by Mark Morris
He stood up and shook out his legs. His knees and his fist ached. The ride home was going to be long. But it didn’t matter. It was going to be the best ride of his life. He’d just killed a fucking tiger. None of his brothers were ever going to be able to top that no matter how many points the next buck had. He just had to trade rifles and he could get on his way.
Earlier in the day.
* * *
FRIDAY
Raymond ran out the back as soon as he heard the motorcycle pulling up the drive. He’d just about given up hope that Bunker was coming. He pulled the keys out of his pocket and looked at his zoo. He thought that he’d miss his cats. But then, probably not.
“Time to raise hell.”
* * *
FRIDAY
Orrin stepped out onto the porch, pulling the door shut behind him and took a deep breath of fresh air. He walked down the steps, not looking over at where he’d shot the tiger. He’d made sure it was dead before he came down from his roost. He’d put the rifle back in the gun cabinet and took the Mossberg along with the ammo. It wouldn’t do for the cops to find shells for a shotgun that wasn’t in the house. He wrapped the box of shells in his T-shirt and stuffed that into his saddlebag. The shotgun he tied to the side of the bike with bungee cords. It wasn’t perfect, but it’d get him home.
He swung a leg over the bike and turned the key. The engine roared to life and he twisted the throttle. His hearing was coming back slowly, but it was still muffled. Between that and his pipes, he never heard the animal behind him.
When it pulled him off the seat into the tall grass he had no idea what was happening until he was already on his back. Everything was a blur. He felt claws puncturing his jacket and his flesh underneath. He felt its hot breath, and then the thing’s teeth biting down on his neck. Orrin wanted to reach for his pistol, but it was under him in the holster at the small of his back. He beat uselessly against the animal with his fists. He struggled and kicked but the tiger knelt down on its elbows and held him there. He tried to gasp for breath, but the jaws holding him were tight and he couldn’t breathe.
He felt a hard tug at his leg and a searing pain as his leathers ripped open and a long muscle tore away from his bone. Another tug. The tiger that had taken him down tightened its hold on his neck. The sound of his spine breaking echoed inside his own skull like when he’d bite down on a piece of gristle. It was a vibration from inside his body, not a sound outside.
The bright day grew dim, even though the sun wouldn’t be going down for hours. And he slipped away while the other hungry tigers ate him, leaving nothing left in his life to come.
Before that, he had been a man who would have liked to have taken a last ride.
Long before that, he had been a boy who loved his bicycle, and the feeling like flying when he rode it down the tall hill behind his house and took his hands off the handlebars.
And earlier still, he was a child and occasionally his mother held him and whispered to him, her breath tickling his ear like a warm bourbon breeze.
And before that, he wasn’t yet born and was exactly like he was now.
Gone in silence, as though he never existed.
BIOGRAPHIES
Priya Sharma’s fiction has appeared in such publications as Interzone, Black Static, Albedo One, Nightmare Magazine, The Dark, Mithila Review and on Tor.com. Her work has been anthologised in several volumes of Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year, in Paula Guran’s Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, in Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2014, Steve Haynes’ Best British Fantasy 2014 and Johnny Main’s Best British Horror 2015. Her stories have also been on many of Locus’s Recommended Reading Lists. Her story “Fabulous Beasts” was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and won a British Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. A collection of her short fiction, All the Fabulous Beasts, is available from Undertow Publications.
Website: priyasharmafiction.wordpress.com
* * *
Stephen Volk is probably best known for the notorious BBC drama Ghostwatch (called by some the most terrifying drama ever seen on TV) and as creator and lead writer of the award-winning ITV drama series Afterlife starring Andrew Lincoln and Lesley Sharp. He wrote ITV’s three-part chiller Midwinter of the Spirit starring Anna Maxwell Martin and David Threlfall, and has penned numerous feature screenplays, including ghost story The Awakening starring Rebecca Hall and Dominic West, and Ken Russell’s Gothic, while his other TV work includes Channel 4’s Shockers. His play The Chapel of Unrest premiered at the Bush Theatre starring Jim Broadbent and Reece Shearsmith. He is the winner of two British Fantasy Awards and a BAFTA. His stories are collected in Dark Corners, Monsters in the Heart and The Parts We Play. His three novellas comprising The Dark Masters trilogy (Whitstable, Leytonstone and Netherwood) will be published by PS in late 2018.
* * *
Robert Shearman has written five short story collections, and between them they have won the World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Edge Hill Readers Prize, and three British Fantasy Awards. He began his career in the theatre, and was resident dramatist at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter, and regular writer for Alan Ayckbourn at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough; his plays have won the Sunday Times Playwriting Award, the World Drama Trust Award, and the Guinness Award for Ingenuity in association with the Royal National Theatre. A regular writer for BBC Radio, his own interactive drama series The Chain Gang has won two Sony Awards. But he is probably best known for his work on Doctor Who, bringing back the Daleks for the BAFTA-winning first series in an episode nominated for a Hugo Award. His latest book, We All Hear Stories in the Dark, is to be released by PS Publishing next year.
* * *
Trained as a journalist, Gemma Files has also been a teacher, screenwriter and film critic. She broke onto the horror scene when her story “The Emperor’s Old Bones” won the 1999 International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Fiction. She is the author of the Hexslinger series (A Book of Tongues, A Rope of Thorns and A Tree of Bones), We Will All Go Down Together: Stories of the Five-Family Coven and Experimental Film, which won both the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award and 2016 Sunburst Award for Best Novel. She has also published two collections of short fiction and two chapbooks of speculative poetry, and will soon add three more short fiction collections to that list—two (Spectral Evidence and Drawn Up From Deep Places) from Trepidatio Publishing, one (Dark Is Better) from Cemetery Dance Graveyard Editions. Five of her stories were adapted as episodes of The Hunger, an erotic horror anthology TV series from Ridley and Tony Scott’s Scott Free production company.
* * *
Kit Power lives in Milton Keynes and writes dark genre fiction. These two facts may or may not be connected. His novel, GodBomb!, and novella collection, Breaking Point, have been published by The Sinister Horror Company, and he blogs regularly for Gingernuts of Horror. He’s also a serial podcaster. His debut collection A WARNING ABOUT YOUR FUTURE ENSLAVEMENT THAT YOU WILL DISMISS AS A COLLECTION OF SHORT FICTION AND ESSAYS BY KIT POWER is now available.
* * *
Tim Lebbon is a New York Times bestselling author of over forty novels. Recent books include Relics, The Family Man, The Silence and the Rage War trilogy of Alien/Predator novels. He has won four British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award and a Scribe Award. The movie of his story Pay the Ghost, starring Nicolas Cage, was released Halloween 2015. The Silence, starring Stanley Tucci and Kiernan Shipka, is due for release in 2018. Several other movie projects are in development in the US and UK.
Website: www.timlebbon.net
* * *
Benjamin Percy is the author of four novels—most recently The Dark Net—as well as two short story collections and a book of essays. He writes for DC Comics (Green Arrow, Teen Titans) and Dynamite Entertainment (James Bond), and his fiction and non-fiction have been published in Esquire, Time, GQ and the Paris Review. His honours include the Whiting Award, the Plimpton Prize, an NEA fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and i
nclusion in Best American Short Stories and Best American Comics.
* * *
Mild-mannered laboratory technician by day, Laura Mauro was born in south-east London and currently lives in Essex under extreme duress. Her work has appeared in Black Static, Interzone, Shadows & Tall Trees and a variety of anthologies. Her debut novella, Naming the Bones, was published in 2017. She is currently studying towards a Master’s in Modern and Contemporary Literature, which mostly involves pretending to have read James Joyce’s Ulysses. In her spare time she collects tattoos, dyes her hair strange colours and blogs sporadically at
www.lauramauro.com.
* * *
Ray Cluley’s short fiction has appeared in various magazines and anthologies and has been reprinted in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year series, Steve Berman’s Wilde Stories 2013: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction, and in Benoît Domis’s Ténèbres series. He has been translated into French, Polish, Hungarian and Chinese. He won a British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story and has since been nominated for Best Novella and Best Collection. That collection, Probably Monsters, is available from ChiZine Press.
* * *
Tim Lucas is the author of two well-received novels, Throat Sprockets (1994) and The Book of Renfield: A Gospel of Dracula (2005), as well as the Saturn Award-winning Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark (2007) and Studies in the Horror Film: Videodrome (2008). Since the early 1970s he has written for nearly all the major magazines devoted to fantastic cinema, as well as Film Comment, Cahiers du Cinéma and Sight & Sound, for which he wrote a monthly column for nearly a decade. He also edited and co-published 184 issues and two Special Editions of Video Watchdog: The Perfectionist’s Guide to Fantastic Video (1990–2017), which raised the bar for critical and journalistic standards in genre film writing. In October 2016, at the Vista Theatre in Los Angeles, Joe Dante directed a live table reading of his as-yet-unproduced Roger Corman biopic script The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes, starring Bill Hader as Corman (with a special appearance by Corman himself)—an event billed as “The Greatest Film Never Made”. A prolific audio commentator for DVD and Blu-ray discs, his forthcoming publications include The Secret Life of Love Songs (a novella) and a monograph on the 1968 Poe anthology film Spirits of the Dead.
* * *
Brian Hodge is one of those people who always has to be making something. So far, he’s made thirteen novels, around 130 shorter works, and five full-length collections. He’ll have three new books out in 2018 and early 2019: The Immaculate Void, a novel of cosmic horror; A Song of Eagles, a grimdark fantasy; and Skidding Into Oblivion, his next collection. He lives in Colorado, where he also likes to make music and photographs; loves everything about organic gardening except the thieving squirrels; and trains in Krav Maga and kickboxing, which are of no use at all against the squirrels. Connect through his web site
(www.brianhodge.net),
Twitter
(@BHodgeAuthor),
or Facebook
(www.facebook.com/brianhodgewriter).
* * *
Catriona Ward was born in Washington, DC, and grew up in the United States, Kenya, Madagascar, Yemen and Morocco. She read English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and is a graduate of the Creative Writing Masters at the University of East Anglia. Her debut novel, Rawblood (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2015), won Best Horror Novel at the 2016 British Fantasy Awards, was shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award and was selected as a Winter 2016 Fresh Talent title by WHSmith. Rawblood is published in the US and Canada as The Girl from Rawblood (Sourcebooks, 2017). She works for a human rights foundation and lives in London. Her second novel, Little Eve, was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in July 2018.
* * *
V.H. Leslie ’s stories have appeared in many publications, including Black Static, Interzone and Shadows & Tall Trees, and have been reprinted in several Year’s Best anthologies. Her fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award, and she won the Lightship International First Chapter Prize. Her non-fiction has appeared in History Today, Gramarye, Thresholds and The Victorianist. She has also been awarded Fellowships at Hawthornden in Scotland and the Saari Institute in Finland and is currently studying for her PhD in English and Creative Writing at the University of Chichester.
* * *
Rio Youers is the British Fantasy Award-nominated author of Point Hollow and The Forgotten Girl. His short fiction has been published in many notable anthologies, and his novel Westlake Soul was nominated for Canada’s prestigious Sunburst Award. He has been favourably reviewed in such publications as Publishers Weekly, Booklist and The National Post. His new novel, Halcyon, was released by Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press in July 2018.
* * *
Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House Press, 2016) and the novella The Warren (Tor.com, 2016). His fiction has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the Edgar Award, and he has won the International Horror Guild Award and the ALA-RUSA Award. He received a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has been translated into Czech, French, Italian, Greek, Spanish, Japanese, Persian and Slovenian. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Critical Studies Program at CalArts.
* * *
Steve Rasnic Tem is a past winner of the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy and British Fantasy Awards. His latest novel, Ubo (Solaris, February 2017), is a dark science fictional tale about violence and its origins, featuring such historical viewpoint characters as Jack the Ripper, Stalin and Heinrich Himmler. Yours To Tell: Dialogues on the Art & Practice of Writing, written with his late wife, Melanie, also appeared in 2017 from Apex Books. New for 2018 from Valancourt Books is Figures Unseen, a volume of his selected stories, as well as The Mask Shop of Doctor Blaack, a middle grade novel about Halloween from Hex Publishers.
* * *
Aliya Whiteley was born in Devon in 1974 and currently lives in West Sussex. She writes novels, short stories and nonfiction and has been published in periodicals such as The Guardian, Interzone, Black Static and Strange Horizons, and anthologies such as Fox Spirit’s European Monsters and Lonely Planet’s Better than Fiction I and II. Her recent novellas, The Beauty and The Arrival of Missives, have been shortlisted between them for a Shirley Jackson Award, the James Tiptree Jr. Award, the BSFA and BFS Awards, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. She blogs at aliyawhiteley. wordpress.com and she can be found on Twitter as
@AliyaWhiteley.
* * *
John Langan is the author of two novels, The Fisherman and House of Windows, and three collections of stories, Sefira and Other Betrayals, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters. With Paul Tremblay, he co-edited Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters. One of the founders of the Shirley Jackson Awards, he served as a juror for its first three years. Currently he reviews horror and dark fantasy for Locus magazine. He lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with his wife, younger son and the sound of guitars.
* * *
Paul Tremblay is the British Fantasy Award-winning author of seven novels including The Cabin at the End of the World, A Head Full of Ghosts, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock and The Little Sleep. He is currently a member of the board of directors of the Shirley Jackson Awards, and his essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly.com, and numerous Year’s Best anthologies. He has a master’s degree in mathematics and lives outside Boston with his wife and two children.
* * *
Alison Moore’s first novel, The Lighthouse, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Awards (New Writer of the Year), winning the McKitterick Prize. Both The Lighthouse and her second novel, He Wants, were Observer Books of the Year. Reviews of her third novel, Death and the Seaside, referred to her as the “talented creator of a new English grotesque” (Isabel Berwick, The Financial Times) an
d as “one of the most gifted and interesting writers of weird fiction in Britain today” (Nina Allan, The Spider’s House). Her fourth novel, Missing, is out now. Her short fiction has been included in Best British Short Stories and Best British Horror anthologies, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra and collected in The Pre-War House and Other Stories, whose title story won a novella prize. Her first book for children, Sunny and the Ghosts, will be published in 2019. Born in Manchester in 1971, Alison lives in a village on the Leicestershire-Nottinghamshire border with her husband and son and is an honorary lecturer in the School of English at the University of Nottingham.
Website: www.alison-moore.com
* * *
Bracken MacLeod has worked as a martial arts teacher, a university philosophy instructor, for a children’s non-profit organisation, and as a trial attorney. He is the author of a collection of short fiction titled 13 Views of the Suicide Woods and the novels Mountain Home, Come to Dust and Stranded, which was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and son, where he is at work on his next novel.
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