Nightmare Magazine, Issue 92 (May 2020): Nightmare Magazine, #92

By John Joseph Adams

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.

 

Welcome to issue ninety-two of NIGHTMARE ! All hotels are a tiny bit creepy, but the hotel in this new story from Yohanca Delgado & Claire Wrenwood ("The Blue Room") is right up there with The Overlook. Be sure to check in and enjoy the room service! After you read "Decorating with Luke," a brand-new story from Adam-Troy Castro, you might be ready to make a few changes around your own house. And don't miss our reprints this month, including work by Jarla Tangh ("The Skinned") and Steve Toase ("Call Out"). Gwendolyn Kiste brings us the latest installment of our column on horror, "The H Word." Plus we have author spotlights with our authors, and a feature interview with author Molly Tanzer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Joseph Adams
• Release date: May 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393903819

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).

Book preview

Nightmare Magazine

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 92, May 2020

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: May 2020

FICTION

The Blue Room

Yohanca Delgado and Claire Wrenwood

The Skinned

Jarla Tangh

Decorating with Luke

Adam-Troy Castro

Call Out

Steve Toase

NONFICTION

The H Word: The Horror of Solitude

Gwendolyn Kiste

Interview: Molly Tanzer

Gordon B. White

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Yohanca Delgado & Claire Wrenwood

Adam-Troy Castro

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

About the Nightmare Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2020 Nightmare Magazine

Cover by Alexandra Petruk / Adobe Stock Images

www.nightmare-magazine.com

From the EditorBEST AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY 2018

Editorial: May 2020

John Joseph Adams | 124 words

Welcome to issue ninety-two of Nightmare!

All hotels are a tiny bit creepy, but the hotel in this new story from Yohanca Delgado & Claire Wrenwood (The Blue Room) is right up there with The Overlook. Be sure to check in and enjoy the room service!

After you read Decorating with Luke, a brand-new story from Adam-Troy Castro, you might be ready to make a few changes around your own house. And don’t miss our reprints this month, including work by Jarla Tangh (The Skinned) and Steve Toase (Call Out).

Gwendolyn Kiste brings us the latest installment of our column on horror, The H Word. Plus we have author spotlights with our authors, and a feature interview with author Molly Tanzer.

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.

FictionDiscover John Joseph Adams Books

The Blue Room

Yohanca Delgado and Claire Wrenwood | 6656 words

When Amada first sees the hotel, she feels her luck has changed at last. One moment she is trudging beneath the palm trees and café umbrellas of Miami’s Ocean Drive and the next it is upon her: an imposing three-story building in the old art deco style, its white façade gleaming in the late-afternoon sun.

Amada stops in the middle of the busy sidewalk, shifting from one sore foot to the other, and stares up at the hotel. For a moment she imagines that the hotel—with its trim hanging over the windows like brows over heavy-lidded eyes, its ziggurat motifs yawning like so many open mouths—is staring back. Amada hikes her purse higher on her shoulder and blinks the sweat from her eyes, and the hotel is just a hotel once more.

She has spent the past seven hours going from hotel to hotel, filling out one application after another. A cousin told her the hotels in South Beach always have work, but so far her search has turned up only raised eyebrows at her four years of missing work history and polite we’ll let you knows. But Amada needs a job, and soon. She has just moved as far from Tommy as she can get without leaving Miami altogether: from Homestead City to a tiny studio in Allapattah, borrowing from her mother to cover first and last month’s rent. Now she is exhausted, the pads of her feet prickly and painful. She applied thick layers of foundation over the bruises on her neck this morning, but the makeup keeps sweating off. Twice now, she’s had to duck into a bathroom to reapply it. Her throat burns whenever she swallows, and the edges of her vision keep clouding. She doesn’t know if this is because of what happened two nights ago with Tommy or because of her mounting fear that she has made a huge mistake.

Still—Amada thinks, as she slips through the revolving doors and into the lobby’s welcome chill—something about this place feels different. Special.

• • • •

The hotel manager is a short man whose hands keep up a constant, flurrying motion about his pot-bellied self: brushing crumbs off his peach polo, adjusting the face of his too-large watch whenever it makes its inevitable descent to the underside of his wrist. He scans her application, passing over the last four, jobless years without comment.

Another one of my maids quit on me last week, he says. Didn’t even hand in her uniform. He looks Amada up and down. All these girls, they come, they go. What makes you different?

Amada has to stop herself from stroking her throat to check if the makeup is still there. What makes her different? She gazes at the hotel’s high ceilings, its soft, leaf-patterned carpet. The hushed stillness reminds her of a church. It makes her feel safe. Welcome. I like this place. And when I like something, I stay.

When can you start? he asks.

Right now, Amada thinks. Seven hours ago. Tomorrow, she says.

• • • •

When Amada arrives the next morning, Mr. Patterson hands her a freshly pressed uniform to wear until her personalized one arrives. He gives her a tour of the hotel, a small, boutique affair with a chic décor that its brochures call tropical art deco. It only has twenty-one rooms, seven per floor. The first two floors have been redone in a sleek modern style, with white walls accented by ornate gold mirrors and artwork in pastels and earth tones. But the top floor hasn’t been renovated in decades; each of its rooms is done up in a different color of the rainbow.

At the end of the third-floor corridor, outside the last room, Mr. Patterson fishes a card out of the top pocket of his polo and hands it to Amada. This is your master key card. You can use it to get into every room. Except the blue room. He jerks his head toward the door, which bears the number 307. The sprinklers in there are broken and it’s not up to code. I heard the owners are planning some kind of renovation, but right now they’re just using it for storage. No guests allowed, no staff—not even me.

Amada shrugs. What’s one locked door compared to a whole hotel? Okay. She slips the smooth, heavy key card into her pocket, remembering how Tommy kept all their keys on a carabiner clipped to his jeans. Every morning, when he left for work, he locked the front door behind him. Now, as Mr. Patterson leads her back to the elevator, she fingers the key card’s laminated edges, picturing a multitude of doors swinging open at her touch.

• • • •

There are six other maids at the hotel, but Amada takes an immediate liking to Lucinda (call me Lucy), who shares many of Amada’s shifts.

On her third day, she and Lucy are