“M-hm.”
She leads me to the silhouette of a roof against the sky.
“Here we are.”
Crossing the pale, perfectly new sidewalk, she slips out of her pack and flings it over the high steel fence onto the lawn.
“Let me,” she pulls me forward and then takes my pack, throwing it over next to hers.
“You don’t have a key?”
“If I had I would have used it,” she says bluntly. “You go first.”
I pull myself up over the fence and drop next to her, lose my balance and sprawl forward. My outflung hands drive back a mat of newly-laid sod, exposing the coffee-ground topsoil beneath it.
We approach the house. The smell of fresh concrete, plaster, and paint mixes with the herby odor from the wild hillside behind the lot. A steel trough, encrusted with dried cement, sits in the driveway like a small boat among heaps of bricks. A shovel leans against the wall of the house, marking it with a dim shadow in the blue. The front door rests on its side against the porch struts. It’s the kind you buy at a box store, adorned with a garish window of many small bevelled panes radiating from an oval centerpiece. Jeanie walks into the house over a threshold sheeted with clear plastic. I look around. There are other, similar houses there in the dark. I see exposed beams, a cement mixer, tools.
Going inside I can hear Jeanie moving around in the gloom, her feet making hollow sounds in the empty house. She looks up at me, her eyes dark in her dimly glowing face.
“I guess they’re remodeling,” she says flatly.
I bend forward to avoid her look and bang my hands against the knees of my pants, leaving faint blackish streaks of topsoil.
When I straighten up again, she has gone through to the next room. I don’t follow right away. My mind seems too receptive. I’m no longer tired, but I can’t seem to think about what I know is wrong. Jeanie is doing something that involves some scraping and rustling. I go through the doorway.
There’s a kitchenette in front of me, a few stray tools, a hammer, caulk gun, boxcutter with a few razors, nails, pins, scattered on the counter. The room beyond the kitchenette is floored with white linoleum, and its sliding glass doors open to the blue backyard. Jeanie crosses toward me naked from the far corner of the room, since I stand by the only door. Brushing by me she sways in my direction and I raise my hand; it streaks her forearm with topsoil.
Her face slackens.
“Dirty. Dirty.”
She plucks up one of the loose razors and slices the side of my neck with it. The left side of my head goes cold, and the back of my right knee and right foot instantly go numb. Jeanie cuts my neck first on one side then the other. I twist and flop forward over the counter and I feel her behind me darting her hand in around my shoulder and pushing my arms away. My breath against the counter, and spatter. She pulls me round to face her and keeps cutting at my neck. I watch my arms float up, but there’s no strength in them, and she easily bats them back down.
I taste blood. She’s gone. I see black streaks everywhere on the white. I am on my back, on the floor. My vision is dim, my eyes are dusty and cold. My neck hurts. I can’t tell where my hands and feet are, how I’m lying. My neck hurts worse—impossibly—burning like acid. They churn avidly, in a trembling, colorless light. I realize they’re eating. Rows of pistons, like piano keys, are applauding.
My heat and strength drain onto the linoleum. I tell my heart to stop. It must be made to realize it’s pumping my blood out of me, not through me. Each beat hushes in my ear, or the one that doesn’t seem to be glued to the floor, and through which the sound of muttering comes to me.
The searing pain in my neck is like a beacon in empty space; it won’t let me go. Mindless, automatic greed surrounds it, just out of sight.
My throat is in agony. I want to sob but whatever I do hurts it more. My body is cold, appallingly weak.
I drag myself to my feet. The night is paling. Outside I can hear the coyotes. They must have been on the train the whole time. Barely able to move, I stagger to the sliding glass door. I need to get out of this house.
In despair I tug nervelessly at the handle. I make a supreme effort and the rubber seal parts with a kissing sound. Hauling the door out of my way, I nearly throw myself off my feet.
My neck is raw, icy and burning. My shirt is stiff and glued to my body. Slowly I am leaving the house behind. The yammering is all around me, very near. I’m in the back yard. Which way do I go?
I call out.
“I am here!”
My voice is so weak I can hardly hear it.
Why am I calling?
“Here!” I call, frailly, my voice breaking. “I am here!”
The ragged whooping erupts on all sides. It rises jubilantly into the sky and dissolves into a swarm of shrill yipes.
The explosion of noise makes me dizzy, I fall at full length on the patio—my wounds are jarred open and bleed again. I gasp, shake. I feel myself nuzzled. For a moment I can almost see myself from a distance—a wild distance.
I turn onto my side. Some part of my mind sees all this, my body outstretched and the coyotes and the grass, house, stars, patio, inside and out, and it’s leaving me. A tongue jabs at my neck—I cry out, convulsing with pain and yet not with surprise. I seem to know all this, or part of me does. I taste my own blood in an alien mouth.
From the corner of the house, Jeanie slinks toward me out of the dark, her loose hair frisking her shoulders. They are so precisely coordinated that neither she nor the coyotes take any notice of each other. She kneels beside me and takes my head in her hands, laying it in her lap. This is so painful that I cry out in despair, the churning mutter roaring in my ears and rising to cover the sound of my voice.
Jeanie is bending over me, impassive as a nurse. She lays my arms outspread on the ground to either side of me, her breasts brushing my face. Now she is stroking my forehead.
She whispers to me, “This is necessary,” lisping it over and over to the shrinking thing that is still me. “This is necessary.”
Jaws sink into my calf and I cry out in pain.
She smiles down at me. Her face becomes part of the sky. She soothes me as they begin eating.
© 2009 by Michael Cisco.
Originally published in Lovecraft Unbound,
edited by Ellen Datlow.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.
Michael Cisco is an American writer, teacher, and translator currently living in New York City. He is the author of novels The Divinity Student, The Tyrant, The Traitor, The Great Lover, The Narrator, Celebrant, and MEMBER, as well as the short story collection Secret Hours. His short fiction has appeared in Lovecraft Unbound, Black Wings, The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, Blood and Other Cravings, The Weird, and elsewhere.
NONFICTION
THE H WORD: NIGHTMARES IN THE BIG CITY
Brandon Massey
There is safety in numbers, goes the popular adage. While that may be true when considering the likelihood of a car plowing into a group of cyclists, when it comes to life in the big city, living among the masses isn’t going to save you from the Bogeyman.
In fact, the masses might have you running for your life. Especially when they come shambling after you with their rotting limbs and insatiable appetites for live human flesh.
As fans of horror, we’re familiar with certain settings in literature and film: the isolated town with the bare bones police force, the cabin deep in the woods where cell phones lose service, the remote research facility in the frozen tundra where strange creatures run amok. These conventions have been spun a thousand different ways over the history of the genre, from The Dunwich Horror to The Evil Dead to The Thing.
But what about cities? Those glittering urban centers bursting at the seams with life in all its varied flavors? Are they not equally suitable environments for tales of terror?
By virtue of the sheer numbers of people that dwell within them, cities also offer the comfort of anonymity for those with a taste for murder. It’s a fair assumption that Jack the Ripper, who prowled the sordid streets of London’s Whitechapel district eviscerating prostitutes, felt confident of slipping away undetected in the foggy folds of the teeming city. Even over a hundred years later, in spite of countless theories, the serial killer’s identity remains a mystery.
Cities with multicultural and economically disparate populations can also be powder kegs, with short fuses that need only be lit by the match of real or perceived injustice. The 1992 Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles spawned a riot of looting, assault, and murder that required military intervention. What might happen in the event of a larger, triggering incident that pushes a city into anarchy? Being dragged out of your home or run down on the streets isn’t so difficult to imagine.
Simply escaping a city teetering on the edge of chaos presents its own challenges, too. With the numbing gridlock that paralyzes many major metro areas regularly during morning rush hour, could you imagine the mass exodus if an unexpected emergency strikes? Here in Atlanta, where I live, a mere two inches of snow and ice on the highways recently left thousands of drivers stranded in their vehicles for over twenty hours.
The message is clear: cities can be dangerous places, and if all hell breaks loose, far from taking comfort in the multitudes, you might not only be trapped—you’ll be on your own.
All of which has found its way into fiction and film over the years. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson, is one of the earliest examples of urban horror. The monstrous Edward Hyde skulked about the shadows in Victorian London, trampling children, bludgeoning men to death, and revolting passersby with his hideous appearance. While the classic tale is typically cited as an analysis of man’s dual nature, it can also be viewed as a model of the Bogeyman in the Big City, the figure wantonly committing crimes and slipping away unscathed into the corridors of the night.
The controversial bystander effect has been powerfully explored in fiction as well. Harlan Ellison’s classic short story, “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs,” inspired by the murder of Kitty Genovese in New York City, still haunts me, two decades after I read it in Deathbird Stories.
In the same vein, in a crime-ridden metropolis, police can be so overworked that they fail to notice the disturbing signs that a monster is on the loose. In Whitley Streiber’s 1978 novel, The Wolfen, the New York police chief is quick to attribute a savage murder in a junk yard to a pack of wild dogs. Two skeptical detectives keep digging and uncover the truth—a race of predators that prey on those never mentioned in the glossy city tourist guidebooks: the homeless, the drug addicts, the outcasts living on the margins. No one noticed when they were taken. And no one cared.
None other than Dracula has found the city to be a hospitable environment, with a big, throbbing heart just waiting to be bled. One of my favorite vampire novels of all time is Robert R. McCammon’s epic They Thirst, in which a master vampire arrives in Los Angeles, spawning an army of bloodsuckers that spreads like a plague across the metropolitan area, from the mansions of Beverly Hills to the gang-ruled streets in the hood. A more recent entry is The Strain, by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan. Written from the angle of “vampirism as epidemic virus,” the story makes abundant use of its Big Apple backdrop, especially the city’s legendary network of subway tunnels.
The zombie genre, still in the midst of an incredible resurgence in popularity, wouldn’t be the same without its use of an urban milieu, either. In 28 Days Later, the lead character awakes to find his beloved London eerily silent and deserted, with signs of apocalyptic chaos everywhere: abandoned vehicles, looted stores, hastily scrawled messages to loved ones. It looks as if he might be the last man on Earth . . . until he stumbles into a shadowed church and alerts a horde of the infected. In both the screen and book versions of World War Z and The Walking Dead, we see entire cities fall to the mindless, undead legions, with survivors trapped in skyscrapers or miles of gridlocked traffic.
And can we forget the classic giant movie monsters? From the perennially popular Godzilla, to the murderous titans found in Cloverfield and Pacific Rim, these frightening creatures, hailing from outer space, a crevice in the earth, or a secret research facility, wreak mayhem on a massive scale. To gain a true appreciation of the behemoth’s size and strength, we need to see it crush the Empire State Building and rip apart the Golden Gate Bridge while the panicked masses stampede over one another like cattle in their mad dash for safety. Such epic scenes of destruction, if transported to a rural setting, would fail to create the visual spectacle that today’s audience demands.
These are only a few example of urban horror. There are hundreds more, past and present, and the future direction of the genre is limited only by the imagination of the writer. By tapping into current tensions surrounding terrorism, economic uncertainty, and pandemics, writers will continue to have a rich lode of material from which to draw.
But in the end, whether the horror strikes in a high-rise or a hayloft, all that matters is fear. Fear of the other, of the unknown. Fear of the darkness. The darkness that falls on us all . . . and that we all face alone.
Brandon Massey is the award-winning author of several novels in the horror and suspense genres. His most recent novel, In the Dark, was a Nook Top 100 bestseller. Massey lives in Atlanta, Georgia with his family and can be found online at www.brandonmassey.com.
ARTIST GALLERY: LESLIE ANN O’DELL
Leslie Ann O’Dell is a self-taught artist based in Colorado. Using photography and digital manipulation, she plays on themes of light and dark, nature, psyche, and self to create richly enigmatic and haunting portraits. Find her work at leslieannodell.com.
[To view the gallery, turn the page.]
ARTIST SHOWCASE: LESLIE ANN O’DELL
Julia Sevin
Why do you create? And why create this sort of work?
My own therapy I would say.
What is your artistic background?
I’m self-taught, but at one point I did I try art school. Only lasted a year, just wasn’t for me. I could never really follow rules or deadlines . . . I felt it fucked with my intuition too much.
Can you name some of your influences?
Subconscious, empathy for the wrong . . . people who dream.
Do you draw ideas from fiction?
Most ideas come from my imagination. I definitely feel influenced or pushed to create after some authors. Anne Rice when I was younger . . . . Not the characters she created, but the atmosphere.
Is your photography strictly digital?
Photography, digital, and some pieces I will add traditional elements.
Do you have an opinion on the democratization of creative tools? Between affordable digital cameras and image manipulation software which any person could train himself in, free promotional hubs such as deviantArt, and a global economy that can source art from anywhere, for any purpose—what does this bode for the future of art? Is it a good thing?
I don’t know about it being a good or bad thing. Maybe it will be harder to wade through and find meaningful work. Or maybe it will just set the bar higher.
You’ve said that you will always create, that the possibility to stop does not exist. If photography were no longer an option for you, is there another discipline you would move to?
I’ve always fantasized about being involved in the criminal world.
Maybe an FBI profiler or a defense attorney.
There’s a significant crossover between photography and fashion and, increasingly, bizarre photo-illustration and fashion. Being that you represent beautiful young female figures so often in your work, do you aspire to or would you consider working with a fashion designer?
You know, I’ve never really thought about that when it comes to fashion. It does sound intriguing and I would be open to it.
Do you have a day job or has this become your primary occupation?
My work is definitely my primary occupation and focus.
What are you working on right now?
I’m collecting very small frames to put images in. Eventually I’ll put them together to make a large piece. Rare for me, I’m finally starting to plan more.
Do you have a life philosophy?
Live and let live.
What keeps you awake at night?
. . . what doesn’t?
Originally hailing from Northern California, Julia Sevin is a transplant flourishing in the fecund delta silts of New Orleans. Together with husband RJ Sevin, she owns and edits Creeping Hemlock Press, specializing in limited special editions of genre literature and, most recently, zombie novels. She is an autodidact pixelpusher who spends her days as the art director for a print brokerage, designing branding and print pieces for assorted political bigwigs, which makes her feel like an accomplice in the calculated plunder of America. Under the cover of darkness (like Batman in more ways than she can enumerate), she redeems herself through pro bono design, sordid illustration, and baking the world’s best pies. She is available for contract design/illustration, including book layouts and websites. See more of her work at juliasevin.com or follow her at facebook.com/juliasevindesign.
INTERVIEW: MARK MORRIS
Nightmare Magazine Issue 21 Page 7
