Nightmare Magazine Issue 4

by Matt Williamson

  Nightmare Magazine

  Issue 4, January 2013

  Table of Contents

  Editorial, January 2013

  On Murder Island—Matt Williamson

  Need—Lisa Tuttle

  Chew—Tamsyn Muir

  The Ease with Which We Freed the Beast—Lucius Shepard

  The H Word: “Choosing Gruesome Subjects”—John Langan

  Artist Gallery: Chelsea Knight

  Artist Spotlight: Chelsea Knight

  Interview: Ellen Datlow

  Author Spotlight: Matt Williamson

  Author Spotlight: Lisa Tuttle

  Author Spotlight: Tamsyn Muir

  Author Spotlight: Lucius Shepard

  Coming Attractions

  © 2013, Nightmare Magazine

  Cover Art and Artist Gallery images by Chelsea Knight.

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

  www.nightmare-magazine.com

  Editorial, January 2013

  John Joseph Adams

  Welcome to issue four of Nightmare!

  Our custom ebook store we built for the magazine is now up and running. So if you’d like to purchase an ebook issue, or if you’d like to subscribe, please visit nightmare-magazine.com/store. All purchases from the Nightmare store are provided in both epub and mobi format.

  And don’t worry—all of our other purchasing options are still available, of course; this is just one more way you can buy the magazine or subscribe.

  Kickstarter backers—and new subscribers—should have received their subscription issue notifications via the new system this morning. If you didn’t, please check your spam filter, and then if there’s still no sign of it, email john@nightmare-magazine.com.

  And remember: We are also still currently offering subscriptions via our friends at Weightless Books. Visit nightmare-magazine.com/subscribe to learn more about all of our current and future subscription options

  With that out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap for you this month:

  We have original fiction from Matt Williamson (“On Murder Island”) and Tamsyn Muir (“Chew”), along with reprints by Lucius Shepard (“The Ease with Which We Freed the Beast”) and Lisa Tuttle (“Need”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with all of our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview with acclaimed editor Ellen Datlow.

  That’s about all I have for you this month, but before I step out of your way and let you get to the fiction, here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Nightmare:

  Website: www.nightmare-magazine.com

  Newsletter: www.nightmare-magazine.com/newsletter

  RSS feed: www.nightmare-magazine.com/rss-2

  Podcast feed: www.nightmare-magazine.com/itunes-rss

  Twitter: @nightmaremag

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/NightmareMagazine

  Subscribe: www.nightmare-magazine.com/subscribe

  Thanks for reading!

  John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Nightmare (and its sister magazine, Lightspeed), is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Epic: Legends of Fantasy, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. He is a four-time finalist for the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award. Forthcoming anthologies include: Oz Reimagined (2013, 47North), The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (2013, Tor), Wastelands 2 (2013, Night Shade Books), and Robot Uprisings (2014, Doubleday). He is also the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

  On Murder Island

  Matt Williamson

  Stone Peter’s Eve

  The north wind’s been spraying Mainland Runoff in our faces for days, but that’s nothing new, nothing worth complaining about. Here on Murder Island, we have a little saying: “If ever you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes and you’ll be murdered.” Or as the Weatherman likes to say: “Radar’s telling us to brace for more hot gusty winds, Mainland Runoff, and murder.” The forecast never changes.

  We don’t have a TV station. How the Weatherman does his forecast is: he stands on a street corner and shouts at passersby.

  The Weatherman is crazy.

  On wet windy days like this, the popularest way to Do someone is drowning-in-a-puddle. How that way works is: you grab the person who you want to Do, push their face down in a puddle, and hold it there until they die of not-being-able-to-breathe. This way works best if the Victim is lighter than you, and unarmed. If the Victim’s heavier, what a lot of times will happen when you try drowning-in-a-puddle is, the Victim will turn right around and drown you in a puddle. Which, the hunter has become the hunted.

  My name’s Toby. I’m seventeen years old, and I’ve murdered eleventeen people. Eleventeen plus six, if you include family.

  Eleventeen is my whimsical way of saying four hundred and eighty-six. Eleventeen is me displaying my creativity.

  My best-ever friend is Peter. He’s way, way older than me. Also, unlike me, who was born here, Peter comes from the Mainland.

  “They didn’t like my ways,” he says. Ways meaning murderousness. They meaning Mainland People.

  For a time, Peter says, the Mainland People tried to tame him with Detention.

  “You don’t tame a lustrous-maned stallion by locking him up in a cell,” Peter says, sharing what he’s life-learned. Peter’s not a stallion, but I know what he means. What he means is, he is stallion-like.

  Sometimes, Peter calls himself “Black Beauty.” Like, “Watch your back, Murder Island; Black Beauty’s in a killing mood.”

  Peter isn’t black—or beautiful—but I know what he means.

  When the Mainland People saw how their jail-taming failed to break him of his murdering spirit, they made him come to Murder Island.

  “Blessing in disguise,” he says, displaying his positiveness.

  Peter and me live together in a big house on the beach. It’s the one I used to share with my parents—and, occasionally, a younger sibling. For a long time, I had it all to myself. Now I share it with Peter.

  The sharing isn’t gay. If somebody—some individual—says gay, that’s the individual showing his or her jealousy and immaturity.

  At our house, we have digital cable and Playstation 4, and a swimming pool that we invented via flooding the basement.

  One of my top-three favorite things to do is go down there at night and turn off all the lights and float in my innertube with a flashlight and run the beam back and forth along the surface of the water and go into a water-trance. The feeling of the air is different down there, and the light is different and the sound is different and the stink is different. It sounds fake to say it this way, but it really is another world down there.

  Peter doesn’t like basementpoolflashlighting. He says it smells too much like when he was in jail. For me, who never was in jail, being down there is like taking a magic time-trip back to when I was a tiny baby, alone in the warm wet quiet dark inside my mother: before I was born and grew up and murdered her with a knife.

  Still gusting, but, whatever: a warm wet wind won’t keep me and my best-ever friend from murdering; it just creates new Challenges. Like: if you’re going to murder someone with bow and arrow, remember to angle your shot into the wind.

&
nbsp; “Fuck,” says Peter, his arrow blowing wide of the mark.

  “Hey,” shouts the Weatherman.

  “Another arrow, Toby. Giveitme.”

  “Hey,” shouts the Weatherman.

  “Aim for the tree,” I say. “You were pointing at the lamppost on the last one, and it went, like, ten feet wide.”

  “Hey!” shouts the Weatherman. “Hey! No! You can’t murder me! I’m an island celebrity! I’m the Weather—gak—”

  “Ouch,” says Peter.

  “Good shot,” I say.

  It’s the first part of dusk now, the sky still dirty and dripping, still slicking us in Runoff. “Runoff is the opposite of fresh,” my best-ever friend says, and I agree.

  We get a real long dusk this time of year, on account of being so close to the equator. The equator, also, is the reason why it’s hot so much. Even the night rain’s warm as blood.

  Violentnatured Road is empty.

  “Where’d everybody go?” says Peter.

  “We murdered them all,” I quip.

  Half-quip, half-say-for-real.

  The carrion birds are out in force. Four of them—four big ones—have been following me and Peter around for the last half-hour. Like, let’s keep an eye on this pair.

  “Shoo, carrion birds,” I shout. “You get!”

  Peter playfully flings his ball at the largest of the birds. The bird swerves for it and just misses plucking it out of the air.

  “You almost lost your ball,” I say.

  “No worries,” Peter says. “I’d just take yours.”

  “Try it,” I say, theatrically patting my damp front pocket, where piano wire bulges in a coil. “Don’t be touching my ball.”

  If a murdered corpse were a box of Cracker Jacks, balls would be the bottom-of-the-box prize. They’re clear and brown—the color of sap, of beer bottles—and give a real high bounce on dry asphalt.

  To get a ball of your own, you will need:

  one murdered corpse

  one eye knife (or equivalent)

  the permission of a grown-up

  Just kidding about the permission. The corpse and knife, though, you will need.

  Begin your Activity by cutting an eye out of the murdered corpse; it doesn’t matter which. Then—carefully, carefully—slice away the White Tissue and Special Color Tissue and Black Tissue, snipping veins out as you go, until you’ve peeled the eye down to its bouncy brown core.

  That core is your ball.

  “If we had a third, we could do Defilement,” Peter says.

  “We should’ve saved the Weatherman,” I say, fake-sad but also not-fake-sad. “For later.”

  “Get lost,” shouts Peter, flinging his ball again.

  “We could do Wilderness Adventure,” I say.

  Wilderness Adventure is when me and Peter go off into the wilderness and explore it and if we find any people we murder them. Most times you won’t get anyone, but every now and then you’ll get somebody good.

  Last summer, in the wilderness, Peter and me got this guy who came to the island by jumping out of his plane in a parachute after his plane broke. One important thing about this story is: I had a sledgehammer hidden in my Secret Jeans Compartment.

  “Thank God y’all found me,” the parachutist said. “Where is this place? Where did I land?”

  “Murder Island,” I said. I unpopped the Compartment and bared my weapon.

  “Uh-oh,” he said.

  I Did him low on his body.

  “Guh,” he said.

  I re-Did him, near the same spot.

  “Gah,” he said.

  He fell to his knees in a way where, for a second, it looked like he was praying. Then he thumped face-first into the dirt.

  “I think you got him,” Peter said.

  “Yep,” I said, trying not to show that I was winded. Trying not to seem murder-gay.

  “That was a good one,” Peter said.

  “Yep,” I said.

  Peter bends, now, to pick up his ball, lodged where it landed in the exposed, hollowed chest cavity of a murdered corpse.

  “We did Wilderness yesterday,” he gripes. “There’s nobody out there. It’s boringer than jail.”

  “Shut up a second,” I say. “Oh—gross.”

  “What?”

  “I got bird doo on my ball.”

  “Should I ask how that happened?”

  “From bouncing it. In a doo-spattered area.”

  “Toby. Listen up.”

  “I’m listening. Shit, Pete. My ball is ruined.”

  “Tobe. Listen. We got to find someone to kill. Black Beauty’s getting restless.”

  I couldn’t say exactly how old Peter is—he won’t tell, except to say my mental age is froze at boy—but if I had to guesstimate, I’d say he’s maybe fifty or sixty or, possibly, seventy-five. Or maybe older. It’s difficult to guesstimate.

  Peter’s body-old, but mind-young.

  But body-old, for sure.

  “Up here’s a festive little boy,” Peter will say, tapping his skull. “A lot of folks—when they found out there was that kind of boy hiding inside this old, murdering man—they tried to strangle the boy out of the man. But one thing about the little boy is: he bites. The man’ll kill you one way, the boy another. And even if the boy don’t kill you, you won’t forget the day you met him. You won’t forget how big a bite he took.

  “This stallion bites,” Peter will say, turning the child into a horse.

  “He’s a special little boy,” he’ll then say, turning the horse back into a child.

  “I’m festive, and special, and lustrous-maned,” he’ll then say, turning the child and horse into himself, and describing himself in horse-words.

  So there’s a boy inside his head. On the outside, though, he’s an old old man. That’s not to say he’s weak! Oh no! He’s got prison-strong arms, from when he lifted barbells in his cage. His skin is thick and rough and red from over-sunning. His teeth end in sharp points, like a shark’s, or some other pointy-toothed animal’s—a spaniel’s, or a liger’s. Peter sharpened them himself, with an eye knife.

  “You think that doesn’t hurt?” he’ll say. “Filing down your teeth like that?”

  “No,” I’ll say, responding to his question. “I believe it hurts.”

  “Don’t think it doesn’t,” Peter will say.

  “I won’t,” I’ll say.

  “Good,” he’ll say.

  Stuff like that.

  Peter talks husky.

  One thing the pointy teeth make it easier for Peter to do is chew through tough meats. When me and Peter prepare a Natural Jerky, and then have competitive eating, his advantage really shows. Also, sharp teeth gives him a bonus weapon. A mouth-weapon.

  “Take a man’s gun,” Peter says, “What does he have left? His knife. Take that away from him, what does he have? Grenades and throwing-stars. Take those away, he’s got a hammer—and, probably, another knife. But if you take everything away? He’d better have damn sharp teeth.”

  Still, I wouldn’t want to have my own teeth all jaggedy like that; I like looking at them how they are.

  Sometimes, in the Upstairs Toilet Mirror, I’ll smile at myself in a way where all my teeth are showing, and I’ll say things to myself like, “Who’s that handsome devil?” and “Looking good, handsome.” That wouldn’t be as much fun to do with pointy teeth.

  One way I’m lucky is, I was born with a fancy smile.

  Peter and me are off in the Violentness Woods now, doing Wilderness Adventure. This is the Peter Pan Roleplay module of our Activity.

  Update: it’s the middle part of dusk. The carrion birds have given up.

  “You be Tinkerbell,” I say. “I’ll be Pan.”

  “You can’t do Roleplay with just Tink and Pan,” says Peter. “Anyway, I’m Peter. I’m always Peter.”

  “You always being Peter sucks big balls,” I say. “Be Tink. I’ll be Hook. We’ll do Tinkerbell Capture.”

  “Tinkerbell Capture’s bor
inger than jail,” says Peter, not-fake-sadly.

  “I’m thirsty,” he says.

  When Peter says thirsty, he means: for blood.

  “You be Tink,” I say. “I’ll be Hook.”

  “Hey,” says Peter, pointing up at the sky. “Hey. Look.”

  “Looking for your friend Peter Pan?” I say. That’s me being Hook. “Ha. Your precious Peter can’t save you now.”

  “No, for real. Look.”

  I see now what’s got his attention.

  It’s a tiny parachutist, floating away from a broken plane a mile or two offshore.

  “Another one,” I say—but Peter isn’t listening.

  “Ride, Beauty,” Peter whispers. “Ride.”

  We’re down in the Bone Shelter, Peter doing his thing with the parachutist’s murdered corpse. I’m half paying attention to digital cable—something with Kanye West and The Late Corey Haim and Tony Danza. The other half of me is watching Peter. I have the bloodener handy, in case he needs it.

  It’s still the middle part of dusk. Our dusks last pretty much forever this time of year, because of the equator. If you had to do a slogan for Murder Island, you could go: Murder Island: where a dusk lasts a lifetime.

  Seeing Peter like he is right now, hunched over a lifeless body with his Defiling Toys arrayed around him, my heart puffs up with non-gay love. We’re a swell team, I think, my best-ever friend and me.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he says, without turning from the corpse.

  I don’t tell what I’m thinking, which is the non-gay-love stuff.

  “Sledding,” he says. “Let’s get this guy up the Sledding Hill and see how fast he slides.”

  I’m doing Parachute; Peter called first-go for Corpse.

  The slide is super-muddy from the rain; we get a real fast ride. Every time the chute hits a bump, I go airborne.

  “Whee,” I say, whenever that happens.

  At the base of the Sledding Hill, I struggle to my feet. Peter’s up already, grinning, muddy.

  “Fuckin’ A,” he says.

  “I get Corpse next time,” I say.

  “He rides great,” Peter says. “Fast.”

  It’s the last part of dusk. (Finally!) We start our trudging to the top. The rule is, you have to drag what you’re going to sled. Peter’s dragging the corpse, meaning, he’s going to sled the corpse. Even though it’s my turn.