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TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 33, June 2015 FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, June 2015 FICTION The Cellar Dweller Maria Dahvana Headley The Changeling Sarah Langan Snow Dale Bailey The Music of the Dark Time Chet Williamson NONFICTION The H Word: Why Do We Read Horror? Mike Davis Artist Gallery Okan Bülbül Artist Spotlight: Okan Bülbül Marina J. Lostetter Interview: Lucy A. Snyder Lisa Morton AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Maria Dahvana Headley Sarah Langan Dale Bailey Chet Williamson MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Stay Connected Subscriptions & Ebooks About the Editor © 2015 Nightmare Magazine Cover by Okan Bülbül Ebook Design by John Joseph Adams www.nightmare-magazine.com FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, June 2015 John Joseph Adams Welcome to issue thirty-three of Nightmare! ICYMI last month, the final installment of The Apocalypse Triptych — the apocalyptic anthology series I co-edited with Hugh Howey — is now available. The new volume, The End Has Come, focuses on life after the apocalypse. The first two volumes, The End is Nigh (about life before the apocalypse) and The End is Now (about life during the apocalypse) are also available. If you’d like a preview of the anthology, you’re in luck: You can read Annie Bellet’s The End Has Come story in the May issue of Lightspeed. Pop over there to read it, or visit johnjosephadams.com/apocalypse-triptych for more information about the book. • • • • In other news, this month also marks the publication of our sister- magazine Lightspeed’s big special anniversary issue, Queers Destroy Science Fiction! We’ve brought together a team of terrific queer creators and editors, led by guest editor and bestselling author, Seanan McGuire. We have eleven original science fiction short stories by Susan Jane Bigelow, Chaz Brenchley, John Chu, Felicia Davi, Amal El-Mohtar, Kate Galey, and others, plus twelve original flash fiction stories (selected by Hugo- nominated editor Sigrid Ellis), as well as an array of related nonfiction (curated by Mark Oshiro). It’s another great special issue, so be sure to check it out. It’s available in both ebook and trade paperback format. Visit destroysf.com/queers for more information. • • • • With our announcements out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month: We have original fiction from Maria Dahvana Headley (“The Cellar Dweller”) and Dale Bailey (“Snow”), along with reprints by Sarah Langan (“The Changeling”) and Chet Williamson (“The Music of the Dark Time”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview with Lucy A. Snyder. 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. Recent and forthcoming projects include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Operation Arcana, Wastelands 2, Press Start to Play, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated nine 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. FICTION The Cellar Dweller Maria Dahvana Headley 4,500 words Buildings were built, in the beginning, everyone knows, to hold the dead down. Every cellar floor was built over the ceiling of something else. Now cellars are used for all sorts of purposes. Roots. Paint cans. Pantries. Workshops. Other. There’s a rhyme someone invented for children. It’s chanted in nurseries in the Banisher’s town. The nurseries are upholstered in chintz, and the walls are padded, as though they’re asylums and the babies inmates. There is an awful thing that lives beneath the cellar floor, little darlings. There is an awful thing that comes up from beneath the cellar floor, up and through the cellar door. The rhyme’s sometimes sung as a lullaby to pretty little ones, who curl in pretty little chairs, and play with pretty little rolling horses and pretty little rocking dogs. When they nod off to sleep, all’s well and right, but beneath their houses, things are fell and wrong. Things press their noses up through the dirt. If you wake at night and hear a roar, perhaps you’ve heard the awful thing that roars behind the cellar door. The children dream, and as they dream, they wriggle in their beds like worms pressed under stones. There are sugarplum visions in their pretty little heads. There is an awful thing that lives beneath the cellar floor, little darlings, and it wants more and more and MORE. They wake singing. They giggle and make faces. There is an awful thing that lives beneath the cellar floor. Run in circles and put on a pinafore. At the end of the rhyme, there’s a reward. Sing it long enough, and someone’ll give you candy. The pretty little ones in the Banisher’s town sometimes tantrum from joy, but when they do, even their crying’s pretty and little. If they wake at night and hear a roar, they don’t go down the nursery stairs and through the cellar door, nor do they go to see what’s roaring beneath the cellar floor. They’re too pretty and too little for that. The Banisher isn’t one of these pretty little children. The worst children on earth are the pretty ones, and that’s something that’s been known to ugly children for centuries. The Banisher’s teeth are crooked, and her hair grows in knots the color of mud. Her elbows are too pointed, and her eyes are shifty and make people nervous. She’s had three broken noses, and she’s also had worms. She may still. Once, all of her fingernails fell off, and another time, she lost all of her hair, even her eyelashes, which made her even uglier than she was before. When that happened, she went underground for a while to avoid being busted. She’s got the kind of nose that runs, and the kind of skin that breaks out in rashes. She has all her limbs, which is somewhat miraculous, but she’s missing the little finger on her right hand. The Banisher wears a coverall she found at a Salvation Army, a hat with earflaps she acquired at a lost-and-found, and a pair of cowboy boots with spurs. The Banisher doesn’t have friends, nor does she have family. She’s the only Banisher in the area. There’s no competition. This is her own business. She’s an exterminator. Her customers have her come to the back door, her equipment hidden in a sack. It’s rare that a homeowner wishes to acknowledge that they’ve become a bed-and-breakfast to pests. She’s made some mistakes. There’re things she’ll never be allowed to have again, but she can live without them. The Banisher’s entirely self- sufficient, though sometimes she cries. People give her food in payment. Mostly she eats bologna sandwiches. The Banisher is nine years old. • • • • All this happened a long time ago. A couple drove to a big-box hardware store two towns from the town where they lived. They bought boards and a shovel. They bought buckets. They had a book of how-tos from another century. Planks, a spade, a shovel, a hammer. Nails made of iron. They read the directions aloud in the car. “Fourteen planks of poplar,” the wife said. “Cut to size.” “An iron nail for every inch,” the husband said, and took a left turn toward the freeway ramp. They were a young and attractive couple. They’d been married a few years, but had already talked about their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, the way they’d throw a party for everyone in their town, the way there’d be a twenty-five-layer cake with strawberries in it, even though they’d been married in December. They would import them from some other city’s summer. Every piece of cake would be served with a glass of pink champagne. They’d talked about the way the two of them would dance, as gracefully as they danced now. They’d taken lessons to surprise their wedding guests. The wife took the husband’s hand over the gearshift knob so that they could shift to a higher speed together. “You’re the most handsome,” she said. “You’re the most beautiful,” he replied. • • • • The Banisher’s ten when she banishes a horde of tiny awful things from the basement of a neighbor. The things are nothing terrifying to look at. They’re an inheritance, a collection of ivory netsuke, but by the time the Banisher meets them, they are occupied with their own agendas. They’re only little creatures, but when the household sleeps, they take to the stairs, doing damage, killing mice and swarming the occasional pet. The neighbor’s tidied them away into a box, but the box can’t contain them, and when the Banisher opens it, the tissue they’re wrapped in is flecked with blood, and all of them bare their teeth at her.

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