Nightmare magazine issue.., p.1
Nightmare Magazine, Issue 145 (October 2024), page 1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Issue 145 (October 2024)
FROM THE EDITOR
Editorial: October 2024
FICTION
Little Horn
Gemma Files
Perfect Water
Simon Gilbert
NotRob
Isabel Cañas
POETRY
Possession
Martins Deep
NONFICTION
The H Word: The Monstrous Bird
Nicholas Belardes
de•crypt•ed: Koch on James
Joe Koch
AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS
Gemma Files
Simon Gilbert
MISCELLANY
Coming Attractions, November 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 Danilo Sanino / Shutterstock
www.nightmare-magazine.com
Published by Adamant Press
Editorial: October 2024
Wendy N. Wagner | 477 words
Welcome to Issue #145 of Nightmare Magazine!
My friends, it is finally October, which means it is time to celebrate all things spooky. I know plenty of people who take a “Thirty Days of Halloween” approach, watching a horror movie every day of the month or reading a horror short story. Others throw parties or make art, and some put it all together for an absolute explosion of spooktacular joy.
Of course the very best part of October is Halloween itself. I fell in love with Halloween at a young age. It was so exciting to put on a costume and become someone different—especially if that someone (or something) was a little unsettling. I’ve never set out to truly frighten anyone with my costumes or home décor, but I quite enjoy making people uneasy for one special night. Halloween is the perfect time to try on your dark side for a few hours.
In honor of the holiday, this month’s issue is all about our dark sides. It’s packed with eerie doubles, demons, and devils, all stand-ins for our worst impulses and unrestrained ids. Gemma Files brings us our first short story, “Little Horn,” delving into the difficult and lonely life of a young Antichrist. Simon Gilbert’s story “Perfect Water” is a quieter tale, set on a peaceful cove along the Welsh coast. With its clear waters and handsome lighthouse, it’s just the place for a relaxing read . . . if only there wasn’t something spooky going on.
In our shorter work, Isabel Cañas brings us “NotRob,” the very unnerving story of a tormented young family, and Martins Deep has penned a darkly unsettling poem called “Possession.” Don’t forget that these short works are now being podcasted just like our short stories! They’re bundled together in their own special Horror Lab episode, and of course you can listen to these not only on our website, but also in all your favorite podcast sites (I love playing these on Spotify when I’m at the gym).
Our H Word essay by novelist Nicholas Belardes is about birds and horror. In the de•crypt•ed column, Joe Koch writes about his complicated relationship with Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. We also have author spotlights with our short fiction authors.
For those of you who are also poets, please note that we are briefly opening to poetry submissions this month. You can check our submissions page for more information.
I hope you all enjoy this spooky issue of the magazine. Next month we’ll be releasing our second annual dark fantasy-themed issue (it’s such a great way to make November more fun), so be ready for a little magic.
Happy Halloween, my fiends!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Wendy N. Wagner is the author of Girl in the Creek, 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 the Theodore Sturgeon and Shirley Jackson awards, and her short stories, poetry, and essays have appeared in more than seventy 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, a very large cat, and a Muppet disguised as a dog.
Little Horn
Gemma Files | 6272 words
* * *
CW: animal cruelty or death, violence, blood or bodily fluids, bodily harm, death or dying.
* * *
“Beloved men, recognize what the truth is: this world is in haste and it is drawing near the end—therefore the longer it is, the worse it will get in the world. And it needs must thus become very much worse as a result of the people’s sins prior to the Advent of Antichrist, and then indeed it will be terrible and cruel throughout the world.”
—Archbishop Wulfstan’s “Sermo Lupi” to the English, 1014.
This whole business, it all started right about when I burned my church down. Not one I went to, or ministered at—I mean the one built around me, raised by my very own personal worshippers, so they could do their sacrificial reverence to me in private. Might’ve done it earlier if I’d only known that was an option, but one way or the other I’d definitely had enough by that point, eighteen damn years’ worth of it. Frankly, cousin, if you’d only known these people the same way I did, I do believe you probably would’ve done it too.
So picture this, if you can: I’m up on the podium, enthroned in front of a shrine of bones with a Hand of Glory on either side of me, my head already sweaty-aching under a crown made from ten different kinds of horns that bites into my scalp so it doesn’t start to tip askew. Got me wearing a black goatskin robe, uncured, rough and stinking; got a reversed cross in pig’s blood drawn on my forehead, so thick it draws flies that sting and cluster ’tween my brows, buzzing like a bad light socket. Twenty naked fools already down on their knees inside the hexafoil, knocking their heads on the ground and scratching themselves hard enough to open wounds—thirteen still robed and masked likewise with their backs turned to the wrangle and a dagger in either hand, supposedly poised to guard us all against incursion. And then, to top it all off, out come the reverend and his sister-wives with a bag of live-caught feral cats and a brace of three-foot skewers.
Preaching from Jubilees like always, chanting away as the blind and swinging mass of cats growls and hisses against each other, getting ready to make them scream. Telling them dirt-faced fools how lawlessness increased on the earth and all flesh corrupted its way, alike men and cattle and beasts and birds and everything that walks on the earth, all of them corrupted their ways and their orders, and they began to devour each other, and every imagination of the thoughts of all men was thus evil continually. Continually, continually, continually.
And didn’t that make ’em all writhe and moan, cousin, just like the words were stuffed with fentanyl cured in crack, or what-have-you . . . well, didn’t it? What do you think?
Yeah, that’s right.
They say good people have a light around them, and that’s true. It licks and laps, sweet like dripping honey, almost edible. But then there’s the others, lurching around, all driven by their own little seeds of darkness, their slime-mold souls—their flesh spored like fungus, turning from within. And I grew up amongst the latter, living symbol of that black angel-sized hole they all claimed to yearn to throw themselves down into. Constantly being told how special I was, how the ruin I instinctively sowed around me had to be nurtured with deliberation, whipped up high like a fire fed by cruelty and filth. How without me to do it before, none of this ridiculous gothic shit they spent their time caught up in would be anything but simple human perversion, the same old lust and hate and murder cops have been cleaning up after since a hundred years before the last millennium’s turn.
They found my mother under a pile of trash after the seven-year cyclone went by, that particularly strange one, a swirling mass of live insects and fire, caught-up animals cooking and bleeding out, rotten garbage of every sort. Rivers burst their banks as it passed by; graves gave up their fruit, the dust and bones of ages past spread miles wide, human ash forming fulgurites with each red lightning strike. The moon eclipsed the sun, turning it blue-black, and fields scored in the storm’s wake became fallow. All these omens: surely, my birth couldn’t fail to be something special, considering my mother was a virgin when the winds came for her. Or so the reverend always claimed.
She was comatose when they pulled her out and dead by the time they cut me from her womb, nine months later, but that didn’t matter, supposedly; just a vessel, the reverend used to say, a necessary step along the low road to the low god. Said god being whoever sowed the seed of me inside her, thus making me harbinger of a long-awaited uprising against the cruel archon who made this awful world, condemning us to live encased in dumb meat until it finally rots enough to fall back off. To set us free.
I’ve heard this shit all my life, cousin—same as you, probably. It never gets more likely, but it sure does get wearing.
That tide of stupid whispers, wet with drool, all ready for the show. All flesh, all flesh, corrupting its way; all flesh, all flesh, corrupting its way—and then the first cat gets dragged out by its scruff, and I’m just done. Done with all of this stupid shit, forever.
So:
“Now, Little Horn,” the reverend calls me, placatingly. But I can feel it in me now, coming up through me, the way he always taught me it would; the true speech, a desert wind blowing straight back from Megiddo, wrathful-raw and rank. That it would be there when I reached for it, when I finally wanted to reach for it. He just never thought he’d be the thing to make me want to, I guess. I mean, why would he?
But: “That’s not my name,” is all I say, by way of reply, and I shut my eyes. Find that door inside my mind, the red one; open it, recognize what’s crouching there, in the dark behind. Let it recognize me, in turn. Then open wide myself, everywhere at once, and tell it to come on out.
And I light that whole fucking place on fire.
• • • •
The cats got out okay, in case you’re wondering. Nobody else, though; I made damn sure of that before I walked away, stepping out of the fire seemingly unburnt, yet still hot enough on the outside that my first few footprints came down all smoking and gooey on the road’s asphalt, ’til my skin cooled enough to draw dust. I was naked by that time, of course, but smeared all over in ash and other debris, which probably made me seem clothed from a distance. Still, someone did slow down to take a gander after a while, which is when I figured out I’d forgotten about that dumb fucking crown of horns.
You know how it is, cousin: Antichrist’s a position, not a person. There’s hundreds of us around might fill that particular slot, we only knew we had the right to try for it. But most of us don’t, no more than most of the normal sheep-folk surrounding us know their ownselves what they’re capable of, under truly special circumstances.
So we wander about instead, hunger-driven—collide and tangle, vaguely aware of each other in proximity like tigers huffing each other on the wind, similarly carrion-breathed, and aroused to heat by the scent of it. Enjoy each other’s company a while, in season, though like as not we won’t cleave together more than a shortish spell; we tend to breed true only with normal humans . . . if you can call your regular range of devout Satanists “normal.”
Wandered down along a road a while, then, enjoying my solitude, for all I didn’t expect to be alone for long, ’cause we never are. People move towards you like iron filings towards a magnet, drunk with praise—fall in love with you and want to do things for you, and you can’t convince them otherwise, not even if you try. But they always destroy themselves for you, over you, or self-destruct if you refuse their tribute. And if you let yourself get angry with them, they’ll be attacked, or have an accident, or commit suicide. You have to accept their worship or you’ll be alone, the reverend always said, but to do so is to know you’re a seeder with no driver sowing death everywhere you go, even unto the end of the world. Just a (semi-)human payload, continually moving towards Armageddon.
(I always know where to shoot. I always know where to go. Which way to step so the bullet hits whoever’s standing next to me. I always know where the fight will be, and I walk through it, unscathed. I am a weapon, made for nothing but final war.)
Fire and blood, bitches.
So when this nice young man got out of his car and took some steps towards me, calling out worriedly: “Lady, you okay? Anything I can do for you, lady?”, I simply smiled. I’m no lady, son, I might have said, if I’d wanted to; not a ma’am, not a missus, not a miz. Just a bad thought, the kind that hurts to think. A scream walking ’round on two legs, searching for yet another mouth to fill.
I was hot, though, that’s true enough—hotter than even I like to be. And my head hurt.
“God wants you kept safe,” he told me, practically panting with the prospect of doing some good, ’long as it wouldn’t cost him too much. “I can drive you wherever easy enough, you need me to. No trouble.”
I nodded, smiling wider yet. “The god you mean’s a fly on a dead dog’s eye,” I replied, mildly. “But go on and do whatever makes you happy, I suppose.”
A mild, surprised frown. “Excuse me?”
“Oh, I doubt even I can do that.”
Here he shook his head just a bit, eyes slightly aflutter, sure he couldn’t possibly have heard what he just did. Then stepped back, and opened the door for me.
“Climb in,” he told me, and I did. We pulled away, Carrie Underwood blasting.
“Bet you just love this song, don’t you?” I asked. “‘Jesus Take the Wheel’ . . . sounds kinda dangerous, to me.”
“Uh huh,” he agreed, nodding, then sniffed. “Oh wow, that’s some kinda stinky—what is that, you think, exactly?”
“That’d be me, I’m afraid.”
“We should do something about that—get you some normal clothes, wash off that stuff. Get rid of the whatever-it-is on your head, too.”
“Probably, yeah.” Gave him a sly look, then, pupils sliding horizontal, yellow-flaring in the dimming sun. “Think your girlfriend might wear the same size as me?”
• • • •
A few hours later, just as twilight became full sodium-glare night, I let that boy drop me off in front of an all-night roadside diner called Meg’s Big Bite, dolled up in pink from head to toe like Devil-baby Barbie. Meg like Megiddo, I found myself thinking; there was a coincidence, or maybe not. Since oh so very little is, in our lives.
When I walked in to find you already there, therefore, that’s why I maybe wasn’t as surprised as I otherwise might have been.
Saw you sitting there and knew immediately what you were to me, cousin—what we were, to each other. Felt the hair at the back of my neck first stiffen a bit, then sleek back down again once you looked up and shook your head, just a bit.
“Like coffee?” you asked. “I ordered us a pot.”
“Hm, could be,” I replied. “Gotta be better than goat’s-blood brewed with moonshine, one way or the other.”
“Shit, I hope so,” you said, eyebrows hiking. “Sit on down.”
We examined each other for a minute or two, staring across the red-checked plastic tablecloth. You were taller than me, probably older—had olive-tinted skin and hair the same vaguely reddish shade as mine, drawn back in a mass of braiding on one side, shaved almost to the scalp on the other. Your eyes were heavy-lidded, lashes thick-dark as mascara above and below but the same basic colour as mine, too, that sly light yellow-brown from some angles, molten gold from others. Hazel, I’ve heard it called, but that’s just the sheep lying to ’emselves, trying to boil it down any way they can into something recognizable. Plus those same slitted pupils, too: slanted and weird, oval on occasion, never fully round. A pair of black moons floating in an alien sky.
“Some call me the Nail,” you said, “on the internet, anyway. And they call you Little Horn down at that hillbilly Left Hand Path honky-stomp of yours, or used to.”
“Yeah, and some call me Kiss My Ass, ’specially when I’ve just laid the hellfire down on ’em,” I told you, voice finally smoke-free, but no less gravelly. “So who the fuck are you really when you’re at home, or even when you ain’t?”
“Beata Callander, nice to meet you. Am I your first fellow antichrist?”
“. . . Pretty much.”
“Me too, or almost. Interesting, huh?”
“Interesting how?”
“Oh, just exactly how hard they all work to keep us apart. And maybe why.”
Me, I’m not too educated, as such; the reverend made sure of that, or tried to. But you, cousin . . . someone took a good long time making sure you could conjure your own opinions and formulate your own insights into arguments; someone taught you debate wasn’t just necessary, but essential. I’d’ve liked to’ve grown up in a house like that.
So: “You tell me,” I suggested. To which you took a little bow, and did.
“My parents were Sunday go-to-meeting kind of Satanists, at best,” you began. “I mean, they practiced, off and on; made their obeisances, but didn’t do much else. To them, this was like some sort of beauty pageant or something—a community thing. Competition to build character. One of us I met later on, though, his parents’d built a cult like yours around him out in the woods somewhere, not quite Manson-level, but not quite not. I used to call him Damon Hellstrom, ’caused I knew it pissed him off.”
