Nightmare Magazine Issue 26

by Nightmare Magazine

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Issue 26, November 2014

  FROM THE EDITOR

  Editorial, November 2014

  John Joseph Adams

  FICTION

  Who is Your Executioner?

  Maria Dahvana Headley

  Rebecka

  Karin Tidbeck

  Rules for Killing Monsters

  David Sklar

  For These and All My Sins

  David Morrell

  NOVEL EXCERPT

  Amity

  Micol Ostow

  NONFICTION

  The H Word: Horror Fiction of Tomorrow

  Eric J. Guignard

  Artist Gallery

  Jeff Simpson

  Artist Spotlight: Jeff Simpson

  Marina J. Lostetter

  Interview: Leslie Klinger

  Lisa Morton

  AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

  Maria Dahvana Headley

  Karin Tidbeck

  David Sklar

  David Morrell

  MISCELLANY

  Coming Attractions

  Stay Connected

  Subscriptions & Ebooks

  About the Editors

  © 2014 Nightmare Magazine

  Cover Art by Jeff Simpson

  www.Nightmare-Magazine.com

  FROM THE EDITORS

  Editorial, November 2014

  John Joseph Adams

  Welcome to issue twenty-six of Nightmare!

  In case you missed it last month, in October we published Women Destroy Horror!, our special double-issue celebration of women writing and editing horror. Guest editor Ellen Datlow presented original fiction from Gemma Files (“This Is Not for You”), Livia Llewellyn (“It Feels Better Biting Down”), Pat Cadigan (“Unfair Exchange”), Katherine Crighton (“The Inside and the Outside”), and Catherine MacLeod (“Sideshow”) and reprints by Joyce Carol Oates (“Martyrdom”), Tanith Lee (“Black and White Sky”), and A.R. Morlan (“. . . Warmer”). And not to be outdone, our guest nonfiction editor, Lisa Morton, solicited a line-up of terrific pieces—a feature interview with American Horror Story’s producer Jessica Sharzer; a roundtable interview with acclaimed writers Linda Addison, Kate Jonez, Helen Marshall, and Rena Mason; a feature interview with award-winning author Joyce Carol Oates; and insightful essays from Maria Alexander, Lucy A. Snyder, and Chesya Burke.

  The issue is available now in both ebook ($2.99) and trade paperback ($12.99). For more information about the issue, including all the stores (ebook and otherwise) in which you can find them, visit our new Destroy-related website at DestroySF.com.

  • • • •

  In other news, Nightmare is now available as a subscription via Amazon.com! The Kindle Periodicals division has been closed to new magazines for quite a while now (and has been since before Nightmare launched), but by employing some witchcraft we were able to get the doors unlocked just long enough for us to slip into the castle. Amazon subscriptions are billed monthly at $1.99 per issue and are available now. To learn more, please visit nightmare-magazine.com/subscribe.

  Also: If you love Nightmare and have a subscription—whether or not it’s via Amazon—if you wouldn’t mind leaving a review over on Amazon, that would be really great. Positive reviews on the subscription page will go a long way toward encouraging people to try out the magazine. It doesn’t have to be much of a review, just a few words and a rating is totally fine—and much appreciated!

  • • • •

  With our announcements out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month:

  We have original fiction from David Sklar (“Rules for Killing Monsters”) and Maria Dahvana Headley (“Who Is Your Executioner?”). For reprints, we have work from Karin Tidbeck (“Rebecka”) and David Morrell (“For These and All My Sins”).

  In the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” Stoker winner Eric J. Guignard talks about some up-and-coming trends in horror writing. We’ve also got author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview with Leslie S. Klinger.

  Our issue this month is sponsored by our friends at Egmont USA. This month, be sure to look for Amity by Micol Ostow. Read an excerpt in our ebook edition or learn more at egmontusa.com.

  That’s about all I have for you this month. Thanks for reading!

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Nightmare, is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. New projects coming out in 2014 and 2015 include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Operation Arcana, Wastelands 2, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated eight times) and is a six-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

  FICTION

  Who Is Your Executioner?

  Maria Dahvana Headley

  Five

  Since we were little, Oona’s collected Victorian photographs. A certain subset of people love them, but I got a library book of them once, just before I met her, and I’ve never not been appalled. I don’t know what a book like that was doing lost in our local library. It’s exactly the kind of thing that would normally have been removed by a logical parent. The book was death images, yes, but worse than that. These were all dead children and babies dressed in their best clothes and propped up for the last family photo. Held in their parents’ arms, posed with their pets and toys, staring at the camera. It was like some sort of Egyptian funerary ritual, except much more hardcore. The thing about them was that everyone in them had to pose for a long time to make it through the film exposure. There’s lots of accidental motion, lots of blur, and so the families look like ghosts. The dead children are the only ones who look alive.

  • • • •

  “Did you hear about Oona? Because if you did, and you didn’t call me, I don’t know who you are anymore,” the voice on the other end of the line says.

  The same rattle Trevor’s had in his voice since we were seven, a sound like tin cans tied to the back of a wedding day junker. It’s been a while since we’ve spoken. Since I’ve spoken to anyone, really. I tried to start over with new people, but I was still the same person and it never works the way you think it will.

  Trev and I faded out in a record shop a few years back, arguing over Kate Bush for reasons that are now difficult to recall. Kate Bush wasn’t really the problem. The problem was the way friendship can tilt into more than friendship for one person, and less than friendship for the other. Trevor and I have a history of cheater’s matinees in crappy un-airconditioned theaters. Back then, we watched superhero movies together, the three-dollar shows where no one we knew would be hanging out. Sometimes I reached over and put my hand in his lap, and sometimes he put his in mine. We were having an affair, but neither of us could commit to a bedroom. Instead, it was his fingers inside me, and my hand on him, both of us watching the latest incarnation of Spider-Man like nothing was happening below our waists.

  We were trying, as we’d been trying for years, to not be in love with Oona.

  “What about her?” She and I have history too, but not the history I wanted. Probably she’s gotten marrie
d or is happy or had a baby or something. I’m expecting a New York Times announcement, her with something handsome beside her, a grinning, sports-playing something, and Oona, her yellow eyes and long red hair. She looks—has always looked—like a tree on fire. She’s six foot two and covered with freckles. One time she and I were naked, and I drew the constellations on her with a Sharpie. All there. Next time I tried it, they were gone. There were new configurations but not the ones I’d mapped.

  It’s getting to be time again for weddings and babies. This is the second round after the first marriages. Trevor’s been divorced a couple years now, and I’m single again too after trying to settle for a woman in Georgia who got pregnant by sperm donor and then said, witheringly, “you always act like you’re so smart, but you’re not as smart as you think you are. You’re fucked up. You’re in love with her, and you should stop lying about it.”

  She was four months pregnant and I hadn’t noticed. I didn’t know she wanted to have kids with me, and she didn’t, it turned out. She wanted to have kids without me. Now I’m back in the city, avoiding my roommate. My life, what there was of it, has dissolved like Kool-Aid in a cup.

  We’re all thirty-seven, Trevor and Oona and me, and we’ve known each other since second grade. I haven’t talked to Oona in years. Every time I see her name in my inbox, I delete it. After the last time I saw her, I’m better off alone. She messes with my head.

  “She’s dead,” says Trevor, sounding astonished. “Oona finally died.”

  He says it like Oona’s gone to India. I’m used to mishearing things like this. Every time I pick up the phone I think someone’s going to announce a tragedy. I’ve been writing a lot of condolences, everyone of my parents’ generation fizzling out, and a fair number of mine too, suicides and cancers, car wrecks.

  “She did what? Who did what?” In my head, I’m looking frantically at a slideshow of the Taj Mahal.

  “Oona,” he says. “What the fuck? Oona died. Where are you?”

  I take a moment to try to be this person, in this world, where Oona isn’t. “On my way wherever you are,” I say.

  “Around the corner from your place, in that bar. The shit one.”

  I didn’t know he knew where I lived. “Are you drunk yet?”

  “I ordered for you. Your ice is melting.”

  • • • •

  I walk in, and there he is. His hair long and dark, his face gaunt. Goatee pointing off his chin like he’s a cave ceiling. He’s got on a t-shirt that I recognize, an anatomical drawing from the 1700s, a memento mori, a face pared down to the skull on one side, handsome and bearded on the other. Trevor has the whole bottle on the table, and when I look at it, he shrugs.

  “To Oona,” he says and raises the bottle at me.

  “To Oona,” I say and pour my own bourbon down my throat. For a minute, we sit in silence. But then:

  “You know what I’m going to say.”

  I’d rather he didn’t.

  “Is she really dead?” Trevor insists. “Where is she, if she’s not? Is she back there?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “How would I know? We don’t even know where there is, not really, Trev. What do we know? Nothing.”

  “Because,” Trevor says. “You know why I’m wondering.” And he sings it, against the rules, the first time I’ve heard it in years. “Dead girl, dead girl, come alive.”

  “Christ, Trev. Fucking don’t,” I say. My skin is covered in buzz. I feel like I’m full of tiny brainless insects, my body a sack of wings and antennae. My stomach lurches painfully, like something inside me’s trying to get out.

  “How?” I ask him.

  “Obit didn’t say,” he says. “I called. Her mom wouldn’t tell me. She was in Indonesia somewhere, collecting beetles. She got some kind of weird entomology job. Fuck,” Trevor says, and sighs. “The last time I saw her, something bad happened.”

  “Don’t,” I say, again. “Please. I don’t need to know any more stories about Oona. I know what she was like when she was weird.”

  But Trevor can’t help himself. “I was sitting at a bar,” he says. “Six o’clock on a Tuesday. Bar was empty except me and the bartender. I heard this sound.”

  “Stop it,” I say. “I don’t want to talk about Oona anymore.”

  Trevor looks at me. “I tried to tell Bridget about it, and you should have heard her. ‘Always been in love with Oona,’ she said. ‘You think that woman’s mouth is magic. You want a witch, Trevor,’ she said.”

  I look at Trevor. He blushes.

  “She wasn’t wrong. So, I hear this noise, and I’m trying to figure it out, when something crawls over my foot. Big black bug. Like, huge. Size of my middle finger. And more of them coming. A whole row of them. Each one of them perfectly in line with the next.”

  “You always did like dive bars,” I say, trying to shut him up.

  His fingers corkscrew awkwardly into mine. I can feel the clammy creeping from me to him and from him back to me.

  “I bend over, and she’s under the bar, crouched down. Oona. Not Oona now. Oona then. She looks up at me, and she makes this face, this so-Oona face. And I’m freaking out, and the bartender’s freaking out on me because he can’t see the bugs, and he can’t see her either. The last thing I see as he kicks me out into the street is Oona, her braids, the corner of her mouth, and then she turns her head and she’s gone.”

  “What do you mean, gone?”

  “Like she folded up.”

  “She didn’t fold up. Oona was still around. I got emails.”

  “Did you open them?”

  I shake my head.

  “They weren’t from Oona. They’d be spam, win a vacation to somewhere, free car, lend money to the lost. Jumbles of numbers, lists of lines from things.”

  “But she was around,” I insist. “Her mom talked to my mom. She grew up. You know she did. Come on. We both slept with Oona.”

  “She was like an animal,” Trevor says. I wonder how much he’s been drinking. “An animal that might bite your face off.”

  He fumbles in his jacket. “I brought something,” he says. “I know you don’t want to see it.”

  We used to be special. Now we’re grown-ups, and this is what you learn. Special children turn into fucked up adults. You can’t even use the word magic now. Back then, we said it all the time, like we’d fallen into something amazing, like what had happened when we were seven could only be a good thing.

  “Something went wrong. I don’t know if it’s ever going to be right.”

  He brings a snapshot out of his pocket. Faded, from the ’80s. I don’t have to look. The three of us the day we met. Oona’s in the middle of the photo. She’d lost a front tooth. Yellow dress. I’m in a dirty t-shirt printed with a buffalo, and Trev’s shirtless. We’re on the steps of the trailer my mom lived in back then. It was the first day of summer, and we’d met at the swimming pool line, but they wouldn’t let Trevor in because he didn’t have a suit. Oona, who was already in her swimsuit, took it off and stood there naked. She said, “I don’t have a suit either.” It took about two seconds for us all to get kicked out, including me, because I’d seen Oona, and so I took my suit off too.

  In the picture, both Trevor and I are blurred. We were jumping.

  “Look at her, Zell,” Trevor says, and there’s something in his voice that makes me want to shut my eyes. “Look at the picture. Tell me I’m not crazy.”

  I look over Trevor’s shoulder instead, out the door of the bar, from the dark and into the cold, bright January street. I see a girl walking past. Pale yellow sundress. Long red hair. A hitch in her step that I know. Except that this girl isn’t thirty-seven. And as she passes, she presses her fingers to the glass and looks in at me.

  “Trev,” I say. “Trevor.”

  “This is the only one she was in, and now she’s gone,” Trevor says, shaking the photo at me. “So maybe she’s really dead.”

  The window explodes inward.

  Four


  “Kagome, Kagome?” Oona asks me and laughs. “All kid’s games started as adult games. That’s not more creepy than the normal ones.”

  “I think it’s creepy,” I say. “Who Is My Executioner isn’t an adult game. It’s not a fucking game at all. Why would you need to know who your executioner is? You need to know what your crime is. You need to know who accused you. The executioner isn’t the point.”

  “Maybe you want to know who’s capable of actually killing you,” Oona says, sitting twist-legged in front of me in a blue bustier and a pair of ridiculously short cut-offs. “Like, maybe they’re your lover, Zellie. Maybe you know their secrets.”

  We’re twenty-seven, and I’m sleeping with her for another round of probable heartbreak. She’s midway through a dissertation on children’s games, and everything about it makes me miserable. Oona knows all my secrets. I don’t know hers. I only know she has them. She’s been mostly normal lately, mostly Oona, this gorgeous eccentric, charming enough to sidestep the fact that she’s professionally a scholar of creepiness. This has always been true. She can do better than pass, most of the time. There’s a thin line between out of control and spectacular.

  I’m in love again, considering tattoos of Oona’s name because here she is, her hair in long copper braids, each one interspersed with black lilies she’s bought somewhere. She’s not goth. The flowers are alive. We’re in a coffee shop she likes, a place hung with bad art and someone in charge of the playlists who chooses Alan Lomax recordings of field songs. I hate it. Slave songs played over a backdrop of cappuccino steaming. Oona’s always been like this. It makes everyone else skeeved out.

  Oona collects horrible things. I regret ever introducing her to the pictures of the dead, but that ship’s sailed. Her walls are covered in them now, all beautifully framed. It’s only when you look closely that you wish you hadn’t. There’s one she’s had blown up. Black beetle on a little blonde girl’s face, right at the corner of her open eye, like a tear.

  “It’s about a beheading, maybe, or about a woman in a cage. Anyway, it’s Japanese,” Oona says. “And it might not be creepy. It might just be sweet. Translators disagree and so does everyone else.”