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Home , Alyssa Wong, Angela Slatter, Arcana (convention), Dale Bailey, John Joseph Adams, John Shirley

TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 43, April 2016

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, April 2016

FICTION Reaper’s Rose Ian Whates ’s Door Café Kaaron Warren The Girl Who Escaped From Hell Rahul Kanakia The Grave P.D. Cacek

NONFICTION The H Word: The Monstrous Intimacy of Poetry in Horror Evan J. Peterson Artist Showcase: Yana Moskaluk Marina J. Lostetter Interview: David J. Schow Lisa Morton

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Ian Whates Kaaron Warren Rahul Kanakia P.D. Cacek MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Stay Connected Subscriptions and Ebooks About the Nightmare Team Also Edited by

© 2016 Nightmare Magazine Cover by Yana Moskaluk www.nightmare-magazine.com FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, April 2016 John Joseph Adams | 750 words

Welcome to issue forty-three of Nightmare! This month, we have original fiction from Ian Whates (“Reaper’s Rose”) and Rahul Kanakia (“The Girl Who Escaped From Hell”), along with reprints by Kaaron Warren (“Death’s Door Cafe”) and P.D. Cacek (“The Grave”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview with author David J. Schow.

Nebula Award Nominations ICYMI last month, awards season is officially upon us, and it looks like 2015 was a terrific year for our publications. The first of the major awards have announced their lists of finalists for last year’s work, and we’re pleased to announce that “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” by Alyssa (Nightmare, Oct. 2015) is a finalist for the Award this year! Over at Lightspeed, “Madeleine” by Amal El-Mohtar (Lightspeed, June 2015) and “And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead” by Brooke Bolander (Lightspeed, Feb. 2015) have been named finalists. This marks Nightmare’s very first nomination. Congrats to Alyssa (and Amal and Brooke) and to all of the other Nebula nominees! You can find the full slate of nominees at sfwa.org. The Nebulas will be presented at the 2016 Nebula Awards Conference, held this year in Chicago, Illinois, May 12–15.

Stoker Nominations In other awards news, Nightmare had two stories—the aforementioned “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” by Alyssa Wong and “Snow” by —on the preliminary Stoker Awards ballot for best Short Fiction (plus Seanan McGuire’s story, “Resistance,” from my anthology The End Has Come, made it in the Long Fiction category), and we’re pleased to report that Alyssa Wong’s story made the final ballot! That marks Nightmare’s (and Alyssa’s) first Stoker Award nomination. So big congrats to Alyssa, and also to Dale and Seanan for nearly making it. You can find the full slate of what made the final ballot at horror.org. The Stokers will be presented at StokerCon 2016, which is being held in Las Vegas, Nevada, May 12–15.

Locus Awards Voting And last but not least, the Locus Awards are still open for voting [bit.ly/locus2016]. Several stories from Lightspeed, Nightmare, and my anthologies made the recommended reading list, though the has a write-in ballot, so you can also disregard the recommendations and vote for whatever you like instead. Voting closes April 15, 2016.

Best-of-the-Year Selections As previously noted, several stories from Lightspeed, Nightmare, the Destroy special issues, and my anthologies have also been selected for reprint in several best-of-the-year volumes. However, we initially somehow managed to leave a couple stories off our big list, so here is the list again, now with everything included:

“Time Bomb Time” by C.C. Finlay (Lightspeed | Horton) “And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead” by Brooke Bolander (Lightspeed | Horton) “ of Home” by Sam J. Miller (Lightspeed | Strahan) “The Book Club” by Nike Sulway (Lightspeed | Horton, Strahan) “The Smog Society” by Chen Qiufan, translated by and Carmen Yiling Yan (Lightspeed | Clarke) “Violation of the TrueNet Security Act” by Taiyo Fujii, translated by Jim Hubbert (Lightspeed | Clarke) “The Astrakhan, the Homberg, and the Red Red Coal” by Chaz Brenchley (Lightspeed | Dozois, Horton) “Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World” by Caroline M. Yoachim (Lightspeed | Clarke) “Snow” by Dale Bailey (Nightmare | Datlow, Guran) “Descent” by Carmen Maria Machado (Nightmare | Datlow) “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” by Alyssa Wong (Nightmare | Strahan) “The Lily and the Horn” by Catherynne M. Valente ( | Guran, Strahan) “Kaiju ®: ‘So Various, So Beautiful, So New’” by Kai Ashante Wilson (Fantasy | Guran, Strahan) “Bannerless” by (The End Has Come | Clarke, Dozois) “The Gods Have Not Died in Vain” by Ken Liu (The End Has Come | Clarke) “Blood, Ash, Braids” by Genevieve Valentine (Operation Arcana | Strahan) “The Graphology of Hemmorhage” by Yoon Ha Lee (Operation Arcana | Horton) “1Up” by Holly Black (Press Start to Play | Guran)

John Joseph Adams Books: New Releases + Acquisitions And finally, one last bit of news: John Joseph Adams Books’ first three releases are now available in bookstores. Our first release, Beacon 23 by , came out in February, and the final two titles of our “pre-launch” season come out in March: Hugh Howey’s Shift and Dust, were released on March 22. They’re volumes 2 and 3 of Hugh’s bestselling Silo series (which began with the blockbuster Wool). You can read an excerpt of Shift in Lightspeed’s March issue. In a related development, I also acquired my first original title for the line: Bannerless, by Carrie Vaughn. It takes place in the same world as her Hugo-nominated story “Amaryllis,” which appeared in the very first issue of Lightspeed. Also more directly-related is her 2015 story “Bannerless” from my anthology The End Has Come (which you can also read online at bit.ly/bannerless). In the official release, we described it as: “a novel in which an investigator must discover the truth behind a mysterious death in a world where small communities struggle to maintain a ravaged civilization decades after environmental and economic collapse.” It’s a two-book deal, with publication of the first slated for Spring 2017.

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It’s another great month for nightmares, so thanks for reading!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Nightmare, is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, a new SF/Fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American & Fantasy, as well as the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, including The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent projects include: Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Operation Arcana, Loosed Upon the World, Wastelands 2, Press Start to Play, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated nine times) and is a seven-time finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams. FICTION Reaper’s Rose Ian Whates | 2169 words

Unpleasant? No, I wouldn’t say that. In fact, quite the opposite. You know the smell of pot? Well of course you do, you’re a policeman . . . No, I didn’t mean anything by that. It’s just that in your line of work you’re bound to have come across it, that’s all. What I’m trying to say is that this smells a bit like pot but without that horrible sweatiness; you know, it has a sort of oily, herbal smell, less acrid and a lot more floral and, well, nicer than pot. Sorry, I know I’m doing a terrible job of describing this, but I don’t know what else to say. Really, it’s not like anything else I’ve ever smelt. Yes, pretty much all my life. Well, near as I can recall. The first time, I thought someone had walked past me wearing expensive perfume, the most wonderful perfume in the world. I remember looking around, trying to work out who was responsible, whether she was in front of me or behind. I was desperate not to let her get away without at least seeing who was wearing such a gorgeous scent. She had to be beautiful. Only a beautiful woman could wear perfume like this. But the platform was crowded and everyone was in a hurry and I couldn’t even decide which direction to look in. And then, of course, it happened. That’s right. Moorgate, in London. The time was 8:38 am. I can say that because I remember looking up at the station clock and thinking that the train had come in three minutes late. Funny the things that stay with you, the little things; I suppose because then you don’t have to dwell on the bigger ones. Yes, I was thirteen, we all were. We travelled in to school together every morning, the five of us, on the same train. Tim and me were the first to get on, then Mick would join us two stops later and finally Alan and John at the next. You know the worst part, what I’ve always been a little ashamed of? Immediately afterwards, all I could think about was whether the woman wearing the perfume had survived. Not my friends. Not the people I saw every day and hung out with, but this woman I’d never met, never even seen, only smelled—someone I’m now pretty certain didn’t even exist. I’ve often thought about that, about what a heartless prick I must have been as a kid. No, there was no warning, none at all. Apart from the smell, of course, but I didn’t know what it was then. Everything happened so quickly. Don’t believe all this malarkey about time stretching and things happening in slow motion, about people’s lives flashing before their eyes. There was none of that, not for me. Just this violent bang, incredibly loud, startlingly loud, and then a shrieking noise that set my teeth on edge—like claws running down a blackboard or a thousand cats yowling inside a metal drum. At first, no one realised what it was; we didn’t know about the derailment, only that something was wrong. My immediate thought was a bomb, that terrorists had struck—not ISIS or Al- Qaeda, not back then, it was the IRA we were all worried about. Everyone froze for a split second, and then went from immobile shock to animated panic in the space of a heartbeat. People started running, shoving. I lost sight of the others, all except for John. I remember seeing him just before the carriage beside us leapt into the air, back end first, and came crashing down on top of us. I couldn’t move, couldn’t get out. There were people lying on me, lots of people, and they weren’t moving. It was claustrophobic and my ears were ringing. There was screaming and somebody was crying, but it all seemed distant, muffled, like the sound of a television in the next room when the door’s shut. I pushed and kicked and yelled, trying to break free, and eventually I did, through the bodies and the wreckage and the shattered glass. Someone helped me to my feet, a woman in a cream jacket with blood down the left arm. I never did find out her name. A battlefield, that’s the only thing I can compare it to, a scene from the blitz in an old war movie, you know, after the air raid. Bodies, lots of bodies, and people standing there, just looking stunned. Wreckage from two trains, a collapsed wall, and smoke and lots of dust—I didn’t see any fire, though I read afterwards that there had been . . . No, it doesn’t work like that. The smell had gone. I only smell it immediately before the deaths, never afterwards. Very lucky, yeah—not a scratch. Three of my best friends dead and Tim hospitalised for a month, and there was me with a dirty shirt and ringing in my ears. Maybe. I mean, I always think of Moorgate as being the first time because that’s the first instance I can be certain of, but even then it seemed familiar, as if I’d smelt it somewhere before . . . I didn’t have a name for it then, not until after the second time, at Duxford. Yes, Duxford, the Air Show. My Aunt Anne took me and my cousin, Robert. She’d made sausage rolls and boiled eggs. I’ve never eaten so many eggs. I remember it was a sunny day, really warm, and the sky was clear. We stood watching these old World War II fighters enact a mock duel, the growl of their engines drifting down to us from above, when suddenly there was that smell again, that rich, evocative smell. This time it was different from Moorgate because I could see what was happening as it happened, not just piece things together afterwards. One of the planes sort of hiccupped and turned oddly, and a split second later you could actually hear the engine stall. Then it dipped, nose down, and started to plummet towards the ground—not directly at us but close enough. People had time to react, to think of getting away, but not enough time to actually do so. Aunty Anne grabbed my hand and started pulling us along: me on one side of her and Robert on the other, but we hadn’t gone more than a few steps when the explosion came. Amazing how big it was, too, given that this was such a small plane. Momentum, I suppose, plus the fuel. Chunks of wreckage and earth started flying past us and then something slapped me in the back—shockwave, I suppose—blowing me off my feet. I was winded, and for a moment I just lay there, making sure I was still alive, not quite believing that I could be. Then I sat up, slowly, feeling bruised but otherwise okay. I still held Aunty Anne’s hand . . . but her arm ended somewhere around the elbow. Of course I was shocked—bloody horrified! I shook my hand free and screamed. I lost it for a while, and was still screaming when they found me . . . Sometimes even now, when I wake up in the morning, I can still feel the pressure of her fingers on the back of my hand. Did you know that someone’s posted footage of the crash on YouTube? Only a minute or so, the best bits . . . It shouldn’t surprise me, really. This was an air show, after all. Lots of people had cameras—no mobile phones back then. I watched it once, the clip I mean. There’s something almost artistic about the way the debris arcs in all directions from this orange bloom of fire. I didn’t feel a thing when I saw it, as if this had nothing to do with me, as if I hadn’t even been there and had just heard about it from someone else afterwards. It was only after Duxford that I started to associate the smell with death. It had a name now, too: Reaper’s Rose. Fitting, don’t you think? Who knew that death could smell so sweet? No, I’ve never told anyone about this before. Why would I? Who’s going to believe me? Besides, no one’s put things together before now, connected me to the disasters, the fact that I’ve survived each time and walked away unscathed. Yes, a few other occasions. None of them were as dramatic as those two, though, at least not until last night. I’ve tried, of course I have. Even took up yoga to see if it would help. I’d sit there and clear my mind, doing my damnedest to conjure up the smell, to remember exactly what it’s like, but I can’t. It only ever comes to me immediately before someone dies. That’s why I had such a problem describing it to you earlier. I can’t quite remember, not until I smell it again. It’s unmistakeable though, once I do. You’re right, not simply death; it’s more than that. When my dad passed away peacefully in hospital, for example, I didn’t smell a thing. Well, that smell you always get in hospitals—disinfectant or antibiotic spray or whatever they use—but not Reaper’s Rose. Violent death, that’s when the smell comes. Imminent. Violent. Death. Yes, exactly like last night. No, of course I wasn’t expecting that. I never do. Wouldn’t have gone there if I had. I don’t know . . . A gas main, terrorists? You tell me, you’re the detective. I’m just a victim here, I didn’t cause this. I was visiting my mum after her operation, that’s all. Glad she’s okay, more relieved than I can say. Yes, I did hear about Doctor Singh. Terrible . . . awful. I was actually talking to her when it happened, you know. She seemed really nice and explained things so clearly . . . I know Mum liked her a lot. They say she’s the reason I’m still alive, that her body took the brunt of the blast, shielding me. I didn’t see much, just this bright flash of light coming from behind Doctor Singh, and then there was a deafening crack and heat washed over me . . . Apparently, I blacked out for a few minutes—the first time that’s happened. When I came to, I was lying amongst the rubble. There was a body close by, two feet in black shoes emerging from beneath the debris. Maybe that was Dr Singh. I don’t know; I didn’t want to look. Devastation and dust were all around, just like at Moorgate, just like Duxford. What? No. What could I have said? “Doctor Singh, run for your life, I can smell roses” . . . ? It’s not as if I get loads of warning, not as if I could have cleared the hospital or anything even if someone had been prepared to listen, which they wouldn’t have. Seconds, that’s all. Not even minutes. I get a strong whiff of Reaper’s Rose and I know that whoever is close to me at that precise moment is about to die. I may not even know what will kill them, except that it’s bound to be horrible . . . and violent. How do you convince anyone of something like that in a handful of seconds? Tell me, please, because I would genuinely like to know. What could I say to make someone believe that I’m not mad and that they really do have only seconds left to live? Yes, it honestly does smell a bit like roses, but more powerful, with maybe a hint of lavender in there too; but it’s so, so much more than that. Imagine the most potent bits of every arousing aroma you’ve ever encountered, distilled and concentrated into one scent. A pheromone frenzy, the most sensuous smell imaginable: heady and intoxicating. It comes in through my nose and spreads out to enflame every cell of my body with anticipation, excitement . . . Bizarrely, I feel more alert, more alive for smelling it. This is the scent that every perfumier has been striving to perfect for centuries without ever getting it right, without even coming close most of the time. I’ve sometimes wondered if maybe Coco Chanel could smell Reaper’s Rose too, whether this is what inspired her and drove her on. What? Yes, I suppose that is a better description than the one I gave you at the start of the interview, but that’s hardly surprising, is it? After all, I couldn’t smell it then.

©2016 by Ian Whates.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ian Whates lives in a quiet Cambridgeshire village with his partner, Helen, and Honey, a manic cocker spaniel. Ian is the author of six novels to date, most recently Pelquin’s Comet in April 2015; also, the Helen, a manic cocker spaniel, and a tailless black cat. He is also the author of the City of 100 Rows trilogy (Angry Robot), and the Noise duology (Solaris). Sixty-odd of his short stories have appeared in various venues, two of which were shortlisted for BSFA Awards, and his second collection Growing Pains (PS Publishing) appeared in 2013. Ian has edited some two dozen anthologies, one of which, Solaris Rising 2, was shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award in 2014. He has served a term as Overseas Director of SFWA and spent five years as chairman the BSFA. He remains a director of the latter organisation. In his spare time, Ian runs multiple award-winning independent publisher NewCon Press, which he founded by accident in 2006.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight Death’s Door Café Kaaron Warren | 6968 words

Theo thought of the pain in his veins as the clawing of bats, the smell in his nose their guano, the rawness of his throat torn by their smoke. It was this, the pain in breathing, that made him climb out of his car at last and walk a block to the Dusseldorf Café. The large purple door had a suburban brass knocker and a spy hole. A plaque beside the door read The Soldier. In larger text: b1922 d1946 Up close, he could see dark stains in the wood. He touched his fingers to the marks, feeling the door’s thick grain, wondering if he’d get a sense of “ending,” an understanding of the death it had once concealed. He knocked. When the waiter opened the door, Theo jumped back. He turned away, wanting to run, knowing he wasn’t able. Once, he could have been around the corner before the waiter even raised a hand. Now . . . he had no choice. Even walking one block from the car had sapped his strength. “Table for one?” said the waiter. “Did you have a booking?” Theo shook his head. The café wasn’t in the phonebook or online; he’d only found it by walking up and down the street. “That’ll be okay, we can squeeze you in. A cancellation, aren’t you lucky?” Theo stepped inside. The waiter led Theo across the room, saying, “There’s a great table over here in the corner. Right next to the magazines.” Theo stood close to him. “Who was The Soldier? If that’s not a rude .” “It’s always the first thing people want to know: Who died behind the door?” The waiter’s face shifted, became serious. “The Soldier was back from war a year, and he was listening to some gloomy music, some sad sort of song, they say, when there was a knock on that door.” The waiter rapped loudly on the table and Theo jumped. The waiter handed him the menu. Theo hadn’t eaten solid food for more than a week. Even glancing at the Chef’s Specialities list, with its “South Coast Swordfish” and its “Hazelnut Chocolate Soufflé,” made him feel ill. “The super special today is a lamb tagine with blood plums. The chef tells me it’s very good,” the waiter said. “So the soldier opens the door, that very door you came through, and who is standing there but his old sergeant? And the sergeant says, ‘You’ve brought shame to an entire division,’ and he reaches in and slashes the soldier’s throat. The soldier bleeds to death so fast, he’s gone by the time the killer reaches the front gate. They say the music was still playing two days later when the body was found. As if that poor dead soldier kept hitting replay.” The waiter shrugged. “So, what’ll it be?” Theo felt sick. “Could I just have a green salad?” he said. The waiter smiled. “We sell a lot of green salads. Chef does a very good one. Anything else for now? Some nice toast? We sell a lot of toast, too.” Theo nodded. Smiled. His dry lips cracked. He didn’t know what to say, how to ask for what he wanted. “Drinks?” Theo shook his head. “I’m not really drinking. I’m . . .” He hadn’t told anyone yet, and he didn’t know what words to use. “I’m not well.” “Oh, you poor thing. How about I bring you one of our fabulous Virgin Marys? We leave out the vodka for sick people.” The waiter smiled. “We get a lot of your type in here.” The café was full, but remarkably quiet. Gentle music played, something with pan pipes and an ethereal female voice. The chair was comfortable; high-backed, soft-seated. Theo shifted back to give himself more room and there was no scraping sound, as if the legs were muffled. The walls were painted all around with a mural he took to depict Dusseldorf and the River Rhine. Along the banks, stylish people strolled, perfectly groomed, laughing, small dogs at their feet. There was nothing dark, no hint of death beyond the door he had walked through. Theo couldn’t eat his green salad when it arrived, but he drank his tomato juice. He watched to see what people did. He wanted a clue, didn’t want to mess up, miss out. An emaciated woman held a bread stick. She was dressed in hot pink as if to draw attention away from her pale face. Her companion, a red-cheeked woman with a high, far- reaching voice, did all the talking, frivolous stuff. She barely took a breath. Theo thought she was frightened the sick woman would speak. He understood this kind of avoidance. He had good hearing (Batboy, his mother called him, because he picked up everything) and didn’t have to strain to listen in. “They’ve got it in green, blue, brown, orange and red,” the healthy woman said. “But they don’t have all the sizes, you’d have to try them on to see. But first you’d decide if you wanted green, blue, brown, orange or red. I, me, I’d choose red or orange though I wouldn’t mind brown . . .” without a break, desperately filling each space. Finally the sick woman reached out a finger and touched the loud woman’s wrist. The loud woman stopped instantly. The sick woman nodded. “Waiter! Waiter. We’re ready to see Jason now,” the loud woman said, waving the menu. Theo opened his menu. The owner’s name was there, in large, ornate type. “Your host, Jason Davies,” it said. Jason Davies came and sat at the table with the women. He was young, black hair, pale blue eyes. Theo saw the patrons in the room all watching him. Nobody spoke or moved; all focused on him. He talked with the sick woman for a while (“How did you hear about us? And is this a friend? A relative?” “I’ve answered all this,” she said. “I’ve told you.”) then led her through a door at the back of the café. She walked slowly, relying heavily on a cane. Theo swallowed. Winced. The friend stood by their table, clutching her handbag. She started towards the back door, but the waiter gently led her to walk towards the front. “Leave it with us, now.” “I need to give her a lift home. She can’t manage.” He smiled. “She’ll be fine.” He moved over to Theo. “Can we help you with anything else today, or just the bill?” “Could I see the owner? Jason? Can I talk to Jason?” he asked, wondering if he was being reckless, ruining his chances. The waiter stood by the table and looked at him. “Come back tomorrow.” “I can’t. I haven’t got the time,” and that meant a different thing to someone with cancer. “I’ll ask him,” the waiter said. “You may have to wait. What’s your name?” It was fifteen minutes before the waiter said, “He can’t see you today. Maybe next time.” “How many visits until you’re considered worthy?” Theo asked. He hoped he didn’t sound sarcastic. He meant the question. “It’s not so much worthiness. Often it’s persistence.” “How many times did that woman visit?” “I’m not sure. Many. Many times. Some of our regulars come for months.” “But I may not have months.” The waiter looked at him. “Jason will know.” Theo felt a ticking in his ears, sign that waves of pain were on their way. He paid. The waiter said, “Come back soon. Tomorrow’s special is French Onion Soup. It’s fantastic. If I had to choose a last meal, that would be it.” His direct gaze told Theo, I’m not joking and I’m not being cruel. He handed Theo a sheet of paper. Questionnaire, it said. “Bring it with you next time,” the waiter said, ushering Theo out. “Be as honest as you can. That’s what Jason always says.” In the car, Theo swallowed pain killers and waited for the nausea to pass before driving. His doctor had told him he shouldn’t be on the road, but that was advice he would ignore for as long as possible. He looked at the twenty-page questionnaire. What do you fear, what do you love, what do you miss most about childhood, where do you think you are going to, do you believe in God? Are you ever tongue-tied or lost for words? What will you do with the rest of your life? He laughed; he hadn’t answered such personal questions since a long-ago girlfriend had wanted to know everything about him before making a real commitment. That hadn’t worked out so well. Before he was five pages in, he was tired. He listened to podcasts: stuff about good eating habits, slow cooking, a bat cave near Denpasar Town, Bali where the bats are known to keep bad things at bay, and children’s theatre. He watched people come and go from the café, so many of them clearly ill. He liked watching them. Two hours passed. He had nowhere to go. Three hours. Then he saw the woman all in pink. She must have left via the back door. She seemed taller and she had no cane. She put out her hand for a taxi, then lowered her arm and walked to a bus stop. As Theo watched, she counted the money she held. Shook her head. Laughed. He started the car, drove alongside her and offered her a lift. “I was in the café,” he said. “Death’s Door Café.” “You were? I’m sorry. I noticed very little.” In the café, she had looked over fifty. Now, she seemed to be in her mid-thirties. Her face glowed, and she bounced on her feet as if full of energy. She leant into his car. Looked at him. Then climbed in. “Where do you want me to drop you?’ She seemed a bit stunned by this. Lost for words. “To your friend’s house?” “No! No. To the airport. I’m, ahhh . . .” “Holiday?” “Holiday.” She looked at the money in her hand again. “You need money.” She shook her head. Then nodded. She laughed. “I’m not sure, actually.” Theo smiled. “I can buy you a ticket. Easy. Money’s just burning a hole in my pocket.” “What would you want in return?” “Nothing, really. Just to talk.” “I can’t tell you anything,” “You look fantastic.” “I do, don’t I? And I feel better than I have in maybe two decades.” “So what happened in there?” “I can’t say. I really can’t. Not even for a plane ticket.” “I’m going to buy you that anyway,” he said. It really did mean nothing to him. Even ten thousand dollars wouldn’t make a dent. “But . . . how do I get in? How do I get Jason to talk to me?” They approached the airport. He said, “Do you want me to give a message to your friend?” She stared at him for a moment. “Oh. No. No. Best not. Look, if you want to get in? Keep going back. And be honest. As honest as you can force yourself to be. And good luck.” She kissed his cheek, her lips warm, soft, alive. “Keep going back,” she said. • • • •

Theo was not the only regular. Some had a constant companion, like the little boy and his mother. She carried him in, set him up with pillows. Ordered a milkshake, chocolate cake, but that made the boy cry with frustration. He took a sip, but Theo could see that it rose straight away back into his mouth. They were invited through the door on the day the boy didn’t stir as the mother walked in with him. Some were always alone. These, like Theo, carried a book or magazine to read, or concentrated on phones, not wanting to look lonely or needy. They exchanged glances, sometimes sat together, but they didn’t talk. Theo wondered if amongst them were potential friends, or long-term partners. The mother of his child. But all they really had in common was illness. Some came in with a new companion every time, paid nurses. An elderly man who walked with a cane always had his nurse bring gifts; he owned a series of stores, Theo discovered. He never said anything, just smiled as the nurse handed out pens, notebooks, chocolates. A sort of camaraderie built amongst them. There were light cheers any time one was allowed through to the back. Jason Davies sometimes nodded at them. Sometimes he’d smile. The regulars would exchange looks when one of them was so blessed. Day after day, Theo drank carrot and ginger juice, ate dried yam chips. At times, the nausea would be too much and he would push through the beaded doorway, (Mountain Walker, the plaque beside it said, b1933, d1972), walking along the increasingly chilly hallway, open the dented back door (Teen Singer b1985, d2001), stumble every time over the rock which sat too close to the path, and enter the toilet, (Three Year Old b1998, d2001) which shared space with a laundry tub and what appeared to be rejected artwork from a teenage girl’s bedroom. He pretended to work at a variety of tables, taking his laptop in, using his phone. He spoke if spoken to, like the day when the elderly man sat at the next table, sitting with his eyes closed, humming softly. His nurse fussed over him, smiled around the room, stayed connected. “You’re a busy, busy man,” she said to Theo. She was in her twenties and smelt faintly of cigarette smoke and breath mints. “What is it you do, busy all the time?” “I’ve got a sonar equipment company.” He handed her his business card. “Love the bat,” she said. Theo had drawn it himself; he had drawn bats from the age of five. “I love bats.” Theo was called Batman at school, because of the cave on his property. He didn’t mind at all; he’d take kids there in groups, let them throw bat poo at each other, tell them things they didn’t know. After all the bats were killed, though, he couldn’t bear to hear the name spoken. Each time was like a punch to the heart. He knew he deserved it, every hard hit, for not stopping the slaughter. He didn’t tell the nurse any of this. He might, he thought, if something happened between them. If she really loved bats, he could show her the cave, they could see it together and she’d cry with him, maybe. But she didn’t come again. Next time, the nurse was a man, bright faced and cheery, who made them all laugh.

• • • •

One morning, Jason appeared. There was silence as always. He surveyed the room. “Can you stay for a while, Theo? It would be good to have a chat.” Theo nodded. “Excellent,” Jason said. He walked over to the elderly man, placed his hand on the back of the chair, and leaned over to whisper in his ear. The elderly man gave a little shudder. “Me?” Theo heard him say. Jason led the elderly man though the door. The waiter (there were three of them, Theo knew, all kind, efficient, professional) said to the nurse, “You’re all done now. You’ll be paid for the month. And thanks.” The other regulars congratulated Theo. He still didn’t know what he was lucky about. No one discussed it. But it was a cure; they’d seen it. They knew it worked. Theo himself had seen six people go through the door and never return to the café. He’d seen three of them later, walking down the street, transformed. Flowers appeared in the café, with notes saying THANK YOU. Like flowers sent to nurses in hospital. There was no follow–up because he knew no names, but still, even to have one day feeling that way would make it worthwhile. Even if it was just that one day. Theo ordered herbal coffee and cheese but could swallow nothing. Sometimes he felt so exhausted, so suddenly and completely drained, he wanted to lay his head on the table and sleep. Sometimes he did nod off, wake to find himself still there, his coffee cold in front of him. Theo was grateful for the pile of magazines, so he could withdraw into himself, not engage. Many were tourist magazines from Dusseldorf and he flicked through these, looking for things to talk about When Jason sat down an hour later, Theo said, “How long did you live in Dusseldorf?” thinking it a safe, intelligent question. “Never even been. I just like the sound of the name. Don’t you?” “Except people don’t call your cafe that, do they?” “Don’t they?” “They call it Death’s Door Café.” “Because of the doors.” He pointed at the huge wooden door where the ill people entered. The door Theo wanted to enter. “We call that Gladiator. We dunno how many died behind it. But plenty. You can see sweat marks from their hands as they stood leaning against it. Some came through okay. But plenty died.” “I’m . . . curious to know what’s behind that door.” Theo wished he had a script, but everyone spoke to Jason differently. “You’ve taken a lot of people through.” “I have. When I get to know someone well, sometimes I’ll let them through.” “I’d like that. I need that.” “People do.” “But I’ve been given . . .” Theo couldn’t say the words aloud. He’d told no one the timing, barely acknowledged to himself that his life could be counted in months. “You like it here, don’t you?” “I do. Really. There’s something very calming about the place.” “That’s what we aim for. Our customers . . . mostly they’ve made a decision. Come to an acceptance, or had a realization. It calms you, to be in that state of mind.” Jason Davies put his hands on Theo’s. “Can you tell me who recommended you?” “Nobody. I just heard about it.” “Usually we only accept recommendations. How did you hear about us?” Theo blinked. “I’m afraid I eavesdropped on a plane. I guess they thought no one could hear, because they were talking under a blanket, but my hearing is very good. I had to find the place myself, though.” He knew everyone was listening, because he had heard all the other interviews, both the successes and the failures. He hadn’t identified why some failed. “Tell me about yourself,” Jason said. He had the questionnaire on the table before him. “It says here your greatest fear is bats.” “No! Not at all. The death of bats. That’s my greatest fear.” Jason tapped his nose. “Is this an element of your disease?” Theo felt his cheeks flush. He rubbed his nose. All his life, blood had drained from it when he was nervous, scared or tired. Children weren’t smart enough to think of connecting it to bat’s white nose fungus, but he thought of it himself and he didn’t mind. He liked the similarity. “No, this is just nerves. My fingertips go white sometimes, too. It’s not life- threatening. Not like the bat disease. It gets carried from one cave to another by people who love bats and want to see them all. One of those ironies.” “People are a bit like that, aren’t they?” He asked Theo about bats, simple questions, leading him to feel comfortable, relaxed. “All right. Look, come through.” Jason led the way through the gladiator door, through a short hallway to a bright-red door covered with stickers of unicorns, rainbows and puppies. Family of four b1952, b1953, b1975, b1980, d1984. Theo touched it. “Father gathered them in the toy room and shot them all,” said Jason. “Incredible tragedy. But don’t things lose their awfulness over time? Become gossip, or matters of curiosity?” Theo realised he was asking an actual question. “It’s still awful, isn’t it? That the children died. And the wife.” Theo thought he heard voices inside and the sound of a ball bouncing. Jason smiled. “Yes. Of course it is. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Theo thought this made no sense at all. Jason led Theo to a small, sunny alcove. A young woman sat there, sipping from a delicate tea cup. Her black hair was soft around her head. “This is Cameron. She’s going to ask you some questions, talk to you a bit about your questionnaire.” Theo sat down and smiled at Cameron. She smiled back. “Would you like a cup of herbal tea?” “No, thank you. I just finished one.” Theo found it hard to contain his nerves, to maintain politeness. “Okay then.” She was very still and Theo was still with her. “What did you think of the questionnaire?” He laughed. “It was pretty full on. I don’t think I’ve ever thought about myself like that before.” Do you think of yourself as a good person? Is there anything that makes you feel guilty? How much do you give to charity each year? How many hours of voluntary work do you do each week? Do you feel guilty about the number of hours you do? “I wasn’t sure what the point was.” “The point is never meant to be clear in these things. We just want an understanding of you and your motivations. It’s really an important part of the process. And, to be honest, we’re not interested in helping psychopaths.” “I hope I’m not one of those.” She smiled. “You are not.” They talked for another hour. Theo hadn’t felt so relaxed in a long time, and he hadn’t ever talked about himself for so long. She seemed to understand about the bats, and didn’t blame him for his state of loneliness. She spun her wedding ring periodically and he appreciated the signal; this is all it is, she was telling him. He liked things to be clear. Jason joined them. “Feeling okay?” Theo nodded. He didn’t want to mention how he felt physically. “Okay. So what we’re talking about here is a second chance. You came to us, like all the others did, because you’re desperate. You want to have another go at it. And you’re tired of the pain, and the fear. Is that about right?” “Yes.” Theo’s throat constricted and the word came out as a whisper. “All right then. We need to sort out the paperwork.” Jason opened the folder he carried and removed papers and a pen. “It will cost your life savings. I need to start with that. You need to begin this process with nothing to your name.” Theo had been prepared for a high price. “If I die I’ll have nothing anyway.” “Exactly. That’s all in the details. But then you will have to reconsider how you live your life. How you re-live it.” “What does everyone else do, given a second chance?” He wanted that as well. “Everybody is different. Every single person.” Jason filled in the forms. Theo signed. He agreed never to kill, never to rape or maim. He agreed to live a good life, to make the most of his second chance. He signed the paper believing fully in this commitment. “So . . . what is going to happen? Can I ask? What is the actual process?” “We can talk about that tomorrow when you come back for your appointment.” “Come here? So is there a clinic here or something?” “We can talk about that tomorrow.” Jason said. “My suggestion is that you spend the day somewhere you care about. Somewhere important. Some will spend it with loved ones, but many prefer not to. There is nothing certain in this world and this is no exception.” Theo knew there were questions he could ask. “It will take all you’ve got. We’ve discussed the money. But the life. You will be leaving your past behind. The people, the places. You won’t want to visit your bat cave again.” “There are other bat caves.” “You’ll feel nothing for them. That memory will be lessened, so much so that you will wonder where you read about it, if you think of it at all.” “I didn’t know that.” “Make your visits. And decide. It’s never too late to change your mind. But this may be your last chance.”

• • • •

Theo went to the bat cave, his first visit in 17 months. Only the memory of them remained, but that memory was strong. Hours spent on a rough mat on the cave floor, his face covered, listening to them, feeling the flap of their wings. Close to half a million bats was the estimation, and through three generations of Theo’s family there had been no harm, no damage. Then reports came in of the diseases they carried, and one scientist was bitten. Theo couldn’t even remember now if the man had died; certainly there was a lot of fuss. Theo never believed it was the bats. His father was determined. “Too many kids here to risk,” he said, because there were cousins as well as siblings, all of them working on the farm, balancing it with school. He was advised that fire was the best, the kindest way. That the smoke would put the bats to sleep and the fire would then burn the bodies so they weren’t left with half a million corpses, just a pile of ash that could be swept away. Theo’s father made the children stay in the house, but it was an old place with gaps so the smell came through dead clear. They watched smoke billowing out, saw Theo’s dad dashing out for air then back in again, and again, the whole thing taking most of the day. Theo’s grandfather helped, and the brothers, all Theo’s uncles, no women allowed to kill. Women inside keeping the kids quiet, baking up scones and cakes, stirring soup, all of them talking bright and cheerful as if a massacre was not taking place. Theo never forgave them for that. It wasn’t as if the advice was right; the smoke did not kill them all, so many were burnt to death. And the fire did not burn them all to ash; the bodies piled at the entrance to the cave so that Theo and his cousins had to help dig the men out. Those bat bodies still warm, some charred, and the flutter of them, the sense they were still alive when they weren’t. And the smell; he’d thought he was used to guano, that he actually liked it, but this was like poison. Years later, a journalist came to confront his father with evidence the bats hadn’t needed to die. Theo’s father cried as the journalist continued relentlessly to tell him . . . you didn’t have to. Those bats had lived in the cave for 150 years and you killed them. Theo cried, too. He said to his father, as he had said many times, “You should have saved the bats.” The farm was no longer in his family. His father was too sick to look after anything at all. His mother long gone. “Those bats. All that bat shit,” his father said, coughing, furious. The new owners didn’t mind Theo visiting, as long has he didn’t come knocking on the door for water. The bat cave was empty. Theo could see his own footprints in the dirt floor, and the broom marks from the last time he’d tidied up. Guano still decorated the walls and the rocks, and the smell of smoke, and the walls were dark from the fire. He lay on the ground and tried to imagine them back again, alive, generations of them coming and going and his family with no guilt on their heads. It was there he decided. Imagine not caring anymore. Imagine not carrying this guilt, this sorrow. And this pain.

• • • •

Theo couldn’t eat or sleep that night. In the morning, he dressed carefully. A casual suit, a fresh, pale mauve cotton shirt, clean shoes, underwear he wasn’t embarrassed by. Clothes he’d be happy to be buried in, if it came to that. He felt as if the atmosphere at the Dusseldorf Café was charged, as if they were all watching him with envy. The waiter brought him a carrot juice he didn’t order. “On the house!” patting him on the back as if congratulating him. Just the smell of it made Theo feel sick. He’d never been so nervous, so terrified, in all his life. Jason came to his table after half an hour. “Come on through,” he said. The other regulars all held their breath, it seemed to Theo. As if they could bring the magic to themselves by not breathing. He wiggled his fingers goodbye. They walked through the gladiator door. Jason said, “Did you manage to see anyone yesterday?” “There’s not really anyone I wanted to see. My family . . . we’re not really in touch. Nothing in common.” Jason nodded, smiled, as if this was ordinary, something he heard all the time. “It’s the people left behind who suffer when someone dies, so a loner leaves less grief than a father of three.” “But I’m still worthy. That’s part of why I’m here,” said Theo. “I want time to make a family of my own, one I choose and have a chance to mould.” “Most people don’t like being moulded.” “I want a second chance, to make people care.” Theo thought for a moment, then amended it to, “To find someone to care for. I don’t want to die alone. This will give me the chance, it’ll help me to find someone. It’ll be different this time.” “How different?” “I’ve made my money. I won’t have to focus on that.” “You won’t have much, though. Financially, it’ll be like starting again.” “But I don’t care now. I’ve done that. I want something else.” Jason touched his shoulder. “Good. That’s very good. Now, the last thing we need to do is to get you to hand-write a letter. To cover us. It’s a farewell letter of sorts.” “Who do I make it out to?” “It needs to be to someone who knows you very well as you are now. You really have no one?” Theo thought of his managers, his staff. “I’ve got people.” He made it out to his vice- president. He had little to say; he’d long since dealt with the business side of things, anticipating his own death. “And then there’s this.” It was a promise of complete secrecy. “Do not tell others what happens. You may, if you are absolutely certain they are suitable, recommend someone, but do not bring them in yourself.” They walked. They passed through a bullet-scarred door to a long hallway. “One of Ben Hall’s gang died in front of this door. Shot to death.” Jason poked a finger through one of the holes. “There is a bat cave where that gang holed up,” Theo said. “No one really knows where. Or they do but they want to protect the bats.” “So many connections,” Jason said. “Now, what we have back here is a series of rooms. We’re going to have a look at them, and you’ll choose the one which suits you.” “How will I know?” “You’ll feel an empathy. Feel it physically, almost as if you could pick it up. One of these rooms will resonate with you. You’ll feel a grieving, a sense of loss. One of these rooms will make your heart beat faster, or bring a lump to your throat. You don’t need to know why; you need to listen to your body.” The door on Room One looked like it had come from a ship. Inside was a small children’s room. “A child died behind this door. It was so airtight and heavy, when the ship sunk he couldn’t get out. He suffocated.” “Oh, God.” Theo closed his eyes. He thought he sensed movement which made him dizzy. He reached out to balance himself on Jason. “Let’s look at the others before you make up your mind.” They walked. “What’s . . . actually going to happen in the room?” Theo asked. “Once I’ve chosen it?” “There will be some relaxation exercises. We always start with that.” Theo thought, I’m an idiot. No one knows I’m here. Who knows what the fuck these people are doing. I’m insane. I should go. “Everyone feels nervous at this point, but I don’t like to pre-discuss too much. It’s better this way. Tell me about what you might do with your second chance. Your questionnaire wasn’t big on helping others, Theo. Would you address that, perhaps?” “I would,” Theo said. “Because it makes sense.” He wasn’t sure that was true. “You might be asked to do more good than you have done before. The universe may ask this, I mean.” Theo was silent. No one had expected him to do good before. “Of course,” he said. “Whatever it takes.” He had an absolute terror of death, after his experience with the bats, and with his mother’s passing. He wanted to avoid it for as long as possible; until he was deep in dementia and didn’t notice his own dying, if possible. The door on Room Two was narrow, with inlaid wood. It seemed Asian in influence. “This is a popular one. Behind this door a Chinese prostitute was beaten to death over a hundred years ago.” Theo leaned toward the door, wanting to touch the detail. “This one?” Jason asked. He pushed the door open. The smell was overwhelming; incense, and perfume, as if both were present in living form. Theo shook his head. Room Three was a toilet with an opaque glass door. “He died in the toilet. Fat and lazy. Heart attack at 42, lay on the floor, paralyzed, blocking the door. They couldn’t get him out for four hours. Everything in the rooms is recreated precisely.” Theo shuddered. Stepped away. Put his hand over his face. “Not that one, then. People do choose it, you’d be surprised. Smell and all.” The door to Room Four was a studded, shiny one. “He slept through the hotel fire alarm and died of smoke inhalation. No one realized he wasn’t safe.” Jason looked at Theo. “This one could be for you.” He opened the door and they stepped inside. It was a typical, dull hotel room. The fan overhead spun slowly, slightly off kilter, and there was a sound to it like flapping bat wings. Theo felt his throat constrict, his veins swell. He could hear them; the bats calling out, as they did when he was a child. Calling out to him, making him feel as if he belonged amongst them. “It sounds like bats flying. Can you hear it?” “Everybody hears something different. We all see the same thing, though.” On the bed; it looked like a man, but there was no substance to him. “We all see it,” Jason said, comforting him. The ghost on the bed shifted onto his side. His shirt tail hung out; it was crinkled. “What I’m going to do now is to help you into a state of deep sleep. This will help us assess your physicality, now that we understand your mentality. It’ll be comfortable, and you’ll wake up with a sense of calm.” Theo felt a moment of panic. He looked for cameras, for some evidence that this was weird and wrong. “Theo, really. It’s okay. You’ve seen the others; you know it’s okay. You really, absolutely know that. Let go of your fear and allow it to happen.” Theo closed his eyes. He thought he could hear the calling of the bats, but he often did. It was a memory. A guiding force. He felt himself slipping into sleep and wondered if this was all he was meant to do. He shivered; it was cold. The ghost was gone, though there was a smell in the air of whisky, and aftershave, and soap. It was night outside, and that darkness with the flapping of the fan brought the bats to mind again. He curled up and wept with grief for those bats, lost generations, and for his father, who had killed them, and his grandfather, and for himself, because he had been a child. He slept. He dreamed his mother was burning the dinner and the smell woke him. There was smoke in the room, it was full of smoke and he could hear sirens and screams and he was hot, now. Flames licked under the door. He wrapped the sheet around his waist and ran to the window. It was bolted shut, double glazed. He found his shoe and hammered the window, coughed, coughed, his eyes streamed and his lungs burnt, he choked and coughed and collapsed, he could not draw breath and he could feel his eyes clouding, feel the heat leaving his body, then all was black.

• • • •

He awoke feeling nothing. He wore his own clothing again and he felt cool, as if a breeze washed over him. He curled up, enjoying the comfort of the bed. He curled up. He had not been able to do that for some time. He felt flexible. He stretched out his arms, lifting them high. “How do you feel?” Jason said. Theo had forgotten his existence, had not heard him enter the room, or, even, knew if he’d left. “I don’t know,” said Theo. There was no guilt, he did know that. And the grief was gone, the sorrow for the death of the bats. There was room for something else. It seemed the ache in his stomach was gone, and his veins didn’t hurt. “Give it a few days.” “I thought I died. There was a fire . . . did someone put it out? Is everyone all right? What about Cameron, is she okay?” “There was a fire,” Jason said. “We discovered that if we trick the body into believing it has died, it will recover from any fatal disease. We’ve had particular success with cancer. So we placed you behind a death’s door, and we physically, in actuality, re- created the death. You DID die. You took some of the suffering of those who have passed before you, especially him.” “I feel as if the world must have changed,” Theo said. “I feel so different, the world must have changed.” “You are a poetic man. But yes. This will suck the spiritual energy from all surrounds. You’ll notice everyone around will be feeling lethargic for a day or two. We like to complete the process on Sunday evenings best. People pass off their reaction as Monday- itis.” Jason handed Theo a wallet with $500. “To get you started. Good luck. I’ve put my card in there. You’re welcome to come back if and when you need to. We don’t encourage debauchery of the body, but . . . well, this gives you the freedom to explore without the concerns others have. You will need to consider the financial element. For each visit we require at least double the last. Obviously, all you possess, but it needs to far exceed the amount you paid this time.” He led Theo to the back door. “Could I say goodbye? I feel as if I know them all so well. And thank the waiters. They’re so kind. And to Cameron.” “Best not,” Jason said. “Not all of them will pass through the door. It’s best for them not to know for sure until . . .” The air outside smelt good; someone was cooking onions. He suddenly felt hungry. “A hamburger,” he said to himself. “No, a steak.” He felt better the next day, and the next, then he saw his doctor. “I’d call it a miracle if I believed in them,” said the doctor. “But I don’t. Good luck. Make the most of your second chance.” Theo did. He met and married a recovering drug addict who never needed another drink or another drug. He didn’t invite any of his family to the wedding; as far as they were concerned he had disappeared. He didn’t miss them. There were times, though, when a spinning fan made a light flicker, or when his ears picked up conversations he shouldn’t hear, that he thought of the bat cave and its cold comfort and he did miss that, with an ache he could not ease.

©2014 by Kaaron Warren. Originally published in & Tall Trees. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Nominee, twice-World Fantasy Award Nominee and winner Kaaron Warren has lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Fiji. She’s sold more than 200 short stories, three novels (the multi- award-winning Slights, Walking the Tree and Mistification) and six short story collections including the multi-award- winning Through Splintered Walls. Her latest novel is The Grief Hole (IFWG Publishing , coming out in August) and her latest short story collection is Cemetery Dance Select: Kaaron Warren. You can find her at http://kaaronwarren.wordpress.com/ and she Tweets @KaaronWarren.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight The Girl Who Escaped From Hell Rahul Kanakia | 5944 words

I thought when they handed over a kid there’d be some complex system of interlocking safeguards, like they use to transport a nuclear warhead across the country, but her mom just plopped the girl into my car. I asked if I needed to register her with someone, and my ex looked at me like I was crazy, so I hopped on I-80 and drove west, out into the desert. Abby was six years old, a mini-person, and she could talk in full sentences and everything, even if there was something a tiny bit precious about the way her voice got squeaky and high at weird points in the middle of words. When we passed into Wyoming, the land got flat and brown and scrubby, and eventually she said, “Is this . . . ? This is the road to Hell?” I laughed. “No, of course not. We’re going to heaven.” She got really silent then, which made me wonder if something was wrong. My girl was buckled into my brand-new car seat in the back, and that made it hard to see her face, but when I glimpsed it in the rearview I saw that her eyes had gotten really amazingly big. I laughed. “Not literally, Abs. I meant we’re going to California.” “Oh,” she said. “I don’t know about that. Satan never showed me Heaven.” I shook my head. This was why I’d gotten custody. After they got injured in a car accident, my wife had filled Abby with some nonsense about a visit to Hell and then made a bundle by writing a book about it. I remember the first time I came across Abs on TV—I think it was Good Morning America—Matt Lauer asked her the obvious question —how could a six-year-old possibly deserve to go to Hell?—and my baby girl spouted the most vicious crap imaginable, about how all human beings were inherently sinful and that’s why we needed to armor ourselves in Christ, while her mom sat next to her, talking sweet, and profiting from every word of it. The very next day, I quit my job at the cannery, and I moved back to Omaha in order to rescue her from the kind of people who’d teach an innocent little girl that she deserved anything less than the best future that she could imagine.

• • • •

That night, I pulled off the freeway because I saw a Super 8, but then I thought, wait a second, the book money would be coming in soon, and my wife had to pay for Abby’s support. I looked at the girl—didn’t she deserve something nice? So we got a suite at the Holiday Inn—two rooms joined by a door—and we ate at the steakhouse, and when we came upstairs, she bounced on the beds a little bit. I’d forgotten kids could do that. They’re tiny, so they can do anything. Then we watched TV a little bit, and I put her to bed at nine, just like the parenting books said I should. And right when she was about to sleep, I looked at her face, with its squidgy eyes and small mouth, and I thought, she’s got a mind in there—a mind of her very own—and this sudden terror ran up my spine. “Abs,” I said. “Can I ask you something?” “Daddy?” she asked. “And you can be totally honest with me. I won’t mind.” She didn’t say anything. Her face was still and grave, and she was clutching the edge of the blanket. “Earlier today, did you really think I was taking you to Hell?” We looked into each other’s eyes for a long time, and I wondered whether this was about her mom. I mean, even with a mom like that, Abs must feel sad about leaving her, right? Except . . . when you were dealing with a kid that young, did it even make sense to talk about that? The parenting books talked about kids feeling anxious or upset, but not about sadness. Maybe they didn’t even feel it. “I don’t know,” she said. “Someday I’ll have to go back.” “What?” I must’ve said it too loud, because she shrank away. I wrapped her up in a hug, but she didn’t hug me back, just sat there, tiny and still. “What’s happened to you?” I said. “Did your mom tell you that? Tell you that I’d take you to Hell?” “N—no . . .” “Well it’s not true. We’re going to the ocean, and we’re gonna have lots of nice things, and we’re gonna be happy, Abs. So happy. You got it?” She didn’t say anything, so eventually I laid her down on the bed and let her go to sleep. Or maybe she was just pretending to sleep, I’m not sure. But what I do know is that when I tucked her in that night, I finally felt that powerful burst of love—it felt like half a line of cocaine, plus a little MDMA—that I’d tried and tried and tried to feel on the day when she was born.

• • • •

A year passed, or maybe three. The check came through from my ex, though only after my lawyer sent her two letters, and I used it to buy a two-bedroom cottage out in Santa Barbara. I’d been to the California coast once, right after me and Abby’s mom broke up, and I’d always remembered the pink sun shining off the green ocean, and the touch of the water, too, how it was so unbelievably cold. I was a good dad. Walked her to school every day. Talked to her teachers. Read her report cards. Made snacks for her soccer matches. Her mom visited once and slept on the fold-out in our living room. They walked together on the beach, and, for days after that, I listened closely to Abby to see if she’d start mentioning Hell again, but she never did. Some nights, I’d start to brood about the immensity of the universe, so I’d go up onto the cliffside and look out into the endless ocean and think about where we’d all end up, and then I’d come down and keep fathering. When she was gone at school, I mostly surfed. Oh, and I also took online classes in graphic design. I was gonna make t-shirts. Not clever ones with words on them. No, beautiful ones, with trees and brightly-colored birds. Everyone’s so slick and clever nowadays; you don’t see any guys out there wearing shirts that’re just plainly beautiful. But they would if they could find them. I could tell there was an army of guys out there like me. People who’d figured out their lives, but were staying quiet about it, because they knew the world hated guys who’ve got it together and are happy. We had to communicate quietly, through bright t-shirts and fist bumps and by raising our beers to each other when our eyes met on the beach. One day, Abby came to me on the beach. I’d just wiped out, and my adrenaline was high because a wave had come out of nowhere and sucked me so far down that I forgot which way was up. I’d surfaced and was fighting to find the board, and then . . . I don’t even know how I saw her—just father’s instinct, I guess—but I saw a tiny figure waving at me. I grabbed my board and hauled ass out of the water. She was standing there with her feet buried up in sand up to the ankles, all alone amongst the beach bums. “Hey daddy!” she said. “I came to find you!” “What are you doing?!” I said. “It’s the middle of the day!” Her face changed instantly, getting smaller and colder. I grabbed her by and yanked her along with me, pulling her away. “You’re supposed to be at school!” A guy sort of stopped and stared at me. Abby was crying a little bit now. I glared at him. “What’re you looking at?” “Do you know this man?” he said. “She’s my daughter!” I snarled. We kept walking. The guy didn’t follow. Fucking lazy- ass Dudley Do-Rights. School had let out early today. They’d sent permission slips or forms or some other notice that I missed down in the juice-drenched paper pulp at the bottom of her backpack, and she’d waited a long time at school for me before deciding to walk out here. She’d come directly here, because she knew that’s where I’d be. Three miles she’d walked, right along the beach, in view of all the bums and crackheads. By the time I pulled her into the car, she was shrieking and crying. “You’re stupid, Daddy!” she said. “You’re stupid! You’re going to Hell! YOU’RE GOING TO HELL!” “Shut up!” She got silent. I strapped her in, and then I grabbed her shoulder. “Hell doesn’t exist,” I said. “Your mom made it up.” “Nuhuh. I saw it. There’s a lake of fire, and devils, and they poke you in the butt with pitchforks, and Satan is—” “You’re wrong. That’s not even in the Bible. That’s only some ’s idea of what Hell looks like. It doesn’t exist, do you get it?” “I saw it.” “No,” I said. “Look, do you know what drugs are? How they make you see things?” “Y—yes . . .” “Well, guess what,” I said. “There’s a drug that exists naturally in your brain, and it’s called DMT, and when you’re about to die, your brain releases a whole eff-ton of it, and that’s why people see things when they get into accidents.” “But . . . I don’t . . .” I could see her mind cranking. She was such an amazing kid. She actually thought about what you said. “Are you saying we took drugs?” “Yeah,” I said. “I mean, not on purpose. But that’s what happened.” “The devil, though, he said you’d try to make me think that he didn’t exist—” “No, he didn’t,” I said. “You didn’t even hallucinate that part, probably.” “But I remember him saying it . . .” “Life is complicated, Abs. It’s really, really complicated. And so’s the human mind. First, you saw something—I don’t know what—and then your mom told you all kinds of stories about what you saw. And you started to believe the stories. And that is what happened.” She sat straight forward and put her feet up, pressing them hard against the glove compartment. The sea was crashing against the beach, and an old shirtless guy was sitting on the steps down to the beach and picking at his belly button. I honked my horn, a little, just to make the man look up, and then I pulled away. I didn’t say anything more that night, or even the next, but a few days later we were watching a cartoon where the main character looks down and sees Hell open up beneath him, and she said, “That looks dumb, doesn’t it?” When I didn’t say anything, she went on: “I think it’s really, really dumb. It’s just drugs, right?” I patted her hand, and she leaned against my side, and I knew we were gonna be alright. A few days later, I wiped out on my board, and I was down there so long, fighting my way upwards, that my started flashing black and red. And my last thought, right before my head broke through into the sunlit world, was, “What would happen to Abby if I never came home?” The next day, I took my board down to the surf-shop and got rid of it.

• • • •

I never sold the shirts. The colors always came out faded and splotchy. I was a fuckup, I’ll admit it. I’d been a fuckup for years—decades. I could be all butthurt and blame the economy or my education or my parents, but I won’t. I just never had that smooth touch— the one that makes things come out right. Not like my ex did. Oh yeah, even when the book money got smaller, Abby’s mom turned out fine. She married some guy, and I could tell from the Facebook pictures—the way he’d sometimes have his hand on her waist, even when neither of them was the focus of the picture—that they really loved each other. And why not? Abby’s mom wasn’t a bad woman. She was fun and cute, and she loved to jump me every chance she could get. Smart, too. Really smart. Not smart like me—not imaginative—but problem-solving smart. The kind of person who could figure out what’s wrong and then turn it around so it was right. But after she and the new guy had a kid, they had less money too. When Abby was fifteen, the checks got really small, like I’d known they someday would. My lawyer called my wife and her lawyer and her agent and the publishing company, and they all confirmed it: the book wasn’t selling much anymore. I did my best to squeeze the he—err, the heck—out of them, but eventually the courts said she just didn’t have the cash, and that was that. Maybe it was for the best, because Abs had almost forgotten about Hell. In fact, whenever someone recognized her, she’d yell out, “Umm, it was all a lie! It was only the drugs in my brain. How stupid are you?” Which was rude, of course, but I didn’t stop her, because the thing needed to be said. Anyway, I hadn’t worked for the man in almost two decades, but for Abby’s sake, I made the sacrifice. A friend gave me a job at the surf shop, and that almost did it. Another friend offered to give me a few shifts at his bar, but I turned those down, because I didn’t want to leave Abby alone at night. She was a nice girl. Wore shorts that were way too short and smeared thick makeup across her eyes in a way that wasn’t trashy so much as just really ugly. But she didn’t talk back, and we didn’t bicker. Only times we argued were when she assumed I’d be cool with something, and I wasn’t. Like when I caught her with a spliff. It was fucking stupid, the argument we had then. She kept saying, but you do it, you do it, and I said, fine, then I won’t do it, and she said I bet you can’t, and I said I bet I can, and we both stopped. Haven’t smoked since. Stopped drinking, too, for the same reason. I was a fuckup, but I knew things about kids. Could her mother have handled it like that? Nah, she’d have forbid and forbid and forbid, and Abby would’ve ignored her. At that point, Abs had a boyfriend, a sweet red-haired guy named Chaz. I never left them alone together in the house, but they’d come home from school looking flushed and antsy, and I’d know they’d been up to something. I’d had girlfriends, too. Other surfers. Or weekend flings with tourists. But nothing serious. That’s not how we do it, us bright t-shirt guys. Still, I liked it here. I knew people. It never got cold. It was a little expensive, though, and after half a year of scrambling to make the mortgage payments, I sat down with her, and I said, “We’ve got a choice to make, Abs.” She was sitting on the cockatoo couch—the one I’d re-upholstered with pictures of birds—and the sun was behind her, shining right into my eyes. “Yeah dad?” she said. “How much do you like it in this town?” She looked around, and I saw how her eyes lingered, but she said, “I like it, but I could live somewhere else.” “Now come on. What about Chaz? You can tell me honest.” She smiled, and her face got a little red. “I really like it here.” Maybe she was remembering Omaha, I don’t know. I sure was. “Your mom says she’s got a place where we can live rent-free if we go back.” “Oh.” Her eyes were narrow. I had a hand in front of my face, trying to block the sun. “I could do either one,” I said. “Stay or go. It’s up to you. But I gotta tell you. If we stay, we’ll probably have to dip into your college fund.” That was just a fact. Abs’ college fund was pretty big—my ex guilted me into putting aside the money when she sent me that first big check—and if we tapped into it, then it could tide us over for a few years. Here was my perspective: if she was okay with moving, then great. But if she wasn’t okay, then why traumatize her? And I knew that if I wanted to get her honest opinion, then I needed to give her the full set of facts. “So we don’t have to move?” she said. “No. But, we probably ought to.” Our dog hopped up onto the cockatoo couch then, and he sidled across her lap. She sort of pushed him aside, but he kept nosing in there. Old Teffy. She didn’t play as much with him as much as when she was a kid. “Teffy would come too, of course,” I said. “He’d see snow for the first time! Exciting stuff, for a dog.” I wondered if I should mention Hell. I wanted to tell her that just because she’d be back near her mom, didn’t mean she’d need to start believing in that stuff again. I’d protect her from it, like I always had. From the believing, that is. I never thought the money was bad—nor even the speaking or the TV appearances. It was the believing. A little girl shouldn’t think she’s gonna go to Hell. It’s just not right. “Let me think about it?” she asked. “Sure,” I said. “Take your time.” Teffy settled his head onto her lap, and I shifted over into the recliner, and we watched a little bit of TV. I thought I deserved a beer, but I didn’t open one. Gotta watch it. Just had to keep her away from booze for three more years. A month passed, and then three. I kept working, taking as many shifts as I could without being away from the house too much. Kids, no matter how old, shouldn’t spend too much time in an empty house. But our place was full of silence. Every time I looked at her, she’d flinch. Finally, one morning she popped into the kitchen, glanced at me and said, “Gotta go,” before I could even say hi. “Wait,” I said. She stopped, hanging half inside the doorway, with her backpack over one shoulder. I could see Teffy in the backyard, running in tight circles. “Abby . . .” “This is just like Hell!” she screamed. “This is it! This is just what it felt like!” Then she dashed out.

• • • •

I took a few weeks, to see if the outburst had cleared anything up for her, and I regret that delay. In fact, I should never have asked her to decide. I thought it was good parenting, but it wasn’t. Finally I said, “We’re staying. When the time comes for you to go to college, we’ll get the money somehow.” She’d developed pale lines on her face. Not wrinkles, not exactly, but flat, dry places that caught the light and made her look haggard. “Alright,” she said. I was a little irritated that she didn’t thank me, but I forgave her, and then we went on with our lives. She was almost done with her sophomore year. Chaz was still in the picture, hanging around her every day. Once he mailed us a letter in a pink envelope, and when I asked her about it, she said, “You didn’t read it?” “Of course not.” “It was a poem,” she said. But she didn’t smile. I wondered if she even liked him, or if he was just something we’d gotten used to having around, kinda like Teffy. The money drained out of her college account, but my boss, Eric, told me that was good. College savings plans were bad—they made you get less financial aid. Eric was an okay guy, I guess, for a boss. But it was hard, waking up. Hard going to work. Nothing wrong with it. People do it every day. But every time I saw a bright t-shirt, I got sad. At breakfast, I told Abby about the financial aid thing, and she said, “I don’t hate you, dad.” My milk-and-cereal suddenly tasted hard, like a mix of stale tortilla chips and watery salsa. “What?” “I’m glad you brought me here,” she said. “Some people hate their parents. I don’t. Not you. Or mom, either.” “Well . . . I don’t . . .” I’d gotten really scared, because I instantly thought: she’s lying —she must hate my guts. “I deserve this,” Abby said. She dropped her spoon into her bowl, and it clattered around like a coin tossed into a toll booth. “It’s just money,” I said. “And it’s temporary. I’ll . . . Eric is gonna open up another shop, and I’ll ask to manage it . . . we’ll . . .” “Daddy, I’m going to tell you about Hell, and I don’t want you to—” She held out two fingers to stop me from shouting. “—I’m an adult now, and I don’t want you to interrupt.” My hand felt heavy, like the spoon had turned into a sword, and I tapped it against my heart, feeling the invisible pass through my chest. I wasn’t sure what was about to happen, but I knew I deserved it. The reckoning. Oh Lord, the reckoning had come.

• • • •

She said, “I believe you about the DMT. And I believe you that mom must’ve fed me a bunch of lies about what I’d seen. But there’s a part of the Hell story that I know wasn’t just DMT, because it happened after I woke up. And I know it wasn’t mom, either, because she made me swear to not tell anyone about it, ever. “You know, I was only down there for like an hour. And when I remember it, I can see devils dancing around stabbing people in the butt with pitchforks. And I suppose that’s all made up. But underneath that, I can also see the greyness. Just a murky black sea, with shapes underneath it. No lake of fire. No torture pits. And I remember falling into the sea and swimming around, and that was it. Just swimming and swimming. If you stopped moving, you’d sink, but the other souls said there was no bottom, so you’d just sink forever. And if you wanted to, you could always swim up to the top. The only thing you couldn’t do was get out, because your body was so light and so puny that even flopping up a few inches out of the water, in order to throw yourself onto the shore, was more than it could manage. “And that was it. I swam and swam. No devils. Satan appeared once, but just as a huge shape, like a whale or a submarine, that shouted, ‘Get out of the way, or don’t, it doesn’t matter!’ as it passed. “Then everything vanished, and I woke up, and mom was there, and I was babbling to her about Hell, Hell, Hell, I’d seen Hell. And I told her that stuff about the other souls I’d spoken to, and the things they’d told me, and she was like, ‘That must’ve been your great- aunt Gracie!’” I couldn’t keep quiet. “Complete lies!” I said. “Don’t you see? She just fit everything into a pattern that—” Abby held out her hand: “Yeah, yeah, I know, Dad. If my Great-Aunt Gracie is in Hell, then I know she wouldn’t care enough to come meet me. There was no caring, there. No meeting people. No relatives. Just endless swimming. “But anyway, after I got out of the hospital, mom kept me home, and we talked a bunch of times. And she called a priest to talk to me, and he was astonished too. And both of them kept asking each other, and me, how someone so young could’ve possibly landed up in Hell. I told them about all the little babyish stuff I’d done—stuffed jellybeans into the DVD player and drawn in marker on the wall and stuff like that—but they were like, no, it’s original sin. That’s all it is. They told me that all people are sinful, and that I hadn’t accepted Jesus into my heart and that’s why I’d gone. Which was amazing news! Finally, I had something that could keep me from going back! So I immediately leapt up and was like, I accept Jesus! And they were so happy, and well, all that stuff is in the book. “But a few weeks after my baptism, a man came to the door. He was wearing a t-shirt and jeans, and he smiled at me, and I knew he was Satan.” “He said hello, and I said hello, and he said ‘is your mom home,’ and I said yes, and before he could say another word, I called for her. But when mom came to the door, she melted into a silvery puddle. And then Satan and I disappeared, and we were back in the sea. Satan whispered to me then that he’d come to take me back, and I said no no no no no, I accepted Jesus! And he said Jesus didn’t care about me! And I was crying and asking why me, why me, and he said it was because I was particularly bad. Not all people went to Hell. Most didn’t, in fact. My mom wouldn’t, for instance. But I had that thing in me. A selfish, unthinking thing. There was no good inside me, he said. But my evil was a subtle thing. I wouldn’t kill anyone. I wouldn’t really even hurt anybody. I’d just . . . I wouldn’t be good or do good. I’d be bad. And when I asked him why he was saying this to me, he said, ‘well, I just wanted to explain it to you, because I’d hate for you to have a wasted life.’ “And then we were back in my living room. A second later my mom bubbled upwards from the puddle, and then Satan was gone.” “I told her what he’d said, and she believed Satan had visited, because she remembered what it’d been like to be a puddle. But she told me that he was the Prince of Lies, and that I shouldn’t believe him, since Jesus had told us, in the Bible, that no man was beyond redemption. But I never believed her. I’m bad. That’s the whole answer. I’m bad.”

• • • •

After she made her confession, we talked about it a few times. I said I could see how that had been weighing on her, but it was plainly untrue. She was a good person. She didn’t lie or cheat. She wasn’t selfish. She was good, and, well, Heaven didn’t exist either, but if it did, then she was destined to go there. And she always said, “well, yeah . . . I mean . . . I guess you could be right . . .” One night, though, I was walking the dog out by the beach, and I got a thought. “Satan” had told her that her mom wouldn’t go to Hell. But what about her dad? Wouldn’t Abs have mentioned it, if he’d said something about me? I was barefoot, and I was slipping around in the sand on the beach. Teffy was skittish about water even after all these years, and he kept yanking me to and fro as the waves came in. And then I remembered that time when she was a little kid, and she’d come to this very beach, and she’d said I was going to Hell, because Satan had told her so. It didn’t mean anything. Her story was totally fake. Or, if not fake, then a delusion. Except . . . what did that mean about Abby? Did she actually resent me? I didn’t ask her, of course, because I didn’t want to encourage her delusions. Instead, we slipped through time, slowly spending down that money. And then something happened. A resurgence of interest. A—what do you call them?—a nostalgia fad. Ten years out, people were like, what happened to the girl who went to Hell? A TV producer tracked us down. And then a film agent. They were offering money. Lots of it. This time I’d learned my lesson. I sat down with Abby, and I made the decision for her. This money would mean a lot to us. If you really don’t want to do it, then you don’t have to, but I think we’d be stupid to pass this up. And I’m sure you think I’m a hypocrite. In fact, I know a lot of people think I never loved my girl, and that the only reason I asked for custody of her was because I wanted to live on easy street. And you know what? Sometimes, deep down in my heart of hearts, I wonder if maybe those people aren’t partly correct. I know I’m not a perfect person. But let me be clear. I never objected to the story—lots of people believe in Heaven and Hell, and there’s no shame in making money off them. What I didn’t like was that my ex-wife convinced Abby that the story was true. There’s a very clear difference there, and I was very careful to tell Abby, “Look. The story isn’t true. But it’s something you experienced. So just describe what happened. And describe your life. It’s entertainment. But none of this means that you need to believe that you’re going to Hell.” I sat with her, going round and round, until I was certain that she got what I was talking about, and it was only then that we called the producer.

• • • •

We were in the limo on the way to the studio. Abby wasn’t nervous at all. She’d done this before, when she was just six. But I heard her whispering some words to herself, and I saw her staring intensely at her reflection in the tinted window. So I took her hand. “Abby,” I said. “Tell me honestly. You don’t believe in any of this, do you?” She clamped down hard on my hand, and shook her head. “No. It’s bullshit.” The words came out in a whisper, so that the driver wouldn’t hear, I guess. We were cruising through the streets of Los Angeles. They’d sent the car for us all the way to Santa Barbara, if you can believe it. “Really?” I said. “You really don’t?” She didn’t look at me. “No.” “Come on,” I said. “Be honest. It’s okay.” Then she turned and stared me full in the face. She was wearing a red coat and a white blouse with ruffles at the neck. Her face had filled out. No pale places anymore. “I’m being honest,” she said. “I don’t believe in any of it. You were right.” I frowned. She’d overdone it. “You really don’t need to humor me.” “Seriously, I’m telling you. I think it’s all garbage. You’re right. I hallucinated it.” I looked into her eyes for a long time, trying to see anything. If she looked away, what did that mean? But she didn’t look away. She held my stare. “Abby,” I said. “I’m your father . . .” “Dad,” she said. “I’m not lying to you, I’m lying to them. The two of us are always honest with each other, aren’t we?” And then the car stopped. She squeezed my hand one more time, “Love you, dad,” she said, and then she stepped out on one high heel. A man in a suit took her hand and pulled her upright, and the next time I saw her was in the studio. When Abs walked onstage, her mom hugged her. They embraced for so long that the applause sputtered out and then restarted. Afterward, they sat down together on the beige couch and smiled identical smiles. When the big question came—“Do you think that when you die, you’ll go back to Hell? Or do you think you’re saved?”—my girl said, “I hope I am. I’ve tried to be. Every day I pray, and every day I ask for the Lord’s .” Then she cried, and so did her mom and the host and half the audience. Afterward, at dinner, her mom made a toast to me and to Abby, and, before I knew it, the two of them were arranging a twenty-city speaking tour. She didn’t even come home. Just flew to Denver without any luggage. Her mom said she’d need all new clothes anyway—their audience would want a wardrobe that was a little less “California.” Now I’m back at home. Money’s gone, so I work at the surf shop and at a bar. I’m even saving a little, so I can pay back Abby’s college fund. Most days, I walk Teffy, drink beer on my front porch, and call my daughter. But when I talk to Abs, I never ask when she’s coming back, because I’m pretty sure I already know the answer. Other than that, I don’t know. It wasn’t easy, now that I’m working two jobs, but the other day I got up early and made it out to the beach. When I got there, I rented a board, and headed out to catch a wave. The first few went fine, but on the fourth, I got knocked clear and found myself deep underwater. At first I panicked and struggled, but then my body went still, and my feet brushed against the bottom, and the ocean vibrated deep inside my lungs, and I hung there for a long moment until the current finally spat me out onto the shore.

©2016 by Rahul Kanakia.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Rahul Kanakia is a Berkeley-based writer whose first novel, a contemporary young adult novel called Enter Title Here, is coming out from Disney- in August 2016. Additionally, his stories have appeared in Apex, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, The Indiana Review, and Nature. He holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins and was a Lambda Literary Emerging Artist Fellow in 2015. If you want to know more you can visit his blog at http://www.blotter-paper.com or follow him on Twitter at @rahkan

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight The Grave P.D. Cacek | 4183 words

It was as if someone had suddenly wrapped a thick layer of cotton around her. Things that had been ordinary and familiar became muted and removed. If she hadn’t been so frightened, she might have even laughed at the feeling. Not that it was an entirely unpleasant sensation. She could still hear the birds singing in the thick, autumn-bright canopy above her and identify each sweet trill and warble, caw, churr, chirp and whistle. She could smell the moss and moisture from the stream as it gurgled through the shallows not twenty feet behind her and she could feel the whispered urgency of the wind reminding her that she really should be heading home for supper. These things were familiar. These things had accompanied her for the last fifteen years as she walked the wooded path to and from her position as Bryner Elementary School’s Head Librarian. These things she heard and smelled and felt. But she saw only the tiny grave. The imaginary feel of cotton tightened around her. For fifteen years, she had walked that same path through the woods, had heard the same noises, felt the same seasonal changes, but until today she had never noticed it. Never saw it. The grave. It was a child’s grave, she was sure of that, even though she had no reason to be. Alone and abandoned and forgotten, the grave was tucked back into the shadows at the far end of a narrow gully; the tiny dirt mound in front of the weathered pink headstone pink is for girls all but eroded by the countless seasons how many of rain and snow and drought, while she, and who knows how many others, passed by. What kind of mother would bury her child, alone, in the woods? What kind of mother would do such a thing? A bad mother, Elizabeth Hesse thought as she looked down at the little grave, a very bad mother. “I would never have done that,” she said out loud. “I would have been a good mother.” But even as she said the words she knew it wasn’t true, because a good mother would have seen the grave before this. And she hadn’t. Until today. One of the things she was always telling the children who came into the library was, “Look. See the world. Don’t just wander blindly through it. Notice everything.” Wonderful, hypocritical words. She had said them for fifteen years, every day for fifteen years . . . and still she hadn’t noticed anything. Hadn’t looked. Had wandered blindly back and forth in front of the grave for fifteen years of her own life and never seen it. Until today. A small sound began to whisper from Elizabeth’s mouth, but she caught it with her fingers before it escaped. Her hand still smelled of the tuna sandwich she’d had for lunch; the fish oil stronger than the gardenia-scented liquid soap in the Teacher’s Lounge. Her father’s company had sent a spray of gardenias to his funeral. Small and white, they had nevertheless filled the viewing room with their scent. Her mother had complained about that, saying it was overpowering. There were no flowers on the small grave, just a thin blanket of autumn leaves. It made Elizabeth shiver just looking at it. A good mother would have tried to keep her baby warm. She would have done that if it had been her child. She would have been a good mother. She wouldn’t have buried it in the woods. No. Elizabeth closed her eyes and let her hand drop to the top button on her cardigan. It wasn’t a real grave. What she had seen, and would see again when she opened her eyes, would be a rock that only looked like a headstone. She hadn’t noticed it before because there was nothing to notice. It’s not a grave. It’s not a grave. It’s not— Elizabeth kept repeating the words until she opened her eyes. And then the words and hope went away. It was a grave . . . but perhaps only the grave of an animal. Yes. That fit. It was the grave of some beloved pet that had died of old age or accident and been buried. Or a favorite dolly. Elizabeth sighed. Of course, it had to be a joke or animal’s grave. No mother in her right mind would bury a child so far away . . . from . . . everything. Alone. Abandoned. Forgotten. Good mothers just didn’t do that sort of thing. Good mothers protected their children and made sure they were healthy and happy and . . . But if the grave was only a childish fancy, then that meant some mother . . . some bad mother had let her child wander into the woods. Alone! Elizabeth turned and glanced quickly up and down the path. The children knew they weren’t supposed to play in the woods. It had been the subject of concern for years; probably even as far back as when she was a child. The woods were not safe, they never had been. Her own mother told her that repeatedly. Only last November, the second day of the Thanksgiving holiday, Polly Winter, a fourth grader, had broken her ankle while playing a game of Hide-and-Seek with visiting cousins. Elizabeth had seen her just that morning from the library window and she was still limping, nearly a full year later, poor child. Poor, willful child. Something rustled in the tall grass near the stand of red-leafed maple directly behind the grave gully and Elizabeth bit her lip. The woods were not safe. The woods were secluded. The woods were lonely . . . so very lonely. Whatever was in the grave—doll or dog (or child)—it was alone and lonely, too. A shiver followed Elizabeth as she stepped from smooth path to rock-rutted gully. Although she moved carefully and cautiously, the way her mother had taught her, her foot almost twisted out from under her and she saw herself sprawled unladylike in the dirt, skirt thrown back, legs spread wide. Stop that! Elizabeth kept her footing, but stopped when another gust of wind rustled the maple leaves in front of her. That was the sound she’d heard. There was no one in the woods besides her. No children, no adults, no one to see her kneel in front of the tiny headstone. It was pink granite flecked with black and silver; and it was cold against the palm of her hand, its edges smooth as butter, the chiseled inscription all but obliterated. With one finger, like a kindergartner connecting the dots with an oversized pencil, Elizabeth traced the letters carved into the stone one at a time. This was no childish project or joke. No animal rested beneath the stone. M. Y. P. R. E. C. I. O. U. S. O. “My Precious One.” Elizabeth dropped her hand and sat back on her calves, felt the left knee of her nylons pop and send runners halfway up her thigh. The grave was real . . . but she’d never noticed it before. But more importantly, none of the generations of schoolchildren she told to “Hush” and “Be quiet” had noticed it either. And Heaven knows they noticed everything else worth whispering about during Free Reading Time: the broken water main that flooded out the toy shop, the broken-down car, the funny-looking cloud that had been all purple and orange, the new traffic lights, the old park benches, the way the sky looked before it snowed. They noticed everything but the grave. And they should have. Because a grave, a real grave, was something much too wonderful and much too terrible not to talk about. Rustling again. And not the wind. This time directly behind her. Louder. Closer.Rustle. Rustle. Thump. Thump. Footsteps. Elizabeth twisted toward the sound and leaned back against the small headstone. Protectively. The way a good mother . . . but not this child’s mother would. “Who’s there?” she said in her Librarian’s voice. “Is someone there?” Rustle, thump . . . and what was that? A giggle? Sitting straighter, Elizabeth took a deep breath and began mentally going down her list of school troublemakers. “Kenny Wisman, is that you?” A brilliant boy with more energy than control, he was always looking for better and bigger pranks to justify his existence. Creating the small grave would be a minor accomplishment for a boy who had not-so-secretly christened her Mz. Hesse-the-Pest. “Kenneth? If that’s you, speak up now! I dislike being snuck up upon.” Without thinking, without caring that she might be laughed at, Elizabeth reached back and hugged the headstone. “Show yourself this instant, young man, or else I’ll be forced to call your mother and—” A tufted blue jay screeched as it shot, arrow-like, from the underbrush in front of her and she screeched with it. When it called again, it was already a hundred yards away. “Foolish,” she said as she turned back to the grave and smiled. “I scared myself, wasn’t that silly of me?” Elizabeth brushed a fallen leaf off the stone. Perhaps no one, including herself, had noticed the grave until now because now was when she was supposed to find it. Perhaps it had been waiting all these years until she was ready to find it. To notice it. To care. My Precious One. “You’re late.” Elizabeth carefully hung her shoulder bag on the coat rack and took a deep breath before answering. “Yes, Mother. Sorry, Mother.” She had said the same thing (yes Mother sorry Mother) for as long as she could remember, with no variations or modifications, but tonight she noticed that the words stuck a little in her throat. The same way she noticed how old and used up her mother looked when she walked into the dining room. “My God, what have you done now? Just look at your clothes!” Despite every effort not to, Elizabeth looked down and felt the same kind of chill that she had at the grave . . . a cold numbing that seeped through the layers of flesh and bone until it reached her lungs and made her gasp for air. She really was a mess. The hem of her skirt was stained with mud and a dead leaf clung to the ruined stocking just below her left knee. Although she didn’t remember it happening, three buttons on her cardigan had torn away. Elizabeth pulled the sweater closed to cover the mud-flecked blouse beneath. Funny, how she didn’t notice when it happened . . . but, then again, she hadn’t noticed so much before tonight . . . “What have you done?” her mother asked again, accusing, all but dropping the covered casserole dish on the table when she mirrored Elizabeth’s action and reached up to clutch the front of her housedress. “You’ve been raped, haven’t you?” The words were cold and sharp and stinging, and left bruises where they hit. “I warned you about walking through those woods, Elizabeth, and now look what’s happened. You’re ruined. No man will ever look at you again.” Elizabeth fingered the broken thread from one of the missing buttons. “No, Mother, I wasn’t raped. I—tripped, that’s all. That path was rather muddy.” The chill moved from her lungs, giving Elizabeth a chance to catch her breath, and made itself comfortable in her untouched womb. “I’m fine.” “Oh.” With a sigh, her mother dropped her hand and busied herself with the casserole. “Well, dinner is probably ruined thanks to your tardiness. I try to make sure everything is timed perfectly and you think nothing of wandering in whenever it pleases you.” “1 didn’t plan on being late, Mother.” “That’s no excuse, Elizabeth. Now, go into the kitchen and wash your hands before the stew gets any colder than it already is.” Sitting herself at the head of the table, her mother began ladling out the steaming chunks of meat and vegetables. “I’ll not wait for you if you don’t mind.” “No,” Elizabeth said, nodding as she walked to the kitchen. “Of course not, Mother. I wouldn’t expect you to.” Her mother grunted something in reply, but Elizabeth decided to not notice. The water, though only lukewarm, stung the abrasions on Elizabeth’s hands as she scrubbed them clean. For all of her life, her mother had taught her that pain was the only thing you could truly believe. If whatever it was you did didn’t hurt somehow, then it wasn’t worth the effort. Her mother had not been a good mother. The chill in her womb rolled over lazily, like a kitten stretching in the sun, when Elizabeth turned off the taps and dried her hands. Her mother didn’t know how to be a good mother. Arms straight out in front, fingers pointing to the ceiling, Elizabeth turned her palms toward her and then back. And sighed. Her poor hands were clean, but the flesh was red and swollen from the vigorous washing and two nails had snapped off at bizarre angles. She’d have to file and mend them before the Kindergarten’s Story Hour in the morning. The older children wouldn’t notice, but the little ones . . . the babies, they saw everything. She had to be so careful around the babies. My Precious One. There was the clank and clatter of metal upon china from the dining room—her mother’s subtle way of telling Elizabeth she was taking much too long at the assigned task. But the clinking and clatter didn’t stop when Elizabeth got back to the table. “You didn’t bring the dinner rolls, Elizabeth.” Elizabeth let her throbbing hands settle against the chill in her womb. Her mother was not a good mother . . . but she’d show her, she’d show her. “I didn’t know I was supposed to, Mother.” Her mother’s fork hit the side of the dinner plate and made it sing. “Well, isn’t that just like you? I would have thought a grown woman, a supposedly mature woman would have taken it upon herself to notice if the dinner rolls were on the table or not and do something about it . . . without having her Mommy have to tell her. My God, Elizabeth, don’t you notice anything?” Not until today, Mother. Elizabeth couldn’t help but smile as she turned and walked back to the kitchen. “And don’t forget the butter,” her mother whined. “You know I like butter on my rolls. And bring the jam. Strawberry. Not the marmalade like last night. Strawberry is for supper, marmalade is for breakfast. It’s not that difficult a thing to remember, so I don’t understand how you manage to forget so often.” Elizabeth picked up the jar with the bright red, plumb strawberries—I forget because I don’t like strawberry jam—and dropped it into the sink. “Oops.” “What was that?” “I dropped the jam, Mother. I’m sorry.” The jar of marmalade felt cool against her palm as she carried it, the rolls and butter back to the table. “I’ll pick some more up tomorrow. And don’t worry about the kitchen, I’ll clean it up after dinner. Would you like me to butter you a roll, Mother?” Her mother glared at her from across the table. “How could you be so clumsy?” Elizabeth ignored the question and spooned a large dollop of the honey-gold marmalade onto a roll. “Mother, have you ever heard of a grave out in the woods?” “What?” “A grave . . . a child’s grave in the woods. Near the stream. Have you ever heard mention of it?” “Of course not,” her mother said, ignoring the offered rolls and butter as she returned her attention to the stew. “There are no in the woods. Why would you ask such a thing, Elizabeth?” “No reason,” Elizabeth answered as she brought the marmalade-laden roll toward her lips. “I heard a rumor.” “Rumors are just that,” her mother growled. “I’m surprised you paid it any notice.” The chill in Elizabeth’s womb reached up and touched her heart. “I am, too, Mother.” Her mother had stayed up past her usual ten o’clock bedtime just to be difficult— puttering around the house in her robe and slippers and refusing to go to bed when Elizabeth suggested it. A good mother would have gone to bed when she was supposed to. A good mother would have known when to leave her child alone. “I’ll know,” Elizabeth said as she carefully unfolded the mud-stained handkerchief that had been tucked away in the bottom of her purse. “I’ll be a good mother.” “Isn’t that right? My Precious One.” The tiny skull, with its brittle fringe of dark brown hair and patina of leathery flesh, fell onto its side when Elizabeth lifted it toward her face. Presenting a cheek to be kissed. So Elizabeth did. The way a good mother would. The grave in the woods had been old, very old; its tiny occupant all but gone to dust. Elizabeth had tried to be gentle, but the moment her trembling hands touched the stained baby blanket (pink, for girls)the body beneath crumbled. She’d only managed to save the skull. Nothing else. But that was enough. “Poor little thing,” Elizabeth whispered, and watched the baby hair tremble under her breath like summer wheat. “You’ve been alone for so long.” She kissed it again, to let it know it was loved. The feel of the dried skin against her lips wasn’t that unpleasant, no more so than any other kiss she’d ever had to give; and away from the confines of the grave and stench of decay, her Precious One only smelled a bit musty . . . like a well-loved book. But still it wasn’t a baby smell. Babies weren’t supposed to smell like books, they were supposed to smell sweet like candy, like flowers, like . . . Elizabeth smiled as she stood up and hurried them both to her dressing table. Cupping her Precious One gently in one palm, she began to dig through the mounds of white panties and bras for the tiny indulgence she’d treated herself to. And hidden. Years ago. The bottle of perfume was still sealed, still perfect; the price sticker still attached. Untouched, until now. Unloved. Until now. Her mother didn’t approve of perfume, but her mother wasn’t going to be the one wearing it. The scent of gardenias filled the room the moment Elizabeth lifted off the white cap. Unlike the day of her father’s funeral, the fragrance made her happy. Humming softly, she held the bottle over her Precious One’s forehead and let a drop fall. It clung like dew to the sparse hair, but then a second drop, larger than the first and not expected, missed its target and fell onto the linen dresser scarf. Leaving a mark. Leaving a stain. Elizabeth gasped as the perfume bottle slipped from her fingers. It bled its clear, fragrant blood across the top of her dressing table and died. The stench of gardenias was overpowering. Her mother would smell it. Her mother would find out. And it was all her Precious One’s fault. “Bad baby!” Elizabeth hissed, and pinched the little chin between her thumb and forefinger; squeezed and saw the tiny right ear fall like a spent blossom. How could she be a good mother to such a child? “Now look what you’ve done. Can’t you behave for just one moment?” Elizabeth brushed the mummified skin off onto the floor and quickly mopped up the spilled perfume with the already soiled scarf. The air was thick with the cloying scent and she almost gagged before she got the soaked linen into the laundry hamper. It was only after she could catch her breath and breathe again that Elizabeth looked down at her baby. Another small flake of skin, perhaps the beginnings of an eyebrow, had fallen off. “What am I going to do with you?” Without waiting for an answer, Elizabeth took the tiny head in both hands and shook it. Something rattled inside the skull, but she knew she wasn’t hurting her Precious One. She was only teaching it right from wrong, the way a good mother was supposed to. “What kind of mother would I be if I didn’t teach you?” she asked when she finally stopped, looking deep into the sunken, empty sockets. “Not a very good one, and I want to be a good mother. I have to be. Now, are you sorry you made such a mess? Yes, I’m sure you are.” Elizabeth leaned down to kiss the wrinkled forehead. “Yes. All is forgiven. All right, time for bed. And no back talk . . . young lady.” Yes, she remembered. Pink was for girls. Her Precious One was a girl. How wonderful. She’d always wanted a daughter. Her Precious One didn’t utter so much as a whimper when Elizabeth, good mother that she was, carried her to the antique toy cabinet at the far end of the room to pick out a body. There was really only one choice among the china dolls Elizabeth had collected since her own childhood—the cupid-faced infant in the long, imported lace christening gown. It was supposed to be very expensive and very old, her mother had told her . . . but her mother had never been a good mother, not like Elizabeth was going to be, so it didn’t matter what she’d said. Elizabeth smashed the doll’s head against the side of the cabinet and smiled at the pattern the china pieces made on the rug. “Look,” she said, holding her Precious One up to see, “like snow-flakes. All right, don’t move and it won’t hurt. Mother promises.” Her Precious One’s withered neck slipped effortlessly onto the wooden dowel the doll’s head had been molded around. “Oh, my,” Elizabeth said, tucking the lace collar in around the hardened flesh. Her Precious One’s head wobbled a bit, but not much. “Oh, don’t you look beautiful? Yes, you do . . . you look beautiful.” Elizabeth tickled and kissed and cooed and waltzed them both around the room that had been hers since birth. That would now be both of theirs. Her mother’s shout ended the dance. Like always. “Elizabeth! It’s almost midnight! Go to bed this instant . . . you have work in the morning.” Elizabeth stopped too quickly. Her Precious One’s head tipped forward, chin against the embroidered yoke of the gown. “Yes, Mother. Sorry, Mother,” she shouted to her mother, then hissed to her child, “Sit up straight! A lady never slumps. I said sit up!” Elizabeth shook her Precious One and watched the baby’s head loll backwards. She was being obstinate. She was being a bad baby. Her Precious One wasn’t so precious after all. Maybe there had been a reason for the lonely grave in the woods. Maybe Elizabeth had been chosen to find it because she was the only one who could handle such a spoiled child. Her Precious One had to be taught. A good mother had to teach her baby. “I’m only doing this because I love you,” Elizabeth said as she lay her Precious One over one arm and lifted her free hand into position. “I’m going to be a good mother to you, but that means you have to be a good baby to me. It’s only fair.” Elizabeth smiled. Her Precious One knew. Her Precious One understood. She was a good mother. “Be brave,” she whispered as she lifted her hand. “This will hurt me more than it will you.” When it didn’t, Elizabeth consoled herself with the knowledge that there would be other occasions to prove she was a good mother. Many occasions in the years to come.

©1999 by P.D. Cacek. Originally published in 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense, edited by Al Sarrantonio. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR The winner of both a Bram Stoker and World Fantasy Award, P.D. Cacek has written over a hundred short stories, six plays, and five published novels. Her most recent novel, The Selkie, is currently available as an e-book from Amazon.com. Cacek holds a Bachelor’s Degree in English/Creative Writing Option from the University of California at Long Beach and has been a guest lecturer at the Odyssey Writing Camp. A native Westerner, Cacek now lives Phoenixville, PA. When not writing, she can often been found either with a group of costumed storytellers called The Patient Creatures (www.creatureseast.com), or haunting local cemeteries looking for inspiration.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight NONFICTION The H Word: The Monstrous Intimacy of Poetry in Horror Evan J. Peterson | 1384 words

Poetry, like horror, is an underrated genre of literature (at least in America). Both are frequently maligned for being self-indulgent and masturbatory, though usually for very different reasons. The horror author is labeled a decadent: she’s a sadomasochist, someone for whom physical suffering and mortal terror are both bread and caviar. The poet is stereotyped as a different kind of pervert, one who enjoys the depths of his own navel and the taste of his own toes, and furthermore, one who wants everyone to know this about him. He too is considered a sadomasochist, obsessing about his tortured existence and taking everyone else into his private Hell. Well. Bugger all of that. What poets and horror scribes have in common isn’t merely a cursory appreciation of despair. The two groups of artists share a universally human quest toward intimacy. The poet seeks to know the mysteries and irrational forces of the heart and the unconscious, of dreams and love and grief. The language of poetry is usually rich (sometimes rife) with metaphor, and these metaphors are often outside linear comparison. For instance, the moon, to most poets, isn’t just a goddess or a lantern. She is instead a dead yet breastfeeding woman gazing from a of bone (Sylvia Plath, “Edge”) or a mouthless face “misted up from inside” (Alice Oswald, “Full Moon”). Come to think of it, many poems about the moon fit easily into the horror genre. While the poet usually seeks to make meaning from the irrational heart, the horror author wants to find the intimacy in fear or even revulsion, a different set of often- irrational emotions. Fear and revulsion are deeply psychological and thoroughly difficult to hide or repress. They’re common human denominators of the vulnerable mind and body. The concept of “vulnerable” is an essential connection here: through vulnerability, most life coaches and new age gurus will tell you, comes intimacy. We “open” ourselves and risk grief and pain in order to know something transcendent. Poet and horror author alike specialize in this sublime wave of emotion. As such, these genres share a preoccupation with the supernatural. Excuse me for quoting the following cliché, but I want to bring it into a new context: Lovecraft asserted that the oldest human emotion is fear, and the oldest fear is that of the unknown. In the same essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” he explains that what makes a tale truly “weird” or spooky isn’t what happens as much as the permeating sense and atmosphere of reality twisting away from us, or the looming terror that something malevolent and indescribable hovers just at the edge of our perception. It’s no surprise that Lovecraft had a rapturous love for poetry, like Poe before him. Both horror pioneers wrote memorable poetry in addition to their horror prose, and both genres rely on mood and atmosphere. “Horror” isn’t as much about what happens as how the reader feels about what happens. In fact, it’s a rather recent development to have a formal schism between authors of weird tales and poets of the sublime. From this common ground, horror authors can find much to learn from poetry. Of all literary genres, horror and poetry rely the most on mood, tone, and atmosphere. Whether I’m writing verse or prose, I want to take my readers somewhere uncanny, and, more often than not, leave them there. I want to get under your skin and rasp your bones, and I usually find it easier to do this in poetry. Poetry is an excellent medium to unnerve and disquiet the reader, especially because of poetry’s lack of fear of fragmentary thoughts, grammatically unstable sentences, and extended concentration on a single image or, just as often, a phantasmagoric montage of images. Poets often embrace these rhetorical strategies while the prose author often stops and thinks, “I don’t know if I can do that.” Of course you can. One of my favorite movements in poetry is the “deep image.” This style, adapted from the Symbolist artists (including their offspring the Decadents and the Surrealists), involves concentrating on a single image and allowing a wealth of strange associations to develop. One of my favorite deep images comes from a surprisingly short poem from the often-horrifying Charles Simic. In “Fork,” he describes the everyday object as, “a bird’s foot/ Worn around a cannibal’s neck [ . . . ] Its head which like your fist/ Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.” I fucking love this poem. This deep image style is useful in prose for our “boo” moments. Many horror authors know how to slow the story’s action to a crawl and spend an excruciating span of words describing a moment of menace. If you don’t know how to do this, go read some poetry. Slow down, elaborate, embellish until the act of description itself becomes less an authorial exercise and more the effect that the reader cannot look away—because you’re holding their attention so well. Sylvia Plath, one of poetry’s queens of despair, wrote a particularly horrifying collection, Ariel, just before her suicide. I’ve learned much from Plath. Watch what she does in “Cut,” a gross little ode to slicing the tip of her finger nearly off while chopping vegetables:

A million soldiers run, Redcoats, every one

[ . . . ]

How you jump— Trepanned veteran, Dirty girl, Thumb stump. Poetry is full of such teased-along explorations of a single awful thing. I also recommend Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil), particularly the poem “Une Charogne (A Carcass or A Carrion),” in which he and his girlfriend see a dead body in the park, pregnant with maggots, eaten at by stray dogs, and he reminds her that she’ll be dead and rotting like this one day. Such a charmer, that one. The art of compelling description is only the beginning. How to pack such gruesome details into a story without inflating it and drawing it out for too long? Look again to the poets. Poetry can be anything, any style, but more often than not, poetry values attention to and economy of language. I can tell a prose poem from flash fiction usually by the amount of content the writer can pack into a single paragraph or sentence, and with any luck the prose poem has a rhythm or musicality to the language. See Arthur Rimbaud, a heretical faggot close to my heart, in his “Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell),” translated here by Bertrand Mathieu: “I called for executioners so that, while dying, I could bite the butts of their rifles. I called for plagues to choke me with sand, with blood. Bad luck was my god. I stretched out in the muck.” Or how about Swedish horror-surrealist Aase Berg, from “The Hypotenuse” in her collection With Deer: “She writhed inside her horrible, backward body, she writhed so that her insides chafed against the shell, so that her muscles rubbed raw against the inside of her skin.” Yowza! Can you write rhythmic and visceral prose like that? Of course you can. Go do it. And while you’re at it, read some Minister Faust. His short story “The Belly of the Crocodile” is highly poetic and mythic horror. These lessons don’t apply merely to screamcraft. All prose benefits from poetry’s attention to the word. Angela Carter and Toni Morrison alike have written prose that sings. You don’t have to be as purple as Lovecraft and Poe (though, dammit, be purple if it makes you happy). It’s not all ululating paroxysms and tintinnabulations. You can be as spare and hard as Cormac McCarthy. It’s about pleasing the reader’s ear while freaking them the hell out.

• • • •

If you’d like some more recommendations and vivisection of the poetics of horror, please visit the archives of my old column, “Intimate Monsters,” which ran for about a year over at Nailed magazine (formerly Small Doggies): bit.ly/nailedmag.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Evan J. Peterson is an essayist, journalist, fiction author, poet, professor, and editor living in Seattle. He’s the author of Skin Job and The Midnight Channel and editor of Lambda Award finalist Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam: Gay City 5. His writing can also be found in The Myriad Carnival, Nightmare Magazine’s “Queers Destroy Horror!” issue, Weird Tales, The , The Queer South anthology, Arcana: The Tarot Poetry Anthology, and Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books. His first nonfiction book will be published by Lethe Press in 2017, and he also reads tarot for international clients. Check out Evanjpeterson.com for more. Artist Showcase: Yana Moskaluk Marina J. Lostetter | 614 words

Yana Moskaluk was born in 1984 in Siberia, and moved to Moscow at nineteen to work at the Art.Lebedev Studio. Yana loves to travel, and draws inspiration from medieval art, ancient sculptures, old towns, legends, and fairytales. She takes the mood and atmosphere projected by such stories and items and recreates them in her own art within a modern context.

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

I’m really afraid of dogs. A pack of street dogs attacked me when I was in my teens. So now when I see or hear a dog, I immediately imagine its teeth around me. It scares me to death! I love cats.

What is your favorite medium to work with and why?

I love computer graphics because of the possibilities. I can change my work at any point to get a better result. I use Adobe Illustrator mostly, some Photoshop, and now I’m trying to figure out how ZBrush works, because I have an interest in creating something in 3D. I prefer colored pencils and watercolors among traditional mediums.

Tell us about this month’s cover image, Ligeia. Who is the woman and what is she doing?

The image was inspired by a story with the same title by Edgar Allan Poe. It’s a pretty old art piece, so I reread the story recently. Ligeia is a dead young lady who comes alive again under scary circumstances. This is her moment of reawakening. I love Poe’s stories. He is a great inspiration.

What do you imagine scares the woman in Ligeia the most?

She doesn’t have any fear. I believe she is the one who scares you in the night.

Your portfolio includes a lot of black-and-white and monochromatic work. What do you find appealing about these palettes?

Actually, I always start to draw colorful things, but end up changing the palette many times (that’s what I like about computer graphics the most). Sometimes I end up with a black and white scheme if I decide it suits a particular work. Often I’ll decide colors are unnecessary, or that they’re more of a distraction from the subject than an aid.

Tell us a little bit about working for Art.Lebedev Studio.

I like working with talented people, and there are lots of them here. We create designs for everything, but my group focuses on illustrations. One of the projects I like most includes designing artwork for the Moscow subway.

Are you active in Moscow’s art community? Are there art related events you like to attend, or is art a more private experience for you?

I’m not originally from Moscow. When I moved here from a small town, I took part in many local projects and exhibitions. Now I like to think not about the Moscow art scene, but about the whole world. One of my pieces is currently traveling in Poland with an exhibition titled, “Across Poland with the Best Fashion Illustration.” The idea that art has no geographical boundaries is very inspiring to me.

Who has been your greatest artistic inspiration?

I’ve loved the Russian artist Mikhail Vrubel since my childhood. He was born in the same city as me, and is well-known there, so I was exposed to his work very early. I think his art will be my inspiration forever.

[To view the gallery, turn the page.]

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Marina J. Lostetter’s short fiction has appeared in venues such as InterGalactic Medicine Show, Galaxy’s Edge, and Writers of the Future. Her most recent publications include a tie-in novelette for the Star Citizen game universe, which was serialized over the first four months of 2014. Originally from Oregon, Marina now lives in Arkansas with her husband, Alex. She tweets as @MarinaLostetter. Please visit her homepage at lostetter.net. Interview: David J. Schow Lisa Morton | 6112 words

David J. Schow is an award-winning writer who lives in Los Angeles. The latest of his nine novels is a hardboiled extravaganza called The Big Crush (2015). The newest of his nine short story collections is a monster-fest titled DJSturbia (2016). He has written extensively for film (The Crow, Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, The Hills Run Red) and television (Masters of Horror, Mob City). His nonfiction works include The Art of Drew Struzan (2010) and The Outer Limits at 50 (2014). He can be seen on various DVDs as expert or documentarian on everything from Creature from the Black Lagoon to Psycho to I, Robot.

It’s hard to find out much about you prior to 1978. You had a childhood, right?

Actually, I sprang full-blown from the forehead of already grown up. If you don’t buy that, how about this: I am an actual German orphan adopted by American parents (then living in Middlesex); my mom died when I was seven years old. Childhood was fun until then.

Was The Outer Limits a big deal to you even as a kid?

I was there, day and date, for the premiere . . . and yes, I really am that old. My window for a sense of wonder was wide open. Imprinting occurred; perhaps possession. Fifty years later, I was still trying to figure out how this TV show from the 1960s had become a “lifework,” so to speak, at least for me. The Outer Limits Companion has now been on the planet for thirty years. I’m working on the third revised edition right now. For a shorter answer that will lead to a much longer answer, see The Outer Limits at 50, which is more about the autobiographical journey as opposed to the documentary approach. I’m not blowing off the question; that really is the briefest way I can respond. Hell, I’m still writing about the show!

Some of my favorite stories of yours display a rich affection for the classic Universal movie monsters. What do they mean to you as an adult?

Enough stories, in fact, to amass a decent themed collection on their own . . . which nobody is interested in publishing, so I’ll get around to it myself eventually. That’s another from childhood; if I changed over the years, how would those monsters also age or be interpolated into contemporary scenarios? On average, I achieved this effect much better than most of the movie reboots we’ve suffered thus far. When you’re a kid, those classic Gothic monsters quickly become allies. The next monster phase was psychos. After that came slashers, whom, if you reflect on their heyday in the 1980s, were mostly like incredibly punishing parents—don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t play loud music or fornicate or camp out or disobey. I revisit those old friends less, these days—only when I really need to.

What can you tell us about your first sale in 1978 to Galileo Magazine? Was it a big deal for a twenty-three year-old?

First fiction sale, to the first place I submitted it, cold, and they bought it. It was a big deal to me, certainly, because I had embarked on a do-or-die, publish-or-perish approach, with no safety net. I had just made my first professional sale (a newspaper article). But at the same time, I was badgering myself because I had read somewhere that made his first fiction sale at age seventeen. So I asked when he sold his first fiction, and he goes, “I was seventeen.” So I already felt six years behind! Beginners call it “breaking in,” which is apt, because it’s a lot like burglary. I broke in and then didn’t sell any other fiction for four straight years.

You’ve credited both Robert Bloch and T.E.D. Klein as mentors. What was it like working with them? What did they teach you?

I didn’t actually meet Bob until 1982, but we had corresponded, much as Bob had corresponded with Lovecraft. Bob put a very human, workaday face on this seemingly glorious pursuit of writing for a living. I admired anybody who could type fast enough to survive in the age of pulp, to free-associate entire novels and have them retain some kind of coherence, which methodology proved to be ideal when I began hacking away at tie- ins. Five novels per year? No problem! (And I’m talking actual, 60,000-word “book length works,” to use the contractese—not the present-day, internet conception of a “novel” tossed off in a weekend.) Bob juggled genres nimbly and wrote TV, stories, novels, and movies with equal aplomb, which seemed to be a very practical approach to which to aspire as a writer. Do it all. I didn’t “work” with Bob per se until much later. But he remained a friend, a colleague, and an inspiration from the first. To this day he still doesn’t get enough credit for inventing the entire genre of “psychological horror,” practically single-handedly. As for Ted Klein (the “T” is for Theodore, hence “Ted”), I camped out on his metaphorical doorstep and refused to go away until he bought stuff from me. He cracked before I did. The first issue of Twilight Zone Magazine hit the stands in 1981, and I saw it with a religious glow around it, like a revelation. My destiny. I must be in this magazine. And I deluged Ted with submissions, and got some very instructive rejections. Then he started buying stuff, oh Lord . . . and from him I got very intuitive editorial input. My big victory came with about the fourth short story I sold him. He called me—we spent a lot of time on the phone—and said, “We’re taking it. No changes.” I am one of the few people on the planet who has read the bones of Ted’s never- finished second novel, Nighttown. I read it while I was staying in his apartment in Manhattan. My in Twilight Zone was in 1982, and I was in the magazine (and its sister digest-sized spinoff, Night Cry) every year until it folded in 1989. Without Twilight Zone, the whole phase never would have happened—visibly, at least. Most specially, it became a go-to place for New York editors seeking new horror. They could audition us by reading our short fiction in a magazine that regularly headlined the stars of the field—not a fanzine or a niche publication, but a periodical that had the muscle of national men’s-mag distribution. You could buy it in 7-Elevens. In more than one convenience store I found Night Cry on the register racks right next to TV Guide.

You’re now the one usually credited with creating the term “splatterpunk.” Has “punk” now been affixed to so many other words that it’s lost meaning?

“Splatterpunk” was most obviously a riff on “,” etymologically speaking. It was immediately inflammatory and divisive, but it was great PR. But the partyline swiftly became vicious: the splatterpunks had ruined horror for everybody. We took a lot of heat. Now flash forward to our mutual editor, John Joseph Adams, running a very successful Kickstarter campaign called People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! Go read the essays. Inclusivity should be mandatory. The only arbiter should be talent. To answer the question, I think folks currently into fashion would resent having their “punk” deleted. And love it or hate it, “splatterpunk” has been in the Oxford English Dictionary since 2002. Go ahead, writers—try to crack that market. I dare you.

Is it fair to say that the original splatterpunks—you, , Joe Lansdale, R.C. Matheson, John Skipp, among others—were dedicated to expanding the boundaries of horror in terms of both style and substance? Was that later corrupted into torture porn?

Yes to the first, and no to the second, which is an unfair corollary. It mistakenly mixes “scary stories” with the lowest common denominator of the worst slasher movies, when the two always had very little in common. has traditionally suffered, and continues to suffer, from a critical conflation with horror movies. One reason horror remains largely a ghetto category is that every time somebody wants to slag the entire genre, they cite torture porn, which confuses cruelty with horror. Now, the “conte cruel” has always been a big part of horror, but as says, it’s not the only part.

In a 1997 interview, you suggested that splatterpunk had also given rise to horror’s “Riot Grrls,” new (at the time) female authors like Kathe Koja, Yvonne Navarro, Caitlìn R. Kiernan, and more. Do you think they sprang out of splatterpunk . . . or as reaction to the largely male-centered authors of the movement?

Time-wise, it’s convenient to say they succeeded us, but the truth is they were there all along. What codified it in my mind as a “moment,” if not necessarily a “movement,” was the formation of Dell Abyss, which embraced women horror writers in a way the Tor Horror imprint rarely had up to that point. And it was refreshing to read because “extreme horror” becomes self-parodying at lightspeed. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you started publishing fiction in the early-to-mid 1990s, yes?

Yep—I think it was about ’94, thanks to our mutual pal Steve Jones.

(Who has kept me alive on the other side of the pond for decades, now.) Let’s look at some numbers: Splatterpunk, as a conceit, had pretty much gasped its last by about 1992 . . . the same year Poppy Z. Brite published Lost Souls (her first novel) and Melanie Tem published Blood Moon (her second)—both from Dell Abyss. Kathe Koja did The Cipher (1991), Bad Brains (1992), and Skin (1993). Lucy Taylor published The Safety of Unknown Cities in 1995, and Yvonne Navarro started publishing novelizations in 1996, by which time Nancy Holder had already been publishing for ten years. Nancy Kilpatrick burned up the entire decade of the ’90s with her “Aramantha Knight” Darker Passions series. By 1998, you’ve got debuts by Mehitobel Wilson, Christa Faust, and Caitlìn R. Kiernan. Yeah, I think women horror writers pretty much owned the ’90s all by themselves.

You’ve only written three horror novels—The Kill Riff (1988), The Shaft (1990), and Rock Breaks Scissors Cut (2003). Do you think horror works better in short form?

To the first: The Kill Riff is not really a horror novel. There’s nothing otherworldly or supernatural in it; it’s more of a thriller, but Tor marketed it as horror—“urban” or “psychological” horror, I guess—which was a fatal error. Rock Breaks fits my definition of horror, but it’s only novella-length. Which leaves The Shaft as the only bona fide horror novel I have written to date. To the second: The Shaft began life as a short story (it was published in Weird Tales, in fact). And yes, always—the short story form is the ideal form for horror. But people don’t have the love for short fiction that once existed, when would publish in the Saturday Evening Post and everybody would be talking about his story the next day, or Ray Russell would publish a new Charles Beaumont tale in Playboy. Readers now want to cock their thumb at a huge brick of text and say, “See? I read that.” But the impetus that sent generations of scary story writers down the slide was always—always —stories. Not , not Frankenstein, not Beowulf, not the infrequent long-form benchmark works, but rather Poe, Lovecraft, Finney, Bloch, Kersh, du Maurier, Dahl, Leiber, Brown, Jane Rice, Sturgeon, Shirley Jackson, and all their ilk, as experienced through a shit-ton of anthologies. I dedicated DJSturbia to all of them, to their short fiction; them and a couple hundred more, for their short stories, whether they did novels as well, or not.

When Publishers Weekly reviewed your third novel Rock Breaks Scissors Cut, they noted that it “rises above the usual genre fare.” Does a phrase like that make you a little crazy?

“The usual,” in horror, is the ghetto—hoary characters, paint-by-numbers plots, hideously under-talented Steve King wannabes. I remind you that not so long ago, nearly all of us thought we could smell the “usual” at fifty paces, because the paperbacks had die-cut covers, foil, embossing, possessed children, skulls, and cutlery stuck in fruit. But here’s the thing: I don’t want the “usual,” and neither do most readers still possessing a functioning brain. I understand literary comfort food and literary junk food; as Joe Lansdale says, “I need my garbage, too.” There are few horror pleasures as sublime as a Harry Adam Knight novel. But as far as Publishers Weekly goes, anything that distinguishes Rock Breaks from all the preceding “usual,” I count as a win. It was highly experimental for me—I wanted to organize the story around the concept of threes and a trio of characters, each represented alternately by first, second, and third-person narratives. This was a vain and mostly doomed choice, but I’m still rather fond of the result.

Do you see your hardboiled fiction (Gun Work, Internecine) as being a natural accompaniment to the horror works? Or are they even more closely related?

They walk hand-in-hand, and the bloodline runs all the way back to The Kill Riff. I like to write suspense novels gilded with what I call “horror perceptions,” which is one of the reasons a bona fide freak show appears two-thirds of the way through Upgunned. The action in Gun Work is nothing if not horrific. You once spoke of writing a number of stories about “Men in Suits With a Plan.” What is that fascinates you about that sort of character?

I love stories about the secret masters of everything, or at least, encountering people who seem to have an innate grasp of what is really going on under the suffocating white noise of pop culture. Every day we look askance at things going on in the world and we wonder what the true story is, and we suspect that somewhere—perhaps down deep where we don’t wish to go—there’s a shadow figure who has the real answers.

Your work also frequently uses Los Angeles and/or Hollywood. Why does L.A. work so well for you as a horror setting?

Because I’ve walked these streets for four decades. Watched them morph. And again, the point of view is not restricted to horror fiction. The three books of my unofficial, very loose trilogy of modern L.A. hardboiled hit-man stories all take place here. Their roots are here. Upgunned takes a slight detour to the East Coast, but it’s because of the film industry. The third one, The Big Crush, stubbornly insisted on sticking to the San Fernando Valley . . . and when the books start telling me what to do, that’s when I feel the most excited about the process.

You and have both made effective use of L.A.’s canyons as horror settings. Why are they so damn scary?

I can’t speak for Dennis, but L.A. is a desert full of canyons, and the canyons are full of critters and darkness, and if you were stuck in one, you might discover that you had an extremely long walk ahead of you before you got back to anything resembling civilization. Spend the night in Griffith Park sometime—sneak in and wander around after hours. Then remember some jogger got decapitated right where you’re walking. You instinctively react to how dark it is because city light doesn’t intrude. There are sections of the hills—I checked this out for a story—where it is entirely credible that a tree canopy could completely obscure an abandoned mansion, and that place could easily be utterly forgotten.

You started writing after studying the works of writers like Gerald Kersh and Charles Beaumont. Why do they remain relevant?

“Studying” is kind of arid; it suggests academia, and I’m a college dropout. I avidly read these writers and many more (again I direct your attention to the dedication for DJSturbia). Kersh is fascinating to read in story or novel form, a unique craftsman from whom you cannot help but learn. It’s interesting that you should cite Kersh and Beaumont together, since I’ve always seen Kersh as the sort of stylistic “bridge” from the work of John Collier to Beaumont. As contemporary fantasists, these people were easily equal to Bradbury, or Matheson, or Leiber, but are little-read today, even despite Beaumont’s Twilight Zone connection. The Beaumont shelf should be twice as long as it is, but he never managed such output before he died prematurely.

You were once involved with an attempt to revive Grand Guignol. What happened to that?

Ahem, this was when I finally got a chance to work directly with Bob Bloch. It was an attempt to revive the idiom of the Theatre du Grand Guignol for modern, live theatre audiences circa 1990. It was executive-produced by Douglas Cramer, who produced some of Bob’s TV movies in the 1970s. Bob sold the production the stage rights to his story “Final Performance,” but did not want to write the actual script, so they called me, and I got to attend unofficial “vaudeville school” with Bob, to insure accuracy of reference. The closest we got to an actual performance was a live read-through with actors; Lea Thompson played “Rosie.” There was a competing Grand Guignol project at the time that Joe Lansdale worked on. As far as I know, both projects collapsed about the same time. For the curious, this is covered in a lot more detail in Crypt Orchids.

Your 1988 anthology Silver Scream was successful and is now considered to be somewhat influential. Why haven’t you edited another horror anthology?

Nobody asked. Plus, editing an anthology is usually a crushing amount of work fraught with crises, and I admire the people who manage to do it serially. Then somebody asked. A huge new omnibus of current horror talent, no theme, a brand-name imprimatur, overseen by a very reputable advocate at a respectable publishing house. (You’ll understand my circumspection in just a moment.) Using email, I filled the book in eighteen hours flat. I flew to New York and met with the brain trust just in time to smash into the first brick wall: “Well, you’ve gotta have one of these three writers or we won’t publish it.” I had this rich, wonderful menu; contributors were throwing great new stories at me, and it was all dependent on one of three souls on the entire planet. And I pulled it off—I acquired one of the three. Then the whole enterprise went swirling down the toilet, because the people in charge were, plainly, idiots or criminals or both. They never wanted an actual book in the first place. They just wanted a brick of text with covers, so they could point at it as something they “did” to prove they weren’t total illiterates when it came to horror, to legitimatize them so they could con other people down the line. Off and on, that sucked up a year or two, all for nothing. Guess who was stuck with explaining to the contributors why nothing happened? I had asked people who were friends of mine to throw in, and they did, enthusiastically. And not one of them got hot or pissed off—everybody understood that this is the nature of even the best-intentioned of projects. They’re not only my friends, but they’re professionals, and they’ve all walked through fire at one time or another. Silver Scream was originally supposed to have a follow-up volume (SS: The Sequel, naturally); that never happened because I wanted someone else to edit it, so I could legitimately submit a story to it. Since then, the Silver Scream format and title have been ripped off several times by people who don’t feel the need to cite precedents. For years, Joe Lansdale and I have been trying to interest someone in a big anthology that would sum up the influence of Twilight Zone Magazine. Everybody was in that magazine; our contents page would knock your eyes right out of your skull. I think it would be a cornerstone volume of considerable historical interest, at least to horror fans. No takers, ever. So, encouragement to tackle another anthology? Not so much.

In the afterword to your collection Crypt Orchids, you mention having once considered putting together an anthology of “stress fiction.” What is “stress fiction”?

Call it endurance fiction. Put characters in a tight spot and make it tighter from frame one, kind of similar to Lester Dent’s classic formula for pulp writing: pile it on and keep piling it on until circumstances look as hopeless as they can be . . . then, at the end, you find out what your characters are made of.

In the past, you quoted a Doug Winter interview with John Coyne in which he referred to readers of horror fiction as “language-deaf.”

Coyne wasn’t singling out the readers of horror fiction, but all readers. Do you have a burning urge to write? Go find a copy of Doug’s interview book, Faces of Fear, and read the John Coyne interview to discover if you have what it takes. That burning urge might just be indigestion. Incidentally, also refer to Doug’s book if you want to read the story of how William Peter Blatty was inspired to write horror by reading a story by . . . Robert Bloch.

Do you think that’s still the case, or has the genre opened up more over the last two decades to more traditionally literary work? I like pulp, but I love language and its permutations. Many readers (in any genre) are only capable of reading on the pulp level, which means great lashings of plot, plot, and more plot, or as some writers have termed it, “blue collar fiction.” There is nothing whatsoever wrong with this sort of writing, or this sort of career—it achieves its aim by entertaining those who come to be entertained. I’ve written metric tons of it, myself. But to subsist solely on one type of writing, be that a genre or a style, is a very limiting, no- growth scenario. It turns the whole of literature into a Baskin-Robbins with one flavor. Some people love being sent to the dictionary every so often. For others, that’s the point at which they fling the book across the room because its language is too highfaluting. Sometimes I need fiction to be more nourishing beyond merely stacking of bricks of plot. I’m sure you do, too. Maybe it’s a craving felt more keenly by writers, because every day you have to decide what altitude is good for the project you’re working on (unless you only work on one level, which strikes me as similar to being color-blind, or creatively hobbled). My test, in terms of horror fiction, is to transition someone from pop-lit by letting them sample Ramsey Campbell, say, or , and then report back. See if they enjoy a slightly more complex flavor.

You’re one of two credited writers on the screenplay for The Crow (the other was ), but you’re the one who was on set in North Carolina. Had you worked on a set before as the writer? What was the experience like?

There’s a little clause in most contracts that says if someone deems your presence necessary during production, you get to go and be blessed by the Per Diem Fairy. The contract, in fact, obligates you to go. These days, a writer on the set has to come after thirty “producers” who want to rack up air miles and see the whole deal as one of their many vacations. I was on the set, on the lot, and at the locations for over a hundred days, from pre- production through wrap. Rewriting on a daily basis, intensively. There are all kinds of chores for a writer to do on set, such as coming up with forty names and inscriptions for headstones in a cemetery, or creating all the building names and business signage on a city street—usually in a single day or less for each task. Does the movie have a band? Does the band have an album? Then you get to title the album, suggest the artwork, and invent all the song titles that will only be seen in a freeze-frame. I spray-painted graffiti on all the buildings. I was also part of the second unit throughout. I doubled a lot, for close-ups. I shot up the board room with an air gun for cutaways. I did my first “movie stunt.” Then my second. A dozen different tasks per day. If you’ve done this sort of thing, no explanation is necessary . . . and if you’ve never done it, no explanation is really possible. For deeper detail on what it was like in the day-to-day, read “For Brandon” and “Door Wars” in Wild Hairs. For the story on why you’ll probably never see most of the behind-the-scenes video I shot, there’s a piece in DJSturbia that might fire you up.

Is it ever hard for you to sit in a roomful of Hollywood executives and keep a straight face?

There are two general reactions. In one, the executive is about twelve years old and saw The Crow at a tender young age when his or her window for a sense of wonder was wide open (see above) . . . and I can’t shit on that. In the other, if you accept the challenge, you realize you must take people back to school because they know nothing—literally nothing—but are in a power position to hire you in such a way that it might keep their salary going, which is when they get interested. One of my favorite meeting anecdotes has to do with a gaggle of producers who fancied themselves very edgy and “dark.” I asked: “Why me?” And they said, “Because we love your stuff, it’s out there, man, it’s dark and we like dark and we want something really dark.” I submitted some ideas based on their ideas and they kind of sucked air through their teeth and said, “Ehhh, not that dark.” Turns out what they wanted was a kind of Dark Lite—you know, half the fear-calories of regular dark. And “Lite” is just another word for watered-down.

In 2015, Centipede Press did an edition of your second novel The Shaft which included a lot of extra material. How hands-on were you in the production of that book?

Credit S.T. Joshi for suggesting the idea. I added the original short story, which was published prior to the novel version. Jerad Walters of Centipede suggested a variety of layout conceits we bashed back and forth for over a year—most of them pretty goddamned cool. Jerad brought in David Ho as artist, and I fell in love with his samples. The text was troublesome. No electronic file existed for the book—that’s how old it was. And on the first pass, first layout, I noticed all the italics had vanished. No global way to replace them. So it was one page at a time . . . one line at a time . . . through about six passes, whenever something new would go astray between proofs.

How is it possible that the Centipede Press edition of The Shaft was the first U.S. edition?

Assorted contractual shenanigans led to me selling The Shaft directly to Macdonald/Futura in England, and it has been in print in Germany since its original publication. In the Centipede edition, we actually printed some of the excuses for domestic rejection alongside the critical fluff—you know, the up-front blurbs stuck in the grille to make you look good. Every potential mainstream publisher in America wanted to gut the book, or shove it to the back of the bus. One long-term advantage nobody could have predicted was that the sheer absence of The Shaft meant it acquired a reputation (deserved or not) as some sort of “repressed” underground horror high-point. Centipede was not the first small press to offer to do it for the first time in the good old U.S.A. There were about five predecessors. The Shaft seemed to delight in destroying small presses (although it was more a matter of timing in each case). When Babbage Press was doing those beautiful trade editions of my backlist, we had The Shaft all ready to go, gorgeous cover, polished text and all . . . and it just never happened, because Babbage evaporated and that wasted at least an additional year. We also had a reprint of Silver Scream equally ready to go, with another gorgeous cover. It was a lot of work to prep those two titles, all for naught. And each failure compounded the frustration, especially when each subsequent offer was a chance to reset to zero and start all over again, and after awhile you think, I cannot do this again. Then came ebook editions; you’ve got to get those on Amazon, right? Great—now proofread five more of your books again. After awhile you just crumple, and then have to work your way back up to tackling a task you’ve already done one . . . more . . . time. And that sucks even more time, because you’re trying to finish new work as well. But The Shaft now exists as an ebook, and a more affordable trade paper edition is right around the corner. I’m getting there. Slowly.

Tell us about the stories in your new collection DJSturbia from Subterranean Press. Are there any new stories in there?

I always begin the process of assembling a collection when I don’t have enough stories—thirteen per book, for those of you who are counting—in order to purposefully leave “holes” that are generally filled over the course of about a year, which is on average how much time it takes me to interfere and nitpick every aspect of the book design, which is a luxury Subterranean Press permits me to indulge. So, yes, there are always new or unpublished stories in each collection. One of the most satisfying moments is when one of those stories which only saw “original” publication because I put it into the collection (sometimes because nobody-but-nobody would buy it) gets chosen for a best-of annual. Very few people have read “Quebradora” or “ of the Skies,” but those are two of my personal favorites among my own stories . . . possibly because they have no submission guidelines to fulfill, or reputation to justify or explain. In DJSturbia, the new stories are “Three Missing Footnotes from the Bad Time,” “The Chili Hunters,” “Two Scoops,” “The Ghosting,” and “Graveside.” Some of your collections in the past have been almost themed. Is there anything that ties the stories in DJSturbia together (besides being all by you)?

I wrote about this a bit in the afterword. The unifying principle—this time—seems to be “monsters.” Adding some bits of nonfiction allowed me to fold in Creature from the Black Lagoon, Godzilla, The Thing, and The Andromeda Strain in addition to actual, made-up, invented monsters that weren’t zombies or vampires or the same old ho-hum.

You don’t currently have a website, but you’re active on social media sites like Facebook. How much of a trap for writers is spending time on social media?

The devil’s deal is that social media is a conditional necessity when writers are forced to shoulder their own publicity. Take Facebook—here you have a zillion people who all have instantaneous access to each other. Everybody feels compelled to participate, so everybody supplies Facebook with “content” for free, which drives Facebook’s advertising revenue. Except for a lot of people, seeing their own words on that screen is a lot like getting your picture in a local, small-town newspaper . . . and many users become convinced this makes them a writer, or an artist, or a director, say. Now we’re surrounded by self-styled “writers” and “artists” and “directors,” with nothing to distinguish the genuine ones, the ones who did due diligence and basic coursework, or the ones who have any talent, because many of those distinctions have been made irrelevant by the mass of people, all of whom wish to be perceived as creators, as talented, as artists themselves. The need for editors and simple basic style has been cast to the wind. I’m arrogant enough to think there is still a very important difference between professionals and “writers” who publish their own work and sell it only to their parents and other writers in their workshop group. And I am definitely not saying that there aren’t talented people out there with no recourse other than waving the writer flag and hoping for the best. But too many people have learned the tricks of presentation and marketing before they bothered to learn anything about writing, and too much of that output is better left unknown. This is the hurricane you must tilt against if you court social media, and you may from time to time feel the need to spend half an hour making a point such as I have just made, here. But remember—you’ll get three “likes” and they’ll move on, because nearly everybody is a “writer” on Facebook. Just look at their profiles.

You just won the Rondo Award for The Outer Limits at 50. Is that your favorite award?

That’s a bear-trap question, like asking “which of your books is your favorite?” when they’re all my children. I cherish the Dimension Award from Twilight Zone Magazine because it’s one of the rarest awards in the horror field—it was only given once. I love the International Horror Guild Award for Wild Hairs because it was an acknowledgement that my work in Fangoria had some value. I love my now-politically-incorrect World Fantasy Award because it’s a friggin’ sculpture by , a friend of mine. And then there’s that Rondo. I’m equally fond of that little bald guy. Your mileage may vary. It certainly seems that the era for anthropomorphic trophies is past. In which case I would argue for a reinstatement of the Dimension Award—we got it right the first time.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER 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 most recent books include Ghosts: A History (which The Times Literary Supplement said “excels at presenting us with instances of the persistence of belief, across all times and cultures”), and the short story collection Cemetery Dance Select: Lisa Morton. A lifelong Californian, she lives in North Hollywood, and can be found online at lisamorton.com. AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Author Spotlight: Ian Whates E.C. Myers | 886 words

“Reaper’s Rose” presents an intriguing, haunting take on premonitions of death and disaster. What inspired it, and how did the story develop from there?

There was genuinely a wonderful, evocative scent that haunted me in my teens. I’ve no idea if it was a perfume I smelt once on a passing stranger or something I conjured from my own imagination, but I could evoke it at will, and once I had, it would tantalize me for days. I really did travel into Moorgate on the train every day with my friends for school, and I was once taken to an air show by my Aunty Anne (who fed me far too many boiled eggs). I’ve known for years that there was a story somewhere to be built around this “ghost” scent, convinced that its elusive occurrence ought to herald something significant. It was just a matter of being patient and waiting for the right story to crystalize . . .

Aside from some descriptions of violent deaths, it seems much of the effectiveness of this story lies in what isn’t on the page—letting the reader’s imagination fill in the horror and its implications. How do you strike that delicate balance?

Good question. I’ve always believed that the disciplines required to write a short story differ from those demanded by a novel, where you have the luxury of pages or even chapters in which to develop characters and setting. In the shorter form, you have to achieve a similar effect within a few deft sentences. I cut my teeth writing shorts before moving up to the longer form, and believe this has benefited my writing greatly. It taught me the importance of being economic with words; of providing sufficient detail to engage the reader and provide them with a framework, trusting their own imagination to fill in the rest. I do my best to achieve that balance every time; whether or not I succeed is a judgement I’ll leave up to the reader.

So many memories are linked to smell. What’s your favorite scent, and what does it remind you of?

To be honest, most of my strong associations tend to be with music—which has always played a big part in my life—and specific songs and groups. When it comes to smells, the memories tend to be more generic and are invariably food related (another passion)— fresh-brewed coffee, vinegar on fish and chips (okay, perhaps you have to be British to appreciate that one), freshly baked bread . . . Except, of course, for a certain mysterious scent that haunted my teens, and was worn by the most beautiful woman in the world; assuming, of course, it ever existed outside of my head . . .

Do you have any particular rituals or habits that are either essential to writing or fuel your creativity?

No, I genuinely don’t. A boring answer, I realise, but an honest one. I tend to do a lot of thinking when walking the dog early in the morning, but I don’t stick rigidly to a regime when it comes to writing (perhaps I should). One thing I never do is force the words in order to meet a self-imposed word count or time table. If a particular scene proves problematic, rather than fighting through it, I’ll move on to a later scene which I know the narrative will catch up with soon, or turn to some editing, all the while letting my subconscious wrestle the obstinate scene into submission. I’m fortunate in that I edit anthologies and run a publishing imprint in addition to writing, so there are always plenty of other priorities to occupy my mind while the back-brain does the dirty work.

What are you working on now? What else we can expect to see from you soon?

In May, I’ve a new short story collection, Dark Travellings, coming out through Fox Spirit here in the UK—this gathers many of my darker stories, as the name implies. I also have short stories imminent in Galaxy’s Edge and the science journal Nature. On the novel front, I’m currently working on Angels Rising, the sequel to my novel Pelquin’s Comet which came out last year (and which, to my considerable surprise, topped various Amazon UK sales charts, including science fiction books). This is a space opera romp that several reviewers have felt is reminiscent of Firefly. I’m also in the midst of three co-written novels set in the Human Legion universe of my friend, Tim C. Taylor, the second of which is due out shortly. 2016 marks the 10th anniversary of my independent publisher NewCon Press, and I’m working on all manner of titles to commemorate the fact, including several anthologies. I’ve already accepted original stories for these from the likes of Nancy Kress, Ramsey Campbell, Peter F. Hamilton, and Adam Roberts, so they promise to be a lot of fun. Oh, and there’s a commissioned novella I’m supposed to be writing . . . 2016 promises to be a busy year, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER E.C. Myers was assembled in the U.S. from Korean and German parts and raised by a single mother and the public library in Yonkers, New York. He is the author of numerous short stories and three young adult books: the Andre Norton Award–winning Fair Coin, Quantum Coin, and The Silence of Six. His next novel, Against All Silence, a thriller about teenage hacktivists investigating a vast conspiracy, is scheduled to appear next spring from Adaptive Books. E.C. currently lives with his wife, son, and three doofy pets in Pennsylvania. You can find traces of him all over the internet, but especially at ecmyers.net and on Twitter @ecmyers. Author Spotlight: Kaaron Warren Sandra Odell | 796 words

“Death’s Door Café” is a story of subtle horrors and the shadows of memory. Can you tell us about what inspired the tale?

The story came from a couple of different places. I went to an exhibition at our National Museum that exhibited artifacts from Australia’s bushrangers. In the middle of the room stood a large, solid wooden door, soft with age, riddled with bullet holes. One of Ben Hall’s gang had been shot and killed in front of this door. The bullet holes were distinctive, and I thought I saw bloodstains, and the image was so powerful I almost imagined his ghost, up against the door. I thought about other doors, and what happens behind them. This is one of my story- telling obsessions; what goes on behind closed doors? The image sat for a while. I began the story of “Death’s Door Café” but couldn’t quite figure out how I wanted it to end. And I wasn’t sure who my protagonist was. I lost a couple of friends to cancer around this time, and much of the raging you do is about wishing you could have done something. Saved them. Then, driving home one day, I heard an amazing story on the radio that affected me so deeply I had to park the car and sit for a while. It was an interview with an elderly man, who spoke about his most lasting memory, the thing that keeps him up at night. His family property had a large cave, where many bats lived. He said that great fear of Lyssavirus meant all of these bats were exterminated; thousands of them. He said the guilt will never leave him. I used that experience, that sense of guilt, to help form the character of Theo.

The sensory impressions drive the story, laying the foundation for each scene: “the pain in his veins as the clawing of bats,” the cracking of dry lips, the chilly hallway, “bat bodies still warm,” a crinkled shirt tail. As a writer, how important do you feel such sensory impressions are to the flow of the story?

Very important. As you say, they lay the foundation for the scenes and for the story itself. They place the reader in the story (and the writer, too) and, I guess, play tricks to lead them into certain ways of feeling. Too much detail can be overwhelming, but these small touches are vital, I think.

In this story you touch on death, perceptions of the afterlife, guilt, and the possibility of redemption. If you were presented with the opportunity to step through one of the doors in the café, which death would you choose?

They’re all pretty awful, aren’t they? I tried to depict deaths that were lonely and sad. The one I wouldn’t choose is the one that Theo chooses. That man is the loneliest of them all, and his unnoticed death the saddest.

Dorothy Parker said, “I hate writing. I love having written.” What would you say is the most challenging aspect of writing? The most rewarding?

I’m one of these annoying people who loves it all! From the spark of an idea to the final edit, I love it. Some days, it’s hard to sit in the chair and work when you’d rather be sleeping or watching stuff on TV or many, many other things, so I think that is the greatest challenge. Making yourself think hard when you’d rather be lazing around. The most rewarding . . . that’s hard! I’d agree with Parker (who I adore), that “having written” is perhaps the most rewarding part. The first draft is the most rewarding completion, because then at least you know you have the bedrock down and have something to work with to make better.

From your first sale in 1993 you’ve had a prolific and varied career. What’s next for Kaaron Warren? What can readers expect from you in 2016?

I have stories in: Star Quake 3: SQ Mag’s Best of 2014, ed. Sophie Yorkston The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2016, ed. Paula Guran Street Magicks, ed. Paula Guran Nightmares: a New Decade of Modern Horror, ed. In Your Face, ed. Tehani Wessely Sisterhood, ed. Nate Pedersen 68 Days, ed. Scott Gable and C. Dombrowski My latest short story collection is Cemetery Dance Select: Kaaron Warren I have an SF/horror novella coming out from Cemetery Dance, announcement soon. And there is an announcement about a new novel, coming soon!

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Sandra Odell is a forty-seven-year old, happily married mother of two, an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, Daily Science Fiction, Crosssed Genres, Pseudopod, and The Drabblecast. She is hard at work plotting her second novel or world domination. Whichever comes first. Author Spotlight: Rahul Kanakia Lisa Nohealani Morton | 763 words

How did you come to write “The Girl Who Escaped From Hell?”

I’ve been having a terrible amount of trouble with my writing lately. It’s almost like I’ve forgotten how to tell a story. So I decided to intellectualize the whole thing, and I created a schema for storytelling. I decided that in order to work, a story needed four things: i) a concrete goal; ii) an internal need that meeting that goal would achieve; iii) a reason, springing from the character’s backstory, for why that need was the most important one in the character’s life; and iv) some sort of consequences if the character didn’t meet that goal. And in order to test this out, I decided I would write a story that I’d designed using this schema. This story was the result: I plotted it out while I was driving home from my girlfriend’s place (it’s a forty-five minute drive), and when I got home I wrote it over the course of about two hours. It was one of the easiest writing experiences of my life, and I thought I had it made from now on! Of course, nothing is ever easy. While this story worked out great, the other stories I’ve written with this framework haven’t yet sold. (In this case, the external goal was for him to get his daughter to stop believing in hell. The internal need was that he needed to believe he was a good father. The backstory was that he’d ripped this girl from his mother, and he felt guilty about it. And the stakes were that if he lost control of the girl then he’d lose his cushy life.) The most obvious inspiration for the story, of course, is The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven, which is a nonfiction account by Kevin Malarkey and his son Alex (that’s really their last names . . . you can’t make this stuff up) where they claim that Alex saw Heaven while he was a in a coma. The boy later recanted, saying his dad had planted the whole story in his mind, and it was a huge mess, but for a while it was quite a cultural phenomenon. There was even a major studio picture, starring Greg Kinnear.

The horror in “The Girl Who Escaped From Hell” really falls on three levels—the fear of hell itself, the fear of a parent unable to protect his child, and the fear of becoming what one hates. Which of these scares you the most? Or is there some other aspect of the story you find more disturbing?

I think the thing that scares me the most is the ending, where the dad realizes that he no longer knows what his daughter really thinks. It reveals the abyss that lies between all people. We open ourselves up to those we love, and we allow them to see what we really think and feel, but we can close that down at any point, and once it’s closed, then we’re nothing more than strangers. What are you working on these days? Any upcoming publications or exciting projects you’d like readers to know about?

My debut novel, Enter Title Here, is coming out from Disney-Hyperion on August 2nd, 2016. That’s definitely the biggest event in my life nowadays! My little promo blurb for the book is: In order to score a book deal, an unscrupulous overachiever has to turn herself into a quirky, light-hearted YA novel protagonist. But after she’s caught plagiarizing an assignment, Reshma Kapoor will need to decide how far she’ll go to get a satisfying ending (Note: it’s pretty far). The book is really good! Reshma is so manipulative and evil, but she’s also magnetic. Girls in YA novels are supposed to be insecure and/or whimsical, but Reshma is hard- charging and ruthlessly effective. I loved writing her, and I know that people will love being in her head. I also have another novel in my contract with Disney. It’ll probably be another YA contemporary, and it’ll probably come out in 2017. Other than that, nothing is known. I’ve also been working on a middle-grade novel that will probably go out to publishers sometime in the next few weeks!

What’s the scariest five-word story you can tell us?

The cockroaches learned to read.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER 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: P.D. Cacek Erika Holt | 729 words

Maybe it’s just me, but I find horror stories with babies and dolls to be extra creepy. In “The Grave,” you have both. What is it about infants and toys that’s so scary, do you think?

I think it’s because they look so real. It’s a true testament to the talent and skill of the doll maker, but, seriously do they have to look like they’re . . . I was going to say “alive,” and that is probably why we find them so unnerving. They look real, they look like us, but they don’t breathe and their bodies are cold to the touch; their eyes may open and shut and even cry, but they don’t blink, and they don’t see, and the expressions on their perfect, little faces never change. They are images of us, but an image that is cold and still and dead, and maybe that’s what some of us see when we look into those empty, staring eyes.

You’ve said in another interview that you drew inspiration for “The Grave” from walking in the woods behind a friend’s condo and spotting a rock outcropping that he’d never noticed before. Did he read the story after you wrote it and, if so, how’d he feel about those woods after? You said you could hardly wait to go back. Did any other stories spring from that place?

I’ve only read the story once after writing it, and that was at an author reading. Generally, I don’t read my own work after it’s been published (unless asked to); I guess it’s like an actor not watching himself in a movie. I would love to walk those woods again, but as it happens that won’t be possible. And perhaps that’s for the best. I wrote “The Grave” because of that one specific walk along that one trail and I’m not even sure I’d be able to find that outcropping now if I did go back. Maybe I’m not supposed to. I did use those particular woods as a setting for another story, “Fireflies,” but have my main character only view the woods and never go into them. But I have other woods to walk through now.

Who is the baby in the grave? I thought maybe she was Elizabeth’s sister . . .

Who indeed? Elizabeth’s sister . . . now wouldn’t that be interesting? You seem to have focused more on short fiction in recent years—do you prefer that length? Are you working on anything at the moment?

I’m actually getting back into short fiction for two reasons: 1) Because apparently if you haven’t appeared in print for a while, people think you’ve stopped writing, and 2) Because I love writing short fiction. I grew up reading comics (they weren’t called graphic novels when I was little) and watching The Twilight Zone and came to realize early on that stories can and sometimes should be told in “one sitting.” Where novels allow me to take certain liberties with time and space and multiple plot lines, I find the restrictions of short fiction enables me to focus on just telling a good, strong story. At present, I’m working on three new short stories and attempting to find a publisher for my rather large, multi-character novel, Remnants.

Any lesser known horror novels, stories, or movies you love and would like to recommend to our readers?

I hate to say “lesser” known when it comes to things like this, so let me just give you a short list of books, one short story, and some movies I really love. Short story: “They Bite,” by Anthony Boucher. (The reason I had a hard time sleeping when I was teaching Desert Survival.) Books: Fog Heart, by Thomas Tessier. (I keep reading this over and over. Absolutely love it.) A Prayer For The Dying, by Stewart O’Nan (BEST ending I’ve ever read). Movies: Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975), The Devil’s Backbone (2001), The Orphanage (2007), Lake Mongo (2008/Australian—and you MUST watch the end credits), and The Eclipse (2010).

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Nightmare assistant editor Erika Holt lives in Calgary, Alberta, where she writes and edits speculative fiction. Her stories appear in several anthologies including Not Our Kind, What Fates Impose, and Evolve Two: Stories of the Future Undead. She is also co-editor of two anthologies from EDGE and Absolute XPress: Rigor Amortis, about sexy, amorous zombies, and Broken Time Blues, featuring such oddities as 1920s burlesque dancers and bootlegging chickens. Find her at erikaholt.com or on Twitter as @erikaholt. MISCELLANY Coming Attractions The Editors | 102 words

Coming up in May, in Nightmare . . . We have original fiction from Adam-Troy Castro (“The Old Horror Writer”) and Lisa Goldstein (“Sawing”), along with reprints by (“Twittering from the Circus of the Dead”) and Sarah Langan (“The Lost”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview with Angela Slatter. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Nightmare. Thanks for reading! Stay Connected The Editors

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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If you enjoy reading Nightmare, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. You can subscribe directly from our website, via Weightless Books, or via Amazon.com. For more information, visit nightmare-magazine.com/subscribe. We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors, and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Nightmare ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! Buying a Bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. Buying either of the half-year Bundles saves you $3 (so you’re basically getting one issue for free), or if you spring for the Year One Bundle, you’ll save $11 off the cover price. So if you need to catch up on Nightmare, that’s a great way to do so. Visit nightmare-magazine.com/store for more information. About the Nightmare Team The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief John Joseph Adams

Managing/Associate Editor Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher Robert Barton Bland

Reprint Editor John Langan

Podcast Producer Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor Jim Freund

Podcast Host Jack Kincaid

Art Director Cory Skerry

Assistant Editors Erika Holt E.C. Myers Editorial Assistant Lisa Nohealani Morton

Copy Editor Melissa V. Hofelich

Proofreaders C. Liddle Devin Marcus

Webmaster Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios Also Edited by John Joseph Adams The Editors

If you enjoy reading Nightmare, you might also enjoy these anthologies edited (or co- edited) by John Joseph Adams.

THE APOC​ALYPSE TRIP​TYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with Hugh Howey) THE APOC​ALYPSE TRIP​TYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey) THE APOC​ALYPSE TRIP​TYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey) Armored Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill) Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 [forthcoming Oct. 2016] Brave New Worlds By Blood We Live Dead Man’s Hand Epic: Legends Of Fantasy Federations The Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects Lightspeed: Year One The Living Dead The Living Dead 2 Loosed Upon the World The Mad Scientist’s Guide To World Domination Operation Arcana Other Worlds Than These Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen) Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson) Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson) Seeds of Change Under the Moons of Mars Wastelands Wastelands 2 The Way Of The What the #@&% Is That? (with Douglas Cohen) [forthcoming Aug. 2016]

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above. Each project also has a mini-site devoted to it specifically, where you’ll find free fiction, interviews, and more.