Nightmare Magazine, Issue 75 (December 2018): Nightmare Magazine, #75
By John Joseph Adams, Adam-Troy Castro, Gemma Files and
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About this ebook
NIGHTMARE is an online horror and dark fantasy magazine. In NIGHTMARE's pages, you will find all kinds of horror fiction, from zombie stories and haunted house tales, to visceral psychological horror.
This month, we have original fiction from Adam-Troy Castro ("The Ten Things She Said While Dying (An Annotation)") and Carrie Vaughn ("The Island of Beasts"), along with reprints by Gemma Files ("Nanny Grey") and Stephen Graham Jones ("Universal Horror"). Over at "The H Word," Nicole Sconiers takes a close look at common horror tropes about children. Plus, we have author spotlights with our authors, and a book review from Adam-Troy Castro.
John Joseph Adams
John Joseph Adams is the series editor of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and the editor of the Hugo Award–winning Lightspeed, and of more than forty anthologies, including Lost Worlds & Mythological Kingdoms, The Far Reaches, and Out There Screaming (coedited with Jordan Peele).
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Nightmare Magazine, Issue 75 (December 2018) - John Joseph Adams
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Issue 75, December 2018
FROM THE EDITOR
Editorial: December 2018
FICTION
The Ten Things She Said While Dying: An Annotation
Adam-Troy Castro
Nanny Grey
Gemma Files
The Island of Beasts
Carrie Vaughn
Universal Horror
Stephen Graham Jones
NONFICTION
The H Word: Shadow of Innocence
Nicole D. Sconiers
Book Review: December 2018
Adam-Troy Castro
AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS
Adam Troy-Castro
Carrie Vaughn
MISCELLANY
Coming Attractions
Stay Connected
Subscriptions and Ebooks
Support Us on Patreon or Drip, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard
About the Nightmare Team
Also Edited by John Joseph Adams
© 2018 Nightmare Magazine
Cover by Chainat / Fotolia
www.nightmare-magazine.com
FROM THE EDITOR
Editorial: December 2018
John Joseph Adams | 77 words
Welcome to issue seventy-five of Nightmare!
We have original fiction from Adam-Troy Castro (The Ten Things She Said While Dying (An Annotation)
) and Carrie Vaughn (The Island of Beasts
), along with reprints by Gemma Files (Nanny Grey
) and Stephen Graham Jones (Universal Horror
).
Over at The H Word,
Nicole Sconiers takes a close look at common horror tropes about children. Plus, we have author spotlights with our authors, and a book review from Adam-Troy Castro.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Nightmare, is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, an science fiction and fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, including The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent projects include: Cosmic Powers, What the #@&% Is That?, Operation Arcana, Loosed Upon the World, Wastelands 2, Press Start to Play, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. Called the reigning king of the anthology world
by Barnes & Noble, John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been a finalist eleven times) and is a seven-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.
FICTION
The Ten Things She Said While Dying: An Annotation
Adam-Troy Castro | 3406 words
In the few seconds she had before the light of her world winked out forever, the dying human being said the following ten things.
"Oh God.
"It hurts.
"It hurts.
"Help me.
"Somebody please help me.
"Anybody.
Holy Shit What Are You?
"Oh, God.
"Please.
Mommy.
Her name was Robyn Howlett, and she was twenty-two years old.
Robyn was an alien creature to me, product of conditions wholly at odds with those that produced my kind. She spoke in a language I had never heard. Nevertheless, I understood everything she said. It is the nature of my kind to understand everything that is spoken in our presence, a necessary adaptation given that we are often summoned by creatures as alien to us as we are to them, creatures who often cannot expand their minds enough to even perceive us in any but the most primitive terms. Somebody has to take charge of the hard work of comprehension, and it might as well be us.
Most of the primitive beings my kind has encountered are limited to thinking of us as demons or nightmares, and have called us into whatever realm they inhabit out of some childish desire to bend some powerful being to their will. The sense that we don’t like being bound even more than they would eludes their understanding, and so they get what they deserve in the way of chastisement, as indeed was already the case of Dr. Emmanuel Eggard, the human being who had constructed the crude machine that opened the portal to my plane. Others are blameless and may be slaughtered, claimed as property, or even left alone, depending on our personal whim. Until Robyn made all of her ten statements, I had not made my final decision.
This is not quite the same thing as saying that I wasn’t judging her from the moment I first laid my thousand eyes on her.
Robyn was—as I saw through her life’s sum total of memories, which washed over me at the instant I shambled into her cramped three-dimensional space—blameless. Not perfect, not an angel, not a creature shining enough to escape the hell her cultural traditions had carved as an afterlife, but blameless, in the sense that her duties in Eggard’s place of power had been no more than menial. She hadn’t understood the principles behind his device. She’d needed some extra money for incidental expenses on campus, and had applied for a part-time clerical position posted on a community bulletin board, understanding only that her chief responsibilities would include getting his coffee, running his errands, and typing up his notes. Upon taking the job, she soon became aware that he also harbored vague ambitions of pressuring her into sex, a prospect that had not yet reached its crisis point, but might have if he hadn’t activated his machine today. At that point, she would have decided whether to quit or file a complaint. The critical factor, in her view, was only that he was disgusting: an ironic judgment, given that she was now being confronted by something she found more repellent by far.
I also had access to Dr. Eggard’s memories, having begun my incursion into this realm at the portal that materialized within his chest cavity. Brilliant by the standards of his kind, though always shunned socially for his volatile personality and failures of personal hygiene, he had built what he imagined to be a workable matter-transmission device, seeking in his arrogance to reduce the higher planes to a shortcut across the vast distances of the universe he called home. He sought a path to the stars, but was not above terrorizing this other human he’d hired to help him. He’d found a certain thrill in ordering the little bubblehead around, in subtly condescending to what he considered a deeply inferior intelligence, and in commencing the manipulation that he believed would end with her agreeing to service him sexually, in order to avoid being blacklisted from further employment on campus. He indeed planned to celebrate her surrender by deliberately mispronouncing her surname as Harlot.
That Robyn considered him physically disgusting was both known to him, and indeed the usual pattern with all his transactions of that sort. He planned to take pleasure in that—a motivation not unknown to my kind, in our fleeting interactions with his. We, too, enjoyed the revulsion we caused. The resonance was the source of what little empathy I had for him.
Eggard had not been prepared when the gateway opened just below his left lung, and I, a creature multiple times that portal’s volume, emerged, ripping asunder the insignificant obstruction that was his physical body, and flinging the pieces in as many directions as five-dimensional geometry permitted. He did not have time to scream, not on Earth, but would have time to do just that in the place his consciousness wound up: a place where the death normally afforded those whose flesh is reduced to droplets, will forever be denied. Sooner or later I would return and eat him. Creatures like him have always been quite the delicacy. And he would continue to be indefinitely, because even after being eaten, death would still be denied him, and I would be able to return to this meal as many times as I wanted. The beings of Eggard’s plane would likely find this easiest to understand as, not devouring, but chewing. We never stopped chewing.
Robyn’s fate was still up to my discretion, and so I paid very