He began to blame the nightmares. If there were such a thing as a wendigo, it might just come to a person in the form of dream. It might pester a person until he was so worried or scared or worn out, it would come creeping in the night and steal his very soul.
Tru-Blood had heard from the old people on the reservation there was an old ceremonial dance performed to ward off the demon. It was called wiindigookaanzhimowin, an Ojibwe word meaning one wore a frightening mask and danced backwards around a drum.
Tru-Blood had no drum. He sat thinking what he should do. Already things were getting desperate again. Though he had food now, it was food that was making him ill, and his sleep was so punctuated with nightmare he might be about to lose his mind. Outside winter was still in thrall, holding his patch of woods tight with snow and ice and dark nights trembling with high wind.
He remembered the beast still lying dead off in the woods. Would his skin be tough enough to make the hide for a drum?
He smiled, took up his knife, and went for a walk. At least making a drum and performing a dance would be something to do. And who would know? No one even knew he’d found and killed a wildman. They’d never know he’d made a drum from him and danced backwards around it to ward off a wendigo. What was the harm?
****
When spring came and the thaw set in, when wild flowers bloomed across Alaskan tundra and blue skies opened up to the sun, Deputy Sortis from Pelican Bay happened upon Tru-Blood’s cabin. Sortis was saddled every spring with the onerous task of checking out the outlying homesteads where the crazies went to live off by themselves far enough from human habitation to make it impossible to reach them except in the springtime.
Sortis had been to Tru-Blood’s place only once before. He couldn’t always find it. He only reached it again by happenstance. He didn’t mind Tru-Blood. The Ojibwe native seemed an all right man, despite the mountain man mentality of going off alone into the wilderness. As he remembered, Tru-Blood was a big man, over six feet tall, with a long greying beard, swarthy skin, and dark, intelligent eyes.
He stood outside his cabin calling, “Tru-Blood! Hey, there, my friend. It’s Deputy Sortis. I’m just out and about, checking in on people.”
The cabin door remained closed, the silence eerie. Even spring birds had left this desolate place.
“Tru-Blood! You in there, man?”
The deputy walked to the door and knocked, wondering if the Indian had gone hunting in this fine weather. The door creaked open and Sortis pushed it the rest of the way, stepping inside to the gloom. At once he was hit with a smell of death that caused him to reach up and pinch shut his nostrils.
“Jesus, what’s happened, Tru-Blood?”
The native man sat slumped in a chair before a dead fire. He finally lifted his head. He had lost weight. He looked cadaverous, his shirt hanging off bony shoulders, his legs spindly as sticks. There was a look of utter madness in his sunken-eyed stare.
“What…?” Sortis looked around the small cabin for the source of the terrible scent assaulting his senses. He saw a body stretched out on the floor behind Tru-Blood. He walked closer to peer at it. It appeared the flesh had been hacked off the body, leaving it part skeleton, part maggot-covered meat. The face belonged to Michael Baden, another crazie who lived ten miles from Tru-Blood in a cabin of his own. He had also visited Baden before, in fact more times than he’d been here to see Tru-Blood. Near the body stood a handmade drum, the skin of it pulled tight and blood-stained brown over the top and bottom.
“What did you do, Tru-Blood? What have you…?”
Just before he retched and had to run for the door he heard Tru-Blood say, “I killed a skoocoom. It was your Bigfoot. I had to eat. Then the wendigo came. It wanted to possess me for being a cannibal. I had to perform a sacred dance.”
Hanging over from the waist, spewing his guts, Deputy Sortis finished and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He had his gun halfway out of its holster and about to turn back to the cabin interior when something struck him hard on the top of the head.
As he fell to his knees, trying so hard to regain his thinking processes so he could stand again to protect himself, he heard Tru-Blood say the two worst words in the entire world.
“I’m hungry,” he said.
Twilight slithered across the melting snow and the silver rivulets of clear water running everywhere. It reached and caressed the cabin with the open door, enveloping it in dark where inside fire shadows danced around a human drum. Near the drum and the cadaver a wendigo stripped meat from a dead man and consumed it. As he did, his body grew longer, taller, and the black wings on his back spread and folded, spread and folded, always ready for flight, always ready for a demon run to where it was needed most.
****
Remembrance by Billie Sue Mosiman
It was 1983, November, and I’d been writing for some time. I was on my third completed novel, Wireman, and some dozens of short stories into trying for publication. The same week I received a phone call from my agent that I’d sold my novel, I also received an acceptance letter from Dave Silva at The Horror Show for the sale of my first short story.
I wish I could remember the title of the story, but I can’t. I went on to sell hundreds of short stories, and a few of those were to The Horror Show. It was astounding to sell in both the story and novel formats in the same month of the same year. It was as if a huge validation sign had been planted in my front yard exclaiming, NOW YOU’RE A WRITER.
How could I ever forget the editor of the magazine who bought my first story ever? And how could I ever forget, over thirty years later, what a terrific magazine he edited and the kind of man who created it? I cannot forget Dave. I’ll never forget Dave. He helped so many of us break into writing. While my novel work was firmly in the suspense genre, my short work always seemed to slide over into horror and real darkness. It was the 1980s and horror was at a zenith. There were several magazines devoted to it and so many novels being published by new budding novelists. When I wrote a new story, it was to The Horror Show that I sent it. I liked the magazine, the writers in it, the kind of fiction it published and represented, and I liked the editor. He gave lots of us our start. He saw something in us and nurtured it by sending checks and by publishing the works. We all probably should have told him before now, when we’ve lost him, what he meant to us and our careers. Since I didn’t, and I’m sorry, Dave, I really am, but I can do it now. I can say unequivocally that David Silva did some great and grand deeds, he headed a terrific magazine, and he made a young storyteller happy and confident enough to continue writing the fiction she most loved. I can never repay him. I can continue to write stories I think he would have loved. That will be part of his legacy–all our stories. So to you, Dave, I dedicate “Tru-Blood.” I think you might have liked it.
Billie Sue Mosiman
BURYING BETSY
Brian Keene
We buried Betsy on Saturday. We dug her up on Monday and let her come inside, but then on Wednesday, Daddy said we had to put her back in the ground again.
Before that, we’d only buried her about once a month. Betsy got upset when she found out she had to go back down so soon. She wanted to know why. Daddy said it was more dangerous now. Only way she’d be safe was to hide her down there below the dirt, where no one could get to her without a lot of trouble. Betsy cried a little when she climbed back into the box, but Daddy told her it would be okay. I cried a little, too, but didn’t let no one else see me do it.
We gathered around the spot in the woods; me, Daddy, Betsy, and my older brother Billy. Betsy is six, I’m nine, and Billy is eleven. Betsy, Billy and Benny–that’s what Mom had named us. Daddy said she liked names that began with the letter ‘B’.
Betsy’s eyes were big and round as she lay down inside the wooden box. She clutched her water bottle and the little bag of cookies that Daddy had given her. The other hand held her stuffed bear. He was missing one eye and the seams had split on his head. He didn’t have a name
.
We closed the lid, and Betsy whimpered inside the box.
“Please, Daddy,” she begged. “Can’t I just stay up this once?”
“We’ve been over this. It’s the only way to keep you safe. You know what could happen otherwise.”
“But it’s dark and it’s cold, and when I go potty, it makes a mess.”
Daddy shivered.
“Maybe we could let her stay up just this once,” Billy said. “Me and Benny can keep an eye on her.”
Daddy frowned. “You want your little sister to end up like the others? You know what can happen.”
Billy nodded, staring at the ground. I didn’t say anything. I probably couldn’t have anyway. There was a lump in my throat, and it grew as Betsy sobbed inside the box.
We sealed her up tight, and hammered the lid back on with some eight-penny nails. There was a small round hole in the lid. We fed a garden hose through the opening, so Betsy could breathe. Then Daddy got his caulk gun out of the shed and sealed the little crack between the hose and the lid, so that no dirt would fall down into the box. Finally, we each grabbed a rope and lowered the box down into the hole.
“Careful,” Daddy grunted. “Don‘t jostle her.”
We shoveled the dirt back down on her. The hole was about eight feet deep, and even with the three of us it took a good forty minutes. Her cries got quieter as we filled the hole. Soon enough, we couldn’t hear her at all. We laid the big squares of sod over the fresh grave and tamped them down real good. Made sure the hose was sticking out at an angle, so rainwater wouldn’t rush inside it. When we were done, Daddy gathered some fallen branches and leaves and scattered them around. Then he stepped back, wiped the sweat from his forehead with his t-shirt, and nodded with approval.
“Looks good,” he said. “Somebody comes by, there’s no way they could tell she’s down there.”
He was right. Only thing that seemed odd was that piece of green garden hose, and even that kind of blended with the leaves. It looked just like a scrap, tossed aside and left to rot.
“And,” Daddy continued, “it will take a long time to dig her back up. It would wear anybody out.”
We walked back up to the house and got washed up for dinner. I had blisters on my hands from all the shoveling, and there was black dirt under my fingernails. It took a long time to get my hands clean, but I felt better once they were. Daddy and Billy were already sitting at the table when I came downstairs. I pulled out my seat. Betsy’s empty chair made me sad all over again.
Dinner was cornbread and beans. Daddy fixed them on the stove. They were okay, but not nearly as good as Mom’s used to be. Daddy’s cornbread crumbled too much, especially when you tried to spread butter on it. And his beans tasted kind of plain. Mom’s had been much better.
Mom had been gone a little over a year now. Didn’t seem that long some days, but then on others, it seemed like forever. Sometimes, I couldn’t remember what she looked like anymore. I’d get the picture album down from the hutch and stare at her photos to remind me how her face had been. And her eyes. Her smile. I hated that I couldn’t remember.
But I still remembered how her cornbread tasted. It was fine.
I missed her. We all did, especially Daddy, more and more these days.
After dinner, Billy and me washed the dishes while Daddy went outside to smoke. When he came back in, we watched the news. Daddy let us watch whatever we wanted to at night, up until our bedtime, but we always had to watch the news first. He said it was important that we knew about the world, and how things really were, especially since we didn’t go to school.
Just like every night, the news was more of the same; terrorism, wars, bombings, shootings, people in Washington hollering at each other–and the pedophiles. Always the pedophiles… A teenaged girl had been abducted behind a car wash in Chicago. Another was found dead and naked alongside the riverbank in Ashland, Kentucky. Two little boys were missing in Idaho, and the police said the suspect had a previous record. And our town was mentioned, too. The news lady talked about the twelve little girls who’d gone missing in the last year, and how they’d all been found dead and molested.
Molested… it was a scary word.
Daddy said it was all part of the world we lived in now. Things weren’t like when he’d been a kid. There were pedophiles everywhere these days. They’d follow you home from school, get you at the church, or crawl through your bedroom window at night. They’d talk to you on the internet–trick you into thinking they were someone else, and then meet up with you. That’s why Daddy said none of us were allowed on the computer, and why he didn’t let us go to school. Child molesters could be anyone–teachers, priests, doctors, policemen, even parents.
Daddy said it was an urge, a sickness in their brain that made them do those things. He said even if they went to jail or saw a doctor, there weren’t no cure. When the urge was on them, there was no helping it. Unless they learned to control it, and even then, there weren’t no guarantees.
I went to bed but couldn’t sleep. I lay there in the darkness and listened to Billy snoring beneath me. We had bunk beds, and it was a familiar sound–sort of comforting. One of those noises that you hear every night, the ones that tell you everything is okay–your big brother snoring, your little sister in the room across the hall, your Daddy’s footsteps as he tiptoes down the hall in the middle of the night.
But tonight, there was just Billy. Daddy wouldn’t be tiptoeing down the hall. He’d left just as soon as we went to bed. I heard the car pull out of the driveway. He was gone, out to fulfill his urges. He’d told me and Billy that he’d always had them, but he’d been able to control them until Mom died. After she was gone, they’d gotten stronger. He knew the urges were wrong, but he had to do what he had to do.
It’s almost midnight now, and I still can’t sleep. Daddy’s not back yet.
Tomorrow, another little girl will be missing.
But at least it won’t be Betsy.
Betsy is buried in the ground, safe from Daddy’s urges.
****
Remembrance by Brian Keene
During my Senior year of High School, in the space of a week, I got in trouble for doing doughnuts in the school parking lot with my 81’ Mustang, and then smoking on school property, and then reading a copy of The Horror Show magazine during English class, and finally, suggesting to my principal (a stern, no-nonsense, authoritarian mountain of a man who was a former Marine who’d done two tours of duty in Vietnam) that he was a Communist for his attempt to punish me for doing these things.
His response to this was to kick me out of the school play (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) one week before show time, and then sentence me to two months of in-school detention. All things considered, I didn’t mind this so much. First of all, I’d been cast as Nick Bottom in the play, and I really wanted to be Puck instead. Secondly, in-school detention was awesome. From the moment you arrived at school until the second you left for the day, you spent all your time in the school’s unused planetarium, monitored by a lone teacher. You weren’t allowed to talk or interact with anyone. The only thing you were allowed to do, once you’d finished your class assignments, was read. I was okay with that, because it gave me time to finish that issue of The Horror Show that had helped land me there in the first place. And when I finished that, I read through my back issues again, along with a stack of horror novels. (I vividly remember re-reading Stephen King’s The Stand in the space of a week during my incarceration, and realizing that more time to read meant more time to read more books).
During that time (and throughout that Senior year) I also tried my hand at writing. My efforts were confined to handwritten novels scribbled down in spiral-bound notebooks. One of them was a pastiche of King’s “The Mist.” The other was a pastiche of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I had it in my head that when I finished them, I’d send them to David B. Silva, editor of The Horror Show, and he would help me get them published.
That never happened. Ins
tead, I graduated High School by the skin of my teeth and got sent off to Boot Camp a week later, followed by several years of travelling the globe, and learning that the world was a much bigger place than just the small town in rural Pennsylvania where I’d come from, and that there were other cultures and people and religions and ways of life than what I had known. I didn’t have much time for writing during those years, but I continued to read. In fact, I remember reading Dave Silva’s novel, Come Thirteen, while in Haifa, Israel.
Years later, I did get to submit something to David, for his other publication, Hellnotes. And for a few years, I freelanced for him. He also offered his time, patience, and invaluable advice in helping me get my own genre newsletter, Jobs In Hell, up and running.
It’s true that David B. Silva was absolutely instrumental in both my early development as a writer, and in my early career. He introduced me to writers whose work I’ve enjoyed for many years, including his own. And he was always willing to offer guidance to young writers still trying to figure everything out. But it wasn’t just me he did these things for. He offered it to an entire generation of us. His influence can be felt on pretty much any dark fiction writer you read today. In many ways, he was the genre. And the genre has irrevocably lost a part of itself with his passing.
Brian Keene
EACH NIGHT, EACH YEAR
Kathryn Ptacek
My father is dead.
He died two years ago.
But every night he visits.
He comes to me, each night of each year.
I am in my childhood bedroom, tired and asleep after a long day at my place of work and an all-too-long evening alone. At first I don’t hear anything. But gradually I become aware of a sound.
Better Weird: A Tribute to David B. Silva Page 9
