Nightmare Magazine Issue 6 Read online

  Jay’s face hardens.

  “My name is—my name—”

  I’m writing this down because I’m starting to forget, I may need to remember someday.

  Her name. She cannot remember her name.

  “My name is Jay?” she asks.

  “Hey, wadda ya know? That’s what this says.” Even with the creature growling outside, she hears their laughter float through the room.

  “She’s the last of the trash, boys—let’s do it.”

  Someone steps forward with a small machine and presses it against her right arm. Shafts of metal tear through the bone and flesh, impaling her to the stone wall. Her head snaps back against the glass, and the window finally breaks. Too late.

  Gloved hands rip open her blouse, and another machine appears. Thin lines of light embroider her skin, searing through the flesh. Someone is screaming—is it her?

  “Yeah, she won’t escape this time.” More laughter.

  The entire building shudders. Everyone falls silent and looks up at the ceiling. From above, there is a crackling, then a thunderous roar of ripping stone and metal.

  “It’s started—everyone out!” The figures grab their equipment, jostling with each other to be the first from the room.

  “Why?” Her howl bounces off their backs. “Why are you doing this? What’s happening?”

  From above a second wave of destruction pounds down through the building. The man with the clipboard looks back at her but doesn’t stop moving for the door.

  “Nothing personal, lady. I’m just the garbage man.”

  He turns and runs.

  Vibrations burrow deep in her bones—they travel up from the stone and through the metal pins. Bits of ceiling break away. With a waterfall of sound, everything around her rises. Something smashes against her side, then rips away. Jay no longer feels her right arm. She no longer feels. She stares up into the sky. There is no sky, only the pulsing gray. Membrane and ridges curl back to reveal a mouth as wide and long as her blood-stained eyes can see.

  “This isn’t my name.” She wants to point to the mark but cannot move. “I’m Jay. I’m Jay—” She lets out a small sob, almost a laugh, as the weight of her name drags it downward. It seeps through the skin, nestles into her soul.

  Jay is a letter. It is the mark. It is not her name.

  The gray sky inhales, and she rises.

  Jay is a traveler now, squeezed through tubes and shunted from one contraction to the next. Shapes flood her eyes and graze her skin: bones, granite faces, bits of carved railing and brass fixtures.

  Trash.

  Flashes of light ripple across her vision—the gray membranes holding her become translucent as they rise. Below, she sees another creature move in to finish the job. It spreads great sails of skin and strands of flesh as it rides an unseen current. Jay would sigh at the terrible beauty of it if she were able to breathe.

  Now they skim in silence over the top of the massive wall. The rest of the city appears, healthy and alive. Jay’s severed right arm lies slightly below her—spires of steel sift between the fingers. She sees the city, a slow-moving river of rooftop gardens and secret alcoves, silver windows and neon smears, resting like the body of a lover, safe in sleep. For now. One calm moment of beauty, worth the price of Jay’s pain.

  The creature tilts. Trash rumbles about her as Jay is thrust forward through hooked membranes. Mucus uncoils from her throat. Everything shifts. Jay plummets into darkness like a blood-tipped comet, the remnants of the building her silky-stoned tail.

  Nothing is left behind.

  My name—

  “What are you looking for?”

  Jay looks up at the sound of the boy’s voice. She is unaccustomed to being spoken to, unaccustomed to anything other than the sound of her hand sifting, sorting, pushing aside, and breaking. She pulls a cardboard box to her side, and opens her mouth. But the words fail her, as always. If she could just find the fragment, she might remember what to say . . .

  The boy steps back and watches as Jay shoves her hair back from her face and stares into the valley. Jumbles of skyscrapers fill deep pockets in the land, separated only by occasional trickles of rivers and accidental bridges. Up where they are, blind horses canter down cracked streets with deformed dogs nipping at their sides. Here, potter’s fields and wooden shanties cling despondently to each other, and the people do the same. Perhaps they are afraid if they let go, they will drift away. From where she stands, she sees no difference between the brown of earth or sky. There is no up or down in the universe’s midden.

  Jay and the boy both crouch as a wind rises. Heaps of trash stir and hitch around them, great stinking piles of garbage—old toys and dishes, broken lamps, bits of magazines, clothes. It is their history. It is everything they ever jettisoned in life, before life jettisoned them. Her box is full of paper. She reaches inside with long, dirty fingers. They curl around like dark worms. Papers crumble. If she could only find a fragment, a piece, a certain word . . . She doesn’t remember. She only remembers the wind and the search, and that sometimes the sky will open up and vomit more broken memories across the land.

  “What’s your name?”

  My name—

  The boy is speaking again. She tries, tries to mold the feelings up out of that festering sore in her chest, to trick it from the darkness in her mind. Her fingers creep, searching for inky triggers. But they find nothing, and the only word that comes out is the only word she knows. It cracks open her mouth and hovers before them, then floats away in the filthy wind, nothing more than what it is—which is everything around it, everything she has ever been.

  “Jetsam.”

  © 2007 by Livia Llewellyn.

  First published in Sybil’s Garage No. 4, edited by Matthew Kressel.

  Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Livia Llewellyn is a writer of horror, dark fantasy, and erotica. A graduate of Clarion 2006, her fiction has appeared in ChiZine, Subterranean, Sybil’s Garage, PseudoPod, Apex Magazine, Postscripts, The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, and numerous anthologies. Her first collection of short fiction—Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors—was published in 2011 by Lethe Press, and was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Collection. You can find her online at liviallewellyn.com.

  No Breather in the World But Thee

  Jeff VanderMeer

  The cook didn’t like that the eyes of the dead fish shifted to stare at him as he cut their heads off. The cook’s assistant, who was also his lover, didn’t like that he woke to find just a sack of bloody bones on the bed beside him. “It’s starting again,” he gasped, just moments before a huge, black, birdlike creature carried him off, screaming. The child playing on the grounds outside the mansion did not at first know what she was seeing, but realized it was awful. “It’s just like last year,” she said to her imaginary friend, but her imaginary friend was dead. She ran for the front door, but the ghost of her imaginary friend, now large and ravenous and wormlike, swallowed her up before she had taken ten steps across the writhing grass.

  From a third floor window, the lady of the house watched the girl vanish into the ground, the struggling man become an indecipherable dot in the sky. Then nothing happened for a time, and she said to the dust, to her long-dead husband, to the disappeared daughter, to the doctor who now lived somewhere in the walls: “Perhaps it’s not happening again. Perhaps it’s not like last year.” Then she spied the disjointed red crocodile walking backwards across the lawn: a smear of wet crimson against the unbearable green of the finger-like grass. The creature’s oddly bent legs spasmed and trembled as it lurched ahead. No, not a crocodile but a bloody sack of human flesh and bones crawling toward the river at the edge of the property. Was it someone she knew? Of course it was someone she knew.

  An immense shadow began to grow around the unfortunate person like a black pool of blood. This puzzled her, until she realized some vast creature was plummeting down from an immense height toward the lawn
. Raw misshapen pieces of the behemoth began to rain down, outliers of the body itself. Within seconds, it would descend, whole. The crawling bag of bones redoubled its efforts, seeming aware of the danger, frantic to avoid being caught in that impact. Now the lady of the house could not contain her fear any longer. She turned and ran, intending to flee down the stairs and seek shelter in the basement. But something wide and white and cut through with teeth reared up out of the darkness and bit her in half, and then quarters, and then eighths, before she could do more than blink, blink rapidly, and then lie still, the image of the crawling man still with her. For a while.

  In the basement, waiting for the lady’s return, a furiously scribbling man sat at a desk. He did not look up once; beyond the candlelight things lurked. As his mistress fell to pieces above him, the man was writing:

  Time is passing oddly. I feel as if I am sharing my shadow with many other people. If I look too closely at the cracks in the wall, I fear I will discover they are actually doors or mouths. There’s something continually flitting beyond the corner of my eye. Something she tells me that I don’t want to remember. Flit. Flit . . . No. Tilt. Tilt, not flit. Tilt.

  He stopped for a moment to restore his nerve because a certain mania had entered his pen . . . and he didn’t know who he was writing to. The child? The doctor? God? Something white and terrible waited in the shadows, its movements like the fevered wing-beats of a hundred panicked thrushes crushed into the semblance of a body. With an effort, he continued:

  The tilt is a gap. The gap is the cracks becoming corridors when I look away, and yet there is no way out. This ends well only if I can be in two places at once. But if other people are using my shadow, isn’t that a kind of door as well? Can I use my own shadow as a window? Can I escape?

  A mighty crash and thud shook the mansion, as if something enormous had landed on the lawn. Dust and debris cascaded down on the man writing. A distant rattling cry came that did not bear thinking about. He looked up from his work for a second, thought, It’s happening again, just like the doctor warned, but continued writing, as if the words might be the spell to undo it all.

  . . . or is it just an inkling? Inklings are like questions that haven’t been answered yet: by the time we ask them, we’re being swallowed by the doors they open. And all that’s left at the end, after the question’s answered, is the shadow, haunting us.

  The man looked up one more time, and now his own pale shadow leered up and curled monstrous across the wall, the desk, the candle, and the rictus of his face.

  “It’s just an inkling, an inkling!” he screamed, but still his own pale shadow took him, teeth glittering cold in the chilly room in the bowels of the mansion where no other thing stirred, or should have stirred, and yet sometimes did. No words, soothed the shadow, as if it made a difference. No words. I’m happening again. I’ll always happen again. But the shadow was him, and he could not tell where his writing ended and the shadow began.

  On the first floor, the maid had fallen to her knees at the impact of the monster from above hitting the lawn. Now it tore into the grass as it bounded forward. It hit the side of the mansion like a battering ram so that the chandeliers cascaded and crashed all around like brittle glass wedding cakes, shards splintering across the floor and beads rolling with a heavy clunk under chairs and sofas. The thing shrieked out words in a language that sounded like dead leaves being stuffed into a gurgling fresh-cut throat. But she kept her grip on the shotgun she had taken from the study cabinet. “It won’t be like last year,” she shouted, although “last year” was something horribly vague in her memory. “It’s too soon!” She shouted it to the house, to the lady of the house, to the man in the basement who had come to document everything the doctor had wanted to do, a very long time ago. I will not blame the child.

  Again the monster smashed up against the mansion. Unpleasant chortles and meaty sounds smashed down through her ears, tightened around her heart, her lungs. She stood with an effort and headed back to the study. The study window was occluded by a huge, misshapen blue-green eye ridged with dark red. The monster. She brought the shotgun to her shoulder, braced for the recoil, and fired. The monster blinked and bellowed but the shots did not fall hot into its corona. Instead, the shotgun barrel curled around to sneer at her. A flash of white. From behind, something wet and unpleasant slapped her head from her neck. For longer than she would have thought, as her head rolled across the suddenly slippery floor, the maid saw the eye and the great bulk behind it withdraw from the window, and then, for a moment, the searing blue sky beyond and a black tower around which flew hideous bird-like shapes. “It’s different than before,” she wanted to say—to the butler, to the lady of the house, to the young writer in the basement who had become her lover—but that impulse soon faded, along with everything else.

  Earlier that day, the maid had argued with the butler, for the butler had seen the eyes of the dead fish move while in the kitchen and knew better than to fight. He had retreated to the huge coffin abandoned near the huge back doors to the mansion when the lady of the house had decided on the mercy of cremation for her husband instead. To either side lay the twin cousins, age twelve, all three waiting for it to be over. “Surely it will be over soon,” one twin whispered into the watchful silence. “It was over last year very quickly,” the other twin said in a hopeful tone. But neither twin could tell the butler exactly what they thought had happened last year. The butler knew, and had avoided the doctor ever since, but it made no difference now.

  As they lay there, the coffin expanded into a limitless night, and at the edges grew terrifying fangs until the coffin was a gigantic mouth, forever contracting until the fangs were too sharply close. The butler lost his nerve, and though he told the twins to close their tear-streaked eyes as he prepared to escape, still they saw all that happened next. As one they burst from the coffin—and through the back doors of the mansion, seeking the grass, the limitless sky, the verdant forest beyond. But the monster lay in wait, had opened its huge mouth to cover the door, and they in their headlong rush were crunched down, heads pulped, before even one of them could do more than think, “It’s much, much worse than before.”

  The doctor received tell-tale glimmers of the butler’s demise from his secret compartment in the walls at the heart of the mansion. Skilled in both medicine and the arcane arts, he had spent a year of disturbing visions, secret guilt, and hysterical mania building a place of mirrors meant to repel the uncanny, breaking almost every piece of glass in the house to capture the shards and position them with glue and nail. Each mirror piece reflected some fragment of another, so that from all sides, using cunning angles, he could glimpse moments of what was happening elsewhere. The doctor saw a hint of the cook turned to quivering meat, a scintilla of the cook’s lover carried off, a suggestion of the girl betrayed on the lawn, and all of the rest. Now he stood quite silent and still in his narrow chamber of bright fragments, lit by a lantern, sweat dribbling down his face, arms, and chest.

  Many quick-darting thoughts passed through the doctor’s mind, reflected in the rapid blinking of his eyes. The flow of these thoughts was interrupted only by the continued siege of the mansion by the monster outside. Each lurch changed his focus.

  Did I make the pieces small enough? Did I make it impossible for them to see me, or do they see all of me now? Why would this happen to me who did nothing out of sequence or step? No one should endure this, and yet almost all of them are dead and they did nothing except the writer who carried on with both the maid and the lady of the house, but how would this concern it? How I wish I had never used a bone saw or performed surgery. It makes this all so much worse because [lurch]

  She was kinder than anyone I knew to tell me what to expect, that poor child, and perhaps I should have indulged her about her friend but I am a man of science too and how could I and now I wonder if her friend was indeed a manifestation or simply a terror in her mind and that I should have ergo ego ego . . . should have conducted an exorc
ism while I could rather than recommend a psychiatrist a séance to her mother but her mother was so nice to me and so concerned and there was no way to tell that creating a circle might [lurch]

  Was that a sound? Was that a noise other than whatever is outside? How can I tell? I cannot tell a sound beyond that sound. How hellish it is to be trapped within one’s mind for even an instant without recourse to another person. How like a hell and all the thoughts that come pouring out and [lurch]

  Be composed. Be composed. You have planned well. The glass will hold. The glass is good. Oh how now I would give for just a glimpse or touch of my beloved, thigh, face, feet. To be in her embrace, and yet this is selfish selfish selfish. [lurch]

  Is the beast closer? A surgical cut, across the throat, from any of these shards, would be quick, painless, without guilt. No one would blame me for that. No one would blame me for that. No one left to. Oh that day we all spent on the lawn, that day glorious and sun-soaked before it began, and how could I ever give up hope of that again. Let that be what makes me strong. Do I deserve to? Do I deserve? Did I feed it? Did encourage it? [lurch]

  Fear that brings sickness

  Fear that brings sorrow.

  Fear that inhabits the smallest places.

  Fear that undoes me.

  Fear that makes me ill. Oh my chest. Oh my stomach.

  No lurch disrupted the doctor’s thoughts next. Instead, the white worm of a creature embedded inside of him so many months ago while he slept had awakened, drawn by the cries of the monster outside. As it crunched through tissue and organs, soon there was nothing larger than a fragment of the doctor left, and every single fragment of mirror covered in its entirety with blood, so that his once blazing light chamber was now the darkest place in the mansion. Early in the process, the doctor felt a fierce and annihilating joy that made him shout his ecstasy to the heavens. Is that you, my imaginary friend? Late in the process, he managed to whisper, “Where am I?” But he knew where he was, and then he knew no more.