TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 27, December 2014

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, December 2014 In Memoriam: Karen Jones, Nightmare Art Director

FICTION Embers Tim Lebbon Bodywork Christa Faust Bog Dog Seras Nikita Night Falls, Again Michael Marshall Smith

NONFICTION The H Word: The Strange Story Simon Strantzas Artist Gallery Brom Artist Spotlight: Brom Marina J. Lostetter Interview: Robert Shearman Helen Marshall

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Tim Lebbon Seras Nikita Michael Marshall Smith

MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Stay Connected Subscriptions & Ebooks About the Editors

© 2014 Nightmare Magazine Cover Art by Brom www.Nightmare-Magazine.com FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, December 2014

John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue twenty-seven of Nightmare! The World Fantasy Awards were presented in early November at the World Fantasy Convention in Washington, D.C. Your humble editor was once again nominated for the award . . . and again managed to lose, for the sixth- consecutive nomination! But many other wonderful folks won, including a lifetime achievement award for our illustrious guest editor of the Women Destroy Horror! special issue, Ellen Datlow. Congratulations to all of the winners and nominees! (If you’d like to see a complete list, visit worldfantasy.org/awards.)

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In other news, Nightmare is now available as a subscription via Amazon.com! The Kindle Periodicals division has been closed to new magazines for quite a while now (and has been since before Nightmare launched), but by employing some witchcraft, we were able to get the doors unlocked just long enough for us to slip into the castle. Amazon subscriptions are billed monthly, at $1.99 per issue, and are available now. To learn more, please visit nightmare- magazine.com/subscribe. Also: If you love Nightmare and have a subscription— whether or not it’s via Amazon—if you wouldn’t mind leaving a review over on Amazon, that would be really great. Positive reviews on the subscription page will go a long way toward encouraging people to try out the magazine. It doesn’t have to be much of a review, just a few words and a rating is totally fine—and much appreciated!

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With our announcements out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month: We have original fiction from Tim Lebbon (“Embers”) and newcomer Seras Nikita (“Bog Dog”). For reprints, we have work from Christa Faust (“Bodywork”) and Michael Marshall Smith (“Night Falls, Again”). In the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” Simon Strantzas talks about the strange and the weird. We’ve also got author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview with Robert Shearman. This issue is sponsored by our friends at Samhain Publishing. Learn more at samhainpublishing.com. That’s about all I have for you this month. Thanks for reading!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Nightmare, is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. New projects coming out in 2014 and 2015 include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Operation Arcana, Wastelands 2, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated eight times) and is a six- time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams. In Memoriam

Karen Jones Nightmare Art Director

The Nightmare family is sad to report that our art director, Karen Jones, died suddenly in early November, of natural causes. In tribute to her, we offer these words of loving memory from two of her best friends in the field, Jennifer Heddle and John Picacio.

—John Joseph Adams

Jennifer Heddle

Karen Avery Jones was my friend for over 17 years. We initially bonded over our mutual love of The X-Files, and soon enough she was a fixture in my life. We went to countless movies together, vacationed together, attended Comic Cons and literary conventions together. She spent more than one Thanksgiving with my family. I never questioned that she would always be there when I needed her. I guess that’s how it happens, right? You assume someone will always be there, until they’re not. If you never had the opportunity to hear Karen laugh, you missed out on something truly special. Her laughter was loud, frequent, and completely infectious—and usually preceded by one of her trademark wicked one-liners that left us all gasping for air. Her easy laugh reflected the simple joys she found in life. She loved reading, seeing movies, gaming, cooking, going to concerts. But that never stopped her from trying to do more, to learn more. She had an intellectual curiosity and a dogged drive to continually improve herself that I envied and admired. She taught herself Japanese and traveled to Tokyo. She decided to learn to draw—and became a capable artist. She taught herself computer programming languages and helped friends with their websites. She assisted on independent films and taught herself everything there was to know about personal finance. There was never a time that Karen wasn’t teaching herself something. As evidenced by her work for this magazine, she also had a great eye for art. Karen wouldn’t just tell you she liked a painting, she would be able to tell you why, with her background in archaeology providing a context for it all. She loved her work for Lightspeed and Nightmare; she took delight in searching out new artists and was genuinely excited every time she offered someone a contract. I don’t think it was a role she’d ever imagined for herself, but like every other task set before her, she took to it with dedication and enthusiasm. Karen was a woman of many talents who filled many roles (not least of which was adoring aunt to her nieces), but the quality for which she will truly be remembered is her friendly, open nature. Everyone around her enjoyed her company. We often attended the World Fantasy Convention together, and by the end of the weekend it seemed like half the people there knew who Karen was. Every friend I introduced her to became her friend, too. That was just how it worked. No one had an unkind word to say about her. Everything was more fun when she was around. She made my world brighter, and I would do just about anything to hear her laugh again.

John Picacio

A great person died last month. Her name was Karen Jones and she was my friend. I heard the news when I was heading out to the World Fantasy Convention Art Show Reception on Nov. 8. Jennifer Heddle phoned me and let me know. It was a shock, to say the least. She introduced me to Karen at the World Science Fiction Convention in 2002, and they were very good friends for the better part of two decades. Rather than dwell on Karen’s death, I want her to be remembered for the good that she brought. She had an infectious smile and laugh, and for several years, a group of us including Chris Roberson, Allison Baker, Lou Anders, Paul Cornell, Jen Heddle, Alan Beatts, Jude Feldman, and Karen were a rolling “rat pack” of sorts that banded together at more conventions than I can count (shoutout to Joe McCabe and Jess Nevins, as well). We were all building pro careers in various publishing capacities, whether it be as editors, illustrators, writers, retailers, or publishers—all of us it seemed, except Karen. She was a voracious reader and connoisseur of film, TV and video games, and she wasn’t chasing a career in publishing. She was simply one of us. She was strong, quietly confident and true to herself. I think it was Chris that once said Karen was the smartest one amongst all of us, and it was true. I don’t know what Karen’s IQ was, but if one of us was officially “genius,” it was her, without a doubt. She never flaunted. She was unabashedly geek-proud, passionate about the things and people she loved. She brought joy wherever she went, and I’ll always remember her for that. She may not have been chasing a career in the arts or publishing back then, but lo and behold, in recent years, she ended up becoming the art director for Lightspeed and Nightmare, once again proving how diverse her talents were. She was funny. She was brilliant. She was luminous. You will not be forgotten, Karen.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Jennifer Heddle is senior editor of adult fiction at Lucasfilm/Disney Publishing Worldwide, handling Star Wars novels and comic books. Prior to that she spent 15 years in publishing in New York, primarily at Penguin and Simon & Schuster. She writes for the official Star Wars Blog at starwars.com and has had pieces published in Star Wars Insider and at io9, and recently has been trying her hand at writing Star Wars Rebels Early Readers. She is originally from New York City, but currently resides in Alameda, California.

John Picacio is an award-winning illustrator of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. His works have illustrated the covers of books by Michael Moorcock, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, L.E. Modesitt, Jr., Dan Simmons, Joe R. Lansdale, Jeffrey Ford, Frederik Pohl, James Tiptree, Jr., Mark Chadbourn, and many more. His accolades include two Hugo Awards, the World Fantasy Award, the Locus Award, five Chesley Awards, and two International Horror Guild Awards. FICTION Embers

Tim Lebbon

They had known that the pillbox was in the woods, but for some reason they’d never got around to visiting it. Andy thought maybe it was because the older kids went there sometimes, smoking cigarettes and drinking cider and, so rumour had it, getting blowjobs from Mandy Sullivan. He wasn’t entirely sure what a blowjob was—though his older brother Nick seemed to think it was something to do with sticking your tongue into your cheek—but those ideas were enough to keep the pillbox out of bounds. Usually. “We should go there,” Joe said. “The old kids won’t be hanging around this time of day. Just to see.” “To see what?” Andy asked, trying to sound cool but feeling scared. “See what it’s all about,” Kai said. “Yeah, that,” Joe agreed. “Come on. Race you to the stream.” Joe went off quickly, Kai followed, and Andy pelted after them, sprinting through the blazing summer sunlight, legs thrashing through long grasses and raising clouds of tiny flies, dandelion seeds, and dust. It was the middle of a long hot summer, and school had finished a week before. Days of potential lay before them, and evenings of barbeques and bike rides around the village. His mum and dad had already told him that they’d give him a bit more freedom this summer. The day rested heavily across the fields between village and woodland. The air was still, as if exhausted from the heat, and everything to Andy seemed large, wide, almost endless— the sun, the humidity, the fields and woodlands that were his playground, and the school holiday that was to last all summer. He whooped and hollered as he ran, overtaking Kai and closing on Joe. Just as they reached the stream he and Joe were neck and neck, and they leapt the old wooden fence together. The timber rail beneath Joe collapsed, sending him sprawling into a thicket of stinging nettles. He yelped and rolled out, scratching all over, grinning from ear to ear. “I am victorious!” Andy yelled, leaping into the stream and almost slipping on the slick rocks beneath the surface. Cold water hushed over his shoes and past his ankles, and he was tempted to throw himself in head-first. “Only because I had an accident.” “Sore loser.” “No, I’m just saying, I fell into the nettles, my race-scars are better than yours.” Joe reckoned that scars made girls like you more. He was scratching like crazy, his face tensed with the unpleasant tingling that would last for hours. “Rematch?” Andy smirked. “Screw you.” Kai arrived at the fence, panting. He leaned on the section just along from the collapsed rail and it broke too, spilling him to the ground. “Fat bastard!” Joe shouted. Andy smiled but didn’t join in. Kai was fat, and it didn’t feel right taking the piss. Joe didn’t care. He rarely did, and though there wasn’t anything really mean about him, sometimes he was too brash for his own good. He was Andy’s best mate. Kai had just begun hanging around with them, and Andy was growing to like the shy, overweight kid. It was only now that his parents were letting him out to play. Andy loved the woods. There were streams to jump and dam, fallen trees to break apart and use to build dens, waist- high wood ants’ nests to prod and throw caterpillars in, places to hide, trees to climb, and animals to watch. It was a well- trodden woodland, but the paths were worn in by use, not formed artificially. There were still places in there that felt wild. Andy, Joe, and Kai played war all the way in, hiding behind trees and performing forward rolls to dodge each other’s bullets. Kai was shot first, then Andy, and Joe declared himself the winner of the battle. That’s just the way it was, invisible bullets obeying an unconscious social ranking. Andy’s dad often commented that Joe would probably be in the SAS when he was older, and Andy wasn’t quite sure whether he meant that in a good or bad way. They played on the concrete bridge over the stream for a while, daring each other to crawl through the wide, twenty- feet-long pipes that carried water underneath, and as always failing to do so. There were stories of a kid getting trapped in there thirty years before and drowning when a heavy storm brought a flash-flood down from the local hills. It was the sort of tale Andy never asked his parents about because a deep part of him wanted it to remain true. Such stories peopled the landscape with ghosts. And ghosts were cool. Time passed, with the same oppressive heat resting over the woodland. Adventures were had. Eventually they found themselves close to the pillbox at the wood’s far edge. One of many built in the area during World War II, it was part of a defensive line stretching past the village, intended to interrupt any German advance should an invasion have occurred. Andy knew of a couple of others in the area—one on Mr. Eddles’ farm, roofless and used for storing bags of fertiliser; another close to the local football club, its entrance and gun slots bricked up—but this one in the woods was the most complete. It was built of bricks laid around a shell of concrete, raised rapidly and made thick and heavy to withstand anything but a direct hit from a tank. It was square, with two gun slots in each face, and overgrown with ferns and brambles like waves of green fire. “There’s no way we’ll get in there!” Kai whined. “Yeah, we will,” Joe said. “The older kids do.” “How?” Andy asked. He meant it. He couldn’t see any sign of an easy approach to the squat building. Brambles grew higher than him in places. Their thorns promised pain. “I don’t like it, anyway,” Kai said. “I’m going home.” “On your own? Through the woods?” Joe knew how to pick at his fears. “Let’s do a circuit,” Andy said. He was excited, nervousness prickling his skin with a thousand pins. He wasn’t even sure why. He paced left and Joe right, leaving Kai standing and staring after both of them. “No!” Joe shouted. “Nothing!” “Nor here!” Andy called back. “No!” “Nope!” “Oh my God!” Joe screamed. “What is it?” Kai yelled, but Andy already knew the tone of his friend’s voice. Hidden around the other side of the building and undergrowth, Joe started laughing and Kai cursed softly. That was when Andy saw the path. Beaten into the brambles, the route quickly jigged right, almost hidden from view. He was about to tell the other boys, but then had a better idea. He followed the path. Turned right, then left again, circling around a tree trunk, then it stopped at the pillbox entrance. He’d already been stung on his bare legs by nettles, and pricked up and down his arms by thorns. But it would be worth it. “No!” Joe called. “Still nothing.” Andy chuckled and wormed inside the building. It was cool in there and stank of piss. It was also filled with rubbish —cans, bottles, sweet wrappers, takeaway packaging—and a couple of old seat cushions propped against the wall. “Andy?” Joe’s voice sounded distant, swallowed by the walls. Only those gun slots and the rough doorway let in a hazy green light, and inside was almost completely silent. “Whoa,” Andy breathed. There was plenty of evidence of older kids using this place to drink and do Bad Things, but he could only see Home Guard soldiers hunkered down with their rifles, firing through the gun slots as Germans advanced along the edge of the woodland towards the village. The sounds of bullets hitting the walls would be deafening. And one lucky shot would cause ricocheting carnage. “I’m inside,” he said. “Andy?” Joe called again. He moved to one of the slots and fired his voice outside. “I’m in here! Come around, there’s a path hidden away. And it’s so cool!” Soon the other two were in there with him. Kai stood near the door wide-eyed, looking around and knowing they shouldn’t be there. Joe kicked stuff around. Cans rattled, and a glass bottle smashed against one wall. “Watch it!” Andy said. “Why?” “Well . . .” He wasn’t really sure why. Equally, now that they were inside the pillbox he couldn’t really remember why they’d wanted to come here at all. It was dirty and smelly, and now scattered with dangerous smashed glass. There was much more fun out there in the woods. He still had a couple of hours until he had to be home for tea— “Wow, look!” Joe said. He bent down and picked something up, approaching one of the gun slots to see the object more clearly. A thin metal can, its end was topped with a narrow plastic spout. “What’s that?” Kai asked. Joe started squirting something over one of the walls from the can. “Joe, that stinks,” Andy said. “Pussy.” “No, I mean it’s, like, petrol isn’t it?” “Lighter fuel,” he muttered. “Look around for some matches.” “What? No way! I’m not setting fires, that’s stupid.” “Why?” Joe asked. He continued squirting. Andy felt a splash of fluid across his hand and he shook it, backing away into Kai. Kai yelped and squeezed outside, yelping again when he lumbered into a bank of stingies. “Joe, seriously, don’t be stupid,” Andy said. Joe threw the can down and started kicking at the floor, sighing. Andy closed his eyes in relief. Maybe his mate would sulk for a bit, but he didn’t care about that, he just didn’t want — “Yes!” Joe said. In the shadows, Andy couldn’t quite make out the object his mate bent to pick up. But after the scratch and spark it was no longer dark, and then he could see nothing at all.

• • • •

Andy sighed at the startlingly fresh memories and turned at the sound of kids playing in the street behind him. There were six of them, ranging from maybe seven to ten years old, scooting around the estate on a homemade go-kart and laughing as if the summer would never end. I remember when all this was fields, Andy thought, feeling so very old. He was only middle-aged. Forty-six . . . or was it forty-seven? Sometimes he had to pause to think about it, and he wasn’t certain whether that was cheery or depressing. His memory of those childhood times was still clear and fresh, even though so much had changed. Two of the three fields between the village and woods had been developed, with boxy brick houses struggling to find character and barely succeeding. The access roads curved gracefully, plots were set in artful disarray, yet the whole place still stank of new. The high fence between estate and the final field was attractive yet functional, the single gate prominently marked with “Public Footpath” signs and intended to guide walkers directly across the hard-packed path into the woods. Even from here Andy could see the beginnings of the paths that had been cast between the trees. They were breaks in the beauty, designed to provide easy access but taking away something of the wild, any sense of discovery. Part of him wanted to pass through the gate and walk on, but he knew it would feel too safe. It was no longer the same place. Maybe tomorrow. Sighing again, he turned his back on that last remaining field and the woodland it bordered and walked back through the estate. He shrugged the rucksack higher on his back and looked around, wondering if he’d see anyone he recognised but knowing that was unlikely. He hadn’t lived here for decades. Climbing the gentle hill towards the heart of the old village, it was a relief when he left the last of the new houses behind and passed between the old. Some of the houses were picture-postcard old, with whitewashed stone walls, deformed glazing, lush gardens filled with wild birds, and oaken doors. There were even a couple around the village square that were thatched. Andy remembered Joe telling him about how they’d used to build a cat into the thatch to keep mice at bay, and he’d spent long nights afterwards imagining a still-living feline scratching its way through village roofs in search of prey. He passed the church. He paid more attention to passers- by, thinking that if there were people he knew he’d see them here. But though he passed some old faces, and swapped a few smiles, none of them lit his memory. He stopped in the village square and bought a coffee. The coffee shop was new, occupying the space that had once been the village bakery, but their coffee was good and the barista attractive and smiling, so he could barely complain. He sat outside and felt himself starting to relax. He’d arrived early and parked, deciding to walk around his old village before checking in to the little guest house. His meeting tomorrow in the nearby town would be boring and hopefully over quickly, but he’d leapt at the opportunity to come. Gone for over thirty years, in a strange way it felt like coming home. “Old face,” a voice said. Andy glanced to the left. An old chap was sitting at another pavement table, a pot of tea before him. He had wispy gray hair yellowed by cigarette smoke, a long thin face, and wore a shirt and tie and tweed jacket, even in the heat. It was nice to see an old man dressed like one, and Andy smiled. “How do you mean?” “Yours,” the man said. “Old face from the village.” Andy squinted against the sun, struggling to strip thirty years from the old guy. Huh, old, he thought, laughing silently. Thirty years ago he would have been around my age. A sparkle of recognition teased him, dancing like a name on the end of his tongue. “Yeah, I left when I was a nipper,” Andy said. “You that Joe Blake?” “No,” he said, frowning. “He was my mate. I’m Andy Randall.” The old guy frowned and stared across the square at the old church. It was twelfth century, apparently, founded by the Normans. Andy remembered going in there one evening with Joe and Kai and finding a grave dug for a funeral the next day. Joe jumped in first, Andy climbed in after some persuading, Kai ran home. Hierarchy maintained. “Andy Randall,” the old man said, almost to himself. “From Oak Lane?” “Huh.” He looked at Andy again, smiling. Tapped his head. “Memory’s gone to shit, sorry, son.” Andy smiled at being called son. “Aren’t you Alf?” “That’s me,” the man said. “Oh dear, now I’m wondering why the hell you remember me.” Cutting his lawns and pruning rose bushes: Andy always remembered that, because his mother had loved roses so much. Cycling to and from the village centre. Shouting at kids when their football bounced from the rec into his garden. Shouting at kids even when their footballs didn’t. Shaking his fist if you rode by his place talking too loudly, laughing too much. Miserable old bastard, Joe had said once, shocking Andy with his use of the “B” word. “Still living out by the rec?” “Yep, and still using that.” He pointed at a telegraph pole across the road, a bike leaning against it. “No way,” Andy said. “Same bike.” Andy laughed. So did Alf. They talked some more, had another drink each and some cake, and chatting about village life from thirty years before was almost like being there. Andy’s memories were sharp and vivid, and the older man’s contributions carried less nostalgia and more simple recollection. Maybe because he still lived there, or perhaps because as you got older there were more memories than hopes for the future. Andy enjoyed it, but all the way through there was something not quite right. A note of confusion in Alf’s voice, a flicker of doubt in his eyes. He can’t remember me, Andy thought, and that shouldn’t have surprised him. Joe was the one his age that people would remember—lively, daring, cheeky, sometimes outright naughty. Alf had even thought he was Joe. Maybe they’d started to look more like each other as they’d grown older. He didn’t know; he hadn’t seen Joe for almost thirty years. But when Alf stood, holding his knees and groaning but actually looking fit and lithe, he frowned at Andy, shielding his eyes from the blazing sun. For a while he just stared at him, looking him over as if trying to match him with a mental facial composite. “Andy,” Alf said, nodding slowly. “Nice to see you.” “You too, Alf. I’m here til late tomorrow, maybe we’ll chat again.” “Maybe,” Alf said, and he crossed the road, mounted his bike, and pedalled away without once looking back. Left alone, Andy leaned back in his seat and looked around the village square, but it suddenly seemed like a strange place. He saw more of the new than the old, and he was sad at the changes rather than nostalgic for the places and features he knew. He finished his second coffee and stood, ready to walk across the village to the guest house on the outskirts. It was the old station house. Trains no longer stopped in Tall Stennington. As he walked he started to sweat. The afternoon sun skimmed over the rooftops and probed beneath the trees overhanging the road. Houses became more occasional, and he waved at a couple of people working in their gardens. One waved back. The skin of his face and balding scalp was tight, sore to the touch, and hot. He’d never learn. Should have used sun cream. He always seemed to burn more easily since that time in the pillbox. Walking home through the woods, he’d been more afraid of being told off than he was worried about the damage to himself. Joe had held his arm and guided him along the paths, and Kai had kept his distance, staring at the boys wide-eyed. It’s the shock, Joe had said, trying to explain why the two of them weren’t screaming. And it’s not that bad. Like sunburn. Close to the edge of the village, about to turn right into Station Road, he saw someone further along the road, a man seeming to intentionally match his pace. When Andy stopped, so did he. A flush of recognition filled him, and he felt inexplicably nervous. “Joe,” he said. “Joe?” Louder. The man turned around. From this distance it was impossible to tell whether or not it was Joe, because age might have changed him so much. But the brash burn scar across the side of his face and head was obvious. His image shimmered in heat haze, almost there, almost not. Andy opened his mouth again but could not speak. The man stepped into a pathway between bushes and disappeared. “Joe,” Andy breathed, but he doubted it had been him at all. He blinked, feeling suddenly dizzied from the sun. Blood roared in his ears like flames. He would get to his guest house, take a drink, and indulge in a long cool shower.

• • • •

Andy must have been sitting outside the coffee shop for longer than he’d remembered. The sunburn across his scalp and face was uneven, brighter on the right cheek and side of his nose, his right ear blazing red. He was angry at himself. After all this time he should know better. Standing naked in front of the big bathroom mirror, his burned bits looked blood-red in the late afternoon light, the rest of his body so pale it was almost translucent. He looked after himself, and considering his age he’d held up well. Had a bit of a pot, and small love-handles, but he was wide across the shoulders and his chest was firm and muscled. Women should love him. He could hardly remember the last time he’d been with one. He dressed in a fresh T-shirt and jeans and slipped on his walking boots. It was early evening now, and he had a meal booked at the Farmer’s Arms at eight o’clock. Still over an hour to kill, and he was bored of sitting in the room on his own. Really, he knew where he was going even as his feet took him there. He walked back through the village, past the square and church and towards the new estate on the other side. The air was heavy and still with summer heat, and sound didn’t seem to carry far. A few cars and vans passed along the road, pedestrians plodded lethargically around the village, but Andy felt very much alone. Memories leapt out like teasing friends trying to startle him. Joe and him playing with magnets outside the small industrial estate, rolling up iron filings and making patterns with them across the metal-clad gates. Throwing knives at the big oak at the edge of the cricket field, trying to get them to stick. Joe had cut his thumb open with one throw, but his knife had quivered in the trunk, and he’d talked about how his blood would always be in the middle of the tree. Mrs Chambers leaning from her front window and shouting at them when they’d fired their water pistols at the cat bathing in her front garden. Andy had fired a daring shot across the garden at her, to Joe’s gasp of delight, but lucky for him it hadn’t found its target. Falling off his bike on the tight bend outside the village shop, skinning his knees, going home crying and watching his mum picking out grit with tweezers. Letting off a smoke bomb by the bridge over the small stream. Mandy Bucknall smiling at him as she rode by on her pony. She had been his first crush, their two-year age gap an eternity. By the time he reached the new estate, he was awash in childhood memories, and he jogged through to the field and woodland beyond so that he did not lose them. Approaching the woods, he saw movement ahead of him, beneath the trees and away from the new path that had been formed. A shadow shifted. He shielded his eyes against the sun burning low above the treeline, squinted, and saw the figure again. It was moving further away from the path and deeper into the woodland, and just as it passed out of sight, it turned to look back at him. “Joe!” Andy called. “Wait! It’s me, Andy!” Joe or not, he did not wait. Moments later the movement ceased, and even though Andy ran the last hundred metres and stood at the new wooden fence between field and woods, there was no sign of anyone beyond. “Damn it,” he muttered. It troubled him that Joe didn’t want to speak. Or maybe it wasn’t Joe at all. But the burns, he thought, remembering the pink burn scar he’d seen across that guy’s face earlier. It must have been Joe. Mustn’t it? He entered the woods through the new gate and walked along the path, and soon he was keen to get off the beaten track. He didn’t recognise anything about the place now that it had been tamed, and he wanted to get in among the trees, where the bluebells were just fading away and his shoes would get covered in dust. Most of all, he didn’t want to meet anyone coming the other way. This was his time, his memory, and he wanted to live it mostly alone. Mostly. Because he also wanted to look for Joe. His old friend must have seen him earlier, and again just now, and if that were the case then perhaps he was following him. Could someone walking ahead be following? Andy didn’t know, but the coincidence was too great. He pushed through a bank of ferns and emerged into a shaded part of the woods that he remembered well. A dried pool was soft with a carpet of lush green moss, and he walked slowly in case there was still any water or deep mud there. It was only during the summer that this pool dried up completely, and it had been a hot one. Really hot. Sweat dribbled down his sides and back. His sunburn hurt, even in the shade beneath the trees, and he wondered whether he should have used some moisturiser. “Joe,” he said, pausing, surprising himself with the utterance. Even hearing the name spoken aloud provoked memories that brought tears to his eyes. He walked onwards, avoiding places where he could see new pathways cut through the woodland like pale scars on a rugged face. Some places were so familiar that he had to stop and stare. Time had worked on the woods in the three decades since he had last been here—many trees had fallen, and new ones grown in their place—but he still knew the place so well. The woods were timeless, and thirty years were barely the flutter of the last leaf to fall before winter. Eventually he found the pillbox. It was buried even deeper beneath undergrowth. Someone must have planted rose bushes around it some time ago, and they had gone wild, twisting and merging with the forest’s natural plant life to form a thorny tangle. Though he circled it several times he saw no easy way through. He had mixed feelings about that. It was good because it meant that local kids didn’t use it anymore. But that also saddened him, because coming in here and having adventures, exploring places like this, was what kids should be doing. Now it was all computer games and TV. He was also disappointed because he thought that perhaps he’d have liked to have gone inside. Joe was watching him through the trees. Andy caught sight of him and held his breath. He was like a tree himself, motionless and expressionless, staring across at Andy as if he had no real thoughts in his mind, no words on the tip of his tongue. “Joe!” Andy called. His old friend was a hundred metres away, visible between trunks because he wanted to make himself so. His image shimmered in the afternoon heat. “Wait there, I’ll come and . . .” Andy hurried away from the pillbox, but as he left he felt a vicious burning sensation across his arms and neck, his face, his scalp, like the memory of flame. It scorched. He gasped, and when he wiped his hands across his face and head, his skin was tight and hot. He smeared sweat, surprised at how much he was perspiring. Looking back he saw that he’d shoved past a bulge of nettles growing beside the pillbox. He smiled through the tingling, burning pain, remembering when Joe had fallen into the stingies that day. The last day they had been together. Joe was gone. Where he’d been standing Andy now saw only the pale trunk of a silver birch. Maybe he’d never been there at all. Wincing against the pain from the nettles and the pulsing ache of sunburn, he started to make his way back out of the woods. He was hungry. It would be dark soon. And suddenly, he no longer wanted to be there when shadows began to grow. Just ahead of him, visible several times through the tree, the shape that might be Joe. Why his old friend was doing this, Andy couldn’t figure out. Didn’t he want to speak to him? Or perhaps he was as much a joker now as he had been back then, and he was just attempting to spook him. The pain of the stings and sunburn continued to trouble him, and now and then it made him feel sick. He moaned against it, as if noise might drive it away. Blood pulsed in his ears, and then roared, blurring his vision with dancing shapes that twisted trees and bushes, catching the sun and concentrating it in flaming arcs that seemed to hang like giant spider webs all around. He reached out to lean against a tree, but drew his arm back, afraid that he might set it on fire. “Joe!” he shouted. “Joe, help me! It hurts!” He’d screamed the same all those years ago when the lighter fuel ignited, or thought he had. Andy tripped and hoped he was falling into a stream. But it was the green flow of more brambles and nettles that caught him, piercing skin, speckling mild poison that added to the fire. He dragged himself upright. What was happening to him? “What’s happening to me?” he screamed. Through his swimming, burning vision he saw that shape again, closer than it had ever been and gesturing him forward. He followed because he could think of nothing else to do. Why weren’t his clothes burning beneath such intense heat? It’s just the sunburn and the stings, he thought, an allergic reaction. But he didn’t want to collapse out here, not alone, and not when he’d done his best to avoid the paths that people would undoubtedly stick to. He staggered through the undergrowth and kicked against a wood ants’ nest, backing away quickly even as he felt the first few acid stings on his lower legs. The shape— “Joe? Joe? Joe?” —waved its arm furiously and moved ahead of him. Andy followed, gasping against the fire that seemed to be deep within him now, singeing his organs, set deep in his bones where it might burn forever. And when he saw where the shape was taking him, the first glimmer of calm touched his skin. The pillbox was no longer overgrown and inaccessible. Even with his senses reeling he was able to find that path beaten into the brambles, turned left and right to hide it from the casual observer. He wasn’t sure whether or not that shape had gone ahead of him, but just as the entrance came into view, he saw a shimmer of movement as something passed inside. As Andy stepped over the threshold and entered the pillbox, the blinding pain of fire seemed to lift from his body and seed itself inside. Small flames flickered over the floor, walls and ceiling, following the swirled lines where Joe had squirted lighter fluid. Andy could smell the tang of burning material and hear the gentle pop-pop of discarded litter shrivelling beneath the heat. “Joe?” he said. But though there was a vague shape in the opposite corner, turned to face the junction of two walls as if ashamed at what it had done, Andy no longer wished to see its face. As the heat inside him dissipated to nothing and the fires began to grow, he wondered whether he had ever left that pillbox, or if he had spent his life nightmaring about it. If he kept the flames at bay, he would never have to find out.

© 2014 by Tim Lebbon. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Tim Lebbon is a New York Times bestselling writer with almost thirty novels published to date, as well as dozens of novellas and hundreds of short stories. Recent releases include Coldbrook, Into the Void: Dawn of the Jedi (Star Wars), Reaper’s Legacy, and Alien: Out of the Shadows. Titan will be publishing The Silence next year in the UK and USA. He has won four British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Scribe Award, and been shortlisted for World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson awards. Fox2000 acquired film rights to The Secret Journeys of Jack London series (with Christopher Golden), and several other novels and stories are in development for screen.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight. Bodywork

Christa Faust

Anna hadn’t even wanted to go to the car show. She told herself that when Ruby called she would bow out, make some excuse. But when the phone shattered the hot stillness of her un-air-conditioned studio, pulling her up from thin, twisted sleep, she knew before she laid a hand on the receiver that she would give in, just like she always did. “Morning, sleepy,” Ruby’s voice, movie star husky and inescapable in the vulnerable curves of Anna’s ear. “You ready yet?” “Ruby, I . . .” “I’ll be there in fifteen.” She arrived in ten, barely giving Anna time to mix instant coffee with hot water from the tap and rinse the night’s suffocating sweat from her skin. “It’s a fucking oven in here!” Ruby announced, flinging her plastic purse on Anna’s rumpled fold-out bed and immediately ripping down the blanket that had been hung over the single window to block out the smog-magnified L.A. sun. Like the sun, Ruby was an unstoppable force, goddess- like in her retrotrash finery and stiletto heels, and Anna knew better than to get in her way. She was Anna’s only friend. “This apartment sucks,” she said, dabbing sweat from her perfectly painted face with a lace hankie baring someone else’s initials. “It’s like a bad hotel room.” She was right, of course, but Anna didn’t care. No matter where she lived, her surroundings had always been spartan, incidental. A way station without identity. The Salvation Army furniture was here when she came and would stay when she left. The fold-out bed, the tacky coffee table, the yellowed lamps. Nothing matched and yet everything had the same sad flavor, like a cluster of drunks in a shitty hotel bar. The carpet was thick and awful, the color of a spoiled orange. Against this tawdry backdrop, Anna stood naked except for a thin, flowered towel bought in a pack of three at Pic’n Save, feeling Ruby’s thickly lined eyes sizing her up as they always did and feeling inadequate as she always did. “Let me do your makeup, honey.” This in a softer voice, conciliatory. Anna nodded, content as always to allow Ruby’s ritual revision. Ruby regularly cut and colored her hair as well, but no matter how new and fabulous she was when the magic of irons and blow-dryers was complete, a week later, Anna always looked like her plain old self again. Digging through her purse, Ruby extracted the ritual tools, mascara wand and eyebrow pencil and slut-red lipstick. Holding Anna’s face between thumb and fore finger, she went to work reshaping her thin lips into a sexy pout, darkening her ashy pale lashes and redefining her gray eyes with some mysterious black liquid that gave them a feline, bad-girl shape. Not satisfied with the stringy tumble of Anna’s recently bleached hair, she herded it up into an impromptu semi- beehive secured with pins and lacquer and the force of Ruby’s will. When she was done, Anna felt new. Sexy even. She didn’t object to the suggestion that she wear that silly leopard- print dress Ruby had bought for her during one of many manic thrift store binges. Stockings and boots and the transformation was complete. Studying her reflection, studying who she had become, she smiled a little. The girl in the mirror would have fun at a car show. “C’mon, already,” Ruby said, impatient nails digging into Anna’s bare upper arm. “You look fine. I wouldn’t let you look bad.”

• • • •

So here she was, sweat trickling down the channel of her spine on this poison-hot September afternoon that smelled of exhaust and carne asada and cheap cologne. They were somewhere like Pomona or El Monte, So-Cal anyburb. Surrounded by uninspired fast food sprawl and dying palm trees, the show was like a bubble of otherworldly fantasy, defiant in the midst of grinding mundanity. The cars lined up like playmates, hoods up, doors open, pornographically spread above strategic mirrors that revealed every proud modification, every hidden mechanism. Gaudy, fantastical, and vaguely menacing, they didn’t even seem to come from the same planet as the humble hatchbacks that clogged the rush-hour freeways. Their immaculate chromed engines flashed seductively. Deep-glossed paint jobs in unearthly colors like Microflake Tangerine or Black Plum Pearl, glistening like half-sucked candy in the vicious sun. Complex hydraulics tilted their rococo chassis in a bizarre, mechanical come-on. Hoods were painted with Aztec gods and girls in bikinis, demons and eagles and tumbling dice. Many were surrounded by trophies and arching golden letters that read things like BOMB SQUAD and LOW ’N’ SLOW. And the men who made them what they were stood close, pride filling their chests as they made small, tender adjustments, wiping away the evidence of their touch with soft cloth. The analogy of a lover’s touch came to Anna’s mind and was immediately discarded. The relationship between machine and maker was a thousand times more profound. Anna wondered what it would be like to be touched like that. Beyond an open area set up with hash-marked poles designed to measure the height that each vehicle’s front end could be lifted off the ground, there stood a second double row of bizarre creations that seemed even farther removed from the constraints of function. And at the end of the long row was a machine that drew Anna to it, seducing her with its outrageous impracticality, its extreme, kaleidoscopic beauty. The proudly displayed interior was a plush riot of purple and green velvet, complete with TV, VCR, stereo, and full bar. Like a porno-movie set, yet somehow pristine, as if the vulgarity of human flesh had never touched it. The engine was a work of art, every humble component replaced by glittering gold and virgin chrome. Surrounded by a forest of trophies, this machine was queen of the show and seemed to know it. Taking a step closer, Anna felt her breath catch in her belly. She no longer felt the heat, the blistering sun. She lost herself in the gorgeous convolutions of mechanical poetry, in the ghostly patterns that skimmed the glossy surfaces of a cool, beetle-green paint job that looked deep enough to drown in. A low, bassline pulse began to beat inexplicably between her legs. Then Ruby, shattering the moment with her bright, intrusive personality. “Time to hustle, honey.” Arm snaking around Anna’s waist to pull her reluctantly away. She had no idea how long she had been standing there. On the way to her car, Ruby decided to brave the row of stinking porta-potties, leaving Anna standing alone and vaguely horny beside a 1959 Impala whose candy-apple skin made her want to taste it. She felt weirdly unfocused, spacey, and filled to overflowing with curious inorganic desire. Waiting dumbly, she became aware of someone standing close to her. A sawed-off Latina, slightly shorter than Anna, compact and muscular with dark skin and blue-black hair cut butch-short in a slick, old-fashioned style. She wore high waisted pants held up by suspenders and a man’s undershirt, big espresso nipples clearly visible through the thin white fabric. There were delicate lacy designs like silver tattoos winding around her sleek forearms, almost as if some kind of metal wire had been embedded in the skin. Black wraparound sunglasses hid her eyes. Her dress shoes were perfect, seeming to intimidate the dust with their pristine gloss. “I saw you looking at the cars,” she said. Her sugar-syrup voice held only a teasing trace of Mexican accent. “They’re all so beautiful,” Anna said, just to say something. She was sweating, dizzy from the sun and from the wicked darts of light thrown off the coils of exposed engines. She was suddenly sure that this woman could tell how turned on she was, that she could smell it somehow. “You could be too,” the woman said. For a second Anna thought she had misheard. Her heart skidded, but she forced herself to remain passive under this sudden scrutiny. The woman reached out and took Anna’s hand, but instead of bringing it to her lips as it seemed for a moment that she might, she turned it palm up and began systematically working the joints in Anna’s fingers as if testing their limits. Though she couldn’t see her eyes, Anna could feel the woman sizing her up, taking in every part of her with the detached speculation of a careful consumer. She found that she wanted anything this woman wanted to do to her. The woman pressed a business card into Anna’s hand. Flustered, Anna licked her lips and clenched her fist around the little rectangle of cheap paper. She was suddenly afraid that Ruby would see it and try to take it away. “Are you a mechanic?” she asked, realizing that she did not want the woman to go away, that she didn’t want Ruby to come back. The woman flexed the corner of her mouth as if privately amused. “Yeah,” she said. “You could say that.” Then, as if Anna’s guilt had evoked her like a vengeful genie, Ruby appeared, freshly lipsticked and frowning. “Excuse me,” she interjected, eyes reduced to jealous slits. “We’re leaving.” Heavy emphasis on “we.” The mechanic gave Anna a last hard stare and then shrugged and walked away. “What was that about?” Ruby asked, possessive now. “Nothing,” Anna lied. “She was just trying to sell me something.” It was the first time she had ever lied to Ruby. It wasn’t until the mechanic was long gone and Ruby was distracted with car keys that Anna was able to focus her eyes enough to read. The crumpled card had only one word printed in simple capital letters above the smaller phone number. It said: BODYWORK. With a not-unpleasant shiver, Anna slipped it into her wallet.

• • • •

Slumped in the passenger seat of Ruby’s big black Riviera, Anna pretended to listen to her friend’s gossipy monologue. Ruby was in “The Industry,” a makeup artist who made a living covering up celebrity imperfections. Anna, on the other hand, was no one. So she nodded gravely at the appropriate places in the litany of sacred names, this latest tapestry of scars from breast implants or needles or suicide attempts. Bruises inflicted by thug boyfriends or the ravages of starvation in a land of plenty. Ruby was speeding, as she always did, cranking the massive steel boat up to ninety-five as they blew past rabbity commuters and execs with cell phones and housewives trying to convince themselves that they were bold adventurers cruising the Serengeti in their Suburban Utility Vehicles rather than baby slaves on the way home from day-care in glorified station wagons. Normally, Anna would be terrified, heart between her teeth while Ruby drove with one hand, casually cutting people off and flipping them the bird. Ruby had obviously already forgotten the mechanic, but Anna hadn’t. She couldn’t. She was barely aware of anything outside of the faint residual tingle in her fingers, the slow burn of that simple business card hidden inside her wallet. Getting back to her building had become a major pain in the ass ever since the cops had blocked off her street at each intersection with steel poles driven into the asphalt, chopping it into inaccessible segments. This was supposed to prevent cruising and drug trafficking, but for Anna, it only prevented Ruby from dropping her off in front of her place. Ruby said she had to rush off to some kind of shoot, so Anna walked that extra half a block alone, very aware of her leopard dress and fishnet stockings and slightly disappointed that Ruby had not wanted to come up. She never seemed to want to come up anymore. Surprisingly, no one hassled Anna as she walked, and she found herself impulsively continuing past the sad aqua lunch box of her building and following Yucca down toward Vine. A tight cluster of grim and unshaven men in front of the Pla- Boy liquor store swiveled dead eyes to follow her, offering up a few half-assed whistles, but she barely heard them, wrapped up as she was in the workings of her muscles and bones, the mechanisms of her body. Visions of hot chrome and the mechanic’s touch and she kept putting one foot in front of the other, instinctively avoiding the dying fever of the Boulevard and looping around on Fountain. The idea of being cooped up in that tiny room seemed unendurable, and it was still far too early to sleep, with the sun only just committing its bloody suicide dive into the Pacific Ocean. So she kept on moving, kept on walking. To be a pedestrian in Los Angeles is to be subhuman, beneath notice. Something to be glanced briefly through tinted windows and then forgotten. Only homeless people walked, pushing shopping carts filled with tin cans and old Christmas decorations and Academy Awards. Homeless and the invisible alien workforce that kept the city’s gardens lush and the toilets clean and the children diapered, greasing the wheels of luxury with their exotic blood. Homeless, aliens, and Anna. Her funky hairdo was melting in the heat, coming undone now that she was out of range of Ruby’s touchups, so she surrendered to entropy, pulling the pins out and tossing them into the street unmindful of the sticky snarls they left behind. Her red lipstick was mostly faded and she wiped the rest away on the back of her hand. She felt as if as she was becoming less defined, more ephemeral with every step, as if Ruby’s modifications were all that had held her anchored in the real world. She felt like a ghost amid the mingled fragrances of sickly night-blooming flowers cultivated in fenced-off yards and split-open trash bags fought over by stray dogs. Of spicy cooking and the hopeless, rusty metal smell of bad neighborhoods in the summer. Without thinking, she hooked up Las Palmas and found herself drawn in to the pale glow that surrounded the narrow newsstand. Just above the fleshy jumble of porn publications was a modest selection of Hot Rod and Lowrider magazines. She could not resist picking one up and thumbing through its bright pages. Captivated by the lush colors and flagrant frivolity displayed within, Anna again lost track of time until the surly cashier informed her of the five-minute browsing limit. She was just about to set the magazine back in its place when her eye snagged on a page of what appeared to be personal messages. There among declarations of love, pleas for second chances, or requests for prison pen pals was that word again, in quiet letters that hit Anna like a stealthy rabbit punch. BODYWORK And beneath that: “The next step.” Then the number. With shaking hands, Anna bought the magazine with the last of that month’s spare change. She felt furtive and nervous, as if she were buying Shaved Nymphos or Barely Legal. She had to breathe deep, force herself to walk slowly away. As she made her way back home, clutching her purchase to her chest, her heart began to slow and her mind drifted. She was content to let it go, to kill time with fantasies of engines and of being loved.

• • • •

The next day Anna had to work. She worked in a copy shop, making endless Xeroxes of desperate spec scripts to be thrust into the faces of annoyed Hollywood royalty in the men’s rooms of trendy restaurants. These writers usually had three names and were always painfully optimistic, like beaten dogs that keep slinking back for more abuse. Sometimes they would practice their “pitches” on Anna while the machines obediently spat out three-holed pages. She would put on her retail robot face and nod politely and try to say something like, “I’m sure Mr. Schwarzenegger will love it.” But that day, her mind was elsewhere. The latest three- named writer had given up trying to talk to her and was instead chatting up one of the Barbies who had come in to pick up zed cards. Anna could barely force herself to complete the brainless tasks her meager job demanded. All she could think of was the joints in her fingers and the magazine and the terrible emotion that curled around her heart, fluctuating between desire and panic. Ruby called and tried to get her to come out after work, but Anna said she was tired. She was amazed at her sudden resistant strength and even more amazed when Ruby let it go. She had to hold on tightly to the edge of the counter, unsteady and afraid the world had been secretly rearranged. Zeke, her cartoon-exuberant co-worker, had been teasing her mercilessly all day as she screwed up one order after another. “So what’s his name?” Zeke would ask repeatedly, clacking his tongue-piercing against his teeth in a way that he knew annoyed her. When she refused to answer, he would sulk, hiding behind an Urban Primitives magazine whenever there was a rush of customers and leaving her to fend for herself up front. When he could no longer avoid helping people, he would leave the magazine open to some close-up photo of spiky genitalia. In the lull just after lunch, she was counting out change for a woman who came in every day with photos of famous actors that she would photocopy, gluing her own cut-out head onto the bodies of the actors’ girlfriends. When she laid the last coin in the woman’s sweaty, glitter-nailed hand, Anna noticed Zeke’s magazine had tumbled off the counter. Squatting to pick it up and maybe even toss it in the trash, she saw that word again, unmistakable. BODYWORK. Same phrase, same number, but this time lurking amidst advertisements for needles and niobium. Anna dropped the magazine as if it were on fire. It took her almost a week to break down and call.

• • • •

“Yeah,” a voice said on the other end, picking up after a single ring. She had no idea if it was the same person. Her heart was beating far too fast. Zeke was staring at her with his tongue out and so she turned away and pulled the phone cord out as long as it could stretch. She felt vaguely faint and had to force herself to speak. “My name is Anna,” she said, appalled at the tentative squeak that had replaced her voice. “We met last week at the car show . . .” She trailed off, hanging terrified over the abyss of silence between them. She thought she could hear the sound of hydraulics in the background and the cicada whir of electric lug wrenches. Just when she was sure she could not stand another second, the voice spoke and she couldn’t believe she didn’t recognize her the first time. “Give me your address.” In a teenage-girl gush, she told the mechanic to pick her up here at the shop when she got off her shift. When she finished reciting the address, the mechanic hung up without saying goodbye. She set the phone back in its cradle and took a deep breath. A customer was saying something to her, but she couldn’t hear him. She left him standing stupid at the counter with a handful of grubby singles and ran to the toilet. Squatting with her back against the door and her pants around her knees, she masturbated viciously, the cheap weave of her Kwik Kopy T-shirt clenched between her teeth. She found a curious fantasy flooding into her consciousness, a dream of silver skin and well-oiled joints, of a perfect, impossible body. In her mind, the beauty of the car show became her own, the organic curves surrendering to the superior strength of chrome and fiberglass. She came suddenly, banging her head against the door hard enough to send a shower of sparks across her vision like the starry splash created when a welder’s torch meets metal.

• • • •

The mechanic was exactly on time, pulling into the lot in a revamped midnight-blue Studebaker that turned heads for blocks. She got out and came around to open the passenger- side door for Anna. Her sharply cut pachuco drape was smooth, supernaturally unrumpled in spite of the oppressive heat. Anna felt wretched and unlovely in her work clothes with her hair pulled back in a sloppy knot. Unable to speak, she bowed her head and slipped into the car. The cavernous interior smelled of pomade and leather and hot steel. The sound of the heavy door slamming was as final as a guillotine blade. Studying the mechanic surreptitiously as she drove, Anna thought that she was in love with her, that she must be. That this desire, this panicked hunger that seemed to own every part of her, must be what people meant when they talked about “crimes of passion.” She wanted to press kisses to the flawless gloss of the mechanic’s two-toned shoes as they spoke to the Studebaker’s pedals, coaxing obedience from the beautiful, high-strung machine. The mechanic never said a word, seeming to be an extension of the car, a modern-day centaur. Anna found that she felt an equal desire to touch both the car, the curved faces of the gauges, the cool texture of the tiny chain-link steering wheel, and the mechanic, the strong angle of her jaw and her thick, callused fingers. She still wore the impenetrable black shades, cutting Anna off completely from any sense of human intimacy. She didn’t miss it at all. Humans lie. Machines do not. They arrived somewhere, and Anna realized abruptly that she had no idea where she was. She had told no one where she was going, and although everyone in the mini-mall parking lot in front of the copy shop had stopped to gawk at her ostentatious ride, she doubted anyone would remember the face of the driver. Instead of feeling scared, she felt comforted by this knowledge. As if fate had given her permission to disappear. Having pulled into the scrap-littered lot of a large and seemingly abandoned garage, the mechanic came around again to open Anna’s door. She felt unsteady and the mechanic seemed to know it instantly, wrapping a firm arm around Anna’s waist to support her as she stood. This simple contact was incendiary. The smell of the mechanic’s skin made Anna’s head swim, musky sweat and burning metal, blood and copper and industrial lubricants. She leaned into her like a tired child, letting the mechanic lead her up to a small door cut high into the larger roll-up. Inside it was surprisingly cool. The space was huge, cathedral-like. There were cars, some covered with tarps, others exposed and vivisected like some complex experiment. Parts too, arcane and gorgeous, and Anna wanted to touch everything but didn’t. Instead she waited, silent, wondering. The mechanic removed her glasses in the dimness, revealing lashless eyes like mirrors, the whole of the ball a shiny, reflective surface in which Anna could see tiny replicas of her own plain face. This barely had time to register before the mechanic took her hand again and spoke. “I’ve been thinking about you,” she said. “Your bones. You are perfect.” She leaned closer, voice dropped low to a near whisper. “Cherry.” Anna’s heart kicked into high gear, chill sweat sheening her skin. “I . . .” she stammered. “I want . . .” “I know,” the mechanic said, scarred fingers brushing her cheekbone. “I know what you want.” She led Anna down a steep flight of cement steps, into a cramped basement workshop that was one of many, set like honeycomb cells in a vast and busy hive. “Wait here,” she instructed, leaving Anna alone and without choices. The circular space was lit like an operating theater. In the center of the room was a strange spidery thing that resembled the love child of a medical examination table and a hydraulic lift. Tools were laid out, easily accessible. Their shapes seemed infinite, ranging from delicate scalpels and hemostats to bulky rivet guns and power drills and things that Anna had never seen. Things that hinted at unthinkable purpose. The floor was tiled, with a large drain in the center. When the mechanic reappeared, she was dressed in a loose-fitting coverall and a thick rubber apron, her strong hands sheathed in latex. “Are you ready?” she asked, her voice almost tender. Anna bit deeply into her lower lip. She was. The mechanic helped her up into the cradle and webbed her in with heavy-duty cable that divided her body up into a butcher’s chart of work areas. As the mechanic moved to insert a massive rubber bit into her mouth, she flinched, fearful and suddenly unsure. “What’s that?” she asked. “It’s to keep you from screaming,” the mechanic told her, soothing her like a vet with a skittish horse. “But I won’t scream,” she said. The mechanic blinked her chromed eyes. Her voice was gentle but firm, like a doctor, like a parent correcting a wayward child. “Of course you will,” she said. A long tense moment unwound between them. Anna could hear the faraway music of laboring machines, keeping time with her nervous heart. She nodded with her eyes closed and obediently opened her mouth.

• • • •

A warehouse, deep in the forgotten maze of some old, industrial neighborhood. The location was secret, of course, but those who knew found it without hesitation. While the car show had been bright and open and full of sun and children, this event was private, hidden, lit with mercury lights and protected by stone-faced gang members with Chinese AK knockoffs. Inside were the machines, each more fabulous than the last. But there was one that took the spectators’ breath away with its delicate, clockwork perfection, its inventive audacity. Razor-thin frills like an air conditioner, like a wedding dress. Clear Lucite covered the curved abdomen. Jealous rivals and beaming club members pressed close to view the gold-mesh and colorful rubber organs contained within. The heart-pump was raised up out of the chest cavity and housed in a complex wire cage glittering with LED displays. A transparent speculum had been inserted to give a better view of a filigreed cervix that blossomed outward like a hybrid lily. The cocked- back legs were powerful and insectoid, triple-jointed and reinforced with pistons. The back of the steel skull was porcupine-spiky with glowing fiber optics. Its name — ANATOMICA — was etched into the smoky glass eyeplate, the club name — BODYWORK — beneath in fine gold script. No one was surprised when she took first place. “Absolutely stunning,” the judge told the mechanic as he handed over an enormous trophy in a storm of camera- flashes. “This is your best and most original work to date.” The other club members rushed the stage to gleefully embrace her and then stand proud for a group photo with the winning entry. “We won, baby,” the mechanic whispered, caressing her masterpiece’s sleek new skull, and although Anna could no longer hear, she knew it and was happy.

© 2000 by Christa Faust. Originally published in After Shocks: An Anthology of SoCal Horror, edited by Jeremy Lassen. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Christa Faust is the author of several novels, including Choke Hold, Money Shot, and Hoodtown. Money Shot was nominated for an Edgar award, Anthony award, and Barry award, and won a Spinetingler award in the “Rising Star” category. She worked in the Times Square peep booths as a professional dominatrix and in the adult film industry both behind and in front of the cameras for over a decade, starring in dozens of racy, fetish-oriented videos. She also wrote and directed a four-part bondage adventure serial called Dita in Distress, featuring world famous Burlesque queen Dita Von Teese. Faust is a Film Noir fanatic, an avid reader of classic hardboiled pulp novels, and an MMA fight fan. She lives and writes in Los Angeles. Bog Dog

Seras Nikita

My hands were badly chapped that fall, the year we found Bog Dog. At least that I remember. The ground iced in early September, a month and a half early, and we had to dig the turnips from the earth with trowels. The soil was like pebbles of ice and the turnip tops were stiffened with freezing juice that re-froze on our hands as we sliced them off. When all the turnips were in and Surrey and I went back to stitching the Christmas Quilt, I remember how the yarns kept catching on the hardened trills of split skin that cracked my palms and fingertips. I remember how the dyed yarn would tug a crack so raw that it bled, leaving a muddy track of green or vermillion where the wetness of my blood had loosened dye from wool. Even with fair hands I hated sewing and I was no good at it (I’m still not), but Surrey could whip stitches so tight and even you’d swear she was a practiced seamstress, like the aged woman with the port-wine birthmark who’d stitched her tiny christening dress eleven years before. I was going on fifteen that winter. A storm was coming, and it was going to be a bad one. Pop could tell because his toe with the gout was swollen up as big as a red potato. He stood in the doorway to the woodshed and rolled a cud of chew in his mouth, counting. Two cords of wood, half a box of kindling, and only eleven blocks of thin peat. Pop grunted and spat, and his eyes looked worried. The meager stack of peat in our woodshed didn’t look like the stuff they burned in the schoolhouse or the chapel. Ours was thin and gray and full of air. When you held it in your hand, it weighed nothing at all, and instead of smoldering hot in the stove, it flamed up yellow and then dissolved into ash. Ma said we didn’t have a very good piece of land because Gran didn’t know what to look for when she bought it, so she’d gotten bamboozled on account of her being a woman and an out-of-towner. Gran had grown up near Aberdeen where they burned coal and ate eels. She didn’t know about peat or sheep or winter storms that could trap a family snowbound until they burned cribs and floorboards and frostbite took their toes. Pops spat again and then he said to the spot of saliva- moistened dirt, “A thief’s not a thief if he steals to save himself and his own.” And then he told me and Surrey to take the barrow from the woodpile and go cut as much peat as we could carry from the Cornwalls’ property. It was almost five o’clock and sun was already low in the sky, but I buttoned up my coat and then helped tuck my little sister into her scarf and mittens. Then we took the old barrow with the wobbly wheel and pushed it along the hardscrabble path that led through the bone-white elms and into the rye.

• • • • The O’Farrells had got two hundred pounds sterling for the bog man dug out of their property in 1954, so Surrey figured we could get at least fifty for the mummified dog we dug up while we were stealing peat from the Cornwalls’ poisoned rye field. At first we weren’t sure if the University would be willing to buy, because we’d been out there stealing blocks of the Cornwalls’ peat. But after, Pops told us Ma said we didn’t have to feel guilty because the fields were just going to thorn anyhow. The Cornwalls were dead, and nobody would make a bid on the land because everyone knew that rye field was haunted. So that’s why we were on the Cornwalls’ property stealing chunks of rich dark moss from their bog, peat that was going to waste anyway. By the time we’d filled our barrow, the wind whipping through the white elms had chapped our lips and cheeks as red as beets. To my back stood the blackened field, with shadows like faces and stalks like naked bones. I buttoned my coat up high on my neck, but I could still feel it watching me. There were as many stories about the Cornwalls’ fields as boys in the schoolyard, but Patrick Freer’s rendition was the most highly regarded. His account went like this: Gregor Cornwall’s daughter Ella had been engaged to the son of a wealthy trader named Thomas Eadie, which was true. Here, Patrick would lower his voice and make it husky, as if he was letting us in on a secret. Mere weeks before the wedding, Ella had got herself into trouble with the butcher’s boy, got herself in a family way, and the child was set to be a bastard. So in the secret of night, Gregor brought Ella to a woman, a witchly woman who lived alone in the woods past Bone Bottom Creek. The woman said she could get the baby out of the child’s belly before it was alive, so it wouldn’t count as murder, which was a mortal sin and worse than birthing a bastard. The old woman charmed Gregor and spoke to him softly with sweet toothless breath and said that for the proper price it could all be done easily without a scratch or a scar. She would scrape the memory from Ella’s mind so that the girl would forget everything, including her love for the butcher’s boy. Gregor’s ears prickled red and angry as he thought of the butcher boy’s thin spotty hands between his daughter’s legs, and of the dowry that would vanish with the Eadie boy. The witch stroked Gregor’s cheek with her three-fingered hand and sold him a spell that would draw the girl tight back together. For an extra twelve shillings, she promised, he could even buy bloody sheets for his daughter’s wedding night. But for days after swallowing the witch’s draught, Ella writhed in delirium, and when at last the baby came it was a screaming thing, dark and eyeless and not yet formed. Gregor and his wife, Maddie, smothered the child to death before Ella’s senses returned, but the damage had been wrought and all three were damned. Ella buried the tiny body in the rye field and then hung herself in the butcher’s smokehouse with the rope they used to tie up hogs for scalding. Broken with grief, Gregor returned to the witch with his payment exactly as the old woman instructed, folded into a square of linen and tied with a twist of black yarn. But instead of silver pieces the linen concealed a heavy pair of shearing scissors, and he killed the witch by putting the blade through her left eye and into her rotten heathen brain. The unbaptized baby buried in the field brought a blight down upon the family. The elms grew scabs and the rye turned black, and by the time the sheep began to birth headless lambs Gregor and Maddie and their four sons were all stone dead, plus a handful of house servants and two Negroes and the stable man. You can see why Patrick’s version of events was the best loved. Ma said Patrick’s father was a gambler and a drunk, so yarn spinning was in his blood. Every time he told the story he wove in another sordid detail, and so no matter how many times we’d heard we all gathered around to listen whenever a new boy wondered aloud why the manse in the elms stood empty. Pops said the witch story was horseshit. He said God sent the scourge into the rye because only Godless Protestants ate rye. We had nothing to fear, he said, being good Catholics and potato-eaters. And I’d never seen a witch or knew anyone who’d know where to find one, least of all liver-skinned Gregor Cornwall with his stutter and faceful of moles and the widening bald spot eating up his thinning orange hair. Cursed or not, the Cornwalls had no doubt died under terrible circumstances, and now the house stood dark. Fat Anthony Kemp’s father was a surgeon. He was also the oldest of us, so he alone could to recall the year the Cornwalls got sick. He insisted to have witnessed a desperate call in the night, after which his surgeon Daddy had raced to the manse in the elms where he’d been forced to saw off Mother Maddie’s arms and legs after they turned black and began to fall apart. He’d sewn polishing rags tightly over all the little boys’ hands, because all else failed to stop them scratching their skin right down to their bones. According to Anthony, Gregor Cornwall had clawed his own eyes clean out of his skull before his surgeon Daddy could stab him with the needle full of sedative. “You think an eyeball would be round and mushy, like a peeled grape,” said Anthony. He was sitting on the stone steps in front of the vestibule eating a thick ham sandwich. A yellow smear of mustard adorned his upper lip. “But Daddy says it’s not so.” Anthony paused to swallow and lick his lips. “He says once it’s popped, it just oozes out from under your eyelid like candle drippings. And he said the whole time old Gregor was digging around in his own head, he had his mouth stretched wide open like this.” Anthony stretched his jaw as far open as it would go and pulled his lips away from his teeth, eyes wide. The roll of fat beneath his chin folded against his throat and looked like a long link of sausage. “Like he was going to scream, but no sound came out. Daddy says he stayed like that till they put him in the ground.” We tried to imagine the horror of this as Anthony finished the last bite of sandwich and produced a cinnamon sticky roll from his dinner pail. But when we found the Bog Dog nestled in the peat, my sister and me forgot all about Gregor Cornwall and Patrick Freer and Fat Anthony Kemp and thought only about bringing the dog whole out of the ground. Fifty pounds would buy coal enough to last till Surrey was married and gone. It would buy beef dinners and new shoes and oranges and walnuts and store-bought soap that didn’t burn with the sting of lye. Fifty pounds sterling. We had to be very careful with the Bog Dog. We wanted to surprise Ma and Pops, so Surrey and me raised him out of the earth by ourselves, very carefully, with a summer sheet that was already so torn up that Ma had been using it to squeeze cracklins out of rendering lard. We lay the sheet down in the bog and with our fingers we carefully cleared the black peat from around Bog Dog’s shriveled-up body. His legs were curled up under him and kind of fused into his belly, so that he looked a little like a tanned rabbit set on its haunches. The skin felt like leather when you touched it, but he also felt hollowed-out, like bird bones. When we lifted him he was as light as a feather. We moved the dog very carefully into the barrow, both of us huddled together so our hands made a soft scoop, but even so we lost a piece of his tail and almost his whole left jowl. He looked like probably a Spaniel or a Springer, so the broken-off jowl barely changed his shape any, not like it would a Boxer or a Saint Bernard. But the tail was easier to notice. Through the hole in his hindquarters you could see right down inside to tell that Bog Dog really was hollowed out, with just a little stringy webbing where his guts should have been. It looked like the inside of a jack-o-lantern on All Hallows Eve. To fit Bog Dog safely inside the bowl of the barrow, we emptied all the peat and sticks of elm into a heap, and left the heap sitting there in the biting cold of the Cornwalls’ cursed bogland. When we got back to the house, Pops was angry at first because we’d abandoned the peat and firewood. But when we showed him Bog Dog his anger left him and he wondered aloud how many pouches of chew it would buy and whether or not the Eadies were selling the eight-week piglets now, or if we’d have to wait till spring. We talked over the tail and jowl with Ma, whether to leave the tail off or try and stitch it back, and Ma decided the missing parts probably wouldn’t decrease Bog Dog’s value. The University people might not even notice, and if they did, we could just give them back the parts and maybe they could put them back on with some special tape or thread. Maybe there was even such a thing as special mummy glue. We put Bog Dog in the corner between the stove and the door, where we could all see him. He almost looked like he was guarding the door. The missing jowl even gave him a kind of ferocious look even though his body was clumped together and melted-looking. Surrey watched him over her spoon while she slurped cabbage soup. She asked Pops why Bog Dog had no insides. He said, “The peat ate it out of him, just like a worm eats the insides of a rotten log.” Surrey looked down at her dirty fingernails and asked if the peat could do that to her, and Pops said it would take hundreds and hundreds of lifetimes buried in the peat for that to happen, so not to worry. Then he got up to spit tobacco juice in the spit bowl by the stove and Ma told him she hoped that chew was worth fifty silver pieces and ten years of frozen yearlings and pneumonia. Pops looked at her and spit again to be defiant, but he spit in the ash bucket, far away from Bog Dog. That night the storm blew in, and it was as bad as Pop’s toe had promised. Grains of ice thwacked against the windows and cold seeped through the glass and under the doors and crept through the place in the roof where the stove pipe poked out. The next morning when Pops braved the twenty bitter steps to the woodshed, he was able to carry back everything we had in a single trip. On the third day we ran out of peat. On the sixth we ran out of wood. On the eighth day we pulled the legs off our kitchen chairs and fed them into the woodstove, and Ma screamed at me and Surrey for throwing everything out of the barrow. Her voice got higher and higher, and pretty soon there weren’t any words in it. Pops slapped her cheek and she got quiet and went to sit by the stove, even though by then the heat coming off it was almost imaginary. Surrey was so thin and so small, the cold bit into her worse than any of us. Her hands and feet turned red and she complained they ached her so she couldn’t sleep. Her arms and hands felt hot, but she couldn’t get to feeling warm no matter how many featherbeds I piled on top of her. When I tried to slip in and warm her with my own body, her eyes were foggy and her skin was gray and stayed dented where I pushed on her. She curled up like a dried-out spider and would not uncurl to eat or to wash. When all the shelves and baseboards were burned up, my little sister stopped answering the questions Ma called through her quilts. Pops scooped her up in his arms, a cold apple turnover with only the tips of yellow hair poking out. Pops bundled her down by the stove and threw Bog Dog on the fire. Bog Dog didn’t light right away. For a few moments he just lay there in the hot ashes, his dog face suddenly seeming very sorrowful, and above Surrey’s swaddled quilts Pop’s face fell and his eyes grew moist. Then all of the sudden there was a loud popping sound, and Bog Dog burst into flames. Or rather, he burst into smoke. Thick yellowish smoke poured from the cavities of his mouth and eyes and the broken-off place where his tail should have been. It kept pouring and pouring, as thick as the banks of fog that roll across the bog when the temperature drops suddenly and the air is heavy with wetness. It billowed out of the stove and sank into a roiling blanket just above the floorboards, then came up from the ground until it filled the room and clogged my eyes and ears and made my mouth taste like rye bread and rotting things. I tried to feel my way toward the door, desperate for the relief of air, but I hadn’t taken a single step before my head began to swim and black-brown flowers bloomed behind my eyes. Then there was nothing but blackness.

• • • •

When I woke up, Ma and Pops were both dead. They lay on the floor, shoulders touching, as if they had kept each other from going alone into the dark. One of Ma’s arms was bent behind her back, and the shoulder was a lump of unnatural knobs. Pops had wet himself. But I didn’t have time to think about them because of what happened to Surrey. When I was little, I suffocated a moth by keeping it in a jar. Not on purpose: I was a kid and didn’t know any better. The moth was so weirdly docile at first. It just let me scoop it right into the jar. After a day or two I realized why the moth had been so sluggish; it was plump with eggs, and now it was squeezing them from its body into the smooth glass of the jar’s floor. Every day there were more eggs. The moth’s body pulsated almost imperceptibly with the effort, not moving or eating. I only knew it was alive because of the way the legs clung to the blade of grass I’d dropped down inside. When it died the legs curled under and the moth fell over to one side, bending one wing and one antenna beneath the tiny head. But the thing was, the eggs kept coming out. For another two days the dead moth’s body continued to push out the eggs, a pile of malformed translucent orbs that would never hatch. It turned my stomach and for some reason the whole thing disturbed me terribly. I had witnessed the dark face of nature, the one that puts maggots into a dead cat’s eyes and sends babies into the world with their insides spilling out their bellies. I still dream about that moth sometimes. In the ten years since, I had seen nothing so grotesque until I awoke from my smoke-induced blackout to find Surrey’s head sewn onto the body of a mummified dog with crooked stitches of green and vermillion quilting yarn. And with the same crude stitches, fastened to the pale, slender neck of my little sister, was the shriveled and eyeless head of Bog Dog. The creature with Bog Dog’s head and the body of my sister was the lesser monstrosity. As horrifying as it looked— and no matter how much I wanted to, I could not stop looking —it just sat in one place and quaked. I could hear its organs clicking and squelching inside as my sister’s heart and lungs and intestines tried to decipher commands from a dead brain like a dried and shriveled pecan. It urinated on itself, unable to make a sound. So I turned my attention to the other, the creature with my sister’s fair-haired head and sprinkle of freckles and the pink- red mouth that wouldn’t stop screaming. I pulled the thing from the hot ashes, touching it with my hands, and slapped away the sparks and embers because I thought that would make Surrey stop making the noises she was making, shrieking and gulping and broken, screaming sob-noises that would have made me believe I had gone mad, if I did not already believe that. But the screaming continued even after the last red flake of fire was snuffed. She never moved her gaze from me, her large, moist eyes rolling and imploring me to help her. I did not know how. She would try to speak and remind herself that only gurgling sounds could be coaxed from the ragged stumps of her vocal cords. The reminder would start her screaming again, either with pain or fear or because above me loomed the face of Death, which could not be far from us now. The red lips of tissue around her eyes began to purple over and her gurgles became wheezes. The rivulets of blood that trickled at first from between the green and vermillion yarns slowed, then stopped. Her eyes glassed. I felt myself heaving but could not know whether I wanted to sob or vomit. I knew I should hold her. She was dying. So I carefully scooped the little thing up, ignoring how the body crumbed away from my fingers, how Surrey’s head flopped to the side and then caught against the stitches, choking off her screams as the vocal cords pinched against those green and vermillion yarns. I carried her out the door and past the woodshed and down the hardscrabble path, my stocking feet making tracks in the snow like a yoked ox. I carried her screaming all the way to the patch of bone-white elms, because she’d always thought them beautiful, and laid her gently down in the cleanest of the snowbanks. I stayed with her until the screaming stopped and I was certain she’d frozen to death, and then I used Pop’s pocketknife to slit the yarn stitches and pull her head away from the stump-neck of Bog Dog. It’s odd to think of how seldom you look at your hands. The palms, I mean. I suppose you do look at the backs of your hands an awful lot, but they rarely do anything wicked. I didn’t notice the tracks of green and vermillion that crisscrossed my own until the morning after I buried my little sister’s head in the frozen earth of the Cornwall’s haunted rye field, while the elms watched me with trunks like naked bones.

© 2014 by Seras Nikita.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Seras Nikita is a hobbyist writer of horror and science fiction. She currently resides in Oakland, California where she works at Tippett Studio, managing PR and the stop-motion project Mad God. She loves painting, horror films, motorcycles, aerial silks, and baking elaborate tarts. Her favorite book is Stephen King’s Misery, and her favorite film is Let the Right One In. Nikita writes mostly short horror tales, and she is in the process of refining her first novel in the “soft” science fiction genre. Influences include Roald Dahl, Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft, Junichiro Tanizaki, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and Stephenie Meyer. (Just kidding).

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight. Night Falls, Again

Michael Marshall Smith

I’m not thinking about where I’m going to sit. I’m not thinking about anything at all. No sir. Not me. My mind is a total blank. I’m just walking into a bar to have a drink, which is a perfectly reasonable ambition. People do it, all the time. Everywhere. That’s what bars are for. For people to just walk into. People like me and you. Otherwise they wouldn’t be there, on every street. The bar in question is called Tony’s and takes up most of a small block a little north of Duval Street. It’s split roughly in half, in terms of area. You can hang inside amongst the dark wood and neon beer signs, planting your elbows on tables sticky with last night’s margaritas; or there’s a covered patio outside, with twisted vines overhead and a good view of the street and its passing mildlife. The tourists mainly opt for the outside—the Europeans, especially, who like the warmth. The locals head for the interior, where it’s cooler. They can get heat anytime—plus the bar has televisions, so they can keep up to speed with the incessant burbling of the news and sports and the soaps. Especially the soaps. People sit there for hours on end, heads tilted back, mouths hanging open, drinking the fiction by the glass: not wanting to miss a moment in the lives of these shadow friends, the narratives of whose existence are barely more deranged than our own. I steer a course through the tables outside and head through the double-door portal to the interior. It’s late afternoon and neither area is crowded. I could sit wherever I want. I’ve lived in Key West for nearly two years now, and so the heat is no big novelty to me either, but I decide that once I’ve sourced a drink I’ll come sit with it outside. Inside is for night time, when it’s dark. During the day you might as well be out in the light: while it’s there; while it lasts. The only problem with the outside is the waitress service. They do their best and are cheery as all hell, but drinks can still be slow in arriving. I know that I shouldn’t let the first one take too long. I don’t want to get panicked. I’m not good with temptation when I’m panicky. Later on, outside will be great. I’ll take up residence at a table with a view, and sip my drink, waiting patiently for the next one to arrive. I’ll watch the people as they amble up and down the street, and make up half-stories about where they’ve come from: the families and the couples, the children growing tired and fractious, the oldsters holding hands. It’ll be sedate and civilised and grown-up. But for now, speed is of the essence. I walk into the dim inner sanctum and walk straight up to the bar. A television is on stun directly above my head, two coifed ladies in tight sweaters accusing each other of fell deeds, the nature of which I can’t make out. One of them has slept with the other’s husband, or daughter, or is her long-lost neurologist, or something. The sound is loud and crackly, the picture an over-saturated bleed of interlacing. I’ve seen the show before but can’t remember what it’s called. Sometimes I’ll let one or other of them welter in front of my eyes for a while, for old times’ sake, but I begin to lose a grip on the difference between what I’m watching and what is real. I find myself expecting friends, people I haven’t seen in a while, to pop up in the next scene. They never have, but I’m not sure whether this is good or bad. The two guys behind the bar are busy, but one nods to show he’ll be with me real soon. I light a cigarette and lean back against the counter, still firmly not thinking. I scan the other customers instead, the husbands and wives, the girls and their guys. The day is unusually hot, and a few tourists have made it inside. Most have foreheads that are at least blushing; some look like they should be sitting in a burns unit. If you’re not used to it, the breeze off the harbour will fool you. There’ll be a few couples wincing in their hotel rooms tonight, carefully putting lotion on each other and making injured hissing sounds. Sleeping under the same sheet later on, but not getting any closer than that, musing that tomorrow they’ll maybe buy a hat, and wishing they’d had the thought twenty-four hours previously. After a minute or so I turn to check on progress, but the drink jockeys are still pouring and stirring. I have an impulse to just walk out, but it’s only mild and I beat it down with little effort. I notice that another man has entered the bar and is now standing at the counter. I frown. I know the guy. At least, I think I do. It feels like I’ve seen him before, anyway. He’s tall with ragged dark hair and is dressed in a dark suit with a tie pulled down, the top button of his shirt undone. His shirt is also dark. I don’t know what he thinks he’s playing at. In Key West, for Christ’s sake. In summer. There are places around here where you can dress like an advert in GQ if you really want to—in the evenings—but stand around looking like that in the afternoon and not only will you be hotter than hell, but you’re going to look like you’ve been up all night. I watch the guy for a while, trying to work out where I know him from. At one point he sweeps his eyes around the counter, probably trying to work out how many are ahead of him in line for a drink. This gives me a better look at his face, but even that doesn’t help. It isn’t like I can think “Oh yeah, that’s . . . oh, what’s his name?” or “Doesn’t he work in such and such a store?” Just a face I know, in some context or other. The bar people are still shaking cocktails, but none of the contents has my name on it. I abruptly decide this isn’t the place for me. Not today. It isn’t working out. I turn and walk away from the counter. I’m going to go back out through the doors and out into the day. And that’s when I get caught. Between the inside and outside doors of Tony’s, there’s a corridor about four feet deep. As I enter it, a bunch of tourists are already in place. An extended family, or a distended one: each looking as if they’ve had been unevenly but enthusiastically inflated with a pump. They start to move, then change their minds and return to the bill of fare, shipwrecked in Gap casuals, mired in space, worrying. Is this a good place, or are they going to get ripped off? Are they going to get value? Those extra couple of cents make all the difference, and never mind that in the search for value nirvana you waste irreplaceable hours of your life. My grandmother used to say that if you look after the cents then the dollars will look after themselves. This has a nice ring to it, but on the other hand Grandma’s dead and has been for a long time, so it evidently didn’t help her with the bigger things in life. She did leave behind a vast jar of small change, I’ll admit. It added up to two hundred and eighty bucks, or about a hundred and fifty instances of not having quite what she wanted, but something slightly cheaper instead. The point is, I got stuck. Tourists to the left of me, tourists to the right, a hot and frowning mass of indecision. I can’t get past. If this hadn’t happened, I would have just walked straight out and into the heat, turned right, walked across the patio and through the gate and into the street. There’s a strong chance that I might have headed out to the harbour and drunk an ice tea; sitting watching the birds until people started to gather for the sunset, at which point I would have gone home and watched the tube or read a book or held something else in front of my eyes until they started to close. My mission in Tony’s had been very specific. A single idea had been allowed to surface, and it was this I was following through. It’s possible that . . . Well, whatever. It doesn’t happen that way. Instead, as I try to be polite about cutting my way through the blubbery mass in front of me, I happen to glance out onto the patio. To the left. And I see her. She’s sitting at one of the tables outside, wearing a long white cotton skirt and a T-shirt that doesn’t have a slogan on it. There’s an empty seat opposite her. She has mid-length blonde hair and skin which has been carefully sheltered from the sun, and she is exactly the person I most don’t want to see. I take a step back, using the tourists as a screen. My heart misfires, a spastic double-thud. I wait, hot and nervous enough to feel a little sick. Eventually the tourists move, like iron molecules in a bar stroked long enough that all of the magnetic poles finally started to point in the same direction. They decide against what’s on offer, and go back out into the light. I still don’t move. For a moment I neither go outside, nor back the way I’ve come. I don’t know what to do. Whichever way I turn seems bad. I’ve lost faith in being inside, but I don’t want the woman to see me. I can’t cope with her today. I’m just not in the mood. I glance inside the bar. One of the barmen is putting a Manhattan in front of the man in the dark suit. The man lays some bills down on the counter, payment for it and against any future brethren it might have. Outside, the woman is still without a drink. A waitress walks right by her, but she doesn’t try to flag her down. She’s settled in for the duration and will wait until the staff deign to see her of their own volition. She’s like that, I know. Willing to wait, marinating you in her displeasure until you’re good and softened up, ready to be flash-fried. That’s harsh, in fact. She isn’t like that often, and it’s usually justified. Enough light is filtering down through the vines in the trellis to pick out the white and blonde in her hair, like a fistful of pretty fibre optics. She looks beautiful, and far away. But not far enough. There’s no other route out of the bar. I have to jump one way or the other, face one music or other. I can’t handle the woman. I turn and go back inside. This time both barmen come to attention immediately, as if wondering what has taken me so long. I ask for what I want and I hand over the exact amount. I don’t leave a wad on the bar. I’m not staying. I don’t even sit on a stool, but drink slowly, standing up. I’m shaking, but only a little. When half of the beer is inside me, I feel steadied enough to look around the room. The tourists are happily sipping and wincing. Two new women in sweaters are on television, baying two sides of some story editor’s idea of trauma. The guy in the dark suit is still in place at the counter. As I watch, he pushes his pile of money toward the barmen in mute request. I turn away, still bothered about where I recognise him from. It’s not like I think he’s trouble, or that he sparks trepidation in me. It just bugs me, not remembering things. It’s getting worse. Either that, or more selective. When I’m halfway through my drink, I go to the john. On the way back, I glance out of the doors. The woman is still sitting out there, still waiting for a drink. Something big and fruity, probably, a non-drink that will take an age to wade through. I walk bad-temperedly back to my position at the counter and start sipping again. On the screen above my head, the voices crackle and spit, clichés put on pedestals by ominous musical stings. My drink gets finished. The barman hovers, waiting to see if I want another. I hold up my hand for him to wait a second, turn to peer out of the door. She’s still out there, waiting. I turn back and nod. I drink slowly for a while. Pretty slowly. Midway through the fourth beer, I go to the john again. It’s that way with me. Suddenly the alcohol starts trickling through my system like clockwork. You become a conduit, experience entering and leaving almost immediately, barely touching the sides. Afterwards I wash my hands with cold water and rub them over my face. I look in the mirror for a while. My hair looks a mess. But my eyes look a little better. Warmer inside. Back at the bar, the other man is still drinking. Sometimes you’ll be sitting in a place like Tony’s and two of you will get talking, rationalizing a lonesome task into sociability. Not this time. I don’t want to talk to him. He doesn’t want to talk to me. We aren’t communicating. Don’t need to. Everything’s cool. It’s fine all round. He just keeps ordering and being served, and by now I’m doing the same, though I’m settling up each time as if this is going to be the last. I still don’t have a tab running. I’m still only there for a couple of quick ones. Until she goes. Maybe an hour passes. It’s late afternoon by now but still sunny outside. Sunset is an hour or so away. The tidal movements in the street outside have started to run in both directions: some people on their way out to the harbour already, others going home to change first. I am dimly aware that I’m being stupid. Instead of standing in here with people who don’t know me and don’t care, I should go outside and get on with what’s planned. It’s childish, like breaking a toy instead of dutifully putting it away. It’s been suggested that what I’m doing is a bad thing to do, and so naturally that means I have to do it. Reaction, instead of action. Always. Bits of you want different things, and it’s so hard to tell which is right unless you’re presented with something you know for damn sure that you don’t want to do. Why is that, for God’s sake? It shouldn’t be that hard. It should be obvious what you want. If there’s genuinely someone there inside you, some one person, then he or she must want something in particular, must have specific desires they wish to see realized. But you still hit that wall, locked in a doorless courtyard, caught in silence between two opposing shouts. Sometimes working out what you want is the most difficult thing in the world, and then you go ahead and get it wrong anyway. The john and I are old friends by now. I’ve started muttering things to myself as I look in the mirror, in that way you do. Drawing yourself closer, mixing the strands together, stroking your own magnet. Telling myself I look okay, that I’ll sort myself out. A kind of tension, enjoying standing there looking at my reflection because I know that when I go back out I have a drink sitting waiting for me. The comfort of short-term futures, of immanently satisfiable desires. I come out again. Look through the open door. She’s still waiting. She’s patient, I’ll give her that. Of course . . . maybe she shouldn’t have been. Sometimes indulgence is not the greatest thing. I creep a little nearer to the door this time, take a longer look. She too is watching the people as they walk in the street, her hands folded in her lap. Her nose, which I liked but which she thought too big, has finally caught a little sun. Her hair is pushed back and behind her ears. A drop of blood is running from above the hairline, down her temple. She puts her hand up to tuck a stray hair back, and the drop is smeared. I go sit back on my stool—I have a stool by now—and signal for another beer. Another couple drinks, and more time passes. Finally it just becomes stupid, and the man and I acknowledge each other. Upward nods of the head. That’s the way it’s done. When I finish my drink I raise my eyebrows at him. He nods, moves his stuff over. That’s also the way that it’s done. You have to invite them in. “Same again,” I tell the barman. “And one for my friend.” Barman only brings one drink, but that’s okay. The man in the suit already has one. We sit, not talking, just watching the people with their beers and cigarettes, their smiles and plans. They have all become a little fuzzy now. I finish my pack of Marlboros, slide off the stool to buy more. Decide I might as well go to the john again, while I’m on my feet. Up and down, up and down: it’s a tough life if you don’t weaken. I caroom off the door frame on the way in, but that’s okay. You expect to pay one way or another. Nobody saw. Mirrors in bar toilets are always so dirty. They make you look ways that you’re not. Sometimes better, mainly worse. Different, anyhow. Sometimes it’s hard to recognize yourself. The face you see in front of you doesn’t look like the one you’re expecting. Just slightly familiar, and rather strange. It’s like living in a house painted purple when everything is white inside. You think: I wonder who lives in there? What is he like, and what does he want? And why is he wearing that suit? I stumble back out again and take a look through the door, and she’s still out there. Still sitting, so fucking stoic. A few lines running down the face now, tracks of vibrant red. One down each cheek. Coming down the forehead too, out of the hair line. The reddening on her nose is not from the sun, I realise. It’s a graze. Blood is dripping off it onto the table and down the front of her t-shirt. What we could have done, of course, had she not been so obsessed with keeping up with The Young and the Brainless, was go out and have a couple drinks in the afternoon together. Do the sunset. Together. Go back, get changed. Then I would have been happy to go straight out to dinner. It just seemed a waste, that’s all. A waste of what we’d come down for. Stool. Raised hand. Another beer. I’m sensing that the barman is viewing me differently with each repetition of this cycle. It doesn’t really matter, so long as he keeps doing his job. I’ve got a friend sitting next to me now. I’m an army of two. That’s enough. I didn’t mean for it to happen. I just didn’t want to be bossed around. I wanted to have a few drinks before we went out for the evening. We were due to have dinner with some people, locals we’d met at the harbour while watching fish in the bay. They lived twenty miles away, up on the next Key. They’d seemed nice enough, but a little wealthier than we were: and so I wore the only suit I’d brought with me and felt kind of an ass because if was so dark and formal and people don’t dress like that around here. Our car was parked outside Tony’s. She hadn’t wanted to stop, didn’t understand what I was so het up about. Looking back, I’m not sure that I do either. I was merely trying to maximise the vacation, fitting in stuff wherever we could. That was my thinking. I just thought it’d be fun to stop in for a couple of cocktails before we went to dinner. Start the evening right. She didn’t want to. She thought it was rude. Probably it was rude. It’s difficult to judge now. Being rude seems a very small issue. Like good value. Who cares? Every drink is a coin in a dusty jar. When I eventually came out, she left the remains of her fruity drink and got up. We didn’t argue. We never did. We just did whatever I said. I’d had maybe five, six Sweet Manhattans. Large ones. I drove. When I go to the john now, I’m careful not to look in the mirror. I am feeling not bad but have reached the stage where thinking is difficult. Words don’t seem to mean very much. Even the letters which make them up feel awkward and unformed and have to be remembered one by one. The paper I got from the barman is getting wet and I’m running out, but I don’t really want to ask him for more because he looked at me kind of weird last time and it’s important he stays on my side. This ballpoint is shit too. And it’s all a waste of time. I have told it a hundred times, to people and pads of paper and to a bird which sometimes comes and perches on the balcony outside the room I rent. Mary would have known what type it was. I don’t. Instead of making more sense, everything means less and less each time. It doesn’t work, the telling. Maybe I’ll try it on the man in the suit. Maybe he can make it untrue. I drove, that night. Into another car. She’s still sitting out there, but she’ll be gone soon. Gone for a while. Someone blurry has taken the place opposite her. In fact, someone is sitting in her seat too. Mary’s face is wholly red now, the back of her head broken open. Blood is spattering softly onto the floor through the slats of chair, out of bad places. She is looking right at me. It doesn’t matter. The barman is my friend and will keep giving me what I need. He likes me now, I think: likes me very much. The man in the suit has gone, but not far. He came and sat on my stool with me. Later I’ll have to leave, but by then she’ll have gone. For a while. She will stay away as long as I stay this way, and I can stay this way as long as I can find what I need and pretend it’s what I want. Stay this way, stayaway, it’s okay—and getting better. You don’t have to wait until night falls. You can go find it, by yourself, at any time. It’s always dark somewhere.

© 2002 by Michael Marshall Smith. Originally published in J.K. Potter’s Embrace the Mutation, edited by Bill Sheehan and William Schafer. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Michael Marshall Smith is a novelist and screenwriter. Under this name he has published eighty short stories and three novels—Only Forward, Spares and One of Us—winning the Philip K. Dick, International Horror Guild, and August Derleth awards, along with the Prix Bob Morane in France: he has won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction four times, more than any other author. Writing as Michael Marshall, he has published seven internationally-bestselling thrillers including The Straw Men, The Intruders— recently a series on BBCAmerica starring John Simm and Mira Sorvino—and Killer Move. His most recent novel is We Are Here. To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight. NONFICTION The H Word: The Strange Story

Simon Strantzas

We’ve heard a tremendous amount recently about the rising popularity of weird fiction. How much, or little, this “new weird” shares with the New Weird movement of a few years ago I’ll leave to the scholars to debate. The long and the short of it is that every few years a new thread of horror fiction is held up as being the next great thing, and currently that thing is a strain of weird fiction that draws its inspiration primarily (even if not obviously) from Lovecraft, as well as Chambers, Howard, Ligotti, and so on. We see it combined with other genres, diluted and distorted into various shapes, but at the end of the day, right now the “weird” is king. At least, it seems this way in North America. I’d argue that elsewhere—primarily in Europe—this brand of horror is less popular. And perhaps that makes sense. Weird fiction of this sort seems to have had its birth in America, bursting onto the scene from Lovecraft’s pen. The exploration of the cosmic indifference (at best; malignance at worst) melded with the adventure story suits the mindset of the new world, whose mythology gravitates to philosopher-explorers. In this context, even the ineffectual scientist has something of a “manly curiosity” about him or her. The weird, for all the craziness that it might usher forth, has often been a genre that eschews much of horror’s potential subtlety. Grand revelations and operatics fill the role of the adventurer’s cliff-hanging, and everything tends to be bigger than the protagonists expected at the story’s outset. Weird fiction is about the universe and our existence within it. It may be about shock, but mostly it’s about awe. Strange fiction, on the other hand, despite sharing many of the same inspirations, is guided by different priorities. Born as an off-shoot of ghost fiction, the strange can be often—and reductively—described as “ghost stories without ghosts.” These are tales where the otherworld isn’t as much known as it is hinted at, and rather than explore the philosophies of our shared existence, the strange is more interested in the psychology of our individual lives. If the weird is cosmic, the strange is micro-cosmic, investigating the universe within our psychological existence. Being born of ghost stories, it’s no surprise many of the strange’s practitioners have been tied to that realm. Its forbearers include authors such as Edith Wharton and L.P. Hartley, and most especially Walter de la Mare, whose “Seaton’s Aunt” is a prime example of a story that takes a detour into the prototypical strange, leaving its reader with the telltale sensation that more was going on beneath the story’s skin. But it was Robert Aickman who later took the strange tale and made it his own. Under his guidance, the strange became something mysterious, something that made less sense on a literal level than it did on an instinctual one—or, at the very least, something that subscribed to the logic of dreams. Much like “nightmare horror,” the strange is best when it’s harnessing the power of dream imagery to activate our subconscious understanding of events and our biologically- coded desire to form patterns out of disparate elements. By presenting a story that fails to make literal sense, our subconscious creates bridges between moments and generates the story for us. In the hands of an expert, this bridging can be guided to form a narrative that satisfies without necessarily providing logical coherence. This is the power of the strange. Even when its narratives don’t take full advantage of dream-logic to form their connective tissue, the strange tale can nevertheless induce in the reader a dreamlike state by unfolding its stories at a different pace than reality. In essence, that altered state is an intended and important part of its atmosphere. Consider the state of mind created by a film like Peter Weir’s A Picnic at Hanging Rock or David Lynch’s Inland Empire, where time slows and actions take on a disconnected quality. Or think of the town behind the mist in Thomas Ligotti’s “Our Temporary Supervisor,” whose tone suggests a similar dreamscape as might be found in a Robert Aickman piece. These hazy hints of a world off-kilter are a fundamental aspect of what we consider horror fiction; however, where we might see this technique sprinkled in small doses in traditional narratives—the ghost in the mirror, the sensation of being watched from the shadows—with the strange the entire tale is designed to fully exploit it. It’s these feelings of disconnection that form the primary power of the strange tale, and from where it draws the bulk of its emotional power. Real life moments of loss, despair, and depression wreak a certain kind of havoc on us and can quite literally distort our comprehension of the world as we experience it. In many ways, this distortion and that of the strange’s dream-logic overlap, allowing the strange to become a proxy and providing readers the opportunity to directly confront their turmoils. That being said, it would be irresponsible to suggest the readers are then able to prevail against these forces, for with the strange no one really comes out ahead. Those that survive are ultimately scarred by the experience—which may be the most realistic and lifelike of all horror’s punishments. Existential wounds follow both the protagonists and the reader long afterward, which plays in stark relief to the weird and its sudden onset of temporary madness in the face of the impossible. This sense of disjointedness in the strange story also illustrates one of its most severe challenges: these tenuous effects are difficult to sustain at novel length. Readers can only submit themselves to a certain degree of subconscious narrative before they pull the plug on the affair. It’s thus in short stories and novellas where the strange succeeds most. The weird doesn’t suffer these same issues necessarily, as its hybrid-adventure nature provides an easily defined arc for its characters and is equipped with built-in ratchet-points that lead to singular revelations. This framework more easily supports the weird, and since the novel form continuously proves the most popular with readers and publishers, the ability of the strange to gain a foothold in the larger publishing markets continues to dwindle. And perhaps it’s best this way. Despite the growing popularity of other threads of horror fiction, the strange’s slow resurgence progresses unabated. It has perhaps taken more time to enter popular consciousness than the weird, but with an increasing number of talented writers working in the mode, new strains are already beginning to emerge (most notably, the decadent strange from Eastern Europe) to prove its vibrancy and vitality. The strange may not receive the same level of notoriety in America it deserves, but as our global community continues to grow and the barriers between nations fall, I suspect the strange’s stature will only strengthen in the oncoming years.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Simon Strantzas is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collections Beneath the Surface (2008), Cold to the Touch (2009), Nightingale Songs (2011), and Burnt Black Suns—published in 2014 by Hippocampus Press. His fiction has been nominated for the British Fantasy Award and has appeared in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, The Best Horror of the Year, The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, the Black Wings series, Postscripts, Cemetery Dance, and elsewhere. He was born in the cold darkness of the Canadian winter and has resided in Toronto, Canada ever since. Artist Gallery

Brom

Over the past decades, Brom has lent his distinctive visions and artwork to all facets of the creative industries, from novels and games to comics and film. He is also the author of a series of award-winning illustrated horror novels: Krampus: The Yule Lord, The Child Thief, The Plucker, and The Devil’s Rose. Brom is currently kept in a dank cellar somewhere just outside of Seattle. Visit him at bromart.com.

[To view the gallery, turn the page.]

Artist Spotlight: Brom

Marina J. Lostetter

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

Runaway political correctness that is destroying our right to offend? Other than that, parasites, anything that feeds on our innards. Ack! But for the most part I am very superstitious and believe the shadows are teeming with things out to get me.

Most people think of December as a time for happy holidays, but as the author of Krampus: The Yule Lord, you know there’s a dark side to the dead of winter. What is your favorite creepy winter myth and why?

Well, since I wrote an entire novel on dear old Krampus, he has to be my first choice. Hard not to love a figure that revels in putting naughty children in a sack and beating the snot out of them. In addition to his child minding, I enjoy his long history that extends far back to pagan times, long before Saint Nicholas came along and stole the holiday season from him. I love the idea of Krampus returning to reclaim Christmas, which is probably why it’s the premise of my novel.

December is also a time for traditions. Do you have any unique winter or holiday traditions?

The family does take some pride in who can wear the ugliest Christmas sweater. Sorry, no pictures. Other than that the usual, y’know, putting coal in my kids’ stockings, eating figgy pudding, slaughtering a goat and offering its intestines to the mother goddess.

What inspired Redd Wing, the image appearing as the cover of this month’s Nightmare?

I seem to have a bit of a fetish for winged women, but hey, who doesn’t? I’ve done similar versions of this bird skull lady for various projects and commissions. She is vaguely based on a concept I have been exploring of what happened to the Valkyries after Valhalla fell.

What kind of world do you envision the figure in Redd Wing comes from?

A world littered with dead gods after Ragnarok and the fall of Valhalla. In early October, you and your wife participated in “Baby Tattooville,” a small weekend intensive that brought together approximately twelve artists and forty art aficionados. Do you prefer appearing at small gatherings, or at larger venues like conventions? Do they each have their own pros and cons?

I love the small, intimate shows with the focus being on art. Wonderful to be able to take your time with people, to indulge yourself in art and creativity.

During the “Baby Tattooville” event, you and the other artists collaborated on an original art piece. Have you ever worked on one piece with so many artists before? What was it like?

I have not. It was, simply put, a hell of a lot of fun. I was far outside of my comfort zone, as I don’t traditionally paint in acrylics, but there was so much talent there to shepherd the painting along. It was fascinating to see the painting mutate, destruct, and finally evolve as more and more artist added their bits.

Can you tell us anything about the new novel you’re working on? Or are the details top secret? I tend to keep details secret until closer to release, but for the most part it is a gritty and visceral romp through purgatory accompanied by dozens of full color paintings and pencil renderings. Shooting to have it out about a year from now. For more details keep an eye on bromart.com.

Do you have any advice for young artists looking to follow in your dark and dangerous footsteps?

Don’t eat paint, but equally important, be sure to put in your portfolio the type of work you really want to do, as the type of work you show is the type of work you will get.

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

Helen Marshall

Robert Shearman has written five short story collections, and between them they have won the World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Edge Hill Readers Prize, and three British Fantasy Awards. His background is in the theatre, and he is resident dramatist at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter and regular writer for Alan Ayckbourn at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough; his plays have won the Sunday Times Playwriting Award, the Sophie Winter Memorial Trust Award, and the Guinness Award in association with the Royal National Theatre. He regularly writes plays and short stories for BBC Radio, and he has won two Sony Awards for his interactive radio series, “The Chain Gang.” But he’s probably best known for reintroducing the Daleks to the BAFTA winning first season of the revived Doctor Who, in an episode that was a finalist for the Hugo Award. His latest collection of stories, They Do the Same Things Different There, was published by ChiZine this summer.

You’ve done every sort of writing one can think of—from producing comedies for Alan Ayckbourn at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough and writing “Dalek,” a seminal Doctor Who episode in the first series, to penning five collections of short stories. What has remained consistent across your career? What’s changed significantly?

Ha! Well, it sounds like an awfully obvious answer, but I suppose the most significant change is . . . age. I’m now determinedly, unavoidably, middle-aged. I don’t really think, no matter how I try to skew the mathematics, that I can really believe I’m not well and squarely stuck in the second half of my life. Especially not if I carry on eating chocolate. But I became a full time writer, more by luck than by design, when I was twenty-three. I was very fortunate—I was writing theatre plays at university, and they got lots of attention and won a few awards, and on graduation I suddenly found myself in demand, with lots of commissions and a bursary from the Arts Council of Great Britain attaching me as resident dramatist to a working theatre. And that was wonderful, of course—I learned how to write the best way possible, by being forced to put them before a big regular audience and seeing what worked and what sent everyone to sleep. But I was so young that I was aping other styles. It was inevitable. I was basically a black comedy writer, coming up with these dark takes on love and marriage and death—having never lost anyone, having never been married then, having never properly been in love. And to an extent you can get away with that, especially in comedy. You read enough literature about the big themes and universal conditions, and you can even have an original perspective on them—and in comedy in particular, if you get the words in just the right order, you can be funny without ever necessarily being true. I’m glad I didn’t try to write horror back then. I think horror is a harder thing to ape. The best horror stories are ones that are genuinely felt—those senses of loss, of mortality, of paranoid worthlessness!—and at twenty-three years old I was very arrogant and very happy with my lot. Why shouldn’t I have been? I had fallen on my feet and was in a dream job, pretending in my writing I had experienced things that I hadn’t. I’m now forty-four—not old, of course not old, but you know, as I say, definitely on the other side of the hill. Loved ones have died, or rejected me. I’ve suffered cruelty and been cruel in return. I’ve lived a bit. When I write now I don’t feel that I’m having to pretend. All of the stuff I come out with— whether it’s supposed to be funny or disturbing, whether it features an angstful Dalek or not, at least is sincerely felt. I can channel that sincerity into fiction, and no matter how weird the fiction gets—and it does get a little weird—it still comes from a place I can recognise. What’s odd is just how much has stayed the same. The plays I wrote when I was in my twenties are concerned with the themes and interests I have now. It isn’t that I’ve rejected a lot of it. I just hope I can do it now without having to pretend.

Your 2007 collection Tiny Deaths won the World Fantasy Award, and two years later your collection Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical won the Shirley Jackson Award and the British Fantasy Award. Did the success of your writing in genre circles come as a surprise to you, and has it changed the way you think about your writing?

Yeah, it was a shock! I mean, I suppose it shouldn’t have been. Doing Doctor Who redefined me as a genre writer. Before that, as I said, I’d spent over a decade writing scripts for theatre and radio. Looking back they were obviously genre too—I’d write comedies about time travelling lovers, or people falling in love with imaginary boyfriends who would start to become real, or do dystopias showing a family Christmas in a world where the Jews had been successfully exterminated. You know, fun stuff like that! That last play in particular, Easy Laughter, really launched my career—it won the Sunday Times Playwriting Award, and was staged all over the world, and was even produced by Francis Ford Coppola. But what was funny, looking back, was the way the critics would never really pick on the debt it all owed to genre writing. When critics trace your influences, they throw out Stoppard or Pinter or Artaud, they never suggest The Twilight Zone or Doctor Who. And that’s because, still, genre writing is seen as something rather shameful. So I was quite happily writing these rather strange little comedies, and I was resistant to moving to TV—mostly, to be honest, because theatre is small and cheap enough that a writer can feel like a god without being beholden to much else. I conquered my fear of that sort of responsibility television has in 2002—just a year before Doctor Who came back. And it meant I was in exactly the right sort of place to be offered a contract on that first series when it did. I’d loved Doctor Who ever since I was a kid, and I was going to write the story that brought back the Daleks, so taking the job was an absolute no-brainer. But I wasn’t really prepared for what that script did for me. For a start, I was outed. There was no question any longer, I was a nerd. I don’t think theatre took very kindly to that. It was like I’d suddenly revealed I wasn’t writing quasi-absurdist plays like Samuel Beckett, I was doing stuff featuring murderous pepperpots chasing people down corridors. And worse still, doing it with a global audience that reached, I think, ninety million people. I still find that staggering. That’s greater than the entire population of the UK. The biggest theatres I had written for had had seating capacity for about a thousand people—and a thousand people can seem rather a lot when you’ve got them sitting next to each other clutching their ice creams in a darkened auditorium, but it’s a minute fraction in comparison. But in another sense it was terribly freeing. Because I felt I no longer had to hide. I’d been writing BBC Radio comedies that were so subtly weird that even my producers thought they were normal. The theatre commissions soon ran dry, but I found I had another audience. I was invited to write a short story for a horror anthology called Phobic, and I was very wary of that—I had never really written prose before, I’d always assumed that was what “proper” writers did. But it was in a book full of writers I really admired, and I told myself I was in an incredibly lucky position to be asked to contribute to a book alongside such greats as Ramsey Campbell or Christopher Fowler. So I went away and wrote a very odd piece about everyone in the world receiving letters telling them the exact circumstances of their deaths. I’d had the idea as a play for years, but had never worked out how to put it on stage. On the page it was easy, and it was enormously fun to do. The publisher got back to me and said, wow—do you have any more of these? And I lied and said I had some more up my sleeve. And right then and there they commissioned Tiny Deaths, my first collection. Again, I couldn’t really believe how lucky I was. I had no expectations that it would be noticed by the World Fantasy Award judges, let alone that it could win. I was told later that one of the judges had seen the collection sitting on a pile of other books in a friend’s toilet and recognised my name from Doctor Who and began to read it. Another judge heard me read from the book when I was at a convention in Australia as a Doctor Who writer. It was extraordinary luck. And what was most lucky, really, was that I found such a hunger to write these stories—I was just thrilled that the bizarre success of the first book allowed me to write some more. If it’s changed the way I approach the writing now, it’s only that—like no longer being young—I don’t feel I have to pretend any longer. I can (and do) write purely naturalistic pieces. I can (and do) write comedies. But most of my ideas aren’t naturalistic and aren’t nice, and I no longer have to bend them into something more palatable—I can let them grow up into whatever they need to be.

In Everyone’s Just So So Special you created a massive Time Chart which weaves together a very personal narrative about loss and memory with a sometimes funny, sometimes biting commentary on English history, and as an extension of that, you came up with the monumental Hundred Stories project. Do you worry about your own place in history as a writer?

Well, it’d be a lie to say you never think about how nice it would be if your work lives on. I mean, you can’t think about it too much, because the word “posterity” is so doom-laden and pretentious, and anyone who writes specifically for that becomes so self-conscious it aches. I think we writers put stuff out into the world because we think it’s important to us, and even if we can’t believe it’ll survive for long, you always hope. It’s that hope that keeps us writing, isn’t it? The idea that the hard slog of sticking down words on to a piece of paper might just, maybe, if the wind’s blowing in the right direction, make some little difference. But I think I’m too much of a literature geek to believe it’s anything we can have any control over. I may never have been a writer. In my teens I was fully expecting to be an academic, specialising in discussing forever the minor plays of Renaissance drama. And from the real perspective of literature, you can see that what gets remembered and what gets forgotten is almost insultingly arbitrary. Jane Austen’s nephew believed that his aunt’s novels would be seen as trivial baubles compared to the output of Sir Walter Scott, and he was hardly alone. Some writers who are massively acclaimed in their own lifetimes fall out of fashion and out of print the moment they die—others, who were barely recognised, trundle on perfectly happily for years, and may find a new audience to trumpet them centuries later. Shakespeare fell out of vogue for ages—his being this all-conquering giant happened only a few generations ago. On a far more humble level—my stuff—I’m always amused and bemused by the stories that seem to be remembered most fondly from my collections. You can write something that you think will really define you—“this’ll knock their socks off,” you think, and it’s met with a certain kind politeness. No one minds that it exists in the world, but no one cares that much. Other stories just suddenly break out and start getting re-anthologised and getting nominations for things. And you’re delighted, but you scratch your head, and wonder why. It’s like having hundreds of tiny children, and suddenly realising that one of the runts you thought would never survive labour has been elected president. I’m in a weird position anyway, again because of Doctor Who. Doctor Who fans never forget. A good episode, a bad episode, it doesn’t matter, you’ll be recited in chronological lists of stories in order of transmission forever. I know that because I am a Doctor Who fan. I’m even writing these answers in a hotel room at a Doctor Who convention in Orlando, and I’ve been flown over here as a guest, even though the one episode I wrote is now ten years old. There’s something nicely humbling about knowing that whatever else I do in life, it is profoundly unlikely it’ll ever be bigger than Doctor Who. And that all the fame I’m feeding off has very, very little to do with me; it’s just that I’m one germ on a much greater body. I travel the world, and even though I’m just a writer on the show, and no one should reasonably know what I look like, I’ll still get recognised sometimes by strangers in record shops in Melbourne or restaurants in Crete. It’s weird, and because it has very little to do with me at all, it’s pleasant without making me an egomaniac. It’s oddly nice to know that whatever I do now, I’ll be buried with a little Dalek statue on my gravestone. Or, perhaps, there’ll be no grave at all, I’ll just have my ashes scattered in the Garden of Former Who Writers—long gone, never quite forgotten. The Afterword to Remember Why You Fear Me puts forward a rather interesting take on horror: that in flights of fancy a reader can find something so absurd it’s amusing, that delight can be taken in the dissonance between what readers expect and what they receive, and that really the horror in question comes from jokes gone wrong. Is that an accurate description of your writing?

I suppose it is! It wasn’t necessarily meant to be. I should explain that the afterword to that collection is a fake—it pretends to be an afterword, but it’s really another horror story, a tale about a professor writer who bears suspicious similarities to M R James, and who finds his career has been eclipsed by the increasingly odd tales of the macabre he tells his students at Christmas. But within the story, almost by accident, I found myself reflecting upon what horror stories are and how this character’s stories are supposed to work. And it may be because my background is in comedy anyway, but I do find that there is a strong connection between comedy and horror. Because both rely upon moments of shock which are intended to provoke an audible response from the audience. And those shock moments don’t have to be greatly dissimilar. Whether something amuses or unsettles, it’s most often done by taking normality and wrenching it askew. Most of my stories start off as what ifs— and at that point in my head, they seem to have the standard structure of a joke. “Have you heard the one about . . . ?” What makes them funny or distressing is how violent is that wrench away from normality, and crucially, the reality of the response from the characters involved. If you think of most jokes, they rely upon people not freaking out when a horse walks into a bar. It’s also to do with the punchline. I think horror stories quite often are jokes where the writer refuses to stop at the punchline, but insists on going on past the point where the story is funny, and examines the consequence of what has just happened. You get the shock moment that ought to produce the laugh—and then the horror writer refuses to let the audience off the hook; he or she is going to make you see the ramifications of the shock, no matter how gruelling or disquieting that may be. You’ll wrench the world off its axis and then have the gall not to be reassuring about it. One of the first Stephen King stories I ever read—and I was scared by the idea of horror when I was younger, so I didn’t pick up any Stephen King until I was nearly thirty!— was a novella from Four Past Midnight. “The Library Policeman” is not, I think, wildly acclaimed, but it really haunted me. It’s a story that King clearly originally saw as a joke. It’s based upon one of his sons being scared by the warnings in a public library about what happens to naughty little kids who forget to return their books before they’re overdue. Really, there’s a story that if it just played out the punchline and left it there, could be something from Dr. Seuss. Instead, King takes it and runs with it and it becomes horror. For my tastes, I love playing with that thin border between horror and comedy. I construct my short story collections very carefully, so that the reader can never be quite sure whether the idea I’m playing with is going to go down a dark avenue or end up somewhere lighter. It makes the process of reading a horror story so much more disquieting if you can’t really be sure it’s going to be a horror story at all.

Reading your writing was described to me once as like hugging a teddy bear only to discover it’s full of razor blades. There’s something jovial and innocuous about your style, but it cuts very deeply. What do you think makes your writing so affecting?

Yeah, I’ve read that description! I love that. That’s what I want to be buried with. Forget the Dalek headstone, I want those words on my grave! I hope my stories are affecting. I hope they get under the skin and move people. I’d much rather move people than merely give them a few jolts. It’s comparatively easier to shock people than it is to move them. I could go out into the convention lobby right now and pull down my trousers and everyone would be shocked—but it’s unlikely anyone would be reduced to tears. (Though, actually, on reflection, they might be. That’s probably a bad example.) I don’t much like horror fiction that doesn’t have any ambition other than to shock. Like all good forms of storytelling, you use the horror to reveal something that you care about, and caring about things is usually rather intimate. If my stories affect some readers—and I hope that’s true— then I can only think they respond to the sincerity of them. That’s my ambition, really. That everything I write, no matter how strange or not, comes from a real place within.

Although your short fiction seems to have been drawing quite a bit from horror, They Do the Same Things Different There draws together stories of weird fantasy and has a lighter tone overall. Has it felt refreshing to revisit some of your earlier stories? Do you find much in common with the writer who created them?

It’s quite galling to go back and look at your old stuff. It’s awful when you realise that stories you hoped were quite good aren’t up to scratch—that’s disappointing. It’s even more awful when you realise stories you hoped were quite good are far, far better than anything you’re writing now. You resent them a bit. Present Rob has enough problems writing as it is without Past Rob pointing at him and mocking him, thank you very much. But at the same time, yes, there is something refreshing about it—about taking stories that worked in the context of one book, in one particular order of contents, and finding a new context for them somewhere else. I think the collision of stories side by side reveals different things about those stories —I’ve always tried to make all my collections have a sort of novelistic feel to them, that there’s a journey to be made through the book. (And my next one, which is this giant collection of one hundred stories that can be read as a choose your own adventure book, from questions prompted at the end of each story about your reaction to it, is all about those different experiences you can generate. It’s fun!) To put it another way, you don’t want to create a pop album that’s merely all your hit singles. Greatest Hits albums are a bit cheap. Retrospective albums, filled with completely new tracks inspired by some of the old songs beside them, are much more interesting. I’ve really not been writing prose long enough to feel that the writer of Tiny Deaths in 2007 is much different to the writer of They Do the Same Things Different There in 2014. I came into this short story thing so late, really! What’s odd is when I go and see old stage plays of mine. Last year I saw advertised an amateur production of a play of mine that had premiered in 1994. I couldn’t resist. I went to see it. And that was really odd—because I really couldn’t remember what the story was—and the writer in me would sit there and hope that the writer back then would go in certain directions or aim for certain twists. I quite liked the play, actually—and I could recognise the same sort of rhythm I have in my writing now, even if the points it was making now are things I would question and address differently. Next year in New York I have a couple of plays being revived—completely coincidentally, by two different production companies. They both date back from the 1990s, and both were rather acclaimed award winning things at the time. And the temptation is to go back and read them—but I know if I did I’d only want to tweak, and that way lies madness. At the end of the day what we do is we write stories, we do them the best we can. And then we move on to the next. And then those stories are left to bob about for a while, and if they’re any good maybe they’ll swim, and if they don’t, they’ll probably sink like stones. But we have to let them be. And I have to let that Past Rob be too, no matter how wrong or misguided I think he is, no matter the confused relationship I sometimes have with the stuff he comes out with. Past Rob has to do the best he can without me. I hope he’ll be all right.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Helen Marshall is an award-winning author, editor, and book historian. Her poetry and fiction have been short-listed for the Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association, and she has won the Aurora Award from the Canadian Science Fiction Society and the Sydney J. Bounds Award from the British Fantasy Society. Her debut collection of short stories Hair Side, Flesh Side was named one of the top ten books of 2012 by January Magazine, and her second collection, Gifts for the One Who Comes After, was released in the autumn of 2014. She currently lives in Oxford, England, where she spends most of her time staring at medieval manuscripts. AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Author Spotlight: Tim Lebbon

Lisa Nohealani Morton

Tell us a little bit about “Embers.” How did you come to write it?

I live in a lovely part of the countryside, and scattered around where I live (South Wales) there are at least half a dozen pillboxes. These are buildings that were built in WWII —designed as heavily fortified machine gun emplacements— and they formed defensive lines across southern and eastern Britain in case of a German invasion. They weren’t designed to stop the enemy advance, just slow it down. They were always built in line of sight of the next pillbox, and though many have now vanished, there are still lots of these overgrown, solid buildings, usually made of cast concrete and brick. They’ve always interested me. I’ve been in quite a few, and though usually now they’re just filled with litter or rotting leaves, their original purpose is still easy to imagine. Spooky places. And I’ve always wanted to include one in a story.

You’re an extremely prolific writer, often releasing multiple books per year. What’s your secret?

Writing a lot! And that’s about it. When I started writing, I learned to write quite quickly, as I worked early mornings or evenings before or after my day job. Now that I’m doing it full time I still find that I work quickly, and that suits me well. I love having several projects on the go—not always at the same time, but different books on the horizon always gives something slightly different to look forward to. Right now I have a thriller, a tie-in novel, and a horror novel lined up for the next year or two, as well as a couple of pitches for TV series and short stories, and other screenplay stuff. And, occasionally, sleep.

You’ve written novelizations and tie-in novels for several movies, and your short story “Pay the Ghost” is being made into a movie as we speak. Having seen the process from both sides, do you have a preference for one or the other?

Obviously seeing a movie made of one of my stories (starring Nicolas Cage!) is fantastic, and something not many people get to experience. So that’s very, very exciting. Tie-ins and novelizations are good fun, and I suspect I’ll always do them now and then. Writing within other people’s worlds flexes the writing muscles, and I only do projects that I’m a fan of anyway (Star Wars, Alien, Hellboy etc).

What are you working on these days? Some new deals, none of which I can officially announce yet! But they include two new thrillers, a new horror trilogy, and a tie-in project. Watch this Space (and there’s a clue).

What classic movie monster do you feel you can best relate to, and why?

The werewolf. I might have a bald head, but my back is quite hairy. And at full moon, I always feel hungry . . .

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Born and raised in Honolulu, Lisa Nohealani Morton lives in Washington, DC. By day she is a mild-mannered database wrangler, computer programmer, and all-around data geek, and by night she writes science fiction, fantasy, and combinations of the two. Her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, and the anthology Heiresses of Russ 2012. She can be found on Twitter as @lnmorton. Author Spolight: Seras Nikita

Sandra Odell

Your work exhibits a remarkable command of sensory impressions: chapped, bleeding hands; the cold; the feel of the dog’s skin; the smell of peat; the description of a toe with gout. These impressions carry throughout the story, keeping the reader close to the main character. What is it about such impressions that encouraged you to explore their impact on this story?

I work in visual effects (for film) as my day job, so I think that visual storytelling is always a big part of my writing. Narrating is kind of a cheat, in both worlds. It’s cheating to tell a reader what to think, and it’s bossy and flimsy and a lot can go wrong. Better to give them something physical to react to and trust that they’ll arrive at whatever you’re getting at by themselves. Visceral impressions are good ways to do that because we all have the same five senses, so the platform of common ground and mutual understanding is already very solid. You just have to be careful because it’s easy to get gratuitous.

“Bog Dog” is all the more terrifying for its lack of horrific detail. The violence and sense of foreboding doesn’t need to scream from the page; it insinuates itself into the reader’s imagination. What first drew you to delving into the world of horror?

My dad was in the Navy, and right before I was born my parents were stationed in Maine, and it was pretty much at the height of Stephen King’s popularity. My mom said that people would wait in lines at bookstores to get his books the night they came out, and they had reading parties and things like that. So we had this huge bookshelf of his books at home. My mom and dad are both teachers, and they were of the opinion that anything that encourages kids to cultivate a love of reading is acceptable reading material. I read Misery when I was in fourth grade—I remember because my teacher kept taking it away from me for sneaking pages under my desk— and it’s still my favorite book. The whole book takes place in one room, with two characters. There are no ghosts or monsters, except for Annie . . . it’s horrifying. I don’t care what anyone says, he’s still the master to me. His book On Writing helped me a lot.

The story is told from the position of age and memory yet hearkens back to the hardships and horrors of a life lived without so-called modern conveniences. What sort of research did you do to prepare for “Bog Dog”?

As a kid I was also a huge fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Gary Paulsen, Kate Seredy, and Thor Hyderdal. I’d say most details in my stories about “hard living” come from something or another I picked up from one of their books. Except the thing about the peat, actually. I once had a supervisor named Scott who was a big whiskey guy, and I’d been reading a Wikipedia article on the Tollund Man at my desk and he got all excited. He knew everything there was to know about peat, because that’s what you use to make whiskey. Around the same time I saw a documentary that suggested ergotism from tainted rye had been the cause of werewolf sightings and witch trials in the 1600s, so those two things are where the idea for Bog Dog came from. Ergot poisoning can cause hallucinations, gangrene, seizures, mania . . . it’s just all bad.

Many people feel that children should not be exposed to horror, while others insist children know more of horror than they let on. What scared you as a child?

Pet Sematary scared me as a kid—not the burial ground thing, but the side plot about the infirm sister Zelda who lives upstairs. Still does. Anything about people slowly losing their minds as a result of pain or illness. That said, I think there’s a big difference between allowing kids to read horror, and to watch horror. I was once ranting to a co-worker about “torture porn” films, and how they’re making it widely acceptable to delight in another person’s suffering, and she correctly pointed out that most great authors have made their careers writing about suffering in some way. I think reading horror is different because the nature of reading forces you to relate more to the characters and become more sympathetic to what is happening to them, to put yourself in their shoes. There are exceptions of course, but I find horror films are most often focused on the horrific event, or horrific villain, than the character experiencing the horror. That’s too disturbing, and it’s not why we go to the movies, so films like that are few and far between and don’t often entice young viewers. If it doesn’t sound too hokey, I think exposing kids to horror through reading is more about introducing the idea of suffering and fear as part of the human condition, which is going to happen anyway. So if your kid is old enough and smart enough to read adult horror novels, they’re probably old enough to begin grasping that truth.

Whom do you read when you’re in the mood for something dark or gruesome?

Lately, Lisa See. Sounds weird, but if you’ve never read up on the practice of footbinding, give it a quick Google. Horrifying. And these girls were like ten, and it happened to all of them! Could you imagine being nine years old and knowing that someday soon your mom and grandmother were going to come into your room and break all your toes and then fold your foot over like a crepe? What can readers expect from Seras Nikita? What shadows lurk just out of sight of the page?

I’m currently working on a short story that takes place in the Bermuda triangle. The main character is a housewife with an eating disorder. She’s pretty unlikeable, in a satisfying way that makes me feel kind of slimy. It’s coming out great.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sandra Odell is an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. She attended Clarion West in 2010. Her first collection of short stories was released from Hydra House Books in 2012. She is currently hard at work avoiding her first novel. Author Spotlight: Michael Marshall Smith

Erika Holt

In “Night Falls, Again” the protagonist is overwhelmed by guilt and regret, so much so that he’s haunted by visions and drinks himself into oblivion night after night. Do you find psychological horror or darkness more compelling than graphic depictions of violence and gore? Or do both have their place?

Once in a while a graphic depiction of violence is exactly what’s required: all of us, from time to time, will be suddenly and shockingly confronted with the visceral reality of the fact that we’re not disembodied minds, but inhabited bodies, to which bad and terminal things can happen. This violence can also stand in symbolically for harsh mental cataclysms of the type that life hands us. But I’ve always found darkness and eeriness and unease far more interesting and compelling than gore in the long run. Working out what’s uncanny is one of the clearest routes into understanding what we believe about the world.

Do you believe in ghosts or any other supernatural phenomena? Why do ghosts—real or metaphorical—so often appear in literature? I don’t strongly believe in ghosts, but I certainly don’t disbelieve in them either. I don’t disbelieve in God. I try not to disbelieve in anything, really, as these ideas are often both compelling and emotionally resonant. The human mind loves to spot or create patterns, and some of these patterns and associations are very nebulous and conceptual—metaphors, perhaps. I’m happy to use anything that gets us just a little closer to understanding what it’s like to be human, because that’s what all literature—and art in general—should be about.

Your writing is elegant and insightful, and blurs the boundaries between genre and literary fiction. Where do you see yourself fitting in?

I just see myself as writing “stories,” to be honest. I’ve never been good at sticking within one particular genre and have wandered across mystery, horror, science fiction, and conspiracy—because I love the feel of each of these, their specific atmospheres and tropes, and I believe genre fiction has recourse to the best and most vital metaphors. But I love words, too, and so try to write in a style that gives them the simplest environment to shine.

You list Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, and Clive Barker, among others, as influences on your writing. What is it about horror and dark fiction that interests you? I think this type of fiction reflects a core part of the way we live and think, areas of life that we may be prone to shy away from on a conscious level. There’s also just a deep fascination, too . . . as Milton said, writing Paradise Lost was far easier than Paradise Regained . . . We know we stand on the end of a precipice. And we want to look over it from time to time . . .

What are you working on now?

At the moment I’m editing my new novel, currently titled Murder Road, and working on a few ideas for television.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Erika Holt lives in the cold, white North (i.e. Calgary, Canada), where she writes and edits speculative fiction. Her stories have appeared in a number of anthologies including Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead, and What Fates Impose. She has also co-edited two anthologies: Rigor Amortis, about sexy, amorous zombies, and Broken Time Blues, featuring 1920s alien burlesque dancers and bootlegging chickens. MISCELLANY In the Next Issue of

Coming up in January, in Nightmare . . . We have original fiction from Kat Howard (“Returned”) and Christopher Barzak (“The Trampling”), along with reprints by Norman Partridge (“The Hollow Man”) and Lucy Taylor (“Blessed Be the Bound”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Nightmare. Thanks for reading! Stay Connected

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John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Nightmare, is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. New projects coming out in 2014 and 2015 include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Operation Arcana, Wastelands 2, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated eight times) and is a six-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.