Candle in the Attic Window

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  And the pain of my open eye socket was rising to the fore.

  So.

  What can I tell you next?

  Did I go insane? Would it be a wonder if I somehow did not? I was half-blind, and even more blinded by a growing agony. I was surrounded and fighting off tentacles worse than any stinger that I feared as a child. I was lost in an ancient underground, with no way out, committed to missions that I was absolutely determined to complete. And ... they were coming.

  I fled. I know that much.

  I ran with the black skull pressed tightly to my bosom. I no longer used my one eye, for the torch was left in the room far behind me. My hands and fingers, like tentacles, saw horrible things. I heard terrible sounds from the mouths of beasts, sounds that could not be copied by the most skilled singers or creative actors of our race. They sought me. I ran.

  And I am sure that, for a time – a continual epoch, perhaps, if only days or weeks, while I ate the hemp I wore and drank whatever moisture I splashed through– I will agree that I was insane.

  •

  When I came to ... which is to say, when I remember thinking clearly again ... I was in the bed of a well-lit room. The soft lips of a woman were pressed, cupping and lovingly over my mouth. The scent of roses and potent oriental blossom cradled me.

  The Lady de Siverey sat over me, a smile of softness upon her face.

  I shut my eye, afraid of the horrors attacking once more, afraid of the consequence of my sin of kissing a woman’s mouth.

  When I looked again, she was standing near the open door of the room. “Well done, Jacques de Ronnay. Now, go, and do thou likewise.”

  I told you before that I never saw her again. I am not sure that I did even then. For I wept and studied the door through which she might have passed. It was tightly shut, as if it had never opened to admit her. Perhaps this was my troubled mind and nothing more. Perhaps I have still never touched a woman so and am therefore clean before all the Saints and Mother Mary.

  I assure you that I am now quite rational. Likewise, I know that I shall run and hide for the rest of my life.

  I never laid eyes on that skull again, though I know I carried it for as long as my memory will replay. I also lost the map.

  Yet, my story must go forth.

  There are people, humans on the errands of nasty fools prancing as educated,, who would have us nurture and protect ancient secrets, as if to harness them in some future day or be harnessed by them as servants in reverence to unholy and alien gods.

  Please. In holy houses and elsewhere, copy this letter. It must be shared with all. It is my testimony that this witness is correct in every account and that Man must know. These secrets cannot be trusted with the uncouth soul any longer. And you need look over your shoulder and into the night, forevermore.

  •••

  Jim Blackstone is a scholar, educator, and writer with a passion for foreign languages and history. His most recent science fiction novel, Interference, was recently released by Golden Acorn Press.

  Broken Notes

  By Maria Mitchell

  Broken notes, anemic strokes,

  and withered snakes of wire

  Incited the fear. The frenzy. The fire.

  What was the reason?

  What was the threat?

  What horror was so dire?

  Dust. Distortion. Solitude.

  The truth of this room without

  artistic interlude.

  Rust. Contortion. Ineptitude.

  The truth of this mind

  without artistic interlude.

  One hand can do many things

  while the mind and horror sing.

  •••

  Maria Mitchell read the poem “We Organized” from Patricia McKissack’s compendium The Dark Thirty in elementary school. Compiled from actual slave narratives by the Library of Congress in the 1930s, it had a vivid imagery of tyranny, slavery, Gothic horror, and retribution that motivates much of her poetry today.

  Ghosts & Death

  “There are two bodies – the rudimental and the complete; corresponding with the two conditions of the worm and the butterfly. What we call “death”, is but the painful metamorphosis. Our present incarnation is progressive, preparatory, temporary. Our future is perfected, ultimate, immortal. The ultimate life is the full design.”

  “The Mesmeric Revelation”, Edgar Allan Poe

  The Malcontents

  By Mary E. Choo

  Curious,

  I planted the seedlings

  just as the catalogue said:

  on the stroke of midnight,

  in late spring,

  when it was more than warm.

  They did well enough

  in that part of the garden

  behind the secret gate.

  Some rose as high as my shoulder,

  their lush leaves unfolding.

  I was delighted at first

  when they all sprouted heads

  with succulent eyes and mouths.

  Still, if it rained during summer,

  they were quick to complain

  about pests and blight.

  Most grew feet

  at the base of their stems

  and wanted to walk;

  shocked, I refused,

  though I cried when I cut their feet off.

  As the weather grew colder,

  they challenged the frost,

  demanding blankets;

  if smaller, their feet did grow back.

  Damp and shrivelling,

  they began to whisper behind my back,

  so I heaped them with cuttings

  and latched them in,

  hoping they’d die.

  One winter night,

  I could hear them plotting

  in their hidden place,

  the uneven tread

  of small, softened feet,

  and on the chill air,

  sudden as the snapping of twigs,

  their louder voices, angry,

  calling me Mother …

  the rusted gate hinge

  creaking.

  •••

  Mary E. Choo’s speculative poetry and fiction has been published in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies, as well as online and electronic publications. She is a two-time Aurora finalist, and has received a number of honourable mentions in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and The Best Horror of the Year (online lists). Her short story, “The Man Who Loved Lightning”, appears in the anthology of fusion fiction, Like Water for Quarks.

  Liminal Medicine

  By Jesse Bullington

  After the journalists discovered the killing fields and Tuol Sleng, the whole world knew about our ghosts. The metaphor is a strong one, I’ll allow: Just as the spectre of Nanking haunts the Japanese and Mao’s revolt made the tale of the hungry ghost more palpable, so, too, did the Rouge grant us our own haunted legacy. Movies and books and articles and television and a rather morbid tourism industry all parade the ghosts of Cambodia before the pitying eyes of the world, and even down all these years local witticisms, such as It is better to lose one leg than both, remind me that countless landmines wait like vipers in the fields, that the phantom of the Khmer Rouge will haunt my country for many lifetimes. The summer I returned home, the news fixated on the arrest of a deranged American murderer and I thus discovered another appropriate allegory for what the Khmer Rouge did to my country – cannibalism.

  My grandfather, like many Cambodians, had a ghost arm; unlike many, he lost his during the civil war and not afterward. He claimed that, had he found and cremated the limb, it would not have haunted him, but even as a child, I suspected this tale was told for my amusement, the waxy stump wiggling for my edification alone. After my uncle whisked me out of the village and bounced me from town to Phnom Penh to border to Bangkok to University, I ran across an article on the phantom limb phenomenon. I translated and copied it to show my grandfather, but by the time I graduated and returned
home, he had found his way back to the arm the Khmer Rouge had taken so many years before.

  After the train and boat and taxi and bus and rickshaw, I found myself on the familiar road home, debating how to approach my grandmother, as a cat mewled somewhere in the cab and insects hummed and the mud squelched under the tires and the jungle pulsed with all the sultry wetness of summer. Much to the curiosity of the two well-dressed men sharing the vehicle with me, I made the driver stop a kilometer outside the village to walk the rest of the way in; the lengthy journey from my new life back to my old had not been nearly long enough to prepare myself, and I thought returning as I had thousands of times before might help. Naturally, as soon as the mud coated my sneakers and the taxi resumed bouncing down the road to deliver my bags, I regretted my decision, the heat turning my dress to sticky rice paper.

  I paused in the shade of the mango tree overlooking my village and smiled. Unlike many of my scholastic compatriots, I felt no shame regarding my rural upbringing and, after the intensity of Bangkok, I relished the notion of a neighbourhood not constantly throbbing with noise, traffic and electricity. Had I any intention of staying longer than the summer, I might have thought differently. That in itself was strange, I ruminated, that the one place I always considered home I now saw for what it was – a quaint and antiquated little hamlet that would likely become intolerable within a few months.

  The mango tree above me wilted pregnant over the road, its fruit crowning down, almost within reach. City living had not made me too proud to hop in the mud like a gibbon and soon, I netted my fingers over a plump, ruddy orb and rent the fruit loose of its moorings. My heel slipped in the muck as I landed and I fell backwards, knocking the wind out of myself as I slapped down in the road. My initial panic at how my grandmother would react to my soiled dress brought on a giggling fit – that particular mango tree had brought on more than one lashing from similar circumstances.

  “Are you a bitch, cooling yourself in the mud?” the thick country accent made it impossible for me to tell if the speaker was male or female, and I scrambled to my feet in embarrassment.

  “I fell picking –” but I stopped as I turned and saw the witch scowling at me, her own dress blackened with mud halfway up her spindly legs. A basket hung against the sharp jag of her knees and she looked even more horrible than she had when I was a child, if such a thing were possible. Yet, I was no longer a child and studying medicine, I had of course thought often of this poor, maligned woman whom the village shunned, yet turned to in place of real medical attention. “Hello, ma’am. It’s good to see you, again.”

  “Eh.” She squinted at me then cracked a yellow-toothed leer. “Jorani’s granddaughter.”

  “Yes, ma’am. My name’s Malis,” I said, resolute to make up for –

  “You used to throw rotten mangoes at my house,” she said, warily eyeing the fruit still clenched in my hand. “And worse. You and that Phirun child.”

  “I’m sorry ma’am,” I said. “We were just –”

  “Nasty little things,” she muttered. “You know how he ended up after you left, that boy you ran with? You hear the bad end he came to?”

  My grandmother had answered every letter I wrote and while, over the last few years, I had not found the time to write as often, she had never mentioned anything happening to Phirun in her replies. We had terrorized this lonely old woman, Phirun and I, and gauging by the sadistic glitter in her eye, something dire had happened indeed. Perhaps noticing the worry on my face, she grinned even wider and fumbled in her basket.

  “What’s happened to Phirun?” I said, when I realized she had no intention of volunteering the information. Withdrawing a hand-rolled cigarette and a matchbox, she lit up and blew an ivory cloud in my face.

  “Gone,” she said, her ghastly face obscured behind the smoke. “Met a bad end.”

  “What happened?” I snapped, remembering I was no longer an ill-behaved child to be talked down to.

  “Run off with a Viet,” she took a drag on her cigarette. “Went to Ho Chi and ain’t come back.”

  “That’s it?” I asked, relieved.

  “Bad end, eh?” The witch was clearly disappointed Phirun’s desertion of the village had not disturbed me. “Living with the Viets?”

  “Let me help with your basket,” I said, the mud drying all over my back and legs encouraging me to get on with my penance or abandon it all together.

  “You sound like a Thai,” she grumbled, but handed off her basket, and together, we walked slowly down the road, the emptied taxi soon passing us on its way back out of the jungle. “Why’re you talking like a Thai now?”

  “I’ve been in Thailand,” I looked off into the eye-scalding brightness of the verdant foliage to hide my smile. “I’ve been training to be a doctor and –”

  “Doctor?” the witch took a long drag. “Why’d you leave, then? Think a Thai knows more than me?”

  “No, ma’am,” I said, leaving the road and following her onto the trail leading to her hut beside the landmine-riddled Dead Field. “I just wanted to learn a different kind of medicine.”

  “Different?” she snorted. “Shitty Thai medicine’s different than the real thing, sure enough. That’s where you’ve been? Learning Thai tricks?”

  “Ma’am, setting bones and stitching up cuts aren’t tricks” I said, reminding myself that her racism and hostility were but results of her upbringing, and she probably had dementia besides.

  “Could’ve taught you that and more, had you shown a bit more sense.”

  “As I said, I’m sorry –”

  “Had another skilled set of hands about, could’ve saved your grandfather.”

  “What?” I stopped, allowing the mosquitoes to swarm me and the fronds she had held back to whip my legs. “What about Grandfather?”

  “Was my master what saved him when he lost that arm, but I helped, yes, I did. And had I a helper when we tried to get the demon out, it might’ve worked.” She clucked her tongue. “Get along, then. I’ve got guests waiting.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I followed her, blinking the sweat and tears out of my eyes. Grandmother wrote when he fell ill and said she was taking him to a doctor, and by the time my response received a response of its own, he had passed away. I assumed she had taken him out of the village, to a real clinic instead of –

  “Coated him in chili oil, bound him tight, and kept the coals good, but it was tough, didn’t want to go. Took him with it.”

  “Coals? Chili oil?” I stopped again, but seeing her advance over the twisted roots, I had to continue as well. “A demon? He had a fever, didn’t he?”

  “Burning up,” she nodded, ducking under a plump vine. “So, I got him on the coals, but it still wouldn’t come up. Toughest little demon.”

  I could hardly believe what I was hearing; I knew rural healers like the witch used genuine natural remedies in conjunction with liberal quackery, but this seemed beyond all reason. That my grandmother would allow it surprised me even more, for she was a smart, semi-educated woman. Fevers can be fatal if medicine is not received, of course, but to roast him over coals would be a virtual death sentence to even a healthy man of my grandfather’s age.

  “You witch!” I blurted out. “How dare you!”

  She stopped and turned, her hut jutting out of the jungle over her shoulder. Her narrow eyes and sharp nose appeared stuck halfway between scorn and pity. I noticed the two well-dressed, middle-aged men from the cab standing by the door to her hut, watching us, but did not think anything of it until much later, after my anger and disgust were shed with the quarts of sweat flowing from me.

  “I only work when I’m paid,” she said, snatching the basket from me. “And I’m only paid when folk come here. Me and the Thais got that in common, at least. You come back at dusk and I’ll teach you something they won’t have showed you. He won’t live out the night, to be sure, and looks like they’ve brought what I need.”

  Much as I wanted to slap her or scream at her or e
ven somehow calmly explain to her how what she did was wrong, wrong, wrong, I did what I had always done as a child when the witch told me something horrible – I turned and ran down the trail without looking back, her cackling laugh sending the cuckoos into flight. By the time I entered the village proper, I had calmed somewhat, and then my neighbors took turns swooping me up, and praising my maturity and beauty, and laughing at my bedraggled appearance, and welcomed me home with an embarrassing amount of fanfare. Grandmother saw at a glance that something other than emotion at my homecoming had darkened my countenance. After we had all eaten together in the village centre, she spirited me inside her – our – sweltering stilt-house to have a proper talk.

  “You took him to see the witch,” I said, when she finally ceased her interrogation of my (long and dangerous) trip, my (obviously poor, without her cooking) health, and my (not too trampy) appearance.

  “Now?” she asked, setting her glass of nectar down. “You’ve just got –”

  “Now,” I nodded. “Why didn’t you take him to the clinic? Pho’s still got his jeep; I saw it.”

  “He wouldn’t listen,” she said and I realized with irritation her sorrow had more to do with my reaction than Grandfather’s death. I guiltily tried to rein in my frustration and, unlike the witch, she had the decency to continue without being pestered. “I’d taken him to that clinic a dozen times. When the last fever got him, he said, ‘No, take me to her.’ What could I do? He was dying, Malis.”

  The heat and the sun streaming into the room sapped some of my melancholy and I simply felt exhausted. Grandfather had rolled cigarettes as fat as his thumb, worked shirtless in the jungle, drank mostly rainwater, and essentially lived a life as far removed as possible from what I would come to consider healthy. The only real surprise was that he had lived as long as he had, the weathered old veteran, and after what the Rouge had done to him, being slathered in chili oil probably seemed more an indignity than a torture.