Nightmare Magazine Issue 26

by Nightmare Magazine

  “Maybe now you’ll believe me when I tell you,” she said across the kitchen table the following day. “Listen, I’m ashamed for all the times you’ve had to come and clean me up.”

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  “No, it’s not. I know you think I’m a coward who’s afraid to really go ahead and kill myself. I know you wish I could make up my mind and either die or start living again.”

  I couldn’t meet her eyes then.

  “It’s always been for real,” she said. “It really has. I can’t sleep through a single night without waking up because Karl is there. He’s standing at the foot of the bed, and I know he’s about to do all those things to me. I want it to stop. I want to sleep.” She looked at me. “Every time I went for my arms with the razor they stopped bleeding. Every time I took pills and alcohol I started throwing up. I never once stuck my fingers down my throat. I promise. I just started throwing up. And if I didn’t, absolutely nothing would happen even though I should be passing out.”

  “So what are you saying?” I said.

  “It’s getting worse. I don’t even get injured anymore. I swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills yesterday, you know?”

  “And . . . ?”

  “They came out the other end this morning. Whole. The Lord is fucking with me.”

  “Don’t swear,” I said.

  “I’m telling you. The Lord is fucking with me. I hate Him. He won’t take the nightmares away. Or the scars, all the scars. But He won’t let me kill myself either. It’s like He wants me to suffer.”

  “Rebecka, we’ve been through this one before.”

  “Would you stop taking His side all the time?” she shouted. “I’m your best friend!”

  “Rebecka,” I said.

  “I know what you’re going to say. He’s not my nanny.”

  “That wasn’t what I was going to say.”

  “If He thinks I’m supposed to deal with this myself, He could have just not come back in the first place. That way I would have known what to do. But now, this is the way things are. And I really don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

  “Me neither,” I said.

  • • • •

  The next time Rebecka called it was early morning.

  “You have to come over,” she said. “We have to talk.”

  I took the bike over to her apartment, expecting to see another scene of a failed suicide attempt. Her face was pale under the scarring when she opened the door.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’ve taken the day off.”

  She let me in. There wasn’t anything on her or in the apartment to indicate she had done anything to herself, just the usual mess. I sat down by the kitchen table while she poured tea. The blue tablecloth was crusted with cup rings. I traced them with a finger.

  “You had me worried,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  “I’ve realized what I have to do.” She put a steaming cup in front of me and sat down in the opposite chair. A smoky Lapsang smell wafted up from the cup. Rebecka rested her elbows on the table and leaned towards me.

  “I’m serious about not coping anymore,” she said. Her tone was matter-of-fact. “I want to die, Sara.”

  “I don’t want you to,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I really don’t want you to.”

  “Well, it’s not for you to decide anyway.” She took a sip from her cup. I didn’t know what to say, so I drank my tea. It was sweetened with too much honey.

  “I suppose you’re going to tell me,” I said eventually.

  “The Lord isn’t going to do anything,” Rebecka said. “I know that now.”

  There were white dregs at the bottom of my cup.

  “Rebecka, what did you put in my tea?” I said.

  Her face was set, almost serene. “I’m going to make Him listen,” she replied. “I’m going to do something he can’t ignore.”

  • • • •

  I was naked when I woke up in her bed. My wrists and ankles were tied to the bedposts. Rebecka was sitting on a chair beside me, a toolbox at her feet.

  “I love you,” I said.

  “I know,” she said.

  © 2010, 2012 by Karin Tidbeck.

  Originally published in Swedish as “Rebecka” in Vemär Arvid Pekon.

  First published in English in Jagannath.

  Reprinted by permission of the author.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Karin Tidbeck works as a freelance writer, teacher and translator in Malmö, Sweden. She has published a short story collection and a novel in Swedish, and debuted in English in 2012 with the acclaimed collection Jagannath. Her short fiction has appeared in Weird Tales, Tor.com, Lightspeed Magazine, Strange Horizons, and numerous anthologies. Her work has received the Campbell Award and the SF & Fantasy Translation Award, as well as nominations for the Tiptree Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the British Fantasy Award.

  To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.

  Rules for Killing Monsters

  David Sklar

  When we started playing LandsBetwyxt, Jerry was all about killing monsters. But Amy was in Drama Club at Hematite High, where we went to school, in the Upper Peninsula, near Lake Michigan, on the dateline, and for her it was about interacting with people we met in the online game. Me, I wanted a chance to not be Jim. I guess I knew even then that there was something wrong with who I was, but I hadn’t yet put it together.

  But Altram the wizard wasn’t who I wanted to be. So I scrapped him and made Kilbert the Rogue. And when he wasn’t it, I created Ursula—a half-elf ranger with a green cloak and bright red hair. I didn’t tell Jerry she was me. I didn’t plan to tell Amy either, but one time I slipped up and called her Amy instead of Katressa on the road to Eldrytch Castle.

  “do I kno u,” Amy asked, “outside of game?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “well?” she asked.

  “it’s me jim,” I admitted.

  She didn’t respond.

  “is that ok?” I typed.

  “good job,” she typed back.

  “what do u mean?”

  “your dressed like a person,” Amy said.

  “huh?”

  She went on: “usu when a guy plays a girl shes in a chainmail bikini or sparkly lowcut gown. a set of pixels to see, not a person to be.”

  I nodded. Of course, she couldn’t see me nod, but I knew what she meant. One guy talked about his character in the third person, even in dialogue boxes. Vannati thinks this. Vannati wants that. Ursula was different.

  “shes not vannati,” I typed. “or, um, im not. :)”

  “lol,” Amy answered.

  And Ursula wasn’t like Vannati. Other players didn’t treat me like a boy. They flirted with me, asked to meet me in real life. I flirted back when they weren’t too creepy.

  Some guys assumed I wouldn’t be much use on a quest because I was a girl. I was proudest of that—it meant I could fool them even if they didn’t want to be fooled. Or that’s what I thought. I didn’t realize the truth underneath until Ursula died.

  We were clearing a nest of chimaeras from the mountains of Tazgref to save the village of Kremiss from their nightly raids. I had taken my eye off my health bar to shoot down the one attacking Katressa, and I didn’t see the other one charging me from behind until it was too late. And I watched myself fall forward on the rocks, still clutching my bow.

  And I just sat there, staring at myself, dead, on the screen, as it faded to black.

  When I’d died as Altram the Wizard, it was more like losing at cards. When Ursula died, I felt it—she took me with her when I watched her fall. I remembered, as if out of nowhere, my father spanking me for wearing my mother’s shoes when I was too young to understand why it bothered him. That was how it felt when Ursula died.

  • • • •

  The path back from the Deadlands was unchanged. In a mono
chrome background, dressed only in a shroud. Dodge the Bone Eaters; get to the River. Keep enough on my Willpower bar to hold together the driftwood boat until I got back to the Living side. It was the same as before. But this time was different. This time it mattered if I made it back.

  After that, I flirted more openly, with Kwentin the Druid and Kalino the Bard, and once with a Paladin. “what r u doing?” Amy asked in an aside.

  “roleplaying,” I answered.

  Ursula found her way into my real life, too. I stopped dreading deer hunting with my dad. I told him I wanted to learn how to hunt with a bow.

  He said, “I guess we’ll make a man of you after all.”

  I just smiled. I felt bad about letting him think that, but he got me the bow.

  I bought a green hooded parka at the Army Surplus Store. And I practiced my archery every day in the back yard.

  The State of Michigan was writing permits that year for antlerless deer because of a deer population explosion in the U.P. My father refused to shoot a doe. Said it just didn’t feel right. But me, I got up before dawn, when my father was still asleep, and I went out of the cabin in my parka and tracked a doe. My feet made almost no sound as I walked across the powdery late November snow, and I watched the doe browsing for acorns and fallen leaves below the bare oaks.

  She was beautiful in that light. She stood there chewing, and I nocked an arrow, admiring the beauty of her tight muscles, the faint white spots on her tawny haunches. I pulled back the bowstring and took aim. I knew exactly where her heart was, for I heard it beat in me. And I let fly.

  She let out a yelp and fell to the ground, stirring for a moment, a cloud of white powdery snow in the air around her as she struck the ground. I ran to her side, the old twigs cracking beneath my boots.

  I walked up beside her and put my hand on her chest. Her heart was still beating. I was ready for her to thrash her legs, like I had once seen a buck do, that my father had shot. But she did not thrash.

  I felt her heartbeat slow, through my fingertips. Mercy, I remembered. I drew my knife and slid it across her throat, so her death would be quick. And then I waited with her, my hand on her side, and felt her heartbeat slow down until it was only my own pulse in my fingers. Until she was done. And her big, brown, glassy eye stared out at no one.

  I took off my mitt and put a finger in her warm, dark blood. And I drew a tear beneath the outside edge of my eye.

  I heard my father’s footsteps behind me on crunchy twigs. He didn’t try to be quiet; the hunt was done. And I knew what he would say before he said it, and I braced for him to shatter the moment’s beauty as he clapped his hand on my shoulder and told me, “Son, you’re a man now.”

  And the courage it had taken to kill the deer was less than it would have taken to say No. No, I’m not. So I said nothing at all, but clung to the shred of the moment as the sun rose on us, my father standing in the snow in his hunting jacket and boots, and me kneeling next to the deer with her blood on my face and hand.

  But it was more okay than it should have been because he was very far away, cut off from the deer and from me by the cold air between us, and by the blood that rushed in my ears and muted the distant sound of his voice.

  • • • •

  After the kill, I got bolder.

  The doe was hanging from a tree in my front yard when I went back to school. I had helped my father gut her and hang her to drain, and the mix of things I’d felt hadn’t quite resolved. I mean, a part of me still felt weird that I had killed a living creature, that I had allowed myself to love her and take her life. But there was a magic in that, also, like it brought me closer to a world that wasn’t real and to a person in that world who was more real than I was. The reality of it buzzed in me—not like I was buzzing, but the feeling buzzed like a swarm of bees inside me.

  Tingling, I walked off my normal route and went past Amy’s house as she stepped outside. “Amy!” I called to her half a block ahead of me.

  She turned. “Hi Jim.” She waited. I caught up.

  “I want to go out as our characters,” I said.

  She said, “What?”

  I said, “I want us to dress up as Ursula and Katressa and go out to a party or something this weekend.”

  She didn’t answer right away.

  I said, “It’s all right if you want Katressa to look human. You don’t have to give her blue skin or pointy ears.”

  She said, “You know that Ursula’s a girl, right?”

  “Of course,” I answered. “She’s my character.”

  “And you want to dress as her?”

  I nodded. “Uh-huh.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she’s me.”

  “No, Jim,” Amy said. “You’re you. Ursula is a character in a game.”

  “I know,” I told her. “But that’s not how I feel. Because right now she’s more me than I am.”

  “Oh shit,” Amy said. “I’ve heard of this. I didn’t think it would happen to anyone I knew.”

  “I know,” I told her. “I was kind of stunned when it happened to me.”

  She said, “My mom warned me not to play these games online.”

  “What?” I said.

  “She said she saw a news story when she was a kid,” Amy went on, “about people getting so hung up on the game that they lose touch with reality.”

  “What?” I said. “Amy, that’s not—”

  “I can’t believe I ignored her,” Amy said, “and I let myself drag you into this.”

  I stopped and took her by the shoulders, and I looked into her face. “That’s not what’s happening,” I told her.

  “But you just said—”

  “It’s not about swords or monsters or magic,” I said. “It’s not about getting away from the world. It’s about something Ursula taught me about who I am that I didn’t see until I played her in the game.”

  “Okay,” Amy said. “I think I understand.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You want to be heroic. You want to feel brave.”

  “No!”

  “You don’t want to be brave?” Amy asked.

  “Well, yeah, I guess I do,” I said. “But that’s not it.”

  “You mean,” she said, and let the words hang there.

  I nodded and waited for her to catch up.

  “It’s about wanting to be . . .”

  “A girl,” I finished for her. “I think I’m a girl.”

  “Are you sure?” Amy asked.

  “I think so,” I nodded.

  “How can you think so?” Amy asked. “Isn’t it just something you know?”

  “I—” I stopped to look at my shoes. “This is the first time I’ve talked about it. To anyone, you know? But yeah, I’m sure. I think I’m sure. I mean, in the woods, there was no doubt. I was Ursula there, when I shot the deer.”

  “You bagged a deer?” Amy asked.

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Good for you!”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But now I’m walking to school, and it’s hard to believe that anything is real. I mean, I feel like I’m failing science, you know, or like science is failing me, because there’s observable facts and there’s truth, but somehow I know they’re not the same.”

  Amy didn’t say anything then, but stood there facing me with the kind of a smile that comic book artists draw when they want you to fall in love with the heroine’s whimsy.

  “Did that make sense?” I asked. “Am I raving?”

  Amy touched my hand. “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For telling me first,” she said. She reached forward and hugged me. “It’s an honor. I feel honored that you trust me.”

  I hugged her back.

  “Ah, shit,” she said.

  “What?”

  She pulled back to face me. “I’m kind of crushing on you right now, but I guess now that’s not going anywhere.” She kissed my cheek by the side of my mouth, and I felt a stirrin
g that seemed kind of wrong, like it was outside where it should’ve been inside, but mostly I wished I had breasts of my own to press against someone the way I felt hers against me.

  “C’mon,” she said, pulling out of the hug and leading me by the hand. “Let’s go to school.”

  • • • •

  We didn’t go out that weekend. Amy had to teach me stuff. Basic stuff like how to walk. How to talk. What to do with my hands. And she had to figure out my makeup. Ursula doesn’t wear makeup, but I needed makeup to look like her, and without it I couldn’t become who I knew I was.

  So I practiced being Ursula. Amy didn’t try to be Katressa—not the same way. She worked a little blue into her eyeshadow and on her cheekbones, and she wore a blouse that was a bit more fluid and let down her hair. She didn’t darken her hair, but she styled it so that it feathered back like Katressa’s and flowed a bit more. And she made two things. She made a ring for me that looked like the one that Ursula wore, with healing properties, and she made herself a necklace with a sparrow bone at the center to replicate the Amulet of Elantha, which Katressa had taken from a Necromancer she defeated. It gave Katressa power over the dead.

  I changed at Amy’s house and went out as Ursula on Friday and Saturday nights. And I would walk into places and take charge. If I walked into a party, people noticed. No one knew who I was or where I came from, but they wanted to know me—wanted to get closer. I told different stories when people asked where I came from—I was from Houghton, from Calumet, from Grand Marais, or visiting from Green Bay. I didn’t bother to try to keep my story straight, and it didn’t matter. The boys who shoved me into lockers during the week were the moths to my flame.

  • • • •

  Jerry got burned as well. He’d seen Ursula at a party, and he told me in biology class how he wanted the nerve to talk to her.

  “She’s out of your league, man,” I told him, cutting open a starfish’s leg.

  He nodded, did not even ask how I knew that when I wasn’t there. “What can I do?” he asked. He opened his sketchbook and started to draw the ridges inside of the leg.