Nightmare Magazine Issue 16

Home , Churel, Immurement, Mortal Fear, Rocky Wood, Something Beneath, The Museum of Horrors

TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 16, January 2014

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, January 2014

FICTION The Mad Butcher of Plainfield’s Chariot of Death by Adam Howe Walled by Lucy Taylor Ghostreaper, or, Life after Revenge by Tim Pratt Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard by Jonathan Maberry

NOVEL EXCERPTS Hoad’s Grim by Jack Kincaid NONFICTION The H Word: Horror Needs New Monsters by Kate Jonez Artist Gallery: Mike Worrall Artist Spotlight: Mike Worrall Interview: Christopher Golden

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Author Spotlight: Adam Howe Author Spotlight: Lucy Taylor Author Spotlight: Tim Pratt Author Spotlight: Jonathan Maberry

MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Stay Connected Subscriptions & Ebooks About the Editor

Happy New Year, and welcome to issue sixteen of Nightmare! Before we get to our stories, just a reminder that over in the Nightmare ebookstore (nightmare- magazine.com/store), I wanted to point out that we currently have the following ebook bundles available:

Nightmare (Issues 1-6) - $14.99 Nightmare (Issues 7-12) - $14.99 Nightmare (Year One: Issues 1-12) - $24.99

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. Of course, if you don’t want to buy a Bundle, you can also just purchase an individual ebook issue, or if you’d like to subscribe directly from us, you can do that too. All purchases from the Nightmare store are provided in both epub and mobi format. Visit nightmare- magazine.com/subscribe to learn more about all of our subscription options.

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With our announcements out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month: We have original fiction from Adam Howe (“The Mad Butcher of Plainfield’s Chariot of Death”) and Tim Pratt (“Ghostreaper, or, Life After Revenge”), along with reprints by Jonathan Maberry (“Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard”) and Lucy Taylor (“Walled”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview with bestselling author Christopher Golden. And, finally, as a bonus for our ebook readers, we have an excerpt from the novel Hoad’s Grim by author (and Nightmare podcast host) Jack Kincaid. That’s about all I have for you this month. Thanks for reading!

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

Gibbons swigged from his hipflask, driving one- handed as he followed the caravan of carny vehicles barreling along the interstate toward tonight’s show. As the booze burned through him, he bared his teeth, glaring in the rearview at the tarp-shrouded shape of the car hooked to his truck. The damned car was supposed to make his fortune. He’d sunk every last penny into buying it. 1960 should’ve been his year. He should’ve been sunning himself down in Florida by now; instead he was barely eking a living, working the off-season circuit with this third-rate carny. What the hell went wrong? He couldn’t understand it. He’d always prided himself as having, if not his fingers on the pulse of America, then his hand in her guts. People wanted to see this kind of thing, he’d been sure of it. Psycho had opened big; people had flocked to see it like the stars of Hitch’s next picture —but why settle for a movie when you could see the real thing? The Butcher of Plainfield, Eddie Gein’s car: a bona fide relic of Hitchcock’s Psycho killer. It burned Gibbons’s ass to see that fat, Limey prick hog the limelight that should’ve been his. Fucking movie. Apart from Janet Leigh’s tits, he couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Gibbons took another belt from his flask and then capped it. Best save some for later, give him some pep for The Show tonight. He glared in the rearview again. A corner of the tarp had peeled loose from the car and was flapping like a giant batwing. He considered pulling over, tying the tarp back down over the hood. The buckled grille glinted like rusted teeth, as if the car wanted to bite a chunk out of him. But he knew if he stopped, the carny wouldn’t wait for him. Management was already looking for an excuse to shitcan him. At the last town they played, when the cops shut him down, before Gibbons could even pitch his tent, the operator had warned him he was on his last chance. He’d put on a brave face. “All publicity’s good publicity, right?” Wrong. Dead wrong. And if his luck didn’t change soon, if the car didn’t start showing a profit, Gibbons was out on his ass. The thought terrified him. The Show was all he knew.

* * * * He’d joined the carny as a kid, running away from home and a tyrannical mother who, the more he read about the Gein case, the more she reminded him of Eddie’s own hellfire-and-brimstone-spouting mother. The similarities ended there, Gibbons was relieved to know. Unlike Gein, Bonaparte “Bunny” Gibbons was no mama’s boy, far from it. And for all his kinks—just ask the gals in the cootch-tent—he’d never felt the urge to pay tribute to Ma by robbing graves and wearing the skins of the dead. He was a natural carny. He served his apprenticeship hawking a mouse circus, before graduating—gravitating, you might say—to the freak show. He climbed quickly through the ranks. Wasn’t long before he was working up front of the tent, hustling the rubes with empty promises of the wonders and oddities to be jeered at inside. His goatee, top hat, cloak, and cane lent him the rakish appearance of a debauched Colonel Sanders. No carny alive could part a fool from his money like Bunny Gibbons. The freak show was good to him. Those were happy days. But after the war—first the Big One, then Korea— Gibbons sensed the freak show’s days were numbered. Too many husbands, fathers, and sons had returned from “Over There” missing arms, legs, and even faces. The freak show had come home to America, and suddenly no one wanted to pay admission to see it. Not a man to rest on his laurels, Gibbons ditched the freaks without a backward glance and started looking around for his next meal ticket. And then, about the same time Eddie Gein was caught hanging some broad by a butcher’s hook in his woodshed, Ma kicked the bucket and left him a small inheritance. Gibbons couldn’t believe his luck; her timing was perfect. When the Gein story exploded across the press, splattering the front pages with grave-robbing and cannibalism and flayed-flesh women-suits, Hitchcock wasn’t the only guy who smelled a buck.

* * * *

Gein’s estate went to auction to pay for his trial; Gibbons moved quick and hit the road. Arriving in Plainfield, Wisconsin—that aptly-named hicktown in the asshole of nowhere—he checked into a motel under an a/k/a. Kept a low profile, dressed down, not his usual snazzy duds. The grieving families of Gein’s victims weren’t his worry, didn’t even enter his thoughts; no, he was afraid some other showman might have the same bright idea and beat him to the punch. Because it was inspired: he was going to use Ma’s inheritance to buy Ed Gein’s house of horrors, open America’s greatest spookhouse. Disneyland from hell. The freak show wasn’t dead. Gibbons only had to see the rubberneckers at a road wreck, or the looky-loos at a suicide leap, to know it. People’s tastes don’t change, especially their prurient interests; they just become more refined. Day before the auction, the Gein house burned to the ground. Electrical fault, the fire chief said. Funny, Gibbons thought, considering the place didn’t have electricity; he knew a torch-job when he saw one. Ignorant fucking hayseeds. There went his spookhouse, up in flames, along with Bunny’s dreams. But the auction went ahead anyway, and he stuck around. There were still acres of farmland to sell; tools, junk farming equipment . . . And Ed Gein’s car. A beat-to-hell ’49 Ford sedan. When the auctioneers rolled her out, Gibbons thought that the car—splintered left headlamp, right side of the grille twisted up in a smirk—seemed to ape the fool’s grin and droopy eye of its owner. Maybe Ed had clipped a tombstone on one of his nighttime boneyard jaunts? Even if it wasn’t true, Gibbons could use that in his act. The old Ford had clearly ridden some road in its time. The body was dented, the running board buckled. The scab-maroon paint was spattered with rust. Inside, it smelled like a dead skunk. The leather seats were torn, spewing horsehair and busted springs like weeds. A real piece of shit clunker. But Gibbons saw a chariot of glittering gold. This was it: what he’d been looking for. The big one. No matter what it cost—the whole of Ma’s inheritance, nearly a thousand clams—he had to have her. As he made the winning bid, the whopping fee raised eyebrows and concerns among the Plainfield yokels. They had feared that a man like Bonaparte Gibbons would arrive to exploit their grief. But he was just getting started.

* * * *

The carnival pitched tent on a hill above town, working fast to beat nightfall and be ready for the rubes. The bruised sky threatened rain. Gibbons prayed tonight wasn’t a washout. He started setting up his stall on the outskirts of The Show. No more midway for Bunny Gibbons. He’d been relegated next to the conveniences, where he’d be lucky if some schmo glanced his way as he went to take a leak, and the wafting smell from the latrines only reminded him of his career. He unhooked the Ford from the back of his truck and began pitching the black, canvas tent over it. The tent was adorned with grisly illustrations of Gein’s house of horrors, drawn in the style of the lurid pulp magazines that Gein had loved. Weird Tales from the Crypt, or some happy horseshit. Spidery writing screamed:

LOOK! The Butcher of Plainfield, Wisconsin! Grave-robbing and murder! SEE! The crimes that shocked the nation! The Ed Gein Ghoul Car that hauled the dead from their graves!

When the movie came out, Gibbons added a new sign:

The REAL ‘Psycho’ killer! Hitchcock-approved!

For all the good it did. Bunny entered the tent and set up inside. He hung a few rubber bats and fake cobwebs from the ceiling. The inner walls of the tent were painted with tombstones and zombie-walking skeletons. He couldn’t claim credit for the charnel smell that choked the tent; that came free with the car, and no amount of air-freshener would shift it. He jammed a battered wax dummy into the driver’s seat. The dummy was dressed in Gein’s trademark plaid jacket and deer hunter’s cap, its face carved with a lopsided fool’s grin and one droopy eye, just like Ed’s. On the passenger seat, Gibbons placed a shovel and crowbar: Eddie’s grave-robbing tools. Strewn across the backseat—the side window was smeared with a bloody handprint—was a rubble of rubber bones and skulls from a novelty store. Okay, so maybe it was a little half-assed. More Ed Wood than Al Hitchcock. But the real showstopper was in the trunk, where Gibbons had rigged a hidden speaker system, and a puppet skeleton on fishing wire. Toward the end of his spiel—he’d paint a vivid picture of Gein driving home from the cemetery, the Ghoul Car heaped with grisly keepsakes—he’d be interrupted by a strange scratching sound from inside the trunk . . . like fingernails clawing at the metalwork. Acting uneasy to shake up the crowd, Gibbons would approach the trunk hesitantly, mopping the sweat from his brow before he extended a trembling hand to open it— And when the trunk clanged open, the skeleton would rear up, shrieking hellishly. Folks just about shit themselves. Forget about The Shower Scene. Hitch would’ve been green with envy . . . So, where did it all go wrong? He still remembered opening night, the first time he’d shown off the car. The way the rubes had screamed when the skeleton popped out of the trunk, he thought he’d hit paydirt. Instead, his luck plain turned to shit. Every gig the carny played, the cops and outraged parent groups shut him down, citing bullshit charges of public immorality. Like Gibbons was some kind of monster, not a trailblazing entrepreneur; the way they carried on you’d have thought Eddie himself had busted out of the nuthouse to roll up in town. We’ve got to protect the children, they’d say. What a crock! The kids were always first in line to pay their two-bits. The other carnies didn’t care for the cops sniffing ‘round. There’s a lot of stuff that goes on behind-the-tents Johnny Law doesn’t know about, and they aimed to keep it that way. And, as any carny will tell you, shit luck is contagious. Gibbons soon became a pariah. Just him and Ed’s car. On the rare occasions he caught a break—got to show off the car without the cops busting his balls—the bad luck kept coming. The tent would collapse in the middle of his spiel. The trunk-lid would jam, or the hidden speakers refused to play. No one could stomach the car’s slaughterhouse stink; kids cried, pregnant women’s waters broke, fat guys puked up their beer and corndogs. One time the car’s handbrake unlocked, and the Ford rolled back over some poor schmuck’s foot; funny thing, the car hadn’t even been parked on a grade. Even Gibbons, a stone-cold skeptic, started to think there was something hinky about the car. The way the doors would swing shut by themselves, catching his fingers if he didn’t move his hands quick enough; or how the horn would blare at night like a wolf howling at the moon, keeping Gibbons and the other carnies awake. Word began spreading that the car was cursed. Maybe, Gibbons thought. Or maybe it was Ma showing her disapproval of his investment from beyond the grave. Gibbons told himself that was crazy thinking. No better than Eddie Gein himself. But how else to explain the night that the car radio—which the auctioneer had said was broken—hissed to life and played Shall We Gather at the River, the hymn that was playing at Ma’s funeral? It had raked up such unexpectedly painful memories of Ma in her casket, Bunny was shocked to find himself blubbering like a baby, weeping alone under his ghoulish carnival tent. He remembered Ma’s note that came with his inheritance: Spend it wisely, the terse note had said; I suspect you won’t. A boy’s best friend is his mother, my ass.

* * * *

Night cloaked the carny, and the townsfolk came out. So did the rain, announcing a storm that swept across the hill. The walls of the tent billowed in the wind, as if the car was alive and breathing within. Rain needled Gibbons’s top hat as he paraded outside the tent, twirling his cane and barking to be heard above the rumble of thunder. “Here it is, folks! The crime that shocked the nation! You read about it in Life magazine! You saw it in Psycho! Now see The Ed Gein Ghoul Car for yourself! The Mad Butcher of Plainfield’s chariot of death! Just twenty-five cents!” Nobody paid him any mind; few people even heard him above the storm. Later that night, the carny operator came by Gibbons’s lonely, rain-sodden pitch and found him slumped in despair, not even bothering to hide his hipflask anymore. “I’m sorry it’s come to this, Bonaparte,” the man told him. And then he scowled at the painted tent, at the illustration of Gein poking his head from a ransacked grave, and shook his head in disgust. “What the hell were you thinking, man?” He wandered away toward the colors and lights of The Show. “People wanna see this kinda thing!” Gibbons shouted after him, but the man was gone. Lurching to his feet, Gibbons staggered inside the tent, pulling the door-flap closed behind him. An oil-lantern, hanging on a hook, flickered dimly in the gloom. Glaring at the car, Gibbons guzzled the dregs of his hooch, and then hurled the empty flask at the driver’s side window, fracturing the glass and his own haggard reflection. Breathing heavily, choking back the tears, he sank to his knees. That’s it, he decided; he’d get rid of the damn thing. He should’ve done it months ago. Sell it to some sucker, or just dump it in a fucking swamp— Lightning flashed suddenly and Gibbons started as he saw the silhouetted figures of a crowd gathered outside the tent. He frowned at the car. The buckled grille grinned at him, the splintered left headlamp winking in the lantern- light. He poked his head gingerly outside the tent— expecting the cops, or a posse of outraged yokels ready to ride him out of town on a rail—blinking in surprise at the crowd that was gathered outside in the dark. They were wearing their finest Sunday clothes. Some of the men wore flowers in the breast pockets of their suits; the women wore fancy hats with veils. A little highfalutin for a third-rate carny, Gibbons thought, but he wasn’t complaining; he hadn’t worked a crowd this big in months. With a sweeping flourish of his top hat, he ushered the crowd inside the tent. They shuffled past him, whispering excitedly, their hushed voices rasping like dry autumn leaves. Gibbons pulled down the lantern from where it was hanging. The shadow-cloaked crowd packed tightly around him, as if seeking warmth from the sputtering flame. It had grown cold in the tent, all of a sudden; Gibbons could see his breath frosting in front of him. Time to warm ‘em up! He started his spiel the same way he always did: straight for the jugular, no fucking around. Between the news reports and the movie, everyone knew the story already; what they wanted was the details, to the last dripping drop. “The missing woman was found hanging by her heels in the woodshed,” he gravely intoned, “butchered clean like a hog, her entrails filling the tub that was placed beneath the ragged stump of her neck. Her head was inside the house . . . with the others.” The crowd was ghostly silent, holding its breath as Gibbons inventoried Gein’s house of horrors like a realtor from hell. The women’s heads mounted on the walls like withered trophies, all lovingly dolled up in lipstick and rouge. The Nazi-style skin-lampshades; the seats upholstered from flesh. The human organs and cutlets of meat chilling in the refrigerator. The noses and ears preserved in jars; the lady parts floating in formaldehyde like brown clumps of seaweed. Hanging in Gein’s closet was the crudely tailored suit of flesh, complete with leggings and sagging female breasts, which Eddie would wear like rotting lingerie, shambling around the derelict farmhouse in ghoulish emulation of his dear departed mother . . . It was Bunny’s greatest performance; he was killing it, flinging blood ‘n’ guts at the speechless crowd like a zoo- house monkey slinging shit. He’d been right all along: people did want to see this kind of thing. He’d just needed the right crowd to get his mojo back. Now his luck would turn around, he could feel it. To hell with management. He’d find another carny someplace. Folks like these who appreciated his talents. But first, tonight, he’d celebrate; buy a fresh bottle of booze, maybe half an hour with Peggy from the cootch-tent—things were looking up at last. “And here it is, folks . . .” he hissed in the quiet of the tent. “The very car that Gein was driving on his grave- robbing raids . . . piling it high with human remains to take home and decorate his house . . . or a fresh dead body to warm his bed.” The crowd shuffled closer. Gibbons raised his lantern to give them a better view. In the flickering flame, the skeletons on the tent walls seemed to dance among the crowd: an unsettling effect Gibbons had never noticed before. The pressing bodies closed tightly around him. A few flies had skipped the cover charge, he noticed, buzzing above their heads. Christ, it reeked something terrible in the tent tonight. Even Gibbons, by now quite used to the smell of the car, felt heady on the fetid fumes. The crowd wasn’t helping matters; didn’t anyone take a bath in this town? They jostled him back against the car. “Take it easy, folks.” He forced a chuckle. “Everyone’ll get a look-see.” The sound of scratching fingernails echoed suddenly from the trunk, startling Gibbons more than the crowd. The cue was early—damned car—but he went with it, like a pro. Didn’t want to spoil the showstopper. “What the heck is that?” He feigned surprise, hamming it up. “Excuse me, folks, I better go check . . .” The crowd made no move to clear his path. Strange bunch; they seemed more interested in him than the car, surrounding him like he was the attraction. He clapped the arm of the man in front of him to gently steer him aside ...... and gave a little cry of disgust as his hand sank into rotting fabric and soft flesh. He looked about at the shadowy crowd, gagging at the sickly-sweet stench, suddenly filled with a terrible suspicion. The room lurched around him like one of the carny rides. His legs turned to Slinkys. He staggered against the car, propping his hand on the tail to steady himself, and felt something clawing and thumping inside the trunk. He tried to remember if he’d even set up the speakers, but it was hard to think clearly while the thing thumped and clawed, and instead of throwing open the trunk for the showstopper, now he held the lid down, fighting to keep it closed. Whatever was inside the trunk, it was important he didn’t see it. Everything else could be explained away. In the cold light of day, and with enough booze inside him, he’d find a rational explanation. Just as long as he didn’t see it. And then the car radio hissed to life, Shall We Gather at the River crackling out, the voices of the choir horribly distorted, as if they were singing at the bottom of the river. He pictured Ma’s empty casket, and suddenly he didn’t need to see to know what was inside the trunk, thumping and clawing. He looked pleadingly at the crowd. “Th-that’s all now, folks,” he wheezed. “Show’s over . . .” But the crowd loomed from the shadows toward him. In the guttering flame of the lantern, shaking wildly in his hand, he saw the lichen-green pallor of their faces, the withered hollows of their eyes, the lips rotted away to snarling grins. He lurched back in horror, his hand slipping from the trunk. The lock clicked open. The lid groaned up with a belch of foul air. And as the rotten, writhing hag reached out, dragging him down into a maternal embrace, Bunny Gibbons gave a show-stopping scream.

Adam Howe is an English writer of screenplays and fiction. He lives in Greater London with his partner and their hellhound, Gino. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Horror Library Volume 5, Beware the Dark, One Buck Horror, and Bete Noire. Writing as Garrett Addams, his short story “Jumper” was chosen by Stephen King as the winner of the On Writing contest; the story was published in the UK paperback edition, and he was granted an audience with The King, who advised the fledgling screenwriter to “write a fucking novel.” An expert procrastinator, he has still yet to do so. Tweet him @Adam_G_Howe. To learn more, read our Author Spotlight on Adam Howe. Walled Lucy Taylor

It was just after the twenty-second anniversary of her confinement in Dunlop House Hospital on Glasgow’s Carrick Glenn Road that Plush awoke one night and heard the sound of something mewling, trapped inside the wall. She thought at first it was a young child crying, and, for an instant, it felt as though her heart stuttered to a stop. She lay there, mesmerized by the sound, which wrenched at her guilt-filled heart with notes as keen and piercing as a shard of bone. “Forgive me,” she whispered, praying it might be Colleen who cried out to her in the darkness. But no, not a child at all. A cat ...... inside the wall. A dream, she thought, or some kind of auditory hallucination, although, during all her years at Dunlop House, Plush had never been one of those patients who heard otherworldly voices, alien music crooning odes to suicide and mutilation and cantos to atrocity. Her madness, what little had not been leeched out of her by nearly two decades of stultifying imprisonment, was of a different nature. When the sound continued, Plush got out of bed and tiptoed to the window that overlooked the street. Creeping about stealthily at night was a habit she’d acquired from the years she’d shared a room with light-sleeping Geraldine, whose stroke the month before had resulted in Plush’s relocation to a single room in the north wing of the building. She raised the shade and peered out between wrought iron grillwork of a sufficiently rococo design— vines ornamented with spirals and cunning coils—to suggest more artistic whimsy than its true intent, a method of ensuring that the occupants of Dunlop House stayed caged. At this hour, the steep and winding Carrick Glenn Road was hushed and almost empty. Wind-whipped litter rustled along the pavement. A pair of punk-haired women, lipsticked and leather-clad, rocked inebriatedly in each other’s arms outside the lesbian jazz club across the street. Plush took in every crannied door and ledge, each bare branch of the scrawny elm outside the Take-Away shop a few doors down. There was no cat. The sounds of feline distress had not diminished, though, nor was Plush any less clear as to their source. Muffled by the bricks, but still unmistakable, the cries emanated from the wall behind her bed. Quietly she pushed the twin bed away from the wall. She got down on her hands and knees and crept along the floorboards, searching for some niche or crevice where a cat might hide. There was no such nook, no acceptably spacious cranny. No place a mouse, much less a cat, could crawl. And yet the cries persisted. Plush found herself weeping with despair and helplessness. The sound reminded her of what she wanted to forget: that she, too, was a prisoner. Whatever the circumstances of the animal inside the wall, she was in no more position to help the wretched creature than she was to free herself. Nonetheless, she put her lips against the cold brick and whispered, “It’s all right. Be brave. I’ll help you.”

* * * *

Although she had been admitted to Dunlop House more than two decades earlier, Plush was certain that she had, in fact, gone mad not prior to, but in the course of her incarceration there. Madness of monotony and boredom had caught up to her within the very walls of the asylum which purported to be capable of healing her, its claim on her mind increasing exponentially the more closely it was bracketed by the visits of tut-tutting and bespeckled doctors claiming to possess a cure. But what Plush considered sanity, her doctors regarded as clear proof of its absence and by the time, according to their standards, she was sufficiently dulled and grounded by captivity to pass for sane on their bleak terms, they found her case no longer of sufficient interest to contemplate release. Neither affluent nor educated and female besides (three conditions that added up to near hopelessness of anyone’s taking her plight seriously), Plush was the eldest daughter of a cattle farmer and his wife from Stromness on the island of Orkney off Scotland’s northern coast. A peculiar and reclusive child, she was close only with her grandfather Mooney, a fisherman who claimed to have seen a vision of the Virgin Mary while being held in a Japanese prison camp in World War II. No one gave much credence to Mooney’s tale, except for Plush, who’d experienced enough visions of her own to perceive such things as ordinary. She had her own name, in fact, for the dull and limited range of perception most people seemed confined to: the Narrows. She had few words, however, to describe the miracles that sometimes visited her, but would wander the shore alone for hours beside the glittering North Sea, eyes slitted down to the thinness of incisions, bedazzled by the swirl and glamour of her private universe, the haunted murmuring of the wind, the baleful lamentations of the tides. And, as an artist paints his or her most secret mindscapes, so Plush’s thoughts unfurled like so much blank canvas and let the Universe scrawl across her senses its mysteries and magic, lush secrets that bewitched and titillated, and appalling, wondrous doodles of the perverse and blasphemous. When her sight was at its keenest, she could slip between the sea and sky at the horizon fold where they converged like silken labia and penetrate a realm of arcane geometry, where time serpentined in bends and coils and seasons were spawned, not in straight lines but spirals, the future turning in upon itself to birth the past and present, all three as singularly knit as a great wave that breaks into several smaller ones upon colliding with the shore. “A simpleton,” the neighbors said behind her back. “Touched in the head,” muttered her own mother, but Plush knew it was they who lacked for vision, they whose sight was so limited as to be just short of blind. They saw the Narrows only. She gazed into the whole of time and God’s design. Thus she had thrived, a charmed captive to her private dance, until, when she was fifteen, a squall churned with fatal suddenness across the North Sea, drowning Mooney and half a dozen other fishermen. Grief and loneliness made Plush unwary, heedless. Over the next few months, she sought comfort in the arms of any boy who offered her a moment’s consolation, conceived a child by one of them, and was summarily evicted from the house by her mother, who said, “No daughter of mine is going to bear a bastard and raise it in my house.” Plush took a job waiting tables at the Braes Hotel and moved into a small stone cottage near the sea, where she gave birth, a few months later, to a daughter whom she named Colleen. The baby was a comfort and a joy and Plush enjoyed two years of relative tranquility—until the day a woman appeared from Childrens’ Aid, acting upon a complaint from Plush’s mother, who had charged her daughter with being mentally unfit to raise a child and had decided to seek custody. Plush was distraught, hysterical. She left her job and took to wandering the shore alone, bereft of visions now, beseeching God with panicked prayers to let her keep her daughter. In the Orkneys, the winter days are eyeblink brief, and darkness never fully concedes its hold upon the land. It was in February, while Plush was meandering along the chilly shore, that Mooney first emerged from the sea to greet her. He wore work pants and an old patched sweater, as if he’d just gotten up from in front of the fire at home, but his form was gossamer and radiant, shot through with smoky light. “Tell no one that you’ve seen me, but come back alone and walk with me tomorrow,” Mooney said. “Be brave. I’ll help you.” And he merged back into the glimmer of the sea. Plush’s ecstasy knew no containment. So much so, that she begged her mother for a visit with Colleen, a boon that, with some reluctance, her mother granted. The next day when Plush returned to the place where Mooney had appeared to her, she brought the child along. “Your grandfather!” she explained excitedly. But the toddler screamed in terror and began struggling in her mother’s arms when she saw the old man’s spectral outline emerge from the water and undulate among the waves. The ghost glided past the breakers, shimmering amid the foam, then hesitated, staring at his daughter with stricken eyes. His edges seemed to fade and bleed away, sucked into the sea like layers of cotton candy licked by an eager child. “Wait! Don’t leave!” Plush cried. She charged into the sea, dragging Colleen behind her. The toddler shrieked and flailed about as the water deepened and the sea spilled over her, knocking her down. Plush lifted Colleen and floated the child in front of her. Oblivious to the danger, she waded deeper. She could still see the wraith, not more than a few yards ahead now, skimming the pewter water like a low-flying gannet, but rapidly dissolving, draining into the nearly colorless crease of the horizon. High walls of slate-colored sea crashed over her, cold brine rushing into her throat, numbing her lungs and stopping her breath, and that was when two fishermen who’d been out checking oyster pots grabbed Plush and lifted up Colleen’s small lifeless body and took them both to shore. They had not, of course, seen Mooney. They had only witnessed a woman battling her way into deep surf, dragging her child face-down through the waves, and they were keen to testify as to the horror of it. Police were summoned, then a battalion of doctors. Plush was accused of murder and attempted suicide. A trial was held in Inverness on Scotland’s mainland. Plush was deemed criminally insane and dispatched to Glasgow. Thus she languished for the next two decades in the two-hundred year old house on Carrick Glenn Road that had served, in the previous century, as a monastery. In such an atmosphere, beset with guilt and boredom, Plush’s visions, once her refuge, had seeped away like rare perfume decimated by the stench of offal. The bleak and sterile Narrows had opened up and sucked her down as surely as the cold North Sea had claimed Colleen. There were no more visions now, no more universe of runes and thralldom, of rotting life and lushly flowering death. Only the stultifying half-life of what others deemed reality and her own burden of self-blame ...... until the night the cat cried out behind the wall and opened up a tiny rent in the fabric of the Narrows.

* * * *

In the mornings, inmates of Dunlop House were encouraged to spend time in the dayroom, a dingy and bespotted parlor where visitations took place. There were splotches on the walls—the most unsavory of ochers and the gray of clotted sperm—and a heart-shaped stain where a love-struck schizophrenic had once painted her and her lover’s names inside a heart described by her own menstrual blood. Nearly a fortnight had passed since Plush first heard the cat. The cries were no feebler now than at the outset, though more sporadic, coming at all hours of the night to torment her waking time and permeate her dreaming. “Is someone keeping a cat?” she asked Sister Lorna, gazing at the nun’s gaunt, pinched face, pale and shiny as a well-licked lollipop. “I thought I heard one yowling yesterday.” She tried to sound as offhand about this as possible, but one does not spend two decades removed from normal society and still retain the skills of artifice and guile. Sister Lorna made a “you poor benighted dear” face and said, “You know perfectly well there are no animals in here.” Plush tried to look forlorn as she said, “Perhaps I’m only lonely and my ears are playing tricks. I do miss Geraldine so much. I was wondering if I might visit her.” Sister Lorna made a small froggy harrumph, her cue that she felt the request to be an imposition on her already frayed good nature, and said, “Geraldine’s still very ill. She might not be ready for visitors. And her face . . . the stroke she suffered has left Geraldine changed, you understand.” Plush nodded, but her persistence wore Sister Lorna down. Thus, a few days later, a nurse escorted her to Geraldine’s bedside in the hospital wing of the asylum, where her former roommate lay with one half of her face apparently in peaceful slumber, the other half contorted in a silent, simian howl. Plush knew the stroke had destroyed the nerves in one side of Geraldine’s face, but she’d been unprepared for the extent of the damage. She’d never dreamed that anything so terrible could befall dear Geraldine who, after all, was a witch, the former Queen of the Lothian Wiccan Order. She had romped skyclad through pagan rituals in her fashionable Edinburgh home and claimed, before she poisoned her drunkard husband into a coma, to converse with the spirits of Aleister Crowley and Saint Magnus. Now she was merely pitiful and old and, until her stroke, had spent most of her time reading the mysteries and history books her children dutifully sent over. Geraldine also functioned as Dunlop House’s unofficial librarian. For those who wouldn’t read or didn’t dare expend the effort for fear of draining minds already sadly overtaxed, she was a source of information, rumor, history. Now, as Plush stared down at her old friend with frank distress, the woman’s good eye popped open and a silver trail of saliva threaded its way out of the corner of the dead half of her mouth. “Here you go, m’dear.” A nurse brought Geraldine her lunch: a bowl of lentil soup and buttered roll, a small, hard brick of cheese. Geraldine complained that it was difficult for her to eat, what with half her face unworkable, so Plush broke up the bread into tiny bits and spooned green broth into the good side of Geraldine’s mouth, wiping her face clean after each spoonful. “Enough,” Geraldine said finally, pushing the food away. She fixed hawkish, deep-set eyes on Plush and mumbled in her slurred, stroke-victim’s voice, “Something’s wrong. What is it? You got that lost dog look.” Plush, already close to tears, blurted out, “The new room that they put me in after you got sick . . . there’s something in there with me . . . something alive.” She was afraid that Geraldine would laugh. Instead, she asked, “Which room is it you’re in?” “First floor,” said Plush, “on the corner.” “North wing?” “Yes.” Geraldine touched a palsied finger to a chin porcine with bristles. “An animal?” Plush nodded. “And would it be . . . by any chance . . . a cat that you’d be hearin’?” At that, Plush’s hand trembled so that lentil soup leaked down onto the bed. “How is it that you know?” Geraldine gave a ragged smile. “Ah, so it’s true. There was a cat.” “What do you mean was? Have you heard it for yourself?” “Not I, for which I thank sweet Gaia. Just something that I read had happened back when Dunlop House was being built. I had no reason to think it true, but now, with this, the story in the history book would seem to be confirmed.” Plush hated it when her old friend spoke in riddles. “I don’t understand.” “Ah,” said Geraldine, while the good half of her face smiled and the other half toffee-pulled into something approximating morbid glee, “you weren’t aware that Dunlop House was founded on the blood of an innocent creature?” “What do you . . . ?” Geraldine shook her gray Medusa locks and grinned a gap-toothed double-double-toil-and-trouble grin. “Don’t look so frightened. You’ve not gone mad. It is a cat you’re hearin’, Plush, sure as day.” “But . . . we ought to tell someone, oughtn’t we? We ought to get it out.” “It’s dead, you goose. Been dead 207 years, since this hellhole was first built.” “But how . . . ?” “Bricking a live cat up inside a wall . . . it was a fiendish custom that got started in the Middle Ages. The besotted Christian savages thought a cat had supernatural powers, so they’d sacrifice one to ensure good fortune for the building and all who lived or worked there.” “Are you sure?” “I’ve read a lot of history books these thirty years since I put strychnine in the old man’s haggis,” said Geraldine. “A lot I do forget, but not so terrible a thing as this. A cat was bricked up in the corner of the north wall, to bring good fortune to the Dunlop family and their building.” “All those years,” said Plush, appalled. “But I tell you, it’s alive. I hear it crying.” “What you hear, if you hear anything at all, then it’s a ghost.” “But we must help it.” “It’s dead, and better off that way,” said Geraldine. “So even if its ghost cries out, you leave it be.”

* * * *

That night when the mewling started, Plush pushed her bed to one side and put her ear against the wall. A cat, a baby, whatever . . . the creature was in terrible distress. She listened to the cries and whispered back consolements. Pain called to pain. Plush’s skin began to roil. Gooseflesh ebbed and flowed along her arms. She closed her eyes. For a moment, she had a glimpse beyond the Narrows, of Colleen’s small form being battered by the sea. Colleen’s arms were up above her head. Bright water spattered between her fingers like golden needles, but the child’s back was turned, and Plush couldn’t tell if she were merely romping in the sea or gripped by mortal fear. She pressed her mouth against the cold wall. “I’ll get you out,” she whispered. From her shoe, she took the spoon she’d used for feeding Geraldine and wedged the handle between two bricks, nicking the most minuscule of indentations in the mortar. A few grains of plaster dusted down. She scraped again. The mortar was ancient, crumbly. Plush pushed the bed back into place, lay down. Be brave. I’ll help you. It was a start.

* * * *

By the end of the week, Plush’s night-long labors had been rewarded with four loosened bricks, all of which she had been able to dislodge and then replace by morning. She’d also swiped a butter knife from the kitchen while the cook was in the loo and kept it hidden, along with Geraldine’s spoon, inside one of the sturdy black shoes her sister Belle had sent her for Christmas. The work was tedious and painstaking and many times Plush thought of giving up. But then the cat would cry again, and tears would course along Plush’s plump cheeks, and she’d think of Mooney and of the baby daughter she had given to the sea and how that child must call for her across the Void, and she’d resume her work. There were no more escapes, however briefly, from the Narrows now, except one day when Plush, returning to her room after the evening meal, saw someone had tossed a scarf upon her bed. She reached up for the light switch, then stopped. The scarf on the bed stirred, uncoiled itself into something vaguely feline, cat-like and yet like no cat, spectral or otherwise, that Plush had ever seen. Its fur, the color of dark marmalade, was intact only in part. Portions of its sketchy anatomy were visible through parchment skin, tissue-paper thin, and when it leaped from bed to floor, Plush saw its head was still unformed, less cat than lumpen papier-mâché mask with mouth and cheekbones missing. “Oh, God,” she said and reached out to offer comfort to the creature. At once the ill-formed thing froze with alarm and hackled up what hair it had to raise. It bounded round the room in panicked flight, then leaped up and was gone. Into the wall . . .

* * * *

“Wake up,” said Sister Lorna. “You sleep too much these days.” The nun yanked back Plush’s window shades, let mid-morning light spring across the room like yellow tigers. “Be packin’ up your things today. You’ll be gettin’ a new room tomorrow and a roommate.” Plush rolled over, still half wedded to a dream in which a flock of skeletal gulls, their tiny bones luminous in the moonlight, plucked Colleen’s body from the sea and carried it aloft, wheeling and dipping so that the child’s head hung down, revealing empty eye sockets nibbled clean by fishes. The phantom gulls swooped into the bedroom and tore at Sister Lorna’s head. Plush blinked hard and came awake in terror. “What?” “I said you’ll be gettin’ a new roommate.” “But why?” As though embarrassed to concede that one of Dunlop House’s inmates had made an escape of sorts, Sister Lorna lowered her eyes to her spare bosom and said, “Geraldine won’t be coming back anymore. She . . . went home last night.” An image came to Plush: of Geraldine’s soul spiraling smaller and smaller like the whorls of a Nautilus shell, and of that world outside the Narrows where her visions had once led. Gone now, the gateway closed to her. “She died.” The translation from euphemism to hard fact irritated Sister Lorna, who began to brush away imaginary lint from her starched shoulders with rapid, swatting motions. “In any case,” she said, “we’ve decided to use the single rooms for short-term stays, those who’ll be gettin’ out eventually. So we’ll be movin’ you to a double room tomorrow.”

* * * *

Bleak despair dogged Plush throughout the day. That night, the moment that the lights went out, she pushed her bed aside, removed the bricks she’d already loosened and set to work. 207 years away, the cat began to yowl. The sound trembled through Plush’s nailbeds, shivered through the tiny hairs inside her ears. She labored at the bricks and prayed and dug with butter knife and spoon and fingernails. The removal of the four key bricks made easier the weakening of the surrounding ones. By ocher dawn, Plush had opened up a foot wide section of the wall. The floor was covered with a thick layer of plaster, Plush’s hands and face dusted with grit. The cat’s wailing sounded so loud now she could not believe no one else heard, that all of Dunlop House was not awakened by the cries. Plush thrust her hands into the hole she’d dug and reached in as far as she could stretch. “Where are you?” Her hand brushed something stiff and dry that made her think of desiccated flowers pressed between the pages of a book. She gasped and pulled back, tried again. It yielded slightly to her touch, not brick at all, but . . . Carefully she reached both arms inside the wall and loosened and withdrew the object she had labored so hard to unearth—the body of a cat, preserved and mummified by its centuries inside the wall. Plush turned it gently in her hands and marveled at it, this thing of almost unreal loveliness and horror. Gossamer ears, translucent, flattened to the head, paws perfectly preserved, right down to the nubs of claws where it had tried to scratch its way to freedom. The eyes were gone, of course, sucked dry by dehydration. Plush gazed into the black and vacant holes and thought she glimpsed the swirl of stars in unknown cosmos, heard strike the first melodious chords of lost and alien sound ...... and tried without success to follow. She pulled the wondrous remnant to her chest and rocked it as she used to do Colleen, singing softly. It shivered, almost as if on the verge of awakening beneath her hands. Then its re-exposure to the air proved too much and it crumbled into powder. A dead thing—less than that, a pile of dust—lifeless as its empty eyes. “No!” Plush let the dusty fragments sift through her fingers. She put her face into her hands and cried until her sobbing was interrupted by the softest of meows. She feared she might have fantasized the sound, but looked up anyway. A cat, translucent calico, its thick fur an undulating tapestry of auburns, was grooming itself on her bed. Preening, corkscrewing its lithe tail in round G-clefs of pleasure. The creature was complete this time, as perfect as it must have been the day the builders of Dunlop House snatched it for its awful fate. Plush beheld the sight in awe. How long since she had seen a living creature except on the street outside her window. And yet, not alive at all, of course. The ghost completed washing one patterned paw, then stretched up in an S-shape, opening its mouth in a stupendous yawn. It leaped down off the bed, caressing Plush’s legs, her buttocks, breadmaking in the soft flesh of her belly without leaving indentations. “Go home,” Plush whispered. “You don’t belong here any longer. Go.” The cat swished out smoky figure-eights around her wrists. Its calico design unfurled into a plume of patterned fog, which leaped past Plush ...... into the wall. “No. Go home.” Plush reached between the bricks to try to touch the vision one last time, her hand came back damp up to the wrist. She put her fingers to her mouth and tasted salt and moisture. The section of the wall that Plush had opened pulsed brightly, appeared to widen. Plush pushed her arm into the rent. From some other bend in time, she heard the tide and smelled it, the beating of the sea on rocky shores, the tang of brine . . . inside the wall. She felt it roll across her then, the extending ripples of an endless shore, where Mooney and Colleen and Geraldine and a multitude of souls washed up like interwoven strands of some vast and undulating carpet before dispersing back again into the whole. Plush shoved her head and arms inside the opening in the wall and found herself swept into a flow much fiercer than anything the sea had ever shown her. The current of the dead seized her and pulled her in, swept her up in their chilly torrent. The dead flowed past and through her, tugging at her soul, and she gave in to their entreaties and let her mind sink into the cool dark of their oceanic realm. “I’ll help you, Mummy,” Colleen said, approaching her. “Be brave.”

* * * *

When Sister Lorna came to fetch Plush to her new room a few hours later, she found her leaning up against the opened wall, breathing still and strong of heart, but limp and mute, with eyes so blind a light shone directly into them produced no observable reaction. And when they took her to the hospital wing and put her in the bed where Geraldine had died, it was the wraith cat who slipped from behind the wall one final time and padded along the corridors to follow after, not to where they took her body, but into sacred realms of mirth and awe where Plush’s empty eyes saw holiness.

Lucy Taylor is the author of seven novels, including Nailed, Saving Souls, Eternal Hearts, Dancing with Demons, and the Stoker-winning The Safety of Unknown Cities. Her stories have appeared in over a hundred anthologies and magazines, including The Mammoth Book of Historical Erotica, The Best of Cemetery Dance, Twentieth Century Gothic, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and the Century’s Best Horror Fiction. Most recently her work has appeared in Danse Macabre, Exotic Gothic 5, and Best Horror of the Year 5. Her collection Fatal Journeys is due out in early 2014, as are stories in Axes of Evil, Miseria’s Chorale, and Of Devils and Deviants. After seven years in Pismo Beach, CA, she recently relocated to Santa Fe, NM. To learn more, read our Author Spotlight on Lucy Taylor. Ghostreaper, or, Life after Revenge Tim Pratt

I’d used duct tape to attach one end of a garden hose to the exhaust pipe, and the other end of the hose ran in through the crack at the top of the passenger-side window, pumping sweet poison into the interior. I took a last swig from the bottle between my knees, the liquor burning its familiar path down my throat. I closed my eyes and waited for a sleep that would be forever untroubled by bad dreams—for the final closing of the unbalanced account of my life—when something tapped against the glass beside my left ear. I lifted my head from my contemplation of the steering wheel and saw a pretty, thirty-something, red-haired woman crouched down and smiling on the other side of the window. She held a long pole in her hand—the length of a broom handle, but thicker, and off-white and weirdly textured. I rolled down the window, my head full of dizzy clouds. “Don’t die,” she said. Her breath smelled of cherries and honey and, faintly, blood-rare steak. “Ah.” The exhaust I’d inhaled so far gave my perceptions a muffled, cotton-swaddled quality. “I . . . what do you mean? What should I do instead?” She said, “Kill.” I had expected her to say “Live,” I guess, that most simplemindedly optimistic imperative. I blinked. “Kill . . . whom?” “‘Whom,’ he says!” She rolled her eyes and grimaced dramatically. “Whomsoever made you want to die yourself, that’s probably a good start. Turn off the engine, will you? The fumes are making my eyes water.” That was demonstrably untrue—her eyes were bright and clear and untouched by tears—but I killed the ignition anyway. She struck me as more interesting than death, which, for a long time now, hadn’t been true of anything else in my life. The woman tapped against the side of the car with the thing that wasn’t a broom handle. “With this, you can punish everyone who ever wronged you.” “With a stick?” I coughed, waving the fumes away from my face. “A spear.” She slid the stick—it was the color of old ivory, carved all over with delicate abstract patterns of swirls and whorls and curlicues—down through her hands, until I could see what capped the end: a pale, glossy spearhead as long as my forearm, lashed to the shaft with leather thongs gone black with age. “What’s that supposed to be? The spear the Roman soldier used to stab Christ on the cross? Are you selling relics?” The flicker of interest I’d felt a moment ago faded as suddenly as it had come. I was so inexpressibly weary, of everything. She snorted. “Ha. I see I’ve got an erudite suicide on my hands. You think it’s the Spear of Longinus, that old thing? No. I’m not selling relics. I’m giving away . . . call it an artifact. An object with a point of view. I hold in my hands one of the most perfect instruments of vengeance ever wrought by human hands—strike that, I’m pretty sure it predates humanity, and I don’t know for sure that any hands at all were involved in its wrought-ing. Wrighting? You wouldn’t say ‘forging,’ it’s made of bones and teeth and skin, not metal . . . its making, then. Anyway, come on. Who are we reaping first?” “Reaping? It’s not a scythe.” “You’re awfully pedantic for a guy who was about to be dead in a few minutes. But reaping’s what I mean. This spear has a name, or at least, some people have a name for it—they call it ‘Ghostreaper.’ Not as classic as ‘Heartseeker’ or ‘Stormbringer,’ but it’s got a certain ring. So. Let’s go make some ghosts?” “I wish you’d leave me alone.” I slumped even further in my seat. “I don’t know you. I don’t want you here. I don’t want what you’re selling. The problems I have can’t be solved with a spear.” “I’m not here to advocate problem solving. I prefer causing problems. I’m here to advocate revenge. Who’s to blame for your suicidal tendencies? You’re, what? Early fifties, only moderately pear-shaped, all your own hair, good teeth, nice house, fancy car . . . It’ll lose a lot of resale value once you die in it, though. So what’s the problem? Heartbreak? Gambling habit catch up with you? I don’t sense anything terminal on you, certainly not cancer—that’s kind of my specialty—and your serotonin levels smell fine, which makes me think it’s situational depression. So what’s the situation?” “It’s . . . lots of things.” The litany of misfortune unspooled in my head. “My boyfriend was killed a few months ago. In a hit-and-run, just a few blocks from our house. This house. We were going to get married. After that, I just . . . had trouble focusing. I lost my job—I am, or was, an accountant, corporate taxes mainly. I cashed in my retirement fund and thought I’d drink myself to death.” I laughed, but not happily. “I just fall asleep before I get very far, though, and throw everything up.” “The key is to sleep on your back, so you aspirate on the vomit,” the woman said seriously. I wrinkled my nose in distaste. I had never liked a mess. “I don’t know why I’m telling you any of this.” “I have one of those faces that makes people want to confess. It’s one of my many fine qualities. Here, give me your hand.” Before I could reply, she reached into the car through the open window, grabbed my wrist, and pressed my palm against the shaft of the spear. I jolted upright. The sensation was like being plunged into ice water, but also like touching a Van de Graaf generator, and— “Feels like getting a blowjob from a guy with a peppermint in his mouth, doesn’t it?” she said. “The tingle! That’s the alcohol leaving your body, and the need for alcohol leaving, too, and any other addictions you’ve got. Maybe the loss of an inhibition or two as well. Ghostreaper likes a clean vessel. So why didn’t you ever hunt down the asshole who ran over your boyfriend?” I kept my fingers curled around the cool haft of the spear. The tingling had subsided, leaving in its place a sort of cold, distancing clarity, as if I were viewing the world through a pool of perfectly still, icy water. “The police didn’t have any leads. Richard was home sick from work that day; I don’t even know why he was out walking—he should have been here in bed. No one saw the car that ran him down. A neighbor found him, bleeding in the street.” His blood had run down into a storm drain; I saw faded brown splotches staining the gutter’s iron grating later. The woman slid across the hood of my car like the heroine of an action movie and pulled open the passenger door—even though I’d locked it—dislodging the hose in the process. She sat down next to me and patted my hand. “I can find the killer for you. And you can introduce them to Ghostreaper. Would you like that?” “What—how—” “It’s pretty much always a waste of time to ask me questions. I prefer assertions, even if they’re mistaken ones. Shall we?”

* * * *

We rearranged things, first. I climbed out of the car awkwardly, keeping my hand on Ghostreaper through the window, unwilling to lose the numbing clarity that touching the weapon seemed to afford. I grasped it with my other hand before untangling myself from the window. The spear was six feet long from its base to the tip of its point, two inches taller than me. The woman slid out of the passenger seat and took a moment to yank the garden hose loose from the exhaust pipe. Then she looked around my garage, humming, and picked up one of my smaller telescopes from the workbench, a refractor with a 2.76 inch aperture, about fifteen inches long. Not as obvious a blunt object as a lead pipe, but of roughly the same dimensions. “Heads up,” she said, and swung the scope at my head like a baseball bat. I flinched away, turning to catch the blow on my shoulder—but when the scope struck me I felt no pain, and barely any sensation, just the barest flutter of pressure, as if I’d been brushed by a butterfly’s wing. She tossed the telescope on the ground with a clatter, and even as my mind raced and my adrenaline pumped, I winced at the tinkle of the lens breaking. “The wielder of Ghostreaper is invulnerable to physical assault,” the woman said. “As long as you’re touching the spear, anyway. Let it leave your grasp and you’re as breakable as ever. So what I’m saying is: while you wield Ghostreaper, act with impunity. Of course, I always say that anyway.” “You could have just told me. You didn’t have to break my telescope—” “I believe in instructive demonstrations. Besides, telescopes are for the long view, and I want you focused on the immediate situation.” I maneuvered the spear into the car with difficulty, shoving its butt deep into the passenger footwell, reclining the seat and leaning the shaft back against it, the head nearly touching the back window. I got into the driver’s seat, resting my fingers on the shaft, glad the car was an automatic and not a stick shift, so I’d have a hand free. The woman sat in the back seat, right behind me. “Who are you?” I reached for the key awkwardly with my left hand, but I didn’t turn it yet. Last time I’d started the car, I’d intended to kill myself. Next time I started it, I would do so with the intent of killing someone else. “My name’s Elsie. You’re Dave, right?” “Carson,” I said. “My name is Carson.” “Oh. Well, that’s okay. You’ll do.” “When you say you can find the killer—” “Open up the garage door, and turn left. Your vehicular manslaughter-er doesn’t live too far away. Keeping it local—I like that, shows real community spirit.” I activated the garage door opener and did as she asked. I followed her directions, and soon parked in front of a neat, narrow, two-story house just a few blocks away. I saw someone moving through the windows inside. “She’s home!” Elsie said. “Let’s go visit.” I stared at the silver Prius parked in the driveway. “They found flakes of silver paint on Richard’s body. The police said it was too common to trace.” “Luckily I have other ways of finding things that interest me.” Elsie took a great gulping inhalation of air. “I can smell chaos in the air. I’m like a bloodhound for strife. Also for actual blood.” I climbed out of the car, bringing Ghostreaper with me. The day was cool but clear, a perfect San Francisco summer. It should have been awkward to get out of a car dragging a six-foot spear after me, but I didn’t have any trouble at all. Still, even with the cold clarity of the weapon in my hand, I hesitated. “I don’t—what do I say to her—” Elsie was somehow out of the car and beside me in an instant. “What, you mean, like, ‘Prepare yourself, Dana Martin, for I am your death, destroyer of worlds?’ Eh. Pithy one-liners are overrated. I mean, the main audience is going to be dead in a minute, yeah? When you tell the story later you can make up any dialogue you want, because who can contradict you? You can say anything you want, or nothing. Though if you do have questions, I find that menacing someone with a huge weapon is a good way to get them to answer. The answers might not be true, but truth is overrated, too.” We walked toward the front door, and I paused by the Prius. I slashed the spear at the car viciously, expecting to smash the rear window. Instead the spearhead passed through the glass, as if I’d slashed at a fog bank. I gaped. “What—” “Oh, sorry—Ghostreaper isn’t much good for general vandalism. The shaft is ordinary matter, at least most of the time, so you could maybe smash a taillight with it. But the spearhead just passes harmlessly through anything that’s not alive. It’s one of those quirks. Magical weapons, what are you gonna do?” She skipped up the front steps, turned the knob, and threw the door open. I was surprised the door was unlocked—but maybe it wasn’t. Locks hadn’t kept Elsie out of my garage, or my car either. I went up the steps, the spearhead passing through the doorframe as if it wasn’t there at all. I stood awkwardly in a stranger’s living room, full of old, comfortable furniture, abstract prints on the walls, and enough potted plants to give the whole place a jungle feeling. The woman, Dana, hurried in from another room, frizzy-haired and sharp-featured, dressed in Bohemian swirls of skirts and scarves. She froze when she saw me, I assumed because I was holding an enormous spear, but then she whimpered and said, “You.” Her body language shifted, as if she planned to run away, but then she steeled herself, lifted her chin, and said, “I didn’t mean to hurt him. I parked my car first; I just wanted to talk to him, but he walked away from me, called me a crazy bitch and then just walked away, and I lost control, I put the car in gear—” I’d half-believed Elsie was trying to deceive me into committing some grudge-murder on her behalf, but this was an open confession, not even of an accident, but of something akin to premeditated murder. Which seemed to me, in the cool comfort of Ghostreaper’s company, to be grounds for a premeditated murder of my own. “We used to climb up on the roof together.” I twisted the spear in my hands, the delicate filigree patterns cutting into my palms. “Richard and I. We’d lay there and look up at the stars, what few we could see with all the city lights. Sometimes we’d go out to the desert to see the stars, or go camping during meteor showers. We made up our own names for the constellations. Now I can’t even look at the sky without feeling a black hole open up in my chest. “ Dana’s face crumpled in on itself, tears springing into her eyes. “I’m so—” “You took the stars away from me,” I said, and stepped forward, swinging the spear at her soft belly. The spearhead passed through her, still with no resistance at all, and I thought it was a different cruel trick, a spear that couldn’t stab anything, the murderous equivalent of those birthday candles you can’t blow out no matter how you huff and puff. But Dana’s eyes went blank, and she slowly crumpled to the floor, sprawling on her side. There was no blood on the spear when I lifted it away, no visible wound, but her body was still and unbreathing. “So how did that feel?” Elsie stepped inside and shutting the door behind her. I looked down at the corpse of the woman who’d killed my boyfriend. “It felt. . .good. Like closing a difficult account forever.” “Revenge gets a bad rap.” Elsie prodded the corpse with her foot. “People say it’s ultimately unsatisfying, that it only ends in tears—but of course, people would say that, wouldn’t they? To discourage people like you from going out and getting revenge on them. I’ve always found vengeance to be pretty satisfying, making people pay for what they’ve done to me. Hell, sometimes I even make them pay in advance.” She looked at the ceiling, and her tone took a turn for the philosophical. “Of course, it is true that an act of revenge can begin an endless cycle of retribution, with this woman’s loved ones coming to kill you, and so on . . . but fuck ‘em. You’ve got the spear. As you can see, Ghostreaper makes it look pretty much like death from natural causes, so it’s super fun at parties—” “You killed me!” a voice shrieked, and Dana walked into the room again—but now she looked like a faded watercolor of herself, almost transparent in places, and her feet didn’t quite touch the ground. “Oh, right,” Elsie said. “I forgot to tell you about that part.” I stumbled away from the shimmering doppelganger, lifting up the spear defensively. Elsie said, “When you kill someone with Ghostreaper, it, well . . . it rips out their soul. Or essence. Or thought- pattern. It makes a ghost, more or less. A ghost that follows you around, uh . . . Forever, pretty much. But if it’s any consolation, no one else can see her, unless you want them to. And she’s bound to your service. Instead of getting an afterlife, she gets to do your bidding for eternity, or the local equivalent.” This was too much. It occurred to me that I was probably still sitting in my car, breathing carbon monoxide, having a terrible final hallucination in my last moments of life. I found that idea very comforting. “Will you tell her to shut up with that wailing?” Elsie said. Dana—my victim—was indeed making quite a commotion, crouching by her corpse, keening. “Ah,” I said. “Could you . . . stop making that noise?” The ghost went silent. Her hands went to her throat, her mouth, and she opened and closed her lips soundlessly, eyes wide. “You can talk, I just don’t want you to—” “He was cheating on you,” she said dully, still looking at her body, stroking the corpse’s frizzy hair. “Richard. He was cheating on you with my husband, Harvey. I did you a favor—” “Richard and I had an open relationship,” I said. “We never wanted a little thing like temporary lust to ruin our connection.” Dana sprang to her feet, floating just above the carpet. “They were going to run away together, you moron! You fat old man, your boyfriend was young, and so was my Harvey—” “Stop talking,” I said, and she did, making those fish- mouth silent gapings, which should have been comical, but were horrible instead. “So what next?” Elsie said brightly. I frowned at her. “What do you mean?” “I mean you’ve been transformed into an instrument of perfect revenge! Surely someone else has wronged you. Like the dead lady’s husband. He walked out on her—I can smell traces of their marital discord—but I can track him down. He was doing the dirty with your boyfriend, and even if you’ve got one of those brains that doesn’t get jealous over a little ugly-bumping, dead Dickie was planning to abandon you for hot-and-heavy Harvey, so surely that—” “No,” I said. “I don’t know this Harvey, and if he made Richard happy, for a little while, that’s all I ever wanted, for him to be happy.” Elsie sighed. “You disappoint me, Dave. I thought I saw real potential in—” “I want to kill my boss.” I caressed Ghostreaper. “The one who fired me. The one who said it wasn’t as if my wife had died, just my boyfriend. Except he said ‘boy toy,’ he—” “Even better.” Elsie beamed like a proud mother. “I love a man who shows initiative. The victims you choose yourself are always the sweetest.” I looked down at the ghost. “Do you have any duct tape?”

* * * *

The car was crowded with Ghostreaper in the passenger seat, Elsie behind me, and Dana in the back seat next to her, body contorted to avoid contact with the wedged-in spear. Dana seemed to be attached to me by an intangible tether: when I walked out the door, she’d bobbed along after me, floating just off the ground, like a helium balloon that had degraded into neutral buoyancy. I drove slowly. I didn’t have any doubt about my chosen course—but that didn’t mean I wasn’t full of questions. “Why did you bring me this spear?” I looked at Elsie in the rearview mirror. “Why are you doing any of this? You don’t even know me.” “Oh, people are the same all over, Dave.” “I told you, my name’s Carson. And that’s not an answer.” She looked out the window, twirling a lock of hair around her finger. “It’s not complicated. I eat chaos, and I get bored easily. There, that’s my motivations sorted.” “Where are we going?” Dana spoke but didn’t look up, sullen as a teenage girl forced to go on a family road trip. Elsie patted her ghostly knee and replied, “To get you some company.”

* * * *

My former employer was an innumerate buffoon who’d inherited the firm from his father, a genuine gentleman who’d had an unfortunate blind spot when it came to recognizing the foulness of his imbecilic spawn. The old man was dead, and the idiot was ascendant, having stripped away all the small perqs and pleasantries of working in the firm until it was as soulless as any corporate cubicle farm. I’d come in late one too many times, probably with breakfast bourbon on my breath, and the idiot had called me in and told me with great relish that I was “out on my ass.” He then said, “Thanks for giving me a reason to get rid of you—now I can hire some young hotshot for half your salary.” I’d spent thirty years at the company, and I was escorted out by security, my possessions boxed up and mailed to me in a jumble. When I opened the box later, I found my framed picture of Richard with a star-shaped crack in the glass. I’d taken the picture on our first trip together to Hawaii, after calling in a favor from an old college friend—one who’d stayed in astronomy instead of dropping out to make money working with numbers—and getting us a tour of the observatory on Mauna Kea. A dome holding a telescope loomed behind Richard in the photo, a ragged gash in the image, his face scratched by the broken glass. My idiot boss had treated my life like meaningless trash, and for a while, I’d thought it was, too. With a spear in my hand, all such existential problems suddenly had obvious solutions.

* * * *

I sat staring at the doors to the building’s lobby. There was a security guard behind the desk, and I knew there was at least one more roaming the ground floor hallways. I knew the names of those men; I knew the names of their children. I knew if I walked in carrying an enormous spear, they would try to stop me. The firm was on the fourth, fifth, and sixth floors of the building. I couldn’t conceive of any way to reach my boss without causing a great deal of trouble along the way. “I should wait,” I said slowly. “Find out where he lives, prepare for him—” “Bor-ing,” Elsie singsonged. “I’ll get fidgety and take the spear away long before that.” I blinked. “You mean . . . you’re going to take it away from me?” “Only if you run out of people you want to murder,” Elsie said. “What—did you think I was here because I think you’re cute?” “What are you?” Dana said. “Some kind of demon?” “You’re just racist against redheads,” Elsie said. “I’m no demon, devil, or monster—just an ordinary gal who feeds on chaos and disaster, who happens to own a magical spear. What I am is an enabler. So what’s it going to be? Are you going to go make with the revenging, or give me back my spear and sit around with ghost-girl here forever?” I wasn’t ready to let go of the feeling of power—or of cool detachment—that holding Ghostreaper afforded me. I climbed out of the car, and Elsie followed, along with Dana’s ghost. We all stood on the sidewalk. “The spear,” I said, trying to hide its length against the side of the car. “Does it have any other powers? Can it make people go to sleep, or—” Elsie laughed. “You can’t set that phaser on stun, son. It’s only got one mode of attack: soul-ripping.” “Those guards never did anything to me.” “Oh, they will in a minute,” Elsie said breezily. “They’ll draw guns on you, probably, and maybe try to shoot you.” I was invulnerable while I held the spear. Perhaps I could simply walk past the guards, brush off their attacks. I reached back into the car and took the roll of duct tape I’d found in Dana’s house, and began to wind the tape around my right hand and the shaft of Ghostreaper, binding the weapon to my flesh, leaving my fingers free, but with the spear strapped to my palm. “Good thinking,” Elsie said. “If you tripped and dropped the spear you’d be dead in a hot second once the bullets started flying.” “This is insane,” Dana said. “I don’t believe this—” “Believe it,” I said, not really thinking of it as a command, but then Dana began to whimper. “I do,” she murmured. “I do believe it. All of it.” I glanced at Elsie, who shrugged. “Ghosts are very literal. If you told her to go fuck herself, the results would be pretty dramatic.” I pushed open the door to the lobby and stepped inside. The guard behind the desk, a huge and affable man named Latu, rose from his chair, eyes wide. “Mr. Whitaker, you can’t—I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” I ignored him, walking toward the bank of elevators. I had a vision of Latu drawing his gun, firing into my chest, bullets bouncing off me like Superman—but instead he simply walked around the desk and grabbed my right arm, the one holding the spear. His grip didn’t hurt, but it was like iron, unshakeable. He was built like a sumo wrestler. “You’ll have to leave,” he said. “Don’t make me call the police. I always liked you—” “Oh, just spear him,” Elsie said. “No.” I gritted my teeth. “He’s innocent.” She cocked her head. “Huh. More or less true, actually.” She sighed. “This is boring. Tell Dana to stick her head into his head.” “I—what?” “Mr. Whitaker, who are you talking to?” Latu said. “Are you hearing voices?” I realized he couldn’t see Elsie. Was she always invisible, or just when it suited her? I suddenly wondered if she was real at all. The possibility of carbon monoxide hallucination arose in my mind again, but somehow seemed less plausible this time. “Her head, his head,” Elsie reiterated. “She’s your ghost, you have to tell her what to do, they lack initiative.” “Dana, ah—put your head into his head.” Dana rolled her eyes, stepped forward, and seemed to head-butt Latu . . . except her head didn’t strike his, it simply submerged into it, disappearing. Latu twitched and shivered and dropped to the floor, spasming and drooling. “Don’t worry, he’s fine,” Elsie said. “Just a little seizure. Your ghost-slaves can actually possess people— clumsily, moving their bodies around about as elegantly as novice stilt-walkers, but still. Dana just jostled his life force a little and made him pass out.” “I was in his head.” Dana hugged herself and shuddered. “My head was in his head—” “Or maybe she disrupted the electro-chemical processes of his brain,” Elsie said, scratching her chin. “I never entirely understood the mechanism.” “I can taste the inside of his brain.” Dana bent over, retching and spitting. “Ha. No stomach, but she still gets nauseated, you’ve got to love it.” Elsie smiled. “Elevators now?” I stared at her. “You won’t tell me what you are, where you come from. But where did this spear come from?” She shrugged. “Another place. Where screaming hordes descend from fortresses made of acid clouds. Where leviathans the size of moons splash in seas that are literally bottomless. Where warriors receive guidance from living books, and go on quests set by mad seers. Where the sky is the belly of a goddess, and the triple suns are just jewels in her navel. Where marsh witches whisper to their children, who are living axes.” She smiled hideously, and the phrase that leapt into my mind was “baby-eating grin.” “I didn’t see any reason why they should get to have all the best toys, so I stole a couple.” The grin abruptly vanished. “Don’t make me regret letting you play with one of them.” I turned and marched for the elevators, then spun, swinging the spear toward Elsie. She leapt several feet straight up, and came down to land in a crouch, balanced on the shaft of the spear, like something from a wire-fu martial arts movie. “Do you think I’d give you a weapon that could hurt me? But it was amusing of you to try.” I shook the spear, and she hopped off, like a bird flitting from a perch. “There’s no going back for me, is there?” I said. “And this isn’t a hallucination, is it?” “No, and no. But look at it this way: this morning you expected to be dead by now. There’s pretty much nowhere your day can go from there except up.” She paused. “Or on to fates worse than death, I guess. Like the one poor Dana here got. No eternal oblivion, no afterlife—if they have those in this world, I can’t recall—no rest at all.” I turned to the elevators. There was nowhere to go now but onward.

* * * *

We rode uneventfully to the sixth floor, and I stepped out, unnoticed at first. Reception and conference rooms were on the fourth floor, and higher up it was mostly offices for HR and some of the more senior members of the staff—and my boss, of course, the idiot. I walked down the hallway, dragging the butt of the spear along behind me, like a kid drawing lines in the dirt with a stick. A security guard I didn’t recognize stepped out of an office in the corridor, holding a weapon that I thought at first was a gun and then realized was a taser. Latu must have called in the arrival of a man with a spear before Dana zapped his brain, or else he’d awakened since then and summoned assistance. “The police are on the way,” the guard said. He was young, freckled, and jittery. “Put down the, ah . . . spear.” He shook his head. “I’ve heard of disgruntled employees coming back with a gun, but what do you think you’re going to do with that?” I stepped toward him, and he fired the taser. The contacts struck my chest, and I felt nothing, not even the tingle I’d experienced when I first grasped Ghostreaper. “Get out of my way,” I said. “I’m not here for you.” The guard dropped the taser and fumbled for his gun. “Dana?” I said. “Stop him.” She sighed, and swept her hand through his chest, and the guard fell back, clutching at his ribs, sliding down the wall. His eyes closed. “I didn’t say kill him!” “I didn’t.” Dana’s sulky tone was grating. “I just made his heart skip a little. I just knocked him out, god.” Somewhere someone screamed, and I heard the thud of running feet. More people would be calling the police soon. I hurried down the familiar corridors, past glassed-in offices and the occasional sad cubicle where contract workers and temps were consigned. My boss, the idiot, had a corner office, of course. His secretary’s desk was deserted, his door closed, and for a moment I thought I’d made a mistake, that he was gone, out of town for a meeting, or just having one of his famous three-hour lunches. Then his door banged open, and he stuck his head out, scowling. He wasn’t yet thirty, and had a very expensive ugly suit and a very expensive stupid haircut. “Where the fuck is—” he began. His eyes widened when he saw me. “Whitaker?” I was stunned when he began to laugh at me. “What the hell is that taped to your hand? Your toy spear from Halloween? Did you go as a Zulu warrior or something? I figured you for the kind of guy who’d dress in drag, or maybe just put on a leather vest and call it a —” He gasped as the point of the spear entered his belly, then slid up through his chest, and out through his throat. I was watching for it this time, and saw the gossamer substance of his soul caught on the end of Ghostreaper’s spearhead. It fluttered away, taking on definition as it fell, until it was recognizably the idiot’s ghost, hovering just above the ground on all fours, shaking his head in confusion. “That’s good,” I said. “Stay like that. Crawl on hands and knees. You don’t get to stand up.” He lifted his stupid face, squinting at me. “Whitaker? I don’t—” “Understand what’s happening to you,” I ordered. “And then shut the fuck up.” His eyes widened, but he didn’t speak. I saw Dana in my peripheral vision, desperately trying not to be noticed, doubtless afraid I’d turn my wrath on her. But the wrath was running out of me like water from a cracked cup. Where would this end? I’d had legitimate grievances against these two, but what would Elsie want me to do next? What offenses were worthy of Ghostreaper’s touch? Should I go back to my hometown in Idaho and take revenge on the aging upperclassmen who’d played “smear the queer” with me in high school? Track down the guy I’d had a one-night-stand with, who’d stolen my TV while I slept hungover in the bed we’d shared? There’s an old saying: “He who seeks revenge should dig two graves.” It’s meant to be a warning about the dark consequences of taking a vengeful path, but I think it’s just good advice. Because I was having a hard time imagining life after revenge. “Elsie,” I said. “I don’t know if I can—” “Don’t worry, sweetie.” She patted my shoulder. “Things are progressing nicely. These little grudges are fun, but they’re so petty. We’ve moved beyond that now. Let’s go to the roof.” I followed her, because I could hear sirens, and knew going downstairs wouldn’t end well.

* * * *

I let the idiot crawl up a flight of stairs—never quite touching the stairs, mind you—before becoming ashamed of my own pettiness and telling him to walk like a man. Now he and Dana hovered near one of the big air conditioners on the roof, while Elsie and I looked down at the chaos below. There were police cars, lots of them, parked at crazy angles in the street, the area blocked off by sawhorses. Crowds of bystanders were taking advantage of their lunch breaks to see what all the commotion was about. A man with a megaphone stood below, shouting something I couldn’t hear from ten stories above. “Ha,” Elsie said. “I’m at full visibility, and I bet they think I’m a hostage. This is great.” She glanced around at the taller buildings surrounding us. “Pretty soon sniper bullets are going to be bouncing off you left and right. There are lots of great perches for gunmen around here.” “What am I supposed to do now?” I was not expecting good advice. But I wasn’t expecting what she actually said, either. “What any animal does when it’s cornered, Dave. You’re going to fight. But unlike the noble but helpless, I don’t know, vole or whatever, when you’re set upon by badgers—let’s say—you’re going to surprise the hell out of them by actually winning.” I shook my head. Ghostreaper suddenly felt heavy in my hand, and if not for the duct tape binding it to my palm, it might have fallen from my grasp. “But what’s the point? There’s just—there’s no good outcome here.” “Here’s what I’d like to see happen.” Elsie touched her chest modestly. “You go on a complete rampage. You stroll down there, or better yet, leap right off the roof, fall ten stories, land in a crouch, and stand up unharmed, swinging the spear like a badass. The cops open fire, bullets bounce off. They try to swarm you, bury you in bodies, and you swing the spear a time or two. Pretty soon your sad little ghost pity party back there becomes a ghost army, and they clear you a path. The cops call in reinforcements. Air support. The National Guard. All kinds of tactical backup. You just walk right through them all. The cops crash cars into you, they shoot missiles at you, I’m talking full-on action movie video game shit.” Her eyes were shining. I don’t mean in some metaphorical sense; I mean they were actually shining, radiating white light as she contemplated that imagined destruction. “Picture it, Dave. A trail of fire and disaster follows you wherever you go. The military steps in, and you brush off their tanks and bombs too, because while you hold the spear, you’re a creature made of iron in a world made of tapioca pudding. Eventually you become a warlord, because there’s pretty much nothing else you can do. You become a conqueror because there’s no other way you can get any rest. You sit on a throne atop a mountain of skulls. I don’t know how that works, logistically—I guess you epoxy the skulls together or something. The world changes, and it can never change back.” She grinned again, and there was blood on her teeth, either from biting her own lip or from some other, more mysterious, source. “Then, when you’re all settled in as king of the world, maybe I find some lowly fucker and give him one of the other toys I’ve come across in my travels. A sword, maybe, that sings notes that can shatter buildings. Or a horn that calls forth the spirits of dead monsters, or an axe forged from the last fragment of a broken alien moon. Something along those lines. And then we have some real fun.” I barked a laugh. “And what if that doesn’t sound like fun to me? What if I won’t fight?” She shrugged. “I’ll take the spear away. You’ll get caught by the cops and go to jail. Even if they can’t pin any murders on you, you came to work and took hostages with a big spear—you’ll get stuck in a psych ward at the very least. Where you’ll be stuck in a cell with your two ghosts, by the way. Maybe you can use the ghosts to escape, and then you’ll get to be an aging fugitive— goodie for you. As for me? I’ll just have to overcome my sadness at your failure and try again with someone else. Ghostreaper is a gift that keeps on giving. You won’t all be such horrible disappointments.” Earlier that morning, I’d expected to die. I’d planned for it. Staying alive had only led to more deaths—and, oddly, I wasn’t bothered by that, not really. The world was better without Dana and my idiot boss, and if they hadn’t deserved death, so what—neither had Richard, and he’d died all the same. But being forced to spend the rest of my life with the ghosts of people I despised was a cruel sort of victory, even if they were puppets I could order to dance. Nor did I relish the prospect of death in a hail of bullets, or conscious suffering in a prison under suicide watch. Or the thought of Elsie laughing at whatever misfortune befell me, growing fat on the chaos I’d created. So I tore away the tape from my wrist, and propped the base of the spear against the low wall that ran around the perimeter of the roof. I positioned the spearhead over my heart, leaning gently against it. “You wanna be careful with that thing, Dave—” The spear pierced me, and I felt no pain . . . until I took my hands away from the shaft, and lost my invulnerability to the weapon, and the point of the spear passed through my body. I didn’t expect it to hurt, but it did, like my body was a sheet of paper being torn in half. My vision blurred, and I gasped, and when my eyes cleared, I saw my own crumpled body lying on the roof. Elsie whistled. “You reaped yourself? I have to say I didn’t see that coming. Usually I like surprises, but this one, not so much.” I looked around. Dana and the idiot were nowhere to be seen. “They’re free.” Elsie waved her hand around vaguely. “They went . . . wherever ghost-slaves go, once their owner dies.” “But I’m still here.” I patted my body, which felt perfectly substantial to me. The rest of the world, however, had gone soft and faded, resembling a watercolor painting of reality. “That’s because you’re a ghost bound in service to yourself. Which is, more or less, the same as having free will. It’s all very boring, Dave. I wanted a banquet of chaos from you, or at least a never-ending salad bowl, and I barely got an appetizer. I’ll just have to take my spear and go—” I had no idea whether my plan would work or not, but I stepped forward, and stuck my head inside her head. Being inside Elsie was like dunking my head into a cauldron of boiling blood while trying to put on a suit of ill-fitting armor. I twisted and writhed inside her, and she fought, screaming at me—but once I got myself aligned properly, she couldn’t reach me, any more than I could claw at my own spleen. She fell down, and then I was inside the borders of her body entirely, looking out through her eyes. I made her arms and legs move, inelegantly, and lurched toward the edge of the roof. Then I made her topple over the side. Halfway down, I let myself float out of her body, and drifted down to the street slowly. She didn’t break when she landed, didn’t splash—just lay sprawled on the sidewalk, some magic keeping her from coming apart. But I’d done a number on whatever she had for a brain, because she just twitched and writhed as the police descended on her, pointing their guns and shouting. I had no illusions that the authorities would hold her for long, no matter how much they wanted to question her. I had no true understanding of what Elsie was, apart from trouble, but I knew she had powers beyond my understanding. But I hoped they could keep her for a little while. For long enough.

* * * *

I escaped in the body of one of my former co-workers. There was so much chaos and confusion with the police, press, concerned relatives, and bystanders milling around that it was surprisingly easy to take the back stairs and stroll away with Ghostreaper wrapped in a torn curtain, tucked under my arm. It was just a short walk to the Embarcadero—though it took me a long time, and I’m sure I looked like a lurching drunk—and then a short wait for the ferry across the bay. The woman selling tickets gave my bundle an odd look, but when I mumbled “Curtain rods,” she just shrugged. I dropped Ghostreaper over the side of the ferry not far from the Golden Gate Bridge, the heavy point dragging the spear’s shaft down, down, down. I left my co- worker’s body—twitching and shuddering on the ferry, making a commotion; Elsie would have enjoyed it—and let myself sink down into the water after the spear. Ghostreaper fell unerringly downward, its descent perfectly vertical, until its point disappeared into the muck at the bottom of the bay. I looked for a while at the shaft, which stood upright like a standard without a flag I missed the cold comfort of the spear in my hand. Even in the depths of the bay, in the frigid waters, I didn’t feel that wonderfully numb. Turning my face up, I floated to the surface. Breaking from the water, I gazed at the unlovely underside of the Golden Gate Bridge, a structure that’s so pretty from other angles. Dana and the idiot hadn’t shown any indication that they could fly, but then, I’d been their master, and I’d never told them to. So I told myself: fly. And rose like a leaf caught in a dust devil, spiraling upward toward the bridge. Maybe I should have driven to the Golden Gate and jumped off, instead of trying to kill myself in my garage. That would have spared me meeting Elsie. I’d wanted to go quietly, that was all, I hadn’t wanted to cause any fuss, and wasn’t that a laugh— “Hey, Davey boy.” Elsie leaned against the railing on the bridge’s pedestrian walkway, one eyebrow raised. I jerked backward, spinning in the air away from her, out of her reach. She laughed, a black scarf blowing around her in the wind. She wore a puffy red ski jacket that exactly matched the fiery shade of her hair, and she was the only perfectly clear and sharp-edged thing in my watercolor world. “Don’t panic. I can’t hurt you now, even if I wanted to. Besides, I’m impressed. I’m used to being the trickster, not so much getting tricked. Anyway, I lied earlier. I’m not really heavily into revenge, it’s too predictable.” She crooked her finger, beckoning me, but I didn’t come any closer. “Listen,” she said. “How about you and me travel together for a while? I used to know a guy who could take control of people’s bodies, but we had a falling out when I had to assassinate his best friend. I always thought I’d have fun with somebody who could take another person’s initiative that way. You and me, Dave, we could go down to Hollywood, get some movie stars in trouble—” I lifted my head and floated up, rising away as fast as I could—which seemed to be very fast. But I still heard Elsie’s voice screeching after me: “Hey, Carson, where exactly are you going?” I didn’t answer her. I didn’t care if she ever figured it out. I was going to see the stars.

Tim Pratt’s short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Year’s Best Fantasy, and other nice places. His most recent collection is Hart and Boot and Other Stories, and his work has won a Hugo Award and been nominated for World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Stoker, Mythopoeic, and Nebula Awards. He blogs intermittently at timpratt.org, where you can also find links to many of his stories. Pratt is also a senior editor at Locus, the magazine of the science fiction and fantasy field. He lives in Berkeley, CA, with his wife, writer Heather Shaw, and their son River. To learn more, read our Author Spotlight on Tim Pratt. Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard Jonathan Maberry

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He had six different names. It was Francisco Sponelli on his birth certificate, but even his parents never called him that. They called him Little Frankie most of his life. A kid’s name that, once hung on him, made sure he’d never quite grow up. His father wasn’t even Big Frankie. Dad was Vinnie. Big Frankie was an uncle back in Sicily but who wasn’t called Big Frankie in Sicily; just when people talked about him. Big Frankie never set a goddamn foot on American soil. In school—from about four minutes after he stepped onto the kindergarten playground—he was Spoons. It was better than Little Frankie in about the same way that a kick in the balls was better than catching the clap. Not a holiday either way. In the old neighborhood in South Philly—he was Frankie Spoons for all of the six months he lived there. And that’s a cool name. Made him sound like a Made Man, which he would never and could never be, but it sounded great when he walked into the taproom and someone called out, “Hey, Frankie Spoons, come on and have a beer with the grown-ups.” Actually, no one ever said exactly that, but it was in his head. It’s what he heard every time he walked into the bar. Especially when he saw one of the Donatellas there, who were third or fourth cousins. It was the kind of thing they said to each other because they were made men. The Donatella cousins worked a protection racket their family had owned since the sixties. They all had great nicknames and they all said cool things to each other. Francisco just like hanging out at that bar because it made him feel like a man, like a tough guy. Then he knocked up a girl from the ’burbs, and next thing he was living in a crappy little town called Pine Deep in the inbred Deliverance backwoods of Bucks County. Near her folks and family, way too far from Philly, and although it was right over the bridge from New Jersey, it wasn’t over the right bridge. Cross over the Delaware up there and you’re in fucking Stockton or Lambertville or some other artsy-fartsy damn place where they put boursin cheese on a son of a bitching cheese- steak, which is like putting nipple rings on the Virgin Mary. Out there in Pine Deep he was Spoonsie to the guys at the Scarecrow Tavern. Another stupid name that clung to him like cow shit on good shoes. He longed to go back to Philly, but Debbie kept popping out kids like she had a t-shirt cannon in her hoo- hah. And any conversation involving “sex” and “condoms” became a long argument about a bunch of Bible shit that he was sure didn’t really matter to God, Jesus, the Virgin, or anyone else. Four kids and counting. In this economy? On his pay? Seriously? God wants kids to grow up poor and stupid in a town like this? As his Uncle Tony was so fond of saying, “Shee-eee- eee-ee-it.” But . . . The nickname was only part of it. It was a splinter under the skin. The kids? Well, fuck it. He did love them. Loved the process of making them, too, though he’d like to explore the option of stopping before he and Debbie turned their lives into one of those we-have-no-self-control-over-our- procreative-common-sense reality shows. He suspected that she had some kind of mental damage. She seemed to enjoy being pregnant. Bloated ankles, hemorrhoids, mucus plugs, the whole deal. He was pretty sure that on some level Debbie was—to use the precise medical term—batshit crazy. But she was also the most beautiful woman he’d ever talked to. Even now, four kids in and a bigger ass than she used to have, Debbie could look at him from out of the corners of her eyes and stop his heart. Even now. So . . . he stayed in Pine Deep. And he worked in Pine Deep. That was something by itself. A lot of people in town didn’t have jobs. The town was still recovering from the Trouble, and the economy blew. Sure, a few of the stores had rebuilt and there was some out-of-town money to rebuild the infrastructure. Federal bucks. And after the town burned down, there was that big rock concert fundraiser bullshit. Willie Nelson, the Eagles, Coldplay, bunch of others including some rappers Francisco never even heard of. It was on TV with that stupid nickname: ANTI-terror. With terror crossed out. All those middle- aged rock stars, none of whom had ever even heard of Pine Deep before those militiamen torched everything, singing about unity and brotherhood. Blah, blah, blah. If any of the money they raised ever actually reached the town, it never made it into Francisco Sponelli’s bank account. All he got was an offer of free counseling for PTSD, which he didn’t have, and a stack of literature about surviving domestic terrorism, which he didn’t read, and a pissant break on his taxes for two years, which wasn’t enough. On the upside—which Francisco didn’t think was really “up” in any way—the Trouble had kind of passed him by. He and Debbie and the kid—only one back then —were down in Warrington watching a movie at the multiplex when it all went down. They heard it on the news driving back. The news guys said that a bunch of shit-for-brains white supremacists put drugs like LSD and other stuff into the town’s drinking water and every single person went apeshit. What made it worse was that it was Halloween and the town was totally packed with tourists. All those thousands of people went out of their minds and started killing each other. Worst day of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. That much was a fact. Francisco took Debbie and the kid to her sister’s in Doylestown for a week. By the time they came back, Pine Deep looked like a war zone. Lot of people they knew were dead. Lot of the town was gone. Just freaking gone. Lot of people out of work, too, because Pine Deep was built with tourist dollars. One of the few businesses that didn’t go under was the one he worked for. The one owned by Tom Gaines, Debbie’s third cousin. Francisco’s workload tripled, but he didn’t get overtime. Gaines said he couldn’t afford it because a lot of the customers couldn’t afford to pay. Not right away. Some not at all. But the job still had to be done. And that was his life. Working for one of Debbie’s family at shit for pay. Not exactly starvation wages, but it was a job with no future. Not really. Sure, he could have the job for as long as he wanted, but there was nowhere to go. There was no promotion possible. The whole company was the owner, Mr. Gaines, and him. And a couple of guys they hired by the hour to help with some heavy stuff. All of the rest of it was Francisco’s to do. Trimming all the hedges. Pruning the trees. Mowing the grass. Digging the graves. And . . . the other stuff. The stuff he did at night. So the graves wouldn’t be messed with. Mr. Gaines sometimes slipped him a couple extra bucks when things got bad. And he let Francisco drink as much as he wanted on the job. He encouraged Francisco. It was that kind of a job. -2-

Before the Trouble, the job wasn’t really that bad. Dead people don’t complain, they don’t give you shit. They don’t dime you out when you go into one of the crypts to smoke a joint. He could get to a level, get mellow, and that would carry him through even the longest shift. The job was quiet except for occasionally chasing teenagers out of the crypts who’d gone there to drink or light up. Once in a while some prick vandal would use spray paint to tag a mausoleum or knock over a few headstones. But that happened in every cemetery, and everyone knew that, so Francisco adjusted to it as part of the job. The job was okay. Even for a while after the Trouble it was tolerable. He worked mostly days, and Gaines didn’t go out of his way to be a prick. The boss was cheap, but not a cheap fuck. The difference mattered. Then things started changing. It started with people talking. The Scarecrow was one of the few bars that wasn’t burned down, and it was a good place for a plate of wings and a schooner of Yuengling at the end of a day. But the flavor of the conversation there changed as the weeks and months went on. It really started after the cops and fire inspectors sorted out the last of the bones. It had taken a lot of sweat and elbow grease to put together a list of all the dead. The official tally was 11,641. Two thirds of the whole town. Only the thing was that there weren’t that many bodies. The count was short. Eighty-four short, and that’s a lot of bodies to misplace. They brought in teams of dogs to search the woods and the fields and under frigging haystacks. Still eighty- four missing. The count stayed the same. That’s when the vandals started hitting the cemetery. Knocked-over headstones, grave dirt churned up, his tool shed broken into, beer bottles everywhere. Couple of times he discovered that someone had pissed on a grave he’d just filled in. He mentioned all this to his cousins over a poker game. Near Danny was nodding before he finished describing the disturbances. “Sure, sure, that makes sense,” said Near Danny. “It does?” asked Francisco, confused. “Yeah,” agreed Far Danny. “People are blowin’ off steam. With all that shit happening—” “All those people dying,” added Near Danny. “All that death and shit . . . ” “ . . . they’re like obsessed with that death shit.” “Morbid.” “Morbid.” Francisco looked back and forth between them. “Okay, but why trash the cemetery?” Near Danny and Far Danny said it at the same time. “Power.” Francisco said, “Huh?” “Death came to that little fucking town and made everybody its bitch,” said Far Danny. Near Danny nodded. “And that boneyard—hell, that . . . what word am I looking for?” “‘Symbolizes,’” supplied Far Danny. “Yeah, that boneyard symbolizes death. So . . . of course someone who lost everything’s going to go take a piss on it.” “Show death that he’s alive, that he’s nobody’s bitch.” The two Dannys nodded. “Wow,” said Francisco. Then Far Danny leaned across the card table and stabbed a finger at him. “But if any of these mamluke bastards fucks with you, then that’s different.” “It is?” Near Danny grunted and gave him a hard sneer. “You’re family.” “Nobody fucks with the family,” said Far Danny. “No fucking body, you hear me, Frankie Spoons?” “Any shit comes down you can’t handle, you pick up the phone.” They sat there grinning at him like extras from a bad gangster film. Chest hair and gold chains, big gold rings, perpetual five o’clock shadows. But they were the real deal. South Philly muscle who were tough on a level that Francisco could understand only from a distance. It was the kind of feeling you got looking at the big cats in the zoo. Then the conversation turned to sports, as it always did. Could the Eagles do anything about their passing game, ’cause right now it was like watching the Special Olympics. More weeks passed, and that’s when people in town started talking. Whispering, really. Real quiet, nothing out loud. Nothing in front of anyone. The whispers started over beers. At first it was late at night, before closing, guys talking the way guys do. Talking shit. Throwing theories out there because that was the time of night for that kind of thing. Even then people talked around it. They didn’t so much say it as ask questions. Putting it out there. Like Scotty Sharp who asked, “Do you think they really put drugs in the water?” People said sure, of course they did. The Fed tested the water, they did blood tests on the people. That’s when Mike DeMarco said, “Yeah, well my sister Gertie’s oldest daughter goes out with that kid, you know the one. He’s an EMT up in Crestville. And he said that only about one in four people tested positive for drugs.” Then some guy would say that was bullshit and there’d be an argument. It would quiet things down. Until the next time it came back up. Lucky Harris—and Francisco thought Lucky was a kickass nickname—asked, “Did you guys see that thing on the History Channel?” They all did. A special about Pine Deep. Two thirds of it was the same bullshit you could get out of any tourist brochure, but then there was section near the end when they interviewed a few survivors—and Francisco wondered if they deliberately picked the ones who looked like they were either half in the bag or half out of their minds. These “witnesses” insisted that the Trouble wasn’t what the news was saying it was, that the white supremacist thing was a cover up for what was really happening. And this is where the host of the show changed his voice to sound mysterious right as he asked what the real truth was about the Pine Deep Massacre. “It was monsters,” said the witness. An old duffer with white around his eyes. “What kind of monsters?” asked the host. “All kinds. Vampires and werewolves and demons and such. That’s always been the problem with Pine Deep . . . we got monsters. And that night? Yeah, the monsters came to get us.” The host then condensed the eyewitness reports into a speculation that the white supremacists were really servants of a vampire king—like Renfield was to Dracula —and that the drugs in the water and all of the explosions were distractions, subterfuge. Then there was a montage of jump shots that lasted only long enough for a dozen other witnesses to say the word “vampire.” The segment ended with the kind of dumbass tell-nothing questions those shows always have, accompanied by stock footage of old Dracula flicks and shots of Pine Deep taken with cameras tilted to weird angles. “Was Pine Deep the site of an attack by vampires? Do the dead really walk the earth? Have creatures out of legend begun a war against the world of the living? And what about the missing eighty-four? Authorities continue to search for their bodies, but there are some who believe that these people aren’t missing at all and are instead hiding . . . and perhaps hunting during the long nights in this troubled little town. Government sources deny these claims. Local law enforcement refuse to comment. But there are some . . . who believe.” The guys at the Scarecrow had all seen that special. Just as they all seen the headlines of the National Enquirer which had supposed photos of vampires on the front page at least once a month. Everybody knew about the stories. The conspiracy theories. As soon as the main shock of the tragedy died down, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert went ass-wild on the subject. They did bits about small town vampires. Conan started a running segment with a vampire dressed in farmer’s coveralls; at the end of each segment the vampire would get killed in some funny way. He’d go out to harvest, forgetting he’d planted his fields with garlic. He’d trip over a chicken and fall on a convenient sharp piece of wood. The vanes of a windmill would cast a shadow of a cross on him. Shit like that. Making a joke out of it because it was stupid. Vampires. It was all bullshit. Except that as the first year crumbled into the dirt and the next year grew up dark and strange, it got harder and harder to call it bullshit. Especially after people started dying. There was a rash of car accidents in town. Accidents weren’t all that rare with all the twists and turns on A32, but before the Trouble it was mostly tourists who wrapped their SUVs or Toyotas around an oak tree they didn’t see, or college kids driving too drunk and too fast with too much faith in their underdeveloped decision- making capabilities. But there was no tourism in Pine Deep right now. Maybe in another couple of years. Maybe if some outside group rebuilt the Haunted Hayride and the other attractions. Right now, State Alternate Route A32 was mostly empty except for farm workers coming and going to day jobs or farmers’ wives heading into town to work shifts at the hospital or at one of the craft shops. So it was locals who started dying. Linda Carmichael went first. Her six-year-old Hyundai went off the road, rolled, and hit a parked hay baler that was sitting at the edge of a field. The papers said she was so badly mangled that her husband had to confirm her I.D. by looking at a mole on what was left of her torso. Francisco didn’t know if he believed that part, but when he drove past the accident spot on the way to work the next day, the car looked like a piece of aluminum foil somebody’d crinkled up. It was a matter of discussion at the Scarecrow, but the Carmichaels weren’t part of their circle, so the conversation moved on to sports. The second accident was a bus full of Puerto Rican day workers. Nine dead because the bus skidded off the road and hit a panel truck. Both drivers were dead, too. There were no witnesses, but it must have been a hell of an impact to mangle everyone that badly. “Yeah, maybe,” said Lou Tremons, “but here’s the thing, Spoonsie, there were no skid marks, and my cousin Davy heard Sheriff Crow say that it didn’t look like a high speed crash.” “Well hell, son,” said Scotty, “you can’t kill that many people in a low speed crash.” They all agreed that the sheriff, who used to be a drunk a long time ago, was probably drinking again and didn’t know his ass from his elbow. The conversation turned to sports. But the deaths kept happening. A mailman ran his truck into a drainage ditch and went halfway through the windshield in the process. Aaron Schmidt’s son flipped his motorcycle. Like that. All violent accidents. Every body torn up. Lots of blood on the blacktop. Except . . . Lou’s cousin Davy heard Sheriff Crow tell his deputy that there didn’t seem to be enough blood. In each case there was less than you’d expect. When Francisco dropped that little tidbit the conversation at the bar stalled. Nobody talked sports that night. Nobody said much of anything that night. Even Francisco kept his thoughts to himself and watched the foam on his beer disappear, one bubble at a time. The following summer was when the fires started. Everyone blamed it on the constant high temperatures, on global warming. But this was Pennsylvania, not Wyoming. There was a lot of water in the state, and even with the heat there was plenty of rain. Francisco found it hard to buy that a drought killed all those people. And a lot of people burned up, too. Three of the Carter family went up while they slept. Only Jolene survived because she was in the Navy. The guys all talked about that, and Bud Tuckerman suggested that it was more likely bad wiring because Holly Carter always had the air conditioners going full blast, and it had been a lot of summers since her husband had bought a new unit. The other guys mumbled agreement, but nothing sounded like enthusiastic support for that theory to Francisco. The other fires? Five dead at the Hendrickson farm when the barn went up and cooked some kids from the horse camp. The wiring at the camp was inspected twice a year. Scotty said so because that’s what he did for a living, and he’d swear on a stack of fucking bibles that everything was up to code. Better than code, he said. A lot of beers got drunk in thoughtful silence that night. The weeks of summer burned away, and by fall there were four more fires. Two businesses, one hotel, one house. That last one was a ball-buster. That’s where it hit home to the guys at the Scarecrow. It was Lou Tremons who got fried. After the funeral, the guys met at the tavern in a missing man formation, with Lou’s seat left empty and a glass of lager poured for him. The conversation was lively for most of the night as they all told lies about Lou. Tall tales, funny stories, some tearful memories. Francisco talked about the time he and Lou drove down to Philly to play cards with the Donatella cousins. Francisco described how Lou nearly busted a nut trying not to laugh at what everyone called the cousins. They were both named Danny, and as cousins they looked a lot alike, almost like twins, except that one of the Dannys—the one from Two Street—was really short, maybe five-seven and the other Danny, the one who lived near Gino’s Steaks, was a moose, six-seven. They looked like the same guy seen up close and far away, and long ago the Don had nicknamed the big one Near Danny and the little one Far Danny. Francisco warned Lou ahead of time not to laugh about it to their faces. Near Danny would break his arm off and beat Lou to death with it; and Far Danny carried a Glock nine and a straight razor and he was a bad mamba- jamba. They worked the protection racket and they were a pair of guys with whom you absolutely did not want to fuck. No sir, no way. Francisco had a private motive for inviting Lou to the game. The Donatellas always called him Frankie Spoons, and he hoped Lou would pick it up and spread it to Pine Deep. But that didn’t happen. They had fun, though. Francisco caught the laughter in Lou’s eyes all through the night, but Lou kept it a plug in it until they were back in the car on I-95 heading north toward home. “Then he totally lost his shit,” said Francisco, and everybody had a good long laugh. Then they toasted Lou and tapped their glasses to his and drank. More than a couple of them had tears in their eyes. Mike said, “Hey, Spoonsie, I saw a big bunch of flowers from the Donatella family. Was that the Dannys?” “Yeah,” said Francisco. “Nice of ‘‘em.” “Yeah. They’re standup. They liked Lou.” The guys nodded. Everyone liked Lou. What wasn’t to like? “Far Danny called me,” added Francisco. “After Lou . . . you know.” Everyone nodded. “He said that he heard a lot of people been dying here in town.” More nods. Nobody said anything. “Then he asks me if I thought there was anything hinky with Lou’s death.” “Hinky,” said Mike. Not a question, just keeping the word out there. “Hinky,” agreed Francisco. “Why’d he want to know that, Spoonsie?” asked the bartender, Joey, who was leaning on the bar, listening like he usually did. “Like I said, he and Near Danny both thought Lou was okay. They told me they thought he was standup.” Nods. “I thought you said those boys were wiseguys,” said Joey. Francisco shrugged. “Yeah, well . . . they’re not bad guys.” Which was bullshit and they all knew it, but they were Francisco’s cousins and when you’re related to criminals —unless they were pedophiles or like that—then whatever they did wasn’t so bad. Or as bad. Or something. None of them really looked too close at it. “If it was something hinky, then maybe they’d have come up here, looked into it. They’re like that. Lou was my friend and he didn’t shark them at cards, and they laughed at his jokes. So, I guess . . . you know.” They nodded. They knew. “But I told them it was just an accident,” said Francisco. “Just a string of bad luck.” They nodded at that, too, but no one met his eyes. The only one there who was nearly silent all evening was Scotty, and eventually Francisco noticed. “What’s wrong, man?” he asked. Scotty was friends with Lou, but only here at the bar. They weren’t really tight. “I don’t know, Spoonsie,” Scotty began, fiddling with a book of matches. He’d pulled each match off and distractedly chipped off the sulfur with his thumbnail and peeled the paper apart layer by layer. He stopped and stared down at the pile of debris on the bar as if surprised that it was there. “What is it?” asked Lucky Harris. “It’s just that . . . ” Scotty began, faltered and tried it again. “It’s just that I’m beginning to wonder if your cousin Far Danny is right.” “About what?” asked Francisco. “About there being something hinky.” “About Lou’s death?” “That . . . and everything else that’s going on in town. You know . . . since the Trouble.” Everyone was looking at him now, and the intensity of their attention formed a little cone of silence around that end of the bar. Francisco was dimly aware of other people, other conversations, music, the Flyers on the flatscreen, but suddenly it all belonged to another world. “What are you saying?” asked Mike. “I don’t know what I’m saying,” Scotty said, in a way that said he did know what he was saying. Everyone waited. He took a breath and let it out. “I was watching that show again. You know the one.” They nodded. “And sometimes—not all the time, but sometimes—I wonder if it’s all bullshit or if maybe, y’know, there’s something there.” He suddenly looked around, trying to catch everyone’s eyes, looking for someone laughing at him. Francisco followed his gaze, looking for the same thing. But nobody was laughing. Nobody was smiling. Most of the guys did nothing for a few moments, then one by one they nodded. That killed the conversation. And it nearly stopped Francisco’s heart from beating. He saw Scotty say something completely under his breath. Francisco read his lips, though. Scotty said, “Jesus Christ.”

-3-

Over the next few months things in Pine Deep seemed to swing back and forth between a rash of new deaths and periods of calm. In a weird way, Francisco was more freaked out by the long spaces between the deaths. It was too much like calms before bad storms. And each one was a little longer than the last, so each time it became way too easy to start thinking that it was over. This time it was over. Except that it wasn’t over. The guys still met at the Scarecrow. They still talked about things, and all the time what Scotty said stayed with them like they’d been tattooed with it. But they didn’t actually talk about it. Not out loud, not in words. But through eye contact? Sure. And with silences and with things that weren’t said aloud. They all knew each other well enough to have those kinds of conversations. Francisco wondered who would pick up Scotty’s conversational ball and run with it. For his part, Francisco had to deal with another effect of the increased mortality in Pine Deep. He managed a cemetery. He dug the graves. And he didn’t like what was going on at Pinelands Grove, which was what the place was called. His discomfort with things at work started a few weeks after Lou’s funeral. It was an overcast day late in October. The colors of the autumn leaves were muted to muddy browns and purples as the slate gray sky thickened into an early darkness. A wet wind was blowing out of the southwest, and the breeze was filled with the smells of horseshit and rotting leaves. Francisco was working in the west corner of the Grove, which was almost a mile from the front gate. The Grove was huge, with sections of old plots that dated back to the Civil War and even a few to Colonial times. But the west corner was new. Before the Trouble it had been a cabbage field that belonged to the Reynolds farm, but all the Reynolds’ died that night and the farm went to a relative who sold it cheap just to unload it. Now the only thing that was planted there were dead bodies. Nineteen in the last month. Not all of them from accidents or fires, but enough so that it was a sad place to be. That afternoon the O’Learys, a nice young couple, buried their thirteen-year-old daughter. She’d been run over by a UPS truck. The truck driver tried to swerve, at least according to the skid marks on the road, but he’d clipped her and then plowed right into a tree. Two dead. Francisco didn’t know where the driver was buried. Doylestown or New Hope, maybe. But little Kaitlin O’Leary went into the ground after a noon graveside service. Pretty pink coffin that probably cost too much for her family to afford. One of those sentimental decisions funeral directors count on. And, Francisco thought, Kaitlin was their only kid. She wouldn’t need a car, college tuition, or anything else. If buying a pink casket gave her mother even a little bit of comfort, then fuck it. The family stayed while the coffin was lowered down by the electric winch, and they and all their friends tossed handfuls of dirt and pink roses into the hole, but Mrs. O’Leary lost it around then and her husband took her away before she had to watch Francisco dump a couple of yards of wormy dirt down on their little girl. Francisco waited a good long time to make sure nobody came late. Then he used a front-end loader to shift the dirt. He tamped it all down with his shoes and pats from a shovel, put his equipment away, and came back to arrange the bouquets and grave blankets according to the parents’ wishes. The garage was by the gate, but he didn’t mind the walk. He walked four or five miles a day here at the Grove, and he was okay with that. Kept his weight down, good for the heart. Except when he came walking across the damp grass toward the grave he could see that something was wrong. The flowers were no longer standing in a neat row waiting for him to arrange them. They were torn apart and scattered everywhere. The grave blanket was in pieces, too. And the little teddy bear Mrs. O’Leary had left for her little girl had been mutilated, gutted, its stuffing yanked out and trampled in the dirt. Francisco registered all of this, but what made him jerk to a stop and stand there was the condition of the grave. It was open. Open. “Jesus Christ,” he breathed. In the time it had taken Francisco to drive the front- end loader back and put his gear away, someone—some fucking maniac—had come up, dug up all the dirt, and left a gaping hole. Francisco snapped out of his shock and ran to the grave, skidded to a stop and teetered on the edge, staring down. The coffin was exposed. Pale pink metal, streaked with dirt. But it was worse than that. Much worse. The coffin had been pried open, the seals broken. Inside there was tufted white silk. There was a photo of the whole family at Disney world. There was a letter from Mrs. O’Leary. All of that was there. But Kaitlin was not there. She was gone. Gone. God.

-4-

That was one of the longest nights in Francisco’s life. Calling Gaines. Calling the cops. Answering a thousand questions. The cops—Sheriff Crow—grilling him, almost accusing him. Gaines looking furious and scared, and giving him looks. Everybody watching as the sheriff made Francisco take a breathalyzer. Their confusion when he passed. No trace of alcohol. All the rubberneckers showing up in crowds like someone sent out invitations. The reporters. First the local guys, then stringers for the regional news. Then the network TV vans. Shoving cameras and microphones in his face. Hour after hour. Then the O’Leary’s showing up. Yelling at him. Screaming. Mrs. O’Leary totally losing her shit. Nobody thinking that was strange, because it wasn’t strange. Francisco thought about how he’d feel if this was the grave of one of his kids. He’d fucking kill someone. Himself, probably. Francisco saw Mike and Scotty and Lucky from the Scarecrow. Some of the other guys, too. Hanging back, standing in a knot, bending now and then to whisper something to each other. Scotty nodded to him once, and that made him feel a little better. Solidarity. He was still one of them, and that wasn’t a sure bet at first. Sometimes things cut you out and make you one of “them,” one of the people the guys talk about rather than talk to. Debbie texted him a dozen times, asking if he was okay, telling him everything was on the news, telling him things would be okay, asking when he was coming home. It was nearly dawn before the cops cut him loose and let him drive home. By then most of the crowd was gone. His friends were gone, and the Scarecrow was closed. Even Gaines was gone. Probably on the phone with his lawyer, worrying about how much of his money he was going to lose to the O’Leary’s when they sued. And, of course, they would sue. This was America, everybody sued everybody. Might even mean that Gaines would fire him, cut his losses, try to blame it all on him. The last person left at the cemetery was Sheriff Crow. “You can go,” he said. Francisco stood for a while, though, staring at the grave. “Why?” he asked. For maybe the fiftieth time. The sheriff didn’t answer. Instead he asked a question he’d already asked. “And you saw no one here?” “Like I told you. I was alone here.” “No kids?” That was a new question and it startled him. “What—you think some jackasses from the college —?” “No, I mean younger kids. Did you see any young teenagers.” “No.” “No teenage girls?” Francisco shot him a look. “What? Like girls from Kaitlin’s class?” The sheriff just stood there, looking at him with an expression that didn’t give anything away. “You can go,” he said again. Francisco trudged back to his car, confused and hurt and scared. Sad, too. He wanted to go home and hug his kids, kiss his wife, and check the locks on all the doors. When he got into his car he checked his cell phone and saw that he’d missed a bunch of text messages. From Scotty and a couple of the guys. Shows of support. More from Debbie asking when he was coming home. And one from Far Danny. He grunted in surprise. The Dannys sometimes texted him, mostly about sports or card games, and always on the birthdays of his kids, but he didn’t expect to hear from them tonight. The message read: Saw u on the news, cuz. Somebody fucking with you? For some reason it made Francisco smile. He texted back, Don’t know what’s happening. Thanks for asking. As he was starting his car a reply message bing- bonged. Anybody gets in your shit, call. Francisco smiled again, started the car and drove home.

-5-

Francisco headed down the long, winding black ribbon of A32 with music turned up loud so he didn’t have to listen to his thoughts. An oldies station. Billy Joel insisting he didn’t start a fire. Francisco not hearing any of the words because you really couldn’t not listen to your thoughts about something like this. His car was bucketing along at eighty when he topped the rise that began the long drop down to the development where he lived. Immediately he slammed on the brakes. Two people were walking along the side of the road, so close to the blacktop that Francisco had to swerve to keep from clipping them. Two people. A tall man with thinning blond hair. A teenage girl. Walking hand-in-hand. They heard his car, heard the screech of his tires on the road, turned into the splash of high beams. They stared at him through the windshield. They smiled at him. Francisco screamed. He screamed so long and so loud that it tore his throat raw. The car began to turn, the ass-end swinging around, smoke rising from the rubber seared onto the asphalt, the world around the car spinning. The world in general losing all tethers to anything that made sense. Francisco had no memory of how he kept out of the ditch or kept from rolling. His hands were doing things and his feet were doing things but his mind was absolutely fucking numb as the car spun in a complete circle and then spun another half-turn so that when it rocked to a bone-rattling stop he was facing the way he’d come, his headlights painting the top of the rise and washing the two figures to paleness. Man and girl. They stood there, still looking at him. Still smiling. Francisco kept screaming. Screaming and screaming and screaming. Long after the car stopped rocking. The man and the girl hesitated, then they took a single step toward him. Which is when the light on their faces changed from white to rose pink. Behind the car, off behind the humped silhouette of the development, the sun clawed its way over the horizon. The man winced. So did the girl. Wincing did something to their mouths. It showed their teeth. Their teeth. Their teeth. The man spoke a single word, and even though Francisco couldn’t hear it, he saw the shape those pale lips made. Spoonsie Francisco screamed even louder. And then the man turned and pulled the girl’s hand. She, more reluctant, finally turned and the two of them ran across the road and vanished into the black shadows under the trees. Francisco screamed once more and then his voice ran down into a painful wet rasp. The man and the teenage girl were gone. Lou Tremons was gone. Kaitlin O’Leary was gone.

-6-

Francisco didn’t tell anyone about what he’d seen. By the time the sun was up and he was home and in Debbie’s arms on the couch, he was more than half sure he hadn’t seen what he’d seen. Because he couldn’t have. No fucking way. Right? That was a long, bad day. After he got a few hours of troubled sleep, Francisco got up, stood under a shower hot enough to melt paint off a truck, dressed, and drove back to the Grove. There was yellow crime scene tape around the open grave, but no cops. The reporters and news trucks were gone, too. Francisco called Gaines to see what was what, mostly worried about whether he still had a job. Gaines sounded bad. “Look,” he said, “can you work tonight?” “Tonight?” Francisco hoped his voice didn’t sound as bad to his boss as it did to his own ears. “We . . . we can’t let this happen again.” “I—” “I’m not blaming you,” said Gaines, in a way that left some doubt about that. “But we need someone there.” Francisco didn’t want to mention that he was actually there when this shit happened. He said he’d stay late. The image of Lou and little Kaitlin O’Leary went walking across the fragile ice in the front of his mind. “Bullshit,” he said out loud. That usually worked. It didn’t do shit today. He got back in his car, drove home, went into his bedroom, and got his gun. Debbie was out, the older kids were in daycare or school, and the house was empty. He sat on the edge of the bed and loaded cartridges into the magazine of a Glock nine that Far Danny had given him once. “Hey, Frankie Spoons, this here’s a good piece,” said Far Danny. “Totally legal and shit. Not on any watch list.” “Good for keeping your kids safe,” added Near Danny. “Long as you’re living out in the fucking boonies you got to be careful.” At the time Francisco hadn’t wanted a gun, but even though they were family you simply didn’t argue with the Dannys. Now he was glad they’d given him a gift like this. Then a pang of mingled pain and fear stabbed through him. Lou Tremons had taught him how to load and shoot the gun. Feeling strange in more ways than he could describe, Francisco got back in his car and drove to work. There was a storm coming, and the day was so overcast that it looked like twilight, and it was only nine-thirty in the morning. Francisco parked by the shed and began the slow, sad walk back to the grave. But halfway there he veered to his left into a different section. To where Lou was buried. After a grave was filled in and the dirt had a chance to settle, Francisco brought in some rolls of sod and filled in the open dirt with green grass. It took a while for the sod to set, for the roots to anchor it to the ground beneath. It had been weeks since Lou was buried and the grass roots had long since taken. But as Francisco slowed to a stop by the grave, he could see that there was something wrong. The sod was wrinkled. There was a distinct bump in the middle. He squatted down and stared at it, studied it. He licked his lips, afraid to do what he was about to do. Then he reached out a hand and pulled at the sod. It came away like a heavy comforter. The roots were all torn, and below the layer of sod the grave dirt was wrong. It was loose, churned. “No,” said Francisco. He fell backward and clawed the gun out of his jacket pocket, dropped it, picked it up again, and bang! His finger had slipped inside the trigger guard and the gun went off by accident. The bang was so loud that he recoiled from it, the gun bucked so hard that it fell from his hand, the bullet hit the granite headstone and whipped backward past Francisco’s ear. The sound scared a hundred crows from the trees. Francisco sat there, his ass on the wet grass, feet wide, eyes wider, heart hammering, mouth opening and closing like a fish. Above and around him the world ticked on into the next minute, and the next. Then something happened. Something awful. The sod moved. It rippled. Twitched. Francisco absolutely could not move. All he could do was sit and stare. The grass cover bulged and trembled. The Glock lay on the edge of the grave, but Francisco could only stare as it rose up and thumped down as something moved beneath the sod. Then a pale worm wriggled out from under the edge of the grass cover. Thick, gray, deformed. And another. And another. Five worms in all, moving through the damp earth. Only they weren’t worms, and Francisco knew it. His mind screamed inside his head that this wasn’t happening, that it wasn’t true. But he knew. Not worms. Worms don’t have knuckles. Worms don’t have fingernails. Worms aren’t attached to a hand. A word boiled up inside Francisco’s throat and burned his mouth. He spat it out. “L—Lou . . . ?” The fingers stopped for a moment as if they’d heard him. There was a sound from under the sod, under the dirt, muffled and indistinct. Like a voice heard through a closed door. Like a voice. Like a name. Spoonsie. Then Francisco was up and running as fast as he could. He didn’t remember picking up the gun, but he became aware of it pressed to his chest with both hands. Hiding it because of his mistake? Or clutching it like a talisman? There was no time, no thought, no breath to answer those questions. His car tires kicked showers of mud and gravel and torn grass as he drove the hell out of there.

-7-

Francisco spent the whole day at the Scarecrow. The whole day. Joey the bartender tried to get him to talk about it, probably thinking it had to do with the big thing last night. And it did, Francisco was sure of it, but he couldn’t talk about it. Not now. Maybe not ever. The pistol was a cold weight between belt and belly flesh. Joey must have made some calls because Lucky Harris showed up. Then Mike and Scotty. They clustered around him. Nobody said a word. For hours. Joey put the TV on and they watched the news. Watched Family Feud. Watched The View. Watched the day get older. Outside it started to rain. There was a low snicker of thunder. It was late afternoon inside the bar; outside it looked like the middle of the night. Scotty was the first one to talk, to try and pry him open. “Hey, Spoonsie, you okay . . . ?” Francisco felt his nose tingle and then his eyes and then before he could get away from the guys and go hide in a toilet stall, he was crying. Really crying. Sobs, shoulders twitching, tears and snot running down his face. Any other time the guys might have fucked with him. Made fun, handled it like dicks because that’s what guys do when emotions get real for anything except the Super Bowl. But not after last night. Scotty—the closest their group had to a hard-ass— reached out and took Francisco’s hand, gave it a squeeze, but didn’t let it go. “We’re here, brother,” he said softly. Without wiping his face, without looking up, Francisco said, “I saw that little girl.” And he told them what he’d seen on the road. Lou Tremons. Kaitlin O’Leary. Walking hand-in-hand. Smiling at him. With all those long, white teeth. Saying his name. And then . . . the five white worms under the dirt. And that voice down there in the dirt. Saying his name again. Mike pressed a wad of paper napkins into his hand. Francisco stared at them for a moment, unable to comprehend what they were or what they were for. Then he wiped his face and his nose. Mike patted him on the back. Joey poured some shots and they all had one. No one told him he was crazy. No one asked him in he was sure. Maybe if this was another town. Maybe if the Trouble had never happened. Now, though . . . no one tried to tell him that he was wrong, or suggest that he’d imagined it. It was Lucky who asked, “What are you going to do?” It was unfortunately phrased. What are you going to do. Not we. There’s a line. If you stand on one side of it and let a statement like that go uncorrected, then the line becomes a wall. The moment stretched and everyone at the bar knew that Francisco was suddenly on one side of the wall, and they were on the other. Lucky tried to fix it without fixing it. “Spoonsie . . . you should just say fuck it. You should call Gaines and tell him to shove his job up his ass.” Francisco shook his head. “I can’t.” No one had to ask why. This was Pine Deep, and this was America, and if the economy blew in the rest of the country, then it was going deep throat in Pine Deep. There were no other jobs. “I got Debbie and the kids,” Francisco said. It was a stupid thing to say. Crazy. Impossible because the town had become impossible. The job was impossible. But there were no other doors marked “exit.” For better or worse, this was his town. His family lived here. And he had nowhere else to go, nowhere else he could go. The gun in his belt weighed a thousand pounds. His heart weighed more. -8-

When he was drunk enough that his legs could carry him and his terror, he staggered into the bathroom, locked himself into a stall, turned and leaned heavily against the door. It took nearly four full minutes to convince himself not to put the barrel of the gun into his mouth and blow his troubles all over the walls. Inside his head, some maniac had started a slide show, flashing high-res images onto the walls of his brain. A pink coffin resting on the canvas straps, ready to go into the ground. The same pink coffin open. Tufted silk. An eviscerated teddy bear. Cold dirt on white teeth. White fingers grubbing through the soil. Lou Tremons calling his name. On the road, under the ground. Monsters. In his town. “God . . . help me.” And as if in answer to his prayers, he heard the bing- bong alert of a new incoming text message. How’s it going? It was from Far Danny. Francisco almost laughed. How’s it going? Well, fuck me, cuz, I think I’m growing a crop of vampires, that’s how it’s going. How the hell are things with you? How’s the leg-breaking business? Any goddamn vampires in the protection racket? Those thoughts tumbled through his head and a laugh bubbled at the edge of his control. He had to fight it back because it was the wrong kind of laugh. The kind you don’t ever want to let get started because there’s no way you can stop it. That kind of laugh can break something you know can’t be fixed. He stared at the stupid message. How’s it going. So, instead of laughing, instead of going totally apeshit out his mind, Francisco did something else equally crazy. He called Far Danny and told him exactly how things were going. Every goddam bit of it.

-9-

Far Danny took it pretty well. After a bit. At first he got a little mad and asked Francisco if he was fucking with him. Then he asked him if he was drunk. And he asked if he was crazy. Francisco said no to the first question, yes to the others, but he didn’t take back anything he said. He couldn’t. It was out there. He wasn’t even afraid of pissing off the Dannys. Things had changed and getting his ass kicked by his goombah cousins didn’t seem so scary anymore. Far Danny said, “Debbie and the kids? They okay?” Francisco stiffened. It was already dark outside. He’d been here in the bar all day. “Oh, god . . . ”

-10-

Francisco ran out of the bathroom with the Glock in one hand and his car keys in the other. Lucky and Scotty and the others yelled and started to make a grab for him, misunderstanding what he was doing, but Francisco blundered past them and headed out into the rain. He drove badly and way too fast. He sideswiped a mailbox and tore some expensive stuff off the side of his car, and he didn’t give a cold shit about it. The storm was pounding down on the hood and windshield and Francisco as fast as he could all the way out of down, along the wet black tongue of Route A32, into his development, up to his front door, skidding to a sloppy stop and splattering mud ten feet high on the front of his house. Left the car door open, ran onto the porch, banged the door open. Scared the hell out of Debbie, who was putting supper on the table. The kids started yelling. The baby started screaming. Debbie saw the gun in his hand and the look in his eyes and she started screaming, too. It took a long time to calm everyone down. He had to calm down a lot to manage it. He put the gun on top of the fridge, out of any kid’s reach. He closed and locked the front door. Checked the whole house. Locked and pinned the windows. Took the cross down off the bedroom wall, the one Debbie’s grandmother had given them for their wedding. Heavy, with a silver Jesus nailed to it. Francisco had to lie to make Debbie calm down. He told her there was an escaped criminal in town. A madman. She looked at the cross in his hand and then at the top of the fridge, and deep lines cut into her pretty face. “Frankie,” she said very softly—too quiet for the kids to hear, “is this about . . . the Trouble?” He stared at her, floored. “What . . . ? How do you . . . ?” She shrugged. “At the beauty parlor. The girls. We . . . talk.” Outside the rain hammered the door and the thunder beat on the walls. An hour later Lou Tremons kicked open the front door.

-11-

Francisco and Debbie screamed. So did the kids. Even the baby, who didn’t know what was going on. Lou smiled. He seemed to like the screams. He was dressed in mud and rain water and his funeral clothes. He had Kaitlin O’Leary with him. And three other people. People Francisco had buried in closed coffins because they were supposed to have been too badly mangled in car wrecks or burned in fires. But they looked whole now. They were smiling, too. Wet lips, long white teeth. Red eyes. Debbie screamed again and broke away from Francisco’s side, throwing herself between the vampires and her children. Francisco raised the cross, holding it up like a torch against the darkness. A couple of them flinched. The little O’Leary girl hissed and backed away. Lou Tremons said with a wicked grin, “Yeah, well, here’s the thing, Spoonsie . . . I’m a fucking atheist. If we don’t believe in something it can’t hurt us, and I don’t believe in that shit.” A voice behind him said, “Do you believe in this shit?” Lou turned. Everyone turned. Far Danny stuck the barrel of a shotgun under Lou’s chin and pulled the trigger. As it turned out, Lou was able to grasp the concept of buckshot. Francisco screamed. Debbie and the kids screamed. Kaitlin O’Leary screamed. The other vampires screamed. Near Danny yanked the pull cord on a chainsaw. He screamed, too. But for him and his smaller cousin, the screams sounded a lot like laughter.

-12-

Francisco sat on beach chairs between Near Danny and Far Danny. It was the last day of October. Halloween. That night at the house was ten days ago, but it felt like ten years ago. Debbie and the kids were staying with Far Danny’s mother in South Philly. Just for a little while. Until things calmed down. Until things got straightened out. Scotty was gone. After that night at the bar, after what Francisco told them about Lou’s grave, he’d driven to a motel of town, then came back the next morning and put his house up for sale. Mike and the other guys were still here, though. But the nights at the Scarecrow were long and mostly silent. No one wanted to talk about what was going on in town. The Dannys went back to Philadelphia for a few hours, then came back with suitcases. They moved into Francisco’s house. Near Danny slept on the couch. Far Danny slept in the La-Z-Boy. They’d brought more guns and other stuff. The bodies of Lou Tremons and the others were back in the ground. Francisco had done that quietly, when no one was looking. The cemetery was a big place and these days not even the college kids went there to hang out. Only Kaitlin’s body was above ground. It was in the morgue. It had been “found” by a motorist on the highway. No one could explain how she managed to get a big piece of sharpened wood buried in her chest. Some kind of post-mortem mutilation by the madman who dug her up. That’s what the papers said. Sheriff Crow came and asked Francisco some questions, but not at as many as he expected. And the sheriff had a strange, knowing look in his eyes. He gave Francisco a smile and a pat on the shoulder, and that was the end of it. Of that part of it. Now it was ten days after the Dannys had come to Francisco’s house. Ten days after a slaughter that would probably keep his kids in therapy for the rest of their lives. Something to deal with. Something else to deal with. The three of them sat on beach chairs. There was an open plastic cooler between Francisco and Far Danny. “Beer me,” said Far Danny, and Francisco dug into the ice, pulled out a longneck bottle of Stella, popped the top and handed it to his cousin. He opened a fresh one for himself. They drank. Sitting in a row. Three thirty-something guys. Cousins. Drinking beer in a graveyard as the sun tumbled over the autumn trees and down behind the mountain. The grave in front of them was a new one. A construction worker named Hollis who’d died when scaffolding collapsed on him. Or so the story went. Lots of injuries, not enough blood at the scene. “Smart the way they do that,” said Near Danny. “Fucking up the body so you can’t tell,” agreed Far Danny. Francisco sipped his beer. They watched the bare patch of dirt that Francisco had filled in and patted down three hours ago. They’d brought a wheelbarrow with them. The handles of two shotguns stuck out the back, flanking the plastic grip of the Black and Decker chainsaw. There were other things in the wheelbarrow, too. Practical things. Holy water from St. Anne’s. The priest there was a fourth cousin. A Donatella. Bottles of garlic oil and Ziploc bags of garlic powder. From Aldo’s Pizza on Two Street. Stuff like that. There wasn’t a lot of conversation. Francisco had said his thanks. He’d wept his thanks, clinging to Debbie and the kids while looking up at the blood-splattered Dannys. It had all been said. And it was all understood. This was family. You do not fuck with family. Not even if you’re an undead blood-sucking soulless fiend. No sir. To have kept thanking the cousins would have been weak. And even though he was not a strong man, Francisco knew that. The sun fell away and the purple shadows flowed over the cemetery. Near Danny lit a Coleman camp lantern. They had another beer. Far Danny lit a joint and they passed it back and forth. The dirt trembled. The joint paused in mid handoff, Far Danny to Francisco. The dirt shivered and danced as something beneath it moved. Near Danny sighed, bent forward, grabbed the handle of the chainsaw and sat back with it. Watching the dirt. Francisco took the doobie and had a nice, long hit. Blew blue smoke out over the grave. The dirt bulged as something pushed upward. Rising. Coming out. Near Danny handed the chainsaw to Francisco. “Yo, Frankie Spoons,” he said. “You’re up.” Francisco took the chainsaw. But it was Frankie Spoons who stood up with it, jerked the ripcord, and stood wide-legged, waiting for the dead to rise.

© 2013 by Jonathan Maberry Productions. Originally published in The Bram Stoker Awards Weekend 2013 / World Horror Convention Souvenir Book, edited by Norman Rubenstein. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Jonathan Maberry is an NY Times bestselling author, multiple Bram Stoker Award winner, and Marvel Comics writer. He’s the author of many novels, including Assassin’s Code, Flesh & Bone, Dead of Night, Patient Zero, and Rot & Ruin; and the editor of V-Wars: A Chronicle of the Vampire Wars. His nonfiction books range on topics from martial arts to zombie pop-culture. Since 1978 he has sold more than 1,200 magazine feature articles, 3,000 columns, two plays, greeting cards, song lyrics, poetry, and textbooks. Jonathan continues to teach the celebrated Experimental Writing for Teens class, which he created. He founded the Writers Coffeehouse and co-founded The Liars Club, and is a frequent speaker at schools and libraries, as well as a keynote speaker and guest of honor at major writers and genre conferences. To learn more, read our Author Spotlight on Jonathan Maberry. NOVEL EXCERPTS NOVEL EXCERPT: Hoad’s Grim Jack Kincaid

“From beyond the door came the chatter of bones, the remains of those coaxed to black ends in that beastly hollow, that place of darkness and teeth. Oh how they hunger in that terrible grim.” —The Gibgoblins by Ed Hoad

SUTTON VALLEY, NEW YORK The cycles ended forever in November of 1956. A gallon of gas cost twenty-three cents. Minimum wage paid three quarters. The Soviets just ended the uprising in Hungary, Eisenhower was reelected, Elvis Presley was huge, and Ed Phillip Hoad was routinely stewed to the hat on whiskey, the only remaining fuel for his faulty inner engines. He knew he had a drinking problem, just as he knew that he had voices that demanded to be heard through his work. They were parts of the same animal that, when left to hunger, lashed out in red bursts that frightened his wife. Frightened even him. They extorted him for years, condemning him to refuel the engines and conduct their business, a bitter and lonely business in a dim office with closed doors. They ate at whatever they could. The love in his marriage. His time with his son Gary, who deserved the attentive father Ed never had. Ed had grown tired of being governed by the things in his inner places and seeing the outer world through a haze. They always coaxed him back to their will, scared him, tricked him, rewired his mind and memory. They wouldn’t be denied. He had to feed them. He didn’t know how not to. Until two months ago when the writing stopped. Whether it was due to his marital turmoil, the failure of his second book, or because he had become conscious of the cycles that plagued his life, Ed didn’t know. Words could not find their way out of the noise in his mind. He stared at nothing while time passed and a page in the typewriter remained blank. His debt was growing. He had lost his job at the Sutton Valley Gazette, was in danger of losing his house on the hill at 34 Saybrook Road, and was trying to swallow the terrible pill that Barbara might have left him for good. Two weeks with no sign of her. He dealt with it the only way he knew how. If there’s stress, relieve it by any means. If there’s pain, take medicine. If it gets worse, up the dosage. Common sense. He was heavily oiled the morning he glanced out the window and saw an unfamiliar car on the shady cul-de- sac. The black Ford sat in front of his house, its round headlights staring over the chrome grimace of the grille, the seats empty. The leaf-covered pavement continued on past the home of the Morgans, pretty Betty and her brawny trash-mouth of a husband Roy, who was washing his ’48 Oldsmobile. Ed shambled to the window. He heard Pat Boone singing on the radio about how he almost lost his mind and heard the TV that he had just seen his son playing near, setting up a camp of army men on the carpet. “What did I tell you about having both those things on.” Ed didn’t look back. “Pick one or the other, son. Unless you wanna pay for the ’lectricity.” “The radio’s not on, Pa.” “My ears don’t lie, so shut it off already.” He braced a hand on the window frame, leaned, and peered toward the cape house next door, a modest home for the family of a money man like Henry Boggs. Beside the jutting back fenders of a new Caddy, Henry held a rake and talked to a man in a long coat and hat. He jotted notes on a pad. When the man glanced through his thick-framed glasses, Ed recognized him as John Broward, the detective who had stopped by many times since Ed reported Barbara missing. Only this time Broward had come to see his neighbors. Ed didn’t like that any more than their faces which showed nothing favorable as they kept glancing toward his house. “I need to talk to a man outside, son.” Ed swiveled his head toward Gary who was belly-down on the floor in his pajamas, dark bangs hanging down to his brows. “Be a good boy and stay put. Play with your soldiers till I get back.” “My soldiers,” he agreed. “You hear me?” “Yes, Pa.” His voice was distant, dreamy, and he didn’t look at Ed, which might have made Ed sore if he wasn’t so taken by the sight of his child playing, imagining, dreaming as creative children dream. A smile crept up, but didn’t spread to his eyes. They were too haunted by the sight of this ghost. Your soldiers, yes they are. You still own the dreams, my boy. God, don’t you ever become like your old man. Don’t grow up to let them own you. Barefoot, clad in a shirt and trousers he had slept in twice, Ed went out onto the porch where the light met him harshly. His hair was unkempt, grown out from his usual flat-top. Tufts of it hooked down against his forehead in commas. Henry freed a hand from his cardigan sweater, straightened his cap, and made a motion that prompted Broward to turn. Speak of the devil and the devil appears, Ed thought. Broward grinned and waved. Ed did neither. He waited. When Broward approached, Ed leaned against a column. Brown hat, charcoal coat, Broward peered up through his glasses. “Mister Hoad,” he said with his nasal voice that sounded deceptively passive. “I was about to give a rap on your door.” His smile and so-happy-to-see-you tone made Ed wonder. “Have you found her?” Ed asked. “I’m afraid not,” he said, the sympathy in his voice too great to believe. “Frankly, everyone’s very concerned.” “No one more than I.” “Of course.” Broward gave a wistful smile, and Ed didn’t believe in that either. “It saddens me when I think of your son. A child needs its mother. This must be very hard on him.” “His dog ran away. Then his mother too. If I didn’t care for her, I might say they were from the same stock. But the boy is holding up. Better than I am. I don’t have his strength.” “If you don’t mind my saying so . . .” Ed waved a permitting hand. “I can tell you that you smell like a saloon. And I’m not even downwind.” Broward fiddled with his hat when Ed said nothing. “We all deal . . .” Pausing, he looked pensive and Ed knew why. Men who stopped to choose words had different dialogue in mind. “With things our own way. Things we could have done. Things we did.” There it was. “Your son will need you more than ever now. Perhaps you shouldn’t go to the bottle so much.” “It calms the devils.” “Devils?” Broward blinked twice. “Mister Hoad?” Ed supposed that stopping to choose words was an example he should follow. “Every man’s got them.” Broward nodded slowly. “And some men have dark sides too.” “Some men hide them. Man is evil. Inherently. If you think William Golding was whistling Dixie, you don’t watch the news.” “William who?” “It doesn’t matter. Because we’re not really talking about philosophy or literature anyway, are we?” Broward sighed. “Mister Hoad—” “Don’t Mister-Hoad me. I know where you’re driving this conversation to and I . . . resent it.” Ed met his eyes, those dark studious spotters beneath his hat brim. “You’re talking to my neighbors and shaking my tree to see . . . if rotten apples fall. I know how the world works. I know you’re doing your job. Because I respect that, I saw to it we wouldn’t be on bad terms, as I could not forgive being insulted in my own house.” “You never invited me in.” “And I just told you why.” Broward opened his mouth, as if to retort, and snapped it shut. “That’s fair.” He cleaned his glasses with a handkerchief that he plucked from his coat. “You must admit that these are suspicious circumstances. I find it very curious that she took nothing when she left. Not her clothes. Her gloves or coat.” He blinked and slipped his glasses back on. “Her purse.” “It is odd, yes.” Broward flipped through notes. “When she disappeared, Gary was at school and you were napping.” Ed nodded and didn’t clarify that he hadn’t napped exactly but drank himself into the black. “Between ten and noon.” “Twelve, twelve-thirty. Yes.” “Betty Morgan . . .” Broward gestured down the cul- de-sac. “Was outside gardening and should have witnessed Barbara leaving. Surely your Barbara wouldn’t have gone through the woods.” Ed licked his lips. “Betty must have missed her, because somebody got the mail.” “The mail?” Ed flagged out an arm. “Mailboxes are out on the street. Barbara always got the mail. The box was empty when I checked.” “You checked the mailbox?” Broward looked enlightened. “Were you expecting anything? A payment for your work, perhaps.” “No.” “I presume you must be paid fairly well in order to—” “Writers don’t get rich. They get burned.” Ed wanted another drink now. “They burn up. Or burn out.” “Perhaps there was no mail. It happens.” Broward crossed his arms, tapping his notepad against a shoulder. “Now, if a car, say a salesman, had come, wouldn’t you say that Betty would have noticed? That Martha Boggs next door would have heard it?” Ed pegged them as trick questions and shrugged. “The Boggs have heard arguments between you and your wife.” “No marriage is perfect.” Ed put a clamp on his emotions. “There were things she wanted from me that she didn’t think she was getting. So maybe she went to get them someplace else.” “Yes, the wayward theory.” “Call it what you want.” “The Sifts insist that Barbara wouldn’t have dropped contact with them. Have you talked at all with—” “No, but you already knew that. They think I’m no good for her.” Ed hadn’t believed that until recently. “We don’t talk.” “They have this . . . very crazy idea that you might have done something to her.” The words entered his mind and looped there as some things did, like plot ideas or radio jingles or that damned Mr. Sandman song from the Chordettes. (—might have done something to her, you might have —) “I’d never.” “Are you sure you were napping?” (Are you sure, are you sure . . .) “Yes.” “It is crazy, isn’t it?” Broward said, deadpan. “If your eyes could see in my heart, you’d know it is.” Broward tilted his head back, pausing, and brought it back down, completing a nod. “Well spoken.” His eyes lowered, and rose. “But as you said, men have dark sides.” Ed heaved a sigh. “Some hide it, but not always. You choose your moments.” You presuppose that I have a choice, Ed didn’t say. “You certainly don’t hide it in your work.” Ed had a feeling it might come to that. “Am I supposed to feel embarrassed now for writing rubbish?” “Your words. Not mine.” “I know what some people say.” Broward paused. “I had a look at one of your books.” “Now should I be impressed that you read my rubbish?” “I had to ask myself a very relevant question.” “Very is your favorite qualifier.” “What can be said of a person who writes such stories?” “Anything at all.” “I’m very sorry if I have offended you in any way,” Broward said, but his tone said I know I am offending you and I am doing it on purpose. “I just find it fascinating actually. Why someone would elect to write stories about—” “I didn’t elect them.” Ed regretted the edge that entered his voice as he saw Broward raise an eyebrow. “They elected me.” Broward looked puzzled. “The book was called . . .” He consulted his notes. “The Jas-manglers.” “Jasm-anglers,” Ed muttered. Broward looked up. “What is a jasmangler exactly?” “I thought you read it.” “No.” He sounded shocked by the implication, as if he had been asked if he ever put on a tutu and licked a monkey’s ass. “I prefer lighter reading. Yours was dark. I found it disturbing. I had to put it down. I can’t say I liked it.” “The critics didn’t either.” Ed rolled his eyes. “The New York Times said it was murdered by metaphors.” “You should also know that I find the dark overtones of this conversation disturbing too.” “You started it and now I’m gonna finish it.” Ed headed for the door. “Have yourself a very good day.” He heard Broward say, “We’ll talk again,” and had no doubt. Ed returned to the living room where army men prepared for battle and Gary was nowhere in sight, probably upstairs in his room to get reinforcements. “Say kids,” Buffalo Bob said on the TV, “what time is it?” It was Howdy Doody Time, of course, and that freckly- faced marionette gave Ed the creeps, maybe because he identified with him too well. Booze was Ed’s Buffalo Bob, the strings his cycles and muses, the puppeteers the things inside that moved him. Without Buffalo Bob, Howdy Doody had no voice. Without the puppet strings: no motion. Take away that and Ed supposed the peanut gallery would still cheer and giggle their heads off. But there would be nothing happy about those sounds. They would be mad. Hungry. If Howdy Doody and his cousin Heidi and Mister Bluster just lay around, drained of magic, Ed imagined the little devils would rush off the bleachers and rip up the citizens of Doodyville for the entertainment they weren’t getting. “You think you’re special now,” he spoke to the TV, which for Ed Hoad was not unusual. “Poor little guy.” He leaned, almost toppling. “Howdy Doody Time won’t last forever.” He shut it off. “They’ll find some other puppet . . .” He shuffled into the kitchen, where he stopped at the sight of his upright freezer that he had come to think of as a symbol of everything wrong in his life. After Henry Boggs bought a freezer and Martha gabbed to Barbara about it, Barbara wanted one. Ed scoffed at the idea whenever she brought it up, at the same time saving up the money. The freezer looked new, which helped keep his secret that he had bought it used. Months later, he didn’t feel as clever. It was a power hog, glitchy, and no bargain. He wished he had listened to Barbara when she argued it should go in the garage. It made the kitchen feel cluttered. It stood out there, didn’t belong there, but he had his say and there it went where visitors could see it. Stubborn pride on display. What’s the point of having a luxury nobody knows you have? was his argument, but Ed had had plans for it. He didn’t want it far from his office. He preferred his liquor cold. If it came down to survival, he would take his hooch warm and poured from a used ashtray as readily as he would eat bread off a dirty floor. But he loved it cold. From the bottle-neck. Not with rocks that would melt and water it down. Not in a glass he would have to refill. His ability to concentrate had become precarious, frayed by such little things as his liquor going lukewarm or refilling a glass. He used to keep two bottles in the freezer, sandwiched between the TV dinners and Wonder Cake or ice cream, and swapped them now and then as he answered the calls of his bladder, a distraction for which there was no remedy but relief. He had connected his work, cold booze, and that freezer, threaded them together and tied himself into a knot. As he stared at it now, he thought of the whiskey that lay beside the Thanksgiving turkey that wouldn’t be cooked this year. If he saw the bottle, the feel-good memory of cold liquor down his gullet would spark a demand. Then he would end up behind the typewriter with a cramping brain that produced no words and angry muses who would start eating him up again. He didn’t want that. He didn’t want a drink either, as he was already tanked. He didn’t want to open the freezer. That’s where his demons were. He felt them pulling. Resisting the movers when they yanked his strings sometimes felt as if he was yanking back and drawing them closer. The fear that brought him, however irrational, usually made him cave. When his resolve held, they conspired to make him forget it and spoke in one united voice through a door in his imagination. You don’t really believe you can change. To what end? So you can be a better man for Barbara? You jest. But there’s no point in trying now. She’s gone. Your work is all that’s left. Get to it. Open the door. Ed did not trust that voice. However persuasive, it was deceptive. It was the addict voice of the watchers and movers in his inner darkness. The masters of his illusions. Parts of himself that had gone cannibal. The gibgoblins in his personal Grim. Like those creatures from his first book, they could not reach him, much less gnaw, if he stayed clear of their door. Drawing that parallel might not have come natural to a man who didn’t think in metaphors or who wasn’t a writer, a superstitious animal that made baseball players with rituals seem mild by comparison, but Ed was both. “Never again.” He felt betrayed by the lack of conviction in his voice. Doubts descended, black clouds behind his bloodshot eyes, and he thought, Who am I kidding? The thought of the liquor inside that had to be cold, so wonderfully cold, intoxicated him and he advanced, his eyes filled with desire, the first steps across the checkered floor urgent. Closer. PAIN jabbed his foot. Cursing, he squinted down at what he had stepped on. He crouched and saw it was an army man—kneeling with a bazooka. “Damn that boy. How many times . . .” Ed stopped and considered how many times he had stepped out of his cycles, battled them hard only to throw it away at a weak moment and find himself back at square one. He had come just as close other times in the past two weeks. It’s become a cycle of its own. He laughed at the absurdity. He had laughed the other times too, but they were sad laughs, because the only thing worse than living life like a skipping record was being fully aware of it. He told himself that if the soldier hadn’t jolted him out of the trance, the fear would have. Ever since the last hallucination that had seemed frighteningly real, he had feared that it would happen again. Days before Barbara disappeared, he had opened the freezer while his eyes yawed drunkenly elsewhere. A mindless ritual, he would reach in and grab for the bottle. That time he had groped at nothing but cold air. His eyes had widened when they looked into the freezer, an impossible window to a black abyss where frost clouds drifted and formless things swam and struggled to take shape, the origin of the low snarling voice which said: “You left us hungry and we’ll have to find something else to eat. We’ll have to eat you up instead. Eat you from the inside out. And you’ll be inside us instead. We’ll be you and you’ll be us because what we eat is what we are.” Ed had slammed the door with a cry that summoned Barbara. He never told her and hadn’t opened the freezer since. That had been the first time he consciously thought of the gibgoblins in context with the freezer and his writing, which was solidified by the nightmare he had that same night. He had dreamt that he had walked into his office and the air was hazed with smoke. Smelling sweet and spicy, it came from the warped pipe of the leprechaun who sat in his chair in its traditional green garb, booted feet up on the desk. “Find the magic in the stout,” the leprechaun had said between puffs. “Keep your skin. You’re inside out.” Keep drinking and writing had been Ed’s interpretation, and there was no doubting the meaning of inside out. His insides were full of monsters. No matter how well caged, sooner or later they broke out. Words on a page, explosions of temper, hallucinations, whatever the means, whatever the shape, the monsters found their way out. Ed walked into his office. The door opened in beside his bar and a painting of his father. Book shelves flanked the room and his desk faced away from windows that looked into the forest. He settled into his chair and grabbed his whiskey bottle off the desk, where he had left it beside his Underwood typewriter. He brought the bottle to his lips, tipped it, and stopped. “Enough.” He dropped the bottle in the waste basket. He looked out the window for a long while, staring through the trees. He thought of how Gary liked to play with his army men in the dirt of the side yard, and thought of the house. His eyes widened a notch and he stared at the trees. Wood. He doubted anyone stopped to consider that they made their homes inside the mutilated remains of another life form, the corpses of trees, as if living in houses of bones. He had read stories about haunted bones, often the bones of bad people. Evil bones. Now he contemplated wood from evil trees. What made them evil? Surely the same thing that made people evil. The environment in which they grew. The dirt from which they derived nourishment. From tainted grounds, desecrated grounds, it didn’t matter. He had enough to start with. His world changed in seconds, filled with confidence and hope where there had been none. He knew that he could draft a great book from that premise, one that would surpass the success of The Gibgoblins and lessen his debt. Ed had the world in his hands again. Lines of text forming in his head, Ed produced a stack of pages from a desk drawer and fed one into the typewriter. He lit a cigar, a task of many steps yet mindless. Once his hands were free, he pounded out the opening lines. The machine-gun clack of the typewriter and ching! of the carriage return were good sounds. Good magic. He scanned the text. Behind his eyes the next line formed and he held it there in the mental womb as he reached— —for nothing. The magic stopped, record skipped again, and he stared at the corner of his desk where he had reached for . . . I don’t need it. There’s no magic in the stout. No magic. It’s already here. It’s inside. His eyes yawed to the side, looked inside for that next sentence which was now gone, and fixed on the page. He told himself he would remember if he reread what he had written, but that was not there either. Instead . . .

Col Dwhiske yifo Rgotth Ecoldw hisk eya ndic annotwor kw Ithouta Coldd rink “.Ia”, mab adpu ppetfor, eve ntr ying toa ba dbadpu ppetfo rno tge ttin gmy coldw. Hi ske youtofth ef Reezer, ica nnotw rit Ewitho Utitic Annotwr.

Ed revolted from it, stumbled back into the wall between the windows. The magic was gone, the excitement of his new inspiration dim, the enthusiasm a ghost, the typewriter no longer his friend, and he wanted it all back. He wanted it now. The flames of that desire consumed him and he stormed into the kitchen. He wrenched open the freezer door. He snatched out the bottle that was frosty and welcome in his warm hands. The whiskey was sure to be robbed of flavor, but it was cold and it had his medicine. With a manic grin, he returned to his desk where his cigar burned. He wrestled with the bottle cap and looked at the page he had started, seeing:

The Indians told Robert Mauwer that the land westward of Saffron Creek was “bad”, the soil tainted, but the land was no longer theirs and the land was cheap. It now belonged to Robert, who owned the Mauwer Lumber Company.

“Yes . . .” When he raised the bottle, the next line of text returned from the darkness in perfect condition. He brought the bottle to his lips . . . and stopped. “The ancient trees there would soon come down,” he said the line, which was simple, logical, unremarkable. His voice of reason came. You mean to tell me that you have to drink that in order to type the ancient trees there would soon come fucking down? Do you know how absurd that is? And by the way, the words came back and you haven’t had a swig yet. He picked up his cigar, puffed thoughtfully, eyes moving between the typewriter and the bottle. What you have on the page isn’t all that remarkable either. His face writhed into a grimace. He shoved the cigar through the bottleneck, into his cold well of spirits, and it joined the whiskey with a sizzle. One eye twitching, he shook the bottle crazily and lobbed it. It hurtled toward the portrait of his father, a stage actor who had committed suicide, and crashed in a flurry of shards and dirty liquor. “I don’t need you!” He meant it. How many times have we dumped out a bottle or smashed it? How many times have we thought we meant it? How many? How many? He looked at the typewriter. What he saw on the page—once again—knocked every door inside him off their hinges. It sent him into a screaming rampage. He picked up the typewriter and hurled it into the shelves. It crashed to the floor, books spilled down, and he seized it again. It smashed into the bar next. Bottles jangled, distracting him, and he smashed them all, on the counter, against the wall, flung them like bombs, laughing madly all the while. His hand wrenched the page from the typewriter, stuffed it in his mouth, and he chewed while he punished the typewriter. Finally, he carried the maimed thing toward a window. He stopped. A better idea popped out from the fires behind his eyes and he stormed into the kitchen with it. “You can have it!” He flung open the freezer door and drove the typewriter in, the slice of his mind still functioning expecting to have to jam it between shelves, but the freezer led to the black place again. The typewriter sailed into the darkness and Ed almost went with it. He caught himself, gazing into The Grim while hot piss flowed down his legs, unaware that he was still laughing and that he was a bloody mess from cutting himself on bottle shards. (Come on in. The water’s fine!) Things stirred and giggled beyond the frosty door, and he knew what he would find at the bottom of their darkness. That would be just fine. If he was wrong and his eyes lied, he had a gun that would do the job splendidly. I end it now. If he didn’t, he might not ever. He might calm down, feel better for a while, but then it would be more of the same. He never believed in spirits that carried on or in Heaven, but he did believe in Hell. He had been living there for years uncounted. The flames may have been metaphorical, the pain and suffering inside instead of out, but those things weren’t what made Hell what it was as much as endless repetition. The last remnant of the man inside the monster conjured the image of Gary. He locked up, trembling violently in indecision. “Gary’s gone,” said his voice from across the kitchen, and he looked. Bloody, crazed, wide eyes set in dark circles, he saw himself. “He’s dead and you know it.” “What, no, he’s upstairs, Gary’s upstairs . . .” “All that noise would have brought him down. We both know what happened. We took care of him. Oh yes, we did.” “No.” “I’m afraid so.” Another voice made Ed snap his head toward the office doorway. Detective Broward stood there in his charcoal coat and hat. “Some have dark sides, Mister Hoad.” (—might have done something to her, might have—) “We took care of Barbara too,” his dark side said. “Napping. That’s good. Let’s drink some more alibis. They’re all free in your house of bones, brother. Let’s drink it all!” Ed jerked his head up toward the ceiling, wailing. “G-A-A-A-A-A-REEEEEEEEEEE!” He stormed through the house, thundered up the stairs, tripped on the top step, tumbled into the hall, and scrambled into Gary’s room. His feet crashed through a festival of matchbox cars, lincoln logs, and little people. Between containers of play-doh and pez dispensers, a platoon of army men lined the dresser. He swooped down for a look under the bed, jumped up, and yanked open the closet. Stuffed animals and game boxes avalanched. “Gary! Where are you!” (We took care of him.) Ed tore back through the house and outside, where Henry Boggs stiffened on the walkway. “Oh lord!” Henry’s eyes were wide. “What happened!” When Ed ran around the house, Henry followed. “E-E-E-Ed!” Gary’s bicycle lay in the yard, removing the chance that he had ridden off scared, as he often did when Ed lost his head. “G-a-a-a-a-a-ry!” Pale, Henry moved his mouth with no words Ed could hear. What he heard was Broward, who stood a little behind Henry. “I think you murdered your son just as you murdered your wife.” Ed screamed at the top of his voice, “I DIDN’T KILL MY SON! I DIDN’T KILL MY FAMILY! I DIDN’T!” Henry backed away with his hands raised. You did, his wide eyes said. Oh my god, you really did. Dishes clanked, drawing Ed’s gaze to the window over the sink. Barbara gazed back, curls snaking down over her face. Henry ran for his house, one arm up and hand on his hat. When Ed bolted into his, he found Barbara in the kitchen, her hair disheveled, green dress tattered, skin pale. “How could you,” she said. He took hold of her and a chill ran up his arms. “Are you all right! Where have you been! Where did you go!” “Would you like to see?” Her lips parted over jagged teeth. He revolted from her. “You’re not Barbara.” A glow rose in her eyes, irises green and rippling, like holes in reality to a place where green flames burned. He motioned for the living room. Buffalo Bob in his cowboy garb blocked his way, pointing. “There’s no place for you in Doodyville now, mister!” The kitchen filled with people. “You didn’t pay attention!” Gary yelled. “And they ate me up! You let them eat me up!” Broward nodded behind him. “Yes, I think we have enough evidence for a conviction.” “Oh, how could you,” Barbara moaned. Ed cupped his hands over his ears. “None of you are real.” “Oh, don’t you worry now, Edward,” his mother said. In a frilly apron and gaudy dress too small for her large frame, she cooked on the stove. “If I cooked them up just the way you liked it, you wouldn’t eat it anyhoo.” Plastic army men sizzled and melted on a frying pan. “This is how you always take them.” “You are hereby convicted of eating your family,” said Judge Frewin, who Ed once stood before after a bar- room brawl in 1949. “Have you anything to say before we commence the sentencing?” Ed’s fingers curled, tightened around his hair, yanked. “It’s not true. None of this is true.” “Oh how they hunger in that terrible Grim,” his twin said. “How they hunger.” Barbara stepped to the side. From behind her came Ed’s father, a gaunt man with a deep-lined face and a bullet hole in his head. While the others snarled and hissed and Howdy Doody giggled in the window over the sink, his father cleared his throat and recited the text off a crumpled page as he might a Shakespeare passage: “The Indians told Robert Mauwer that the land westward of Saffron Creek was bad. The soil tainted. But the land was no longer theirs . . .” Ed’s dark twin snatched away the page and ate it. “Guess what time it is,” Buffalo Bob said gravely. “How . . .” Ed backed as the crowd closed in, grinning with cannibal teeth, eyes filled with hunger. “Howdy Doody Time?” Buffalo Bob shook his head slowly. Barbara cackled, a sound not sane or human. Ed felt frigid air, saw frost wafting out around his head, and whirled toward a black opening in the world. Arms rushed out. Clawed hands gripped and pulled him through the door that slammed shut behind him. Demons take demon shapes. Inside out, Ed Hoad went into the Grim now theirs. There he suffered the fate of The Jasmanglers. Murdered by metaphors.

Jack Kincaid is best known as the creator and producer of the cyberpunk audio drama series, Edict Zero – FIS. He is a speculative fiction writer with a handful of short stories published and many novels waiting in the wings. He is also a diverse voice actor whose work can be heard in audio dramas on the web and in podcasts such as The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy, among other places. His background includes theatre, A/V production, music, games, sound design, and early machinima. Find him on Twitter at @jackkincaid9. NONFICTION The H Word: Horror Needs New Monsters Kate Jonez

For generations, the monsters populating horror fiction have, with very few exceptions, belonged to the scary trinity: vampires, werewolves, and zombies. For every aswang, a dozen Draculaesque vampires sip bodily fluids. For every huli jing, a score of humans transform into their wolfish selves under a full moon. For every draugr, a horde of reanimated corpses out of central casting shambles by looking for brains. Horror authors have struggled for years with varying degrees of success to bring a fresh twist to the tropes of the scary trinity, but these lately those tropes are wearing thin. Horror needs new monsters. We have been telling tales about monsters ever since we first found our way out of the darkness and sat together around a fire, and every culture has a long list of what scares them most. Many of these creatures of myth and folklore are fascinating . . . and can be a strange and wonderful cornucopia of material for horror authors (and readers). Maybe you haven’t heard of these monsters from mythology and folklore:

The Adze

The adze, found among the Ewe people of Southern Ghana, assumes the shape of a firefly and enters a home through a keyhole. The tiny monster drains children— especially infants—of their blood. No magic or net or insecticide can keep the adze away from its victims. The only way to destroy it is to capture it. When captured, it reverts to its human form and can be disposed with the usual methods for dispatching humans. But the adze are especially charming and charismatic, which makes the task of killing them difficult.

The Busaw

The busaw is a ghoul from the Philippines who looks and behaves like an ordinary human being—until night falls. If a man cocks his head to listen for the sounds of death as the sun goes down, this is a sign that he is actually a busaw. In his demon form, the busaw has pointed teeth, hooked nails, and a long tongue. He creeps around in cemeteries and steals corpses, replacing the bodies with the trunks of banana trees. The busaw’s greatest talent is his ability to turn human corpses into pork. (He’s also a pretty good cook.) Once he returns to his human form, he often prepares a nice feast for his neighbors. Eating the busaw’s pork, as delicious as it is reported to be, will turn unsuspecting neighbors into grave-robbing ghouls. Inhabitants of busaw infested areas keep them away by washing corpses with vinegar and rubbing them with strong-smelling herbs. Liberal application of salt is also supposed to help.

The Churel

The churel, from India, is the vengeful spirit of a woman who died an unnatural death. The churel is usually depicted as a woman with sagging breasts, a black tongue, and wild hair. Her most notable feature is that her feet face the wrong way. Her victims are usually male family members, but occasionally she will attack an attractive, unrelated man. She tempts the men with food; if they follow her, she keeps them with her until dawn, which is long enough to turn their blood to dust. When she returns the men to the village, they are desiccated and old. The Zemu

The zemu is a Moldavian spirit that appears to widows in the form of a flame before it transforms into a man and enters her bedroom for a night of passionate lovemaking. Some believe the Zemu is an incubus that drains away the widow’s life force. Others believe the zemu is conjured by a murdered husband to exact revenge. Whichever is the case, the outcome is the same: The widow is dead by morning.

The Adlet

Adlets are a vicious hybrid of human and dog that terrorize the Inuit people. According to legend, a girl who lived with her father and refused to marry decided to mate with a giant red dog. The result of this unlikely pairing was ten offspring. Five had the head and torso of a human and the bottom half of a dog. The other five had the reverse. The girl’s father was not pleased by this situation and the increased number of mouths to feed. He banished the little family to an island and drowned the dog father. The girl, desperate to save her children, set five of them out to sea in a boat. The other five she sent inland to fend for themselves. The pups that sailed across the ocean landed and mated and spawned Europeans. The children who were sent inland became adlets. They grew into fierce predators with a taste for human blood. Even today they wander the tundra in packs searching for human prey.

The Rusalka

From Slavic mythology, rusalki are the spirits of pregnant, unmarried women who have been disposed of by their lovers. Although they sometimes appear as hideous and bloated corpses, they most frequently appear as beautiful women. The rusalki watch for handsome men and attempt to lure them with songs and dancing. If properly infatuated with their beauty, the men agree to join them in their home on the floor of the lake. (And because men obviously have difficulty breathing underwater, drowning is a common result.) Men strong enough to escape drowning still have to contend with the rusalki’s deadly, shrill laugh. The piercing sound can kill even at a distance. Some believe that a rusalka is destined to haunt the lake for what would have been her natural life span. Others believe that once a rusalka’s death is avenged, she is free to move on. Rusalki are often angry about their plight, and always dangerous. The only protection against them is for potential victims to entwine fern fronds in their hair.

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These are just a few examples of the literally thousands of monsters in folklore and myth that have been underutilized in horror fiction. Monsters, whether they are metaphors for human fears or failings or the manifestation of external evil, are the most fascinating element of horror fiction. Western horror fiction, if authors take appropriate care to respect the culture from which the monster was borrowed, can only grow richer by embracing a wider tradition.

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We at Nightmare Magazine like discussions. Please use the comments feature on our website to give us your thoughts on whether the H brand is an albatross or worth holding on to.

Kate Jonez writes dark fantasy fiction. Her debut novel Candy House, published by Evil Jester Press, is available at Amazon in print and ebook. Ceremony of Flies is forthcoming from Dark Fuse in April 2014. She is also chief editor at Omnium Gatherum, a small press dedicated to providing unique dark fantasy, weird fiction, and literary horror in print, ebook, and audio formats. Three Omnium Gatherum books have been nominated for Shirley Jackson Awards. Kate is a student of all things scary, and when she isn’t writing she loves to collect objects for her cabinet of curiosities, research obscure and strange historical figures, and photograph weirdness in Southern California, where she lives with a very nice man and a little dog who is also very nice but could behave a little bit better. Artist Gallery: Mike Worrall

Mike Worrall is a UK-born, self-taught fine artist. Now based in Australia, his massive oil paintings depicting dreamlike surreality hang in private collections and gallery shows worldwide. His work is exhibited in one- man shows biannually, the latest of which was at the Richard Martin Gallery in Woollahra, New South Wales, from November 23rd to December 11th. Find him online at www.mikeworrall.com.

[To view the gallery, turn the page.]

Artist Spotlight: Mike Worrall Julia Sevin

You’ve been painting since the early sixties. Can you describe for us how you got your start?

When I left school in the late fifties, my father would not allow me to go to art school—he was good father and was thinking of my future and realized it could be a hard life in the fine arts—so I started as a coffee boy in an advertising agency in my hometown of Reading, where I stayed for a year, knowing it wasn’t for me. I next did a stint in the merchant navy, then back into advertising, joining a studio in Soho, London, full of freelance illustrators where I would pick up useful illustrative skills. In my spare time I would be drawing and painting and would at weekends hang on the railings at such places as Green Park Piccadilly, Hampstead, and the Bayswater Road, hoping to sell to the public. At about this time I would attend life drawing classes, etc. I would become what was called a summer artist; that is, during the winter I would get a job in an advertising studio, then leave when it got warmer. I even did pavement art around the National Portrait Gallery. My big break came when, towards the end of the sixties, I was discovered by a well-known collector who bought all I did for the next three years and introduced me to a top gallery in Cork Street, where I had my first one-man showing 1971. I had arrived and was being taken seriously at last.

You’ve described your early work as presenting more “horrific” themes and subjects, a phase which causes you to “cringe” now. Why? Simply because of the lack of subtlety, or something else?

I think most artists are slightly embarrassed by some of their earlier work; my case being subject matter, partly because the various artists in history I admired tended to dwell on the pathos in life. One such was Käthe Kollwitz, who drew on the downtrodden and their suffering. Inspired by her, I created a highly realistic piece called “After the Rape,” which I thought would stop people in their tracks . . . it did! I was addicted to shock tactics. War images, the pit of death, etc. were to follow. But I feel that, at the time, I did treat them with as much subtlety as was possible. One of my earlier jobs was working as an illustrator for a government magazine called Accidents, the purpose being to warn and prevent accidents in industrial workplaces such as factories and building sites. One was given a draft to illustrate a particular mishap, often ending in a fatality. A lot of them were quite grisly, too. “Show no blood or horror” was the mantra oft quoted, which presented quite a challenge. One had to show a lot of subtlety and yet get the message across. I think this was good training for what I call my “Blue” period. In about the late seventies the wish to shock had abated somewhat, as I realized shock had a short-lived attention span, and that more pleasant subject matter has more staying power.

Tell us about your role as a conceptual artist in feature films in the seventies and eighties.

Well, it was through one of my Blue period paintings that I was first introduced into concept art for film. Roman Polanski told me that he got the idea to make his version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth from a painting he had of mine, and asked me to work out the design for Panavision. From there, a few years later I was invited to do work on a Nick Roeg film version of Flash Gordon, later aborted. I have worked on several feature films and television productions in the UK, New Zealand, Australia, and Hollywood.

So your work has inspired creators in other artistic disciplines. Do other disciplines inspire you? Music, fiction, film?

I suppose I feel a need to create out of habit. I have only known a life of thinking up ideas since my earliest memories; it’s my identity, it’s my essence. I get very depressed to the point of tears at times when I have an artistic blockage (which I do every so often), but I have learnt that you can only go down so far and it always breaks and I’m back up again fighting, fit and ready to go! I did have a nasty tussle about eighteen months ago. It lasted nine months, that was hard going. But I broke out of it! A lot of the reasons I get so-called blocks is I lose faith in myself, in short I’m suddenly confronted with the fear that nothing will work, and I’m no bloody good, and people are just humoring me and it’s all a whopping lie! It helps to just keep drawing. In my case I doodle a lot. In fact, these days, unfortunately, I hardly ever go on to a full drawing: it’s do a doodle which I like, then straight on to the painting. This is a shame . . . I’m trying to rectify this. Why do you create this sort of work?

My mind is geared to creating what you could call Mystery Paintings. They can be surreal situations like stills from a dream. My love is to incorporate women, mainly in various interiors or landscapes and backgrounds, suggesting a bit of a conundrum if you like —this can be a nice place to be—or even a face with an odd expression or knowing gaze. These expressions usually just arrive or don’t in the process of painting. I mostly paint directly from my imagination, preferring not involve a model or photo. But sometimes I do use a real person’s face which is inspiring. Of course, I am unconsciously observing and absorbing the material of life as I move through it.

What are you working on right now?

I’m currently tidying up the studio and catching up on all those piled-up jobs that I have ignored over the last eighteen months of sometimes frantic activity in preparing for a solo show, which we had the opening night for just the day before yesterday. But I am very aware of not letting the brush get too hard and am thinking what the next project will be. You could say it’s a bit of mystery.

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

Surely there are few authors who can match Christopher Golden in terms of both the astonishing amount of acclaimed work he has produced, and the number of different genres and forms he has mastered. His first novel, Of Saints and Shadows, was published by Berkley in 1994 and inaugurated his series of urban fantasies centering on the vampiric hero Peter Octavian; other popular series include the “Prowlers” and “Body of Evidence” books. He has received awards and nominations for nonfiction books (Cut: Horror Writers on Horror Film), graphic novels (Baltimore Volume I: The Plague Ships, co-authored with Mike Mignola), anthology editing (The New Dead), and alternative forms (the Ghosts of Albion webseries, co-authored with Amber Benson). He is a frequent figure in the “Buffyverse,” having written or co-written dozens of novels, comics, and episode guides, and he has also written in the world of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. He recently edited the two- volume tribute to Rick Hautala, Mister October, and has three new releases in January: the novel Snowblind, the collaborative anthology Dark Duets, and the graphic novel Cemetery Girl (written with Charlaine Harris and illustrated by Don Kramer). Golden is a native of Massachusetts, where he still lives.

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You celebrated your twelfth birthday by turning out the lights at your party and reading from a horror novel. Were you also writing horror by then?

Not at that point. I believe back then the only thing I had written was a single chapter of a sort of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen team-up story featuring Doc Savage, Robin Hood, and a handful of other characters. They were on a plane and it was about to crash. I started writing horror in high school, beginning with a story about a bunch of teenagers drinking by some train tracks, playing chicken with a train . . . and it going very badly. That year the school published a sort of literary journal and my story was in it. Exciting times for young Chris.

Your bio describes you as “a lifelong fan of the ‘team- up.’” Were there certain writing pairs you admired growing up?

I loved team-ups of all sorts, as my reference to that Doc Savage/Robin Hood story illustrates. I loved Abbott & Costello, Marvel Team-Up, the time that Charlie’s Angels crossed over with the series Vegas, with Robert Urich. No, I’m not joking. As for writing, the first time I remember realizing that two authors could write a novel together was when I read that Stephen King and Peter Straub would be releasing a collaborative novel called The Talisman. My head just about exploded. They were my two favorite writers and they were writing a novel together! How could it be anything but brilliant? It was brilliant, of course. Much later, during my senior year in college, I read John Skipp and Craig Spector’s novel The Light at the End, which was the inspiration I needed to finally start writing my first novel. So, yep . . . I still love a good team-up.

When asked to talk about your favorite genre to write in, you once answered, “I like monsters.” Monsters, of course, are the ultimate outsiders, but is there another reason you enjoy writing about them so much?

There are so many facets to the word “monster.” I love writing about monsters because I love folklore and mythology and horror stories. I enjoy reading old bits of folkore and doing the research that leads to inspiration for me. Historically, the label of “monster” has been used as a way to explain things that frighten or confound us, and searching for the root of that is always fascinating. Stories of vampires, for instance, are ancient and global. Though the nature of those particular monsters varies widely in world folklore, they’re similar enough that it’s clear they were all an attempt to explain something that people of the age did not understand . . . something that troubled or frightened them. We create our own monsters, just as we create them to frighten our children in order to keep them from wandering too near the water, or going about on their own after dark. I’m also always intrigued with the idea of turning the concept of monstrosity on its head, of looking at a conflict through the eyes of the character that we would normally presume to be evil or cruel. That ties in with the “outsider” reference. In Frankenstein, the monster is noble and sympathetic, and yet every time it has been adapted into another medium, the monster becomes more monstrous. In the Hammer version, the doctor is much more monstrous than his creation, but the monster is still a monster. But in the novel, you feel for him. Even in my college days, writing about Moby Dick, my paper was called “In Favor of the Whale.” I dissected the language of the novel, illustrating how the Ahab/white whale dynamic suggests Ahab as protagonist, or at least a protagonist, with the whale as antagonist, but the language Melville uses to describe them suggests the opposite. The same is true of the structure of my favorite film, which is Blade Runner. Structurally, Deckard is the protagonist and Roy Batty the antagonist, but in the language of film, the opposite is true. Deckard never smiles, is never shown in light, is nearly always shown in close-up or mid-range shots. Roy is lit up . . . illuminated . . . and is shown in long shots, often from below, almost deifying him. So I’m not just fascinated with monsters, but with monstrosity, both human and—in the way it reflects back the human— supernatural.

You co-authored (with Stanley Wiater and Hank Wagner) The Complete Stephen King Universe: A Guide to the Worlds of Stephen King. How influential has King’s fiction been on your own work?

Well, I wrote a book, so pretty influential, I’d say. I always say that Stephen King is the narrative voice of my youth. I went from reading S.E. Hinton and Doc Savage and Norse mythology to The Stand . . . and from The Stand to everything else. King led me to an entire generation of horror writers, and then back through Matheson and Bradbury all the way to Poe, Lovecraft, Horace Walpole, you name it. His books changed my life. His characters became people I knew. I got in trouble in the—seventh grade, maybe—for reading Firestarter instead of something the nuns who taught me thought was more appropriate. I read all of King’s stories and novels over and over again. Danse Macabre led me to other writers and to movies I would never have otherwise seen. In high school, a stupid kid, I wrote him a letter and sent him two of my short stories. He sent the stories back with a note saying that his lawyer advised him not to read unsolicited manuscripts (of course, but I was maybe sixteen, so . . .). I should have been bummed, but instead I was thrilled! Stephen King had written back to me, and the letter had his signature on it. When I was in college, I sent him a fortieth birthday card . . . and not longer after, I happened to be in Harvard Square when I heard someone say he was in Wordsworth bookshop, just . . . shopping. I went in, grabbed a paperback copy of Misery, and waited —starstruck—while he paid for his purchases. Then I stopped him, apologized for the intrusion, and babbled something about wanting to be a writer, and that I’d interviewed Clive Barker, who’d been incredibly supportive. He signed the book for me and left, and I was grinning from ear to ear. Since then, I’ve written a lot of books and retired my fanboy hat. But King is still my favorite author and The Stand—tied with John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany—remains my favorite novel. Peter Straub told me a couple of times over the years that Stephen King was “keeping an eye on” me, so when I wrote Wildwood Road, I asked if he’d read it with an eye toward a blurb. He agreed, with no guarantees. When he called me one day, on his way to a Red Sox game, to tell me he was halfway through and loving it, and would be giving me a blurb, I honestly thought for at least the first fifteen seconds or so that it was one of my friends busting my balls. Most recently, he was incredibly kind in agreeing to read Snowblind for a blurb. The blurb itself is great, but even more valuable to me were the emails he sent me as he was reading it and the kind things he said in those emails. I should point out that King is far from my only influence. My interests are broad and I read all sorts of things. But Stephen King and Rod Serling are certainly the two biggest influences on my writing. Given that your Peter Octavian series (beginning with Of Saints and Shadows in 1994) predates the term “urban fantasy,” have you enjoyed watching the explosion in popularity of that genre since? Do you ever feel a sense of almost-parental satisfaction?

It’s an interesting history, isn’t it, the whole urban fantasy thing? I always thought of urban fantasy as what Charles de Lint and Emma Bull wrote, and that influenced me a lot, too. Then Buffy the Vampire Slayer happened and whatever ingredients were boiling in the pot—including what I did in Of Saints and Shadows— became its own genre. I never considered, not for a moment, that I’d had any part in planting the seeds that would become modern urban fantasy. Then Penguin was re-releasing the earlier Octavian novels and Charlaine Harris agreed to write a short intro for Of Saints and Shadows, in which she pointed out that many of the elements that are fundamental to urban fantasy first appeared in that book—my first novel. Jonathan Maberry wrote something similar. I don’t know that anyone’s ever done the research and tried to figure out how true it is, but it’s nice to think about. You’ve been writing dark fiction for young adults for several decades now. How has that landscape shifted during that time?

Well, not several decades. Two. My first YA novel came out in 1995. I think it’s young adult fiction in general that’s changed the most. Once upon a time there wasn’t a lot of crossover. Most writers who wrote YA set out to do that—they wanted to speak to that audience because they had something to say, or because certain books touched them at that age, or because they’d felt that there weren’t books for younger readers that they’d want to have read at that age. Then YA became a red-hot publishing category and suddenly every major writer of adult fiction also wrote YA, sometimes with great results and sometimes . . . not so great. One element that has changed only in the sense that it’s worsened is that while there are plenty of teen and tween girls reading, getting boys to read is an uphill climb. I actually enjoy writing female protagonists more, but if I could figure out a way to get young boys to read, I’d be doing more of that just because I think it’s so important.

You’ve written or co-written at least seventeen Buffy the Vampire Slayer books. Is there anyone who knows more about the Buffyverse than you do?

Sure. Joss Whedon.

You and Nancy Holder wrote your first Buffy novel, Halloween Rain, in three-and-a-half weeks. Even given that the book is relatively short (160 pages) . . . How is that possible?

Oh, it’s not that crazy when you do the math. I think it was something like 55,000 words. That’s about 27,000 words each. Twenty-five days at even 1,100 words a day puts you over that.

Did collaborating on the Ghosts of Albion series with Amber Benson (Tara from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) come about as a result of all the Buffy books?

Indirectly, I suppose, in the sense that writing the novels led to me writing Buffy and Angel comics. Then I was out in L.A. for various Hollywood-type meetings and a mutual friend set up a lunch so that Amber and I would meet. We got on well and the next time I was out there, a big group of us got together at dinner again. That dinner led to us writing Willow & Tara comics together for Dark Horse, and the fact that we had written those comics together inspired a fellow at the BBC (Rob Francis, who has since become a good friend to both of us) to contact me with the invitation for Amber and me to create an online animated series. Ghosts of Albion, as a webseries, was way ahead of its time. We’re still very proud of what we accomplished with that.

Although you’ve written a number of highly- acclaimed stand-alone novels, you’ve produced dozens of books in series. When you begin a new series, how much do you already know about the plots of future volumes?

It varies, of course. With something like Prowlers, I had a full outline for only the first book and then a general idea for what the future volumes would contain—just short descriptions. The same was true for Body of Evidence. Those were both YA series. But with my Veil trilogy—starting with The Myth Hunters—I had it fairly well laid out in my original pitch document . . . and then when I wrote the trilogy, the story changed more dramatically than anything else I’ve ever done had changed from outline to finished manuscript.

In the introduction to the 2008 anthology British Invasion (co-edited with Tim Lebbon and James A. Moore), it’s stated that you thought “with British writers, the lines between genres seem far more blurred.” What genres do you see the British authors meshing?

It’s just that they don’t tend to categorize things the way we do. If a crime story is also a ghost story, there’s not a lot of talk about labels. Fantasy tends to have more darkness in it, in a general sense. Tim Lebbon’s “Noreela” books are a great example. I’m not sure if I wrote that bit of the introduction, but I think the point is that British genre writers don’t seem to feel the need to pigeonhole their work, to confine it within established parameters. Read any story by Robert Shearman, as a for instance, and you’ll see what I mean.

Your collaborations with Mike Mignola started with Hellboy illustrated novels and moved onto the original Baltimore illustrated novel and then graphic novels. Can you talk a little about how your partnership with Mignola works? Does he give you a lot of story input, and do you ever give him suggestions on the art?

The only way I’ve ever given him any input on the art has been during conversations about whether or not certain elements of the novels ought to be included in the illustrations. But as for whatever his approach might be to art, I would never presume. He’s Mike Mignola, after all. What can I bring to a conversation with him about illustration? On the comics it’s very different, of course, because I’m writing the scripts, and of course half the job is explaining what you want to see in each panel. Ben Stenbeck has been the artist of the comic book series from the first issue and is extraordinary. Just a supremely talented guy. It’s been a gift, working with him. As for how the partnership works—each of the novels has had a different dynamic, but in general, the first two novels came from Mike’s ideas, with me filling in places he hadn’t considered or hadn’t gotten around to yet, or making sense of things that needed sorting out. I write the actual prose and he gives me feedback about what he had in his imagination that he’d like to see me do a little differently. The third book we did together, Father Gaetano’s Puppet Catechism, was a novella whose plot came from me, but which hit on a lot of Mike’s sweet spots, including the whole creepy puppet thing. On the comics, we talk out our ideas for Baltimore stories, I plot them out in detail and then write the scripts, and Mike reads it, calls me with his notes, and makes everything better. He knows I’m not going to argue with him over something unless I think it’s important, which also means that usually when I do argue with him about a change he’s asking for, he relents. It’s funny, because we’re both what I think most people would think of as “control freaks,” and yet I think we have an excellent working relationship.

You were friends with Rick Hautala before you even wrote your first novel. Was it hard for you to edit the two-volume tribute anthology Mister October (released in November 2013 by JournalStone)?

The opposite of hard, actually. It was a gift. A blessing. In a very real way, putting together Mister October was therapeutic for me. Rick was one of my closest friends and I still miss him every day, but in the midst of staggering grief, I was in touch with all of these wonderful writers and artists who all either also loved him or—if they hadn’t known him well—at least admired him and wanted to contribute to this perfect memorial. Rick had a career full of ups and downs and unfortunately died during one of the downs, shortly after he’d had to let his life insurance policy lapse. Christopher Payne, the publisher of JournalStone, had made a two-book deal with Rick just weeks before he died, and when I explained Rick’s circumstances to him, he agreed to publish the book without taking a penny above his costs. All of the writers and artists donated their work, so that every dime goes to Rick’s wife, Holly Newstein, and his three sons, Aaron, Jesse, and Matti, all of whom were left with financial difficulties on top of their grief when he passed away. I still get emotional about losing him, but putting together Mister October helped get me through the worst of it.

Your new novel Snowblind (published in January by St. Martin’s Press) has been compared to the early work of Stephen King. Do you find a comparison like that flattering or nerve-wracking?

It’s funny, I don’t really think about it that much. Comments like that are like reviews, and while great reviews are flattering, if you take the great reviews completely seriously, then you have to take the really negative stuff to heart as well. Given King’s influence on me as a writer, it’s no surprise that some of that influence would seep in enough that it might be remarked upon. It’s a supernatural horror ensemble set in New England, it’s a character piece in which the horror is a catalyst for the characters’ growth and self-examination (well, the ones who survive). But anyone making a qualitative comparison—suggesting that Snowblind is up to King’s level—is obviously delusional.

Snowblind is being touted as your first horror novel in ten years. Was that gap just dictated by schedules, or was there another reason for it?

It’s purely an accident. I’ve very rarely set out to write something that I would consider horror. The Ferryman is horror. Prowlers is horror. Wildwood Road is horror. But pretty much nothing else I’ve done started with the intention of being horrific. Much of it has been published as horror—and I grew up on horror; the horror people are my people—but I start with the idea first, and worry about what genre it might fall into afterward.

January also sees the release of the first volume in a new graphic novel trilogy, Cemetery Girl, co-authored with Charlaine Harris (and released by InkLit). Is it fair to call it a YA/horror/graphic novel/team-up genre-crosser?

Strangely enough, I think that’s pretty close. It’s not precisely YA, but it’s YA-accessible. Working with Charlaine has been fantastic, and we’ve just done what I always do, which is create characters and dream up a plot, and let other people figure out how to label it.

Did your new anthology Dark Duets (published in January by Harper Voyager) spring out of your affection for team-ups? Did you suggest collaborations to the contributors, or let them come up with their partners?

Absolutely. It all went back to my excitement when I heard King and Straub were writing The Talisman. In some cases I did suggest collaborations, as in the case of Mark Morris and Rio Youers. For the most part, I approached certain writers and asked them to come up with another writer they’d been interested in collaborating with. In a couple of cases, as with Kevin Anderson and Sherrilyn Kenyon, I’d approached them both and they chose each other, which was great.

Do you have any rituals for shifting gears when you move between projects/genres?

Sleep, and watching too much television.

Why is Croatia the coolest place you’ve ever been?

If you go to Dubrovnik by sea, you come across the harbor and the city looks like something straight out of Lord of the Rings. It’s this white, walled city, full of lovely buildings and friendly people, with cobblestoned streets. I was there for half a day, on a cruise, and I’m dying to go back and explore not only Dubrovnik, but as much of the country as I can. Someday.

Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of nonfiction books, award-winning prose writer, and Halloween expert whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as "consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening." Her short fiction has appeared in dozens of anthologies and magazines, including The Mammoth Book of Dracula, Dark Delicacies, The Museum of Horrors, and Cemetery Dance. In 2010, her first novel, The Castle of Los Angeles, received the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel. Recent books include the graphic novel Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Times (co-written with Rocky Wood, illustrated by Greg Chapman), and Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween. Forthcoming in 2013 are the novellas Summer’s End and Smog, and the novel Malediction. A lifelong Californian, she lives in North Hollywood, and can be found online at www.lisamorton.com. AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Author Spotlight: Adam Howe Britt Gettys

Your story follows Gibbons, a middle-aged man who has essentially grown up as a “carny,” or carnival employee. What interested you about this unusual lifestyle, and did you do any research?

Bunny Gibbons was a real guy, a footnote character from the Ed Gein story. I first learned about him while reading Harold Schecter’s definitive Gein bio Deviant, and I thought that telling the Gein story from the POV of a carny would be interesting, given the macabre nature of Gein’s crimes and the resulting media circus. Very little is known about the real Bunny Gibbons, what became of him, or Ed’s car, so I had a lot of license to fool around. The old EC horror comics were also a big influence, where cigar-chomping, cane-twirling carny barkers were a regular staple. It was easy to visualize Gibbons as drawn by the great EC artists like Graham Ingels, Jack Davis, and Johnny Craig.

The arc of the story centers on the public’s fascination with murder and death, from the box-office hit Psycho —which Gibbons references multiple times—to Gibbons’s own plan to profit from the used relics of a serial killer. What is it about these gruesome subjects people find so fascinating?

The real Bunny Gibbons was quoted as saying, “People want to see this kind of thing.” And you only have to look at today’s thriving, serial killer cottage industry to see that the guy was way ahead of his time. Murderabilia is a big business, and I shudder to think what Ed’s car would be worth today. The Eddie Geins’ of this world are all too human monsters. And I think— though we don’t like to admit it—we recognize something of ourselves in them. We live vicariously through their crimes, fulfilling our deepest, darkest desires. Murderabilia allows us almost to touch it; to hold death in our hands. (Maybe Ed isn’t the best example here; I don’t think there are too many people out there secretly longing to molest corpses and wear human flesh- suits—at least, I hope not.)

Many ghost stories feature an irate ghost bound to an object from their life, but you deviate from this trope by tying the haunting to Gibbons and his decisions, and imbuing the ghost with its own sense of justice. What was your thought process behind this?

As I’ve said, the story was a riff on the old EC horror comics. Quite often, these stories featured some irredeemable bastard getting his or her much-deserved comeuppance from beyond the grave! From the little that is known about the real Bunny Gibbons, the guy was certainly morally suspect, if not quite the shitheel of my story. He couldn’t understand why people took such offence to The Mad Butcher of Plainfield’s Chariot of Death. He even vowed to one day exhibit the car in Gein’s hometown—to “play Plainfield”—where the grieving families of the victims still lived. I felt that a guy like that was just begging for his just desserts in the EC style. I have no problem with the classic horror tropes, as long as they’re done well.

What projects are you currently working on, and can you tell us a bit about them?

I’ve got a few dark fiction stories doing the rounds, looking for a home. And some new stuff I need to rewrite and start hustling. I’m between agents at the moment, so my screenwriting career is on the backburner for the time being; I’m developing a few screenplay ideas, but it’s hard to push them without a rep. Right now, I’m enjoying, and prefer to write, prose fiction. I lost more years than I care to admit to a long period of illness, and I’m only just starting to find my feet again. Being published in Nightmare Magazine, alongside some true legends of the genre, is a huge boost for me. If I can keep the momentum going, hopefully next year I’ll start work on my first novel. I’ve got an idea what that might be, but mum’s the word for now . . .

Britt Gettys currently attends Pratt Institute where she is pursuing a BFA in Creative Writing. She is the editor of Pratt Success, a student run blog, sponsored by Pratt’s Center for Career and Professional Development, which reviews the work of current Pratt students and alumni. Additionally, she illustrates graphic novels and her work has been featured in two Pratt sponsored exhibitions. An editorial intern at Lightspeed and Nightmare Magazine, Britt hails from Seattle, Washington, where she spends her time writing, cosplaying, and painting. Author Spotlight: Lucy Taylor Erika Holt

What sort of research did you undertake when writing “Walled”? Did people really used to do that to cats?

The setting for “Walled” was inspired by a trip I made to Scotland about a year before I wrote the story. I was particularly intrigued by the town of Stromness in the Orkney Islands, its physical beauty as well as its remoteness and the high, rough seas I experienced on the ferry traveling between Scrabster on Scotland’s north shore and the Orkneys. Stromness seemed the kind of place where things both terrible and wondrous could occur. It was also during that trip that I first heard of the medieval practice of walling up a sacrificial victim at the end of a construction project to ensure good luck for the building and its occupants. Whether or not this was actually practiced in Scotland, I don’t know for sure, but references to the immurement of people and animals appear in folk tales and legends in many parts of Europe. Dunlop House in Glasgow, where Plush is confined, is, of course, fictitious. Plush is a complex character and reading the story through her eyes is interesting. She professes to have extraordinary sight, not confined to the “Narrows” like most people, and feels persecuted and misunderstood. Yet these visions resulted in the death of her daughter, which she’s haunted by but never directly confronts. Is the reader to take her as a reliable narrator? Is her confinement just or unjust?

Plush is a spiritually gifted young woman whose mental intelligence falls short of her inner wisdom. I see her as a reliable narrator in the sense that she reports more honestly on her own truth than do most people, and sometimes does so to her detriment. Colleen’s death was the tragic result of the panic Plush experienced at the sight of her beloved grandfather Mooney disappearing; she turned her attention away from her young daughter at a fateful moment. I wrote the story with the intent that Plush’s confinement is unjust and punitive. She’s neither crazy nor dangerous and is probably saner than most. She’s a mystic—always a dangerous line of work—but she lacks the intellect and education of someone like, say, Meister Eckhart or Teresa of Avila. Her gift is unhoned, her use of it incautious. Rather than being admired or venerated for her visions, she’s viewed as a looney, frightening eccentric who caused the death of her own daughter.

Whether or not Plush’s account is entirely accurate, certainly her gender plays into her circumstances and treatment at the hands of the medical establishment. Could this story have been set in the present to equal effect?

That’s an interesting question, because the story actually is set in the present, in the late 1990s at any rate. And yes, Plush’s gender, as well as her lack of education and her lower socioeconomic status, work against her. Also the fact that she was promiscuous in her youth surely goes against her as well, something that would hardly be the case for a man. Now whether a situation such as Plush finds herself in—essentially sentenced to lifelong confinement—could happen in a modern hospital, I would hope not, but if you take into consideration the confusion that exists even today day on the subject of mental illness, on what does or does not constitute insanity, I’d say the possibility for abuse is surely there. Do you see the ending of “Walled” as uplifting, in that both Plush and the cat “escape” in a manner of speaking, or as tragic?

Well, since childhood, I’ve always been a big believer that, “there are many fates worse than death . . . etc.” Endless confinement, the suppression of all that one naturally is or has the potential to become—these are horrors far worse than dying. So the ending, by my standards, is intended to be uplifting. Plush is still among the living, but my feeling is that death will come soon— her essence, all that she truly is, has already fled. I might add that a challenge for me when I sat down to write a story for Twists of the Tale was that when it comes to writing, I really have only one taboo: I will never show cruelty inflicted upon an animal onstage. I remembered the legend about the immurement of the cat and decided I could write about that if the creature were a wraith. I also think Grace plays a part in this story. Though she wasn’t able to save Colleen, Plush achieves redemption—and ultimately her own freedom—through her compassion for the cat.

What do you like to read? Any thoughts on what goes into a great story?

I read primarily horror and dark fantasy, although at the moment I’m reading The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. For me a great story is one with multiple levels, where the horror increases exponentially as new facets of the character and his/her true situation is more accurately revealed. A great story leaves me gasping and breathless, wanting to immediately sit down and read it again to savor every nuance and subtlety. I could name dozens, but the one that immediately comes to mind is “Afterlife” by Sarah Langan, Nightmare Magazine October 2012.

What’s up next for you?

At the moment I’m working on a novel, finishing up a couple of short stories, and getting settled into my new home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Coming up, I have a new collection—Fatal Journeys—that will be out in March of next year from the Overlook Connection Press, and I’ve got stories coming out in Axes Of Evil, Miseria’s Chorale, and Of Devils and Deviants. Erika Holt lives in the cold, white North (i.e. Calgary, Canada), where she writes and edits speculative fiction. Her stories appear in Shelter of Daylight issue six, Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead, Tesseracts Fifteen: A Case of Quite Curious Tales, and What Fates Impose. She has co-edited two anthologies: Rigor Amortis, about sexy, amorous zombies, and Broken Time Blues, featuring 1920s alien burlesque dancers and bootlegging chickens. Author Spotlight: Tim Pratt E.C. Myers

What inspired “Ghostreaper, or, Life After Revenge”? Did the story change much as you developed it?

The character of Elsie Jarrow appears in my Marla Mason urban fantasy series—she’s mentioned several times in various stories and novels as a figure of dread and power, and is the principle antagonist of the sixth book, Grim Tides. I love Elsie’s character and wanted to write about her more, which was tricky, since (uh, spoilers) she is pretty definitively dealt with in Grim Tides, but I thought: this is why we have a multiverse. So the events of “Ghostreaper” take place in some other, parallel universe where Elsie is still wandering around loose to make mischief. Obviously, I wrote the story so it would stand alone, and you don’t need any prior familiarity with the character to enjoy it, but the connection is maybe an extra treat for devoted readers. Carson seems pretty okay with revenge, all things considered, and for Elsie it’s just a means to an end. What’s your personal take on revenge?

Revenge is appealing in theory, toxic in practice. I love stories about revenge—from The Crow to Kill Bill to Joe Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold—and tales of escalating responses and counter-responses are great in fiction. Personally, though? I think living well is the best revenge. Let your enemies gnaw their guts in misery while you shine, shine, shine; be content in knowing they think about you often, seething with resentment, letting their minds be poisoned by your presence there, while you scarcely spare them a thought at all, because you have better things to do. Of course if anyone ever hurts my wife or my kid I will devote myself to their subtle and overt destruction.

A magical artifact like a soul-reaping spear would be right at home in your Marla Mason series. How would she have handled Elsie?

Ghostreaper comes from a Marla Mason story, actually! (I am fond of such little cross-dimensional cameos in my work.) In my story “Ill Met in Ulthar,” Marla Mason enters the dreamscape of a deranged epic fantasy writer, and Ghostreaper is one of the magical weapons she encounters there. In my novel Grim Tides, Elsie goes into that same writer’s dream world and comes back out with an artifact called the HellHorn, used to summon monsters; in the parallel universe of “Ghostreaper,” she apparently brought out the magical spear instead. And used it to amuse herself. As for how Marla handles Elsie—just check out Grim Tides. Elsie’s my favorite villain in that whole series, and she has a lot of competition.

You’re a prolific author, writing and publishing a fair number of novels and stories each year. Do you work on novels and stories at the same time, or do you alternate? Does one format come more naturally to you?

I tend to think about short stories for a while and then draft them in a single sitting, unless they’re quite long. (Of course, it takes time to get them revised and polished into final shape.) I often write stories as breaks from longer projects—it’s nice to get that sense of accomplishment that comes with finishing something!— or as palate cleansers in between. I am a natural story- writer—really, a natural novelette writer, though I’ve trained myself to do shorter stories too. As for writing novels . . . After writing twenty-five or so, I still feel like I have a lot to learn, but I’m getting the hang of some aspects of it, sometimes.

You recently co-edited with Melissa Marr an original short story anthology called Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales, published by Little, Brown. You and your wife, Heather Shaw, also edit Flytrap magazine, which was recently revived after a five- year hiatus, and you’re senior editor at Locus. What’s it like wearing the editor hat versus the writer hat?

I was a lover of stories before I was a writer of stories, and I still love nothing more than reading a story that surprises and delights me. Editing is a chance to look for those kinds of stories, and promote them, and shepherd them into the world—and sometimes even to get paid in the process. What could be better? Rags and Bones is an amazing book, and I’m grateful to Melissa for asking me to co-edit with her. The opportunity to ask people like Holly Black and Neil Gaiman and Gene Wolfe and Kelley Armstrong and Garth Nix to write you original stories? That is a thrill. Flytrap was always much more about finding weird stories from people you probably haven’t heard of before —though lots of our contributors are quite well known now—and we’ll be bringing that same off-kilter aesthetic to the revival; our first new issue will be out early next year. Locus is a whole different thing, but it’s been valuable for teaching me to work to deadline, and to do research. Writing the obituaries is the closest thing in my life to a sacred trust.

What are you working on now?

A contemporary fantasy novel called Heirs of Grace that’s going to be published as a five-part serial by 47North. It is funny and magical and romantic and harrowing, and it’s something I’ve been wanting to write for years.

What work do you have out now or forthcoming?

My newest book is the aforementioned Rags and Bones anthology, which I encourage everyone who loves stories to check out. The seventh Marla Mason novel, Bride of Death, should be available both as an eBook and in a print edition (from The Merry Blacksmith Press) by the time this interview appears; it’s got monsters and motorcycles and a mean-spirited talking head in a birdcage. Next summer my contemporary fantasy novella The Deep Woods should be out from the fantastic British press PS Publishing—I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written.

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

Can you tell us a little about Pine Deep and how “Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard” came to be?

Ghost Road Blues was my first novel, and it brought me into the horror world in a big way. It won a Bram Stoker Award, and it connected me to the vast crowd of my fellow horror enthusiasts. That book, and its sequels, tell a big story about the troubled little town of Pine Deep, Pennsylvania, but it’s far from the only story there is to tell. I’ve since revisited Pine Deep to tell other tales. “Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard” is a weird, creepy little story that I’ve wanted to tell for some time. Ironically, it was originally written for the souvenir program book for the most recent Bram Stoker Awards banquet. And I won another Stoker that weekend. Kind of strange and kind of wonderful. It was like coming home to Pine Deep.

Pine Deep is a small town living with a dark secret that it refuses to admit, even to itself. What is it about small towns that make them such perfect settings for horror?

Small towns often hold big secrets. Because there are fewer people in a small town, people tend to know—or want to know—each other’s secrets, and that tends to instill in some of the population a strong desire for privacy. Or secrecy. Secrets are often dangerous things. Like cancers, hidden things tend to grow in the dark. That’s the vibe I had in mind when I sat down to begin plotting out the Pine Deep novels. Also, it doesn’t take much distance for a rural setting to look calm and innocent. But that’s often an illusion. We can look at a pretty red barn while driving past it in a car and think “how quaint,” and yet animals are slaughtered in barns. There’s death and blood soaked into the soil of rural America. Like Tom Waits says in his song, “Murder in the Red Barn,” “There’s always some killing you got to do around the farm.”

You also write for comic books. How does that compare to writing prose fiction?

It’s an entirely different process. With novels it’s pretty much a solo act. You, the writer, are alone, and your primary interaction is with your own laptop. It’s only much later in the process that you get feedback from an editor, but you spend months alone in your own head. With comics, everything is more interactive. You pitch an idea and discuss it with your editor. You submit an outline and beat sheet. You draft out the script and then get notes back on that. And you interact with the artist along the way as he develops concept sketches, pencils, and later finished art. It’s a very collaborative process. But a big difference is the way in which the ideal story unfolds. The writer creates the story and the script, but comics are a mainly visual medium. So, the writer has to anticipate the artist’s ability to tell big chunks of the story through art rather than through the writer’s dialogue. As a writer you have to dial down your need to be center stage and let the other creative types share in the process. That takes some time for a writer because until you’ve seen some of your scripts become completed comics, you don’t know how much you can or should trust the artist to get your ideas onto the page. Over time, though, I’ve learned to trust many of the artists I’ve worked with. I know for a fact that their visual storytelling has made my scripts into better comics. No doubt about that. What’s coming up for you? Current projects, new publications, news you’d like to share with readers?

Jeez . . . I’m at the beginning of what I’ve been calling “hell year.” My writing schedule is insane. I have to write four and a half novels over the next twelve months, including The Nightsiders (first in a new series of middle-grade, SF-horror novels), Predator One (the seventh in my Joe Ledger, weird science thrillers), Watch Over Me (a mystery thriller for older teens), Deadlands: Ghostwalkers (a novel based on the popular role-playing game), and then the second Nightsiders book. And I have a slew of short stories and comics due. As for what’s hitting bookshelves in the next year . . . I have two new comic book series dropping: Bad Blood, a five-issue vampire comic from Dark Horse launches January first; V-Wars, a new ongoing comic launches from IDW in May. The second V-Wars anthology, which I’m editing, drops in June, and another anthology, Out Of Tune will be released the spring. In April, Journalstone will release a new collection of my short stories—Joe Ledger: Special Ops—and the same month they’ll release a special limited-edition hardcover edition of my first novel, Ghost Road Blues. In March, St. Martins Griffin will release my sixth Joe Ledger novel, Code Zero, and in August they’ll release Fall of Night, the sequel to Dead of Night, which is now in development for film. Plus a bunch of short stories will hit in various anthologies. So, like I said, it’s going to be a crazy, crazy year.

You’ve written a number of nonfiction books about the supernatural. What’s your favorite bit of paranormal folklore?

I have two favorite bits of folklore. One is the benendanti, which is part of the folklore of Livonia, Italy, and Germany. These are families that date back to Etruscan times and claim to be werewolves who fight evil on the side of heaven. Very cool and heavily underused in fiction. The other is the strigoni benefici, vampires who were captured by Medieval monks who would then “recondition” them—what we call enhanced interrogation these days—after which the vampires would then serve as assassins for the church. And the wild thing . . . both of these monsters are mentioned in actual church history. Life is so much weirder than fiction.

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 In the Next Issue of

Coming up in February, in Nightmare . . . We have original fiction from Kat Howard (“Dreaming Like a Ghost”) and Adam-Troy Castro (“The Totals”), along with reprints by Tanith Lee (“The Gorgon”) and Gary Braunbeck (“We Now Pause for Station Identification”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview with master of horror Dean Koontz. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Nightmare. Thanks for reading! Stay Connected

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John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Nightmare, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Oz Reimagined, The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Epic: Legends of Fantasy, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. Upcoming anthologies include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Wastelands 2, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. He has been nominated for six Hugo Awards and five World Fantasy Awards, and he has been called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble. John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed Magazine, and is the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.