did it too, six months later on Cam’s birthday. From a tree and everything. I don’t think he used his jeans, though. I think he used a rope. Then there was Cam’s best friend, Thommo. He had no teeth from taking too much speed. Great bloke. He got me the job driving road trains, sat in as my driving instructor, laughing hysterically as I bunny-hopped the trailers down the road. Bloody near killed us both. You’ve passed, mate, he said, and ticked all the boxes on the clipboard, still laughing and blowing smoke. Buy me a pack of Winnies. Thommo fell in with some bikers, major ice producers. In central Australia there are these huge drug farms that the cops only find by sending out helicopters to scan the ground for plants and sheds. The blokes who run the places never get done for it, ’cause the police only ever charge the employees. The drug farm is still going, but Thommo dropped off the face of the earth. Just disappeared. As for me, I quit driving road trains after I fell asleep on the road for the second time and the truck flipped sideways into a ditch and scared me shitless. I went back to my hometown in the Southeast. Mum cooked me roast beef that was dry and tough and talked about the mines in Western Australia, and how I could make a killing up there being a rigger. She had a mate could get me work. Hundred and twenty grand a year, she said. Put some aside for your old mum. I pictured myself up in the crow’s nest, climbing ropes with a dodgy harness and shouting orders to the fat blokes below, and I just got tired. I’ll think about it, I told her. Just need some time off. She shrugged, but I could tell she was annoyed. Me mate will have to fill the job soon, she said. Can’t take too long to think about it. I sat on her couch for six months, and that’s when I heard about Barry. Bloody sad, that he went like that. When I came down with a fever, I thought maybe it was just the sadness, getting into my head and making me shivery. But it turned out to be meningitis. Or meningococcal. They never quite figured it out, and I couldn’t understand half of what the doctors said, probably because they never spoke to me. They spoke over me, to each other or to my mum. They thought I was a vegetable.

• • • •

I’m telling this all out of order, I know that. My brain’s still not quite right. I can’t get time to go in a straight line, as if it ever did anyway. I spend so much time alone with my thoughts now that I start thinking about things like time and whether it exists or not. And how I’ve lost so much of it, if it exists.

• • • •

I came to slowly over a few months, like a baby being born and coming into consciousness, in a pink-painted room, hooked up to a bunch of machines, with a real sore throat. From the conversations the nurses have over me I gather I’ve been shifted a few times, from emergency to some other unit. I don’t remember. Time has gone from me, like a flash in the corner of your eye that disappears when you turn your head to look at it. Not that I can turn my head anymore. I’ve been in the pink room for two years. Mount Gambier General is not the tidiest of hospitals, not exactly space age; and even though I’d spit on anyone who ragged on my mum, I can’t say she’s a charmer. She screeches at the doctors and nurses sometimes, tells them they’re useless dipshits. They hurry out, red and angry, and the nurses deliberately turn me less often than they should. They never test me for signs of consciousness, and they don’t bother to be gentle when they give me injections because they think I can’t feel pain. I don’t blame them for taking it out on me. Most people never get the chance to take their anger out on the right person. And everyone thinks I’m a hopeless case, a waste of a hospital bed. I hear the doctors discussing the mystery illness and whether it precludes me from being an organ donor when I finally drop off the perch. They discuss my death as a desirable, if not imminent, event. When one of the doctors broached the organ donor thing with mum, she flipped her lid. You wanna harvest my son like a fucking tomato plant? She said. No way. He might wake up. The doctor tapped his chart and made a honking noise with his nose that sounded like fat bloody chance. Like I said, they’re not too stringent at Mount Gambier General. Pretty sure there are rock lizards that care more about the patients than some of the doctors do. Yesterday mum helped a nurse turn me over, and as they lay me back down on the bed I thought I heard her sniffing away tears. She touched my face, once, brushed my hair back with warm fingers, but took her hands away too quickly and their absence left me with the fiercest longing I’ve ever known. I wish people would touch me more often. My mother sits by my bedside, touching the sheets, the monitor, everything except my hand, and tells me she’s going to lose the house because I’m not paying her mortgage anymore. Funny how she still complains, even though she thinks I can’t hear her. But it’s never once occurred to her to ask the fucking question: Dylan, can you hear me? Blink twice if you can hear me.

• • • • At night I hear breathing in the bed next to mine. I can’t turn my head to look, but I know it’s a woman because I heard mum talking to the nurse about her. Sometimes there’s a whimpering when she exhales, like she’s having a bad dream, but she can’t speak and neither can I. Here’s what I can do, though: I can open my eyes. Blink, focus. That is all. A good day is when a spider runs across the ceiling: something to look at. A bad day is when a spider runs across my face. It’s taken them this long to find me. Barry and Cam and Thommo. They turn up just as I’m slipping into sleep.

• • • •

There are a few things I’ve left out of this story. Sorry about that. Maybe you’ve been wondering, why did he begin by telling us all about his dead mates, only to rattle on all fucking day about becoming a vegetable and never once mention them? Like I said, I’m all out of order. Pretty soon you’ll see what I’ve done: lured you in by giving you the sob story about my mates and my full body paralysis so you’ll think I’m a pretty decent, if unfortunate, bloke. So now when I hit you with the crazy stuff, you’ll think, this poor bastard wouldn’t lie to me. Remember earlier, when I said something like, that’s when I heard about Barry? Well I never heard about him. I found out he was dead because he appeared on my mum’s couch next to me, eyeing my beer. One moment I was alone in mum’s house, wanking off to the memory of one of the cleaners in Beverley and trying not to spill my Four X, the next there’s Barry lounging like a fat red troll on mum’s floral three-seater. Fucking dropped my beer. Barry looked kinda pleased, and opened his mouth into a red, wet tunnel to laugh, only no sound came out. It freaked me out a little, but I knew what had happened. It was worse the first time, when Cam went. He materialised in the cab of my truck next to me while I was barrelling down a long, lonely gibber plain that looked like Mars. He grinned at me and twirled his rat’s tail. I veered off the road in fright, screaming and trying not to lose control of the truck but still snapping my head sideways, back and sideways again to see if Cam was still there. When I’d ground the gears to hell getting out of the scrub and back on the road, he was still there. He rode with me all the way to Mitchell, just staring and grinning and not talking. Spooks can’t speak, in my experience, or at least we can’t hear them. My eyes leaked and my bladder too and by the time the town was in sight and Cam was going blurry at the edges I was a sobbing wreck. But I couldn’t pull over, see? ’Cause I was on deadline. I rang around that night, trying to get hold of him to see what the hell was going on. Eventually his brother called me back and told me how Cam had hung himself, and I cried like a baby. I was eating a hotdog at a petrol station when Thommo went. Appeared opposite me in the stinking booth, grinning and pressing his tongue into his gums where the teeth were missing. I stopped halfway through taking a bite and leaned back into the split red vinyl. For a second I thought that it was the real Thommo, that he’d quit working for the bikies and had just strolled into the petrol station while I was staring at my hotdog, but he kept on grinning and not saying anything and I remembered Cam. You better not be dead, mate, I told him. We sat there for a while, then he followed me into my truck and rode with me for a while before he faded. And I cried like a fucking baby again.

• • • •

Their voices are tinny and far away but I can hear them now, maybe because I’m somewhere in between living and dying. Barry’s telling Cam and Thommo a story about a guy he knows who stuck a fish up his arse. The fish got stuck because he’d put it in head first and when he tried to pull it out the gills winged out and ripped his arsehole, so he’d ended up going to hospital and within hours the whole town knew what he’d done. I’ve heard the story before, but Barry adds a new detail with every re-telling, and it’s still funny to see him mime the gills, his hands flapping like little wings on either side of his face and his mouth opening and closing in a puckered O like a fish’s. Thommo jabs a thin elbow into Barry’s ribs. Bet it was you. Bet you stuck the fish up your arse, eh Bazza? They’re gathered at the end of my bed, leaning on the metal railing like they’re about to order a beer. Oi, mate, me arsehole’s as pure as fuckin’ Mary, says Barry. I try to speak, but of course I can’t. They look up at me in unison anyway, as if I’ve made a sound. You’re awake, says Barry. Guess what? says Thommo. Barry stuck a fish up his arse.

• • • •

A couple hours later and Cam’s trying to get the lid off the water jug so he can spill it on the floor. Barry goes for the pink wallpaper, taking hold of the top corner between thumb and forefinger, and tears a pathetic flint-sized piece off. Thommo’s trying to push my bed around with a wicked grin on his toothless face, but it’s the old kind of hospital bed and it doesn’t have wheels. It makes a loud scraping sound when he does get it to shift an inch. They’re lazy bastards, and they’re not really trying. Thommo smacks his lips and calls for a beer break, but they’re spooks, they can’t drink, so instead they just pile onto my bed and stare at me. It’s a little bit off. The spooks look like they did when they were alive, and talk like it, but they’re childish. They forget things, like what they said five minutes ago. Why are we here again? Cam asks in his soft, sleepy voice. But they keep coming back over the next few days, as if they know they’ve got a job to do but they’re not really sure what it is. You’re supposed to save me. I think it as loud as I can, but they don’t understand. Save you from what? Cam asks. Dying. Mate, you’re not dying. You could live for years, says Barry. Like this? My mind’s still here, but no one knows. We know, they chorus. I look at Cam desperately, and he nods. He understands what I mean. Don’t worry, mate, we’ll do something about it. But then he forgets, wanders off thinking he’s gotta take a piss, as if his cock will still work in the afterlife. But I’m not in the afterlife. I’m still here.

• • • •

Why am I so attached to my piddling little life? I dunno. It’s all I’ve got. I love the feel of air going into my lungs, the light on my eyelids before I open them in the morning. I even love the itchy feeling of flies’ feet crawling over my cheek, if only because the strain of not being able to scratch it spikes my blood pressure. Not enough for anyone to notice, but enough for me to know that my body still knows me and wants me to live. I’ve been trying to catalogue my best memories. I can’t write them down; couldn’t lift a pen even if I had one. And I’ve never been much of a words- on-paper man, even though my friends would say I can tell a tale. But there’s something about this dying thing. I don’t know what comes next. I could tell you all about Cam, the way he’d tug on his rat’s tail when he wanted to say something but someone else was still talking, and how he broke up with his girlfriend by telling her he’d moved to New Zealand, except he forgot to give his housemates the heads up, so when she came calling to return his belt and jacket they told her he would be back from Beverley the next day and she took a shit in his favourite pair of shoes as a parting gift. I could tell you how when Thommo was talking to the foreman he used to stick his tongue into the empty part of his gums and wiggle the loose front tooth like a pendulum, then cackle at the disgusted look on the guy’s face. Those bastards like the money I make ’em but they sure as fuck don’t like to look at me, he’d say, and puff his smoke. And Barry, Barry with his round red face and sweaty forehead and big, stupid grin as he waved a wrench, shouting maaayte! as I pulled into his workshop. But me, I never was like them. Thommo always ribbed me for doing a year of economics at university—think you’re an educated man, don’t ya? he’d say, and elbow me—but that wasn’t it. I liked the feel of a woman. Not just under the sheets, I mean, but the feel of her in her kitchen, or on her front porch, or just lying on the grass having a smoke, one hand on her cigarette and the other on my knee. I say her kitchen, and her porch, because I never had a home of my own. All I had was a bunch of licenses —for rigging, heavy vehicles, boats—and a pair of work boots, and that was about it. Didn’t even have my own truck, but I never wanted one because it was a shit job and I was glad to give it away. I always thought, one day I’ll meet some woman and move into her place, and we’ll have a bunch of kids and it won’t matter anymore that I’ve built nothing, made nothing, because we’ll have each other and I don’t need anything more than that. But I never met that woman. The smart ones wouldn’t give me a chance, they’d see my work boots and hear my voice still country-rough and look away before I could impress them with the books I’d read. The dumb ones —well, how can you make a life with them? And I was gone so often, working fly-in-fly-out or truck-in-truck-out from all these places where half the time there weren’t any women, and if there were they were toothless like Thommo or dumb like Barry. There was one woman, Alicia, who I moved in with in Mount Gambier. She was ambitious, a country lawyer from a sheep-farming family with plans to move to Melbourne and work in a big firm one day. She laughed at my jokes and made me dinner sometimes, but every now and then I’d say something embarrassingly anti-capitalist and she’d just shut down. So I’m part of the evil system? she’d say, on the defensive. Or, don’t be so negative. The world’s not a bad place. Our eyes would meet at a loss and then she’d look away and we’d pretend I never said it. We blew up about something stupid, eventually. I missed a family event of hers one too many times and she was gone.

• • • •

Mum comes in with shaking hands one morning and does the unthinkable: lights up a cigarette. The nurses descend upon her faster than they do even when there’s a code red, shouting at her to put it out. She arcs up, her round little body shaking with rage, flyaway greys stuck to the sides of her face with nervous sweat. It’s just a fucking cigarette. I’m just having a smoke with my boy, she shouts. The thin young doctor comes in after the nurses, grabs her by the elbow and starts dragging her out. Go on, get outside, he says. She shakes him off. Do I have to call security? he asks. I hate doing that.

• • • •

Barry and I sit in affable silence, watching the wallpaper. The TV’s off for once and I can hear myself think. Just when I think I’ve found my favourite memory of my mother, he breaks into my thoughts. So you want someone to figure out you’re not a vegetable, right? Yep. Not that you useless bastards are helping. He affects a wince and spreads his hands. Mate, he says. You gotta trust me. After Barry leaves, Cam shows up. He looks at me sadly and switches on the television. Cam, I was trying to think here, I say. He shrugs and looks up at the TV. It’s the news. Michael Schumacher’s had a skiing accident and they’re saying he’s brain damaged. His lawyer or someone is talking, saying, we’ve helicoptered him out of the French Alps, he’ll have the best medical care and rehabilitation money can buy to get him functioning again. The newscasters speculate how much the future at-home care will cost. They think it will run into the tens of millions. I look at Cam and he meets my eyes. What I see there sends a shot of pain like razor wire through my belly. I know what he’s trying to tell me.

• • • •

Where’s Barry? Watching telly with your mum, Thommo says.

• • • • I’m alone. The TV’s up too loud but I can’t turn it down. My left leg is aching like a motherfucker because the nurses didn’t turn me properly and my right leg’s slightly over the left and now all the blood’s getting trapped there. The fluorescents are putting white spots in my vision but I don’t want to close my eyes because I’ve got to make the most of my time on earth, even if that just means looking at the ceiling instead of at nothing. I’ll have enough of nothing when I’m dead. Last night the boys came to visit me one last time. They apologised. She watched the show, but I don’t know if she put two and two together, Barry said. Sorry mate. It’s alright, I tell them. I don’t blame them. They tried their best, but no one knows they are there. I know what that’s like. Now they’re just waiting for me to join them.

• • • •

In the morning, mum comes into my room with dark circles under her eyes. I saw a TV program about a boy in South Africa, she says. He woke up after twelve years. They said he was conscious the whole time, had something called locked-in syndrome. So Barry did his job right for once, I think. They asked him to blink if he could hear them, she says. She leans in and breathes ciggie smoke and apples all over me. I’m gonna ask you in a sec, she says. But I’ve got my hand on the plug, see. The white spots start to pop in my vision again. Blood pressure goes up. I’m gonna ask you three times, and if you don’t blink then I’m gonna pull the plug. And they’re not gonna know about it until it’s too late, ’cause I’m not letting anyone open you up and gut you, give away your organs, she says. You’re my boy. There are so many things I want to say to her. I want to give my organs away. I want to help other people live. Imagine how many people could keep living their beautiful, stupid, precious little lives because of me? How many people could lie on the grass with their hand on someone’s thigh, listening to someone else breathe, watch the sunset with my kidney throbbing in their side, my eyes taking in the view, my heart beating in their chest? But I can’t tell her. This is how it is. I breathe in. I breathe out again. I think about blinking. She asks me the question. Dylan, Dill baby, can you hear me? Blink, blink if you can hear me. But blink twice, so I know it’s on purpose. What if I blink? What will happen then? She’s losing the house, probably already lost it. She doesn’t complain to me about it anymore, as if it’s so awful she can’t bear to talk about it, even to a silent body. She can’t afford to give me the Schumacher treatment while she’s sleeping on a mate’s couch. Where would she send me? Who would pay for the rehabilitation? Dill, blink twice. Blink twice. And then, would I ever move again, even if I did get the rehab? Actually I don’t even care if I can’t move: would I ever speak again? All I want now is my voice back. It’s not enough that Cam and Thommo and Barry can hear me. I need real people, real laughter. Mum’s crying now. Her shoulders are heaving up and down, her breath comes hard and heavy. She’s making an awful noise, a ragged animal noise, and I wish she would stop. Dylan. Baby. Can you hear me? Mum, please touch me, I think. As if she’s heard me, her hand creeps towards the bed, patting blindly. She finds my hand through her sobs and squeezes it. The calloused skin presses loving indentations into my hand. Then she slips the plastic peg of the heart monitor from my finger to hers in one deft movement, so the alarm won’t ring out when my heart stops. Her arm arcs up to rest her hand against my forehead. The warmth of her palm is the last thing I feel. She pulls the plug.

• • • •

It will take a few minutes for my heart to stop, now that the sucking sound of the respirator has gone quiet. My eyes drift closed and I’m back on the gibber plain. Miles and miles of red rocks that look like Mars, the heat of the sun on my shoulders. I’m sailing over the crests of the narrow highway in the cab of my truck, all alone, nothing but red rocks and dust and blue horizon.

©2016 by Rose Hartley.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Rose Hartley lives in Adelaide, Australia and is a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop 2015. A former international aid worker, she is currently editing her first novel with the help of her mentor, Hachette Australia editor Sophie Hamley. Her short fiction has appeared in f(r)iction and Poetic Justice: Contemporary Australian Voices on Equality and Human Rights. Her perfect day would be spent reading Ursula Le Guin, thinking of new places to go in her 1962 caravan and singing along badly to Americana music. You can find her on Twitter as @theRosamond.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight Inspirations Seanan McGuire | 6598 words

She counts the days by the cuts on her arms. Her captors tell her the year when she asks them—one of the few questions they ever answer for her— but the numbers mean nothing. She remembers the birth of the Industrial Age, remembers men flying like Icarus flew (and falling, falling, so many of them falling, so many melting waxen wings) . . . but oh, even then, the numbers meant nothing. Who measures years by thousands? No empire stands two thousand years; no man measures such a span. Not even scars endure that long, and so she measures out the days in wounds. On Monday, her arms weep ribbons of blood that wind around her body before falling into the basin below (nothing is ever wasted here). The bleeding stops by Tuesday, cut off by the slowly forming scabs. Wednesday and Thursday bring the unbearable itching of flesh knitting against flesh; she heals quickly. She and her sisters have always healed quickly. On Friday there is no pain at all. By Saturday the scabs have dropped away, leaving her arms (her shoulders, the insides of her thighs) white and whole. Saturdays find her as pure as the day they brought her down from the mountain, caught her in their chains, and bound her here. On Saturdays, she is whole. On Saturdays, they bring the new supplicants to view her, showing them the pale, weeping woman bound above the basin of her own blood without the damning presence of her nearly-constant wounds. It’s easier for the new ones if they only see the blood and never see her bleeding; understanding will come later, when it’s too late to run. The faithful bring the wide-eyed children before her and promise them that she feels no pain. They say she cries only because tears are her natural state of being. They promise those children the world if they will come, just once, to take Holy Communion . . . Sundays are holy days. They’re always careful when they come to bleed her. The knife slipped the one time they sliced her breasts, leaving the skin clinging to the wound like a flower that was never meant to open; the priest cut too deeply, bringing her closer to death than she’d ever been. The scars remained with her for a week of Saturdays, turning her flesh hot and raw, giving her ecstatic visions, until it seemed she could almost touch Olympus. They didn’t dare call a doctor. How could they? They had no way to explain the grooves the manacles cut into her wrists (the only scars that never left her, her only company through the slow dance of days) or the inhuman pallor of her skin. She’d been bound for years (years mean nothing; count by what matters—how long since she’d seen the sun?), and she had never eaten, never relieved herself. What would a doctor find if he examined their bound and weeping goddess? Nothing human. That much, at least, was sure. No, the priest said; no. The infection would have to run its course. They had been careless. The mistake would not be repeated, if she lived. He pulled the faithful away, told them they were being tested, and closed and locked the prison doors. For two months, she was left alone in darkness while the fever ran its course. She had long since abandoned prayer—who should she pray to? She knew no one was listening—but she allowed herself a moment of hope when the fever broke enough to let her rise to painful lucidity. Please, she begged, let this be enough. Let me go. I have been too long away from the mountain. I want to go home. Let me die. The infection ran through her like wildfire and ice, showing her the things she had forgotten (so much to forget; only so much the mind could keep, could hold, only so much, even for the immortal . . .), reminding her of countless horrors and tiny tragedies. It burned until she screamed in the ecstasies of pain, believing freedom to be finally in reach. She was climbing towards the sun, the sun, at last— —and her fever broke, and she fell. That week’s communion was the best in years. The blood they took from her was hot with remembered agony, tragedies caught there like flies in amber. They drank, each to each, and fled home to their keyboards and their pens, the chains that bound them to the church and their unwilling goddess. Their wives laughed and whispered, saying they served some dark mistress, some unseen calling that forced them to write their nights away creating horrors no one else had ever seen . . . But someone else has seen those horrors. Their “dark mistress” knows every word, remembers every second. She never serves them willingly; those tragedies are hers to keep, not theirs to take, but when they come to her, she shares them all the same. When the knife is pressed to her skin, she has no choice but to bleed. She counts the weeks by the cuts on her arms and dreams the day the knife slips again and the fever returns to court her, love her, and carry her home to the mountains of the sun. She counts time by the scars.

• • • •

“Where are we going, exactly?” The man behind the wheel smiles, trying to be reassuring. It isn’t working. “I already told you: we’re going to church.” “I thought you said this was some sort of writer’s group—” “It is, I promise. This will be exactly what you need.” “I hope so.” I settle in my seat, letting my gaze wander to the window. The landscape flashes by outside the car, becoming less urban as the inner city slides away. Steel and rust has already given way to carefully mowed lawns and an endless progression of mini-malls, all stamped from the same prefabricated mold. “I haven’t written anything in months.” “We’re gonna get you fixed right up.” John turns a corner, still chattering; I idly wonder whether he’s ever quiet. “I was in your position when Paul brought me in. Said it was just what I needed, and damn, was he ever right! I went home that night and started the first King’s Hill Slasher book. A little inspiration is all it takes.” I fold my arms, struggling to hide my interest. “And you say you get inspiration from this . . . church?” “Didn’t your momma teach you the value of faith?” He laughs, the deep, chesty laugh of a happy man. I bite back my own derisive chuckle, drawing blood from the tip of my tongue. Oh, yes, my mother taught me the value of faith, swearing it was the virtue that suited me best. I learned the pulse of the church, the slow rise and fall of the ecclesiastic voice, the promise and the pain of religion. I remember every lesson. They just don’t do me much good. This isn’t a world that treats faith very kindly. “I’m not much of a churchgoer.” I make my voice small and shy, like the frightened innocent he thinks I am. “I guess I lost my faith in, well . . .” “God?” he offers. It’s as good an answer as any. “It’s so hard to have faith these days. To really believe in a greater power.” “Well, honey, I can promise you one thing about our church.” “What’s that?” “When it’s over, you’ll believe.” This time his smile is beatific—the smile of a man who has seen the face of the divine. I’ve seen that smile on priests, madmen, and the few true believers remaining in this world. I stare at him, awed and frightened by what I see in his eyes. What have I gotten myself into? “Once you’ve taken Communion,” he says, “there’s no way you can doubt what we believe.”

• • • •

She wakes from uneasy slumber and sees that she is whole again; the scabs on her arms have fallen away, leaving her skin as white and smooth as marble. Her tears begin afresh, running down her cheeks and dripping down her chin, her throat, the curves of her breasts, cutting tracks through the blood and washing it away as they fall. If she is whole, there will be a ceremony. There will be a sermon. And there will be Communion. Closing her eyes, she weeps, and damns the cyclic betrayal worked by the calendar of her skin.

• • • •

John parks in front of an old high school. There aren’t many cars; most, like his, are shiny and new, although a few older models lurk around the edges, seeming ashamed to come out of the shadows. Flickering lampposts light the front of the school, showing peeling paint and faded wood. The doors are padlocked shut. He slides out of the car and walks around to open my door, a true gentleman. I knew what he was when we met in the writer’s group, me reading my tortured prose and wincing at every critique, him providing the smooth ease of experience and the careful guiding hand of a professional, trying to soften the rough edges of my work. He was always proper. He never put a hand on me, never asked me for more than dinner or coffee. In exchange, he critiqued my manuscripts, offered suggestions, and did his best to praise me—not that there was much to praise. If there was mercy there, it was in that we both knew how bad I was. I have no talent for mainstream writing. I’m too gruesome for fantasy, too fantastic for mystery, and too unscientific for science fiction. Horror is my last hope, my last shot at the big time before I go home to mother and admit that she raised me too well, that I’m not good for anything but having faith. I take his hand, letting him help me from the car, and he leads me toward the school. He glances in my direction, smiling a small, knowing smile. “Nervous?” “A little,” I say. It’s closer to the truth than I want it to be. “What kind of church is this? It’s not some kind of cult, is it?” “Oh, no! Nothing like that.” He shakes his head, looking honestly shocked. We walk in silence for a while, circling the school as we head into the darkness behind the building. Just as I start to think he’ll make me learn for myself, he says, “We just worship a little . . . differently. That’s all?” “Differently?” I don’t have to fake the quaver in my voice. There are many kinds of faith, and no matter how nice John seems, I’ve read his books. It takes a certain amount of darkness to write that kind of story. His most successful series—ten books and still going—focuses on a man called “the King’s Hill Slasher.” They’re gory and disgusting, each one worse than the last, and they’ve made millions . . . and most of the Slasher’s victims have been women. I wouldn’t be easy to kill—I’ve had self-defense lessons from the best—but he could hurt me enough to make it inconvenient. Not that it matters; it’s not like I have anywhere to go. I’m not sure where we are, and I have no way to get myself home. I never learned to drive. There never seemed to be much point. I can almost always find someone to get me where I need to go, and situations like this—where I’m trapped by my own limitations—are rare. I’ll be more careful in the future, but now . . . Now, whether I like it or not, I’m going to church. John lets go of my arm, looking at me. “I guess I should give you a little warning. We don’t get many women, but you need it bad enough.” “Need what?” I ask, warily. “The inspiration.” He looks uncomfortable. “That’s what we worship here. Pain, screaming, redemption, the old tragedy—that’s what horror is about, right? Old tragedies, written into new shapes.” “John, you’re scaring me.” John grins lopsidedly. “Oh, honey, we’re not going to hurt you. We’d never hurt a soul.” “Then what—” “I said we’d never hurt a soul. Some things don’t have souls.” He starts walking faster. I watch him, fighting the urge to run. His back is to me. I could get away. But he’s promised me so much. He’s promised the words and the inspiration I need. And he’s right—I have to have the things he’s offering. It’s not just desire; it’s sheer, aching need. Without the words, I’ll have to go home, admit my failure, and try to live without my faith in a world I’ve outgrown. There isn’t a place for me there. Faith was all I had, and now that it’s dead, I’m scrambling to find something—anything—to fill the holes it left behind. My sisters still have their callings; they don’t understand why I’m so lost. If John can give me what I need, why should I run from him? He won’t kill me. I’m almost sure of that. If there’s no other choice, I’ve always been able to stand a little pain.

• • • •

The priests come in silence, wiping damp rags across her skin, cleaning and polishing her like a statue. She shivers under their touch. She has given up trying to speak to them, trying to reason with them. They see her as an object of worship (as it should be, as it has always been), but never as a person. They meet her eyes and see only what she can give them. They refuse to see her as a woman; they see only potential for stories without end. She is nothing to them but a channel, and that, too, is as it has always been. There will be new supplicants tonight. They wouldn’t bother washing her if there weren’t; the existing members of the congregation have seen it all before. The show is only for the new ones, the innocents who stare and wonder what she is. There were always a few who would demand her freedom if they saw her dripping with blood and tears. Freedom. To see the sun . . . It’s happened before. There are always a few who believe her a woman, who call her confinement torture (and it is, but not in the way they believe), who swear they’ll find a way to free her. She no longer believes any of them will succeed. They shout and demand she be set free, but they all come back the next day. They come to see her, how her bindings are tied, and dream that they can free her. And they drink, just once, to keep up the masquerade. And then they belong to her, although she doesn’t want them; they’ll be hers until they die, because once they drink, they believe. She never asked to be a goddess, but she is theirs, and they are hers, forever and ever, amen. They go home from that first draught with all thoughts of her freedom forgotten, and they begin to write . . .

• • • •

“I’m glad you came.” He smiles as he leads me into the maze of halls inside the school. Why are American schools always built along such tangled plans? It’s too easy to get lost in them. “I was a worried for a minute there. And you need this, honey.” “What is it?” “It’s, well . . . it’s home.” He stops at the cafeteria doors—the only unlocked doors I’ve seen so far. He pushes them open, and we step inside. The windows are covered with black paper that traps the light; from outside, I would never have known the room was in use. There are perhaps a dozen people present, mostly men. Small tables are scattered around the room, holding food and drink, and a large jar half-filled with cash sits next to the door. John pulls out his wallet, adding two fifties to the contents. He sees my curious look, and shrugs. “We’ll ask you to contribute if you come back for Mass, just to help pay for the food. We own the school. The church bought it years ago, when the first of us started making it big. Go get yourself a plate. Mingle a little. I’ll come back and get you when it’s time to take the supplicants back to the communion room.” I give him a sidelong look but do as I’m told, grabbing a soda as I start into the crowd. There are faces here I recognize: authors I’ve seen before, on book covers and flyers. Some are very big names in the business—some are very big names indeed. I start to wonder what exactly waits in the communion room. The presence of the women is reassuring. I find myself falling into conversation with one of them, talking about the books she’s writing about the life of Joan of Arc. She plans to explore the demons she believes stalked the young Frenchwoman, making it a story of corruption and seduction. I sip my drink, hiding my smile behind my hand. I’ve never seen that much complexity in Joan’s story. It was simply a matter of divine inspiration, if you ask me. A matter of faith. Time slips away, and I’m surprised when John returns, putting his hand on my shoulder. “Come on, honey,” he says, “it’s time to go.” “But—” The woman I’ve been talking to laughs, nimbly plucking the cup out of my hand. “Go on,” she says, flashing me her book-jacket smile. “We can talk tomorrow night, when you come back for Mass.” Looking around, I see only calm expectation on the faces surrounding me. They believe this is inevitable. I nod, giving in, and let John lead me away. For the first time in memory, I am truly frightened.

• • • •

The priests have left her alone. She shivers, although the cold never really touches her anymore—only the absence of the sun, the glorious sun. Does he even know she’s gone? Does he miss her at all? She stares up at her arms, willing the cuts to blossom there once more, to tear open and let her die. As always, her wish goes unfulfilled. She sags in her chains, closing her eyes, and continues to cry.

• • • •

“Isn’t anyone else coming?” “Not tonight, honey. We don’t invite many people to join us.” “Oh.” He leads me to a closet, opening it to display a rack of long white robes. “I know you dressed special for tonight,” he says, almost apologetically, “but we don’t want to get anything on those nice clothes of yours.” I eye him warily as a take a robe. “Does that happen often?” “Only when she’s feeling frisky.” “What?” I freeze. “John?” He pulls a robe on over his clothes. “It’s time to tell you the story of our church. I need you to have an open mind, all right?” He pauses, frowning at my expression, and repeats, “All right?” I force myself to nod, saying, “All right, John.” I have no idea how to get out of here. There were too many turns, too many dark passages; I didn’t pay close enough attention. All I can do is go along with whatever sickness lives here, smile, nod, and run like hell when John takes me back into the light. John nods in turn, apparently satisfied. “About twenty years ago, there were a couple of kids who wanted to write. Not little stories—big ones, the kind that change the world. You know that feeling, don’t you?” Agreement is easy. “Absolutely.” “These were pretty clever kids. One of them knew a lot about the old religions, the old gods. The Greeks had these girls called ‘Muses.’ They were Goddesses of Inspiration, but—here’s the thing—that was all they did. No thunderbolts. They were as close to harmless as gods get. They couldn’t fight you. Couldn’t defend themselves. And they controlled ideas. Those boys spent two years researching the rituals, searching until they found the perfect words to say, the perfect ingredients to use. When they had everything they needed . . . they summoned a Muse.” “They did what?” I ask, voice dying on my lips. John takes my tone for disbelief. He nods. “They did it. Pulled her off Olympus, or wherever it is the old gods live these days, and bound her here. It took them a while to figure out how to make her share the words. After all, you can bet that little lady wasn’t too happy with her captors.” “So how did they . . .” “Blood. Holy Communion, just like in church, only what we’re sharing here is something more tangible. It’s inspiration—faith and hope and words. They wrote the stories they set out to write. You’ve probably read a few of them.” He starts walking again. I follow, too stunned to do anything else. A Muse? Is that possible? And if it is, if they did it . . . which one do they have? “You drink her blood?” I whisper. “There’s nothing wrong with what we’re doing. We worship her, like she needs to be worshipped, and everything we do to her heals right up again. She’s not human. She’s just an idea given pretty flesh.” He stops in front of another door. “No one will believe you if you try to tell them what you see here tonight. We’re a writer’s group. We own this school. They’ll think you’re a groupie and a crazy woman, and when you bring them here, we’ll open our doors and show them that everything is perfectly normal. And you’ll never have a chance like this again. Understand?” I swallow, and say, “I understand.” “Good.” He opens the door, tugging me into the presence of his tortured goddess. I freeze in the doorframe, trying to justify what I see. The image is disjointed by its very nature: the brain, even mine, refuses to admit what it sees when reality becomes too unkind. This is too much. It’s impossible. And it’s real. The chains that hang from the ceiling gleam like tarnished silver; they must have shone like stars in the darkness when she was first bound. Ancient glyphs are hammered into the concrete floor, some in Latin or Greek, some in older, stranger tongues, rough, but readable. Dried blood cakes the crevices of the lettering. This is old magic, even older than Olympus. And there’s so much blood . . . I guess when you’re bleeding a goddess, you can keep going forever. A basin no larger than a child’s wading pool sits at the room’s center, half-filled with blood curdled almost black. It must fill and overflow from time to time, washing over the glyphs and renewing them. The prisoner binds herself. She bleeds, and the metaphysical chains remain as strong as the manacles around her wrists. It’s both beautiful and terrible in its simplicity. I force my eyes upwards. I see the goddess. She is naked, and perfect. Her arms are bound above her head, leaving her weight to dangle from her shoulders. The pain must be immense. Her feet taper toward the basin, and her hair falls to her knees in a snarled wave. Tears run down her cheeks, falling inexorably to mingle with the blood beneath her. Blood and tears. Nothing is wasted. “What . . .” I breathe, and her head snaps up, eyes opening. Her features are classic, so flawless they may as well have been carved from marble. Wisps of hair have tangled around her cheeks and chin, black streaks against the white. Her eyes are pale gray, the color of clouds, and bleak with exhaustion, agony, too many years and too many hours of witnessed pain. I step back and wonder if John will realize that her eyes are like mine.

• • • •

She lifts her head, eyes glazed by the long slow years of abandoned prayer, and stifles a gasp as she sees the woman below her. The newcomer stands behind one of the long-time parishioners. They gaze at each other across the gulf of time, and for the first time in years, the tears she cries are tears of hope. She knows that woman. She knows her as well as she knows herself (as well as she knows the sun), even if she is wearing different clothing, even if she has dyed her hair a pale and unflattering blonde. She knows her, no matter how long it has been. She knows. And she believes.

• • • •

I lick my lips. “What’s . . . what’s her name?” “Melpominee,” John says. His voice is soft, awed. He dreams of her at night; I can see it in his eyes. When he touches mortal women, he’s really touching her. He was drawn to me not because of any talent he thought I possessed, but because he could see his goddess echoed in my face. Why can’t I hate him for that? “The Muse of Tragedy.” “And you’ve bound her.” I raise my voice to hide the recognition I’m certain he can hear there . . . but no, no. All he hears is reverence. “For twenty years,” he speaks like she can’t hear him, and oh, sweet heavens, he doesn’t believe she can. She’s nothing but a living altar to them, a font of endless creativity and knowledge. But isn’t that what the Muses always were to man? “Why a church?” “So that we can share the bounty. There are enough editors out there for all of us; we can all live on what her gifts provide. This way there’s no jealousy, no reason for the ones without any real talent to try sniffing out what makes us stars when they can’t force their pen to the paper. We just bring them home, if they’re the sort to try, and they join the congregation. And this way there will always be someone to take care of her.” “Forever?” I ask. The broken goddess hanging from the silver chains closes her eyes, going limp with despair. It suits her. “We can’t let her go. The Muses were harmless, but they weren’t the only gods on Mount Olympus.” He shakes his head, almost regretfully. “This church has to stand forever. We can’t have her telling her parents.” “Her parents?” I say. “Her mother was a minor goddess. But her daddy was Zeus himself.”

• • • •

She shivers inside her skin, which has become as much of a prison as her chains. Forever?

• • • • John leads me back to the main room, and I join the crowd, laughing, drinking too much and listening to stories directly from the lips of some of the greatest writers of this decade. Most of them write horror, like John, like me. Horror must be the simplest genre to pull from the blood of the Muse of Tragedy—most of the details are already there. They just need someone to put the pen against the paper. We leave when the clock strikes midnight; John promises to bring me back for Communion, and the others applaud. They approve of his choice of supplicants. I hear one of them whisper, “She has eyes just like—” But he’s cut off before he can finish, and I don’t hear the rest of his statement. It doesn’t matter. I know what he was going to say. We drive back to the city in silence. John stops in front of my apartment, looking at me with something close to fear in his expression. “So, honey . . .” he begins. “What time are you picking me up tomorrow?” I ask. His relief is almost physical. He expected me to refuse; he thought I wouldn’t return. As if that was an option. We make our plans and I clutch my purse against my chest, watching him drive away. Before long, he’s out of sight. And I call a cab.

• • • •

It takes no effort to find the school. I paid attention on the ride home; I have an excellent memory, and the aura of faith around the place is unmistakable, now that I know what it means. I pay the driver and get out, suppressing a smirk. What would my father think if he saw such an obvious manifestation of belief in today’s world? Would he auction off the other Muses to the highest bidder? I think he might. The locks on the door aren’t an issue; none of them are. It takes more than steel to bar me. I make my way through the school without pausing, trailing my hand against the wall. The building is abandoned, except for Melpominee, buried deep, far away from the touch of the sun. Poor thing. She always loved the sun. It must have been driving her crazy to be sealed away from it. Her eyes open when I step into the room. “You found me. I knew you’d find me. I knew it.” The words are Greek, as ancient as the letters on the floor. “Yeah, I did,” I say in English, folding my hands behind my back so that she won’t see them shaking. I won’t admit that I wasn’t looking for her, or that I rejoiced when she disappeared. She doesn’t need to know. “Can you get me down? Can we go home?” “Not tonight, Mel.” Her eyes dim, and I add, “Mass is tomorrow, remember? I can’t get you out tonight. They’d notice. Tomorrow . . .” I don’t finish the statement. She seizes the assumed promise, suddenly smiling. “Thank you.” “Don’t thank me.” I glance over my shoulder, feigning nervousness. “I should go. I don’t want to get caught.” “Tomorrow?” “Yeah, Mel.” I nod, fleeing the room. “Tomorrow.” The taint of faith is impossible to ignore as I walk through the empty halls of the school. They truly believe. How could they not? The proof is in front of them, immortal and bleeding; the proof is on their printed pages, in the inspirations flooding their minds. I remember when my inspirations lit those sorts of fires, when I could make men scream for the touch of my hand, for just a glimpse of my eternal flames. I remember being a goddess. Now she has the chance to get it all back, and she wants out. How can she be that stupid? Melpominee always was the dumb one.

• • • •

The door closes and she is alone again, waiting for the holy day to come. But this time, she does not wait in fear; she waits for freedom. In the small hours of the morning she closes her eyes, and dreams of Olympus.

• • • • John meets me at sundown, and we drive back to the suburbs together. Neither of us speaks. In a way, we’re both going to meet our faith head-on. The atmosphere at the school is different tonight. Last night was a social gathering, but this . . . this is holy. The faith in the room is so thick I can feel it on my skin, hot and needy and pleading to be let inside. I fight the urge to open myself completely and let it flow over me like wine. There will be time later. There is always time. We dress in white robes, and a quiet man I recognize from a hundred book covers leads the congregation to the room where Melpominee waits. He walks slowly, and I feel the faith burning in him like a fire, using him as much as he uses it. He’s spent his life worshipping her. The taste of his belief is intoxicating, like spoiled milk and honey on my tongue. He believes . . . they all believe. How long has it been since so many believed? Too long. I have missed their faith. Candles light the room from a hundred different angles like stars. One of the supplicants, faceless in his white robes, begins to turn a tiny crank beside the door. The chains scream. The goddess descends. How many years did it take to carve the binding sigils, to string the chains from the ceiling? How long did they work to be certain she was properly bound, that she would never, ever leave them? That’s faith. That’s love. They were willing to re-create the world for her. Melpominee must have been blind if she couldn’t see that. The chains stop her just above the basin, her toes almost touching the blood that pools beneath her. The priest draws a knife from his robes. I know what has to come next. Ritual is so easy to predict. I still flinch when he presses the blade against her arm. The cut opens her flesh from wrist to elbow. She whimpers, but doesn’t scream. I have to respect her for that. She doesn’t scream. Several members of the congregation push their way forward, holding cups beneath her elbow to catch the blood that runs down the inside of her arm. They believe in her. They believe so much it hurts. I stop fighting. I let their belief flow through me, remaking me, and I know what I have to do. The cups make the circuit of the room, passed from hand to hand as each of them shares the sacrament of a goddess’ blood. It comes finally to John’s hand. He drinks, and hands the cup to me, eyes filled with a quiet anxiety. This is the moment when he learns whether he has chosen wisely. This is the time when he learns whether I will betray them. I take the cup in numb fingers, head ringing with an over-abundance of faith. She’s staring at me from behind her chains, eyes pleading for release. I could give it to her easily enough—either death or freedom. I could slice her throat and be gone before any of the fools around us had a chance to react. I could refuse communion, pretend disgust, and sneak back under the cover of darkness to set her free. I could flee with her back to the slopes of Mount Helicon, where our mother and sisters were waiting. I could let her go, free the Muse of Tragedy in a world obsessed with dying. I could go back to being the one that was outdated, unneeded and unremembered. It hurts to be forgotten. Mom can keep waiting. “Sorry, sis,” I whisper, raising the cup to my lips, “but tragedy is so much easier to come by these days than faith.” And I drink.

• • • •

She counts the days by the cuts across her arms. The new priest is more skilled with the blade than the last; she knows how deep to cut, how to force infection and how to control it when it blooms. The blood that flows from those enflamed cuts is hotter, richer with unspoken promise. She is sick almost all the time now, but the cuts still bloom and wither like hothouse flowers, leaving her ready for each week’s communion. The others rarely come to her anymore. It is always the new priestess who brings the washing cloths and empties the basin, giving them a sense of ritual and awe they never had before. She wonders (does the sun still shine?) what became of the old priest, but fears the results of asking. She knows too well what her sister is capable of doing in the name of religion. She also wonders (is Olympus standing?) if any of them realize what they have invited amongst themselves; if they see the Olympian madness in their new priestess’ eyes. If they realize they have not one goddess among them, but two? Polyhymnia, Muse of religion, who has finally found a faith strong enough to sustain her. Sometimes, late at night, Polyhymnia comes to her. They whisper old stories to each other, and Melpominee wonders when the love in her little sister’s eyes became hatred. She would tell her, if she thought her sister, her priestess, her supplicant would listen: she would tell her faith is as eternal as tragedy, even if it is always so much harder to find. She would tell her she believes in the gods again; that Polyhymnia has filled her purpose, that she has restored her sister’s faith. She would tell her, if she thought she might listen. She counts the days by the cut across her arms, and dreams of dying.

©2009 by Seanan McGuire. Originally published in The Edge of Propinquity. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Seanan McGuire was born and raised in Northern California, resulting in a love of rattlesnakes and an absolute terror of weather. She shares a crumbling old farmhouse with a variety of cats, far too many books, and enough horror movies to be considered a problem. Seanan publishes about three books a year, and is widely rumored not to actually sleep. When bored, Seanan tends to wander into swamps and cornfields, which has not yet managed to get her killed (although not for lack of trying). She also writes as Mira Grant, filling the role of her own evil twin, and tends to talk about horrible diseases at the dinner table.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight Princess Dennis Etchison | 2681 words

When the woman flips the visor down, a weak glow flickers on around the mirror. She reaches above her head for the dome light. “Turn it off,” the driver tells her. “I have to check my makeup.” “Off.” He squints at the road and the taillights smearing past like wet blood cells in the fog. “Can’t see where I’m going with that thing on.” “Walter, please . . .” The driver lifts one fist from the steering wheel and finds the switch in the headliner. Behind him, tiny electronic voices chirp in the dark. Now a small human voice begins to sing along with them. “What’s going on back there?” “Don’t upset the girls. Not tonight.” “Who’s upset?” The back seat is blurry, as if the fog has crept into the car. He wipes mist off the rearview mirror with his thumb. “Are you upset, Angela?” “No, Daddy.” A young girl’s face shines in the dim light from a video game. Her hair is tied back tightly in the manner of a preteen ready for ballet class, and reflections of pink-and-blue fairies dance across her cheeks. “Um, can I ask a question?” “Of course you may,” says the woman. “How far is Princess Land?” “Not far,” the driver mutters. “Soon as I find the street. What’s it called now?” “Mermaid Lane,” the woman reminds him. “We just have to make one little stop . . .” “I’ll be late for the contest!” “You won’t, darling. It’s on the way.” “How many more miles?” “Angie,” says the girl next to her, “do me a favor.” “What?” “Stop talking.” The younger girl’s eyes open wide, as if she has been slapped. “Why should I?” “I’m trying to work.” “Now, Tracy . . .” the woman warns. “That’s just like her,” says the man. The older girl sighs. “I said please.” “She did-ent!” The man grips the wheel and bears down. “What’s she doing reading in the dark? She’ll ruin her eyes.” “I’m not reading. I’m drawing a picture.” “What kind of picture?” says the woman. Tracy holds up her composition book. All that shows is a hazy scrimshaw of lines in the middle of the page. “It’s Mr. Muggles.” “Again?” the woman asks. “He’s the only thing I like to draw now. I think he’s so beautiful.” “Great,” says the man. “Now she wants to be an artist.” “So?” says Tracy. “Where do you think that’ll get you?” “Walter . . .” “She’ll be on drugs before she’s out of high school. You’ll see.” The woman takes a deep breath. “Take the next left, and then the first right.” He rubs out a spot on the windshield and hunches forward. “Where’s the corner?” “Why don’t you turn on the defroster?” He grunts and jabs a button. “It doesn’t work.” “We need a new car,” says the woman. “Don’t start with that.” In the back, the girls turn away from each other and rest their foreheads against the side windows, breathing on the glass. Angie’s lips are a thin, tense line. Tracy lifts one finger and traces a long-nosed face with two drooping dots for eyes. Then she opens her window a few inches. A breeze ruffles her eyelashes and the air begins to clear. Mermaid Way comes into view. Colorful lights line both sides of the repaved street, like a landing strip for tourists. Most of the storefronts have been freshly painted, and banners depicting cartoon kings and queens are strung between lampposts, pointing the way to a pink turret that pierces the fog a mile ahead. “Look,” says Angie, “the castle!” The driver squints. “What did they do, tear down Main Street?” “Isn’t it wonderful?” says the woman. “Once the park opens, Santa Mara will be rich.” “Where’s the tackle shop? And Moony Cobb’s Outback Diner? Remember when we used to go there?” “All I remember is a lot of orange groves.” At the end of the first block, a few aging stores remain in a strip mall that has yet to be made over: a mini-mart, a nail salon, a thrift shop, an antique dealer and a fortune teller’s parlor with a burned-out neon sign. “Pull in there, Walter.” He looks at her. “You’re kidding.” “There are plenty of spaces.” “Don’t tell me she’s still here,” he says in a low voice. The woman does not answer. “No, Gail. I mean it. Not this time.” “Why are we stopping? I want to go to Princess Land!” “Soon, honey,” the woman tells Angie. “First, I have a surprise for you.” “But—” “You want to be chosen, don’t you? Well, guess what Aunt Masha found? A tiara, from the old country. And a necklace, and a beautiful gold belt. Everything a Princess needs. Tracy, come with us. I’ll bet she has something for you, too.” “No, thanks.” “How much?” says the man. “Don’t be silly,” the woman says. “Masha’s family.” He blinks at the soft horizon behind the mall, where a new Holiday Inn towers against the sky. Below the top floor fuzzy red letters spell out the words EXTENDED STAY. He lowers his head. “Well, make it quick.” The woman and the little girl cross the strip mall, Angie scampering ahead, happy as a sprite. The fortune teller’s is closed and the antique store next to it is a jumble of dark shapes behind dirty glass. BRING THE MAGIC HOME, reads a tattered sign. Tracy unlocks her door. “Where are you going?” “The Stop’N Start.” “Stay in the car.” “I’ll be right back.” “I’m telling you—” “I’m thirsty, okay?” “How much?” “I have my own money.” “Since when?” “I’ve been saving up.” “Here.” He reaches into his pocket and holds out a five. “You know, you could have at least tried.” “What does that mean?” “Look at you. What are you wearing? I’m sure your sister appreciates that. If you were nicer to her, maybe—” “Maybe what? You wouldn’t all hate me?” “Nobody hates you . . .” “She’s not even my sister!” He turns in the seat to see her: the shapeless sweatshirt, the flat grey eyes, the short, boyish haircut. “Why did you say that?” “Forget it.” “I asked you a question.” When he places a hand on her arm his touch is almost gentle. “What do you remember?” “I don’t remember anything, all right?” “Listen.” He lowers his voice, as if afraid someone else might hear. “It’s nothing personal. But we all have our place in the world. Someplace where we belong. We have to find it. Otherwise, it just doesn’t work out. Can you understand that?” “Sure.” She takes the bill from his fingers. “I get it.” “Tracy—” He watches her leave the car, his face striped with pink and blue lights from the shops across the street. One will sell posters and framed lithographs of a fantasy land where elves live in snow-covered cottages. Another window is full of T-shirts and souvenirs and plastic jewelry with the Princess Land logo. His eyes glisten in the reflection.

• • • •

When Tracy comes out of the mini-mart, the woman is carrying a cardboard box from the antique store. Angela pauses to do a cartwheel on the blacktop, her pink tutu fanning out like an Elizabethan collar around her waist. She spots Tracy and skips over. “Wait’ll you see what I got!” “Let me guess.” “I’m gonna be a Princess!” “You have to be a Pixie first.” “Duh.” “Is it what you really want?” “Heck, yeah. Can I have some of your Monster Gulp?” Tracy hands her the soda. “A lot of other girls will be there. Trying out.” “So?” The younger girl slurps the straw down to crushed ice. “Now I’ll win for sure.” “And then what?” Angie considers. “Then I’ll be in the show. And get lots of money. That’s what Mom says.” “You won’t.” “Will, too.” “They’ll get it all.” Tracy nods at the woman loading the box into the car. “And you’ll be on your own.” “Huh?” “Forget it.” Angela shrugs and starts walking. “Let’s go.” “Okay.” “And Tracy?” “Yeah?” “When I get on the stage, you have to clap real loud and yell. Don’t forget.” “I won’t.” “Then come on!” The older girl takes a few steps to catch up, then stops behind Angie and drapes her arms down over her shoulders. Angie pulls away. “What are you doing?” “I have to ask you something.” “What?” “Could you take care of Mr. Muggles, all by yourself? Even if I’m not around?” “Where are you going?” “I don’t know yet. I haven’t planned it out. But this is very, very important. You have to walk him around the block in the morning, and after school, and twice at night. And let him sleep on your bed. Can you do that?” “When?” “In the spring, probably.” Angela’s smooth face tilts. “Are you running away from home?” “This isn’t my home.” “‘Course it is. You’re my sister.” “Am I?” Angela blinks. Her green eyes are huge. Tracy squats on the toes of her tennis shoes until her old jeans go tight at the knees, then leans in so that her head touches the other girl’s. She holds the sides of Angela’s face to keep her from turning away. “Now don’t you dare cry. Your eyes will be all red. And don’t tell anybody. Do you hear? Or they’ll take Mr. Muggles to the pound.” “They will?” Tracy nods solemnly. “Promise?” “I promise.” “High five.” Angie touches palms with her. “But . . .” “But what?” “When I get to be a Princess, in the parade and everything, well . . .” “Well what?” “Will you be there?” “If I can.” “But will you?” “Don’t worry about it. You’ll be great.” Tracy lets go of her as the woman walks over. “Front seat,” she tells Angie. “You ride with Daddy.” She turns to Tracy. “Come with me.” Tracy gazes at the storefront. There is the outline of a heavy woman with black hair in the doorway. “Why?” “Just for a minute. She has something for you.” “I don’t need anything.” “She found a sketchbook and a set of oil pastels. All for you. Wasn’t that nice of her?” “I guess.” “Then come along. Get rid of that cup. No food or drink inside.” She takes Tracy’s arm. “And stand up straight.” “I am.” Even in flat shoes the woman is taller. Almost sadly she shakes her head as she leads Tracy away.

• • • •

Angie settles into the front seat. “Where’s my stuff?” “In back.” She wriggles around, reaching for the cardboard box. “Leave it,” the man says tightly. Angie takes out her video game. “Can I play Nintendo?” “Not now.” “When are we going?” “Soon.” “But when?” “When they get here.” Angie presses her face to the window. A dark figure stands between the stores, watching as two people leave. They move slowly out of the shadows, the woman supporting the one next to her, who is having trouble in high heels. Without the woman’s help she would barely be able to stand. “Here they come,” says Angie. The man does not look over his shoulder. “Put on your seatbelt.” “Who’s that with Mom?” “Eyes straight ahead.” “Did Tracy get a makeover?” “Eyes, I said.” Now bare ankles show above the shoes, and the hem of a pretty pink dress. It is a perfect fit for the tall, narrow-waisted body. The woman removes the shoes for her, then stands on tiptoes and reaches up to adjust the shawl over the girl’s head before they get to the car. The back door opens. The woman shoves the box aside and presses the girl’s head down so that she does not bump it when they slide in. “Tracy?” says Angie. “Is that you?” The man starts the car. In the back seat, the well-dressed girl moans as if half-asleep or drugged. When the car rolls forward her head lolls sideways and long, shiny hair falls across her face. Before it is completely covered her eyes open halfway, glinting in the light from the dashboard. They are dull green slits. “Well?” says the woman proudly. Angie stares. “That’s not . . .” The woman opens the box and holds a jeweled crown over the other girl’s head. “She’ll be the most perfect Princess anyone could imagine. Just like you, Angela. I’m sure of it.” As the eyes close again, she passes the tiara to the front seat. “Go ahead. You may try it on.” “Mom, where’s—?” The man reaches over and jerks the passenger seatbelt so tight that Angie can hardly breathe, while the woman fumbles in her purse. “Here. Try a touch of my lipstick, this once. You’re going to be such a pretty Pixie, darling.” “But Mom!” Angie cries. “Mom-my! That’s not—” “Oh, you’ll forget all about her. She was never really one of us. Was she, Walter?” the woman says angrily. “Was she? Was she!” The man does not say another word as he drives on to the castle.

©2016 by Dennis Etchison.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dennis Etchison is a three-time winner of both the British Fantasy and World Fantasy Awards. His short story collections are The Dark Country, Red Dreams, The Blood Kiss, The Death Artist, Talking in the Dark, Fine Cuts, Got To Kill Them All & Other Stories and A Little Black Book of Horror Tales. He is also the author of the novels Darkside, Shadowman, California Gothic, Double Edge, The Fog, Halloween II, Halloween III and Videodrome, and editor of the anthologies Cutting Edge, Masters of Darkness I-III, MetaHorror, The Museum of Horrors, and (with Ramsey Campbell and Jack Dann) Gathering the Bones. He has written extensively for film, television and radio, including more than 150 scripts for The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas. He served as President of the Horror Writers Association (HWA) from 1992 to 1994. His latest books are It Only Comes Out At Night & Other Stories, a massive career retrospective from Centipede Press, and an expanded edition of Fine Cuts, a collection of Hollywood noir stories now available in its first U.S. publication from Borderlands Press. His e-books are available from David Niall Wilson’s Crossroad Press.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight Where Angels Come In Adam L.G. Nevill | 7421 words

One side of my body is full of toothache. Right in the middle of the bones. While the skin and muscles have a chilly pins-and-needles tingle that won’t ever turn back into the warmth of a healthy arm and leg. Which is why Nanna Alice is here; sitting on the chair at the foot of my bed, her crumpled face in shadow. But the milky light that comes through the net curtains finds a sparkle in her quick eyes and gleams on the yellowish grin that hasn’t changed since my Mother let her into the house, made her a cup of tea, and showed her into my room. Nanna Alice smells like the inside of overflow pipes at the back of the council houses. “Least you still got one ’alf,” she says. She has a metal brace on her thin leg. The foot at the end of the calliper is inside a baby’s shoe. Even though it’s rude, I can’t stop staring. Her normal leg is fat. “They took me leg and one arm.” Using her normal fingers, she picks the dead hand from a pocket in her cardigan and plops it on to her lap. Small and grey, it reminds me of a doll’s hand. I don’t look for long. She leans forward in her chair so I can smell the tea on her breath. “Show me where you was touched, luv.” I unbutton my pyjama top and roll on to my good side. Podgy fingertips press around the shrivelled skin at the top of my arm, but she doesn’t touch the see-through parts where the fingertips and thumb once held me. Her eyes go big and her lips pull back to show gums more black than purple. Against her thigh, the doll hand shakes. She coughs, sits back in her chair. Cradles the tiny hand and rubs it with living fingers. When I cover my shoulder, she watches that part of me without blinking. Seems disappointed to see it covered so soon. Wets her lips. “Tell us what ‘appened, luv.” Propping myself up in the pillows, I peer out the window and swallow the big lump in my throat. Dizzy and a bit sickish, I don’t want to remember what happened. Not ever. Across the street, inside the spiky metal fence built around the park, I can see the usual circle of mothers. Huddled into their coats and sitting on benches beside pushchairs, or holding the leads of tugging dogs, they watch the children play. Upon the climbing frames and on the wet grass, the kids race about and shriek and laugh and fall and cry. Wrapped up in scarves and padded coats, they swarm among hungry pigeons and seagulls; thousands of small white and grey shapes, pecking around the little stamping feet. Sometimes the birds panic and rise in curving squadrons, trying to get their plump bodies into the air with flap-cracky wings. And the children are blind with their own fear and excitement in brief tornadoes of dusty feathers, red feet, cruel beaks and startled eyes. But they are safe here—the children and the birds—closely watched by tense mothers and kept inside the stockade of iron railings: the only place outdoors the children are allowed to play since I came back, alone. A lot of things go missing in our town: cats, dogs, children. And they never come back. Except for me and Nanna Alice. We came home, or at least half of us did. Lying in my sick bed, pale in the face and weak in the heart, I drink medicines, read books, and watch the children play from my bedroom window. Sometimes I sleep. But only when I have to. Because when I sink away from the safety of home and a watching parent, I go back to the white house on the hill. For Nanna Alice, the time she went inside the big white place as a little girl is a special occasion; like she’s grateful. Our dad calls her a “silly old fool” and doesn’t want her in our house. He doesn’t know she’s here today. But when a child vanishes, or someone dies, lots of the mothers ask the Nanna to visit them. “She can see things and feel things the rest of us don’t,” my mom says. Like the two police ladies, and the mothers of the two girls who went missing last winter, and Pickering’s parents, my mom just wants to know what happened to me. At least when I’m awake, I can read, watch television, and listen to my Mom and sisters downstairs. But in dreams I have no choice: I go back to the white house on the hill, where old things with skipping feet circle me, then rush in close to show their faces. “Tell us, luv. Tell us about the ‘ouse,” Nanna Alice says. Can’t think why she’s smiling like that. No adult likes to talk about the beautiful, tall house on the hill. Even our dads who come home from the industry, smelling of plastic and beer, look uncomfortable if their kids say they can hear the ladies crying again: above their heads, but deep inside their ears at the same time, calling from the distance, from the hill, from inside us. Our parents can’t hear it anymore, but they remember the sound from when they were small. It’s like people are trapped and calling out for help. And when no one comes, they get real angry. “Foxes,” the parents tell us, but don’t look you in the eye when they say it. For a long time after what people call “my accident” I was unconscious in the hospital. After I woke up, I was so weak I stayed there for another three months. Gradually, one half of my body got stronger and I was allowed home. That’s when the questions began. Not just about my injuries, but about my mate Pickering, who they never found. And now crazy Nanna Alice wants to know every single thing I can remember, and all of the dreams too. Only I never know what is real and what came out of the coma with me. For years, we talked about going up there. All the kids do. Pickering, Ritchie, and me wanted to be the bravest boys in our school. We wanted to break in there and come out with treasure to use as proof that we’d been inside, and not just looked in through the gate like all the others we knew. Some people say the house and its grounds was once a place where old, rich people lived after they retired from owning the industry, the land, the laws, our houses, our town, us. Others say it was built on an old well and the ground is contaminated. A teacher told us it used to be a hospital and is still full of germs. Our dad said it was an asylum for lunatics that closed down over a hundred years ago and has stayed empty ever since because it’s falling to pieces and is too expensive to repair. That’s why kids should never go there: you could be crushed by bricks or fall through a floor. Nanna Alice says it’s a place “where angels come in.” But we all know it’s the place where the missing things are. Every street in the miles of our town has lost a pet or knows a family who’s lost a child. And every time the police search the big house, they find nothing. No one remembers the big gate being open. So on a Friday morning when all the kids in our area were walking to school, me, Ritchie, and Pickering sneaked off, the other way. Through the allotments, where me and Pickering were once caught smashing deck chairs and bean poles; through the woods full of broken glass and dog shit; over the canal bridge; across the potato fields with our heads down so the farmer wouldn’t see us; and over the railway tracks until we couldn’t even see the roofs of the last houses in our town. Talking about the hidden treasure, we stopped by the old ice-cream van with four flat tyres, to throw rocks and stare at the faded menu on the little counter, our mouths watering as we made selections that would never be served. On the other side of the woods that surround the estate, we could see the chimneys of the big, white mansion above the trees. Although Pickering had been walking out front the whole time telling us he wasn’t scared of security guards or watch dogs, or even ghosts—“’cus you can just put your hand froo ’em” — when we reached the bottom of the wooded hill, no one said anything or even looked at each other. Part of me always believed we would turn back at the black gate, because the fun part was telling stories about the house and planning the expedition and imagining terrible things. Going inside was different, because lots of the missing kids had talked about the house before they disappeared. And some of the young men who broke in there for a laugh came away a bit funny in the head, but our dad said that was because of drugs. Even the trees around the estate were different, like they were too still and silent and the air between them real cold. But we still went up through the trees and found the high brick wall that surrounds the grounds. There was barbed wire and broken glass set into concrete on top of it. We followed the wall until we reached the black iron gate. Seeing the PRIVATE PROPERTY: TRESSPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED sign made shivers go up my neck and under my hair. The gate is higher than a house with a curved top made from iron spikes, set between two pillars with big stone balls on top. “I heard them balls roll off and kill trespassers,” Ritchie said. I’d heard the same thing, but when Ritchie said that, I just knew he wasn’t going in with us. We wrapped our hands around the cold black bars of the gate and peered through at the long flagstone path that goes up the hill, between avenues of trees and old statues hidden by branches and weeds. All the uncut grass of the lawns was as high as my waist and the old flower beds were wild with colour. At the summit was the tall, white house with big windows. Sunlight glinted off the glass. Above all the chimneys, the sky was blue. “Princesses lived there,” Pickering whispered. “Can you see anyone?” Ritchie asked. He was shivering with excitement and had to take a pee. He tried to rush it over some nettles—we were fighting a war against nettles and wasps that summer—but got half of it down his legs. “It’s empty,” Pickering whispered. “‘Cept for ’idden treasure. Darren’s brother got this owl inside a big glass. I seen it. Looks like it’s still alive. At night, it moves its ’ead.” Ritchie and I looked at each other; everyone knows the stories about the animals or birds inside the glass that people find up there. There’s one about a lamb with no fur, inside a tank of green water that someone’s uncle found when he was a boy. It still blinks its little black eyes. And someone said they found skeletons of children all dressed up in old clothes, holding hands. All rubbish; because I know what’s really inside there. Pickering had seen nothing, but if we challenged him he’d start yelling, “Have so! Have so!” and me and Ritchie weren’t happy with anything but whispering near the gate. “Let’s just watch and see what happens. We can go in another day,” Ritchie couldn’t help himself saying. “You’re chickening out,” Pickering said, kicking at Ritchie’s legs. “I’ll tell everyone Ritchie pissed his pants.” Ritchie’s face went white, his bottom lip quivered. Like me, he was imagining crowds of swooping kids shouting, “Piss pot. Piss pot.” Once the crowds find a coward, they’ll hunt him every day until he’s pushed out to the edges of the playground where the failures stand and watch. Every kid in town knows this place takes away brothers, sisters, cats and dogs, but when we hear the cries from the hill, it’s our duty to force one another out here. It’s a part of our town and always has been. Pickering is one of the toughest kids in school; he had to go. “I’m going in first,” Pick said, standing back and sizing up the gate. “Watch where I put my hands and feet.” And it didn’t take him long to get over. There was a little wobble at the top when he swung a leg between two spikes, but not long after he was standing on the other side, grinning at us. To me, it now looked like there was a little ladder built into the gate—where the metal vines and thorns curved between the long poles, you could see the pattern of steps for small hands and feet. I’d heard that little girls always found a secret wooden door in the brick wall that no one else can find when they look for it. But that might just be another story. If I didn’t go over and the raid was a success, I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life being a piss pot and wishing I’d gone with Pick. We could be heroes together. And I was full of the same crazy feeling that makes me climb oak trees to the very top branches, stare up at the sky and let go with my hands for a few seconds knowing that if I fall, I will die. When I climbed away from whispering Ritchie on the ground, the squeaks and groans of the gate were so loud I was sure I could be heard all the way up the hill and inside the house. When I got to the top and was getting ready to swing a leg over, Pick said, “Don’t cut your balls off.” But I couldn’t smile, or even breathe. My arms and legs started to shake. It was much higher up there than it looked from the ground. With one leg over, between the spikes, panic came up my throat. If one hand slipped off the worn metal, I imagined my whole weight forcing the spike through my thigh, and how I would hang there, dripping. Then I looked up toward the house and I felt there was a face behind every window, watching me. Many of the stories about the white place on the hill suddenly filled my head: how you only see the red eyes of the thing that drains your blood; how it’s kiddy-fiddlers that hide in there and torture captives for days before burying them alive, which is why no one ever finds the missing children; and some say the thing that makes the crying noise might look like a beautiful lady when you first see her, but she soon changes once she’s holding you. “Hurry up. It’s easy,” Pick said from way down below. Ever so slowly, I lifted my second leg over, then lowered myself down the other side. He was right; it wasn’t a hard climb at all; kids could do it. I stood in hot sunshine on the other side of the gate, smiling. The light was brighter over there too; glinting off all the white stone and glass up on the hill. And the air seemed weird—real thick and warm. When I looked back through the gate, the world around Ritchie—who stood alone biting his bottom lip—looked grey and dull, like it was November or something. Around us, the overgrown grass was so glossy it hurt your eyes to look at it. Reds, yellows, purples, oranges and lemons of the flowers flowed inside my head and I could taste hot summer in my mouth. Around the trees, statues and flagstone path, the air was a bit wavy and my skin felt so good and warm I shivered. Closed my eyes. “Beautiful,” I said; a word I wouldn’t usually use around Pick. “This is where I want to live,” he said, his eyes and face one big smile. Then we both started to laugh. We hugged each other, which we’d never done before. Anything I ever worried about seemed silly now. I felt taller. Could go anywhere, do anything I liked. I know Pick felt the same. Protected by the overhanging tree branches and long grasses, we kept to the side of the path and began walking up the hill. But after a while, I started to feel a bit nervous as we got closer to the top. The house looked bigger than I thought it was, down by the gate. Even though we could see no one and hear nothing, I also felt like I’d walked into this big, crowded, but silent place where lots of eyes were watching me. Following me. We stopped walking by the first statue that wasn’t totally covered in green moss and dead leaves. Through the low branches of a tree, we could still see the two naked children, standing together on the stone block. One boy and one girl. They were both smiling, but not in a nice way, because we could see too much of their teeth. “They’s all open on the chest,” Pickering said. And he was right; their dry stone skin was peeled back on the breastbone and in their outstretched hands they held small lumps of stone with veins carved into them — their own little hearts. The good feeling I had down by the gate was completely gone now. Sunlight shone through the trees and striped us with shadows and bright slashes. Eyes big and mouths dry, we walked on and checked some of the other statues we passed. You couldn’t help it; it’s like they made you stare at them to work out what was sticking through the leaves and branches and ivy. There was one horrible cloth thing that seemed too real to be made from stone. Its face was so nasty, I couldn’t look for long. Standing under it gave me the queer feeling that it was swaying from side to side, ready to jump off the stone block and come at us. Pick walked ahead of me a little bit, but soon stopped to see another. He shrunk in its shadow, then peered at his shoes. I caught up with him but didn’t look too long either. Beside the statue of the ugly man in a cloak and big hat, was a smaller shape covered in a robe and hood, with something coming out of a sleeve that reminded me of snakes. I didn’t want to go any further and knew I’d be seeing these statues in my sleep for a long time. Looking down the hill at the gate, I was surprised to see how far away it was now. “Think I’m going back,” I said to Pick. Pickering looked at me, but never called me a chicken; he didn’t want to start a fight and be on his own in here. “Let’s just go into the house quick,” he said. “And get something. Otherwise no one will believe us.” But being just a bit closer to the white house with all the staring windows made me sick with nerves. It was four storeys high and must have had hundreds of rooms inside. All the windows upstairs were dark, so we couldn’t see beyond the glass. Downstairs, they were all boarded up against trespassers. “They’s all empty, I bet,” Pickering said to try and make us feel better. But it didn’t do much for me; he didn’t seem so smart or hard now; just a stupid kid who hadn’t got a clue. “Nah,” I said. He walked away from me. “Well I am. I’ll say you waited outside.” His voice was too soft to carry the usual threat. But all the same, I suddenly couldn’t stand the thought of his grinning, triumphant face while Ritchie and I were considered piss pots, especially after I’d climbed the gate and come this far. My part would mean nothing if he went further than me. We never looked at any more of the statues. If we had, I don’t think we’d have ever got to the wide stone steps that went up to the big iron doors of the house. Didn’t seem to take us long to reach the house either. Even taking small, slow, reluctant steps got us there real quick. On legs full of warm water, I followed Pickering up to the doors. “Why is they made of metal?” he asked me. I never had an answer. He pressed both hands against the doors. One of them creaked but never opened. “They’s locked,” he said. Secretly relieved, I took a step away from the doors. As all the ground floor windows were boarded over too, it looked like we could go home. Then, as Pickering shoved at the creaky door again, this time with his shoulder and his body at an angle, I’m sure I saw movement in a window on the second floor. Something whitish. Behind the glass, it was like a shape appeared out of the darkness and then sank back into it, quick but graceful. I thought of a carp surfacing in a cloudy pond before vanishing the same moment you saw its pale back. “Pick!” I hissed at him. There was a clunk inside the door Pickering was straining his body against. “It’s open,” he cried out, and stared into the narrow gap between the two iron doors. But I couldn’t help thinking the door had been opened from inside. “I wouldn’t,” I said to him. He just smiled and waved at me to come over and help as he pushed to make a bigger space. I stood still and watched the windows upstairs. The widening door made a grinding sound against the floor. Without another word, he walked inside the big white house. Silence hummed in my ears. Sweat trickled down my face. I wanted to run down to the gate. After a few seconds, Pickering’s face appeared in the doorway. “Quick. Come an’ look at all the birds.” He was breathless with excitement. I peered through the gap at a big, empty hallway and could see a staircase going up to the next floor. Pickering was standing in the middle of the hall, not moving. He was looking at the ground. At all the dried-up birds on the wooden floorboards. Hundreds of dead pigeons. I went in. No carpets, or curtains, or light bulbs, just bare floorboards, white walls, and two closed doors on either side of the hall. On the floor, most of the birds still had feathers but looked real thin. Some were just bones. Others were dust. “They get in and they got nuffin’ to eat.” Pickering said. “We should collect all the skulls.” He crunched across the floor and tried the doors at either side of the hall, yanking the handles up and down. “Locked,” he said. “Both of ‘em locked. Let’s go up them stairs. See if there’s summat in the rooms.” I flinched at every creak caused by our feet on the stairs. I told him to walk at the sides like me. He wasn’t listening, just going up fast on his plumpish legs. I caught up with him at the first turn in the stairs and began to feel real strange again. The air was weird; hot and thin like we were in a tiny space. We were both all sweaty under our school uniforms from just walking up one flight of stairs. I had to lean against a wall while he shone his torch up at the next floor. All we could see were the plain walls of a dusty corridor. A bit of sunlight was getting in from somewhere upstairs, but not much. “Come on,” he said, without turning his head to look at me. “I’m going outside,” I said. “I can’t breathe.” But as I moved to go back down the first flight of stairs, I heard a door creak open and then close, below us. I stopped still and heard my heart banging against my ear drums from the inside. The sweat turned to frost on my face and neck and under my hair. Real quick, and sideways, something moved across the shaft of light falling through the open front door. My eyeballs went cold and I felt dizzy. Out the corner of my eye, I could see Pickering’s white face, watching me from above on the next flight of stairs. He turned the torch off with a loud click. It moved again, back the way it had come, but paused this time at the edge of the long rectangle of white light on the hall floor. And started to sniff at the dirty ground. It was the way she moved down there that made me feel light as a feather and ready to faint. Least I think it was a she. But when people get that old you can’t always tell. There wasn’t much hair on the head and the skin was yellow. She looked more like a puppet made of bones and dressed in a grubby nighty than an old lady. And could old ladies move so fast? Sideways like a crab, looking backwards at the open door, so I couldn’t see the face properly, which I was glad of. If I moved too quick, I’m sure it would look up and see me. I took two slow side-steps to get behind the wall of the next staircase where Pickering was hiding. He looked like he was about to cry. Like me, I knew all he could hear was his own heartbeat. Then we heard the sound of another door open from somewhere downstairs, out of sight. We knelt down, trembling against each other and peered around the corner of the staircase to make sure the old thing wasn’t coming up the stairs, sideways. But a second figure had now appeared down there. I nearly cried when I saw it skittering around by the door. It moved quicker than the first one, with the help of two black sticks. Bent right over with a hump for a back, it was covered in a dusty black dress that swished over the floor. What I could see of the face through the veil was all pinched and as sickly-white as grubs under wet bark. When she made the whistling sound, it hurt my ears deep inside and made my bones feel cold. Pickering’s face was wild with fear. I was seeing too much of his eyes. “Is they old ladies?” he said in a voice that sounded all broken. I grabbed his arm. “We got to get out. Maybe there’s a window, or another door ‘round the back.” Which meant we had to go up these stairs, run through the building to find another way down to the ground-floor, before breaking our way out. I took another peek down the stairs to see what they were doing, but wished I hadn’t. There were two more of them. A tall man with legs like sticks was looking up at us with a face that never changed because it had no lips or eyelids or nose. He wore a creased suit with a gold watch chain on the waistcoat, and was standing behind a wicker chair. In the chair was a bundle wrapped in tartan blankets. Above the coverings I could see a small head inside a cloth cap. The face was yellow as corn in a tin. The first two were standing by the open door so we couldn’t get out. Running up the stairs into an even hotter darkness on the next floor, my whole body felt baggy and clumsy and my knees chipped together. Pickering went first with the torch and used his elbows so I couldn’t overtake him. I bumped into his back and kicked his heels. Inside his fast breathing, I could hear him sniffing at tears. “Is they comin’?” he kept saying. I didn’t have the breath to answer and kept running through the long corridor, between dozens of closed doors, to get to the end. I looked straight ahead and was sure I would freeze-up if one of the doors suddenly opened. And with our feet making such a bumping on the floorboards, I can’t say I was surprised when I heard the click of a lock behind us. We both made the mistake of looking back. At first we thought it was waving at us, but then realised the skinny figure in the dirty night-dress was moving its long arms through the air to attract the attention of the others that had followed us up the stairwell. We could hear the scuffle and swish as they came through the dark behind us. But how could this one see us, I thought, with all those rusty bandages around its head? Then we heard another of those horrible whistles, followed by more doors opening real quick, like things were in a hurry to get out of the rooms. At the end of the corridor, there was another stairwell with more light in it that fell from a high window three floors up. But the glass must have been dirty and greenish, because everything around us on the stairs looked like it was underwater. When he turned to bolt down them stairs, I saw Pick’s face was all shiny with tears and the front of his trousers had a dark patch spreading down one leg. It was real hard to get down them stairs and back to the ground. It was like we had no strength left in our bodies, as if the fear was draining it through the slappy, tripping soles of our feet. But it was more than the terror slowing us down; the air was so thin and dry, it was hard to get our breath in and out of our lungs fast enough. My shirt was stuck to my back and I was dripping under the arms. Pick’s hair was wet and he was slowing right down, so I overtook him. At the bottom of the stairs I ran into another long, empty corridor of closed doors and greyish light that ran through the back of the building. Just looking all the way down it, made me bend over with my hands on my knees to rest. But Pickering just ploughed right into me from behind and knocked me over. He ran across my body and stamped on my hand. “They’s comin,’” he whined in a tearful voice, and went stumbling down the passage. I got back to my feet and started down the corridor after him. Which never felt like a good idea to me; if some of them things were waiting in the hall by the front doors, while others were coming up fast behind us, we’d get ourselves trapped. I thought about opening a door and trying to kick out the boards over a window in one of the ground-floor rooms. Plenty of them old things seemed to come out of rooms when we ran past them, like we were waking them up, but they never came out of every room. So we would just have to take a chance. I called out to Pick to stop. I was wheezing like Billy Skid at school who’s got asthma, so maybe Pickering never heard me, because he kept on running toward the end. I looked back at the stairwell we’d just come out of, then looked about at the doors in the passage. As I was wondering which one to pick, a little voice said, “Do you want to hide in here?” I jumped into the air and cried out like I’d trod on a snake. Stared at where the voice came from. I could see a crack between this big brownish door and the doorframe. Part of a little girl’s face peeked out. “They won’t see you. We can play with my dolls.” She smiled and opened the door wider. She had a really white face inside a black bonnet all covered in ribbons. The rims of her dark eyes were bright red like she’d been crying for a long time. My chest was hurting and my eyes were stinging with sweat. Pickering was too far ahead of me to catch him up. I could hear his feet banging away on loose floorboards, way off in the darkness and I didn’t think I could run any further. I nodded at the girl. She stood aside and opened the door wider. The bottom of her black dress swept through the dust. “Quickly,” she said with an excited smile, and then looked down the corridor, to see if anything was coming. “Most of them are blind, but they can hear things.” I moved through the doorway. Brushed past her. Smelled something gone bad. Put a picture in my head of the dead cat, squashed flat in the woods, that I found one time on a hot day. But over that smell was something like the bottom of my granny’s old wardrobe, with the one broken door and little iron keys in the locks that don’t work any more. Softly, the little girl closed the door behind us, and walked off across the wooden floor with her head held high, like a “little Madam” my dad would say. Light was getting into this room from some red and green windows up near the high ceiling. Two big chains hung down holding lights with no bulbs, and there was a stage at one end with a thick greenish curtain pulled across the front. Little footlights stuck up at the front of the stage. It must have been a ballroom once. Looking for a way out—behind me, to the side, up ahead, everywhere— I followed the little girl in the black bonnet over to the stage and up the stairs at the side. She disappeared through the curtains without making a sound, and I followed because I could think of nowhere else to go and I wanted a friend in here. The long curtains smelled so bad around my face, I put a hand over my mouth. She asked my name and where I lived. I told her like I was talking to a teacher who’s just caught me doing something wrong, even giving her my house number. “We didn’t mean to trespass,” I said. “We never stole nothing.” She cocked her head to one side and frowned, like she was trying to remember something. Then she smiled and said, “All of these are mine. I found them.” She drew my attention to the dolls on the floor; little shapes of people I couldn’t see properly in the dark. She sat down among them and started to pick them up one at a time to show me, but I was too nervous to pay much attention and I didn’t like the look of the cloth animal with its fur worn down to the grubby material. It had stitched up eyes and no ears; the arms and legs were too long for its body. And I didn’t like the way the little, dirty head was stiff and upright like it was watching me. Behind us, the rest of the stage was in darkness with a faint glow of white wall in the distance. Peering from the stage at the boarded-up windows down the right side of the dance floor, I could see some bright daylight around the edge of two big hardboard sheets nailed over patio doors. There was a breeze coming through. Must have been a place where someone got in before. “I got to go,” I said to the girl behind me, who was whispering to her animals and dolls. I was about to step through the curtains and head for the daylight when I heard the rushing of a crowd in the corridor that me and Pickering had just run through — feet shuffling, canes tapping, wheels squeaking and two hooting sounds. It all seemed to go on for ages. A long parade I didn’t want to see. As it went past, the main door clicked open and something glided into the ballroom. I pulled back from the curtains and held my breath. The little girl kept mumbling to the nasty toys. I wanted to cover my ears. Another crazy part of me wanted it all to end; wanted me to step out from behind the curtains and offer myself to the tall figure down there on the dance-floor, holding the tatty parasol over its head. It spun around quickly like it was moving on tiny, silent wheels under its long musty skirts. Sniffing at the air. For me. Under the white net attached to the brim of the rotten hat and tucked into the high collars of the dress, I saw a bit of face that looked like skin on a rice pudding. I would have screamed but there was no air inside me. I looked down to where the little girl had been sitting. She had gone, but something was moving on the floor. Squirming. For a moment, it looked like all her toys were trembling, but when I squinted at the Golly with bits of curly white hair on its head, it was lying perfectly still where she had dropped it. The little girl may have hidden me, but I was glad she had gone. Way off in the stifling distance of the big house, I heard a scream; full of all the panic and terror and woe in the whole world. The figure with the little umbrella spun right around on the dance-floor and then rushed out of the ballroom toward the sound. I slipped out from behind the curtains. A busy chattering sound came from the distance. It got louder until it echoed through the corridor and ballroom and almost covered the sounds of the wailing boy. It sounded like his cries were swirling round and round, bouncing off walls and closed doors, like he was running somewhere far off inside the house, in a circle that he couldn’t get out of. I crept down the stairs at the side of the stage and ran across to the long strip of burning sunlight I could see shining through one side of the patio doors. I pulled at the big rectangle of wood until it splintered and I could see broken glass in a doorframe and lots of thick grass outside. For the first time since I’d seen the first figure scratching about the front entrance, I truly believed I could escape. I could climb through the gap I was making, run around the outside of the house and then go down the hill to the gate, while they were all busy inside with the crying boy. But just as my breathing went all quick and shaky with the glee of escape, I heard a whump sound on the floor behind me, like something had just dropped to the floor from the stage. Teeny vibrations tickled the soles of my feet. Then I heard something coming across the floor toward me—a shuffle, like a body dragging itself real quick. Couldn’t bear to look behind me and see another one close up. I snatched at the board and pulled with all my strength at the bit not nailed down, so the whole thing bent and made a gap. Sideways, I squeezed a leg, hip, arm and shoulder out. Then my head was suddenly bathed in warm sunlight and fresh air. It must have reached out then and grabbed my left arm under the shoulder. The fingers and thumb were so cold they burned my skin. And even though my face was in daylight, everything went dark in my eyes except for little white flashes, like when you stand up too quick. I wanted to be sick. Tried to pull away, but one side of my body was all slow and heavy and full of pins and needles. I let go off the hardboard sheet. It slapped shut like a mouse trap. I fell through the gap and into the grass outside. Behind my head, I heard a sound like celery snapping. Something shrieked into my ear which made me go deaf-ish for a week. Sitting down in the grass outside, I was sick down my jumper. Mucus and bits of spaghetti hoops that looked all white and smelled real bad. I looked at the door I had fallen out of. Through my bleary eyes I saw an arm that was mostly bone, stuck between the wood and door-frame. I made myself roll away and then get to my feet on the grass that was flattened down. Moving around the outside of the house, back toward the front of the building and the path that would take me down to the gate, I wondered if I’d bashed my left side. The shoulder and hip were achy and cold and stiff. It was hard to move. I wondered if that’s what broken bones felt like. All my skin was wet with sweat too, but I was shivery and cold. I just wanted to lie down in the long grass. Twice I stopped to be sick. Only spit came out with burping sounds. Near the front of the house, I got down on my good side and started to crawl, real slow, through the long grass, down the hill, making sure the path was on my left so I didn’t get lost in the meadow. I only took one look back at the house and will wish forever that I never did. One side of the front door was still open from where we went in. I could see a crowd, bustling in the sunlight that fell on their raggedy clothes. They were making a hooting sound and fighting over something; a small shape that looked dark and wet. It was all limp. Between the thin, snatching hands, it came apart, piece by piece. In my room, at the end of my bed, Nanna Alice has closed her eyes. But she’s not sleeping. She’s just sitting quietly and rubbing her doll hand like she’s polishing treasure.

©2005 by Adam L.G. Nevill. Originally published in Poe’s Progeny, edited by Gary Fry. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Adam L.G. Nevill was born in Birmingham, England, in 1969 and grew up in England and New Zealand. He is the author of the supernatural horror novels Banquet for the Damned, Apartment 16, The Ritual, Last Days, House of Small Shadows, No One Gets Out Alive, and Lost Girl. In 2012 The Ritual was the winner of The August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel, and in 2013 Last Days won the same award. The same two novels were awarded Best in Category: Horror, by R.U.S.A. Adam lives in Devon and can be contacted through www.adamlgnevill.com. To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight NOVEL EXCERPTS NOVEL EXCERPT: Bleeding Earth (Adaptive Books) Kaitlin Ward | 2507 words

I drape my arm around a towerlike gravestone, watching my best friend hover at the cemetery’s edge. She’s lived across from this graveyard her entire life, and still, she’s terrified of it. Like skeletons might crawl out from the coffins below the soil and wrap their bony fingers around her ankles. “Hillary, come on!” I shout. “I promise, the cemetery will not hurt you.” She takes a grudging step forward. I gasp theatrically and stumble like something’s just grabbed me. She shrieks and shuffles back toward the edge of the road. “You’re so easy it’s almost not even fun,” I say, laughing. She glares at me, sweeping fawn-colored bangs away from her eyes. “I so do not love you right now.” “Just get over here so we can get this done.” I’m torn between exasperation and amusement. Hillary truly is terrified of cemeteries. She’s not faking to be cute or whatever. But I’m only so patient, and we’re here for a reason. Her reason. She’s getting tracings of the gravestones of her local ancestors as part of her family history project. At first she takes baby steps into the cemetery, tugging anxiously on her lip ring. We both have them; we dared each other last year, to the non- amusement of our mothers. Finally, she makes it past the first row of graves, striding toward me with intense purpose. I consider pretending to be attacked by a dead person again, but decide it’s not in my best interest to traumatize her more. “See?” I smile when she reaches me. “Still alive.” “Oh hush. And hold this.” She hands me a fat crayon, its wrapper peeled off. Then she holds the tracing paper over the face of a gravestone. I rub the side of the crayon back and forth over it until I have a cerulean outline surrounding the name and dates of one of Hillary’s ancestors. We move on to the next, and the next. She’s still tense, but I’m kind of enjoying this. It’s April; we haven’t had much spring so far, and today is so warm I almost wore my flip-flops for the first time this year. The new grass surrounding the graves is an enthusiastic shade of green, and the brook that runs through the cemetery is swollen with melted snow. I’m just happy to be outdoors, even if it’s here. We’ve wandered pretty far in now, but the longer we’re among the graves without incident, the more Hillary relaxes. Her shoulders lose their arch of tension; her eyes stop darting around like she’s expecting to see a ghost. She even starts making jokes about the names of her ancestors. “Immersion therapy,” I tell her. “We should come here every day and cure your fear.” She laughs. “Maybe.” I scrub the crayon over her last piece of tracing paper. She admires our work and rolls it up carefully around the outside of all the others. “Ms. Hartman better give me an A on this project,” she says, patting the smooth granite top of the gravestone. “I’m sure she will. And you survived the cemetery. No creepy dead girls sprang forth from their eternal resting places to drag you to the underworld.” She smirks. “So far.” We start back toward her house, which perches on a small hill across the street. I wish we could go hiking now, since it’s such a beautiful day, but if I even hint at suggesting it, she’ll get all guilty and cancel her already-made plans with her boyfriend. She’s really weird about putting friends before relationships. Which is nice, except when it loses her the boyfriend. When we were in ninth grade, she saw something on TV about how you’ll regret lost friendships more than lost romantic opportunities, and she’s really taken it to heart. I think she’s probably right; no one has impacted my life more than my best friend. But her last boyfriend broke up with her after she cancelled three dates in a row for friend “emergencies,” and I don’t want to be the cause if it happens again. Sometimes I wonder if she doesn’t use this whole friends-first-no-matter-what idea to keep them from getting too close. If maybe falling in love is scary. She rolls her eyes and changes the subject any time I suggest such a thing, though. We’ve almost reached the front of the cemetery when I step in something mushy. This far from the stream, I wasn’t paying attention for mud. “Hey, Hill, look out, it’s . . .” I trail off because what’s smeared on the heel of my shoe isn’t mud. It’s darker. It’s red. “What happened?” Hillary’s voice has an edge again. “I don’t know. Something weird’s on my shoe.” I crouch and inspect the ground. The grass is slick with a reddish-copper substance. “Blood,” I say aloud. “I just stepped in fucking blood.” “What the hell?” Hillary squats beside me. “Dude. Look, it’s all over.” She’s right. Blood is oozing up out of the ground in front of this gravestone. Tiny beads like grisly dewdrops, glittering on the bright blades of grass. The longer I look, the plumper the beads become. They push together, forming miniature blood puddles. “Is this even possible?” I back away slowly, toward the road, toward Hillary’s house. “I don’t know. Could the grave be . . . fresh?” I wrinkle my nose. It’s a recently erected stone, but they take the blood out of corpses before they bury them. Don’t they? I ask Hillary, and she just shrugs. “Like I know anything about science.” Neither of us are destined to become biologists, that’s for sure. A cloud crosses the sun, cooling both the temperature and my already declining mood. “We should tell someone,” I say. I’ve scrubbed my foot through the dirt at the side of the road over and over, but it’s only smudging the blood. I’m going to have to bleach these shoes. Or throw them out. “I told you the cemetery was creepy,” Hillary grumbles as we wait for cars to pass. “This is not normal cemetery shit.” We run across the street, up Hillary’s driveway, and through her front door. Inside, it smells like peppermint because her mom has an obsession with candles. Hillary’s eight-year-old brother is shrieking delightedly from his bedroom upstairs, and her cat eyes me disdainfully before prancing out of sight, as if he cannot be bothered to even waste his eyesight on these foolish human teens. “Mom!” Hillary calls, slipping out of her shoes. “In the kitchen!” her mom shouts back. We skid into the shiny-tiled kitchen in our socks. Hillary’s mom is setting out chocolate chip cookies on a cooling rack. They smell heavenly but look, well, I’ll say iffy, to be nice. I take one anyway, when she offers them to us. It tastes okay. “Mom.” Hillary leans her elbows on the kitchen’s island. “There’s blood in the cemetery. Like, a lot. Lea stepped in it.” “Near one of the newer headstones,” I add, as though this information is relevant. “It seemed like it was oozing out of the ground.” It sounds so, so stupid now that we’re in this peppermint-and-cookie- scented kitchen, away from the gravestone. And Hillary’s mom is a nurse, which makes me feel even more stupid. She sees blood all the time. “Probably a coyote got something,” she says. “I don’t know, Mom.” Hillary’s brow furrows. “It was a lot of blood.” “Do you want me to go look with you?” Her tone makes me feel even dumber. It’s the tone moms use when you’re worried about a monster under your bed. The tone they still use sometimes when you’re seventeen, but only when they think you’re acting like you’ve lost ten years off your age. “I guess not.” Hillary glances at the oven clock and her eyes widen. “Shit! Shoot, I mean.” The amendment is in response to receiving the Look from her mother. “Levi will be here in fifteen minutes.” “I’ll head out,” I tell her. “You’re sure you don’t want a ride home?” I wave her off. “I know you want to change before he gets here. It’s nice out. Walking’s good for me.” “Oh yeah. And maybe you’ll run into—” Hillary cuts herself off, but I hear the end of her sentence in my head—Aracely. We don’t talk about my relationships. Not in front of her mom, anyway. I’m out at school, and my parents have known for over a year, but Hillary’s parents would so not be okay with the idea that their daughter’s best friend dates girls. “Oh, is there a boy?” Hillary’s mom asks, catching on—or so she thinks. “I’m leaving now,” I say, but I give a coy smile so she’ll think I’m just shy about a crush. This way she won’t bring it up again for a long while, and I won’t have to lie about anything. Or worse, tell the truth. “I’ll text you,” Hillary says, heading for the stairs as I head for the door. As I walk down the driveway in my defiled shoes, Levi is just pulling up. I tug my phone from my pocket and text, Better change quickly! Levi smiles hesitantly at me as he parks. Hillary’s been dating him for a few months now, and he’s still kind of uncertain around me. I actually think he views me as competition, which is hilarious, because Hillary couldn’t be more straight if she tried. He isn’t a bad-looking guy. He’s got the standard blond-haired, blue-eyed thing going on, and he plays sports, so he’s in shape. He’s always polite, and I heard him make a pretty good joke once. But our distrust is mutual I guess, because there’s something about him that bothers me. I just can’t settle on what. I don’t glance toward the cemetery as I walk down the adjacent road. Great—now I’ve picked up Hillary’s irrational fear. It’s just, even thinking about something being killed and leaving behind so much blood unnerves me. And then there was the way the blood seemed to ooze. It wasn’t right. All in all, I’m glad when I reach Main Street’s wide sidewalks. It’s a pleasant twenty-five-minute walk from Hillary’s house to mine, and a bonus of spring is that there are few tourists. Skiing is done, leaf-peeping is long done, and summer tourist traps haven’t yet opened. Which means Main Street is blissfully free of fanny packs and of iPads being used as cameras. And Hillary was right; I am hoping to maybe possibly run into Aracely, whose apartment is at the other end of Main Street. Aracely and I have only been on a few dates, but I’m already falling pretty hard. I barely knew her before; she’s a junior, and we don’t have any overlap in our circles of friends, but we had a class together last semester. I noticed her—how could I not?—but she’s not out, so other than a couple wistful daydreams, I didn’t give any thought to dating her. Until the day she came up to me and asked me out. I pass by a church that recently upgraded its inspirational quotes sign to an LED display with bright pink bulbs. Usually, I don’t pay it much mind, but today they have up the absolute creepiest quote I have ever seen. Beloveds, don’t be afraid, it reads, and there’s something so chilling about reading those words in that cheerfully bright lettering. I take a picture of it with my phone because this needs to be texted to every single friend I have. I’m captioning my message when someone across the street screams. It’s the kind of scream that digs into my bones and nestles in the marrow, echoing as pulses of fear in my nerves. And then there’s shouting. Not where I heard the scream, but farther down Main Street, where the shops are. I can’t tell what’s happening, what’s getting to everyone. They’re all backing toward the storefronts. Mothers are picking up their children. A parked police car turns on its lights. I creep backward onto the church steps, looking around wildly for a hint about what’s wrong. No one’s clustering together. People aren’t fleeing just one spot, either; they’re panicking all over. Edging into stores or sitting atop the hoods of cars. It’s the sidewalk people are pointing at. The sidewalk they’re abandoning in droves. But the sidewalk’s fine. It’s— It’s not fine. Holy shit. I crouch carefully on the bottom step, peering down. There’s something red seeping up through the cracks between slabs of the sidewalk. Spilling over and dripping onto the street. It’s impossible and it’s insane, and part of me thinks I’m having a hallucination. Beloveds, don’t be afraid, the sign still proclaims brightly beside me. But I am. I am suddenly so afraid that the fear becomes a white-hot brand, pressed into my heart. And I should be, because something impossible is happening. The earth is bleeding.

© 2016 by Kaitlin Ward. Excerpted from Bleeding Earth by Kaitlin Ward. Published by permission of the author and Adaptive Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kaitlin Ward grew up on a dairy farm in Monroe, New Hampshire, the same town where she lives today with her husband and son. Before settling back in her hometown, Kaitlin studied animal science at Cornell University. She co-founded the well-known blog, YA Highway, and by day she works at a company that sells coins. Bleeding Earth is her debut novel. NONFICTION The H Word: Fairy Tales: The Original Horror Stories? Alison Littlewood | 1757 words

I wasn’t focused on any particular genre when I started my writing journey, but in an odd sort of way, my five-year-old self had it all sussed out. I was a dreamy little kid who loved reading and making my own books, and more than that, I adored fairy tales. It may seem strange to some, but I do wonder if that’s why I write horror. In many ways, fairy tales could be seen as the first horror stories, full of terrors such as the death of a parent, being eaten alive, or being abandoned. In Hansel and Gretel, the children are left to their fate in the forest because there isn’t enough for the family to eat. The parents in Rapunzel and Rumpelstiltskin trade away their babies. Bluebeard tests his wives’ obedience and murders them when they fail. There is enough betrayal, jealousy, murder, cannibalism, and cruelty in the stories to satisfy any horror fan. Before any concerned parents ban their kids from fairy tales forthwith, I would add that I didn’t find such things particularly terrifying at the time. When the Grimms first published their collected fairy tales, they added a warning that they weren’t suitable for children; and yet children revel in tales of the macabre, don’t they? I don’t remember being afraid, just deliciously enthralled. In fact, the only story I remember being disturbed by was The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen, in which the heroine sacrifices all to win the love of a prince who never loves her back. Even then, it made me cry rather than frightened me, and I loved and broke my heart over it in equal measure. The grue and the gore of fairy tales wasn’t an issue. After all, they’re only stories, safely contained within the pages of a book. And perhaps that was their purpose, back when fairy tales were part of an oral tradition of story-telling—to gather a little closer to the fire while people told their horrific tales of wolves and witchcraft and other dangers which were once rather more present than they are today. Back then, fairy tales weren’t safe. They weren’t even kept within the pages of a book. There were times when fairies, or the little folk, were believed to occupy the hollow hills, sometimes helping humans and sometimes harming or hoodwinking them. People falling foul of them could be “fairy struck,” which gives us the origin of the word “stroke”. Young women or babies could be stolen away as changelings and replaced with a double that would become querulous or sicken and die. The concept is fascinating—so much so that I’ve just written a novel, The Hidden People, around it. It is also terrifying. What if you weren’t sure that the people you love are really who you think they are? It’s a long way from the sweet and airy visions of Disney. Even today, I think it’s true that fairy tales are more disturbing to the adults they were originally intended for than to children, and not just because of the murders and maimings that often take place within them. I was a little shocked when I recently re-read The Red Shoes, again by Andersen, not for its depiction of the poor child being forced to dance until she begged a woodcutter to chop off her feet, but because all this was a punishment for not concentrating in church. We are unused to such moralistic didacticism. Another example is Perrault’s 1697 version of Little Red Riding Hood, which reflects the tension arising when turning an oral tale for adults into a written story for children. The inventive Little Red no longer escapes by her own wiles but is eaten by the wolf, and Perrault makes no bones about the reason. He appends his own “moral” to the tale, warning young ladies not to talk to strangers. Of course, Little Red also has more sinister overtones, with the wolf representing a sexual predator, but as a story for young children it still seems a woefully harsh punishment for stepping off the path on the way to grandmother’s house. What horrors redound upon a simple lapse in concentration, or indeed a little wilfulness! And yet, that is what Perrault’s versions were intended for—they became instructive tales for young ladies and gentlemen. The Grimms, too, added more Christian and moralistic elements as they gathered and rewrote their stories. There is a parallel here to be drawn with horror fiction, which is often accused as being the most conservative genre in terms of good triumphing over evil. Indeed, since it examines issues so fundamental to humanity as loss and death and what might come after, it would be difficult to evade issues of morality. I have read (and indeed written) stories where the forces of good do not triumph, but I always feel that readers’ sympathies should be in the right place. And let’s not forget the slasher flicks, where having sex is a sure-fire way to be first under the killer’s knife. As fairy tales became part of a literary tradition, it wasn’t just the moral aspects that came to the fore. They were also adapted and edited to remove the nasty bits—or as some would say, censored and bowdlerized. Some of the originals were clearly too close to horror fiction for comfort. The stories adapted for children were also made emotionally safer. In early versions of Hansel and Gretel or Snow White, it is the children’s own parents who abandon or try to kill them. Later, we have the invention of the wicked step- mother to make the cruelty a little more distant. In an early version of Cinderella, the stepsisters cut off their heels and toes to try to make the glass slipper fit. They get their come-uppance, however, when birds peck out their eyes. In different versions of Snow White, the huntsman is ordered to kill the heroine and bring back various items to prove she’s dead: variously a bottle of blood, her heart, her intestines and a blood-soaked shirt, or her lungs and liver, which are to be cooked and eaten by the queen. The violence isn’t restricted to the baddies, either. In The Lost Children, an early version of Hansel and Gretel, the devil and his wife take the place of the witch, and the children escape by slitting her throat. There has been sexual censorship too. In the 1634 version of Sleeping Beauty by Italian poet Basile, the king who finds his Beauty doesn’t stop at kissing her but rapes her while she is sleeping. She only wakes after giving birth to twins, when one of them sucks a bewitched splinter from her finger. The witch imprisoning Rapunzel only realises she has been visited by the prince when she notices her swelling belly. When I wrote my novel Path of Needles I was largely addressing the question of what if such things weren’t kept safely within the pages of a book, but happened in our world of today. It isn’t just about fairy tales but their history; the protagonist has to discover the different variants of the tales in unravelling the plot. I discovered gore aplenty during my research, and that was in tales that are reasonably familiar. I didn’t even start on some of the ones that have been more resistant to adaptation over time but have instead faded into obscurity: such as How Some Children Played at Slaughtering, which is included in Jack Zipes’ recent translation of Grimm’s original tales—The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Here, brothers play at being a butcher and a pig. The butcher slits his brother’s throat. The enraged mother comes running, grabs the knife and stabs the murderous child. While she has turned her back, however, her baby drowns in his bathtub and she hangs herself in remorse. When the father comes home, he—well, he just dies of sadness. What else would he do? Whether they match that level of bloodthirstiness or not, there are plenty of writers who have brought back the wild, wicked, dangerous fairies of old and aimed them firmly at adults, such as Angela Carter in The Bloody Chamber or A.S. Byatt in The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye. We also have anthologies by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and work by Neil Gaiman, Sarah Pinborough, Angela Slatter, S.P. Miskowski, Tanith Lee, and the much-missed Graham Joyce. Fairies refuse to go away and they refuse to capitulate to our attempts to make them safer, perhaps because they represent the wild, sensuous, dangerous, untameable, mysterious, creative parts of ourselves. Oddly, it was only recently that I realised that my favourite Stephen King novel, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, is essentially a take on Little Red Riding Hood. King’s version even represents a return to a more resourceful heroine; his little girl lost in the woods certainly has no woodcutter to come and rescue her but must find a way to survive. And Carrie could be seen as a version of Cinderella. She’s the downtrodden and isolated girl who thinks she has a chance to become a princess, at least in her own little world of high school, at her ill-fated ball. In a book by Tony Magistrale, Stephen King: the Second Decade, Danse Macabre to the Dark Half, King commented: “To my mind, the stories I write are nothing more than fairy tales for adults.” I couldn’t agree more, though I’d probably remove the “nothing more.” I love fairy tales now every bit as much as when I was that enthralled little kid of five. They contain so many of the things I love in fiction: beauty, darkness, the wildest reaches of the imagination, mystery, the unknown, and of course the potential for a little bit of magic to exist in the world. And it is a very small step from the magic of fairy tales to the darkly supernatural strangeness of some of my favourite horror fiction; but then, fairy tales always were pretty dark.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Alison Littlewood is the author of A Cold Season, published by Jo Fletcher Books. The novel was selected for the Richard and Judy Book Club, where it was described as “perfect reading for a dark winter’s night.” Her second novel, Path of Needles – a dark blend of fairy tales and crime fiction – was shortlisted for a British Fantasy Award. She has recently written The Unquiet House, A Cold Silence, and a Zombie Apocalypse! novel, Acapulcalypse Now. Alison’s short stories have been picked for Best British Horror 2015, The Best Horror of the Year and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror anthologies, as well as The Best British Fantasy 2013 and The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 10. She also won the 2014 Shirley Jackson Award for Short Fiction with her story “The Dog’s Home”, published in The Spectral Book of Horror Stories. Alison lives in Yorkshire, England, with her partner Fergus, in a house of creaking doors and crooked walls. You can talk to her on twitter @Ali__L or on Facebook, and visit her at www.alisonlittlewood.co.uk. Artist Showcase: Steven Stahlberg Marina J. Lostetter | 676 words

Steven Stahlberg was born in 1959 in Australia but grew up in Sweden. He started working with commercial art in the ’80s, went digital in the late ’90s, and began working in games in 2000. He’s also lived in Hong Kong, the USA, and Malaysia. He now lives in Kuala Lumpur, working for Streamline Studios.

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

Drowning, and a close second, burning. I can’t imagine what it must feel like, but I also can’t help but keep trying to imagine it whenever I think of it. I’ve had a close call while diving, and burned myself a few times, so that gives me an inkling, but of course the real thing would probably be a thousand times worse . . .

What inspired this month’s cover illustration, Nightmare 3?

Thinking about vampires, and hospitals, and how a vampire working the night shift might have easier access to blood, and to defenseless people. I think the train of thought started with a blood bank, but that’s been done to death, no pun intended.

Included in the gallery is a piece entitled Self-Portrait of the Artist as an Orc. Why did you choose to take this particular approach to a self- portrait?

I didn’t really choose to, I wanted to draw a monster, because it’s not something I do very often. (Also in this particular style, inspired by another artist.) But when I was done, I noticed a strange resemblance to someone I knew . . . quite possibly some kind of subconscious statement there that I’m a bit leery of investigating further.

The lighting in Fairy and Snake is very crisp, which gives the image exceptional depth. What techniques did you use to achieve this effect?

That particular one is the 3-D version. I also did a 2-D version in Photoshop. So that was done in Maya, in 3-D.

What is your favorite medium to work with and why?

Nowadays it’s Photoshop, I used to prefer Maya, but it just takes longer to achieve similar effects. As you mentioned it can be crisper and more detailed, but it comes at a steep cost of time and effort. Photoshop to me is more responsive and interactive. 3-D of course could be used for animation, but I don’t do much of that anymore either.

You’ve traveled extensively. What is your favorite place to visit?

I love visiting new places, but I prefer to live where I live now, in Kuala Lumpur. So far anyway. I reserve the right to change my mind in the future.

How has your travel affected your art?

I think I’ve learned more about lots of little things, like how things work, how people work, what makes us similar and different, weather, environment . . . and from there to be able to be more logical and realistic when I draw. At least I hope so.

Is there some place you have not yet been able to visit, but would like to travel to someday? What is it about that place that calls to you?

Oh yes, Japan. I’ve wanted to go there since I was fifteen. Not sure what it is, maybe the purity and beauty of zen applied to everything from architecture to war to tea, the energy of giving yourself to a single task for a life time, the food, the art, the anime. I don’t think I’m the common definition of a Japanophile; I don’t indiscriminately adore everything Japanese. I don’t really want to live there, mostly because I couldn’t afford it, but I do want to visit.

[To view the gallery, turn the page.]

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Marina J. Lostetter’s short fiction has appeared in venues such as InterGalactic Medicine Show, Galaxy’s Edge, and Writers of the Future. Her most recent publications include a tie-in novelette for the Star Citizen game universe, which was serialized over the first four months of 2014. Originally from Oregon, Marina now lives in Arkansas with her husband, Alex. She tweets as @MarinaLostetter. Please visit her homepage at lostetter.net. Interview: David Mitchell The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy | 7880 words

David Mitchell is the best-selling author of the 2004 novel Cloud Atlas, which was adapted by the Wachowskis into a feature film starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry. All of Mitchell’s novels are set in the same universe with characters from one book appearing in or being referenced in the others. Those books include Ghost Written, Number Nine Dream, Black Swan Green, and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Mitchell’s most recent books are The Bone Clocks, about a secret war between two factions of immortal occultists, and Slade House, a decade-spanning haunted house novel. This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by David Barr Kirtley and produced by John Joseph Adams. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the interview or other episodes.

We’re here with David Mitchell. Welcome to the show.

Thank you very much, David. Good to be here.

I mentioned that this is a show for fantasy and science fiction fans, so the first thing I want to talk about, is just what were some of your favorite fantasy and science fiction books growing up?

Where to begin? Tolkien, of course, Ursula Le Guin, the Earthsea books. I’ll start with fantasy. Some you may not have heard of; they were for British kids more at the time. I’m not sure if they made it over to this side of the Atlantic. A Celtic-flavored fantasy quintet called The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper, but I’m not sure how well those—

They’re actually fairly popular here, yeah. Oh really? Great. A British fantasy writer called Alan Garner. Does that ring any bells?

I don’t think I know that one, no.

He’s interesting. Oh, the Stephen Donaldson books. I remember having those. The Thomas . . .

Thomas Covenant?

Yes, that’s the one. Thank you. A long time ago, though. Thirty years and longer. It was probably more science fiction that attracted me. Bradbury got involved in the golden age of great American science fiction writers. I subscribed to a comic called 2000 A.D. that fed the appetites of many hungry science fiction fans back in the ’70s and ’80s. Harry Harrison, Stainless Steel Rat, have you heard of this one?

Yeah, of course.

Yeah, that was big in the U.K. as well. E.E. Doc Smith, the Lensmen books. They probably haven’t dated that well, those books, which was where the 2030s looked an awful lot like the 1950s. But, again, they were good for my imaginative education at the time.

If people don’t know those books, they were very influential on the Green Lantern comic book, so it’s kind of a similar thing.

Right, right. One more, the Riverworld books by Philip Jose Farmer, about an extraordinary planet where everybody who had ever lived, including the famous, was resurrected along the banks of this enormous, never ending river on a vast planet, and they would still all need to be taken care of. That was quite a trippy book, but I don’t meet many people who know them. I haven’t read the Riverworld books, but I know Philip Jose Farmer because he had a series called World of Tears that was very influential on Roger Zelazny’s Amber series, which is my favorite fantasy series, so I kind of know of them, but I haven’t actually read them.

Yeah, there’s so much to read out there, isn’t there?

Yeah, and so how did you start reading the fantasy and science fiction? Was there somebody like a friend or a teacher or something who got you into it?

Not really. This was just back in the days when I think fewer books were published. Book shops were smaller. You knew what was on the shelves, and if you were a bookish kid, you just went there, and it was my idea of the best entertainment to read the back jackets of all these books one after the other. I’d just go through the whole shop, pretty much, and I had an appetite for it. We weren’t that rich or anything when I was growing up, but my parents always found the money to buy me books because they thought it was good for me, and I think they were absolutely correct. This was all pre-internet, pre-book blogs, of course, so it was just a question of hit and miss. There were probably some like-minded kids at school as well, and we would compare and contrast past books found a little bit, and you just slowly build up knowledge on your way to geekhood, don’t you?

Did you ever experience any pressure from students or teachers not to read fantasy and science fiction?

No, no. Maybe it became a little bit uncool around 15, 16, 17 when it is more politic for young males to seem to be into sports and the right music and even girls than it is to be into elves, orcs, dwarves, and dragons. Maybe only then there was some peer group pressure, but I don’t think it lasted that long, and I don’t think it was that intense. And from teachers . . . I did not go to the kinds of schools where teachers cared very much what you read, or even if you read. How about you? Did you ever receive any of that kind of pressure yourself?

Yeah, like a lot of, I think, American kids, I don’t know if it’s different where you grew up, but you got teased for being into computers and science fiction, and I did have a number of English teachers who would tell you that science fiction wasn’t real literature and you should read “real books.”

Did you ask them about 1984, or Brave New World, or The Master and Margarita, or early Margaret Atwood, or H.G. Wells? That’s such a nonsensical viewpoint, isn’t it? Like a Charles Dickens is shot through with fantasy. You’ve got a guy who dies of spontaneous internal combustion, you’ve got ghost in A Christmas Carol. It’s weird how once things have become sanctified on the great canon of English literature, people then forget, conveniently, that it is actually what we would now call genre.

Even Shakespeare, which is full of ghosts and witches.

Yeah, you name it, they did it.

I’ve never found that intellectual consistency was a big concern of people who are of this attitude. You would say, “Yeah, what about 1984?” And they would say, “Oh, that’s not science fiction.” And you’re like, “Well, it’s set in the future, and it’s an imaginary world, and there’s imaginary technology, and all this stuff.” And they’re like, “No, no, that’s not science fiction because it’s good.”

Exactly. I think with that we can rest our case. And Henry James, who had the best, most sustained, most perfect ghost novella in literary history with The Turn of the Screw. One of the best ghost stories of all time with The Friends of Friends. This is fantastic stuff, but as you say, there’s no intellectual consistency in these arguments, so let’s just consign those to the bowels of the Earth where they belong. The thing that really frustrates me is that when people actually read a fantasy or science fiction book, they tend to like it, but they’re also convinced that there’s this gigantic body of science fiction books that they just know they would hate if they were to read them, but they’ve never actually read them.

Yes, they do think that. I think people have an allergy . . . well, people judge books by the cover, which is a shame. It’s their loss. It’s not good for the kind of bookshop culture. It’s convenient to have a horror section, it’s convenient to have a science fiction/fantasy section, it’s convenient to have a mainstream literary fiction section, but these should only be guides. They shouldn’t be demarcated territory for one type where on type a reader belongs and another type that a reader does not belong. It’s a bizarre act of self-mutilation to say that, “I don’t get on with science fiction and fantasy, therefore, I’m never going to read any.” We’ve already agreed it’s inconsistent, but it’s also . . . what a shame. A lot of great books that you’re cutting yourself off from.

Exactly, I agree that it’s very destructive, this kind of us-versus-them mentality because since I had been reading these science fiction books from early childhood and loved them so much, when teachers told me they didn’t like them, it made me very hostile to the teachers, and so it cut me off from reading the kinds of books that they wanted me to read because I had this hostility to them. So, even things like you mentioned, Ursule Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea. I resisted reading that for the longest time because it was on the school reading list, and I didn’t want to read anything that was on the school reading list, and so I missed out on this great novel at that time.

Yeah, it cuts both ways, doesn’t it? In a sense, we’re talking about snobbery and inverted snobbery, and they’re both harmful. Anyway, I’m glad you got to Wizard of Earthsea in the end. Isn’t it fantastic? And The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore. I love those too. I actually saw you said that it was reading Wizard of Earthsea that made you want to be a writer.

Yeah, there’s a lot in that. On the one hand, it’s a packed story and a new answer to an impossible question: what made me want to write? “Because I’m me” is the real answer, but people are never really happy with that. On the other hand, it isn’t a complicated answer. I do have clear memories from way back of finishing A Wizard of Earthsea on a rainy Saturday morning and just having this incandescent urge inside me, like a magnesium ribbon going tssss. I really wanted to do that as well. I wanted to make those worlds and people, those imaginary worlds, and send them on journeys and give them quests and make other people feel what she had made me feel, so yeah, that’s real. Also, those books just get better. They were good then, but they’re extraordinary now. I revisit Earthsea about once a decade, and I read myself when I’m there, my earlier selves, reading them as a boy of nine, and a teenager of fifteen, and a young man of twenty-six or so, and as a writer of thirty-five. I’ve personally written an introduction to the Folio editions, a recent hardback reprint of A Wizard of Earthsea, so it’s come full circle.

I read the article you just wrote about Earthsea, was that adapted from your—

Yeah, that was actually the introduction. I had no idea that The Guardian were invested in it and were going to put it in their readings section, but that was a sort of homage to Ursula, who I know very slightly. I accepted the commission on the condition that she would read it herself and had vetted and changed anything she wanted to, but in the end she was happy with it, so that is what was used. But The Guardian, I think, printed it directly as I wrote it.

Did you get any responses on that from readers or Earthsea fans? Anything like that? I think in the comments section there’s quite a lot, if you hadn’t read the comments. I hope it doesn’t sound standoffish, but I tend not to read comments sections or anything.

That’s probably a wise policy.

You get some extremely wise and insightful people putting considered responses there, but you get responses which are somewhat less than that.

One other thing I was just curious about, just reading The Bone Clocks and Slade House, there are references in there to Dungeons and Dragons, and at one point in The Bone Clocks, a character runs through a comic book convention. I was wondering how involved you are in that geek culture sort of stuff.

I haven’t been to any conventions, not because I wouldn’t go, they seem like enormous fun, it’s just I’m not really at a stage in my life that allows me free time away from my family when I have to be away so often anyway. I played Dungeons and Dragons as a kid; a lot of us did actually. A lot of the writers I know would be at bars late at night after literary festivals. Sometimes the conversation will get around to us huddled over in the corner saying, “So, did you play Dungeons and Dragons?” And it’s amazing how many say yes. Gary Gygax has a lot to answer for. I know there are probably PhD theses out there somewhere on Gary Gygax’s influence on the 21st century novel. It would not be negligible.

Do you have any memorable experiences from playing Dungeons and Dragons?

Within the world of exploring or in the kitchen and living rooms?

I guess I would be curious about either. Yeah, one or two. Ingenuity and the way that some of the dungeons, the scenarios, could outwit you and trick you, and the deliciousness of being outwitted and tricked. So number one, I’ve got no idea what the names are, but an adventure began on a mountaintop, and there was a pool, just a clear pool, and nothing else, nothing else in the world, and you had to work out how to get into the adventure, and I tried to throw a stone into the pool. And the dungeon master, Charles, said, “You see a splash.” That was it. And we wasted more time looking around for the way in again, and then Charles said, “Just try throwing another stone in.” So, we did, and he said, “You see a splash.” And, okay, yeah and? Nothing. Then the third time, Charles said, “You see a splash.” Then my friend, Richard, who I’m still friends with, and who is and was smarter than me, said, “You see a splash. You don’t hear a splash. You just see a splash.” And that was the key. So it was an illusory pool of illusory water because you just saw it, you didn’t hear it. Isn’t that cool? And it’s these constellations of, “Isn’t that cool? Isn’t that cool? Isn’t that cool?” in the generation of the world that I still remember and think very fondly on. More generally, outside the world, and on our level of reality, it was a collaborative art form. It’s something you all made. It was noncompetitive. It was based on cooperation, and you only won if you worked together, and there was a generosity of spirit in not picking the pieces, or finding faults with, or wasting time on hunting for the inconsistencies within the whole enterprise, and that is something that I don’t feel you get on computer generated multiplayer games. Computer generated is really a long word for it, but digital versions of the same. But we were speaking with each other. We were laughing, and interacting, and making things, and being friends. And the games, although we took it seriously, in a way, it was simply the vehicle for the human interaction that made the whole thing so very enjoyable. Does that all make sense?

Yeah, absolutely. And it hadn’t really occurred to me until you were just saying that, but I wonder if Slade House was influenced at all by your time spent playing Dungeons and Dragons because it’s a similar idea of getting sucked into this dangerous imaginative world and having to survive. Yes, I think it must have been. It hadn’t really occurred to me either, but there would be similarities. It would be quite easy to adopt Slade House, or to adapt Slade House, to that format. I think the room by room, the puzzles, and the challenges, and the doors, and the fickle, mercurial nature of the danger within the world.

Why don’t we just back up and for people who haven’t read Slade House, just say a little bit more about it, and how you came up with it.

It is a story about apparent ghosts and their apparent house. Every nine years, the twins, Jonah and Norah Grayer, they make it happen that guests are invited to Slade House, which exists, or is only ever accessed via a small black iron door that’s not normally there but is when the twins would like you to visit. And each of the five guests enter Slade House and do not necessarily come out again. The book starts in 1959 and the last one is in 2015. So that is the elevator pitch version of the story without having heard of it whatsoever. And so, what was part two of your question, Dave?

Just how did you come up with it?

It goes way, way back to when I first was thinking about The Bone Clocks, and that was going to be six novellas set in the six adult stages of man over six decades, that was going to be seventeen individual stories set around a seventy-year lifespan, which is one of those ideas that sounds great on the launchpad, but when you are actually lighting the fuse, it blows up because you read short stories in a different way to reading novels, and a novel made of short stories, at least the way I was trying to do it, proved to be unreadable. However, I didn’t, which is why The Bone Clocks evolved away from that and took on a pretty different form. However, before I found out that it was unwriteable in that form, I’d done some work on stories that looked like what Slade House kind of morphed into. Just this idea of a house that’s less a house, and a kind of immortality machine in a bubble of reality all of its own with a mind of its own. So, I wrote The Bone Clocks, put that away, and then I had another idea for a Twitter story, I wanted to experiment with kinds of fiction on Twitter, just to see if it would work or not. And the first story to hand, and it may not be an obvious candidate, was the first section of Slade House, which back then was a standalone story called “The Right Sort.” I did that for Twitter. I was happy enough with the results, but it raised a lot of questions and wanted answers. And so Slade House . . . it’s a short book, but it’s got sharp elbows, and it barged its way to the front of the queue of books still waiting to get written. And I sort of spent the next ten and a half months doing that.

The book is just incredibly creepy to read.

Oh, thank you, David. Thank you. You sound like you really know your creepy fiction, so for you to give it that endorsement, it’s a big deal for me. You never know if you’re being frightening or not, the same way you never really know if you’re being funny or not. You’re immune to its threats and fears. It’s really hard to do on the page. Really hard. So, I’m really happy to hear you say that.

No, I do. I read a lot of horror fiction and most of it I enjoy, but I don’t find that scary, but this book I really found unsettling. I thought it was really effective.

May I ask why? What was it that unsettled? Was it its entirety, or was it some elements you found, or was it a combination of the elements?

It’s hard to say without spoilers, but basically you really made me hope that something good would happen to the characters, right? And I think a lot of it is that it was short. I think there’s so much pressure in publishing today to have long novels, and it’s very hard to make a long book scary. But this was short enough pieces that it was able to sustain that intensity. Thank you. I broke it down into five parts, and they’re about fifty pages a head, and you can manage it in fifty pages. There are variations as well, so you can mess around with readers’ expectations about what’s going to happen next. We’ve been here before, but aha, you can make it not like it was before. It’s a way of having your cake and eating it as well. Good ghost stories tend to be short but novels, obviously, do have to have the pages at least long enough to be novels, so I executed a diabolical plan to do both by, in a sense, repeating the same story five times but making the story very different and putting them in the chain. I don’t think you would have noticed, to go without any spoilers, even though the people who you hoped good things would happen to do not necessarily have those good things happen to them, even though that is the case, they still form a kind of a chain that brings about the raw ending that you may have wished for. That’s a very, very vague, gnostic kind of paragraph I just said, but you understand me as someone who read the book.

Oh yeah, for sure. I was going to say, I think another thing that makes this so effective is a similar thing that you have in Lovecraft where he tells all these different stories and it kind of builds up this entire world, and so there are references in each story to things in other stories, and in this you have this whole . . . it feels real because it feels like there’s this whole world behind it. And I just love the terms you have: “psychosoterica,” “anchorites,” “horologists,” “orison,” “The Ninevite candle.” It feels like a fully fleshed out world.

Oh, great. I’m grinning like a Cheshire cat on the end of the phone here. You can’t see it, but thank you.

How did you come up with those terms? Did you just dream them up or are they inspired by anything?

You go looking for them, and you stay open for them when they walk in. “Horologists,” my sister-in-law gave me a book about obscure words to go with different times of the day called The Horologicon. It was one of these Christmas books that nobody reads but you get given it for Christmas or give it to other people for Christmas, but “horology.” This is a great word. Horology is not about time, but about the science of the measurement of time. It seemed an appropriate name for who and what the horologists are in The Bone Clocks with some, as you say, some overlap in Slade House. The anchorites are even something bitter. They have bitter, religious overtones, and anchorites, again if you don’t know, were women who were walled up with their consent—although consent can be a slippery fish—but allegedly with their consent, into the walls of medieval churches. They were alive. They were kept alive. They were fed. Basic needs were met, but they sort of anchored the churches more firmly against the winds, the storms, of the buffetings of sin, of evil, of the devil, of the plague, of war. And they spent their lives in prayer. You have to wonder how long or fulfilled those lives actually were. Always women, of course, never men, of course. So, an orison is essentially an experience of words of prayer. It appears in Hamlet. “In thy orisons, oh Nymph. Be all my sins remembered.” I think is something like what Hamlet says to Ophelia. We meet the word in Cloud Atlas, right? It’s a kind of futuristic recording device which projects an image that’s on a replay mode, which is sort of like looking at a prayer, like the ephemeral nature of it, in the same way that prayers are ephemeral, but it’s too cool a word to confine to that. So, I just like the idea that words have different applications through time and technology as well as particularly adept at adopting or co-opting much older words. And last “psychosoterica,” this is, in a sense, a lot of the reviewers both positive and negative talked about The Bone Clocks as a fantasy novel. I do end up kind of explaining the fantasy in terms of it being this science that hasn’t been discovered yet, or “psychosoteric” mental faculties could actually be acquired or learned or honed and possibly even empirically measured, so in a way, I’ve wanted this in-between them, between fantasy and science fiction. It’s “esoteric” which puts it into fantasy, but it’s also psychological, it’s of the mind. It’s to do with all those subjects, all those words that begin with the word psycho, except it’s like a killer, which is very different, so the word itself is sort of a tug of war rope being pulled on one side by the fantasy zone and pulled on one side by the science fiction zone, and I like that tension between them. You mentioned the critical reaction, what sort of responses to The Bone Clocks and Slade House to the extent that you’ve gotten yet, sort of sticks out in your mind the most?

I’ve successfully avoided reading all of them.

All right.

But, I’ve had my agents tell me which way the wind is going. I thought The Bone Clocks was generally pretty good. One or two hatchet jobs, but mostly from the British, one or two three-star reviews, but mostly good, solid fours, four and halves, and a few fives. Slade House, however, I’m yet to be aware of even an indifferent review towards it. There will probably be something appalling in the morning in a major news organ, but one of the majors who have reviewed it so far, as far as I know from my agent and my publicist, have been really good, which is interesting. It’s my slightest book in some ways, but perhaps that’s part of the appeal. Maybe I go on too long, normally.

How about just from readers? Do you ever get like really out there things? Like people thinking the anchorites and the horologists are after them, or anything like that?

It’s happened before with Slade House. I tweeted as Bombadil, or rather I wrote Bombadil’s last ten weeks’ worth of tweets from the first of September to last Saturday, when he goes in the house, and I put tweets into sort of a pre-launch platform to say when you want them going out at which time. So, over those ten weeks, I’ve been tweeting the last seventy days as Bombadil. That’s more likely to mess with people’s heads if anyone is suffering from schizophrenia, that kind of thing, when it’s arriving in the phone from someone who’s really apparently believing in this stuff, as opposed to being in a book by David Mitchell. I think the tweets are likeliest to be mistaken by people with a tenuous grasp on reality as reality. How did that idea come up, to create that Twitter character and have it be sort of outside the text?

By my reluctance to write the kind of . . . How I tend to write this book article that I have to do, that I’ve done for all of my other books. I’ve done one about fourteen months ago for The Bone Clocks, and I’m really grateful for the attention there, and I don’t mean for this to sound as precious as it may sound, but I just couldn’t really muster any enthusiasm whatsoever about cranking out another twelve-hundred word article on how I came to write this novel. So, I asked the publishers, “Instead of doing that, would you let me off that if I give you this? If I do these tweets?” And so that was a major reason. And my publishers being the forward looking, compassionate people that they are, said, “Yeah, sure, go for it.” And so I did. It was a lot of fun. It’s also letting us use this technology, Twitter, as something more than just a notice board where I put up my bookshop appearances. I’ve got no interest in tweeting about my life. I don’t find it that interesting. So, that’s really all I want to use my Twitter account for. But, I do get excited about fiction, as you may have noticed already, so to use Twitter, sort of as a work of art, as a reading of a character development, that’s interesting. I don’t have to feign any interest about that.

One thing I really wanted to ask you about is I interviewed Kazuo Ishiguro back in April, and he said that you were one of the authors that really made him feel empowered to add these fantasy and science fiction elements to his work.

Bless him, yes, I did see that. Bless him. He’s one of my favorite writers ever, in any language. He is the first official writer I ever met on my very first book tour across America, last century, in Minneapolis, I think we met. I would just say in return, he empowers me. And I’m not the only person in my generation who thinks that. His first two books were very Japanese, then he wrote a very English book, a quintessentially English book, then he wrote a 1930s Germanic novel, sort of a seven-hundred page modernist novel. That’s what it is. It’s everything that The Remains of the Day wasn’t. Him doing that empowered me, after I got my hit, with Cloud Atlas, you know . . . “What would Ishiguro do?” Would he write another version of Cloud Atlas but kind of not as good, or would he go in the other direction, and do something completely different, which he did. And then When We Were Orphans, there were great sections in that, and then science fiction, Never Let Me Go. That’s a science fiction novel. But, I’m already thinking about your teachers who would say, “That’s not science fiction.” I mean, it is. It’s an alternate universe, and it’s a dystopian one. But, maybe this is the point. The book doesn’t care what it is. The book doesn’t care if it’s science fiction. The book doesn’t give a damn about genre. It just is what it is. And that’s what I want to do. The Bone Clocks, that was in the corner of my mind of I don’t care what genre any of this is, this is what the book wants to be, and then he did it again with The Buried Giant. There’s a dragon in it! Have you read that, may I ask, Dave?

Yeah, that’s the book I interviewed him about.

Ah, right. I think the book depends partly because he’s of a certain age, because he’s of his generation, full of writers who mostly are now still writing the same book, essentially, that they wrote when they were forty because he is one of two people, five remaining kings of greatest living British writers, and there’s just a big brouhaha in the press, in the admittedly tiny corners of the press that the book will occupy, there was just this, “How dare he? Has he lost his marbles? What does he think he’s doing?” A lot of people didn’t get it, that this is what the book wants to be, and you’re possibly entitled to not like the book because you don’t think it works. You’re allowed to not like the book because you don’t get on with his style of writing. You don’t like the book because of its uncertainty and strangeness. But don’t not like it because it’s got a dragon in it. But don’t not like it for that reason, please, anything but that. So, he has said very nice things about me in the press, but he’s a friend now, and he’s sort of a mentor, but more than that, he’s an example of how to age and still be writing really worthwhile stuff into his sixth decade. Because lots of people write great stuff in their 30s, and then it tails off, and it behooves us to think about how to avoid that failure and how to keep writing vital, thriving work that never sits on its laurels and never falls into a cycle of diminishing returns. Am I making sense, or am I going all over the place?

No, absolutely, yeah. I want to ask you, speaking of the future, obviously since this is a science fiction show, we like to think about the future a lot, but there’s just this real pattern these days where stories set in the future tend to be really depressing, and you’ve written about this too in your work. I’m just curious, do you think we’re heading into a depressing future, or do you see hope for any kind of bright science fiction future?

Well, it’s the future, so we do not know. What we know is that there are a range of possible futures that our timeline can enter. Civilizationally, which isn’t a word, but never mind, we can be pretty sure we’re headed for some kind of a hard landing. Our civilization is addicted to oil, and nothing really is coming close . . . there’s nothing really on the horizon that can cow it, at least not on the near horizon. Solar power, wind power, these things are great for electricity, for our domestic usage, but we need oil to move ourselves around. We need oil to create enough food to feed seven billion and growing very quickly people. We need oil to bring container ships from China to bring things that we need to satisfy the thousand and one things that human beings have. We need oil to fly. And without it, how is any of this going to work? Unless we answer that question really very soon, the hard landing will not only be hard, but maybe worse than hard. Then there’s ecology, climate change, the safe point to keep them, the average increase in global temperature within the two degree limit, that’s probably in the rearview mirror now. That’s probably gone. We don’t have the political systems to save it. We are too bad at voting for politicians who will transform our societies to save the life support system that Earth is. We’re too bad at voting them in, and we are too good at voting in people who mock the former. Antarctica is melting, sea levels will rise, most of the world’s greatest populations are on the coast. Hurricane Katrina, I should fear, it’s just a mild early warning. And while all of what I’ve said is true, it should be an impetus to action. It should be a reason not to roll over, give up, and think slightly guiltily, yes we screwed the world, we’re all screwed, but it’s not my problem, and I can’t do anything about it any way. Yes, the possibilities are real, but that’s all the more reason to become scientists and engineers who will devise technologies that don’t yet exist to soften the hardness of the landing we are headed for, and to become artists and voices and administrators and a thousand and one other things that human beings can become. I’m on a soapbox. You’ve put me on a soapbox, Dave. I need to come down. There isn’t much oxygen up here.

I can join you for a second on the soapbox because I think that, one of the things I think is so important about science fiction is that it gets people to think about the future, and I tend to think if more people were reading stories set in the future and thinking seriously about it, it might shift the conversation in the way you’re talking about, that would shift the political system to actually act on some of these problems. But I wanted to ask you, speaking of that—you’re actually writing a novel that’s not going to be read for a hundred years.

Yeah, that’s a vote of confidence in the future. I can’t be that convinced that we’re all headed for The Planet of the Apes, or for Mad Max, if I was doing that, would I? Yes, it’s a complicated project. Scottish artist Katie Paterson has started a project whereby she or her appointed successor is asking a writer of the day once a year to write a work that will be put away in a library in Oslo and will not see the light of day until the year 2114 when it will be printed on books made from wood pulp of trees that were planted last year, so it’s this time vaulting art project. I was asked, and I considered, and it was idealism that made me say yes. A bit of idealism in the night is very important. Like Vitamin C, you don’t need much, but it’s really crucial. It protects you from scurvy. It protects you from cynicism, which is very easy, and it looks very cool, cynicism, and you’re rarely wrong, and it’s a dry, Teflon-coated droll, posturing, cool position, but it’s also cowardly. So, that’s why I said yes. The purpose is sort of like, I don’t know if you know The Long Now foundation, but it’s just that if people are aware, it’s just anything that’s not going to happen for a century is just trying to get people to think on that timeframe and just realize that a century from now is just as real as the present.

And that our present is only as good as it is because people a hundred years ago were thinking of the long-term as well. We’re living off savings put aside, environmental savings, social savings, laws that mean that life is much better for the non-rich now than it would have been for great, great grandparents. All of these invisible, multitudinous strivings that we are oblivious to, that’s why the world is what it is. Speaking from Pittsburgh, I’m in a nice park that’s under a museum of the university section with these beautiful, huge trees, but they were planted by strangers, kind of for my benefit; they weren’t very impressive in the lifetimes of the people who planted them. They were just sort of mediocre, 18-year-old oak trees, but now they’re these beautiful, blazing fall-colored giants, and we need to do the same. We can’t just spend that. We need to invest for the people who come after us. We bloody well should, anyway. And we need to take care of their planet for them. To take care of their now for them. Still on the soapbox, great view.

Okay, so we’re almost out of time, and I want to end things on a slightly lighter note, so I came across this thing that you said. You said, “If you know anyone from Japan, just ask them about Hanako-San?” Can you tell us about Hanako-San?

Hanako-San is a ghost who lives in . . . I can’t remember which toilet cubicle it is, but in every school toilet there’s a row of cubicles, and Hanako-San is presumably in the girls’, though for some reason boys aren’t always necessarily immune to her murderous intentions either. I think it’s the last stall but one, and if you use that cubicle without basically saying a spell of protection, or offering her due homage, then she will extract a murderous and bloody revenge. The terms of the deal vary from region to region and from generation to generation, but I have yet to meet a Japanese person who does not know about the toilet of Hanako-San. It’s an urban myth. It’s more than an urban myth, it’s a piece of universal folklore that is graded into Japanese popular culture.

It’s funny, because when I was a kid, I used to go to the video store, and one of the boxes in the video store was this movie called Ghoulies 2, that featured the Ghoulies coming up out of the toilet, and I think that disturbed me more than anything else I ever saw. I maintain to this day that my childhood would have been about twice as happy if I’d never seen the cover of Ghoulies 2.

That’s an even more entertaining sort of British-English . . . because in British-English, “the goolies” is a euphemism for testicles, so the idea of testicles coming up out of the toilet is both comic as well as deeply disturbing.

David, that’s why I have to have you on this show, for those kinds of insights.

Except instead of ending on a light note, I’ve ended on a somewhat smutty note, haven’t I?

Well, that’s good too.

Let’s end with The Martian. Have you seen The Martian?

I read the book, and I just interviewed Andy Weir, I haven’t gotten a chance to see the movie yet.

Oh, really? You interviewed Andy Weir? I interviewed Andy Weir, yeah. Just a couple of episodes ago. He’s a fantastically nice guy.

Oh, wow. If you’ve got his email would you just say he’s fantastic, and if he’s ever heard of me, I’ve got no idea, but say I thought the book was great, and I really enjoyed the film as well. What an ingenious book. It just feels sort of effortless, doesn’t it? It’s clever, and unexpected, and brilliantly plotted and paced.

Absolutely. And it was self-published originally. And I think what’s so interesting about the self-publishing revolution, I mean a lot of published novels, you kind of get the sense that the author is going through the motions, that they wrote this book because this is their job, this is what they do. But some of these things like The Martian, you get the feeling like this guy, his whole life was leading up to writing this one book. He’s been studying this stuff since he was a kid, and this is the culmination of a lifelong passion.

That’s maybe why the protagonist is so convincing. There’s a lot of passion in the book. I doubt very much that the standard of self-publishing is anywhere near that, but it is good to remember that it happens sometimes, and however manky the haystack might be, sometimes you’ll find a needle of pure silver in there. I have to go to and iron a shirt, my friend, because I’ve got a lecture at Carnegie in fifteen minutes, but thank you. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation. Me too, me too. Thank you so much, David, for joining us on the show. I hope our paths cross again, and keep up the fantastic work at Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is produced by John Joseph Adams and hosted by: David Barr Kirtley, who is the author of thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, in books such as Armored, The Living Dead, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He lives in New York. AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Author Spotlight: Rose Hartley E.C. Myers | 1246 words

My two favorite things about “No Other Men in Mitchell” are the voice and the setting. And the worldbuilding (make that three things). I think people who enjoyed Mad Max: Fury Road are going to love this! Can you tell us a little about where the story came from?

I might lose my citizenship for admitting this, but I haven’t seen any of the Mad Max films! But I think trucks and the desert are firmly entrenched in the Australian psyche. My husband used to work for a drilling company and drove road trains (three trailers) full of drilling equipment between work sites all over Queensland and South Australia. He’s got some crazy stories from that time, and I just write them down. I’m sorry to say the exploding cow is a true story. And his window was open. In the Simpson Desert in northern South Australian, there are these gibber plains, just miles and miles of red rocks and not much else. We used to go there on family camping trips. Playing I-Spy on that part of the highway is pretty repetitive: S-sky, R-road, G-gibbers. The landscape sort of gets burned into your memory once you go there. I have to work hard not to set all my stories in the desert. So I had all these vignettes and characters, and at the same time, I was thinking about the story of Martin Pistorius, a South African kid who had locked-in syndrome and lay in a hospital bed for twelve years before anyone realized he was conscious. The voice that ended up narrating the story came pretty naturally—it’s a voice that’s both familiar and foreign to me. Dylan’s a guy I feel I’ve met a hundred times before, a good person who’s lonely and alienated by rigid class structures, who has funny ideas about how a woman is going to save him (and maybe cook him dinner). And I was thinking about how ghosts seem to turn up when there’s something rotten in the world, but they’re essentially powerless.

Last summer, you attended the Clarion writers’ workshop in San Diego. As a Clarion West alumnus, I know how intense and transformative that can be. Nearly six months out, has that experience affected your writing and process?

Intense and transformative—that’s an accurate description. I think it will take longer for me to really understand the effect Clarion has had on my writing. For now, all I can say is that I’m more committed. I’m getting up early to write, and I’m more able to push through the pain when the story starts beating me up. At Clarion, for the first time in my life, I wrote things that made me feel physically ill, things that made me cry, things that made me feel afraid of how they’d be received. And everyone else was doing the same. Now I am only interested in writing stories that make me feel uncomfortable. Maybe the most important thing I learned at Clarion was that stories are too important to just churn out and publish for the sake of publishing. They have to mean something to you, even if you don’t know what that is.

In addition to your short stories, you’re also an accomplished poet, and you’re working on your first novel. Do you approach each form differently? Do you enjoy writing (or reading) one more than the others?

I approach short stories with fear. It takes a huge amount of will to finish when I start one. The best—and worst—thing about short stories is that you can say things that are difficult to say. One of my favorite stories is “Singing My Sister Down” by my Clarion instructor Margo Lanagan. It’s the words that are left out that make the story so powerful. It says something difficult without ever saying it. Short stories can quietly rip your guts out and send you crazy—see any Shirley Jackson story—or they can shatter your view of the world and make you question yourself, like “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula le Guin. My favorite stories are the ones that really stick the knife in. I don’t read short stories to be comforted, put it that way, but I read plenty of novels for that purpose. Novels are probably my main love, and in terms of reading, they have the power to change my thinking in the most significant way. There’s no other art form in the world that can take you so far inside somebody else’s head, or analyze humankind so deeply. My Clarion classmates would start talking about mirror neurons at this point, but whatever. Writing a novel is a bloody slog, though. It’s not as if you can get it done in a burst of inspiration over a couple of days. I’m rewriting my entire novel at the moment, the whole 87,000 words. It’s heartbreaking. I’m totally uneducated when it comes to poetry. Every time someone likes a poem of mine, I’m convinced it’s a fluke, even though it’s the form I’ve been working with the longest. I won a prize in 2014 and immediately came down with a case of imposter syndrome. I haven’t written a poem since. I don’t remember how to do it.

You were one of the winners of the first South Australian Hachette Mentoring Program, a unique chance to work with a professional publisher on your novel. What has that been like?

So far, it’s been fantastic. My mentor is a publisher at Hachette and was formerly a literary agent, so her insight is unparalleled. She read the second draft of my manuscript and we had a long conversation about plot and character, instigating the enormous rewrite I mentioned. She understood my story and protagonist right away. In fact, she articulated the story better than I could, that it’s an answer to road trip stories that exclude women. I think every emerging writer could do with a mentor. I wanted one for a long time, but I didn’t feel that I had the right to ask somebody to mentor me. This program that the South Australian Writers Centre organized with Hachette was a huge opportunity and I put everything into my application. I feel so lucky to have been chosen.

What are you working on, and what can readers expect to see published soon?

The novel that I’m workshopping with my mentor is a work of contemporary fiction set in Melbourne, Australia, where I used to live. It’s about a downwardly mobile middle-class woman who moves into a caravan in a city alleyway in an attempt to be free of societal expectations. Writing the first draft was a lot of fun and a great excuse to set sex scenes in a caravan. If I manage to finish the final draft this millennium, I’ll rewrite my other Clarion stories (“No Other Men in Mitchell” was the first story I wrote at Clarion), but until then, I’m mostly writing caravan sex.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER E.C. Myers was assembled in the U.S. from Korean and German parts and raised by a single mother and the public library in Yonkers, New York. He is the author of numerous short stories and three young adult books: the Andre Norton Award–winning Fair Coin, Quantum Coin, and The Silence of Six. His next novel, Against All Silence, a thriller about teenage hacktivists investigating a vast conspiracy, is scheduled to appear next spring from Adaptive Books. E.C. currently lives with his wife, son, and three doofy pets in Pennsylvania. You can find traces of him all over the internet, but especially at ecmyers.net and on Twitter @ecmyers. Author Spotlight: Seanan McGuire Lisa Nohealani Morton | 432 words

What inspired “Inspirations”?

I know this is a terrible answer, but I honestly don’t remember. It’s one of those stories that started from like eight different directions at once. I had to put it together like a puzzle, one piece at a time. I remember sitting in a friend’s kitchen in St. Paul, working on the middle section, so it took a long time to do. Sometimes the stories I like the best work out like that: they don’t have a concrete beginning. They’ve just always been with me.

Whenever I read a story that ends with a twist, I find myself wondering: did you start from the idea of Polyhymnia’s betrayal and work backwards from there, or did you work forward from Melpominee’s imprisonment?

I started with the idea of muses falling, and where they would wind up. So they sort of came at the same time, hand in hand, like a terrible chain. It was never possible for me to have one of them without the other.

Melpominee notes that several people have formed the intention to free her, only to change their minds once they taste Communion. As a writer, do you fear you’d fall prey to the same temptation?

Once. I think that, if the temptation had been offered to me before I was more confident in what I do, I would have had trouble refusing the drink. Inspiration is powerful. It’s a narcotic, in its own weird way. But effort matters just as much, if not more. I like to believe that I know enough about hard work to stick with it. But that’s probably not true. Offer me an easy way to write more and better, and I’d probably take it. What are you working on these days?

Currently, an unnamed Mira Grant project and the next October Daye novel. And a bunch of short fiction projects. There are always a bunch of new short fiction projects. The day that there aren’t, I’m probably dead, and my estate is trying to hide that for as long as possible.

When you wake up in the middle of the night and look under the bed, what’s there?

A bunch of plush Pokémon and occasionally an irritated Maine Coon cat. Alice and Thomas go wherever they want, and sometimes it’s under the bed.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Born and raised in Honolulu, Lisa Nohealani Morton lives in Washington, DC. By day she is a mild-mannered database wrangler, computer programmer, and all-around data geek, and by night she writes science fiction, fantasy, and combinations of the two. Her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, and the anthology Hellebore and Rue. She can be found on Twitter as @lnmorton. Author Spotlight: Dennis Etchison Erika Holt | 773 words

In an interview originally appearing in Interzone, you stated, “Any writer worth reading is going to talk about his own experience, even if he is writing fantasy . . .” Would you say all of your stories relate in some way to your own experience? What draws you to this approach?

It’s unavoidable, isn’t it? All that surrounds us—sights, sounds, colors, music, words, fragments of conversations—penetrates our minds to some degree and is turned into something else. Think of an earthworm’s castings, which are the product of what passes through its body to be transformed into something new and enriched, or at least different from what it was. The process happens whether we’re aware of it or not, and it’s beyond our control. As Stephen King once remarked, if you eat asparagus tonight, your piss is going to smell funny tomorrow, and there’s nothing you can do about it. If your mind and your senses are alive, it’s inevitable. Of course, we don’t write about everything that happens to us. Ideas are everywhere, like fireflies in the air, but only certain ones stick and get under the skin. Why? Don’t ask me. The trick is to follow and explore what intrigues you. Was it Terence McKenna who said that life is not a puzzle to be solved but a mystery to be experienced? The best advice I can think of for a writer is a line by Kenneth Patchen: “Never oppose that which seems strange in yourself. It is the only part that is aware.”

I find some of the scariest stories to be those in which something about an otherwise ordinary situation seems a little off; where the menace lurks between the lines on the page, rather than being out in the open. I had this feeling while reading “Princess.” Is creating that sort of tension or tone important when writing horror stories in particular?

I’ve written many stories about that feeling you get when you know something’s wrong, but you’re not quite sure what it is yet. “It Only Comes Out at Night” was an example, and this one is the latest. The conscious mind focuses on one thing at a time, but the unconscious is in touch with all and everything inside you, the accumulation of events and experiences and associations that we cannot readily access at will. In the case of “Princess,” I remember very clearly when it came together. It was a night in March of last year, after the Paperback Show in Glendale. I was sitting at a table by the pool with Peter Atkins, Julius Francisco, Ashley Dioses, K. A. Opperman, Lindsay Lane and a couple of other friends, and I glanced up and noticed the words EXTENDED STAY in neon letters at the top of the Con hotel, which was a Holiday Inn Express. It seemed ominous somehow, and I began a jokey riff about the possibilities of what it might mean. Months later, I remembered a story I had started years earlier but never finished because it didn’t seem to be going anywhere. My working title was “Just Like You,” and it was about four people, two children and two adults, in a car. Now, finally, that scene connected on some deeper level with the two words I saw written in red against the sky. The style of the story made itself, once I had an inkling of what it was really about.

What are you working on now?

More stories, of course. It Only Comes Out at Night & Other Stories, a career retrospective from Centipede Press, was published in November but sold out in less than a week, with no plans for a second printing, alas. Since then, I’ve been proofreading a new, expanded edition of my book of Hollywood noir tales, Fine Cuts, for Borderlands Press. It has a cover by Harry O. Morris and it’s turned out beautifully. This is the first U.S. publication, with a recent, previously uncollected story to bring it up to date. All the copies are signed and numbered, and the lettered state includes “Twenty-Four Frames a Second,” an essay about motion pictures. Borderlands is also bringing out a thirty-five-year anniversary edition of my first collection, The Dark Country, later this year. So I’d say things are looking pretty good. ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Nightmare assistant editor Erika Holt lives in Calgary, Alberta, where she writes and edits speculative fiction. Her stories appear in several anthologies including Not Our Kind, What Fates Impose, and Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead. She is also co-editor of two anthologies from EDGE and Absolute XPress: Rigor Amortis, about sexy, amorous zombies, and Broken Time Blues, featuring such oddities as 1920s burlesque dancers and bootlegging chickens. Find her at erikaholt.com or on Twitter as @erikaholt. Author Spotlight: Adam L.G. Nevill Robyn Lupo | 818 words

Growing up, there was a cabin near my elementary school that had a local legend attached—a witch that ate children lived there, of course. There’s nothing inherently spooky about an old house, and yet we make it the setting for many of our darker narratives, and in the case of “Where Angels Come In,” it’s far more than just an old house. What do you think it is about these spaces that gets us writing and reading the scarier stuff?

Old structures intended for human habitation often transmit a sense of the previous occupants and of past times. Attributing a sinister nature to those former occupants, as well as imagining their lingering influence, often coincides with the level of rustication or dilapidation that has taken hold of the place. Age insinuates a new character. It’s perfectly natural to respond to this sense of a place with a shudder. But that’s also far too rational an explanation. When we imagine the full variety of the lives that were experienced inside an old building—the intensity of the pain, tragedy, misery, ecstasy, joy, loneliness, terror and love, the life and death, that may once have been very real beneath that roof—do we not sense, when we are there, that at certain times these former experiences, personalities and events can manifest in strange ways around us, or inside us, as influences?

Can you tell us a little more about how this story is influenced by M. R. James?

The homage to James is more in the spirit of the master than anything else. He certainly wouldn’t have written in that style, nor from the point of view of a young child. In some ways it’s an antithesis to James, in that the narrator lacks the erudition and sophistication that a Jamesian scholar or narrator would command. But the touch of the supernatural within it—the glimpses and suggestions of something demoniac and ghastly—was my tribute to James. Also, the statues in the overgrown garden are all depictions of “things” that feature in his actual stories.

What inspired you to draw on the insight of fear of ridicule trumping all the other fears associated with the house?

Because kids, and particularly boys, will do the most imbecilic and dangerous things to meet the approval of a peer group, or one dominant ape, I mean, individual. I wager every single adult man and woman could look back on a formative experience and cringe at how they were led, or coerced, or tricked into doing something absurd and reckless in the hope of winning approval. With boys and young men, it is so often the question of courage that leads to dares and potentially life-threatening antics. I once worked with a disabled man who’d shattered his neck. His life-changing accident had been the result of sublimating himself to the internal pressures of a group of boys. He’d dived into water that was far too shallow and had broken his neck as a result. It took years for him to be able to move again, because of one thoughtless act on a hot summer afternoon amongst his friends. Young boys goading each other into a local house with a sinister history is probably as universal as the behaviour of children gets.

We often talk about what scares us as individuals, but in horror stories, we’re often confronted about what scares society as well. What do you suppose scares societies and individuals about contagion? Do you see that fear working differently between the two cases?

I’d say with communal contagion, or a pandemic, then the picture becomes much bigger within our minds. It’s not about one person—us— becoming ill, which is bad enough, but there is the risk of society collapsing too, of chaos and of that chaos changing the familiar into the unfamiliar, and of us not being able to fend for our loved ones and dependents, or to get help for them if they become ill. In my story, the contagion is shame within one small community; those who fail at the task of going over the wall are, quite literally, shunned forever within that community. In young minds, everything is at stake.

What can readers expect from you in the future? Anything scary coming up for us?

My new novel is called Lost Girl and is set in the near future during runaway climate change and its myriad consequences. My novel-in-progress is due to be published in early 2017 and will be a novel of psychic terror. Somewhere between those points I’d also like to put out my first short story anthology.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Robyn Lupo has been known to lurk around Southwestern Ontario, complaining about the weather. She helped destroy flash-sized science fiction in 2014 and hopes to wreck poetry for decent people everywhere soon. MISCELLANY Coming Attractions The Editors | 113 words

Coming up in March in Nightmare . . . We have original fiction from John Skipp (“Bringing Out the Demons”) and Sandra McDonald (“The Modern Ladies’ Letter-Writer”), along with reprints by Nancy Holder (“Lady Madonna”) and Charles L. Grant (“When All the Children Call My Name”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Nightmare. Thanks for reading! Stay Connected The Editors

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If you enjoy reading Nightmare, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. You can subscribe directly from our website, via Weightless Books, or via Amazon.com. For more information, visit nightmare-magazine.com/subscribe. We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors, and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Nightmare ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! Buying a Bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. Buying either of the half-year Bundles saves you $3 (so you’re basically getting one issue for free), or if you spring for the Year One Bundle, you’ll save $11 off the cover price. So if you need to catch up on Nightmare, that’s a great way to do so. Visit nightmare-magazine.com/store for more information. About the 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 Cory Skerry Assistant Editors Erika Holt E.C. Myers

Editorial Assistant Lisa Nohealani Morton

Copy Editor Melissa V. Hofelich

Proofreaders C. Liddle Devin Marcus

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

If you enjoy reading Nightmare, you might also enjoy these anthologies edited (or co-edited) by John Joseph Adams.

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 & Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill) Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 [forthcoming Oct. 2016] Brave New Worlds By Blood We Live Dead Man’s Hand 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) 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 The Way Of The Wizard What the #@&% Is That? (with Douglas Cohen) [forthcoming Aug. 2016]

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above. Each project also has a mini-site devoted to it specifically, where you’ll find free fiction, interviews, and more.