by Andy Cox
The women’s network dissolved within days of the stranger’s death. The mothers attended their mothering, they took care of each other and you, but the towns had no desire for any but the most necessary contact. You stayed together, always, even though you didn’t know exactly why. Rivalries erupted, and love stories, too, though none lasted, until one did.
I decided to finish this chronicle on the day of the little one’s birth. I began putting my notes into order, the order you see here. It was clear that you needed to understand more than you understood, that you were of the age to know what could be known.
Perhaps, though, you knew more than I guessed – more than any of us guessed.
Three days ago, I had written most of this story for you.
Two hours ago I watched you – all of you, mother and father, uncles and aunts – tear the little one to death in the sand of the gravel pit.
I watched you laugh. I watched you.
You heard me behind you. You turned, one by one, to look at me. You stared at me, smiling, your mouths all dripping with blood.
And in that moment I realized one thing: You have your father’s eyes.
***
Matthew Cheney’s work has been published by Nightmare Magazine, Wilde Stories 2014, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Interfictions, and Locus, among other places. He is the former series editor for the Best American Fantasy anthologies, and co-editor of the occasional online magazine The Revelator (http://revelatormagazine.com). He currently lives in New Hampshire, USA.
TTA NOVELLAS
COLD TURKEY by CAROLE JOHNSTONE
All Raym wants to do is give up smoking. So why is his entire life falling apart? Why are new mistakes and old terrors conspiring against him? Why is he being plagued by the very worst spectre from his childhood? And why does giving up suddenly – horrifyingly – feel much, much more like giving in?
“Carole Johnstone’s Cold Turkey is darkly funny, assuredly written, and deliciously creepy. It’s also the best giving up smoking manual I’ve read” — Sarah Pinborough
“From its grisly opening gambit reminding the reader of the dark, phlegmy fate awaiting all who fail to give up the snouts, to its climactic stalking, creeping, flailing, bloody finale, this is what horror should be like – as ghastly as examining the contents of a dying man’s hankie, and a hell of a lot more fun” — Christopher Fowler
“A disturbing, nightmarish yet also darkly humorous take on the perils of addiction, self-deception and lost time; in some ways Cold Turkey is reminiscent of a Stephen King story but Carole Johnstone’s voice is distinctively Scottish, her talent uniquely her own” — Lisa Tuttle
“Cold Turkey is one hell of a read. Johnstone’s prose is consistently lively and engaging throughout, speckled with moments of wonderfully dark comedy. Best of all, though, is the villainous Top Hat, who is brought to life so vividly that his every stretched grin fills the mind’s eye with ease. He’s creepy, frightening and just sheer nasty – a brilliant character, realised impeccably. An excellent novella, and highly recommended” — Dread Central
“Cold Turkey is wise, mischievous and a delight to read” — Joseph D’Lacey
Wraparound cover art by Warwick Fraser-Coombe
http:///warwickfrasercoombe.blogspot.co.uk
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GOAT EYES
DAVID D. LEVINE
You slam the door behind yourself and lean heavily against it, panting hard.
This is your home – your own, familiar apartment – with all your stuff. Your art on the walls, your piles of books, your comfy chair with its quilts and blankets. Your bra hanging on a doorknob. And yet it does not reassure.
Nothing is different. Everything has changed.
A splintering creak sounds from behind you. You turn and see the door has cracked from the force with which you slammed it. A long dark splintered line stretches from bottom to top.
You lock and bolt it anyway, and fasten the chain as well. Not that those shiny, slim links would defend against much of an assault.
Your heart pounds at the very thought. You swallow hard – the acid bile of vomit still burns the back of your throat – and try to breathe deeply through your nose.
The eyes. Those hideous goat eyes, horizontal slits edged in gold and brown.
His eyes were the first impossible thing. How could you have believed that any normal human being could have eyes like that? How could you ever have found them intriguing?
Your survival, you have to admit, was a fluke. For all the self-defense courses you’ve taken, for all the confident attitude you’ve cultivated, your best efforts at self-preservation were nothing more than spit in a hurricane. If your attacker hadn’t been struck by that car…
That was the second impossible thing. Chasing you across the street, he’d been clipped by a white sedan slewing around the corner – a drunken hit and run, the bang of crumpling steel followed by tires squealing on a weaving path into the night, the impact sending your attacker sprawling into the gutter. And yet he’d shaken himself and come charging at you again, hands outstretched, fangs bared, and goat eyes livid with malice.
But the collision had given you a respite from panicked running. You’d taken the moment to grab whatever lay to hand to defend yourself – a gray and splintered fragment of an old fence paling. You were just raising it as he slammed into you.
The broken board had been wedged between you as his weight and the momentum of his charge carried both of you to the sidewalk.
The bright smack of your head impacting the concrete. The gritty slide of the pavement against your back. The hard pain of the broken board against your sternum – and the sickening sensation of the other end, the pointed end, penetrating his flesh.
The expression on his face. Malevolence, pain, anger…surprise.
And then the third impossible thing. The way he’d…dissolved, with a hissing exhalation of breath and a hideous smell of rot and sulfur, leaving nothing behind but a foul and greasy black ash.
You bring your hands up to your face with a sudden jerk, as though to catch them by surprise and find them clean. But the residue of that black powder remains, staining the lines of your palms and the creases of your leather jacket. The elbows, too, bear witness, shredded from that slide across the pavement. The pain in your shoulder blades, your buttocks, the back of your head could be a dream or a delusion, but the jacket…
It happened. It really happened, just that way.
Your stomach seizes again. You roll over on hands and knees and heave and heave, but there’s nothing left. Only a long string of drool emerges to darken the mundane stains beneath the shoe rack.
Eventually the retching and shuddering end. You fall back against the shoes and fallen scarves, wipe your mouth with your wrist – it tastes of blood and ash – and stare blankly at the umbrella stand.
Goat eyes. Fangs. Struck by a car and came back fighting. Dissolved into ash.
Impossible.
But it happened.
***
You call the cops, of course. It’s only forty-five minutes before they show up, a crewcut white man and a muscular black woman, both in blue polyester, belts crowded with cop equipment. They smell of metal. She does most of the talking, for which you are grateful.
It’s not so hard when you start out. The bar, the conversation. He’d seemed nice enough, intelligent and sexy and genteel, dark-blond hair swept back from a high forehead, his strange eyes a conversation piece. “They run in my family,” he’d said. “One of my great-grandmothers was burned as a witch because of them. You don’t think I’m a witch, do you?”
You tense up as you describe how you left the bar together, how
he grabbed you in the parking lot, how his grip on your upper arm was like a steel vise. You show the bruises.
You don’t show the jacket. The jacket is in the dumpster three stories below your balcony. You couldn’t bear to see it, to touch it, to be in the same apartment with it. The scarred and shredded elbows, shoulders, hips. The smell of greasy ash and sulfur. A reminder of impossibility.
You didn’t even empty the pockets before you threw it over the railing.
The cop interprets your hesitation as trauma. And you are traumatized, but that’s not why you hesitate.
“Were you sexually assaulted?” No. “Was the attacker known to you?” No. “Did he have any distinguishing marks?” After a long pause, you shake your head; the one detail that’s indelibly branded on your mind seems too unbelievable to recount. For the same reason you don’t mention the hit-and-run, nor the way the incident ended. Instead, you tell her you managed to slip away somehow.
She seems unconvinced, but doesn’t push. “If you do remember any details, please call.” She leaves her card.
***
The card is still on the table three weeks later.
You do not leave your apartment. You call out for pizza or Thai when you remember to be hungry. Your manager is understanding, sympathetic; she tells you to take all the time you need.
Once you find yourself sitting on the edge of your bed wearing a bra but no panties, one sock on, the other held in your hand. You have no idea how long you have been sitting like that. You don’t even know whether you were getting into bed or out. It’s three in the morning.
Sometimes you hug your pillow and cry and cry and cry.
Sometimes your jaw hurts. You realize you are gritting your teeth nearly all the time.
You let the phone ring. The message indicator blinks constantly. Not now, you think.
***
Sirens in the night jolt you awake. You lie shuddering in bed, listening to them wail, wondering what might be the cause. Eventually the echoing cries fade away, but in the comparative silence that follows your mind still spins. Finally you rise, driven by curiosity and dread.
There is dust on your laptop. You don’t recall ever seeing that before. You blow it off, lift the lid, boot up. White numbers in a red oval indicate over two thousand unread email messages. You ignore them and launch your web browser.
The news is appallingly, refreshingly ordinary. A five-alarm fire near the airport, still burning, must be the cause of the sirens but otherwise does not affect you. The other stories show that little has changed while you’ve been away – only the usual round of weather, sports, and politics.
One small story stands out, though. The mutilated body of a prostitute has been found under a freeway overpass. Police are investigating.
Your eyes flick to the officer’s card that still rests undisturbed on the table beside your computer. But you don’t pick up the phone. Instead, you open a new browser window.
The cursor blinks below the happy colorful search engine logo. You hesitate a long, long time before you type anything.
You type one word, then pause.
You stare at the word on the screen, heart pounding.
Vampires.
This is the first time you have admitted, even to yourself, exactly what it was that attacked you.
You swallow and press Return.
At first your searches return nothing but myths, legends, movies, books, role-playing games. But your attacker was no actor, no wannabe, no role-player. His strength and durability were truly inhuman, his dissolution unnatural.
The sun rises and you are still at your keyboard, a half-eaten cup of instant noodles cold beside it. Soda cans litter the floor.
There are medical conditions that are said to mimic vampirism. They leave the afflicted weak, fragile, sensitive to light. None of these explain what happened to you.
There are mental conditions whose sufferers believe they must avoid the sun and drink blood to survive. A few of these people have become violent. None of them have ever survived a direct hit from a car or dissolved into greasy ash.
There are new-age adherents who claim to require “energy”, and perhaps even blood, from other people; there are those who voluntarily donate to them. Both tend to write long web screeds with terrible formatting and grammar. Though they call themselves “real-life vampires”, you see no indication that they should be taken seriously.
Nothing mentions goat eyes, with the exception of some interminable pages of “slash” describing the imagined sex lives of characters from video games.
Dead end.
The sun shines brightly behind your closed curtains as you huddle under the covers. Though you are exhausted, you do not fall asleep for a long time.
***
When you awake the next day at a little past noon, you feel ready to reconnect with the world. It is as though your everyday life had been waiting for you inside your dusty laptop.
You take out the garbage, put up a load of laundry, call your boss. The two of you agree that you will try coming in on Monday for a half-day. But though your body is moving through the actions of a normal person, your mind still swirls with visions of sneering lips and goat eyes.
There is no new information on the so-called “overpass killer”, but you leave a browser tab open on the story.
Stepping out your front door is more difficult than you had anticipated, but after twenty minutes of standing, sweaty and heart pounding, on the threshold you manage it. The day is overcast but bright, pleasantly chill. Somehow, while you were not looking, it has become autumn.
Nothing attacks you between your front door and the parking lot.
You look under the car and in the back seat. Nothing.
Getting into the car is a familiar series of motions – door, key, mirror, pedals – and as you pull out into traffic you find old instincts returning. By the time you arrive at work you feel practically ordinary.
Your co-workers are glad to see you, but their smiles are provisional, fragile. They discuss only work-related matters and light, pleasant topics. The weather. Sports. You sense them staring uncertainly at your back, but the smiling masks spring into place when you turn to face them. They have been well coached.
You don a smiling mask of your own. You tell them that it was a terrible experience but that you are feeling much better now. You tell yourself the same thing.
A representative from Human Resources comes down from the eighth floor to make sure you are reintegrating well. Her face shows the concern the others hide, but in her case it is the concern that is the mask. Behind that mask are cold eyes that judge your fitness to contribute to the quarterly bottom line.
You sit forward, eager to please, to remain employed, to be a good cog. Here in this conference room with its marker-stained walls and generic art you feel yourself reverting to the person you have been in this place and others like it ever since you graduated from college.
Did it really happen? In this gray, ordinary room it seems impossible.
You accept the HR person’s warm, dry handshake and a folder of papers on mental health resources.
***
The counselor – not a psychiatrist, not a therapist, a counselor – is warm and caring and motherly, a small round person with a knitted shawl and an open, friendly smile. She seems entirely genuine.
You sit in a comfortable chair; herbal tea steams on a low table between you and your new friend. With gentle probing questions she brings out the fear and uncertainty you have been feeling, and though you resist she eventually breaks through your reticence and you admit the impossible thing you believe happened to you. Tears run down your cheeks and dampen your collar. The box of tissues on the table is family size.
She does not mock or question your statements, but it quickly becomes clear that her perspective is that the experience, genuine though it may seem to you, should be interpreted as your mind’s attempt to process a traumatic situation and not as a literal truth. She
wants to help you understand this. She wants to help you because she cares.
And you wonder. When impossible things happen to people in fiction, often the first thing they ask is “am I going mad?” Yet you had never considered this. The experience had been so real, so visceral, that there had never been any question that it had literally, physically happened to you. Even the memory is almost too immediate to contemplate.
But the counselor’s words are soft and logical and reassuring. The human mind is very resilient, she explains. Like an injured muscle that tightens to protect itself, the mind can wrap itself in illusion to avoid considering a horrific truth. But, like a muscle spasm, the mind’s protective impulses can create even worse problems if allowed to continue untreated. The underlying cause must be found, diagnosed, and resolved.
You sniff back tears, swallow, and nod.
You make another appointment for the following week.
***
That night after supper – a rotisserie chicken dinner from the grocery store, the closest you’ve come to home cooking since before the incident – you sigh and decide to tackle your unread email. But first, you have to close out a few open browser tabs.
When you come to the tab with the news search about the Overpass Killer, you learn that another body has been found.
Your throat tightens as you read. The police have little information and no suspects. But as you reach the bottom of the story, your cursor hesitates over the Read More link.
What would your counselor say about your fascination with this story? Are you using the mystery, the horror of it, as a distraction from your own emotional problems?