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Fiction: J.B. Park (“Chop Shop”), Daniel H. Wilson (“Foul Weather”), Tananarive Due (“Summer”), Sarah Pinborough (“The Nowhere Man”).
Nonfiction: Editorial by John Joseph Adams, The H Word: Getting What You Deserve by R.J. Sevin, Artist Showcase: Justin Cherry, Interview: Mike Mignola.
Cover art by Justin Cherry
Welcome to issue number three of Nightmare! We’ve got another great issue for you this month; read the editorial to see what we’ve got on tap.
“I’ve had enough. I’m getting out of here, I swear to God I am.” Amy had been sitting cross-legged on the end of Ben’s bed, wearing the same jeans, t-shirt, and trainers she would disappear in later that night, when she whispered the words to herself, or to him or to the pitch black outside. Ben wasn’t sure which or even if she’d meant to say the words aloud at all. He just sat silently in the dark and listened.
The setting wasn’t drawn from my experience, but an ex-boyfriend of mine used to live in a rural town in Tasmania and he told me a story about how he once saw a stranger walking across their school sports field carrying a large knife. It was the germ for this story so I kept the setting. Plus, death is almost a character in this story so I wanted to have a barren, hard setting as the backdrop.
If only she could find the right words to thank him. As he cuts into her thigh, she wants to say something, some small word of gratitude, but her tongue is gone and so she keeps quiet—utters not even a mumble as he continues his work. The scalpel shaves off small slivers of flesh and the sensation is electrifying, little jolts that flash through the drug-haze, and when it’s all over she stares down with dull curiosity at her legs, flayed to the bone. There is a detachment there in which she luxuriates.
I didn’t have trouble going where I thought [the story] needed to go. The doubts came after.
Remember when telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve was an integral part of the holiday? No?—Me neither, but that’s what they tell me. It’s a practice from before our time, a Victorian-era vestige that gave us the stories of M.R. James and A Christmas Carol and has since been all but eclipsed by Rudolph and Frosty and Charlie Brown’s pitiful little twig of a tree.
During the baby’s nap-time, a housefly buzzed past the new screen somehow, and landed on Danielle’s wrist while she was reading Us Weekly on the back porch. With the Okeepechee swamp so close, mosquitoes and flies take over Graceville in summer. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she said.
This story is most definitely about the challenges of parenting, especially parenting alone. I’m lucky enough not to be a single mother or have long separations from my husband, but I think all mothers have a moment when they think, “Wow, this is way more challenging than I expected.” And all of my supernatural stories are metaphors for true life challenges and observations.
I’d like to hope that my work represents a sort of honesty. I feel as if we are all different types of witches, and for artists their spell-craft is obviously their artwork. So that’s what I’m trying to bring about; an inborn, quasi-dormant thaumaturgy. Thematically I’m drawn to topics that are seemingly unsettling; topics that have a lot of dimension and are not perceptibly moral or amoral. I think when I think about my interests in those terms, I want to explore more of the unspoken side to the human experience: psychological trauma, sexual perversion, the occult, and deep spiritual conditioning.
Some things you can’t figure out. Not even with a whole heap of scratch paper and a ribbon of data from a chattering teletype machine. Not before time runs out. And time is like progress—she’s not stopping for anybody. The answer is out there, though, in the weather.
It’s terrifying to contemplate violent weather wrecking your plane. But I think the real horror of “Foul Weather” goes deeper than that. We all know that Mother Nature is trying to kill us, usually via the weather, but the understanding is that it’s not personal. Mother Nature is Mother Nature—she’s not good or evil. This story wonders whether that’s true. Is there a deeper evil that permeates the hidden dimensions? Could it reach us from beyond the veil in the form of wind and rain and thunder?
When the first Hellboy series came out, in the same batch of fan mail I got a letter from somebody from the Church of Satan and I got a letter from a minister, and they both liked it. And I thought, “What am I doing that I’m making both these guys happy?”
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