Nightmare Magazine Issue 9, June 2013

Table of Contents

Editorial, June 2013 The House on Cobb Street—Lynda E. Rucker Shiva, Open Your Eye—Laird Barron God of the Razor—Joe Lansdale Fishwife—Carrie Vaughn The H Word: Lovecraftian Horror—W.H. Pugmire Artist Gallery: Soufiane Idrassi Artist Spotlight: Soufiane Idrassi Interview: Robert McCammon Author Spotlight: Lynda E. Rucker Author Spotlight: Laird Barron Author Spotlight: Joe Lansdale Author Spotlight: Carrie Vaughn Coming Attractions

© 2013, Nightmare Magazine Cover Art and Artist Gallery images by Soufiane Idrassi. Ebook design by Neil Clarke. www.nightmare-magazine.com Editorial, June 2013 John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue nine of Nightmare! This month, we have original fiction from Lynda E. Rucker (“The House on Cobb Street”) and Carrie Vaughn (“Fishwife”), along with reprints by Laird Barron (“Shiva, Open Your Eye”) and Joe R. Lansdale (“God of the Razor”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with all of our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview with Robert McCammon. That’s about all I have for you this month, but before I step out of your way and let you get to the fiction, here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Nightmare:

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

Concerning the affair of the house on Cobb Street, much ink has been spilled, most notably from the pens of Rupert Young in the busy offices of the Athens Courier; Maude Witcover at the alternative weekly Chronictown; and independent scholar, poet, and local roustabout Perry “Pear Tree” Parry, Jr. on his blog Under the Pear Tree. Indeed, the ink (or in the case of Parry, the electrons)—and those from whose pens (or keyboards) it spilled—are all that remain today of the incidents that came to be known locally (and colloquially) as the Cobb Street Horror. The house itself was razed, its lot now surrounded by a high fence bearing a sign that announces the construction presumably in progress behind it as the future offices of Drs. Laura Gonzales and Didi Mueller, D.D.S. The principal witnesses in this case did not respond to repeated enquiries, and in one case, obtained a restraining order against this author. And the young woman in question is said by all to have disappeared, if indeed she ever existed in the first place. —Ghosts and Ghouls of the New American South, by Roger St. Lindsay, Random House, 2010 I wanted to embed the YouTube video here, but it looks like it’s been removed. It was uploaded by someone bearing the handle “cravencrane” who has no other activity on the site. Shot in low quality, perhaps with someone’s cell phone, it showed a red-haired woman in a gray wool coat—presumably Felicia Barrow—not quite running, but walking away from the lens rapidly and talking over her shoulder as she went. “Of course Vivian existed,” she said. “Of course she did. She was my friend. That hack would print anything to make his story sound more mysterious than it was. Roger St. Lindsay, that’s not even his real name.” And then she was out of the frame entirely, and the clip ended. The snippet purported to be part of a documentary- in-progress known as The Disappearance of Vivian Crane, but little else has been found about its origins, its current status, or the people behind it, and it is assumed that the project is currently dead. Felicia Barrow was located but had no comment about either the project or the fate of the Cranes. —Perry “Pear Tree” Parry, blog post at Under the Pear Tree, June 26, 2010

Vivian wakes. It is a night like any other night and not like any night she has known at all. The heart of the house is beating. She can hear it, vessels in the walls, the walls that exhale with that life’s breath that is just as sweet to the house’s groaning floorboards and arched doorways and soaring cupolas as her own breath is to her; she can hear it, heart beating and moaning and sighing and “settling.” That was what her mother used to call it, in the other old house they lived in way back when, her a skinny wild girl; and maybe “settling” was the right word for what that old house did, that old house that was never alive, never had a pulse and a mind and—most of all—a desire, but “settling” was the least of what this old house did. Vivian knows that if she doesn’t know anything else at all. This old house is not settling for anything. This old house is maybe waiting, and possibly thinking, and could be sleeping, even, but never settling. This house is getting ready for something. She can feel that like she can feel the other things. She has watched cats before, how they crouch to pounce, their muscles taut, rippling under the skin it’s said, and she thinks it now about the house—even though it’s a cliché (phrases become clichés because they’re true, she tells her students)—this house is doing it, tense and expectant, counting time, ticking off years and months and weeks and days and hours and minutes and seconds and fragments of seconds and fragments of fragments and soon time itself degrades, disintegrates, and dies. And then the alarm is screaming, and Vivian wakes for real.

Waking for real had become an important benchmark, and sometimes it took as many as several hours for her to be certain she had done so. She would be standing up in front of a class of freshmen who exuded boredom and eagerness in equal parts, talking about narrative point of view in “A Rose for Emily,” and the knowledge would grip her: I am here, this is real, I am awake. And then she would drift, like one of the sunlight motes in the bright windows, and the class would wait—their professor was weird, a lot of professors were weird, I’m still wasted from last night, can I borrow your ID, did you hear, did you, did you—and the dull cacophony of their voices, familiar and banal, would bring her back, but past that point she could never bring them back, and often as not had to dismiss the class to save herself the humiliation of trying and failing to reengage them. That the house was haunted was a given. To recite the reasons she had known this to be the case from the moment she crossed the threshold was almost an exercise in tedium: there were the cold spots, the doors that slammed when no breeze had pushed them, the footsteps that paced in the rooms upstairs when she knew she was at home alone. But Chris had been so pleased, so happy to be moving back home. He’d found the house for sale and fallen in love with it, shabby as it was, battered by decades of student renters and badly in need of much repair and renovation but a diamond in the rough, he was sure, and how was she to tell him otherwise? It wasn’t just that neither of them believed in such things; that was the least of it. But to suggest that the house was less than perfect in any way was to reject it, and, by extension, him. Chris, as it turned out, had noticed those things as well.

Authorities have ruled the death of thirty-eight-year-old Christopher Crane a suicide, resulting from a single gunshot wound to the head. Crane shot himself at approximately two a.m. on Thursday, July 22, in the backyard of the house on Cobb Street in West Athens that he shared with his wife, Vivian Crane. According to Chief Deputy Coroner Wayne Evans, investigators discovered a note of “mostly incomprehensible gibberish” that is believed to be Crane’s suicide note. Crane was born and raised in Athens, and had recently returned to Georgia after seventeen years in the Seattle area . . . —“Crane Death Ruled Suicide,” by Rupert Young, Athens Courier, July 29, 2008

When you watched those movies or read those books —The Amityville Horror had been her particular childhood go-to scarefest—what you always asked yourself, of course, was why don’t they leave? Why would anyone stay in places where terrifying apparitions leapt out at you, where walls dripped blood, where no one slept any longer and the rational world slowly receded and the unthinkable became real? Countless storytellers worked themselves into contortions and employed ludicrous plot contrivances to keep their protagonists captive, and yet the answer, Vivian learned, was so much simpler: You stayed because you gave up. You succumbed to a kind of learned helplessness that convinced you that the veil between worlds had been pulled back and you could not escape; wherever you went, you would always be haunted. You entered into an abusive relationship with a haunted house. And of course, there was also Chris to be considered. If the house did, in fact, capture the spirits of the souls who died there, shouldn’t she stick around to keep him company, in case he wanted to contact her, in case he needed her for something? But Chris had remained strangely silent on the subject; he either couldn’t or wouldn’t talk to her. She found herself growing angry at his reticence, angrier even than she’d been at him in life, when the house and its ghosts first began to come between them, as he was pronouncing her anxiety within its walls “neurotic” and “crazy,” not yet knowing all the while those same ghosts had their ectoplasmic fingers deep inside him, in his brain and his heart, twisting them into something she no longer knew. He was soundproofing one of the downstairs rooms so he could record music there, and then he wasn’t; he stopped doing much of anything at all, she later realized, save for going to work, network administering something or other, but even there—well, nobody was going to tell a suicide’s widow that her dead spouse would have been fired in short order, had he not offed himself before that eventuality could come to pass. But she wasn’t a professor of literature for nothing; subtext was her specialty. In every interaction with his ex-coworkers and former supervisor she read it: he’d been neither well-liked nor competent, she surmised, and yet that wasn’t the Chris she’d known and loved and married and moved into the house with. That wasn’t her Chris, the Chris with the still-boyish flop of brown hair in his eyes and penchant for quoting from obscure spaghetti westerns. Not her Chris with his left hand calloused from the fret of his bass and his skill at navigating not just computers but workplaces and the people therein. And not just work: he had a warmth and generosity toward his fellow musicians that never failed to stagger her (a tireless ability to offer constructive feedback on the most appalling demos and YouTube uploads, because, he said, assholes were rampant enough in the music world without his increasing the net total assholery out there). Nobody disliked Chris, or at least not until the final months of his life. That was the Chris the house made.

The first time for her, it was the little girls. They were the worst of all; they had come to her when she slept in the guest room, coughing and feverish. She moved there so as not to disturb Chris with her tossings and turnings, her sweating and chills. That first time, she woke and heard them, an explosion of vicious whispers like a burst of static, and one word distinguishable above the rest, her, her, her—and she never knew that three letters, a single breathed syllable, could be weighted with so much hatred. Next she became aware that she could not move, that her arms and legs and indeed her entire body seemed clamped in a vise; and finally, she knew that the vicious little girls floated somewhere above and just behind her head. She could see them in her mind’s eye: four or five of them all with wide pale eyes, pert little nose, mouths half-open to display rows of sharp shiny teeth. The morning after, she attributed it to fever (although she was really not that sick), or something else, googled phrases like hypnagogic hallucination and sleep paralysis and gazed on the Fuseli painting until she could no longer bear the image of the demon on the woman’s breast and the mad-eyed horse thrusting its demented face through the curtains. She drank her coffee, cycled to campus (a bad idea; she had to pull over for three coughing fits in the two short miles she rode), and forgot about it. She didn’t forget about it; she’d had dreams stay with her before, mostly the unpleasant kind, and she hated those days, haunted by her own unconscious. She knew instinctively this was different. This was something from outside her. She could not have produced objective proof to show to someone that this was the case. She knew all about the games the mind could play to make oneself believe in its wild flights of fancy. And she knew in the depths of her soul (in which she did not believe, any more than she believed in ghosts or haunting) that the kind of words she’d googled and the daylight world with its prosaic explanations and even the most unwholesome depths of her own brain had nothing to do with the things that had stolen into her room that night and despised her with such vehemence. She had always thought of hate as a human emotion, a uniquely human frailty, a condition from which we might have to evolve in order to survive. Never before had she considered the possibility that hate was the most essential thing there was; that the universe was an engine driven by hate, animals savaging one another, atoms smashing together, planets and worlds dying in explosions of rock and fire. And to have so much of that directed at her. At her. She sat stunned in her office at Park Hall, her eyes fixed on the fake wood grain of her desk, someone knocking and knocking at her door and she knew it was a student because he’d scheduled an appointment with her and yet she could not answer it, she could not move, she could only sit paralyzed by her newfound knowledge, and at last the knocking ceased and went away and she wished she could, too.

The existence of Christopher Crane has never been in question. The roots of the Crane family run deep in the soil of Clarke County, and though Crane himself was away for many years, he was fondly remembered as one of the founding members of the indie/alt-country group the Gaslight Hooligans, who went on to moderate mainstream success following his departure. At least, this is how I remember Chris Crane, as do a number of people I know, but others insist on a different narrative. That Chris Crane never left town, that the Gaslight Hooligans broke up more than a decade ago after playing a few house parties and one or two dates in local clubs, to indifferent reception. Same as hundreds of other bands that spring up here each year and are soon forgotten. Sources online and off are mixed in their reportage, but one thing is certain, that at least two and possibly more conflicting versions of the life of Chris Crane are out there. This introduces a disconcerting possibility: that we are all, now, existing in a dubiously real and unstable present, one in which Vivian Crane was and was not, and the house on Cobb Street at the heart of it all. —Perry “Pear Tree” Parry, Google cache of a blog post made at Under the Pear Tree, July 9, 2010 (not available on the blog itself)

It is six months since she lost Chris. Her best friend Felicity has come from Seattle to visit her, has been staying in the house with her and urging her to get out. She doesn’t need to do anything big, Felicity says, but she needs to do something besides go between home and campus. (This awful home, Felicity doesn’t say, this terrible place that took Chris and is taking you. But Felicity knows.) But she’s hiding something from Felicity, and she’s increasingly sure Chris was hiding the same thing from her in his last days. It’s something that happened just before Felicity arrived, and afterward she tried to make Felicity postpone her visit (forever), but Felicity was having none of that. Felicity thinks Chris’s suicide has opened the gulf between them, best friends from the age of five gone suddenly quiet and awkward in one another’s presence. Felicity has no idea that the gulf is so much greater than that. Vivian does not know whether to be overjoyed or horrified that she now bears physical proof that she isn’t mad. A week before Felicity’s visit, she is sleeping in the bed she and Chris shared. She has woken paralyzed once again, and something is screaming in the walls. This is not so bad; at least it’s in the walls, and not in the room with her. She lies there and thinks about “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a story she has taught to countless freshmen, and the poor insane narrator following the twisty patterns and the women creeping beneath them. Thinking of these creeping women serves, oddly, to calm her as the screamer eventually winds down, perhaps because she is able to make them into academic abstractions and symbols while the suffering of the screaming woman in the walls is so very real. But it is not long before she senses a presence beside her, in the very bed next to her, and this is so terrible that she starts to shake all over in spite of the paralysis. If it were Chris, she would be sobbing with joy, but it is not Chris. It is something else. She cannot tell if it is male or female, or neither, or both. The something else takes her hand, weaves its awful fingers through hers in that intimate fashion, and she realizes that before now she has never known what cold truly means. From the palm of her hand the cold blooms into her wrist, up her arm, and then throughout her body, and she thinks this is my death and knows they will find her some hours or days later and pronounce it “natural causes” without knowing there is nothing in the world so unnatural as the thing that has hold of her in the bed at that moment. And then it’s gone; she’s heaving and sputtering and gasping and racing for the bathroom where she steps into a scalding hot shower, pajamas and all (for she is afraid to be naked), and she is scrubbing herself, shivering still, and her now ungripped hand is cold, so cold, and that’s when she first uncurls her fingers from her palm and sees it there, a scorched circular shape, and then she looks closer and notices the head of the snake in the fleshy part at the base of her thumb and realizes what she is seeing: an Ouroboros, the serpent devouring its own tail. And she knows in that moment that she has been claimed by something terrible.

The house on Cobb Street possessed several unique properties in regards to its purported haunting. There appeared to be no originating event, no horrific murders, no ghastly past prior to its possession of the Crane couple (and after reviewing the evidence, I believe this is indeed the best description of the effect the house had on Christopher and Vivian Crane). Locals remember no unsavory legends attached to the house. For roughly three decades prior to its purchase by the Cranes it was simply another decaying student residence. The house was previously owned by two sisters, who spent their entire lives there. Its Wisconsin- based owner, a great-niece who died shortly after the Cranes purchased it, left its management to the local Banks Realty, who say no unusual problems were ever encountered beyond the usual wear and tear. Yet few of its residents from the years immediately prior to the Crane purchase could be tracked down. Of those who reported any paranormal experiences at all, each attributed it to the ingestion of psilocybin mushrooms or LSD. All three were located as in-patients at separate mental health facilities. None had been roommates with or were aware of the others, nor had any of them discussed their experiences with anyone else, but all date the onset of their initial mental illness as subsequent to their residence at the house on Cobb Street. Each claimed to have once borne a circular tattoo on the palm of their left hand, visible now only in the faintest outline of one of the three: that of the snake Ouroboros, the symbol for infinity. It appears to have been a symbol with which Vivian Crane was obsessed as well, since, following her disappearance, numerous versions of it were said to have been found scratched on the walls throughout her house. This evidence, combined with the temporal shifts reported by Ms. Crane and all three of the former residents interviewed, originally led this author to theorize that this particular “haunting” is an occurrence on the order of “freak” weather events such as rains of frogs, sudden tornadoes, and so on. In other words, not ghosts at all, but an anomaly in the very fabric of time and space, burst into existence at some stage in the last few years. And the Ouroboros symbols suggest some sort of intelligence lurking behind this anomaly, something perhaps even more fearsome than the ghosts that populate the rest of this volume. —Ghosts and Ghouls of the New American South, by Roger St. Lindsay, Random House, 2010

I’ve been reading Roger St. Lindsay’s account of our local haunting, and reckless and inaccurate as his speculations appear to me (not to mention entirely ignorant of the laws of physics, and this apparent even to myself who knows as little about the topic as anyone), his method is not entirely one of madness. His history of the house is more or less corroborated, although his theories do border on the ludicrous. By the way, an alert reader recently forwarded to me the details, available only with a “pro”-level subscription, of an IMDB page regarding the documentary The Disappearance of Vivian Crane. Currently Vincent Llewellyn, who made his name with the Poltergeist Rising series of fictional “found footage” horror movies, is attached to the project. Apparently, however, production on the Crane documentary was halted due to legal concerns. —Perry “Pear Tree” Parry, blog post at Under the Pear Tree, August 12, 2010

Vivian wakes. It is not a night like any other night. At first she cannot be certain why this is the case, and then she realizes: it’s because of the silence. This is a terrible thing. Like the silence of children up to no good, except this silence is sinister, not mischievous. She reaches to touch Chris and of course he is not beside her. She does this almost every night, but this time it reminds her of that other night. The last night. She had not been immediately concerned—why should she have been?—even though it wasn’t like him to be up in the middle of the night, but then Chris had not seemed much like himself for some time. That night, she reached for the lamp and in the little pool of light she found her robe. She peeked into the guest room and at the sofa and Chris was nowhere. She went through the house looking for him, still not concerned, because none of it seemed real although she was certain it was not a dream. Back up the stairs and down them again. It was here she began to call his name, here she started to get really worried. She wanted to be angry, because angry was better than worried, and she thought that she would be angry later, after finding him, angry at him for frightening her and happy for the chance to be angry because it would mean nothing was really wrong. Later the questions would come, disbelieving: how could she have slept through the shotgun blast? Had she been drinking? Did she take drugs? Sleeping pills? Did she and Chris have a fight beforehand? They needn’t have blamed her; she blamed herself. How could you not have known, how could you not have done something, how could you, how could you? She had not been the one who found him propped against the back fence, his head ruined; a neighbor phoned the police shortly after it happened, reporting a gunshot, but this could not be possible, for she walked up and down the stairs and from room to room for hours, searching for him, long before she stumbled into a backyard awash in spinning lights and the sound of police radios and a cacophony of panic. Some nights, the best nights, the police never arrived. On those nights she searched until she, Vivian Crane née Collins—born Vancouver, Washington June 10, 1971, raised in Seattle, the shy bookish only child of a single mother (father present only following occasional bursts of paternal guilt)—ceased to exist, or became a ghost, if that was indeed how one did become a ghost; she simply searched and searched the rooms, and the stairs, and the hallways again and again until she no longer remembered who she was or what she was looking for, and sometimes she woke and still could not remember for long moments where she belonged. Driving Felicity to the airport in Atlanta at the end of her visit almost saved her. Almost. She remembered thinking that—remembered the hard and beautiful reality of Interstate 285 with its multiple lanes of frantic traffic, the billboards and the chain restaurants and the warehouses and the mundanity of it all. At Hartsfield, the busiest airport in the world, she stood in line at the check- in counter with Felicity and thought about sleek planes bearing her away to someplace, any other place, a place that was safe and faraway, and then she saw Felicity through the security gate. Afterward, she sat in the atrium in the main terminal for a while and chewed on a pesto chicken panini from the Atlanta Bread Company and thought about what to do next. In the end it was all too overwhelming: where would I go how would I explain to people what would happen to me my job my life my belongings I don’t know any other way. And she got in her car and she drove back home again. Chris’s death had branded her as much as the Ouroboros symbol ever would. So now she wakes to the silence of infinity. She has a singular thought, to leave the house, and it is so strong she wonders that she has not thought it before. She has been sleeping in a T-shirt and a pair of yoga pants (she used to take yoga, long ago when she also used to be a real person); to change, to even find her shoes would delay her disastrously, and her feet hit the floor with a thump and she is running down the stairs; she half expects the corridor to stretch out forever before her like a horror movie or a dream but the corridor is normal and the door springs open to her touch and outside the stars are reeling and she gasps lungfuls of air that are not house-air and she is free; it is so easy, she need only not go back inside again. She doesn’t have her keys (no time) so she cannot take the car, but she can run now, up the street, she can run forever if she has to, because even the simple act of breathing and running is an act of living and not one of extinction. But here is nothing but silence. A dead, dark street, familiar houses blank and empty, no sound of traffic from the busy street a block away. No dogs barking, no sirens, nothing. She will run back into the house and reset it; this time it will work. Back inside the house. Deep breaths on the house side of the front door, and how has she not noticed the corrupted air, the choking rot and decay? Again she opens the door; again she steps outside; again and again and again and again and she never imagined eternity like this, isolated even from her fellow ghosts, an infinity of repeating the same futile action again and again until time itself does die.

It is Athens’s very own urban legend, one of short duration and dubious provenance, a tale of a woman who disappeared not only from her own life but from the lives of all of us. There is no record of her employment as an adjunct instructor at the university, though a few former students claim to recall taking her class. Chris Crane lived and died alone in the house on Cobb Street, although many insist this was not the case; some say his wife stayed there after his death, the wife in whom no one can quite believe or disbelieve in any longer. Some say it was she who was haunted, not the house, and she brought the haunting to all of us. Some say memory is forever shifting, never reliable; we take it on faith that we have lived all the days of our lives up to this moment. But the handful of students who claim to remember Vivian Crane all produce the same account of the last day she turned up to class. “She was going on and on about a snake eating itself, about time turning itself inside out and what would happen if you got caught in something like that, and where would something like that come from—God or another human being or just a natural force in the universe. And then she showed us this weird tattoo of the snake on the palm of her hand,” says one young woman, who asked only to be identified by her first name, Kiersten. “And she said, ‘What would it be like if reality had to constantly readjust itself in order to make things fit—what would it be like for the ones left behind?’” This story is roughly the same as that told by two other individuals, both of whom asked not to be named or quoted at all. A fourth former student, who recounted a similar tale (with a few variations), has since recanted and asked not to be contacted again. When I attempted to follow up with the others I was unable to find anything about them. I did contact the recanted student despite his request, but he would not speak with me and indeed purported not to know me. And so it goes: the mystery appears to be solving itself by scrubbing out its own traces until there will be no mystery left at all. But Chris Crane was a friend of mine; we grew up together, we went to college together, we did stupid things together, and had he gone away for seventeen years and come back with a wife, surely I would be one of the first to know about it? —“The Crane Enigma,” Maude Witcover, Chronictown, week of July 24-July 30, 2009

She cycled home from campus that day as fast as she could, like she was outrunning something, even though she knew whatever it was could never be outpaced. She thought briefly of taking refuge in a church on the way; she had not believed in so very long that she was surprised at the tiny seed of comfort that began to unfurl deep in her chest when she thought it, but the only church she passed was the Southern Baptist one with the all- trespassers-will-be-towed sign in their parking lot and a dubious reputation with the progressive neighborhood in which it sat, and she imagined its doors would be locked literally, no need for the figurative. She rode as fast as she could but it is not possible to ride fast enough when infinity itself is at your heels.

A small assortment of reporters and curiosity-seekers were on hand today for the planned demolition of the house at the center of what has come to be known as the Cobb Street Horror. The house had in recent months, following the disappearance of Vivian Crane, become a major nuisance for law enforcement and neighbors, as several self-styled “urban explorers” broke in to photograph the bizarre signs and symbols—purportedly left on the walls by Ms. Crane—and a series of mounting disturbances were reported in the vicinity. Said disturbances included the sound of a woman screaming, day and night; the sight of several little girls running from the front of the house; and a figure whom no witness could adequately or consistently describe in terms of sex, age, or appearance crawling about the perimeter of the house. Although the “urban explorers” spoke of signs and glyphs and drawings of the now-famous Ouroboros throughout the house, none of them ever produced any identifiable photograph from inside. A number of photography methods were experimented with, from top- of-the-line digital technology to old 35mm film and even a Polaroid at one stage, but neither the least nor the most sophisticated technologies produced any images. Save for one. One resourceful young woman went so far as to construct a ‘pinhole’ camera out of a cardboard box, and with that captured a single image: in a low right-hand corner near the front door, written in very small letters with a ballpoint pen (as the woman described it), were the words “This house erases people.” Paranormal investigators assert that the existence of this photograph supports the idea that Vivian Crane herself was trying urgently to convey something important to those who read it; if so, however, it was that one time only, for while others who entered the house reported seeing the graffiti, no one else was able to reproduce the pinhole camera’s photograph, not even the photographer herself. The demolition of the house on Cobb Street commenced without incident; in fact, it was so routine that bystanders quickly lost interest and dispersed. —Perry “Pear Tree” Parry, blog post at Under the Pear Tree, October 19, 2010

The heart of the house is lost. The heart of the house is beating. The heart of the house is bleeding. The heart of the house is breaking. The heart of the house is longing, mourning, searching, willing itself back into being, circles within circles, time turned inside out. The heart of the house, like all of us, is mad and lonely and betrayed.

No unusual activity has been detected along Cobb Street since the house was razed and the dental offices built. The dentists at the site report a thriving practice. Today, fewer and fewer locals appear willing or able to talk about the incident in the house on Cobb Street. The symbol of snakes twining round a rod known as the caduceus is sometimes used on medical signs although in fact this represents a confusion with the single-serpented Rod of Asclepius, and thus this author feels it would be irresponsible to speculate about or attach any significance to the inclusion of the similar (if symbolically quite different) Ouroborous on the modest sign on the front lawn of the brick building. It ought, however, to be noted that on the day this author visited, several little girls were engaged in making similar chalk drawings on the sidewalk in front of the offices. On attempting to question them, this author was informed that they were not allowed to speak with strangers. This author’s sensitivity to the unsettling effects of their shrill voices and the flash of their fingers gripping the chalk and the sound of the chalk scratching at the sidewalk are all most likely attributable to the severe fever this author subsequently suffered through in his hotel room later that night. For now, we can only say that the house on Cobb Street has gone, and has taken its mysteries with it.

From the ebook edition of Ghosts and Ghouls of the New American South, by Roger St. Lindsay, published with added material in 2012

© 2013 by Lynda E. Rucker.

Lynda E. Rucker is an American writer currently living in Dublin, Ireland. Her fiction has appeared in such places as F&SF, Black Static, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror. She is a regular columnist for the magazine Black Static, and her first collection, The Moon Will Look Strange, is due out from Karōshi Books later this year. She blogs very occasionally at lyndaerucker.wordpress.com and tweets more frequently as @lyndaerucker. Shiva, Open Your Eye Laird Barron

The human condition can be summed up in a drop of blood. Show me a teaspoon of blood and I will reveal to thee the ineffable nature of the cosmos, naked and squirming. Squirming. Funny how the truth always seems to do that when you shine a light on it. A man came to my door one afternoon, back when I lived on a rambling farm in Eastern Washington. He was sniffing around, poking into things best left . . . unpoked. A man with a flashlight, you might say. Of course, I knew who he was and what he was doing there long before he arrived with his hat in one hand and phony story in the other. Claimed he was a state property assessor, did the big genial man. Indeed, he was a massive fellow—thick, blunt fingers clutching corroborative documents and lumpy from all the abuse he had subjected them to in the military; he draped an ill-tailored tweed jacket and insufferable slacks over his ponderous frame. This had the effect of making him look like a man that should have been on a beach with a sun visor and a metal detector. The man wore a big smile under his griseous beard. This smile frightened people, which is exactly why he used it most of the time, and also, because it frightened people, he spoke slowly, in a big, heavy voice that sounded as if it emerged from a cast-iron barrel. He smelled of cologne and 3-IN-ONE Oil. I could have whispered to him that the cologne came from a fancy emerald-colored bottle his wife had purchased for him as a birthday present; that he carried the bottle in his travel bag and spritzed himself whenever he was on the road and in too great a hurry, or simply too hungover, for a shower. He preferred scotch, did my strapping visitor. I could have mentioned several other notable items in this patent-leather travel bag—a roll of electrical tape, brass knuckles, voltmeter, police-issue handcuffs, a microrecorder, a pocket camera, disposable latex gloves, lockpicks, a carpet cutter, flashlight, an empty aspirin bottle, toothpaste, a half-roll of antacid tablets, hemorrhoid suppositories, and a stained road map of Washington State. The bag was far away on the front seat of his rented sedan, which he had carefully parked up the winding dirt driveway under a sprawling locust tree. Wisely, he had decided to reconnoiter the area before knocking on the door. The oil smell emanated from a lubricated and expertly maintained thirty-eight-caliber revolver stowed in his left-hand jacket pocket. The pistol had not been fired in three-and-a-half years. The man did not normally carry a gun on the job, but in my case, he had opted for discretion. It occurred to him that I might be dangerous. I could have told him all these things and that he was correct in his assumptions, but it did not amuse me to do so. Besides, despite his bulk he looked pretty fast and I was tired. Winter makes me lazy. It makes me torpid. But— Rap, rap! Against the peeling frame of the screen door. He did not strike the frame with anything approaching true force; nonetheless, he used a trifle more vigor than the occasion required. This was how he did things—whether conducting a sensitive inquiry, bracing a recalcitrant witness, or ordering the prawns at La Steakhouse. He was a water buffalo floundering into the middle of a situation, seizing command and dominating by virtue of his presence. I made him wait longer than was necessary—to the same degree as his assault on my door was designed to set the tone and mood—although not too long, because sometimes my anticipatory juices outwrestle my subtler nature. I was an old man and thus tended to move in a deliberate mode anyway. This saddened me; I was afraid he might not catch my little joke. But— I came to the door, blinking in the strong light as I regarded him through filtering mesh. Of course, I permitted a suitable quaver to surface when I asked after his business. That was when the big man smiled and rumbled a string of lies about being the land assessor and a few sundries that I never paid attention to, lost as I was in watching his mouth, his hands, and the curious way his barrel chest lifted and fell under the crumpled suit. He gave me a name, something unimaginative gleaned from a shoebox, or like so. The identity on his State of Washington Private Investigator’s License read Murphy Connell. He had been an investigator for eleven years; self-employed, married with two children— a boy who played football at the University of Washington, and a girl that had transferred to Rhode Island to pursue a degree in graphic design—and owner of a Rottweiler named Heller. The identification was in his wallet, which filled an inner pocket of the bad coat, wedged in front of an ancient pack of Pall Malls. The big man had picked up the habit when he was stationed in the Philippines, but seldom smoked anymore. He kept them around because sure as a stud hound lifts its leg to piss, the minute he left home without a pack the craving would pounce on him hammer and tongs. He was not prone to self-analysis, this big man, yet it amused him after a wry sense that he had crushed an addiction only to be haunted by its vengeful ghost. Yes, I remembered his call from earlier that morning. He was certainly welcome to ramble about the property and have a gander for Uncle Sam. I told him to come in and rest his feet while I fixed a pot of tea—unless he preferred a nip of the ole gin? No, tea would be lovely. Lovely? It delighted me in an arcane fashion that such a phrase would uproot from his tongue—sort of like a gravel truck dumping water lilies and butterflies. I boiled tea with these hands gnarled unto dead madroña, and I took my sweet time. Mr. Connell moved quietly, though that really didn’t matter, nothing is hidden from these ears. I listened while he sifted through a few of the papers on the coffee table—nothing of consequence there, my large one—and efficiently riffled the books and National Geographics on the sagging shelf that I had meant to fix for a while. His eyes were quick, albeit in a different sense than most people understand the word. They were quick in the sense that a straight line is quick, no waste, no second-guessing, thorough and methodical. Once scrutinized and done. Quick. I returned in several minutes with the tea steeping in twin mugs. He had tossed the dim living room and was wondering how to distract me for a go at the upstairs—or the cellar. I knew better than to make it blatantly simple; he was the suspicious type, and if his wind got up too soon . . .Well, that would diminish my chance to savor our time together. Christmas, this was Christmas, or rather, the approximation of that holiday, which fills children to the brim with stars and song. But Christmas is not truly the thing, is it now? That sublime void of giddy anticipation of the gaily colored packages contains the first, and dare I say, righteous spirit of Christmas. Shucking the presents of their skin is a separate pleasure altogether. But— Mr. Connell sat in the huge, stuffed lazy boy with springs poking him in the buttocks. It was the only chair in the room that I trusted to keep him off the floor and it cawed when he settled his bulk into its embrace. Let me say that our man was not an actor. Even after I sat him down and placed the mug in his fist, those accipitrine eyes darted and sliced from shadowed corner to mysterious nook, off-put by the cloying feel of the room— and why not? It was a touch creepy, what with the occasional creak of a timber, the low squeak of a settling foundation, the way everything was cast under a counterchange pattern of dark and light. I would have been nervous in his shoes; he was looking into murders most foul, after all. Pardon me, murder is a sensational word; television will be the ruin of my fleeting measure of proportion if the world keeps spinning a few more revolutions. Disappearances is what I should have said. Thirty of them. Thirty that good Mr. Connell knew of, at least. There were more, many more, but this is astray from the subject. We looked at each other for a time. Me, smacking my lips over toothless gums and blowing on the tea—it was too damned hot, as usual! He, pretending to sip, but not really doing so on the off chance that I was the crazed maniac that he sought, and had poisoned it. A good idea, even though I had not done anything like that. Since he was pretending to accept my hospitality, I pretended to look at his forged documents, smacking and fumbling with some glasses that would have driven me blind if I wore them for any span of time, and muttered monosyllabic exclamations to indicate my confusion and ultimate verification of the presumed authenticity of his papers. One quick call to the Bureau of Land Management would have sent him fleeing as the charlatan I knew he was. I ignored the opportunity. Mr. Connell was definitely not an actor. His small talk was clumsy, as if he couldn’t decide the proper way to crack me. I feigned a hearing impairment and that was cruel, though amusing. Inside of ten minutes the mechanism of his logic had all save rejected the possibility of my involvement in those disappearances. No surprise there—he operated on intuition; peripheral logic, as his wife often called it. I failed the test of instinct. Half-blind, weak, pallid as a starfish grounded. Decrepit would not be completely unkind. I was failing him. Yet the room, the house, the brittle fold of plain beyond the window interrupted by a blot of ramshackle structure that was the barn, invoked his disquiet. It worried him, this trail of missing persons—vague pattern; they were hitchhikers, salesmen, several state troopers, missionaries, prostitutes, you name it. Both sexes, all ages and descriptions, with a single thread to bind them. They disappeared around my humble farm. The Federal Bureau of Investigation dropped by once, three years before the incident with Mr. Connell. I did not play with them. Winter had yet to make me torpid and weak. They left with nothing, suspecting nothing. However, it was a close thing, that inconvenient visit. It convinced me the hour was nigh . . . The tea grew cold. It was late in the year, so dying afternoon sunlight had a tendency to slant; trees were shorn of their glory, crooked branches casting crooked shadows. The breeze nipped and the fields were damp. I mentioned that he was going to ruin his shoes if he went tramping out there; he thanked me and said he’d be careful. I watched him stomp around, doing his terrible acting job, trying to convince me that he was checking the value of my property, or whatever the hell he said when I wasn’t listening. Speaking of shadows . . . I glanced at mine, spread out across the hood of the requisite fifty-nine Chevrolet squatting between the barn and the house. Ah, a perfectly normal shadow, if a tad disfigured by the warp of light. A majority of the things I might tell are secrets. Therefore, I shall not reveal them whole and glistening. Also, some things are kept from me, discomfiting as that particular truth may be. The vanished people; I know what occurred, but not why. To be brutally accurate, in several cases I cannot say that I saw what happened, however, my guesswork is as good as anyone’s. There was a brief moment, back and back again in some murky prehistory of my refined consciousness, when I possessed the hubris to imagine a measure of self-determination in this progress through existence. The Rough Beast slouching toward Bethlehem of its own accord. If leashed, then by its own device, certainly. Foolish me. Scientists claim that there is a scheme to the vicious Tree of Life, one thing eats another and excretes the matter another being requires to sustain its spark so that it might be eaten by another which excretes the matter required to sustain the spark—And like so. Lightning does not strike with random intent, oceans do not heave, and toss-axes do not ring in the tulgey wood or bells in church towers by accident. As a famous man once said, there are no accidents ‘round here. Jerk the strings and watch us dance. I could say more on that subject; indeed, I might fill a pocket book with that pearl of wisdom, but later is better. Mr. Connell slouched in from the field—picking about for graves, by chance?—resembling the Rough Beast I mentioned earlier. He was flushed; irritation and residual alcohol poisoning in equal parts. I asked him how he was doing, and he grunted a perfunctory comment. Could he possibly take a closer look at the barn? It would affect the overall property value and like that . . . I smiled and shrugged and offered to show him the way. Watch your step, I warned him, it wouldn’t do for a government man to trip over some piece of equipment and end up suing the dirt from under my feet, ha, ha. This made him nervous all over again and he sweated. Why? Two years before this visit, I could have said with accuracy. He would have been mine to read forward and back. By now, I was losing my strength. I was stuck in his boat, stranded with peripheral logic for sails. Mr. Connell sweated all the time, but this was different. Fear sweat is distinctive, any predator knows that. This pungent musk superseded the powerful cologne and stale odor of whiskey leaching from his pores. To the barn. Cavernous. Gloom, dust, clathrose awnings of spent silk, scrabbling mice. Heavy textures of mold, of rust, decaying straw. I hobbled with the grace of a lame crow, yet Mr. Connell contrived to lag at my heel. Cold in the barn, thus his left hand delved into a pocket and lingered there. What was he thinking? Partially that I was too old, unless . . . unless an accomplice lurked in one of the places his methodical gaze was barred from. He thought of the house; upstairs, or the cellar. Wrong on both counts. Maybe his research was faulty—what if I actually possessed a living relative? Now would be a hell of a time to discover that mistake! Mr. Connell thought as an animal does—a deer hardly requires proof from its stippled ears, its soft eyes or quivering nose to justify the uneasiness of one often hunted. Animals understand that life is death. This is not a conscious fact, rather a fact imprinted upon every colliding cell. Mr. Connell thought like an animal, unfortunately; he was trapped in the electrochemical web of cognition, wherein curiosity leads into temptation, temptation leads into fear, and fear is considered an impulse to be mastered. He came into the barn against the muffled imprecations of his lizard brain. Curiosity did not kill the cat all by itself. His relentless eyes adjusted by rapid degrees, fastening upon a mass of sea-green tarpaulin gone velvet in the subterranean illume. This sequestered mass reared above the exposed gulf of loft, nearly brushing the venerable center-beam, unexpressive in its obscured context, though immense and bounded by that gravid force to founding dirt. Mr. Connell’s heartbeat accelerated, spurred by a trickling dose of primordial dread. Being a laconic and linear man, he asked me what was under that great tarp. I showed my gums, grasping a corner of that shroud with a knotted hand. One twitch to part the enigmatic curtain and reveal my portrait of divinity. A sculpture of the magnificent shape of God. Oh, admittedly it was a shallow rendering of That Which Cannot Be Named; but art is not relative to perfection in any tangible sense. It is our coarse antennae trembling blindly as it traces the form of Origin, tastes the ephemeral glue welding us, yearning after the secret of ineluctable evolution, and wonders what this transformation will mean. In my mind, here was the best kind of art—the kind hoarded by rich and jealous collectors in their locked galleries; hidden from the eyes of the heathen masses, waiting to be shared with the ripe few. Came the rustle of polyurethane sloughing from the Face of Creation; a metaphor to frame the abrupt molting bloom of my deep insides. There, a shadow twisted on the floor; my shadow, but not me any more than a butterfly is the chrysalis whence it emerges. Yet, I wanted to see the end of this! Mr. Connell gaped upon the construct born of that yearning for truth slithering at the root of my intellect. He teetered as if swaying on the brink of a chasm. He beheld shuddering lines that a fleshly tongue is witless to describe, except perhaps in spurts of impression— prolongated, splayed at angles, an obliquangular mass of smeared and clotted material, glaucous clay dredged from an old and abiding coomb where earthly veins dangle and fell waters drip as the sculpture dripped, milky-lucent starshine in the cryptic barn, an intumescent hulk rent from the floss of a carnival mirror. To gaze fully on this idol was to feel the gray matter quake inside its case and reject what the moist perceptions thought to feed it. I cannot explain, nor must an artist defend his work or elucidate in such a way the reeling audience can fathom, brutes that they are. Besides, I was not feeling quite myself when I molded it from the morass of mindless imperative. Like a nocturnal flower, I Become, after that the scope of human perception is reduced and bound in fluids nameless and profane. There are memories, but their clarity is the clarity of a love for the womb, warmth, and lightless drift; fragmented happiness soon absorbed in the shuffle of the churning world and forgotten. Mr. Connell did not comment directly; speech was impossible. He uttered an inarticulate sound, yarding at the lump of cold metal in his pocket—his crucifix against the looming presence of evil. Note that I refrain from scoffing at the existence of evil. The word is a simple name for a complex idea, an idea far outstripping the feeble equipment of sapient life. It is nothing to laugh at. As for my investigator, I like to remember him that way —frozen in a rictus of anguish at wisdom gained too late. Imagine that instant as the poor insect falls into the pitcher plant. He was an Ice-Age hunter trapped in the gelid bosom of a glacier. It was final for him. I reached out to touch his craggy visage— My perceptions flickered, shuttering so swiftly that I could not discern precise details of what occurred to big Mr. Connell. Suffice to say what was done to him was . . . incomprehensible. And horrible, I suppose most people would think. Not that I could agree with their value judgment. I suffered the throes of blossoming. It tends to affect my reasoning. The ordeal exhausted me; yet another sign. Mr. Connell vanished like the others before him, but he was the last. After that, I left the farm and traveled north. Winter was on the world. Time for summer things to sleep.

I only mention this anecdote because it’s the same thing every time, in one variation or another. Come the villagers with their pitchforks and torches, only to find the castle empty, the nemesis gone back to the shadowlands. Lumbered off to the great cocoon of slumber and regeneration. In dreams I swim as I did back when the oceans were warm and empty. There I am, floating inside a vast membrane, innocent of coherent thought, guided by impulses to movement, sustenance and copulation. Those are dim memories; easy to assume them to be the fabrications of loneliness or delusion. Until you recall these are human frailties. Interesting that I always return to the soup of origins, whether in dreams or substance. Every piece of terrestrial life emerged from that steaming gulf. The elder organisms yet dwell in those depths, some hiding in the fields of microbes, mindless as jellyfish; others lumbering and feeding on what hapless forms they capture. Once, according to the dreams, I was one of those latter things. Except, I am uncertain if that was ever my true spawning ground. In fairness, I do not ponder the circumstance of my being as much as logic would presume. My physiology is to thank, perhaps. There come interludes—a month, a year, centuries or more—and I simply am, untroubled by the questions of purpose. I seek my pleasures, I revel in their comforts. The ocean is just the ocean, a cigar is just a cigar. That is the state of Becoming. Bliss is ephemeral; true for anyone, or anything. The oceans have been decimated several times in the last billion years. Sterile water in a clay bowl. Life returned unbidden on each occasion. The world slumbers, twitches and transforms. From the jelly, lizards crawled around the fetid swamps eating one another and dying, and being replaced by something else. Again, again, again, until you reach the inevitable conclusion of sky-rises, nuclear submarines, orbiting satellites, and Homo sapiens formicating the earth. God swipes His Hand across Creation, it changes shape and thrives. A cycle, indeed a cycle, and not a pleasant one if you are cursed with a brain and the wonder of what the cosmic gloaming shall hold for you. Then there is me. Like the old song, the more things change, the more I stay the same. When the oceans perished, I slept and later flopped on golden shores, glaring up at strange constellations, but my contemplation was a drowsy process and bore no fruit. When the lizards perished, I went into the sea and slept, and later wore the flesh and fur of warm-blooded creatures. When ice chilled and continents drifted together with dire results, I went into the sea and slept through the cataclysm. Later, I wore the skins of animals and struck flint to make fire and glared up at the stars and named them in a language I don’t have the trick of anymore. Men built their idols, and I joined them in their squalid celebrations, lulled by flames and roasting flesh; for I was one with them, even if the thoughts stirring in my mind seemed peculiar, and hearkened to the sediment of dark forms long neglected. I stabbed animals with a spear and mated when the need was pressing. I hated my enemies and loved my friends and wore the values of the tribe without the impetus of subterfuge. I was a man. And for great periods that is all I was. At night I regarded the flickering lights in the sky and when I dreamed, it occurred to me exactly what the truth was. For a while I evaded the consequences of my nature. Time is longer than a person made from blood and tissue could hope to imagine. Ask God; distractions are important. But— Memories, memories. Long ago in a cave on the side of a famous mountain in the Old World. Most men lived in huts and cabins or stone fortresses. Only wise men chose to inhabit caves, and I went to visit one of them. A monk revered for his sagacity and especially for his knowledge of the gods in their myriad incarnations. I stayed with the wizened holy man for a cycle of the pocked and pitted moon. We drank bitter tea; we smoked psychedelic plants and read from crumbling tomes scriven with quaint drawings of deities and demons. It was disappointing—I could not be any of these things, yet there was little doubt he and I were different as a fish is from a stone. The monk was the first of them to notice. I did not concern myself. In those days my power was irresistible; let me but wave my hand and so mote it be. If I desired a thought from a passing mind, I plucked it fresh as sweet fruit from a budding branch. If I fancied a soothing rain, the firmament would split and sunder. If I hungered, flesh would prostrate itself before me . . . unless I fancied a pursuit. Then it would bound and hide, or stand and bare teeth or rippling steel, or suffocate my patience with tears, oaths, pleas. But in the end, I had my flesh. That the monk guessed what I strove to submerge, as much from myself as the world at large, did not alarm me. It was the questions that pecked at my waking thoughts, crept into my slumberous phantasms. Annoying questions. Stark recollection of a time predating the slow glide of aeons in the primeval brine. The images would alight unasked; I would glimpse the red truth of my condition. Purple dust and niveous spiral galaxy, a plain of hyaline rock broken by pyrgoidal clusters ringed in fire, temperatures sliding a groove betwixt boiling and freezing. The sweet huff of methane in my bellowing lungs, sunrise so blinding it would have seared the eyes from any living creature . . . and I knew there were memories layered behind and beyond, inaccessible to the human perception that I wore as a workman wears boots, gloves, and warding mantle. To see these visions in their nakedness would boggle and baffle, or rive the sanity from my fragile intellect, surely as a hot breath douses a candle. Ah, but there were memories; a phantom chain endless as the coil of chemicals comprising the mortal genome, fused to the limits of calculation— I try not to think too much. I try not to think too much about the buried things, anyhow. Better to consider the cycle that binds me in its thrall. For my deeds there is a season—spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Each time I change it becomes clearer what precisely maintains its pattern. That I am a fragment of something much larger is obvious. The monk was the first to grasp it. There was a story he mentioned—how the priests prayed to their gods, good, and bad, to look upon men and bestow their munificent blessings. They even prayed to terrible Shiva the Destroyer, who slept in his celestial palace. They prayed because to slight Shiva in their supplication was to risk his not inconsiderable fury. Yet, the priests knew if Shiva opened his eye and gazed upon the world it would be destroyed. But— In the spring, I walk with the others of my kindred shell, nagged by fullness unsubstantiated. In the summer, I see my shadow change, change and then I learn to blossom and suckle the pleasurable nectar from all I survey. Nail me to a cross, burn me in a fire. A legend will rise up from the ashes. Invent stories to frighten your children, sacrifice tender young virgins to placate my concupiscent urges. Revile me in your temples, call upon Almighty God to throw me down. No good, no good. How could He see you if not for me? How could He hear thy lament, or smell thy sadness? Or taste thee? In the autumn, like a slow, heavy tide, purpose resurges, and I remember what the seasons portend. A wane of the power, a dwindling reserve of strength. Like a malign flower that flourishes in tropical heat, I wither before the advance of frost, and blacken and die, my seeds buried in the muck at the bottom of the ocean to survive the cruel winter. I know what I am. I understand the purpose. I left the farm and disappeared. One more name on the ominous list haunting law enforcement offices in seventeen states. I vanished myself to the Bering Coast— a simple feat for anyone who wants to try. An old man alone on a plane; no one cared. They never do. There is an old native ghost town on a stretch of desolate beach. Quonset huts with windows shattered or boarded. Grains of snow slither in past open doors when the frigid wind gusts along, moaning through the abandoned FAA towers colored navy gray and rust. The federal government transplanted the villagers to new homes thirteen miles up the beach. I don’t see anyone when I leave the shack I have appropriated and climb the cliffs to regard the sea. The sea being rumpled, a dark, scaly hide marred by plates of thickening ice. Individual islets today, a solid sheet in a few weeks, extending to the horizon. Or forever. I watch the stars as twilight slips down from the sky, a painless veil pricked with beads and sparks. Unfriendly stars. Eventually I return to the shack. It takes me a very long time—I am an old, old man. My shuffle and panting breath are not part of the theater. The shack waits and I light a kerosene lamp and huddle by the Bunsen burner to thaw these antiquitous bones. I do not hunger much this late in the autumn of my cycle, and nobody is misfortunate enough to happen by, so I eschew sustenance another day. The radio is old, too. Scratchy voice from a station in Nome recites the national news—I pay a lot of attention to this when my time draws nigh, looking for a sign, a symbol of tribulations to come—the United Nations is bombing some impoverished country into submission, war criminals from Bosnia are apprehended in Peru. A satellite orbiting Mars has gone offline, but NASA is quick to reassure the investors that all is routine, in Ethiopia famine is tilling people under by the thousands, an explosion caused a plane to crash into the Atlantic, labor unions are threatening a crippling strike, a bizarre computer virus is hamstringing two major corporations, and so on and on. The news is never good, and I am not sure if there is anything I wanted to hear. I close my rheumy eyes and see a tinsel and sequined probe driving out, out beyond the cold chunk of Pluto. A stone tossed into a bottomless pool, trailing bubbles. I see cabalists hunched over their ciphers, Catholics on their knees before the effigy of Christ, biologists with scalpels and microscopes, astronomers with their mighty lenses pointed at the sky, atheists and philosophers with fingers pointed at themselves. Military men stroke the cool bulk of their latest killing weapon and feel a touch closer to peace. I see men caressing the crystal and wire and silicon of the machines that tell them what to believe about the laws of physics, the number to slay chaos in its den. I see housewives scrambling to pick the kids up from soccer practice, a child on the porch gazing up, and up, to regard the same piece of sky glimmering in my window. He wonders what is up there, he wonders if there is a monster under his bed. No monsters there, instead they lurk at school, at church, in his uncle’s squamous brain. Everyone is looking for the answer. They do not want to find the answer, trust me. Unfortunately, the answer will find them. Life—it’s like one of those unpleasant nature documentaries. To be the cameraman instead of the subjects, eh? Ah, my skin warns me that it is almost the season. I dreamed for a while, but I do not recall the content. The radio is dead; faint drone from the ancient speaker. The kerosene wick has burned to cinders. A flash from the emerald-colored bottle catches my eye; full of cologne. I seldom indulge in cosmetics; the color attracted me and I brought it here. I am a creature of habit. When my affectations of evolution decay, habit remains steadfast. Dark outside on the wintry beach. Sunrise is well off and may not come again. The frozen pebbles crackle beneath my heels as I stagger toward the canvas of obsidian water, leaving strange and unsteady tracks on the skeletal shore. There is a sense of urgency building. Mine, or the Other’s? I strip my clothes as I go and end up on the cusp of the sea, naked and shriveled. The stars are feral. They shudder—a ripple is spreading across the heavens and the stars are dancing wildly in its pulsating wake. A refulgence that should not be seen begins to seep from the widening fissure. Here is a grand and terrible happening to write of on the wall of a cave . . . God opening His Eye to behold the world and all its little works. I have seen this before. Let others marvel in my place, if they dare. My work is done, now to sleep. When I mount from the occluded depths what will I behold? What will be my clay and how shall I be given to mold it? I slip into the welcoming flank of the sea and allow the current to tug my shell out and down into the abyssal night. It isn’t really as cold as I feared. Thoughts are fleeting as the bubbles and the light. The shell begins to flake, to peel, to crumble, and soon I will wriggle free of this fragile vessel. But— One final kernel of wisdom gained through the abomination of time and service. A pearl to leave gleaming upon this empty shore; safely assured that no one shall come by to retrieve it and puzzle over the contradiction. Men are afraid of the devil, but there is no devil, just me, and I do as I am bid. It is God that should turn their bowels to soup. Whatever God is, He, or It, created us for amusement. It’s too obvious. Just as He created the prehistoric sharks, the dinosaurs, and the humble mechanism that is a crocodile. And Venus flytraps, and black widow spiders, and human beings. Just as He created a world where every organism survives by rending a weaker organism. Where procreation is an imperative, a leech’s anesthetic against agony and death and disease that accompany the sticky congress of mating. A sticky world, because God dwells in a dark and humid place. A world of appetite, for God is ever hungry. I know, because I am His Mouth.

© 2001 by Laird Barron. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited by Gordon Van Gelder. Reprinted by permission of the author.

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

Richards arrived at the house about eight. The moon was full and it was a very bright night, in spite of occasional cloud cover; bright enough that he could get a good look at the place. It was just as the owner had described it. Run down. Old. And very ugly. The style was sort of Gothic, sort of plantation, sort of cracker box. Like maybe the architect had been unable to decide on a game plan, or had been drunkenly in love with impossible angles. Digging the key loaned him from his pocket, he hoped this would turn out worth the trip. More than once his search for antiques had turned into a wild goose chase. And this time, it was really a long shot. The owner, a sick old man named Klein, hadn’t been inside the house in twenty years. A lot of things could happen to antiques in that time, even if the place was locked and boarded up. Theft. Insects. Rats. Leaks. Any one of those, or a combination of them, could turn the finest of furniture into rubble and sawdust in no time. But it was worth the gamble. On occasion, his luck had been phenomenal. As a thick, dark cloud rolled across the moon, Richards, guided by his flashlight, mounted the rickety porch, squeaked the screen, and groaned the door open. Inside, he flashed the light around. Dust and darkness seemed to crawl in there until the cloud passed and the lunar light fell through the boarded windows in a speckled and slatted design akin to camouflaged netting. In places, Richards could see that the wall​paper had fallen from the wall in big sheets that dangled halfway down to the floor like the drooping branches of weeping willows. To his left was a wide, spiraling staircase, and following its ascent with his light, he could see there were places where the railing hung brokenly askew. Directly across from this was a door. A narrow, recessed one. As there was nothing in the present room to command his attention, he decided to begin his investigation there. It was as good a place as any. Using his flashlight to bat his way through a skin of cobwebs, he went over to the door and opened it. Cold air embraced him, brought with it a sour smell, like a freezer full of ruined meat. It was almost enough to turn Richards’s stomach, and for a moment he started to close the door and forget it. But an image of wall-to-wall antiques clustered in the shadows came to mind, and he pushed forward, determined. If he were going to go to all the trouble to get the key and drive way out here in search of old furniture to buy, then he ought to make sure he had a good look, smell or no smell. Using his flash, and helped by the moonlight, he could tell that he had discovered a basement. The steps leading down into it looked aged and precarious, and the floor appeared oddly glasslike in the beam of his light. So he could examine every nook and cranny of the basement, Richards decided to descend the stairs. He put one foot carefully on the first step, and slowly settled his weight on it. Nothing collapsed. He went down three more steps, cautiously, and though they moaned and squeaked, they held. When Richards reached the sixth step, for some reason he could not define, he felt oddly uncomfortable, had a chill. It was as if someone with ice-cold water in their kidneys had taken a piss down the back of his coat collar. Now he could see that the floor was not glassy at all. In fact, the floor was not visible. The reason it had looked glassy from above was because it was flooded with water. From the overall size of the basement, Richards determined that the water was most likely six or seven feet deep. Maybe more. There was movement at the edge of Richards’s flashlight beam, and he followed it. A huge rat was swimming away from him, pushing something before it; an old partially deflated volleyball perhaps. He could not tell for sure. Nor could he decide if the rat was trying to mount the object or bite it. And he didn’t care. Two things that gave him the willies were rats and water, and here were both. To make it worse, the rats were the biggest he’d ever seen, and the water was the dirtiest imaginable. It looked to have a lot of oil and sludge mixed in with it, as well as being stagnant. It grew darker, and Richards realized the moon had been hazed by a cloud again. He let that be his signal. There was nothing more to see here, so he turned and started up. Stopped. The very large shape of a man filled the doorway. Richards jerked the light up, saw that the shadows had been playing tricks on him. The man was not as large as he’d first thought. And he wasn’t wearing a hat. He had been certain before that he was, but he could see now that he was mistaken. The fellow was bareheaded, and his features, though youthful, were undistinguished; any character he might have had seemed to retreat into the flesh of his face or find sanctuary within the dark folds of his shaggy hair. As he lowered the light, Richards thought he saw the wink of braces on the young man’s teeth. “Basements aren’t worth a damn in this part of the country,” the young man said. “Must have been some Yankees come down here and built this. Someone who didn’t know about the water table, the weather and all.” “I didn’t know anyone else was here,” Richards said. “Klein send you?” “Don’t know a Klein.” “He owns the place. Loaned me a key.” The young man was silent a moment. “Did you know the moon is behind a cloud? A cloud across the moon can change the entire face of the night. Change it the way some people change their clothes, their moods, their expressions.” Richards shifted uncomfortably. “You know,” the young man said, “I couldn’t shave this morning.” “Beg pardon?” “When I tried to put a blade in my razor, I saw that it had an eye on it, and it was blinking at me, very fast. Like this . . . oh, you can’t see from down there, can you? Well, it was very fast. I dropped it and it slid along the sink, dove off on the floor, crawled up the side of the bathtub and got in the soap dish. It closed its eye then, but it started mewing like a kitten wanting milk. Ooooowwwwaaa, oooowwwaa, was more the way it sounded really, but it reminded me of a kitten. I knew what it wanted, of course. What it always wants. What all the sharp things want. “Knowing what it wanted made me sick and I threw up in the toilet. Vomited up a razor blade. It was so fat it might have been pregnant. Its eye was blinking at me as I flushed it. When it was gone the blade in the soap dish started to sing high and sillylike. “The blade I vomited, I know how it got inside of me.” The young man raised his fingers to his throat. “There was a little red mark right here this morning, and it was starting to scab over. One or two of them always find a way in. Sometimes it’s nails that get in me. They used to come in through the soles of my feet while I slept, but I stopped that pretty good by wearing my shoes to bed.” In spite of the cool of the basement, Richards had started to sweat. He considered the possibility of rushing the guy or just trying to push past him, but dismissed it. The stairs might be too weak for sudden movement, and maybe the fruitcake might just have his say and go on his way. “It really doesn’t matter how hard I try to trick them,” the young man continued, “they always win out in the end. Always.” “I think I’ll come up now,” Richards said, trying very hard to sound casual. The young man flexed his legs. The stairs shook and squealed in protest. Richards nearly toppled backward into the water. “Hey!” Richards yelled. “Bad shape,” the young man said. “Need a lot of work. Rebuilt entirely would be the ticket.” Richards regained both his balance and his composure. He couldn’t decide if he was angry or scared, but he wasn’t about to move. Going up he had rotten stairs and Mr. Looney Tunes. Behind him he had the rats and water. The proverbial rock and a hard place. “Maybe it’s going to cloud up and rain,” the young man said. “What do you think? Will it rain tonight?” “I don’t know,” Richards managed. “Lot of dark clouds floating about. Maybe they’re rain clouds. Did I tell you about the God of the Razor? I really meant to. He rules the sharp things. He’s the god of those who live by the blade. He was my friend Donny’s god. Did you know he was Jack the Ripper’s god?” The young man dipped his hand into his coat pocket, pulled it out quickly and whipped his arm across his body twice, very fast. Richards caught a glimpse of something long and metal in his hand. Even the cloud-veiled moonlight managed to give it a dull, silver spark. Richards put the light on him again. The young man was holding the object in front of him, as if he wished it to be examined. It was an impossibly large straight razor. “I got this from Donny,” the young man said. “He got it in an old shop somewhere. Gladewater, I think. It comes from a barber kit, and the kit originally came from England. Says so in the case. You should see the handle on this baby. Ivory. With a lot of little designs and symbols carved into it. Donny looked the symbols up. They’re geometric patterns used for calling up a demon. Know what else? Jack the Ripper was no surgeon. He was a barber. I know, because Donny got the razor and started having these visions where Jack the Ripper and the God of the Razor came to talk to him. They explained what the razor was for. Donny said the reason they could talk to him was because he tried to shave with the razor and cut himself. The blood on the blade, and those symbols on the handle, they opened the gate. Opened it so the God of the Razor could come and live inside Donny’s head. The Ripper told him that the metal in the blade goes all the way back to a sacrificial altar the Druids used.” The young man stopped talking, dropped the blade to his side. He looked over his shoulder. “That cloud is very dark . . . slow moving. I sort of bet on rain.” He turned back to Richards. “Did I ask you if you thought it would rain tonight?” Richards found he couldn’t say a word. It was as if his tongue had turned to cork in his mouth. The young man didn’t seem to notice or care. “After Donny had the visions, he just talked and talked about this house. We used to play here when we were kids. Had the boards on the back window rigged so they’d slide like a trap door. They’re still that way. . . Donny used to say this house had angles that sharp​ened the dull edges of your mind. I know what he means now. It is comfortable, don’t you think?” Richards, who was anything but comfortable, said nothing. Just stood very still, sweating, fearing, listening, aiming the light. “Donny said the angles were honed best during the full moon. I didn’t know what he was talking about then. I didn’t understand about the sacrifices. Maybe you know about them? Been all over the papers and on the TV. The Decapitator, they called him. “It was Donny doing it, and from the way he started acting, talking about the God of the Razor, Jack the Ripper, this old house and its angles, I got suspicious. He got so he wouldn’t even come around near or during a full moon, and when the moon started waning, he was different. Peaceful. I followed him a few times but didn’t have any luck. He drove to the Safeway, left his car there and walked. He was as quick and sneaky as a cat. He’d lose me right off. But then I got to figuring . . . him talking about this old house and all . . . and one full moon I came here and waited for him, and he showed up. You know what he was doing? He was bringing the heads here, tossing them down there in the water like those South American Indians used to toss bodies and stuff in sacrificial pools . . . It’s the angles in the house, you see.” Richards had that sensation like ice-cold piss down his collar again, and suddenly he knew what that swimming rat had been pursuing and what it was trying to do. “He threw all seven heads down there, I figure,” the young man said. “I saw him toss one.” He pointed with the razor. “He was stand​ing about where you are now when he did it. When he turned and saw me, he ran up after me. I froze, couldn’t move a muscle. Every step he took, closer he got to me, the stranger he looked . . . he slashed me with the razor, across the chest, real deep. I fell down and he stood over me, the razor cocked,” the young man cocked the razor to show Richards. “I think I screamed. But he didn’t cut me again. It was like the rest of him was warring with the razor in his hand. He stood up, and walking stiff as one of those wind-up toy soldiers, he went back down the stairs, stood about where you are now, looked up at me, and drew that razor straight across his throat so hard and deep he damn near cut his head off. He fell back in the water there, sunk like an anvil. The razor landed on the last step. “Wasn’t any use; I tried to get him out of there, but he was gone, like he’d never been. I couldn’t see a ripple. But the razor was lying there and I could hear it. Hear it sucking up Donny’s blood like a kid sucking the sweet out of a sucker. Pretty soon there wasn’t a drop of blood on it. I picked it up . . . so shiny, so damned shiny. I came upstairs, passed out on the floor from the loss of blood. “At first I thought I was dreaming, or maybe delirious, because I was lying at the end of this dark alley between these trash cans with my back against the wall. There were legs sticking out of the trash cans, like tossed mannequins. Only they weren’t mannequins. There were razor blades and nails sticking out of the soles of the feet and blood was running down the ankles and legs, swirling so that they looked like giant peppermint sticks. Then I heard a noise like someone trying to dribble a medicine ball across a hardwood floor. Plop, plop, plop. And then I saw the God of the Razor. “First there’s nothing in front of me but stewing shadows, and the next instant he’s there. Tall and black . . . not Negro . . . but black like obsidian rock. Had eyes like smashed windshield glass and teeth like polished stickpins. Was wearing a top hat with this shiny band made out of chrome razor blades. His coat and pants looked like they were made out of human flesh, and sticking out of the pockets of his coat were gnawed fingers, like after-dinner treats. And he had this big old turnip pocket watch dangling out of his pants pocket on a strand of gut. The watch swung between his legs as he walked. And that plopping sound, know what that was? His shoes. He had these tiny, tiny feet and they were fitted right into the mouths of these human heads. One of the heads was a woman’s and it dragged long black hair behind it when the God walked. “Kept telling myself to wake up. But I couldn’t. The God pulled this chair out of nowhere—it was made out of leg bones and the seat looked like scraps of flesh and hunks of hair—and he sat down, crossed his legs and dangled one of those ragged-head shoes in my face. Next thing he does is whip this ventriloquist dummy out of the air, and it looked like Donny, and was dressed like Donny had been last time I’d seen him, down there on the stair. The God put the dummy on his knee and Donny opened his eyes and spoke. ‘Hey, buddy boy,’ he said, ‘how goes it? What do you think of the razor’s bite? You see, pal, if you don’t die from it, it’s like a vampire’s bite. Get my drift? You got to keep passing it on. The sharp things will tell you when, and if you don’t want to do it, they’ll bother you until you do, or you slice yourself bad enough to come over here on the Darkside with me and Jack and the others. Well, got to go back now, join the gang. Be talking with you real soon, moving into your head.’ “Then he just sort of went limp on the God’s knee, and the God took off his hat and he had this zipper running along the middle of his bald head. A goddamned zipper! He pulled it open. Smoke and fire and noises like screaming and car wrecks happening came out of there. He picked up the Donny dummy, which was real small now, and tossed him into the hole in his head way you’d toss a treat into a Great Dane’s mouth. Then he zipped up again and put on his hat. Never said a word. But he leaned forward and held his turnip watch so I could see it. The watch hands were skeleton fingers, and there was a face in there, pressing its nose in little smudged circles against the glass, and though I couldn’t hear it, the face had its mouth open and it was screaming, and that face was mine. Then the God and the alley and the legs in the trash cans were gone. And so was the cut on my chest. Healed completely. Not even a mark. “I left out of there and didn’t tell a soul. And Donny, just like he said, came to live in my head, and the razor started singing to me nights, probably a song sort of like those sirens sang for that Ulysses fellow. And come near and on the full moon, the blades act up, mew and get inside of me. Then I know what I need to do . . . I did it tonight. Maybe if it had rained I wouldn’t have had to do it . . . but it was clear enough for me to be busy.” The young man stopped talking, turned, stepped inside the house, out of sight. Richards sighed, but his relief was short-lived. The young man returned and came down a couple of steps. In one hand, by the long blond hair, he was holding a teenage girl’s head. The other clutched the razor. The cloud veil fell away from the moon, and it became quite bright. The young man, with a flick of his wrist, tossed the head at Richards, striking him in the chest, causing him to drop the light. The head bounced between Richards’s legs and into the water with a flat splash. “Listen . . .” Richards started, but anything he might have said aged, died, and turned to dust in his mouth. Fully outlined in the moonlight, the young man started down the steps, holding the razor before him like a battle flag. Richards blinked. For a moment it looked as if the guy were wearing a . . . He was wearing a hat. A tall, black one with a shiny metal band. And he was much larger now, and between his lips was a shimmer of wet, silver teeth like thirty-two polished stickpins. Plop, plop came the sound of his feet on the steps, and in the lower and deeper shadows of the stairs, it looked as if the young man had not only grown in size and found a hat, but had darkened his face and stomped his feet into pumpkins . . . But one of the pumpkins streamed long, dark hair. Plop, plop . . . Richards screamed and the sound of it rebounded against the basement walls like a superball. Shattered starlight eyes beneath the hat. A Cheshire smile of shiny needles in a carbon face. A big dark hand holding the razor, whipping it back and forth like a lion’s talon snatching at warm, soft prey. Swish, swish, swish. Richards’s scream was dying in his throat, if not in the echoing basement, when the razor flashed for him. He avoided it by stepping briskly backward. His foot went underwater, but found a step there. Momentarily. The rotting wood gave way, twisted his ankle, sent him plunging into the cold, foul wetness. Just before his eyes, like portholes on a sinking ship, were covered by the liquid darkness, he saw the God of the Razor—now manifest in all his horrid form—lift a splitting head shoe and step into the water after him. Richards torqued his body, swam long, hard strokes, coasted bottom; his hand touched something cold and clammy down there and a piece of it came away in his fingers. Flipping it from him with a fan of his hand, he fought his way to the surface and broke water as the blonde girl’s head bobbed in front of him, two rat passengers aboard, gnawing viciously at the eye sockets. Suddenly, the girl’s head rose, perched on the crown of the tall hat of the God of the Razor, then it tumbled off, rats and all, into the greasy water. Now there was the jet face of the God of the Razor and his mouth was open and the teeth blinked briefly before the lips drew tight, and the other hand, like an eggplant sprouting fingers, clutched Richards’s coat collar and plucked him forward and Richards—the charnel breath of the God in his face, the sight of the lips slashing wide to once again reveal brilliant dental grill work—went limp as a pelt. And the God raised the razor to strike. And the moon tumbled behind a thick, dark cloud. White face, shaggy hair, no hat, a fading glint of silver teeth . . . the young man holding the razor, clutching Richards’s coat collar. The juice back in his heart, Richards knocked the man’s hand free, and the guy went under. Came up thrashing. Went under again. And when he rose this time, the razor was frantically flaying the air. “Can’t swim,” he bellowed, “can’t—” Under he went, and this time he did not come up. But Richards felt something touch his foot from below. He kicked out savagely, dog paddling wildly all the while. Then the touch was gone and the sloshing water went immediately calm. Richards swam toward the broken stairway, tried to ignore the blond head that lurched by, now manned by a four-rat crew. He got hold of the loose, dangling stair rail and began to pull himself up. The old board screeched on its loosening nail, but held until Richards gained a hand on the door ledge, then it gave way with a groan and went to join the rest of the rotting lumber, the heads, the bodies, the faded stigmata of the God of the Razor. Pulling himself up, Richards crawled into the room on his hands and knees, rolled over on his back . . . and something flashed between his legs . . . It was the razor. It was stuck to the bottom of his shoe . . . That had been the touch he had felt from below; the young guy still trying to cut him, or perhaps accidentally striking him during his desperate thrashings to regain the surface. Sitting up, Richards took hold of the ivory handle and freed the blade. He got to his feet and stumbled toward the door. His ankle and foot hurt like hell where the step had given way beneath him, hurt him so badly he could hardly walk. Then he felt the sticky, warm wetness oozing out of his foot to join the cold water in his shoe, and he knew that he had been cut by the razor. But then he wasn’t thinking anymore. He wasn’t hurting anymore. The moon rolled out from behind a cloud like a colorless eye and he just stood there looking at his shadow on the lawn. The shadow of an impossibly large man wearing a top hat and balls on his feet, holding a monstrous razor in his hand.

© 1987 by Joe R. Lansdale. Originally published in Grue Magazine, edited by Peggy Nadramia. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over thirty-five novels and twenty short story collections. He is also an editor and co-editor of several anthologies of fiction and non-fiction. He has sold numerous screenplays and comics. He has received the Edgar Award, seven Bram Stoker Awards, the British Fantasy Award, and numerous others. Two of his stories, “Bubba Ho-Tep” and “Incident on and Off a Mountain Road,” have been filmed. He writes regularly for The Texas Observer and is Writer in Residence at Stephen F. Austin State University. He is also a member of The Texas Institute of Letters. Fishwife Carrie Vaughn

The men went out in boats to fish the cold waters of the bay because their fathers had, because men in this village always had. The women waited to gather in the catch, gut and clean and carry the fish to market because they always had, mothers and grandmothers and so on, back and back. Every day for years she waited, she and the other wives, for their husbands to return from the iron-gray sea. When they did, dragging their worn wooden boats onto the beach, hauling out nets, she and the other wives tried not show their disappointment when the nets were empty. A few limp, dull fish might be tangled in the fibers. Hardly worth cleaning and trying to sell. None of them were surprised, ever. None of them could remember a time when piles of fish fell out of the nets in cascades of silver. She could imagine it: a horde of fish pouring onto the sand, scales glittering like precious metals. She could run her hands across them, as if they were coins, as if she were rich. Her hands were chapped, calloused from mending nets and washing threadbare clothing. Rougher than the scale that encrusted the hulls of the boats. Her husband had been young once, as had she. Some days she woke up, and in the moment before she opened her eyes, she believed they were still young. His arms were still strong, and she would guide them around herself, until he was holding her tightly against him. A fire burned in her gut, and she felt as she had the night after their wedding, both sated and still hungry, arrogantly proud that he belonged to her forever. She always knew which boat was his, of the dozen silhouetted against the horizon on the far end of the bay. Then she opened her eyes, saw the creases of worry in his face, the streaks of gray in her own once-dark hair, and remembered that years had passed, and nothing had gotten better. She clung to the pride she once felt. She remembered what it had been like, and on those days she wanted so badly to seduce him. But he was too tired to be seduced, and she was too tired to keep trying. The best she could do was take a small geranium from her flowerbox to stick in his buttonhole or behind his ear. Sometimes when she did, he smiled. Every day, the fishermen returned empty-handed, and they bowed their heads, ashamed, as if they really had thought today, this day of all days, their fortunes might change. Once a week they went to the village’s small church, where the ancient priest assured them, in the same words he’d used every week for decades, that their faith would be rewarded. Someday. Basket in hand, she would pick a path through the sand to his boat. He would greet her silently, frowning. The shame, apology, in his eyes had faded over time. Now, there was only defeat, and habit. He goes out in the boat because he always has, because he has nothing else to do, because she is always standing on the beach with her basket, waiting for him and a catch that never quite materializes. She was always too tired to touch his face, to offer a smile of comfort. Dutifully, silently, she gathered up the day’s catch from where it flopped on the wet sand. A few dull creatures, sickly whitefish no bigger than her hand. Not enough to cover the bottom of her basket, but she would scale them, gut them, clean them, and take them to the square to sell. Their village did not have a market of its own. Instead, a buyer in a rickety truck, its sides built up with wooden slats, came to buy what they offered. The only reason the man came at all was because he could pay less here than anywhere else. They should ask for more money, she always told herself, they deserved more money. But when she stepped forward, shoulders set and chin raised to stand up for herself, the other women held her back. They couldn’t afford to drive him away. Sometimes, though, she recalled the pride she once felt and made her demand. He simply turned his back, threatening to get in the truck and drive away. She had to beg him to stay, and when he offered less than he ever had before, she had to accept. He fed on their desperation with a smug smile. They did not have a choice; no one else would ever come to make an offer. Now, she was the one to feel shame peeling back her face. She’d take the few coins in exchange for the scant catch, and think of the impossibility of even wishing for something better. She kept on, for no other reason than her husband made the effort to take out the boat at dawn. Going through the motions was the least she could do. So the circle played out, and would play out for all the days to come. To do anything else would upend the order of the universe. At least they didn’t have children, as if the village’s population had thinned as thoroughly as the bay’s. The last thing she did each day, after their dinner of soup and hard bread, as the sun went down, was water the box of flowers in the single window of their one room clapboard home. The red geraniums usually flowered and granted some color to her tired, washed-out world. They even smelled a little, a faint perfume cutting through the stink of fish. As long as she had fresh water for the flowers, as long as the flowers sparked green and red against the salt-scoured drabness of her house, she could continue to wake each morning and imagine that she was young, imagine that today was the day her husband would return to shore with a boatful of fish, and their fortune.

One day she woke up, opened her eyes, got herself and her husband out of bed. Fed him and sent him off to the boats, but he returned a short hour later, and asked her to come with him to the beach. They’d found something. On the sand, the fishermen and their wives gathered, standing in a semicircle around a figure: a man, shoeless, in torn and weathered clothing, lying face up at the tideline, unconscious. The waves lapped at his feet, and there were grooves in the sand that hinted that he must have clawed up from the surf. A castaway perhaps, but no other debris littered the beach, no broken spars or ripped sails, no other bodies or survivors. No storm raged last night, to account for a body washed up on their shore. Disbelief at the oddness, the disruption in the eternal routine, kept anyone from moving closer. So she was the one who went to the man, brushed his tangled black hair from his pale face and touched his neck, feeling for his pulse. When he opened his eyes, she flinched. Not a drowned body, but a man, alive. His eyes were the gray of slate. He smiled at her. Seeming hale and strong now, he sat up and smiled at them all, not at all like a man who’d been found on the beach, baking under the morning sun after freezing in the night air. She stared at her hand; he’d been cold, where she touched him. When he spoke, his voice wasn’t at all parched like it should have been, washed up from the sea as he was. Instead, it was clear, deep, beautiful, and he made them an offer. He promised them bounty, all the treasure they’d wished for for so many years, all that they’d prayed for and never received. To prove he could make good on his vast assertions, he asked to borrow one of the fishermen’s nets. Her husband gave him his. Taking the net, the stranger waded into the water, until the waves met his knees, and he cast. The net settled, sank, and, skillfully, as if he’d fished all his life, as if he’d come from a place where men had fished for hundreds of years, perhaps even a small poor village like this one, he held on to the net, dragged it, gathered it in, hauled it to shore. He leaned against the weight of it, because the net was full. A hundred fish thrashed against the net’s fibers. But more than fish, there was gold: he reached in among the flopping bodies and drew out a cup, a plate, and a circlet —a band of twisted gold that might fit around a woman’s arm. The bend of it spiraled one way and another, resembling the infinite curl of a seashell. The shape drew the gaze, which fell into it, spiraling down until you believed you might fall in truth, and then you looked up into the sky, and realized the sky too went on forever. She stopped thinking at all, lest she become ill. The castaway reached out, offering her the band of gold. She took it; it was cold, burned her hand with its chill, but she held it tightly, drawn close to her breast. This was all the riches she had ever dreamed of. The god of the village’s old priest had never given such glittering proof of his good faith.

The price they had to pay was blood. It didn’t even have to be their own. Just blood, shed in sacrifice, which, when she thought of it, made a certain kind of sense, as much sense as the wealth the castaway drew forth with his net —a concrete wealth that she could feel and taste, not a wish and hope for something that might never come. What else did they have to trade but blood? Never mind all the blood she and her husband had already shed, stabs from fishhooks, burns from rough nets, bruises, broken bones, blisters, a slip of a knife, chapped hands from so much washing, washing, washing, until the water she rinsed in ran red. Accidental blood didn’t count. The bargain needed fresh blood, clean and intentional. She knew exactly where to find the blood they needed. While the others glanced between them, uncertain, she rounded her shoulders and caught her husband’s gaze. Convinced him she knew what to do, took his hand, and marched to the village square. Everyone followed her, except for the old priest in his faded gray robes. The cloth might have been white once, before she was born. The old man was afraid and begged her, all of them, to stop. He could barely look at the castaway and made the sign against evil at him. For his part, the castaway laughed, and that was all it took to drive the priest into his church. She saw the priest one more time trying to light a candle in the window, but his matches were damp, and the wick was moldy. He stood there, striking over and over, his motions sharp and desperate, his face pursed in concentration. She looked away, didn’t look again. He’d never helped them, in all her years of praying for fish, for health, for salvation. How wonderful now, to be doing something more than praying. At the same time she always did, she went to the square, her basket in hand, waiting for the man in the rickety truck. She looked like she did any other morning, waiting for what their buyer thought of as charity, what the wives knew was shame. The air seemed very quiet, not even the gulls crying over the water. The buyer arrived in a puff of stinking exhaust, climbed from the rusted cab of his truck like he always did, his smile broad as if he had just finished laughing at a joke. Faced her, arms spread, as if to say good morning and what fine weather. She didn’t give him time to look surprised as she dropped her basket and slashed his throat with the hooked gutting knife she’d kept hidden at her side. It was a cut she’d made a thousand times, designed to part flesh instantly and spill the guts cleanly. His throat opened, shining red like the inside of a fish’s gills. His eyes bulged, round and unblinking. The man fell soundlessly, and his blood spilled. A much darker red than her geraniums. How nice, to see some color in their faded world. She showed them all how easy it was to make a strike for a better future.

The next day, every boat was filled with fish and gold. The new god provided. She spent hours studying the gold band around her arm, tracing her fingers along its arcs and spirals, sighing at its color, an inspiring glow, what she imagined the sun must look like in a fairytale kingdom, so perfect and warm. Along a certain curve, she could imagine that the metal caressed her back. The second sacrifice was even easier. The village had one inn, a decayed plankboard house, two stories, with a cupola that looked over the bay. It might have been elegant, once, and was still the most stately building in the village, with its overgrown yard and peeling facade. In summer months, a handful of tourists might decide the village was quaint and choose to spend a night here. They never stayed more than one. But this was winter, and no one had passed through for months—until today, which must have been a sign. She spied on the man, a sickly young thing with an ill- fitting suit and scuffed hand-me-down briefcase. The innkeeper said he was a scholar studying the region’s history, and had asked many outlandish questions about economic depression and whether it might be brought on by curses. Depended on how you defined curses, she thought. Approaching midnight, a whole crowd of them went to the inn to do the deed. Again, she held the weapon and made the cut. The rest stayed behind to ensure the sacrifice could not flee. He didn’t escape. He hardly made a sound when she struck. She stood over his bed as he gaped, and he didn’t even seem surprised as he bled out.

Her husband brings her trinkets of gold that he draws up in his nets, along with fish, though she cares less and less about the fish. Now, when she pulls herself to him and guides his hands to her hips, he digs in his fingers greedily, clutching her to him so that her breasts are flattened by his chest. His eyes are bright enough to match the flashing of jewels in sunlight as he kisses her, and she is warm as fire, no matter how clammy the winter air outside grows. The flowers have died. Their scent has long ago faded, and for a time, she continues to water the dried out, blackened stems, the broken petals lying shattered on the cracked soil of the planter box. It’s out of habit rather than hope. One day she forgets, distracted by the twisted gold band around her wrist. Its light draws her like a sun, if she could remember what the sun looks like. She follows the pattern of its spirals, the depth of its whorls, and she can almost hear the chanting of the beings who made it. They must be beautiful. The fisher folk gather in the square in front of the old priest’s church. The old priest hasn’t been seen in some time. She hardly wonders what has happened to him, and can’t remember what he looked like or what he preached. She forgets the old life, because what of it is worth remembering? Though she notices the splash of red across the church door. It reminds her of her geraniums, and she always liked flowers. These days, her husband comes home smiling and rushes at her, arms outsretched to grab her up, to feel every inch of her, carry her to their cot and pin her there. She burns, answering him. It’s no longer work to seduce each other, and they rut like eels, writhing around one another. After wearing each other out, they fall asleep smiling, wake smiling, and they kiss deeply, wetly, before she sends him off to the boats. The ocean has become a joy instead of the torment it was. She can smell nothing now but salt and slime. She bathes sometimes in the old tub that has stood behind their shack for years, gathering debris. She cleaned it out, scrubbed it, filled it with water from the sea, and now soaks in it for hours. Her graying hair coils and snakes around her like the limbs of some leviathan. When she pulls at the strands, they come out, and she stares, studying them. Wraps them around her fingers and wrists, twining them with the twisted gold she wears. She’ll fall asleep like this, floating, suspended, dreaming of deep places and distant voices; then wake submerged, staring up through the distorted lens at a wavering world, gray and dimly lit, and hardly notice that she has not drowned. Once, she looks up through the warped glass of the water and sees the castaway above her, looking back, seeming to study her, taking in every inch of her naked body, curled up in the tub. She recalls that she should be embarrassed at the very least, mortified and blushing. She should hide herself. Ought to be angry and cry out for her husband. But she doesn’t. Though her skin is cool, her mouth clammy, her gratitude for him burns, and she would take his hand and draw him down with her, to show him how deep her faith runs. But he touches her face, strokes back what’s left of her hair, smiles like a father showing affection for a favorite daughter. And she thinks, he does love me, he loves us all.

They perform the rituals, make the sacrifices. They watch the little-used roads for signs of travelers, whom the innkeeper invites into his decrepit building with a hungry gaze and grasping hands. So eager, most guests are suspicious. Some listen to their instincts and leave, in which case they’ll be taken on the road leading out of the village. Some stay, though soon the keeper won’t have a room to offer that isn’t stained with blood. Her husband loses his thick brown hair, leaving a scalp like a whale’s hide. She still loves to rub her scaled hands over it, stroking him to a frenzy as he lays his now- toothless mouth against her neck for sucking kisses. His boneless arms fit so tightly around her, and her legs cling to him with a sinuous determination, like an octopus gripping its rocky mount. They lie in the salty bathtub together, and it feels like home. Their new priest preaches of a time when they will go to the sea. This is their reward, eternal life in the holy depths. No longer slaves to the sea, but masters of it. So he says. They gather, chanting, and the rituals make her feel like that first glimpse of gold did: overwhelmed, soaring over an abyss, the infinite spirals, so much greater and terrific than anything she had ever seen before. She has kept that gold band around her wrist, where it remains locked, her peeling gray flesh swelling in folds around it. There comes a time when they are gathered, chanting and writhing, performing their sacred rites of blood, when she isn’t sure anymore which of the gray-skinned, eel- headed men is her husband. If she calls out his name, none of them will answer, but she doesn’t call, because she doesn’t remember. They seem like such small things, names and husbands. Now, she only dreams of the time which must come soon—always, must come soon—when they will go to their reward, to dwell in the eternal kingdom in the darkest places under the ocean. She remembers one thing. Tiny, so small and inconsequential she has forgotten to forget. A day, a moment in a day, in her young and newly married life, before the future stretched unbreaking. She found a wooden box which she filled with dirt and mulch. She planted flowers, watered them, kept them alive for years, until she didn’t. Reds and greens and yellows, a memory of color that stings her mind like the cut of a knife. She flinches at the sting, hardly knows why. Instead, she turns again to the sound of chanting, which by now has become the sound of resolve. When she slips under the waves and lives forever more in a world of gray, she wonders if her resolve will break. Because even then, she’ll remember the warmth of the sun on her face, and the scent of the flowers.

© 2013 by Carrie Vaughn, LLC.

Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of the Kitty Norville series. The twelfth novel, Kitty in the Underworld, is due out in July 2013. She has also written young adult novels, Voices of Dragons and Steel, and the fantasy novels, Discord’s Apple and After the Golden Age. Her short fiction has appeared many times in Lightspeed and Realms of Fantasy magazine, and in a number of anthologies, such as Fast Ships, Black Sails and Warriors. She lives in Colorado with a fluffy attack dog. Learn more at carrievaughn.com. The H Word: Lovecraftian Horror W. H. Pugmire

Today’s mail brought the current issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland, which I ordered because S. T. Joshi wrote two articles for it. The issue amazed me, because none of the articles cover film adaptations of Lovecraft’s Works. Two articles (“Lovecraft’s Acolytes,” by Robert M. Price and “The New Mythos Writers,” by S. T. Joshi) discuss those writers who were influenced by his fiction and have written tales therein, from the time that Lovecraft was alive to the present day; and one article (“The Language of Lovecraft,” by Holly Interlandi) looks at Lovecraft’s prose style and sentence structure! The Lovecraft influence thrives today, as can be seen from such amazing anthologies as Lovecraft Unbound (edited by Ellen Datlow), Black Wings (aka Black Wings of Cthulhu, edited by S. T. Joshi), New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (edited by Paula Guran) and The Book of Cthulhu (edited by Ross E. Lockhart). When we think of Lovecraftian horror, or the Lovecraft Mythos (as it exists in Lovecraft’s works alone), we need to differentiate those stories from what has come to be called the Cthulhu Mythos, a name invented by August Derleth. Lovecraftian horror incorporates aspects of the Cthulhu Mythos (which oozed forth from Lovecraft’s influence), but Lovecraft’s horror fiction is much more than cosmic entities that filter to our planet and corrupt our dreams and sanity. Indeed, Datlow and Joshi, in their anthologies, requested that Cthulhu Mythos tropes not be a feature of submitted stories. Black Wings, for this reason, has a carefully chosen subtitle: “New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror.” The word “new” is as significant as the word “Lovecraftian.” It seems astonishing to realize that this sub-genre came into being in the distant 1920s, around the time when radio was becoming a new entertainment medium. As he discovered himself as a writer, Lovecraft was touched by many influences. Poe was paramount; Dunsany and the Decadents tugged his interest for a moment; and the burgeoning new genre that has come to be known as science fiction began to color Lovecraft’s imagination, perhaps in part because he was beginning to contemplate writing for the new SF pulp magazines due to sudden and repeated rejections of tales submitted to his regular publication outlet, Weird Tales. Both “At the Mountains of Madness” and “The Shadow out of Time” were initially published in science fiction pulp zines (submitted to those zines not by HPL but by friends to whom he had loaned copies of his stories). One of the fannish criticisms aimed at Datlow’s excellent Lovecraft Unbound is, “These stories ain’t Lovecraftian!” So what is Lovecraftian horror? Some of those who deride this sub-genre may evoke a sentiment voiced in “The Dunwich Horror”: “As a foulness shall ye know Them.” This was actually the opinion of Joshi until, as an editor hunting for new books to be published by Hippocampus Press and other houses, he discovered that Cthulhu Mythos books sell rather well. Joshi asks this very question in his introduction to Black Wings II: “What defines a ‘Lovecraftian’ story? This seemingly simple question is in fact full of ambiguities, perplexities, and paradoxes, for the term could encompass everything from the most slavish of pastiches that seek (usually unsuccessfully) to mimic Lovecraft’s dense and flamboyant prose . . .” The first and foremost acolyte to attempt this nameless replication of Lovecraft’s style was August Derleth, but he did it for a very specific reason. Derleth fell under the shadow of Lovecraft while the older writer still lived, and he sent HPL his early attempts at writing Lovecraftian horror. Whatever may be said about Derleth’s success as a Mythos writer, his initial keen sincerity cannot be doubted. He loved H. P. Lovecraft. He spent much of his own money establishing, with Donald Wandrei, Arkham House, publishers with the sole intent of preserving the weird fiction and poetry of Lovecraft in handsome hardcover editions. In 1943, Derleth and Wandrei published their second Lovecraft omnibus, Beyond the Wall of Sleep, in which they published “The Commonplace Book,” consisting of entries that Lovecraft recorded of dreams and suggestions for stories. These entries, plus the discovery of notes for a story that Derleth eventually wrote as “The Survivor,” and the two chunks of text that helped to formulate the novel The Lurker at the Threshold, inspired Derleth to begin writing what are called the “posthumous collaborations,” which were published under the dual byline of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth. Part of Derleth’s approach in the writing of these things was to try and mimic absolutely the prose style of Lovecraft, which he proclaimed wasn’t easy, adding, “I should know,” as a way of suggesting that he thought he had succeeded, which in fact he had not. Many reviewers of Lurker found that it was far less successful than anything else they had read from the pen of Lovecraft. One gent wrote that it was obvious that the first two-thirds of the novel were the work of Lovecraft and the final third the writing of Derleth. The novel is often published in paperback with just Lovecraft’s name on the cover, when in fact he had nothing to do with this book that was written after his death. These posthumous collaborations have long been abused by Lovecraft scholars who see them, for various reasons, as a criminal act. I decided to read the first collection of these stories, The Survivor and Others, and do a story-by-story commentary on YouTube; and what I found was that these stories, although not in any way as fine or as original as Lovecraft’s own work, weren’t bad at all, and that some few of them (especially “The Survivor”) were genuinely Lovecraftian in tone and substance. I have become an obsessed writer of Lovecraft horror; it has become my chosen profession. Part of the method of writing this kind of story is going back and reading Lovecraft’s original tales, becoming intimate with his work, and letting those stories and poems sink into one’s being. Doing this has shewn me that the Works of H. P. Lovecraft have depths of originality and power that may constantly be culled for inspiration in writing one’s own fiction. It is fruitless to try and “write like Lovecraft,” and why would anyone want to do something so boring anyway? We pay homage to the Gentleman from Providence by writing stories that evoke his genius without ripping off his ideas, however keenly our tales may conjoined to HPL’s originals. We can, while “being Lovecraftian,” write horror fiction that remains audaciously our own. It’s fucking rad.

We at Nightmare Magazine like discussions. Please use the comments feature to give us your thoughts on whether the H brand is an albatross or worth holding on to. Print may be dead, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be old school and have a good, old-fashioned letters page.

W. H. Pugmire has been writing Lovecraftian weird fiction since the early 1970s, determined to shew that one can write in the Lovecraft tradition and still remain original and audacious. His many books include The Tangled Muse, Some Unknown Gulf of Night, The Fungal Stain and Other Dreams, and Gathered Dust and Others. 2013 will see the publication of two new hardcover collections, Encounters with Enoch Coffin (Dark Regions Press, written in collaboration with Jeffrey Thomas) and Bohemians of Sesqua Valley (Arcane Wisdom Press). Willy also has many tales in numerous forthcoming anthologies. Artist Gallery: Soufiane Idrassi

Artist Spotlight: Soufiane Idrassi Julia Sevin

Soufiane Idrassi is a twenty-two-year-old freelance digital artist from Meknes, Morocco. Four years ago, Soufiane began teaching himself Adobe Photoshop—still his weapon of choice for his creations—and has become expert enough that his technique was explored in the January 2013 issue of Advanced Photoshop Magazine. He is currently expanding into 3D character creation and 2D concept art with his startup company, CG Pro Technology.

Can you tell us a little about the attitude toward horror and horror art in your area of Morocco? Is your community conservative or progressive about it? Has your work been well-received locally or has the Internet made this a private endeavor?

Design in general is not advanced in my country. As for horror art, it’s not something that attracts people, mainly because this is an Islamic country. Most of the new generation likes this kind of art but it’s preferable to share it with other artists through online portfolios and social networks for more professional feedback.

You’re a freelance artist. How did you get your start? In what medium?

Before I heard of freelancing or Photoshop, I did a lot of things. First I started with just traditional mediums; then I started learning pencil techniques and all that fine art stuff. When I became good at that I wanted to do my own drawing, not just copying, so I started drawing anime characters. But then people started criticizing. “This is childish,” “why draw cartoons at your age,” etc. Anyway, I didn’t care so I continued learning how to draw anime characters. In my senior year of high school, I met my best friend Issam Er-Raya. He exposed me to a lot of thing that I didn’t know about, like graffiti and street art, and then he showed me Photoshop and I was like, what the hell? You can do anything with this! So I started learning from him the basics and tools. I graduated high school and continued learning and practicing for four years, and then I decided that this was what I want to do for living. I started posting my work on different websites and next thing you know I’m on the cover of Advanced Photoshop Magazine.

Why do you create? And why create this sort of work?

I create because this is my passion. I love digital art. It’s like a drug to me. Why this sort of work? Well, I’m a positive guy, always got a smile on my face, so all the negativity I have goes through my art.

For these compositions, do you do any of your own photography?

I wish! For now I only download stocks. However, I have a couple of friends who are photographers, so they supply me with photos once in a while, but I hope in the future I’ll get the materials to make my own component images.

What are you working on now?

I’m currently working with my teammate Salim Ljabli, a talented freelance automotive artist, on some projects to build our portfolio. Our team is called CG Pro Technology and we will be specialized in high resolution modeling for films, cinematic, and videogames; rendering; texturing; lighting; shading; and concept art. Our main goal is to produce digital assets to the highest possible standards required by the game industry.

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

In the 1980s, as horror exploded in popularity and supermarket paperback racks were crammed with books that featured glowing eyes and demonic children, critics and fans alike often talked about the genre’s three primary practitioners: Stephen King, Peter Straub, and Robert McCammon. A one-time journalist who grew up in the south during the era of civil rights activism, McCammon produced a string of popular novels beginning with Baal in 1978; he explored ancient cults next with Bethany’s Sin (1980), vampires with They Thirst (1981), the legacy of Poe’s most famous family with Usher’s Passing (1984), a post-apocalyptic world in Swan Song, and werewolves in The Wolf’s Hour (1989). He took horror seriously enough that in 1985 he co- founded (with Joe and Karen Lansdale) the Horror Writers of America (later the Horror Writers Association), and he was one of the first recipients of the organization’s Bram Stoker Award (he won both the first short fiction award for his story “The Deep End” and the first novel trophy for Swan Song); later, he edited HWA’s first anthology, Under the Fang. In 1991, he released what many consider his best book—the coming-of-age tale A Boy’s Life—and yet that book almost became (ironically) his own swan song to horror fiction. That same year, McCammon wrote a letter to his fans (it appeared in his newsletter) in which he expressed his disillusionment with horror (“a sense of wonder and beauty has been drained from our field”), and he left the genre behind to focus on historical fiction. In 2002, he published Speaks the Nightbird, the first of his historical detective novels focusing on the character Matthew Corbett; he has since published three more Matthew Corbett books, and one stand-alone rock-and-roll novel, The Five. However, McCammon’s next release, I Travel by Night (released in May by Subterranean) seemed to promise a return to horror, as it follows a vampire protagonist. McCammon was recently awarded the HWA’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and he currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama.

As a kid, you wrote ghost stories on an old Royal typewriter. What were your inspirations?

My inspirations were books about supposedly true hauntings and the fact that there was a “haunted house” in my neighborhood . . . right next door, as a matter of fact. But I actually was a big fan of science fiction, and I was doing those kind of stories too, as well as “war stories” starring kids in my classes. Those made me fairly popular because everybody either wanted to survive or die as heroes, and I had their fates in my hands.

You’ve written several short stories about Halloween, your novels have referenced characters with names like “The Pumpkin Man” (Usher’s Passing), and academic Marian Carcache has remarked on the use of masks in your work. Was Halloween a major day for you as a child?

Absolutely it was. It was a great day. I always enjoyed wearing masks and “changing my identity,” so to speak. It was a sad day when my daughter decided she was too old for Halloween and wanted to hang out with her friends instead of going trick-or-treating.

You were growing up in Birmingham at a time when it was one of the centers of the civil rights movement. That plays an obvious part in Boy’s Life, but did it affect your writing in other ways? Well, I saw a lot of the actual violence of the civil rights movement on TV, and I suppose that sank in. There was a feeling of violence and danger in those days in Birmingham . . . I know that has affected my writing, for sure.

In their review of the 2011 re-release of your first novel Baal, Publisher’s Weekly complimented the book’s “fluid prose and vivid descriptions.” Before Baal, you’d worked mainly as a journalist—was writing a novel difficult, or liberating?

It was a necessity. I had a dead end job at a newspaper and I knew if I didn’t at least try to write a novel, I might be stuck on the copy desk for the rest of my life. It’s interesting to me that when the book first came out, it didn’t get such a good review. But yes . . . it was liberating because it freed me from that dead end job at the newspaper . . . which now is gone, and the job of copy editor is pretty much a thing of the past, as well.

In the past, you’ve noted that you were unhappy with the quality of the writing in your first four (Baal, Bethany’s Sin, The Night Boat, and They Thirst), but you’ve recently allowed Subterranean to reissue them. What changed your mind? And were you tempted to indulge in any rewriting?

I was convinced that some readers wanted a complete collection of my work. I was not tempted to indulge in rewriting, because I might have rewritten the entire books. It’s just that I feel like my ability has moved on so far from where I began . . . but I do believe that some readers want to complete their collection of my work, and reading back over those books I find they’re not as poorly written as I recall them to be, so . . . there you go.

Your 1984 novel Usher’s Passing followed up the Usher family created by Edgar Allan Poe, and even briefly included Poe as a character, but the style and many of the novel’s plot points—urban legends, greed —were distinctly your own. How did the idea for that book come about—did it begin as homage?

No, I just had the idea and the curiosity about what had happened to the Usher family over the years. I wanted to complete the family history. That began as every book I write begins . . . as a book I want to read, and I’m going to have to write it to be able to read it. Your short story “Nightcrawlers” was adapted for the New Twilight Zone in 1985, directed by William Friedkin, and is now generally considered to be that series’ finest episode. Were you pleased with the adaptation?

Yes, Friedkin did a great job. I was very proud of that episode.

Your work is full of memorable characters—Swan in Swan Song, Cory in Boy’s Life, and of course Matthew Corbett in the recent historical detective novels, just to name a few. When you plan a book, do you start with the characters?

No, I start with a basic idea and go from there. Again, it has to be a book I want to read. I don’t work with an outline, so the characters define themselves as the story goes on. The only time I tried to work with an outline I got bored and gave the project up because I’d already read the book! It was like the Cliff’s Notes version . . . so I just write on faith that everything will work out, though I do have what I call “signpost scenes” that keep me going in what I believe—or hope—is the right direction. You’ve published about thirty short stories, many of which were collected in Blue World (1990). Do you enjoy writing short fiction as much as novels?

I do, I just have more ideas for novels than I do for short fiction.

In 1991, you wrote, “The field of horror writing has changed dramatically since the mid-to-late-‘70s. At that time, horror writing was still influenced by the classics of the literature. I don’t find that to be true anymore.” Do you think the genre has changed in the twenty years since you wrote that? Do you still read horror?

As an answer to both questions above, I do still read horror fiction but not as much as I used to, and my comment from 1991 was based on my belief at the time that horror fiction was becoming too gory and sadistic for my taste.

“The Enigmatic Emperors of Crime” is a short article you recently wrote about your affection for villains, including Fu Manchu and Fantômas. Do you read a lot of pulp fiction?

I read a lot of what intrigues me and what I think I will enjoy, but I don’t limit that to one area. My “Enigmatic Emperors of Crime” article basically talked about the power of the villain in all fiction.

The label “Southern Gothic” has occasionally been applied to your work, including Boy’s Life. Do you consider anything you’ve written to be Southern Gothic?

I think there are elements of what might be considered “Southern Gothic” in Usher’s Passing, Mystery Walk and Gone South as well. I don’t set out to do this, it just happens.

You returned from retirement with Speaks the Nightbird, the first of your historical Matthew Corbett novels, and you’ve mentioned plans for ten novels in this series—are they already outlined?

I don’t have all of them planned—and certainly none are outlined, because I don’t work that way—but I know where the series is going. I know how it will end and I know the last line of the final book.

You’ve talked about how much difficulty you’ve had finding a publisher for your historical novels, because it’s not what they expect from you. Did you ever consider a pen name for those books?

I had an agent once who told me publishers didn’t want anything but horror from me, and when I suggested using a pen name he said that wouldn’t work because then my fans couldn’t find me. I then retreated again to my cave.

Technology has changed so much since you began to publish and, later, encounter difficulties with publishers. Does the idea of self-publishing appeal at all to you?

Self-publishing? Well, I’m not sure about that but certainly the publishing world has changed and is still changing. Where it will go from here is anyone’s guess, and I surely don’t want to make one. I’ve heard you speak about The Village, your historical novel about a Russian theater troupe in World War II, and I thought it sounded fantastic, but your website states that it will “never be published”— can you talk about that?

No, I really can’t. That is a painful episode in my own personal history.

Given your journalism background and your obvious affection for research, have you ever considered writing a nonfiction book?

Hm . . . maybe, someday, if I have time.

Is your new book I Travel by Night (released this month by Subterranean) a conscious return to horror fiction?

I’ve always said I write what I want to read, so if it’s not there to be read I have to create it. I don’t think of it as “horror fiction” but as something I created because I wanted to read the story. The “genre” thing has always been a thorny issue for me. I mean . . . really . . . what is “horror fiction”? What is its point? What does it say? Does it exist to convey a meaning or a “truth” or is it simply to provoke a gross- out? There are so many varieties and styles of “horror fiction,” that it’s hard to put the genre in a box. So . . . again, I always write what I want to read.

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. Forthcoming in 2013 are the novellas Summer’s End and Smog, and the novel Malediction. A lifelong Californian, she lives in North Hollywood, and can be found online at www.lisamorton.com. Author Spotlight: Lynda Rucker Lisa Nohealani Morton

Can you tell us about the background of “The House on Cobb Street”? What sparked you to write this story?

The story came from a few different places. One was an actual hypnagogic hallucination I had—which I am normally not prone to. I “woke up” but was frozen and I could hear creepy little girls whispering behind me, and could picture them as well. I wrote that section of the story down the following day and the first few pages of the story quickly formed around it, including the initial clippings that helped tell the story. At some point, prior to that, I had also come up with the title; I’d wanted to write a story set in Athens, Georgia, for a long time, and I once lived on the real Cobb Street, so all the elements fell together after that.

Everyone in the story seems to have a different theory about exactly what’s going on with the house. Are any of them right? That’s for the reader to decide! I never tell the reader what to think outside of the story itself.

Vivian’s fatalism about the house gives the story a sense of a slow, inevitable march towards doom (and neatly sidesteps the “Don’t go in the basement!” problem, as Vivian herself muses). Would you say that this sense of inevitability is a common feature in your work in horror? Is it something you’re attracted to yourself as a reader?

I think that it is a feature of a certain type of horror, and it is often a feature of the horror that I write. In a way, I suppose, it sort of violates a central principle of storytelling in which the protagonist needs to keep making an effort to solve the problem—the active protagonist, if you will. My protagonists often, though not always, tend to be more doomed than active. This is actually a really interesting question, and I’m going to have to think about it some more; I have a sense that if the protagonist is really active, the story sometimes becomes something other than horror, but I’m not sure about that! You’ve got a short story collection coming out soon. Care to tell us a bit of what readers can expect from it?

It’s been pushed ahead to June because I am trying to finish a couple of original stories to include in it. It’s called The Moon Will Look Strange and will include my first eight published stories—that means stories from The Third Alternative and Supernatural Tales as well as a little journal Len Maynard and Mick Sims published for a while called Darkness Rising. It’s published by Karōshi Books, which is a new imprint of Noose & Gibbet Publishing run by Johnny Mains in the UK. Johnny runs Karōshi along with Peter Mark May of Hersham Horror and Cathy Hurren. I’m really excited to have a lovely introduction from Steve Rasnic Tem, whose work influenced me as an aspiring writer.

What are you working on now?

Mostly, I’m presently working on a supernatural novel about the mystery surrounding a forgotten horror writer from the Golden Age of pulps, a cursed book, and a doomsday cult. What’s your favorite haunted house story?

Definitely The Haunting of Hill House; it’s one of my favorite books of all time, period. At shorter lengths, I love Oliver Onions’ “The Beckoning Fair One” and Kelly Link’s “The Specialist’s Hat.”

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: Laird Barron Seamus Bayne

What do you think is under the tarp, and does its ability to kill have a ritual significance to the timing of the later events in the story?

In a horror story, there’s always the choice to reveal the monster, or monstrous, or leave it to the imagination. I chose the latter as one’s imagination will often supply a far more dire vision than a cold description on paper. If nothing else, whatever is under the tarp signifies the narrator’s connection, and obeisance, to a dread and awful power.

The main character seems somewhat sympathetic to the plight of humanity, its role in their development, and eventual end. Why?

The narrator feels a connection to humanity because he, or it, has reincarnated into a facsimile of a man. Of course, the being is irredeemably Other, and it experiences melancholia that spans eons. Water seems to factor heavily in the role of the main character. Is this because of the belief that all life springs from the sea?

Water is a colossal force, the veil of mystery upon our world. It is what we seek when we seek life elsewhere in the universe.

When the creature next rises, what will the world look like? What other beings might it guide?

I’m not prepared to speculate on that. The implication is certainly unpleasant for humanity, for all life on the planet.

What is the significance of it being the mouth of God?

I originally conceived the idea in my youth when trying to wrap my mind around Jesus as a mortal, yet also the Son of God. It occurred to me that what was being described was a human who’d been designed or repurposed to act as a sensor for an outside agency. I just combined that with a Lovecraftian view of the universe and added water. What else do you have in the works that might interest our readers?

My latest collection, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, should be available sometime in 2013. I’m working on a crime novel and writing a lot of stories for various anthologies. An Alaska-themed collection is in the works.

Seamus Bayne got his start writing during the ‘90s working in the roleplaying game industry. In 2010, he attended the Viable Paradise writer’s workshop. Seamus is the co-founder and host of the Paradise Lost writing retreat held annually in Texas. You can learn more about him, and his writing at www.seamusbayne.net. Author Spotlight: Joe Lansdale Erika Holt

Where did the idea for “The God of the Razor” come from?

I don’t know exactly, but it came to me in the late seventies, and in 1980 I began to write The Nightrunners. I had finished Act of Love that year, as well as Dead in the West, and neither had found a home yet, and I started this one. I began to imagine the character and I don’t know exactly where it came from. A multitude of sources. Perhaps I wrote something about it earlier, but at this point I no longer remember.

The characters in this story seem to have little or no say over their fates. Could Richards have done anything differently to change the outcome?

That’s the noir influence, about how a character gets on the railway and can’t stop the train. But, I think Richards might have made different choices, and maybe they would have helped, and maybe not. But it seemed he was pretty much on one of those noir trains, only when it went off the rails it tumbled down into something dark and strange. I always felt the people “The God of The Razor” appealed to were standing by, ready and willing, at least on some level, to board that train.

What drives the God? Does he have any metaphorical significance?

I think he has a lot of metaphorical significance, and some of it is about choice. You can choose to ride the train, and once on it seems impossible to get off, or you can turn away from the depot. But the God also represents the darker desires of humanity, a kind of built in self- destruct. From what I can tell, we don’t learn much from history, or at least we seldom learn.

You write in many different genres, but what is it about horror, in particular, that interests you?

I love horror for the tone and the mood, but I really don’t like it any better than the other things I write. It appeals to me on a gut level, but I also love crime, which is a close cousin. I’m really fond of historical and Western- influenced fiction, but if I had to write just one thing I’d go crazy. I need the variety.

Can you tell us about your process? Do you write a certain number of hours or words per day? Work on multiple projects at once?

I sometimes work on multiple projects, more frequently lately, but mostly one thing until it’s done, or at least nearly done, before I start another. I write in the mornings, usually it takes about three hours, but I go by pages. I try to do three to five pages a day and seldom do less, the exception being on the first few days I start a novel, and I may not do as much then until I get the handle on the characters and the voice. I don’t think much about the plot, as that develops out of the tone and the character, and sometimes a singular situation. As I start to write I may get more pages naturally, and often do. I may, on rare occasions, work in the afternoon or at night. I often find when I work the other shifts, it’s usually on something different than the main project. I write like this five to seven days a week. I take a day off now and then, but it’s not unusual for me to work on Christmas or Thanksgiving morning, my birthday, what have you. I get through in a short time, the three hours, acquire the three to five pages, and I’m off to do whatever. Rarely do I take a lot of time off. Lately, I’m in one of those rare circumstances where I have taken quite a bit of time off after three years of writing an unnatural amount of material. But, this week I started a new novel, which at this point I’m still playing with, to see if it’s really there, or it’s a false dream.

What are you working on now?

Well, I pretty much answered that question. A novel. But I have a few small projects in the background, including a novella that I plan on writing once I get the novel going well. But I don’t talk about what I’m writing at this stage. It’s still taking shape.

Erika Holt lives in the cold, white North (i.e. Calgary, Canada), where she writes and edits speculative fiction. Her stories appear in Shelter of Daylight issue six, Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead, and Tesseracts Fifteen: A Case of Quite Curious Tales. She has co-edited two anthologies: Rigor Amortis, about sexy, amorous zombies, and Broken Time Blues, featuring 1920s alien burlesque dancers and bootlegging chickens. Author Spotlight: Carrie Vaughn E.C. Myers

I loved how this story snuck up on me with a building sense of horror, as thrilling as it is disturbing. On your website, you describe “Fishwife” as, “a damp foray into Lovecraftian horror,” but it also has roots in fairy tales. Can you talk about what suggested this story to you and how it evolved with those two influences in mind?

The story owes pretty much its entire existence to the Stuart Gordon film Dagon. While watching it, I felt like I finally got what Lovecraftian fiction was all about, a feeling I hadn’t gotten from any other story, or even any of Gordon’s other Lovecraft-inspired films. It really is horrifying, it never quite crosses that line into gross or silly, and the resulting madness the main characters fall into feels genuine rather than contrived. I just loved it. But of course, given my own quirks, I wasn’t interested in the main characters’ story, I was interested in the villagers, and how they got to where they are from what they had been before. I went back to the original Lovecraft story “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” folded that background into the story, and there we are. If there’s a fairy tale influence, it has to do with Lovecraft’s own roots in fairy tale tropes, the dangers of magic and witchcraft, the psychology of the liminal, and so on.

You’ve drawn from fairy tales, mythology, and various genres before, most notably in your novel Discord’s Apple. What are the challenges of referencing such familiar source material? What draws you to incorporating and confronting fairy tales and myths in your work?

Folklore and myths are a universal language in some ways. They’re primal. They’re always being revisited and reworked for the current culture. They have to do with birth, death, growing up, the nature of the world. The challenge is—you have to take a stand. Most fairy tales and myths can be interpreted many different ways, and if you’re going to be writing about them you have to decide what they mean, for yourself and for the story, and I think the stories that come out of them have to have conviction. A confidence that the story really is true and universal. They can’t just be pastiches, they have to be interpretations. What’s your favorite fairy tale or myth? How about your favorite Lovecraft story?

I like the stories involving animals and communication —“The White Snake,” “The Golden Bird,” “The Goose Girl”—where the hero accidentally gains the power of speech of with animals and thereby accesses great wisdom, or the hero is helped along in his or her quest by a talking fox, horse, etc. I haven’t written much inspired by these stories, but they were always my favorite to read when I was young. I don’t think I have a favorite Lovecraft story. As I mentioned, I just never got into his work, except in the ways it’s inspired other writers and artists. For example, the Lovecraft episode of The Real Ghostbusters cartoon in which Egon observes that Cthulhu makes Gozer look like Little Mary Sunshine. I will put in a plug for an earlier author who inspired Lovecraft—Arthur Machen, whose work is truly weird, liminal, disturbing, and wonderful. I love his stuff.

Please tell us a little about your writing process, in general and for this story in particular. Did you do any special research for it? Did anything in the story surprise you as you wrote it? Once I have the idea—writing a story about the villagers from “The Shadows over Innsmouth,” for example—I let it cook for a little while. Then I’ll brainstorm. For a short story, I’ll often just start writing scenes, setting, and atmosphere, to try to get a handle on where I want it go. Pretty quickly I’ll figure out an ending, where I want to the story to go, and that will give me a map on what the rest of the story needs to look like. I’ll usually do two to three drafts on a short story. My only research for it was reading the original Lovecraft story and a bit of Googling to look at fishing tools. I don’t know that I get surprised, per se, since the whole writing process is about discovery. I’m expecting to find and learn things about the story. I do get a rush when it all comes together better than I expected, like with “Fishwife.” I joked with my friends while watching the movie that I was going to write a story, and those jokes don’t always bear fruit. I’m glad it did this time.

You’re a very prolific and versatile writer, producing short fiction and novels for adults and teens in many different genres. Is there any type of story you haven’t written yet that you’d like to try?

I’ve written just about every genre at the short story length, but I definitely would like to write novel-length traditional fantasy and space opera, which I haven’t done yet. Also, romance is a weak spot in my storytelling and I’d like to do a bit more of that—writing about relationships, rather than the straightforward adventure stories I usually do.

What are you working on now? What published work can readers expect to see from you soon?

Two Kitty books are being published this year—Kitty Rocks the House in March and Kitty in the Underworld in July. After that, my next released book is likely to be the sequel to my superhero novel—Dreams of the Golden Age. As usual, I have a bunch of short stories that will be trickling out over the next year. The novel I’m working on now is the next one in the Kitty series, that’s actually from the point of view of a secondary character, Cormac. It’s an exciting change of pace.

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

Coming up in July, in Nightmare . . . We have original fiction from Anaea Lay (“They Called Him Monster”) and Brit Mandelo (“And Yet, Her Eyes”), along with reprints by Maria Dahvana Headley (“The Krakatoan”) and Ramsey Campbell (“The Companion”). We’ll also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with all of our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Nightmare. Thanks for reading!