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    Nightmare Magazine, Issue 100 (January 2021): Nightmare Magazine, #100
    Nightmare Magazine, Issue 100 (January 2021): Nightmare Magazine, #100
    Nightmare Magazine, Issue 100 (January 2021): Nightmare Magazine, #100
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    Nightmare Magazine, Issue 100 (January 2021): Nightmare Magazine, #100

    By John Joseph Adams

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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.

     

    Welcome to issue one hundred of NIGHTMARE! It feels like a milestone of terror-and we couldn't have made it without the support of all our supremely talented writers-and dedicated and loyal readers like you. To celebrate, this issue is overflowing with original fiction from some of our most stalwart contributors over the years. Stephen Graham Jones commits the perfect-or at least a perfectly terrifying-crime in his new short "How to Break into a Hotel Room." Adam-Troy Castro reports from the set of an unsettling television show in "Rotten Little Town: An Oral History." If you're hungry for a monster, Desirina Boskovich is glad to oblige with her story "I Let You Out." Our ebook readers will also enjoy several bonus stories in this super-sized extravaganza: A tale of a viral threat from Sam J. Miller ("Darkness, Metastatic") and a modern, dark fairy tale from Maria Dahvana Headley ("Wolfsbane"). Our reprints this month include a fantastic scare from Tananarive Due ("Last Stop on Route Nine"), Gemma Files ("Thin Cold Hands"), Carmen Maria Machado ("The Things Eric Eats Before He Eats Himself"), Victor LaValle ("Up From Slavery"), and Laird Barron ("Jaws of Saturn"). But wait, there's more! Our nonfiction team has also gone the extra mile, for Team NIGHTMARE. Orrin Grey returns to "The H Word" with an essay about the way the Vietnam War changed the state of horror. Plus, we have author spotlights with our authors, a book review from Terence Taylor, and a roundtable interview with your humble (outgoing) editor and our amazing (incoming) editor Wendy N. Wagner. On top of all that, we've also got a special treat for our ebook readers: Assistant editor Xander Odell collected some of our staff and writers' favorite scares. Here's to another hundred issues-enjoy!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAdamant Press
    Release dateJan 1, 2021
    ISBN9781393495185
    Nightmare Magazine, Issue 100 (January 2021): Nightmare Magazine, #100
    Author

    John Joseph Adams

    John Joseph Adams is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent books include The Apocalypse Triptych (consisting of The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come), and series editor for The Best American Fantasy and Science Fiction. John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award and is a six-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of the digital magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare, and is a producer for WIRED’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

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      Nightmare Magazine, Issue 100 (January 2021) - John Joseph Adams

      Nightmare Magazine

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      Issue 100, January 2021

      FROM THE EDITOR

      Editorial: January 2021

      FICTION

      How to Break into a Hotel Room

      Stephen Graham Jones

      Last Stop on Route Nine

      Tananarive Due

      Rotten Little Town: An Oral History (Abridged)

      Adam-Troy Castro

      I Let You Out

      Desirina Boskovich

      Darkness Metastatic

      Sam J. Miller

      Wolfsbane

      Maria Dahvana Headley

      Thin Cold Hands

      Gemma Files

      The Things Eric Eats Before He Eats Himself

      Carmen Maria Machado

      Up From Slavery

      Victor LaValle

      Jaws of Saturn

      Laird Barron

      NONFICTION

      The H Word: Victims and Volunteers

      Orrin Grey

      Book Reviews: January 2021

      Terence Taylor

      Interview: John Joseph Adams and Wendy N. Wagner in Conversation

      John Joseph Adams and Wendy N. Wagner

      What Are You Afraid Of: Celebrating 100 Issues of Nightmare Magazine

      Xander Odell

      AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

      Stephen Graham Jones

      Adam-Troy Castro

      Desirina Boskovich

      Author Spotlight: Sam J. Miller

      Author Spotlight: Maria Dahvana Headley

      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

      © 2021 Nightmare Magazine

      Cover by Grandfailure / Adobe Stock

      www.nightmare-magazine.com

      Published by Adamant Press.

      From the EditorBEST AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY 2018

      Editorial: January 2021

      John Joseph Adams | 394 words

      Welcome to issue one hundred of Nightmare! It feels like a milestone of terror—and we couldn’t have made it without the support of all our supremely talented writers—and dedicated and loyal readers like you.

      To celebrate, this issue is overflowing with original fiction from some of our most stalwart contributors over the years. Stephen Graham Jones commits the perfect—or at least a perfectly terrifying—crime in his new short How to Break into a Hotel Room. Adam-Troy Castro reports from the set of an unsettling television show in Rotten Little Town: An Oral History. If you’re hungry for a monster, Desirina Boskovich is glad to oblige with her story I Let You Out. Our ebook readers will also enjoy several bonus stories in this super-sized extravaganza: A tale of a viral threat from Sam J. Miller (Darkness, Metastatic) and a modern, dark fairy tale from Maria Dahvana Headley (Wolfsbane).

      Our reprints this month include a fantastic scare from Tananarive Due (Last Stop on Route Nine), which will be available on our website. Thanks to the bonus original content on the website this month, the rest of our reprints are exclusive to our ebook edition. That issue—which you can still purchase for the regular issue price of $2.99—contains reprints from horror giants Gemma Files (Thin Cold Hands), Carmen Maria Machado (The Things Eric Eats Before He Eats Himself), Victor LaValle (Up From Slavery), and Laird Barron (Jaws of Saturn).

      But wait, there’s more! Our nonfiction team has also gone the extra mile, for Team Nightmare. Orrin Grey returns to The H Word with an essay about the way the Vietnam War changed the state of horror. Plus, we have author spotlights with our authors, a book review from Terence Taylor, and a roundtable interview with your humble (outgoing) editor and our amazing (incoming) editor Wendy N. Wagner. On top of all that, we’ve also got a special treat for our ebook readers: Assistant editor Xander Odell collected some of our staff and writers’ favorite scares.

      It’s been an honor and a privilege editing Nightmare for these past one hundred issues, but I’m really looking forward to seeing the exciting new directions Wendy takes it. Thanks again to everyone who’s made this wild, terrifying journey possible; I hope y’all stick with Nightmare for another hundred.

      ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher of Nightmare, is 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: A People’s Future of the United States, Wastelands: The New Apocalypse, and The Dystopia Triptych: Ignorance is Strength, Burn the Ashes, and Or Else the Light. 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

      How to Break into a Hotel Room

      Stephen Graham Jones | 5404 words

      Javi is short for Javier. Javier is short for Has the Perfect Scam.

      He hasn’t told anybody about it yet.

      Especially not the hotels.

      It’s not the kind of thing you get rich with—one fancy watch or a pair of earrings doesn’t exactly pay the rent—but it is the kind of thing that’s good enough for a smile at three in the morning. It is the kind of thing that’s good enough when your dying friend Tran just cashed in his retirement. When Tran’s flush he’s a pawnshop, will buy whatever trinket you bring him, pretty much, so long as it’s got a story, is guaranteed hot, and when he’s flush with retirement savings and dying—which is always, lately—he’s not all that concerned with making sure both columns of the ledger even out. It’s like, as he’s being lowered into the grave, he’s pulling all the shiny things to him he can.

      How could Javi not want to help him out with that? If stolen trinkets will give Tran a little break from dying, fascinate him in a way that’s not an ordeal or a battle, just let him be his old self for half a moment—this won’t even really be stealing. It’ll just be helping a friend out. Reminding him who he is. Who both of them are: still the same two punks in the last stall of the far bathroom in junior high, buying junk the seventh graders pilfered from their own houses, then selling that junk to the ninth graders, who had the cash for stray pills, bottles with a drink or two left. Once word got out, they’d graduated to shoes still in the box, bikes that hadn’t been chained up, copies of house keys, and tests, and what they got from all these transactions wasn’t money, but suspensions and expulsions, which translated into cred, made them street, which they wore proudly, like the most inky black hoodie, their hands thrust deep into the kangaroo pocket, which could be holding anything.

      So, selling Tran a fancy watch or a pair of cufflinks now, years after they’d graduated to other things, it won’t be about the cufflinks or the watch. It’ll be about remember when.

      It’ll be about how they’re still them, they’re still the same, the world hasn’t touched them. They’re still pure, and the world is still out there, just waiting to get scammed.

      And, if you’re pure, then how can you be dying, right?

      Right.

      What Javi leaned forward to announce over the battle-scarred coffee table was that he was going for another case, his treat this time—the good stuff, something dark, with dots over the letters maybe. If he said he was going out to scam a hotel, he’d be a half hour getting out the door.

      Be sure to take Mercer, yeah? Tran said from the depths of the couch, lifting his bottle in farewell, like toasting Javi out into the night.

      Mercer cuts through the neighborhood to get up to strip mall-land, is the safest, most cop-free way to get to the gas station where they can still buy afterhours. What Tran was saying was for Javi not to get pulled over again, not get arrested again, not have to serve weekends at county anymore.

      Standing in the doorway, Javi’d looked at Tran a moment too long. Not with his own eyes, but with the eyes he’s pretty sure he had at twelve years old. To the twelve-year-olds they’d been, Tran, sitting on the couch in this grungy living room, baggies and bottles all around him, he had made it, man. Both of them had. This was the life.

      And maybe it is.

      That’s the part that hurts, Javi suspects. Even more than Tran almost being dead.

      But you can hold a thing like that off with the right stolen watch, the right pair of cufflinks—cufflinks will be best, really, because what kind of shirt do you even need to wear them with, right? Stealing them will be stealing the most extra, useless thing, will prove that it’s about the act itself, not what you get. The scam is what’s holy, never mind what you get with it. What’s important is getting away with it.

      Because cigarettes are important for the scam, Javi saves his last one. Now he’s leaned back by the hotel’s parking lot door—the one he can’t open without a keycard, sure, but also the one that won’t announce to the front desk clerk that he’s just strolling in off the street.

      Also important is that he’s left his socks and shoes on the front seat of his rat-trap Accord. And that he’s mussed his hair all up, as if nicotine levitated him out of bed, delivered him down to this lonely stoop.

      Just when he doesn’t think the cigarette’s going to be long enough, that he’s going to have to resuscitate one from the ashtray, an older couple in cocktail party get-up staggers in from the parking lot, swipes their way through the door.

      Javi catches it right before it closes, and even if they see him, so what? You can’t smoke in the rooms, so this, as far as they know, is what he’s been reduced to. It’s hard to remember your key at three in the morning, your fingers shaking from withdrawal.

      This is Step One.

      Step Two is ducking into the first stairwell—because of fire regulations, there’s nearly always one immediately past the door—jogging up three landings, then one more, for luck. In Javi’s hand already is change for the vending machine. Because there are cameras, because you have to think there are cameras, he zones out, zombies his eyes down to match the late hour, and follows the quarters in his hands.

      The vending machine nook is right at the crotch of the two wings of the hotel.

      To try to shake what Tran said out of his head—no, to try to shake Mercer out of his head, he pushes the grossest of the six buttons: iced tea. The kind that’s been sitting in a bottle for months, what his dad used to call dead tea.

      The idea is that gagging down a drink or two will wash Mercer down as well.

      It is the most cop-free route to beer, but it hasn’t always been cop-free.

      Right at the end of Javi and Tran’s low-stakes junior high fencing operation, a house-job had gone bad. House-job was cool-kid code for B&E. Smash and grab, ripped straight from television, was a good one too, but there’s nothing to sell smash-and-grabbers, except maybe bandannas to hide their faces. And everybody’s already got those. For a house-job, though, well. If you can erase the breaking part, then the entering gets a lot quieter, doesn’t it?

      That had been Javi’s pitch, selling house keys out the bathroom down by metal shop.

      Nobody was supposed to get hurt.

      At worst, some CDs might disappear. Or a wallet, if somebody’d left it out. Because all you take on a job like that is what’s been left in the living room. You never go down the hall, to the bedrooms.

      Or, you’re not supposed to.

      What neither Javi nor Tran had banked on, though, was it being the last link in the chain. They’d assumed they were selling the keys to the actual breakers and enterers. One of those breakers and enterers, though, he turned out not to want to get his own hands dirty. He resold the key, probably at a markup.

      Trick was—Javi and Tran had been upfront about this—this set of keys they had for sale, they weren’t like the rest of the keys. The rest had been copied from hide-a-keys ferreted up from fake rocks and behind shutters, that kind of stuff—a seventh grader doesn’t sell their own house key, they sell their neighbors’ keys.

      This set, though, it had just been in the parking lot. Car keys, two of what looked like house keys, and a whole slew of little nothing-keys. They probably opened a lot of stuff, sure, but finding those doors, that was going to be the impossible part of the job.

      It was why they were only asking five dollars for the set.

      Easy money, guilt-free.

      Until something went bad.

      The reason Javi and Tran thought they might be involved was that the newspaper accounts said there were no signs of forced entry.

      At three in the morning on a Tuesday night, someone or someones had crept into each bedroom of Lisa K’s family, and opened their throats. Even her infant brother, just born, who couldn’t have even understood what was happening.

      Lisa K was in Javi and Tran’s pre-Algebra.

      Or, she had been.

      The only reason she made it through was that she’d crept out her window that night, to drink warm beer down at the old drive-in with the rest of the eighth graders.

      Once, coming up Mercer on a beer run not long after graduation, Javi had seen Lisa K. He was pretty sure it was her, anyway. It had been years, but she’d always had a way of standing. It was like she’d just been punched in the gut. Like she was waiting for the next punch.

      According to everybody, she’d been married twice and was a mom once by then. What she was doing was smoking cigarettes by the storm drain in front of her old house, and throwing her butts out onto Mercer. Her heels were slung over her shoulder. Her makeup had been smeared into raccoon eyes. And she’d watched Javi coast pass. She’d watched him like she knew.

      He hadn’t stopped.

      He hadn’t told Tran.

      Back then, Tran was going to live forever.

      Back then, Javi hadn’t even thought of Lisa K’s family for years.

      For the next couple years, though, he couldn’t stop thinking about it, even up to driving the long way around Mercer. The way that, as it turned out, had cops that were watching for cars bouncing off the dividing line, finally edging over half a tire width.

      Javi, standing in the hotel’s bright hallway, tries to wash all that gone with the bitter dead tea.

      It almost makes him throw up.

      Just a stupid street, he tells himself. And: It wasn’t us anyway.

      Under that is what he doesn’t give voice to, what he can’t even start to mutter, even in the privacy of his head: that what’s happening to Tran now, the corruption eating him away from the inside, it started in the eighth grade, in the bathroom all the way down by metal shop. For five dollars.

      Javi makes himself swallow another drink.

      And, yes, like always, he’d checked the back floorboard of the Accord before climbing in.

      That’s just rational.

      A baby can hide anywhere. Especially one with a slit-open throat. Babies whose heads Pez-dispenser back can wriggle back into even the tightest floorboard, the slightest shadow, so that when you look back, it’s straight down into a neck stump, which is a ragged little window into that baby’s last moments in the crib, a gloved hand over its mouth to keep from waking the next family member, one door down the hallway.

      Without thinking, Javi lifts the tea to his mouth a third time, and, because of cameras, because you have to complete motions you start, because he has to sell this, Javi raises it to his mouth, sloshes a drink of the deadness in.

      Right on cue then, a door ahead of him swings back.

      Javi keeps the bottle up for camouflage—not interested in you, in y’all, just this—slows down like he’s slowing to try not to spill.

      Not like he’s watching.

      Not like he’s clocking.

      Just like he would have called ahead for it if he could have, it’s the couple that stumbled in from the cocktail party, left the door swinging for him. This was just coming back to the room to freshen up, it looks like. Or restock. Now it’s out on the town again, to the next place, and the next. They’re doing it up right, Javi thinks. Nice clothes. Arms hooked together, because two drunk people equal one standing person.

      Javi gives them space, logs 422 as he passes, only looking over once.

      He makes sure to get to the elevators late enough that they won’t try to hold the doors. Couples at this hour need elevators to themselves. And skulkers like Javi, they need their faces not remembered.

      If he’s careful, they probably won’t even miss anything until the morning. And, loaded like they are, will they even raise a fuss?

      So far, three hotels in: no.

      Acting for the cameras again, Javi slaps his front pockets, his rear pockets, then looks down the hall, to 422, trusting that whatever security monitor he’s on, it’s cycled a couple of times during his walk—enough to break continuity.

      422, it might actually be his room, right?

      He leans that way like he’s falling, and then knocks lightly on the door.

      No answer.

      Now for the hard part, the part he won’t be able to explain if Security walks up on him.

      He twists the cap back onto the powdery tea, chocks it under his arm, and cracks his wallet open like really digging deep for a keycard. Because he’s butterfingers, he of course drops the whole affair—except for the driver’s license.

      While gathering and sorting, he does the hard part: slides his driver’s license as far as he can under the door, into the blackness.

      He got the idea one night in a different hotel, a room he’d rented. He’d been able to see feet-shadows in the hall, and that reminded him of Tran’s big brother’s stories from his one year of college. In the dorm, the big joke was to fill a record sleeve with shaving cream, then push the open slit of that record-sleeve mouth under someone’s door and jump on it, spraying all that shaving cream into the room.

      But it didn’t have to be just shaving cream.

      Javi stands a moment, organizing his wallet, and then, his shoulders exaggerating his frustration for the cameras, he makes his way back down to the elevators, only stopping to cut through the vending nook, to ditch his wallet and keys on top of the snack machine, way back in the lint and dust, where nobody’s reached for months.

      On the ride down to the lobby, he forgets again, takes another drink of the tea.

      It leaves his mouth not wanting to touch itself.

      At the front desk, he sets the plastic bottle down first, to show how the droplets are still condensing on the clear plastic. It’s that fresh.

      Let me guess, the clerk says, going off Javi’s mussed hair, bare feet.

      I know you can’t burn me another key without ID, Javi leads off.

      Wallet’s in the room?

      Javi tips the tea up, says as if proud of it, I did remember to bring the quarters, right?

      Name?

      It’s 422, Javi says—this is the second tricky part, the part you have to fast-forward past for this all to work— but my wife, she’s sleeping. I don’t want to call, or knock. Yesterday Security was able to—

      Yesterday?

      Last night, Javi says, breaking eye contact like this has been a recurring problem in his life. I even got extra keys burned when I— But he interrupts himself: That one guy, he let me in, then I got my ID, showed him. It was all good.

      Dan, you mean?

      Javi shrugs like he probably should know the name, but . . . ?

      I’ll send him up, the clerk says, keying his walkie open.

      Thank you thank you thank you, Javi says, then, right as he’s pushing the up-button on the elevator, the clerk calls across: Mr. Barnes?

      Javi turns.

      The clerk is holding up the tea.

      Yes, yes, of course.

      Javi takes another drink on the ride up. It’s bitter, and losing its chill. Still, Javi smiles into his chest.

      This is so easy. How does everybody not do it?

      He musses his hair again before stepping out of the elevator, then gets paranoid of cameras in the elevator. But Dan won’t be watching—in fact, Dan is waiting when Javi steps out on the fourth floor.

      Making rounds, Dan explains, his posture somehow evoking twirling keys or a nightstick. He’s either Javi’s exact age, or a year older.

      Good.

      Sorry for this, Javi says, twisting the lid on the tea down.

      Happens all the time.

      Bet you’ve got some stories, Javi says on the way down to 422.

      Dan just chuckles.

      At the door, Javi crosses his lips with his index finger, nods inside, says, Sleeping. I won’t turn the lights on.

      This is to keep Dan in the hall.

      You understand I’ve got to— he says, his master keycard not yet cocked up to open the door.

      Oh, yeah, I get it, Javi says, and rabbit-ears the front pockets of his jeans out, turns around and scoops his index fingers through his back pockets, to show empty they are, and even stretches his waistband out dangerously far, to show he doesn’t have a driver’s license secreted away on his person. He holds his arms up for a patdown, says, Cavity search?

      Dan just looks at him. He’s not spinning anything imaginary on his finger anymore.

      Javi rubs his hair to show nothing’s in there either.

      Dan considers this, considers some more, then stabs a hand forward, touches the short sleeve of Javi’s left arm.

      You’re right-handed, Dan says, the sleeve obviously empty. You’d put it there.

      Guess I would, Javi says, as if following this train of thought.

      Dan looks to the door, looks down the hall behind them—nothing—then reaches his decision, thumbs the card up from his shirt pocket, holds it up to show Javi how he’s trusting him, here.

      Just, shhh . . . Javi says, keeping the idea of his wife alive. I’ll be right back. Hold the door?

      Like that, then—because this is the only exit, because Javi is so caught if he tries to run—Dan keys the door open, holds it just wide enough for Javi to sidestep through.

      Let me just find it, Javi whispers, and then he’s in, his bare right foot already finding the slick certainty of the driver’s license on the floor.

      Still, he moves around, rattles the ice bucket and remote on the dresser.

      Then he’s back.

      He produces the license.

      Barnes? Dan says, after reading Javi’s different last name.

      Javi, pretending his wife is sleeping, steps out, still whispering. Say what? he says, careful to keep a socked foot in the door.

      Caleb said you were Barnes, Dan says, waggling his walkie to show how Dan told him.

      "She is, Javi says. Kept her own name, yeah?" As if this can possibly prove that, Javi passes his license across.

      Dan compares the face on the license to Javi, then compares it again.

      Room’s in her name, Javi says, using his guest-is-always-right voice. His it’s-three-in-the-morning voice. "Her work gives her that . . . what’s it—oh yeah, the corporate rate."

      All the same, he’s getting light on the balls of his feet, too. Maybe this particular scam has run its course. Maybe he’s about to be running, will be collecting his Accord tomorrow at lunch.

      But Dan finally has no reasonable objection. He hands the license back, his eyes flicking down the hall already, like he has something pressing.

      Thank you, Javi says, stepping back in, being gentle with the door. Anything else?

      Dan starts to say something but Javi says it for him: I’ll check with Caleb in the morning. He’s on until six, right?

      Dan nods once, slow, then again, twice, like talking himself into something. Have a good night, he says, saluting Javi by launching his walkie’s stubby antenna off his forehead.

      Javi lifts the bottle of tea in farewell, eases the door shut, and, in case Dan the security man might be staking out the hall, he waits a full five minutes before turning on the light.

      It takes a second to catch, the bulb in a lamp all the way in the far corner—aren’t they usually right above the door?—and then . . . . seriously?

      The room is perfect.

      The covers on the bed aren’t rumpled from sitting on, to strap a shoe over a heel. The remote is still lined

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