TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 15, December 2013

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, December 2013

FICTION 57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides by Sam J. Miller Distress Signal by Connie Willis The Owl by Conrad Williams A Home in the Dark by David J. Schow

NONFICTION The H Word: Babes in the Wilderness by Laird Barron Artist Gallery: Łukasz Jaszak Artist Spotlight: Łukasz Jaszak Interview: Joe R. Lansdale

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Sam J. Miller Connie Willis Conrad Williams David J. Schow

MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Subscriptions & Ebooks About the Editor

© 2013 Nightmare Magazine Cover Art by Łukasz Jaszak www.nightmare-magazine.com Editorial, December 2013 John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue fifteen of Nightmare!

Before we get to our stories, just a reminder that over in the Nightmare ebookstore (nightmare- magazine.com/store), I wanted to point out that we currently have the following ebook bundles available:

Nightmare (Issues 1-6) - $14.99 Nightmare (Issues 7-12) - $14.99 Nightmare (Year One: Issues 1-12) - $24.99

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.

Of course, if you don’t want to buy a Bundle, you can also just purchase an individual ebook issue, or if you’d like to subscribe directly from us, you can do that too. All purchases from the Nightmare store are provided in both epub and mobi format. Visit nightmare- magazine.com/subscribe to learn more about all of our subscription options.

* * * *

With our announcements out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month:

We have original fiction from Sam J. Miller (“57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides”) and David J. Schow (“A Home in the Dark”), along with reprints by Connie Willis (“Distress Call”) and Conrad Williams (“The Owl).

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 with master of horror Joe R. Lansdale.

That’s about all I have for you this month, but before I step out of your way and let you get to the fiction, here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Nightmare: Website www.nightmare-magazine.com

Newsletter www.nightmare-magazine.com/newsletter

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Subscribe www.nightmare-magazine.com/subscribe

Thanks for reading!

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Nightmare (and its sister magazine, Lightspeed), is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Oz Reimagined, Epic: Legends of Fantasy, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. He is a six-time finalist for the Hugo Award and a five-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. He is also the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams. 57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides Sam J. Miller

1. Because it would take the patience of a saint or Dalai Lama to smilingly turn the other cheek to those six savage boys day after day, to emerge unembittered from each new round of psychological and physical assaults; whereas I, Jared Shumsky, aged sixteen, have many things, like pimples and the bottom bunk bed in a trailer, and clothes that smell like cherry car air fresheners, but no particular strength or patience.

2. Because God, or the universe, or karma, or Charles Darwin, gave me a different strength, one that terrified me until I learned what it was, and how to control it, and how to use it as the instrument of my brutal and magnificent and long-postponed vengeance.

3. Because I loved Anchal, with the fierceness and devotion that only a gay boy can feel for the girl who has his back, who takes the Cosmo sex quiz with him, who listens to his pointless yammerings about his latest crush, who puts herself between him and his bullies so often that the bullies’ wrath is ultimately re-routed onto her. 4. Because after the Albany Academy swim meet, while I was basking in the bliss of a shower that actually spouts hot water—a luxury our backwoods public school lacks— I was bodily seized by my six evil teammates, and dragged outside, and deposited there in the December cold, naked, wet, spluttering, pounding on the door, screaming, imagining hypothermia, penile frostbite, until the door opened, and an utterly uninterested girl opened the door and let me in and said, “Jeez, calm down.”

5. Because it’s not so simple as evil bullies in need of punishment; because their bodies were too beautiful to hate and their eyes too lovely to simply gouge out; because every one of them was adorable in his own way, but they all had the musculature and arrogance of Olympic swimmers, which I lacked, being only five-six of quivery scrawn; because I loved swimming too much to quit the team—the silence of the water and how alone you were when you were in it, the caustic reek of chlorine and the twilight bus rides to strange schools and the sight of so much male skin; and because of those moments, on the ride home from Canajoharie or Schaghticoke or Albany, in the rattling, medicine-smelling short bus normally reserved for the mentally challenged, with the coach snoring and everyone else asleep or staring out the window watching the night roll by, when I was part of the team, when I was connected to people; when I belonged somewhere.

6. Because I had spent the past six months practicing; on animals at first, and after the first time I tried it on my cat she shrieked and never came near me again, but my dog was not so smart, and even though his eyes showed raw animal panic while I was working him he kept coming back every time I took my hand away and released him, and pretty soon working the animals was easy, the field of control forming in the instant my fingertips touched them, their brains like switches I could turn off and on at will, turning their bodies into mirrors for my own, but I still couldn’t figure out a way to harm them.

7. Because once, while she slept, in my basement, engorged on candy and gossip and bad television, I tried my gift on Anchal, and it was much harder on a human, because she was so much bigger and her brain so much more complex and therefore more difficult to disable, and even though I tried to only do things that would not disturb her, her eyes fluttered open and then immediately narrowed in suspicion and fear, the wiser animal part of her brain recognizing me as a threat before the dumb easily-duped mammalian intellect intervened and said, no, wait, this is your friend, he would never do anything to hurt you, and she smiled a blood-hungry smile and leaned forward and said, “How the hell did you do that?”

8. Because Mrs. Burgess assigned us Edgar Allan Poe’s “Hop-Frog” for English class, which helped my vengeance take shape, and because none of the boys had read it.

9. Because Anchal did read it, and came to me, after school, eyes all laughing fire at the ideas the protagonist gave her—Hop-Frog, that squat, deformed little dwarf who murdered the cruel king and his six fat ministers in a dazzling spectacle of burned flesh and screaming death, and her excitement was infectious, and we worked on my gift for hours, until turning her into a puppet was as easy as believing she was one.

10. Because Carrie came on television that same night.

11. Because I am an idiot who still hasn’t learned how stories and movies mislead us, showing us how things ought to end up, which is never how they do; and because stories are oracles whose prophecies we can’t unravel until it is too late. 12. Because Anchal worked long and hard on the revenge scenario, sketching out all the ways my gift could be used to cause maximum devastation, all the ways we could transform our enemies into an ugly spectacle that would show the whole world what monsters they truly were.

13. Because I didn’t listen when she said we would have to kill them, that they were sick sons of bitches and would never stop being sick sons of bitches. Because I still believed that they could be mine.

14. Because Anchal, equal parts Indian and Indian— Native American and Hindu—always smelled like wood smoke, lived with her Cherokee mom in a tiny house barely better than a cabin, and so I thought that she was invincible, heiress to noble, durable traditions far better than my own impoverished Caucasian ones, and that she could survive whatever the world might throw at her. And because she was beautiful; because she was smart and strong; because boys flocked to her; because she knew that if there was one sure thing we could depend upon, it was that teenaged boys were a lot more likely to make dumb decisions when lust was addling their brains.

15. Because Spencer, alone among my swim team mates, would smile at me for no reason, and speak to me sometimes when the others weren’t around, and because some tiny actions gave me hope that he too was gay, and that we were each other’s destinies.

16. Because Rex, on the other hand, an ogre of rare and excellent proportions, thick-headed but shrewd when it came to cruelty, served as the ringleader, and just as they had all obeyed him in his plan to pour Kool-Aid into Anchal’s locker as punishment for stopping them from stomping my skull in, so I knew that he was the linchpin, the only one I would need to work, and that once I had him, the others would fall.

17. Because coach was sick that day, and our next meet wasn’t for a week, so we had the day off from practice, an unheard-of gift of free time, and I knew that this was our shot, and we couldn’t waste it, so I texted Anchal We are GO and then after school, while Rex was alone in the weight room, I stood outside in the hallway and called her cell, and said in a maybe-a-little-bit-too-loud voice, “Hey, so, I got a couple hours to kill, wanna meet me by the slate quarries in an hour, maybe bring some of your mama’s vodka?” and she said, “Yes,” and I said, “Great,” and whistled while I walked away. 18. Because I hid myself in a darkened classroom where I could watch the weight room through the window in the door, and I saw how Rex called them all into a huddle when they arrived from their own classes, and they rubbed their hands or licked their lips or punched each other in the arm in glee, and then they left, as one, and I knew the bait had been taken.

19. Because they had their bicycles and I had mine, and after they left I let five minutes go by, and if I had stuck to that timeline everything would have gone exactly according to plan.

20. Because as I was about to unlock my bike I heard someone holler my name, and I swooned at the sound of it in Spencer’s mouth, and I stopped, and saw him standing sweaty and tank-topped at the cafeteria window, smiling, nervous, looking exactly like he always did in the dreams where we finally told each other our separate, identical secrets, and said “Can I maybe talk to you for a minute?”

21. Because I have an easily-duped mammalian intellect of my own, and because if there’s one thing you can depend upon, it’s that teenage boys are a lot more likely to make dumb decisions when lust is addling their brains.

22. Because I went to him, and said, “Hey,” and he said, “Hey,” and we stood there like that for a second, and his pale skin had the same faint green-blue tint as mine from soaking in chlorine four hours a day for months, and his eyes were two tiny swimming pools, and somehow there wasn’t a single pimple anywhere on him. And he said “That Edgar Allan Poe shit was pretty fucked up, wasn’t it?” and I laughed and said that yes, it was, and my heart was loud in my throat and it had hijacked my brain and I could not disobey it, through several long minutes of small talk, even while I knew what it meant for Anchal.

23. Because he smiled and said, “Do you think I could, I don’t know, come over some time?” and I grinned so hard it hurt, and said “Yeah, yes, sure, that’d be great,” while my mind scrolled through a zoetrope of blurry images, heavy petting on the bean bag chair in my basement, pale skin warming pale skin, us walking hand-in-hand through the hallowed horrible halls of Hudson High, me and Spencer against the world, my heinous monastic celibacy broken.

24. Because his phone buzzed, then, and he took it out and looked at it and then looked at me and said “Yeah, uh, so, I should be going,” and I saw at once that my plan had been seen through, my timeline tampered with, and I knew what even these six minutes of delay might mean for Anchal—and I left him in midsentence, and ran for my bike and pedaled as hard as I could, heading for the slate quarries.

25. Because the long rocky road in to the quarry was littered with giant jutting slabs of slate, obscuring my view and slowing me down, so I didn’t see her, or any of them, until I arrived at the top of the quarry and saw Anchal standing her ground, the five of them in a semicircle around her, but nothing between her and a drop to the jagged rocks and quarry lagoon below, and her face was bruised and bleeding but she was still on her feet and holding something in her hand, and she turned, and saw me, and saw Spencer coming close behind, and knew what I had done, how my weakness had hurt her, how only her own strength had saved her from the horrific fate I abandoned her to, and she knew, in that moment, exactly what I was, and what I was was a sick son of a bitch just like the rest of them.

26. Because Rex had taken off his jacket, and his sweater, and his shirt, even though it was mid-December twilight, and he was freezing, and goosebumps armored his torso, and he turned and smiled when he saw me ride up, and said, “Hold on for a minute, boys, let me just take care of something first.”

27. Because I tossed my bike to the ground and advanced on him, unafraid for once in my life, because guilt and shame over how weak I was had overpowered the fear of physical pain that usually held me back, and one of them laughed with surprise at my aggressiveness and said, “Damn, Rex, look out,” and I yelled, “Get away from her you pigs!” and Rex laughed and said, “Or what? You’ll take us all on? All six of us?”—for Spencer had taken Rex’s spot in the semicircle—and I said, “I’ll kill you all,” and I knew, hearing myself say it, that it was true, that Anchal was right, that there was no way not to kill them, that being a threat was who they were, and only death would make them cease to be one.

28. Because Rex said, “Come on then!” and I reached out for him, and he evaded me, and I reached again with the other arm and he leapt back, and I wasn’t throwing fists because all I had to do was touch him, bare skin to bare skin, to possess him. 29. Because the terrible thought occurred to me, when Rex had successfully dodged several of my grabs, and threw his arm out at me, not in a fist but in the same extended-finger grip as mine, What if I’m not the only one with this gift?

30. Because our fight looked more like a ballet than a battle, ducking and leaping and flinging our arms out, and I was gaining ground, pushing him back toward the circle and the ledge, and his friends were laughing but in a nervous kind of way, and because I knew that he was thrown off balance by trying not to make eye contact with any of his fellow thugs, but that so was I, in my efforts to avoid looking into Anchal’s eyes, for fear of what I’d find there.

31. Because Anchal’s arm shot out then, and sprayed the little mace canister in Rex’s eyes, and he stopped like someone pushed pause, and I struck his bare shoulder with one triumphant palm.

32. Because his scream of pain was cut short in that instant, and we stood like that, frozen, touching, for a solid thirty seconds, while I battled Rex for control of his body, and I saw how ill-advised this plan had been, because only the pain and confusion caused by Anchal’s mace kept him from easily turning my gift back on me, and if any of his friends had touched me my control would have been broken and I’d surely have died that day.

33. Because none of them did touch me.

34. Because once I had Rex, the rest were easy.

35. Because I reached out my left arm and Rex reached out his in a precise mirror-motion, and touched it to the right arm of the boy standing beside him, and now when I reached out with my left arm both boys reached out with theirs, and touched the next boy, and so on, until all six boys, including Spencer, were linked hand to hand with me, and every move I made, they made.

36. Because my gift had established a field of control that no longer depended on mere touch, and when I took my hand away the boys were my vassals, my puppets, unable to move or speak on their own, free will gone, their hearts pumping at precisely the same rate as mine, their lungs taking in and casting out air in perfect rhythm with my breath. 37. Because I, on the other hand, felt nothing at all beyond the slight tension of the muscles that I always felt when I used my gift.

38. Because I raised my arms and they raised theirs; I jumped and so did they; I let loose a wolf call matched by six baying voices.

39. Because their eyes, I was surprised to learn, retained their autonomy, and the semicircle now showed me an impressive ocular display of hatred, fear, pain, anger.

40. Because Anchal stood up, and looked at me, and unlike my captive animals her eyes told me nothing, and she ran, silently, into the dark, and when I called her name those six boys said it too.

41. Because I let a long time pass, standing, listening, waiting for her to come back.

42. Because she didn’t.

43. Because it is not a simple thing, to kill a man who mimics your every move.

44. Because Anchal chose the slate quarry for just that purpose.

45. Because I squatted, and they squatted, and I picked up a heavy rock, and their hands closed on nothingness, and I stood, and they stood, and I hoisted the rock over my head, and they raised their empty hands up just as high, and I threw the rock as hard as I could at Rex’s head, and they made the same gesture.

46. Because Rex could neither flinch nor blink nor budge as the rock struck his face, nor even snap his head back to soften the impact by moving with the rock’s inertia, and blood covered his face in seconds, and in the darkness we could smell the blood but not see the extent of the damage, and now every emotion other than terror was gone from those eyes.

47. Because I spoke, then—I shouted, and their screams formed around my words, a ghastly chorus of doomed men, echoing: “Once I dreamed of being one of you, of having your bodies, of moving so easily and fearlessly through the world, of belonging so effortlessly to a group of friends—but now that I can taste it for myself, now that I have your bodies, now that I am you, all of you, I see it for the horrid meaningless thing that it is.” 48. Because the speech was not for them, and I’d spent a long time practicing it, and I was proud of it, but its intended audience was gone, fled, betrayed and hurt, by me.

49. Because suddenly my anger was gone, replaced by shame, and I had no more energy for our plan of a moment ago, of slowly but surely inducing them to bash each other to bits, to leave a grisly mess for forensic scientists to spend decades puzzling over.

50. Because the water at the bottom of the quarry was still an eerie blue with the light from the sky, even though the sun had already slipped past the horizon.

51. Because they were all standing so much closer than I was to the uneven lip of the quarry, and I reached out my arms and clasped my hands on air, so they were linked up in a human chain, and I ran and leapt and they went over the edge but I still had another three feet of solid ground ahead of me.

52. Because I stepped forward and looked down and there they were, far below, their backs to me, waist-deep in water and looking down into it, still holding hands, some of them unable to stand on broken legs, and there was blood in the water.

53. Because it was more from weariness than anything else when I lay down on the ground, head pressed to the dirt, and I knew even though I couldn’t see them that they were all fully underwater, and I opened my mouth and breathed in that sweet cold December night air and then breathed it out, breathed it in and breathed it out, until the tension slackened in my muscles and I knew the field was broken, because they had drowned.

54. Because I got up off the ground knowing I had lost her forever, that she had seen straight through to the cold twisted heart of who I was. And in seeing who I was, she had shown me myself.

55. Because I had been too dumb to see how this power, this privilege I didn’t want but had nonetheless, far from helping me to see, had blinded me to the truth of who we were.

56. Because in the movie, Carrie’s punishment for killing her foes was to die, and mine was to live.

57. Because Anchal knew what I did not: that we are what we are, and we act it out without wanting to, and only death can break us of the habit of being the bodies we’re born into.

© 2013 by Sam J. Miller.

[JUMP TO THE AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT]

Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Shimmer, Electric Velocipede, Strange Horizons, Icarus, The Minnesota Review, and The Rumpus, among others. He is a graduate of the 2012 Clarion Writer’s Workshop and the co-editor of Horror After 9/11, an anthology published by the University of Texas Press. Visit him at www.samjmiller.com. Distress Signal Connie Willis

Caroline was not in the room. Amy could hear her crying somewhere down the hall. Her crying sounded louder, as though some other, all-pervading sound had suddenly ceased. “The engines have stopped,” Amy thought. “We are dead in the water. Something has happened,” she thought. “Something terrible.” She had gone to get Caroline, to get her out of this house, and Caroline had run from her, sobbing in terror. Had run from Amy, her own mother. She had found Caroline with the women, clinging onto their gray, drifting skirts. They had dressed her like themselves. “When did they do that?” Amy thought frightenedly. “I have let things go too far.” She had said firmly, so they wouldn’t know how frightened she was, “Get your things together, Caroline. We are going home.” “No!” Caroline had screamed, hiding behind their skirts. “I’m afraid. You’ll hurt me again.” “Hurt you?” Amy said, bewildered and then furious. “Hurt you? Who has been telling you that, that I would hurt you?” She reached angrily into the protective circle of the women for Caroline’s hand. “What have you been telling her?” she demanded. Debra stepped forward, graceful as a ghost in the drifting gray, and smiled at Amy. “She wanted to know why she got so sick at the picnic,” she had said. Amy had had to hold her hands stiffly against her body to keep from slapping Debra. “What did you tell her?” she had said, and Caroline had shot past her, out the door and down the hall to the parlor. Caroline had hidden under the big seance table in the parlor. Amy had gotten down on her knees and crawled toward her, but Caroline had backed away from her until she was almost hidden by the massive legs of the carved chair. Amy had crawled out from under the table so she would not frighten her, and squatted back on her heels, her arms extended to the six-year-old. Caroline stayed huddled behind the chair. “Come here, Caroline,” she had whispered, horrified that she should be reduced to having to say such a thing, “I won’t hurt you, honey.” Caroline shook her head, the tears still wet on her face. “You’ll poison me again,” she whispered. Amy could hardly hear her. “Poison?” Amy whispered. Caroline in her arms and dying, and then Jim, carrying her across the park to the house, she running after him, her heart pounding, running here because the police station was on the other side of the park and she was afraid Caroline would die before Jim got her there. Jim carrying her here, to this house, which was so much closer. To these people. Thinking hysterically as Ismay took Caroline’s limp body from Jim’s arms, “We should not have brought her here.” “Somebody poisoned you,” Amy said, and knew it was true. She was so shocked that for a long minute she was not able to say anything. She crossed her hands on her breast as if she had been wounded there and whispered, so quietly someone standing behind her could not have heard her, her lips moving in almost silent prayer, “I would never hurt you, Caroline. I love you.”

* * * *

The sound of Caroline’s crying was louder again, as though someone had opened a door. “I must go find Caroline,” she said aloud, and tried to keep that brave thought in her mind as she went out the open door toward the sound of the crying. But before she had come to the room where they had Caroline, she was saying over and over, like a prayer, “Something terrible has happened, something terrible has happened.” She stopped, standing in the open door, and looked back toward the parlor. The lamps in the hall wavered like candles and then steadied, dimmer than before. The hall was icy. “I should go back for my coat,” Amy thought. “It will be cold on deck.” And then the other thought, even colder, “I mustn’t go in there. Something terrible has happened in the parlor.”

* * * *

Ismay had taken her into the parlor to wait while the doctor saw Caroline. Amy had been standing at the foot of the wide stairs, clutching the newel post, trying not to think, “She’s going to die,” for fear she would know it was true. “Don’t give up hope,” one of the gray-haired women had said, patting Amy’s clenched hands as she went up the stairs with a blanket. She was dressed in the floating gray all the women, even the young one, wore. They had clustered like specters around Caroline’s limp body, and Amy had thought, “It’s some kind of cult. I shouldn’t have brought her here.” But the young one—Debra, Jim had called her—had gone immediately for the doctor. Debra had led the doctor up the stairs past Amy, saying, “The little girl collapsed in the park. They were having a picnic. Her father brought her here,” and she had sounded so normal, in spite of the drifting ghost’s dress, that Amy had begun to hope again. “Hope persists, doesn’t it?” someone said behind her. “Even with the most blatant evidence to the contrary.” “What do you mean?” Amy stammered. This was the man Jim had called Ismay. Debra and Ismay. How had he known their names? “Did you know,” he said, “it was nearly an hour before the passengers on the Titanic knew that she was sinking? Then they looked down at the lights still shining underneath the water on the lower decks and said, ‘How pretty! Do you think perhaps we should get into a lifeboat?’” Amy was very frightened at what this talk of sinking ships might mean, and she half-started up the stairs, but his hand closed over hers on the banister, and he said, “They won’t let you up there. The doctor’s still with her. And your husband.” He moved his hand to her arm and led her into the parlor. “Caroline’s dead,” she thought numbly, and looked unseeingly at the parlor. “The body is like a ship. It does not die all at once. It is struck by death, the fatal iceberg brushing past, but it does not sink for several hours. And all that time, the passengers wander the decks, sending out S.O.S.’s to rescue ships that never come. Have you ever seen a ghost?” “There were survivors on the Titanic,” Amy said, her heart pounding so hard it hurt. “Help came.” “Ah, yes,” Ismay said. “The Carpathia steamed boldly up at four in the morning. Captain Rostron stumbled about among the icebergs for nearly an hour, thinking he was in the wrong place. He was too late. She was already gone.” “No,” Amy said, and she knew from the panicked sound of her heart that this conversation was not about sinking ships at all. “They weren’t too late for the lifeboats.” “A few first-class passengers,” Ismay said, as if the survivors did not matter. “Did you know that all the children in steerage drowned?” Amy did not hear him. She had turned away from him and was looking at the parlor. “What?” she said blankly. “I said, the Californian was only ten miles away. She thought their flares were fireworks.” “What?” she said again, and tried to get past him, but he was behind her, between her and the door, and she could not get out. “What is this place?” she said, and could not hear her voice above the sound of her heart.

* * * *

Amy stood in the doorway, looking back to the parlor. “I must go back there,” she thought clearly. “Something terrible has happened in the parlor.” “Mama!” Caroline said, and Amy turned and looked in through the open door. The women stood motionless around the little girl, their hands reaching out awkwardly to comfort her, Debra kneeling at her feet. “They should be getting her lifebelt on,” Amy thought. “They must get her up to the boat deck.” Caroline held out her arms in joy toward Amy. Amy said, “We’re going home now, Caroline.” But before she finished saying it, one of the women said, not interrupting but instead superimposing her words over Amy’s so that Amy could not hear her own voice, “Your mother’s gone, darling. She can’t hurt you now.” “She is not gone,” Caroline said. The three women looked up at the little girl and then anxiously at one another. “You miss her, of course, but she’s happy now. You must forget all the bad things and think of that,” Debra said, patting Caroline’s hand. Caroline yanked her hand away impatiently. “Do you think we should give her a sedative?” said the woman who had spoken first. “Ismay said she might be difficult at first.” “Caroline,” Amy said loudly. “Come here.” “No,” said Debra, and at first Amy thought she was answering her, but she didn’t reach out to restrain Caroline, and her voice sounded as it had when she was playing ghost at the seance, “perhaps she does see her mother.” A shudder, like the sudden settling of a ship, went through the women. “Caroline?” Debra asked carefully. “Where is your mother?” “Right there,” Caroline said, and pointed at Amy. The women turned and looked at the doorway. “Perhaps she does see something,” Debra said. “I think we should tell Ismay,” and she went out the door past Amy and down the hall to the parlor. “Oh, something terrible has happened in the parlor,” Amy thought, “and Ismay has done it.”

* * * *

The parlor was the room she had seen from the park. Handing Caroline her glass of milk, she had looked at the heavy gray drapes in the windows and wondered what the gaudy Victorian house was like inside. She had imagined it like this room, rich woods and faded carpet, but the room they had hurried Caroline into upstairs was barren, a folding cot, gray walls, and she had thought again, “The house has been taken over by some kind of cult.” Near the windows was a large round table with chairs around it and candles burning in a candelabra in the center. One of the chairs was more massive than the others and heavily carved. “The captain’s table,” she thought, thinking of the Titanic, “and the captain sits in that chair.” She had turned away from Ismay, and in turning, seen what was behind her, dimly white in the darkness of the room. An iceberg. A catafalque. A bier. “I have seen it too late,” Amy thought, and tried to get past Ismay, but he was at the door. “The Titanic went down very fast,” he said. “A little under two-and-a-half hours. People usually take longer. Ghosts have been seen for years afterwards, although it is my experience that they go down in a matter of hours.” “What is this place?” Amy said. “Who are you?” “I am a man who sees ghosts, a spiritualist,” Ismay said, and Amy nearly fainted with relief. “You hold your seances in here,” she said, relieved out of all proportion to his words. “You sit in this chair and call the ghosts,” she said giddily, sitting down in the carved chair. “Come to us from the other side and all that. Have you ever had a ghost from the Titanic?” “No,” he said, coming around to face her. “Every ghost is his own Titanic.” He made her uneasy. She stood up and looked out the window. Across the park she could see the police station, and she was overcome by the same wild relief. The police within signaling distance and the doctor upstairs, and all the ghostly ladies only harmless tableturners who wanted to talk to their dead husbands. In this room Ismay would make the windows blow open and the candles go out, he would cause ghosts to hover above the catafalque, their hands folded peacefully across their breasts, and what, what had she been afraid of? “I had a progenitor on the Titanic,” he said. “Rather a cad actually. He made it off in one of the first boats. Did you know that the Titanic was the first ship to use the international distress signal? And the Californian, only ten miles away, would have been the first to receive it, an historic occasion, but the wireless operator had already gone to bed when the first messages went out.” “The Carpathia heard,” Amy said, and walked past him and out the door, to go to where Caroline was already getting better. “Captain Rostron came.” “There were ice reports all day,” Ismay said, “but the Titanic ignored them.”

* * * *

Amy leaned against the wall after Debra passed, pressing her hands to her breast as though she had been wounded. “I must find Jim,” she thought. “He will see she gets in one of the boats.” She had a very hard time with the stairs. They seemed to slant forward, and it took all her concentrated thought to climb them and she could not think how she would make Jim hear her, how she would convince him to save Caroline. Even the hall listed toward her, so that she struggled toward Debra’s room as up a steep hill. When she came to the closed door, she had to stand a minute before she had the strength to put her hand on the doorknob. When she did, she thought the door must be locked. Then she looked down at her hand. She dropped it to her side, as if it had been injured. Debra opened the door, leaning her graceful body against it. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You can’t just leave her in there,” Jim said. “What about the police?” “Why would the police come unless someone went to get them? We don’t have any phones. The outside doors are locked. Who would go get them?” “Caroline.” Amy came into the room. Debra shook her head. “She’s only six years old, and it isn’t as if she saw anything. We told her her mother died in her sleep.” “No,” Amy said. “That isn’t true. I was murdered.” “I’d feel safer if Ismay had taken care of her, too. She might have seen something afterwards.” “She did,” Debra said, and watched the color drain from Jim’s face. “She thought she saw her mother this morning.” She hesitated cruelly again. “Ismay has decided to have a seance,” she said. She waited to see the effect on him and then said, “What are you afraid of? She’s dead. She can’t do anything to you.” She went out the door. “You poisoned her,” Amy said to Jim. “She wasn’t sick. She was poisoned. You planned the picnic. It was a trick to bring us here, to Debra, whose name you knew before. To bring us here so Ismay could murder me.” Jim was watching the door, the color slowly coming back into his face. He took a plastic prescription bottle out of his shirt pocket and rolled it in his hand. Amy thought of him standing in the park, looking first at the police station and then at the house with the gray curtains, measuring the distances and whistling, waiting for Caroline to drink her milk. “I will not let you kill her,” Amy said. “I am going to save Caroline.” She tried to take the poison out of his hand. Jim put the bottle back in his shirt pocket and opened the door.

* * * *

She had gone to the seance because Caroline was better and she could not be frightened by anything, even Jim’s unwillingness to leave. The windows had banged open and the curtains had drifted in, flickering the candles. Amy thought, “He is doing something under the table.” She looked steadily through the candles’ flame at him. “Come to us, oh spirit,” Ismay said. He was sitting next to the big carved chair, but not in it. “We call you. Come to us.” It was Debra, projected somehow above the bier though she had not let go of Amy’s hand. Debra made up with greasepaint and dressed in flowing white. She hovered there, her hands crossed on her breast, and then drifted toward the table. “Welcome, spirit,” Ismay said. “What message do you bring us from beyond?” “It is very peaceful,” the ghost of Debra said. Ismay slid his hand under the table. The stars were very bright, glittering off the ice. The ship hung like a jewel against the dark sky, its lights too low in the water. “He is doing something,” Amy thought. “Something to frighten me.” She tried to fight it, watching the phony ghost of Debra drift to the table. The candles guttered and went out as she passed. She drifted down into the carved chair. “I bring you word from your loved ones,” she said, her hands resting on the carved arms. “They are at peace.” The stern of the ship began to rise into the air. There was a terrible sound as everything began to fall: the breaking glass of the chandeliers, the tinny vibrations of the piano as it slid down the boat deck, the people screaming as they struggled to hang onto the railings. The lights went out, flickered like candles, and went out again. The stern rose higher. “No!” Amy blurted, standing up, still holding Jim’s and Debra’s hands. Ismay did something under the table and the lights came on. The ghost of Debra disappeared. They were all looking at her. “I heard . . . everything started to fall . . . the ship . . . we have to save them.” She was very frightened. “Some see the dead,” Ismay said. “Some hear them. You should have been on the Californian. They didn’t hear anything until the next morning.” He waved the others out of the room. He was still seated at the table. The candles had relit themselves. “Did you know that when the Titanic went down, she created a great whirlpool, so that all the people who were too close to her were pulled down, too?” he said, and she had bolted past him out the door, running to find Caroline, who had sobbed and run from her.

* * * *

Jim left the door open and she hurried after him, but at the head of the stairs she stopped, too frightened to go down, afraid that the parlor would already be underwater. “I must hurry. I must save Caroline,” she thought. “Before all the boats are away,” and she went down the slanting stairs. They were at the table in the parlor. “Come to us, Amy,” Ismay said. “We call you. Can you hear us?” “I hear you,” Amy said clearly. “You murdered me.” Ismay was not looking at her. He was watching the carved chair, and there was someone in it. “I am happy here,” the ghost of Amy said. Debra made up with greasepaint, sitting with her hands easily on the carved arms. “I wish you were here with me, darling Caroline.” “No!” Amy screamed, and tried to get across the table to the image of herself, but the floor was tilting so that she could hardly stand. “Don’t listen to her,” Amy sobbed, “Run! Run!” Ismay turned to Caroline. “Would you like to see your mother, dear?” he said, and Amy flung herself upon him, beating against his chest. “Murderer! Murderer!” “We’ll go see her now,” he said, and he moved from the table, holding Caroline’s hand. “Nuh-oh!” Amy shouted in a hiccup of despair and swung her arm against him with a force that should have knocked him against the table, spilling the candles into pools of wax. The candles burned steadily in the still air. “Help, police! Murder!” she screamed, scrabbling at the window latches that would not open, hammering her hands against the windows that would not break. They could not hear her. They could not see her. Not even Ismay. She dropped her hands to her sides as if they were injured. Ismay said, “The shipbuilder knew immediately, but the captain had to be told, and even then he didn’t believe it.” She turned from the window. He was not looking at her, but the words had been intended for her. “You can see me,” she said. “Oh, yes, I can see you,” he said, and stepped back from the bier. They had washed off the blood. They had pulled a sheet up to her breast and crossed her hands over it to hide the wound. Of course they could not see her, wandering the halls, shouting over their voices to be heard. Of course they could not hear her. She was here, had been here all along, with her useless hands crossed over her silent breast. Of course she could not open the door. “I cannot save Caroline,” she thought, and looked for her among the women, but they were all gone. “They have put her in the boats after all,” she thought. Ismay stood by the seance table, watching her. “We are on the ice,” he said, smiling a little. “Murderer,” Amy said. “I can’t hear you, you know,” Ismay said. “I can tell what you are saying sometimes by watching you. The word ‘murderer’ comes through quite clearly. But my dear, you do not make a sound.” She looked down at her body, at her still face that would not make any sound again. “The dead do make a sound,” Ismay said. “Like a ship going down. S.O.S. S.O.S.” Amy looked up. “Oh, my dear, I see you hope even yet. Isn’t the human soul a stubborn thing? S.O.S. Save our ship. Imagine tapping out such a message when the ship cannot be saved. The Titanic was dead the moment she struck the iceberg, as you were the moment after I discovered you at your prayers. But it takes some time to go down. And till the very last the wireless operator stays at his post, tapping out messages no one will hear.” There was something there, hidden in what he had said, something about Caroline. “It is apparently a real sound, dying cells releasing their stored energy, although I prefer to think of it as dying cells letting go of their last hope. It’s down in the subsonic range, so its uses are limited. The lovely Debra and a few hidden speakers are far more practical in the long run. But it’s useful at seances, although its effect is not usually as theatrical as it was on you.” He had reached under the table. The forward funnel toppled into the water, spraying sparks. There was a deafening crash as it fell, and then the sound of screams. The ship hung against the sky, nearly on end, for a long minute, then settled back at the stern and began to slide, slowly at first, then gaining speed, into the water. She must not let him do this to her. There was something before, about her being at her prayers when he killed her. He thought she was kneeling under the table to pray, but she wasn’t. She was looking for Caroline. He turned the sound off. “The range is, as I said, very limited, and the wireless operator on the Californian shuts down at midnight, fifteen minutes before the first call.” “The Carpathia,” Amy said. “Ah, yes,” Ismay said. “The Carpathia. It’s true I’ve had the police at my door several times, but they stumbled about in the front hall among the icebergs of apology and foolish explanation for an hour or so and then went away, thinking they were in the wrong place. By then, there was not even any wreckage for them to find.” “Caroline,” Amy said. “You think I would be so foolish as to let her lead the police in here? No, she will be in no position to lead them anywhere,” Ismay said, misunderstanding. Amy thought, “I must not let him distract me.” There was something about Caroline. Something important. He had killed her at her prayers. At her prayers. “Why did you kill me?” she said, making an effort to form her words clearly so he could read them. “For the most prosaic of reasons,” he said. “Your husband paid me to. It seems he wants the lovely Debra. Did you think I was vain enough to murder you for trying to find out my tricks? Snooping about under my seance table like a child looking for clues?” “He did not see Caroline under the table,” she thought. “He does not know she saw me murdered.” But that meant something, and she did not know what. “He has paid me for Caroline, too,” he said, and waited for her face. “I won’t let you,” Amy said. “You won’t?” he said. “My dear, you still will not give up hope, will you? I could use your body as an altar on which to murder your beloved Caroline, and you could not lift a finger to stop me.” He had been standing by the seance table. Now she saw that he was leaning casually against the door. “The end is very near. I would like to stay and watch, but I must go find Caroline. Don’t worry,” he said. “I will find her. All the lifeboats are away.” He shut the door. “He did not see her hiding under the table when he murdered me,” Amy thought, and now the other thought followed easily, mercilessly, “She is hiding there now.” “I must lock the door,” she thought, and she waded toward it across the listing room. The lock was already under water, and she had to reach down to get to it, but when her hand closed on it, she saw that it was not the lock at all. It was her own stiff hand she touched. She had not moved at all. “The end must be very near,” she thought, “because I have no hope left at all. S.O.S.,” she cried out pitifully, “S.O.S.” She stood very straight by her body, not touching it, and at first the slight list was not apparent, but after a long time, she put her hands out as if to brace herself, and her hands passed through and into her body’s hands, and she foundered.

* * * *

Caroline let the policemen in. They had a search warrant. Caroline said clearly and without a trace of tears, “They killed my mommy,” and led them to the body. “Yes,” the captain said, pulling the sheet up over Amy’s face. “I know.” “We have had a tragedy here, I’m afraid,” Ismay said coming into the room. “The little girl’s mother. . .” “Was murdered,” the captain said. “While she knelt by this table. With her hands crossed on her breast.” Caroline silent behind the chair, watching. Amy’s lips moving as if in prayer. The sudden explosion of blood from behind her hands, and Caroline backing against the wall, the tears knocked out of her. “Murdered by you,” the captain said. “You cannot possibly know that,” Ismay said. Jim ran in. He sank to his knees by Caroline and clutched her to him. “Oh, my Caroline, they’ve murdered her!” he sobbed. Caroline wriggled free and went and put her hand in the captain’s. “It’s no use,” Ismay said. “It would seem these gentlemen have received a message.” “Caroline!” Jim said, moving threateningly toward her. “What did you tell them?” “Caroline didn’t tell them anything,” Ismay said. He reached under Jim’s jacket into his shirt pocket and took out the medicine bottle. He handed it to Caroline. “You have been rescued,” he said to her. “All the first class children were, except for little Lorraine Allison, only six years old. But your name isn’t Lorraine. It’s Caroline.” He looked up at the captain. “And yours, I suppose, is Captain Rostron.” “Who sent a message?” Jim said hysterically. “How?” “I don’t know,” Ismay said calmly. “I doubt if even these fine policemen know, in spite of their search warrant and their familiarity with the facts of the crime. But I will wager I know what the message was,” he said, watching the captain’s face. “‘Come at once. We have struck a berg.’”

© 1981 by Connie Willis. Originally published in The Berkeley Showcase: New Writings in Science Fiction and Fantasy, Vol. 4, edited by John Silbersack and Victoria Schochet. Reprinted by permission of the author.

[JUMP TO THE AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT]

Few authors have enjoyed as much success as Connie Willis. A prolific novelist and short story writer, Willis has received seven Nebula awards and eleven Hugo awards for her fiction. She is a member of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and in 2011 was named a SFWA Grand Master. She lives in Colorado with her family. The Owl Conrad Williams

Walk continuously around a tree with an owl in it: the owl will keep its eye on you until it has wrenched off its own head. He couldn’t remember where the words had come from, but he knew they were old and the last time he had heard them he could have been little more than five years of age. Luc, the estate agent, turned the stiff corpse of the barn owl over with his foot so that they could all get a better view. “Hibou,” he said, and smiled, almost apologetically. “This place, they have lots of owl.” “One less, now,” Ian said. “Yes, well,” Molly said, giving him a look. “No need to go stating the obvious, is there? Poor thing. It’s beautiful.” “It won’t be for long,” Ian said, and wished he’d kept his mouth shut. She was right: the bird was beautiful. He had never been this close to an owl before, and was struck by the size of its head, how round it was. Luc shuffled, clearly indicating that they should move on. There was much more of the house to see and dusk was pouring oil over the garden; soon it would be too dark to see anything. “I forget my torch,” he said, and shrugged. “This house has good electric. But not switched on at present. Come.” They proceeded up a makeshift wooden staircase that would not be safe for too much longer; tiny holes were scattered across the grain, fresh frass on the floorboards. Ian felt his wallet wince. He plucked at Molly’s sleeve. “This whole house . . . you know, we’re going to have to get it all treated for woodworm.” She moved away from him, clearly annoyed by his pettifogging. “I’ll wait here. I’m not going up there, not in my condition.” Ian followed Luc up into the attic. He couldn’t speak much French, beyond Bonjour, ça va? Au revoir, so the atmosphere grew slightly strained, despite his liking the estate agent. Luc was pointing at the curious circular windows low on the wall, a peculiarity of the Charente region. “Très jolie, non?” “Like portholes,” Ian said. Luc smiled, frowned, shook his head. “Never mind.” There wasn’t much else to see in the attic, except for the awkward, low beams and a few rotting batons that would need to be tackled quickly if they weren’t to deteriorate further over the coming winter. “Good space for children,” Ian said to Molly as he carefully returned down the stairs. He pressed his hand against the firm swell of her belly, and kissed her cheek. The storms in the Charente were spectacular affairs, Ian had been promised. He had always fancied himself as a stormchaser, and harbored a wish to one day visit Tornado Alley, go in search for some big game like the guys he saw on the Discovery Channel. There was something about lightning and the brightness in the sky turned right down that appealed to a raw and ancient part of him. The lowing of thunder, miles away, getting closer. The air pressure, grinding down on you. In the Charente, the flat countryside offered nothing upon which the storms might spend themselves. They drifted away but then they might come back again. On very rare occasions, two storms might gather in the same area, and revolve around each other. One of these broke the first night they spent in the house, after the contracts had been signed in the presence of the solicitor in Matha, the nearest town to their little village. “It’s a double-yolker,” Ian said, face pressed against the window of what they had chosen for their bedroom, a ridiculously large room that could have easily accommodated a walk-in wardrobe and an en suite bathroom and still left them with more space than they had known in their one-bedroom flat in London. “Listen to that thunder. It’s practically on top of us.” Molly was lying on the inflatable bed, watching the steam rise from her mug of raspberry leaf tea. She was trying to read a book about herbal remedies especially aimed at pregnant women but the candlelight was too faint, or too agitated for her to concentrate properly, because she gave up after only a short while, tossing the book to the side of the bed. She ran a hand through her hair. The fingers of her other hand were absently toying with her belly button, which had recently become convex. Ian had altered the depth of his focus so that he could watch her reflection in the window, her transparent face blitzed by raindrops. He liked the way she always seemed to be able to find the most comfortable position with apparently minimum effort. In this way, she reminded him of a cat. She could fall asleep anywhere. There was a photograph of her as a young girl, half hanging out of a wicker chair, her head almost touching the floor, as content in sleep as she might have been in a deluxe bed. They had met on Brighton beach, a little over two years previously. She had been kneeling on the shingle in such a bizarre way—her almost supernaturally long legs somehow splayed out and tucked beneath each other— that it seemed more like a torture than a position of rest. The first time they made love, she had hooked her legs over his shoulders and then, hushing his protests, detached herself from him, lifted herself up on her neck muscles alone, twisted around and lowered herself slowly into a new position, presenting her rear to him, laughing deeply in the dark. She seemed double-jointed, treble- jointed. She folded herself around him like strange origami. “I love you,” he said, the words falling out of him, coming from somewhere beyond his control, fuelled by the sentiment in his memories. Rain, like buckshot, scattered across the glass. The sky was so alive with pulses of lightning now, constant, random, that it could pass for day. Molly laughed and reached out her hand to him. He could not remember the last time he had told her he loved her, and didn’t know whether that was a good thing. He joined her on the inflatable bed and she pressed his hand against her stomach, the skin as tight as that on a drum. “Say hello to the baby,” she whispered. He did so, touching his lips to that warm curve, passing on a message of love, of hope. “Hello, baby . . . Daddy here . . .” Molly moved against the tickle of his mouth, gently touching his face with her fingers, nudging him lower. Some time later, the storm having finally tired itself out, they lay awake, listening to each other breathing in the dark, and the beat of water as it leaked from the roof onto the attic floor above them. “I wonder if all the houses, even the ones in good order, have leaks?” Ian said. “This house is in good order,” Molly said. “Or it will be soon. There’s a lot of work needs doing, but we knew that at the start, when we first talked about this, remember?” He remembered, but their moving here seemed to have come around so quickly. Too quickly, for him. He had been happy in their one bedroom flat, even though the space seemed to shrink around them by the day. “I’m a DIY dunce, Mol,” he said. “I see a claw hammer, I don’t know if I should hit something with it, or pick my teeth.” “So you keep saying. But nobody is born with that kind of knowledge. You’ll learn. You’ll have to. We’ll have to.” Sleep drew them down. Ian was on the edge of it, his thoughts deepening, fracturing into nonsense, into dreams, when the shriek slapped them both awake. “What in Christ . . .” Molly was already up, standing at the window. Her naked body didn’t appear pregnant from behind. A boy, that means, she had said. A bulge out in front, that’s a boy. Light from the floods trained on the church outlined her. From where he lay, perched on one elbow, he could see a great sweep of stars spraying out across the sky, like spilled sugar on a dark tablecloth. “Bats?” Ian asked. “Maybe. Maybe owls.” “Owls make that kind of noise? I thought they hooted. It sounds like someone being torn apart.” He saw her shrug. “Maybe it was. I’m no wildlife expert. Maybe it was a rabbit or a mouse being killed. Maybe it was the local cat being fucked. Maybe it was somebody’s hinges need oiling.” He could never tell, when Molly was in this mood, whether she was merely teasing him or being more aggressively dismissive. He was aware that his questions tended to be on the pointless side, begging, for the most part, confirmation of something already said. It needled him that, two years on—married, with a kid on the way— he still did not know his wife as well as he felt he ought to. The noise came again, a truly creepy rasp vented somewhere from the lime trees that shivered outside their window, and Ian saw how it could not possibly belong to an animal being hunted. It was a predator’s cry. It was what bloodlust sounded like. “Come back to bed,” he said. He dreamed of climbing the church tower from within. It was an old building—thirteenth century—and the interior stone, though initially pale and attractive, was, up close, failing rapidly. A wooden staircase took him only so far. He had to ascend the remaining darkness by a rickety ladder, some of the rungs of which had rotted away and been replaced by lengths of rusting iron, or sawn-off shafts of broom handles. The smell of bird shit was intense; it burned his nostrils. The netting, hung over the open arches to prevent the belltower from being invaded by wildlife, had decayed badly. It flapped ineffectually in the breeze. Night shifted beyond it like something that could be touched. As he reached the landing, a group of pigeons leapt nervously away from him, heads cocked, eyeing him with suspicion. He paused for a moment, the shape of the great bell within arm’s reach. Its stillness was all wrong. Its size and silence seemed to go in direct contradiction of all that was meant for it. As if in acknowledgment of his thoughts, the bell began to move. Slowly at first, the sound of the cord as it was tugged fizzed lightly against the chamfered apertures of the landing. The bell tipped this way and that, gathering pace, and fear tipped with it, filling the gaps in his body with cold until his temperature had dropped so drastically it seemed he could be nothing but vacuum. He didn’t want the bell to swing so violently. Not because of the immense sound that it would generate, but because it would mean he would be able to see through to the other side of the landing, and what waited there for him. He could not escape quickly enough. The pendulous slices showed him a scattering of picked corpses. The owl moved out of the shadows. It carried a dead rat in its beak. The owl’s eyes held Ian like the headlights of a car will trap a rabbit. With a claw, the bird raked open the rat’s stomach and half a dozen hairless, blind babies spilled from it. Ian’s laboring breath wakened him, more so than the dream. He lay listening to Molly sleep and tried to unpick the dream of its threat before his discomfort grew to the extent that he would have to get up, switch on some lights, make tea. Owls don’t leave bodies lying around like that. And not so big, either. The bones of their prey were evacuated in their spoors. Owl shit wasn’t scary. Christ, owls weren’t scary. Before breakfast, still feeling jittery but much happier now that the night was over, Ian spent some time in the garden, acquainting himself with the flowers and shrubs as they solidified in the early morning mist. The field across the way was a featureless gray screen. The church tower was soft, like something captured out of focus on a camera. He paid it scant attention. The hibiscus, the geranium, the hazel tree were known to him; pretty much everything else was not. Ivy scarred the walls and inserted damaging fingers under the pan tiles that protected them. The ground was covered with what seemed like thick grass, but it came away in great swatches when he pulled at it, like hair from the head of a person suffering from alopecia. The soil was stony, uncooperative. A tree had collapsed, possibly during one of the great storms, and a riot of ivy and convolvulus had knotted around it, anchoring it to the ground. The only tool he owned was a rusty scythe he had found lying in the grass. His own teeth were sharper. There was so much work, everywhere he looked, that it appeared insurmountable. He didn’t know where to begin. And then Molly was at the window, pushing back the shutters, smiling down at him above that splendidly proud stomach, and he realized that it didn’t matter where he began. They had all the time in the world. “What does a sodding starter motor look like, anyway?” he said, leaning over the Xantia’s engine, trying to find some sense in its weird steel and plastic codes. “Have a look at the manual.” By the time they fired the engine up it was gone ten and the pleasant morning they had envisaged pottering around the market stalls of Saintes was steadily being eaten away. The N10, usually so quiet, a pleasure to drive along, was congested with great lorries. Added to that, the radio was asking him to input the security code and neither of them had noted down what it was when they picked the car up from the garage in Oxford. “The guy who sold us this Shitroën, I’m taking a contract out on the bastard.” Molly ignored him. She was leafing through a baby catalogue, marking items they needed with a red highlighter pen. More money they didn’t have. It didn’t seem to make things any better to consider these things essentials: a car seat, a travel cot, changing mats; at least he hadn’t yet bothered to work out how to convert Euros to Sterling. This way, the total would just be so many figures that he didn’t understand; it might make the pain of unfolding his wallet that bit more bearable. They arrived in Saintes as the stallholders were in the process of packing away their produce. Hastily, Molly hurried to buy vegetables and a few cuts of meat for that evening’s meal, her easy way with the language never failing to impress Ian. “Look at the cheeses,” he said. “My God. Look at what we’ve missed.” “We can come again,” Molly said. “There’s always the market in Cognac we can go to. There’s even one in Matha, although I’ll have to find out when it’s on.” The baby shop was on the other side of the market, on a one-way street. They passed the remaining few stalls, and their owners, who were hosing down their pitches and loading the last trays and cartons into their vans. A butcher wiped down his chopping blocks. Steel glinted. A pile of skinned rabbits gritted their teeth at Ian as they were tipped into a thick polythene bag. Their eyes seemed too big for the heads that contained them. Molly was hurrying on, aiming for a gap in the traffic. In the instant that Ian’s attention swung back to his wife, he saw another pile of peeled bodies being swept into storage. When he checked himself and stepped back to have another look, to confirm they were what he thought they were, the butcher flipped the latch off the awning and drew it across the service hatch. By the time he opened the baby shop door, and navigated a path through the prams and buggies, Molly had already gathered a number of items under her arm that hadn’t been on the original list. “What, do you want the baby to have nothing?” she asked, when he pointed out that their budget might not be sturdy enough to factor in these items. “I didn’t say that,” he said. “But come on. Toys, nightlights. A bean bag. Hardly essentials, are they?” She dropped the things at his feet. “You sort it out, then,” she said. He shrugged at the shop assistant as Molly slammed her way out of the shop. “Je suis desolé,” he said, haltingly, and then paid for everything. He found her sitting outside a café on the Cours Reverseaux. She was sipping a latté and flicking through a magazine at speed. Not reading anything, hardly looking at the pictures, just needing something to do with her fingers to deal with her anger. Her left foot bounced against her right. He watched it. He watched the sun glinting on the silver ring that encircled her little toe, a present he had given her on their honeymoon in Bali. “I’m sorry,” he said, but he had uttered the words too often for them to have any meaning. She thawed a little, on the way back. It helped that he had bought something that wasn’t on the list either: a small toy owl. It had seemed fitting, somehow. A tribute to the dead creature. The traffic had dispersed for the legendary French lunch; they made good time going back, and could enjoy more of the scenery now that there were no tailgating Renault drivers, or swerving HGVs to keep an eye on. Crumbling farmhouses; fields freshly opened by the tractors, the soil dark and dense, brown as wet leather; long gray roads. They turned on to one now, flanked by elm trees, an object lesson in perspective. “Now there’s pretty for you,” Molly said. “There are moves to pull trees like that down,” Ian said, and then mentally kicked himself for once again putting a downer on things. Why couldn’t he just agree occasionally? It was what she wanted to hear. “Why?” “Too dangerous. They hide the junctions joining the main road. So if a car comes out and you swerve so as not to hit it, there’s a tree waiting for you to wrap yourself around.” Silence. “But you’re right. Pretty. Reminds me of the opening titles to Secret Army.” Molly returned to her baby magazines and her yoga manuals. Ian switched on the radio. Normally he could not stomach the inane Euro- pop that tumbled from the speakers, but anything was better than this atmosphere. But then, a few minutes later, the signal faded, replaced by a wall of static so dense that Ian had to lash out at the volume control. “Jesus,” Molly said. “Do you mind?” “It wasn’t my fault,” he said, but she had blanked him again. Ian swallowed against his rising anger—he didn’t want to get into a fight with Molly in her state—and tried tuning the radio to a different station. Static followed him, wherever he sent the dial. “This bastard car,” he said. When he returned his full attention to the road, snapping off the radio with a curse, he flinched. A shaded figure was standing inches away from the Tarmac, a red fracture splitting his head. The fact that it was only a cardboard cut-out was no relief. “Did you see that?” Ian asked. “Look, there’s some more.” Single black figures, or pairs, were positioned by the road; they marched off into the distance, provocative, ineluctable, all of them with the same crude head injuries. Molly seemed unimpressed. “They’re fantômes,” she said. “They’re a warning to drivers. They signify that there have been deaths on these roads. Violent deaths. So slow down and watch what you’re doing.” Ian said nothing more on the drive home. He stopped off in Matha and bought an English newspaper, then popped into the local Bricomarché and bought a garden fork, a spade, some secateurs, a machete, and a pair of gloves. “Ian,” Molly said, as he got back behind the wheel, “Look, I know we’re not going through the best of patches at the moment, but things will get better. What might help is if you lay off buying things that we don’t need.” “The garden is in a mess, Molly. We need gardening equipment. What do you expect me to do? Kick the weeds into submission? Talk to them in a stern manner?” “Darling, there’s no need to be facetious. The garden can wait. We need to sort out a room for the baby.” “Which will be done.” “I know it will, but not if you’re out in the garden all day.” He swallowed, counted to ten. There was no question of him returning the gardening tools. Just let her have her moment. Let it slide over you. “And those newspapers. They’re so expensive for what they are. Why don’t you just check out the Beeb’s website?” Back home, he unloaded the car and made tea for them both. Molly watched him and then said she didn’t want any tea when he handed her a cup. Ian stared at her, but kept his mouth shut. He emptied the cup, rinsed it, grabbed his paper and his own tea, and headed for the door. “Where are you going?” she asked. “I’m going for a shit. Is that okay with you?” There were a couple of owl droppings on the cement floor of the hangar, he saw, as he was returning from the outhouse. He poked at them with his boot and they disintegrated: a tiny mandible, ribs like fishbones, half a skull, the size of a pistachio nut. Above him, a beam was spattered with white bird shit, like pointless graffiti. He suddenly found himself thinking of his child, safe and warm inside Molly. It had been this size once, smaller, even, and just as fragile. Its own bones as thin as an eyelash. A heart beating, the size of a pinhead. He entered the house determined to make things better. Molly was in the room they had chosen for the baby, chosen for its lack of a window, painting the roughly plastered walls. “You shouldn’t be doing that,” Ian said. “The fumes. Here, let me—” “Get away from me!” Molly’s eyes, in the gloom, glinted like scratched coal. The paint brush had become a weapon she held out in front of her. “Just leave me alone. I’ll have the baby without you, if that’s what it takes to be happy. I’m sick of doing everything around here while you swan off buying garden tools. I’m the only one preparing for this child. You haven’t even talked to me about what names you like.” He was too taken aback to retaliate, or to reason with her. He moved away from her as she returned to the wall, streaking the plaster with fiercely applied strokes. Crazed thoughts descended on him as he stepped into the garden, like the leaves that spiraled down from the disrobing trees. Leave now. Take the car and go. Fuck it. But the baby. The baby. Fuck it. She’ll leave you in the end and take the baby with her. Stick around for the birth and it will only be worse. It will be impossible to leave once you’ve held the child in your arms. Leave. Leave now. An agonized cry caught in his throat. Tears of impotent rage made further nonsense of the wild garden. He stalked to the barn where he had stored his equipment and rammed his fingers into the gloves. He took the machete and walked around the house to the fallen bough. She couldn’t let go of anything he said; nothing he could do was good enough. Even this, trying to clear the garden of obstacles, she’d criticize. I’m stuck here toiling and you’re outside doing all the lovely creative stuff. Great. Thanks. He attacked the naked limbs of the tree almost in a panic, shaking from the absurd interior arguments he was fashioning. Jesus, she wasn’t even around and he could get into a row with her. What did that mean? Nothing good, nothing good. The virgin blade chewed into the damp wood, squealing as he recovered it. The shocks that flew up his arm were welcome distractions. After a couple of minutes of senseless hewing, he stopped, exhausted. Despite the cold, sweat coated his forehead and steam was rising from his muscles. At the point where the tree had split from its roots, a great mass of stinging nettles had sprouted. Thick climbers and thorny vines moved through it, reminding him of Walt Disney scenes of enchanted castles guarded by menacing flora. He snorted and lifted the blade again. And they lived happily ever after. This time he worked more systematically, lopping off the branches close to the trunk and stacking them in a pile to be either burnt on the spot once it had dried, or to be stored as kindling. He thrashed at the nettles until enough of the climbers and vines had been exposed to be able to get at them. After half an hour he had cleared a goodly portion of the tangle, and the underlying shape of the garden was coming through. He felt calmer, and was beginning to enjoy himself, the sense of achievement as it grew, but the air was changing, deteriorating. The sky to the east was leaden, sucking all of the light into it. The hairs on Ian’s arms shifted slowly, like the legs of a cautious spider making itself known to something it hasn’t yet recognized on the web. A rumble shifted across the horizon. The engine fired first time, thank God. He didn’t relish the prospect of asking Molly to help him start the car, and the inevitable queries. He didn’t bother closing the gates in case she was already on her way down to see where he was going. The country lane to the main road was less than a mile long; by the time he had covered it, rain was spitting against the windscreen. There was nothing else on the road. The countryside opened up around him. A village a couple of miles to his left was painted momentarily with gold through a rent in the black sheet. Rain hung like fishermen’s nets, trawling the skies in great swathes. It must be ten miles across. Beyond it, or within it—Ian couldn’t tell—a sudden trigger of lightning burnt everything onto his retina. It was followed almost immediately by the crash of thunder, so close it seemed it must split the sky above him. Ian heard it despite the protesting engine. He pushed the car hard, hoping to intercept the storm as it passed over the N939. If he missed it, it would mean a pursuit along the smaller country thoroughfares, which would be impossible, especially if he had to slow down to fifty kph every time he hit a village. He wound down the window and was assaulted by the chill wind, the almost horizontal slanting of rain. “Come on!” he screamed. “Come on!” He took the car off the road at the top of a slight rise and parked without caring if he had spoiled the plowed patterns of the field, or whether he would be able to drive out of the mud when his adventure was over. He stumbled out of the car, unconsciously stooped because of the closeness of the sky. The darkness was alive. At its edges it trembled, where real light still existed, somehow compacted and intensified at the horizon, as if the pressure of the storm was affecting it. He could still make out the soft, black ribbons of rain as they approached, before they engulfed him and he became a part of their pattern. The howling of the wind went away as the storm’s heart settled over him and for a moment he could hear nothing, except for the beating in his own chest. It felt as though something invisible was being drawn up from the ground. He felt his testicles contract; the hairs on his nape standing to attention. He felt as if the sky was breathing him in. And then the sky opened under a brilliant slash of a knife that drove the grim colors away for a beat. Thunder collapsed around him, shaking him. Again he screamed, as hard as he could, but the sound was lost; his was a tiny voice, an insignificance. He slumped back against the car as the storm left him, now one, now three, now five miles further west, still violent, but already sounding weak to Ian’s ears. Rain continued to batter down, but he barely felt it. The sharp, almost sour taste of ozone flooded him. He felt alive for the first time in his thirty-odd years. He felt, somehow, defined. He watched the storm recede until it disappeared, and yet he stayed on, willing it to return, until the darkness around him no longer had anything to do with the weather. When he arrived at the house, he found he could not remember his return journey. Maybe the electrical play had done something to his mind, short-circuited him, thrown a few switches. Maybe pure elation had wiped a little bit of him out. The clock on the dashboard read a quarter to midnight. He eased himself out of the car and trudged in the dark around to the front of the house. What he’d give for a hot, deep bath now, instead of the cold shower that was their only means of keeping clean. A cognac then, and a piece of last year’s Christmas cake. He’d take some tea up to Molly and tell her about the storm. He would apologize, and promise to make things right between them. The storm had scored a line beneath him. Things could change. He wanted the best possible start for their baby. His clothes were strewn about the garden like the remains of bodies that had decomposed into the grass. The photograph of him and Molly on their wedding day was hidden behind a white star in the glass. His love letters to her were torn and discarded, fluttering at his feet. The front door was locked. He rapped on it, but Molly was either asleep, or ignoring him. He moved back from the door and looked up at the bedroom window. The shutters had been closed. “Molly? Molly, please?” he hated the wheedling tone that edged his voice. But she wasn’t giving way this time. Ian picked up his sopping clothes and the disintegrating cards and notes and dumped them in the outbuilding they were using for storage. He briefly considered spending the night in there, but it was cold, and there was an unpleasant smell of bleach from a sink where they washed their clothes. He went back to the car, shivering now. The storm had scoured the sky and it was eerily clean; there seemed to be more stars than the space they were studded into. Cold filled the gaps. Inside the car he started the engine and turned on the heating. It didn’t take long to warm up. He dragged a blanket from the boot through the access hatch in the back seat and wrapped it around him. He tried the radio. No static this time. There was a faint classical music station and he felt himself drifting as a soft, soothing piece played. He wondered vaguely who might have composed it, and what had driven him to do so. As sleep came, he recalled the tableau from the road as the lightning’s flash photography trapped it in his mind. The village, the black wet strip of Tarmac, the sheets of rain, the trees like shocked things staggering back from the ghastly breath of the weather. There was something else there, something, in his excitement, that he had missed the first time. A fat cuneiform shape, arresting itself against the thermals, talons outstretched in a classic pose of predation. A shriek startled him out of a dream that he could not fully recall, other than that it involved the machete, and dark parts of the garden that became more, not less, tangled as he scythed through to them. He moved in the seat and pain ricocheted through him like a hard steel ball in a game of bagatelle. His arms felt as if they had been wrenched into impossible positions, forced to do things beyond what human physicality ought to be able to achieve. They felt tenderized. His hands were raw and itchy, as they were when he washed lots of dishes in detergent without moisturizing them afterwards. Gingerly, he straightened and his gaze fell upon the rear- view mirror. In it he saw three figures reduced by the night to faceless mannequins: two close to the rear of the car, one further behind, almost at the great arched gate. All of them approached stiffly, incrementally, their outlines filled in with a black that was deeper than their surroundings. They seemed, somehow, damaged. The click that jerked him from his paralysis was his throat reacting as he tried to swallow. He got out of the car. He got out of the car and he did not look back because to do that was to confirm his own madness. He would not allow that. There was nobody else in the grounds of his house. Ian stood by the car long enough for them to be able to touch him, if that was what they wanted, and then, feeling vindicated, walked to the front of the house. Dawn light had set fire to the lowest edge of the gloom, but it was damp and it burned slowly, coming on with the same terrible slowness as the figures he had seen. Thought he had seen. He tried the door and felt a bitter victory to find that it was unlocked. Molly had capitulated. He was being offered an unspoken invitation to return to the fold. He passed through the kitchen, which smelled faintly of the previous night’s casserole, and he broke off a piece of stale baguette to take the edge from his enormous hunger. Food could wait. At the top of the stairs he smelled the fresh paint in the nursery and felt cold fingers of rooms seldom used reaching out to him. In the bedroom he switched on the light and was greeted by an empty bed, the covers torn away from it, lying in a pile in the middle of the floor. “Molly,” he said, and his voice fell flat. Had she gone into labor while he was sleeping? Why didn’t she come to him in the car? Surely her troubles with him could be forgotten if their baby were on the way. She wouldn’t go to a neighbor for help instead, would she? Their first baby. How could she not want him with her? He hurried downstairs, feverishly patting his pockets for the car keys. Presumably she would have been taken to Saintes to give birth. He ought to ring ahead, but he didn’t have the number, and anyway, he was reluctant to talk to a voice that couldn’t understand his urgency, and time was precious to him now. All that was forgotten when he stepped into the cold mist of morning and saw the figures again, shifting slowly around the corner of the house— two walking abreast, the other still lagging behind—the jagged wounds in their heads clearly visible, shining wetly in the embryonic light. He stepped away from them, into the shade thrown by the canopy of trees. He heard the ticking of long gone rain on a carpet of dead leaves as the branches gave up the water they had gathered the previous night. The owl landed on the wall and began to clean its bloodied beak. The light’s slow accretion, so subtle that it couldn’t be measured. Ian turned to look up at the crooks of the branches and waited for her wrenched shape to assume there, and that of the strange pendulum that swung bloodily from her guts. He retrieved his machete from the foot of the tree at the same moment that the third figure joined its companions. Ian rejoined his own moments later.

© 2004 by Conrad Williams. Originally published in Use Once, Then Destroy. Reprinted by permission of the author.

[JUMP TO THE AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT]

Conrad Williams is the author of seven novels, four novellas, and over 100 short stories, some of which are collected in Use Once, Then Destroy and Born with Teeth. In addition to his International Horror Guild Award for his novel The Unblemished, he is a three-time recipient of the British Fantasy Award, including Best Novel for One. His debut anthology, Gutshot, was shortlisted at both the British Fantasy and World Fantasy Awards. He is currently working on a novel that will act as the prequel to a major video game from Sony, as well as a novel of supernatural horror. A Home in the Dark David J. Schow

Californians don’t even get out of bed for less than a 5.0. What is more annoying is that any temblor at all is classified as an “earthquake,” thereby making the news, which prompts a flood of emails and phone calls from the East: “Are you okay?!” Trust me, we’re fine. We didn’t even notice the calamity and probably slept through it. If a luxury liner takes on a little water, that’s not news; if the ship keels over or sinks, that’s news. If a racecar driver whined to national media about a slight rear-end shimmy at 180mph, he’d be laughed out of the pit, whereas if he crashed and made a fireball, it would be noteworthy on the old daily feed. Most Southern California quakes are akin to one misstep while strolling. It might throw your balance off for a moment, but you keep walking. Think of how your bed wiggles side-to-side when a cat jumps onto it, or your partner merely seats him or herself on the opposite end. That’s what most local seismic events feel like. It’s not worth mentioning until skyscrapers keel over and fissures swallow cars. But everybody has seen certain movies, and in their dark, secret hearts they want to hear that bridges have collapsed and wholesale panic reigns, because that would serve us all right for living on the Left Coast, Sodom to New York’s Gomorrah. The irony is that many of those “are you okay?!” messages come from zones that catch twenty tornadoes per year. Or cities so frozen that the dead cannot be counted until the spring thaw. Or New Orleans. Most of my fellow Los Angeles sinners hear quake news the day after, usually during wakeup coffee, since for some mystical reason a lot of the minor temblors strike unerringly between two and five am. These little ground shivers start far out in the desert and radiate the same as ripples in pond water, diminishing in force as they peter out. Or the infamous San Andreas fault will hiccup while it (and you) are fast asleep. Maybe it just had a nightmare and needs a drink of water. Maybe a dinosaur woke up. Or perhaps somebody (not you) just had themselves some terrific sex. Did the earth move for you, too? By the time there is a rumble and some odd motion, by the time you can ask yourself is it a quake, it’s over. One view holds that frequent tremors are a good thing— it’s the earth adjusting itself. Take that, you smug Midwesterners, living in your fool’s paradise where nothing ever wiggles. One day without warning your entire town will plummet into a yawning crevice, because your topography has failed to compensate tectonically. In Los Angeles, when the whole city shakes, it’s from movies bombing at the box office on opening weekend . . . especially those bloated CGI tentpoles with budgets in excess of the gross national product of many small countries. The notorious Northridge quake of ’94 struck at four- thirty during the wee hours. It’s called the Northridge quake even though the epicenter was in Reseda, about sixteen miles from my house in the Hollywood Hills, which isn’t as glitzy as it sounds. That was a 6.7 magnitude for twenty seconds, reaping a tally of fifty- seven dead, 9,000 injured, and a gross cost of around twenty billion dollars. By the time it reached my house, it knocked some books off a shelf and assassinated a dinner plate, which left me short one matching place setting and became bothersome enough that I had to buy an entirely new set of dishes. Tragedy is relative. The way I discern a mild quake is by glancing at a candle sconce that hangs down from my fireplace mantel. It’s made of cast iron in the shape of an owl. If that thing is rocking to and fro on its own, it’s either an earthquake or my house is possessed by a sardonic poltergeist. I felt a nudge and glanced at the owl. Sure enough. It was three o’clock in the morning, the “midnight of the soul,” as some poets would have it—although that reference actually comes from an old hymn, “If, On a Quiet Sea.” I was up and feisty at three am, because that’s when I can get the most work done. Phones and texts and tweets and prompts all subside by ten o’clock, and anybody who comes banging on the door after that deserves to say howdy-do to a gun muzzle. The clock measures seconds more prudently. Even my online connectivity seems more forgiving at night. You can feel the hostile outside world ease its grip just a notch for downtime, relaxing into the more ancient rhythm of tides and phases of the moon. I have never understood why regular citizens still cling to the outmoded notion of keeping an invasive telephone right next to their sleeping place—“for emergencies,” they’ll always tell you. Right. Then again, I would never permit a TV screen in my bedroom, either. It would make me feel like an invalid. And since most of the walking world has eagerly embraced the notion of constant, unrelenting contact, it only makes sense for them to be hooked up even while they’re asleep . . . and if that’s not an Orwellian dilemma, I don’t know what is. Not that I’m a Luddite. What I was doing was writing and proofreading online manuals for Javascript—that’s right, helping strangers navigate the chop of internet commerce, meta-indices, interoperability consortia, HTML validators, and are your eyelids getting heavy yet? I’ve even touched upon such exotic topics as Tesla’s free energy converter—you can actually see the genius’ blueprints online—and the realities of copyright law in an age where most common users get all huffy if you tell them everything they see is not for free, and stealing is still stealing. In fact, it’s the job that helps me turn off all the “devices,” since being nakedly tracked on a 24/7/365 basis seems too much like additional wage work. I won’t say our brave new world is bad; I’ll just say some aspects seem more aimed at obliterating my privacy than they should be. I was working from home—what once was called “telecommuting,” but that never caught on—in the middle of the night, without having to dress for the job, comfortably at home in the Hollywood Hills. Again, not as red-carpet as it sounds. My house is above the flats in Beachwood Canyon but not nestled in the shadow of the Hollywood sign, which is on a whole separate mountain (Mount Lee). My house was here before most of the others in the Canyon, built in 1926 during the first construction rush attendant to the Hollywoodland real estate development. Time passed and people built more houses, virtually anywhere they could fit, resulting in a mad mashup of architectural styles all chockablock with each other. The badly-maintained, serpentine meander of roads that feed this area is more sundered and pocked than the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and practically none of the residents ever use a garage for actual parking—the overage of vehicles parked curbside exacerbates this urban arteriosclerosis and keeps the fire department screaming about access. Each resident has visitors, and company means more cars, and non-locals rarely have any skill when it comes to parking on steep and already-narrow streets. Fat Navigators and Escalades jut into the roadway and quickly steam up your kill urge. It’s a jungle up here. People don’t walk. They have their people walk their dogs or air out their children. The only pedestrians you see up here are lost tourists, looking for the goddamned sign that’s in plain sight. They think it’s a restaurant or amusement park or something you can go to in order to enjoy an entertainment experience. You see bumper stickers that read: Why is it called tourist season if we can’t shoot them? The interesting distinction of my house is that, against the odds of rampant super-development, there is a vacant lot to either side. It’s nestled into the backside of a mountain, designed to relax against the bedrock instead of somersault downhill if there’s a seismic event. If it was earthquake-bolted, then the structure would be married by girders to the rock, which would vibrate everything loose. The ’50s and ’60s homes cantilevered out of the cliffside are in more danger of rattling downward than my place. To my immediate south there is a deep valley—more a fissure—which offers a drop of about fifty feet from my rear patio. There’s a huge fallen tree full of termites spanning the deepest point, where underbrush has grown unchecked. Of course it’s technically a lot, but only a lunatic or a filthy-rich gambler would ever think about building something there—you’d have to blast out the entire hillside from above, then build a “stairstep house” straight down. It was easy enough to look up on the internet, and turned out to be so unbuildable that it was astonishingly cheap. The empty parcel to my north is on the same kind of land I am (the top of a hummock). It sold to a buyer eight years ago and ever since then the fellow has been fighting the zoning commission over variances for the home he plans to build there. Lately, ominous heavy trucks have shown up to pour immense foundation caissons of concrete that required anchor holes thirty-five feet deep. Construction will take at least another eighteen months. I suppose it was inevitable. The eventual eyesore will rise to three stories, but the lot is set back and to the left of my view, which means I’ll never even see it from anywhere except my kitchen. I’ll know it’s there, though, crowding me. Which is why I wanted to buy the other lot, the one with the dead tree. To keep from being surrounded. A bargain at the price, especially for land in Los Angeles. That wasn’t very likely, though. The economy was not cooperating with my dreams. This year made last year look like a birthday party (clowns and all), and last year had been dire. I was running out of breath in the mortgage marathon, gliding on fumes and hoping to place my few meager work bets appropriately. One gig can change everything—especially in Hollywood—but the trick is nailing that one gig in your sights with the bottomless stealth and patience of the high hide . . . then taking it down like a former lover and not giving up until you’ve feasted on its heart. My creditors were not likely to appreciate my good intentions—another reason for avoiding voice messages that always mispronounced my name. After a suitable grace period, minions came to pound on the door to ascertain whether the property was, in fact, occupied. This happens as a matter of course. Tenants often die without telling anyone. The entire nation was defaulting on its obligations and ducking the check faster than a hanger-on at a group dinner, but such parsimony was accepted, even encouraged so long as you were the size of a bank or a political campaign, the size of history’s other Big Lies, the super-size of “too big to care.” Those of us not powerful enough to raise our own debt ceiling were doomed to scandal and ill repute. Even mighty Kodak went bankrupt just prior to the 2012 Academy Awards, and kicked up a minor brouhaha about removing its imprimatur from the venue for the high-profile distribution of golden statuettes (not solid gold—never, in fact—but a gold-plated alloy that put the unit cost for making an Oscar at about five hundred bucks per, in case you were overcome with curiosity). It had been a down year. It happens, and your tale of woe is no worse to you personally than someone else’s travail is to them. Nonetheless, the harpies of finance were unwelcome as I tried to hold fast and scan the barren ocean horizon for signs of land. The stress can sneakily deplete your metabolism of vital nutrients, and before you realize it, you become lightheaded, exhausted, and angrier than usual. I was at that precise precipice of disorder when I caught a man skulking around outside, taking pictures of the house. This was the same day as the ground’s most recent predawn shudder, the last mini-quake that would rake in the messages of concern from afar: Are you okay? Whole books have been written about the global allure of the Hollywood sign, and the reasons tourists make hadj to photograph it. If you drive up Beachwood any time—even in the middle of the night—there they are, trying to immortalize themselves in the vicinity of an icon they only vaguely comprehend, arms outstretched in bizarre, balletic poses, pretending to “hold up” the sign for the camera, absurdly proud that they are the first to have thought of this perspective trickery, confidently smug that “it wasn’t what I thought it would be,” as though they had devoted any thought to the process at all. One does not see famous people on the hoof, for this is a neighborhood where neighbors keep to themselves, except for the usual irritants such as the “homeowner’s associations” made up of bored hausfraus, the unfamous, or the busybodies. Adjacent to Griffith Park and Bronson Canyon, the hillside clusters of homes are backed up to the wilderness area surrounding the Mulholland Dam. The manmade reservoir is called Lake Hollywood for the same reasons the concrete spillway that bisects the San Fernando Valley is called the L.A. River—to confer a false sense of nature in the midst of the urban. The real neighbors in this locale are the often-startling wildlife: deer, coyotes, bobcats, raccoons, skunks, rattlesnakes, and all their prey. The coyotes are savvy, organized, and know which day is garbage day; they compete with the Mexican scavengers who come to raid the recycling bins. They (the coyotes, not the Mexicans) will boldly snatch your housecat or small dog for a snack if it wanders into the world. The dreaded rattlers are more rumored than seen, more feared than experienced, but the phobia generates from the concept that they can fit through the same small apertures through which lizards, scorpions, spiders, and impossibly tiny mice often gain access to even a secure home. Most often, if you spot a rattler, you need do nothing. They buzz as a warning, and unless cornered, will flee as fast as their snaky belly scales can transport them, which is very quickly indeed. Just how fast, you can never know if you’ve only seen them on TV or behind glass. Ever-frantic and meddlesome, local citizens’ groups wax dictatorial about animal encounters, advising you to lock up your offspring, call Animal Control, and live in a tightly-wound state of perpetual panic. Above all, they caution, don’t feed the critters. I called bullshit on that long ago, saddened that such people would never experience the wonder of seeing a deer standing on their front lawn in the predawn. The beasts were here before us; they lived here, and we needed to appreciate the fact that they had allowed our cohabitation, not that they had been given a vote. A lot of my leftovers went over the side, into the valley with the broken tree, half as tribute and half as practicality—my garbage disposal had clogged up once and I never wanted that nightmare to happen again. Sometimes, though, the wildlife got pushy and failed to abide by the unspoken covenant of inside versus outside. Such as the time my car began to malfunction as a result of a giant rat setting up housekeeping in the engine bay. It was the inviting warmth of the motor that attracted this invader; during a cold snap it must have seemed like a resort, parked there by the narrow curb. Rats love to gnaw things; if they don’t, their teeth grow out of control. This one chewed up my hoses and wiring. I opened the hood one afternoon to put in more power steering fluid (my first guess as to what was going wrong with the car) and was confronted with a wonderland of shredded plastic, a nest of repurposed insulation and Styrofoam littered with nut husks, orange peels, and little ratty footprints. Quite without warning, very much like Whack-A-Mole, a startled rat head poked up from the engine configuration and withdrew just as quickly to make his escape. He hit the street with an audible thud and I watched his enormous rat caboose beat a double- time retreat down into the underbrush to the south. The damned thing was practically the size of a meatloaf; how the hell had it squeezed itself into the convolutions of the motor? After getting the engine refurbished, I saturated it with a repellant—never was a substance more aptly named, since this was composed of such ingredients as dried blood (the first item on the label), seaweed, ammonia and other noxious compounds, guaranteed to drive away the hardiest of creatures. It stank up the car for a month but performed as advertised. Lesson learned and logged. It was so vile you had to wear latex gloves and a paper filter mask when applying it, because if it got onto your garments you could smooch them goodbye. Even pushier, the goddamned tour buses were starting to snake up onto my street, invariably getting lost right in front of my house, or worse, disgorging outsiders and foreigners to snap odd angles in their ceaseless pursuit of the Hollywood sign. The guy I caught in front of the house that afternoon was not a tourist. I spotted him through the kitchen window and immediately knew this was some minion of the bank, sent to photograph my home in preparation for more harassment. Like the rattlesnake, I had been cornered just enough to strike. I went outside and braced him before he could jump in his Prius and get away. I had a gun tucked into my pants when I did it. California is a state in which you have to be extremely cautious when it comes to the deployment of firearms, even as a threat. On the topic of defending one’s home and hearth against bad guys, here is how a friend with the LAPD put it to me: You can’t shoot them in the yard even if it is your property. If you do shoot them in the yard, drag them into the house and put a weapon in their hand. A butcher knife will suffice but a gun is better if you’ve got one that doesn’t trace to you. You have to establish that you acted in fear for your own life, not like Dirty Harry. You have to establish that there was no other option. Now you know and I know that a reasoned discussion is probably not going to take place in the midst of an intrusion. But if you put them down, be ready to prove they were intent on doing you bodily harm . . . you might even have to injure yourself to prove it. Simply shooting someone doesn’t prove what the Penal Code calls “specific intent to kill.” The idea is that you acted to prevent violence, not cause further violence. Thus, if I walked out onto a public street and stuck a gun into the face of Prius-boy, I would be committing a crime . . . unless the gun was unloaded, and stayed tucked as an implicit threat rather than a definitive one. If I waved the gun in his face, I would be guilty of the diminished charge of “brandishing a weapon in a threatening manner,” something almost impossible to prove, even though the mere act of pulling your jacket aside to exhibit a weapon counts as “brandishing.” From the window, the guy with the Prius had the rodential look of a frustrated screenwriter remanded to menial subsistence tasks. He was antsy and did not want to be here. He was like a process server or a meter maid, slogging through a job he hated (and which no one would ever thank him for) in order to reap a wage. I thought of squirting him with the noxious animal repellant. That would at least fuck up the rest of his day and cost him some duds, and return some degree of the headache I had suffered at the whims of his fiscal masters. It wasn’t the day for rapier-like gestures. Once I was on the boil I frothed over more quickly than I ever could have imagined, the black, pent-up rage (born of one humiliating month after another of mounting debt) hitting critical mass almost instantaneously. I charged up my walk, yelling at the sonofabitch to remove his ratty ass from my sight. He spotted the gun instantly; I never even had to touch it. “I’m calling the police!” he blurted as he backpedaled. His thumbprinty tortoiseshell glasses made his eyes two blank white circles. “I’m standing on my own property,” I said. “You’re threatening me!” He dropped his keys and awkwardly dipped to retrieve them while monitoring me. “I’m threatening that camera.” I pulled the gun, a lovely nickel-finished Sig .40, and placed it atop my mailbox, still on my property. I didn’t need it. Two steps more and I was between Prius-boy and his car. He retreated rearward, toward the high curb that was the only barrier to the deep crevasse of the empty lot below. If you weren’t careful while parking, your wheels might bump over it and you’d be halfway to a nasty end- over-end plummet. His eyes prayed for intervention but there were no dog walkers or joggers to bear witness. He was still formulating his next half-assed protest— something about how I had no right—when he crossed one foot behind the other and stumbled over the curb. To either side of my frontage there is a classic old Hollywoodland streetlamp from the 1920s, an upright concrete post with a single apothecary globe and the un- nostalgic designation of “CD-803” to denote its style. The globes are high-impact weatherproof plastic now, and the bulbs upgraded to modern halogens. Every time the power goes out in the Hills—that is to say, almost every time the Santa Ana winds blow harder than a breeze—the timing on the street lights gets screwed up. I remember that when the invader with the Prius and the nosy camera fell down the hillside, the streetlamp was on even though it was mid-day. I had been working all night. Slept until noon. He had assumed I wouldn’t be home, just like a burglar. Next to the southern streetlamp is a gnarled pepper tree. When the guy got tangled in his own legs and fell, he grabbed for the streetlamp. He grabbed for the tree. He missed both and gravity took him. He made a little whup! sound as he fell. On top of the mountain bedrock there is a layer of permeable topsoil laced with frangible caliche. Rain and wind belabor it to treachery. If you try to plant a foot in it for purchase you’ll sink ten inches, your center of balance will be thrown, and you’ll still fall. Nine times out of ten, the branch you grab to arrest your descent will uproot or disintegrate. I learned this when I once roped down into the depression to harvest some paddle cactus for my front yard. It was growing wild all over the lot, threaded through vines and dead wood. No way I would attempt going down there without a belaying line; it was just too steep. I made it to the curb in time to see the guy’s feet flail up into the air as he began a backward somersault and started a minor avalanche of loose rocks and debris. Many of the stones are shaped like dinosaur eggs, and locals collect them to decorate their walkways. Weather delivers them regularly from the constantly-eroding hillsides. The man fell all the way down, disappearing into his own self-generated dust cloud. The sliding sound was akin to a heavy bag dragged quickly over gravel. The gauntlet was brimming with pointed sticks, rusted metal, critter nests, jagged stone, and decades-worth of poisonous litter. In seconds the only sound was settling rockfall. The dust cloud wafted away, hazing the air, almost the same as if there had been another minor earthquake. I picked up the guy’s camera, dropped near the curb next to the streetlamp, a place where you could regularly find the morning-after effluvia of late-night curbside sex. Balled tissues, dead twelve-packs of lite beer, the biologically translucent Glo-worm of a flattened condom or two, once a single shoe, once a pair of viral-looking Jockeys (hanging from the tree). It is dark and remote enough up here to tempt wily fornicators lacking a safe house in which to fuck. Up by the scenic lookout near the reservoir, you could sometimes see parked cars with no earthly reason for being there . . . until you spotted the steamed-up windows and the pressed ham against tinted glass. There was no cry for help from below. The Prius was still parked in front of my home. Dammit. I couldn’t depend on the coyotes to eat the guy with anything approaching haste. The day had just gotten larger. I stood guard, watching, waiting, and nothing new happened. After what I thought was a suitable period, I reluctantly went back into the house to fetch my climbing rope. Just as I had when hunting cacti, I jerry-rigged a rudimentary harness with a six-foot piece of rope looped back on itself and secured with fisherman’s knots. You twist the loops into a figure-eight and step into it. I tied off against the streetlamp and began to back down the nearly seventy-degree slope, carefully. The air smelled of allergen-laden vegetation, dust, and creosote bushes. Ten feet down from street level, the valley was a mausoleum of haunted house trees, broken edges jutting up no differently than pungi sticks. A lot of transients had pitched a lot of garbage down here, despite the residential trash receptacles up and down the street. Aluminum lawn chairs, now rusted to match the foliage. Crushed beverage cans, shattered bottles, even the butt of an old refrigerator poking up from the strata like the prow of a half-sunken ship. From my balcony vantage I could discern none of these things in detail, because new growth had interlaced to form false canopies and hidden deadfalls. Somehow the spooky branches shifted position to foul the straight line of my rope, and I slipped, planting my hand into a dark jellied mass of some animal or foodstuff in mid-decay, still moist. Further down, there were bones—small animals, eaten by bigger ones. Looped around the intact neck of a Corona beer bottle with a logo at least twenty years out of date was a pet collar for some long-lost companion named Erky. Tiny paws and hearts alternated around its sun-bleached surface. Small dog or large cat, Erky had been delivered to pet heaven a long time ago. You always saw posters and homemade flyers for MIA pets down by the Beachwood Market. They faded over time and were replaced by new flyers, new victims. My descent quickly became a sort of archeological tour, like that stretch of highway in Colorado that takes you through history one layer of sediment at a time. I had no idea there was this much sheer stuff down here. Rotten chunks of plywood. Twisted spires of forsaken rebar. Sundered foundation concrete frosted with asphalt, as though someone had torn up an old road and dumped it into the nearest available open space rather than truck out such cumbersome waste. An ancient bicycle that had somehow gotten folded double, tires long decomposed to fibrous spiderwebs. A wealth of cubbies and sinkholes in which whole tribes of creatures could set up housekeeping unobserved. It took me twenty minutes to rope down to the bowl of the valley, which rose again to present a rock wall to the curve of the residential street below mine. This was the furthest a person could conceivably fall . . . and there was no person other than me. The line of rope defined the path of a spill, and there was no chance Mr. Prius had taken an abrupt turn on the way down. It was against physics. He had fallen down the hillside and vanished as though swallowed by the earth. I know; I checked. It was unlikely that he had rallied enough to climb out to the next street; surely a tumble such as his would have snapped a bone or two. I would have heard him. I had expected to find him unconscious and bleeding. My hope was to assist him back to the world, explain my situation in the face of this larger catastrophe, and beseech some small human mercy or common understanding, which was foolish—this guy represented the bank. My foot sank into a scatter of junk with the sensation of grinding crushed ice underheel. The pile was mostly dried brittle bones, the leftovers of some wild food-chain picnic. Among them I found a nearly intact skull, elongated with pronounced canines, bigger than a rabbit or raccoon skull. It was from a coyote. Something down here had eaten a coyote, or it had opted to die and decay in this hidden spot. Or other scavengers had enjoyed take- out. There were redtail hawks here, and whole murders of ravens. Even seagulls, occasionally. They swooped down and snatched prey and had been known to lose bits of their quarry in flight. Once I found a single white cat paw on my deck and had to suss out how it might have gotten there. Some unseen thing slithered heavily through the lean- to of dead eucalyptus branches to my right. I froze the same way I did whenever there was an earthquake, waiting to see if that was all. I backstepped into more bones with a potato-chip crunch. Gravity had brought them to rest here, a bargain bin of two-for-one calcified runes. There was a little clotted spout sticking up, which turned out to be the mouth of a small, squared-off bottle. A shred of petrified label clung to it with an insectile iridescence, but was unreadable. There was embossing near the neck of the bottle and when I wiped away the scabs of dirt I could see that it read 3-in-1. Jesus. 3-in-1 oil had not been in stoppered glass bottles since 1910, when they went to screwtops (I looked it up). This could not have been idly loitering around the surface for a century, waiting for me to pick it up as casually as dropped change. For antique bottles, one had to dig. Unless a seismic event helped push ingrown treasures upward, as is the nature of earthquakes. Near the bottle, already mottled with dust, I found an iPhone, still warm. I pocketed these finds and wasted the last few moments of waning daylight in a half-hearted look- around that could not honestly be called a search. There was no Prius guy down here, and I was in trouble. During my grubby ascent, a hypodermic pain pierced my thigh and I instantly concluded I had gotten nailed by a bougainvillea vine. It’s not much of a fantasy to claim these plants, émigrés from South America, are actively malign. Used as decoration by people who don’t have to tolerate close contact, its woody tendrils invade and dominate adjacent plant life while its fat, annelid roots steal and hoard groundwater from competitors. The vines bristle with waxy black thorns that are mildly toxic. Sweep the vine aside and two or three more thorns will invariably bite you. It fits my definition of a parasite since it thrives on murdering its neighbors. The puncture in my leg, beneath my pants, began to itch madly. Later, with the now-empty oil bottle on my desk, I noted that no pestersome phone calls had come in for the day. Of course not—they had sent a guy to photograph the house. Some hammer was about to fall. The call list on Prius guy’s iPhone confirmed that he was acting on behalf of one of my mortgage companies. His car was still parked out front—locked and alarmed. If it sat there for longer than two days I could call a special number and have it towed as an abandoned vehicle. It happens often up in the Hills, and the Prius was on the hot list of desirable autos for theft, conveniently enough. Any second I expected hostile banging on the front door by a man who would resemble a revenant from a zombie movie or The Monkey’s Paw writ new, demanding his camera and iPhone and at least a quart of my blood. Or worse, police cars with flashing lights and a waterfall of questions. Note that I said the “now empty” oil bottle, above. After I took a hot shower to wash off my climb, I found a hobo spider perched on the comforter of my bed, near where I had flung my trousers. It had crawled out of my pocket, hence out of the oil bottle, to sting me for disrupting its routine as I climbed out of the valley. I should have smashed it in revenge, but instead plonked a drinking glass over it to scoop it up for closer inspection. Hobo spiders are locally mistaken for the dreaded brown recluse, mostly because . . . well, they’re brown and their bite can raise skin lesions. It’s an aggressive little beast because it can’t see very well. I found out that it is a funnel-webber, an import from Europe in line with the gag that goes nobody in L.A. is actually from L.A. It raked its metallic legs along the inside of the inverted glass, impotent and imprisoned, now. Its life was up to me. The reflex to eliminate him didn’t feel right. I had invaded his territory, usurped his home and stuck it in my pocket, and if anything his response sting was more in the manner of a toll to pay. I finally walked out onto the rear deck and cast him back into the valley from which he had come. I worked over the tiny ulceration on my leg with Benadryl. My appetite had zeroed out and sleep was a joke. Waited. My TiVO was two-thirds full but no drama could engage me since I already had a better one of my own. Had a drink. Didn’t help. Ditto cigarettes. A hundred times, I looked out the front door peep- hatch to see if the Prius had magically vanished. It was still sitting there, squat and inviting only as a new nightspot hang for the rat with the big butt, or his posse. The night was cool and clear. My house is at the same elevation as the observatory in Griffith Park, two mountaintops to the east. The hardier stars shone against the barrage of city light, stubbornly declarative, almost arrogant since their light took so long to reach us that they might not exist anymore. Carl Sagan once said the Earth was a dot, a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. My problems meant nothing to the universe at large. That’s when the earth below my feet decided to shake again. This was more than a wiggle, it was a rumble as the ground tasted and tested a modified arrangement. A five-point or better, the kind where they advise you to get under a lintel or dash outside. I was already outside. Some of the stars above me blotted out. Maybe they were dead, or had all clicked off at once in an unlikely group, but that wasn’t it. There was an enormous shape, rising up from the valley, blocking the starlight the way an ancient redwood can bisect a postcard view, dominating it. It wavered almost mesmerically in a kind of cobra dance—albeit a cobra with a mouth that could swallow a limousine. I could not see a face, features, or eyes, just the absence of light where it lingered, but I knew it was looking down at me. I thought of Prius guy’s camera, inside on my desk. Yeah, the flash of a strobe would solve—and probably end—everything. There had been no earthquake. The dark jaws distended and a steaming tube of putrescence was ejected to splatter the lawn five feet from my shoes. Amid the strings and tatters of partially- digested tissue was most of a human skeleton, topsy-turvy in order. And a pair of half-dissolved tortoiseshell glasses. The shadow withdrew into the earth. Gloved and masked, I gathered the bones into a trash bag which I disposed of far from home. I got rid of the glasses separately, as I did the camera and iPhone, less their destroyed chips. I never found the guy’s car keys, which was normal for my credit line of luck. Two days later the Prius was towed away by the city. The spider bite eventually healed, leaving a tiny white scar. It took several months to subside. Among the general effects of the venom I found out that it was purported to cause “intense headaches, abnormalities of vision, and feelings of malaise.” Construction on the lot to my north was halted due to unanticipated geo-thermal stress fractures in the concrete, so read the report that judged the ground beneath that one lot to be unusually unstable, more so than the original survey had reckoned. I still toss leftovers over the side. Coyotes and other wildlife come to eat the offerings, and sometimes, something larger eats the eaters. There are rumors of a mountain lion loose in the vicinity. Pets continue to go missing, as is normal for this neck of the woods. You’ve seen dog’s paws twitch while they’re sleeping. If you stumble in your mind while dozing, you’re not really falling down, but the galvanic jolt of your body is enough to wake you up. Nowadays when I feel the house get jostled by that stealthy tremor in the dead of predawn, I don’t fear earthquakes as much. I know that it is only the guardian of this old place, dreaming.

© 2013 by David J. Schow.

[JUMP TO THE AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT] David J. Schow’s short stories have been regularly selected for over twenty- five volumes of “Year’s Best” anthologies across three decades, and have won the World Fantasy Award, the ultra-rare Dimension Award from Twilight Zone magazine, plus a 2002 International Horror Guild Award for Wild Hairs (his compendium of “Raving & Drooling” columns written for Fangoria). His novels include The Kill Riff, The Shaft, Rock Breaks Scissors Cut, Bullets of Rain, Gun Work, Hunt Among the Killers of Men, Internecine, and Upgunned. His short stories are collected in Seeing Red, Lost Angels, Black Leather Required, Crypt Orchids, Eye, Zombie Jam, and Havoc Swims Jaded. He has written extensively for films (The Crow, Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, The Hills Run Red) and television (Tales from the Crypt, Perversions of Science, The Hunger, Masters of Horror). His other nonfiction work includes The Outer Limits Companion and The Art of Drew Struzan. As expert witness, you can see him talking and moving around on documentaries and DVDs for everything from Creature from the Black Lagoon, Incubus, and The Shawshank Redemption to Scream and Scream Again, Beast Wishes and The Psycho Legacy. He is also the editor of the three-volume Lost Bloch series for Subterranean Press and Elvisland by John Farris. He co-produced supplements for such DVDs as Reservoir Dogs; From Hell; I, Robot; The Dirty Dozen Special Edition; and Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe. His bibliography and many other fascinating details are available online at his official site, Black Leather Required, www.davidjschow.com. He lives and works in his beloved Los Angeles. Google him, by all means. The H Word: Babes in the Wilderness Laird Barron

Some years ago I left Alaska, land of my birth. Since then I’ve dwelt in the cities and farmland of the Pacific Northwest, and deep in the mountains of western Montana. At the moment, the trail has led a long and winding way to upstate New York, about as far as one can migrate east and still dwell within the continental U.S. Nothing has changed except the scenery. Great storms lashed the East this spring, followed by unseasonably hot weather, lending this region the lush vibe of a temperate jungle. The mighty cicada host known as “Brood Two” awoke from its seventeen-year slumber and took over the world. Trillions of cicadas bored through dirt and leaves to emerge here in the Hudson Valley. Out there in the green and the dark, the insects trilled, their communal song rose to an agonizing pitch on the decibel register. For a time, it was an alien universe beyond the back deck of the house. That relentless song ceased every evening, but continued to echo in my dreams, shaping them. And come the dawn, the song resumed. Day after day for over a month so the cycle went, until one morning a hush fell over the nearby woods. A hush interrupted only by faint birdcalls, the rustle of leaves shifting against one another, indifferent to the annihilation of Brood Two. Death, in manifold forms, swept up innumerable flickering insect souls, and bore that light into the green and leafy graveyards that surround our toy model constructs. Weeks later, I walked among the withered carcasses of the cicada host. Hollow shells crunched beneath my tread. Reek and rot had diminished to a hint of perfume on the night breeze. I thought, this could be us. One day it will be us. What I believe to be true of horror is that it inevitably comes around to death. Death in the physical mortality, death of innocence, disintegration of moral constructs, erosion of sanity, physical transformation—either sub or posthuman. But where does it all go, the energy matrix that animates us? Into the ground, into the water, maybe into the zero vacuum of space or the maw of a black hole. What’s around us is merely a reflection of what lies within us writ large as mountain ranges and star fields.

* * * * I’ve long considered setting to be a critical element of horror and dark fantasy literature because a well-drawn location amplifies mood and atmosphere, secondary characteristics that are vital to such tales. So much of horror and the weird depends upon the architecture and the lay of the land, whether the action occurs within a haunted mansion or the bowels of a cavern. X marks the spot, and if that spot intensifies isolation or engenders dislocation or estrangement from civilization’s normative state, then so much the better. Horror is a primitive nerve. My personal bias leans toward the wilderness and its raw, flensing majesty, its implacable reality that transcends human pretense of superiority, if not negating our perceived significance. In the right hands, the landscape is of greater consequence than a mere backdrop, it becomes a character or an antagonist. This is exemplified in the classic short story by Jack London, “To Build a Fire,” wherein the man succumbs inexorably to the cold as his dog looks on, and all round this pair looms a vista of ice and snow and trees silent as death. Then there’s Hyboria, stomping grounds of Robert E. Howard’s infamous barbarian and the crucible of Conan’s transformation into a steely-thewed killing machine: home of weird beasts and weirder civilizations. Consider the alien river islets of “The Willows,” and the frigid outlands of “The Wendigo” by Algernon Blackwood. Or the godsforsaken moonscapes of the deserts of Mexico as indelibly imprinted upon our hind brains by Cormac McCarthy, and the lashed and seared post-apocalyptic nightmare vistas of his epic The Road. The characters in these tales are important, but they are challenged and illuminated by the landscapes they tread. Conan bursts from the wilderness to master the settled lands with his savagery; the hunting party in “The Wendigo” is illustrative of how the primeval world waits to swallow mankind whole; and the father and son bear witness to the fall of civilization and the revealed primacy of the devouring universe as they trek The Road. It is the landscape that dominates. It is the wilderness that defines.

* * * *

In the course of preparing an essay, I revisited “The Wendigo” a few years ago. The fires of summer were dwindling, and nights grew chill in my quiet neighborhood on the farmland outskirts of Olympia, Washington. It is a region of big old fir and maple, pocked by lakes and swamps, and even my suburban street lay beneath a mantle of primeval force during the long hours after midnight. I read Blackwood and also Karl Edward Wagner, that master of the rural horror story, as the winds came out of the north and the great limbs of the trees creaked and groaned along the black street and the rain slapped the glass of my office window. And I considered the many times I’d bunkered down in a tent or under a simple tarp back in the days of my youth, when my travels took me through the wilderness as a matter of routine. This experience revived in me an awareness that during my youth I’d lived for many years with an unconscious, but ever present, fatalism. There were dangerous animals, treacherous ice, and blizzards to contend with; my own flawed preparation, the naïve sense of invincibility we possess as young adults. All these presented the potential for serious mishap, as did encounters with the occasional fellow traveler, for not everyone in the wilderness is well met. The fatalism crept in over time, after I’d survived a blizzard by virtue of dumb luck. I’ve carried it with me ever since, like a talisman against the dark. Men and the works of men are tiny things against the backdrop of the terrestrial wilderness, and but specks lost in the cosmic gulf that yawns between nictitating points of light. When attempting to make sense of the ineffable, to grapple with horrors fantastic or mundane, we’d do well to remember this.

* * * *

For at least a decade after I departed Alaska, I experienced recurring dreams. In the most persistent of these, I walked across a plain of small stones and scrub brush toward a tiny cabin. The cabin was gray and decrepit. Its windows were smashed-in black sockets. As I trudged in shirt sleeves and tennis shoes, the sky darkened into iron. Snowflakes began to swirl around me; it froze upon my lashes and the cabin was lost. I am often asked where I get my ideas, and since I’m a horror writer, I’m often asked with suspicion. It’s not an easy question to answer with a straight face. The clichéd question has become far more interesting to me of late because I’ve chosen to take it literally. Where indeed? When speaking of muses, we may speak not only of passion and logic, intuition and divine inspiration, but also of place, the Ur landscape of deep, primordial consciousness that lies in the ocean womb and at the heart of the earth, and, of course, within the human heart. My chief muse is a pass through the Kaltag Mountains to Unalakleet in Alaska—a bridge between the Yukon and the Bering Sea. Many years have rolled by since my last visit, but I dream of that range often. The coldness, the shape and the darkness lie submerged in memory so that only the sonar of dreamtime ever really makes sense of its immensity. Other times I dream of the great immaculate and star-studded blackness that is a March night on the frozen Yukon River, or the ancient hills between Ophir and Iditarod where a handful of dusty snow can swirl to the empty horizon upon a gust of wind, yet moments later a hundred-strong herd of caribou might wheel over a ridge and thunder in a vast wedge of fur and hoof until it becomes a flickering shadow against the frozen sun. It must be similar for anyone who dwells overlong in a region dominated by its geographical features. The contours of the landscape pattern the contours of your mind. As the comport of your mentors and authority figures impress your child’s brain, by osmosis do the vicissitudes of season and weather leach into your psyche and, as an artist, when you breathe life onto the sterile canvas, it is the blood of the beast, the howl of the storm, that is emitted.

* * * * We at Nightmare Magazine like discussions. Please use the comments feature to give us your thoughts on whether the H brand is an albatross or worth holding on to.

Laird Barron is the author of several books, including the short story collections The Imago Sequence and Occultation, and the novel The Croning. His work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Inferno, Lovecraft Unbound, Sci Fiction, Supernatural Noir, The Book of Cthluhu, Creatures, The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, and Best Horror of the Year. He is a three-time winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, and a three-time finalist for the Stoker Award. His work has also been nominated for the Crawford, World Fantasy, International Horror Guild, and Locus awards. Artist Gallery: Łukasz Jaszak

Artist Spotlight: Łukasz Jaszak Julia Sevin

Łukasz Jaszak is a thirty-six-year-old self-taught photographer and graphic designer living and working in Krakow, Poland. He made his start in this dark discipline when approached to do album art for a friend’s metal band, eventually doing work for acts like Blood Red Throne, Decapitated, The Vision Bleak, Vomitory, and Behemoth. A visual perfectionist who enjoys making something from nothing, Jaszak cuts no corners: for his photoshoots, every item is carefully selected or created, right down to building his own sets and performing taxidermy for animal props. This stringency aside, Jaszak does not force himself to produce, but waits for his twisted muse to come to him. His work can be found at www.jaszak.net.

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So, Łukasz, what did you do before this?

Not much! My rabid obsessions started quite early. I’ve finished high school and said no to further “education” in this fucked up country. I stayed on my own and tried to do my own thing, which turned into a proper job some months after. I was distributing records of German Prophecy Productions here in Poland and before I knew it, I started designing album covers for them. Then, by word of mouth, more people flew in and I was making my living doing designs for bands and such. I’ve been doing some photography every now and then, but couldn’t really find my path until I decided to stop searching and focus on what I know best: darkness. And, of course, I have a day job, but it’s closely related to music and design so I can’t complain. It’s hard to make money on music these days, with all the downloads, markets collapsing and all that. (Plus I never went door to door asking people for jobs, so there, haha, maybe I could do better with a little asslicking, but I still refuse to do so.)

Music appears to be a large inspiration for you.

Yeah, music is always here, no matter what. I won’t be really original if I say I can’t imagine life without it. It’s been a major part of my life, if not the main one. Basically everything I’ve done so far has a lot to do with music, and I am thankful for that. I can’t say it inspires my work, though, it just gets me through thick and thin. I rarely get inspired by the bands I am working for. I can usually pull out a great artwork for the band and then tell them I never even bothered to hear their music. Some get really touchy about it, haha . . .

Is the dark and disturbing nature of your work tied to the music that launched you? Or do you have a separate and longer-standing interest in edgy art, and if so, can you tell us about that?

I don’t know much about my “art” . . . See, I can’t even name it properly. I don’t plan it, I don’t think it over, the ideas just pop up and it’s done. I don’t even have names for the things I’ve done. I rarely check others’ stuff, I guess I don’t want to know and get discouraged that something was already done or done better. I just go around and suddenly say, “You know, this would look killer if I put it together with this and that and in the middle of that,” and the idea is born. I suppose it comes from somewhere, but I am not at this step of self- discovery yet to know what the fuck is wrong with me. There’s surely a lot of self-expression and personal trauma in what I do. A lot of solitude, sadness, anger, and frustration, for sure.

You had the opportunity last year to shoot Henry Rollins. How did that come about?

It was nothing, really. No proper session or anything. He just happened to perform at one place and, since I was there, I decided to say hi and ask if I could snap a photo of him. He had no problem with that, and here we are. Funny thing, after a couple of shots I told him, “Gimme me more attitude,” and dude just pulled down his eyebrows and that was it, haha! It was great to meet a legend, even though I am usually not so crazy about this “meeting celebrities” thing.

As an autodidact, do you feel that art is antithetical to structured instruction? Or do you feel that you missed out?

I couldn’t tell, could I? It must be wonderful to be taught it all, to know what you’re doing and be professional enough to do whatever the fuck you like, but on the other hand I’ve met so many people who had the tools but were so clueless about what they want to do that they ended up nowhere. It tears me inside to see some of my truly talented friends who end up designing fucking icons for iPhone applications ‘cause it’s safe money. I know, we all gotta make ends meet, but they didn’t even try a different path.

You shoot a lot with your girlfriend, model Dolly Ann. What has that been like?

Definitely comfortable. I have a bad case of detest for most people, and all the photos I’ve taken are of friends. I never reach for “outside” models unless I get to know them first (which usually never happens, haha). But overall, shooting with my own girlfriend wasn’t as perfect as it may seem. We did some great work together, but I kind of ended up doing nothing else . . . But that’s an easy trap to fall into, so I don’t blame myself much. I am looking forward to trying something else in the future.

One of the themes of your work is illustrating the depravity and violence of what one might call American redneck culture. I wouldn’t go as far as you described it, as I don’t know that much about this culture. I just picked up visuals which were always fascinating to me—the look, the style—it just looks so good on camera. I’ve been following the lowbrow culture of America for a long time, be it hotrods, rockabilly, trailer trash style, et cetera. The redneck factor I just find humorous. Can’t relate much—I lived in my car once, but only for three months.

Do you have a life philosophy?

Kind of. It’s to do my own thing and prepare to die of starvation in the name of it.

Do you draw ideas from fiction?

Not really. I rarely read fiction. I usually swallow nonfiction only: biographies, stories, whatever the fuck. I suppose I am seeking kindred spirits in the world of the dead and glorious, because I sure as hell won’t find it in a girl next door.

Can you name some of your influences? Apart from the undisclosed location of my personal traumas, some of the people that inspired my style of shooting were definitely Nikki Sixx, Chad Michael Ward, P.R. Brown, Joseph Cultice, and Philip Warner. I absolutely love the drawings of Tom Bagley, too.

What’s your dream illustration job?

I’d love to work with anybody who is creative enough on their own. I am kinda tired of being approached by people who want their stuff to be done “I don’t know, your style, you rule” and then are too chickenshit to take it, so they strip it down part by part so it’s finally a piece of shit like everything else. That’s the point where I usually quit. I love “visual” bands who know what they want, be it Wednesday 13 or Twiztid, whatever! Working with those would probably go smooth as fuck.

What keeps you awake at night?

The future. I can’t stand the thought.

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

Few writers can authentically claim to be their own distinct genre, but there’s no question that Joe R. Lansdale is a category unto himself. He’s written award- winning horror, mystery, suspense, westerns, graphic novels and comics, media tie-ins, screenplays, and mainstream literature, yet each new work fits recognizably into the East Texas-slang-filled, fast-paced, fluid storytelling style that defines the Joe R. Lansdale genre. His most recent works include the novel The Thicket (which critics have compared to some of Mark Twain’s books), and the feature film Christmas With the Dead, which Lansdale’s son Keith adapted from Joe’s short story of the same name (Lansdale also served as producer on the film). Lansdale’s novel Cold in July has also recently been adapted into a movie starring Michael C. Hall, Don Johnson, and Sam Shepard.

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You were a full-time writer by 1981, and about 1989 was when your work suddenly seemed to be everywhere.

I feel like 1986 was a big turning point for me, because The Magic Wagon came out that year from Doubleday and got reviewed in the New York Times, so it kind of got that train going. At the same time, Dead in the West came out, so I also had the small press thing going on. And then “Tight Little Stitches” came out and was nominated for a World Fantasy Award, so that was a big year. It sort of built momentum toward 1989, which is when Cold in July came out.

For many of us, our introduction to your work probably came via the story “On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks” from the seminal anthology The Book of the Dead.

Right. I’d been selling short fiction in the seventies and eighties, and probably by about 1983 I’d started writing my stuff, in the sense that I’d sort of gotten out of the vein of the apprenticeship of writing like other people. I mean, you’re always influenced by other people, but from that point on my momentum was growing, and I think by 1986 somebody had started to take notice and the novels helped give that notice. By 1989 I was starting to get film options, and Cold in July came out, and that book was my second film option—I’d gotten Dead in the West before that.

So your career was kind of like a series of little plateaus.

Yeah, it’s funny, when you look back on it. 1973 is when I started, and I was selling nonfiction exclusively— in fact, I wrote nothing but nonfiction.

It was farm reports, wasn’t it?

Farm articles. I wrote an article with my mom, under her name, and sold it first crack out of the box, and then I sold every nonfiction article that I wrote, and I thought, “Well, this is easy.” But I wanted to write fiction—that was what I’d always wanted to do—and that took me a couple of years. I was working in the rose fields, and my wife was working in a meat-packing plant, and she told me to take three months off and just write. So I wrote a story a day, because I didn’t know you couldn’t do that. I wrote roughly ninety stories in ninety days. And over the next three years I got about a thousand rejections, because there used to be ten or twenty markets you could submit every story to.

And all this was on the old typewriter, not even using a word processor!

That’s right! It was a manual, too. I’d had those big old Underwoods, which were terrible. My wife had this little Montgomery Ward’s typewriter, and it was easy to use. I used that until I could afford an electric typewriter. But anyway, that was a big turning point for me. Then in 1981, when I started selling. Then came 1983, when I realized that I didn’t really want to write the stuff I’d been doing—I was doing ghostwriting work, and suddenly I realized I didn’t want to do that. By 1986 I was doing my stuff, and it just kept rolling. The real turning point for me was probably “Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back,” which I wrote in 1986, and was followed by “The Night They Missed the Horror Show,” which David Schow bought for the movie- themed anthology Silver Scream, and then after that was “On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks.” I had a bunch of stories I’d written that I couldn’t sell because everyone thought they were too odd, and then all of a sudden “The Pit” sold, and that had been rejected by everybody! Now it’s been reprinted and it’s being reprinted again next year. My wife always said that Kasey was born in 1986, and we knew it was going to cost money!

You were (and still are) frequently grouped with the 1980s “splatterpunk” trend. Were you comfortable with that label?

I hated it. I’m gonna kill David Schow for it! I think a lot of people were just trying to look for a humorous way to identify what they were doing, but as soon as they did that, I said, “Man, you’re gonna rue the day you did this, because it’s gonna box you in.” And I was afraid it would box me in, because they would keep sayin’ it—it still pops up now and again. But I just refused to accept it. There were two or three stories of mine that fit very well there and that’s fine, but I always thought the attitude was different. So when I started writing other stuff, for ninety percent of the readers I didn’t stick in that box. Of course there’s that ten percent of the readers who, any time you change and move on they say, “What happened to that one?” and you say, “Well, I wrote that one already!” Been there, done that.

Horror was booming in the 1980s, but that boom turned into an explosion that decimated much of the market. In one interview, you said, “Horror failed to mutate when it was most necessary. There was just too much of it. It’s kind of like if you saw a ghost every day—after a while, who gives a shit?” Did you make a conscious decision then to move away from the genre more into mystery?

Well, you know, the truth of the matter is that by 1981 I’d sold a crime novel already called Act of Love, so my first novel was a crime novel, and my first short story sales were all crime stories, mainly to Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. But I was also writing for Twilight Zone Magazine, so my interests were always broad. I think I started out to be a science fiction writer, but I wasn’t having any luck with it. So I all of a sudden discovered crime and mystery—I’d grown up with it, but I’d never thought about writing it, and when I did I just became a nut for it. Then that kind of segued into one of my other childhood interests, which was horror. Some of it was planned, but I don’t want to make myself sound smarter than I really am. I did a lot of stuff just because I wanted to do it! But I did think horror was filled to the brim, and I was tired of it. I feel like if I sit down to write something that’s mechanical, I don’t want to do it. And if I feel like everybody’s expecting the “boo,” I don’t want to do it. I came back to it later, of course.

Well, you never really left. Even the first Hap and Leonard novel was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award.

Savage Season was a nomination that I almost asked them to remove because I couldn’t understand why it was there. It’s a crime novel, very clearly.

In a 1997 interview, you said, “You’re starting to see more horror films again as well, and I think that you’re starting to see a trend back to that sort of thing. It’s almost a fifties, B-movie sensibility. It’s really coming back, though. Not that it ever really left.” Did horror come back to stay then? Or has it mutated since?

I don’t think anything ever really disappears. It has different levels and different degrees. Horror is still here, but it’s not like it was in the eighties. I think what happened in the eighties was you had an insane moment when you had . . . well, I think a lot of people forget this: They forget that people like me and David Schow and a lot of others came along and we hit horror at a time when it was changing, and we were changing it. For better or worse, we were the vehicles of that change. It cycles in and cycles out. I think it’s now cycled back to more traditional things. Like in the films, there are a lot of ghost stories and monsters. It goes through cycles until it gets tiring. I borrowed the tools and furniture from it for other things.

I agree 100% with the idea that Joe R. Lansdale stories are their own genre, because they are so recognizably your work, regardless of whether they’re horror, mystery, graphic novels, whatever. Are you ever conscious of genre when you sit down to write?

Well, I’m conscious of it when somebody says, “I’ve got an anthology and I’m doing stories about Jack the Ripper.” Even then I can go mystery or I can go horror. Internally, I don’t worry too much about it. I know I’ve got a basic idea, and I might think, “Okay, it’s going to be horrific . . . but to what level, what angle, what degree, what method of attack . . .” And then some of the stories I’ll write for anthologies like that will later get reprinted in crime or mystery anthologies or different things.

You’ve mentioned before that you have a particular fondness for novellas.

It’s my favorite form.

Is it the best form for horror?

I think novellas and short stories are the best form for horror. There are some really good horror novels, but for me horror novels usually play out at about forty or fifty pages. There are exceptions, of course.

When you wrote Savage Season in 1990, did you expect to carry on the saga of Hap and Leonard for so long?

No! I wrote Savage Season because I was very much a big fan of the Gold Medal novels. So Cold in July and Savage Season are in many respects my Gold Medal novels. Aspects of that continued throughout the series, along with the noir. But I really think that Savage Season is the most Gold Medal novel. And Cold in July is the most Gold Medal of the non-Hap and Leonard novels. Or maybe Waltz in Shadows.

For some reason, I’m always surprised when I see the word “quirky” applied to your work, as it often is with the Hap and Leonard books in particular; I think “quirky” implies “arch” to me, whereas your style seems to honestly reflect a particular place.

I don’t like that label; I don’t think they’re “quirky”. I think they’re different in some ways, but I also think they’re some of the most traditional stuff I do. I guess it’s because of what I do they apply that word quirky; it’s like they apply that word “cult”. But I’m a pretty big cult now!

Did you hear a lot of that East Texas patois growing up?

Oh, absolutely. People give me a lot of credit that I don’t deserve because a lot of that’s just . . . y’know, ignorance has been a great boon for me. I’m not terribly educated—I’ve got a high school education and a couple of years of college, but I don’t have degrees and stuff like that. Most of my stuff I learned from doing. I never took a writing class or anything like that; I just wrote. Some of the benefits for me have been not knowing the proper way to do certain things.

Your latest novel, The Thicket, is not obviously a horror novel, but it does open with gruesome disease deaths, a violent murder, and an act-of-God storm, and leaves the reader with that sense of unease that great horror should provoke.

Yes. I think that goes back to that constant blending of genres. I grew up on all those things, a mish-mash. I grew up on comics, which mish-mashed everything anyway. I used to watch, in the 1950s and 1960s, a lot of old movies and serials they brought to TV. I used to watch all the Flash Gordon serials and the old Tarzan films, and all that stuff just sort of ran together. And then I was reading, too. My parents never said, “This is bad for you,” so I was reading everything from Burroughs to Hemingway (Edgar Rice Burroughs, not William S.— that was later!). So you read all these things, you don’t think, “Oh this one’s good for me and this one isn’t.” I just read.

Is the definition of horror sometimes narrower than it should be?

It depends on the definition. For some people if you expand it, it’s no longer horror. But for me, horror aspects are in a large percentage of what I write; horror is certainly an engine behind a lot of my stuff. Horror and mystery. I have one unpublished novel (that will be published) called Fender Lizards. It has no horror, no mystery, no science fiction whatsoever, but there’s something about the way it’s written . . . it almost feels like a mystery without the mystery. The tone and the attitude and the feeling come across in the prose.

You’ve written a lot of work in other writers’ universes—Jonas Hex graphic novels, Batman animated series scripts, and Tarzan novels. Is it ever difficult to slip into someone else’s world?

Sometimes it is. It used to not be as much; I did some of those things just because I loved them and I wanted to do them. But I’ve been turning down things like that because as time’s gone on I’ve thought, I don’t really want to leave some things behind that are somebody else’s. Especially since I don’t get any more money out of it, so my family’s not going to get any more money out of it, either. So my take on it is that if something comes along that I just really have to do or want to do, or I’m just really driven to touch some childhood dream like Batman or Tarzan, then I’m going to do it. But those are becoming smaller and smaller; I’ve done most of them.

I really enjoy your Facebook and Twitter posts, and you’ve obviously embraced these new forms of social media. How important is that direct connection to your readers?

I like to stay connected with things like that. I don’t really enjoy doing it all that much because I’d rather write, but I know it’s a part of the business now. I also have a lot of people wanting to know things, and I can cover a lot of ground that way instead of writing fifty letters or a thousand emails. I do that and I’m done. And I can promote my books. Publishing has changed so much that it’s harder and harder for even publishers to promote books, or at least to promote them well. The competition has changed, it’s very different, so I feel like that’s my way of doing it. And I always remember all these things that people will teach you about writing, that work for some people, but they don’t work for everybody. A lot of it’s just like cliché—you know, “this is this, and that is that”—and I probably do that, too. I’m just saying my way is one way, I’m not saying it’s the way.

You recently talked on Facebook about writers who complain about loneliness and other aspects of the craft, and you noted, “If you want to be miserable writing, that’s your choice.” Why do you think some writers describe it as some painful, soul-sapping drudge?

I’m sure there are some people out there who are just miserable . . .

They’d be miserable if they were plumbers.

Right. But I think also it’s a pose for a lot of people, because they think they’re doing something that doesn’t require that they dig a ditch or fix a car. I think because it’s intangible. When you take a job, you get paid when you first start out whether you know what you’re doing or not, but in writing you’re not necessarily getting paid when you’re starting out, so are you a writer or are you not a writer? So I think a lot of it too is insecurity, that feeling that it’s like, “Look, I’m really working, this really is important and it’s really hard.” And it’s not that it isn’t hard sometimes—it is. I’m not saying it isn’t hard work; I beat my head against the wall sometimes thinking, I just can’t get that right. But that’s not the same thing as saying I’m miserable doing it. It may be a hard thing to do, but I enjoy doing it. And I feel lucky, because I’ve never wanted to do anything else. It’s not the same for everybody, but I feel like I just got the best break in the world.

One recent tip you offered was, “Actually start out with Once upon a time and continue.” Have you done that?

Yeah, I’ve done it. I even have one story that begins, “Once upon a time.” I’ve done it several times. I just type “Once upon a time,” and then I’m into it.

You’ve probably written more screenplays than most of your readers realize, and you’ve even taught screenwriting. Is that a form that you enjoy?

Yeah . . . when I’m in the mood for it. It’s a nice break. I find it easier than novels and short stories, but not as satisfying. My son and I are working on one together right now that I hope to direct, if we can raise the money.

I was wondering if you’d ever thought about directing . . .

I never really wanted to direct. I just want more control. I’m sort of producing some of the films that are coming out. It’s sort of a title that comes with a check, but that’s about it.

David Lynch was attached to a film adaptation of The Two-Bear Mambo at one point, wasn’t he?

Yeah, he was. It was always a vague thing, and I don’t remember much about it. He also had The Big Blow for two or three years. Then Ridley Scott picked it up, and I did the screenplay, but they never made it. They had it optioned for several years, and then they finally bought the film rights outright. [Joe’s son, Keith Lansdale, joins us.]

Christmas With the Dead started as one of your dad’s short stories, then you adapted it into a screenplay. That must have been an interesting experience.

Keith: Yeah, it was a lot of fun, actually! He was trying to find somebody to write it, and I was like, “Well, I could give it a go.” I had no experience whatsoever doing screenplays, but I figured if I had any questions I had somebody I could go to. I was willing to take that leap. And I thought that the original story was a fun idea, anyway—a guy who’s just tired of the apocalypse. He gave me advice. “There is no dog,” he said. “And your sister’s going to play a part, and we have a guy who’s going to be the co-star . . .” so it was like being given a bunch of puzzle pieces and you’re not quite sure how they fit together. I still had a lot of room to do something with the original idea.

Joe: I told him he had to take the dog out, because we couldn’t afford it. And it had to have more scenes so it could be longer—otherwise it would have been a twenty minute film. That’s about it; then I just turned him loose on it. Keith, was it ever intimidating?

Keith: Well, yeah, of course. I don’t know if I was “intimidated,” though. I know I was getting into something I’d never done before, but I wasn’t nervous about it. I felt pretty okay with it, actually.

So you had your very first screenplay produced! That doesn’t happen for a lot of writers.

Keith: That’s true. It was kind of handy to have him as the producer, because I knew that meant it would get made somehow.

Joe: When he complained, Lee (the director) and I would tell him, “You’re getting treated nicer than anyone in Hollywood, because they don’t even let the writer on the set a lot of the time!” I did get to go on the set of other things, but usually they don’t.

Were you on the set for this, Keith?

Keith: A little bit here and there. It was unfortunate that it was in the hottest part of the summer, and of course you can’t run the air conditioner when they’re shooting. I’d stay as long as I could stand it, then I’d say, “I’ve gotta go home.”

Joe: It was so hot we just left Lee and them there and we went to Italy. It was so hot the makeup would melt as fast as they’d put it on. It was one of the hottest summers on record. In Texas, you know you’re going to have hot summers, but this one was just unrelenting. They were filming at three in the morning, and it was still eighty- five.

So it was all shot on location?

Keith: It was all shot right there in Nacogdoches, except for one scene that was shot in Lufkin, which is right down the road from Nacogdoches.

Joe, as producer, were you ever conscious of reining in Keith as the screenwriter?

Joe: Not really. It’s like he and I have the same brain, it’s actually pretty amazing. What I did was just help him with the format. But he was fine with the storyline. I’d have an idea, but he was already doing it, so that was funny.

Keith, do you plan to continue screenwriting?

Keith: Yeah. Sure thing. He mentioned the one we’re doing together—that’s been a lot of fun. There’s a lot of kind of going back and forth. Sometimes I find myself arguing about little minute details that I know are not going to matter, but it’s just when you’re in the minute and you’re thinking, “It’s got to be exactly this way!” If something really comes up, I can say, “You’re probably right because you’ve been doing this a long time,” but I’m definitely getting my words in there. No question.

Joe: And I encourage that, too. He’s written comic books—he wrote for Antarctic Press—and I think that helps. The framing of comics owes something to film and vice versa.

Keith: And it’s more visual than just a regular novel.

So, Joe, can you tell us anything about this project? Joe: “Fried-pie noir” is what I call it. It’s about a guy who’s a fried-pie king. Or just a pie king. We haven’t decided if it’s fried pies or just pies. But the problem lies with the pies, or the ownership of the pie recipe, and that’s about all we can say. It’s kind of noir, it’s kind of funny, it’s kind of western. It’s got characters with names like Birdhouse Willie.

You don’t often collaborate . . .

Joe: No. I actually collaborate with my children best. Kasey and I did a story together that’s coming out in Dark Duets, edited by Christopher Golden. She and I are doing another story together. The kids wrote stories together back when they were eight and twelve—one was published by Random House. The kids have been around it all the time—people who are writers or directors used to come to the house, people were always there.

What else is coming up for you?

Joe: Well, besides this screenplay Keith and I are working on, I’m working on a new novel. And Cold in July has been filmed and is coming out next year. They’re editing it now, and what I’ve seen of it looks great. It’s got Michael C. Hall and Don Johnson and Sam Shepard and Vinessa Shaw . . . it’s going to be really, really good. What I saw just impressed the hell out of me.

Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of nonfiction books, award-winning prose writer, and Halloween expert whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” Her short fiction has appeared in dozens of anthologies and magazines, including The Mammoth Book of Dracula, Dark Delicacies, The Museum of Horrors, and Cemetery Dance. In 2010, her first novel, The Castle of Los Angeles, received the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel. Recent books include the graphic novel Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Times (co-written with Rocky Wood, illustrated by Greg Chapman), and Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween. Forthcoming in 2013 are the novellas Summer’s End and Smog, and the novel Malediction. A lifelong Californian, she lives in North Hollywood, and can be found online at www.lisamorton.com. Author Spotlight: Sam J. Miller Erika Holt

As the title suggests, “57 Reasons” has an unusual structure: it’s a story told by way of a list (and works brilliantly). Was this challenging?

Aw, thanks. As a reader and a writer, I approach unconventional structures with extreme caution, and perhaps a bit of prejudice. A formal conceit really needs to be earned, and I often find that quirky structures are there partially to distract from a story’s other deficits. But then I’ll find an amazing story that really could not be told any other way, and I’ll happily ditch my bias. My Clarion classmate, Carmen Maria Machado, used a similarly unconventional structure for her brilliant story “Inventory,” published in Strange Horizons, and it reminded me that you can use that kind of format to highlight what’s structured out of the story—in the case of “57 Reasons,” the way the narrator’s selfish and single-minded pursuit of revenge blinds him to the reality of the situation, and his own guilt and responsibility. We don’t learn much about Anchal’s backstory, though she’s definitely a strong, sympathetic character. What were her motivations for wanting to carry out the revenge plot? Was she really the main character’s puppet, or did she have reasons of her own?

I love stories where the reader can see around the narrator’s limitations. Nick Carroway is such a flaming fuckwad—I can’t believe people can actually read The Great Gatsby without seeing that this is a story about how his cowardice and arrogance prevents him from forming meaningful relationships with people, and how his superiority complex helps destroy the lives of the people around him. So, of course Anchal does have reasons of her own, just like she has a life outside of Jared. But Jared only sees her as she reflects and relates to him. I can’t speak to her motivations—she might be coming from a place of love and support for Jared, or she might have shadiness of her own up her sleeve. As far as Jared knows, Anchal is idealized and selfless . . . until the ending, when he realizes how cataclysmically his selfishness has harmed her.

The POV character ends up concluding he’s no different from, and just as bad as, the boys he kills. Do you agree?

Yeah, he’s a jerk. But at least now he knows he’s a jerk. This is a story about how privilege warps people’s relationships, and can turn people into monsters. Jared’s special abilities are not in the end all that different from his white male privilege, and they combine to hurt the one person in this story who cares about him. Because they’re bullies, and he’s bullied, Jared believes the boys are automatically bad and he’s automatically good. Often, we’re so focused on how we’re different from people that we miss how similar we are. A lot of my gay brothers think that because we don’t desire or objectify women the way straight men do, that we’re somehow immune to misogyny and male privilege. That’s interesting to me, that kind of blind spot.

On your website you mention occasionally writing essays on topics that make you “really happy or really, really angry”—do you ever address these themes or issues in your fiction?

I’m a community organizer, and so I spend all day trying to convince people that a certain social problem is real, is wrong, needs to be fixed, and that someone—an elected official, a corporate executive, etc.—has the power to fix it. Fiction doesn’t work like that. Arguing a political point is a pretty good way to kill a story. But I do think it’s possible to explore in fiction the issues that are important to us. That’s the writing that excites me the most, and of course horror provides a robust toolkit for exploring what’s horrible about our world. But it’s a totally different mechanism from organizing and activism. In fiction, the goal isn’t to convince—it’s to bring an issue to life in a new and illuminating way, by rooting the issue in the experience of characters that readers can connect with emotionally. A story like Ken Liu’s “The Man Who Ended History,” does that so well—presenting real-life issues of unspeakable horror in all their complexity, so that the reader walks away with no easy answers but a deeper understanding of things.

And I’m curious, what makes you really, really angry about horror movies?

I love horror movies. The same things anger me in horror movies that anger me in other artistic works. Violence against women used uncritically, to invoke an easy emotional response. Flaccid storytelling. Great set- ups that peter out into stale monsters, tired denouements, etc. Failure to really engage with some new aspect of the horror in this world—do we really need to see more rich kids get butchered on vacation? I want more Candyman-type horror films, stuff that springs from the horror that countless people deal with every day of their lives.

Are you working on anything new at the moment?

I’m working on a YA novel about a teenage girl who can take people’s memories by touching them. Which instead of being super awesome, turns out to cause no end of horrible problems. Someone in my writer’s group said that “alienated loners with superpowers” are kind of my thing, and I think they’re right. Mostly that’s because I believe that being gay is a superpower. It gives me an insight into how the world really works, and how patriarchy harms us all . . . and maybe a slightly more sophisticated fashion sense and superhuman ability to remember facts about Bette Davis and Donna Summer. Of course, it also got me beat up all the time in high school, and the homophobia I internalized in those years caused me no end of emotional problems and made me a colossal dick to lots of wonderful people. But that’s what superpowers are really like, and why I love the X-Men and Octavia Butler so much—there’s this gritty realism to their superpowers, an acknowledgment of the fact that coming of age with superhuman abilities in a world that’s so viciously hostile to difference would totally damage you, and you’d be more likely to emerge emotionally crippled and angry at the world than strong and noble and committed to helping people.

Erika Holt lives in the cold, white North (i.e. Calgary, Canada), where she writes and edits speculative fiction. Her stories appear in numerous anthologies including Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead, and Tesseracts Fifteen: A Case of Quite Curious Tales. She has co- edited two anthologies: Rigor Amortis, about sexy, amorous zombies, and Broken Time Blues, featuring 1920s alien burlesque dancers and bootlegging chickens. In her spare time she works as a lawyer and at the public library. Author Spotlight: Connie Willis E.C. Myers

“Distress Call” first appeared in 1981 in The Berkley Showcase Vol 4: New Writings in Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Victoria Schochet and John Silbersack. In fact, this story provided the cover illustration for that anthology. Did you write “Distress Call” specifically for the collection? How did it develop from idea to publication?

I wrote the story so long ago I can’t quite remember how it ended up in The Berkley Showcase, nor what inspired the story, but I know one of the things that has always annoyed me about ghost stories is how the ghosts are always able to to do stuff, like make spooky noises and turn doorknobs and deliver messages from the other side. For me one of the great terrors of dying has been the possibility that you’d be dead but still aware of what’s happening to your loved ones and would have the nightmare of having to watch silently, unable to speak or reach out to help them. I don’t want to spoil readers of this story or your 2001 novel, Passage, but readers discovering “Distress Call” today for the first time probably will note some similarities between the two. How much did this early story influence the novel?

I’ve been in love with the sinking of the Titanic since I read Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember when I was fifteen. It has everything—horror, pathos, redemption, courage, appalling decisions, irony. Or as the Onion said in one of its great historical deadlines: WORLD’S LARGEST METAPHOR SINKS. It also has calls for help that aren’t heard, rescue that comes too late, drowning children, self-sacrifice—all the elements of a ghost story. I guess you could call “Distress Call” sort of a first attempt at capturing something of the feeling that the Titanic gave me. When I wrote it, I had no intention of returning to the theme and certainly not of writing a whole novel on the subject, but the Titanic and its meaning continued to nag at me through the years, and eventually resulted in Passage.

“Distress Call” is a far cry from your beloved Christmas stories and screwball comedies, though it does contain some time travel of a sort. What struck me most is that this story presents the end of Caroline and Jim’s relationship, and you so often write about the beginnings of romance. Although plenty of horror can be found in many of your stories—psychological horror, the horrors of war—you aren’t known for writing traditional horror stories. Do you read or watch much horror? What draws you to or repels you from the genre?

I have actually written traditional ghost stories. Early on, I wrote a short story called “Service for the Burial of the Dead,” and I consider both Lincoln’s Dreams and Passage to be ghost stories, though there are science fiction elements there, too. As to horror, I’m not really a great fan of it—and as I get older and see more and more actual horrors in the world, I’m even less of one. And I hate slasher stuff and gore. I even had trouble with the bloody scenes in Looper, which I thought was otherwise a great science fiction movie—and I know the gore was totally necessary to the plot, but it gave me nightmares. But I love psychological horror. My favorites? The movie The Others, Kit Reed’s “The Wait,” Daphne DuMaurier’s House on the Strand and “Don’t Look Now,” and pretty much everything Shirley Jackson ever wrote, especially The Haunting of Hill House (the book and the movie The Haunting, not the recent remake) and a little number called “The Summer People,” about an elderly couple who decide to stay on in their cabin by the lake after Labor Day.

Relatedly, the 1991 limited edition Roadkill Press chapterbook of “Distress Call” also included your essay “On Ghost Stories.” I wasn’t able to track down a copy before this interview, but I’m intensely curious. Would you briefly share with us some of your thoughts about ghost stories?

As I say, I love psychological horror, which also means loving ghost stories. They’re terrifying, but they don’t produce that terror by using shocks and blood and violence; they get it from the subtlest and simplest of everyday things—a flicker of movement, a half-heard sound, or something not quite right about the situation. In Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, nothing much happens—the lights go out, there are some funny sounds, somebody gets lost in a garden, the person you thought was holding your hand is actually on the far side of the room—but I dare you to read it late at night. With ghost stories (as with all stories really), the best stuff is all in your head. To me the heart of a ghost story is always what would cause someone to come back from the dead. What reason would you have to have to come back? And the fact that you were murdered or had committed suicide or wanted to correct an injustice isn’t really enough. I mean, this is death we’re talking about. The reason would have to be much stronger—and stranger— than that. And in all my favorite stories, it is.

So, you’re a big fan of the British series Primeval, which I’m ashamed to admit I have not yet seen. What has replaced that show on your DVR and in your heart? Did you like Primeval: New World?

Yes, I adored Primeval, the BBC series, all five seasons of it. It was just an ordinary action-story premise about chasing dinosaurs in modern-day London, but it shows what can be done when you apply great writing, great acting, and really clever plotting to an ordinary premise. I’ve used it to teach plotting in the last three workshops I’ve taught. It was funny, heartbreaking, romantic, and I couldn’t figure out what was going to happen—and I always know what’s going to happen. Just how good it was was proved to me when I watched the Canadian spinoff, Primeval: New World, which had exactly the same premise and a big budget, but which was absolutely wretched. By episode two I was rooting for the dinosaurs to win. What’s replaced it in my heart? Nothing. I still watch Primeval and discover new stuff all the time. But I adore Sherlock, especially ”The Reichenbach Fall” episode, which I thought was brilliant —Martin Freeman is the best actor alive today—and this fall my husband and I have been watching Broadchurch, with David Tennant on BBC America. It’s a mystery series, but oddly, it has rather the feel of a ghost story and is one of the few shows I’ve ever seen that treats death with the seriousness (and horror) it deserves. We loved it.

I’ve heard your next novel is about telepathy! Feel free to take my money now. I know better than to ask how it’s coming or when it will be published, but can you tell us a little more about the book? What other work do you have out now or have forthcoming?

Yes, my new novel, which has a working title of The Very Thought of You, is about telepathy. But don’t think Dying Inside or The Demolished Man. My novel’s a romantic comedy and is based on the premise that telepathy is a terrible idea. It’s bad enough that we keep upping the level of communication with Twitter and smart phones and Skype and Instagram (and yet somehow never manage to communicate with each other). I firmly believe that telepathy would only make things worse, not better, and I intend to show you just how with the new book. As to other stuff, my new collection, The Best of Connie Willis, is just out, and I’m currently working on a story about the Isle of Capri and one about a mysterious bookshop.

E.C. Myers was assembled in the U.S. from Korean and German parts and raised by a single mother and a public library in Yonkers, New York. He has published short fiction in a variety of print and online magazines and anthologies, and his young adult novels, Fair Coin and Quantum Coin, are available now from Pyr Books. He currently lives with his wife, two doofy cats, and a mild-mannered dog in Philadelphia and shares way too much information about his personal life at ecmyers.net and on Twitter @ecmyers. Author Spotlight: Conrad Williams Lisa Nohealani Morton

Can you tell me a bit about how you came to write “The Owl”?

In 2002, my wife and I bought a crumbling, old (but very beautiful) farmhouse in southwest France, near Cognac. The first time we were shown around the place by the estate agent, we found a dead owl in the attic. Owls lived in a number of the outbuildings and you could hear them at night when they went out hunting. We’d done a lot of driving around in search of the perfect property, and on some of the roads were these “fantômes,” black, person-sized cut-outs that stood at the edge of the tarmac, signifying a death by road traffic accident. Pretty sobering. Some of them had jagged red fractures in their heads. The story came out of those two elements.

“The Owl” leaves the reader with an unsettling sense of ambiguity about what, exactly, happened. Do you have any thoughts on the tension between an ambiguous ending and a stark reveal?

I could tell you what the story means to me, but I’d rather not. It’s up to each individual reader. I like ambiguity in a story. In a horror story, especially, the ambiguity can intensify the feeling of terror that is created. Having everything neatly explained away leaves you with nothing to mull over. A short story, I think, needs some kind of mystery to it in order for it to work. The worst stories, for me, are those that hammer home their point and have an expositional talking head to hold your hand through to the end.

What are you working on these days? Any upcoming publications readers should watch for?

I have stories in Ellen Datlow’s latest Year’s Best anthology, and two Stephen Jones projects: Psycho- Mania! and the final installment of his Shadows Over Innsmouth trilogy. I’ve just delivered a novel to Sony which will act as the prequel to a major new video game release, and I’m putting the finishing touches on a novel of supernatural horror set in a . . . um . . . crumbling farmhouse in southwest France. What’s your least-favorite horror movie cliché?

It has to be the jump scare. Lazy, cheap, and overdone. Every time a refrigerator door gets opened in a horror movie, a pound will give you ten there’ll be someone standing behind it when it’s closed again. Because that’s what you’d do, isn’t it, if you were a psychopathic killer who had broken into someone’s house? You’d wait till they opened the fridge and then go and stand behind the door. Jeez . . .

Born and raised in Honolulu, Lisa Nohealani Morton now 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: David J. Schow Seamus Bayne

The detail with which you describe the setting in “A Home in the Dark” is awesome. Did you base it on a real-world home?

It’s actually the Hollywood Hills, not far from my house. Some details real in a look-out-the-window sense; some made up. Hence, fiction.

The narrator explores his work and life in California during the story, but we never find out exactly what he does for a living. What was his job?

He says he, “writes and proofs online manuals for Javascript” . . . vague code for “between actual jobs” in the way that screenwriters “between projects” are classified as “unemployed.”

In “A Home in the Dark,” the horror seems to be more about the stifling and destructive lifestyle of the narrator than the creature in the canyon. Was that your intent?

It is an interior story about an exterior event, which casts the reliability of the narrator into deep doubt. This follows a more vintage horror form—a detailed rendering of a single event leading to what Poe called the “effect” (the essence of horror), which may be a fever dream or hallucination.

You described the creature as a massive, ophidian dweller of the deep. If the narrator could have seen it, what would he have seen?

I’m not a Lovecraftian per se, but was deep in that Ourobouros groove at the time. Think gigantic, toothy worm-serpenty thing.

What, if any, was the significance of the creature regurgitating the partially digested remains of the photographer at the feet of the narrator?

It’s a solidarity gesture referencing what the narrator called the “deal” with the local critters, like coyotes, whom he feeds. By not rejecting the wildlife—the residents—he, too, has become a local, enough so that the guardian spirit of the whole mountain abides by the “deal,” embracing instead of rejecting his presence, and serving as protector.

What else do you have in the works we could share with our readers?

There’s a new novel (and half another one) out there in the limbo-land of marketing, a few short stories coming up in various anthologies like The Mammoth Book of Psychomania, a new story collection from Subterranean Press in 2014, and a deluxe edition of my only horror novel to date, The Shaft, coming soon from Jerad Walters and Centipede Press—technically, the very first US edition of the book. 2012 saw the first four digital editions from my backlist; expect more downloadables in 2013. Plus the usual work in the script mines, best left undescribed.

Seamus Bayne got his start writing during the 1990s working in the roleplaying game industry. In 2010, he attended the Viable Paradise writer’s workshop. Seamus is the co-founder and host of the Paradise Lost writing retreat held annually in Texas. You can learn more about him, and his writing at www.seamusbayne.net.

In the Next Issue of

Coming up in January, in Nightmare . . . We have original fiction from Adam Howe (“The Mad Butcher of Plainfield’s Chariot of Death”) and Tim Pratt (“Ghostreaper, or, Life After Revenge”), along with reprints by Jonathan Maberry (“Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard”) and Lucy Taylor (“Walled”). 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! Subscriptions & Ebooks

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. 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! Visit nightmare- magazine.com/store for more information. About the Editor

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Nightmare, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Oz Reimagined, The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Epic: Legends of Fantasy, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. Upcoming anthologies include: Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, and Wastelands 2. He has been nominated for six Hugo Awards and five World Fantasy Awards, and he has been called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble. John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed Magazine, and is the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.