Nightmare Magazine Issue 6 Page 8

  The doctor’s screams—amplified from his hiding place by the vents, the dumbwaiter, the floorboards, the very pores of the walls—seemed to the lady’s older daughter, kneeling beside a chimney on the roof, to emanate from a mansion in agony. She had chosen this vantage to observe the monster and the growth of the tower. Long ago she had been an amateur biologist familiar with certain types of animal mimicry. Now she crouched with a small telescope aimed at the tower. She could no longer force herself to observe the monster. The stench of it wafted up and made her feel as if she were being smothered in maggot-covered meat no matter how she tried to unsee the atrocity of its form.

  Using the telescope was akin to using the microscope in her make-shift laboratory to examine cells from the strange grass of the lawn: a way to know the truth of things, no matter how uncomfortable. The telescope confirmed that it was all happening again, although only the accounts of others from that time told her anything, really. She had avoided thinking about the implications of her own notes from last year, which were incomprehensible and toward the end written in blood:

  center of the shadow near the marrow might be a door a door a door that in the white shadow there comes a presence that is made of the center of the door that in the window reflects mimics a wall a room but if we were to touch would recoil would we recoil from that the tiny white worm inches and inches cross the floor watch it carefully resurrecting, this extraction is extracted.

  At the far edge of the lawn, the tower had grown pendulous and resembled less a tower now than the upper half of some thick serpent or centipede. It had been birthed by the monster, which had planted a huge, glistening white egg in the crater created by its impact. The tower curved and shook from side to side now while the ragged bird-things circled it, cawing.

  The scientist also followed the cook’s efforts to reach the stream; with the telescope his blunt visage was still recognizable despite the awful softness of his skull. Coming from the tower on his left, the bird-things swooped down at times to tear flesh and gristle from him, returning to toss it onto the top of the tower. Somehow, his excruciating journey seemed important, but the scientist did not know why. She knew only what the writer and doctor had speculated, for she had not been part of the circle. “You did this while I slept?” she had said, enraged that they had taken such a risk. Then retreated to her experiments to keep at bay the feelings of depression and helplessness that ever since threatened to engulf her.

  Below, the monster attacked the mansion again and the mansion screamed and she made observations of a scientific nature to calm her nerves. She dispassionately noted, too, the way the forest to all sides seemed thicker, more impenetrable, and the sky brighter than ever before, and took grim delight in her detachment in recording that “long, fleshy arms have begun to sprout from the sides of the tower.” As she watched, these arms began to snatch the bird-things from the sky and toss them into a gaping pink opening near the top of the tower. “It is feeding itself to grow even larger,” she observed. “And it is now obvious that it is not a tower. I do not believe it is a tower. I do not believe it is a tower.” She had to say it three times to truly believe it. She had no notepad to record these thoughts, and even when she braced her arm against her knee, the telescope shook a little.

  Now the tower sang to the monster battering the mansion, and the monster seemed unable to resist the melody. The singing intensified and the scientist wished she had cotton to stuff in her ears, for the song was so sweet and light and uplifting that it was like an atrocity in that place, at that time. And especially now against the extreme quiet of the mansion, for the screams had stopped. Finally. “It’s nothing like last year.”

  The monster, swaying in a drunken fashion, came closer and closer to the tower, trying to break away, unable to break away from its song. Until, finally, within the unbroken circle of fact that was the telescope’s lens, the indescribable beast curled up at the base of the tower. The tower was cooing now, almost as if in reassurance, and the scientist’s fascination at this muffled her terror . . . even though she could hear wet, thick sounds on the stairwell that led to the roof . . . and a snuffling at the locked door directly behind her.

  The tower, still cooing, stretched impossibly tall, lunging up into a sky beginning to bruise in anticipation of dusk. It leaned over to contemplate the monster below with something the scientist thought might be affection. With incredible speed and velocity, it dove down to pierce the monster’s brain. The monster flailed and brought its legs up to struggle, to push out the dagger of the tower, but soon this effort became half-hearted, then ceased altogether. A flow of gold-and-emerald globules rose up through the tower’s darkness from the monster. The farther these globules rose, the more transparent they became, until the tower had assimilated them entirely and was as dark as before.

  The monster lay husked. The tower grew taller and wider. The mansion beneath the scientist grew spongy and porous, and a kind of heartbeat began to pulse through its many chambers. But the scientist observed none of the things. The tower’s song and the piercing of the monster’s brain had pierced the telescope, too. The telescope, grown strange and feral and querulous, had punctured her eye on its way to her brain, and as she lay there and the tower ate the monster, so too the telescope made a meal of her. Satisfied, the white worm behind the door retreated.

  Dusk came over the land. An impossibly large, impossibly purple-tinged moon sent out a blinding half-light across the wandering grass, the mansion, and the tower. The cook had finally reached the lip of the river bank, and in some instinctual way recognized this small victory, even though the remains of his head were twisted above by happenstance to look back across the lawn.

  The mansion had become watchful and its upper windows gleamed like eyes. The corners of the mansion had become rounded so that it squatted on powerful haunches, poised to spring forward on four thick legs. The cook was unsurprised: he had argued for months that the mansion had been colonized by something below it, rising up, and the walls had begun to even seem to breathe a little. But they had laughed at him. “It’s like last year,” he said, although he could not really remember last year . . . or why the fish had looked so strange.

  At a certain hour, the tower began to stride toward the mansion, and the two joined in a titanic battle that split the air with unearthly shrieks: solid bulk against twisty strength. Around the two combatants, their tread shaking the ground, the grass rippled with phosphorescence and from the forests beyond came the distant calls of other mighty beasts.

  The remains of the cook found no horror in the scene. The cook was beyond horror, all fast-evaporating thought focused on the river that had been the site of his happiest memory—a nighttime rendezvous with his lover. As they lay beside each other afterwards, the contented murmur in his ear of a line of a poem. “No other breather. . . .” This memory tainted only by the pain of remembering his lover’s reaction when he had slid into bed that last time, after having been so reduced by the white worm that had sprung at him from the walls of the kitchen.

  So he slid and pushed, still hopeful, losing more flesh and tissue and bone fragments, down the bank of the river, and by an effort of will he managed to whip his head around to face the water. There, through his one good eye, the cook saw his lover and the little girl and the lady of the house and the doctor and the maid and the butler, the lady’s two young cousins, and the scientist . . . they lay at rest at the bottom of the river. Waiting with open, sightless eyes. He had a sudden recollection of them all sitting around a table, holding hands, and what came after, but then it was gone gone gone gone, and he was sliding down into his lover’s embrace. The feel of the water was such a balm, such a release that it felt like the most blissful moment of his entire life, and any thought of returning home, of reaching home, vanished into the water with him.

  Behind him, under stars forever strange, the tower and the mansion fought on.

  © 2013 by Jeff VanderMeer.

  Jeff VanderMeer rec
ently signed a three-book, six-figure deal with Farrar, Straus & Giroux. His novels have made the year's best lists of the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and he is the recipient of both an NEA-funded Florida Individual Writers' Fellowship and Travel Grant. VanderMeer is a three-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, twelve-time finalist, and has been a finalist for the Nebula, Hugo, Philip K. Dick, and Shirley Jackson Awards, among others. His latest short story collection is The Third Bear (2010). He also regularly reviews books for the New York Times Book Review, the Guardian, Los Angeles Times Book Review, and the Washington Post. He has lectured at MIT, the Library of Congress, and many other institutions. He serves as the co-director of Shared Worlds, a unique teen SF/F writing camp located at Wofford College in South Carolina.

  The H Word: “The F Bomb”

  R.J. Sevin

  I write this missive from the ruins of December 21, 2012, which came with blood and fire upon the heels of not one but two Raptures. I write to you from the propane-warmed heart of my Y2K shelter, where my fridge is stocked with Tang and canned juice, my shelved piled high with Maruchan ramen and bulging bags of Malt-O-Meal. The stock market has crashed: the dollar is worthless. The recently dead are walking the streets with food in their teeth, and we’re what’s for dinner. It is as we have always feared: the world has ended.

  Before we discuss the end of all things and why we crave it, I want to talk a bit about fear itself. The two are connected, you see:

  I fear—you fear. Fear motivates us. It debilitates us. It freezes us in our tracks; it sends us running. It makes us do stupid things. We use it against others and we are controlled by it, each of us, every single day.

  What do you fear? I fear all sorts of things. Same as you—sudden accidents, sudden deaths. Injuries. Terminal illness. Someone smashing into your house at three in the morning, and you’ve only just gotten to sleep because you and your significant other were fighting again, and you see a shadow and there’s a flash maybe, and then you’re nothing.

  Or worse: you see that flash and hear the blast, and it’s the back of your kid’s head that takes the shot instead of your stomach. Her pigtails twitch, her baby-blues go this way and that, and her face turns inside out. She hits the ground like a ragdoll with a rumpled fold of meat and hair for a head. One of her teeth is stuck to your cheek, and then the guy gut-shoots you and rapes and kills your wife on the floor beside you while you bleed out. And then you’re nothing.

  Now, I know—that’s an extreme example. It’s not likely to happen to you at all. No way. But:

  The vehicle jerking into your lane: nothing. The static charge when you touch the plastic gas tank brimming with noxious amber fluid: nothing. The sudden hot tightness in your chest during sex: nothing.

  The slip getting into the shower: nothing. The errant blood-clot racing through your brain while you’re driving your family to the mall: all gone.

  Me, personally—I fear becoming ill and dying before I get to see my son grow up. That shit scares me. What also scares me: raising a son. Shaping the fucking life of a human being who then has to go out into the world and figure out all this shit. I fear losing my son. I fear losing my wife. I fear one of our rare date nights becoming the night on which our son becomes an orphan.

  I fear the moment when I learn that my mother has died.

  What about you? Seriously—think about it for a second. Get yourself worked up. Roll it around on your tongue and taste it. Fear is everywhere and in all things. It is the thing that unites us. You and I pretty much fear the exact same thing, right down to those dark little fears that crawl about in the middle of the night when you’re trying to get to sleep and it’s almost four—the nasty little private fears we never admit to anyone.

  Tornados terrify me. As in, I have tornado nightmares on a semi-regular basis, and they are horrifying. Tornados and cancer and getting shot in the head and car accidents and being decapitated by a maniac with a machete.

  One fear, however, reigns above all: the bomb.

  I was a very sharp, aware ten-year-old in 1985. I watched Nightline every night, network news daily. Sixty Fucking Minutes. Cable brought an onslaught of boobs and violence and twenty-four hour music videos and news. Loved the news, and followed all that Cold War business like religion. It didn’t help that my mom grew up in the fifties and was traumatized by the Cuban Missile Crisis as a young woman. Because of this, the motherfucking atomic bomb glows white hot at the center of my fears. I had nightmares for days after reading Alas, Babylon. I fear that flash in the distance—maybe it blinds me, maybe it doesn’t, but then there’s the rumbling, and it grows and grows and then everything around me is bursting into flames and I’m trying to hold my family, trying to say something to them, and then we’re on fire and our lungs boil and then we’re nothing.

  Deconstructed, our varied individual fears boil down to the same thing: fear of losing control, fear of things falling apart. The individual fears personal apocalypse. Society fears Apocalypse.

  See, we fear the sweeping upheaval of the infrastructure of our lives—but, on some level, we also crave it. We’ve grown sick of this world and the stream of injustices and indignities it vomits out on a daily basis, and we want to see it toppled, laid to waste. And rebuilt. This craving, this need to conquer our ultimate fear by embracing it, can even cloud our judgment. Four examples from within our own dark little corner:

  George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Stephen King’s The Stand. Robert McCammon’s Swan Song. The Walking Dead.

  Most Romero fans rank Dawn as their favorite of his films, and Stephen King has lamented that, for many of his Constant Readers, he may as well have have died after writing The Stand—to “Stand-fans,” nothing he’s done since will ever compare. Good luck finding copies of Baal, Stinger, The Night Boat, or any other early McCammon at your nearest B&N, but they have at least one copy of Swan Song in stock at all times. The Walking Dead is the most popular show on TV.

  Is The Walking Dead the best show on television? Hardly—you can probably point to four TV dramas that leave AMC’s zombie opera looking directionless, muddled, and occasionally laughable (it’s all three). Swan Song, a novel that I’ve always considered to be, at best, an entertaining but ultimately shallow rip-off of The Stand, is not McCammon’s finest novel—readers will point to his later work instead. I cherish memories of reading The Stand for the first time, but King has written tighter, better novels—The Dead Zone, his follow-up to the sprawling tale of Stu, Fran, Larry, and that Walkin’ Dude, is but one example. Dawn of the Dead is a masterpiece, but Romero’s somber vampire thriller, Martin, is the finer film.

  No—these works are not popular because they are masterworks (though some of them are). They have become indelible because they tap our shared apocalyptic fears. Constant-Readers love The Stand for the same reason that Bible-Thumpers obsess over Daniel and Revelation: they want front-row seats during the apocalypse, and they want that apocalypse to be manageable.

  Ditto for the popularity of zombies in fiction/movies/video games in general these days—it’s got nothing to do with zombies. It’s about imagining the coming upheaval and placing oneself at the center of it, not as victim but as survivor.

  It’s about fear—fear that drives us as individuals and as a culture—and it’s about conquering that fear, even superficially. Temporarily.

  Because it’s only temporary, you realize. Your fears will come home to roost, and whether or not the bombs fall from the sky or society crumbles in riot and ruin, your world will end within the next fifty or sixty years.

  You will know fear in those final, gasping moments leading up to your transition from something to nothing, and you will scream.

  We at Nightmare Magazine like discussions. Please use the comments feature to give us your thoughts on whether the H brand is an albatross or worth holding on to. Print may be dead, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be old school and have a good, old-fashioned letters page.
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  R.J.Sevin is the co-editor of the Stoker-nominated anthology Corpse Blossoms and he currently edits Print Is Dead, the zombie-themed imprint from Creeping Hemlock Press. His nonfiction has appeared in Cemetery Dance, Dark Discoveries, Fear Zone, Famous Monsters of Filmland Online, and Tor.com.

  Artist Gallery: Daniel Karlsson

  Artist Spotlight: Daniel Karlsson

  Julia Sevin

  Daniel Karlsson is an autodidact illustrator living in Sweden who believes that “nothing is ever 100% pure/evil.” His pop surrealist and horror art, both digital and traditional, is primarily made for self-expression rather than income.

  Daniel, if I’m understanding things correctly, you only rarely illustrate for income, yes? So most of the rather grotesque and even sexually twisted imagery we see in your portfolio is not just a visualization of someone else’s fiction or franchise, but rather a raw fruit of your own psyche. It’s largely pretty disturbing. What does this process do for you? And do you worry about being personally judged by your family, friends, coworkers?

  Socially, I’m not always allowed to doubt or question other people’s idea of happiness, beauty, and normality—not without risk of alienating them—but through my art it’s possible for me to criticize, violate, and expose those things. It’s a way for me to communicate my emotions and thoughts without forcing anything upon anyone. It’s there for anyone to listen to, and if they understand or relate to it then there is a meaningful connection between us. I’m not worried about what people close to me think because I’m confident that most of my other traits disarm any worries my art might stir up.

  Much of your work is sexually graphic, and not in a pleasant or positively erotic way. What has the reaction been to that? Is it comparable to horror art with regard to public judgment?