Aickman's Heirs
Page 28
It was what I saw when he went past that haunts me. There was someone walking behind him, so close it was unnatural, and a collision seemed imminent, yet because they continued in this manner for as long as I could follow their progress with my eyes, I knew it was deliberate, and Tommy well aware of, even allowing, this pursuit.
The person behind wore a long black overcoat—a completely unnecessary garment in the stifling warmth of the Texan night—and a slouch hat, which should have made him nearly impossible to identify. But what I could see—the parchment-coloured cheeks and chin, the long, incredibly thin, flat hands—and perhaps above all the odour, faint but unmistakable, carried to me on the faint breeze of his passage, of cheap pulp paper—convinced me that I had encountered him before, in the basement of a second-hand bookshop in Notting Hill.
The feeling of guilt for what I’ve done, what I’ve inflicted on poor Tommy—
Is it guilt that I feel? Or jealousy?
###
Contributors
Nina Allan’s stories have appeared in many anthologies, including Best Horror of the Year 6, Strange Tales (Tartarus), and The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women. Her novella Spin, a reimagining of the Arachne myth, won the British Science Fiction Award in 2014, and her collection The Silver Wind, a story-cycle on themes of time and memory, won the Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire in the same year. Her debut novel The Race, set in an alternate future England and featuring bio-engineered greyhounds and island-sized whales, is out now from NewCon Press.
Nadia Bulkin writes scary stories about the scary world we live in. She moved from a Muslim society to a Christian one when she was eleven, although she remains unaffiliated and unabsolved. She now lives in Washington D.C. and tends her garden of student debt sowed by two political science degrees. Her fiction has recently appeared in the anthologies Letters to Lovecraft, Phantasm Japan, and Sword & Mythos. For more, see nadiabulkin.wordpress.com.
Michael Cisco is the author of novels The Divinity Student (Buzzcity Press, 1999, winner of the International Horror Writers Guild award for best first novel of 1999), The Tyrant (Prime, 2004), The San Veneficio Canon (Prime, 2005), The Traitor (Prime, 2007), The Narrator (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2010), The Great Lover (Chomu Press, 2011), Celebrant (Chomu Press, 2012), and MEMBER (Chomu Press 2013). His short story collection, Secret Hours, was published by Mythos Press in 2007. His scholarly work has appeared in Lovecraft Studies, The Weird Fiction Review, Iranian Studies, and Lovecraft and Influence. Michael Cisco lives and teaches in New York City.
Malcolm Devlin’s stories have appeared in Black Static and Interzone. He currently lives near the canal in Oxford, England.
Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection Windeye (Coffee House Press 2012) and the novel Immobility (Tor 2012), both of which were finalists for a Shirley Jackson Award. His novel Last Days won the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. His novel The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press) was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he is a Professor in Brown University’s Literary Arts Department.
Richard Gavin is a Canadian author in the realms of horror and the esoteric, oftentimes cultivating the borderland where these worlds meet. To date he has released four short-story collections, including At Fear’s Altar (Hippocampus Press, 2012). His tales have also appeared in The Best Horror of the Year, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and the Black Wings anthologies. His occult writings have been featured in Starfire and Clavis: Journal of Occult Arts, Letters and Experience. He welcomes readers at www.richardgavin.net
Yaroslav Gerzhedovich was born in 1970 in Leningrad (St. Petersburg), and studied at the Serov Art College. During his 20-year career his style has undergone some changes, but the foundation remains the same—small size works, many small parts, muted colors, meticulous manner of execution, which has developed under the influence of Gothic and Renaissance art.
Vince Haig does design, layout, and illustrative work. Find out more at barquing.com
John Howard was born in London. He is the author of The Defeat of Grief, and Numbered as Sand or the Stars, and the short story collections The Silver Voices, Written by Daylight, and Cities and Thrones and Powers. His collaborations with Mark Valentine have appeared in the collections The Rite of Trebizond and Other Tales, and The Collected Connoisseur. He has published essays on various aspects of the science fiction and horror fields, and especially on the work of classic authors such as Fritz Leiber, Arthur Machen, August Derleth, M.R. James, and writers of the pulp era. Many of these have been collected in Touchstones: Essays on the Fantastic.
John Langan is the author of two collections, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies (Hippocampus 2103) and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (Prime 2008), and a novel, House of Windows (Night Shade 2009). With Paul Tremblay, he has co-edited Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (Prime 2011). One of the founders of the Shirley Jackson Award, he lives in upstate New York with his wife, younger son, and a houseful of animals.
Helen Marshall is an award-winning Canadian author, editor, and doctor of medieval studies. Her debut collection of short stories, Hair Side, Flesh Side (ChiZine Publications, 2012), was named one of the top ten books of 2012 by January Magazine. It won the 2013 British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer and was shortlisted for a 2013 Aurora Award by the Canadian Society of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her second collection, Gifts for the One Who Comes After, was released in September, 2014. She lives in Oxford, England where she spends her time staring at old books.
Daniel Mills is the author of Revenants: A Dream of New England (Chomu Press, 2011) and The Lord Came at Twilight (Dark Renaissance Books, 2014). His short fiction has appeared in various magazines and anthologies including Black Static, Shadows & Tall Trees, and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 23 & 25. He lives in Vermont.
David Nickle is the author of the novels The ’Geisters, Rasputin’s Bastards, and Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism, and co-author of The Claus Effect, with Karl Schroeder. His stories are collected in Knife Fight and Other Struggles, and Monstrous Affections. He lives in Toronto, Canada, where he works as a journalist covering municipal politics.
Lynda E. Rucker is an American writer born and raised in the American South and currently living in Dublin, Ireland. She has sold more than two dozen short stories to such places as The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, The Best Horror of the Year, Black Static, F&SF, Shadows & Tall Trees, and Nightmare Magazine. She is a regular columnist for Black Static, and her first collection, The Moon Will Look Strange, was released in 2013 from Karōshi Books.
Lisa Tuttle has been writing strange, weird stories nearly all her life, making her first professional sale in 1971. She is a past winner of the John W. Campbell Award, the British Science Fiction Award, and the International Horror Guild Award. Her short stories have been widely published and reprinted, and gathered into five published collections to date. Her first novel, written in collaboration with George R.R. Martin, Windhaven, originally published in 1981, is still in print, and has been translated into many other languages. Her other novels include Lost Futures, The Mysteries, The Silver Bough, and, forthcoming in 2016, The Curious Affair of the Somnambulist and the Psychic Thief. Born and raised in Texas, she now lives with her family in the highlands of Scotland.
D.P. Watt is a writer living in the bowels of England. He has two collections of short stories, An Emporium of Automata, (Eibonvale Press, 2013) and The Phantasmagorical Imperative, (Egaeus Press, 2014). Recent and forthcoming works include, The Usher, (Dunham’s Manor Press), ‘Honey Moon’ in A Soliloquy for Pan, ed. Mark Beech, (Egaeus Press), and ‘Myself/Thyself’ in Terror Tales of the Highlands, ed. Paul Finch, (Gray Friar Press). Why not visit him at theinterludehouse.co.uk
Michael Wehunt spends his time in the lost city of Atlanta. His fiction has a
ppeared or is forthcoming in such publications as Cemetery Dance, Shadows & Tall Trees, and the Paula Guran-edited Mammoth Book of Cthulhu, among others. You can visit him at www.michaelwehunt.com.
The Editor
Simon Strantzas is the author of Burnt Black Suns (Hippocampus Press, 2014), Nightingale Songs (Dark Regions Press, 2011), Cold to the Touch (Tartarus Press, 2009), and Beneath the Surface (Humdrumming, 2008), as well as the editor of Shadows Edge (Gray Friar Press, 2013).
His writing has been reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, The Best Horror of the Year, The Year’s Best Weird Fiction and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror; has been translated into other languages; and has been nominated for the British Fantasy Award. He lives in Toronto, Canada.
Also from Undertow Publications
1905 Faylee Crescent
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undertowbooks@gmail.com
www.undertowbooks.com
Table of Contents
Introduction
Seaside Town / Brian Evenson /
Neithernor / Richard Gavin /
Least Light, Most Night / John Howard /
Camp / David Nickle /
A Delicate Craft / D.P. Watt /
Seven Minutes in Heaven / Nadia Bulkin /
Infestations / Michael Cisco /
The Dying Season / Lynda E. Rucker /
A Discreet Music / Michael Wehunt /
Underground Economy / John Langan /
The Vault of Heaven / Helen Marshall /
Two Brothers / Malcolm Devlin /
The Lake / Daniel Mills /
A Change of Scene / Nina Allan /
The Book That Finds You / Lisa Tuttle /
Contributors /