Nightmare magazine issue.., p.1
Nightmare Magazine, Issue 141 (June 2024), page 1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Issue 141 (June 2024)
FROM THE EDITOR
Editorial: June 2024
FICTION
MAMMOTH
Manish Melwani
The Dark Devices
Bruce McAllister
Billy Blue
Ally Wilkes
POETRY
Penis Secrets of the Anunnaki
Sonya Taaffe
NONFICTION
The H Word: New Millennium Nautical
Emmett Nahil
Book and Media Reviews: June 2024
Adam-Troy Castro
AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS
Manish Melwani
Ally Wilkes
MISCELLANY
Coming Attractions, July 2024
Stay Connected
Subscriptions and Ebooks
Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard
About the Nightmare Team
© 2024 Nightmare Magazine
Cover by Juhasz Sz / Shutterstock
www.nightmare-magazine.com
Published by Adamant Press
Editorial: June 2024
Wendy N. Wagner | 366 words
Welcome to Issue #141 of Nightmare Magazine!
One of my most enduring childhood memories is of waking in the night, certain a shadowy figure was standing in my bedroom doorway. I remember sliding out of my bed and burying myself in my toybox to hide from whomever—or whatever—stood watching me sleep.
How many of us have similar terrifying stories? In bad lighting, who hasn’t mistaken an innocent item like a coat thrown over the back of a chair for a prowler? Who hasn’t startled themselves when catching movement in a dark room only to realize they were startled by their own reflection? And who hasn’t awakened in the grip of sleep paralysis and seen a hideous figure crouched at the foot of the bed? In fact, the night hag or “sleep paralysis demon” is such a common experience it gave birth to the term “nightmare.”
Every society generates its own terrors, but the shadowy figure is universal.
This issue is about shadowy figures—metaphorical or otherwise. In “MAMMOTH,” a new short by Manish Melwani, the shadowy figure emerges from the internet, where a series of terrifying videos sets off a maelstrom of terror. Ally Wilkes’s “Billy Blue” features a shadowy figure in the stairwell of a brand-new luxury apartment who begs us to ask which is more terrifying: gentrification or ghosts? Our flash story (“The Dark Devices” by Bruce McAllister) features a monk searching for answers from the shadows of his monastery. We also have a fresh poem from Sonya Taaffe: “Penis Secrets of the Anunnaki.”
Our nonfiction includes an H Word essay about the nautical Weird by Emmett Nahil (not technically about the shadows, but even Nahil notes the long shadow cast by H.P. Lovecraft across this field!) and a book review by Adam-Troy Castro. Our spotlight crew sat down with our short fiction writers to get a few more insights about their work, as well.
Shadowy or not, it’s a delicious issue. I hope you’ll lower the lights and allow yourself to enjoy all these unsettling figures.
And when you turn off the lights, don’t forget to say hello to your sleep paralysis demon for me!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Wendy N. Wagner is the author of The Creek Girl, forthcoming 2025 from Tor Nightfire, as well as the horror novel The Deer Kings and the gothic novella The Secret Skin. Previous work includes the SF thriller An Oath of Dogs and two novels for the Pathfinder Tales series. Her short fiction has been nominated for a Shirley Jackson award, and her short stories, poetry, and essays have appeared in more than sixty venues. A Locus award nominee for her editorial work here, she also serves as the managing/senior editor of Lightspeed Magazine, and previously served as the guest editor of our Queers Destroy Horror! special issue. She lives in Oregon with her very understanding family, two large cats, and a Muppet disguised as a dog.
MAMMOTH
Manish Melwani | 2155 words
* * *
CW: school shootings, political violence, gore.
* * *
If you haven’t seen it yet, you will.
Three hooded figures sit cross-legged on the floor of a candle-lit warehouse. There’s something strange about the middle one: its torso somehow both too long and too hunched. The figure flickers, like a transcription error in crimson candlelight.
It gets stranger.
Sixteen school shootings in sixteen days, the connections between them simultaneously obvious and obscure. No clear geographical pattern. The shooters all young men, almost all white. Eight of them were lurkers on the same message board. Twelve were members of the same three-thousand-person groupchat—promptly disbanded after the murder-suicides; retreating, undoubtedly, to darker digital environs—but a half-dozen victims were members of that groupchat, too.
Further investigation unearthed two more names, puzzled over by journalists like some sort of cypher; repeated mantra-like by memelords, trolls, and talking heads until they became meaningless.
Except, they weren’t meaningless.
The first: Gorgo Mormo. You’ve seen her. High school counselor, clinical psychiatrist. She’d worked at three of the sixteen schools before her social media career took off. A woman beloved by the manosphere’s more esoteric fringes—including that same three-thousand-person groupchat.
The second, of course, was the name of the groupchat itself; the name of the message board; the name of the video.
MAMMOTH.
If you haven’t seen it yet, you will. If you have seen it, then you’ve seen the next one. And the one after that. There’s an infinite reservoir of them: the Variants, as they’re called by those who obsessively catalog their mutations.
The videos are algorithmically generated, surely. Spawned by large language models glutted on training data of unknown provenance. The thing no one can agree on, though, is whether the original video—the Progenitor, they call it—is itself a deepfake. Or if it’s a performance. An art film, some hopefully suggest: studio lights, makeup, costumes, digital and practical effects.
It doesn’t matter. None of that matters.
All that matters is that the video exists, and that if you haven’t seen it yet, you will; and that thirty seconds into the Progenitor-video, the three robed figures stand. When they do, you get a sense of how wrong that central figure is. It unfolds itself, as though segmented; like some enormous annelid. It towers over the other two, nearly twice their height, seemingly subject to some distortion of scale. Its cavernous hood drapes across immensely sloped shoulders. Its face is shadow.
They (the lurkers; the posters; the commentators) call it the Entity.
A fourth figure enters the frame, jarringly dressed: jeans, sneakers, a grey hoodie cowling their face—as though in imitation of the robed ones. The new arrival kneels before the Entity, dwarfed by its great and awful form.
The Entity leans over this person (referred to, generally, as the Supplicant). It hinges forward suddenly and violently at the waist—somehow, this is one of the video’s most discomforting features—so that its voluminous hood completely engulfs the top half of the Supplicant’s body. Shadows stretch. Something happens.
The Entity rears back up, the Supplicant caught inside its hood. The Supplicant does not move; does not struggle. We see the bottom of their legs. The make and model of their sneakers are clearly visible. High-top Converse All-Stars, in the Progenitor-video. The Entity tilts its head back and swallows the Supplicant whole. The person is gone. Disappeared. Devoured. Overwritten. Eaten by it. (Or by It, as some insist, referring to the Entity with a capitalized third-person pronoun as though it were a god.)
The entire time, the other two robed figures chant, though it sounds like many more than two people chanting. They chant the same word, again and again, transcribed by the auto-captioner as MAMMOTH, though almost everyone agrees—despite the Entity’s vaguely pachydermic form—that they’re chanting something else: a slightly different word; this slightly different word being the Entity’s name. (Its Name, the commenters insist, capitalizing the “N” while not actually speaking or writing the Name they revere. Not yet, anyway.)
In the variant-videos, sometimes things go differently. But the outcome is always similar enough. Three figures seated at the beginning. At least one—the Entity—left standing at the end. Sometimes the figures stand after five seconds instead of thirty: perhaps the most shared Variant; certainly one of the most popular for programmatic advertising.
Sometimes the Entity eats one, or the other, or both of its robed companions. Sometimes other humans enter the frame, but they never survive until the video’s end.
In every video, a large banner hangs on the wall behind the figures. In every video, it bears a slightly different glyph. Theories abound: that correlations exist between the glyph-shapes and the patterns of blood and viscera so frequently spilled in these clips. That there is a proto-glyph, an ur-glyph, an almost infinitely complicated glyph older than our species; and that this glyph is a key. (Or perhaps it is a door, or a gateway. Or perhaps it is more like what happens when a snake sheds its skin.)
One popular theory states that this access point—this key, gate, portal, whatever it is—had stayed safely shut for aeons, but now? Oh, now we have finally constructed a circuit of similar complexity and malevolence. A blind, mute, utterly compulsive circuit of capital and computational power; of eyeballs an
MAMMOTH.
“Yes, your life is meaningless,” Gorgo Mormo says in one of her most-viewed videos. “We’re all just links in a great chain. The strong prey on the weak. Bigger animals eat smaller ones. We never left the muck and mulch of this world: we’re all just worms, burrowing and tunneling in shit.”
She smiles at the camera. “You are a worm,” she says. Firm, but not unkind. Mommy Mormo, some of the groupchats call her. “Not all worms are created equal. Some are greater than others. Some are predator, and some are prey. What kind of worm will you be? Will you be mulch? Or will you be much greater? To be king among worms is still to be a worm, yes. But it’s also to be king. And who wouldn’t want to be king?”
MAMMOTH. MAMMOTH. MAMMOTH.
• • • •
Perhaps you’ve read the manifestos. Perhaps you’ve seen the photos, embargoed for the sake of the victims’ families, leaked by bad-faith actors: words scrawled on bloody blackboards; glyphs formed from entrails on classroom floors.
KING AMONG WORMS.
VERMIS REX.
Perhaps you’ve seen the gifs and memes where politicians, social groups, entire ontological categories are photoshopped onto the sneaker-wearing Supplicant as it is being swallowed whole by the Entity.
MAMMOTH.
Perhaps you’ve seen the posts about how this is a fad; a trend; a momentary morbid symptom. The thinkpieces about how the discourse around the video dwarfs any efforts to figure out the identity of the devoured Supplicant—much as the Entity itself dwarfs the Supplicant. (Have they even been reported missing? Does anybody even care about them?)
Reputable parties insist the video is fake or staged. It has to be. But neither you, nor anyone else who has seen it, is reassured by this. Just as you are not reassured when you hear your father quoting Gorgo Mormo at the dinner table—“Bigger animals eat smaller ones”—or when you see old friends posting memes of the Entity devouring people, places, or things you care about. Or when you see the glyphs in all their infinite variance begin to appear graffitied on the walls of your town or city. Or when the mammoth emoji becomes ubiquitous, and edgelords and eco-fascists start posing for photos with hands raised to their mouths, index fingers upright like tusks.
MAMMOTH.
(The strong prey on the weak, after all; the soft are hunted to extinction. Will you be predator or provender?)
MAMMOTH. MAMMOTH. MAMMOTH.
Stranger videos begin to surface. New influencers emerge. Acolytes: strange young men, their faces adorned with glyphs. The groupchats re-coalesce and disperse into what the media goes far, far out of its way to avoid calling terror cells. There are pronouncements, incantations, threats. Endless posts, endless comments.
NATURE IS RETURNING—RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW.
WE’LL CARVE GLYPHS INTO BODIES WITH BULLETS; SPATTER THEM FROM ARTERIES IN CRIMSON ARCS; READ THEM FROM YOUR ENTRAILS WHEREVER WE FIND YOU.
TOMORROW IS WRIT IN SUPERSTORM CLOUDS.
THE SEAS RISE LIKE BILE.
• • • •
A new video surfaces and disappears just as suddenly, like something ancient and awful breaching the waves. It leaves behind an effluence of gifs and captioned screengrabs, and new Variants all of its own. But this time, every clip is virtually identical—except for the voice, and the faces. A singularity of sorts. A dead end, beyond which only insignificant details can change.
If you haven’t seen it yet, you will: the same warehouse space; the same three robed figures. Except it’s slightly brighter, and the camera is mobile instead of fixed. It’s shaky; restless. Whoever’s operating it is desperate for you to see what they see. (And you will.)
The warehouse is on the high floor of an old industrial building in a major city. There are windows: tall, but not quite floor-to-ceiling. Outside them, the seas have risen. The streets are deluged with brackish storm-surge, and down there in the floodwater, between the tops of streetlights and telephone poles, are bodies.
There are thousands of them. Mostly dead and bloated, drifting in glyph-like formations. A few still live, splashing and frantic. (Look closer, do you recognize anybody?) Larger shapes flit through filthy water beneath them, muscular appendages somewhere between fin and tentacle breaking the surface. Antediluvian apex predators, loosed from permafrost prisons to hunt anew, dragging survivors down into the murk.
There are things in the sky, too: stranger shapes not built for flight but somehow aloft. They trail hungry tendrils, plucking distant, tiny human forms from the tops of buildings.
You cannot hear the screams.
The camera turns back to the warehouse interior; to the dais and the banners and the still-seated Entity, hulking in its voluminous robes. “To be a king among prey is to still be prey,” someone says off-camera. The voice is familiar. Perhaps it is Gorgo Mormo. Or one of the acolyte-influencers. Or a politician. Or a celebrity. Or perhaps someone you know and love. A different voice, in every variant-video. “But to be a god among worms is to be God,” the speaker intones.
The Entity stands now, unfurling itself; awful and segmented. Vermis Rex. Vermis Dei. Mammon. Mammoth. MEMMOTH.
The camera, still restless, still anxious, spins to show you the rest of the warehouse. The robed figures are not alone. There are hundreds—no, thousands—of people here. Most of their faces are visible. (Pause, look closely: do you recognize them? This is the main difference between these final variants: the faces in the chanting crowd; the faces of the carrion and live prey in the water. Somewhere out there is a video with your face in it; with the faces of your loved ones in it. See them chanting against a backdrop of writhing banners. See them in the dark sea.)
MEMMOTH. MEMMOTH. MEMMOTH.
The person holding the camera spins again and steps forward towards the Entity. It is huge. It looms over you. Engulfing.
Its hood envelops you; swallows you into a vast and seemingly eternal void eventually broken by glinting starlight. Teeth: unending rows of teeth, lining a gullet ten million light-years long.
(Its Gullet, you think, and at last you see: a planet, rotating in the dark of Its maw. The edges of familiar continents swallowed by scabrous, carnivorous oceans; obscured by superheated atmosphere. Transformed by inexorable feedback loops into a hothouse; a hunting ground. A glimpse; a portent; a promise of things to come.)
If you haven’t seen It yet, you will.
©2024 by Manish Melwani.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Manish Melwani is a Singaporean writer of strange and monstrous fictions that skulk the borderlands of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. He attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop in 2014, and then completed a master’s thesis at NYU entitled Starports, Portals, and Port Cities: Science Fiction and Fantasy in Empire’s Wake.
You can find him on the web at manishmelwani.com, and read his work in Nightmare Magazine, Lontar: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction, and in the Shirley Jackson Award-winning Shadows and Tall Trees 7.
To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight
The Dark Devices
Bruce McAllister | 1362 words
* * *
CW: torture.
* * *
As so many pieces of this length do—and I’m not the only writer who will report this—the idea and storyline for “The Dark Devices” came to me in a very visceral, very disturbing (wait for it) flash. The writing itself? A little research on Pieter’s period and country before that could happen. And a surprise ending or else. (Thank you, Rod Serling, O’Henry, Clarke and so many other short fiction masters who left their mark on me as a young writer half a century ago.)
—BM
At the tiny abbey in the province of Tasselt—the only abbey in the region with both an abbot and his monks and a dozen nuns as well (a temporary matter that had somehow become permanent)—the abbot, whose skin had gotten paler even as the veins beneath it had become more pronounced, and who preferred darkness to light of any kind, had taken over the West section of the abbey, with its many, darker rooms. This had driven the nuns quietly, month by month, into the eastern “Dorter” rooms of the abbey, the dormitory, where they either pretended they didn’t know what he had become or really did not know. The four monks under the abbot’s care, who knew quite well what their abbot was doing, what he was becoming, but said nothing, had moved to the Chapter House, putting sleeping mats on its floors.
