Nightmare Magazine, Issue 97 (October 2020): Nightmare Magazine, #97

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-seven of NIGHTMARE! Happy October, the spookiest month of the year! We're kicking things off with a creepy little morsel from David Tallerman, "Not Us," which adds a sprinkle of Invasion of the Body Snatchers to a choice serving of bad marriage. In "The Monkey Trap," Adam-Troy Castro takes us to a book dealer with an incomparable collection-and a pretty creepy method of organizing it. We also have reprints from Kaaron Warren ("Furtherest") and A.C. Wise ("The Secret of Flight"). In our nonfiction features, we have Premee Mohamed discussing empathy in the latest installment of our column on horror, "The H Word," plus we have a book review from Adam-Troy Castro, and of course, author spotlights with our authors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adamant Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393975410

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 97, October 2020

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: October 2020

FICTION

Not Us

David Tallerman

Furtherest

Kaaron Warren

The Monkey Trap

Adam-Troy Castro

The Secret of Flight

A.C. Wise

NONFICTION

The H Word: An Empathy of Fear

Premee Mohamed

Book Review: October 2020

Adam-Troy Castro

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

David Tallerman

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 Andrey Kiselev / Adobe Stock Image

www.nightmare-magazine.com

Published by Adamant Press.

From the EditorBEST AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY 2018

Editorial: October 2020

John Joseph Adams | 128 words

Welcome to issue ninety-seven of Nightmare!

Happy October, the spookiest month of the year! We’re kicking things off with a creepy little morsel from David Tallerman, Not Us, which adds a sprinkle of Invasion of the Body Snatchers to a choice serving of bad marriage. In The Monkey Trap, Adam-Troy Castro takes us to a book dealer with an incomparable collection—and a pretty creepy method of organizing it. We also have reprints from Kaaron Warren (Furtherest) and A.C. Wise (The Secret of Flight).

In our nonfiction features, we have Premee Mohamed discussing empathy in the latest installment of our column on horror, The H Word, plus we have a book review from Adam-Troy Castro, and of course, author spotlights with our authors.

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

Not Us

David Tallerman | 3142 words

When he comes home that evening, he wants to talk.

He tells her about his day, about an argument with his boss, about the new contract. He relates a funny story narrated by a colleague. He wants her to react.

She has difficulty feigning the correct demeanour, or even recalling what it should be. What does sympathetic annoyance look like on her face? How do her features register amused interest? She’s drawing maps in the sand, maps of unknown lands, as the waves sweep in to wash her work away.

If he notices her failings, he says nothing. Halfheartedly he compliments her on the dinner, a dish she’s prepared on a hundred occasions. She can taste each separate ingredient, can reel them off as though they were words on a page. She thanks him, as she always does, and knows distantly that once his praise had meaning to her.

In bed, she wriggles over to flick the switch on the lamp and then maintains her distance. But he presses close, reaching casually to slip a hand within her negligee. His fingers are cold. His penis is hard against her bare rump. She craves to ignore him, but she can’t. She knows that Tuesday is a night when they fuck: private time, special time, near enough to the start of the week that they both have a modicum of energy spare to convert into passion. He’s fought to preserve this tradition. She remembers this, as she remembers the mechanical process of the act.

What she can’t remember is how it’s supposed to make her feel. Now it’s merely grotesque: a part of him moving within her, rummaging parasitically at her innards. When he comes, she experiences only gratitude that her new body is sterile. She has made one life, and that was more than sufficient.

Afterwards, she lies immobile, staring at the hairline crack of night sky revealed by the gap in the curtains. She doesn’t need to sleep. Nor does she grow bored. Inside her, a scream is building, but to release it would be futile. Everything she knows, they know too. Every thought she has is theirs as well. She senses them out there, the multitude of which she’s a component. They’re closer than kin, far closer than lovers. They are her and she is them.

Nevertheless, the question rises. When?

The form beside her is silent. Even if he were to wake, she wouldn’t be able to understand him, nor he her. He relies on words, on gestures, on expressions, and she’s surpassed those.

How much longer? How much more?

She knows they can hear, as she knows they won’t answer—that the notion of answering is meaningless. But knowing doesn’t make her questioning less urgent.

• • • •

The next morning, she spends an hour in front of the mirror, meticulously inspecting feet, legs, belly, breasts, arms, and shoulders.

She suspects that her body is continuing to change, though she can see no evidence. Before she was one and now she’s a part of many. How can her flesh not represent that? She stares at her fingertips, willing their whorls to be replaced by the blank pinkness of scar tissue. She checks the lines of her face, insisting they be gone. Once, her appearance seemed important to her. Now she’d prefer to be featureless and sexless as a store mannequin. This visage is solely a mask. Why does it refuse to resemble one?

There’ll be a day when these final differences have vanished. Perhaps this vestige of separate bodies will be abandoned altogether, and all isolation will be gone. Her mind, too; eventually these stubborn traces will be wiped clean, and she won’t be she but only they. She yearns for that day with the whole of her being, and can’t escape the irony that it’s her old self doing the yearning. Her future incarnation will endure neither need nor want.

The fault, then, lies with those who remain: those who cling to an extinct way of being.

She doubts. Why can’t they change everyone together? Could it be a weakness? She can’t conceive of weakness in a unity so complete and perfect. Yet if not, what explanation can there be?

Perhaps they’re testing her. Perhaps these residues of self are like dirt in oil, poisoning the workings of their great machine. She wishes she could expunge her thoughts. Her mind should become a blank slate.

Maybe the responsibility for change lies in her hands and not theirs.

Maybe the failure is hers.

• • • •

That afternoon, she goes outside, as she hasn’t in days. She can’t put it off anymore.

The streets are glutted. As she passes each person, she thinks, he is us, she is not us, he is not us, he is us. This she knows instinctively. She never looks up, never lets her eyes linger on a face. Looking at faces to interpret the mental processes behind them belongs to the past, and to those not yet joined.

There was a time when she’d have assumed that her behaviour would be suspicious. She’d have imagined that the mass of humanity would be disturbed by this intruder worming at its heart. Now she knows better. No one looks at her either. No one regards her as strange, or if they do, not so strange as to distract them from their fractured lives.

In the store, she buys the products she’s always bought. She’s grateful to her past self for having made these decisions, so