Nightmare Magazine Issue 4
Page 2
“If you’re doing Corpse again, I get two goes with Corpse,” I say. “I get the next two goes.”
“I’ll be bummed to see this end,” says Peter. He’s in front of me, his back turned to me, hauling the corpse back up the hill.
“See what end?” I say.
“All this. You and me. The sledding. The beach house. The murdering.”
“Who says it’s going to end?” I say.
“Ah. It’s almost done. We’re—unh—” he grunts— “Hang on.”
Peter pauses— changes his grip on the corpse— resumes his trudging up the hill.
“We’re running out of people, is all I meant. We’re using up the island.”
“What about the parachutists?” I say. “What about the broken planes? More will come. They always do.”
“No,” he says. “Sooner or later, those planes’ll learn not to fly over Murder Island. Or else, someone’ll figure out a way to make them fly without breaking all the time. Some scientist.” He spits.
The rain’s just trickling now. The wind’s pretty much died—or maybe it’s the hill, sheltering us.
“One day, it’ll just be us out here, and—ah—” Peter loses his breath, struggling with the corpseweight as the Sledding Hill steepens. He looks old, is what I think but don’t say.
“One day,” he says, “it’ll just be us. And then, just one of us. Not because I want it that way, mind. You know I have Control Problems.”
“Yeah?” I say. Letting go of the parachute. Leaving it behind.
“It’s weird, ain’t it? To think of the two of us in a showdown-type scenario.”
“Showdown,” I say. And I can feel my bloodspeed speeding.
“We got to face up to the possibility of that-type scenario developing, is all I’m saying. Pretty soon, we’ll be the only ones left. We’ll have this whole island to—gak—”
I hold the piano wire tight as I can around his neck. My best-ever. He paws at the wire—weak, wholebodyslack, like I cut all the best cords right at the beginning of the murder.
Lucky, I think.
But I think it not-fake-sadly.
Passing Violentnatured Road on the way home, I wonder: why no weather report?
Then I remember. Peter and me. We murdered the Weatherman this afternoon. We did Dress-Up with the Weatherman in the Bone Shelter.
The Weatherman is dead.
Stone Peter’s Day
I start the day, according to my usual custom, in my Rumpus Closet, with the Picture-Diary.
Every morning, according to my custom, I do a thing in it in fingerpaint. It’s like a regular diary, except it’s more picture-creative. I do myself a little bigger in it every day; thumb the pages like a flipbook, and you’ll see me growing! I usually do a bunch of corpses in the back part of the picture, the pile-size corresponding to my Total Kills. I used to do a big sun in the corner of the picture, but then the corpse-pile got so big I had to shrink it.
The first things in the book show me and my parents and the Weatherman and corpses. The later things show me and my parents and my sister and the Weatherman and corpses; then me and my parents and the Weatherman and corpses; me and my parents and my brother and the Weatherman and corpses; me and my parents and the Weatherman and corpses; me and the Weatherman and corpses; and me and Peter and the Weatherman and corpses.
For today’s entry, I do myself, and corpses.
I do the sun as big as my head.
Then I go to the Star Drawer and award myself a Gold for creativity. In the Project Book, I start today’s entry, which includes my name and age, and the Activity of the day: Replacing Peter.
I line the Peter Replacement Nominees up against the side of the house. The Nominees are: a rake; an empty thing of biscuit dough; a thing of driftwood; Peter’s corpse; a large stone; a mediumish stone; a small stone; and a wire whisk.
I’ve wrapped a toilet paper sash around each of the Nominees. The sash around the rake keeps blowing off; finally—exasperatedly—I stick the toilet paper to the rake with duct tape.
I do the ceremony.
“They’re all winners,” I say loudly.
But the biggest winner is the mediumish stone.
“It was an honor just to be nominated,” I say in a silly voice, jiggling the rake.
When you versus it against Real Peter, Stone Peter has advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages: Stone Peter’s made of hardier material; Stone Peter can more easily be lifted; when hurled, Stone Peter becomes a murder weapon.
Disadvantages: Stone Peter cannot talk; Stone Peter cannot move around by itself; Stone Peter cannot murder people except through teamwork. Stone Peter’s Friendship Score, as well, is lower than Real Peter’s.
Still: Stone Peter can be lifted and hurled, and is made of hard and durable material, and can be used, through teamwork, as a murder weapon. The only way that you could ever have done a murder by hurling Real Peter is if it was something faggy, like a flower, you were trying to kill.
Only a faggot would try to murder a flower.
I’m off with Stone Peter in the Violentness Woods, doing the Tinkerbell Capture module of Wilderness Adventure.
I do Tink, Pan, and Hook; Stone Peter does the Lost Boys and the Pirates.
“Still waiting for your precious Peter?” I say. “Well, you’ll be waiting a long time. My men have, shall we say, dispatched him.”
I make an angry/sad face. That’s me doing Tink. Tinkerbell can’t talk, except with faces.
“Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha,” I say.
“What’s so funny, Hook?” I say.
“Peter Pan!” I say.
Then I jump around for a while, swashbuckling.
I make my right arm swashbuckle against my left. Then I make the left arm swashbuckle. Then I have the two arms wrestle each other. Finally, I shape my left hand like a hook, and punch it five times, hard, with my right hand. I make sound effects to go with the punches: goosh, goosh, goosh, goosh, goosh.
“You’re free, Tinkerbell!” I shout.
I make a relieved/happy face. That’s me being Tink.
Then I make a bored/disappointed face. That’s me being me.
Moving funeral-slow, I position Stone Peter on the whacking block. For an executioner’s mask, I’ve got some underwear on my head. I have a real executioner’s mask back at the house—hanging on the wall of the Rumpus Closet—but it’s still dirty from the last time, and Stone Peter deserves clean.
I raise the sledgehammer over my head, and read the verdict aloud: “For the crime of being dull as shit, I sentence you to die.”
I bring the hammer down with a mighty crack.
What happens next is like something out of Greek mythology.
Instead of killing Stone Peter, the sledgehammer blow has multiplied it—creating two smaller, nearly identical Stone Peters.
“What are you?” I ask, squeezing and shaking one of the miniature Stone Peters. “What are you, that you have such powers?”
I try gouging-in-the-eye. Pummeling-with-a-bat. Poisoning. I try freezing and fire. I try the silent treatment, which sometimes leads to suicide. I cyber-bully. Still, Stone Peter lives. Both of its monstrous halves yet live.
I load Stone Peter Twin into the Radio Flyer, and cart it to the beach. I try drowning-in-the-ocean. I hold both of the Peter-halves beneath the surface of the filthy water—pressing all my weight against the halves as if they were resisting. Then I back away and close my eyes and count to ten. The stones are still there, still alive; it’s like they’re winking at me, through the sludge and seawater.
“Unmurderable,” I say, dramatically. I sometimes say my thoughts out loud, like someone in a movie.
I retrieve Stone Peter’s halves—both Runoff-shiny from the ocean—and walk them up the beach. One of them I drop. The other one I hurl at an invisible person whom I created out of make-believe. The person dies.
Then, I pick up the other Stone Peter half and hurl it at a palm tree.
Stone Peter is becoming an army of itself. An army, or a family.
I collapse, exhausted, on the beach, the whole Stone Peter Brotherhood arrayed around me in the sand. On the far horizon, Dump Copters are spilling different kinds of stuff into the ocean. The colors of today’s stuff are blue and red. The slick from yesterday’s Dump Copter stuff is making rainbows.
“My Mama didn’t give birth to no quitters,” I say. The line is something borrowed from a movie, I believe, or else a TV show or Software Adventure.
It’s true, though: I’ve never quit a murder. And I’m not about to start right now.
Unmurderable. To me, that’s just another Challenge, because I’m plucky. (“Murder the unmurderable? This kid’s just balls enough to try.”)
“Mark my words,” I say, to the people watching the movie. “I’ll do every kind of murder on this family of rock.”
And then, I think, I’ll do a hundred more—invent a hundred more—Stone Peter’s pieces all the while growing smaller and more numerous, until the last of the Stone Peter fragments has been pounded into dust. And when Stone Peter’s dust is carried wind-and-rain across the island, I will turn my murdering power against the island itself—will dig and burn through dirt and grass and rock to get the secret Peter-flecks the island harbors. If Peter’s dust should flow into the ocean, I will murder the ocean. Thanks to Peter’s creepy Greek mythology multiplying trick, the murder of one will become a massacre.
In this stone, I think, I’ve found my ideal victim. My Forevervictim.
I crawl around the beach, giving every Peter-shard a kiss.
“There was poison on my lips,” I lie.
Then I close my eyes and kiss the island itself. Pretending I’m poisoned, I kiss it dead: my mother-father, my lover-victim. My Road Runner, my Tweety Bird, my Jerry-Tom.
© 2012 Matt Williamson
Matt Williamson's stories have appeared in a variety of literary journals, magazines, and books—most recently Bat City Review and the anthology Fakes from W.W. Norton.
Need
Lisa Tuttle
After ballet, Corey liked to walk home through the cemetery. The grounds were large and well tended and offered the visitor a wealth of picturesque monuments and sentimental gravestone inscriptions, some of them dating back before the Civil War. There were columns, slabs, and spheres in abundance of the pinkish marble that was quarried locally, and among the mausoleums built to look like temples, chapels and houses was one defiant pink pyramid.
The walk through the cemetery, like the ballet class that preceded it, was one of the few things Corey enjoyed, something she did because she wanted to and not because she was expected to or thought she should.
On this October afternoon, crunching through the dead leaves and breathing in the crisp, autumn-scented air, Corey felt pleasantly tired, and looked forward to reaching her apartment where she could have a cup of hot tea and some sandwiches before settling down to write her usual evening letter to her fiancé.
But although she looked forward to those simple things, there was also pleasure in being able to delay them. With no one waiting for her and no schedule to follow, there was no reason to hurry back. It was a beautiful day, and she knew she had at least an hour before it would begin to get dark. So she turned aside from the main path and wandered the sloping, uneven ground among stone angels and headstones until she came to her favorite spot, discovered on a previous walk.
This was a bench beneath a large old oak tree with a view of a cluster of elaborately carved tombstones all commemorating various members of the Symonds family, and a statue of a gentle-faced young woman holding a baby, with a second child clutching at her stone draperies, half turned as if looking longingly at the graves.
“It’s as if she were saying, ‘Why did you abandon me, and leave us here alone?’” said a voice behind her.
Corey jumped up and turned to see a young man in a bright blue windbreaker. He had a pleasant, rather weak-looking face, and seemed about her own age.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“I thought I was alone. I didn’t hear you walk up,” she said, and realized she had pressed one hand against her heart; she let it drop, feeling embarrassed.
“And in a cemetery . . . I don’t blame you for being frightened.”
“I’m not,” Corey said. “I was just startled, that’s all. I like cemeteries. I like this one, anyway. It’s peaceful. I often walk here.”
“I know,” he said. “I do, too. I spend a lot of time here. I’ve seen you, although I don’t suppose you ever noticed me. I’ve seen you, always by yourself, and I suppose I got to thinking that I knew you. That’s why I came up and spoke like I did. It was stupid of me, and rude—I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right, really, I understand,” Corey said. “You don’t have to keep apologizing.” He gave off such an aura of unhappiness and unease that she felt obliged to try to lessen it.
“I can tell you like this spot,” he said. “It’s one of my favorites. I love to sit on the bench and look at that woman with her children. She’s so beautiful and so sad, really a tragic subject. Her husband has left her—and it’s the ultimate desertion. He hasn’t gone to another lover, but to Death. So she knows she can never win him back. But she stares at his grave and dreams, and asks him why. You’d think that her beauty and her obvious need would make any man change his mind—but it’s too late, of course, for both of them.”
Corey felt uneasy now, her pleasant mood shattered. She had no desire to be standing in a cemetery, talking to an odd boy who had watched her without her being aware. But force of habit kept her polite.
“I have to be getting back soon,” she said. “I have things to do.”
“You’re from the South, aren’t you?”
“North Carolina.”
“My parents live in Florida, so that’s supposed to be my home now. But actually, I was born here in town. My family goes way back. In fact, I’ll be buried right here in this cemetery when I die. There’s a family plot, with a space reserved for me. But you’re a long way from home. What made you come here?”
“It’s a good school,” she said, her voice resentful. “My parents thought I should have the opportunity to go to a first-rate school and see another part of the country. But I’m only here for a year. In May I’m going home. I’m getting married.”
“You’re engaged.”
“That’s right.”
“He’s not here?”
“He’s home, in North Carolina.”
“Ah.” He nodded quickly. “I thought you were . . . it’s the lonely who seek out the cemeteries. We have that in common.”
She wanted nothing in common with him. She wanted to get away, to escape to the dull confines of her furnished apartment and reread Philip’s old letters. Blandly cruel, she said, staring at the bright blue of his jacket, “In common? You mean you’re engaged to someone who isn’t here, too?”
“Engaged? Oh no, I . . . I don’t have anyone. I don’t have anyone at all except my dead friends here.”
“I’ve got to go,” Corey said, glancing at a wrist on which there was no watch. Anything not to see the misery on his face. She walked away quickly, deliberately crunching through fallen leaves. If he spoke again, or called after her, she might not hear him above the noise she made.
When the letter came, it had been five days without a word. Corey was so excited that her hands shook, and she tore the envelope in getting it open.
It wasn’t very long. Just one page written in Philip’s precise hand. She read it through to his signature without understanding, and then read it again, her mouth going dry and her stomach beginning to hurt.
He was releasing her from their engagement, he said. Their parents were right—they were too young to make such a momentous decision. He did love her, bu
t he felt they should both date other people and get to know their own minds better. He was sure she would agree with him, but they could talk this over at greater length when they saw each other at Thanksgiving.
Corey dropped the letter on the floor and walked across the small room to stare unseeing at the wall. Less than two months they had been apart. He hadn’t been able to last even two months.
She clenched her fists and pressed them against the sides of her head. Her mouth open wide, she breathed in ragged, tearing gulps, feeling as if she were drowning. She wept.
It was beginning to get dark, and still Corey remained slumped on the couch where she had spent most of the day since reading Philip’s letter. She had tried to call him, and had left a message with his roommate. She didn’t know what she would say if he returned her call, but she had to talk to someone, and she could think of no one else to call.
She had come to this distant, northern town, this first-rate university, under protest, in order to satisfy her parents. She saw her agreed-upon year here as a time of trial, something that must be undergone before she could be united with Philip, and so she had taken a certain grim pleasure in refusing to do anything that would make the time easier on herself. She hadn’t joined any organizations or tried out for plays, as she would have back home, and she had not made any friends. What was the point? She would be gone at the end of the year. Why should she pretend that this lonely interval had anything to do with her real life?
She didn’t need dates, she didn’t need friends, so long as she had Philip, no matter how far away he was. That was what she had thought. And now that she longed for a friend, anyone with a sympathetic ear, she had nowhere to turn.
She thought of the people from her classes who had spoken to her, and how she had always turned aside whatever gestures they had made toward friendship. She thought of the boy in the cemetery. He was as alone as she was now. Remembering how she had deliberately cut him, she felt deeply ashamed.
Abruptly she stood up. She had to get out. She had done nothing but sit and brood and cry alone all day, until the walls and furniture were so saturated with her grief that she could scarcely bear to look at them any longer.