Lacrimosa Silvia Moreno-Garcia Soft F

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 38, November 2015

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, November 2015

FICTION Lacrimosa Silvia Moreno-Garcia Soft F. Paul Wilson Demon in Aisle 6 Matthew Kressel The Emperor's Old Bones Gemma Files

NONFICTION The H Word: In My Restless Dreams—A Study of Horror in Video Games Justin Bailey Artist Showcase: Bruno Wagner Marina J. Lostetter Interview: Jason Blum The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Silvia Moreno-Garcia F. Paul Wilson Matthew Kressel Gemma Files

MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Upcoming Events Stay Connected Subscriptions and Ebooks About the Nightmare Team Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue thirty-eight of Nightmare! Back in August, it was announced that both Lightspeed and our Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue specifically had been nominated for the British Fantasy Award. (Lightspeed was nominated in the Periodicals category, while WDSF was nominated in the Anthology category.) The awards were presented October 25 at FantasyCon 2015 in Nottingham, UK, and, alas, Lightspeed did not win in the Periodicals category. But WDSF did win for Best Anthology! Huge congrats to Christie Yant and the rest of the WDSF team, and thanks to everyone who voted for, supported, or helped create WDSF! You can find the full list of winners at britishfantasysociety.org. And, of course, if you somehow missed out on WDSF (and/or Women Destroy Horror!), you can learn more about that, including where to buy it, at destroysf.com.

• • • •

ICYMI last month, October saw the debut of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, a new entry in the prestigious Best American series. In it, guest editor Joe Hill and I present the top twenty stories of 2014 (ten science fiction, ten fantasy), by the following: Nathan Ballingrud, T.C. Boyle, Adam-Troy Castro, Neil Gaiman, Theodora Goss, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, Seanan McGuire, Sam J. Miller, Susan Palwick, Cat Rambo, Jess Row, Karen Russell, A. Merc Rustad, Sofia Samatar (two stories!), Kelly Sandoval, Jo Walton, and Daniel H. Wilson. Learn more at johnjosephadams.com/best-american. Also recently released was Loosed Upon the World (Saga Press, Sep. 2015), the definitive collection of climate fiction. These provocative stories explore our present and speculate about all of our tomorrows through terrifying struggle and hope. Join bestselling authors Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, Nancy Kress, Kim Stanley Robinson, Jim Shepard, and over twenty others as they presciently explore the greatest threat to our future. To learn more, visit johnjosephadams.com/loosed. And back in August, I published a new anthology co-edited with Daniel H. Wilson called Press Start to Play. It includes twenty-six works of fiction that put video games—and the people who play them—in the spotlight. Whether these authors are tackling the humble pixelated coin-op arcade games of the ’70s and ’80s, or the vivid, immersive form of entertainment that abounds today, you’ll never look at phrases like “save point,” “first- person shooter,” “dungeon crawl,” “pwned,” or “kill screen” in quite the same way again. With a foreword from Ernest Cline, bestselling author of Ready Player One, Press Start to Play includes work from: Daniel H. Wilson, Charles Yu, Hiroshi Sakurazaka, S.R. Mastrantone, Charlie Jane Anders, Holly Black, Seanan McGuire, Django Wexler, Nicole Feldringer, Chris Avellone, David Barr Kirtley, T.C. Boyle, Marc Laidlaw, Robin Wasserman, Micky Neilson, Cory Doctorow, Jessica Barber, Chris Kluwe, Marguerite K. Bennett, Rhianna Pratchett, Austin Grossman, Yoon Ha Lee, Ken Liu, Catherynne M. Valente, Andy Weir, and Hugh Howey. Visit johnjosephadams.com/press-start to learn more.

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With the announcements out of the way, here’s what we have on tap this month: We have original fiction from Matthew Kressel (“Demon in Aisle 6”) and Silvia Moreno-Garcia (“Lacrimosa”), along with reprints by Gemma Files (“The Emperor’s Old Bones”) and F. Paul Wilson (“Soft”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word”—this time a look at storytelling in horror video games from gaming insider and author Justin Bailey—plus author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview with horror film producer Jason Blum. 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 series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent and forthcoming projects include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Operation Arcana, 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 king 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 World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams. FICTION Lacrimosa Silvia Moreno-Garcia | 2687 words

The woman is a mound of dirt and rags pushing a squeaky shopping cart; a lump that moves steadily, slowly forward, as if dragged by an invisible tide. Her long, greasy hair hides her face but Ramon feels her staring at him. He looks ahead. The best thing to do with the homeless mob littering Vancouver is to ignore it. Give them a buck and the beggars cling to you like barnacles. “Have you seen my children?” the woman asks. Her voice, sandpaper against his ears, makes him shiver. His heart jolts as though someone has pricked it with a needle. He keeps on walking, but much faster now. It isn’t until he is shoving the milk inside the fridge that he realizes why the woman’s words have upset him: she reminds him of the Llorona. He hasn’t thought about her in years, not since he was a child living in Potrero. Everyone in town had a story about the Llorona. The most common tale was that she drowned her children in the river and afterwards roamed the town, searching for them at night; her pitiful cries are a warning and an omen. Camilo, Ramon’s great-uncle, swore on his mother’s grave that he met this ghost while riding home one night. It was the rainy season, when the rivers overflow and Camilo was forced to take a secondary, unfamiliar road. He spotted a woman in white bending over some nopales at the side of a lonely path. Her face was covered with the spines of the prickly pears she had savagely bitten. She turned around and smiled. Blood dripped from her open mouth and stained her white shift. This was the kind of story the locals whispered around Potrero. It was utter nonsense, especially coming from the lips of a chronic alcoholic like Camilo, but it was explosive stuff for an eight-year old boy who stayed up late to watch black-and-white horror flicks on the battered TV set. However, to think about the Llorona there in the middle of the city between the SkyTrain tracks and a pawn shop is ridiculous. Ramon never packed ghost stories in his suitcase, and Potrero and the Llorona are very far away.

• • • •

He sees the homeless woman sitting beneath a narrow ledge, shielding herself from the rain. She weeps and hugs a plastic bag as though it were a newborn. “Have you seen my children?” she asks when he rushes by, clutching his umbrella. Nearby a man sleeps in front of an abandoned store, an ugly old dog curled next to him. The downtown homeless peek at Ramon from the shadows as he steps over old cigarette butts. They say this is an up and coming neighborhood but each day he spots a new beggar wielding an empty paper cup at his face. It is disgraceful. This is the very reason why he left Mexico. He escaped the stinking misery of his childhood and the tiny bedroom with the black-and-white TV set he had to share with his cousins. Behind his house there were prickly pears and emptiness. No roads, and no buildings. Just a barren nothing swallowed by the purple horizon. It was easy to believe that the Llorona roamed there. But not in Vancouver which is new and shiny, foaming with lattes and tiny condos.

• • • •

The dogs are howling. They scare him. Wild, stray animals that roam the back of the house at nights. His uncle told him the dogs howled when they saw the Llorona. Ramon runs to the girls’ room and sneaks into his mother’s bed, terrified of the noise and his mother has to hold him in her arms until he falls asleep. But when he wakes up Ramon is in his apartment and it is only one dog, the neighbor’s Doberman, barking. He rolls to the centre of the bed, staring at the ceiling.

• • • •

Ramon spots the woman a week later, her arms wrapped around her knees. “My children,” she asks, with her cloud of dirty hair obscuring her face. “Where are my children?” Nauseating in her madness, a disgusting sight growing like a canker sore and invading his streets. Just like the other homeless littering the area: the man in front of the drugstore that always asks him for spare change even though Ramon never gives him any, or the gnarled man beneath a familiar blanket, eternally sleeping in the shade of the burger joint. The city is heading to the gutter. Sure, it looks pretty from afar with its tall glass buildings and its mountains, but below there is a depressing stew of junkies and panhandlers that mars the view. It reminds him of Potrero and the bedroom with the leaky ceiling. He stared at that small yellow leak which grew to become an obscene, dark patch above his bed until one day he grabbed his things and headed north. He felt like repeating his youthful impulsiveness, gathering his belongings in a duffel bag and leaving the grey skies of Vancouver. But he had the condo which would fetch a killing one day if he was patient, his job, and all the other anchors that a man pushing forty can accumulate. A few years before, maybe. Now it seemed like a colossal waste of time. Ramon tries to comfort himself with the thought that one day when he retires he will move to a tropical island of pristine white beaches and blue- green seas where the wrecks of humanity can never wash ashore.

• • • •

He’s gone to buy groceries and there she is, picking cans out of the garbage in the alley behind the supermarket. Llorona. He used to send a postcard to his mother every year when he was younger, newly arrived in the States. He couldn’t send any money because dishwashing didn’t leave you with many spare dollars and he couldn’t phone often because he rented a room in a house and there was no phone jack in there. If he wanted to make a call he had to use the pay phone across the street. Instead, he sent postcards. Carmen didn’t like it. His sister complained about his lack of financial support for their mother. “Why do I have to take care of mom, hu? Why is it me stuck in the house with her?” she asked him. “Don’t be melodramatic. You like living with mom.” “You’re off in California and never send a God damn cent.” “It ain’t easy.” “It ain’t easy here either, Ramon. You’re just like all the other shitty men. Just taking off and leaving the land and the women behind. Who’s gonna take care of mom when she gets old and sick? Whose gonna clean the house and dust it then? With what fucking money? I ain’t doing it, Ramon.” “Bye, Carmen.” “There’s some things you can’t get rid of, Ramon,” his sister yelled. He didn’t call after that. Soon he was heading to another city and by the time he reached Canada he didn’t bother sending postcards. He figured he would, one day, but things got in the way and years later he thought it would be even worse if he tried to phone. And what would they talk about now? It had been ages since he’d left home and the sister and cousins that had lived in Potrero. He’d gotten rid of layers and layers of the old Ramon, moulting into a new man. But maybe Carmen had been right. Maybe there’s some things you can’t get rid of. Certain memories, certain stories, certain fears that cling to the skin like old scars. These things follow you. Maybe ghosts can follow you, too.

• • • •

It’s a bad afternoon. Assholes at work and in the streets. And then a heavy, disgusting rain pours down, almost a sludge that swallows the sidewalks. He’s lost his umbrella and walks with his hands jammed inside his jacket’s pockets, head down. Four more blocks and he’ll be home. That’s when Ramon hears the squeal. A high-pitched noise. It’s a shriek, a moan, a sound he’s never heard before. What the hell is that? He turns and looks and it is the old woman, the one he’s nicknamed Llorona, pushing her shopping cart. Squeak, squeak, goes the cart, matching each of his steps. Squeak, squeak. A metallic chirping echoed by a low mumble. “Children, children, children.” Squeak, squeak, squeak. A metallic chant with an old rhythm. He walks faster. The cart matches his pace; wheels roll. He doubles his efforts, hurrying to cross the street before the light changes. The cart groans, closer than before, nipping at his heels. He thinks she is about to hit him with the damn thing and then all of a sudden the sound stops. He looks over his shoulder. The old woman is gone. She has veered into an alley, vanishing behind a large dumpster. Ramon runs home.

• • • •

The dogs are howling again. A howl that is a wail. The wind roars like a demon. The rain scratches the windows, begging to be let in, and he lies under the covers, terrified. He feels his mother’s arm around his body, her hands smoothing his hair like she did when he was scared. Just a little boy terrified of the phantoms that wander through the plains. His mother’s hand pats his own. Mother’s hand is bony. Gnarled, long fingers with filthy nails. Nails caked with dirt. The smells of mud, putrid garbage, and mold hit him hard. He looks at his mother and her hair is a tangle of grey. Her yellow smile paints the dark. He leaps from the bed. When he hits the floor he realizes the room is filled with at least three inches of water. “Have you seen my children?” the thing in the bed asks. The dogs howl and he wakes up, his face buried in the pillow.

• • • •

He takes a cab to work. He feels safer that way. The streets are her domain, she owns the alleys. When he goes to lunch he looks at the puddles and thinks about babies drowned in the water; corpses floating down a silver river. Don’t ever let the Llorona look at you, his uncle said. Once she’s seen you she’ll follow you home and haunt you to death, little boy. “Oh, my children,” she’ll scream and drag you into the river. But he’d left her behind in Potrero. He thought he’d left her behind.

• • • •

Ramon tries to recall if there is a charm or remedy against the evil spirit. His uncle never mentioned one. The only cure he knew was his mother’s embrace. “There, there little one,” she said, and he nested safe against her while the river overflowed and lightning traced snakes in the sky.

• • • •

In the morning there is a patch of sunlight. Ramon dares to walk a few blocks. But even without the rain the city feels washed out. Its colour has been drained. It resembles the monochromatic images they broadcasted on the cheap television set of his youth. Even though he does not bump into her, the Llorona’s presence lays thick over the streets, pieces of darkness clinging to the walls and the dumpsters in the alleys. It even seems to spread over the people: the glassy eyes of a binner reflect a river instead of the bricks of a building. He hurries back home and locks the door. But when it rains again, water leaks into the living room. Just a few little drops drifting into his apartment. He wipes the floor clean. More water seeps in like a festering boil, cut open and oozing disease.

• • • •

The Llorona stands guard in the alley. She is a lump in the night looking up at his apartment window. He feels her through the concrete walls and the glass. Looking for him. He fishes for the old notebook with the smudged and forgotten number. The rain splashes against his building and the wind cries like a woman. The dial tone is loud against his ear. More than ten years have passed. He has no idea what he’ll say. He doesn’t even understand what he wants to ask. He can’t politely request to ship the ghost back to Mexico. He dials. The number has been disconnected. He thinks about Carmen and his mother and the dusty nothingness behind their house. There might not even be a house. Perhaps the night and the river swallowed them.

• • • •

The Llorona comes with the rain. Or maybe it is the other way around: the rain comes with her. Something else also comes. Darkness. His apartment grows dimmer. He remains in the pools of light, away from the blackness. Outside, in the alley, the Llorona scratches the dumpster with her nails. The dogs howl. Ramon shivers in his bed and thinks about his mother and how she used to drive the ghosts away.

• • • •

She is sitting next to a heap of garbage in the middle of the alley, water pouring down her shoulders. She clutches rags and dirt and pieces of plastic against her chest, her head bowed and her face hidden behind the screen of her hair. “My children. My children.” She looks up at him, slowly. The rain coats her face, tracing dirty rivulets along her cheeks. He expects an image out of a nightmare: blood dripping, yellow cat-eyes or a worn skull. But this is an old woman. Her skin has been torn by time and her eyes are cloudy. This is an old woman. She could be his mother. She might be, for all he knows. He lost her photograph a long time ago and can’t recall what she looks like anymore. His mother who ran her fingers through his hair and hugged him until the ghosts vanished. Now he’s too old for ghosts, but the ghosts still come at nights. The woman looks at him. Parched, forgotten, and afraid. “I’ve lost my children,” she whispers with her voice of dead leaves. The alley is a river. He goes to her, sinks into the muck, sinks into the silvery water. He embraces her and she strokes his hair. The sky above is black and white, like the pictures in the old TV set and the wind that howls in his ears is the demon wind of his childhood.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Silvia Moreno-Garcia is the author of Signal to Noise, a tale of music, magic, and Mexico City which The Guardian has called “a magical first novel.” Her debut collection, This Strange Way of Dying, was a finalist for The Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Her stories have also been collected in Love & Other Poisons. She has edited several anthologies, including Dead North and Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse. She blogs at silviamoreno- garcia.com and tweets @silviamg.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight Soft F. Paul Wilson | 5445 words

I was lying on the floor watching TV and exercising what was left of my legs when the newscaster’s jaw collapsed. He was right in the middle of the usual plea for anybody who thought they were immune to come to Rockefeller Center when—pflumpf!—the bottom of his face went soft. I burst out laughing. “Daddy!” Judy said, shooting me a razorblade look from her wheelchair. I shut up. She was right. Nothing funny about a man’s tongue wiggling around in the air snake-like while his lower jaw flopped down in front of his throat like a sack of Jell-O and his bottom teeth jutted at the screen crowns-on, rippling like a line of buoys on a bay. A year ago I would have gagged. But I’ve changed in ways other than physical since this mess began, and couldn’t help feeling good about one of those pretty-boy newsreaders going soft right in front of the camera. I almost wished I had a bigger screen so I could watch 21 color inches of the scene. He was barely visible on our 5- inch black-and-white. The room filled with white noise as the screen went blank. Someone must have taken a look at what was going out on the airwaves and pulled the plug. Not that many people were watching anyway. I flipped the set off to save the batteries. Batteries were as good as gold now. Better than gold. Who wanted gold nowadays? I looked over at Judy and she was crying softly. Tears slid down her cheeks. “Hey, hon—” “I can’t help it, Daddy. I’m so scared!” “Don’t be, Jude. Don’t worry. Everything will work out, you’ll see. We’ve got this thing licked, you and me.” “How can you be so sure?” “Because it hasn’t progressed in weeks. It’s over for us—we’ve got immunity.” She glanced down at her legs, then quickly away. “It’s already too late for me.” I reached over and patted my dancer on the hand. “Never too late for you, shweetheart,” I said in my best Bogart. That got a tiny smile out of her. We sat there in the silence, each thinking our own thoughts. The newsreader had said the cause of the softness had been discovered: a virus, a freak mutation that disrupted the calcium matrix of bones. Yeah. Sure. That’s what they said last year when the first cases cropped up in Boston. A virus. But they never isolated the virus, and the softness spread all over the world. So they began searching for “a subtle and elusive environmental toxin.” They never pinned that one down either. Now we were back to a virus. Who cared? It didn’t matter. Judy and I had beaten it. Whether we had formed the right antibodies or the right antitoxin was just a stupid academic question. The process had been arrested in us. Sure, it had done some damage, but it wasn’t doing any more, and that was the important thing. We’d never be the same, but we were going to live. “But that man,” Judy said, nodding toward the TV. “He said they were looking for people in whom the disease had started and then stopped. That’s us, Dad. They said they need to examine people like us so they can find out how to fight it, maybe develop a serum against it. We should—” “Judy-Judy-Judy!” I said in Cary Grantese to hide my annoyance. How many times did I have to go over this? “We’ve been through all this before. I told you: It’s too late for them. Too late for everybody but us immunes.” I didn’t want to discuss it—Judy didn’t understand about those kind of people, how you can’t deal with them. “I want you to take me down there,” she said in the tone she used when she wanted to be stubborn. “If you don’t want to help, okay. But I do.” “No!” I said that louder than I wanted to and she flinched. More softly: “I know those people. I worked all those years in the Health Department. They’d turn us into lab specimens. They’ll suck us dry and use our immunity to try and save themselves.” “But I want to help somebody! I don’t want us to be the last two people on earth!” She began to cry again. Judy was frustrated. I could understand that. She was unable to leave the apartment by herself and probably saw me at times as a dictator who had her at his mercy. And she was frightened, probably more frightened than I could imagine. She was only eighteen and everyone else she had ever known in her life—including her mother—was dead. I hoisted myself into the chair next to her and put my arm around her shoulders. She was the only person in the world who mattered to me. That had been true even before the softness began. “We’re not alone. Take George, for example. And I’m sure there are plenty of other immunes around who are hiding like us. When the weather warms up, we’ll find each other and start everything over new. But until then, we can’t allow the bloodsuckers to drain off whatever it is we’ve got that protects us.” She nodded without saying anything. I wondered if she was agreeing with me or just trying to shut me up. “Let’s eat,” I said with a gusto I didn’t really feel. “Not hungry.” “Got to keep up your strength. We’ll have soup. How’s that sound?” She smiled weakly. “Okay . . . soup.” I forgot and almost tried to stand up. Old habits die hard. My lower legs were hanging over the edge of the chair like a pair of sand-filled dancer’s tights. I could twitch the muscles and see them ripple under the skin, but a muscle is pretty useless unless it’s attached to a bone, and the bones down there were gone. I slipped off my chair to what was left of my knees and shuffled over to the stove. The feel of those limp and useless leg muscles squishing under me was repulsive but I was getting used to it. It hit the kids and old people first, supposedly because their bones were a little soft to begin with, then moved on to the rest of us, starting at the bottom and working its way up—sort of like a Horatio Alger success story. At least that was the way it worked in most people. There were exceptions, of course, like that newscaster. I had followed true to form: My left lower leg collapsed at the end of last month; my right went a few days later. It wasn’t a terrible shock. My feet had already gone soft so I knew the legs were next. Besides, I’d heard the sound. The sound comes in the night when all is quiet. It starts a day or two before a bone goes. A soft sound, like someone gently crinkling cellophane inside your head. No one else can hear it. Only you. I think it comes from the bone itself—from millions of tiny fractures slowly interconnecting into a mosaic that eventually causes the bone to dissolve into mush. Like an on- rushing train far, far away can be heard if you press your ear to the track, so the sound of each microfracture transmits from bone to bone until it reaches your middle ear. I haven’t heard the sound in almost four weeks. I thought I did a couple of times and broke out in a cold, shaking sweat, but no more of my bones have gone. Neither have Judy’s. The average case goes from normal person to lump of jelly in three to four weeks. Sometimes it takes longer, but there’s always a steady progression. Nothing more has happened to me or Judy since last month. Somehow, someway, we’re immune. With my lower legs dragging behind me, I got to the counter of the kitchenette and kneed my way up the stepstool to where I could reach things. I filled a pot with water—at least the pressure was still up—and set it on the Sterno stove. With gas and electricity long gone, Sterno was a lifesaver. While waiting for the water to boil, I went to the window and looked out. The late afternoon March sky was full of dark gray clouds streaking to the east. Nothing moving on West 16th Street one floor below but a few windblown leaves from God-knows-where. I glanced across at the windows of George’s apartment, looking for movement but found none, then back down to the street below. I hadn’t seen anybody but George on the street for ages, hadn’t seen or smelled smoke in well over two months. The last fires must have finally burned themselves out. The riots were one result of the viral theory. Half the city went up in the big riot last fall—half the city and an awful lot of people. Seems someone got the bright idea that if all the people going soft were put out of their misery and their bodies burned, the plague could be stopped, at least here in Manhattan. The few cops left couldn’t stop the mobs. In fact a lot of the city’s ex-cops had been in the mobs. Judy and I lost our apartment when our building went up. Luckily we hadn’t any signs of softness then. We got away with our lives and little else. “Water’s boiling, Dad,” she said from across the room. I turned and went back to the stove, not saying anything, still thinking about how fast our nice rent-stabilized apartment house had burned, taking everything we had with it. Everything gone . . . furniture and futures . . . gone. All my plans. Gone. Here I stood—if you could call it that—a man with a college education, a B.S. in biology, a secure city job, and what was left? No job. Hell—no city. I’d had it all planned for my dancer. She was going to make it so big. I’d hang on to my city job with all those civil service idiots in the Department of Health, putting up with their sniping and their back-stabbing and their lousy office politics so I could keep all the benefits and foot the bill while Judy pursued the dance. She was going to have it all. Now what? All her talent, all her potential . . . where was it going? Going soft . . . I poured the dry contents of the Lipton envelope into the boiling water and soon the odor of chicken noodle soup filled the room. Which meant we’d have company soon. I dragged the stepstool over to the door. Already I could hear their claws begin to scrape against the outer surface of the door, their tiny teeth begin to gnaw at its edges. I climbed up and peered through the hole I’d made last month at what had then been eye-level. There they were. The landing was full of them. Gray and brown and dirty, with glinty little eyes and naked tails. Revulsion rippled down my skin. I watched their growing numbers every day now, every time I cooked something, but still hadn’t got used to them. So I did Cagney for them: “Yooou diiirty raaats!” and turned to wink at Judy on the far side of the fold-out bed. Her expression remained grim. Rats. They were taking over the city. They seemed to be immune to the softness and were traveling in packs that got bigger and bolder with each passing day. Which was why I’d chosen this building for us: Each apartment was boxed in with pre-stressed concrete block. No rats in the walls here. I waited for the inevitable. Soon it happened: A number of them squealed, screeched, and thrashed as the crowding pushed them at each other’s throats, and then there was bedlam out there. I didn’t bother to watch any more. I saw it every day. The pack jumped on the wounded ones. Never failed. They were so hungry they’d eat anything, even each other. And while they were fighting among themselves they’d leave us in peace with our soup. Soon I had the card table between us and we were sipping the yellow broth and those tiny noodles. I did a lot of mmm-gooding but got no response from Judy. Her eyes were fixed on the walkie-talkie on the end table. “How come we haven’t heard from him?” Good question—one that had been bothering me for a couple of days now. Where was George? Usually he stopped by every other day or so to see if we needed anything. And if he didn’t stop by, he’d call us on the walkie- talkie. We had an arrangement that we’d both turn on our headsets every day at six p.m. just in case we needed to be in touch. I’d been calling over to George’s place across the street at six o’clock sharp for three days running now with no result. “He’s probably wandering around the city seeing what he can pick up. He’s a resourceful guy. Probably come back with something we can really use but haven’t thought of.” Judy didn’t flash me the anticipated smile. Instead, she frowned. “What if he went down to the research center?” “I’m sure he didn’t. He’s a trusting soul, but he’s not a fool.” I kept my eyes down as I spoke. I’m not a good liar. And that very question had been nagging at my gut. What if George had been stupid enough to present himself to the researchers? If he had, he was through. They’d never let him go and we’d never see him again. For George wasn’t an immune like us. He was different. Judy and I had caught the virus—or toxin—and defeated it. We were left with terrible scars from the battle but we had survived. We acquired our immunity through battle with the softness agent. George was special—he had remained untouched. He’d exposed himself to infected people for months as he helped everyone he could, and was still hard all over. Not so much as a little toe had gone soft on him. Which meant—to me at least—that George had been born with some sort of immunity to the softness. Wouldn’t those researchers love to get their needles and scalpels into him. I wondered if they had. George might have been picked up and brought down to the research center against his will. He told me once that he’d seen official-looking vans and cars prowling the streets, driven by guys wearing gas masks or the like. But that had been months ago and he hadn’t reported anything like it since. Certainly no cars had been on this street in recent memory. I warned him time and again about roaming around in the daylight but he always laughed good-naturedly and said nobody’d ever catch him— he was too fast. What if he’d run into someone faster? Only one thing to do. “I’m going to take a stroll over to George’s just to see if he’s okay.” Judy gasped. “No, Dad! You can’t! It’s too far!” “Only across the street.” “But your legs—” “—are only half gone.” I’d met George shortly after the last riot. I had two hard legs then. I’d come looking for a sturdier building than the one we’d been burned out of. He helped us move in here. I was suspicious at first, I admit that. I mean, I kept asking myself, what does this guy want? Turned out he only wanted to be friends. And so friends we became. He was soon the only other man I trusted in this whole world. And that being the case, I wanted a gun—for protection against all those other men I didn’t trust. George told me he had stolen a bunch during the early lootings. I traded him some Sterno and batteries for a .38 and a pump-action 12-gauge shotgun with ammo for both. I promptly sawed off the barrel of the shotgun. If the need arose, I could clear a room real fast with that baby. So it was the shotgun I reached for now. No need to fool with it—I kept its chamber empty and its magazine loaded with #5 shells. I laid it on the floor and reached into the rag bag by the door and began tying old undershirts around my knees. Maybe I shouldn’t call them knees; with the lower legs and caps gone, “knee” hardly seemed appropriate. From there it was a look through the peep hole to make sure the hall was clear, a blown kiss to Judy, then a shuffle into the hall. I was extra wary at first, ranging the landing up and down, looking for rats. But there weren’t any in sight. I slung the shotgun around my neck, letting it hang in front as I started down the stairs one by one on hands and butt, knees first, each flabby lower leg dragging alongside its respective thigh. Two flights down to the lobby, then up on my padded knees to the swinging door, a hard push through and I was out on the street. Silence. We kept our windows tightly closed against the cold and so I hadn’t noticed the change. Now it hit me like a slap in the face. As a lifelong New Yorker I’d never heard the city like this. Make that not heard. Even when there’d been nothing doing on your street, you could always hear that dull roar pulsing from the sky and the pavement and the walls of the buildings. The life sound of the city, the beating of its heart, the whisper of its breath, the susurrant rush of blood through its capillaries. It had stopped. The shiver that ran over me was not just the March wind’s sharp edge. The street was deserted. A plague had been through here, but no contorted bodies were strewn about. You didn’t fall down and die on the spot with the softness. No, that would be too kind. You died by inches, by bone lengths, in back rooms, trapped, unable to make it to the street. No public displays of morbidity. Just solitary deaths of quiet desperation. In a secret way, I was glad everyone was gone—nobody around to see me tooling across the sidewalk on my rag-wrapped knees like some skid row geek. The city looked different from down here. When you have legs to stand on you never realize how cracked the sidewalks are, how dirty. The buildings, their windows glaring red with the setting sun that had poked through the clouds over New Jersey, looked half again as high as they had when I was a taller man. I shuffled to the street and caught myself looking both ways before sliding off the curb. I smiled at the thought of getting run down by a truck on my first trip in over a month across a street that probably hadn’t seen the underside of a car since December. Despite the absurdity of it, I hurried across, and felt relief when I finally reached the far curb. Pulling open the damn doors to George’s apartment building was a chore, but I slipped through both of them and into the lobby. George’s bike—a light-frame Italian model ten-speeder—was there. I didn’t like that. George took that bike everywhere. Of course he could have found a car and some gas and gone sightseeing and not told me, but still the sight of that bike standing there made me uneasy. I shuffled by the silent bank of elevators, watching my longing expression reflected in their silent, immobile chrome doors. The fire door to the stairwell was a heavy one, but I squeezed through and started up the steps—backward. Maybe there was a better way, but I hadn’t found it. It was all in the arms: Sit on the bottom step, get your arms back, palms down on the step above, lever yourself up. Repeat this ten times and you’ve done a flight of stairs. Two flights per floor. Thank the Lord or Whatever that George had decided he preferred a second-floor apartment to a penthouse after the final power failure. It was a good thing I was going up backward. I might never have seen the rats if I’d been faced around the other way. Just one appeared at first. Alone, it was almost cute with its twitching whiskers and its head bobbing up and down as it sniffed the air at the bottom of the flight. Then two more joined it, then another half dozen. Soon they were a brown wave, undulating up the steps toward me. I hesitated for an instant, horrified and fascinated by their numbers and all their little black eyes sweeping toward me, then I jolted myself into action. I swung the scattergun around, pumped a shell into the chamber, and let them have a blast. Dimly through the reverberating roar of the shotgun I heard a chorus of squeals and saw flashes of flying crimson blossoms, then I was ducking my face into my arms to protect my eyes from the ricocheting shot. I should have realized the danger of shooting in a cinderblock stairwell like this. Not that it would have changed things—I still had to protect myself—but I should have anticipated the ricochets. The rats did what I’d hoped they’d do—jumped on the dead and near- dead of their number and forgot about me. I let the gun hang in front of me again and continued up the stairs to George’s floor. He didn’t answer his bell but the door was unlocked. I’d warned him about that in the past but he’d only laughed in that carefree way of his. “Who’s gonna pop in?” he’d say. Probably no one. But that didn’t keep me from locking mine, even though George was the only one who knew where I lived. I wondered if that meant I didn’t really trust George. I put the question aside and pushed the door open. It stank inside. And it was empty as far as I could see. But there was this sound, this wheezing, coming from one of the bedrooms. Calling his name and announcing my own so I wouldn’t get my head blown off, I closed the door behind me—locked it—and followed the sound. I found George. And retched. George was a blob of flesh in the middle of his bed. Everything but some ribs, some of his facial bones, and the back of his skull had gone soft on him. I stood there on my knees in shock, wondering how this could have happened. George was immune. He’d laughed at the softness. He’d been walking around as good as new just last week. And now . . . His lips were dry and cracked and blue—he couldn’t speak, couldn’t swallow, could barely breathe. And his eyes . . . they seemed to be just floating there in a quivering pool of flesh, begging me . . . darting to his left again and again . . . begging me . . . For what? I looked to his left and saw the guns. He had a suitcase full of them by the bedroom door. All kinds. I picked up a heavy-looking revolver—an S&W .357—and glanced at him. He closed his eyes and I thought he smiled. I almost dropped the pistol when I realized what he wanted. “No, George!” He opened his eyes again. They began to fill with tears. “George—I can’t!” Something like a sob bubbled past his lips. And his eyes . . . his pleading eyes . . . I stood there a long time in the stink of his bedroom, listening to him wheeze, feeling the sweat collect between my palm and the pistol grip. I knew I couldn’t do it. Not George, the big, friendly, good-natured slob I’d been depending on. Suddenly, I felt my pity begin to evaporate as a flare of irrational anger began to rise. I had been depending on George now that my legs were half gone, and here he’d gone soft on me. The bitter disappointment fueled the anger. I knew it wasn’t right, but I couldn’t help hating George just then for letting me down. “Damn you, George!” I raised the pistol and pointed it where I thought his brain should be. I turned my head away and pulled the trigger. Twice. The pistol jumped in my hand. The sound was deafening in the confines of the bedroom. Then all was quiet except for the ringing in my ears. George wasn’t wheezing anymore. I didn’t look around. I didn’t have to see. I have a good imagination. I fled that apartment as fast as my ruined legs would carry me. But I couldn’t escape the vision of George and how he looked before I shot him. It haunted me every inch of the way home, down the now empty stairs where only a few tufts of dirty brown fur were left to indicate that rats had been swarming there, out into the dusk and across the street and up more stairs to home. George . . . how could it be? He was immune. Or was he? Maybe the softness had followed a different course in George, slowly building up in his system until every bone in his body was riddled with it and he went soft all at once. God, what a noise he must have heard when all those bones went in one shot. That was why he hadn’t been able to call or answer the walkie-talkie. But what if it had been something else? What if the virus theory was right and George was the victim of a more virulent mutation? The thought made me sick with dread. Because if that were true, it meant Judy would eventually end up like George. And I was going to have to do for her what I’d done for George. But what of me, then? Who was going to end it for me? I didn’t know if I had the guts to shoot myself. And what if my hands went soft before I had the chance? I didn’t want to think about it, but it wouldn’t go away. I couldn’t remember ever being so frightened. I almost considered going down to Rockefeller Center and presenting Judy and myself to the leechers, but killed that idea real quick. Never. I’m no jerk. I’m college-educated. A degree in biology. I know what they’d do to us. Inside, Judy had wheeled her chair over to the door and was waiting for me. I couldn’t let her know. “Not there,” I told her before she could ask, and busied myself with putting the shotgun away so I wouldn’t have to look her straight in the eyes. “Where could he be?” Her voice was tight. “I wish I knew. Maybe he went down to Rockefeller Center. If he did, it’s the last we’ll ever see of him.” “I can’t believe that.” “Then tell me where else he can be.” She was silent. I did Warner Oland’s Chan: “Numbah One Dawtah is finally at loss for words. Peace reigns at last.” I could see that I failed to amuse, so I decided a change of subject was in order. “I’m tired.” It was the truth. The trip across the street had been exhausting. “Me, too.” She yawned. “Want to get some sleep?” I knew she did. I was just staying a step or two ahead of her so she wouldn’t have to ask to be put to bed. She was a dancer, a fine, proud artist. Judy would never have to ask anyone to put her to bed. Not while I was around. As long as I was able I would spare her the indignity of dragging herself along the floor. I gathered Judy up in my arms. The whole lower half of her body was soft; her legs hung over my left arm like weighted drapes. It was all I could do to keep from crying when I felt them so limp and formless. My dancer . . . you should have seen her in Swan Lake. Her legs had been so strong, so sleekly muscular, like her mother’s . . . I took her to the bathroom and left her alone. Which left me alone with my daymares. What if there really was a mutation of the softness and my dancer began leaving me again, slowly, inch by inch? What was I going to do when she was gone? My wife was gone. My folks were gone. What few friends I’d ever had were gone. Judy was the only attachment I had left. Without her, I’d break loose from everything and just float off into space. I needed her . . . When she was finished in the bathroom I carried her out and arranged her on the bed. I tucked her in and kissed her goodnight. Out in the living room I slipped under the covers of the fold-out bed and tried to sleep. Useless. The fear wouldn’t leave me alone. I fought it, telling myself that George was a freak case, that Judy and I had licked the softness. We were immune and we’d stay immune. Let everyone else turn into puddles of Jell-O, I wasn’t going to let them suck us dry to save themselves. We were on our way to inheriting the earth, Judy and I, and we didn’t even have to be meek about it. But still sleep refused to come. So I lay there in the growing darkness in the center of the silent city and listened . . . listened as I did every night . . . as I knew I would listen for the rest of my life . . . listened for that sound . . . that cellophane crinkling sound . . .

ABOUT THE AUTHOR F. Paul Wilson is the award-winning, bestselling author of The Keep and some fifty- odd other novels spanning horror, adventure, medical thrillers, science fiction, and virtually everything between. He is best known for his urban mercenary, Repairman Jack. His latest books are Fear City and the YA horror novels, Definitely Not Kansas and Family Secrets. Find out more at repairmanjack.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight Demon in Aisle 6 Matthew Kressel | 6529 words

I first saw the demon the Sunday after you died. It was 11:53 p.m. Just seven minutes until I would have grabbed my knapsack and biked home to Mom and bed and a life of sound sleep. That night the flurries were drifting down like nuclear ash. Most folks had fled for warmer places, but a few shopper-zombies still wandered SuperMart’s bright aisles, seeking redemption in the form of deep discounts. I was wheeling a mop and bucket down to Aisle 17, where a crate of cherry soda had fallen from the shelf and sent high-fructose fizz all over the concrete floor. When I passed Aisle 6, the demon looked up at me. I felt as if a swarm of moths had hatched in my belly and were wriggling out of their cocoons to feast on my organs, as if someone’s hand had clutched my heart and squeezed. It hurt so much I gagged, because there he stood, this giant ball of brown afterbirth, eight feet tall, hunched and crooked, one eye white and huge, like the moon on the night you died, the other this black drop of oil, a black hole sucking up all light. He was a pinwheel of jagged teeth and claws and bones, like some aborted dinosaur fetus. And I didn’t want to look. I was too afraid. But there he was, more there than anything I’d ever seen. And he stared at me, this nightmare fetus, eating candy. Shredded bags of Skittles and Starbursts and Tootsie Rolls lay over the floor like confetti after a parade. A strip of orange plastic hung from his disjointed mouth. I couldn’t take it anymore, so I ran. I shoved the bucket down to Aisle 17 and mopped up the sticky black puddle and pretended I’d never seen him, hoping he would go away and never come back. But that was stupid, because he made sure to keep coming back until I understood he was as real to me as you once were.

• • • •

I still have that selfie you took at Onderdonk Lake as the background pic on my phone. It hurts like hell every time I check the time or take a call, but it hurts even more when I think of removing it. It makes me remember your smile. Your big, pouty, red lips. Your huge front teeth. My little Freddy Mercury. Do you remember when we first met, outside school? It was the end of lunch period, and all the kids waited by the doors for the bell. I was talking to Deb and Jen, my new BFFs, puffing a smoke, trying real hard to make more friends, because to everyone else I was that weird transfer kid from New York who pronounced “coffee” with a “W,” who dressed all in black like some “Goth heathen,” who had to be shunned because he came from that place with too many “tree-hugging liberal faggots.” I only knew you as this shy boy who sat in the back of my physics class and made everyone look stupid with your perfect grades. I told this dumb joke, and I heard this enormous laugh, as if the whole world was shuddering with joy. I turned, and I saw you smile, and this sugary-sweet feeling filled my heart, like my chest had become a giant balloon and I was floating way up above all the bullshit of the world, and all that was left was you, me and endless blue skies. You asked me for a smoke. I said, “I’m Lucas,” and shook your warm, soft-but-firm hand. “Davis,” you said, your eyes watering from the smoke, locked hard to mine. Later, you told me you’d never smoked before, that you’d puked in the bathroom halfway through English class. We laughed a lot about that. We laughed about a lot of things. And when you died, I thought I’d never hear you laugh again. Now? I’m not so sure.

• • • •

The nightmares came like freight trains, loud and huge and terrifying. I’d wake up screaming, shivering, with memories of vague, bloody shapes, limbs and teeth and bones all mixed together in a monster smoothie. Once I dreamed of you standing outside my bedroom door, your body open to me like those cutaway slices of earth in our physics textbooks. You stared at me, and I wanted to say something, maybe goodbye or hello or just anything, but you turned and walked away. I woke gasping. I wondered what you were trying to say, if you had wanted me to follow you. And, yeah, I considered following you many times. How could I not? I tried to convince myself I’d hallucinated the demon, but he was more full of life than all those shopper-zombies wandering SuperMart’s bright aisles. I avoided Aisle 6 as much as possible, afraid he’d come back. But he did. He had to. It was Tuesday, 11:47 p.m. I was tired and wanted to go home. Your Freddy Mercury smile stared up at me when I checked the time on my phone. I was restocking Aisle 7. I didn’t want to be so close to 6, but my boss had noticed that the shelves near 6 were getting sparse and sent me on a mission. I worked as fast as I could, but after twenty minutes I decided my fears were stupid. I had to stop being a baby. I peeked into Aisle 6, where this toddler sat in a big red shopping cart, kicking his legs, while his mom rifled through huge bags of M&Ms. And as I look into the aisle, the kid says, “I don’t like him, mommy.” And the mom says, “Be nice, Mikey. He’s just doing his job.” But then the kid says, “No, not him, mommy. I don’t like that one.” He points over her shoulder to the end of the aisle, where the shadows fell all wrong, as if the light got lost and confused before it hit the ground. The mother has her back to this, but I see it clearly. The kid starts howling, and the hairs on the back of my neck rise as the demon lopes into view like he was stepping through an invisible door. He’s all white and glistening, with a new crooked head and a mouth like a blowfish. Thousands of long, sharp teeth, and a honeycomb of cow’s eyes, all dark and black and huge. All gazing at me. And, yeah, he’s different this time, but I know he’s the same demon because the same colony of termites are eating my intestines, the same firm hand is wringing my heart. The mother doesn’t dare look where the kid was pointing. But she must have seen the terror in my face, because she says, “Por favor, espíritu, leave us be! We’re shopping for his birthday!” She crosses herself and shoves her kid and cart toward checkout like she’s racing the Iditarod. But me, I can’t move. I’m frozen with dread as the demon lopes over to the shelves and tears open a bag of Tootsie Rolls with his teeth. He swallows them whole, wrappers and all, while his lips smack wetly together. Gobs of black saliva drip to the floor and make these weird rainbows in the fluorescent lights. I feel a touch on my arm and I scream. But it’s just this long-bearded dude that smells like cigarettes and bourbon. And when I look back, the demon is gone, but he’s left the shredded wrappers behind. The dude says, “Sorry to startle you, man. Coffee filters? Which aisle?”

• • • •

I asked you to tutor me, but I think you knew I was after more than grades. Mom works two jobs and I need to work six nights just so we can starve more efficiently. It’s been like this since Fuckface left us for sexier pastures. Mom’s almost never home, so I knew you and I would be alone for hours. We did physics problems. Motion, energy, momentum. I got frustrated, and we stepped out into a gray and rainy autumn day that made me want to wear wool sweaters and drink soup and nap all afternoon until the sun set too soon. The leaves had just turned this luscious gold, and when I mentioned their color you said, “The leaves don’t actually change color. They’re always golden, or orange, or red, but their colors are hidden under the green of chlorophyll. It’s only when the chlorophyll breaks down in the fall that their natural color emerges.” And I said, “Just like people. You only see their true colors when their defenses break down.” And you said, “Yeah, but people’s true colors aren’t always beautiful.” And that’s when I knew you and I were each half of a greater being yet to form. We shared a cigarette. By then you smoked like Louis Jourdan, every puff an erotic display. Grace and angst danced blissfully across the micro- expressions of your face. I wanted you so badly I shuddered. You told me about your favorite books. To Say Nothing of the Dog and The Road and a writer named James Tiptree, Jr. who was really a woman. You got excited about this TV show where this closeted doctor in a religious English town hid his desires for fear he might lose his thriving business if his patients knew he was gay. The conversation had to go this way, toward sex, toward desire, in the same way that water has to flow downhill to merge with other streams until it forms a gushing river. Hunger burned in your eyes as you gazed at me. Ancient glaciers melted in my body, flooding me with heat. I wanted to connect your universe to mine so together we could birth galaxies. But the water hit a dam, pooled, and stopped. You turned the conversation to your dad, a detective. He worked late nights, and you told me how he’d come home drunk and break things, and every now and then he’d try to break you. My heart broke a little too. I told you to report him, because fuckers like him deserved to die, but you said you thought it would only make things worse. Without your dad, you had no one. Your mom died from breast cancer when you were six. And I said, “God, Davis, that must’ve been so hard to lose her so young.” And you said, “No, I haven’t lost her. Life is energy, and energy can’t be destroyed. I don’t believe in death, Lucas. Mom’s not gone. She’s just traveling.” Words more beautiful had never been spoken. I leaned in, and you didn’t stop me. Your hot tongue tasted like cigarettes, and all the pain I had been carrying, the anger about my dad leaving us to fend for ourselves, my frustration at all these ignorant kids in this podunk town who had no room in their cliques for a gay freak like me—all of that melted away into the flood of warmth radiating from my heart. I was a new star, blazing. Life had brought me to this moment, and therefore life was beautiful. It was the first time you’d kissed a boy. It was the first time you’d kissed anyone. I’d kissed plenty of boys back in New York. In my public school in Manhattan, kids had two moms, or two dads, or a black dad and a white mom, or a white dad and an Asian mom, or a Jewish mom and a Buddhist dad, or a Muslim dad and a Christian mom, or no mom, or no dad, or no parents at all, and it was all one beautiful, glorious, dancing spectrum of color, and no one cared, because that’s just how it was. But here in podunkville, if a boy dares want another boy, you’re Satan’s spawn, or a pedophile, or you sweat AIDS and exhale sin, and I’d absorbed all these disgusting worlds of hate in the three months that I’d lived here, in overheard snatches of conversations, in people’s hard expressions and uncomfortable sighs, or more overt revelations shouted in the halls. But I kissed you anyway. “You’re shivering, Davis,” I said. And you said, “I feel like a leaf, stripped of my outer covering.” And I said, “And your true colors are beautiful.”

• • • •

When SuperMart’s security guard went on one of his epic-long breaks, I snuck into his office and cued up the surveillance tapes. I needed to know if I was losing my mind, or if my demon was real. Maybe I’d see him, but I’d settle for hovering bags of candy, unnatural shadows, or really any damned scrap of evidence proving that I’d seen someone swallowing massive doses of high-fructose corn syrup in Aisle 6. It took some time to find the right tape. I cued it up, and there I stood on the blurry screen, this horrific blank stare on my face, jaw open, arms at my side, like some tranced kid at a stage hypnotist show, frozen by a magic word. There was no one else in the aisle with me. Eventually this blank-eyed figure walks over to the shelves and opens a bag of Starbursts with his teeth. After I’d watched myself shove a third handful of still-wrapped candy into my mouth, I stopped the tape.

• • • •

I’m pretty sure Mom knew I was gay for years, but I told her on the drive from New York just to be sure. Eyes fixed on the road, she barely nodded, as if I were telling her my shoe size was 10 or that I had brown eyes. But after, I sensed that she was happy to know how different I was from Fuckface, that I’d never destroy a woman like he destroyed her. But I’m not so different from Fuckface after all. It’s just that my targets are a different gender. You came over every day after school, and the tutoring quickly stopped. Or at least you stopped teaching me physics and I taught you how to kiss, where to touch, when to be gentle, and when to be rough. But that first time we curled up in my bed, our bodies pressed together like two clinging atoms, you needed no instruction. I felt as if we were wrapped in a warm blanket that would enclose us forever. We held each other and stared up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling. But after, your thoughts turned to your dad. You told me he’d shot some unarmed kid, that he was on paid suspension, that his drinking had gotten worse, and that he’d smashed your laptop. I noticed the bruises on your chest. I’d never hated a person more than I hated your dad then. Not even Fuckface had induced such rage in me. But you talked me down, turned the conversation to your mom, how much you missed her, how you regretted never getting to know her, not having her around. You curled up in my arms and cried, and I held you until you fell asleep. No one had ever opened up to me like this, and I savored my role as consoler. It gave me purpose. When you awoke, we talked about moving to Copenhagen or Berlin, starting a new life someplace where people didn’t give a damn who or how you loved. We walked a lot through the streets after school, passing quiet houses, kicking up leaves, holding hands. You picked up a small stone and told me how its matter was formed in the heart of dying stars, that everything in the world was formed when ancient stars exploded. I loved that, both of us, cosmic debris. Your hot breath misted the air as you handed me the stone. “Here,” you said, “have a little star.” I’d put it in my pocket, held onto it like it was gold. You read me your favorite sections of books and a short story you’d written about a blind boy who wanted to be a pilot, and it was beautiful and brave and heartbreaking. You said you wanted to be a writer someday, or a scientist, or both. We were walking home under a majestic spray of stars, and I was in awe, because we never had skies like these in Manhattan. You pointed out Orion and Sirius, bright in the east. Your house was this small, crooked thing, the lawn overgrown, junk piled on the side, weeds everywhere, and I fell in love with it instantly, because this was the place that had formed you. But you wouldn’t allow me in. “My dad,” you said, “he won’t like you. He doesn’t like anyone, really.” But I pushed and prodded, because I wouldn’t let this alcoholic child- abuser stop me from visiting the home of the boy I loved, and after a time you relented, but not before you made me swear I wouldn’t say a word. Your dad sat on the couch. The TV was on and a Marlboro burned in the ashtray. Snickers wrappers littered the table. He looked at both of us, back and forth, in that probing way that only cops can do. I tried to hold his gaze, because I wanted to let him know I knew the monster he was, that he didn’t scare me. But I shivered and looked away. I’d expected this buff, hard- jawed, mountain of a man, but instead there sat this pathetic hunched and balding creature drunk and disheveled on the couch, and I almost felt sorry for him. Almost. He turned back to the TV, told you to take out the trash, slurring his words. My heart pounded as you led me away. Your room was small, with bright red walls, and posters of the periodic table, the Sombrero galaxy, Nikola Tesla and Neils Bohr. You organized your books by color, and it was adorable. But the room had a faint odor of sadness, as if I could smell a decade of tears. “Well,” you said. “Here we are.” I went to kiss you. But you stopped me. “Not here,” you said. “Never here.” And I said, “Why do you let that shitbag control your life?” And you said, “Stop, Lucas. Please.” But I knew just how to touch you, what words to whisper in your ear to stir your desire. Soon I had you panting, my hands wrapped around your erection. Later, you told me you’d never come so hard.

• • • •

After I’d seen the security video, I thought I was going crazy. But I went on mopping up shattered pickle jars and toddler vomit, working the register, smoking by the dumpsters like I always had, trying my best to forget. It was Thursday, 11:39 p.m. It had been raining all day. A blanket of fast- moving clouds hung low over the parking lot, reflecting the orange streetlights into absurdist paintings across the sky. I hadn’t slept more than two hours the night before and hadn’t eaten all day. I had finally become a shopper-zombie, flitting through the world from one aisle to another without reason or purpose. Cold red light smacked the side of my face, and I gasped when I realized I had wandered into Aisle 6. Shadows leaped over the candy as if swarms of birds spiraled beneath the high fluorescent lights. And in the far corner, like a jagged oval mirror, hovered a crack in the world. On the other side a flat and brown and utterly barren landscape spread under a bleak sky. Here and there, twisted metal shapes spiked up from the ground, like half-buried debris from an ancient civilization. A dim red sun glowed behind black clouds, and its blood-red light shifted over the ground. Creatures with too many limbs loped across some distant, twisting road, fuzzy and indistinct. A hot wind blew in my face that reeked of ancient tears. Something wailed, the sound of an enormous beast crying, and the whole world shuddered. This was familiar. We had met, this world and me, but where or when, I didn’t remember. But I had to know. I took one step toward the door. Two. Answers lay on the other side. The hot, reeking wind tousled my hair as I took a third step. A fourth. I stood at the threshold. The oval boundary flickered with whorls of blue fire. I knew whatever lay on the other side would destroy me, that after I entered, I would be erased forever. But I wanted to be destroyed. I deserved to go up in flames. And so I stepped through the door.

• • • •

Those days with you were the happiest in my life. You had unlocked me from the cage I didn’t know I was in. I boasted of you to Deb and Jen, and they giggled and hugged me and were glad I’d finally outed myself to them. I posted sappy song lyrics on Facebook and wrote that I’d finally found happiness. I tried to hold your hand in the halls, but you yanked your fingers away and gave me hateful stares. I tried to kiss you by the bleachers after school, but you shoved me away. “They might see!” you said. “Who?” I said. “The gay police? Why do you care what anyone thinks?” You gritted your teeth and said, “In gym they threw me to the grass, called me a faggot. I scuffed my elbow.” “Those fucks!” I said. I kissed your elbow, where the skin was red and raw. “You can’t let them do this, Davis. You have to fight back, or they’ll do it again.” What I didn’t say was that a kid had spit on me that morning and the day before another had shoved me into a locker and called me queer. But these small bruises were unimportant. We had each other, and that was enough. And you said, “I’m not a fighter, Lucas.” And I said, “We have to be.” “But how do they know?” “It’s obvious, Davis.” “But is it?” you said. “I hardly speak to you in school. And outside physics class, we don’t see each other much.” “Maybe they heard rumors.” “From who? We both promised not to tell.” My face burned as I remained silent. “Who?” you said. “Who did you tell, Lucas?” “No one,” I said. But this was a lie. I’d already told Jen and Deb, because I had to share my happiness with someone. And they had to share it too, because I’m pretty sure by then the whole damn school knew. “I have to go,” you said, avoiding my eyes. “But it’s early,” I said. “I thought we would go to the park.” “No,” you said. “I have to go home.”

• • • •

When I stepped through the burning door the first thing that struck me was the sound. A cry from some immense, distant beast. It was low and deep and lingering, and shook my belly until I felt like throwing up. The sound grew in volume until it filled the stale air. I should have turned and ran, but I stayed. The ground was soft and spongy, and a weight pressed on my shoulders so that my feet sunk halfway into the brown foam. All was dull and shapeless, but my senses were heightened, as if I had drunk too much coffee and was watching a hi-def film flickering before my eyes. A trail of footprints, huge feet with branching potato-spud toes and fans of claws, led me forward. I grew weaker with every step, until I stood dizzy and panting before one of the twisted metal shapes. Like the skeleton of a huge iron flower, it spiked from the ground toward the red sun. In the flickering light the metal seemed to breathe. On its twisting girders smaller spikes branched from the larger, and smaller spikes branched from these, and so on, and so on, down and down into fractal infinity. And all over the spongy ground lay little rusty fragments that had fallen off. I picked one up, and it was hot, and my fingers turned red with dust. And suddenly there he was, my demon, standing beside the iron flower as if he had always been there. This time he was full of eyes, a thousand black, huge and angry orbs, all staring at me, accusing. A hole opened in his side, as if he were splitting in two, revealing rows of small, sharp teeth and a black tongue. And from this came such a scream that the whole world shuddered, and I fell. He crawled over to me, end over end like an inchworm. A lump formed in his side, a pseudopod reaching, that became a long, fat limb. On its end was a giant hand, flying toward my face. It slammed into my skull, and I screamed and fell back again. Then I was flying through space, zipping around an immense black void, trillions of stars spiraling with me, falling into the void, one by one. And I swung around this cosmic whirlpool, for ages and ages. And I knew that I’d spin like this for eternities before it was my turn to fall into the void and be destroyed. And I spun, and spun, and spun, and spun . . . I awoke on the floor. My coworker, Mary, held a cup of Hi-C to my mouth, and the red liquid shimmered in the lights. I spent thirty minutes begging my boss not to call an ambulance because I didn’t have health insurance. It was low blood sugar, nothing more, I said. He gave me the night off, with pay, and as I unlocked my bike for the ride home I noticed my palm was red. I thought, finally I had proof that all of this was real. But I remembered that some of Mary’s Hi-C had spilled down my hand. My tongue was still sickly sweet.

• • • •

On Monday, I walked you home after school under towering sycamores on Benefit Street. You walked fast, and told me you had a lot of homework and probably wouldn’t have time to hang out for the next few days. “What is it?” I said, sensing the wall rising between us. “What’s going on?” You didn’t answer at first, but I pushed. “Some kids posted all this homophobic stuff on my Facebook page,” you said. “Who?” I demanded. “We have to report them to the principal!” “No, Lucas. No.” “Tell me, Davis! Who was it?” “Just forget it.” I took out my phone to look, but you said, “I’ve already deleted the posts. Do me a favor and just let it go.” “No,” I said. “I won’t. And you shouldn’t either. You need to come down hard on them, or they’ll do it again.” You stopped and faced me. “Why do you think you always know what the fuck is best for me?” You never cursed, and the look in your eyes was close to hate, so I pretended I hadn’t seen it. “Davis,” I said, “you have to stop hiding your true self from others. Be proud of who you are. Be brave.” And you said, “That might work for you, Lucas. But you and I, we’re different.” “Yes,” I said. And maybe because I remembered the hate in your eyes, I said, “You’re a fucking coward, and I’m going home.” I turned down State Street and never looked back. I’ll never know if you stopped to watch me or kept on walking.

• • • • On Friday I snuck into the security office and stole the store key. I had it copied and returned before anyone discovered it was missing. That night, around 1 a.m., I snuck into SuperMart. It was easy enough to turn off the alarm, having watched the guard enter the keycode a hundred times when we smoked together. I’d swiped a bottle of Gordon’s from Mom’s stash, and by this time I had a solid buzz on. “Hello!” I announced to the empty store. “Lucas is here!” The aisles were dark and full of shadows from the dim red exit signs and the orange streetlights glimmering through the front windows. I sauntered into Aisle 6, half expecting my demon to be waiting. But there was only candy. “Where are you?” I shouted. “I’m here! Come get me!” I had my phone ready, camera app open. He wouldn’t escape this time. I took a swig of vodka and put down the bottle. “Where are you?” I shouted. “I’m here!” I walked up and down Aisle 6, over and over, like a marching soldier. I knocked candy to the floor, and I shouted at the top of my lungs. “Where are you? Show your face, you motherfucker!” My voice echoed and faded, until the only sound was the faint thrum of the highway beyond the parking lot. I stumbled toward the vodka bottle and sat next to it. I remained there for a while, slowly finishing the bottle, until I was so drunk the candy seemed to shiver. “Davis,” I said, tears rolling down my cheeks. “Davis I miss you. I miss you so goddamned much. Why did you have to leave?” I lifted the bottle by its neck and swung it down onto the metal racks. The glass shattered and pieces spread far and wide. I rubbed my face and it felt wet. In the shadows the blood looked black as oil. “Oh, god,” I said, pulling pieces of glass from my cheeks. I stumbled out of the store, blood and tears spilling down my face, and somehow managed to bike to Jen’s house. I called three times before she awoke, and she snuck me in her room through her first-floor window. And there, as she carefully removed the glass from my face with tweezers, as she applied swabs of stinging alcohol, and wrapped me in a warm blanket, I told her everything. I told her of you and me, and I told her of the demon. And God bless Jen, she didn’t judge. She didn’t say I was going crazy or needed meds. She only listened and nodded and held me until I stopped shivering. “I’m sorry I told people about you and Davis,” she said. “I regret it every day.” “It’s not your fault,” I said. “Davis asked me not to tell anyone about us, and I did anyway. You can’t be held responsible for a promise you didn’t make.” “I guess I just got excited because you were so open about it,” Jen said. “Lucas . . . Deb and I, we’re gay too. We’ve been together since junior high.” I stared at her, shocked. “Really? I can’t believe I never noticed.” “We keep real quiet about it. You know how this town can be.” And I nodded, because I did know. But by then was too late.

• • • •

The day after I left you in the street, you didn’t come to school. I called and texted you a dozen times, but you didn’t respond. All these hateful, homophobic posts piled up on your Facebook page, and I wondered why you weren’t erasing them. School was dreary without you. I didn’t eat lunch, and a cramp gnawed at my stomach. I went straight home after school, and when the sun went down early, I got frantic. I had to see you and apologize for calling you a coward and for telling others about us, because I had broken my promise. I knew you’d be angry with me, but you’d soften. Eventually, you’d forgive me. And later, maybe even that same night, we’d cuddle, and all would be right again. When I set out for your house, it was getting dark. A full moon rose above the black trees, shining like an enormous eye. A single light was on in your house. I was trembling as I stepped up to the door, but it was open, and I went in. Your house reeked of cigarettes and sweat, and empty beer cans and candy wrappers covered the table by the TV. In the distance, someone was crying. Time slowed as I approached your door. Your dad crouched on his knees just inside the threshold, weeping and shuddering. He looked up at me, his eyes red pinwheels surrounding pools of black, and he said, “You! You did this to him, you selfish motherfucker!” Saliva dribbled from his chin and splattered to the floor. I stared at him, unable to move. “Look!” he screamed. “Look at what you did!” You lay on the bed, as if sleeping, and for a moment I pretended that’s all I saw. But your dad’s nine millimeter was still clasped in your hand, and little red pieces of your skull were scattered all over the room. I was still staring at you, unable to believe what I was seeing, when your dad’s fist struck me in the face.

• • • •

I found out about the funeral a day too late. Your father didn’t make it public. You were buried in a small Jewish cemetery eighteen miles from town. I had to take a bus there. I didn’t even know you were Jewish. You’d never told me. People had left a few pebbles on your headstone, so I added the one you gave me when you said we were all formed in the exploding hearts of stars. I had a black eye for a week, but I didn’t press charges against your dad, because I deserved it. He was right. It was my fault. I was a selfish motherfucker. There was an obit for you on the school blog written by some kid who never knew you. In the moderated comments students wrote that you were with God now, that Jesus forgives all sin. No one ever mentioned you were Jewish. People spoke about you for a few days and pointed at me in the halls. The hateful comments on your Facebook page were removed and it became a makeshift memorial. But all this soon faded, like a cinder in a dying fire. The school bells went on ringing as they always had. And I still had homework and my job at SuperMart after school. And I thought, this can’t be all. You couldn’t have been snuffed so easily. When I told Jen about the demon, she offered some armchair analysis. “It’s all very clear to me,” she said. “The bleak world that you walked into, that’s Davis’s bedroom. The weird metal plant, all twisted and broken, that’s Davis. And the demon’s accusing eyes, those are his father’s. You see, Lucas? The demon is your guilt.” It seemed obvious when she said it. All the pieces fit. My guilt had been so overwhelmingly strong that I summoned the demon from my subconscious. And it had haunted me until I acknowledged it. And so, knowing this, I’ve tried to go on living, as the scabs on my face slowly heal and my black eye fades. But then last night, as I was emptying my pockets before bed, out came a small piece of metal. I thought it was the stone that you’d given me when we were walking through the streets, the ash from an ancient exploding star. But I had placed that stone on your grave. My fingers turned red from touching this one, and I remembered that I had picked up a fragment of the metal plant when I had stepped through that flaming door. And I thought, if the intensity of my guilt could summon a demon, what could my love summon? I put the stone on my windowsill last night, under the bright stars of Orion and Sirius, and I focused all of my love for you onto it. I thought of your Freddy Mercury smile and your world-shuddering laugh and I thought of your gentle kindness that carried me through these autumn days. I fell asleep, thinking of you, and when I awoke, the east was orange with the coming dawn, and the little stone on my windowsill had sprouted five tiny new limbs. And that’s when I knew, Davis, that like your mother, who left you far too soon, you’re not really gone, you’re just traveling.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Matthew Kressel’s short fiction has been twice nominated for a Nebula Award. His debut novel King of Shards, the first in the epic fantasy Worldmender series, comes out this October from Arche Press. His fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, io9.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Interzone, Electric Velocipede, Apex Magazine, and the anthologies Naked City, After, The People of the Book, and other markets. His story “The Meeker and the All-Seeing Eye” was recently nominated for a Nebula Award. He has been nominated for a World Fantasy Award for his work editing Sybil’s Garage, a speculative fiction ’zine he published from 2003-2010. Currently he co-hosts the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in Manhattan with Ellen Datlow. He is a member of the Altered Fluid writers group, and in his spare time he studies the Yiddish language.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight The Emperor's Old Bones Gemma Files | 7818 words

Oh, buying and selling . . . you know . . . life. —Tom Stoppard, after J.G. Ballard.

One day in 1941, not long after the fall of Shanghai, my amah (our live- in Chinese maid of all work, who often doubled as my nurse) left me sleeping alone in the abandoned hulk of what had once been my family’s home, went out, and never came back . . . a turn of events which didn’t actually surprise me all that much, since my parents had done something rather similar only a few brief weeks before. I woke up without light or food, surrounded by useless luxury—the discarded detritus of Empire and family alike. And fifteen more days of boredom and starvation were to pass before I saw another living soul. I was ten years old. After the war was over, I learned that my parents had managed to bribe their way as far as the harbor, where they became separated in the crush while trying to board a ship back “Home”. My mother died of dysentery in a camp outside of Hangkow; the ship went down halfway to Hong Kong, taking my father with it. What happened to my amah, I honestly don’t know —though I do feel it only fair to mention that I never really tried to find out, either. The house and I, meanwhile, stayed right where we were—uncared for, unclaimed—until Ellis Iseland broke in, and took everything she could carry. Including me. “So what’s your handle, tai pan?” she asked, back at the dockside garage she’d been squatting in, as she went through the pockets of my school uniform. (It would be twenty more years before I realized that her own endlessly evocative name was just another bad joke—one some immigration official had played on her family, perhaps.) “Timothy Darbersmere,” I replied, weakly. Over her shoulder, I could see the frying pan still sitting on the table, steaming slightly, clogged with burnt rice. At that moment in time, I would have gladly drunk my own urine in order to be allowed to lick it out, no matter how badly I might hurt my tongue and fingers in doing so. Her eyes followed mine—a calm flick of a glance, contemptuously knowing, arched eyebrows barely sketched in cinnamon. “Not yet, kid,” she said. “I’m really very hungry, Ellis.” “I really believe you, Tim. But not yet.” She took a pack of cigarettes from her sleeve, tapped one out, lit it. Sat back. Looked at me again, eyes narrowing contemplatively. The plume of smoke she blew was exactly the same non-color as her slant, level, heavy- lidded gaze. “Just to save time, by the way, here’re the house rules,” she said. “Long as you’re with me, I eat first. Always.” “That’s not fair.” “Probably not. But that’s the way it’s gonna be, ’cause I’m thinking for two, and I can’t afford to be listening to my stomach instead of my gut.” She took another drag. “Besides which, I’m bigger than you.” “My father says adults who threaten children are bullies.” “Yeah, well, that’s some pretty impressive moralizing, coming from a mook who dumped his own kid to get out of Shanghai alive.” I couldn’t say she wasn’t right, and she knew it, so I just stared at her. She was exoticism personified—the first full-blown Yank I’d ever met, the first adult (Caucasian) woman I’d ever seen wearing trousers. Her flat, Midwestern accent lent a certain fascination to everything she said, however repulsive. “People will do exactly whatever they think they can get away with, Tim,” she told me, “for as long as they think they can get away with it. That’s human nature. So don’t get all high-hat about it; use it. Everything’s got its uses—everything, and everybody.” “Even you, Ellis?” “Especially me, Tim. As you will see.” • • • •

It was Ellis, my diffident ally—the only person I have ever met who seemed capable of flourishing in any given situation—who taught me the basic rules of commerce: To always first assess things at their true value, then gauge exactly how much extra a person in desperate circumstances would be willing to pay for them. And her lessons have stood me in good stead, during all these intervening years. At the age of sixty-six, I remain not only still alive, but a rather rich man, to boot—import/export, antiques, some minor drug- smuggling intermittently punctuated (on the more creative side) by the publication of a string of slim, speculative novels. These last items have apparently garnered me some kind of cult following amongst fans of such fiction, most specifically—ironically enough—in the United States of America. But time is an onion, as my third wife used to say: The more of it you peel away, searching for the hidden connections between action and reaction, the more it gives you something to cry over. So now, thanks to the established temporal conventions of literature, we will slip fluidly from 1941 to 1999—to St. Louis, Missouri, and the middle leg of my first-ever Stateside visit, as part of a tour in support of my recently-published childhood memoirs. The last book signing was at four. Three hours later, I was already firmly ensconced in my comfortable suite at the downtown Four Seasons Hotel. Huang came by around eight, along with my room service trolley. He had a briefcase full of files and a sly, shy grin, which lit up his usually impassive face from somewhere deep inside. “Racked up a lotta time on this one, Mr. Darbersmere,” he said, in his second-generation Cockney growl. “Spent a lotta your money, too.” “Mmm.” I uncapped the tray. “Good thing my publisher gave me that advance, then, isn’t it?” “Yeah, good fing. But it don’t matter much now.” He threw the files down on the table between us. I opened the top one and leafed delicately through, between mouthfuls. There were schedules, marriage and citizenship certificates, medical records. Police records, going back to 1953, with charges ranging from fraud to trafficking in stolen goods, and listed under several different aliases. Plus a sheaf of photos, all taken from a safe distance. I tapped one. “Is this her?” Huang shrugged. “You tell me—you’re the one ’oo knew ’er.” I took another bite, nodding absently. Thinking: Did I? Really? Ever? As much as anyone, I suppose.

• • • •

To get us out of Shanghai, Ellis traded a can of petrol for a spot on a farmer’s truck coming back from the market—then cut our unlucky savior’s throat with her straight razor outside the city limits, and sold his truck for a load of cigarettes, lipstick and nylons. This got us shelter on a floating whorehouse off the banks of the Yangtze, where she eventually hooked us up with a pirate trawler full of U.S. deserters and other assorted scum, whose captain proved to be some slippery variety of old friend. The trawler took us up- and down-river, dodging the Japanese and preying on the weak, then trading the resultant loot to anyone else we came in contact with. We sold opium and penicillin to the warlords, maps and passports to the D.P.s, motor oil and dynamite to the Kuomintang, Allied and Japanese spies to each other. But our most profitable commodity, as ever, remained people—mainly because those we dealt with were always so endlessly eager to help set their own price. I look at myself in the bathroom mirror now, tall and silver-haired— features still cleanly cut, yet somehow fragile, like Sir Laurence Olivier after the medical bills set in. At this morning’s signing, a pale young woman with a bolt through her septum told me: “No offense, Mr. Darbersmere, but you’re—like—a real babe. For an old guy.” I smiled, gently. And told her: “You should have seen me when I was twelve, my dear.” That was back in 1943, the year that Ellis sold me for the first time—or rented me out, rather, to the mayor of some tiny port village, who threatened to keep us docked until the next Japanese inspection. Ellis had done her best to convince him that we were just another boatload of Brits fleeing internment, even shucking her habitual male drag to reveal a surprisingly lush female figure and donning one of my mother’s old dresses instead, much as it obviously disgusted her to do so. But all to no avail. “You know I’d do it, Tim,” she told me, impatiently pacing the trawler’s deck, as a passing group of her crewmates whistled appreciatively from shore. “Christ knows I’ve tried. But the fact is, he doesn’t want me. He wants you.” I frowned. “Wants me?” “To go with him, Tim. You know—grown-up stuff.” “Like you and Ho Tseng, last week, after the dance at Sister Chin’s?” “Yeah, sorta like that.” She plumped herself down on a tarpaulined crate full of dynamite— clearly labeled, in Cantonese, as “dried fruit”—and kicked off one of her borrowed high-heeled shoes, rubbing her foot morosely. Her cinnamon hair hung loose in the stinking wind, back-lit to a fine fever. I felt her appraising stare play up and down me like a fine grey mist, and shivered. “If I do this, will you owe me, Ellis?” “You bet I will, kid.” “Always take me with you?” There had been some brief talk of replacing me with Brian Thompson- Greenaway, another refugee, after I had mishandled a particularly choice assignment—protecting Ellis’s private stash of American currency from fellow scavengers while she recuperated from a beating inflicted by an irate Japanese officer, into whom she’d accidentally bumped while ashore. Though she wisely put up no resistance—one of Ellis’s more admirable skills involved her always knowing when it was in her best interest not to defend herself—the damage left her pissing blood for a week, and she had not been happy to discover her money gone once she was recovered enough to look for it. She lit a new cigarette, shading her eyes against the flame of her Ronson. “‘Course,” she said, sucking in smoke. “Never leave me?” “Sure, kid. Why not?” From Ellis, I learned to love duplicity, to distrust everyone except those who have no loyalty and play no favorites. Lie to me, however badly, and you are virtually guaranteed my fullest attention. I don’t remember if I really believed her promises, even then. But I did what she asked anyway, without qualm or regret. She must have understood that I would do anything for her, no matter how morally suspect, if she only asked me politely enough. In this one way, at least, I was still definitively British.

• • • •

Afterward, I was ill for a long time—some sort of psychosomatic reaction to the visceral shock of my deflowering, I suppose. I lay in a bath of sweat on Ellis’s hammock, under the trawler’s one intact mosquito net. Sometimes I felt her sponge me with a rag dipped in rice wine, while singing to me—softly, along with the radio: A faded postcard from exotic places . . . a cigarette that’s marked with lipstick traces . . . oh, how the ghost of you clings . . . And did I merely dream that once, at the very height of my sickness, she held me on her hip and hugged me close? That she actually slipped her jacket open and offered me her breast, so paradoxically soft and firm, its nipple almost as pale as the rest of her night-dweller’s flesh? That sweet swoon of ecstasy. That first hot stab of infantile desire. That unwitting link between recent childish violation and a desperate longing for adult consummation. I was far too young to know what I was doing, but she did. She had to. And since it served her purposes, she simply chose not to care. Such complete amorality: It fascinates me. Looking back, I see it always has—like everything else about her, fetishized over the years into an inescapable pattern of hopeless attraction and inevitable abandonment. My first wife’s family fled the former Yugoslavia shortly before the end of the war; she had high cheekbones and pale eyes, set at a Baltic slant. My second wife had a wealth of long, slightly coarse hair, the color of unground cloves. My third wife told stories—ineptly, compulsively. All of them were, on average, at least five years my elder. And sooner or later, all of them left me. Oh, Ellis, I sometimes wonder whether anyone else alive remembers you as I do—or remembers you at all, given your well-cultivated talent for blending in, for getting by, for rendering yourself unremarkable. And I really don’t know what I’ll do if this woman Huang has found for me turns out not to be you. There’s not much time left in which to start over, after all. For either of us.

• • • •

Last night, I called the number Huang’s father gave me before I left London. The man on the other end of the line identified himself as the master chef of the Precious Dragon Shrine restaurant. “Oh yes, tai pan Darbersmere,” he said, when I mentioned my name. “I was indeed informed, by that respected personage who we both know, that you might honor my unworthiest of businesses with the request for some small service.” “One such as only your estimable self could provide.” “The tai pan flatters, as is his right. Which is the dish he wishes to order?” “The Emperor’s Old Bones.” A pause ensued—fairly long, as such things go. I could hear a Cantopop ballad filtering in, perhaps from somewhere in the kitchen, duelling for precedence with the more classical strains of a wailing erhu. The Precious Dragon Shrine’s master chef drew a single long, low breath. “Tai pan,” he said, finally, “for such a meal . . . one must provide the meat oneself.” “Believe me, Grandfather; I am well aware of such considerations. You may be assured that the meat will be available, whenever you are ready to begin its cooking.” Another breath—shorter, this time. Calmer. “Realizing that it has probably been a long time since anyone had requested this dish,” I continued, “I am, of course, more than willing to raise the price our mutual friend has already set.” “Oh, no, tai pan.” “For your trouble.” “Tai pan, please. It is not necessary to insult me.” “I must assure you, Grandfather, that no such insult was intended.” A burst of scolding rose from the kitchen, silencing the ballad in mid- ecstatic lament. The master chef paused again. Then said: “I will need at least three days’ notice to prepare my staff.” I smiled. Replying, with a confidence which—I hoped—at least sounded genuine: “Three days should be more than sufficient.”

• • • •

The very old woman (eighty-nine, at least) who may or may not have once called herself Ellis Iseland now lives quietly in a genteelly shabby area of St. Louis, officially registered under the far less interesting name of Mrs. Munro. Huang’s pictures show a figure held carefully erect, yet helplessly shrunken in on itself—its once-straight spine softened by the onslaught of osteoporosis. Her face has gone loose around the jawline, skin powdery, hair a short, stiff grey crown of marcelled waves. She dresses drably. Shapeless feminine weeds, widow-black. Her arthritic feet are wedged into Chinese slippers—a small touch of nostalgic irony? Both her snubbed cat’s nose and the half-sneering set of her wrinkled mouth seem familiar, but her slanted eyes—the most important giveaway, their original non-color perhaps dimmed even further with age, from light smoke-grey to bone, ecru, white—are kept hidden beneath a thick-lensed pair of bifocal sunglasses, essential protection for someone whose sight may not last the rest of the year. And though her medical files indicate that she is in the preliminary stages of lung and throat cancer, her trip a day to the local corner store always includes the purchase of at least one pack of cigarettes, the brand apparently unimportant, as long as it contains a sufficient portion of nicotine. She lights one right outside the front door, and has almost finished it by the time she rounds the corner of her block. Her neighbors seem to think well of her. Their children wave as she goes by, cane in one hand, cigarette in the other. She nods acknowledgement, but does not wave back. This familiar arrogance, seeping up unchecked through her last, most perfect disguise: the mask of age, which bestows a kind of retroactive innocence on even its most experienced victims. I have recently begun to take advantage of its charms myself, whenever it suits my fancy to do so. I look at these pictures, again and again. I study her face, searching in vain for even the ruin of that cool, smooth, inventively untrustworthy operator who once held both my fortune and my heart in the palm of her mannishly large hand. It was Ellis who first told me about The Emperor’s Old Bones—and she is still the only person in the world with whom I would ever care to share that terrible meal, no matter what doing so might cost me. If, indeed, I ever end up eating it at all.

• • • •

“Yeah, I saw it done down in Hong Kong,” Ellis told us, gesturing with her chopsticks. We sat behind a lacquered screen at the back of Sister Chin’s, two nights before our scheduled rendezvous with the warlord Wao Ruyen, from whom Ellis had already accepted some mysteriously unspecified commission. I watched her eat—waiting my turn, as ever— while Brian Thompson-Greenaway (also present, much to my annoyance) sat in the corner and watched us both, openly ravenous. “They take a carp, right—you know, those big fish some rich Chinks keep in fancy pools, out in the garden? Supposed to live hundreds of years, you believe all that ‘Confucius says’ hooey. So they take this carp and they fillet it, all over, so the flesh is hanging off it in strips. But they do it so well, so carefully, they keep the carp alive through the whole thing. It’s sittin’ there on a plate, twitching, eyes rollin’ around. Get close enough, you can look right in through the ribcage and see the heart still beating.” She popped another piece of Mu Shu pork in her mouth, and smiled down at Brian, who gulped—apparently suddenly too queasy to either resent or envy her proximity to the food. “Then they bring out this big pot full of boiling oil,” she continued, “and they run hooks through the fish’s gills and tail, so they can pick it up at both ends. And while it’s floppin’ around, tryin’ to get free, they dip all those hangin’ pieces of flesh in the oil—one side first, then the other, all nice and neat. Fish is probably in so much pain already it doesn’t even notice. So it’s still alive when they put it back down . . . alive, and cooked, and ready to eat.” “And then—they eat it.” “Sure do, Tim.” “Alive, I mean.” Brian now looked distinctly green. Ellis shot him another glance, openly amused by his lack of stamina, then turned back to me. “Well yeah, that’s kinda the whole point of the exercise. You keep the carp alive until you’ve eaten it, and all that long life just sorta transfers over to you.” “Like magic,” I said. She nodded. “Exactly. ’Cause that’s exactly what it is.” I considered her statement for a moment. “My father,” I commented, at last, “always told us that magic was a load of bunk.” Ellis snorted. “And why does this not surprise me?” She asked, of nobody in particular. Then: “Fine, I’ll bite. What do you think?” “I think . . .” I said, slowly, “. . . that if it works . . . then who cares?” She looked at me. Snorted again. And then—she actually laughed, an infectious, unmalicious laugh that seemed to belong to someone far younger, far less complicated. It made me gape to hear it. Using her chopsticks, she plucked the last piece of pork deftly from her plate, and popped it into my open mouth. “Tim,” she said, “for a spoiled Limey brat, sometimes you’re okay.” I swallowed the pork, without really tasting it. Before I could stop myself, I had already blurted out: “I wish we were the same age, Ellis.” This time she stared. I felt a sudden blush turn my whole face crimson. Now it was Brian’s turn to gape, amazed by my idiotic effrontery. “Yeah, well, not me,” she said. “I like it just fine with you bein’ the kid, and me not.” “Why?” She looked at me again. I blushed even more deeply, heat prickling at my hairline. Amazingly, however, no explosion followed. Ellis simply took another sip of her tea, and replied— “‘Cause the fact is, Tim, if you were my age—good-lookin’ like you are, smart like you’re gonna be—I could probably do some pretty stupid things over you.”

• • • •

Magic. Some might say it’s become my stock in trade—as a writer, at least. Though the humble craft of buying and selling also involves a kind of legerdemain, as Ellis knew so well; sleight of hand, or price, depending on your product . . . and your clientele. But true magic? Here, now, at the end of the twentieth century, in this brave new world of 100-slot CD players and incessant afternoon talk shows? I have seen so many things in my long life, most of which I would have thought impossible, had they not taken place right in front of me. From the bank of the Yangtze River, I saw the bright white smoke of an atomic bomb go up over Nagasaki, like a tear in the fabric of the horizon. In Chungking harbor, I saw two grown men stab each other to death over the corpse of a dog because one wanted to bury it, while the other wanted to eat it. And just beyond the Shanghai city limits, I saw Ellis cut that farmer’s throat with one quick twist of her wrist, so close to me that the spurt of his severed jugular misted my cheek with red. But as I grow ever closer to my own personal twilight, the thing I remember most vividly is watching—through the window of a Franco- Vietnamese arms-dealer’s car, on my way to a cool white house in Saigon, where I would wait out the final days of the war in relative comfort and safety—as a pair of barefoot coolies pulled the denuded skeleton of Brian Thompson-Greenaway from a culvert full of malaria-laden water. I knew it was him, because even after Wao Ruyen’s court had consumed the rest of his pathetic little body, they had left his face nearly untouched—there not being quite enough flesh on a child’s skull, apparently, to be worth the extra effort of filleting . . . let alone of cooking. And I remember, with almost comparable vividness, when—just a year ago—I saw the former warlord Wao, Huang’s most respected father, sitting in a Limehouse nightclub with his Number One and Number Two wife at either elbow. Looking half the age he did when I first met him, in that endless last July of 1945, before black science altered our world forever. Before Ellis sold him Brian instead of me, and then fled for the Manchurian border, leaving me to fend for myself in the wake of her departure. After all this, should the idea of true magic seem so very difficult to swallow? I think not. No stranger than the empty shell of Hiroshima, cupped around Ground Zero, its citizenry reduced to shadows in the wake of the blast’s last terrible glare. And certainly no stranger than the fact that I should think a woman so palpably incapable of loving anyone might nevertheless be capable of loving me, simply because—at the last moment—she suddenly decided not to let a rich criminal regain his youth and prolong his days by eating me alive, in accordance with the ancient and terrible ritual of The Emperor’s Old Bones.

• • • •

This morning, I told my publicist that I was far too ill to sign any books today—a particularly swift and virulent touch of the twenty-four-hour flu, no doubt. She said she understood completely. An hour later, I sat in Huang’s car across the street from the corner store, watching “Mrs. Munro” make her slow way down the street to pick up her daily dose of slow, coughing death. On her way back, I rolled down the car window and yelled: “Lai gen wo ma, wai guai!” )Come with me, white ghost! An insulting little Mandarin phrase, occasionally used by passing Kuomintang jeep drivers to alert certain long- nosed Barbarian smugglers to the possibility that their dealings might soon be interrupted by an approaching group of Japanese soldiers.) Huang glanced up from his copy of Rolling Stone’s Hot List, impressed. “Pretty good accent,” he commented. But my eyes were on “Mrs. Munro”, who had also heard—and stopped in mid-step, swinging her half-blind grey head toward the sound, more as though scenting than scanning. I saw my own face leering back at me in miniature from the lenses of her prescription sunglasses, doubled and distorted by the distance between us. I saw her raise one palm to shade her eyes even further against the sun, the wrinkles across her nose contracting as she squinted her hidden eyes. And then I saw her slip her glasses off to reveal those eyes: Still slant, still grey. Still empty. “It’s her,” I told him. Huang nodded. “Fought so. When you want me to do it?” “Tonight?” “Whatever y’say, Mr. D.”

• • • •

Very early on the morning before Ellis left me behind, I woke to find her sitting next to me in the red half-darkness of the ship’s hold. “Kid,” she said, “I got a little job lined up for you today.” I felt myself go cold. “What kind of job, Ellis?” I asked, faintly—though I already had a fairly good idea. Quietly, she replied: “The grown-up kind.” “Who?” “French guy, up from Saigon, with enough jade and rifles to buy us over the border. He’s rich, educated; not bad company, either. For a fruit.” “That’s reassuring,” I muttered, and turned on my side, studying the wall. Behind me, I heard her lighter click open, then catch and spark—felt the faint lick of her breath as she exhaled, transmuting nicotine into smoke and ash. The steady pressure of her attention itched like an insect crawling on my skin: Fiercely concentrated, alien almost to the point of vague disgust, infinitely patient. “War’s on its last legs,” she told me. “That’s what I keep hearing. You got the Communists comin’ up on one side, with maybe the Russians slipping in behind ’em, and the good old U.S. of A. everywhere else. Philippines are already down for the count, now Tokyo’s in bombing range. Pretty soon, our little oufit is gonna be so long gone, we won’t even remember what it looked like. My educated opinion? It’s sink or swim, and we need all the life-jackets that money can buy.” She paused. “You listening to me? Kid?” I shut my eyes again, marshalling my heart-rate. “Kid?” Ellis repeated. Still without answering—or opening my eyes—I pulled the mosquito net aside, and let gravity roll me free of the hammock’s sweaty clasp. I was fourteen years old now, white-blonde and deeply tanned from the river- reflected sun; almost her height, even in my permanently bare feet. Looking up, I found I could finally meet her grey gaze head-on. “‘Us’,” I said. “‘We’. As in you and I?” “Yeah, sure. You and me.” I nodded at Brian, why lay nearby, deep asleep and snoring. “And what about him?” Ellis shrugged. “I don’t know, Tim,” she said. “What about him?” I looked back down at Brian, who hadn’t shifted position, not even when my shadow fell over his face. Idly, I inquired— “You’ll still be there when I get back, won’t you, Ellis?” Outside, through the porthole, I could see that the rising sun had just cracked the horizon; she turned, haloed against it. Blew some more smoke. Asking: “Why the hell wouldn’t I be?” “I don’t know. But you wouldn’t use my being away on this job as a good excuse to leave me behind, though—would you?” She looked at me. Exhaled again. And said, evenly: “You know, Tim, I’m gettin’ pretty goddamn sick of you asking me that question. So gimme one good reason not to, or let it lie.” Lightly, quickly—too quickly even for my own well-honed sense of self- preservation to prevent me—I laid my hands on either side of her face and pulled her to me, hard. Our breath met, mingled, in sudden intimacy; hers tasted of equal parts tobacco and surprise. My daring had brought me just close enough to smell her own personal scent, under the shell of everyday decay we all stank of: A cool, intoxicating rush of non-fragrance, firm and acrid as an unearthed tuber. It burned my nose. “We should always stay together,” I said, “because I love you, Ellis.” I crushed my mouth down on hers, forcing it open. I stuck my tongue inside her mouth as far as it would go and ran it around, just like the mayor of that first tiny port village had once done with me. I fastened my teeth deep into the inner flesh of her lower lip, and bit down until I felt her knees give way with the shock of it. Felt myself rear up, hard and jerking, against her soft underbelly. Felt her feel it. It was the first and only time I ever saw her eyes widen in anything but anger. With barely a moment’s pause, she punched me right in the face, so hard I felt jaw crack. I fell at her feet, coughing blood. “Eh—!” I began, amazed. But her eyes froze me in mid-syllable—so grey, so cold. “Get it straight, tai pan,” she said, “‘cause I’m only gonna say it once. I don’t buy. I sell.” Then she kicked me in the stomach with one steel-toed army boot, and leant over me as I lay there, gasping and hugging myself tight—my chest contracting, eyes dimming. Her eyes pouring over me like liquid ice. Like sleet. Swelling her voice like some great Arctic river, as she spoke the last words I ever heard her say— “So don’t you even try to play me like a trick, and think I’ll let you get away with it.”

• • • •

Was Ellis evil? Am I? I’ve never thought so, though earlier this week I did give one of those legendary American Welfare mothers $25,000 in cash to sell me her least-loved child. He’s in the next room right now, playing Nintendo. Huang is watching him. I think he likes Huang. He probably likes me, for that matter. We are the first English people he has ever met, and our accents fascinate him. Last night, we ordered in pizza; he ate until he was sick, then ate more, and fell asleep in front of an HBO basketball game. If I let him stay with me another week, he might become sated enough to convince himself he loves me. The master chef at the Precious Dragon Shrine tells me that The Emperor’s Old Bones bestows upon its consumer as much life-force as the consumed would have eventually gone through, had he or she been permitted to live out the rest of their days unchecked—and since the child I bought claims to be roughly ten years old (a highly significant age, in retrospect), this translates to perhaps an additional sixty years of life for every person who participates, whether the dish is eaten alone or shared. Which only makes sense, really: It’s magic, after all. And this is good news for me, since the relative experiential gap between a man in his upper twenties and a woman in her upper thirties—especially compared to that between a boy of fourteen and a woman of twenty-eight— is almost insignificant. Looking back, I don’t know if I’ve ever loved anyone but Ellis—if I’m even capable of loving anyone else. But finally, after all these wasted years, I do know what I want. And who. And how to get them both. It’s a terrible thing I’m doing, and an even worse thing I’m going to do. But when it’s done, I’ll have what I want, and everything else—all doubts, all fears, all piddling, queasy little notions of goodness, and decency, and basic human kinship—all that useless lot can just go hang, and twist and rot in the wind while they’re at it. I’ve lived much too long with my own unsatisfied desire to simply hold my aching parts—whatever best applies, be it stomach or otherwise—and congratulate myself on my forbearance anymore. I’m not mad, or sick, or even yearning after a long-lost love that I can never regain, and never really had in the first place. I’m just hungry, and I want to eat. And morality . . . has nothing to do with it. Because if there’s one single thing you taught me, Ellis—one lesson I’ve retained throughout every twist and turn of this snaky thing I call my life— it’s that hunger has no moral structure.

• • • •

Huang came back late this morning, limping and cursing, after a brief detour to the office of an understanding doctor who his father keeps on international retainer. I am obscurely pleased to discover that Ellis can still defend herself; even after Huang’s first roundhouse put her on the pavement, she still somehow managed to slip her razor open without him noticing, then slide it shallowly across the back of his Achilles tendon. More painful than debilitating, but rather well done nevertheless, for a woman who can no longer wear shoes which require her to tie her own laces. I am almost as pleased, however, to hear that nothing Ellis may have done actually succeeded in preventing Huang from completing his mission —and beating her, with methodical skill, to within an inch of her corrupt and dreadful old life. I have already told my publicist that I witnessed the whole awful scene, and asked her to find out which hospital poor Mrs. Munro has been taken to. I myself, meanwhile, will drive the boy to the kitchen of the Precious Dragon Shrine restaurant, where I am sure the master chef and his staff will do their best to keep him entertained until later tonight. Huang has lent him his pocket Gameboy, which should help. Ah. That must be the phone now, ringing.

• • • •

The woman in bed 37 of the Morleigh Memorial Hospital’s charity wing, one of the few left operating in St. Louis—in America, possibly—opens her swollen left eye a crack, just far enough to reveal a slit of red-tinged white and a wandering, dilated pupil, barely rimmed in grey. “Hello, Ellis,” I say. I sit by her bedside, as I have done for the last six hours. The screens enshrouding us from the rest of the ward, with its rustlings and moans, reduce all movement outside this tiny area to a play of flickering shadows— much like the visions one might glimpse in passing through a double haze of fever and mosquito net, after suffering a violent shock to one’s fragile sense of physical and moral integrity. . . . and oh, how the ghost of you clings . . . She clears her throat, wetly. Tells me, without even a flicker of hesitation: “Nuh . . . Ellis. Muh num iss . . . Munro.” But: She peers up at me, straining to lift her bruise-stung lids. I wait, patiently. “Tuh—” “That’s a good start.” I see her bare broken teeth at my patronizing tone, perhaps reflexively. Pause. And then, after a long moment: “Tim.” “Good show, Ellis. Got it in one.” Movement at the bottom of the bed: Huang, stepping through the gap between the screens. Ellis sees him, and stiffens. I nod in his direction, without turning. “I believe you and Huang have already met,” I say. “Mr. Wao Huang, that is; you’ll remember his father, the former warlord Wao Ruyen. He certainly remembers you—and with some gratitude, or so he told me.” Huang takes his customary place at my elbow. Ellis’ eyes move with him, helplessly—and I recall how my own eyes used to follow her about in a similarly fascinated manner, breathless and attentive on her briefest word, her smallest motion. “I see you can still take quite a beating, Ellis,” I observe, lightly. “Unfortunately for you, however, it’s not going to be quite so easy to recover from this particular melee as it once was, is it? Old age, and all that.” To Hunag: “Have the doctors reached any conclusion yet? Regarding Mrs. Munro’s long-term prognosis?” “Wouldn’t say as ’ow there was one, tai pan.” “Well, yes. Quite.” I glance back, only to find that Ellis’ eyes have turned to me at last. And I can read them so clearly, now—like clean, black text through grey rice- paper, lit from behind by a cold and colorless flame. No distance. No mystery at all. When her mouth opens again, I know exactly what word she’s struggling to shape. “Duh . . . deal?” Oh, yes. I rise, slowly, as Huang pulls the chair back for me. Some statements, I find, need room in which to be delivered properly—or perhaps I’m simply being facetious. My writer’s over-developed sense of the dramatic, working double-time. I wrote this speech out last night, and rehearsed it several times in front of the bathroom mirror. I wonder if it sounds rehearsed. Does calculated artifice fall into the same general category as outright deception? If so, Ellis ought to be able to hear it in my voice. But I don’t suppose she’s really apt to be listening for such fine distinctions, given the stress of this mutually culminative moment. “I won’t say you’ve nothing I want, Ellis, even now. But what I really want—what I’ve always wanted—is to be the seller, for once, and not the sold. To be the only one who has what you want desperately, and to set my price wherever I think it fair.” Adding, with the arch of a significant brow: “—or know it to be unfair.” I study her battered face. The bruises form a new mask, impenetrable as any of the others she’s worn. The irony is palpable: Just as Ellis’ nature abhors emotional accessibility, so nature—seemingly—reshapes itself at will to keep her motivations securely hidden. “I’ve arranged for a meal,” I tell her. “The menu consists of a single dish, one with which I believe we’re both equally familiar. The name of that dish is The Emperor’s Old Bones, and my staff will begin to cook it whenever I give the word. Now, you and I may share this meal, or we may not. We may regain our youth, and double our lives, and be together for at least as long as we’ve been apart—or we may not. But I promise you this, Ellis: No matter what I eventually end up doing, the extent of your participation in the matter will be exactly defined by how much you are willing to pay me for the privilege.” I gesture to Huang, who slips a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket. I tap one out. I light it, take a drag. Savor the sensation. Ellis just watches. “So here’s the deal, then: If you promise to be very, very nice to me— and never, ever leave me again—for the rest of our extremely long partnership—” I pause. Blow out the smoke. Wait. And conclude, finally: “—then you can eat first.” I offer Ellis the cigarette, slowly. Slowly, she takes it from me, holding it delicately between two splinted fingers. She raises it to her torn and grimacing mouth. Inhales. Exhales those familiar twin plumes of smoke, expertly, through her crushed and broken nose. Is that a tear at the corner of her eye, or just an upwelling of rheum? Or neither? “Juss like . . . ahways,” she says. And gives me an awful parody of my own smile. Which I—return. With interest.

• • • •

Later, as Huang helps Ellis out of bed and into the hospital’s service elevator, I sit in the car, waiting. I take out my cellular phone. The master chef of the Precious Dragon Shrine restaurant answers on the first ring. “How is . . . the boy?” I ask him. “Fine, tai pan.” There is a pause, during which I once more hear music filtering in from the other end of the line—the tinny little song of a video game in progress, intermittently punctuated by the clatter of kitchen implements. Laughter, both adult and child. “Do you wish to cancel your order, tai pan Darbersmere?” the master chef asks me, delicately. Through the hospital’s back doors, I can see the service elevator’s lights crawling steadily downward—the floors reeling themselves off, numeral by numeral. Fifth. Fourth. Third. “Tai pan?” Second. First. “No. I do not.” The elevator doors are opening. I can see Huang guiding Ellis out, puppeting her deftly along with her own crutches. Those miraculously- trained hands of his, able to open or salve wounds with equal expertise. “Then I may begin cooking,” the master chef says. Not really meaning it as a question. Huang holds the door open. Ellis steps through. I listen to the Gameboy’s idiot song, and know that I have spent every minute of every day of my life preparing to make this decision, ever since that last morning on the Yangtze. That I have made it so many times already, in fact, that nothing I do or say now can ever stop it from being made. Any more than I can bring back the child Brian Thompson-Greenaway was, before he went up the hill to Wao Ruyen’s fortress, hand in stupidly trusting hand with Ellis—or the child I was, before Ellis broke into my parents’ house and saved me from one particular fate worse than death, only to show me how many, many others there were to choose from. Or the child that Ellis must have been, once upon a very distant time, before whatever happened to make her as she now is—then set her loose to move at will through an unsuspecting world, preying on other lost children. . . . these foolish things . . . remind me of you. “Yes,” I say. “You may.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Born April 4, 1968, in London, England, Gemma Files is the child of two actors (Elva Mai Hoover and Gary Files), and has lived most of her life in Toronto, Canada. Previously best-known as a film critic, teacher and screenwriter, she first broke onto the horror scene when her short story “The Emperor’s Old Bones” won the International Horror Guild’s 1999 award for Best Short Fiction. Her current bibliography includes two collections of short work )Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart, both Prime Books) and two chapbooks of poetry )Bent Under Night, from Sinnersphere Productions, and Dust Radio, from Kelp Queen Press). Her first novel, A Book of Tongues: Volume One in the Hexslinger Series (CZP), was published in April 2010. The trilogy is now complete, including sequels A Rope of Thorns (2011) and A Tree of Bones (2012), and she is hard at work on her first stand-alone novel. Files is married to fellow author Stephen J. Barringer, with whom she co-wrote the story “each thing i show you is a piece of my death” for Clockwork Phoenix 2 (Norilana Books).

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight NONFICTION The H Word: In My Restless Dreams—A Study of Horror in Video Games Justin Bailey | 1677 words

Short of physically walking through a haunted house, there is no narrative experience more immersive in the horror genre than modern video games. I grew up playing video games. I received an Atari 2600 when I was three years old; Nintendo captured my imagination the way Disney films captured earlier generations. I’ve seen the technology around video games grow and change along the course of my life. I’ve had the pleasure of working as both a tester and copywriter for the game industry, and I’ve geeked out over my passions with fellow enthusiasts from all over the world. My interest in horror grew alongside my love of gaming, though I always viewed the two as distinct and separate. I could never have imagined the bright colorful worlds of video games and the gaudy darkness of horror fiction interacting, until the day I lead the intrepid members of the Special Tactics and Rescue Service into an abandoned mansion deep in the woods . . .

• • • •

Good horror hinges on identification; the more you can sympathize with the innocent babysitter, the nervy cop, the obsessed antiquarian, or the other beleaguered protagonists of the genre, the more you can vicariously experience their terror. Unfortunately, there’s a built-in limit to how close you can get to their story. Characters live and die for our voyeuristic thrill. Their victories are their own and their stories end without our intervention. Conversely, when I hide in the closet from the deformed Scissorman, when I dart between the trees frantically trying to collect pages before the Slender Man snatches me away, when I struggle to keep the lights on at my guard station knowing that malevolent animatronic nightmares are creeping through the dark to tear me apart, I’m in the story itself. The characters have their stories, but they can’t earn their happy endings without my direct intervention. Their struggles become my own.

• • • •

The horror genre often occupies a strange niche in gaming. Most video games are power fantasies. Push a few buttons and you have the same skill level as a Navy SEAL, the starting line of the biggest NFL teams, or Batman. Horror is dependent on vulnerability, and many gamers view vulnerability as the antithesis of gaming. In order to experience the terror that your protagonist feels, you have to share their limitations. Often, this vulnerability is built into resource allocation. You never have enough ammo, healing is hard to come by, the smaller monsters can do tremendous damage, and you’re forced to think carefully about how you defend yourself. Most early examples of the genre had tricky control layouts, most famously Resident Evil’s notorious tank controls, which only heightened the tension. One of the core philosophies behind game design is the seamless integration of technology with player so that control becomes almost instinctual. But the design of many early horror games took a lot of getting used to. It inadvertently helped to capture the feeling of how a real person would react when confronted by a supernatural threat. Nothing is quite so terrifying as watching a wall of zombies shamble forth from an unexpected corner as you struggle to line up a shot that will do real damage before they get you. Finally, one of the most compelling aspects of horror games is how they confront the concept of danger and death that lies at the root of the genre. It’s easy to sit back and mock the teenagers on the screen or the disbelieving saps on the printed page; it’s quite another to put yourself in their shoes and be forced to make split-second decisions to stay alive. In horror gaming, you have to earn your happy ending through death after death, each time becoming a little more prepared to face the monster at the heart of the labyrinth. Much like Tom Cruise’s beleaguered military officer in Edge of Tomorrow—a film whose source material was directly inspired by video games—your character winds up trapped in a hellscape of endless repeating nightmare. Your efforts represent their only chance for escape. • • • •

As I transitioned from horror enthusiast to horror creator, I found that I kept drawing from my experiences with video games for my stories. There’s something of the immediacy and relentless tension of gaming that works well in horror fiction, and I’ve met a lot of fellow writers around my age who were influenced by video games in the same way, much like EC Comics influenced Stephen King and his generation of writers. Gaming certainly has made its influence shown in popular art. Jhonen Vasquez, creator of the deeply macabre Invader Zim television show, credits his angular, jagged art style to the 8-bit video games he grew up with. Obviously, it’s easier to show video game’s influence in a visual medium, but video games can teach tremendous lessons to horror fiction writers. First, video games are ultimately about agency. Your avatar’s success or failure is directly in your hands, which can be a tremendously empowering experience if you’re deeply invested in their struggle. While a reader cannot actually influence events in a piece of prose, making a protagonist both identifiable—if not necessarily likable—and having them affect the narrative in compelling ways will help the reader slide into their shoes. This doesn’t mean that every horror protagonist needs to be a two-fisted action hero (horror always works best from positions of vulnerability) but it does mean that the protagonist needs to make the most out of the opportunities that they are given. As Alan Moore wrote in his seminal V for Vendetta graphic novel, sometimes we’re only given an inch to move in, but within that inch we are free. Second, techniques of horror video games can often be reasonably simulated in fiction by the use of close perspective. The vast majority of games put you in command of a single perspective, and you interact with the game world through their eyes and through their limitations. As you start playing any game, you’re quickly taught what your character can and cannot do, and you gain a sense of the character’s personality through those actions. This was true even back in the primitive 8-bit days of gaming, where Mario’s motions and sound effects gave the impression of a character filled with unbridled enthusiasm. Let your readers get a sense of who your characters are immediately, infuse their personality into their smallest interactions with the world around them, and you will have the foundation for that close perspective. This will be endlessly useful for when the monsters come knocking. Finally, the most horrifying moments in games often come when a character is out of control. Whether it’s a non-intuitive control scheme stifling action in moments of panic or a monster that is invulnerable to a character’s attacks, there are always moments in horror video games when a character struggles to control themselves as the threats start closing in. I find there are a lot of horror stories that are simply action/adventure with a ghost mask on. We have all read books where monsters are put in their place with a cocky attitude and an AK-47. While those stories are fine, they often undercut horror’s need for vulnerability. In a recent interview, horror author David Nickle said something that really struck me: “Strength, resolution, courage all negate fear—turns a nightmare into an adventure, or maybe just a tough job. They might all have their place in a good tale of terror—but not until weakness, indecisiveness, and cowardice have done their work.” [For the rest of the interview, see sfsignal.com/archives/2015/08/mind-meld-using-fear-fiction.] If a writer truly wants to create a work exploring fear, they need to remember what being vulnerable is like. The video game Doom 3 was often startling, in that monsters were constantly jumping out in the dark and screaming in your face, but it is hard to be scared of something your Space Marine protagonist could easily blast away. Conversely, the game Fatal Frame cast you in the role of a terrified teenager in a haunted house with only a ghost-capturing camera to protect you. You heard the character’s panicked breathing, controlled her as she stumbled through the mansion, and every fight was a life-or-death struggle to align your camera against the flitting grotesqueries set against you. I’d never been so terrified of a fictional work in my life, and I’ve strived to simulate that sense of fear in my writing.

• • • •

Video games are really important to the future of the genre both because the medium has grown exponentially in our lifetimes and because they’re going to be part of the material that fuels the next generation of horror creators. Video games are often maligned by the older generation who either think of them as disposable entertainment like Pong or assume all games go to the excess of titles like Grand Theft Auto. As a result, many of them miss the fact that video games have developed deep, immersive storytelling techniques over the last few years. Generations of people have grown up with these shared experiences and they will fuel their imaginations the way disturbing radio crime stories, ghastly horror comics, and gruesome heavy metal music have influenced previous generations of horror creators. There are a wealth of ideas and techniques that horror creators can borrow from video games to enrich their own narratives. But, as the original Resident Evil game warned, these games often contain scenes of explicit violence and gore.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Justin Bailey took his pseudonym from a video game cheat code. He was born in San Francisco and currently lives in Brooklyn like a big hipster cliché. He holds an MFA in writing popular fiction from Seton Hill University and his fiction has been featured in Old Scratch and Owl Hoots: A Collection of Utah Horror. For more of his thoughts on the horror genre, check out CreatureCast.net. Artist Showcase: Bruno Wagner Marina J. Lostetter | 692 words

Born in Strasbourg in 1979, Bruno Wagner graduated in applied arts. Caught up by the new technologies and the internet craze, he turned toward multimedia. He became an experienced web designer and Flash animator and fulfills his position as an art director in an agency. But illustration remained his first calling. Very young, he was fascinated by artists like Boris Vallejo, Wojciech Siudmak, H.R. Giger and Brom, and his work continues to be inspired by his first loves. Strongly attached to traditional techniques, he works with oil or acrylic on canvas and sometimes revisits them in front of his screen. He also creates entirely digital pieces. Now he is resuming his work as an illustrator with a lot of fervor for book covers, publications, et cetera.

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

Like everyone else, spiders. But above all, those little children who fixedly watch you from the foot of your bed, unmoving and expressionless like in The Grudge!

What inspired Black Widow, the image appearing as the cover of this month’s Nightmare?

I really liked the curves of this long shot, beautiful and feminine. I found it interesting to work the black widow and death into this sweet and seductive face, and making it ominous. I enjoy this ambivalence in my illustrations.

What do you imagine scares the woman in Black Widow the most?

I think it’s her succubus side, a beautiful, seductive woman who draws you into her trap and brings your death.

Who has influenced you artistically?

I really like Neoclassical and Pre-Raphaelite painters, and in terms of fantasy, I am a huge fan of Giger and Brom. I believe I try to mix a little of all these influences.

You are a web designer as well as an illustrator. Which came first, and how do the two professions relate to one another?

Basically, I am a web designer by education, but I have always done illustrations on the side. It’s only been a few years since I got into doing illustration professionally. My work as a web designer influences me a lot, because I can reference designs and graphics outside the field of SF and fantasy illustration, and this allows me to enrich my own style.

You’ve done some beautiful artwork for the digital card game Legends of the Cryptids. How was creating illustrations for the game different from other work you’ve done?

For Legends of the Cryptids I was given very precise instructions; it’s a really fantasy style. It’s a universe a little different from my own, which is dark and tortured, but I try to produce cards with a mix of the two styles, and I think they enjoy that.

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

I don’t have any particular rituals. In general, I just relax and watch movies that might inspire me (as background noise), and if I’m not feeling inspired, I just watch my film and let my imagination wander. All the same, I tend to prefer working quietly in the evening or at night, when everything is calm.

What is your favorite medium to work with?

Today, I work entirely in Photoshop. I use a little ArtRage, which is a program that makes traditional paint effects, but overall my tools are very simple. I would love to return to oil paints, because before CG I painted with oil exclusively, but at the moment I unfortunately lack the time.

[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: Jason Blum The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy | 5110 words

Jason Blum is one of the most prolific producers in Hollywood, having worked on over fifty movies; low budget horror films such as Paranormal Activity, The Purge, and Sinister. He recently edited the anthology The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares: The Haunted City, which includes short fiction by Hollywood figures like Ethan Hawke and Eli Roth. This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by David Barr Kirtley and produced by John Joseph Adams. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the interview or other episodes.

First off, just tell us a bit about how you became a horror fan. Were there any particular books or movies that really got you into it?

My mother loved Edgar Allan Poe; she exposed me to him at, possibly, too young of an age. Our favorite holiday was Halloween; I say “our” because she and I used to start my Halloween costume in August, so since I was a kid, I liked scary stuff. Hitchcock is my favorite genre movie director; in college, I took a class on just Hitchcock movies, so every week we saw two movies and talked about them. The movie that scared me the most was Friday the 13th, which I saw alone at home when HBO first started out; I was at my cousin’s house in Los Angeles, and it frightened me too much. Like playing with fire; you want to put your hand in the fire even though it hurts. I’ve always been into movies in one form or another; in college I was a film major and made a bunch; after college, I worked on more art-house movies. The first movie I ever produced was Kicking and Screaming, which was Noah Baumbach’s first movie, and I worked at a little distribution company in New York called Arrow, and then I worked at Miramax until I was thirty. It wasn’t until after I left Miramax that I figured out what Blumhouse would be, which is our company now. I’ve heard you say that one of the things in your life that had a big impact on you was that you passed on The Blair Witch Project.

When I was working for Miramax, before Sundance, a videotape of The Blair Witch Project went to a lot of the buyers. I passed; a bunch of people passed. The worst crime was that once it screened at the festival, we still all passed and when it was bought at Sundance it was one of the smaller deals of the festival; the big deal was one I was involved in called Happy Texas, which did not do well after we bought it. And then for six to nine months, from when Sundance ended to when the movie opened, I watched the movie marching towards success and was reminded by my bosses what a dope I was. What was formative about the experience is that people who were older than I was and who knew more than I did also passed on this movie. When I first saw Paranormal Activity, I had gotten it in the context that it was going straight to DVD and that it wasn’t going to be distributed; then I watched it with an audience to check myself and saw how the audience responded and said, to the filmmaker, “I think there is an audience for this movie and I think it could work in a movie theater.” And even though everyone said “no,” everyone said no to Blair Witch and look what happened to that. That gave me the strength and conviction to hang on when everyone kept saying I was a dope.

What do you think it is about movies like Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity that makes them resonate with audiences when executives will look at them and see nothing special?

When something is really different, I think people are frightened of it; when something is really innovative and new, and you can’t compare it to anything else, it’s hard for those things to find a home. It’s not an accident that Blair Witch and Paranormal had a similar history.

Paranormal Activity did really well; how did you attempt to capitalize on that success? I’d been on the other side of buying movies from people and turning directors into stars, in a way, when I worked at Miramax; in the ’90s, Miramax was the AAA place to be, so when we would buy a movie it would shine a lot of light on the filmmaker. Sometimes things worked out great, and sometimes they didn’t, but I was lucky enough to have experienced a lot of that by the time Paranormal Activity happened. So rather than saying, “I want to make World War Z,” or something really expensive, or Oscar movies, I really loved the exposure I had to the scary movie community, and I love the notion of a movie being done very low budget and independently and then distributed by a studio. So what I set my sights on was to try and build a business around that idea, and everyone felt we would never be able to do that again but then we did Insidious pretty soon after Paranormal. After Sinister and The Purge, everyone decided we were onto something.

Could you say more about why it’s key to your success to do these lower budget movies?

When you do a movie for a low budget, the pressure to be a financial success goes down exponentially; it’s hard to make a movie that’s very expensive and not be thinking about the results all the time. Generally, the creative process is hurt if you’re thinking about the end as opposed to focusing on day-to-day decisions and also focusing on taking chances; I really encourage the filmmakers we’re working with to try new things and take advantage of the fact that we’re working with a low budget so that they can take creative risks. I’m the first one to say that some of the lower budgeted movies that we work on don’t resonate commercially with a wide audience, but a lot of them do. Once we pick what the script is, the cast and the director, I try and put the filmmakers in a bubble to think about making the coolest, most interesting, different movie or television show without thinking about the amount of money it will or won’t make.

What are some of the movies that you’ve worked on that have been the most “out there” in terms of subject matter that you could have never done if it was a big budget movie?

Almost all of them. Creep, which is out now, could never been done for a big budget. The Purge is one of my favorite examples; just on a purely conceptual basis, no one in their right mind would give you twenty million dollars to make a movie about, “What if crime were legal in America for twelve hours a year?” But for three million, you can experiment and that experiment worked out. Insidious was the same thing; when James Wan pitched Insidious, he would always pitch that the third act of the movie, when they go into the Further, would feel like a David Lynch movie. If you’re making that movie for a million dollars, that’s fine, but if you’re making that movie for twenty-five million dollars, that’s not commercial enough. I don’t think there’s a single movie we’ve made that could’ve been done at a higher level, and almost all of them would’ve suffered with more money.

Are you talking about in terms of CGI? Or what exactly is the downside to having too much money?

Almost all of our affects are practical; what happens on the screen we’ve really done because we can’t afford CGI. Unless you’re making Marvel movies, CGI is usually tougher; especially in our mid-budget range, when you see CGI, at least when I do, I react poorly. But I also mean on a storytelling level; if you had a story where crime was legal for twelve hours, no one would finance that because there’re so many things that could go wrong. Another example from both The Purge and Sinister, the lead of the movie gets killed; that’s something big Hollywood movies don’t like to do. And I understand why they don’t but again, when you have a low budget, you can kill your lead and it’s ok.

I really enjoyed Sinister, and I think a lot of our listeners don’t have a good sense of what a producer does on a movie like that. What was your role? Scott Derrickson was a filmmaker I admired, and we reached out to each other because of Emily Rose, which I always thought was a terrific movie, and we met and he didn’t have a script but he pitched me Sinister and said he was going to write it with Cargill. I loved the pitch, and he had a lot of other movies happening at the time, and I said I could finance it in six months. And I think he was thinking that it wouldn’t happen that quickly, but he agreed and we started putting the movie together and he said, “The person I always imagined to play the father was Ethan Hawke.” This has never happened to me before or since; it was his first choice. He didn’t know, but Ethan and I have been friends for twenty years—we’ve worked together a lot, but we’re also socially close—and I told Scott, “Don’t keep your hopes up, because I’ve sent Ethan a lot of our scripts and he doesn’t like horror movies.” I sent it to him and he responded to it; to him, Sinister is about a father who’s struggling with where to spend his time, on his career or with his family. He puts his career before his family, and the results are not good. He really liked the script and asked to meet Scott; Scott went to New York and they got along great and Ethan agreed to do the movie. Juliet Rylance was actually cast because Ethan had done a play with her; she’d never been in a movie before. So I helped cast the movie, to go back to your question, and we shot the movie in New York; some movies I’m on the set a little, some hardly ever, and some a lot. On that movie, I was on the set from beginning to end. We shoot most of our movies in Los Angeles, where I don’t have to go as often, but New York we hadn’t shot in so much. It was a tough shoot; we actually shot for two days and shut the movie down for five days and started up again. And then, once the movie was done, the producer helps with distribution; in that case, it was a company called Summit, which is now part of Lionsgate but at the time it wasn’t. Lionsgate’s the company that does The Hunger Games movies, and Summit is the company that does the Twilight movies. Then we work very hard once the movie’s done on marketing.

You mention the book, and Ethan Hawke; tell us about this Blumhouse Book of Nightmares. How did that come about? We have an office in a funny part of LA; funny because there’s no other movie or TV companies where we are. We’re in Koreatown, ten minutes west of downtown LA. We edit in the offices and do color correction, all the technical, post-production work. There’s a community of filmmakers in and out of our offices all the time, and there’s a place to eat and I really wanted to create a destination for people who love scary stuff. And as I did more after Paranormal, from James Wan in particular, and Leigh Whannell— who wrote Insidious 1 and 2 and directed Insidious 3; those guys wrote and directed the first two Saw movies—I started learning a lot more about horror movies and the history of horror, and the more I learned about it, the more excited I got about the community of horror filmmakers. I think because, as a genre, horror is sometimes looked at as a second class citizen, it makes fans and people who make horror stick together more than in other genres. I always liked encouraging the idea of a community, and I thought a logical extension of that was to do a book of short stories. One of the things I’m most proud of is that the book is not an anthology of stories that had been published. It’s all original; everyone wrote a very specific story for this collection.

Most of the contributors have a lot of film and TV credits, but how much experience did they have writing short fiction, which can be a much different medium?

Cargill had a lot, and some of them had much less. Not everyone I asked said yes, but most of them did and they were excited to try a new medium. And everyone said, “What are you going to do with the TV and movie rights?” I didn’t do this in order to make television shows and movies from the stories, so I said, to all the contributors, “You retain the movie and TV rights.” I’ve got plenty of other intellectual property to turn into movies and television, but I really didn’t want the contributors to write stories with the idea that eventually there might be a TV show or movie; I thought what might be fun is to write a story that was a great short story and for once not have to worry about a production budget or how to do it; to let their imagination be free of the parameters around filmed content. The full title of the book is The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares: The Haunted City. Why did you choose that as a theme?

I thought it was important to give one other rule besides “make it scary.” Most scary things—I think it’s true of literature, too, but definitely of movies and television—take place in the country because there’s no one around; or at least in a suburb, where you’re in a house. There’s not a lot of varied tradition in urban environments. I didn’t say it had to take place in a city, all I said was that it had to do with a city. I thought that was counter- intuitive to what a lot of people would do, and I like the idea of mixing it up like that.

If you’re writing about cities at the present moment, you have to deal with the idea of runaway gentrification on one hand and urban decay on the other, and a bunch of the stories in this book deal with those themes: “Hellhole,” “Gentholme,” and “Donations.” Talk about how these stories dealt with gentrification and urban decay.

I don’t want to give away what the stories are, but I think the way to most effectively tell scary stories is to root them in real themes. We have a movie coming out called The Visit that M. Night Shyamalan directed; we were talking about this, and he said every movie he does is a drama and then he drapes it in a genre. I think a lot of the stories in the book are about true to life things that we’re afraid of: That’s really what The Purge was, that’s what Sinister was, and that’s the heart and soul of what makes an effective scary story, television show, or movie.

Some of my favorite stories in the book are the ones by Eli Roth, George Gallo and Steve Faber. People may know Eli Roth as the director of Hostel, and his story here takes a somewhat similar premise but takes it in a different, unexpected direction. I particularly want to point people to that one.

I loved his story. I asked him first, and he was the first person in; I think it’s something he’d been thinking about. He actually had a version of it and he wasn’t sure what he was going to do with it, and he was very generous; when I asked him to do it, he said, “I have something, I’m going to send it to you in a week.” And it was great that he said yes, because it was great to tell everyone else that Eli was going to do one of these. It really helped galvanize the whole thing.

You mentioned Ethan Hawke earlier, and there’s an Ethan Hawke piece in this book. My girlfriend and I were both curious about the story behind that.

Ethan had written a version of that story some time ago; it’s based on something that actually happened to him. He’s written three books now, and he wasn’t sure if he was going to use it in a book of his or what the right place for it was. When I called him and described what we were doing, he said, “I have just the thing.” And he worked on it quite a lot to get it to the shape that it’s in now. I love his story.

That was the sense I had reading it, that it was at least partly autobiographical.

Yeah, but I’m not saying what part.

There’s a story called “Dreamland” by Michael Olson, and one line in that that jumped out at me is, “Sleep research is finally getting the attention it deserves, given that poor sleep kills more people than cancer.” I thought it was funny, because this episode is sponsored by Casper Mattress, so I just wanted to remind our listeners to be sleeping on an affordable, comfortable Casper mattress, or else they’re probably going to die.

That’s great. Do they sponsor all of your episodes? No; this is the first one.

Well this is perfect for them.

Say more about the horror movies that you’ve worked on. What do you see as the role of horror in society? Is it just good entertainment or do you think these movies help people out in their lives?

It’s hard to generalize; some horror movies are just that, a fun ride for an hour and a half, and some horror movies have a lot to say. The horror movies in the ’70s started the tradition of laying in social messages. The Purge is a cautionary tale; we’ve made two Purge movies, and we’re about to make a third, and in Europe in particular everyone understood them as a cautionary tale of what would happen if we stay on the track that we’re going on: There’s a shooting of some kind or another and then the gun laws get less, not more. Where could that go? And James DeMonaco, who wrote a story in the book, wrote and directed The Purge; it was his idea of where we could be headed. Sometimes, in the United States, it was misinterpreted; a lot of people who saw it were like, “Yeah, I’m gonna kill someone!” That’s not disappointing to me, though it was to him; you can’t control what people take from what they see, and movies first and foremost need to be entertaining. At least for the movies we make, that’s what we’re focused on. The minute you start making movies that are lessons, no one sees them anymore.

I did hear you say that Barry Levinson originally wanted to make a documentary about pollution in Chesapeake Bay and his agent told him no one would watch that, so he made The Bay as a horror movie instead.

That’s true; John Burnham was his agent. He made a “found footage” movie and we produced it; it was one of the earlier movies we did after Paranormal. It wasn’t a mass appeal movie for a bunch of reasons, but it was an interesting movie. There were some good “jump” scares in it.

Did anyone ever say they got concerned about pollution in Chesapeake Bay after seeing The Bay?

I think the thing that went wrong with The Bay is that we got too much message and not enough entertainment; you could make a movie with a very important message, but if no one sees it, no one hears your message. I’m sure The Bay got people talking about Chesapeake Bay, but in such a small number that it had no effect. Had it been the hit that Insidious was, it could’ve made it a much bigger part of the conversation.

Can you say more about getting involved with the horror community? Have you met some really colorful characters? What sort of things have people said about your movies?

I was more talking about the community of filmmakers as opposed to straight fans, but I’ve met a ton of fans. We’ve done several haunted houses: The Blumhouse of Horrors; a couple based on The Purge and Insidious. The most fun about haunted houses is when you get to talk to people after they go through; with movies, unless you stand outside the theater, which is a little weird, you don’t get to do that. It’s a funny segue, but we have this movie called Jem and the Holograms which comes out in October, and it’s about a movie that not only says it’s ok to be different, but that you should celebrate being different. To me, that’s why I love the fans in horror more than in any other genre, because there’s a real embracing of strange or odd.

People say horror writers are always really cheerful and comedy writers are morose and depressed. You must have met a ton of horror writers, what is your experience?

The set of a comedy, nine times out of ten, is exactly what you just said, and the set of a horror movie is the exact opposite. One of the reasons Ethan didn’t want to do a horror movie is because he always though it would be scary to make; there’s nothing scary about making a horror movie. There’re children and tutors and sixty people and you film the takes in makeup that looks funny because it’s not lit right—the sets of our movies are fun. The horror community, whether they’re writers or directors, get out their moroseness in their work, which makes them cheerier. I can also say it about the people; Leigh Whannell is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met, and James and Scott—all those guys are not what you’d expect, but that’s the rule, not the exception.

I don’t know if you ever saw a documentary called American Movie, but it’s about this guy trying to make a horror movie. And there’s this scary part, to me, where they’re trying to slam somebody’s head through a cabinet, and they don’t know how to do this as an effect, so they’re smashing a guy’s head against the cabinet and not succeeding in breaking through, and they’re doing take after take. It’s always stuck with me as an example of how horror is something a lot of people start with; people see it as an avenue. And I heard you say in an interview that it annoys you when people see horror movies as a stepping stone to get to bigger and better things.

Maybe I said it, but I didn’t mean it—or I was misquoted—of other people; it annoys me when people assume that of me. I’m not judgmental, though I do give James Wan a lot of shit because he said he would never direct another horror movie after The Conjuring; he is directing another one, just like I said he would. But for me, I didn’t make all these scary movies in order to make Whiplash—which we also made—and now I’m going to make other movies like Whiplash. I’m really glad we made it, but it didn’t change the trajectory of the company, which is scary stuff. I’m not doing it in order to do something else. But people do; Roger Corman had tons of actors and directors and writers go through his horror factory who turned out to be better known for other things. And I think that’s awesome; I have nothing against them. There was this show, The Jinx, that my girlfriend and I were obsessed with when it came out, and it said that you were an executive producer on that. What was your take on that? Your involvement?

I was similarly involved in The Jinx as I was in Paranormal or the movie Unfriended that came out earlier this year. It seems to be a lot of the movies, not so much TV, that we do, we get involved when there’s a rough cut or sometimes a version has been shopped a bit—that wasn’t the case with The Jinx, but was with all the other movies I just mentioned—and the person behind it is like, “I know I made something great; why isn’t the world listening.” And we’ve done a lot of listening; The Jinx is something that I saw early on and no one on the business side of television was paying attention to it. So I got behind it, obviously before HBO was involved, and helped get it out into the world.

That’s pretty shocking, that no one was interested in it given how compelling it is. Why do you think that is?

For the same reason that people didn’t jump on Paranormal Activity and Blair Witch. One reason, though—which makes the comparison unfair—is that only the first episode was together, so people are only judging the series based on seeing that, not the subsequent five, although I thought the first episode was incredibly compelling. People think Andrew’s a filmmaker, so why should he know what television is? I think that’s another one that’s confusing to people. The world doesn’t like to see people switch gears. Durst is an unbelievably complicated character and there have been a ton of stories about him but never the definitive story, but every single person that had a story said that theirs was the definitive one. All those are reasons it didn’t initially resonate.

It sounds like you have a ton of other projects coming up, but do you want to give us a rundown of what you’re working on now and what people should keep an eye out for? We have this movie that Joel Edgerton directed; it’s his first movie, called The Gift, and it’s with Jason Bateman and Joel stars in it, and Rebecca Hall. It’s super taut and creepy. That comes out August 7th. Then we have Sinister 2, which Scott Derrickson and Cargill wrote; that comes out later in August. For the rest of the year, we have M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit, which comes out in September. Eli Roth, who’s obviously a contributor to the book, also has another movie, Green Inferno, that couldn’t find a home that I saw and really liked, so we’re going to release that. The last two movies of the year are the final chapter of Paranormal Activity, which I’m happy and sad about, and then Jem and the Holograms. And, of course, I’ve been doing a lot of talk about this book, and we hope to do more books; I want to do novels and I have an idea for another anthology so hopefully we’ll be doing more of that. And more haunted houses.

I really enjoyed The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares, so I’m definitely looking forward to more books from you. Jason, thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me; I really appreciate it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is produced by John Joseph Adams and hosted by: David Barr Kirtley, who is the author of thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, in books such as Armored, The Living Dead, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He lives in New York. AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Author Spotlight: Silvia Moreno-Garcia Erika Holt | 562 words

Can you tell us more about the mythology surrounding the Llorona and her importance in this story? Do you often feature mythology or folklore in your stories?

She’s the Mexican Medea, although unlike Medea she is punished for her actions and suffers for them. La Llorona, The Weeping Woman, weeps because she murdered her children, drowning them, and now spends her afterlife haunting the countryside, crying out for them. She is often dressed in white. I feature a lot of folklore, yes. My great-uncle told us the story of how he met the Llorona one night and she was eating prickly pears on the side of the road.

Your protagonist, Ramon, is an interesting and complex character. On the one hand he’s somewhat unsympathetic—particularly in his attitudes toward homeless people and the abandonment of his family— yet also feels tremendous guilt and seems to be motivated by shame and a desire to leave his roots behind. How do you see Ramon?

People love to classify things as black and white, good or bad, but I’ve seldom met any one who can be neatly defined and classified. Ramon is a person like many I’ve met.

You wear a lot of different hats: writer, editor, and publisher, to name a few. Do you enjoy one more than the others? Does being an editor/publisher inform your writing in any way, and vice versa?

I like to write, mostly. I don’t know if editing and publishing informs my writing. It forces you to be more organized when you deal with many things, but then again I like to do many things. What makes an effective horror story? Are you a fan of horror and, if so, what are some of your favorite stories, novels, and/or movies?

Dread. It’s never as fun seeing the monster as much as imagining. I kind of hate it when people ask for favorite anything, but I have read a lot of du Maurier and Jackson, and I am partial to quiet, slow, psychologically intricate work.

Congratulations on the publication of your debut novel, Signal to Noise! What has that been like?

Weird. It had a lot of good reviews but that doesn’t mean anyone knows me or that my local bookstore carries it. I’m .25 less obscure than I was a year ago; probably more prone to drinking now.

What projects are you working on now and what do you have forthcoming?

My agent just sold my second and third novels to Thomas Dunne. The second is called Young Blood and Publisher’s Marketplace said it was “about a garbage-picking homeless teen in Mexico City who falls for a vampire and gets caught up in a huge mess involving warring families of narcovampires.” The third is a completely different novel, a romance in a fantasy Belle Époque titled Proper People. On the editing side I co-edited She Walks in Shadows, the first all-woman Lovecraftian anthology, out this October. It has generated a bit of interest and we are seeing about selling foreign rights to it.

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: Vampire 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. Author Spotlight: F. Paul Wilson E.C. Myers | 630 words

“Soft” was published originally in J.N. Williamson’s Masques anthology in 1984. You’ve stated before that the story was inspired by the AIDS epidemic. Can you tell us more about how it developed from there?

Well, the trigger for the story was this steroidal bodybuilder at a gym I frequented complaining about how the country was going soft. An image of boneless people flashed through my head and I went, “Hmmm . . .” I needed a way to melt those bones and chose a virus. I modeled the soft virus on the early days of AIDS when the syndrome was called GRID (gay- related immune deficiency). The term AIDS came later. Back then, it was thought to be a result of the constellation of infections that were part and parcel of the urban male homosexual’s promiscuous lifestyle. There was talk also of a possible single etiologic agent, but that was only theory then. The real-life confusion seen in AIDS’ early years is reflected in the confusion and vacillation displayed by the story’s authorities regarding the etiology of the softness. It’s not a pleasant piece. Publishers Weekly called it “vivid and viscerally wrenching”—exactly what I was shooting for.

Reportedly, Williamson’s requirement for stories in Masques was “Scare me!” Your story has a horrific virus, rats, and of course the humans who deal with it all in violent, selfish ways. What scares you?

Depending on the day: being understood (I’m used to being misunderstood), writer’s block (hasn’t happened yet), being stuck in one genre.

You entered the horror genre with your novel The Keep in 1981, and “Soft” was one of your earliest short stories. What first drew you to the horror genre? Always wanted to write horror. The first story I ever wrote at age 7 was about a haunted house. But the horror market didn’t exist in any meaningful way when I started writing, so I wrote my second love, SF. (My formative years were filled with monsters and rocketships.) When the K-Man blew open the horror door, I jumped through with The Keep.

“Soft” was reprinted in your first story collection, Soft and Others, in 1989. Nearly a decade later in your third collection, you joked, “Maybe I should have subtitled the collection ‘Watch Wilson Learn How to Write.’” What did you learn from “Soft”? Given the benefit of your experience now, is there anything you wish you had done differently in it?

You’ve done your homework, I see. “Soft” was pretty solid from the get- go, but some of my early SF stories in the ’70s used a lot of passive constructions that I learned to avoid as I went on. In some cases, I let the ideas overwhelm the storytelling. The story should be king.

Do you have a particular writing process or routine?

Up early and start hitting the keys during the first cup of coffee. Minimum 2,000 words a day when on a first draft; never rewrite, rarely even look back until the vomit draft is done. Then go back and tidy up and add nuances.

What other work do you have out now or forthcoming?

Tom Monteleone and I put out Family Secrets, the second in our YA series about a place called Nocturnia. My first post-Repairman Jack novel is a mystery-adventure that will be a summer book for 2016. I think it will be as fun to read as it was to write. 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: Matthew Kressel Sandra Odell | 911 words

“Demon in Aisle 6” is an intimate horror story, one where the lines between personal hells and those of society blur. What inspired this tale?

Most of my fiction tends toward science fiction or dark fantasy, but at the time I wrote this story I had been reading a lot of horror and weird fiction. Stuff from Ellen Datlow’s Fearful Symmetries and Laird Barron’s Year’s Best Weird Fiction and a lot of Robert Aickman. And so I wanted to try my hand at a horror tale with a lot of weirdness. But I also wanted to tell a love story, where the force of one partner’s personality destroys another.

The story is rich with a number of subtle diversities: age, income, sexual preference, cultural differences based on geography, the description of life in New York, the struggles of a single-parent family. How much of yourself went into “Demon in Aisle 6”?

Quite a bit. In my senior year of college a close friend of mine took his own life, and the weeks and months after I felt as if I were walking through a personal hell, where mundane things became monstrous. My guilt was the hardest to face. Was it my fault? Could I have done anything differently? During this time a lot of weird things occurred too. Lights would pop and blow out. Photos would be weirdly double-exposed. And my dreams were frightening and vivid. Went I went to school in Georgia, after having grown up on Long Island, there was a bit of culture shock initially when I tried to adjust to the different pace of life and social norms. I have also, at various times throughout my life, been close with people who I have allowed to influence me, only to later recognize how destructive those relationships were to my health. Over the years I have been both Davis and Lucas. Horror and sexuality often go hand in hand. Here, the two mingle both as character development and as the struggle of big city versus small town. What is it about the twin forces of sex and death that appeal to horror readers?

Sex, procreation, is the opposite of death. But sex is also more than procreation. It’s the most intimate connection possible with another human. It’s a shared experience, beyond words. We naturally approach each other as a way to counter our fears of annihilation. It won’t prevent our ultimate erasure from existence, but it makes it less frightening knowing we have someone to stand beside us when the worst comes. Intimacy is a natural reaction to the fear of death.

While many writers consider subjects such as suicide, teen sex, and child abuse to be fair game for their works, many refuse to write about such things saying that such subjects are a step too far when it comes to exploring life through fiction. For you as a writer, are there any subjects you consider off limits?

It’s dangerous to say, “I won’t ever write about that.” I feel that my strongest works are those where I delve deep into the parts of my psyche I’m normally reluctant to visit. There are psychological barriers there that don’t want me to look too closely, to protect my ego from harm. But that’s also where the gold lies. I try not to limit myself and let my subconscious guide me.

Your novel King of Shards is slated for release in October of 2015 from Resurrection House. How does writing a novel differ from writing short stories?

I find novels more difficult to write than short stories. It’s not so much the length as the complexity of narrative. To keep all the plot threads neatly sorted takes a lot of mental energy. I can devote a week or two to write a strong short story, and then I’m done and can move on to the next. But a novel requires you linger in that headspace for months. If you step away from a novel for a bit, it’s harder to step back in and pick up where you left off. But I also enjoy the novel form because it lets me explore things in greater detail. I’m currently working on Queen of Static, the second book in the Worldmender series, and the sequel to King of Shards, and it’s a hell of a lot of fun exploring these characters I’ve created and seeing how they come to life.

What scares Matthew Kressel? What gets under your skin and lingers there with fire and dread?

I’m terrified that the facade of orderliness of the world will one day vanish and there will be chaos. I’m afraid that we will ruin the planet before we learn to protect its precious resources. I’m afraid of those who thrive on hate and war. There is great peace in the world, I have found, but there is also great violence. I’m lucky to live in a relatively peaceful patch of Earth, but I fear those who would do violence to others, especially to those whom I love.

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: Gemma Files Lisa Nohealani Morton | 1014 words

What inspired “The Emperor’s Old Bones”?

Most directly? I was re-watching Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, the film adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s memoir about his time in a World War II Japanese internment camp after the fall of Shanghai; Christian Bale plays “Jim,” while John Malkovich gives an amazing turn as Basie, an American deserter turned war profiteer who becomes the camp’s designated King Rat. As I did, I began turning things around in my mind, wondering how the story might change if I gender-flipped Malkovich’s character and conjured a formative crush towards her for our barely pubescent protagonist, functionally sociopathic protagonist; fanfic as pearl-grit, the way things often starts to form, at least in my garburator mind. At that point, I suddenly remembered having seen a documentary on some Nature-type show which actually walked viewers through the cooking of the titular dish, in all its cruel, Imperial glory. Since the point of filleting and cooking a carp alive was the transfer of its long life to whoever ate it, I immediately started thinking about whether that sort of (un-)sympathetic magic would work if you substituted, say, a child for the fish. And hey, presto! Something different.

Many examples of cannibalism, both historical and fictional, involve stealing or absorbing some sort of power from the victim. Deep down, do we all truly believe that “you are what you eat”?

I don’t think the metaphor would keep coming up so much if we didn’t, to some degree. The human species is definitely a predatory one, much like any other group of meat-eating animals, but what sets us apart is that we understand our own mortality, as well as the mortality of others. I think that’s what gives rise to the idea of unfairness, which extends rather weirdly but neatly into the concept of torment: physical torture, mental torture, emotional torture. We stave our own pain off by feeding on the pain of others, telling them exactly what we’re going to do and then doing it, or doing it for a while, then lying about stopping. And what’s worst about this impulse is that while you’re engaged in it, it often seems to work like an utterly perverse bonding exercise—the same capture bonding Will Graham talks about, in Season One of Hannibal. We break each other, tame each other, get creepily close, make ourselves vulnerable, and cultivate a current which comes horribly close to that innate impulse to destroy and consume what we love, the old fairytale refrain: I’ll eat you up, I love you so! But then again, maybe this is just sophistry. Cannibalism begins in hunger, a simple mechanism of survival, but we all want to dignify it afterwards, because we know it for nothing but sheer, selfish betrayal of our own. Those who can, do, and as long as it gets them what they want, they don’t have to feel bad about it after, unless they make themselves: that’s the slippery, Randian parody of morality Ellis Iseland teaches Tim, in the story. Blood magic requires nothing less.

You have a novel coming out this November. Care to tell us about it?

Experimental Film is a stand-alone contemporary horror novel set in Toronto, Canada whose protagonist—Lois Cairns—is very definitely not “me” per se, even though she’s also a former film critic and film history teacher who lost her job around the same time her son was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder; the main difference is that she never cultivated a fiction career on the side, so when her professional life collapses, she has nothing to fall back on. While at the bottom of a depressive spiral, Lois attends a screening of locally-made experimental films and realizes that one of them may contain potential proof that there might have been a hitherto- unknown female filmmaker operating in Ontario around the same time as George Méliès, making silent movies charged with eerie power on flammable, poisonous silver nitrate film. So she starts researching this woman, Mrs. A. Macalla Whitcomb, and discovers she’s a mysterious figure mainly known for having disappeared under mysterious circumstances, but that just fascinates Lois even more; she keeps going, and . . . bad stuff ensues. Because, as it turns out, Mrs. Whitcomb’s films contain something she was trying to take out of her own head, something whose lasting influence renders these films extraordinarily dangerous to watch.

What are you working on these days?

Right now, I’m going from appearance to appearance and deadline to deadline, mainly short story fills for anthologies and the like, but I’m also planning out what hopefully will become my next novel, or possibly my next couple of novels. Thus far, I’ve noticed that I seem to have two very distinct audiences—people who mainly know me from my novels (the Hexslinger Series, We Will All Go Down Together), versus people who mainly know me from my shorter, more explicitly horrifying work. So the hope is that Experimental Film may change things for me by bringing these two groups together, thus creating a larger pool of fans I don’t want to disappoint or keep waiting any longer than I have to.

What historical or fictional person (or people) would you most like to be dinner for, and why?

Well . . . obvious answer is obvious, right? With Hannibal Lecter, at least you know you’d be beautifully packaged, transformed into something truly sumptuous and artistic. But the fact is, once I’m dead, I’m not going to give a damn who eats me, or how. So as long as nobody does the Emperor’s Old Bones on me, I’ll be just as happy.

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. MISCELLANY Coming Attractions The Editors | 109 words

Coming up in December, in Nightmare . . . We have original fiction from Damien Angelica Walters (“The Judas Child”) and Caspian Gray (“King of Ashland County”), along with reprints by Tim Lebbon (“Reconstructing Amy”) and Nancy Etchemendy (“Honey in the Wound”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Nightmare. Thanks for reading! Upcoming Events The Editors

Want to meet our editor John Joseph Adams and/or contributors to the magazine? Here’s a list of upcoming events at which you can find us:

World Fantasy Convention | Saratoga Springs, NY | Nov. 5-8

Convention | Panel Discussions, Signing | Featuring: John Joseph Adams.

Forbidden Planet | New York, NY | Nov. 9 (7pm)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 event | Panel Discussion, Signing, Q&A | Featuring: John Joseph Adams, Joe Hill, and Seanan McGuire (additional contributors TBD). Moderated by David Barr Kirtley of The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy.

NYRSF Reading Series | New York, NY | Nov. 10 (7pm)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 event | Readings | Featuring: John Joseph Adams, Seanan McGuire, and Carmen Maria Machado.

WORD Bookstore | Jersey City, NJ | Nov. 11 (7:30pm)

Press Start to Play event | Readings, Signing, Q&A | Featuring: John Joseph Adams, Robin Wasserman, Seanan McGuire, and David Barr Kirtley.

Bluestockings Bookstore | New York, NY | Nov. 15 (7pm)

Destroy event | Discussion, Readings, Q&A, Signing | Featuring: Christie Yant (guest editor, Women Destroy Science Fiction!), Seanan McGuire (guest editor, Queers Destroy Science Fiction!), and Liz Gorinsky (guest reprint editor, Queers Destroy Fantasy!), plus contributors Merav Hoffman, Richard Bowes, Lisa Nohealani Morton, and artists Odera Igbokwe and Orion Zangara.

Columbia University Science Fiction Society | Columbia University, New York, NY | Nov. 17 (6pm)

Talk and Q&A (Open to the Public) | Featuring: John Joseph Adams and Christie Yant (editor of Lightspeed’s Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue). 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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Subscribe www.nightmare-magazine.com/subscribe Subscriptions and Ebooks The Editors

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

Proofreader C. Liddle

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 APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with Hugh Howey) THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey) THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, 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 Wizard 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.