TABLE OF CONTENTS
Issue 21, June 2014
FROM THE EDITOR
Editorial, June 2014
FICTION
Spores
Seanan McGuire
Don’t Go
Łukasz Orbitowski
Dirtman
H.L. Nelson
Machines of Concrete Light And Dark
Michael Cisco
NONFICTION
The H Word:
Nightmares in the Big City
Brandon Massey
Artist Gallery
Leslie Ann O’Dell
Artist Spotlight: Leslie Ann O’Dell
Julia Sevin
Interview: Mark Morris
Lisa Morton
AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS
Seanan McGuire
Łukasz Orbitowski
H.L. Nelson
Michael Cisco
MISCELLANY
Coming Attractions
Stay Connected
Subscriptions & Ebooks
About the Editor
© 2014 Nightmare Magazine
Cover Art by Leslie Ann O’Dell
www.nightmare-magazine.com
FROM THE EDITOR
EDITORIAL, JUNE 2014
John Joseph Adams
Welcome to issue twenty-one of Nightmare!
Some good news to report this month on the awards front: “57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides” by Sam J. Miller (Nightmare, December 2013) has been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award! The winners will be announced at Readercon in Burlington, MA on July 13, 2014. You can learn more about the award and see the full list of nominees (which includes a story from our sister-magazine, Lightspeed), at shirleyjacksonawards.org. Congratulations to Sam and to all of the other finalists!
In other awards news, the Nebula Awards were presented in mid-May by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Lightspeed had four nominees this year: two finalists in the short story category and two in novelette. That of course meant that everyone knew going into it that—barring any ties—Lightspeed was going to lose at least twice. Overachievers that they are, they managed to lose all four! That makes Lightspeed 0-for-11 in the Nebulas all-time. But truly, it is an honor to be nominated, and hey—eleven Nebula nominations in just four years is not too shabby!
• • • •
Speaking of Lightspeed, this month marks the publication of its special, double-sized fourth anniversary issue—the guest-edited, crowdfunded phenomenon: Women Destroy Science Fiction! It was a project so monumental that it spawned two other special issues—Women Destroy Fantasy! and Women Destroy Horror! You’ll have to wait until October for those two specials, but Women Destroy Science Fiction! is available now—in both ebook and print formats! To learn more about the issue, or to order it, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/wdsf.
• • • •
In other news, my anthology Dead Man’s Hand came out last month, but it’s still so new it still has that new anthology smell! It’s full of weird-western goodness, and it has a great lineup, featuring all-new, never-before-published stories by Kelley Armstrong, Seanan McGuire, Elizabeth Bear, Alastair Reynolds, Jonathan Maberry, Joe R. Lansdale, Tad Williams, Hugh Howey, and many more. If you’d like a sneak peek at the anthology, the complete text of Rajan Khanna’s story, “Second Hand,” appears in Lightspeed’s May issue. Additionally, Fred Van Lente’s story in the May Lightspeed (“Willful Weapon”) takes place in the same world as his Dead Man’s Hand story, “Neversleeps.” Plus there’s a bunch of “free reads”—and additional information about the book—available at johnjosephadams.com/dead-mans-hand.
Speaking of my anthologies, The End is Nigh, volume one of The Apocalypse Triptych, came out in March, but it was exclusive on Kindle for 90 days so we could take advantage of the Kindle Select program. If you’re a non-Kindle ebook reader, then we have some good news for you: Sometime in June, The End is Nigh should become available in other ebook marketplaces, like Nook, iBooks, Kobo, etc. To help celebrate that, we’re reprinting one of the stories from the anthology here in Nightmare—the one that seemed to be the consensus pick for creepiest damn thing in the book, “Spores” by Seanan McGuire.
• • • •
With our announcements out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month:
We have original fiction from Łukasz Orbitowski (“Don’t Go”) and H.L. Nelson (“Dirtman”), along with reprints Michael Cisco (“Machines of Concrete Light and Dark ”) and the aforementioned Seanan McGuire story, “Spores.”
We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview with Mark Morris.
That’s about all I have for you this month. Thanks for reading!
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 include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Wastelands 2, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. He has been nominated for eight Hugo Awards and five World Fantasy Awards, and he has been called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble. 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
SPORES
Seanan McGuire
June 2028
Something in the lab smelled like nectarine jam. I looked up from the industrial autoclave, frowning as I sniffed the air. Unusual smells aren’t a good thing when you work in a high-security bio lab. No matter how pleasant the odor may seem, it indicates a deviance from the norm, and deviance is what gets people killed.
I straightened. “Hello?”
“Sorry, Megan.” The round, smiling face of one of my co-workers—Henry, from the Eden Project—poked around the wall separating the autoclave area from the rest of the lab. His hand followed, holding a paper plate groaning under the weight of a large wedge of, yes, nectarine pie. “We were just enjoying some of Johnny’s harvest.”
I eyed the pie dubiously. Eating food that we had engineered always struck me as vaguely unhygienic. “Johnny baked that?”
“Johnny baked it, and Johnny grew it,” Henry said, beaming. “The first orchard seeded with our Eden test subjects has been bearing good fruit. You want a slice?”
“I’ll pass,” I said. Realizing that I was standing on the border of outright rudeness, I plastered a smile across my face and added, “Rachel’s planning something big for tonight’s dinner. She told me to bring my appetite.”
Henry nodded, his own smile fading. It was clear he didn’t believe my excuse. It was just as clear that he would let me have it. “Well, we’re sorry if our festivities disturbed you.”
“Don’t worry about it.” I gestured to the autoclave. “I need to unpack this before I head out.”
“Sure, Megan,” he said. “Have a nice evening, okay?” He withdrew, vanishing around the cubicle wall and leaving me comfortably alone. I let out a slow breath, trying to recover the sense of serenity I’d had before strange smells and coworkers disrupted my task. It wasn’t easy, but I’d had plenty of practice at finding my center. Less than thirty seconds later, I was unpacking hot, sterile glassware and getting my side of t
he lab ready for the challenges of tomorrow.
Project Eden was a side venture of the biotech firm where I, Henry, and several hundred others were employed. Only twenty-three scientists, technicians, and managers were appended to the project, including me, the internal safety monitor. It was my job to make sure the big brains didn’t destroy the world in their rush toward a hardier, easier to grow peach, or an apple that didn’t rot quite so quickly after it had been picked. On an official level, I was testing the air and lab surfaces for a committee-mandated parts per million of potential contaminants. On an unofficial level, I spent a lot of time sterilizing glassware, wiping down surfaces, and ordering new gloves, goggles, and lab coats.
It was work that could have been done by someone with half my education and a quarter of my training, but the pay was good, and it gave me an outlet for the compulsions that had kept me out of field biology. Besides, the hours were great. I didn’t mind being a glorified monkey if it meant I got to work in a good, clean lab, doing work that would genuinely better the world while still allowing me to quit by four on Fridays.
The team was still celebrating and eating pie when I finished putting the glassware away and left for the locker room. I hadn’t been kidding about Rachel telling me to save my appetite. It had been a long day, and I wanted nothing more than to spend an even longer night with my wife and daughter.
• • • •
Rachel was in her studio when I got home. She had a gallery show coming up and was hard at work on the pastels and impressionistic still lifes that were her bread and butter. I knocked on the wall to let her know I was there and kept walking toward the kitchen. It was her night to cook—that part was true—but that didn’t mean I couldn’t have a little snack before dinner. The farmers’ market was held on Tuesday afternoons. I had worked late Tuesday night, but I knew Rachel and Nikki had gone shopping, and Rachel had the best eye for produce. Whatever she’d brought home would be delicious.
The fruit bowl was in its customary place on the counter. I turned toward it, and froze. A thick layer of grayish fuzz covered its contents, turning them from a classicist’s ideal still life into something out of a horror movie. “Rachel!” I shouted, not moving. It was like the information my brain had was too jarring to fully process. It would take time for all of me to get the message. “There’s something wrong with the fruit!”
“You don’t have to shout, I’m right here.” My wife stomped into the kitchen, wiping her hands on the dishtowel she’d been using to clean her paintbrushes between watercolor overlays. She had a smudge of bright pink dust on one cheek, making her look like a little girl who’d been experimenting with her mother’s cosmetics. I fell in love with her all over again when I saw that perfect imperfection.
That was the best thing about being married to my best friend, as I’d been telling people for the past fifteen years: I got to fall in love with her every day, and no one ever thought I was being weird. Sometimes normalcy is the most precious gift of all.
I didn’t get the chance to tell Rachel about the fruit. Her eyes followed my position to its logical trajectory. It was almost a relief when she recoiled the same way I had, her upper lip curling upward in atavistic disgust. “What did you do?” She turned toward me, scowling. “This was all fresh when we brought it home yesterday.”
I blinked at her. “What do you mean, what did I do?” I asked, feeling obscurely offended. “I can’t make fruit go off just by looking at it.”
“Well, then, did you bring something home from the lab?” She stabbed her finger at the gray-washed contents of the bowl. “This isn’t right. I examined this fruit myself. There was nothing wrong with it.”
“You got this from the farmers’ market, right?” She was right about the age of the fruit: I remembered her bringing it home and dumping it into the bowl, and it had looked fine then. I’d even been thinking about how nice those peaches would taste with some sharp cheddar cheese and a bottle of artisanal hard cider. I wouldn’t have done that for moldy fruit. I wouldn’t have made it to the office without sterilizing the entire room.
Rachel frowned. “Yes, we did.”
“There you go.” I picked up the whole bowl, holding it gingerly to avoid any contact with the gray scum, and walked it over to the trash can. The decay had progressed far enough that the bowl’s contents made an unpleasant squishing noise when I dumped them out. I wrinkled my nose and put it in the sink, resisting the urge to toss it into the trash with the fruit instead. “Something went bad and set off a chain reaction.”
Rachel wasn’t listening. She wrinkled her nose at the place where the bowl had been sitting, and before I could say anything, she ran her finger through the circle of gray fluff marking its footprint. “This crap is on the table, too. We’re going to need disinfectant.”
“I’ll disinfect the table,” I said, swallowing a jolt of panic. “Go wash your hands.”
Rachel frowned. “Honey, are you having an attack?”
“No.” Yes. “But this stuff reduced a bowl of fruit to sludge in less than eighteen hours. That doesn’t make me feel good about you getting it on your hands.” I glared at the gray circle. Rachel’s finger had cut a clean line through it, showing the tile beneath. “Please. For my sake.”
“Megan, you’re scaring me.”
“Good. Then you’ll use extra soap.”
“You’re such a worrywart,” she said, a note of affectionate exasperation in her voice. She kissed my cheek and was gone, flouncing back into the hall, leaving me alone with the faint scent of rotten fruit.
I looked at the circle for a moment longer, and then turned to the sink. I was going to need a lot of hot water.
• • • •
Fungus is the great equalizer.
We give bacteria a lot of credit, and to be fair, life as we know it does depend on the tiny building blocks of bacteria. They allow us to digest food, recover from infections, and eventually begin the process of decaying back into the environment. But the truly heavy lifting of the decaying process comes from fungus. Fungus belongs to its own kingdom, separate from animals and vegetables, all around us and yet virtually ignored, because it’s not as flashy or exciting as a cat, dog, or Venus flytrap.
There are proteins in mushrooms that are almost identical to the ones found in mammalian flesh. That means that every vegetarian who eats mushrooms instead of meat is coming closer than they would ever dream to their bloody hunter’s roots. With so many things we’ve cataloged but don’t understand, how many things are there that we don’t know yet? How many mysteries does the kingdom of the fungus hold?
Rachel—after washing her hands to my satisfaction—had gone to pick up our daughter from cheerleading practice. Nikki was in the middle of one of her “dealing with either one of my mothers is embarrassing enough, I cannot handle them both” phases, which would normally have aggravated me. Tonight, I took it as a blessing. Having them both out of the house made it easier for me to go through the kitchen and systematically bleach, disinfect, and scrub every surface the fruit might have touched to within an inch of its life.
Rachel’s immediate “what did you do” response wasn’t unjustified. I worked in a lab full of biotech and geniuses, after all; it wasn’t unreasonable to blame me when something went awry. But that was why I was always so careful. Didn’t she see that? Nothing from the lab ever entered our home. I threw away two pairs of shoes every month, just to cut down the risk that I would track something from a supposedly clean room into our meticulously clean home. Whatever this stuff was, it couldn’t be connected to Project Eden. It just didn’t make any sense.
When I was done scrubbing down the counters I threw the sponges I’d used into the trash on top of the moldy mess that had been a bowl of nectarines and apples—the mold had continued to grow, and was even clinging to the plastic sides of the bag—and hauled the whole thing outside to the garbage bin.
I was on my knees on the kitchen floor, going through my third soap cycle, when Ra
chel and Nikki came banging through the front door, both shouting greetings that tangled together enough to become gloriously unintelligible, like an alphabet soup made of my favorite letters. “In here!” I called, and continued scrubbing at the linoleum like I’d get a prize when I was finished. I would, in a way. I would get the ability to sleep that night.
Footsteps. I looked up to find them standing in the kitchen doorway, and smiled my best “no, really, it’s all right, this isn’t an episode, it’s just a brief moment of irrational cleanliness” smile. It was an expression I’d had a lot of practice wearing. The elbow-length rubber gloves and hospital scrubs probably didn’t help. “Hi, guys. How was practice?”
Nikki frowned, which was almost a relief. There had been a lot of eye-rolling and stomping lately, which wasn’t fun for anyone except for maybe her, and I wasn’t even certain about that. Having a teenager was definitely a daily exercise in patience. “Mom, why are you scrubbing the kitchen floor? It’s not Thursday.”
I’d been braced for the question. I still cringed when it was actually asked. There was a weight of quiet betrayal behind it—nights when I’d missed my medication without realizing it and wouldn’t let her eat until I’d measured every strand of dry spaghetti and placed it in a pot of boiling, previously bottled water; days spent searching through the women’s department at Target for the only bras that had no structural or cosmetic flaws. Years of living with my OCD had left her gun-shy in a way neither Rachel nor I could have predicted when we decided to have a baby.
Nikki looked so much like me at her age, too. That was part of the terror. Nikki was sixteen, and that was roughly the age I’d been when my symptoms had really begun to solidify. Had she managed to dodge the bullet of her genetics, or was she going to start washing the skin off of her hands any day now? No one knew. No one had any way of knowing.
“Remember I told you about the fruit from the farmers’ market going off?” asked Rachel, coming to my rescue as she had so many times before. “That mold was nasty. It needed to be cleaned up before we’d be able to cook in here again.”
Nightmare Magazine Issue 21 Page 1
