Nightmare Magazine, Issue 33 (June 2015)

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

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. The Banisher picks them up by their scruffs and drops them into a tin formerly used for cookies, now lined with a washcloth. The Banisher isn’t cruel. “Where will you take them?” the neighbor asks, looking worried. “Out,” the Banisher says. In her hand, the tin buzzes and clacks. She asks the neighbor for her sandwich and then she puts the tin of awful things into her bicycle basket. She ferries them into the woods, climbs a tree, and then takes them from the tin. They hiss and clamor and clatter against one another. She puts them into an old squirrel’s nest. The little things spit, but shortly they curl into their new abode and look out at the sky and branches. They’ve not been outside before. She gives them some scraps of foil balloon, a ponytail elastic, and a few shiny buttons, and leaves them. As she climbs down, she hears them yammering and whispering, but she ignores them. She eats her sandwich at the base of the tree and reads a library book about ancient warfare.

• • • •

The husband used the saw to cut the poplar planks to the proper length, and the wife got out the shovel and went down the cellar stairs. All that was down there was hard-packed mud. It should’ve been lined in wood, and in nails. It was damp, and the damp came up the stairs and into the house like a guest with five suitcases and no return ticket. She pushed the shovel into the dirt and stepped on it. She laughed at herself for grunting. It was dark in the cellar. Upstairs, her husband sawed the planks, and down here she dug a hole. She thought about chintz and nursery walls as she dug, about the way she’d hang a mobile of little birds. Upstairs, the husband thought about the way he’d make a rolling duck on a rope. There was nothing down here in the cellar yet. The wife dug and dug. No one had ever seen a couple as pretty as they were. No one had ever seen anything so lovely. She wore a white dress even to dig in. She wore a flower in her hair. Upstairs, she could hear her husband singing the song about the cellar and she joined him. She imagined how she’d sing it one day, not so far from now, one day when all this was done. She’d sit in the upholstered nursery with a new baby in her arms and sing a song about the awful thing, but she’d never worry again. Her own mother’d sung it to her, and her mother’s mother before her. • • • •

The Banisher specializes in household inconveniences, the sorts of cellar dwellers that offer too much for the modern world. She advertises her services particularly for the banishment of gremlins, poltergeists, pixies, and nixies. She does a side business in rats, raccoons, starlings, and mice. They come with the territory. The Banisher banishes an overpopulation of brownies who’ve lost control of their domestic urges and made a flood of porridge that’s filled a cul-de-sac. Those brownies are taken to a package drop, and overnighted to a country in the clutches of famine. She’s called in to banish wood-gnawing fairies nested in the walls of someone’s newly-renovated showpiece home, and she draws them out with a combination of vinegar and honey. When they’re all safely basketed in individual wicker enclosures, she spackles over the holes in the walls. This is the second time she’s done this house. The client watches her nervously as she works her spatula, smoothing over the divots. The Banisher tsks. The client’s offended. They think she’s too young to tsk. “You’d do well to spackle this place yourself from time to time,” the Banisher says. “Any little hole, and they’ll get back in. This whole place was built on top of bad things. I know it looks like a fancy neighborhood, but it’s filthy here.” The client pays her only three dollars in pocket change, child’s wages, and so the Banisher makes another little hole and lets the termite fairies directly back into the walls. This earns her some angry reviews and gets her thrown into foster care three towns away. The Banisher banishes two foster fathers, one to the same forest she took the tiny awful things to. They’ve gotten bigger, and remember her. She returns to her original town. In this town of pretty little children, the Banisher’s unadoptable, and for a while after that banishment, she lives under an awning, next to a magazine store. Something like her is never really homeless, or at least she doesn’t call it that. Sometimes she thinks about her parents. She hasn’t seen them since she was six. By now, she’s thirteen. At night, she doesn’t sleep well. The world’s filled with things that call out for banishing, but she can’t banish them all. Someone spits on her from a car, and someone else unfastens his trousers. Lots of things come out at night, but are invisible during the day. Eventually, she pulls herself up and starts banishing at a higher level. She banishes a hobgoblin from the mayor’s office and then demands certain things in the way of subsidization. By the time the Banisher’s fifteen, she’s become a fixture in city politics. All the office basements are overrun. They’re relieved to pay her salary, and she’s relieved to have a living situation that includes walls and a ceiling. No one looks at her. She comes to the back doors of buildings. She banishes bad things, and though the city’s built upon the dead, most of what she sees is lost and living. She uses jackhammers on drains full of trolls. She pries up tiles and plucks out ragged house demons trapped in the grout. If she sees something else below the cellar floors from time to time, that’s nothing anyone discusses. The city has its ways, and she’s its Banisher. The city officials look at her with their pretty little mouths pursed, and she puts the flaps of her hat down and gets to work. Buildings were built in the beginning, everyone knows, to hold the dead down. That’s a line from the town charter, but it is hyperbolic. Buildings were built to hold the living. The rest is a side effect.

• • • •

Up in each of the nurseries, the pretty little children sang for cake, and their parents sang to them about the awful things beneath the cellar floor. It was tradition. Who’d change it? It was one of the things that made the place so lovely. Everyone wanted to live in a place like this, where everyone was beautiful and no one was bad. In the kitchen, there was a pile of sawdust, and in the cellar, there were planks. All the nails had been driven into the wood, and the planks were carefully laid against one another, over the mud, over the dark. The lovely young couple sat at their kitchen table, eating their first lunch after the cellar’s completion. She gave him a bite of her sandwich, then opened her mouth and closed her eyes. He fed her a strawberry he’d brought out from the fridge as a surprise. She laughed in delight. She put a record on the record player and put her arms around his neck, and he looked down at her. “So beautiful,” he said. “So handsome,” she said. There was a sound from behind the cellar door, but the music muffled it, and the young couple danced in a lovely circle through their sitting room, past the yellow upholstered couch and up the yellow carpeted stairs, past the nursery with its upholstered walls and the rolling toy on the landing, which had a broken wheel, a missing eyeball and a crushed leg. It had started as a pretty and perfect little wooden horse. The wife stumbled. She caught her high heel on the rope meant for tugging, but her husband lifted her off the ground and carried her into the bedroom as though they were honeymooning all over again.

• • • •

When the Banisher goes to college, she majors in literature. A professor confidently insists that the most beautiful words in the English language are ‘cellar door.’ “Fuck that noise,” says the Banisher, who doesn’t care about beauty. The Banisher graduates with honors. She still has a coverall and a hat with flaps, but she’s a normal person, and everyone agrees on that. She’s not become pretty. She’s tall and thin as a tine, her knots of hair still the color of mud, her eyes the color of moth wings. Her nose is even more crooked than it was. Now she calls herself Agatha. She’s got a list of losses, but awful things up from hell only ever wanted to go to the forest. Awful things from under the hill were starving for milk and bread. She gave them sandwiches and cups of milk. She treated them as she wished to be treated. She took the rats to dine on garbage, and the raccoons to wash their food in wading pools. She took the poltergeists to rooms full of pots and pans and let them play. She lets it slide, the employment of childhood. When people ask, she refers to banishing as her lemonade stand, the way she put herself through college, the way she found a home after she was orphaned. She doesn’t tell people what really happened. Her parents were there, and then they weren’t. She puts her memory of banishing into the darkness where she keeps all the things she’s found behind cellar doors. Those stellar scores, tiny hoards of gold pressed beneath the floorboards by little men. Those yeller roars, howled into the night by wormhounds. Those hell armoires sometimes found in the oldest of the basements, doors that opened into darkness. Occasionally, she unearthed a nevermore in one of the cellars, and she whispered to it and took it to the woods or to the sandwich counter, took it to a brightly lit room where it might look at tanks of fish. She knew what nevermores needed. They were only lonely.

• • • •

Eventually, the Banisher’s childhood is nearly twenty years in the past, and if sometimes she goes into a closet in her apartment, if sometimes she wanders in the basement of her building, it’s no oddity. She’s a woman alone, and always has been. There are some things she’s not allowed, nor will she ever be. She sits on her couch and reads library books about ancient warfare. She teaches classes at the college. No one who knows her now knows anything about her history. The town proceeds. Every house has its couple, and every nursery has its baby. Agatha lives in a building full of the rest of the unpretty from everywhere, not in the town at all, but on the outskirts. If it still feels like home, she can’t blame herself for that. A newly-wedded couple in the town buys a house with a cellar full of dirt. The house is a shameful thing: a fence without paint, a yard overgrown, abandoned for years, at last sold at auction. Nothing unusual. The couple’s seen all the paperwork. The problem’s always been the cellar. It’s just a dirt room, dirt from the bottom to the top, and when the cellar door’s opened, dust puffs out into the kitchen. It’s a pretty little house, and so the pretty little couple moves into it with their pretty little child, a nursery on the top floor, but still, there’s this trouble. It’s part of the square footage the couple paid for, but it’s unusable. Their pretty little daughter wants to go down those stairs. She can hardly be kept from it. The couple puts their heavy kitchen table on top of the cellar door, and their daughter plays beneath the table with her rolling dog and her dancing dolls, and all’s well and good for a while, but then it isn’t. The daughter sprawls upon the cellar door, listening to the kitchen floor. Something screams one night, and then every night after, in agony and futility. It screams that it’s trapped. The couple panics. The couple consults. Someone at the church, someone less-than-holy, finds them the Banisher’s phone number.

• • • •

The Banisher steps into the house through the back door. It’s like every other place in the town. She looks up to where the nursery is, and there are the stairs, and there’s the pretty little daughter in her pretty little white dress. “Hello,” says the child. “What are you?” “Right,” says the Banisher. She’s wearing her coverall. It’s stained. She fumbles with her earflaps. “You want to show me the problem?” She walks behind the mother of the house, down a hall painted yellow, toward a kitchen door painted white, and everything in her wants to run, but there’s no reason for that. Her name is Agatha. She lives alone in an apartment with nothing particular in it. No small ivory objects. No mementos. “I don’t even want to go near that door,” the husband says and shudders. “Not even near it. It’s weird, right? Whatever happened down there?” The wife pushes a plate of sandwiches across the table toward their guest. “He’s not kidding,” she says. “Have a seat.” The wife pulls out one of the kitchen chairs. There’s a sound from below the floor. A crying sound, a wailing sob, something miserable. Something large. “I’ll just do what I came to do,” says the Banisher, and heaves the kitchen table from off of the cellar door. “You might want to leave the house for the afternoon. No telling what I might need to use to clear this.” The pretty little girl runs down the pretty little stairs, her toy in her arms. She stares at the Banisher. “It’s stuck,” the little girl says as her parents take her from the house. “It’s been calling for a long time.” The Banisher turns toward the cellar and kneels to unlatch the door. All’s dust, then, in the base of this building, its foundation full of dirt, the cellar and its planks, its iron nails, and all around her, the sound of the wailer’s wails. If you hear a wail, if you hear a roar, dig your fingers deeply beneath the cellar door. If you feel a cut, if you feel a score, it’s only something awful trapped beneath the cellar floor. The Banisher moves the dirt. There’s enough to fill the kitchen, but it’s loose, not packed down. At last, she touches wood. At last, she touches iron. She pries up a plank and finds a place where no plank is, the wood splintered and broken, the dirt beneath it moist. The Banisher whispers, and there’s an answer. There’s a set of glowing eyes in the dark, and she holds out her hands and takes the awful thing into her arms, kneeling on the wood and iron, her body bending into the hole.

• • • •

A plate. A bologna sandwich. A sliced apple. A little girl looked up and smiled at her mother’s pretty face. Her mother in a white dress with a white flower over her ear. Her mother with a smudge of mud on her cheek and a shovel in her hand. When she woke, she was trapped, heaviness around her body, her hands stretching. There was a ceiling made of wood. Her parents were gone. She’d banished them somehow. She cried in the dark, but it didn’t get light. She cried for days and nights, perhaps for weeks, and above her, the sound of a record player, and then a baby crying, and then a song. Above her, the sound of a rolling toy, but she was below it, beneath the cellar floor, in the dark and grime, in the underneath. High-heeled shoes danced around the kitchen, and the leather soles shuffle-stepped, and the bare feet of the little pretty one learned to walk. She cried for something, and finally something came. It dug around her with its long claws and shoveled the dirt away from her face and hands. She discovered her finger was gone, chopped off by a careless shovel. The awful thing licked her face and brought her food. It curled around her and comforted her. Later, she’d emerge, in the night, into the kitchen. Later, she’d leave muddy prints across the tile. Later, she’d run from the house and into the street, covered in mud, her clothing rotted from the dirt, her hair in tangles, her eyes flicking across every face. Later, no one would see her or know her. Later, she’d put up a flyer to earn food by helping the things she knew from her time in the dark out into the light. All this was a very long time ago. Now its claws scrabble on the planks. Its eyes are large as plates. The nevermore’s been down here twenty years. The Banisher wraps the nevermore in a blanket and carries it up the cellar stairs, up and through the cellar door. It’s as large as she is. It’s the only one who knows her. She gives it milk and bread. She gives it her hand to hold. The most beautiful words in the English language are well known to those who know them, but they are not the most beautiful words to everyone. She bundles the nevermore into the front seat of her car and drives it to a night market. She and the rest of the ugly city roam, the ivory awful things grown large as men now, their joints stitched with sinews stolen from wild animals, their jaws rattling when they see her, the wood-gnawing fairies selling carvings of bees and hummingbirds. The Banisher barters for Christmas roses gathered into a bundle of burgundy and black. She buys her nevermore a cup of hot milk, and her nevermore buys her an abyss contained inside an acorn.

• • • •

She looks for them now, though they’ve never looked for her. They’re still here, of course, though they abandoned their house. One day, the husband went down and saw a hole in the floor, a hole without a bottom. They filled the cellar with mud and moved to the other side of town. It’s twenty-five years since the December day her parents married, and they’re having a party. The whole town’s invited. There’re lights strung up around the center of the city, and under the town there’re cellars and more cellars, and beneath every building, secrets. Buildings were built to hold the dead down. There are no ugly children here, no ugly young couples. There’s only light and sunshine and padding. There’re only nurseries full of pretty songs. The Banisher saw them as she banished. Little skeletons in the dirt beneath the cellar floors, one or two, or sometimes more, planted there. Houses built atop them, and the houses bloomed with flowers and the families were more lovely, and the little children sang the rhyme to keep the things from screaming, though the dead were done with screaming. All the things beneath the ground came here. All the fell were called by the sorrow of dying children, but the Banisher is the only one they found in time. They brought her out into the light. It’s snowing, and the Banisher drives, her nevermore beside her. In the backseat, there’s a bouquet. The car’s filled with creatures, all of them things from the dark and damp. The Banisher walks into the kitchen in her coverall, and the kitchen staff rustle nervously. None of them are for viewing. They’re not from this town. The ivory accompanies her, a troupe of netsuke with scavenged fox teeth, and the kitchen staff consults with itself and departs out the back door. The band’s playing, and all the guests are giving speeches about beautiful and handsome, and all the townsfolk on the dance floor are spinning on their toes. The two of them are there in the middle, a white dress on her, a white tie on him. They are no less beautiful, though her hair’s brighter and his is streaked with silver. The Banisher looks at them for a moment. There is their other daughter, a pretty little lovely with her pretty little love. All of them are wearing shades of pale. All of them have had all of these years, and none of them are different. Beneath the dance floor where every lovely couple whirls in their fancy dresses and tuxedos, awful things are singing in the tunnels, sweeping out the dust that holds the ground together, planning for a festival, planning for a parade. The cake’s in the kitchen spinning too, in the center of a susan, lazily turning, twenty-five layers filled with strawberries out of season. The Banisher decorates it. There’s a table stacked with glasses of pink champagne, all of them poured, and the Banisher and her brownies garnish them with petals. And later in the evening, when the town eats hellebore, when the dancers fall to shambles through the broken dancing floor, when deep beneath the city, there is heard a horrid roar, all the something-awfuls come up to settle their score. Her creature holds her hand and whispers, and the word it says is, “More.” It is a fell thing with a tail, and she’s the one the fell adore.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Maria Dahvana Headley is the author of the young adult skyship novel Magonia from HarperCollins, the novel Queen of Kings, the memoir The Year of Yes, and co-author with Kat Howard of the short horror novella The End of the Sentence. With Neil Gaiman, she is the New York Times-bestselling co-editor of the monster anthology Unnatural Creatures, benefitting 826DC. Her Nebula and Shirley Jackson award-nominated short fiction has recently appeared in Lightspeed (“Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream,” “The Traditional”), on Tor.com, The Toast, Clarkesworld, Apex, The Journal of Unlikely Entomology, Subterranean Online, Uncanny Magazine, Glitter & Mayhem, and Jurassic London’s The Lowest Heaven and The Book of the Dead, as well as in a number of Year’s Bests, most recently Year’s Best Weird. She lives in Brooklyn with a collection of beasts, an anvil, and a speakeasy bar through the cellar doors. Find her on Twitter @MARIADAHVANA or on the web at mariadahvanaheadley.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight. The Changeling Sarah Langan

2,500 words

She peered through the window at the slumbering cherub. Pale skin and black lashes. A nightlight shone against the red drapes, and tinted the walls bloody. It was warm inside that nursery, she imagined. Snug, like the house where she’d once lived. But that was a long time ago. She did not remember her name anymore, or the person she’d once been. Only the job, the houses she visited each night. The faces of the children she stole. This place was familiar, its weeping willows and honeyed air. The roots of giant trees had fissured the wide sidewalks into strips of pebbles. Swaths of grass lazed on lawns like kudzu’s wealthy cousin. The house was a brick Victorian with stained glass eyes. Yes, this terrain was familiar. Like a tune she couldn’t place, or the scent of a stranger wearing an old friend’s skin. The cherub startled and sat up. They had a sixth sense sometimes, and knew when she was near. He threw off his Batman bed sheets, and she readied herself for the scream, the hurried entry she would have to make, the kicks and bites he would inflict as she carried him away. He didn’t scream. The boy scooted out of the small bed and approached the window. The tip of his nose flattened like a mushroom against the glass, and he squinted into the dark. “Sister,” his red lips mouthed. The word rattled like ice against her hollow bones: she knew this boy.

• • • •

She’d stolen thousands. Brown eyes, blue eyes, green eyes, hazel. She’d seen cockroach-candied mattresses, mobiles that twisted overhead to the tune of Mozart’s Figaro, dirt floors, hand-knit blankets so soft and sweet- smelling that more than once she’d been tempted to steal them along with the child. At first they’d been missions of mercy. The starving, the sick. Better to carry them away. And then she’d graduated to the unwanted. Their mothers cursed their every breath. And now, finally, the loved. They were the most valuable in the scheme of things. The most satisfying meal. She delivered the children to a place deep underground. Set them down inside a mouth of rocks. The dead smelled the scent of young flesh and came quickly, smacking their lips. They bent over the infants until their whimpers were piercing howls that suddenly went silent. Twice she’d taken pity. A little girl from New Hyde Park, Long Island had caressed the webbing of her fingers as if trying to heal it. She’d held the girl, and kissed her cheek. Another time she’d spared a sleeping baby. The child’s crib had looked especially warm, and though she’d done it hundreds of times before, her mind had set like a strip of steel. She would not steal the child from a happy dream. She would rather have died. But these had happened long ago. The years had suckled her pity dry. This was just a job now. A thing she did out of necessity, like shit and sleep. Corruption is the eyes, the nose, the sense of touch. Corruption is the salve, and its irritant.

• • • •

She remembered everything, even the womb. Her parents were a young couple with healthy good looks. Tall and brunette and glowing from summers spent at the helms of boats and winters at the gym. They’d looked alike. Could have been siblings and in a way, were. They’d married within their town, their social set, their country club. She was their first child. Born too quickly for a hospital. A labor in two- hours and without an afterbirth. Ravenous, she’d chewed her way down the canal. Their faces at the sight of her had been all smiles. Their perfect child. Their perfect life. And then the mid-wife bathed her, and they saw gray skin, gaunt body, and long limbs. Her crown of black curls like the laurels of an illegitimate queen. Forgetting her professional demeanor, the midwife dropped the baby in the sink, and made the sign of the cross. From her first breath she cried without relent. At first they crooned lullabies and rocked her. Shook stuffed giraffes and elephants and bears at her angular face. Wept over the stygian squeals transmitted through their Walkie-Talkies (How could she cry for so long? Was she sick? Hurt? Frightened?). But soon their concern became exhaustion. She did not take her mother’s milk, but only formula. Over the weeks and then months of her endless shrieks, her body remained gaunt. Any material other than burlap gave her a rash, and if she wore the cashmere blanket her mother had knit, her skin opened up and began to bleed. There were doctors. Trips to universities where women in white pricked her toes with needles. But she did not stop crying. She did not learn to speak. She did not smile. To muffle her constant wails, they nailed rugs to the walls of her nursery. But still they heard her, and no one in that house slept. They stopped seeing friends, stopped speaking on the phone, stopped loving the child that bore not their looks, but their name. After her second birthday, they started adding fingers of whiskey to her milk. Boozy, she did not fall asleep, but instead drifted away. Once, her father sneaked into the room and lifted her into his arms. A hairy little girl with feathery down on her chin. How could this child belong to him? He must have wondered. He ran his fingers along the seams of her limbs. Not a tender touch. He recoiled even as he did it. “What are you?” he asked when she was only two years old, and if she could have given him an answer, she would have. She’d been crying for two days straight when her mother delivered the bottle full of brown whiskey. Medicine, they called it, but her mind was more fertile than they knew. Her eyes were focused, watchful. She understood the things they did. Since drinking the whiskey, her hair had fallen out. Her mother held her. Squeezed her nose and mouth against her dry bosom. Tighter. Tighter. Tighter. So tight she hitched, and her lungs emptied, and she stopped breathing. Her eyes bulged, and she could not name the emotion she felt. She did not know what emotions meant. “Why won’t you go away?” her mother whispered, and then threw her back into the crib. They stopped kissing her good-night. They stopped opening her bedroom blinds in the morning so that she could witness the rising sun. With stealth they sped past her room. They resumed the vacations they’d missed. Trips to sun-dappled islands surrounded by tropical fish, and sides of mountains where their downward skiing was rewarded with mugs of hot chocolate in front of warm fires. They went out at night with friends again, and left her to wail until she fell asleep. They went through new nannies almost every week until they’d contacted every agency in town, and there were no more nannies to be hired. None could endure her endless shrieks, her strange body, her knowing eyes. They started paying the woman who cleaned house to feed and change her once a day. The woman did as she was instructed, but wore gloves so as never to touch her gray skin. She remembered watching things back then. The twisting mobile that she could not reach. The sky that thickened like soup in the summer heat. The designs on the blanket in her crib that were blue posies. She thought about death. When she was four, the gloved woman called her parents, who were away on vacation, to tell them that the child’s cries had not ceased for two days. In broken English she explained that she could not stay another second. She was leaving. In a daze, they packed their bags. They called the airline. They headed for a taxi, and then they stopped. They were hungry, and it was better to eat before a long trip. They ordered eggs from room service. They watched the news and learned that another Kennedy had died. At the last minute they decided to attend a cocktail party that was important for his career, where they drank too much wine, and had to stay overnight at the hotel. When thirsty headaches woke them the next morning, something insidious slipped between them. A thing that would gnaw at them without cease until all that remained was the husks of their bodies. They looked at each other and this thing coiled itself between then, nourished by their mutual madness. They did not go home for their child. Alone, she cried until her lungs gave out, and her throat burned from thirst, and her stomach began to digest itself. The posies on her blanket looked like death. The shadows in her room looked like death. The dead came to her, then. They entered the cabin like a fog that slipped through the cracks under the nursery door. Their bodies were conjoined, each starting before the other ended. Faces looked down at her while she wept, so hungry, in her crib. By luck they had found her. A meal. A chance to live another day. But when they saw her, they stopped. There was something kindred in her. Something they understood. In their mercy they adopted her as one of their own. One of them, a woman, saw the child’s hunger, and ran her teeth along the inside of her palm until her cold flesh opened wide. She suckled the dead woman’s blood. Black nourishment filled her belly like sleeping snakes. She stopped crying, and never cried again. They carried her to the window, this foundling. This child that had been born not quite human. They carried her away. Even the dead have honor, and to show their disdain for what the parents had done, they replaced the changeling’s body with the carcass of a pig. She lived with them for fifteen years. Spent her days with them in the dark underground. They came out at night after feeding to spy on the living. Listen to old stories, visit old loves. They fixated on the epithets written on their headstones, and fomented old grudges, and sometimes wandered the floors of malls, their steps in synch with Barry Manilow tunes. They refused to let go, and so they lingered in a world they had no place. To keep their shadows from losing shape, to give them the semblance of flesh, they fed off the lives of children. But she was not one of them. They offered her the bodies of broken- necked squirrels and small birds from above, and the meat from roots that grew underground. Once, they even found a jar of apple sauce. She could not keep any of it in her stomach, and so they took turns cutting open their hands and feeding her their blood. She was stronger than them, and in return for their blood, she learned to steal. They made her in their image. To help her to climb the sides of houses, they bound and shredded her hands and toes until the flaps of skin on them became webbed. The sustenance of their cold blood gave her strength, but her nourishment had been neglected for so long that her bones were hollow, and when she moved, she ached. The dark had made her eyes and skin so sensitive that she couldn’t tolerate natural sunlight. She’d lived for so long without human touch that she did not know how to feel. Only to steal, to watch through windows, to skirt between two worlds, coveting both the living and the dead. This was her story. A changeling raised with less humanity than a pig. Now, the little boy smiled. She did not smile back. She suctioned her webbed fingers against the window and soundlessly opened it. She climbed inside. This place was familiar. So familiar. The boy was brunette, and had the glow of health. Wide brown eyes. Victorian house. She knew this place. She remembered this place. She entered the room. On his bed was a blanket with blue posies. He didn’t scream. Perhaps he had been born different, too. Could sense in her their kinship. She lowered her hands over the lids of his eyes and closed them. He thought they were playing a game. Hide and seek. Peek-a-boo. So trusting. So sweet she could lick him. She wondered if she had ever left this house. If the dead were an invention she’d dreamed in this very nursery, too ignorant to recognize that she’d gone mad. The feeling was like rocks in her stomach, rooting her deeply to the floor, drowning her here. The memories of this place. She should have jettisoned them long ago, and yet they persisted. The boy climbed into her arms, and she thought about taking him away. Saving him the way she wished she’d been saved. They’d enter the sunlight together. She carried him to the window. But down below the dead had risen early, and followed her here. They reached their arms up to catch him, this boy. To feed from him. A test. The dead had sent her here to test her loyalty. The boy hugged her tightly, and her hollow bones ached. Behind her the door opened and she saw a couple, older now. Sadder, now. A man and a woman. They stopped in the doorway. There was recognition, and then it closed like an eye winking, and they forgot. They did not know her. What had they done with the pig? She dangled the child out the window. Trusting her, he did not fight. The dead clamored. The couple shouted. The boy did not blink. Such a sweet thing. Brown eyes, brown hair. A cold snake coiled inside her belly, and knew that she loved him. This, her opposite. This thing too perfect to be human. And yet, together, they were whole. She dropped him into the arms of the dead. He was too surprised to scream. Wide-eyed, he fell with his arms extended, as if convinced that at the last moment she would reach out and catch him. And then the thud and moan when he landed, a startled sound. And then the crunch, and the smacking lips, and the snakes in her stomach writhed like rage. The couple was weeping when she turned to them. Their eyes became the opposite of stars. They went from wet and shining, to black. They looked at her, and their recognition returned. Then she climbed inside the tiny bed, and took her rightful place as their firstborn child.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sarah Langan is the author of the novels The Keeper and The Missing, and her most recent novel, Audrey’s Door, won the 2009 Stoker for best novel. Her short fiction has appeared in the magazines Cemetery Dance, Phantom, and Chiaroscuro, and in the anthologies Brave New Worlds, Darkness on the Edge, and Unspeakable Horror. She is currently working on a post-apocalyptic young adult series called Kids and two adult novels: Empty Houses, which was inspired by The Twilight Zone, and My Father’s Ghost, which was inspired by Hamlet. Her work has been translated into ten languages and optioned by the Weinstein Company for film. It has also garnered three Bram Stoker Awards, an American Library Association Award, two Dark Scribe Awards, a New York Times Book Review editor’s pick, and a Publishers Weekly favorite book of the year selection.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight. Snow Dale Bailey

4,500 words

They took shelter outside of Boulder, in a cookie-cutter subdivision that had seen better days. Five or six floor plans, Dave Kerans figured, brick façades and tan siding, crumbling streets and blank cul-de-sacs, no place you’d want to live. By then, Felicia had passed out from the pain, and the snow beyond the windshield of Lanyan’s black Yukon had thickened into an impenetrable white blur. It had been a spectacular run of bad luck, starting with the first news of the virus via the satellite radio in the Yukon: three days of disease vectors and infection rates, symptoms and speculation. Calm voices gave way to anxious ones; anxious ones succumbed to panic. The last they heard was the sound of a commentator retching. Then flat silence, nothing at all the length of the band, NPR, CNN, the Outlaw Country Station, and suddenly no one was anxious to go home, none of them, not Kerans and Felicia, not Lanyan or his new girlfriend, Natalie, lithe and blonde and empty-headed as the last player in his rotating cast of female companions. On the third day of the catastrophe — when it became clear that humanity just might be toast — they’d powwowed around a fire between the tents, passing hand-to-hand the last of the primo dope Lanyan had procured for the trip. Lanyan always insisted on the best: tents and sleeping bags that could weather a winter on the Ross Ice Shelf, a high-end water- filtration system, a portable gas stove with more bells and whistles than the full-size one Kerans and Felicia used at home, even a Benelli R1 semi- automatic hunting rifle (just in case, Lanyan had said). The most remote location, as well: somewhere two thousand feet above Boulder, where the early November deciduous trees began to give way to Pinyon pine and Rocky Mountain juniper. Zero cell-phone reception, but by that time there was nobody left to call, or anyway none of them cared to make the descent and see. The broadcasts had started calling it the red death by then. Kerans appreciated the allusion: airborne, an incubation period of less than twenty- four hours, blood leaking from your eyes, your nostrils, your pores and, toward the end — twelve hours if you were lucky, another twenty-four if you weren’t — gushing from your mouth with every cough. No-thank-yous all around. Safe enough at seventy-five-hundred feet, at least for the time being — the time being, Lanyan insisted, lasting at least through the winter and maybe longer. “We have maybe two weeks’ worth of food,” Kerans protested. “We’ll scout out a cabin and hunker down for the duration,” Lanyan said. “If we have to, we’ll hunt.” There was that at least. Lanyan was a master with the Benelli. They wouldn’t starve — and Kerans didn’t have any more desire to contract the red death than the rest of them. All had been going according to plan. Inside a week they’d located a summer cabin, complete with a larder of canned goods, and had started gathering wood for the stove. Then Felicia had fallen. A single bad step on a bed of loose scree, and that had been it for the plan. When Kerans cut her jeans away, he saw that the leg had broken at the shin. Yellow bone jutted through the flesh. Blood was everywhere. Felicia screamed when Lanyan set the bone, yanking it back into true, or something close to true, splinting it with a couple of backpack poles, and binding the entire bloody mess with a bandage they found in a first-aid kit under the sink. The bandage had soaked through almost immediately. Kerans, holding her hand, thought for the first time in half a dozen years of their wedding, the way she’d looked in her dress and the way he’d felt inside, like the luckiest man on the planet. Luck. It had all turned sour on them. “I’m taking her down, first thing in the morning,” he told Lanyan. “What for? You heard the radio. We’re on our own now.” “You want to die, too?” Natalie asked. “I don’t want her to die,” Kerans said. That was the point. Without help, she was doomed, anybody could see that. There wasn’t a hell of a lot any of them could do on their own. A venture capitalist and a college English professor and something else, a Broncos cheerleader maybe, who knew what Natalie did? “Even if it’s as bad as we think it is down there,” he added, “we can still find a pharmacy, antibiotics, whatever. You think there’s any chance her leg isn’t going to get infected?” Grim-faced, Lanyan had turned away. “I think it’s a bad idea.” “You have a better one?” “How are you going to get down, Dave? You planning to use the Yukon?” Kerans laughed in disbelief. “I can’t believe you’d even say that.” “What?” Lanyan said, as if he didn’t know. “You were the best man at my wedding. Hell, you introduced me to Felicia.” “The rules have changed,” Natalie had said. “We have to think of ourselves now.” “Fuck you, Natalie,” Kerans said, and that had been the end of the conversation. He was wakeful most of the night that followed. Felicia was feverish. “Am I going to die, Dave?” she’d asked in one of her lucid moments. “Of course not,” he’d responded, the lie cleaving his heart. Lanyan woke him at dawn. They stood shivering on the porch of the cabin and watched clouds mass among the peaks. The temperature had plunged overnight. The air smelled like snow. “You win,” Lanyan said. “We’ll go down to Boulder.”

• • • •

The snow caught them when they were winding down the rutted track from the cabin, big lazy flakes sifting through the barren trees to deliquesce on the Yukon’s acres of windshield. Nothing to worry about, Kerans thought in the backseat, cradling Felicia’s head in his lap. But the temperature — visible in digital blue on the dash — continued to plummet, twenty-five, fifteen, ten; by the time they hit paved road, a good hour and a half from the cabin, and itself a narrow, serpentine stretch of crumbling asphalt, the snow had gotten serious. The wipers carved slanting parabolas in the snow. Beyond the windows, the world had receded into a white haze. Lanyan hunched closer to the wheel. They crept along, pausing now and again to inch around an abandoned vehicle. “We should have stayed where we were,” Natalie said, and the silence that followed seemed like assent. But it was too late to turn back now. Finally the road widened into a four-lane highway, clogged with vehicles. They plowed onward anyway, weaving drunkenly among the cars. By the time they reached the outskirts of Boulder, the headlights stabbed maybe fifteen feet into the swirling snow. “I can’t see a thing,” Lanyan said. They turned aside into surface streets, finding their way at last into the decaying subdivision. They picked a house at random, a rancher with a brick façade in an empty cul-de-sac. The conventions of civilization held. Lanyan and Kerans scouted it out, while the women waited in the Yukon. They knocked, shouting, but no one came. Finally, they tested the door. It had been left unlocked; the owners had departed in a hurry, Kerans figured, fleeing the contagion. He wondered if they’d passed them dead somewhere on the highway, or if they’d made it into the higher altitudes in time. The house itself was empty. Maybe they’d gotten lucky. Maybe the frigid air would kill the virus before it could kill them. Maybe, Kerans thought. Maybe. They settled Felicia on the sectional sofa in the great room, before the unblinking eye of the oversized flatscreen. Afterward, they searched the place more thoroughly, dosing Felicia with the amoxicillin and oxycodone they found in the medicine cabinet. Then the food in the pantry, tools neatly racked in the empty garage, a loaded pistol in a bedside table. Natalie tucked it in the belt of her jeans. Kerans flipped light switches, adjusted the thermostat, flicked on the television. Nothing. How quickly it all fell apart. They hunched around a portable radio instead: white noise all across the dial. Welcome to the end of the world, it said. Not with a bang, but a whimper.

• • • •

The snow kept coming, gusts of it, obscuring everything a dozen feet beyond the windows, then unveiling it in quick flashes: the blurred limb of a naked tree, the shadow of the Yukon at the curb. Kerans stood at the window as night fell, wondering what he’d expected to find. A hospital? A doctor? The hospitals must have been overwhelmed from the start, the doctors first to go. The streetlights snapped alight — solar-charged batteries, the death throes of the world he’d grown up in. They illuminated clouds of billowing white that in other circumstances Kerans would have found beautiful. Cold groped at the window. He turned away. Lanyan and Natalie had scrounged a handful of tealight candles. By their flickering luminescence, the great room took on a cathedral air. Darkness encroached from the corners and gathered in shrouds at the ceiling. They ate pork and beans warmed over the camp stove, spread their sleeping bags on the carpet, and talked. The same goddamn conversation they’d had for days now: surely we’re not the only ones and how many? and where? and what if? “We’re probably already dying,” Natalie said, turning a baleful eye on Kerans. “Well, we’re down here now,” she said. “What’s your plan, Einstein?” “I don’t have a plan. I didn’t figure on the snow.” “You didn’t figure on a lot of things.” “Cut it out,” Lanyan said. “We didn’t have to do this, Cliff,” Natalie said. “What did you expect me to do? I’ve known Felicia for years. I’ve known Dave longer. It’s not like we had access to weather reports.” No, Kerans thought, that was another thing gone with the old world. Just like that. Everything evaporated. By then the cold had become black, physical. Kerans got to his feet. He tucked Felicia’s sleeping bag into the crevices of the sofa. She moaned. Her eyes fluttered. She reached for his hand. Kerans shook two oxycodone out of the bottle. “These’ll help you sleep.” “Will you stay with me, Dave?” All the way to the end, he thought, and he knew then that at some level, if only half-consciously, he had accepted what he had known in his heart back at the cabin. She was gone. She’d been gone the moment she’d slipped on that bed of scree. And he’d laughed, he remembered that, too. Whoops, he’d said, and she’d said, I’m hurt, Dave, her voice plaintive, frightened, tight with agony. He’d never heard her use that voice in seventeen years of marriage, and he knew then that she was beyond help. There was no help to be had. What had Natalie said? The rules have changed. We have to watch out for ourselves now. Yet Lanyan had surrendered the Yukon, and they had knocked on the door before barging into this house, just as they had knocked on the door of the summer cabin in the mountains before that. How long, he wondered, before they reverted to savagery? “Will you stay with me, Dave?” she said. “Of course.” He slid into his sleeping bag. They held hands by candlelight until the oxycodone hit her and her fingers went limp. He tucked her arm under her sleeping bag — he could smell the wound, already suppurating with infection — and lay back. The last of the tealights burned out. Kerans glanced at the luminescent dial of his watch. Nine-thirty. The streetlight’s spectral blue glow suffused the air. He closed his eyes, but sleep eluded him. An endless loop unspooled against the dark screens of his eyelids: Felicia’s expression as the earth slipped out from under her feet. His helpless whoop of laughter. I’m hurt, Dave. He opened his eyes. “You awake, Cliff?” he said. “Yeah.” “You think Natalie’s right? We’re all going to wind up coughing up blood in twenty-four hours or so?” “I don’t know.” “Maybe the snow,” Kerans said. “Maybe the cold has killed the virus.” “Maybe.” They were silent. “One way or the other, we’ll find out, I guess,” Lanyan said. Snow ticked at the windows like fingernails. Let me in. Let me in. “About the Yukon —” Kerans said. “It doesn’t matter, Dave. You’d have done the same for me.” Would he? Kerans wondered. He liked to think so. “I’m sorry I was an asshole,” Lanyan said. “It doesn’t matter.” “Felicia’s going to be okay.” “Sure she is. I know.” Kerans gazed across the room at the shadowy mound of the other man in his sleeping bag. “What do you figure happened?” “Hell, I don’t know. You heard the radio as well as I did. Something got loose from a military lab. Terrorists. Maybe just a mutation. Ebola, something like that.” Another conversation they’d had a dozen times. It was like picking a scab. A long time passed. Kerans didn’t know how long it was. “It doesn’t matter, I guess,” he said, adrift between sleep and waking. “Not anymore,” Lanyan said, and the words chased Kerans down a dark hole into sleep.

• • • •

Lanyan woke him into that same unearthly blue light, and for a moment Kerans didn’t know where he was. Only that strange undersea radiance, his sense of time and place out of joint, a chill undertow of anxiety. Then it all came flooding back, the plague, Felicia’s fall, the blizzard. Lanyan’s expression echoed his unease. “Get up,” he said. “What’s going on?” “Just get up.” Kerans followed him to the window. Natalie crouched there, gazing out into the sheets of blowing snow. She held the pistol in one hand. “What is it?” he whispered. “There’s something in the snow,” she said. “What?” “I heard it. It woke me up.” “You hear anything, Cliff?” Lanyan shrugged. Wind tore at the house, rattling gutters. Kerans peered into the snow, but if there was anything out there, he couldn’t see it. He couldn’t see anything but a world gone white. The streetlamp loomed above them, a bulb of fuzzy blue light untethered from the earth. “Heard what?” he asked. “I don’t know. It woke me. Something in the snow.” “The wind,” Kerans said. “It sounded like it was alive.” “Listen to it blow out there. You could hear anything in that. The brain, it” — he hesitated — “What?” Natalie said. “All I’m saying is, it’s easy enough to imagine something like that. Voices in the wind. Shapes in the snow.” Natalie’s breath fogged the window. “I didn’t imagine anything.” “Look,” he said. “It’s late. We’re all tired. You could have imagined something, that’s all I’m saying.” “I said I didn’t imagine it.” And then, as though the very words had summoned it into being, a thin shriek carved the wind — alien, predatory, unearthly as the cry of a hunting raptor. The snow muffled it, made it hard to track how far away it was, but it was closer than Kerans wanted it be. It held for a moment, wavering, and dropped away. A heartbeat passed, then two, and then came an answering cry, farther away. Kerans swallowed hard, put his back to the wall, and slid to the floor. He pulled his knees up, dropped his head between them. He could feel the cold radiating from the window, shivering erect the tiny hairs on his neck. He looked up. His breath unfurled in the gloom. They were both watching him, Lanyan and Natalie. “It’s the wind,” he said. Hating himself as he said it, hating this new weakness he’d discovered in himself, this inability to face what in his heart he knew to be true. Came a third cry then, still farther away. “Jesus,” Lanyan said. “They’re surrounding us,” Natalie said. “They’re?” Kerans said. “They’re? Who the hell do you think could be out there in that?” Natalie turned and met his gaze. “I don’t know,” she said.

• • • •

They checked the house, throwing deadbolts, locking interior doors and windows. Kerans didn’t get the windows. You wanted to get inside bad enough, you just broke the glass. Yet there was something comforting in sliding the little tongue into its groove all the same. Symbolic barriers. Like cavemen, drawing circles of fire against the night. As for sleep, forget it. He leaned against the sofa, draped in his sleeping bag, envying Felicia the oblivion of the oxycodone. Her skin was hot to the touch, greasy with perspiration. He could smell, or imagined he could smell, the putrescent wound, the inadequate dressing soaked with gore. Across the room sat Lanyan, the Benelli flat across his legs. At the window, her back propped against the wall, Natalie, cradling the pistol in her lap. Kerans felt naked with just the hunting knife at his belt. The snow kept coming, slanting down past the streetlamp, painting the room with that strange, swimming light. Lanyan’s face looked blue and cold, like the face of a dead man. Natalie’s, too. And he didn’t even want to think about Felicia, burning up under the covers, sweating out the fever of the infection. “We should look at her leg,” he said. “And do what?” Natalie responded, and what could he say to that because there was nothing to do, Kerans knew that as well as anyone, yet he felt compelled in his impotence to do something, anything, even if it was just stripping back the sleeping bag and staring at the wound, stinking and inflamed, imperfectly splinted, oozing blood and yellow pus. “Just keep doling out those drugs,” Lanyan said, and Kerans knew he meant the Oxycodone, not the Amoxicillin, which couldn’t touch an infection of this magnitude, however much he prayed — and he was not a praying man. He couldn’t help recalling his mother, dying in agony from bone cancer: the narrow hospital room, stinking of antiseptic, with its single forlorn window; the doctor, a hulking Greek, quick to anger, who spoke in heavily accented English. We’re into pain management now, he’d said. “How much is left?” Natalie said, and Kerans realized that he’d been turning the prescription bottle in his hands. “Ten, maybe fifteen pills.” “Not enough,” she said. “I don’t think it’s enough,” and a bright fuse of hatred for her burned through him for giving voice to thoughts he could barely acknowledge as his own. After that, silence. Kerans’s eyes were grainy with exhaustion, yet he could not sleep. None of them could sleep. Unspeaking, they listened for voices in the storm.

• • • •

At two, they came: one, two, three metallic screeches in the wind. Lanyan took one window, Natalie the other, lifting her pistol. Kerans stayed with Felicia. She was stirring now, coming out of her oxycodone haze. “What is it?” she said. “Nothing. It’s nothing.” But it was something. “There,” Natalie said, but she needn’t have said it at all. Even from his place by the sofa, Kerans saw it: a blue shadow darting past the window, little more than a blur, seven feet long or longer, horizontal to the earth, tail lashing, faster than anything that size had any right to be, faster than anything human. There and gone again, obscured by a veil of blowing snow. Kerans’s own words mocked him. Imagination. Shapes in the snow. He thought of that icy snow tapping like fingernails at the window. Let me in. Felicia said, “Dave? What is it, Dave?” “It’s nothing,” he said. Silence prevailed. Shifting veils of snow. “What the hell was that thing?” Lanyan said. And Natalie from her window. “Let’s play a game.” Nobody said a word. “The game is called ‘What if?’” she said. “What are you talking about?” Kerans said. “What if you were an alien species?” “Oh, come on,” Kerans said, but Lanyan was grim and silent. “Way ahead of us technologically, capable of travel between stars.” “This is crazy, Dave,” Felicia said. “What is she talking about?” “Nothing. It’s nothing.” “And what if you wanted to clear a planet for colonization?” “You read too much science fiction.” “Shut the hell up, Dave,” Lanyan said. “We’re intelligent. They would try to —” “We’re vermin,” Natalie said. “And what I would do, I would engineer some kind of virus and wipe out ninety-nine-percent of the vermin. Like fumigating a fucking house.” “And then?” Lanyan said. “Then I’d send in the ground troops to mop up.” Kerans snorted. “Dave —” “It’s craziness, that’s all,” he said. He said, “Here, these’ll help you sleep.” Nothing then. Nothing but wind and snow and the sound of silence in the room. After a time, they resumed their posts on the floor. Felicia, weeping, lapsed back into drugged sleep. “We’re going to have to get to the Yukon,” Natalie said. “We can’t see a fucking thing out there,” Kerans said. “At first light. Maybe the snow will stop by then.” “And if it doesn’t?” Lanyan said. “We make a run for it.” “What about Felicia?” Kerans said. “What about her?” Kerans looked at his watch. It was almost three o’clock.

• • • • He must have dozed, for he came awake abruptly, jarred from sleep by a distant thud. A dream, he thought, his pulse hammering. It must have been a dream — a nightmare inside this nightmare of dark and endless snow, of a plague-ravished world and Felicia dying in agony. But it was no dream. Lanyan and Natalie had heard it, too. They were already up, their weapons raised, and even as he stumbled to his feet, shedding like water the sleeping bag across his shoulders, it came again: a thump against the back of the house, muffled by snow and the intervening rooms. “What is it?” Felicia said, her voice drowsy with oxycodone. “Nothing,” he said. “It was nothing. A branch must have fallen.” “That was no branch,” Natalie said. “Not unless it fell twice.” And twice more after that, two quick blows, and a third, and then silence, a submarine hush so deep and pervasive that Kerans could hear the boom of his heart. “Maybe a tree came down.” “You know better,” Lanyan said. “Dave, I’m scared,” Felicia whispered. “We’re all scared,” Natalie said. Felicia began softly to weep. “Shut her the fuck up,” Natalie said. “Natalie —” “I said shut her up.” “It hurts,” Felicia said. “I’m afraid.” Kerans knelt by the sectional and kissed her chill lips. Her breath bloomed in the cold air, sweet with the stink of infection, and he didn’t think he’d ever loved her more in his life than he did at that moment. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he whispered, wiping away her tears with the ball of his thumb. “It’s just the wind.” But even she was past believing him, for the wind had died. The snow fell soft and straight through the air. The streetlamp was a blue halo against the infinite blackness of space. Natalie’s game came back to Kerans — what if — and a dark surf broke and receded across the shingles of his heart. Felicia took his hand and squeezed his fingers weakly. “Just don’t leave me here,” she said. “Don’t leave me here to die.” “Never.” The glitter of shattering glass splintered the air. Felicia screamed, a short, sharp bark of terror — “Shut her up,” Natalie snapped. — and in the silence that followed, in the shifting purple shadow of the great room with its sectional sofa and the gray rectangle of the flatscreen and their sleeping bags like the shucked skins of enormous snakes upon the floor, Kerans heard someone — something — — let’s play a game the game is called what if — — test the privacy lock of a back bedroom: a slow turn to either side. Click. Click. Silence. Felicia whimpered. Kerans blew a cloud of vapor into the still air. He clutched Felicia’s fingers. He remembered a time when they had made hasty love in the bathroom at a friend’s cocktail party, half-drunk, mad with passion for each other. The memory came to him with pristine clarity. He felt tears upon his cheeks. And still the silence held. Lanyan snapped off the safety of the Benelli. Natalie put her back to the foyer wall, reached out, and flipped the deadbolt of the front door. She pushed it a few inches ajar. Snow dusted the threshold. “The Yukon locked?” she whispered. “No.” Once again, the thing tested the lock. “Dave, don’t leave me —” “Natalie —” She froze him with a glance, and something else she had said came back to Kerans. The rules have changed now. We have to look out for ourselves. God help him, he didn’t want to die. He choked back a sob. They had wanted children. They had tried for them. In vitro, the whole nine yards. “I won’t leave you,” he whispered. Then the privacy lock snapped, popping like a firecracker. The door banged back. Something came, hurtling down the hallway: something big, hunched over the floor, and God, God, shedding pieces of itself, one, two, three as it burst into the room. Guns spat bright tongues of fire, a barrage of deafening explosions. The impact flung the thing backward, but the pieces, two- or three-foot lengths of leg-pumping fury, kept coming. Snapping the Benelli from target to target, Lanyan took two of them down. Natalie stopped the third one not three feet from Keran’s throat. It rolled on the floor, curving needle-teeth snapping, leathery hide gleaming in the snow- blown light, and was still. Those alien cries echoed in the darkness. “Time to go,” Natalie said. Lanyan moved to the door. Felicia clutched at Kerans’ hand, seizing him with a tensile strength he did not know she still possessed. The cocktail party flashed through his mind. They had wanted children — “Felicia —” Kerans said. “Help me —” “No time,” Natalie said. And Lanyan: “I’m sorry, Dave —” The moment hung in equipoise. Kerans wrenched his hand away. “Time to go,” Natalie said again. “We can’t wait. You have to decide.” And regular as a metronome inside his head: the rules have changed the rules have changed the rules the rules — Natalie ducked into the night. A moment later, Lanyan followed. Glass shattered at the back of the house, one window, two windows, three. “Don’t leave me, Dave,” Felicia sobbed. “Don’t leave me.” Outside the Yukon roared to life. The rules have changed. We have to watch out for ourselves now. “Dave,” Felicia said, “I’m scared.” God help him, he didn’t want to die — “Shhh,” he said, brushing closed her eyelids with his fingers. “Never. I’ll never leave you. I love you.” He bent to press his lips to hers. His fingers fumbled at his belt. They closed around the blade. A moment later, he was running for the Yukon.

© 2015 by Dale Bailey. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dale Bailey’s new collection, The End of the End of Everything: Stories, came out in the spring. A novel, The Subterranean Season, will follow this fall. He has published three previous novels, The Fallen, House of Bones, and Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay, Jr.), and one previous collection of short fiction, The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories. His work has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the Nebula Award, among others, and he won the International Horror Guild Award for his novelette “Death and Suffrage,” later adapted for Showtime Television’s Masters of Horror. He lives in North Carolina with his family.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight. The Music of the Dark Time Chet Williamson

6,800 words

The fear took him by the throat with the first chord. It was the violins and their high, piercing wail that caught him unaware, making the terror vibrate within him as the strings vibrated to their horsehair prod. Tortured, he thought. The bow tortured the strings to make them howl so. The music grew in intensity and volume, and he knew he would have to leave before he could not leave, before the soaring, searing music immobilized him like a fly in amber, before the fear solidified and he was once more back in the years of darkness, where joy was a memory and music had become a cruel farce. His legs moved slowly, dream-thick, as he turned, and faces watched idly, uncaring, from the other side of the glass, where the red and orange lights shone like candles, the thousands of candles he had lit over the long years, the hundreds of times he had said Kaddish for those he had seen go to their deaths at Adlerkralle, while the Four Angels played and played on the strings that ground into his ears like gritty shards of glass. Walk, Weissman, he told himself. Walk, Jude! And the feet rose and fell as he walked from the room, the vacuum cleaner lurching behind him like a balky dog. The music shrieked at him to stay, but he kept moving, and soon the sounds were lost behind the studio door. Karl Weissman remembered to breathe again, and leaned against the cool wall of the hall in exhaustion. He thanked God that he had escaped before he had heard more — the marching footsteps, the murmured remarks — before he had seen eyes that stared into his own with hatred and disgust, faces that had haunted him for over forty years. He should find another job. One where there would be no music, none at all. He shook his head sadly. How could he? He knew no trade but one, and that one was out of the question. Unbearable. Unthinkable. Unheard of.

Ron Talbot steepled his fingers, looked across the desk top, and shook his head slowly. “I don’t know, Bobby. It’s so goddam downbeat.” “Not if it’s packaged right,” Bobby Goodman replied. “Brummel said it wouldn’t go in Germany.” “They’re too close to it in Germany. Hell, the camps are still standing — they don’t need to be reminded of it anymore.” Goodman nervously fished his pack of cigarettes from a pocket. “What I don’t get,” Talbot said, “is why Brummel offered it to you so cheap. He’s no dummy.” “He is where this is concerned. They don’t realize the interest in it over here. Jesus, they sell coffee table books about the Holocaust now, and what about Shoah . . . and that miniseries a few years back . . . and what about that movie with what’s her name — Vanessa Redgrave? That’d tie right in.” “Too many years back — people don’t remember TV movies.” “There’s an audience, Ron, I swear there is.” “It’s pretty sick.” “It’s all in how you look at it,” Goodman countered. “We publicize it as a testament to survival, dedicate it to those who died.” “Dedicate it?” “Sure. Let me tell you how I see it — no quick and dirty pressing, no skinny album that gets lost in the documentary bin, but a two-record boxed set, with a nice booklet —” “Two records?” Talbot interrupted. “Is there enough material?” “I’ve got that figured out. On the wire recording that Brummel got from the SS guy’s widow, there are only two sides’ worth — one is the ‘Grosse Fugue,’ and the other is an earlier Beethoven quartet, one of the Rasumovskys. Now that’s the only stuff we have that was actually recorded in the camps. But — there are tons of German recordings from the forties that we know were played on camp P.A. systems for the SS. I see maybe one side of vintage Wagner and another side of piano and vocals — Walter Gieseking, maybe a couple of others who sucked up to the Nazis. The rights would be dirt cheap, and we could still use the title.” “Music of the Holocaust,” Talbot said. “Right. Very classy package. Black and white print — or gold and silver. A lot of dignity.” Talbot smiled thinly. “The contents are sensational enough, huh?” Goodman nodded. “I’ve listened to it three or four times, once last night with Sam. It’s effective as hell, obviously recorded outside — you can hear the wind whip the mike and at one pianissimo spot there’s this voice that yells, ‘Schnell, schnell, Juden!’” “Jesus,” Talbot whispered. “Strong stuff. Another weird thing is that the last dozen or so measures, the cello drops out.” “Can Sam engineer it?” “Oh yeah, no problem. He can take most of the crap out, but we’ll want to leave in all the background noises. I don’t think we’d want to dub in the cello at the end — adds a little mystery.” Talbot leaned back and stared at the ceiling. “Christmas release?” Goodman permitted himself a small smile of triumph. “That’s what I had in mind. Late October. I already talked to John Samuels at Newsweek, and he promises a paragraph in their gift record column.” “You think of everything, Bobby. You got the book all laid out too?” “Roughly. Lots of photographs, nothing too graphic, no piles of bodies. The focus should be more on dignity, like I said. Photos of faces, women, children, maybe some defiant-looking men. And a bonus record.” “Bonus record?” “Yeah. A twenty-minute seven-incher. Spoken word reactions to the music.” “By survivors?” “Sure. It’ll be fantastic. What I’d like to do is track down some people who were really in Adlerkralle, see how much they remember about it, and record their reminiscences, then play them the tapes and tape their reactions.” “Isn’t that a little thick?” Goodman shrugged. “Since it’s a bonus record you don’t have to listen to it — but I know damn well anyone who buys the album in the first place will want to.” Talbot’s frown deepened. “It could be perceived as insensitive.” “Hardly.” Goodman shook his head. “Remember Bookends?” “Simon and Garfunkel, sure.” “Remember the band that went into ‘Old Friends’? Recordings of people whining in an old folks’ home. Two minutes of unrelieved misery, and everybody who heard it thought it was the most sensitive thing since Rod McKuen. Granted, that was the sixties, but they’ll still eat this up.” “How would you find these people?” “They’re around. Seems like every old Jew you meet was either in a death camp or had a relative there.” He smiled slightly. “I had an uncle at Bergen-Belsen.” “No kidding.” Talbot’s eyes widened. “What would he have to say about this?” “Nothing. He died there.” Talbot pursed his lips as if he’d just tasted something sour. “And what do you think about it? Personally?” “It’s history. It doesn’t bother me. I wasn’t even born then.” Talbot sat silently for a moment. “Okay. Let me think about it. Couple of days.” “Fine. I’ve got enough to keep me busy. Sam and I’ve been working on the Philharmonic tapes. Haydn’s done, but the Bartok still needs work.” Talbot nodded dismissal. “I’ll get back to you.” Sure you’ll get back to me, Goodman thought, after you try to sell it to Wildeboor, and he tries to sell it to Kearny, and when all three of you realize it’ll sell like crack on the boulevard.

• • • •

It took a full week, but at the end of it Talbot called Goodman back into his office and told him that it was a go, with one reservation. “The bonus record,” Talbot said. “It makes me edgy. We’ve got a lot of Jewish stockholders. If they think we’re exploiting this —” “We’re not exploiting,” Goodman interrupted. “I promise you, this thing will be viewed as sympathetic and sensitive. Now we can do it without the bonus, but I really want it. I swear to God you won’t be sorry.” Talbot sighed through flared nostrils. “Twenty minutes of whiny, crying people remembering all that shit would be awful. Like pulling wings off flies.” “But it won’t be like that! Sure, a few of them may cry or get mad, but that’s real emotion, it’s sincere, it’s poignant. And besides, we can edit it so that we get exactly what we want.” Talbot drummed his desk top with his fingers. “There’ll be extra expense involved — finding these people, the engineering, the vinyl cost . . .” “And worth every penny. Marketing guesses thirty percent increase in unit sales with the bonus disc. And even if they’re only half right, figuring fifteen percent — on a nineteen dollar retail price, with expected sales of a hundred thousand units, that’s an extra three hundred grand gross. I’m sure the stockholders won’t fart at that.” “Hmm. I don’t know.” “And no extra vinyl cost on the CDs.” Talbot swiveled his chair to look out at the spiky skyline. “All right,” he said finally, his back to Goodman. “How about a trial run?” “Trial run?” “Yeah. Take a Nakamichi and find some of these people. Get their reactions and let me have them. If I like, you can go ahead with the bonus. If not, we release the record without it.” And if Wildeboor likes it and if Kearny likes it and . . . ”You’ve got a deal.” “So how are you going to find these people?” “Start calling rabbis, I guess.” Which was exactly what he did. Rabbi Robert Sakowicz’s synagogue was only three blocks away from the Republic Records building. After setting up the appointment by phone, Goodman went to the rabbi’s office the following morning. “It’s not something people talk about very much,” Rabbi Sakowicz said. “Certain members of the synagogue were incarcerated in the Nazi camps, but it’s not the kind of thing they want to remember. Why do you want to speak to them?” Goodman smiled reassuringly. “We’re looking into the possibility of a recorded oral history of the Holocaust. It’s not definite yet, and we’re trying to get a feel as to whether or not it’s workable.” “Jumping on the bandwagon, then?” The rabbi did not smile. “Rabbi,” Goodman said admonishingly, “of course we’re a profit-making outfit, but there are other reasons for doing this. As a Jew myself,” and he paused just a second too long, “I think it’s important that people not forget. Call it a pet project of my own.” “I should hardly think the deaths of six million should be classified as a pet project.” “Okay, an unfortunate choice of words. Let’s just say I think it’s important.” “Other people want very much to forget, Mr. Goodman, and I don’t wish to intrude upon their privacy.” “Well, could you contact them first, see if they’d be willing to talk to me? If not, no harm done.” The rabbi thought for a moment, then opened a desk drawer and removed a Pendaflex file. “Give me a minute.” He flipped through a sheaf of papers, paused briefly at each one, then glanced away as if recording it mentally, his youthful fingers stroking his thick brown beard. Suddenly the door opened, and the rabbi’s secretary appeared. “Excuse me, Rabbi. It’s Mr. Feldman calling. His grandson’s bar mitzvah?” “I’ll call him back.” “He’s just about to go out of town on business for a week. He seems pretty insistent.” Rabbi Sakowicz shook his head impatiently, excused himself, and left the room, letting the door stand ajar. Goodman thought it odd until he noticed the phone jack disconnected at the wall, and remembered the difficulty the secretary had had connecting him with the rabbi the day before. Then he looked at the file on the desk top and licked his lips. He could hear the dull tones of the rabbi on the telephone in the outer office; the secretary seemed to have disappeared. Leaning across the desk, he turned the folder so that he could read it, and saw the name “Weissman, Karl” at the top of a page. He gave an astonished laugh. It can’t be. Jesus, what luck. Goodman started to read on, but was only able to see “1943-44, Adlerkralle”, before the rabbi’s steely voice made him slap the folder shut guiltily. “Find anything interesting?” Goodman chuckled impotently, knowing full well that the rabbi would not be charmed out of his anger. “Yeah, I did.” “Don’t impose on strangers, Mr. Goodman. Please.” “Not a stranger, Rabbi. A coworker.” A sadness crept into Rabbi Sakowicz’s eyes. “Weissman,” he said softly. “You know Weissman.” “I know all the custodians at Republic. I work late a lot.” “I can believe that. And probably very hard, too. Do you go through other people’s files as well?” “I’m sorry about that, Rabbi.” Sakowicz ignored the apology. “Leave Karl Weissman alone, Mr. Goodman. He can’t help you and I’m sure you can’t help him.” “Why do you say that?” “Karl Weissman is one of the few who still lives those days. Not only remembers them, but lives them. It would be . . . terribly cruel to ask him to tell you of those times.” “Don’t worry, Rabbi. I’m not a cruel man. And remember, I’m a Jew myself.” The rabbi’s smile was a thin line. “And Benedict Arnold was an American.”

• • • •

Bobby Goodman had told Rabbi Sakowicz that he would wait to hear from him, but once he was sitting behind his own desk in his own office, he realized he wouldn’t have the patience. Karl Weissman was a gift, a gift from the god of his fathers, Goodman thought wryly. If he cooled his heels waiting for Sakowicz, he could lose his momentum, Talbot could lose his interest, and Sakowicz might wind up a dead end anyway. No, Goodman wouldn’t, couldn’t wait. It was difficult enough to wait until the six o’clock shift, when old Karl came on. Goodman had always thought of him as “old” Karl, although Weissman couldn’t have been over sixty-five, still the required retirement age for all Republic employees. Weissman looked far older, his brows crisscrossed with lines like a wartime map of Europe. His hair was a dirty yellow-white, and his eyes were constantly bloodshot, the whites appearing pinkish as a result. He looked, Goodman thought, like an albino with a hangover. He’d wondered more than once if Karl had a drinking problem. Now, knowing the man had been in Adlerkralle, he wondered how Karl could possibly have avoided one. At 6:04 a soft knock sounded on the door of Goodman’s office. “Come in,” he said calmly. Karl Weissman entered, drab to the point of invisibility in his janitor’s grays. “Mr. Russell told me to come up here.” The voice was quiet, the accent Midwestern with only a hint of a Mittel-European comic opera precision. “What needs to be done?” Weissman stood quietly, like a soldier awaiting orders. “I need your help, Karl,” Goodman said. He didn’t smile. He had the feeling that Karl Weissman had forgotten what smiles were for. “We’re whipping together a project on the Second World War.” “Yes,” Weissman said. “The rabbi told me of your visit to him.” Goodman struggled to keep the angry surprise out of his face, but he felt his mouth twist nonetheless. “The rabbi told you?” “He told me what you might want. And I’m sorry, Mr. Goodman, but I want nothing to do with it.” “Karl, be fair,” Goodman said, damning the rabbi. “You hardly know what this is all about.” “Oh, I know. I know exactly what it was about.” Goodman shook his head. “That’s not what I mean, Karl.” He stood up. “Will you come with me? Just down the hall into Studio C. Let me explain the situation to you, that’s all. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. This is just between you and me. You don’t want to help, fine. Mr. Russell doesn’t have to know a thing.” The very use of Russell’s name was an unspoken threat. The janitors hated the building superintendent, who ruled them like a petty tyrant. “I don’t care if Mr. Russell knows or not,” Weissman said, his weak chin thrusting forward, “but I . . .” He hesitated, and Goodman dug into the silence. “That’s fine, fine,” he said, putting a hand on Weissman’s shoulder. “Five minutes. You don’t have to say a word.” Goodman went out the door, not looking back to see if Weissman was following, knowing his confidence would pull the older man along. As he opened the door of Studio C’s control room, the awry chords of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra came lancing out, piercing the hall with sound. He turned, saw Weissman behind him, saw the wrinkled face pale to a pasty grayness while veins bulged blue beneath the paper-thin skin of the man’s temples. “Karl?” Weissman feebly raised a hand, gesturing for Goodman to close the studio door. Goodman let the thick door drift shut, and silence settled over the hall once more, broken only by Weissman’s ragged, asthmatic breathing. “What is it?” Goodman asked, though he was starting to suspect. “Nothing,” Weissman said. “I felt faint, that’s all.” Goodman stared heavily at him, but the older man would not meet his eyes. “Wait here a minute, Karl,” he said, and stepped back into the control booth. When he reappeared, Sam Pearson, the sound engineer, was with him, and the room was now quiet, washed clean of music. Pearson glanced at Weissman, then walked away down the hall, while Goodman beckoned the janitor to join him inside. He did so obediently, and sat in one of the three high-backed padded chairs Goodman indicated. “Karl,” Goodman said, still standing. “You were in Adlerkralle, weren’t you?” “Yes.” The whisper was clear and distinct in the perfect aural environment of the shadowy control room. “On this machine, Karl,” Goodman said, patting the gleaming surface of a Teac four-track, “is a tape I’d like you to listen to.” “No, I . . .” “I don’t want to tell you what it is,” Goodman went on, unheeding, “because I think you’ll know.” Weissman looked up at the machine, from which the loaded reel and its take-up glared at him like sharp, pin-pointed eyes, the four VU-meters beneath shining like a row of yellow teeth. “I must know,” he said, “what it is. I must know before you play it.” Goodman sat next to him, his mood swinging from stern disciplinarian to suddenly relaxed friend, his personality adapting itself chameleon-like to what he felt would affect Weissman most favorably. “Music, Karl,” he smiled. “Just some music.” It would be unfair to Goodman not to say that something within him burned as he tried to persuade the janitor to do what he wanted, that no pain of betrayal gnawed at him even as he considered what his next method of coercion would be. But the sympathy he felt for the man before him was not so great as to smother the brighter urge, the demanding, overwhelming urge to fill a small cassette with memories of a hell where angels played, searing souvenirs so gripping that they would sell unit after unit forever and ever . . . and maybe even a spot on the Billboard chart and I’m goddamn made and . . . “Just a little music.” “No, no,” Weissman said, refusal giving his voice added strength. “No music. I don’t . . . want to listen to this music.” Goodman pressed just a bit so as not to lose him. “You don’t like music, Karl? Everyone likes music.” “No, I don’t listen to music.” “This is a record company, Karl. You’ve got to hear music around here.” “I . . . I don’t. I wait until it’s done . . .” “No music at night, huh?” Goodman pushed now, hard and fast. “Not at night. It’s quiet.” “You scared of music, Karl?” “Not . . . scared, I just don’t —” “You looked scared just now, when the music came out of here. You looked scared as hell. What kind of music scares you, Karl?” “I’m not . . .” “I don’t think rock scares you, does it? Or jazz? Maybe you don’t like them, but there’s one kind of music that really scares you, isn’t there, Karl?” “No . . .” There were tears in the voice. The jaw trembled, like a long- held tower about to fall. “Classical music, right, Karl? That’s what scares you shitless, isn’t it? Huh?” “Don’t . . . talk to me like that . . .” The accent was becoming more pronounced, guttural, and thick. “Where did that happen, Karl? And when? I can guess. You want me to take a guess? Someplace you were locked up, wasn’t it?” “You have no right —” “And you’re still there, aren’t you, Karl? You’ve kept yourself locked up for over forty years —” “No!” Even in the perfect acoustics of the room, the voice echoed like a trumpet as the man leaped to his feet, his gaunt face towering above Goodman, who drew back involuntarily. “Who are you?” he cried. “Who are you to talk to me this way, to pry into my life?” “Hey, relax! Just relax now.” He’d pushed too far. He realized he’d been clumsy, careless, misreading the man, and he could have kicked himself. “I’m sorry, Karl. I just got sort of carried away, you know?” The older man went on as though he had never heard. “You want to make your guesses? Then guess! Yes, I hate music. I cannot listen to it, it makes me sick!” Weissman’s face twisted in trembling rage. “Because of the camps . . .” “Because of Adlerkralle, yes! But you knew that, didn’t you? Oh yes, you’re so smart, you knew that.” “Well, the way you acted when you heard the music,” Goodman said smiling, trying to look open and careless. “And then I remembered a couple of times before . . .” “Before, when I would go elsewhere when you were playing your music, when I would clean a toilet rather than hear this music.” “Karl, I’m sorry, really. All I want is —” “What do to want me to listen to? Screams? People screaming? Isn’t that what they call music now?” “No, Karl. A string quartet.” Weissman seemed to freeze in place. Then the set anger of his face melted into a kind of wondering fear. “A string quartet?” The voice was far away, haunted, disembodied in the dimly lit room. “Yes.” Oh my God, I’ve got him now, will you just look at him. “What . . . is this quartet?” “It played there, Karl. Where you were. At Adlerkralle.” “The . . . the Angels?” “That’s what Commandant Hossler called them, wasn’t it? The Angels that played the heavenly music while the condemned went to their deaths.” “You have a recording of . . . the Angels?” Goodman nodded slowly. “A wire recording transferred to tape. It’s on that machine right now.” He gestured around the room, at the hundreds of sliders and knobs and dials and meters. “Everything is set to play it. All somebody has to do is push the play button on that machine.” Weissman, Goodman observed gratefully, was once more watching the Teac as he would a cobra, its hood spread, ready to strike. “All it takes is a push, Karl. It’s so easy. But I won’t do it. I’d like you to hear it, I’d like you to tell me what you think of it, how it makes you feel. If you want to do it, Karl, all you have to do is press the play and record buttons on this smaller machine here, right next to the big one.” Goodman felt vaguely absurd as he gave the instructions, as though he were advising a statue. But he had to make sure Weissman knew, knew and remembered. “Just press both buttons at once and talk into the microphone, that’s all there is to it. You understand me, Karl?” He didn’t answer right away, but finally a whispered “Yes” came out. Goodman leaned toward the unwillingly fascinated man, and used all his wiles to sound like friend, brother, priest, father-confessor. “All these years, Karl, you’ve kept yourself bound. Now, finally, you can be free. But it’s got to be your choice, your decision.” Goodman stood and went to the door. “Nobody will come in here tonight. I’m leaving, and everyone else is gone. If you want to walk out, fine. Just leave things as they are, and we won’t talk about it again. But if you want to listen, it’s here. It’s waiting for you, Karl. It’s been waiting for a long time.” He opened the door and stepped into the hall, his last glimpse of Weissman an unmoving, huddled figure whose head seemed buried halfway between his shoulders. Goodman felt jubilant. He would have his tape now, he had no doubt, if there was enough left in Karl Weissman after listening to the Angels for him to articulate his thoughts and emotions. But after so many years of being bottled up, Goodman thought, they should flow out of him like blood in a slaughterhouse. Goodman could have stood there all night waiting to hear the music from inside, waiting for Weissman to come out the door. But as much as he wanted to know whether or not Weissman would take the bait, he was hesitant about confronting the man again. Goodman generously interpreted it as decency on his part, and decided to go home and try to sleep. It was hard to turn and walk down the hall, but it would have been harder to face Weissman after that music had blasted his soul. Morning would come soon enough, and he honestly hoped it would come for Weissman too, that hearing the music might somewhat cleanse him of the terrors he’d borne for decades. But only after he’d put those terrors on tape.

III

The eyes of the reels stared at Weissman. Time had stopped for him. 1988 was 1944 was 1988, and those years of horror and the empty years in between were all compressed into this hour, this moment in the dim room with the little lights like stars that expanded the time back into all the years again. He felt as though he would sit there forever, waiting for his finger to push the button and see what happened, see what he would do when the dark time came again. The past forty-four years he had been waiting, been pressing it away from him like some black, cold gelatin that seeped through his fingers and around his wrists, forcing him backward into a shadowy corner, where at last it would envelop him. And now the time was here, was all dark time, and the shadowy corner was this warm, softly glowing room where he sat and stared into the eyes and teeth of yesterday. An unexpected peace touched him then, and a sense of inevitability guided him forward, pushed the button so that the wheels began to turn. There was no sound at first, and Weissman leaned back, taking his gaze away from the rolling eyes, looking upward to where the twin speakers hung. Then a hissing filled the room, and he stiffened, knowing what it was. Not the hiss of a speaker or of old tape, but the sly, teasing hiss of wind, the wind whose special voice had blown into his spirit. The wind that mocked them with its freedom, entering and escaping the camp a thousand times a day. The wind that tortured them with the odors of the burning, the olfactory evidence that their only escape would be on that same wind that would snatch them up as their smoke-wraiths fled from the pits. Then he heard voices, faraway, low barks of orders that he wondered if he imagined rather than heard through the speakers. But no, they were there, followed by a harshly whispered imprecation that quieted them. And the music began. It nailed him to the chair as though a thick spike of ice had been driven through his heart and into the seat back. The volume was moderate, the tone was mellow, but the unison notes captured him between the octaves as though there were not nor had there ever been any other sound in the world. He would have screamed had he had the breath. The music split into harmonies then, rocking and bouncing madly from the violins to viola to cello and back, while Weissman thought, the Fugue, mein liebe Gott, die Grosse Fugue, die Engels, die verdammte Engels! The wind added a fifth voice to the quartet, ethereal, pure, and taunting, higher than Saperstein could ever have played, Saperstein with his hollow eyes and bald, yellow head, scraping weakly at his violin with the split back, the violin Sturmbannfuhrer Hossler had batted from his hands after Saperstein had mangled a run in the Schumann. Now the brief overtura was ended, and as the music grew more frenzied, he saw Saperstein in the gem-clear theater of memory the control room had become, Saperstein’s bald head bouncing like a great, shapeless ball, trying to hold die Engels together in the chaotic labyrinth of the double fugue section. And there was Brendel sawing away on second, the poorest player of the four, a constant frown of fear on her cracked, gray lips. Dessauer on viola, consumptive, withered, brilliant, fingers clawed with cold and arthritis so that the simplest run became agony, and an extended trill a horror. Oh, how they played, even with their infirmities and terrors, with the acrid wind in counterpoint and the moans of the dying as a constant continuo! playing because not to play was to die. And as the others passed by, the ones who would leave as smoke, whose dying music would turn to muffled cries of anguish as the gas stole all they had left, it was their eyes that burned, their sneers that accused, not the cruel eyes of the masters, the Sturm und Drang-headed fools who kept die Engels alive for their music, for the serenade sung to their master, Death. The rollicking double fugue, clattering along like dead men’s bones, slowed and shifted to the G-flat section, startlingly lyrical after the previous madness, and the slow, somber chords took Weissman back fully, adding to sight and sound and scent the sense of touch as well, so that he held the long horsehair bow in his right hand while his left palm pressed the sweat- polished smoothness of his cello’s neck and his fingers trembled on the fingerboard. Oh, the faces were there, so real, so vivid, so full of pain and battered hope and envy as they looked at die Engels, and the thoughts were so loud he could hear them, saying — — If I could play I would not be walking to death. — I had my body to keep me alive, but it failed me at last. — When your hands fail you, you will join us. — Play your tunes, whores for the Nazis. You will play another soon enough. They were the voices Karl Weissman had heard for over four decades, the voices that yammered at him in dreams, that spoke just below the surface of melody that lay in wait everywhere he turned, that made it impossible for him to have a radio, a television set, to go to movies or stores where always the music played, the remindful, omnipresent music that inflated the guilt within him like the bloated stomach of a corpse, until there was only one statement, one great truth: You should have died. It was what all the faces had told him as they passed, every day, every single face, even . . . Anna. Allegro molto! Now they were into it again, the notes galloping like war- maddened furies, weaving in and out of each other as Saperstein’s head bobbed frantically, the fear of losing the beat clear in his eyes as the tempo increased, and now they were nearing the measure he had never forgotten, would never forget, when Anna . . . There! His heart stopped, the shock was so great. Stopped, then started again in a frenzy as if to make up for its failure. The error, the false note he had played when he had seen her, the B-flat that had shrieked and twisted into a gratingly off-key natural before he could find his place in the fugue again. He had heard it on the tape, and its presence told him precisely what day it was, what day it had been ever since. March 17, 1944. The day when Anna, his Anna, Anna of the long, tapered fingers that had caressed a piano’s keys like a baby’s brows, had walked into the yard with the others, had turned to the left at the flick of the commandant’s whip; Anna, whose fingers had been crushed by the cattle car’s doors, whose music had been crushed by a young and careless Army guard too anxious to shut away the Jews from his sight; Anna who at last turned toward the path of death, of escape on the cruel wind. His fingers had slipped then, the one time, the only time he had drawn disharmony into the air of Adlerkralle. But he had re-entered the tapestry of the fugue, playing as though sound alone could halt time, and reverse it, savaging the strings with the intensity of his grief. No! he had thought. No! It is a mistake! Every time, every time she returns alive! They have made a mistake! They will see, she is still strong! They will see! And now the fifth and final sub-movement began, a trembling, rapid pulse as he sawed and sawed, biting the notes off, back and forth, back and forth, while the melody soared leisurely above him as if two differing tempi warred above sublimely for predominance, he and Dessauer’s unbridled ferocity against Brendel and Saperstein’s patient and unhurried calm. The end approached, and he saw an SS Obersturmfuhrer cross to the women and look at Anna and he thought Now! Now! They will see! even though he knew that what had happened had happened and could never be changed. Nothing could ever be changed. As the Obersturmfuhrer regarded the women coldly and turned from them, young Karl Weissman’s last hope vanished like a pianissimo phrase on the wind, and all thoughts of music fled from him. His left hand slipped down the neck of the cello, and his right lowered the bow to his side while Saperstein’s old eyes flared and blinked a panicked signal. But Weissman’s full attention was on the young, fatally slim woman who walked past the quartet’s platform with the others, others who looked at the musicians with a loathing that would survive them by a lifetime. And in the young Karl’s eyes, the young woman stared at him with envy mixed with anguish, while her mouth opened pleadingly and formed words he took to be the muttered curses the others had voiced, and, perhaps worse, a call for help that he could not give. But years later, in the old man’s mind that looked in memory through the young man’s eyes, Karl Weissman saw something else. To his surprise, and to the accompaniment of a startling joy that he told himself he must not feel even as it overwhelmed him, he saw not hate but love in the eyes, and hope. And he knew at last what she was saying, knew, not guessed or wished, for he heard her now above the whining, suddenly impotent wind and the other three trying to sound like four. “Play,” she said. “Play for me.” And while the young man in 1944 sat ignorant and powerless, deafened by guilt and grief and distance, Karl Weissman, hearing, grasped an unseen cello and an invisible bow, and, in a cracked voice that filled the darkened control room, sang for Anna, sang to its glorious end the great fugue he had begun so many years before. As the notes poured out of him, so too did something else, something that eyes younger than Karl Weissman’s might have detected as a veil of shadow, a sheet of darkness that unfolded from around Weissman like a cloak of the thinnest gossamer to hover just below the ceiling, into which it seemed to fade as the music ended.

The halls were empty at five in the morning when an impatient Bobby Goodman arrived at the Republic Records building. The night janitors had finished their shifts hours ago, and it would be another three hours before anyone else showed up. Goodman wondered where Karl Wiessman was. He paused before opening the control room door, not knowing what his usually glib tongue would say if the old man were still there. But the room was vacant, at least of Karl Weissman. From the instant he entered, Goodman felt oddly unalone, as if someone were watching from the shadows in the room’s corners. He threw off the unexpected sensation long enough to look at the Teac, and grinned at what he saw. The take-up reel was full. “He listened!” Goodman said, laughter in his voice. “He heard it!” He shot his gaze to the Nakamichi’s counter, which stood at 127. It had been at 000 when he’d left Weissman alone in the room. “Oh, goddamn, goddamn!” he cried gleefully, rewinding the cassette on which Karl Weissman had offered up his reactions. “Okay, baby,” he said, pushing the play button. “Let’s hear it.” It seemed as though the voice belonged to a much younger man, as if years had been lifted from it and tossed away. “Thank you, Mr. Goodman. I don’t know what you want to hear me say, I don’t know why you wanted me to hear the music, but I thank you for driving me to the point where I listened.” The voice paused, then want on. “I did not believe before. In anything. But now I do. I believe in God again, for how else can I explain how this has come back to me across all the miles and the years? Yet it has somehow. To give me peace. To give me back my music. Thank you for the part you played in this, whatever your reasons. I wish I could give you something in return.” Another pause, so long that Goodman looked at the machine to make sure it was still running. Only one word followed —”Perhaps . . .” and then silence. Goodman sat back, thinking. What the hell had Weissman meant? Goodman had expected almost anything but the cool, confident words that had come from the speakers. He rewound the tape and listened to Weissman again, but still could not unravel the mystery he had convinced himself must exist. Maybe the music would give him a clue, something he’d missed on previous listenings. He rewound the tape on the Teac, started to play it, and listened as the cold wind swept into the room, chilling him through the heavy sweater he wore. As the first unison notes of music sounded, the lights of the room started to dim, and the darkness began to grow, creeping from the corners, melting from the ceiling until it encased him in a black, gelatinous shell of fear. And in the back of his mind he realized that some emotions do not die when their bearer deserts them, that when the nurturing of pain is strong and lifelong, then the pain, and the guilt and terror that feed it, live on, not destroyed, but waiting. The music played on, rushing about his mind like waves on a blood-red sea, drowning him as he tried to float above the surface, pressing down upon him with gaunt, hate-filled faces, envious eyes, hands brittle and thin as sticks. The music cut and tore and burned and froze, every phrase more cruel than the last until he knew he could bear no more. But he did, unable to move, unable to retreat into unconsciousness, until the last few measures were ended, the final measures in which the cello, deep and sonorous, sang in triumph over its stringed fellows. The fugue was ended. Goodman sat in the chair, sick and shaking, his sole desire to run from the room when his legs would finally obey him. To run and run until he was far away from where the agonies of the music seared him. He did not want to hear it ever again. He did not want to hear the music.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Chet Williamson has written in the field of horror, science fiction, and suspense since 1981. Among his many novels are Second Chance, Hunters, Defenders of the Faith, Ash Wednesday, Reign, and Dreamthorp. Upcoming in 2015 are The Night Listener and Others (a story collection from PS Publishing), A Little Blue Book of Bibliomancy (Borderlands Press), and Psycho: Sanitarium, an authorized sequel to Robert Bloch’s classic Psycho (St. Martin’s Press). Over a hundred of his short stories have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, Playboy, Esquire, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and many other magazines and anthologies. He has won the International Horror Guild Award, and has been shortlisted twice for the World Fantasy Award, six times for the Horror Writers Association’s Stoker Award, and once for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award. Nearly all of his works are available in ebook format at the Kindle Store and through Crossroad Press at macabreink.com. A stage and film actor (his most recent appearance is in Joe R. Lansdale’s film, Christmas With the Dead), he has recorded over forty unabridged audiobooks, both of his own work and that of many other writers, available at audible.com. Follow him on Twitter (@chetwill) or at chetwilliamson.com. To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight. NONFICTION The H Word: Why Do We Read Horror? Mike Davis

When I was asked to contribute to this column, I thought I’d probably write about cosmic horror — after all, I edit and publish a Lovecraftian magazine (The Lovecraft eZine). That article was almost completed, however, before I realized that my heart wasn’t in it. So for better or worse, I jotted down what was really on my mind. It’s not fun stuff, but we are talking about horror. Which the dictionary defines as “an intense feeling of fear or shock.”

• • • •

Here is horror: I’m a child, standing in a line with my friends. The boy at the front of the line enters a room and closes the door. Moments later, we hear him being beaten. Sometimes the boy screams, sometimes he cries. Crying is better. They don’t like it when you scream. The beating will be extremely painful — I know because this has happened before, many times. Standing in the line, waiting for my turn, is torture. I used to crowd near the end, but I’ve learned that that makes it far worse. Physical abuse. Mental abuse. Emotional abuse. Sexual abuse. I endure it all . . . for years. I used to be a talkative kid, but saying things without thinking gets me into trouble, so I become stoic, mute. I frequently go entire days speaking less than ten words. Worse than anything else — for me, at least — is the absolute control they have over us. They tell us what to do and when to do it. They tell us what to say, how to dress, what to think. We don’t watch television or go to the movies. We aren’t allowed to ride bikes or play video games. As bad as everything else is, this unconditional domination is worse. I endure all of this for over a dozen years . . . until I am old enough to leave.

• • • •

So . . . what’s my point? Simply this: Having grown up this way, why in the world would I read horror? Why would I choose to publish, edit, and write horror? I’m honestly not sure that I have the answer. But there are some things that occur to me, and perhaps what is true for me may be true for others. Maybe one reason I read horror is that it makes me feel less alone. These people have had it bad, too. They’ve gone through terrible things. Yes, they are fictional characters . . . but it still helps somehow. Because of what I’ve been through, I feel broken, and in horror stories, I find broken people like me. It’s comforting. Like I said, I don’t have the answers. I’m thinking out loud. It isn’t easy for me to write about such intensely personal things. But in light of how I grew up, why I read horror and why I chose it as a profession is something I’ve been asking myself lately. More thoughts occur . . . In the 2001 film Vanilla Sky, one of the main characters tells another that “the sweet is never as sweet without the sour . . . and I know the sour.” He meant that he’d had a hard life, so when good things happened to him, he appreciated them more. Perhaps when I read a horror story, on some level I feel that — yikes! — that guy has had an even harder life than me. There’s some perspective for you, bud. Perhaps. And perhaps if someone has had a good life, horror gives them a contrast. Bad day at the office? Well, at least zombies aren’t after you. Behind on your bills? Could be worse: You could be dealing with the end of the world. Maybe your life isn’t so bad, after all. A contrast. The old “I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet” line of thinking. Or maybe, just maybe, I — and you — enjoy reading horror because it’s manageable. If it gets to be too much, we can close the book. Unlike real life, it can’t touch us. After all, there are terrors in real life that are every bit as ghastly as anything you’ll find in a horror story. There are thousands of nuclear weapons on Earth. At any one time, there are between thirty-five and fifty serial killers in the United States. Over two million children a year die as a result of hunger-related causes. Children. And there is more. Much more. As we all know. As individuals, we can’t do anything about those terrors, so we try not to think about them. Sometimes, though, a good horror story isn’t just chilling — it’s also thrilling. We enjoy it not because it frightens us, but because it suggests that there is more to life than what appears on the surface. If you’re reading a ghost story — even a scary one — there’s another message there too, isn’t there? It says that after this life, there is more. There’s another adventure beyond the veil. In the story, at least. It’s comforting to pretend that it’s so. And that’s what we’re doing when we read a book: pretending. I recently published The Sea of Ash, by the ultra-talented Scott Thomas. There are some scary moments in that novella, to be sure. It certainly classifies as a horror story. But at the same time, when I read it I found myself wishing (hoping?) that life could be more like that. That there could be more to explore than what we currently understand. That perhaps behind a boarded door I walk by every day, mysteries await. Or around the corner, another world. We’re explorers. We’re always searching for more. Maybe the reason why we love cemeteries and scary stories and Halloween is less about being scared, and more about a yearning to discover unknown realms. Or maybe I’m wrong about all of it. I can’t know your reasons for reading horror, and apparently I can only guess at mine. In answer to the question of why he writes horror, Stephen King wrote (in one of my favorite forewords to any book, Night Shift): “Why do you assume I have a choice?” A question that haunts me sometimes is: Who would I be if those awful things hadn’t happened to me? What would I be doing now? Almost on the spur of the moment, my parents made the decision to move a thousand miles to join a cult. Everything that happened afterward hinged on that one choice. Would I be working in the small press as a horror editor and publisher? Is that why I read horror? Did that one decision guarantee that I would be forever haunted by darkness? I don’t know. I will never know. So. Why do you read horror?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mike Davis is the founder and editor of The Lovecraft eZine. He lives in Texas with his wife and son, one dog, five cats, and lots and lots of books. Artist Gallery Okan Bülbül

Okan Bülbül was born in Turkey in 1979. Since childhood, he has loved drawing and painting. He was encouraged by his teachers to attend an art school, but because he was also good at science his parents convinced him that being an engineer would make a better career. He attended a science high school before entering Middle East Technical University’s Mechanical Engineering department and subsequently transferring to the Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering. After graduating, he started working as an engineer in a company that produces construction machinery, but he never gave up drawing and painting. He became a self-taught illustrator and has taken many freelance jobs. He has illustrated children’s books, designed fantasy book covers, and painted portraits and sceneries, etc. He is married and has an adorable four-month-old daughter. He still works as an engineer by day and is a freelance artist by night (but only while his baby is sleeping). For more examples of his artwork please visit facebook.com/ArtofOkan or artofokan.deviantart.com.

[To view the gallery, turn the page.]

Artist Spotlight: Okan Bülbül Marina J. Lostetter

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

Dogs scare me the most. A dog growling and showing its teeth is definitely the scariest thing for me.

Who has influenced you artistically?

I’d say all the illustrators of the comic book Conan inspired me. Especially Frank Frazetta with his brilliant covers. Yes, I think Frank Frazetta influenced me the most. There are many more artists I can add to this list such as Rembrandt, Bierstadt, Bouguereau, Sargent, Roberto Ferri . . .

Your style varies from realism, to horror, to cute and cartoonish. Do you have a favorite style?

I am most comfortable when I’m drawing a realistic figure. But I love creating challenges for myself, so I practiced and learned to draw fantasy, horror, and cartoonish-style drawings. I’ve also started drawing caricature- like characters these days. Maybe it would be better to focus on one style and become an expert at it, I don’t know. However, I love drawing in different styles, creating different compositions and thus giving different feelings to the viewers.

The image appearing as the cover of this month’s Nightmare, “Werewolf,” is a wonderful depiction of a classic monster. Why did you choose this particular angle for the portrait? As I said, I am really scared of a dog with bared teeth. So I wanted to paint a picture which would scare me the most. That angle gave the most ferocious and scary feeling to me.

You have a wide range of portraits in your DeviantArt gallery. What is it about doing portraits that speaks to you?

Portraits of people, animals, monsters, cute creatures; they are all very appealing to me. I think the portraits are the best way to impart emotions to the viewers. I feel like I’m communicating with the viewer through my subject’s emotions whenever I draw a portrait, and it really fascinates me.

You also have a good mix of fan art as well as original art on display. What does creating fan art mean to you?

Fan art is my way of paying a tribute to the shows, books, and movies I like. I have to admit they are also really good ways to expand my audience.

What is your favorite medium to work with, and why?

My favorite art medium is my graphic tablet, i.e. digital mediums. I also love using traditional mediums and I use acrylics, pencils, inks, watercolors, crayons, and pastels. Digital media gives me more freedom; it enables me to explore different styles. Also, since I don’t have a studio to work in and to store my art supplies and my paintings, digital is the most suitable medium for me.

When you illustrate, do you have any little rituals? For example, is there a certain kind of music you like to listen to, or certain type of beverage or food you like to have on hand?

I love listening to classical music and protest music while I’m drawing. I also loved smoking while drawing, but since our baby was born, I don’t smoke at home anymore.

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: Lucy A. Snyder Lisa Morton

Lucy Snyder is one of those rare genre-hopping writers who are equally at home in horror, science fiction, poetry, or nonfiction. Throughout her career, she has (almost gleefully) defied clichés and reveled in contradiction: She was raised in what she calls the “cactus-and-cowboys” area of Texas, but her work is often urban in setting and tone; she has published collections of both erotica (Orchid Carousals) and humorous essays about computers (Installing Linux on a Dead Badger); she can be outspoken about the difficulties facing women in publishing, but she also calls her urban fantasy series (which began in 2009 with Spellbent) “guy-friendly”; and this year she won the Bram Stoker Award® for both Fiction Collection and Nonfiction. She’s currently working on her fourth book in the Jessie Shimmer series, Devils’ Field (which was financed by a successful Kickstarter campaign), and her poetry will be featured in the forthcoming young adult horror anthology Scary Out There. She lives in Worthington, Ohio with cats (no ferret, unlike her frequent heroine Jessie Shimmer), and her husband, author Gary Braunbeck.

You grew up in Texas and cite Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time as an early influence, in large part because of its effectiveness in provoking wonder. Was there something that also inspired you to explore darker notions?

Yes: nightmares. I’ve had nightmares for as long as I can remember. For instance, when I was three or four, I had a recurring nightmare that a large pile of avulsed eyeballs would chase me around the third-story wraparound porch of our house in South Carolina; the doors were locked and I couldn’t get away from it. I wasn’t allowed much TV back then, and my parents certainly hadn’t taken me to see any scary movies, so I’m not sure where all that came from. People said I would grow out them, but I never did. My brain is a nightmare factory. Even now I can generally count on having at least one memorable nightmare a week, and at least once a night I’ll wake in a panic. If any of that sounds like fun . . . it really isn’t! But the major silver lining is that I have gotten many, many story ideas from my dreams. My first novel, Spellbent, germinated from a particularly terrible nightmare I had, but ironically my editor decided those parts of the book were too horrific and I had to rewrite them.

Your first degree was in biology. Had you planned on pursuing a career in that area? Have you made use of this degree in your writing work?

Right up until my senior year in college, I planned to pursue a PhD in botany and become a researcher. But I started visiting a few graduate schools, and the students I met spent pretty much all their time in the lab and didn’t seem happy. So I applied to a multi-disciplinary environmental science grad program . . . which turned out to focus far less on ecology and far more on economics. I took a science reporting class as an elective, loved it, and ended up transferring to the journalism program. I do use my biology background in my work. My Stoker-winning poetry collection Chimeric Machines has a strong science thread running throughout. And I’ve written a fair number of dark stories that are either science fiction or have themes of biological horror, such as “Magdala Amygdala” and “Antumbra.” I was able to get my geek on entirely when I wrote a story for A Field Guide to Surreal Botany.

From your website: “If genres were wall-building nations, Lucy’s stories would be forging passports, jumping fences, swimming rivers, and dodging bullets.” Have you made genre-hopping part of your “author’s platform”? Do you ever worry that it might make you more difficult to market?

People stick me in boxes no matter what’s on my website, so I’m not too concerned about that! I’ve met a fair number of people who base their view of my work on the first thing of mine that they read, and that impression is set in concrete. For instance, if they read one of my poems first, from then on they think of me as a poet, and nothing will sway that notion. I actually had to point out to a writing workshop coordinator (who was sending me loads of epic fantasy manuscripts) that I could help students who write horror, too, and she just sort of blinked at me and said “But your novel is fantasy!” And so I started talking about my horror publications and she had an expression on her face like I’d suddenly started speaking in Esperanto riddles. It’s as if we’re all allowed to be good at just one thing in our culture, have just one identity, and that gets frustrating. My goal as a writer is to be able to write anything, and write it well . . . and make it known that I have those skills. I don’t want my own skills to ever keep me out of the running for a writing gig that interests me.

Is there anything you wouldn’t want to write?

I’d hate to have to write something I found incredibly boring or morally repellent. That said, I’ve written a whole lot of technical documentation, so I can cope with most garden-variety boredom.

You went through the prestigious Clarion Workshop. What was the single biggest thing you took away from that?

I think most of us who attended the 1995 class will remember Gay Haldeman cheerfully ordering us to always keep the receipt! She had a lot of excellent advice about the business of writing. But it was Joe Haldeman’s dissection of the five-point-plot structure that was a real epiphany for me. I’d had some literary writing courses before, and they all treated plot as something that just sort of magically happened. Nobody before then had popped the hood on a story’s engine and showed me how the different parts drove the narrative.

Since you write in so many different formats and different genres, are there any writing rituals you go through before you sit down to write in a specific genre or area? Do you choose different music, for example?

My preparation is pretty much the same for any writing session: coffee in hand, fuzzy socks, comfy pajama pants, music. However, if I’m working on an intense scene, I’ll choose more intense music (Tool, NIN, etc.) If I’m writing nonfiction I might listen to Mozart. My default writing music lately has been a mix of Juno Reactor and Omar Faruk Tekbilek’s RaRe Elements. I usually prefer music without vocals when I’m writing, but I’ve found myself listening to Glass Animals’ Zaba a lot.

The Jessie Shimmer novels — which begin with Spellbent — are classified as “urban fantasy.” Do you think that made them easier for you, a female author, to sell?

Some horror fans see urban fantasy as a “female” genre but the authors my writing in Spellbent has been compared to are male: Jim Butcher and Tim Pratt. And if you look at Butcher’s career as an urban fantasist, or the careers of Chuck Wendig, Simon R. Green, Kevin Hearne, Richard Kadrey, Neil Gaiman . . . nobody’s lamenting “Oh, if they’d only been ladies, their work would have been taken so much more seriously and sold so much better!” I think what happened was that I wrote a decent dark fantasy novel and market forces dictated that it be sold as urban fantasy, largely because of the genre’s popularity but also because I am female. My first editor had me make changes to the novel — such as re-writing it in first person, emphasizing the love story and nerfing the horror in the final quarter of the book — to make it appeal more to the vast paranormal romance market. While I can understand the desire to tap that market, most romance readers found Spellbent way too dark and violent, and meanwhile the horror fans I’d written the book for in the first place often skipped it unread (despite the Stoker nomination) because they figured it would be too fluffy. I sometimes wondered if a male author would have been asked to make the same changes that I was asked to make. And I can compare my edit requests with Gary A. Braunbeck’s experience of being told to cut an important romantic sub-plot from his novel Keepers because his editor at Dorchester figured that horror fans didn’t want to read any of that icky, kissy stuff. Which was annoying from the start, but reached a “Fall to your knees and scream Khaaaaan!” level of frustrating when the book was released and reviewers criticized it for having an undeveloped love story.

You financed the fourth Jessie Shimmer novel, Devil’s Field, via a successful Kickstarter campaign. Would you use Kickstarter again to finance a book? Will crowdfunding become a more commonly accepted tool for writers to use in the future?

I’ve never really understood why people were so skeptical of crowdfunding, because small and mid-sized publishers have a long history of taking pre-orders to fund books and determine print run sizes. Yes, if you fund a Kickstarter, there’s a risk that you might not get a finished product, but guess what? There’s the exact same risk involved in pre-ordering a book from a traditional small press. It’s not really any different. That said, crowdfunding offers huge promotional advantages over traditional pre-orders because everything is so tied in with social media. There’s also a gamification aspect to the whole thing that can inspire people to fund a publishing project when otherwise they might wait to get the book later. Crowdfunding is a whole lot of work — I’ve participated in over a dozen campaigns at this point — but it can provide excellent results for novelists who’ve already established readerships and for anthology editors with engaging concepts.

You’ve called your work “guy-friendly.” How deliberate is that on your part?

Because publishing companies have blurred the lines between urban fantasy and paranormal romance, some see UF as simply a “harder” version of paranormal romance and therefore squarely in the realm of books for women. But I did a signing at an upscale Barnes & Noble in San Antonio to support Shotgun Sorceress (the sequel to Spellbent); the place was full of white suburban women but eighty-percent of the readers who came to get books at my table were working-class Hispanic men. That floored me, because the standard publishing industry wisdom is that men tend to stick to male authors, whereas women will read authors of any gender if it’s a genre they like. And yet the men who are picking up my books are enjoying them as much as my female readers do. My statement of guy friendliness was an effort to reach out to the male readers who haven’t given my work a shot yet because of preconceived notions that it won’t be interesting or entertaining.

Your story “Magdala Amygdala” deals with both transformation of the body (or “body horror”) and the role of the outsider. Did that story have a particular inspiration?

I was inspired to write the story because of my experiences working the weekend graveyard shift in a computer data center at a Very Large Computer Company. The night shift can do horrible things to your brain after a while, because often you just don’t get the right kind of sleep (if you can sleep at all during the day; I never got the hang of it), and it kills your social life dead. I felt disconnected and zombified, and my short-term memory was starting to slip. My story emerged from my wondering: what if I’d been put on that shift precisely because I was some kind of monster who couldn’t be allowed around normal people?

Why are we so frightened by the thought of our bodies reshaping themselves?

There’s the old idiom, “I know it like the back of my hand.” If our hand abruptly and inexplicably changes, what does that mean for the rest of our world? There’s a lot of terror in that. Much of your work has been first published in the small press. Why choose the small press over self-publishing?

Because I like being paid for my writing! Let me elaborate. I could self-publish, but doing self-publishing right involves a murderous amount of work, and I’d rather spend my time writing if I can. Most of the people I know who have done really well with self-publishing (and who haven’t turned themselves into small-press publishers in the process) are either writing niche porn or developed sizeable audiences through traditional publishing before they made the leap. It’s valuable to me to have someone who’s a competent publisher sharing the workload and who will be invested in the book’s success. Even if a small press is just a couple of people, they’re taking care of the book production and a portion of the promotions, and chances are good that they’re more experienced at all that than I am. Further, through them my work will be put in front of new readers I couldn’t easily access on my own.

Your nonfiction book Shooting Yourself in the Head For Fun and Profit: A Writer’s Survival Guide is unique among writing how-to guides in covering everything from establishing setting to the usefulness of library catalog listings. What made you decide to tackle a book on writing?

Most of the pieces in that book started out as standalone freelance articles or as Horror World columns. I realized that I had written a whole lot of writing how-tos, and so I put the book together and wrote some new pieces to fill in the gaps. The big challenge with the book was figuring out how to order the chapters to provide a good flow for the reader.

In interviews and in Shooting Yourself . . . , you’ve spoken about the necessity of balancing writing and family. Do you think that’s harder for female writers? Oh, definitely. In most communities and families, women are still expected to be the ones who largely take care of the kids, do the cooking, do the cleaning, care for aging parents and sick relatives. Women are still expected to put their husbands’ career aspirations and children’s needs first. The result is that women are often left with less time and energy and support for their writing. Even just getting ready in the morning — women are expected to sink more time and energy into our appearances, and we are criticized more harshly for looking unkempt or sloppy. I try to be as low-maintenance as I can, but I’m sure I spend a solid half-hour more per day on grooming and dressing than my husband does. That works out to over 180 hours per year! Most women spend a whole lot more time there than I do; I don’t even wear makeup every day. It’s very hard for us to set that time sink aside because we’ll be penalized socially and professionally for it. More men are pitching in on childcare and household chores than they did in past decades, but the cultural conditioning men and women both receive make it harder for women to preserve the time and energy they need to develop careers as writers and artists. It’s getting better, but there’s still a long way to go.

Are you ever aware of yourself as a potential role model to other up- and-coming female genre writers?

I’m mostly aware of it in terms of my being a mentor in the Seton Hill MFA program; I feel a responsibility to give all my students good advice to navigate the difficult waters of publishing. And sometimes, with my female students, it involves warning them about crappy situations they may find themselves in, and discussing ways they can get through those problems.

The sexuality in your work is often playful and genuinely affectionate, and is refreshingly free of the clichés often found in genre sex scenes. Do you work to make your erotic elements feel new?

My feeling is that if you’re writing any type of fantasy fiction, you need to “sell” the reader on the supernatural or otherworldly aspects of the narrative by grounding them in as many realistic, believable details as you can. So, I try to present people and their relationships as believably as possible. But my own interests temper all that; bad, boring, awkward sex is entirely realistic but I don’t usually want to read or write about it.

Your work often features a lot of action and colorful settings, which makes me wonder if you’ve ever thought about writing graphic novels . . .

I’d love to write for comics or graphic novels. But right now I haven’t a clue as to how to crack that industry, mostly due to a lack of time and proper research on my part.

You’re married to the esteemed horror author Gary A. Braunbeck. Is living with another genre writer ever stressful or competitive?

It’s certainly stressful if we both have deadlines at the same time and we’re both in bad moods because the writing isn’t going well. But we’re not competitive; we want each other to succeed. Gary was the first man I dated who was genuinely supportive of my writing ambitions. When I was starting out as a writer, supportive boyfriends were few and far between. One boyfriend read one of my stories and asked me “Why can’t you write anything nice?” Another, who had literary ambitions of his own, looked disdainfully at a contributor’s copy of a magazine that had come in the mail and sniffed, “Well, I could do that, too, if I wanted to be in some silly SF magazine!” Gary and I are polyamorous, and we both have sweeties who are very supportive of our work. We are both extremely lucky in that regard. For instance, if we’re both losing our minds over difficult projects, we can count on our girlfriend to bring us dinner and keep the cats from destroying the couch. If Gary’s busy and I have an event, I can count on my boyfriend or girlfriend to help me schlep books and keep me company at my table. Have you really worked as a bassoon instructor?

Yes. When I was a teenager, I lived and breathed music. I played saxophone and bassoon and was in band, jazz band, and orchestra. In my first year of undergrad, I got a music performance scholarship because the band needed a bassoon player. So, I was doing a lot of the things that the music majors were doing, and my music professor arranged for me to give paid private lessons to junior high school kids who were just starting to learn the instrument. But after that first year, I realized that I just didn’t have time to do all the things I wanted to do. I took a hard look at what I wanted to do with my life and decided I just couldn’t keep playing. So I turned in my bassoon and haven’t looked back since.

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

Tell us a bit about “The Cellar Dweller.” How did you come to write it?

See tweets below, from July 2014. I was fiddling around with rhymes for the alleged most beautiful words in the English language, “cellar door.” These are the kinds of things that occur to me when I’m supposed to be doing other things. I’m interested consistently in what is considered beautiful, what isn’t, and why. It’s a thing I could rail about for days, on really any topic, whether it be human physical beauty, or sonic beauty, anything. I find lots of things beautiful, and they are frequently things that’ve been intermittently categorized otherwise throughout history. So I tweeted:

“Cellar Door.” “Dweller Snore.” The alleged two most beautiful words, little shift, and WHAM. Nevermore.

This makes me think I oughtta write a story with cellar doors, dweller snores, seller roars, hellebore. Troll + witch, night market.

I tweeted those, and got a lot of responses from people wanting me to write that story . . . so I did. In truth, once I tweeted that second tweet, I knew I’d have to write it. It was already there scribbled in space. It turned out that I loved grubbing around in phonaesthetics. The idea that cellar door would be inherently a beautiful phrase is relatively longstanding. There are some interesting hypotheses as to why, in Geoff Nunberg’s essay “The Romantic Side of Familiar Words” on Language Log — he connects it to portal fantasy, the notion of a romantic Narnian unknown. You should also read the “On Language” essay by Grant Barrett which inspired Nunberg’s essay. A fascinating selection of people, including Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Dorothy Parker, have agreed that cellar door is the one true phrase. All these things combined into this story about “beauty,” and what is done to those who don’t have it.

“The Cellar Dweller” is told in something of a fairy-tale mode, and it includes some nursery-rhyme recitations. Were there any real-world fairy-tales that inspired the story?

Shortly after I started writing this story, I flukily moved into a house with actual cellar doors, and a speakeasy behind them. (There’s another nice 1919 reference as to why the words cellar door were considered beautiful — they led to speakeasies, and Prohibition was on!) I’d like to tell you that there’s nothing awful beneath my cellar, but I live in NYC. 1827 was the year that the last slaves were freed in NYC, but New Amsterdam had cellar doors opening onto evil beginning in 1626. The same is true all over the country, when we talk about the catastrophic and arbitrary aesthetics of America (part of my family came over on the Mayflower, so I think about this often) and to anyone who isn’t seen as beautiful and good — those qualities assessed by a narrative Anglo-Saxon American voice built on enslavement of one group of fellow humans and theft of land and genocide of another. America is a country built on a bone-filled cellar. That’s historic, but it’s also fairy tale. Maybe because in fairy tales we can be insulated in our honesty. We can say: “We built a house out of bones,” and have no one judge us for actually doing so. The role of fairy tales is something I could go on about — and I’m speaking as someone who sometimes writes them. Sometimes I think they’re used to distract from real blood. The best ones, though, are used to point at real blood. For example: I was talking to a friend about Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” the other day. I hadn’t read it in a long time (I just did again as I write this interview — and damn, as ever, damn) but of course it’s one of the great ones. He’d been a teacher years ago, and assigned it to a class of teenagers. In the discussion, my friend asked the classroom of very privileged kids whether they’d stay in Omelas, or walk away, knowing about its condition for existing. There was uncertainty, until one kid unscaled their eyes by saying, “Guys, don’t you get it? We live in Omelas already.” The teacher couldn’t say that, but the story, disguised as fantasy, could lay privilege on them. There’s an example of a fairy tale which points at real blood very successfully. I’ve talked to lots of people whose lives radically shifted upon reading it. Relatedly, I’m also inspired by “The Lottery” here. Neither of those are fairy tales, exactly, but both feel slightly dreamlike, until they bite. I’m disinclined to allow the all too real human urge toward injustice to be categorized as fairytale, though here I am, writing these strange stories about the things that make me furious on our living, breathing shoot-unarmed- people-in-the-back and starve-our-daughters planet. But sometimes, you can talk about some of this, and shout in a way that makes for a story with fairies and trolls and hellebore in it. Nursery rhymes, notably, are often just history and catastrophe distilled into pretty little songs.

You’ve got a young adult novel recently out. Care to tell us about it?

Love to! Magonia came out in April from HarperCollins. It’s based in medieval lore about a shipping kingdom in the sky, something I ran across in the Annals of Ulster, and spun out into a contemporary story about a sick girl on earth who ends up on a ship in Magonia. She’s dropped into the center of political and familial battles, while trying to decide where her loyalties lie — with her family on earth, or with her new family in the sky. It’s a YA book, but anyone who’s read my work and liked it should like this too — I tend to orbit around themes you’ll recognize from everything I shout about in all the places I shout — in this case, who gets the food? Who has to starve? Who decides that? Among many other things. It’s also got squallwhales, stormsharks and a heavy dose of sky pirates. It’s an adventure full of love, pain, and uncertainty.

What are you working on lately?

Everything. I have five or six projects on the go, several almost done things I’ve owed for a while. The craziest one is a rewrite of a Broadway- bound cabaret show. There’s a Magonia sequel. There is an adaptation of one of the big huge classics of the universe. I just worked with a co-writer to do something totally whack with Arthurian mythology for an anthology we both owed things to. I’m writing a historical epic TV show pilot. I’m made of whirr. Some days I’d like to be less busy, but then who would I be? Not this person.

If you were a fairy-tale monster, which one would you be?

Baba Yaga, but I consider her a heroine.

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 Hellebore and Rue. She can be found on Twitter as @lnmorton. Author Spotlight: Sarah Langan Jude Griffin

What was the spark for this story?

Oh, the usual drama. I can say that I wrote it in an hour, all hopped up on emotional turmoil. This is a very good argument for avoiding social media. If I’d decided to peruse LiveJournal (or Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, whatever), or post something ridiculous as a means of distracting myself from what was bothering me, I doubt I’d have written that story.

I was struck by the choice to reveal early on the relationship between the changeling and the child in the opening scene. Most authors, I think, would have held that back for shock value until the end. Were you tempted?

I love this question. I typically thought every piece of advice I got from writing professors was terrible, or at least, not applicable to my goals. But in college, a professor announced to the class that you should never have a twist ending. If you know something, reveal it sooner. This is great advice. Twist endings are stupid. As a writer, if I know something and hold back, I also hold my story back. It can’t evolve because I’m depending on a very static ending (Soylent Green is people!). But if I tell you from the outset what’s happening, then suddenly my characters can grow. I can complicate the plot. I can have an ending that fosters deeper emotional arcs, and greater discoveries. Maybe the ending will be a new twist that only became apparent as I wrote it. My writing should always surprise me.

You make an unsympathetic character so sympathetic without flinching away from showing the evil they do — can you talk about the choices you made in what you showed and how it was presented? I think it’s easier to sympathize here because the character is the victim of a greater crime than she’s committing. Also, it’s so clearly the stuff of nightmares and dream logic. Readers would never do the things she’s doing, but in their nightmares, they’d imagine them.

There’s a lot going on in this story — the dead devouring the living, the changeling who feeds on blood, the non-legendary creature origin of the changeling, no swapping of babies for changelings, mother’s milk not being healthy for the changeling, etc. Can you talk about how you wove it all into something still recognizable but also so new? Were there any twists on folklore that you ultimately decided not to use?

I’m an instinctual writer when it comes to using mythology and genre tropes. I take what I like and leave the rest. It would never occur to me that I’m doing anything new. More like pillaging. I forget who said it, and this is a bastardization, but the line goes something like: Good writers borrow. Great writers steal.

The Batman sheets, the little arms reaching out until the end, the trusting embrace: you spared our tender hearts nothing, or did you?

I didn’t have kids when I wrote this. It seemed saccharine sweet, and from the monster’s perspective, enragingly perfect. Honestly, I’m not sure the kid is very realistic. If he were, this might be a less popular story.

Are there any particular changeling stories that stick with you?

I’ve only read my husband’s The Hobgoblin Proxy, a kid’s book involving changelings, which I’d recommend to all middle readers!

Whose stories scare you?

That’s tough these days. I don’t scare as easily as I used to. I think the front cover of the New York Times is pretty scary. Frontline, too. The possibility that the era of Enlightenment isn’t a right, but something we have to fight for every day. There’s these people, they behead reporters. There’s these school girls, they’re missing. There’s these black kids, they keep getting shot.

In one of your interviews, you talked about Alice Munro, Joyce Carol Oates, and Margaret Atwood, and how the struggles they faced over the years kept them and their work fresh. How has struggle proved fruitful for you so far?

Oh, I love this interview. Thank you for giving it so much thought. The above are mostly moms. I slowed down after kids. Some of that’s because I had less time. Some of that is because I was always too exhausted for creative thought. A lot of it’s because I struggled against the new person I’d become. My kids made me different and I feared this difference. I grew up with a mom who stayed home and sacrificed everything for her family. I didn’t want to go that route. I’d worked my whole life like a dog to get a book deal. And then, poof! Derailed! What was weirder, I couldn’t figure out what I wanted or who I was anymore. Was I that pretty young girl who pretended to be a little happier and dumber than I really am at conventions? No, I wasn’t that anymore. Couldn’t be — I’d gained twenty pounds and looked haggard. Was I a serious writer? Well, sometimes. I tried to be. But novel work means only writing novels. Going to sleep thinking about them. I wasn’t that. I was too worried about whether my daughter and her nanny were a good fit (they weren’t), and if I was doing any of it right. I’d always been an anxious person, but now, oh, boy. If you’d plugged me in I might have powered Brooklyn. So, that’s probably where a lot of that novel writing energy went. I still don’t know who I am, but I’m clearer on what I want. It’s less the fame and success than the happiness. I had to break a little to get to this place. I had to open up and make room for my new family. Don’t get me wrong, I fantasize pretty constantly about my next bestseller. But I don’t much care about how strangers feel about me. I have no interest in being anyone’s cute young thing. I care about what my daughters and husband think. They don’t have to like my work, but it is important to me that I’m a good role model. Jesus, that’s so much harder than writing a good novel! So, it’s been a struggle, and not one that every woman goes through. I suspect I’m a throwback from a more uptight era. But the struggle has definitely changed my work. I’m a mature writer. I can identify with more kinds of people. I’m more perceptive and more my own master. In addition, everything feels fresh to me. Every day I get to write is special. Early in my career, I had a hard time deciding what to write about. It felt like work. Nothing feels like work anymore. It all feels like gravy.

Any news or projects you want to tell us about?

“The Old Jail” is coming out in July in an anthology called The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares. I’ve got the first halves of four novels written(!). I think I was afraid to finish anything for the identity crisis reasons above. But now that that’s over, I picked one and am finishing it. It’s called The Clinic. I think it’s fucking awesome. Hopefully after I finish it and my agent sells it, the people reading this will judge for themselves.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon. Author Spotlight: Dale Bailey E.C. Myers

On your blog, you’ve talked about how tough it is for you to pinpoint the inspiration for stories beyond an intriguing title or image. I feel the same way! So I won’t ask what inspired “Snow,” but would you share a bit about how it developed in the writing?

“Snow” is one of the very few stories I can recall writing in much detail — usually I just recall a sense of generalized anxiety. This one, however, was intended for an anthology of stories set in the aftermath of alien invasion. The idea was to do something emphasizing the insignificance of human life against the grand scale of the universe, a story in which people were basically vermin on an alien-ruled earth — the equivalent of cockroaches or mice. But it wasn’t working at all. And besides William Tenn had already done a spectacular treatment of the same idea in Of Men and Monsters. So I scaled it back to the beginnings of what may or may not be such an invasion, and tried to examine the kind of terrible human choices such an invasion might force us into.

For some reason, I can’t get enough of survival stories, the more post- apocalyptic the better, and “Snow” hit all the right notes for me. What keeps drawing us to these kinds of stories, particularly today with shows like The Walking Dead and Revolution? What about them attracts you?

I don’t really have a definitive answer. Partly, I think, it’s the idea of wiping the slate clean and starting over. But that doesn’t really account for it all. Maybe it’s just that we like the idea of watching a band of disparate people banding together to survive the odds. I’m thinking especially of the “cozy catastrophe” — as Brian Aldiss calls it in Billion Year Spree — as practiced by mid-twentieth-century British writers like John Wyndham and John Christopher. I loved those stories when I was a kid. The academic in me wants a more complicated answer, wants to say that apocalypse stories reflect the culture somehow — and no doubt they do — but I can’t quite figure out how.

You’ve discussed literary theories of horror in essays and interviews before, particularly Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, and it’s interesting to read “Snow” with that in mind. Since a key line in your story is “the rules have changed,” in what sense, if any, has horror changed or broken the rules of telling scary stories?

I think most horror fiction adheres to a very strong set of conventions, actually. In most of them some supernatural force (or serial killer or Godzilla or whatever) disrupts the everyday order of the world and is repelled, restoring the status quo. As King says in Danse Macabre, horror is as conservative as a banker in a three-piece suit (though I don’t think anyone wears those anymore). But the kind of horror that really interests me is the kind that doesn’t reassure us that way, that plunges us into some nightmare scenario and doesn’t give us any easy out. I’m thinking of stuff like the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (excluding all the idiotic sequels and remakes) or American Psycho, which are absolutely nihilistic in their vision.

Can you recommend some recent horror stories, novels, and/or films that you’re excited about?

I think Nathan Ballingrud’s North American Lake Monsters is the best horror collection I’ve read in years. Karen Russell’s story “The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis,” in her collection Vampires in the Lemon Grove, left me breathless with dread. And I’m going to reach way back in time for a novel that I suspect has been more or less forgotten, even though it’s been twice filmed: Davis Grubb’s The Night of the Hunter. It’s the kind of book that, if I have extra copies, I want to hand them out to strangers on the street. Nightmarish. Lyrical. Utterly unforgettable. And out of print for way too many years. What other work do you have out now or forthcoming? What are you working on?

A new collection — The End of the End of Everything — just made its debut, and everyone should go out right away and purchase one for themselves and one for their mother, too. Then a novel called The Subterranean Season this fall. Mom will want a copy of that one as well.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Nightmare assistant editor E.C. Myers was assembled in the U.S. from Korean and German parts. He is a graduate of the 2005 Clarion West Writers Workshop and a member of the writing group Altered Fluid. His short fiction has appeared in various publications, including Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Sybil’s Garage, and Shimmer, and his first novel, Fair Coin, is available now from Pyr. He also blogs regularly about Star Trek: The Next Generation at theviewscreen.com and at his website, ecmyers.net. When he isn’t working, writing, or editing, he plays video games, watches films and TV, sleeps as little as possible, and spends too much time on the internet. Follow him on Twitter @ecmyers. Author Spotlight: Chet Williamson Erika Holt

What was the impetus for “The Music of the Dark Time”?

I’d been listening to Beethoven’s late string quartets, and the image came to me of the prisoner/musicians who played in the death camps playing that particular work, and the story grew out of that.

This is a powerful story dealing with unspeakable, real-life horror — the use of music by Nazis in concentration camps to terrorize, humiliate, and pacify prisoners, combined with the modern day horror of a psychologically fragile survivor being forced to re-live the experience for someone else’s economic gain. Was it difficult to write?

Not really. I usually think about stories for some time before I begin to write, and the story was worked out fully in my mind before I started.

Are you a classical music fan, or was that something you had to research for this piece?

I’m a huge classical music fan. I’ve listened to and enjoyed it ever since I was a child. I play piano, and am a trained singer. My wife plays first stand violin in the Hershey Symphony Orchestra, so we’re really into classical.

As well as being a prolific, award winning author, you’re an accomplished actor. Would you say being an actor informs your writing in any way, or vice versa?

It does. I think coming to writing out of acting has made my work far more character-oriented. For me, character is the most important element. I like to climb inside characters’ skins and try and think and react as they would.

What do you have in the works at the moment?

A new short story collection, The Night Listener and Others, is out from PS Publishing; Borderlands Press is doing my Little Blue Book of Bibliomancy, and next year will see the release of Psycho: Sanitarium from St. Martin’s Press. It’s the first sequel to Robert Bloch’s Psycho since Bloch himself, and it takes place immediately after the events of Psycho. It was a dream to be able to use Norman Bates, one of the true icons of fiction, as a character.

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. Follow her on Twitter: @erikaholt. MISCELLANY In the Next Issue of

Coming up in July, in Nightmare . . . We have original fiction from Alison Littlewood (“Wolves and Witches and Bears”) and Nate Southard (“Thoughts and Movements”), along with reprints by Lisa Tuttle (“Replacements”) and Christopher Golden (“Under Cover of Night”). 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 of course, 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

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Nightmare:

Magazine Website www.nightmare-magazine.com

Destroy Projects Website www.destroysf.com

Newsletter www.nightmare-magazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed www.nightmare-magazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed www.nightmare-magazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter www.twitter.com/nightmaremag

Facebook www.facebook.com/NightmareMagazine

Subscribe www.nightmare-magazine.com/subscribe Subscriptions & Ebooks

If you enjoy reading Nightmare, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. You can subscribe directly from our website, via Weightless Books, or via Amazon.com. For more information, visit nightmare-magazine.com/subscribe.

We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors, and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Nightmare ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! Buying a Bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. Buying either of the half-year Bundles saves you $3 (so you’re basically getting one issue for free), or if you spring for the Year One Bundle, you’ll save $11 off the cover price. So if you need to catch up on Nightmare, that’s a great way to do so. Visit nightmare-magazine.com/store for more information. About the Editor

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.