TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 21, June 2014

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, June 2014

FICTION Spores Seanan McGuire Don’t Go Łukasz Orbitowski Dirtman H.L. Nelson Machines of Concrete Light And Dark Michael Cisco

NONFICTION The H Word: Nightmares in the Big City Brandon Massey Artist Gallery Leslie Ann O’Dell Artist Spotlight: Leslie Ann O’Dell Julia Sevin Interview: Mark Morris Lisa Morton

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Seanan McGuire Łukasz Orbitowski H.L. Nelson Michael Cisco

MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Stay Connected Subscriptions & Ebooks About the Editor

© 2014 Nightmare Magazine Cover Art by Leslie Ann O’Dell www.nightmare-magazine.com FROM THE EDITOR EDITORIAL, JUNE 2014 John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue twenty-one of Nightmare! Some good news to report this month on the awards front: “57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides” by Sam J. Miller (Nightmare, December 2013) has been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award! The winners will be announced at Readercon in Burlington, MA on July 13, 2014. You can learn more about the award and see the full list of nominees (which includes a story from our sister-magazine, Lightspeed), at shirleyjacksonawards.org. Congratulations to Sam and to all of the other finalists! In other awards news, the Nebula Awards were presented in mid-May by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Lightspeed had four nominees this year: two finalists in the short story category and two in novelette. That of course meant that everyone knew going into it that— barring any ties—Lightspeed was going to lose at least twice. Overachievers that they are, they managed to lose all four! That makes Lightspeed 0-for-11 in the Nebulas all-time. But truly, it is an honor to be nominated, and hey—eleven Nebula nominations in just four years is not too shabby!

• • • • Speaking of Lightspeed, this month marks the publication of its special, double-sized fourth anniversary issue—the guest-edited, crowdfunded phenomenon: Women Destroy Science Fiction! It was a project so monumental that it spawned two other special issues—Women Destroy Fantasy! and Women Destroy Horror! You’ll have to wait until October for those two specials, but Women Destroy Science Fiction! is available now—in both ebook and print formats! To learn more about the issue, or to order it, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/wdsf.

• • • •

In other news, my anthology Dead Man’s Hand came out last month, but it’s still so new it still has that new anthology smell! It’s full of weird-western goodness, and it has a great lineup, featuring all-new, never-before-published stories by Kelley Armstrong, Seanan McGuire, Elizabeth Bear, Alastair Reynolds, Jonathan Maberry, Joe R. Lansdale, Tad Williams, Hugh Howey, and many more. If you’d like a sneak peek at the anthology, the complete text of Rajan Khanna’s story, “Second Hand,” appears in Lightspeed’s May issue. Additionally, Fred Van Lente’s story in the May Lightspeed (“Willful Weapon”) takes place in the same world as his Dead Man’s Hand story, “Neversleeps.” Plus there’s a bunch of “free reads”—and additional information about the book—available at johnjosephadams.com/dead- mans-hand. Speaking of my anthologies, The End is Nigh, volume one of The Apocalypse Triptych, came out in March, but it was exclusive on Kindle for 90 days so we could take advantage of the Kindle Select program. If you’re a non-Kindle ebook reader, then we have some good news for you: Sometime in June, The End is Nigh should become available in other ebook marketplaces, like Nook, iBooks, Kobo, etc. To help celebrate that, we’re reprinting one of the stories from the anthology here in Nightmare—the one that seemed to be the consensus pick for creepiest damn thing in the book, “Spores” by Seanan McGuire.

• • • •

With our announcements out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month: We have original fiction from Łukasz Orbitowski (“Don’t Go”) and H.L. Nelson (“Dirtman”), along with reprints Michael Cisco (“Machines of Concrete Light and Dark ”) and the aforementioned Seanan McGuire story, “Spores.” 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 Mark Morris. That’s about all I have for you this month. Thanks for reading! John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Nightmare, is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. New projects coming out in 2014 and 2015 include 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 eight 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 a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams. FICTION SPORES Seanan McGuire

June 2028

Something in the lab smelled like nectarine jam. I looked up from the industrial autoclave, frowning as I sniffed the air. Unusual smells aren’t a good thing when you work in a high- security bio lab. No matter how pleasant the odor may seem, it indicates a deviance from the norm, and deviance is what gets people killed. I straightened. “Hello?” “Sorry, Megan.” The round, smiling face of one of my co- workers—Henry, from the Eden Project—poked around the wall separating the autoclave area from the rest of the lab. His hand followed, holding a paper plate groaning under the weight of a large wedge of, yes, nectarine pie. “We were just enjoying some of Johnny’s harvest.” I eyed the pie dubiously. Eating food that we had engineered always struck me as vaguely unhygienic. “Johnny baked that?” “Johnny baked it, and Johnny grew it,” Henry said, beaming. “The first orchard seeded with our Eden test subjects has been bearing good fruit. You want a slice?” “I’ll pass,” I said. Realizing that I was standing on the border of outright rudeness, I plastered a smile across my face and added, “Rachel’s planning something big for tonight’s dinner. She told me to bring my appetite.” Henry nodded, his own smile fading. It was clear he didn’t believe my excuse. It was just as clear that he would let me have it. “Well, we’re sorry if our festivities disturbed you.” “Don’t worry about it.” I gestured to the autoclave. “I need to unpack this before I head out.” “Sure, Megan,” he said. “Have a nice evening, okay?” He withdrew, vanishing around the cubicle wall and leaving me comfortably alone. I let out a slow breath, trying to recover the sense of serenity I’d had before strange smells and coworkers disrupted my task. It wasn’t easy, but I’d had plenty of practice at finding my center. Less than thirty seconds later, I was unpacking hot, sterile glassware and getting my side of the lab ready for the challenges of tomorrow. Project Eden was a side venture of the biotech firm where I, Henry, and several hundred others were employed. Only twenty-three scientists, technicians, and managers were appended to the project, including me, the internal safety monitor. It was my job to make sure the big brains didn’t destroy the world in their rush toward a hardier, easier to grow peach, or an apple that didn’t rot quite so quickly after it had been picked. On an official level, I was testing the air and lab surfaces for a committee-mandated parts per million of potential contaminants. On an unofficial level, I spent a lot of time sterilizing glassware, wiping down surfaces, and ordering new gloves, goggles, and lab coats. It was work that could have been done by someone with half my education and a quarter of my training, but the pay was good, and it gave me an outlet for the compulsions that had kept me out of field biology. Besides, the hours were great. I didn’t mind being a glorified monkey if it meant I got to work in a good, clean lab, doing work that would genuinely better the world while still allowing me to quit by four on Fridays. The team was still celebrating and eating pie when I finished putting the glassware away and left for the locker room. I hadn’t been kidding about Rachel telling me to save my appetite. It had been a long day, and I wanted nothing more than to spend an even longer night with my wife and daughter.

• • • •

Rachel was in her studio when I got home. She had a gallery show coming up and was hard at work on the pastels and impressionistic still lifes that were her bread and butter. I knocked on the wall to let her know I was there and kept walking toward the kitchen. It was her night to cook—that part was true—but that didn’t mean I couldn’t have a little snack before dinner. The farmers’ market was held on Tuesday afternoons. I had worked late Tuesday night, but I knew Rachel and Nikki had gone shopping, and Rachel had the best eye for produce. Whatever she’d brought home would be delicious. The fruit bowl was in its customary place on the counter. I turned toward it, and froze. A thick layer of grayish fuzz covered its contents, turning them from a classicist’s ideal still life into something out of a horror movie. “Rachel!” I shouted, not moving. It was like the information my brain had was too jarring to fully process. It would take time for all of me to get the message. “There’s something wrong with the fruit!” “You don’t have to shout, I’m right here.” My wife stomped into the kitchen, wiping her hands on the dishtowel she’d been using to clean her paintbrushes between watercolor overlays. She had a smudge of bright pink dust on one cheek, making her look like a little girl who’d been experimenting with her mother’s cosmetics. I fell in love with her all over again when I saw that perfect imperfection. That was the best thing about being married to my best friend, as I’d been telling people for the past fifteen years: I got to fall in love with her every day, and no one ever thought I was being weird. Sometimes normalcy is the most precious gift of all. I didn’t get the chance to tell Rachel about the fruit. Her eyes followed my position to its logical trajectory. It was almost a relief when she recoiled the same way I had, her upper lip curling upward in atavistic disgust. “What did you do?” She turned toward me, scowling. “This was all fresh when we brought it home yesterday.” I blinked at her. “What do you mean, what did I do?” I asked, feeling obscurely offended. “I can’t make fruit go off just by looking at it.” “Well, then, did you bring something home from the lab?” She stabbed her finger at the gray-washed contents of the bowl. “This isn’t right. I examined this fruit myself. There was nothing wrong with it.” “You got this from the farmers’ market, right?” She was right about the age of the fruit: I remembered her bringing it home and dumping it into the bowl, and it had looked fine then. I’d even been thinking about how nice those peaches would taste with some sharp cheddar cheese and a bottle of artisanal hard cider. I wouldn’t have done that for moldy fruit. I wouldn’t have made it to the office without sterilizing the entire room. Rachel frowned. “Yes, we did.” “There you go.” I picked up the whole bowl, holding it gingerly to avoid any contact with the gray scum, and walked it over to the trash can. The decay had progressed far enough that the bowl’s contents made an unpleasant squishing noise when I dumped them out. I wrinkled my nose and put it in the sink, resisting the urge to toss it into the trash with the fruit instead. “Something went bad and set off a chain reaction.” Rachel wasn’t listening. She wrinkled her nose at the place where the bowl had been sitting, and before I could say anything, she ran her finger through the circle of gray fluff marking its footprint. “This crap is on the table, too. We’re going to need disinfectant.” “I’ll disinfect the table,” I said, swallowing a jolt of panic. “Go wash your hands.” Rachel frowned. “Honey, are you having an attack?” “No.” Yes. “But this stuff reduced a bowl of fruit to sludge in less than eighteen hours. That doesn’t make me feel good about you getting it on your hands.” I glared at the gray circle. Rachel’s finger had cut a clean line through it, showing the tile beneath. “Please. For my sake.” “Megan, you’re scaring me.” “Good. Then you’ll use extra soap.” “You’re such a worrywart,” she said, a note of affectionate exasperation in her voice. She kissed my cheek and was gone, flouncing back into the hall, leaving me alone with the faint scent of rotten fruit. I looked at the circle for a moment longer, and then turned to the sink. I was going to need a lot of hot water.

• • • •

Fungus is the great equalizer. We give bacteria a lot of credit, and to be fair, life as we know it does depend on the tiny building blocks of bacteria. They allow us to digest food, recover from infections, and eventually begin the process of decaying back into the environment. But the truly heavy lifting of the decaying process comes from fungus. Fungus belongs to its own kingdom, separate from animals and vegetables, all around us and yet virtually ignored, because it’s not as flashy or exciting as a cat, dog, or Venus flytrap. There are proteins in mushrooms that are almost identical to the ones found in mammalian flesh. That means that every vegetarian who eats mushrooms instead of meat is coming closer than they would ever dream to their bloody hunter’s roots. With so many things we’ve cataloged but don’t understand, how many things are there that we don’t know yet? How many mysteries does the kingdom of the fungus hold? Rachel—after washing her hands to my satisfaction—had gone to pick up our daughter from cheerleading practice. Nikki was in the middle of one of her “dealing with either one of my mothers is embarrassing enough, I cannot handle them both” phases, which would normally have aggravated me. Tonight, I took it as a blessing. Having them both out of the house made it easier for me to go through the kitchen and systematically bleach, disinfect, and scrub every surface the fruit might have touched to within an inch of its life. Rachel’s immediate “what did you do” response wasn’t unjustified. I worked in a lab full of biotech and geniuses, after all; it wasn’t unreasonable to blame me when something went awry. But that was why I was always so careful. Didn’t she see that? Nothing from the lab ever entered our home. I threw away two pairs of shoes every month, just to cut down the risk that I would track something from a supposedly clean room into our meticulously clean home. Whatever this stuff was, it couldn’t be connected to Project Eden. It just didn’t make any sense. When I was done scrubbing down the counters I threw the sponges I’d used into the trash on top of the moldy mess that had been a bowl of nectarines and apples—the mold had continued to grow, and was even clinging to the plastic sides of the bag—and hauled the whole thing outside to the garbage bin. I was on my knees on the kitchen floor, going through my third soap cycle, when Rachel and Nikki came banging through the front door, both shouting greetings that tangled together enough to become gloriously unintelligible, like an alphabet soup made of my favorite letters. “In here!” I called, and continued scrubbing at the linoleum like I’d get a prize when I was finished. I would, in a way. I would get the ability to sleep that night. Footsteps. I looked up to find them standing in the kitchen doorway, and smiled my best “no, really, it’s all right, this isn’t an episode, it’s just a brief moment of irrational cleanliness” smile. It was an expression I’d had a lot of practice wearing. The elbow-length rubber gloves and hospital scrubs probably didn’t help. “Hi, guys. How was practice?” Nikki frowned, which was almost a relief. There had been a lot of eye-rolling and stomping lately, which wasn’t fun for anyone except for maybe her, and I wasn’t even certain about that. Having a teenager was definitely a daily exercise in patience. “Mom, why are you scrubbing the kitchen floor? It’s not Thursday.” I’d been braced for the question. I still cringed when it was actually asked. There was a weight of quiet betrayal behind it —nights when I’d missed my medication without realizing it and wouldn’t let her eat until I’d measured every strand of dry spaghetti and placed it in a pot of boiling, previously bottled water; days spent searching through the women’s department at Target for the only bras that had no structural or cosmetic flaws. Years of living with my OCD had left her gun-shy in a way neither Rachel nor I could have predicted when we decided to have a baby. Nikki looked so much like me at her age, too. That was part of the terror. Nikki was sixteen, and that was roughly the age I’d been when my symptoms had really begun to solidify. Had she managed to dodge the bullet of her genetics, or was she going to start washing the skin off of her hands any day now? No one knew. No one had any way of knowing. “Remember I told you about the fruit from the farmers’ market going off?” asked Rachel, coming to my rescue as she had so many times before. “That mold was nasty. It needed to be cleaned up before we’d be able to cook in here again.” Nikki glanced to the trash can, which was so clean it gleamed. “All this over a little mold?” “It wasn’t a little mold,” I said. I was starting to feel like I should have taken a picture of the trash before taking it outside. That stuff had been growing at a rate that made me frankly uncomfortable, and for more reasons than just my OCD. I might be obsessed with cleanliness, but that didn’t make me immune to the allure of a scientific mystery. Mold that grew at that kind of rate was mysterious to be sure. If it were legal to burn trash in our neighborhood, I would have already been looking for the matches. “Uck,” said Nikki: her final word on the matter. She backed out of the doorway and announced, “I’ll be in my room,” then turned to prance away, flipping her hair theatrically. Rachel watched her go, waiting until the characteristic sound of a door being slammed confirmed Nikki’s retreat to her room. Only then did Rachel turn back to me, rolling her eyes. I managed to stifle my laughter. “You’re where she gets the stomping around and slamming doors, you know,” I accused, resuming my scrubbing. “My little drama queens.” “I had to contribute something,” Rachel said. There was a worried note in her voice. I glanced up to see her leaning in the doorway, arms folded, frowning as she watched me. “Honey . . . is this really about the mold? You can tell me if you’re having a bad night. I just need to know.” I shook my head and went back to work. “I’m fine, honestly. I took my medication, and I’m not having trouble breathing.” Asthma-like symptoms were often my first warning of a serious attack. “I just really didn’t like the looks of that mold, and I don’t want to risk it being carried through the house on our shoes. I already scrubbed down the table and the trash can.” “Mmm-hmm.” From Rachel’s tone, I could tell that she was debating whether or not to believe me. “What about the fridge?” The smell of the bleach was soothing. I kept scrubbing. “The fruit never went into the fridge. I did a basic check for mold or signs of spoilage, found none, and left it alone. You can check if you want, as soon as I’m done with the floor.” “I will, you know.” “I know.” I dropped the sponge into my bowl of sudsy water and stood, stripping off my gloves. I threw them into the trash and turned to find Rachel still looking at me with concern. I offered her a tired smile. “I’m sort of counting on it. What do you want to do for dinner?” “How do you feel about spaghetti?” The question was neutral enough, but I understood its intent. Spaghetti was one of my triggers, and had been since Nikki was a baby. If I could tolerate irregular pasta, I wasn’t having an attack. “Spaghetti sounds great,” I said. “Do you want me to go get some tomatoes from the garden?” “That would be wonderful.” “Be right back.” I stepped out of the kitchen, my bare feet feeling slightly tacky from the bleach, and kissed her cheek before starting for the back door. The floor was clean. The mold was gone. It was a beautiful evening, and it was going to be an even more beautiful night.

• • • • Rachel’s spaghetti was, as always, fantastic. She had a real gift with the sauce, managing to combine basic ingredients in a way that was nothing short of magic to me. I could work up complex solutions in the lab, I could synthesize impossible things, but ask me to brown some ground turkey and I was lost. Even Nikki, who had been making vague noises about watching her weight—worrisome, given how slim she was and how often OCD was connected to eating disorders—ate a serving and a half. Dessert would have been a fruit tart, had everything gone as planned. In the absence of the fruit, we had ice cream— pear sorbet for me, Ben and Jerry’s coffee with chunks for Rachel and Nikki—while we talked about our days. As always, Nikki was happy to listen to Rachel talk about painting, and began interrupting with facts about her own infinitely interesting life as soon as I started talking about what I’d been working on back at the lab. I thought about getting offended, and settled for smiling and stealing half of Nikki’s ice cream while she was distracted. Rachel’s job was more interesting to hear described: she created art, something that could be seen and touched and immediately understood without years of education and practical experience. All things being equal, I’d rather hear about Rachel’s job, too. All in all, it was a pretty peaceful night at home. No, that’s not right. Once I shut away the dread that still lingered in the pit of my stomach over the gray mold in the kitchen, it became a perfect night. It was just flawed enough to be real, and so real I wanted to repeat it over and over again for the rest of my life. If I could have had that night a hundred times, I would have been able to die a happy woman. That’s the trouble with perfect nights: No matter how good they are, you only ever get to live them once. It was a work night for me and a school night for Nikki, and both of us were in bed by ten. Rachel joined me an hour or so later. I woke up when she pressed a kiss into the hollow of my throat, her lips practically burning my skin. She snuggled close, and we both dropped down into dreamland, where everything was safe and warm and nothing could ever hurt us, or change our perfect little world. I woke to the sound of Rachel whispering my name, over and over again. “Megan,” she said, her voice tight with some arcane worry. “Megan, wake up, please, I need you to wake up now. Please.” It was the panic in that final plea that did me in, yanking me straight through the layers of sleep and back into our bedroom. There was a strange, dusty scent in the air, like something left in the back of an airless room for a long time without being disturbed. “Rachel?” I sat upright, reaching for the lamp on my side of the bed. Light would make things better. Monsters didn’t thrive in the light. “No! Don’t turn it on.” The panic that had woken me was even stronger now. “Megan, I . . . I need you to take Nikki and go next door. Call the paramedics when you get there, but don’t turn on the light.” “What?” I squinted into the darkness. Rachel was sitting on the far edge of the bed. I could see her silhouette in the light coming through the open bathroom door. “Honey, what’s wrong? Did you hurt yourself? Let me see.” “Oh, no.” She laughed, but the panic wasn’t gone. It laced through her laughter, turning it jagged and toxic. My heartbeat slowed for a moment, and then sped up as my own panic bloomed. “You don’t want to see, Megan, all right? You don’t want to see, and I don’t want you to see, so please, just go. Get Nikki and go.” “I’m not going to do that. Honey, what’s wrong?” And then, God help me, I turned on the light. Rachel was wearing her favorite nightgown, the blue satin one with the popped and faded lace flowers around the neckline. Her back was to me and her hair was loose, hanging to hide her face from view. As I watched, she sighed so deeply that her entire body seemed to sag, the delicate tracery of her spine pressing hard against her skin. “I should have known you’d turn on the light,” she said, and twisted to face me. I didn’t gasp or recoil. I wish, looking back, that I could say I’d been a better person than that, but the truth is that I was too stunned to do anything but stare silently, trying to make sense of the single gray mitten that she had pulled over her left hand, or the patch of pale gray felt that she had glued to the corner of her left eye. Then she blinked at me, and the strands of mold clinging to her eyelashes wavered in the breeze, and my denial snapped like a broken branch, leaving me holding nothing but splinters. Before I knew it, I was standing with my back against the wall, as far from her as I could get without actually fleeing the room. Now I understood the dry, dusty smell. It wasn’t old paper or a forgotten library book. It was mold, living, flourishing mold, feasting on the body of my wife. My throat was a desert. It didn’t help that Rachel—my beautiful Rachel, who should have been the one panicking, if either one of us was going to—was looking at me with perfect understanding, like she hadn’t expected any other reaction, yet still couldn’t blame me for following the nature she’d always known I was slave to. She blinked again, and I realized to my horror that the sclera of her left eye was slightly clouded, like something was beginning to block the vitreous humor. Something like the spreading gray mold. “I must have had a cut on my hand,” she said. “I thought I’d scrubbed hard enough, but I guess I was wrong. And then I rubbed my eye in my sleep . . . maybe that’s a good thing. The itching woke me up. So we can go to the hospital and they can do whatever it is you do when you get a . . . a fungal infection, and then it’ll all be okay. Right? I just have to go to the hospital. Right?” There was a fragile edge to her words, like she was standing very close to the place where reason dropped away, leaving only a yawning chasm of blackness underneath. She looked so sad. My girl. My wife. The woman I had promised to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, amen. And I couldn’t make myself go to her. I tried—no one will ever know how hard I tried—but the muscles in my legs refused to work, and the air in my lungs refused to circulate until I was stepping backward into the doorway, away from the dry, dusty smell of mold growing on human flesh. “I’ll call the hospital,” I said, and fled for the hall.

• • • •

Nikki woke when the ambulance pulled to a stop in front of our house, flashing lights painting everything they touched bloody red. “Mom?” She appeared on the stairs, holding her robe shut with one hand and squinting through the curtain of her hair. “What’s going on?” I forced myself to smile at her. The EMTs already had Rachel outside. They’d taken one look at her and swung into action with a speed that impressed even me, producing gloves and sterile masks and anything else they could use to keep themselves from coming into contact with her skin. Even then they’d touched her as little as possible, guiding her with words, not hands, casting anxious looks at each other and then back at me as they moved. I understood their concern, but there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t even force myself to follow them. The dry mold smell filled our bedroom, almost solid in its presence. I wanted to bleach the whole place, would have bleached the whole place, except that I knew Rachel’s treatment might depend on being able to examine the spot where she’d been infected. “Rachel’s not feeling so well,” I said. “I’m going to follow her to the hospital as soon as they call and tell me it’s all right. I was going to come up and make sure that you were awake before I went.” Nikki’s eyes got very wide and round. “You’re going to leave me here?” “No, I’m going to ask Mrs. Levine from next door to keep an eye on you.” I didn’t want to leave her alone in the house, but even more, I didn’t want to take her to the hospital. Not until we knew what the thing on Rachel’s arm was, and whether it was contagious. It had to be contagious. It had been on the fruit, and then it had been on the table, and Rachel had touched the residue on the table; just touched it, nothing more than that. If this stuff wasn’t contagious, she had been exposed at the same time as the fruit, and Nikki— Sudden terror seized me. “Honey,” I said, fighting to keep my voice level, “are you feeling all right?” Nikki’s eyes got even wider. “Why? Is it food poisoning? My stomach feels fine.” “No, it’s not food poisoning. Hold on.” I flicked on the light, illuminating the hall and stairs in a harsh white glow. Nikki squinted at me, looking affronted. I would worry about her sensibilities later. “Show me your hands.” “What? Mom—” “Show me your hands.” I was using the tone Rachel always called “OCD voice”—and she wasn’t kidding, exactly, even if she used the label to soften my admittedly violent reactions, turning them into something that wouldn’t frighten people who weren’t as used to me as she was. Nikki had grown up with my quirks and issues. She stopped arguing and held her hands out for me to inspect. They were spotlessly clean, with short, close-clipped fingernails that had been manicured with a simple clear coat. Most importantly, there was no mold on them. I swallowed the urge to tell her to disrobe, to prove that she wasn’t infected. Things weren’t that bad. Things weren’t going to get that bad. I wouldn’t let them. I couldn’t help her if I let them. I had to hold onto control with both hands, because if I lost it— If I lost it, I was going to lose everything. For the first time in my life, the sense of impending doom that followed me around might actually have weight. “Mom, what’s going on?” Her voice shook a little as she pulled her robe tight around herself once more. “Where are they taking Rachel?” “I told you. To the hospital.” I turned to look at the front door, and then at the open door to our bedroom. “Go upstairs. You can get online if you want, but I don’t want you down here until I’ve cleaned up a little.” Any mold that was in our bedroom could stay; I could sleep on the couch. But the kitchen? The dining room? My fingers itched, and I rubbed them together to reassure myself that it was just the urge to clean, and not a sign of contamination. “Okay,” said Nikki meekly, and turned and fled back to her room, where she could barricade the door against me and my insatiable need to scrub the world. Rachel’s hand. Rachel’s beautiful, delicate hand. Completely obscured by clinging gray. I turned and walked straight for the closet where we kept the bleach.

• • • •

The hospital called a little after five a.m., four hours after they had loaded Rachel into the back of an ambulance and left me alone with a contaminated house and a teenage daughter who refused to come out of her room. The gray mold had been growing on Rachel’s latest picture, almost obscured by the pastel loops and swirls. I’d stopped when I found it, standing and staring transfixed at the delicate swirls it cut through the color. There was something strangely beautiful about it. It was hardy, and alive, and finding sustenance wherever it could. Even in pastels. It was eating the last thing my wife had touched before she came to bed and woke me up pleading for help. I had thrown the picture in the trash and was in the process of bleaching the studio walls when the phone rang. My gloves were covered in bleach. I answered anyway. I didn’t trust the receiver. “Hello?” “May I speak to Megan Riley?” “Speaking.” It felt like my insides had been bleached along with the walls. Please don’t be calling to tell me that she’s gone, I prayed. Please, please, don’t be calling to tell me that she’s gone. “Your wife, Rachel Riley, was admitted shortly after one o’clock this morning. She’s resting comfortably, but I have some questions for you about her condition.” Relief washed the bleach away. “So she’s all right?” There was an uncomfortable pause. “I don’t want to mislead you, Ms. Riley. Her condition is very serious. Anything you can tell us would be a great help.” I closed my eyes. “She came into contact with a strange gray mold that was growing on some fruit in our kitchen around five o’clock yesterday afternoon. She woke me up shortly after one with the same mold growing on her hand and eye. Judging by how advanced it was, I would estimate that it had been growing since the afternoon, and had only reached a visible stage after she went to bed. She said that it itched.” “Have you, or has anyone else in your home, come into contact with this mold?” Yes. I’ve been chasing it through my house, murdering as much of it as I can find. “No, although I’ve poured a lot of bleach on it,” I said. “My teenage daughter is here with me. She hasn’t touched any of the mold, and she’s clean. I didn’t sterilize our bedroom. I thought you might need to examine some of the stuff growing in a relatively natural way.” There was a pause before the doctor asked, “Do you have anyone who can look after your daughter for a short time, Ms. Riley? You may want to come to the hospital.” “Is Rachel all right?” “Her condition is stable for the moment.” We exchanged pleasantries after that, but I didn’t really hear or understand them. When the doctor ended the call I hung up, opening my eyes and leaning against the counter with all my weight on the heels of my hands. My gaze fell on the sink, and on the fruit bowl, which I had scrubbed until my hands were raw before going to bed the night before. A thick layer of gray mold was growing in the bottom.

• • • •

I relaxed as soon as Nikki and I stepped into the cool, disinfectant-scented lobby of the hospital. Nothing could take away from the sense of cleanliness that pervaded this place, not even the people sitting in the chairs nearest to the admission window, waiting for their turn to see the doctor. Nikki was wearing her robe over a pair of jeans and a pilled sweatshirt that she should have thrown away at the end of the winter. It swam on her petite frame, making her look smaller and even more fragile. I resisted the urge to put an arm around her, offending her teenage pride and making her reject me. Instead, I walked to the open window, waited for the receptionist to acknowledge me, and said, “Megan and Nikki Riley. We’re here to see Rachel Riley?” Her eyes went wide with comprehension and something that looked like fear. “Please wait here,” she said, before standing and vanishing behind the dividing wall. I stepped back, rubbing my chapped hands together and wishing I didn’t feel quite so exposed. Something was wrong. I knew it. “Ms. Riley?” Nikki and I turned to the sound of our last name. A door had opened behind us, and a doctor was standing there, looking weary and worried, wearing booties and a plastic hair cap in addition to the expected lab coat and scrubs. I stepped forward. “I’m Megan Riley,” I said. “Good. I’m Dr. Oshiro. This must be Nicole.” He offered Nikki a tired, vaguely impersonal smile. “There are some snack machines at the end of the corridor, Nicole, if you’d like to go and get something to eat while your mother and I —” “No.” She grabbed my hand, holding on with surprising force. “I want to see Rachel.” The doctor looked at me, apparently expecting support. I shook my head. “I told her she could stay home if she wanted to.” Although not in the house, dear God, not in the house; not when mold could grow on a ceramic bowl that had already been bleached and boiled. We’d have to burn the place to the ground before I’d be willing to go back there, and even then, I would probably have avoided contact with the ashes. “She said she wanted to see her mother, and I try to accommodate her wishes.” The doctor hesitated again, taking in the obvious physical similarities between Nikki and I, and comparing them to dark- skinned, dark-haired Rachel, who couldn’t have looked less like Nikki’s biological mother if she’d tried. Family is a complicated thing. Finally, he said, “I don’t want to discuss Ms. Riley’s condition in public. If you would please come with me . . . ?” We went with him. For once, I didn’t feel like the people still waiting were watching with envy as I walked away: they had to know what it meant when someone arrived and was seen this quickly. Nothing good ever got you past the gatekeeper in less than half an hour. The air on the other side of the door was even cooler, and even cleaner. The doctor walked us over to a small waiting area, guiding Nikki to a seat before pulling me a few feet away. Neither of us argued. We were both in shock, to some degree, and cooperation seemed easier than the alternative. Voice low, he said, “Ms. Riley’s condition is complicated. We have been unable to isolate the fungal infection. To be honest, we’ve never seen anything this virulent outside of laboratory conditions. We’ve managed to stabilize her, and she’s not in much pain, but the fungus has devoured the majority of her left arm, and patches are beginning to appear elsewhere on her body. Barring a miracle, I am afraid that we will have no good news for you here.” I stared at him. “Say that again.” Dr. Oshiro visibly quailed. “Ms. Riley . . .” “Outside of lab conditions, you said. Is this the sort of thing you’ve seen inside lab conditions?” He hesitated before saying, “Not this, exactly, but there have been some more virulent strains of candida—the fungus responsible for yeast infections—that have been recorded as behaving in a similar manner under the right conditions. They had all been modified for specific purposes, of course. They didn’t just happen.” “No,” I said numbly. “Things like this don’t just happen. Excuse me. Is there somewhere around here where I can go to make a phone call?” “The nurse’s station—” “Thank you.” And I turned and walked away, ignoring Nikki’s small, confused call of “Mom?” at my receding back. I just kept walking.

• • • •

The phone at the lab rang and rang; no one answered. I hung up and dialed again: Henry’s home number. He picked up on the second ring, sounding groggy and confused. “Hello?” “What did you do?” I struggled to make the question sound mild, even conversational, like it wasn’t the end of the world waiting to happen. “Megan?” Henry was waking up rapidly. Good. I needed him awake. “What are you talking about?” “What did you do?” All efforts at mildness were gone, abandoned as fast as I had adopted them. “How much fruit is Johnny’s orchard producing? Where have you been sending it?” And then, to my dismay and rage, Henry laughed. “Oh my God, is that what this is about? You figured it out, and now you want to yell at me for breaking some lab protocol? It can wait until morning.” “No it can’t.” Henry wasn’t my teenage daughter: he’d never heard me use that tone before. He went silent, although I could still hear him breathing. “What did you do? How did you slip her the fruit?” I was a fool. I should have realized as soon as I saw the mold . . . but maybe I hadn’t wanted to, on some level. I’d already known that it was too late. God help me, I’d wanted my last perfect night. “Maria from reception. We had her meet your wife in the parking lot and say she’d bought too many peaches. It was going to get you to come around to our way of thinking, but Megan, the fruit is safe, I promise you—” “Have there been any issues with contamination of the samples? Mold or fungus or anything like that?” There was a long pause before Henry said, “That’s classified.” “What kind of mold, Henry?” “That’s classified.” “How fast does it grow?” “Megan—” “Does it grow on living flesh?” Silence. Then, in a small, strained voice, Henry said, “Oh, God.” “Did it get out? Did something get loose in the orchard? Who decided testing genetically engineered food on human subjects was a good idea? No, wait, don’t tell me, because I don’t care. How do I kill it, Henry? You made it. How do I kill it?” “It’s a strain of Rhizopus nigricans—bread mold,” said Henry. “We’ve been trying to eliminate it for weeks. I . . . we thought we had it under control. We didn’t tell you because we thought we had it under control. We didn’t want to trigger one of your episodes.” “How kind of you,” I said flatly. “How do I kill it?” His voice was even smaller when he replied, “Fire. Nothing else we’ve found does any good.” “No anti-fungals? No poisons? Nothing?” He was silent. I closed my eyes. “Who decided to give it to my wife?” “I did.” His voice was so small I could barely hear it. “Megan, I—” “You’ve killed her. You’ve killed my wife. She’s melting off her own bones. You may have killed us all. Enjoy your pie.” I hung up the phone and opened my eyes, staring bleakly at the wall for a long moment before realizing that the nurses whose station I’d borrowed were staring at me, mingled expressions of horror and confusion on their faces. “I’m sorry about that,” I said. “Maybe you should go home now. Be with your families.” There wasn’t much else left for them to do. For any of us to do.

• • • •

Rachel was in a private room, with a plastic airlock between her and the outside world. “The CDC is on their way,” said Dr. Oshiro, watching me and Nikki. Anything to avoid looking at Rachel. “They should be here within the day.” “Good,” I said. It wasn’t going to help. Not unless they were ready to burn this city to the ground. But it would make the doctors feel like they were doing something, and it was best to die feeling like you might still have a chance. The bed in Rachel’s room was occupied, but where my wife should have been there was a softly mounded gray thing, devoid of hard lines or distinguishing features. Worst of all, it moved from time to time, shifting just enough that a lock of glossy black hair or a single large brown eye—the right eye, all she had left—would come into view, rising out of the gray like a rumor of the promised land. Nikki’s hand tightened on mine every time that happened, small whimpers that belonged to a much younger child escaping her throat. I couldn’t offer her any real comfort, but I could at least not pull away. It was the only thing I had to give her. I could at least not pull away. The doctors moved around the thing that had been Rachel, taking samples, checking displays. They were all wearing protective gear—gloves, booties, breathing masks—but it wasn’t going to be enough. This stuff was manmade and meant to survive under any conditions imaginable. They were dancing in the fire, and they were going to get burnt. All the steps I’d taken to keep my family safe. All the food I’d thrown away, the laundry I’d done twice, the midnight trips to the doctor and the visits from the exterminator and the vaccinations and the pleas . . . it had all been for nothing. The agent of our destruction had grown in the lab where I worked, the lab I’d chosen because it let me channel my impulses into something that felt useful. I hadn’t even known it was coming, because people had been protecting me from it in order to protect themselves from me. This was all my fault. Dr. Oshiro was saying something. I wasn’t listening anymore. One of the nurses in Rachel’s room had just turned around, revealing the small patch of gray fuzz growing on the back of his knee. The others would spot it soon. That didn’t matter. The edges told me that it had grown outward, eating through his scrubs, rather than inward, seeking flesh. The flesh was already infected. The burning had begun. “Mom?” Nikki pulled against my hand, and I realized I was walking away, pulling her with me, away from this house of horrors, toward the outside world, where maybe—if we were quick, if we were careful—we still stood a chance of getting out alive. Nikki was all I had left to worry about. Rachel, I’m sorry, I thought, and broke into a run.

© 2014 by Seanan McGuire. Originally published in The End is Nigh, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey. Reprinted by permission of the author.

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

Seanan McGuire was born and raised in Northern California, resulting in a love of rattlesnakes and an absolute terror of weather. She shares a crumbling old farmhouse with a variety of cats, far too many books, and enough horror movies to be considered a problem. Seanan publishes about three books a year, and is widely rumored not to actually sleep. When bored, Seanan tends to wander into swamps and cornfields, which has not yet managed to get her killed (although not for lack of trying). She also writes as Mira Grant, filling the role of her own evil twin, and tends to talk about horrible diseases at the dinner table. DON’T GO Łukasz Orbitowski (translated by Agata Napiórska)

One

—Don’t go—she said. Leaning on the door frame as if she was about to fall down. I understood that she was worrying about me. She could’ve stopped me, but she didn’t. Only the words: “Don’t go.” A lump in her throat, no strength to say more than this. And I left her standing there in her white t- shirt and washed-out jeans. This is how I remember her in that moment.

Two

I can’t say that girls are any easier now. I think we were just unlucky. Me and Bolo. Other guys already had it covered —sports jocks with deep voices. I don’t know what was wrong with us. Fourteen year old virgins from a small town, trying to get under girls’ bras or between their legs. Maybe we were just trying too hard. We played Nintendo, roamed in the forests, and spanked our monkeys like it was a race. For a long time, we paid no attention to Zośka. Maybe it was because we’d always known her. We’d lived in the same neighborhood all our lives. She was much taller than us, and had manly hands with short, stubby fingers. She wore boy’s clothes and was always kicking a ball around and telling mucky jokes. She was massive. Once the roof of a shed collapsed when she stood on it. One day everything changed: I noticed her leaving her block in a very short dress. She’d dyed her hair black and wore a new bra. Our mate Zośka had become a woman. The race was on. We followed her around like lap dogs, but she only laughed at us. She was two years older than us, and to her, we were just brats. Spring came and the town’s thoughts turned to the disappearance of a young child, his picture covering the streets. The third boy to go missing. But we had something else on our minds. Zośka’s legs, arms, lips—and what she could do with those lips. We took her to the cinema, played games of pool, and we couldn’t wait for the summer so we could swim in the quarry. Zośka in her swimming suit—now that would be something! Bolo asked me to back off, he even begged. He tried to bribe me with ten of his best mixed tapes. I think he really loved her.

Three

Our only fear was Mr. Scar. He lived in a big, dilapidated house on the outskirts of Rykusmyk. His shaven sideburns made him look like an old soldier from American movies. He always wore a short denim jacket and dirty shoes covered in mud. He didn’t have a family, and nobody knew his age or if “Scar” was his real name or just a nickname. He barely ever visited our town. He used to drive an old Russian four-by- four, buying gas bottles, sweets, and many fish-hooks. I really don’t know what was wrong with him, but his cold stare could make you feel terrified. Mr. Scar had just one eye. He lost the other whilst working in the mine—the screwtop of a mineral water popped into his face. His teeth made him look like a monster, and so people were surprised when he appeared in our local shop with a smile like from an American sitcom. As a gift to Zośka, Bolo promised to steal his new false teeth. I didn’t want to be outdone, so I promised to bring his glass eye. Zośka laughed at us and, as always, didn’t take us seriously. But whilst I was leaving, she finally realized we were pretty serious. “Don’t go”—she said. But I left.

Four

Mr. Scar’s house was next to the forest. The ground floor was made of concrete, but the rest of the structure was made of wood. And it had begun to rot. The chimney was falling apart, roof tiles were in disarray and there was no light in the windows. You could get there via an old stony road, but we didn’t want to be noticed, so we chose a way through the surrounding fields. We laid flat on our bellies. Bolo took out some binoculars and scouted ahead, then passed them to me. Seen from a shorter distance, the house seemed even more obscure and abandoned. If it wasn’t for Mr. Scar’s car, we’d have been certain the house was actually abandoned and we had just made up the whole Mr. Scar thing. In that case we could have just gone back home. I thought someone like Mr. Scar should have a dog or something. I saw the remains of what looked like a dog house and many random things were just strewn around—rabbit cages, some wooden boards, and old car parts. I looked at Bolo. He was trying hard not to look scared, but I knew he was. I think we both waited for the other to say: “Let’s go home,” but neither of us did. And then it all began. If I could say anything about Bolo, it would be that he was an unhappy kid, as was I. We only became friends because there were no better options. Bolo’s shoulders were narrow, his belly was soft, and his legs were crooked. He spoke slowly and was always uptight, like he was constantly defusing a bomb. And I thought he would never be able to manage his life, even if the golden fish appeared to fulfill his dreams. Nowadays he’s a timid shell of a man with two kids and a wife who doesn’t love him and who he doesn’t find attractive. I know he keeps thinking about that night, and that he regrets what happened.

Five We crept around the house. Mr. Scar lay in his bed. There were three glasses on his bedside table: one with his glass eye inside, one which contained his false teeth, and one with vodka in it. It was dark and the objects within the room formed dark shapes. Bolo wanted to enter through the door, but I noticed a window was open on the first floor. I helped Bolo to climb inside, and once he was up he pulled me in through the open window. The floor creaked. I looked around at the furniture; it was so old it could probably remember WWII, and all the pictures were of people who had probably died years ago. The room smelled odd, something old, like a mixture of sweat, cheap perfumes, and death. I don’t think Mr. Scar spent much time on the first floor. He probably settled downstairs and didn’t bother venturing upstairs. There was a chair and an old wooden rocking chair in the corner. The carpet was full of cigarette burns, and there was a broken coal trolley next to an old oven and many canvas book covers. I was surprised that there was an old typewriter on the heavy table. And a violin without any strings. Next to the wall there were many tools: fishing rods, a couple of axes, and some baskets that smelt of fish. We were careful not to damage anything. When we got to the kitchen, there were a couple of buckets on the floor and a table with a plastic tablecover. I kept checking on Bolo and looking around. He walked like an ape, hunched with his arms dangling toward the floor. He was trying to catch the air with his nostrils, and squinting his eyes as if to hide them from sight. If you asked me to recall some memories from that day— apart from the steel door and the knocking we could hear from the other side of the building—it would be the hazy dusk, the horrible smell, and sweets wrappers all over the place. I felt like I had discovered Mr. Scar’s weakness. He obviously loved candy: Snickers and white chocolate, but above all, he loved cola-flavored jelly sweets. There were piles of jelly sweets wrappers next to a badly burnt oven and a sink full of dirty dishes. Standing silently in that fucking dimness, we were able to hear Mr. Scar’s snoring from the other room. We decided it was now or never. Bolo and I were desperate to just snatch what we wanted and run all the way back to Zośka. Bolo went first. Mr. Scar was lying on his back, wearing only underpants and a tank top. His veins were bulging, and he had small but strong-looking muscles and many scars on his arms. I was right behind Bolo. He was almost there, right next to the glasses that contained our prizes, when suddenly Mr. Scar sat up and looked around through a sleepy haze.

Six

We scurried behind the door. Mr. Scar just sat there for a little while and mumbled to himself. Finally he lay back down and went back to sleep. I checked on Bolo; he was shivering. There was another door behind him on the other side of the room. We didn’t know what to expect there, but there was no chance for us to go back the way we had come. At this point we were so afraid, we’d stopped thinking of the eye and the teeth. Bolo crawled to the door. I followed him. The room we entered was small and darker than the rest of the house. The blinds were drawn and there was lots of stuff on the windowsill, but the floor was clean. There was no furniture apart from a little stool. A second door on the left led back to where we’d already been—the part of the house with the burnt oven and the stairs. In the middle of the floor was a trap door, no bigger then a square meter but locked with a shiny new padlock. I checked it thoroughly. Bolo kept pointing at the door on the left, while I concentrated on the padlock, struggling with it in my hand. And so we were sitting in the darkness, gathering our strength and catching our breath, Bolo with his scared face and me with the padlock in my hand. And then came a knocking. A very quiet, soft knocking coming from somewhere beneath us. Now when I try to remember what happened that day, I think I might have heard some strange noises, the terrifying moan of a weird creature, something between a child and an animal. Maybe I just imagined it. The imagination can sometimes go crazy. But what I’m definitely sure of is that Bolo escaped, not waiting for me. Unseen like some kind of ghost, he ran upstairs. Once there he jumped from the window and, after crashing to the ground, he ran. At the police station he cried like a baby.

Seven

I sat there, still crouched down above the trap door. I decided to knock back. Then a stronger knocking came from the other side. The person—or whatever it was—seemed to know it wasn’t Mr. Scar knocking, and knew that there was someone else in his prison now. Knock, knock on steel. He must have been very weak, the knocking was so soft— more like tapping. All the leaflets I’d seen in town suddenly came back to me. How strong could a seven-year-old child be? Instantly I wanted to save him, but I didn’t have the key. I started thinking. The layout of the house was such that it was possible to get from the prison to the other room and then to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the bedroom and back here. I prayed to God and tapped the trap door with a stool. The sound lingered in the air longer then I’d hoped. Mr. Scar was awake, shouting. I ran to the other door, then into the kitchen, and I crawled under the table. I saw his shadow approaching, but I’m sure I got to the bedroom with one jump and remained unseen. Mr. Scar was already there, standing above the trap door, still in his underpants and a tank top. He held the stool and rattled the padlock. Hidden under the bed, I managed to crawl to the bedside table, took the eye out of the glass, and ran down the stairs, then burst outside where a rain like shards of glass fell on me. I hurried through the fields, but the time it took really scared the shit out of me. Once I made the forest I hid and felt as if I could stay there forever. The ground was damp and cold, like a dungeon. The shadows of the trees resembled sharp knives and fangs, and every rustle sounded like the massive figure of Mr. Scar just about to catch me and take back his eye. It was only when the sun began to set that I heard the drone of passing cars and built up my courage to go back home.

Eight

The police felt sorry for me. I told them the truth, every word. Well, the part with the stool and the stolen eye, I kept to myself. In fact, I refused to admit that I’d stolen the eye. I don’t think they believed me, but it doesn’t matter now. Bolo was at the police station a couple of hours before me. Mr. Scar was arrested the same night, while I was still in the forest. They caught him in his yard in the middle of burying the body, sweaty and panting from exhaustion, dirty from the blood and mud. The cop who had put him in handcuffs later told everyone who’d listen that Mr. Scar was very calm and even offered his help in digging up the body. His only eye, the real one, was as empty as the dark hole in the ground next to where he stood. The kid’s body was returned to the parents. And I know now what it means to feel remorse.

• • • •

My parents did the best they could for me. They didn’t want to let me out of the house, so I waited two days before visiting Zośka. The whole Mr. Scar story had spread like wildfire. Everone in Rykusmyk knew. Zośka was home alone, in her tight jeans and a low cut blouse. She let me in this time. We stood in the corridor next to the open bedroom doorway. I had a speech prepared in my head but found myself tongue- tied. I just handed her the eye. And I only managed to stammer that I needed to go back home. I only wanted to sleep. She looked at me like no other before nor after, pulled me closer and pleaded: “Don’t go.”

© 2014 by Łukasz Orbitowski.

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

Author’s Note: This story is set in the 1990s in Rykusmyk, a small town in Poland. The name of the town is a play on words. In Polish, “ryk” means “scream,” and “smyk” means “small child”: the town where little boys scream. Łukasz Orbitowski is the author of twelve books, such as the critically acclaimed I’m Losing Warmth (pol. Tracę ciepło); Saint Wrocław (pol. Święty Wrocław); a collection of short stories, Here It Comes (pol. Nadchodzi); and the widely acclaimed novel Spectres (pol. Widma). In 2012, Orbitowski was granted a Young Poland scholarship funded by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. In December 2013, he was nominated for the literary branch of the Paszporty Polityki, an award created for distinguished young artists in Poland. He regularly publishes articles on the subject of popular culture for Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s main daily broadsheet. Orbitowski lives in Copenhagen, Denmark. Despite being a particularly glum fellow, he is known to have sharp sense of humor. His favorite leisure activities are travelling, drinking, and weightlifting. Agata Napiórska is editor-in-chief of the lifestyle magazine Zwykłe Życie (Ordinary Life), and regularly writes for the children’s magazine Kikimora. She lives in Warsaw, Poland. DIRTMAN H.L. Nelson

You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. —Exodus 20:4

When I see the scorpion curled under a caliche rock I picked up, my first want is to smash it like Daddy would. Daddy’s always killing things—hairy tarantulas in the hall, fat diamondbacks in the field, and my hound pups when they get parvo. Our few patches of grass have the sick, but Daddy won’t treat it. He says it costs too much, that “those old dogs don’t deserve much thought.” Since the summer I turned seven, most of my pups have caught it. Two years dealing with litter after litter of all-rib dying dogs, because of Daddy. The scorpion shifts around in the sandy hole, its stinger held up, pincers pointed at me, ready for a fight. I feel a liking for the fiery bug. It’s just the two of us out here in the dirt while Mama and Daddy yell. I can hear them through the messed up screen door. I replace the rock, give the scorpion back his cool, dark home. But then I look to the shed, where I know dirtman lies in the dark. I grab the mason jar I’d brought outside, lift the rock, and coax the scorpion in with a mesquite stick. He fights, but I win. I tighten the jar top, but the holes in it will keep him alive until I need him. Even if you don’t like something here in this desert, you have no choice but to get used to it. When I was younger, I couldn’t stand the dirt. It’d get in my diaper, and I’d cry ’til Mama cleaned me up. Dirt gets in through the screen door, through the torn mesh, and blows in the gap at the bottom. No matter how many times Mama and I dust in a day, within the hour, a thin coating of the stuff is on every surface. Even on the sleeping dogs. Daddy told me once after a six-pack of Coors, “Our people were born of the dirt, Lucy Ann. And to the dirt, we’ll be released. ’Til then, we scrounge around with the lowest of the low.” When he said it, an image flashed in my head of floods and lightning hitting our land, how we struggled up from the earth, flopping around like fishes trying to breathe. How we formed arms and legs and learned to crawl, learned how to protect ourselves from the heat, then grew used to the drought, able to take the pain, tough and hard. Daddy didn’t mention anything about us being tough and hard. He must have forgot that part. I try not to listen to Mama screaming about Daddy’s drinking. I focus on the six-inch patch of dirt right in front of me until everything else fades away. Sometimes I think the dirt is my only true friend. I use the stick to turn over small rocks, to make little lines, write messages. Mostly to dirtman, since he can’t talk. At times, I swear he answers me, takes over power of the stick, scratches messages into the dirt. I can’t understand the squiggles, though. Not yet. Bringing my face down real close to the sandy square, I squint through the magnifying glass I got out of a box of Sugar O’s. If I have a friend, I want to know them the best I can, so I try to know this dirt by looking real close. It’s made of tiny crystals, sand lions, bits of rock, shell, bone. Some of the crystals are like glass. In school, my teacher says this desert was once all water. I’m not sure I believe it, even when I see the shells. Everything is dry and crumbly as old flour. Maybe my grandpa’s grandpa’s grandpa upset God and he dried the land out. It’s not even good to grow in. Our garden never does well—the corn, beans, melon pinch up like Grandpa Lee’s face in the heat, no matter how much Mama has me water them. This dirt’s only good to house horned toads, mean-as-sin yellow jackets, hairy wolf spiders, fast lizards. And to make dirtmen. Dirtman is dried up, but not like most folks around here are dried up. They’re like Mama’s jerky after I leave it out for a few days. Drier than dry. Daddy goes to Stafford Farm and picks out a cow to be killed, then comes back with a whole side that Mama cuts up and jerkies. She always freezes the rest. I’ve had nightmares about half a cow chasing me through the tumbleweeds and mesquite, thorny branches clawing at my clothes and skin. I’ve woken up drenched, then remembered Mama cut up that half a cow and it was cooling in the deep freeze, frosting over with a fine ice. I’d still look at the meat sidelong when Mama pulled it out. Didn’t trust it until it was in my belly. I hear her inside, saying, “I swear to God, Jessup, if you don’t quit drinking, I’m going to leave you. You’ve already lost the oil rig job, best job you ever had, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to stick around and let you bury me, too.” I ignore them. Our trailer walls are thin as ghosts, no matter how hard I press my hands to my ears. More than likely, I’ll be out here for hours, even after the sun’s down. I’m used to playing by myself in the yard, though. I have the bugs, the dirt. And I have dirtman. I look up, squint at the blazing sun, and I think it’s not so bad. Things could be worse. Then I see the storm clouds building at the end of the sky, remember Mama saying it’s supposed to flood tonight. Then I look down and see fire ants swarm over a dung beetle. The beetle keeps going, but the more ants that load him down, the slower he moves. His entire shell is covered, and it’s like the ants are moving his body for him, one stiff step at a time. I expect he’ll be dead soon. I’ve been bitten and stung up so many times by ants, bees, scorpions, that I don’t care too much anymore. I figure insects and reptiles are like people—they’re going to do what they do, no matter what. No sense in complaining. Complaining is for the weak, and we don’t have time for weakness. We only have time for hard work, for family, for God. Mama says that a lot. She’s never complained about Daddy to me. Or anything. Not once. Sometimes I think Mama is the strongest person I’ve ever known. Sometimes, too, I wonder why she married Daddy. But then I remember all the times she said how nice he smells, and she looked at him like he was the most beautiful person she’d ever seen. Daddy is handsome, it’s true. At least he was before he started drinking so much. Before, he’d bring Mama flowers from Henshaw’s, would sing to me and her while playing his guitar, his bangs falling in his eyes in a nice way. At night, he’d stroke my hair and cheek and hum to me until I’d sleep. I tell dirtman these things, not just the bad things. But, my memory gets foggy at times, it’s been so long since Daddy loved on me. Watching the beetle as the ants topple him over, I remember times Daddy got mad. Like when I wouldn’t come to the dinner table, because I was trying to save a mama bug by picking her up with the flyswatter to set her outside. Her rear end, a long pointy thing that babies would come out, was stuck to the carpet, and no matter how gently I tried to lift her onto the swatter, she wouldn’t budge. Then Daddy yelled, “Lucy Ann, get your ass to the table!” and I was scared, so I rushed the mama bug onto the swatter. It tore her belly in two, spilled out a mess of wet white eggs. I crushed her with my shoe, to end it quick, then cried and cried at the table. Daddy didn’t care. He told me to shut up and eat my green beans. Mama told him to stop being a heathen, hugged my shoulders, then sat down, clasped her hands together, and prayed: “Lord, let Lucy Ann’s bug crawl up to you in Heaven. And please, Lord, help us release our anger, into the air, way up to you, so we can fly free.” She looked at Daddy when she prayed. I think about these things, I hear them yelling inside, and the poor beetle waves its thin little legs as the ants tear him apart. Grandpa Lee’s big sledgehammer is within my reach, leaning against the shed. Grandpa Lee swings it so easy when he helps tear down old houses, but I can’t even pick it up. It’s too heavy. All I can do is push the handle over, bringing it down on the beetle. The crunch sounds like stepping on Daddy’s beer bottles. This time, I feel bad for the beetle, but I don’t cry. I do what I have to do. Rubbing the bug guts off the hammer’s handle with my toe, I think about dirtman’s face, how to make it. I have two of Daddy’s empty beer bottles that I snuck outside with me, so I set to work. There are a lot of empties hidden in my closet, but right now I only need these two. Using a ball peen, I break the bottle glass, and it cracks in jagged lines. I chip off shards from the bottom, then I do the same with the other bottle. Holding up the circles of brown glass when I’m done, I gaze through them like they’re strange sunglasses. Everything looks like an alien planet, like I’m somewhere else. It’s all so much darker, creepier. The yard and trailer are blurry along the barely curved sides, but clear right in the middle is our shed. I shift the bottle bottoms away from my eyes, blink a few times, to bring the clear color back, to make sure I’m still here. It’s like Daddy’s not really here when he drinks. And he’s meaner. I hate it. Once, he threw my porcelain ducks at the wall, and they shattered, pelting pieces all over the carpet. I’d found them buried in the yard when I was digging, had left them laying on the floor and he’d stepped on them. He almost hit me for it, but I ran to my room and locked the door before he could. He didn’t follow that time. Another afternoon, Mama called from the clothes factory where she works and asked if Daddy was home. I swallowed hard on the phone, told her no he wasn’t. Mama got quiet, said he was at the bar then, and that she wouldn’t be home that night. She told me not to tell him she’d called. Before she hung up, she said she was praying to God that Daddy wouldn’t dare touch me, or he’d have hell to pay. I don’t blame her anymore. I’m not sure I would have come home, either. Daddy knew I was lying when I told him Mama hadn’t called. He hit me so hard, I fell to the floor. I screamed, “Daddy, don’t kill me!” He stopped then and said, “I could wring your neck like a chicken’s. You’d do best to remember. Now, get on to bed.” I was hungry and scared all that night, and the next morning no one was home to fix my breakfast. In my room, with the door shut tight, is when I get back at Daddy. I rip out my dolls’ hair, drive nails through his empty beer cans with the ball peen, tear up his old t-shirts. When I do mad things, I feel bad after. I made dirtman so I can stop doing mad things, and I hope to God he can help me. I get up, brush the dirt from my shorts and knees, pick up the two bottle bottoms and the mason jar with the scorpion, and go into the shed. At least in here I can’t hear Daddy and Mama anymore. I stop and watch the dust float around with lazy magic, circle-eighting in the air. Late-day sun slanting into chinks between the weathered wood gives the air a warmth. It feels like Mama’s blue robe, when she wears it after a bath. I sniff deep and smell the rain coming. It’ll come soon and some may get through the gaps and sprinkle the floor. I curve around months of heaped, brittle magazines, the red rusted tiller, bags of stale dog feed with mice nested in them, half-used dented cans of oil. It all smells like Grandpa Lee’s storm cellar, old and moldy. I pass these tall stacks of Daddy’s things and, in the deepest back corner, I kneel down by dirtman. When we’re so close I can smell his pressed sandy skin, like the shore we visited one summer, I tell dirtman that Daddy makes me real mad. I can sense him listening, and I pretend the wind whistling around the shed door is him talking to me. I haven’t finished his face, so he can’t really say nothing. And he doesn’t have arms and legs. I’ve gathered up some things, though. I reach over and place the bottle bottoms and the mason jar in the pile of things to help me finish him. I tell dirtman that Mama talked to me before bed last night. My black and tan hound, Lady, got off her chain and tried to run out the yard. I chased her down and whipped her good while Daddy watched. I took everything out on her while he watched. Daddy looked proud of me. After, I snuck Lady into my room. I cried, and hugged her. She looked so sad, as if she knew it would happen one day, and long ago had accepted it. I didn’t know Mama had seen everything from the kitchen window. She sat on the edge of my bed, and all I could see of her was her outline by the weak closet light. She said, “Lucy Ann, sometimes you are just like your Daddy, and that scares me so. I don’t want you to end up angry and unhinged.” I shook my head hard, back and forth. “Please promise me right now you’ll let love flow into your heart like an ocean. Of forgiveness, joy, and hope. Let’s pray to God for this, okay baby?” “Yes, Mama.” And at that moment, when we clasped hands and bowed our heads and prayed, I felt that ocean coming into my heart, flowing fast and flowing straight. Straight from Mama. When I tell these things to dirtman, something loosens inside me. It’s like talking to God, telling Him my sins and asking for forgiveness. Somehow, I know dirtman forgives me. I hear Mama screaming from the house. I lurch up, run past the piled things, out the shed, and bang in through the screen door. In the living room, Daddy’s standing over Mama. She’s on the floor, has red coming off her. I don’t know what the red is or where it’s coming from. She isn’t moving. Then I realize it’s blood. I run over to Daddy and kick his shins. I shout, “What’d you do to my Mama!” He grabs my kicking leg, makes me fall on my tailbone, says, “Go to the field and don’t come back ‘til I yell. Your Mama and me gonna talk things through. I’ll beat your ass if you come back afore I call. Go now.” I nod fast. Mama’s hurt, but she’s just asleep. Daddy’ll wake her. I go outside. The clouds gathered together are black as Grandpa Lee’s bad toenail. They are ready to pour. My tailbone hurts, so I rub it as I hustle to the shed. Fumbling in the dark until my eyes adjust, I make my way to the back. I know exactly where he is—he says nothing, but I can tell he’s mad. It pulls me like an ant to a sand lion. This doesn’t make me uneasy, it seems right. I find the little oil lamp and make a flame. Then I see dirtman’s body. He looks larger in the pool of oily light. I need him to talk to me, to tell me what to do. My hand is shaking, but I lift the jar and jostle the scorpion out and into the chest cave I made with my fist. The scorpion will be dirtman’s heart. I watch it crawl in, then plug the entrance with our moldy bathtub stopper. I take the bottoms of the bottles and press them in for eyes. The milky brown deepens, and I know he sees me, even if all the color is gone. For his mouth, I make a gash with a stick and jut in my dead dogs’ teeth. Far down into his throat I push a small, creased piece of paper. I’d scrawled the words “Help me make Daddy stop” onto it. “Can you talk to me? Please?” My whispered voice sounds like someone else’s. I hear the scrape of a shovel outside the shed. I don’t understand what Daddy’s doing out there. I rock to calm myself. I tell dirtman I don’t know what to do, that I need a sign from him, a word, that I’ll do anything he wants if he’ll just help me. His body is heavy beside mine. I wipe tears off my cheeks. Then I hear a brittle voice coming from his packed dirt flesh, No worry. Due time. We will release. I start, jerk my head, and bite down too hard on my lip, taste blood on my tongue. I whisper, “Was that you, dirtman?” No answer. The only sounds are those made by the shovel outside. They continue for a long time. Then there’s a terrible silence, like the quiet that comes when coyotes prowl our field. The squeal of the screen door and a yell from the back porch, “Lucy Ann, come inside!” I blow out the lamp quick-like and race in. I can’t wait for Mama to wrap her arms around me, to tell me everything is okay. When I come in, Daddy’s sitting in his EZ chair. He looks a mess, with dirt all on him. He’s cracked open a beer, takes a long pull on it. I say, “Where’s Mama?” “Mama’s not coming back,” Daddy says. It takes me a minute to realize what he’s said. At first, I think he said she was in back, and I start to run outside to find her. But then it sinks in, what he actually said. A cold feeling comes over me as I watch him in his chair. His face is relaxed, as if he doesn’t have a care in the world. As if he doesn’t give a good god damn about Mama leaving. I feel like a trapdoor spider about to pounce. I say with gritted teeth, “This is all your fault.” Then I run to him and hit his chest with my fists. I keep hitting him and yelling, “You’re no good! You drink too much, and you made Mama mad by losing your job. Mama only stayed before because she felt sorry for you. You are too damn mean and weak for her. And for me!” He rears back and hits me across the side of my head. I wake up on the floor. Daddy isn’t here. My left eye is closed, swollen over, and throbs real bad with pain and heat, but I get up and run as fast as I can outside, into the shed. It’s so dark that I knock over piles of Daddy’s things, slip and fall as they hit me on my hurting head. Somehow, I make it to the back. There’s no time. I finish dirtman in the dark. My eye hurts and I can’t see, but I make dirtman’s arms and legs with knowledge that’s buried in me, crawling up from the past, from my kin, in times of need. I dump water from a pail, make the damp mud into the shape of big arms and legs. Bigger than Daddy’s. And I push Daddy’s brown belt between dirtman’s body and the floor, cinch it ‘round the middle. It’s the belt Daddy uses on me. When I finish dirtman, the rains begin. I can hear it run across the land. There’s too much, it’s too fast to let in, this ground is so used to the dry. It’s a stubborn, unloved ground, doesn’t know what to do when it gets what it needs. I go outside and stand in front of the empty dog pen and let it wash over me. I wish there was enough rain to fill this entire basin up, to wash everything clean. But there will never be enough. Still, I wish. I wish as hard as I can, and just then there’s a deafening sound behind me. I clutch my ears and turn. The shed roof is cracked in half, and in the near-dark, I see a shape standing in front of the door. I blink my eyes a few times, then wipe the rain from them, look again, and it’s gone. A shadow lengthens across the yard from the back door. “Lucy Ann, what the hell you doing out here when I’m yelling for you? You’re deaf as a box of goddamn nails.” I face Daddy. I want to warn him, but I don’t. Dirtman could be anywhere. He could do anything. Daddy grabs me by the neck and slings me to the ground. My face lands in mud water. “I have told you and told you, time and again, not to be running off without telling me.” He bends down, holds me in the water, and I thrash, try to push his hands off my head. It fills my lungs. I choke, but can’t keep it out. My vision blurs and everything sounds like it’s happening from a great distance, just a low thrumming that I’m experiencing outside of me. I feel light, light enough for my legs to lift off the land, and I see myself and Daddy, from above, pulling away higher. For a second, I revel in this feeling of outsiderness. I forget that I need saving. Then, from above, I see a lurking shadow by the side of the house. Daddy pulls my head out of the puddle and brings me crashing back into my body. I choke up water, and my lungs burn fierce. Daddy’s face is close to mine. I can smell the beer through my spluttering. He yells in my ear over the rain, “Don’t you ever do that again, Lucy Ann.” He lets me go, stalks into the trailer, and barks, “Come in. Now.” Before I go in, I look at the side of the house, but I see nothing. I make sure to open the screen door slow so it won’t squeak. I take a quiet bath, try to calm down. When I’m done, I cry into Mama’s soft blue robe. I rub it on my hair and down my cheek. I pretend Mama is holding me and Daddy is playing the guitar and singing. Much later, I come out, and Daddy’s in his chair. His eyes are closed. The rain is still pounding with the rhythm of blood in my hurt eye and head. There is a feeling in me as I look at Daddy in the chair. Like I’m shriveled inside. Like there’s no more good I can do. Nothing I can make myself be or do that isn’t already a part of me. Right now, I decide. I decide I don’t need Daddy. I don’t need Mama. All I need is myself and my dirtman. When lightning cracks again, I see him in the window. His beer bottle eyes glisten in the electric light. His canine teeth jut out all crooked. I know a scorpion crawls in his empty spaces and wants what it wants, doesn’t feel bad about it. I know that its stinger is certain. I’m sorry, Mama. I don’t feel an ocean. Not one drop. My dirtman is at the screen door now. Something is in his muddy hand. The door squeals open, then is torn completely off its hinges. I back away, over to Daddy, who’s drunk and passed out in the EZ chair, his cigarette still burning away in the ashtray, an empty bottle of Wild Turkey and a case of crumpled Coors cans littered around him. Daddy, who slapped me so hard once for wandering in the field that I couldn’t hear for two days. Daddy, who blacked my eye when I told him he’s too weak to be with Mama. With me. Daddy, who made Mama leave in the first place. Daddy, who kills everything. Peering up at my dirtman towering over us, something thumps from deep in my guts, from as far back as my kin goes. Mama’s words float into my thoughts: I don’t have time for weakness. I only have time for hard work, for myself, for my dirtman. I just need one last look at Daddy before I do my work. I go to Daddy, and I lean way down. He’s curled in the chair with smooth, relaxed features, gentle and open. His muscles twitch like my baby niece’s do when she’s asleep. He looks handsome again, like my old Daddy. I lean down until I smell his breath, sweet with whiskey. Until I remember his songs and his smiles and his hand on my cheek. Until I see a fine sweat on his forehead, blood drumming in his neck curve like a trapdoor spider opening its lid. As if the hollow in his neck is this whole depressed desert, and we’re all stuck in it, trying to climb our way out from the danger. Maybe he’s stuck, too. Daddy sighs in his sleep, and it’s about the nicest sound I’ve heard from him in a long time. Then I hear a low rumble and the words, Must release. I stand straight and look at my dirtman. His glass eyes blaze. His crazy muck mouth opens wide, the dog teeth like insane fangs pointing every which way, but I know for him, there is only one way. The scorpion burrows in his muddy body, and it is ready. His huge arm reaches out, palm opening to the ceiling, to God above the blinding sun who made us all. Who made us all writhe around in the dirt. My dirtman’s slimy hand opens for me. Grandpa Lee’s hammer is in it. But I can’t take it. It’s too heavy, and just now, seeing my dirtman, seeing my Daddy, I feel weak. My dirtman grunts and raises the hammer. On instinct, I shove myself between him and Daddy. I hit his chest with my fists until my arms and face are coated in mud. “Dirtman, don’t!” His leaden hand pushes on my shoulder until I have no choice but to lie down, flat to the floor. He kneels over me and gazes, his crazy face, the face I made, alive and electric and wet. The jagged black eyes and crooked-teeth mouth don’t animate at all, as if he’s half dead, but doomed to move by someone else’s want. By my want. I flinch and jerk my head when he lifts his arm up and brings it down. Then he rubs his heavy hand across my hair and cheek. I feel his slick, thick finger leave a trail as it slides. He hums to me, a rumbling that is deep water churning. I cry, and the tears sear my eyes. I close them and wish that everything was different, that everything was better, that we could all escape, be clean and free. I wish this as hard as I’ve ever wished anything. And I know my dirtman hears my wish. When I open my eyes, I see the hammer hanging in the air. I shut them again, and wait. For the red to spread under my legs, then back, then head. For my dirtman to make me an ocean. My Daddy’s ocean, all he had to give, final and glorious. Floating me up forever.

—For my mentor and friend, Pinckney Benedict, and his “Mudman.”

© 2014 by H.L. Nelson.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight. H.L. Nelson (hlnelson.com) is head of Cease, Cows literary magazine, Associate Editor for Queens University of Charlotte’s journal, Qu, and Proofreader for Literary Orphans. Her publications include Writer’s Digest, Lunch Ticket, PANK, Menacing Hedge, Hobart, Connotation Press, plus over forty others in the last year. H.L.’s poem “Absolution” was nominated for Best of the Net 2013. Her fiction chapbook, The Sea is Only Meat, will be out this year (Sundress Publications). She is busy co-editing an anthology which includes stories by Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, Lindsay Hunter, Mary Miller, and other excellent female writers (Upper Rubber Boot Books, 2015). MACHINES OF CONCRETE LIGHT AND DARK Michael Cisco

Things always seem closer together on a bad morning. I slept poorly last night, and now the relentless brilliance of the day makes my eyes smart and my face ache with squinting. Just within the station doors I stop to adjust my bag where it is cutting into my shoulder, and I notice at my feet a small piece of black plastic shaped like a capital L, and one end is frayed into a tuft of fibers. What did that come off of—or is it a complete thing? I check the board and signs and walk hastily to meet my train. A glance to my right tells me that someone has fallen in step with me. I think, it’s Jeanie . . . but she had had one of those faces whose outlines vary so much from one angle to another that she could sometimes be hard to recognize. She always preferred to walk on my right, and would keep her head turned to me in just that way, as if she were getting ready to rap me on the scalp with her chin. She’s looking at me now with a superior expression, having crept up and fallen in with me, taking me unawares the way she used to do. Not wanting to acknowledge her, a little frightened, and made blank-minded by surprise, I lower my eyes again on the tile floor ahead of my feet. It’s perfectly flat. That would be a pretty pitiful bit of deception, but if it weren’t for the weariness I wouldn’t be subsiding into myself like this. Defeated, I turn to her, and she halts with me. “Jeanie?” I ask falsely, trying to seem to verge on being pleasantly surprised, a fading part of me still en route to my train. “I thought it was you,” she says confidently, her lisp unchanged, her voice much lower now, the hair not much longer, the skin if anything paler, flaking a little by her eyes like I’d forgotten it did. She has a bag on her back too. We always had looked more alike than different, even if she was taller. “Where are you going?” she asks, a little imperious, looming over me. I explain disjointedly. The names and places that I belong to now sound as bizarre as if I’d invented them, but they’re everything I’ve loved and built around myself in the nine years since July, the pier or boathouse or whatever it was and the path back through the trees to the street and not looking back and not listening. “My parents moved back into the old house. That’s where I’m going now,” she tells me. “Why don’t you come along?” “How long—?” I hear myself ask. “Just a day. You can spend the night.” “All right,” I say. “Sure.” Without smiling, she opens her arms and takes me in them. She is smiling when she releases me. A thready, faltering sort of voice is chattering to me—It won’t take too long, I suppose—I won’t be missing anything and actually I was going back a day early; I could spend the night and go on in the morning. The words skip along the adhesive surface of a black, silent, motionless body of refusal, and its familiar spirit hissing at me, telling me insistently to escape, even if that means turning on my heel and running from her. The station is vast, the high ceiling above me crawls with a disembodied roar of announcements. Black clocks with shiny plastic faces spell out the time in white points. Cold air gushes from colossal, softly-whirring vents. Everything is new, and spotless, white tile, white plastic, white steel, and white air conditioning tubes, and all manner of gleaming sterility. The air is so cold and dry it hurts my eyes. Jeanie points the way to her train. One moment it is far off in the distance, and the next moment it’s directly in front of us, looking like a prostrated space rocket in a museum, glistening like ice. Its rounded windows and hatches are like frozen wafers of ink. Jeanie is in her clean element; she always hated feeling dirty and derived a great deal of pleasure from the exaggerated measures she took to keep herself clean. “I think this train is new.” The words drop from my mouth like the lifeless inanities they are. There’s something about Jeanie that utterly inhibits idle talk; I never could speak with her unguardedly. I had to watch what I said, vet it, and, as a rule, decide against saying it. It isn’t that I wanted to avoid exasperating her with trivia, it’s that there is something so relentlessly ultimate about her that I would feel like an ass no matter what I said, and consequently spoke as efficiently as possible. She nods, looking at the silent train. The muttering under the white ceiling, which seems to hang above us like a luminous cloud, drones on, and somewhere an alarm is buzzing. Another train rumbles away from a nearby platform. Stepping through the hatch, an odor like hospital smell, and new plastic, and bleach, surrounds me. I’m shocked to see a narrow black passageway in the car, lined with skinny doors of gleaming black acrylic. I was expecting to see rows of ordinary seats. “Compartment 17C,” Jeanie says. “17C.” Suddenly I feel a quick intensification of regret at what I’m doing, now that I know there are compartments instead of open seats and there will be no other people, visible around me, for me to turn to for respite. I didn’t realize I would be so completely on my own with Jeanie. I find a white plastic tab with 17C on it and turn the recessed steel lever, pull the door open and step back awkwardly to make room for it as it swings out into the corridor. My bag gets caught in the doorway, and I have to yank it this way and that behind me to get into the box. Throwing my bag up on the glinting steel rack over the seat, I turn and watch Jeanie coming in, getting jammed a bit and pulling herself free. She has always been taller. Her figure has filled out quite a bit since, much more than mine did, but she’s still lean. It’s as acridly cool in the train as it was in the station. Jeanie turns her head toward the platform. Without a sound, the train glides forward, as if at her bidding. Adjusting my bag in the rack, the movement takes me by surprise, and I allow myself to fold onto the seat. The muttering has followed us into the train; the voices are so faint they can’t possibly be making announcements—no one would hear. They seem to be murmuring amongst themselves. Jeanie sits between me and the window, on my right. The train passes a succession of pillars that languidly stroke the station lights, already dimmed by the heavy tinting of the glass. She is looking at me, fixedly, with no expression. I pretend to be more curious about the view through the window than I am. The tunnel covers us like a black cape and we’re alone together in a little cell of light, rolling along in the deep. My reflection blocks my view when I try to gaze out directly. I have to look around it, diagonally. Jeanie turns to glance out the window herself, and then becomes still, as if something interesting out there had arrested her attention. “Darkness—do you ever wonder if darkness is something in itself, and more than just the absence of light?” “Yes,” I say, honestly. Jeanie was always asking these kinds of questions, without any overture. I go on, determined not to be cowed by her: “I think that, as a distinct physical sensation in its own right, it’s probably no different from light. Just as positive.” Still looking out the window at the tunnel that is presumably conducting us up toward the surface, so that her face is a luminous membrane reflected there, she asks, “Do you think light can be negative?” “. . . I suppose it could be,” I say. “Let me think. It wou— it might be—like a kind of dazzle . . .” “That’s too much of something,” she snaps in the old way, peremptory but calm. “I mean a palpable absence.” “. . . if there were no darkness for contrast.” Her tone stirs my defiance; I’m not going to let her have the old ascendancy over me. “You said you think darkness can be positive as a sensation? I hadn’t thought of that.” She smiles at me, as always, without opening her lips. “It’s a good answer, but do you think that a sensation has the same positive essence as an object does?” “It’s just as real,” I say, spreading my hands. “Do you think a sensation has as much reality as a physical object?” “I don’t know. I only say they’re both real.” “Yes.” She keeps her eyes all but riveted on mine, their focus expands to engulf my whole head. “Can a sensation be outside?” “Outside the mind?” I can feel her using me. Wisps of hair escape from the loose ponytail at her neck and waft toward me like gossamer antennae. “Yes . . .” she draws it out, as if I were being slow. “That depends,” I say. “How would you tell?” Her eyes slam shut. “Right,” she says briskly. “How would you tell? We should never have parted company. But perhaps this time apart has given us both a chance to learn useful things. We can teach each other.” A glimmer illuminates the walls of the tunnel and the next moment the cape is swept back on buildings that whirl like tops, and trees blackened by a fire spinning as they go by, fragments of daylight twinkle in their charred branches. I’d known Jeanie since grammar school, and for years we’d been so severely close we’d sealed virtually everyone else out. Now she’s asking me about the years of mine she’s missed. She gets evasive, vague answers from me. I don’t want her to make contact, even secondhand, with the life I’d lived after I broke with her, and I regret having let slip even the few details I had mentioned back at the station. I feel that I’ve spoken too freely. But she doesn’t seem to be interested in the people I’ve met or the places I’ve been; I get the idea she’s fishing for something in particular, having to do with abstract ideas. I can no longer deny I have made a serious mistake. We had been seated in the same group in second grade. In fourth grade, we hid behind the bungalows lining the lower playground and I’d joked that she couldn’t really be a djinni because she wasn’t stuck in a bottle. “There are all sorts of ways to be confined,” she’d replied, a moment later. Her tone, and her use of the word “confined,” sounded precociously adult to me then, and I think that was the moment—the playground visible all around her head, the trees over us, the dark corky ground, dingy white wall of the bungalow, her thin form in shorts and a white t-shirt, hair pulled back as it is now—when I really understood that the strength of her intellect drove her into weird places. Whenever I met her, I was always cutting into a line of reflections that had begun long ago and moved from point to point according to a succession of unpredictable associations. She was always lecturing me about something. Her father had been a professor and she’d picked up some of his mannerisms. Adolescence brought us still closer because neither of us were interested in asinine giggling over boys. Jeanie had an affinity for spacious, air-conditioned caverns like museums, libraries, theatres, and train stations. We rode the trains, went exploring in my car, walked together under the stone pylons of the railway trestle that towered over a hundred feet above our heads: the arches cut into the pylons molded space into a tall corridor, like the nave of a ruined cathedral, or a passageway for giants, strewn with their litter, their condoms, their flattened refrigerator boxes, and marked with their graffiti and their urine. July—when we’d gone to the park together. There was a pier or a boathouse or something; I can’t remember what it was. A splintery old wooden relic by the water in the park. We’d been in there alone, looking out at the broad, green, tepid water, speculating about what invisible thing was causing the circles to spread on its surface. And she’d said something, I don’t remember what, that sounded to me like a casual insult. It wasn’t the first time that had happened. She often spoke harshly. She had an especially light touch when it came to subtle condescension. But this time I felt my patience completely give way. I was disgusted with her. That disgust grew and grew, was fed by, and opened onto, a long-sealed recess of silent resentment—and fear. The feelings showed themselves to me for what they were, then. I started to walk, following the path through the trees that was the most direct way out of the park, seeing my way home like a map and route. Jeanie came hurrying after me, demanding to know why I’d left that way, without a word. Turning, I repeated to her whatever it was she’d said. It was an afterthought; she’d said something, and added that I might understand if I were capable of it, something like that. This made her impatient. “I didn’t mean that,” she drawled, rolling her eyes disdainfully. The gesture humanized her too much for her own good, and I felt strengthened. My anger outgrew my fear of her. “I know,” I replied calmly, “but it should have occurred to you—it should have mattered to you—that I might take it that way.” “Don’t be stupid!” “You should express yourself more carefully, Jean.” I didn’t think I wanted . . . I’d grown used to believing I didn’t want anything more than to go on with her in the same way forever, and I realized later that that must have been precisely my reason for breaking it off. Showing her my back, I walked unhurriedly down the path, thinking—is this what I want? Do I just break it all off, just like that? Now? It seemed as though the bond between us had just happened to wear thin, and I had, for the moment, the strength to break it. Am I really doing it? I remember feeling her there in the silence behind me as if she were shouting at my back. Is it happening? Is it? —I am doing it! For hours afterwards I had to keep on telling myself I’d done it, that I wouldn’t go back, and that she wouldn’t come after me, before I could believe in it. I pictured a massive, black guillotine blade, as big as a wall, slowly dropping down between us. And there to stay. There never was such a person, I told myself. She never existed. I drove her from my mind. The sun, through the smoky windowpanes, gives off a sullen, solarized leaden light that bursts and flashes over the dusty pines lining the tracks. The rails beneath us make a rheumatic hum, and Jeanie, the window at her back, is nearly a silhouette. That seems to make her more solid, the denseness with which she blocks the light. Later, I’d heard from someone else who knew her that she’d checked herself into a hospital. Behind her, rows of massive white globes and pyramids and tall white stacks, billowing clouds of brilliant white steam, float by faster and faster. Slender and lofty tubes tipped with orange fires trail streaks of heat-agitated air, like invisible banners trembling in the wind. That muttering overhead is more like yammering now, almost like yelps of laughter. Then it cuts off, abruptly. “God! It’s been so long!” Jeanie says, her chin high. I look past the tendons in her neck to the fractured light sluicing by the glass. The train accelerates to hypnotic speed. With a whisper, it seems to tear the world outside the window to pieces, as if the land and trees and buildings and machinery and sky had all been flung into a blender, and the glass bizarrely separates the stillness of this compartment from the catastrophic violence outside. The sight has a numbing effect on me, and my head is getting heavy. She used to talk to me about “chafing.” The chafing of the arrangements she found herself in was an indication that individual fractions of mind or consciousness created a ghostly tumult around her, making her irritable to the point of desperation. She saw herself caught in the middle of something like a mobile the size of the world. Bigger. “What do you think of the idea that insanity is a predator or a parasite you see only in its effects on its victims?” I told her I thought it was a promising idea. She had been obsessed with the subject of insanity; even then, to an oblivious fool like me, I could tell she was getting to be more and more at home with a tragic idea of herself. “I close my eyes, look inside, and see the pistons, wheels, gleaming metal,” she declared with enthusiasm. “They don’t come from inside, or outside, exclusively, but from both at once.” Her words come back to me at random, in a raft of incomplete memories. “A question of time—if all time is simultaneous—the pieces of mechanized consciousness are drawn into a different . . . mode of time, and so they become immanent, which means—old? Or do I mean young, or older-younger- older-younger?” That was her theme: minds devouring each other, taking pieces out of each other. One consuming another. The action was always understood in terms of eating, but the result was something else. Not digestion. Not excretion. Co-optation. Use. Loss. The idea was that parts of people’s minds were being integrated into an interpersonal machine, or more than one. Sometimes these parts were torn out, like chunks of flesh ripped from a carcass, but sometimes they were left in place. Those parts left in situ would sometimes be completely inaccessible to the host consciousness, but not always. Quote-Insanity-unquote meant one’s mind, or part of one’s mind, had been lost to, or incorporated into, interpersonal machines, another species of mind following its own scheme of cause and effect—totally, or partially, for an instant, or a while, episodically, or constantly, or forever. Sometimes this could happen so briefly, or on such a small scale, that no one would be aware of it. One would be insane for only a split second. Fractions of consciousness were being used. The predators were the thoughts of other living things being thought with someone else’s mind, and minds consisting of pieces of countless minds. Long archipelagoes of insane people, insane animals. Tiny motes of insanity hidden in objects, plants, stones, buildings. These machines consist of both material and immaterial elements and extended into this dimension from some other. Their tissue is and isn’t theirs . . . They don’t act according to need—the closest analogy would be sexual, like sex combined with eating. They are machines that build themselves; some parts are gravity; some parts are empty spaces, or light, or even darkness and cold, things that are normally considered strictly negative like death, absence, and silence; colors, gestures, relations of objects in a volume . . . emotions, symbols, and steel and copper and blood and nameless things . . . acts . . . subterranean slime . . . quantities, odors, textures . . . They are bodies seen one way, minds seen another way, and still other things to the infinity of all the ways of seeing. They actually consist in part of the way they are seen, and in relations between the different dimensions, the ways they relate, actually part of them, just like a wheel is part of a car. “They’re organisms,” she’d told me, “but at the same time they’re like making a plan, seeing abstract relations . . . like doing calculations in mathematics. They aren’t many or one . . . and they have no reasons—they have no reasons”— here she spoke with a quickening intensity, almost fiercely, “They’re free! Really free!” I wake up. Jeanie’s eyes are fixed on nothing in particular, not exactly out of the window, but straight ahead. I don’t know if I am hearing that yammering again. I don’t believe I am. The country outside the window looks narrow, like a medieval landscape painting, crowded and deep. The sun’s orange and white octagons keep raking my face. We flash through a station, almost a blink, and I see the faces of the people waiting for the local train all smear together. As I am drooping back into half-sleep, Jeanie turns toward me. Perhaps she wants to sleep with her back to the window. At dusk we came to the rim of the valley. The ridge line comes rushing toward the train like the edge of the world, crumbling away with terrifying speed. We’ve switched seats. I sit by the window. A thrill comes over me—I feel in my chest, in my body, my own life, like light water, a sort of constantly vanishing glory. We’re travelling at top speed now. Blue light fills the valley below, and seems to thicken, gathering into a dark, grainy band of deep indigo all around us. Just opposite me, that blue thrusts a shapeless finger high up into the sky, like a plume smoke. A single planet shines at me, almost directly level with my eyes, and I realize that there is a fine mist in the valley, and a thin veil of dim white clouds hanging just above us; the dark indigo band is really a clear gap in between; the “finger” isn’t dark blue smoke, but a rent in the white cloud above. Beneath me, there is the crust of the earth. Beneath that, magma. Go far enough, through the core, eventually there will be crust again, and the bottom of the ocean. Then sea water. Then air. Then the edge of the atmosphere. Then infinite nothingness, directly beneath my feet. The entire earth is a little trapeze, holding me up over yawning emptiness. And space extends to either side of me, in front of me, behind me, and above me as well, forever. I see the planet out there in the blue the way I might see the porch light at the end of a dark street; I mean not as a light in a high ceiling or as something in a different plane of existence from me, but as a part the space I occupy. All that there is between that planet and me are this glass, a trivial bit of air, and an inconceivable expanse of empty space. A plummeting fall that would go on for years and years. Innumerable years. The light changes on the hills all at once. Behind them I imagine clicking gears shimmering with incessant, precise, mindlessly purposive adjustments. The train cants forward and the ridges bound up around us like rigid waves. My weight shifts oppressively as we begin the long brake into the first station stop. The air conditioning flutters out, and now the compartment is stuffy. Drowsing, I am dimly aware of a vague outline on the other side of the window and hope that no one wants to share our compartment. The train is so completely silent I can hear a fly buzzing around. It must have wormed its way into the car when the hatches opened, and crept under the door, or through the lock. A cold, gelatinous living thing buzzing to and fro above me, and occasionally knocking against the window with a distinct splat. Jeanie springs up and reaches for her bag. “We’re here,” she says, looking down at me from between her upraised arms. I follow her from the carriage into the stale heat of the open platform. The lights are on in the station, but the curved platform is dark. I can’t see either end of the train, only this middle section, white glowing blue. We walk alone into the empty station. The train is gone when we emerge from the other side. I can hear the rustling of trees and brush far up on the ridges. Behind me, the public announcement system murmurs sleep language, in short, declarative phrases. Jeanie leads me up a steep sidewalk, lined with old shops in wood-frame houses, curtains drawn across the windows. There are no signs. There are no streetlights, just a porch lamp here and there, throwing distinct circles of wan radiance onto the pavement. Trees dense with leaves tower over the buildings in foamy black heaps and seem to trap the light close to the ground. The town is beautifully eerie, and I begin to feel a pleasurable conspiratorialness with it. Finally, I comment on the quiet. “That’s right,” Jeanie says, without really looking back at me. She’s walking steadily along and I try to fall in step with her, beginning to breathe hard. It’s difficult to shake the jolted-awake feeling. Synchronizing my pace to hers, I suddenly find the effort far less. After a few moments, I allow myself to drop out of step with Jeanie again. I think I prefer the effort to that strange ease. As if sensing this, she says, “The town really empties out in the summer.” There are a few streetlights now, like cowled figures dropping cones of heavy light down onto the street. Some are older; simply lamps stuck on poles, and each creates a short halo of foliage around itself where it nestles in the overhanging branches. The houses here are all dark. We come to the top of the street, where it intersects another that climbs up toward the peak of the hill, to our left. We go down the shoulder. After only a few minutes’ descent, Jeanie points to an overhung side street that opens into the darkness like a burrow’s mouth. It is illuminated by a solitary lamp at the corner that shines on a crescent of leaves like a stationary wave. A pleasant, night wind washes over me as we jolt down the slope toward it. Turning onto the street is like going under a high archway into another world. Now there’s dark blue sky ahead, stars, black ridges jumbled against each other black on black, moving air stirring fragrant brush. “We’re at the edge of town,” I remark. My voice sounds strange in the becalmed air. “M-hm.” She leads me to the silhouette of a roof against the sky. “Here we are.” Crossing the pale, perfectly new sidewalk, she slips out of her pack and flings it over the high steel fence onto the lawn. “Let me,” she pulls me forward and then takes my pack, throwing it over next to hers. “You don’t have a key?” “If I had I would have used it,” she says bluntly. “You go first.” I pull myself up over the fence and drop next to her, lose my balance and sprawl forward. My outflung hands drive back a mat of newly-laid sod, exposing the coffee-ground topsoil beneath it. We approach the house. The smell of fresh concrete, plaster, and paint mixes with the herby odor from the wild hillside behind the lot. A steel trough, encrusted with dried cement, sits in the driveway like a small boat among heaps of bricks. A shovel leans against the wall of the house, marking it with a dim shadow in the blue. The front door rests on its side against the porch struts. It’s the kind you buy at a box store, adorned with a garish window of many small bevelled panes radiating from an oval centerpiece. Jeanie walks into the house over a threshold sheeted with clear plastic. I look around. There are other, similar houses there in the dark. I see exposed beams, a cement mixer, tools. Going inside I can hear Jeanie moving around in the gloom, her feet making hollow sounds in the empty house. She looks up at me, her eyes dark in her dimly glowing face. “I guess they’re remodeling,” she says flatly. I bend forward to avoid her look and bang my hands against the knees of my pants, leaving faint blackish streaks of topsoil. When I straighten up again, she has gone through to the next room. I don’t follow right away. My mind seems too receptive. I’m no longer tired, but I can’t seem to think about what I know is wrong. Jeanie is doing something that involves some scraping and rustling. I go through the doorway. There’s a kitchenette in front of me, a few stray tools, a hammer, caulk gun, boxcutter with a few razors, nails, pins, scattered on the counter. The room beyond the kitchenette is floored with white linoleum, and its sliding glass doors open to the blue backyard. Jeanie crosses toward me naked from the far corner of the room, since I stand by the only door. Brushing by me she sways in my direction and I raise my hand; it streaks her forearm with topsoil. Her face slackens. “Dirty. Dirty.” She plucks up one of the loose razors and slices the side of my neck with it. The left side of my head goes cold, and the back of my right knee and right foot instantly go numb. Jeanie cuts my neck first on one side then the other. I twist and flop forward over the counter and I feel her behind me darting her hand in around my shoulder and pushing my arms away. My breath against the counter, and spatter. She pulls me round to face her and keeps cutting at my neck. I watch my arms float up, but there’s no strength in them, and she easily bats them back down. I taste blood. She’s gone. I see black streaks everywhere on the white. I am on my back, on the floor. My vision is dim, my eyes are dusty and cold. My neck hurts. I can’t tell where my hands and feet are, how I’m lying. My neck hurts worse—impossibly—burning like acid. They churn avidly, in a trembling, colorless light. I realize they’re eating. Rows of pistons, like piano keys, are applauding. My heat and strength drain onto the linoleum. I tell my heart to stop. It must be made to realize it’s pumping my blood out of me, not through me. Each beat hushes in my ear, or the one that doesn’t seem to be glued to the floor, and through which the sound of muttering comes to me. The searing pain in my neck is like a beacon in empty space; it won’t let me go. Mindless, automatic greed surrounds it, just out of sight. My throat is in agony. I want to sob but whatever I do hurts it more. My body is cold, appallingly weak. I drag myself to my feet. The night is paling. Outside I can hear the coyotes. They must have been on the train the whole time. Barely able to move, I stagger to the sliding glass door. I need to get out of this house. In despair I tug nervelessly at the handle. I make a supreme effort and the rubber seal parts with a kissing sound. Hauling the door out of my way, I nearly throw myself off my feet. My neck is raw, icy and burning. My shirt is stiff and glued to my body. Slowly I am leaving the house behind. The yammering is all around me, very near. I’m in the back yard. Which way do I go? I call out. “I am here!” My voice is so weak I can hardly hear it. Why am I calling? “Here!” I call, frailly, my voice breaking. “I am here!” The ragged whooping erupts on all sides. It rises jubilantly into the sky and dissolves into a swarm of shrill yipes. The explosion of noise makes me dizzy, I fall at full length on the patio—my wounds are jarred open and bleed again. I gasp, shake. I feel myself nuzzled. For a moment I can almost see myself from a distance—a wild distance. I turn onto my side. Some part of my mind sees all this, my body outstretched and the coyotes and the grass, house, stars, patio, inside and out, and it’s leaving me. A tongue jabs at my neck—I cry out, convulsing with pain and yet not with surprise. I seem to know all this, or part of me does. I taste my own blood in an alien mouth. From the corner of the house, Jeanie slinks toward me out of the dark, her loose hair frisking her shoulders. They are so precisely coordinated that neither she nor the coyotes take any notice of each other. She kneels beside me and takes my head in her hands, laying it in her lap. This is so painful that I cry out in despair, the churning mutter roaring in my ears and rising to cover the sound of my voice. Jeanie is bending over me, impassive as a nurse. She lays my arms outspread on the ground to either side of me, her breasts brushing my face. Now she is stroking my forehead. She whispers to me, “This is necessary,” lisping it over and over to the shrinking thing that is still me. “This is necessary.” Jaws sink into my calf and I cry out in pain. She smiles down at me. Her face becomes part of the sky. She soothes me as they begin eating.

© 2009 by Michael Cisco. Originally published in Lovecraft Unbound, edited by Ellen Datlow. Reprinted by permission of the author.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight. Michael Cisco is an American writer, teacher, and translator currently living in New York City. He is the author of novels The Divinity Student, The Tyrant, The Traitor, The Great Lover, The Narrator, Celebrant, and MEMBER, as well as the short story collection Secret Hours. His short fiction has appeared i n Lovecraft Unbound, Black Wings, The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, Blood and Other Cravings, The Weird, and elsewhere. NONFICTION THE H WORD: NIGHTMARES IN THE BIG CITY Brandon Massey

There is safety in numbers, goes the popular adage. While that may be true when considering the likelihood of a car plowing into a group of cyclists, when it comes to life in the big city, living among the masses isn’t going to save you from the Bogeyman. In fact, the masses might have you running for your life. Especially when they come shambling after you with their rotting limbs and insatiable appetites for live human flesh. As fans of horror, we’re familiar with certain settings in literature and film: the isolated town with the bare bones police force, the cabin deep in the woods where cell phones lose service, the remote research facility in the frozen tundra where strange creatures run amok. These conventions have been spun a thousand different ways over the history of the genre, from The Dunwich Horror to The Evil Dead to The Thing. But what about cities? Those glittering urban centers bursting at the seams with life in all its varied flavors? Are they not equally suitable environments for tales of terror? Certainly, the popular perceptions of some aspects of urban life would seem to fit. One example: people in the city are so focused on their own affairs, their skins thickened by so many external stimuli, that even if a stranger is bleeding out on the sidewalk, no one will stop to offer assistance. It’s a social phenomenon called the bystander effect: the greater the number of folks milling past a stranger in crisis, the less likely it is that anyone will stop to lend a hand. Whether myth or true, the perception persists. By virtue of the sheer numbers of people that dwell within them, cities also offer the comfort of anonymity for those with a taste for murder. It’s a fair assumption that Jack the Ripper, who prowled the sordid streets of London’s Whitechapel district eviscerating prostitutes, felt confident of slipping away undetected in the foggy folds of the teeming city. Even over a hundred years later, in spite of countless theories, the serial killer’s identity remains a mystery. Cities with multicultural and economically disparate populations can also be powder kegs, with short fuses that need only be lit by the match of real or perceived injustice. The 1992 Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles spawned a riot of looting, assault, and murder that required military intervention. What might happen in the event of a larger, triggering incident that pushes a city into anarchy? Being dragged out of your home or run down on the streets isn’t so difficult to imagine. Simply escaping a city teetering on the edge of chaos presents its own challenges, too. With the numbing gridlock that paralyzes many major metro areas regularly during morning rush hour, could you imagine the mass exodus if an unexpected emergency strikes? Here in Atlanta, where I live, a mere two inches of snow and ice on the highways recently left thousands of drivers stranded in their vehicles for over twenty hours. The message is clear: cities can be dangerous places, and if all hell breaks loose, far from taking comfort in the multitudes, you might not only be trapped—you’ll be on your own. All of which has found its way into fiction and film over the years. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson, is one of the earliest examples of urban horror. The monstrous Edward Hyde skulked about the shadows in Victorian London, trampling children, bludgeoning men to death, and revolting passersby with his hideous appearance. While the classic tale is typically cited as an analysis of man’s dual nature, it can also be viewed as a model of the Bogeyman in the Big City, the figure wantonly committing crimes and slipping away unscathed into the corridors of the night. The controversial bystander effect has been powerfully explored in fiction as well. Harlan Ellison’s classic short story, “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs,” inspired by the murder of Kitty Genovese in New York City, still haunts me, two decades after I read it in Deathbird Stories. In the same vein, in a crime-ridden metropolis, police can be so overworked that they fail to notice the disturbing signs that a monster is on the loose. In Whitley Streiber’s 1978 novel, The Wolfen, the New York police chief is quick to attribute a savage murder in a junk yard to a pack of wild dogs. Two skeptical detectives keep digging and uncover the truth—a race of predators that prey on those never mentioned in the glossy city tourist guidebooks: the homeless, the drug addicts, the outcasts living on the margins. No one noticed when they were taken. And no one cared. None other than Dracula has found the city to be a hospitable environment, with a big, throbbing heart just waiting to be bled. One of my favorite vampire novels of all time is Robert R. McCammon’s epic They Thirst, in which a master vampire arrives in Los Angeles, spawning an army of bloodsuckers that spreads like a plague across the metropolitan area, from the mansions of Beverly Hills to the gang-ruled streets in the hood. A more recent entry is The Strain, by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan. Written from the angle of “vampirism as epidemic virus,” the story makes abundant use of its Big Apple backdrop, especially the city’s legendary network of subway tunnels. The zombie genre, still in the midst of an incredible resurgence in popularity, wouldn’t be the same without its use of an urban milieu, either. In 28 Days Later, the lead character awakes to find his beloved London eerily silent and deserted, with signs of apocalyptic chaos everywhere: abandoned vehicles, looted stores, hastily scrawled messages to loved ones. It looks as if he might be the last man on Earth . . . until he stumbles into a shadowed church and alerts a horde of the infected. In both the screen and book versions of World War Z and The Walking Dead, we see entire cities fall to the mindless, undead legions, with survivors trapped in skyscrapers or miles of gridlocked traffic. And can we forget the classic giant movie monsters? From the perennially popular Godzilla, to the murderous titans found in Cloverfield and Pacific Rim, these frightening creatures, hailing from outer space, a crevice in the earth, or a secret research facility, wreak mayhem on a massive scale. To gain a true appreciation of the behemoth’s size and strength, we need to see it crush the Empire State Building and rip apart the Golden Gate Bridge while the panicked masses stampede over one another like cattle in their mad dash for safety. Such epic scenes of destruction, if transported to a rural setting, would fail to create the visual spectacle that today’s audience demands. These are only a few example of urban horror. There are hundreds more, past and present, and the future direction of the genre is limited only by the imagination of the writer. By tapping into current tensions surrounding terrorism, economic uncertainty, and pandemics, writers will continue to have a rich lode of material from which to draw. But in the end, whether the horror strikes in a high-rise or a hayloft, all that matters is fear. Fear of the other, of the unknown. Fear of the darkness. The darkness that falls on us all . . . and that we all face alone. Brandon Massey is the award-winning author of several novels in the horror and suspense genres. His most recent novel, In the Dark, was a Nook Top 100 bestseller. Massey lives in Atlanta, Georgia with his family and can be found online at www.brandonmassey.com. ARTIST GALLERY: LESLIE ANN O’DELL

Leslie Ann O’Dell is a self-taught artist based in Colorado. Using photography and digital manipulation, she plays on themes of light and dark, nature, psyche, and self to create richly enigmatic and haunting portraits. Find her work at leslieannodell.com.

[To view the gallery, turn the page.]

ARTIST SHOWCASE: LESLIE ANN O’DELL Julia Sevin

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

My own therapy I would say.

What is your artistic background?

I’m self-taught, but at one point I did I try art school. Only lasted a year, just wasn’t for me. I could never really follow rules or deadlines . . . I felt it fucked with my intuition too much.

Can you name some of your influences?

Subconscious, empathy for the wrong . . . people who dream.

Do you draw ideas from fiction?

Most ideas come from my imagination. I definitely feel influenced or pushed to create after some authors. Anne Rice when I was younger . . . . Not the characters she created, but the atmosphere.

Is your photography strictly digital?

Photography, digital, and some pieces I will add traditional elements.

Do you have an opinion on the democratization of creative tools? Between affordable digital cameras and image manipulation software which any person could train himself in, free promotional hubs such as deviantArt, and a global economy that can source art from anywhere, for any purpose—what does this bode for the future of art? Is it a good thing?

I don’t know about it being a good or bad thing. Maybe it will be harder to wade through and find meaningful work. Or maybe it will just set the bar higher.

You’ve said that you will always create, that the possibility to stop does not exist. If photography were no longer an option for you, is there another discipline you would move to?

I’ve always fantasized about being involved in the criminal world. Maybe an FBI profiler or a defense attorney.

There’s a significant crossover between photography and fashion and, increasingly, bizarre photo-illustration and fashion. Being that you represent beautiful young female figures so often in your work, do you aspire to or would you consider working with a fashion designer?

You know, I’ve never really thought about that when it comes to fashion. It does sound intriguing and I would be open to it.

Do you have a day job or has this become your primary occupation?

My work is definitely my primary occupation and focus.

What are you working on right now?

I’m collecting very small frames to put images in. Eventually I’ll put them together to make a large piece. Rare for me, I’m finally starting to plan more.

Do you have a life philosophy? Live and let live.

What keeps you awake at night?

. . . what doesn’t?

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

Mark Morris has been a major figure on the British horror scene since 1989, when Toady, the first of his sixteen novels, was published to critical acclaim and solid sales (the 1990 paperback release debuted at number seven on the bestseller list). When his fourth novel, The Secret of Anatomy, was published by HarperCollins in 1995, he was being called “the new Clive Barker,” but his next few novels were victims of a serious downturn in horror. His 2002 novel Fiddleback was acquired by PanMacmillan and received a significant advance from Random House for an American release . . . provided Mr. Morris changed his name to the gender-neutral “J. M. Morris,” to reflect the book’s female protagonist. After PanMacmillan passed on his next novel, Morris found success in writing Doctor Who and Torchwood tie-ins, editing nonfiction anthologies of film essays, and contributing short fiction to dozens of anthologies. His most recent releases are the tie-in novel for the Darren Aronofsky film Noah, and Zombie Apocalypse!: Horror Hospital, a stand-alone novel set within the Zombie Apocalypse! world created by editor Stephen Jones. Morris and his family live in Tadcaster, North Yorkshire. As a child, you watched Doctor Who and the Hammer films, and you’ve mentioned both as influences. Was there a point as a child or teenager when you abruptly realized you wanted to make your living writing horror?

I’d always loved writing stories from a very early age— when other kids were eking out two or three page stories in their exercise books for English homework, I’d happily rattle off fifteen to twenty stories, which would then be read out in class, to the delight of my schoolmates, because it meant they didn’t have to do any work for that lesson. I’d completed two full-length original Doctor Who novels by the age of twelve (which I’ve still got, hand-written in ring-binder notepads), but it wasn’t really until I graduated from college at the age of twenty-one with no idea what I wanted to for a living that I finally thought: Hmm, maybe I should give this writing lark a proper go?

You graduated in 1984 but didn’t sell your first novel, Toady, until 1988. What did you do in those intervening years?

As I say, I had no idea what I wanted to do for a living when I left college, so I got hold of a second-hand typewriter and started writing stories and radio plays to fill in the time waiting for responses to jobs I’d applied for. After a while I started getting good feedback to what I was writing, so decided to devote more time to it. I sold a couple of stories to small press magazines, and then eventually managed to sell one to Charles L. Grant for one of his Shadows anthologies after meeting him at the British Fantasy Convention in 1987. I also wrote a horror novel called The Winter Tree during this time, which garnered some good feedback and was a hair’s- breadth away from being published by Sphere, but which I was ultimately unable to sell. I was getting such encouraging signs from publishers and editors, however, that I wrote a second novel called Toady, which ended up being so long that it took me two years to complete, and then I joined the Enterprise Allowance Scheme as a writer, which was set up by Thatcher’s Conservative government with the intention of helping the self-employed to get established during their first year of business. In reality it was simply a way of massaging the unemployment figures, as the government grant you were given to help you along was barely more than the dole, but it did mean that I was given an extra year to market Toady and write a further novel, Stitch, without being forced to join some sort of job scheme in order to maintain the payment of my unemployment benefits. Luckily within six weeks of joining the scheme, Piatkus Books made an offer for the hardback rights to Toady, and then subsequently sold paperback rights to Corgi in the UK. So by the time the EAS money ran out in 1989, the first payments from Toady were beginning to filter through—and I’ve just about managed to keep my head above water as a full-time writer ever since. Toady was published in Great Britain in 1989, and Bantam released it in the U.S. in 1991, under the title The Horror Club. Is it true that the American release was cut by a third?

Yes, though I did the cutting, and it was all from the latter, more fantasy-oriented section of the novel.

You’ve cited Ramsey Campbell, Clive Barker, and Stephen King as influences. Toady, which starts with a group of suburban schoolboys who’ve formed their own Horror Club, seems most reminiscent of King, although the style is very different. Were you conscious of King’s work while writing that novel?

Very much so—and indeed, King’s novel It came out while I was writing Toady, which sent me into despair for a week or two, as It’s and Toady’s basic premises—a group of teenage friends battle against a powerful, shape-changing entity which is slowly taking over their town—are almost identical. For a while I even considered abandoning Toady and writing something different, but by that time I was so far into it, and so fully immersed in it, that in the end I just decided to plough on. And funnily enough, in all the years that Toady has been around, having been re-published and re- issued on several occasions, only one reviewer has ever flagged up the basic plot similarity between the two books. Not long after Toady was published, the horror market bottomed out. What do you think happened—was the market just glutted with badly-written books from the boom in the eighties, or is the genre’s popularity cyclical?

If it’s cyclical, it’s been a hell of a long cycle. I think what happened was that in the mid- to late- seventies, after a long fallow period in UK publishing during which the only horror books you could find were Pan and Fontana horror anthologies, cheap and tawdry Jaws knock-offs about killer dogs, spiders, etc., and Dennis Wheatley reissues, suddenly Stephen King and James Herbert burst onto the scene with startlingly modern, high-profile horror novels which actually sold. This led to updated (in terms of packaging) reissues of books by great writers like Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson and Ramsey Campbell, plus a whole host of new writers, some of whom were very good and are still around—or at least fondly remembered—and many of whom are now long- forgotten. The genre was given a further boost in the mid- eighties when Clive Barker came on the scene, the resultant excitement and enthusiasm prompting a new tide of horror writers, one of whom, I’m pleased to say, was me. In the late eighties, when Toady came out, horror was massive. The paperback of Toady, for instance, was given a huge amount of publicity, enough to propel it to number seven in the UK Bestsellers Chart in the first week of release. But then, yes, I think the market reached saturation point. There were so many publishers launching horror lines, and so many publishers frantically hoping to find the “new” Clive Barker, that a lot of bad books were subsequently published. These bad books resulted in poor sales, which then led inevitably to a lack of confidence, even a sense of panic, among UK publishers. And even now, twenty years later, we’re still feeling the effects of that. Apart from a few isolated cases, which provide glimmers of hope for the future, we’re still being told that horror doesn’t sell—or rather that in order to sell it has to be disguised and marketed as something else.

Throughout the nineties you wrote a number of highly- regarded horror novels, including Stitch (which was acquired in the U.S. for the Dell Abyss line) and The Secret of Anatomy, which was purchased by HarperCollins with the intent of pitching you as “the new Clive Barker.” Was that comparison flattering or terrifying?

It was inevitable, I think, but it hampered me professionally to some extent, in that it soon became obvious that all publishers wanted from me were big, apocalyptic, phantasmagorical, multi-viewpoint horror novels. I lost a couple of publishers by going against the grain—most notably when I followed up The Secret of Anatomy with a grim, intense, self-contained psycho-thriller called Mr. Bad Face, which contained only an ambiguous glimmer of supernatural content. I must point out, however, that I feel no resentment towards Clive at all. Though I rarely see him these days, I still regard him as a mate—and indeed he endorsed my work many years ago with a lovely quote which publishers are still using to this day.

You had your greatest financial success with the novel Fiddleback, which was published with the author name “J. M. Morris” because the book featured a female protagonist and was told in first person. Were you ever uncomfortable with the name change, which was designed to suggest that Fiddleback’s author was female?

I was a bit disappointed at the time, I think, because obviously I’d built up a bit of a reputation and a following with my own name, so I remember feeling anxious to ensure that my readers wouldn’t think I’d completely disappeared from the scene. As it was, the J.M. Morris name only lasted for one book, the reason being that it didn’t occur to me— and my editor at the time didn’t think to mention it—that from Fiddleback onwards my publisher would expect every J.M. Morris book to have a female protagonist. As I remember it, it took a while to sell Fiddleback (this was the point at which my long association with Piatkus came to an end), by which time I’d already started work on my next novel, which was called Nowhere Near an Angel. Now, the problem with this book, from Pan Macmillan’s point of view, was that it featured a male protagonist, which left me with three choices: Either I could try to rework the story so that it featured a female protagonist (which I quickly realized was impossible), I could scrap the whole thing and come up with something else (which, when you’re committed to and passionate about a particular story—as every writer will tell you—is a bit like trying to force a runaway juggernaut to do a U-turn), or I could plough on, finish Nowhere Near an Angel, sell it to an independent publisher to produce as a limited edition hardback, and then come up with another story featuring a female protagonist, which Pan Macmillan could then publish as the J.M. Morris follow-up to Fiddleback. So I went with the third option. I finished Nowhere Near an Angel and sold it to PS Publishing, and then came up with an idea for a novel called Cold Harbour about a woman who is lured back to the seaside town of her childhood in search of her missing husband and son. Unfortunately, however, we were a couple of years down the line from Fiddleback by this time, and I suspect that sales of the book hadn’t been as healthy as either my UK or US publishers had hoped, and so Pan passed on Cold Harbour, saying that we’d missed the boat and had failed to follow up on Fiddleback’s momentum. As it happened, Cold Harbour proved to be a problematical book, which it took me a long time to get a handle on. I rewrote it and rewrote it, and kept re-working the story, until I was happy with it. I started it in . . . what? 2004? And it’s finally being published later this year, again by PS Publishing, under the title The Black.

You’ve also produced an impressive amount of short fiction, which has appeared in such prestigious anthology series as Shadows, Dark Terrors, The Year’s Best Horror and Best New Horror, to say nothing of two collections. When you’re a working writer struggling to pound out 1,000 words or more a day to meet deadlines, do you ever feel guilty about taking time away from novels for short fiction?

I only tend to write short stories if I’m specifically commissioned to do so these days, and gone are the days— except in very rare circumstances—when I’ll write a short story for little or no money. But no, I don’t feel guilty. I adore short fiction. I read a huge amount of anthologies and single-author collections, and in fact my introduction to horror fiction was almost exclusively via short fiction—as an adolescent I devoured the Armada, Pan, and Fontana horror and ghost story collections, and many other anthologies besides: the Peter Haining stuff, the Alfred Hitchcock stuff, books with titles like Ghosts, Spooks, and Spectres and Ghosts and Spirits of Many Lands. I don’t think I read an actual horror novel until I was thirteen or fourteen, which was when I discovered King and Herbert. I truly believe—and I’ve said this before—that short fiction is the life-blood of the horror genre. But, you know, it’s interesting—when I speak to fellow writers who are relatively new to the scene, newer than me anyway, such as, for instance, Gary McMahon, who’s become a good friend over the past few years, they always have this inkling that I’ve written a lot more short fiction than I actually have. In a twenty-five year career I’ve only written about fifty to sixty stories, and I’ve only appeared in Best New Horror three or four times out of—what?—twenty-odd volumes? Compared to my contemporaries, like Nick Royle and Conrad Williams, who’ve each written at least a couple of hundred stories, my output is fairly pitiful. I’ve often thought how nice it would be to spend an entire year just writing short stories, but unfortunately you can’t make a living doing that, besides which I’m not sure I’d be able to come up with enough ideas—which is always the hardest part of the writing process for me.

Some of your short fiction seems more surreal than your longer work. Is the short fiction perhaps where the influence of Campbell and Barker comes more into play?

Yes, I think so. You can do surreal stuff in novels, but in general they have to be more commercial, more accessible, so that they appeal to as many people as possible. Plus it’s hard to sustain a sense of weirdness over 80,000 words without it becoming tiresome or irritating for the reader—though some writers have managed it. But the beauty of short fiction is that you can often be weird without having to explain the weirdness. Some of my favourite short stories are ones in which the writer introduces surreal elements or concepts into the narrative, which have their own internal logic and are simply accepted as part of the everyday world within the story, to create an atmosphere of threat or dread.

In the award-winning collection of horror movie essays you edited (Cinema Macabre), you surprised some readers by choosing Hammer’s The Reptile—a movie you first discovered as an adolescent—for your article. Is part of horror’s appeal that it allows us to connect with how we experienced emotions at a younger age?

Absolutely. The world is so vivid when you’re young, and emotions and reactions are so raw and extreme. The highs are certainly higher, probably because as a child or a teenager you can devote yourself whole-heartedly to whatever you’re engaged with at that particular moment—and, on a personal level, I’m thinking specifically here of movies and TV shows I watched, music I listened to and books I read—and you don’t have a million other everyday responsibilities and concerns niggling away at you and distracting you. Much as I still love movies, books, music, and TV shows, I don’t find myself becoming as absorbed in them or as wholly transported by them as I used to be when I was ten or twelve or fourteen. This is nothing to do with the quality of the material, but entirely to do with how my attitudes and perceptions have changed over the years. For that reason seminal influences acquire a mystique and a magic; certain films or books or songs or TV shows set off happy, nostalgic triggers inside me, which their modern counterparts can’t hope to emulate because they don’t carry the same weight of pure, unadulterated memory and emotion. Hammer and Amicus films terrified me when I was younger, as did Doctor Who when I was younger still, sometimes to the point where I would literally be rigid with terror. And yet oddly I look back on those viewing experiences with enormous affection, and indeed am disappointed nowadays whenever I watch a modern horror film that doesn’t have that effect on me . . . which I have to admit is ninety-nine percent of the time. I feel a sense of exhilaration these days when I see a film that actually scares me. And I feel the same on the rare occasions when a book carries me along to such an extent that I stop being aware of what page I’m on, or forget about the million and one other things I should be doing instead of reading it. Has this answered the question? I hope so. It’s probably a very long-winded way of saying that, purely because of when I watched it, and the circumstances in which I watched it, The Reptile had a very profound effect on me, as a result of which I will love it forever. Over the last decade, you’ve written a number of movie and television tie-in novels, including Doctor Who titles. That must have been immensely satisfying for you.

Doctor Who is my first love. It’s the first thing that terrified me, the first thing that captured my imagination and made me realize how much I loved monsters and spaceships and scary stuff. And so yes, to be given the opportunity to contribute to that world, to that vast and amazing canon of material, is a dream come true. As well as novels and novellas, I’ve also written several Doctor Who audio dramas, and what is particularly magical is hearing my dialogue spoken by actual Doctors—by Peter Davison and Sylvester McCoy— and creating characters which are then brought to life by amazing actors like Benedict Cumberbatch, Liza Tarbuck, Keith Barron, and Timothy West. Tie-in work is often hard—on several occasions I’ve had to write an 80,000 word novel in four weeks—but I never fail to find it a satisfying challenge and it’s always fun playing with other people’s toys. I know some writers who are a bit sneery about it, who regard it as word-whoring, but I don’t see it that way. I’m a jobbing writer and I like to think I can turn my hand to anything. And I’m a big admirer of people like John Burke, who did a huge amount of tie-in work whilst still producing his own, often excellent novels and short stories and scripts. Your most recent release is a different kind of tie-in: Zombie Apocalypse!: Horror Hospital is a stand-alone novel that ties into the shared-world anthology series Zombie Apocalypse!, created and edited by Stephen Jones. How did that job come about?

I’ve known Steve for years, and it really just started out when he and I had a chat one day at a social gathering— Sarah Pinborough’s fortieth birthday party, if I remember correctly—about tie-in novels. Steve knew I’d written tie-in novels for Doctor Who, Torchwood, Hellboy, Dead Island, etc., and was eager to expand Zombie Apocalypse! into that area. He told me that if he managed to get the project up and running his aim would be to start with one UK-based novel and one US-based novel, and that he would like me to write the UK book—so even at that very early stage he had very definite plans. This is one of the many things I like about Steve and that I have huge admiration for—he’s very single- minded and determined and has a very clear vision. Added to which, he’s incredibly loyal to the writers who work for him, and always strives to get the very best deal he can for everyone, which is not always easy in the current publishing climate.

You weren’t involved with any of the other Zombie Apocalypse! volumes. Did that present any special difficulties for you when it came to writing a novel that had to incorporate characters and situations from the dozens of short stories found in the anthologies?

No, not really, because I’d read them—or at least, I’d read the first one and had a copy of the second, which I then subsequently read. The greatest difficulty was in staying true to the time-lines and the characters that had already been established, and of not contradicting anything that had gone before.

In the Zombie Apocalypse! books, a virus (called “HRV”, or “Human Reanimation Virus”) is at the heart of the transformation and resurrection of the dead, and many of the stories in the anthologies—which recreate things like medical reports—are explicitly technical. How did you go about researching that aspect of Horror Hospital?

Fortunately the medical reports are written—or mostly written—by John Llewellyn Probert, who makes his “proper” living as a surgeon and who is a good friend of mine, so if there was anything I needed to know I just dropped John an email. The nursing and paramedic and ambulance staff material in the book was partly a result of on-line research and partly a result of putting an appeal on Facebook for any nurses, paramedics, etc. to contact me so that I could ask them questions about their jobs for a book I was writing. I got a pretty good response to that, and a few of the people who replied to my plea were incredibly generous with their time and wrote long, detailed answers to my no-doubt often silly questions.

At one point you and Tim Lebbon were co-writing a YA horror novel. Is there a chance we’ll be seeing that in the future?

We’re still writing it! The problem is we’ve both been so busy over the past eighteen months or so that it’s been sitting in limbo until we can free up some time to work on it. It’s about eighty percent done, barring rewrites, so I’m hoping we can finish it towards the tail-end of this year. The problem is we’re writing it on spec, so it keeps being put on the back burner while we concentrate on the stuff we’re actually being paid for. But we’re both really pleased with it, and if we finish it and get a deal for it and the publisher, whoever that might be, is interested in turning it into a series (which is our intention), then we’ll no doubt write the second book a hell of a lot faster.

You frequently attend conventions and have been somewhat involved with the British Fantasy Society, and you once said, “For me, being among other writers is like being plugged into a massive, never-ending socket of creativity.” How important is it to you to be part of a community of writers? Would you continue to craft horror if that community suddenly vanished?

Good question. When I started out I didn’t know any other writers, so I guess the answer to the second part of your question would be yes. But it’s massively important to me to be a part of the horror/fantasy community. Most of my best friends, my lifelong friends, are writers, and we share so much in terms of enthusiasms, attitudes, experiences, even senses of humour, that I can’t now imagine my life without that incredible support network. To me, being among other writers, other creative people, is exhilarating. It may be a cliché, but when I’m with my writer friends I get an energy, a buzz, that I don’t get elsewhere. I feel content. It’s like I’ve found my niche. It’s like I’ve come home.

Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of nonfiction books, award-winning prose writer, and Halloween expert whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” Her short fiction has appeared in dozens of anthologies and magazines, including The Mammoth Book of Dracula, Dark Delicacies, The Museum of Horrors, and Cemetery Dance, and in 2010 her first novel, The Castle of Los Angeles, received the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel. Recent books include the graphic novel Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Times (co-written with Rocky Wood, illustrated by Greg Chapman), and Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween. Appearing in 2013 were 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: SEANAN MCGUIRE Erika Holt

You’ve written about viruses, parasites, and fungi—what is it about these pathogens that fascinates you?

Everything! I figure I have two choices, with as much as I know: I can either be extremely fascinated and excited and enthralled, or I can be terrified and never leave my home again. The former seems healthier, oddly. And all these things are amazing! Everything’s amazing, when you look at it the right way. This is life in a format and on a scale that we so rarely stop to see.

What do you enjoy more: researching or writing? Has a new story idea ever sprung from your research, or does it always happen the other way around?

I enjoy them both in their own ways. It’s sort of like asking which I enjoy more, Disneyland or Disney World. Both of them have their unique appeals. Writing is a bigger playground, but research is my home. New stories come out of research all the time, whether it’s research for an existing project or research for funsies. And, I’m curious, after all of your research, what do you see as the biggest potential threat to the survival of humanity?

Honestly, right now, the two-pronged fork of “humanity itself” and “the flu.” The fact that we have an anti-vaccination movement, like people saying “nope, I don’t like that science” is somehow as valid as the centuries-old experiment wherein we do not die of smallpox, measles, or other preventable childhood diseases, terrifies me. I think we’re going to get a lovely new flu strain, something with some teeth, and the fact that many people will choose not to get their flu shots because “oh it’s poison it’s a scam it’s whatever the blogs say this week” will mean that we can’t slow the speed of spread. I’m banking on something in the H13s, but there are a lot of candidates.

On your website you indicate that Stephen King is your overall favorite author. What do you like or admire about his work? What makes for a good horror story, in your opinion?

I started reading Stephen King when I was nine years old. At this point, the way he uses words is incredibly soothing to me, like a literary security blanket. I don’t need anything else from him. I do adore his use of character, the way he puts things together so slowly and precisely, like he’s building a house. A man owns what he builds. I learned that from him. I learned a lot of things from him. A good horror story should show you something you don’t really want to see, and it shouldn’t be cheap. I speak out a lot against rape in horror, because it’s cheap. It’s lazy and it’s cheap, and there’s no reason to do it when there are so many more interesting, more terrible things that can be done.

As of January 15, 2014 you became a full-time writer— congratulations! How’s that going and what does the year ahead look like for you?

It’s going pretty well, although I’m still catching up on sleep from the last couple of years! I have a bunch more conventions, and several books coming up in the second half of 2014: you can find details at seananmcguire.com.

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

“Don’t Go” features a fairly universal setting. What drove this decision?

Really, I don’t know. As a writer, I can concoct a story about almost anything except the setting. I just can’t. So, I set all my stories in places that really exist, like Warszawa or Kraków. The name “Rykusmyku” is fictional, but this town is real. My former wife comes from Rykusmyku and my son lives there now. So, I’ve known this town for fifteen years, and I started to write about it.

Where did Mr. Scar come from? Was there someone in particular that inspired his character?

He is a combination of two different characters. The first, most obvious, inspiration was Ed Gein. I’m sure that you’re familiar with this extraordinary man. Before writing, I’d watched some movies about him. He still creeps me out. And I have a long time friend who lost his eye exactly the way Mr. Scar did, in a Polish mine. I combined the two and Mr. Scar was born. You never name the narrator. Why not?

I thought he just didn’t need a name. He is an ordinary boy with ordinary dreams living in an ordinary town. It could be you, me, or anyone else. I tried to suggest that this kind of horror could happen to anyone. And anyone could behave as badly as this boy.

That a child is missing is a detail very casually delivered in the beginning so the reader experiences a moment of realization in parallel with the narrator. What drew you to this type of horror, as opposed to, say, dramatic irony?

I’ve learned this the hard way. In my early stories, I would try to shock my readers with ghosts and a lot of blood. Now I know that sometimes less means more. We have movies like the Saw series, and games like Dead Space, and they will be more effective, much scarier in a traditional way, than books can be. So, I’m looking for something different. I can’t scare my readers, not anymore. But I can make them feel uncomfortable and restless.

The narrator successfully retrieves Mr. Scar’s eye and finds the missing child. This could be a heroic story, but instead he and Bolo experience regret. Why did you decide to take the story in that direction? Because I’m a cynical guy? I don’t know. I think people are cowards in most cases. I’ve met many, many cowards in my life and only a few brave heroes. That’s the point. I’m trying to write about “normal life” and “normal people.” People scare me. I think my nameless boy is much scarier than Mr. Scar.

What work do you have out now or forthcoming, and what are you working on now?

I still write short stories about Rykusmyku, and want to publish a collection next year. The timing is good, because my latest novel was a huge success in Poland. And now the time has come to write a new one, which I hope will turn out even better. It’s “true crime” about a Polish serial killer—a young guy named Jacek Balicki who killed two children in Bydgoszcz in the nineties. I’ve spent the last month researching case files, photos, and so on. It’s extremely hard. The horror of real life gets to me. And of course I hope to publish more stories in Nightmare Magazine.

Caroline Ratajski is a writer and software engineer currently living in Silicon Valley, California, USA. Previously published as Morgan Dempsey, her fiction is available in Broken Time Blues and Danse Macabre, as well as at Redstone Science Fiction. She is represented by Barry Goldblatt of Barry Goldblatt Literary, LLC. AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT: H.L. NELSON Erika Holt

This story ends with a dedication. Would you like to tell us more about that?

I would. Thanks for asking. I’ve just finished my next-to- last grad school term at Queens University of Charlotte and had the illustrious Pinckney Benedict as instructor. He’s honestly the whole reason I chose to apply to Queens, because I feel a kinship with his work. As an instructor he did not disappoint, with his unaffected demeanor and despite his insistence that he only has a small amount of knowledge to impart. (Ha!) Before attending QU I read his “Mudman” piece in Miracle Boy and Other Stories, and I knew I had to write my own golem piece. I’d been wanting to do so since I studied Piercy’s He, She and It in a Science and English Lit course years ago at Texas Tech U. After I turned in a solid draft of “Dirtman,” Benedict offered crucial criticisms that helped me solidify the dirtman’s role and craft the best possible ending. I know I couldn’t have written it the way it ended up without his insights.

In other interviews you’ve been very candid about your difficult childhood. Was it tough writing about a protagonist with whom you share some common experiences? Do you think drawing on personal experience makes for a deeper, more profound story?

This was the toughest story I’ve ever written, hands down, and it’s because I do feel quite close to my main character. This story started off as an 800-word piece, because I couldn’t write more than that for months. There are specific scenes that come directly from my own childhood experiences, and perhaps a few cathartic tears were shed during the second draft filling-out process. With the help of my awesome beta readers who talked up the story, I kept at it. I think any time a writer draws from intense personal experience, and is able to transmute it into story form in a beautiful way, readers will certainly respond.

Have you written from the perspective of a child before? What do you like about this approach, and what do you find challenging?

Nothing that’s been published, I don’t believe. It was very challenging to maintain this main character’s voice and dialect without using words that could be construed as too advanced for her age. I’ve read differing things on the subject, though. Some writers say it’s perfectly fine to give children advanced voices, and other writers disagree. I had to go with what I felt worked for my main character, who is smarter, more learned, and experienced than the average nine year old.

I get the sense from this story that you’re fond of critters, be they dogs or insects. Would you say that’s true?

It’s not true, actually! I haven’t owned a dog since my eldest son was a crawling baby, and I pulled dog hairs out of his balled fists every day, despite vacuuming incessantly. Dogs plus kids equals too much trouble for me. And, though I don’t mind most insects, I prefer they stay outdoors. Having grown up in a semi-arid region, I’ve been bitten by scorpions, ants, and a host of other creepy crawlies, so I’m done with all of it!

As well as writing prolifically, you edit Cease, Cows, an online literary magazine. What do you as an editor look for in a story?

For CC, we want to see a complete story, no story sketches. We want there to be a surreal element, even if it’s slight. And, of course, we want the least amount of grammatical mishaps as possible. But that goes without saying. Lately, we’ve received a rash of submissions that aren’t surreal in the slightest, so we’re imploring submitters to read our guidelines. What are you working on now?

The better question is: What am I not working on? My thesis is due to Pinckney Benedict (I chose him as my advisor, of course) by October, so I’m desperately trying to finish a draft. It’s my first full collection of dark fiction, and I hope to be shopping it around by the end of the year. I’m also working on a collection of short fiction for Marginalia Publishing. Additionally, my husband and I have started a new venture, Litdemon.com, with workshops and, eventually, manuscript services. It’s been a fun process setting up the site and bringing the instructors aboard. And, I’m working with Waide Marshall of RedReel Productions to bring a short-film version of “Dirtman” to the screen. We’re hoping to be finished by the end of the year. I am never, ever bored!

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

“Machines of Concrete Light and Dark” originally appeared in Lovecraft Unbound, edited by Ellen Datlow. In your afterword in that volume, you explained that you “wrote this piece to try out a variation on his theme of a lurking power or divinity.” Are those your favorite types of Lovecraft stories?

My favorite Lovecraft stories change with time. I wouldn’t say any one feature attracts me significantly more than any other. This lurking idea was simply a propitious jumping off point for the story.

With that anthology as motivation for writing a Lovecraft pastiche, what else inspired this story? How did it develop from there?

The story swam together out of a collection of impressions and memories. I grew up in a small canyon and we would hear the coyotes caroling at night sometimes. You knew they were out there, not particularly scary, but wild animals. The idea of necessity entered the story by way of some philosophical reading I’d been doing about free will at the time.

You have nine published novels and dozens of short stories. Do you approach writing novels and short stories differently? Does one format feel more natural for the tales you want to tell?

Novels are more intuitive for me, because they are capacious and varied. Short stories force me to concentrate on making a single impression. The challenge with novels is finding the path that will travel through all the desired points. The challenge with short stories is in finding the right way to push past the stopping point and give the story real depth.

In addition to writing, you are also a college English professor. How did your course Literature of the Macabre and the Supernatural come about, and will you share some of the reading list?

I simply piloted the course as a possible elective. We read:

Washington Irving, “The Tale of the German Student” Edgar Allan Poe, “Ligeia” Arthur Machen, “The Great God Pan” M. John Harrison, “The Great God Pan” J. Sheridan Le Fanu, “Carmilla” Joanna Russ, “My Dear Emily” Oliver Onions, “The Beckoning Fair One” H.P. Lovecraft, “The Thing on the Doorstep” Shirley Jackson, “The Daemon Lover” M.R. James, “Wailing Well” Algernon Blackwood, “The Willows” Arthur Machen, “The White People” Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” Julio Cortazar, “House Taken Over” Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House Edgar Allan Poe, “William Wilson” Mary Shelley, “The Transformation” H.P. Lovecraft, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu” T.E.D. Klein, “Black Man with a Horn” Robert Aickman, “The School Friend” Ramsey Campbell, “Boiled Alive”

You also translate Spanish and French literature to English. What have you translated recently? Are there any authors who have not found an American audience yet that you would like to bring to English readers?

The last thing I translated was a story by Alfonso Reyes, a Mexican author almost totally untranslated into English, as far as I can tell. Reyes should be better known.

With your teaching schedule and translation work, where does fiction writing fit into your life?

Wherever the bolt lands.

What published work can we expect to see from you next? What are you writing now?

I’ve just finished a new novel called Animal Money that is destined to appear soon, although I can’t go into any further details about it. At the moment I’m working on several short stories for various anthologies and waiting for my next task to present itself. I also have an essay on Lovecraft, Poe, and the cosmic, which I hope is on its way to a good home.

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. MISCELLANY IN THE NEXT ISSUE OF

Coming up in July, in Nightmare . . . We have original fiction from Lane Robins (“The Black Window”) and Mari Ness (“Death and Death Again”), along with reprints by Denis Etchison (“Talking in the Dark”) and Tom Piccirilli (“The Misfit Child Grows Fat on Despair”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Nightmare. Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got new fiction on the way from Desirina Boskovich, Ben Peek, Sunny Moraine, Daniel José Older, Seras Nikita, and David Sklar— and in October, a special Women Destroy Horror double- issue edited by the legendary Ellen Datlow. 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 series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. New projects coming out in 2014 and 2015 include 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 eight 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 a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.