 
# Fiction Vortex

A Speculative Fiction Typhoon

Special Horror Issue

with Guest Judge Johnny Worthen

October 2014

Volume 2, Issue 9

Edited by Dan Hope & Mike Cluff

Copyright 2014 Fiction Vortex

Cover Image by Niels Christensen

Cover design by Dan Hope

Smashwords Edition

Website: FictionVortex.com

Twitter: @FictionVortex

Facebook: FictionVortex

#  Table of Contents

Letter from the Guest Judge

Short Stories

Dormant — by Grimm Webster (5th Place)

Collection — by Rebecca Ann Jordan (4th Place)

The Things We Carry — by Amanda Crum (3rd Place)

The Friends — by Luke Dykowski (2nd Place)

Other Side of the Tracks — Daniel DeLong (1st Place)

Articles

Johnny Worthen on Dark Fiction and Horror

Book Review: Eleanor, by Johnny Worthen — Review by Mike Cluff

A Moment with Tananarive Due — Interview by Z.M. Quynh

About Fiction Vortex

#  Letter from the Guest Judge

There are two types of fiction meant to induce a physical reaction in the reader: Pornography and Horror. Putting aside the smut, let us play in the shadows, see those things and visit those places that send gooseflesh down our backs, sweat to our palms, and make us switch on more lights in a perfectly bright house.

This year's Fiction Vortex Horror Contest has some of the best short fiction horror I've ever seen. Entries ran the gamut from personal to apocalyptic. Filled with strangeness and terror, madness and fear, these stories are a tour to the dark places of the imagination. Guided by expert writers who build tension upon fear and lure us into places of wonder and fright these stories that do not end at the final word but haunt the reader for days like a dark secret memory.

As this year's Special Guest Judge, I journeyed through the top stories, basing rank on both visceral reaction and technique. Fiction Vortex will be sharing these top stories on the site, one a week, all month so you can get into the spirit of the season. This is October, the in-between time, Samhain, Fall, the season of change and decay, when things are not alive but neither are they wholly dead. This is the season of the witch, make no mistake. Welcome to the fair!

Johnny Worthen

(Back to Table of Contents)

#  Dormant

by Grimm Webster; published October 7, 2014

Fifth Place Winner, 2014 Fiction Vortex Horror Contest

A small hand gripped his shoulder with crushing force, dragging Peter to a halt. The new shoes he wore squeaked in protest on the polished floor of the mall. His heart pumped faster and his breathing quickened. The exit was only a few feet away. He pictured himself tearing out of his captor's death grip and heading for the door and never looking back.

Images of police cars with flashing lights and being led away in handcuffs flooded his mind, all while the shoes squeaked like damned mice.

"Do you like them?"

"Uh ... What?" He was confused by the kindness of the voice. He turned to see, not Mall security but an elderly woman.

"The shoes, dear child. Do you like them?"

"I ... uh ... Yes?"

 "Yes. I thought you might. Now were you planning to buy them, or just trying them out around the store?"

"I wasn't going to steal them."

"No. But you weren't planning to buy them either. Were you?"

Her tone remained kind. And she looked serious but not angry. He noticed that she was holding the box in which he had hidden his old shoes.

"No. I don't have any money."

"How old are you?"

"Sixteen."

"Well. I'll make you a deal then. I own an apartment building down on Fifth Street. If you come by and do some chores for me, I'll pay you. I'll even buy these shoes for you. We can call it an advance. What do you say?"

Ten minutes later, Pete was leaving the store with a new pair of shoes and piece of paper with an address written on it. He had promised to come by the next day to get started, but he had no intention of keeping his end of the bargain. She had already bought the shoes, and while he had her address, she didn't have his.

He reached his foster home to find the door locked. Betty, his foster mother, never missed an opportunity to let him know what a burden he was to her, and if the government hadn't been paying her to take care of him, she would have put him out within the first week.

Aside from that the deal wasn't terrible. She kept him fed, or at least she let him feed himself. And there was always a place to sleep if he could get in, and she never really cared where he went or what he was doing.

He trudged around the side of the house to his bedroom window and slid it open. Locking it wasn't an option when it was his only way in at least two times a week. Hoisting himself up and sliding through, he landed on his bed. Laying there he breathed a sigh of relief. Today had been lucky. In the future he would have to be more careful. As the orange light of a setting sun faded from his window, he drifted off to sleep.

"What the hell is wrong with you?"

The shrill scream cut through his dreams and his eyes flashed open. Above him stood Betty, a short, squat woman, nearly as wide as she was tall, and she was pissed.

"What kind of trash heap do you think you live in? Leaving dirty foot prints on the side of my house. Then I come in here to find you sleeping in the same muddy shoes, making a mess out of everything!"

"You locked me out. Again." He countered. "I had to climb through the window."

She ignored him, "You're lucky the government is paying me to keep you. I can see why your parents left you."

He swung his feet to the floor and stood in one motion. "Don't you ever talk about my parents! You don't know anything about them! If you ever talk about them again..."

"What," She said. "What will you do?"

Everything he wanted to say faded away. He stood there, staring defiantly into her fat little face.

"Get out of my house you little hoodlum. If I see you again today I'll have you sent away."

He stared a moment longer. The anger on her face had turned to smugness as she realized she had won. Shoving past her, he stormed out the door.

Cold and damp morning air chilled him as he inwardly raged. With nowhere to go he simply walked until he exhausted his supply of expletives and hunger began to make itself known. He searched his pants pockets, hoping to find a misplaced dollar, but only came up with a wadded piece of paper and a stick of gum. He unwrapped the gum and stuffed it into his mouth. It was cheap gum that turned to powder as he chewed it. Spitting the disgusting mess out onto the sidewalk, he sat down against a small tree. The crumpled bit of paper still sat in the palm of his hand. He opened it up.

* _S Kirschner. Fifth Street apartments_ *

Maybe she would be good for some lunch out of the deal at least. He stood up, got his bearings, and headed off in the direction of Fifth Street.

The apartment building looked like an old house. He might have missed it if not for the vacancy sign in the front yard. He pushed the button that said Kirschner, and a moment later the door opened. The old woman stood in the doorway, a smile on her face.

"Do come in, child."

She led him to the top of a staircase with a door on either side. She opened the door on the right.

"Who lives next door?" he asked.

She smiled at him, "An old grump who sleeps all the time. This door is mine," she said and then ushered him in.

There were frilly things all over the place. A bowl of candy sat in the middle of the coffee table. His stomach growled when he saw it. She told him to sit and he did, trying his best not to displace the decorative pillows on the couch. He watched as she left the room and his eyes fell on the wall just behind where she had been standing. There was a large, red and gold tapestry, covered in some sort of Asian writing. On either side of the tapestry were various blades, swords, and knives.

"I see you've noticed my collection." She said, coming back with a plate of sandwiches, setting them in front of him. "I thought you might be hungry."

"Yes. Thank you." He tried to be polite, but after the first bite he couldn't help himself. He devoured the whole plate, and didn't look up until he had finished. She appeared to be pleased.

"Why do you have the swords?"

"My late husband, Artie, was an instructor of martial arts. I never liked the things, but Artie was always so proud of them. When he died, this building with the golden tapestry and those blades were all I had left of him. I couldn't bear to take them down."

"How did he die?" He regretted asking as soon as he spoke. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have asked."

"No child. Don't be sorry. Curiosity is a wonderful thing. My Artie died in an accident. Struck by a car that had crossed lanes. They tell me he didn't suffer. I prefer to believe that." She fell silent for a moment before asking. "What about you? What is your story?"

"I don't have a story."

"Everyone has a story. I bet yours is interesting. Why don't you start with what put you in the store yesterday, why you're wearing the same clothes, and why those sandwiches were probably the first thing you've eaten all day."

"I ... I had to leave my house in a hurry this morning. I didn't get a chance to change. Or eat."

"And why did you have to leave in a hurry?"

"I had a fight with my foster mother. She keeps locking me out."

"Foster mother?"

"Yeah. My parents died in a botched carjacking when I was little. I don't have any other family, so I just live in foster homes."

"That's terrible. I'm sorry to hear that." She sat down and placed a hand on his. "What will you do tonight? Will your foster mother let you back into the house?"

"Maybe, but I doubt it. I've had to sleep in the street before; it's not a big deal."

"It most certainly is a big deal." She stood up. "That is child endangerment, I'm sure of it. I should call someone about that."

"No! Please don't."

"Heavens! Why not?"

"I get by just fine. I only have a little over a year until I'm on my own. I don't want to have to start all over somewhere new with people I don't know." She stared at him like she was digging into his soul, but he didn't look away. After a few moments she spoke again.

"I can't let you go without a place to sleep. It would be unconscionable of me. But I understand how you feel. I was young once too." She walked to the door. "Come with me child." She grabbed a set of keys from a hook beside the door and motioned for him to follow.

She led him down the stairs. The door to the left gave a creak when Mrs. Kirschner pushed it open. The apartment smelled old and forgotten. Dust particles danced in the light that poured through the gap in the curtains. A couch and two chairs sat in front of a television centered in the living room. The kitchen was bare, all of the appliances gone. Beyond the living room was a door with a bed visible beyond it.

"This," proclaimed Mrs. Kirschner. "was to be your job today. We need to get this apartment cleaned up and ready to rent. Nothing beyond your skill level I'm sure. Mostly washing and painting. And I'm sure it's suitable enough for a troubled young man to sleep in for a night should he need to."

Pete pulled his eyes away from the apartment and looked at her. "Are you serious?"

"Of course I am. I can't just let you sleep in the street, can I? Of course not. You can call your foster mother if you like and let her know. Then we'll get you some supplies and you can start cleaning."

Pete spent the next five hours scrubbing, mopping, and vacuuming everything in sight. Just off of the bedroom was the bathroom. He saved it for last, mostly because he didn't want to rush into scrubbing a toilet, but also because of the noise inside the wall. Every time he entered the bathroom, a faint scratching and thumping would come from the wall behind the toilet. He had dealt with rats in one of his earlier foster homes, so the noise didn't bother him all that much. On the other hand, he had seen a rat crawl right up out of a toilet before, and that was enough to make him reluctant to clean in there.

Mrs. Kirschner appeared in the doorway.

"Goodness. You've done a great job so far. Are you hungry? I brought you something to eat."

Pete followed her to the living room. On the small coffee table he found a bowl of chicken and dumplings and a glass of tea. It smelled wonderful. All Betty ever made was frozen dinners.

Mrs. Kirschner waited until he had finished before she spoke. "How much have you got left? It doesn't look like much."

"No not much," he wiped at his mouth with a napkin. "I washed all the walls and I can get started painting them tomorrow if you want."

"That sounds good. Though it looks like you haven't cleaned the bathroom yet."

"No. I was just about to start, but I wanted to let you know that you might have rats." The smile dropped from her face, and was replaced with worry.

"Rats? In the wall?"

"Yeah. Just behind the toilet. It's no big deal. I just thought you should know."

"Don't worry about the bathroom for now. I'll call an exterminator." She stood and gathered the empty dishes before walking away.

"I'm not afraid." He said after her. "I can finish it up." She turned quickly to face him.

"No!" Then more softly. "Just forget about it for now. We'll handle it in the morning. Why don't we call it a night?"

"Sure. I'll see you in the morning." She nodded and left.

The air in the apartment was hot and sticky. Pete tried channel surfing for over an hour before giving up and closing the windows and turning the thermostat to the cool setting. Somewhere in the heart of the building, a fan started up, but ten minutes later there was no change in temperature.

Pete scanned the room for a vent, finding one at the top of the wall. He grabbed one of the chairs from beside the couch and dragged it over. He climbed up and held his hand in front of the vent. There was cold air, but it only trickled out and it smelled bad.

Just over the distant fan, Pete could hear Mrs. Kirschner, presumably talking on the phone. She sounded angry. Something must be wrong. He couldn't imagine that tone coming from the lady that had been so kind to him. But then again, he didn't know her that well. He leaned closer to the vent.

"I don't care,'' she said.

"When you said dormant, that's what I expected. What am I supposed to do now?" She waited, and then spoke again.

"No, I can't. There is someone in there."

A pause.

"A boy. He was helping to clean it up."

Another pause.

"Because I wanted to rent it out."

Pause.

"Because you told me the damned thing was dormant."

Pete pushed closer still, his curiosity turning to confusion. What the hell was she talking about? As he listened, the distant fan grew more muffled and the trickle of cool air ebbed away.

Mrs. Kirschner's conversation faded, replaced by a hissing sound. It started quietly, as if from a distance and slowly grew louder. He placed his ear close against the vent. Something hit the vent grate. Pete tumbled back onto the floor, his eyes locked on the vent. It bulged outward. He sat watching in stunned silence. With a shriek of protesting metal the vent gave way and crashed to the floor. Hissing reverberated from the torn opening in the ventilation shaft.

A snout poked out. The nose was pink with long, wiry whiskers coming out of the sides. A tongue slathered out from between sharp teeth the size of pencils and licked the tip of its nose. It hissed in agitation and began struggling harder to free itself.

Pete yelled and leapt to his feet. The thing in the vent paused to sniff and then redoubled its efforts. With a ripping of wood and metal it hit the floor hard enough that Pete felt it through his new shoes. It looked like a rat but was the size of a pig, dripping wet, and stinking of sewage. Pete's mind reeled at the thought of such a thing squeezing itself between the walls and in the vent. He ran.

Another thump sounded behind him as he reached the door and flung it open. A second rat-thing scurried after him. The first one hissed as its mouth opened wide to bite him. He jumped through the doorway and slammed the door behind him, tripping over his own feet and landing on the floor.

The door shook and cracked. He could hear them hissing on the other side. They thumped into the door once, twice, then silence.

Pete waited for a long moment, a thousand thoughts rushing through his head. Had that really just happened? It couldn't have. He must be hallucinating from all the cleaning fumes. Or maybe Mrs. Kirschner had drugged him or something. There was no way that any of it could be real.

He listened for a while. Nothing. Standing up, he inched closer to the door, listening carefully. He put his hand on the knob, but didn't turn it. Instead he rattled it.

The door shook under an impact like a battering ram. He sprang back, unsure of what to do next; surprised the old door still stood. Hissing came from beyond the door and then the sound of scratching and wood tearing. _Oh god_. He thought. _They're chewing through the door_.

It was time to get out. He took a step towards the front door, but before he reached it he thought of Mrs. Kirschner. He couldn't just leave her, she'd been kind to him. He bolted up the stairs, taking them two at a time. At the top he pounded on Mrs. Kirschner's door.

"Mrs. Kirschner. open up! We gotta get out of here!"

Her voice came through the door, "Pete? Is that you?"

"Yeah. It's me! Open up! We gotta go now! There are giant rats in my room! We have to get out of here!"

"I'm sorry Pete." Her voice was sad. "We can't leave. What's done is done. We must see this through."

"What?" Pete said. "You knew?" There was no answer. He could hear the door downstairs splintering apart. He pounded harder, but it seemed that Mrs. Kirschner had abandoned him.

The rats appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Their noses sniffed at the air, whiskers twitching. They came up the stairs in a rush. He kicked Mrs. Kirschner's door. Nothing. "Let me in!" he screamed.

He kicked again. The sounds of their claws on the stairs made him cringe, anticipating a bite at his back or legs. He kicked again and the door burst open. Rushing inside he ignored Mrs. Kirschner's screams of protest as he held the door shut. The broken latch lay splintered on the floor.

"Help me!" he yelled at Mrs. Kirschner, but she seemed dazed.

Scanning the room for anything he could use, his eyes fell once again on the Asian tapestry hanging on the far wall. It wasn't the tapestry that he wanted though: it was one of the blades that hung next to it. The door he held shut bulged as weight hit it. Pete struggled to hold it. He grabbed a desk next to the door and dragged it in front of it. Then he made a dash for the weapons on the wall.

He grabbed the first sword he reached, a short kind of katana with a black blade. In video games it was called a waka-something, but he only cared that it worked. Facing the door, he watched as the things forced it open.

They lumbered in as if sure of their prey, sniffing and hissing to themselves. One of them bared its teeth and hissed at him. It charged. He let out a yell and swung, catching it in the neck as it sprang, stopping it only inches from his face.

Blood sprayed over him. He gagged, staggered back and almost fell as the second rat-thing bit into his calf muscle. Screaming, he stabbed downward, sinking the blade deep into the rat's body. It squealed and thrashed backwards, leaving a bloody trail across the floor until it lay still.

Pete limped over to a chair and fell into it. He lifted his pants leg to inspect the damage to his calf. His leg was covered in blood. The wound didn't look that bad, though he would need to clean it as soon as he could. He leaned back into the chair and breathed deeply. Mrs. Kirschner still sat where she had fallen on the floor in the corner.

"You ... you don't know what you've done. Oh god. They told me it was dormant."

"What are you talking about? I killed them. It's over now."

"Dormant. They told me it was dormant."

The shock must have been too much for her to handle. He let out a sigh and decided to leave her alone. He needed to deal with his leg. Standing up, he hobbled over to the wall and set the sword back in its place.

The tapestry caught his eye. For the first time he looked at it closely. It was a deep red with gold characters and all around the border were painted little golden rats. His eyes followed the trail of rats around the border where they ended with a much bigger rat. A giant compared to the others.

"They told me it was dormant," whispered Mrs. Kirschner from the corner.

The tapestry moved, bulging slightly in the center and then back. Pete frowned. How could a tapestry on a wall move?

In one quick motion he grabbed it and tore it from the wall. Behind it was a hole large enough to fit a Volkswagen. He stumbled back, the tapestry falling from his hands and bunching on the floor. The hissing rumbled so loudly that Pete clapped his hands over his ears. He backed away until he tripped over a chair. Mrs. Kirschner sat in the corner, tears streaming down her face.

"They told me it was dormant."

~~~~~

~~~~~

_Grimm Webster is a freelance writer, language lover, and author of multiple horror and dark fiction stories. He can be found on Facebook and Twitter, or on his Swedish learning blog at_ tillswedish.blogspot.com

(Back to Table of Contents)

#  Collection

by Rebecca Ann Jordan; published October 14, 2014

Fourth Place Winner, 2014 Fiction Vortex Horror Contest

I wish that death were more final.

One year ago, Evangeline's mother, Maya, was beheaded. They sent her body back to be dropped in a river, buried, worshipped, melted, or eaten in the respective traditions of the five villages. As is right and good.

I oversaw the feast preparations myself — Maya was my only daughter, after all, and a man has certain obligations when it comes to selecting just the right spice. Maya had always been a devoutly contrary woman. Cayenne would go well with her.

Jacobi, Evangeline's father, clutched his little girl in his fat cacao arms. He dwarfed her; at six, she was a frail, spindly thing, with a head that was too big for her body, and eyes that were like the pits our hunters dug to catch tigers — yawning. Sharp-edged. Consuming everything that dared to step near. That was the reason I had never really held my granddaughter's gaze. I was afraid of being swallowed.

 As I was saying, Jacobi carried his child with him and stood beside me as a pair of men — one of them, my silent brother Marius — pried open the box the Queen's soldiers had dropped at our doorsteps before fleeing. The lid scraped off and thudded onto the humid ground. It was as I had expected: the body of my daughter, and the severed head just above it, cushioned by Maya's thick black hair, like it was being swallowed into the night. I reached down to close the staring eyes, but Maya blinked, and her thick lips rippled to form words.

"Where is my baby?" she said.

Wait.

You're wondering what Maya did to deserve a beheading.

In this region, there is the winter, spring, summer, fall, and the season _between_. It is the breath that lasts before death but after dying. Shut off the candles. Huddle together, and continue counting heads to be sure no one has gone missing in _between_ times, that the _between_ season hasn't snatched them into the nothing-darkness that weighs down our jungle like sweat and a woolen blanket. Sometimes the season is just a few hours long. Sometimes, in bad years, it lasts a month, and there is utter silence, then, for if you speak in the _between_ you will lose your voice. My brother Marius, before he died, once laughed, thinking the _between_ had turned to winter. He didn't speak again while he lived. It is dangerous to wander in the _between_. Tense and cautious to eat. Idiocy to speak.

And, as you may have guessed, illegal to conceive a child during the _between._

"Where is my baby?" Maya said, and puckered her lips to kiss her darling girl.

Evangeline laughed with chilling glee to see her mother's head looking around for her.

Marius lifted Maya's body out of the box and laid her on the feasting table, allowing three women to prepare her.

"Are you going to ignore me?" Maya demanded, still in the box.

My wife grinned, most of her teeth gone, and cackled, but then, my wife never had been sane. I reached to tuck a stray wisp of soft white hair behind her ear. It seemed the only reasonable thing to do.

Maya glared as Marius picked up her head by the scalp, holding it aloft for the rest of the village to see. "Well? No need to wait on my account. Are you going to feast?" The village continued to stare. "Oh, I'll do it myself." She glanced down at her body, but her hands didn't twitch for the spices and her legs didn't move toward the cauldron.

"Don't strain yourself," Jacobi said, though his voice was a bare whisper. He moved forward to take the head from Marius and tuck it neatly under his free arm. "If it's a feast you want, it's a feast you'll get."

While the rest of my people shuddered into motion, Evangeline clapped her hands and squealed with delight.

"It's alright, baby," Maya said. "Everything will be alright."

Some small part of me thought that we had displeased the Three Goddesses, and that maybe, when we had finished roasting her body, spicing her flesh, and burying the bones, she would be at peace and Maya's eyes would close. But they didn't.

Afterward, as a warm night crept in around us, Jacobi carried his daughter in one arm and his wife's head into the other, Maya cooing to Evangeline all the way to their tent. I don't know what happened in the very late hours of the dark — I imagined Evangeline's nothingness-stare — but I heard, close by, Maya singing a lullaby my wife had sung to her when she'd been young:

Szerelem, szerelem

_átkozott gyötrelem_

Love, love. Wretched suffering.

Behind the tent wall, Evangeline applauded.

We had known her father would be next — the crime second only to the woman's seduction in the _between_ was the willingness of the man to give in to that seduction — but Jacobi refused to flee and leave his daughter. "Don't be a fool," Maya snarled at him that morning as her skull swung from the pendulum of hair. "They'll cut off your head, and then where will our daughter be?"

Jacobi set Maya's jaws to nestle in Evangeline's lap, gave his whisper: "We don't know that they'll kill me. And Evie needs me." The little girl looked up at him where she sat cross-legged on the ground, running a comb through Maya's hair.

"Ow," Maya gasped. "Honey, could you go a bit more gently with that?"

The spindly, big-headed creature that was my granddaughter smiled and whispered something into Maya's ear.

~~~~~

"Am I good enough for your daughter yet, sir?" Jacobi asked me.

Wait. You're wondering what happened to him. If you're smart, you only wondered in one direction.

They came the next morning for Jacobi. He wrapped his enormous cacao arms around Evangeline so tightly I thought I heard the crack of a frail bone. The Queen's soldiers kicked at his knees until he went down, and then prodded his arms with knives until he had to release Evangeline. I think I was the only one who noticed that the soldiers avoided touching the little girl. For copulating in the _between_ , they said, Jacobi would be sentenced to die. One of them began to wonder that wasn't it odd that the criminals' daughter was so old? No, said his commander. It was some demon's work of the _between_ that had obscured the parents from justice for so long.

I held my daughter's head aloft. While the rest of the village watched in solemn quietude, Maya screamed, "Don't take him! It was all my doing! Oh, by all Three Goddesses, take me! Crush my skull! Just don't hurt him!"

_Demon work_ , muttered the soldiers, and they tugged their helmets down over the place between their brows, the house of the inner eye.

They took Jacobi anyway. I found myself surprisingly content with this. He had never been good enough for my daughter.

As is right and good, the box was sent back to us with Jacobi's body inside. We knew it was coming. We had been cooking side dishes and preparing the seasonings all day. Jacobi had been softer-hearted than my shrewish daughter — fresh rosemary would suit his body well. And yet nobody moved forward to open the casket. I finally gave Evangeline a wide berth, crowbar in my hand, and pried the nailed lid off. Jacobi's massive body was cramped in the box.

But his eyes rolled up to stare at me. His lips worked for a moment before Jacobi said, "Am I good enough for your daughter yet, sir?"

I would have said no, except it is disrespectful to speak ill of the dead. Even if you're speaking _to_ the dead in the first place.

Maya and Jacobi were placed at the head of the table while servings were doled out. There was an air of celebration this time — friends of the village, still alive! Would the rest of the villagers live on when they were dead, too? They toasted to Jacobi, especially those who had hunted with him, and made lewd jokes about his lips, and even passed him a bite of meat from Jacobi's own hip. This Maya took eagerly between her teeth. At that moment, Jacobi and Maya looked at each other with such longing that I was glad they no longer had hands to touch with.

I would not bring my child's head with me to my tent, nor the head of the man who had deflowered her, but Evangeline was still whole, and I supposed my wife and I were the only family she had left. When I opened the flap of Evangeline's tent to collect her for the night, having made a small pile of blankets for her to sleep on in my tent, I found her with her parents' heads. She had grasped one in each hand, yanking by the hair, and was pressing their lips together. Maya and Jacobi moaned with soft contentment.

It should have been my first inkling, but my horror drowned out the fact that a spindly young thing like her should not have been able to lift a ten-pound head in her fist, let alone two.

~~~~~

When everyone was dead, it was much louder around camp.

Wait. I'm forgetting some essential part of the narrative. Be patient with me. I'm old and my mind isn't once what it was.

It took longer than I would have thought for the rumors to spread. Perhaps no one in the rest of the five villages believed the soldiers who had first come to take Jacobi away. Perhaps they were afraid to see that it was true. But come people did, eventually. They came to stare at my daughter and her lover, who attempted to engage the strangers in lively conversation. Unsurprisingly, no guests opted to stay overnight.

Then the soldiers came. Demon work, they said. The whole place was cursed, they said, but maybe more of us than just Maya and Jacobi had committed illegal things in the _between_. More likely culprits — the cooks, who silently made our food in that breath before winter, those who had grown bigger, those who had coughed or had a fitful dream in the _between_ — all of these were questioned. My people pointed fingers at each other, terrified of being the next to fall under the axe. The next person they took was Marius, my brother. I will not say that I did not shed tears when they took him, and he looked over his shoulder, lips parted with words that the _between_ had stolen forever from him.

That is, until he was sent back.

"Oh!" he cried, once I pried open the lid. "Brother! How long I've waited to have a real conversation with you." I'd almost forgotten what his voice was like — rich and full-bodied. Honey and whiskey would go well with his roast.

Evangeline rushed to take his head, and cradle it lovingly in her arms. He laughed. "Where are we going, my dear?"

"With the others," she said simply.

This went on until early fall of that year. The bodies in our village dwindled, while Evangeline's collection of heads only grew. Eventually they even took my wife, who cackled until they'd dragged her out of my earshot. This was the first time I remember Evangeline ever embracing me. Her skin was cool to the touch, and yet had an intangible quality, like trying to grasp hold of a snake.

And still they sent the bodies back, heads and all. As is right and good.

Eventually they came for me, the last of the villagers. I was resigned to it. After all, I couldn't leave Evangeline alone. But as it happened, I had retreated into the forest — taking care of natural functions that none of my people had to fulfill any longer — when the soldiers arrived. Evangeline told me this, later. "They don't believe in killing children," she said with a little pout. "But I think they don't know I can take care of myself. They think I'll starve without help. But there are still bodies left, aren't there, Grandfather? Might we eat, now?"

When everyone was dead, it was much louder around camp. At first, I considered this a blessing. I still had my daughter. I still had all my friends, chattering far more frequently to each other than they ever had before. Is it odd to say that their lack of bodies knit our community more tightly together? Evened everyone out. Nobody was taller than the other, and everyone only weighed about ten pounds.

Evangeline took to carrying around Maya's head. "Why are you still on two feet?" Maya said to me one day, the warning scowl coming over her face. "When the rest of us can't move around at all. Do you have any idea how privileged you are, picking us up and putting us down?" I didn't mention that actually, Evangeline did most of that, arranging the heads like settings at a death-feast to create the highest possible output of harmony among the guests. "To have two hands again. I'd give anything."

"Honey," said Jacob, "It isn't his fault that we had the misfortune to have our heads severed. This is our doing, anyway." I respected him a little bit more for that. It had been their doing, but young lust was hardly to blame, no matter how foolish.

"Don't defend him," Maya snarled, curling her lip even farther than she'd been able to in life — a result of the cayenne, I suspected. "What gives him the right to walk all arrogant while the rest of us are at the mercy of my baby girl? No offense, darling."

"Mama," Evangeline said, dragging her by the hair up so their eyes were level. "You said yourself someone had to take care of me. Grandpa's doing a good job."

I was smart enough, by then, not to feel warmed by the compliment. I had begun to feel a persistent headache coming on beneath my forehead.

There was no place to put them — their own tents were out of the question, as they couldn't get in or out themselves and if they had a problem they would simply scream until I came to pick them up. That was when Evangeline said, "We should build a shelf. A big shelf, with squares, and we can put each head in a square, and even write their names on labels, so we'll never forget who was who."

Though I was inwardly horrified at the thought, it _was_ a good solution. I'm not bitter. I recognize talent when I see it, and Evangeline certainly had it. So the two of us left in the village began to collect and polish the wood. Evangeline herself had a large hand in the specifications, furrowing her brow in such concentrated childhood that she looked years older. And still not quite human. Her body was growing, but long and spindly, hardly able to manage itself, like a newborn deer.

As I was hammering the boards into place, Evangeline picked up Marius' head to place it experimentally on his shelf. He was bald, and so she had made a hat out of his own clothes to sit lopsidedly atop his scalp. "What is this?" he asked with good-natured curiosity.

"A shelf," Maya said with a roll of her eyes, a shelf below his. "What does it look like, Uncle?"

"No matter, no matter. Just curious. Are we going to make tea together again, Evie?"

The little girl grinned. "That would be just lovely in every way."

On the shelf above Marius, my wife winked at me and flashed a mouth of missing teeth and howled with laughter. Her placement reminded me of some kind of twisted family tree bearing odd fruit.

The shelf was done just before the end of fall. Evangeline arranged the heads and began to mark labels near each one. I helped her reach the higher rows. Everyone chatted eagerly, settling into their preferred spots. Some arguments about ideal shelf-space were quickly remedied by exchanging cubbies. By the time it was done, the shelf was completely full. I was impressed with Evangeline's perfect forecasting in that regard.

No, that isn't right. I remembered there was one unoccupied cubby near the top.

~~~~~

I'm still not sure where Evangeline got the axe from.

Wait. Let me start over.

When the _between_ came that year, I bundled Evangeline into my arms and we retreated to my tent. I told her to keep quiet. If she was hungry, she must reach as slowly as possible for the food and eat without smacking her lips against her gums. If she was restless, she must breathe in and out, slowly, and not make any sudden movements, and not jump up and run out to see how our shelf of villagers was faring. If she heard screams, she must not be afraid, but must stay put.

The twilight came.

It bleached all the color from the open tent and the land around us. The trees were gray. The sky was some shade of white. My skin was black. I would say that Evangeline's skin was black, too, but that does not even come close to the color. It was a purple so deep it wasn't purple. It swallowed all light.

Very slowly, I pressed my finger to my lips. I had survived many _betweens_ before. This one was no different. An unseen beast howled outside, a hurricane tore at the trees, and yet nothing touched our skins, not even, it seemed, the air. We remained in that nothing-place, surrounded by the thrashing death throes of the season. Presently I became aware of Evangeline staring at me intently.

For perhaps the first time in her young life, I met her gaze. I felt nothing in that time. All of my fears, my trepidations for the future, my sweet and bitter memories—everything fell away, left with an emptiness so refreshing that I thought, for half a moment, I would very willingly do whatever Evangeline told me to do, like a prodded cow pushed to more fertile land. There is comfort in having your fate decided by another.

I'm still not sure where Evangeline got the axe from. It was in her hand before I remember her reaching for it. She must have moved quickly to grab it, yet I thought I would have noticed and chastised her if she had.

"What are you doing?" I said, alarmed, before I could stop myself.

Her teeth flashed with glee. "Mama was right," she said, and her voice rang clearly through the noise. No, it _was_ the noise. There were monsoons in her throat and hail in her fists and tornadoes in her hair. "It isn't fair." She moved too quickly for me to see. Her cool nothing-skin traced the folds of my deep wrinkles. Hairs rose all over my body. Her fingers trailed down to the age-waddle of my throat. "My collection is almost done."

I don't remember pain. Isn't that odd? I remember suddenly being sideways on the ground, unable to move, blinking as my granddaughter used my thin shirt to clean my blood from her axe. "There we go," she said, and picked my head up, and kissed my forehead, just above my persistent headache. "You are my revered grandfather. Your place is at the head of our village."

She tucked me gently under her arm, climbed up the shelf I had built and placed me lovingly into the empty cubby in the top row. The _between_ ended abruptly as it had begun, leaving the world perhaps a little rumpled but no less bright than it had been before the silent storm. As is right and good. "My girl," Maya cooed. "My brilliant baby girl." Evangeline began to sing: _Szerelem, szerelem_ , and stroked a comb lovingly through her mother's hair.

~~~~~

~~~~~

_Rebecca Ann Jordan is a speculative fiction author and artist. She has published poetry and fiction in Infinite Science Fiction One, Fiction Vortex, FLAPPERHOUSE, Strangelet, Swamp Biscuits & Tea, Yemassee Journal and more. Becca regularly columns for DIYMFA.com, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing from California Institute of the Arts. See more of her work at_ rebeccaannjordan.com _._

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#  The Things We Carry

by Amanda Crum; published October 21, 2014

Third Place Winner, 2014 Fiction Vortex Horror Contest

When the storm rolled through, Jason Krauss was still sitting in the ambulance, safe and dry. The bubble lights threw strobes of red and white across the passing landscape, illuminating the pines in brief flashes. Their shadows were still too deep for the lights to puncture, and so all he got was a momentary glimpse of branches before the night stole them away again.

He was out with Bobby tonight, his least favorite coworker. Brenda was his usual partner but she was out with the flu. Brenda was a nice older lady. She never made Jason uncomfortable, unlike Bobby, who told the most disgusting jokes about having sex with dead bodies. It was disrespectful, Jason felt, and unprofessional. He hadn't gone to school for as long as he did and gone into debt to pay for it just to listen to an ignorant ass make off-color jokes about the dead. And they weren't even funny. Somehow that was just as insulting. Jason had a great sense of humor and it really pissed him off when people thought they were funny but weren't. Also — and Jason tried really hard to overlook this fact, since it was unkind to think such things — Bobby was really overweight and had body odor. Sometimes, when they were working closely together, Jason had to hold his breath to keep from gagging.

 The ambulance headlights cut through the darkness, leading them away from town and into more dangerous territory. Here the roads were so curvy that Bobby, who was driving, had to come to an almost complete stop to take the turns. Jason hated to think of the county fire engine trundling through here, taking hairpin curves with its bulk swaying back and forth on the narrow blacktop, but it had done just that only ten minutes earlier. The fire department was always first to respond to car accidents; Jason and his fellow EMT's mostly picked up the bodies. Knowing what was waiting for them made the night suddenly cold and Jason turned up the heat on the dash.

One would have thought he would be used to the deaths by now. In six months he'd seen his fair share already. Plymouth, Tennessee was by no means a big city — or even a large town — but the winding roads of the countryside claimed their share of the population at all times of the year. Jason had lived there his entire life and was familiar enough with every square inch of the land to know where to take it easy on four wheels, and assumed everyone else did, too. But it was almost as if the roads themselves changed, bending their curves ever so slightly so as to throw off the drivers.

But death wasn't something a person could ever really get used to, Jason thought. And maybe it wasn't supposed to be. Maybe once you stopped being affected by it, you started to lose a little of your humanity.

Wind buffeted the ambulance, rocking it slightly as they took one last curve before the accident site. Jason could see the action up ahead. The reflective yellow coats the firefighters wore were blurred in the heavy rain, making it appear as though they were moving much more quickly than they actually were.

There was no need to move quickly. The driver of the little red Toyota Camry sitting on the side of the road could not have survived. It looked...squashed, somehow, as though a giant hand had come down upon the roof and caved it in like a cheap toy.

"Bad one," Bobby murmured, bringing the ambulance to a stop several feet from the fire truck in order to give it space to maneuver.

"They're all bad," Jason said curtly. He flipped up the hood of his rain gear and jumped down from the cab, splashing cold rain water onto the cuffs of his pants.

"Lost control coming around that last curve there," Joshua Higgins, the Sheriff Deputy, said as Jason approached. He could see the Sheriff's car now, on the other side of Engine 1. The strobe lights from all three vehicles merged at a particular point in the trees on the side of the road, creating a starburst of red and blue. "Car flipped over about three times, from the looks of the marks on the road. Happened before the rain even started. She must be an out-of-towner. Plates are from Libertyville."

As if that accounted for anything, Jason thought but didn't say.

"Just one victim?" he asked gravely. He could see Bobby in his peripheral, chuckling with one of the fire jockeys. It was always this way when they worked together. Jason did the talking, Bobby did the lifting. An unspoken agreement.

"Just the one. She's over there."

He pointed vaguely into the pines on their right, where Jason could just make out the county coroner, Lucinda Grey, kneeling over a prone body. The rain pelted down, spattering off the shoulders of his coat and stinging his eyes like sweat.

"Wasn't wearing a seatbelt," Josh said. "Damn shame. She might've made it."

Ignoring him, Jason made his way over to Lucinda. She had set up an umbrella, staked to the ground so as to keep the body relatively dry and contamination-free.

"Evening," she said without looking up. Jason watched as she carefully examined the victim's hands before making a note on her legal pad.

"Hello, Lucinda."

Lucinda was pretty in a severe way, Jason thought. Her hair was always pulled tightly back on top of her head and he had never seen her wear any makeup other than a slash of pale lipstick every once in a while. But her eyes were large and pale blue and her skin was the color of milk. He liked that she looked severe. It made her seem more professional. Once he'd asked her to be his date to the company Christmas party and she had looked at him so strangely that he'd gone home later and sat in the dark for a while. Sometimes rejection was easier to take than confusion.

"D.O.A.?" he asked.

"Yes. She hit that tree there in one of the revolutions and was thrown through the windshield. Massive head trauma would be my guess, but of course I can't be sure until I conduct the autopsy."

Jason turned to look at the tree. It seemed innocent enough, standing alone on the side of the road away from the cluster of pines. But knowing what it had been responsible for, Jason couldn't look at it the same way ever again. His mind was funny like that. He had responded to many car accidents on this road — a particularly bad stretch — and he remembered all of them when he was driving his own car and happened to pass a site.

A plastic sheet covered the girl, protecting her from the rain, and added a certain amount of respect. The only part of her Jason could see was her forearm and hand, which Lucinda was still holding. It was placed palm-up. He could see that she had been a nail-biter. Nasty habit.

Something about that hand reminded him of someone else, and it took him a moment to figure out who it was.

"Say, isn't this near the spot where we found that college student a few months ago? The girl who was hitchhiking?"

Lucinda glanced around briefly. "Yes, I think so."

He contemplated the trees for a moment, the slickness of the road, the clouds which obscured the moon. Bobby had gone with one of the firefighters to set up reflective cones on the road, although it was probably unnecessary. For as many accidents as it had seen, it wasn't a very busy thruway at night.

"So many lives lost," he said softly.

"Sorry?" Lucinda asked. She was still scribbling in her notebook and sounded impatient.

"Nothing," Jason said. "I'll leave you to it."

"It's okay, I'm done," she sighed, standing up with a groan. "I need to start bringing a folding chair with me. My back can't take all this kneeling and stooping."

Jason frowned at that visual. "You wouldn't really do that, would you?"

"Jeez, I was joking," she snapped, flipping her legal pad closed and stalking off. He watched her return to her truck, where the Sheriff was waiting for her. They spoke briefly and he saw Josh crane his neck to look at him around Lucinda. They were talking about him, then. He felt his cheeks burn.

Suddenly he wanted to be at home, in the shower. Sometimes he showered in the dark. It was comforting.

After a moment, Bobby came back and they loaded the dead girl into the back of the wagon.

~~~~~

A strange thing happened after Jason and Bobby dropped her off at the morgue.

They were almost to the parking lot of the hospital, ready to end their shift and turn in their keys, when Bobby suddenly noticed something on the floorboard. It was pushed into the shadows on the passenger side, almost invisible until his foot brushed it.

"Crap!" he cried. Jason, who had been daydreaming about relaxing in his favorite chair and watching a horror movie, started and turned to him in alarm.

"What?"

"That girl's purse! Lucinda put it in here and I forgot to put it with the body."

Jason rolled his eyes. "How did you sign her in without I.D.?"

"Her driver's license was in a little change purse on her key ring. I totally forgot about this. Dammit! Pull in here and I'll take it back. You can go on home."

And Jason, who felt a strong dislike for Bobby, did a most unusual thing. He did it without thinking. The words just popped right out of his mouth.

"I'll take it back."

Bobby looked at him curiously. "You don't have to do that, man, it was my bad."

"Yeah, and you'll owe me one. Go on, you know if you get overtime again Curtis will pissed."

Bobby considered this. "Yeah, he will. Alright, if you're sure..."

Jason pulled into the parking lot and left the engine running. "I'm sure. See you tomorrow."

"Off tomorrow. Won't be back 'til Wednesday."

"Wednesday, then."

He watched as Bobby jumped down from the cab and ran in the rain to the sliding doors of the Emergency Room, and even then he didn't know why he had volunteered to do a favor for one of his least favorite people in the world.

But when he looked down at the purse, he remembered.

~~~~~

At home, he sat freshly showered at his kitchen table. The horror movie was forgotten.

The purse sat in front of him, a cavern of secrets to be told and held.

His palms were slick and his heart a crazy jackrabbit in his chest. What he was about to do was highly unethical and unprofessional. He knew this in the back of his brain, but something had awakened in him at the thought of going through the dead girl's things. Part of it was voyeurism, part of it was curiosity, and part of it was the thrill of doing something so wrong that he himself would shun another for doing the same thing.

But it couldn't be helped.

He took a deep breath and opened the purse.

It was black leather, with lots of chains and zippers. He looked inside for a moment first without touching anything, and then decided he would need to dump everything out to examine it all. He tipped it up and a jumble of papers, coins, makeup, pens, and various detritus tumbled out onto the polished surface of his dining table.

He took his time, sorting everything into piles: paper, writing instruments, and a small black address book went into one pile. Gum and candy went into another. Makeup and Chapstick went into a third. Soon he had seven small piles arranged before him, and he began with the one closest to him.

Her name was Kristin Haverty. She had twenty-seven checks in a plastic checkbook adorned with butterflies. Behind the checks were photos in plastic sleeves: two were of a young blonde girl, one was of a German Shepard, and two were of Kristin herself. Jason recognized her easily enough, even though her face had taken a lot of damage in the accident. These last two photos showed her on the beach with a man. They looked sunburned but happy.

She had been pretty, much prettier than Lucinda Grey. Her eyes were dark but she had blonde hair, an interesting combination. She had a nice smile.

He laid the checkbook aside and read through every scrap of paper. Some were receipts; she had gone shopping at the mall the day before. There was a wadded-up piece of foil that appeared to have held chocolate at one point. There were Post-It notes, filled with cryptic sentences.

_D. M. Tuesday. Check? Reports?_ read one.

The makeup was simple; one tube of red lipstick and a compact filled with pale powder. She'd had fair skin. There was also a tube of Wintergreen Chapstick, which Jason pocketed on impulse. It had been mostly used up, but he didn't want to use it. The little tube of wax was so personal to her. He didn't want to throw it out.

He sat for two hours, looking through Kristin's belongings and reading her handwriting. For a little while, he felt as though he'd known her. It was a nice feeling. He burned the purse and all of Kristin's belongings — except for the Chapstick — in the fireplace and then went to bed. He slept soundly and without anxiety for the first time in months.

~~~~~

Over the next two weeks, Jason was called to three more fatal car accidents. A stroke of luck ensured he didn't have to work with Bobby again. Bobby had taken ill with the flu, presumably caught from Brenda. Jason was glad for the break. Bobby was a talker and he didn't want the issue of the purse to come up again.

One of the accidents — the first — involved a man and his elderly mother. The old lady survived, but her son wasn't so lucky. Jason wasn't interested in his belongings. He went home that night disappointed and the old anxiety crept back in as he lay awake in bed, looking up at the ceiling.

Four days later, a woman in her thirties tried to outrun an oncoming train and was killed instantly when it slammed into the driver's side of her BMW. Jason snuck her purse out of the morgue's Personal Affects locker and took it home, where he took three hours to go through its contents. His heart shook with anticipation as he picked up each item, running his fingers over them as if he could discover secrets they held.

Angela Harvey's purse was much like Kristin's: paper, makeup, a checkbook and wallet. Mints instead of gum. But while putting everything back inside, Jason discovered a small zippered compartment. With shaky hands, he opened it to find a black velvet jewelry box. Inside was a silver heart-shaped locket.

It was old and the hinges were rusted, so he was unable to open it. He didn't care. He held it up to his nose and smelled the ghost of her perfume, something sweet and citrusy. It was too strong for his taste, but not terrible. This would be the thing he kept, he decided, and burned the rest. He slept with the necklace on, beneath his shirt, resting against his bare skin.

~~~~~

The next day he was assigned to work with Bobby again. He drove them to Arby's for lunch and they sat in the cab of the ambulance, eating to the sounds of classic rock.

"County Coroner's office called Curtis today," Bobby said suddenly, watching two young girls in short skirts walk by.

Jason swallowed his bite of roast beef with difficulty. "Oh yeah?"

"Said someone stole a victim's purse out of the lockers at the morgue. Who would do such a thing, ya think?"

"Who knows?" Jason said, frowning. "There's some sick people out there."

"Yeah, no !@#$%^&*. Speaking of which, did you get an eyeful of that Harvey chick's !@#$%^&*? She must have made some lucky man pretty happy."

Jason glared at him and started the engine, ignoring his comment. Bobby giggled and tossed his trash out the window.

"Don't be so serious, man," Bobby said, still chewing the last of his sandwich. "It's okay to have a sense of humor. Hell, in our line of work it's a must."

"When I find anything you say funny, I'll let you know."

~~~~~

One week later, Jason was starting to get antsy. He hadn't slept more than three hours a night since Angela and his anxiety was at an all-time high. On his days off he found himself taking three or four showers, all of them in the dark. He'd even taken to wearing Angela's necklace beneath his shirt at all times, but nothing helped. He went for long drives at night along the back roads, the ones that were so dangerous and which kept him earning a paycheck, and thought about all the people whose lives had been claimed in their cars. He wondered briefly if he would have to stoop to causing an accident just to get a good night's sleep, but quickly pushed the thought away. He wouldn't do that.

Then on Saturday, a three-car pileup on the interstate saved him. Eight people were involved, two of which died on impact, another at the hospital.

The two on-site victims were Jennifer Groves and Ashley Mackenzie. College students. Ashley had a purse with her, but Jennifer had a purse _and a backpack_. Jason could barely concentrate as he and his coworkers did their jobs, tending to the wounded as quickly as they could. His eyes kept straying to the car that held Jennifer and Ashley, his fingers itching to get hold of their belongings. Bobby noticed how distracted Jason was and nudged him as they were bandaging one of the other drivers.

"You okay, man?"

"I'm fine," Jason said, edging away from him.

"You look a little pale. Could be you're coming down with that flu that's been going around. If you need to take a break, I've got this—"

"I said I'm fine," Jason said through his teeth.

He could feel Bobby looking at him, could see it from his periphery. Suddenly he was sure that Bobby knew. He wasn't the smartest person in the world, but he had somehow figured out that it was Jason who had taken the purse. He had figured it out and he could see, in the way Jason's eyes were darting back to the car with the dead girls that he meant to do it again.

"I think I will take a break," he said after a moment. He walked toward the side of the highway, where there was a grassy area. He felt Bobby's eyes on his back the entire way.

~~~~~

Six hours later, Jason was back in the relative comfort of his apartment.

He hadn't been able to stop himself from taking the purses and Jennifer's backpack, despite his concern that Bobby knew what was going on. The thought of a good night's sleep — and of what he might find — was too good to resist.

He placed the purses in their own space on the kitchen table and chose one at random to go through first. It was bright yellow and shiny, like plastic. A look inside the wallet told him it was Ashley's. She'd been a deeply tanned girl, so tan she was almost orange, and her hair was dyed black. Not Jason's typical style, but still, she was good looking beneath it all: pretty green eyes, nice mouth, a lovely body.

But the inside of her purse yielded nothing particularly interesting. It was the same as he'd found before: receipts, scraps of paper, change and a bit of paper money, makeup (although she did have more makeup than the others, almost a whole bag full), gum. Nothing personal at all, nothing as good as Angela's necklace.

He wondered — for the first time — why he was doing this. For the thrill, yes. He understood that part of it. Because he liked to snoop? Was that why he was risking his job and his reputation? His career? Certainly he would never work as an EMT in this town again if he was found out.

He was lonely. So, so lonely. He hadn't been on a date in over a year, and the last one hadn't gone well. Girls didn't seem to get him. His sense of humor was too broad, he supposed. Or perhaps his intelligence put them off. Also, he loved horror movies and most girls weren't into those.

"What are you looking for?" he whispered.

But he thought he knew the answer to that. His hand found the strap of Jennifer's purse and he dumped it unceremoniously on the table, among the mess of Ashley's bag. He had come too far to stop now.

Jennifer's was much the same as the others. There was no makeup, but otherwise it could have belonged to any of them.

He let out a bellow of rage and slung the purses across the room.

They were all the same. He had done this for nothing. He thought of Lucinda and her steely gaze, her too-tight bun, her cutting words. She was a grade-A !@#$%^&*, he thought disgustedly. She'd get hers. And Bobby, that fat nosy pig. He might have something coming to him, too.

~~~~~

Bobby climbed the steps to Jason's apartment holding a brown paper bag. He whistled as he climbed the first flight, glad to be off work for the next 24 hours, then took a deep breath as he began the second flight. He was really getting out of shape, and that flu hadn't helped matters. He still felt like he was breathing through cheesecloth when he laid down at night. He was sure Jason was coming down with it; the poor guy had been positively white on their last run. They might have had their differences, but Jason had done him a favor and covered his ass after he screwed up, so he figured the least he could do was bring him some chicken noodle soup and a six-pack.

He began the last flight of steps, clutching the bag tighter.

~~~~~

Jason had just started the fire when someone pounded on his door.

He straightened up so fast his spine cracked audibly and looked at the door, eyes wild, hair standing up in spikes from where he'd run his hands through it in frustration.

"Jason? It's Bobby."

_!@#$%^ &*! _That nosy prick had decided to call him out. He would confront Jason with what he knew and threaten to turn him in. No, he would blackmail him probably. The smelly bastard.

"You in there, man?" Bobby called. His voice was muffled through the thick door.

"I'm in here," Jason whispered. He picked up the heavy, iron fireplace poker.

"I know what's been making you act weird lately," Bobby said. "Let me in."

Jason put his hand on the doorknob, felt how slick his palm was with sweat, and wiped his hand on his shirt before returning it to the brass knob. He wrapped his hand tighter around the poker and flung open the door.

"Hey man," Bobby said. "There you are. Wow, you look like !@#$%^&*. I bet you are coming down w—"

He trailed off as he got a view of the apartment over Jason's shoulder, where there were two familiar bags lying on the carpet amidst a litter of paper.

"Hey," he said. "What's that?"

He stepped over the threshold and Jason struck.

~~~~~

One hour later, Jason sat on his living room floor, looking confusedly around him. There were things that did not belong: purses, blood, a fireplace poker matted with hair and bits of brain. He vaguely remembered where they had come from, but he didn't want to think about that. There was something in the bathtub which would require his attention later, and he didn't want to think about that, either.

Something caught his eye. Something bright pink, beneath the kitchen table.

He had forgotten all about Jennifer's backpack. He crawled over to it and unzipped it carefully, reverently. Perhaps it held the things he had been missing. Fragile things.

He took out everything carefully and laid each item on the carpet, taking in every detail. Here was a well-worn and much loved copy of _The Catcher In The Rye_ , Jason's favorite book. An anatomy textbook. _She had been smart._ Various pens and pencils, some for sketching. _Artistically inclined_. He liked that. Folders containing her homework, notebooks containing her notes. And in the large front pocket, a small tube of deodorant and a travel-size bottle of perfume. He lifted the cap and inhaled its scent — light and flowery. Perfect. There was also a small leather-bound book.

A journal.

He sat with the book in his hands for perhaps five minutes, simply staring at the cover. Here was the most personal thing he'd found thus far, and it belonged to a girl who seemed to be the one from his dreams. The one he'd never been lucky enough to find on his own.

Finally, he opened the cover. The first page was covered in doodles. Hearts, stars, little moons, a funny man with a mustache. And there, on the inside, was a ticket stub for a midnight movie at the multiplex over on Glendale.

Friday the 13th.

He stood up in one smooth movement, tucking the journal inside his shirt as he did so. He would have to read it at length later.

Right now, he needed to get to the morgue.

~~~~~

~~~~~

Amanda Crum is a writer and artist from Kentucky. She has a love of horror and things that haunt the senses and has been published in Bay Laurel, Dark Eclipse, and SQ Magazine. She currently lives in a small town with her husband, two kids, and their husky, Danzig.

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#  The Friends

by Luke Dykowski; published October 28, 2014

Second Place Winner, 2014 Fiction Vortex Horror Contest

Conner Nilsen did not leave his property often. At least — not anymore. But that didn't matter. Even though he lived on Haskell Lake, twenty-four miles from the nearest town, Rockville, and had to go in often to buy bread and milk and toilet paper and fishing lures, it didn't matter. Not since he had met his new friends.

It had been a week now — no, two weeks. Or was it a week? Who knew? Not Conner. A month?

It didn't matter anymore.

He had found the fungus ... three days before he met his friends? It was hard to tell.

 The stuff had been growing, just a small patch of it, no larger than his thumb, on the edge of the television set. Right next to the screen.

He noticed because the TV was turned on. It had been broken for eight years. Now it was on.

Well, not really on. There was just static, a lot of static, and faintly, very faintly, a shape. Who knew what. Who cared.

The static was quite quiet — in fact, he barely heard it. It was like the fungus — too small to really notice it. But day by day, the static grew louder. He could not turn off the TV, or adjust the volume. The shape behind the static grew clearer. Now it looked like a silhouette. Of what, he couldn't tell. As the sound of the static and the figure's clarity grew, so did the fungus.

Now, the reddish fuzz blanketed every wall of his modest cabin and every surface within it. Except for the TV screen. But who cared? Not Conner. And not his friends.

The friend's didn't care at all. On the third day after the fungus started, they began to talk to Conner from behind that grey, rippling veil.

And, Oh! How they loved to talk!

They would babble on, in voices, voices, so many voices for hours and hours! And oh how Conner loved to listen to them. He had been lonely in the cabin — just him, an old man, and Haskell Lake — all alone in the north woods. But now! Now was different. He loved his friends, so, so dearly. He loved to hear them talk in their strange and terrible voices, speaking without real words of worlds cold and lonely, nestled in the harsh glare of a million foreign stars. At first, he had been afraid of those voices. They came from the TV, yes — that he knew — but they were not in the TV. He heard them in his head, but they were not in his head. They were somewhere else.

At first he had tried to run, tried to break the TV when he heard his friends (before he knew they were indeed his friends). But he could not smash it in, he could not shatter that static veil over the dead TV screen. He tried, but he couldn't. They wouldn't let him.

Conner had tried to leave, but his truck would not start. He had gas, and the old Ford had been repaired a month ago. Every appliance in the vehicle was dead — save the radio. The radio had been broken longer than the TV — he had spilled coffee on it. But the voices came out of the radio, still drifting through the static, telling him to stay, stay, stay...

So he stayed. What choice did he have? Maybe they would go away.

But of course, they didn't, and he grew to love those sighing voices and their chilling laughter that would echo through the silent house in the odd hours of the night. He grew to love his friends.

That's why he had built the pyramid for them. His friends had threatened a whole assortment of unpleasant things — and he had seen these terrors on his eyelids when he went to sleep — but there was no need to threaten. He loved his friends. He would do anything for them. The request for the pyramid — or whatever it was — had come ... how long ago? Conner couldn't say. He knew it was the same day his tooth had fallen out — a perfectly healthy tooth — and in its place he had felt the fungus that now enveloped the living room like a plush crimson carpet. The stuff was in its mouth. But the friends told him not to worry, hush hush, not to worry, and then they had told him about the pyramid. He had been so wrapped up in pleasing his friends with the thing that he barely noticed when his hair — thick, despite his age — began to fall away too.

In its place grew the fungus.

Conner Nilsen had worked for days and nights he could not remember — everything was a blur of activity, and, ever louder, the static and the voices of his friends. Now the pyramid was done. It sat in the front yard, by the Lake - eight feet long and wide, and eight feet high. He had cobbled it together from God knew what — his friends had told him what to use. Yes to the lawn mower deck, no to the picture frame, yes to the boat hull, and so on and so forth, yes to this and no to that, seemingly without rhyme or reason. But Conner didn't worry. His friends knew what they were doing.

At the pointed top of the pyramid was an empty slot — about a foot wide and deep. Countless wires from varying appliances — the phone, the toaster, the copper strands inside his heating blanket, and who knew what else — snaked into, from, and around the slot. What would fill it, Conner did not know. His friends would tell him when they were ready to come for a visit. This they had told him. How badly he wanted to meet them. "How long must I wait?" he asked.

Not much longer, they told him. Hush hush, not much longer.

Meanwhile, the fungus grew inside the car to, covering the seats and the roof and the windshield in a thick swathe of crimson. Everything except the broken radio, which had been stripped of its remaining wires and electricals completely for the pyramid and was now little more than a plastic shell with a dial. Inside that radio, the voices continued their babble, louder than ever before.

Today, at last, was the day. It was time to fill the socket and complete the pyramid. His friends told him from the TV. By now, the sound of the static had reached an unbearable volume, but to Conner, it was the loveliest sound he had ever heard. It was the sound of his friends.

In addition to that, the figure behind the static had grown clearer. It was closer now, much closer, and he could see that it was humanoid, but by no stretch of the imagination was it human.

It was, however, his friends. Or at least one of them. This he knew.

The friends told him, in their awful, beautiful voices, to take the truck and go into town.

But, he told them, the truck would not work, so he could not go into town, and would have to walk.

Too slow! Too slow! The voices screamed.

A bolt of pain shot through his head, and he felt the fungus in his mouth throb as the stuff on his head tightened against his skull. Never had his friends hurt him before, and he almost cried out in pain and alarm. Then the pain was gone.

Foolish foolish, his friends shrieked with impatience. The truck will start. Now go!

Obediently, lovingly, Conner went out to the truck. He had removed most of the engine block for the pyramid, but, regardless, the truck was running. He had to heave the fungus off the windshield with a snow scraper in order to see the road. Hurry, hurry! His friends urged. There is no time to waste. Hurry!

On the way to town, Conner asked his friends why they had hurt him.

Hush hush, they soothed through the mangled radio. We didn't mean to, we love you. We are eager, very eager to visit you.

When will you come?

Soon, soon.

The friends told Conner what he needed was at Mike's Hardware and Goods.

3000 batteries, they said.

So parked the engineless truck outside of Mike's and went in.

"Heya, Nilsen!" Mike called from inside his office, behind the counter. Conner tried to move his hand to wave, but the friends wouldn't let him.

Hurry, hurry, hurry!

So he didn't stop to wave. He didn't need Mike. He had his new friends.

Into the battery aisle. Overhead, the lights flickered like strobes.

"Sorry about those damn lights," Mike called from the back room. "Been actin' like that for nearly a week. Can't even call the 'lectrician to come fix 'em 'cause the phone line's good as dead." Conner barely heard. He (or was it the friends? It was hard to tell where he ended and the friends began. They were a blur now) swept his arm along the shelf. Batteries fell into the shopping cart in heaps.

More, more! Cried the friends.

Soon, the shelves in the aisle were bare and the cart was heaped almost as high as Conner's shoulders with batteries.

The cart was heavy, but he

(the friends)

wheeled it over to the front desk without a problem.

No no no no NO NO NO!

The friends yelled inside his head.

LEAVE! HURRY!

"I hafta pay," Conner said aloud.

NO! LEAVE!

"He won't let me leave if I don't pay," Conner said slowly. It was hard to talk, the fungus coated his mouth so thickly. Just then, Mike emerged from his office. The stout redneck greeted him with a warm smile.

"Well, howdy there, Nilsen! It's been a while since you've come over to this ne—"

Mike stopped when he saw the batteries. A look of puzzlement crossed his face, and he glanced warily from the cart to Conner. Then, Mike's eyes lighted upon the top of Conner's head, and the crimson fungus that covered it. His mouth dropped open, and he took a step sideways.

Conner

(the friends)

stared back with dead eyes. Then he felt the fungus tighten again around his skull, and he could feel himself inside Mike's mind, inside his brain, like a tumor.

A crimson tumor.

He could hear Mike's heartbeat in his ears, and the odd whispers as Mike's thoughts intertwined and passed his by. Mike spoke, and Conner could hear it from not only the man's mouth, but his conscience. The voice was shaky — afraid.

"Now, hang on one second sir, I just ... I just need to go back and g-get ... something." He jerked his thumb towards the back office, before turning and hurrying — no, running — off behind the counter.

But Conner knew better. He could see the phone on the office desk, and the gun in the drawer, a handgun with a gleaming silver barrel, and he could feel the phone buttons under Mike's fingers as he dialed for the police.

HE KNOWS!

Conner thought to run, but overpowering all his thoughts were his friends. They spoke two words:

KILL HIM

And as the fungus surged tighter around Conner's head, he pushed his mind against the dull confines of Mike's brain, and felt Mike's thoughts stumble, and slip away.

A scream echoed from the back room, but Conner had already left Mike's Hardware and Goods.

It would be almost eighteen hours before anyone ventured inside Mike's, as Conner had thought to flip the door sign to read 'Sorry, We're Closed' as he left.

And if that unfortunate shopper chose to wander into the back office, in search of Mike, they would find him.

His corpse would be lying as it had fallen, beside the desk. With morbid fascination, they might note through their shock that his head had literally imploded — destroyed from the inside, not out. And, thriving in the blood pooled on the cheap white tiles would be — as thick and soft (if that visitor dared to touch it) as a carpet, the crimson fungus.

Whatever human regret or guilt Conner had thought of killing Mike was drowned out by the clamor of the friends. As the daylight faded, they guided his hands, and he

(they)

wound wires and wrapped cords around, between, inside the 3000 batteries. He had to work outside now — the static from the TV inside the house was so loud, the noise was nearly incapacitating. It was late at night (he could not say what time exactly) when he hauled the mass of wires and batteries down to the pyramid. The lake glittered, dark and silent. The watery light of the pale moon shone dimly through the clouds. No birds called, no insects clamored. Only the wind sighed through the trees.

Staggering under the weight of the 'capstone', Conner tripped on something heavy and soft, and nearly fell down the gentle embankment towards the lakeshore. He stopped to wipe his brow (which was now home to several strands of the fungus, snaking down from his hairline) and examine what had tripped him.

It was a beaver, and it was stone cold dead.

Conner would have looked longer, if only to rest, but he

(they)

righted himself, shifted the capstone in his hands, and continued toward the pyramid. A stepladder leaned against it. He could not remember putting the ladder there, but...

Whatever.

It was only when he stood before the pyramid, as silent as the lake and the beaver, that he

(they)

allowed himself to rest. The voices had grown quiet, but Conner could feel their anticipation, their excitement. He knew what to do.

Climbing the ladder, and perching the capstone carefully, ever so carefully, against the rim of the socket, he leaned over, and then slowly, gently, lowered the capstone, until it touched the bottom of the socket...

Conner leapt back, falling from and howling in pain. He lay writhing on the grass, and blinked away tears as he inspected his hands. His palms, which had gripped the capstone, were burned raw and red. Above him, the pyramid exploded in light, and a single, blinding ray shot from the capstone into the dark sky. The clouds parted around it as it hurtled skyward, as if it was poison.

At the same time, every window in the house shattered, and he heard a coughing snap as the TV speakers gave out. The static was silent, but the pyramid roared like an ungodly machine. Inside the house, the figure in the TV pulsed crimson, before the screen shattered and melted.

As if an invisible cord had been unplugged, the pyramid was silent and dark once again.

As was the rest of the world. There was only silence ... echoing, deafening silence.

Conner lay dazed on the ground, the pain in his palms forgotten. The friends had ceased their chattering, but in their place was joy — sheer, overwhelming joy.

They were coming.

Why? Because he had called them — yes! He had called, and the friends had answered.

THEY ARE COMING!

But in calling them, he had made a pact, a union, a bond as immortal and eternal as time itself. He was one with his friends.

WE ARE COMING!

And, as if in sync with this revelation, thunder echoed from within the great, swirling hole

(—not a hole but a window)

(—not a window but an EYE)

the pyramid had opened in the clouds.

But with that, the feeling dissipated. It was totally gone — in its place was a cold dread.

A great cawing and crowing rent the air with deafening suddenness, and birds erupted from the forest, taking to the skies. Conner gazed in awe — by God, every bird from Haskell Lake to Rockville must have taken flight!

They swirled and wheeled under the hole

(eye)

above the lake, a mass so thick it seemed solid. And then, first slowly, but them in droves, faster and faster and faster, they dropped dead from the sky.

Feathered corpses splashed into the still waters like so many copper pennies in a fountain.

On his left, a deer ran from the woods, frothing at the mouth, its eyes wild. It was followed by two, three, five, eleven — dozens of deer sprinted past Conner, their chests heaving in desperate exertion. They reached the shores of the lake, and, skittering on the wet rocks, fell dead, as if mowed down by invisible bullets. Blood trickled from their nostrils and the corners of their eyes, and Conner vaguely realized they had all died from massive internal hemorrhaging. Soon, the corpses were piled like sandbags on a bulwark, and the beach rocks were slick with gore.

Conner sat up and rubbed his battered head — the moss fell off in dry clumps — it, too, was dead.

What had caused such wild fury, such insanity, such death?

The pyramid?

No.

The friends.

He had called, and they had answered, oh God, oh yes, oh God they were coming they were COMING THEY WERE—

Thunder echoed once more.

The lake began to writhe furiously, the water foaming and frothing, the black bird corpses on its surface like an oil slick, agitated by some unseen hand.

Cold terror gripped Conner's heart — not fear, not worry, not angst — terror. The kind of horror you feel when the world is dark, and shadows dance, and no birds call and thunder echoes in the west, and outside the window a wolf — but maybe not a wolf — no something more, something so ancient and angry and HUNGRY howled with the thunder.

Conner felt this now, and he tried to run.

The thunder echoed again, but this time it was not a single peal, it was a constant, awful thrumming, groaning, wailing, and the lake writhed and the hole

(eye)

swirled.

Oh, he tried to run, but he could not move. And so he watched, with indescribable horror as lightning flashed again, again, again, it then it was the color of the fungus, it was RED, RED RED—

And so he watched as something — a craft, a ship, a messenger from a place so distant and cold that lay in slumber under the light of a thousand foreign stars, that had flown through nebulae and centuries of howling darkness, until it had found a beacon, found a signal, found him — lowered itself from the hole in the clouds.

And so what could Conner do but watch as his fingernails fell off and his skin cracked and burned red and as the grass withered and as the lake boiled and the trees snapped and burst into flames, and he screamed into the air that screamed around him.

Because they had come.

The Friends had come.

~~~~~

~~~~~

Luke Dykowski is a freshman from Wisconsin. In addition to writing, he enjoys cross country skiing, marching band, geography, and spending time with his (terrestrial) friends. This is his first published work.

(Back to Table of Contents)

#  Other Side of the Tracks

by Daniel DeLong; published October 31, 2014

First Place Winner, 2014 Fiction Vortex Horror Contest

The day they found Tobin's body in the creek was when she knew her days were almost at an end. She hid nearby in a little hollow of cottonwood trees while the search-and-rescue people and firefighters removed him from the water.

The two of them had spent time in that hollow, sleeping there, eating whatever they could scrounge from the dumpster behind the Mexican restaurant a few blocks away. But they hadn't been there for a long time ... hadn't been hungry or even able to eat or drink anything for many weeks.

They hadn't slept in months.

The firefighters joked that they were in the movie _Stand By Me,_ going down the railroad tracks to see a dead body by the river. But she wasn't upset by that. How could they know?

She saw his face when they rolled him over. His skin looked like frosting, eyes melted from their sockets.

"Been floating in the water at least four days," the coroner remarked, looking at what he assumed was water-logging and perhaps the nibbling of tiny fish. But he was wrong. Other things could make your face look like that. And in the end they had.

The coroner's assistant — a cute young thing like Tandy imagined she herself had once been — carefully examined Tobin's body as it lay on the muddy bank where the search and rescue raft had towed it and the firefighters pulled it out. Poking through his clothes, she quickly found the small disk-shaped box where Tobin kept his rosary. At first glance it was mistaken for a can of chewing tobacco.

The death wouldn't cause much of a stir. He had no ID, his odd finger-print patterns would find no match and, of course, he looked older than his age ... older by decades. Best he could recall he'd been about twenty-two but could easily have passed for seventy or more. Just another homeless old-man, probably got drunk and fell into the creek and drowned. There wouldn't even be a story in the paper.

She'd only known him about six months, she thought ... maybe a little longer? It was hard to tell. First they stole your flesh, then your memories.

And eventually they stole your eyes.

She opened up the tiny paper, the poem he'd written her two nights before when he realized his sight had begun to leave him:

I am not drowned

I am alive

I am resolved

I am dissolved

I am bound on the outside

And lost on the green railroad track

Something in it, something in there for her, he'd said. He couldn't remember but he'd thought it might make a difference. Now she could only wonder at his words ... an upside-down prophesy, like he'd known what would happen yet cried out in denial. For he was most definitely drowned. He was not alive.

The railroad tracks—not green, but silver and gray and brown with rusted ambivalence — had ultimately led him back here, back to the east side of the river where it snaked through the industrial areas abutting downtown, near their former nest in the cottonwood trees with its myriad of single-use plastic bags and soiled blankets.

I am resolved

She folded the tiny paper and put in her pocket, repeating the words in her mind even as they slipped away from her.

Tobin was in a body-bag now, the firefighters carrying him back up to the tracks on one of those gurneys with the retractable legs ... no way wheels would roll down here. The search-and-rescue people picked up their inflatable raft and carried it away. The coroner put Tobin's rosary into a small plastic bag.

Something turned over beneath her feet. She'd felt it before, but never this close.

The cops were the last ones to leave. They took a few more pictures and then went the way the others had gone.

I am dissolved

It was many hours later when she emerged and long after nightfall. The twin ribbons of track curved away the direction Tobin had been taken, the lights of the city reflecting on their arch. But she turned the other way and moved off into darkness, navigating by wooden ties and gravel, deflected back to the center whenever her stumbling feet veered and contacted steel rail.

~~~~~

She walked all night and the sleeping neighborhoods she passed didn't awaken. Daylight found her beyond the city at the edge of the foothills and back at the old water tower. She climbed. They were less prevalent up here; she couldn't feel them as much.

She wondered if she was sad about Tobin. She was pretty sure that was what she was supposed to feel, and she could remember that she had been sad about things before: her grandmother dying, a lost dog — or had it been a cat?

Sad. She knew what it meant. She just couldn't remember what it felt like.

The boards of the water tower were old and black, broken in some places. Inside were bugs and nests of spiders and other things. She crawled inside and sat amongst them and watched a late morning winter sun pass through the wide spaces between the boards. This tower would not hold water, she thought. It would just spill out.

That made her sad.

She sat inside for the rest of the day and the night. When morning came she could still see light between the boards, but to her eyes it appeared much dimmer than before and she knew her time was growing short. She crawled out of the tower and down the splintery wooden ladder to the ground and with nothing else to do, began walking. Her arms and legs shimmied like the steering wheel of an old car.

The tracks continued on and she followed them for a time, eventually coming to an abandoned spur with weeds growing up between the ties. Feeling an unexplained compulsion she left the main line and followed the spur as it turned west, towards the foothills and across a field. Very soon there were no more ties. Unpinned rails lay directionless and half-buried until they themselves abruptly ended. Something caught her eye, a single sheet of paper tacked to a fence post. It fluttered in the tiny breeze. She moved over to it.

It was a "missing person" flier and it had been there a long time ... months. Her eyes were failing. She stretched closer to see. The faded picture was that of a smiling young woman with a pretty face.

bound on the outside

A wrinkled hand moved to her mouth but wasn't fast enough to stop the scream that descended quickly into a moan.

It was her. The face on the flier was hers ... or what had been hers.

She turned away, mouth gnawing on her withered knuckles, tearless eyes clamped shut. She fell to her knees and shuddered like an unbolted machine. The flier continued to flutter. After a moment she opened her eyes. The raised rail bed, free of wood and steel, bent away towards the foothills, a flat, narrow carpet of weeds and grass bisected by a single foot-path.

the green railroad track

And then she remembered.

~~~~~

Grasshoppers ricocheting from their footfalls as they'd walked, the grass on the rail bed as green as the fields on either side, a few cattle in the distance. It had been their second date, and he'd told her about a place he wanted to take her.

Eventually the fields gave way to forest, the heat of late spring cut with moss and earth, grass replaced by pine needles and leaves. They came to a fence. The no-trespassing sign declared watershed land belonging to the city and that all violators would be prosecuted.

"Won't we get in trouble?"

"Nah," he'd told her. "No official people ever come up here. At least I've never seen any."

The further they went the more rugged the land became. They crossed a rocky stream by stepping on undercut concrete footings, canted remnants of a long-vanished bridge that bore the same lichens as the smooth stones around them.

"How long ago did they...?"

"Shut down this line? In the thirties I think, not long after they built the highway over the mountains. Used to be this was the best way over to the coast, unless you wanted to cross a bunch of private properties with toll-roads. That's what folks used to do in these mountains. Buy some land, build a road and then charge people to use it."

He found local history fascinating and got very excited when talking about it. It was one of the things she liked about him.

"I meant the tunnel. How long ago did they close it?"

"Oh." He blushed a little. She liked that too.

"In the fifties. It was the height of the Red Scare and they were afraid communists were going to hold-up in there and take over the country or something." They both laughed.

The rail bed was becoming less obvious. Large trees grew in the path, and only by comparison with the truly giant ones on either side was it apparent that men had once shaped this land. Steep banks suddenly rose on either side of the trail. They were there.

Moss grew thick on the crumbling portal, at first glance no different than any other outcrop on the abrupt hillside. Then she saw the hole in the side of the mountain. Brooklets born of a wet spring wound down from the headland and dropped in cascades, tiny waterfalls guarding a dark archway.

"It's smaller than I'd pictured."

"This was a narrow-gauge railroad. They were cheaper to build, especially in the mountains where there would be a lot of tunnels and bridges. This tunnel was over a mile long."

"And they just blocked it off?"

"Yeah, blasted it shut. Dynamited it at either end. But it still goes in about fifty feet or so. In high school my friends and I used to ditch class and come hang out here." He looked at her and blushed again. "Not that I was a total delinquent or anything."

She smiled at him. He smiled back. They walked into the tunnel.

It was cooler inside. Evidence of generations covered the arched roof above their heads, layers of graffiti and soot, streaked with moss wherever rivulets found passage through the concrete. The air was heavy, laden with silence and the smell of dark earth. He pulled a flashlight from his pocket and turned it on.

"Been a long time," he said, almost to himself.

The beam of his flashlight moved across the dirt floor, across the walls and finally to the earthen ramp at the far end of the space.

"Is that the...?"

"Where they blasted it, yeah."

They walked further in. She shivered, folding her arms across her chest and wishing she hadn't left her sweater in the car.

"If you go up on the hillside directly above this spot, there's a crater where it all caved-in. We tried to dig in there once from above, because according to legend they left things in the tunnel when they sealed it."

"According to legend?"

He chuckled. "Uh-huh."

"Left what?"

"For sure old rail cars. But there were rumors that the cars had things in them, like munitions, army equipment, surplus stuff from World War II. And then there were other rumors too, like the cars were filled with radioactive waste or a nuclear bomb." She had to giggle at that. He laughed with her.

"I know, huh? But it gets even better." They were at the foot of the ramp now. His flashlight played across it. "There were claims that it was alien technology from an ancient space-ship they dug-up in the desert outside of Roswell, or the body of—"

"Hey ... what's that?" She pointed.

At the very top of the dirt ramp, where it met with the fractured concrete ceiling, was a hole. The beam of his flashlight was a small crescent in its mouth.

"Whoa. Must be an animal burrow." He paused only for a moment before climbing up the ramp. He reached the hole and pointed his flashlight inside. "It _is_ a burrow or something. It goes back quite a ways. And down."

"What do you think made it?"

"I don't know. Badger maybe? It's almost big enough to crawl in there. I think it's too tight though. Huh. I think I can see—"

The dirt at the top of the ramp suddenly swelled, puffed-out like it was infused with a static charge. All at once Tobin became translucent. He lit up from the inside and she could see his organs and his bones. He began to scream.

Involuntarily she backed away, just as the ground near her bulged, and she felt it in the small of her back and up her spine. Her bladder let go and then there were thousands of millions of them under her skin like centipedes, crawling and prodding and invading. She felt the moisture sucked from her flesh and then they were in her brain and the world turned inside-out.

They left her hollow.

When she was a little girl, her family raised chickens. She would break open a small pumpkin and feed it to them and they would eat it from the inside, every bit except the very outermost layer of orange skin. She thought it was funny that from the outside it just looked like a pumpkin. But turn it over and you'd see it was only a shell, pecked clean and paper thin. If you weren't careful when you picked-it up it would break apart.

She lay on her side on the moist earth, scooped bare like an autumn gourd.

Tobin's flashlight rolled and bounced down the ramp and came to rest near her hands which were curled upon the ground in front of her face. They were the withered hands of an old, old woman ... of a corpse.

Now she too had begun to scream.

~~~~~

She thought it must have been seeing her face on the flier, reading her name. Why else would these memories have suddenly returned? Whatever the cause, she didn't believe they would last. It was still early afternoon but the sun had become a bright coin in a darkening sky. Her eyes would soon be gone too.

She left the small piece of paper fluttering and moved west, up the green railroad track as it crossed the fields towards the foothills, her mind preyed upon by freshly stark memories of the last time she'd been here.

~~~~~

They'd tried to follow the rail bed back but had lost it and spent that first night wandering in the woods. They knew something had happened to them but thoughts came and went like dabs of sunlight reflected off rippling water. Nothing made sense.

With daylight they were able to navigate back to the main railroad line but couldn't think of what to do next. So they followed the tracks and eventually came to an old water tower. It had a ladder, and they climbed it, thinking that from up high perhaps they'd be able to see something they needed to see.

They stayed in the water tower for three days.

When they finally came down they saw the railroad tracks were still there, so again they followed them and soon found themselves adrift in the crevices of the city, the in-between places where the indigent moved and lived.

Tobin had kept his wallet for a little while. Sometimes he would take it out and try to make sense of it, but it always made him frustrated. Finally he just gave it to a homeless man near the river. The man had been skeptical.

"Where did you get this? Did you steal it?"

"No. It's mine."

"Then why are you giving it to me? Why do you have his guy's ID and stuff?"

"He's me. I'm him. I'm a young man. Just take it."

"Right. Are you trying to set me up?" In the end the man took it. "Crazy old coot." They watched the man ditch all the cards and keep the money. It wasn't much, about thirty dollars. The man kept the wallet too. It was a nice wallet.

In the end the only thing Tobin had kept was his rosary, and while he rarely took it out of its small case, he never seemed to wonder at its importance, although its meaning continued to elude him.

They would try to talk about the tunnel. Most times they couldn't. They would begin to remember but their thoughts would be pulled up short like a horse whose reins are tugged. But sometimes, just for a moment, they could get a glimpse.

"It took our memories. I know we weren't always like this. They take your memories ... they take them. That's how they know what to do next."

"What do they want to do?"

"Live."

It. They. Them. There was no distinction; a pure alien existence defined neither by group nor individual.

He seemed to know more than she did. He'd surmised that maybe it was because he had been closer or because he was the first to be taken, but when it had entered him and right before his mind tore loose from its moorings he'd seen things ... just flashes, like images from a dream. And that was how he knew something had failed inside the tunnel, something that was meant to contain it. He believed it was a simple failure--a switch or a wire or a cap — something that perhaps could easily be set right.

"Maybe we can fix it."

But such thoughts always left as quickly as they came, drawn back and lost in a miasma of frustration and apathy.

In places where the invisible people dwell they were now just two more of the many, adrift and dirty. Once when the police were rousting a group of them, an officer had questioned her about where she'd gotten her shirt ... seems it matched the description of one worn by a missing girl when she went missing. And some personal items of her companion had been found nearby too, credit cards and things. He also was missing. She didn't have an answer. She honestly couldn't remember. The police came around quite a bit at first, but after a time they stopped coming around.

Their hollowness became more and more refined as the months passed.

"I don't understand," she would ask. "Are we alive?"

"We have to be. We're talking."

"But living things eat. They sleep."

"We eat. We sleep."

But they were never hungry. They tried for the longest time, forcing themselves to consume scraps just like the other homeless people living in the filthy river encampments, under bridges and on the bush-covered banks of the freeways. Eventually they gave up.

And they were always tired but sleep came less and less until finally it came no more.

Tobin tried to comprehend the impossibility of it. "We're like florescent lights," he once stated, catching some fleeting memory of high-school science class. "I think some of its energy is still sticking to us, like how static electricity can make a tube glow; that's what is keeping us alive."

"But it's going away."

"Yes, it's fading."

Eventually they started seeing others like themselves, hollow people, empty and crumbling. They weren't surprised by this because more of it was coming out all the time.

They could feel it.

It moved under the ground, through old sewer pipes, abandoned gopher runs, the space between root and dirt, moving and turning, yearning for the time when it would be completely free. Soon it would be able to take anyone from anywhere, not just those who had wandered too close. The night he'd written her the poem the ground beneath them seemed to be writhing eagerly.

I am not drowned ... I am alive

Two days later he was gone and his fate made mockery of the words he'd left behind.

~~~~~

It was even darker in the woods. She could still barely see the rail bed, still detect the path and she shambled onward, her body hitching and swaying like a bicycle with all its screws loosened. She found the creek and splashed across, her feet slipping and glancing from the stones the two of them had used to cross it months before. Several times she fell completely but eventually crawled soaking wet up the steep bank on the other side.

"You can't be here." The voice croaked the words, as though it hadn't spoken in a long time.

He lolled near the edge of the bank, legs curled beneath his slumping body. The back of his hands lay in the dirt. He raised his head, and when she saw his withered face, his lost eyes, she knew.

"You can't be here. I work for the city. You can't be here." His button-up shirt was torn, dirty. She could just make out the patch on his shoulder. _Water Department_ , it read.

"You can't be here. This is city property."

A small sound escaped her as she choked back a cry. "They took your memories, didn't they? They took mine too." Her voice was barely above a whisper.

His head swayed like it might drop forward again, but it didn't. For a moment he just looked confused. Then his eyes suddenly grew wide. "You can't _be_ here!" This time he shouted it as an epiphany. His sagging features swelled into a bloated smile, a joyful recognition of purpose. He raised one filthy hand and pointed.

"I work for the city! You can't be here!" He lurched forward, propelling himself towards her like a partially broken wind-up toy. His expression was that of a man in the midst of a spiritual awakening. "I work for the city! You can't _be_ here!"

With a moan she tried to crawl away but his hand grabbed her leg. She rolled onto her back.

"I work for the city."

She began kicking his face.

"This is city property."

Her kicks were weak, but they connected. Still, he made no attempt to stop them. She kicked again and again.

"You can't be here."

His face turned to blood and dirt and his words became just muffled sounds, a repeating meaninglessness punctuated by the dull cadence of her foot.

And then he was sliding and rolling down the bank away from her. She heard a splash and the blunt sound of flesh and bone against stone. After that there were no more sounds.

She found herself gazing upwards.

The tops of the trees had become black paper cut-outs, the cloudless late-afternoon sky an opaque dream. She lay on her back, breath rasping through the furnace in her chest. After a time she managed to rise and continued stumbling up the trail.

Very soon she was crawling.

Here she felt them everywhere — inside plant and leaf, wood and stone and earth quivering with rank impatience — and she was gripped with an urgency unknown for many months. For while the watery surface of her thoughts had at last become smooth, she felt the pool itself was quickly draining.

All shapes finally melded together into dark oblivion and she thought she could go no further. Then the sound of waterfalls — only trickles this time of year — were enough to let her know she'd reached the portal.

She dragged herself forward and felt the air in the tunnel as it pressed tight around her ears. After a short distance the ground tilted and then she was clawing her way up the ramp.

Her head contacted crumbling mortar. She pawed at the dirt until at last she found the breach. The ground hummed, and waves of them passed through her to no effect. What more could they take? There wasn't much of her left, but perhaps there might be just enough.

Tobin had said he didn't think he could fit into the hole, but she was smaller.

maybe we can fix it

With the last of the failing fumes of her memory she recalled that it had been a dog she had lost. He'd become scared during a lightning storm and ran off and they never found him. His name was Jake.

She was a little girl and had lost her dog. He was a good dog.

Something wet was on her cheek. She thought it might be tears and reached up to feel one moist orb and then the other as they deflated, leaving a puddle and a damp trail that in another life could have passed for sorrow. Dirty fingers investigated the empty sockets and then pulled the lids closed.

It didn't matter. Where she was going it was sure to be dark.

~~~~~

~~~~~

A retired Fire Captain from a large metropolitan city in central California, Daniel Frank DeLong lives deep in the Santa Cruz Mountains with his wife and daughter, two dogs, three cats, a couple of pigs and an ever changing number of chickens, at last count 21. When he's not writing, he spends his time driving his tractor around in the woods, and contemplating the potential collapse of the civilized world ... often doing both at the same time.

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#  Johnny Worthen on Dark Fiction and Horror

by Johnny Worthen; published October 9, 2014

Before I begin to tell you why dark fiction and horror are so wonderful, perhaps you want to know who I am. Well, I'm going to tell you anyway.

I am Johnny Worthen. Next year I'll release three different books from two different publishers and be a household name in some of my friend's living rooms. "Why won't Johnny leave?" they might be saying. "Has he been kicked out of his own house again?"

But now all my published works are dark.

My debut novel BEATRYSEL, an occult thriller/horror was released in 2013. It's an adult look at the occult and the dark sides of love. If you don't own it yet, rush on over to Amazon and get one. While you're there, pick up DR. STUART'S HEART, it's a little companion piece to BEATRYSEL. You'll be glad you did. Go ahead. I'll wait. Done? Good.

This year, my Young Adult Paranormal series, THE UNSEEN launched with the award winning, ELEANOR. It received a Gold Quill as the year's best published young adult novel by the League of Utah Writers. The same group, having great taste but low standards, named me this year's Writer of the Year. I got a plaque to prove it.

There is a monster in ELEANOR and thus it has found a horror following along with a young adult, literary, and familial audiences. It's a great freaking book and if you don't already own a copy, rush to a bookstore or back to Amazon and pick one up. I'll wait. Go ahead. Do it. It's a wonderful book and will go far to making you a better person for having read it. Got it? Good. I'll continue.

I didn't intend to be a horror writer when I wrote BEATRYSEL and ELEANOR. It just happened. I needed to push the bounds of fiction and horror was the way to do that. The edges of dark fiction are blurry and binding. Fear faced deeply, honestly, starkly and raw-ly must by definition be horror.

But that's a lie. Horror is just a name. Genre is a completely made-up thing. It's a label critics use to associate and book stores use to shelve. That's it. Most bookstores I visit have actually taken horror out of its own shelf and put it with general fiction, science fiction, of if they're really bright in 'speculative fiction.'

Still we all must agree that horror is a thing, if only for the fact that it names a certain type of writing that has a physical effect on us. It and porno are the two types of fiction that can have measured physical responses to reading it. I've never tried writing porn; I'm no good at flash fiction (ba'da-ching!) but getting my heart rate up as tension builds and terrors — both real and imagined — seep into my consciousness is a thrilling experience I create and crave.

But horror goes beyond scares and tension. The best horror is an insidious stream of rationalization and twisted reality, a lingering feeling that is akin to a smothering blanket more than a knife edge. These are the dystopians (Hunger Games) and the invasions (War of the Worlds), the paranoids (Body Snatchers), the plagues (The Stand) and the hopelessnesses (The Road). These are the ones that seep into the imagination and linger. These are the ones where even after the victim has died, there is no respite.

These are intellectual horrors. Often and most pronounced, they are supernatural, but there are horrors enough in real life to go around. Disease, war and famine. The four horseman are as deadly and as present as ever. Perhaps it is these horrors we wish to escape in the pages of fictional ones.

In the 'controlled' context of a page, we can visit the dark stay and stay as long as we dare. We have only to look up to see the comfortable room around us to find security again, even if we see the colors are now a little darker than we remember them.

There's an adage I know that compares one's life to a tapestry. The dark threads are as important as the light ones in defining who we are. So too I believe is life and reality. Thus, dark fiction has its adherents rightfully so.

We can choose to shelter ourselves behind happy endings and uplifting fantasy, make a true escape from the world, or we can seize the darkness and make it a part of us. We can understand and recognize the yin and yang of the universe. We can celebrate the decay as we would growth, roil in fear to feel the life therein as acute as a joyful laugh. That is what dark fiction offers.

Someone, I think it was Chaplain, said that comedy is wide angle and tragedy is close-up. Horror is close-up.

That's not to say that horror can't have a happy ending, but it is decidedly optional and damn well better be deserved. Dark fiction with its open ends demands an honesty that other genres do not. Endings, good or bad, must be earned.

This is strange to say, I know. How can I, who write about demons and monsters, killers, and ghosts, argue for truth in these things? Well I can. And I am. A writer is one who tells the truth through lies, and in horror with its stretched realities and weird angles is really just exaggeration: close-ups.

We are emotional creatures, we humans. We love and we hate, we hope and we fear. Writers deal with all these, exploring the dark along with the light, facing their fears as well as realizing their hopes. It's all part of the wonderful experience of life. There is a season to each of these things, and Fall, Autumn, Halloween, Samhain, as the Wiccans call it, or the Season of Witch by others, is most definitely a time for fear and wonder. It is time for the dead to speak and for the unspeakable to teach, and words to cast shadows while illuminating.

I welcome you to Fiction Vortex's celebration of dark fiction and horror – October, 2014. Go buy my books and enjoy the chills here there and wherever you find them.

Blessed be and Happy Halloween!

Johnny Worthen

www.johnnyworthen.com

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#  Book Review: Eleanor, by Johnny Worthen

Review by Mike Cluff; published October 16, 2014

There are certain things, horrible things, that a person should never see, let alone experience. These moments carry their own particular flavor of immediate horror, but what about those moments and lifetimes after?

Some people attempt to go back to normal life and have those occasional nights, like Jon Voight's character at the end of _Deliverance_ , where they wake up screaming from suppressed memories that manifest in dream. Or, in the case of young Eleanor Anders, whose family was slaughtered in front of her, leaving humanity behind helps cover the pain and bury the horror.

However, it is when Eleanor Anders rejoins humanity that she has to deal with the inevitable process of facing her past and living once again as a human.

In _Eleanor_ , Johnny Worthen takes the coming-of-age story and transforms it into a paranormal tale like no other. Eleanor isn't exactly human and she has a difficult time blending in with the citizens of a small Wyoming town. And to top it off, she's a teenager. Her adopted mother is dying and Eleanor would much rather just disappear into the wild. That is until, David — the only other human apart from her adopted mother that has ever cared for Eleanor — moves back into town.

I can honestly say that Johnny Worthen has created in Eleanor one of the most multi-faceted (on a few levels one might not suspect), conflicted, and beautiful characters that I have ever read. My one complaint is that we only get snippets of her history, which I imagine the author did on purpose.

In addition to the characters, the quality of writing proves that Johnny Worthen is no accidental author. Readers need to go into the book expecting paranormal elements, but also be aware that this book is very honest (no flashy nonsense) and grounded in a world young adults and adults alike can all easily fit into and accept, but a world that Eleanor cannot. That is what makes the book so compelling.

The first in a new series, _Eleanor_ will leave you wanting more.

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#  A Moment with Tananarive Due

Interview by Z.M. Quynh; published October 23, 2014

For this year's horror issue, I thought it would be a good idea to sit down with Tananarive Due, who is an African American horror writer and one of my favorite authors. She's known for such amazing stories as _In the Night of the Heat_ (with Blair Underwood and Steven Barnes) for which she received the NAAACP Image Award and _The Living Blood,_ for which she received the American Book Award.

Tananarive is a versatile writer with amazing range in the genres of supernatural thriller, horror, mystery, memoir, and historical non-fiction. Of all her works, my favorite is her civil rights memoir, _Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights,_ which documents her journey with her mother, Patricia Stephens Due, a leading African American civil rights activists, through the Civil Rights Movement.

 The following is an interview Tananarive did for Fiction Vortex's horror issue, where she talks about her background and influences.

~~~~~

**Fiction Vortex:** What led you to writing horror as opposed to other areas of speculative fiction?

**Tananarive Due:** I didn't understand anything of the concept of "speculative fiction" when I began writing horror; horror has simply been a consistent love of mine, perhaps because of my mother's love for horror films and my early enchantment with the work of Stephen King. I also think horror appealed to me because it gave me a safe prism through which to address my real-life fears of mortality and the terrible impact of inter-generational racism.

**FV:** Can you define what "horror" means to you and the scope of stories that would fall into that category, especially in this current decade.

**TD:** Horror traditionally refers to supernatural stories meant to be frightening, but "horror" truly is an emotion rather than a genre — so I count Toni Morrison's novel _Beloved_ as a horror novel on multiple levels. Horror can be literary or commercial, in can be nestled within science fiction, it can be nonfiction — in my view.

**FV:** What advice would you give to aspiring horror writers?

**TD:** My advice for horror writers is the same advice I give all writers: hone your craft with short stories, read far more than you write (including short stories), finish what you write, and submit what you write. Don't start a novel until you have mastered storytelling basic enough to publish short fiction — and then continue to publish short fiction while you write your novel.

For horror writers in particular, go straight at the thing that scares you the most. Mirror any supernatural horror with the real world horror that scares you.

**FV:** Do you have nightmares from your own writing, or do nightmares lead to your stories?

**TD:** While I was writing my first novel, _The Between_ , I had to be careful about certain imagery late at night. There was a funeral procession that haunted my sleep after I wrote it. (Or was it before?) Sometimes it's hard to tell if the nightmares or the stories come first. But I definitely have given myself unhappy dreams after writing sessions.

**FV:** What are you currently working on now?

**TD:** I am compiling a short story collection, _Ghost Summer and Other Stories_ , which Prime Books will publish in the summer of 2015. I am also working on a historical novel about a Florida event that touched my family — but I have vowed to stop talking about that project and simply work on it. Though I did blog about the historical event: <http://tananarivedue.wordpress.com/2014/01/09/unburying-the-lost-boys-pt-2-the-real-life-horrors-at-the-dozier-school/>

**FV:** You have had your young adult novel _Devil's Wake_ optioned for a film. Can you tell us what that process is like? Do you have to shop your work to get it optioned or does someone just contact you?

**TD:** Options work in many ways. With _Devil's Wake_ , we crowd-funded a short film adapted from the novel (the film is called Danger Word), won a spot at a film festival, and met the producer at the festival. That's one way. Another way is to pitch around Hollywood, which is the most exhausting way. Most often, my options have resulted from producers reaching out to me to inquire about the rights.

**FV:** Your previous work, _My Soul to Keep_ , was optioned for a movie by the actor Blair Underwood in 2004. What was that process like and did the movie ever come out?

**TD:** Blair and his producing partners set _My Soul to Keep_ up at Fox Searchlight, where it sat for many years. It was both a very exciting and deeply disappointing experience, since the film was never made. But _My Soul to Keep_ has been optioned again, so we shall see.

**FV:** I know that Octavia Butler was a friend of yours, how does she influence your work?

**TD:** I was very lucky to meet Octavia Butler in 1997 at a conference at Clark Atlanta University entitled "The African-American Fantastic Imagination: Journeys in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror." (I also met my soon-to-be husband, Steven Barnes, at that conference.) Much of the time I knew her, I had her on the kind of pedestal that precludes phone calls like, "Hey, Octavia, what's up?" I now, of course, regret this. Octavia was a longtime friend of Steve's, however, so we visited her at her home when she lived in the Seattle area and we lived two hours south.

Her influence is so great that it's difficult to measure. I did not know her work during my more formative years as a writer, but when I began publishing, her stature as THE Octavia Butler uplifted the entire black speculative fiction genre in a way we could not have found without her. She gave us enough weight to sustain. We lost some of that sustenance after she died, but the current rise and interest in black speculative fiction is, I think, much to her credit.

In terms of my actual writing, I hear Octavia's literary voice in my head when I write near-future fiction, i.e. her voice in _Parable of the Sower_ , in asking the question of where we might be heading if our current practices continue. She cared deeply for the world and all of its creatures, and I do want to help carry that torch. I dedicated my novel _Blood Colony_ to her, and I tried to imagine what Octavia might have said about big pharma, the War on Drugs, and war in general as it related to the unfolding of my story.

**FV:** You and your husband, Steven Barnes, a Hugo-nominated science fiction writer who has written for many television shows including _The Outer Limits_ and _Stargate SG-1,_ co-write several works with you, including _Devil's Wake_ and _Domino Falls_ , as well as others. How do you go about creating and writing a book with someone else? What is the process like?

**TD:** Collaboration can be very difficult, especially for novelists, but Steve spent years working in television, which is VERY collaborative, so he had much more experience when we started. The number one rule, for me, is never to write a collaboration if you could do it on your own. Don't collaborate as a favor, or to make another writer feel good. The only reason to collaborate is that the story naturally springs from more than one source.

The next biggest rule I learned from Steve: Someone has to be the lead writer and have the final veto. Some collaborators literally sit side by side as they work, but I cannot write that way. Steve and I outline together, though he does much of the work of outlining because plot and story are two of his great strengths. Then we decide who will write the first draft and the second writer follows. If disagreements emerge, the lead writer (first draft) has final veto.

Collaboration in screenwriting is much more common because writing screenplays takes so many more skills, in my view, than writing a novel — the verbal skill of pitching, the skill of visual storytelling, the ability to process feedback from several sources, etc. I enjoy collaborating on screenplays — in fact, I haven't written a solo screenplay yet.

**FV:** I love that your body of work features diverse characters, particularly characters from the African diaspora. How much diversity do you see in the genre of horror? What are some issues that may be affecting diverse writers in this genre?

**TD:** Diversity is a fight that is long from over. It is, in fact, a wearying conversation. But I will say this: editors and readers make assumptions about books based on faces on the cover, author names, etc. Writers of color are still fighting to win over white readers who have never, as I have, lived in a culture where MOST of the work they study in school is about white characters, most of the films are about white characters. If you're in the majority culture, you have no reason to stray outside of your comfort zone. This is a vast generalization with many blessed exceptions, but I often ask black writers, "How many books have you read by Asian writers?" to make the point. How many straight readers gravitate to work by LGBT writers? This is simply a matter of human nature. It is changing, but slowly. There are some heroic editors and readers out there pushing for diversity, but it will take time.

There are far more writers of color who self-identify as horror writers than when I began publishing, but I don't necessarily believe that this means more self-identified white horror readers are discovering them. What's happening is that black readers are embracing more diverse genres themselves — black science fiction, black horror. The crossover question will be an interesting one to follow.

I would argue that my own work is universal, but happens to feature the journeys of protagonists of color. I have had many white supporting characters, even co-leads, but feel no need to write a book with a main protagonist who is white because there are so many fine writers doing that already. I'm writing for the reader I used to be, the aspiring writer I used to be, who need to see black characters the way grass needs rain. All readers are welcome on the journey.

**FV:** Finally, I really want to ask: You have such a unique name; where does it come from, what does it mean, and is there a story behind it?

**TD:** Tananarive was the capital city of Madagascar, now called Antananarivo. My mother, the late Patricia Stephen Due, first learned the name at a course at Florida A&M University. The only other Tananarive I had met also had parents who attended Florida A&M University, so I'm not sure what was going on there.

**FV:** We'd like to thank Tananarive for taking the time to answer questions, and for being such a great inspiration. You can find out more about her and her works below.

~~~~~

~~~~~

Info about Tananarive Due

Tananarive Due began her career as a journalist, having received her bachelor's degree in journalism from Northwestern University and a master's in English literature from the University of Leeds, England, where she specialized in Nigerian literature as a Rotary Foundation Scholar. She is a former feature writer and columnist for The Miami Herald.

Aside from crafting stories, she is a creative writing instructor and has taught in the MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles, the Hurston-Wright Foundation's Writers' Week, the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop, VONA, and the summer Imagination conference at Cleveland State University. She serves as the Cosby Chair for the Humanities at Spelman College.

Her work has been nominated for multiple awards, including the a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel for _The Between_ (a novel which crosses the genres of horror, speculative fiction, and detective thriller) _,_ and the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel for _My Soul to Keep,_ the first novel in her African Immortals Series. Her historical fiction, _The Black Rose_ (2000), based in part on research conducted by Alex Haley before his death — about the life of Madam C.J. Walker, the first female self-made millionaire in America — was nominated for an NAACP Image Award.

Tananarive was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation in 2013 at the 17th Annual Celebration of Leadership in the Fine Arts. She was also awarded the 2008 Carl Brandon Kindred Award for the novella _Ghost Summer_.

Her speculative fiction novels include _The Good House_ (2003) and _Joplin's Ghost_ (2005). Her African Immortals Series includes _My Soul to Keep_ (1997), _The Living Blood_ (2001), _Blood Colony_ (2008), and _My Soul To Take_ (2011). This popular series began with a 500-year-old Ethiopian immortal named Dawit and his unknowing wife, Jessica, a Miami newspaper reporter _._ The first book in the series dealt with the conflict of a devastating secret between a married couple and the costs that comes with immortality. The award-winning sequel __ introduced the danger inherit in having blood that has the power to heal.

Her list of published short stories includes: _Like Daughter,_ published in _Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspor_ a (2000); _Patient Zero_ , published in _The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection_ (2001), _Trial Day_ , published in _Mojo: Conjure Stories_ (2003), _Aftermoon_ , published in _Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2004), Senora Suerte_ , published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction[9] (September 2006), _Like Daughter,_ published in Lightspeed Magazine (June 2014), and _Herd Immunity_ , published in the anthology, _The End is Now, Volume Two of the Apocalypse Triptych_ (September 2014).

Ever evolving, Tananarive is currently dabbling with films. You can read more about her on her blog, <http://tananarivedue.blogspot.com/> where she talks about her exciting foray into filmmaking with her first zombie movie, "Danger World," starring Frankie Faison & Saoirse Scott. The movie is a collaboration with her husband, Steven Barnes, based on their young adult novel, _Devil's Wake._ The film was nominated for Best Narrative Short at the BronzeLens Film Festival and Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles and has been optioned by Tonya Lewis Lee, Spike Lee's wife and a producer at ToniK Productions. Check in at www.tananarivedue.com to learn more.

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#  About Fiction Vortex

Fiction Vortex, let's see ...

A fiction vortex is a tornado of stories that pick you up and hurl you through a barn to find enlightenment on the other side. It's a whirlpool of fascinating tales so compelling that they suck you in, drag you down to the bottom of your mind, and drown you with incessant waves of glorious imagery and believable characters.

Nope.

A fiction vortex is an online speculative fiction magazine focused on publishing great science fiction and fantasy, and is run by incredibly attractive and intelligent people with great taste in literature and formidable writing prowess.

Not that either. But we're getting closer.

Founded in the 277th year of the Takolatchni Dynasty, Fiction Vortex set out to encourage people to write and publish great speculative fiction. It sprang fully formed from the elbow of TWOS, retaining none of TWOS's form but most of its spirit. And the patron god of writers, the insecure, the depressed, and the mentally ill regarded Fiction Vortex in his magic mirror of self-loathing and declared it good, insofar as something that gives writer's undue hope can be declared good. Thereafter, he charged the Rear Admiral of the Galactic 5th Fleet to defend Fiction Vortex down to the last robot warrior.

Now we're talking.

Take your pick. We don't care how you characterize us or the site.

Fiction Vortex focuses on publishing speculative fiction. That means science fiction and fantasy (with a light smattering of horror and a few other subgenres), be it light, heavy, deep, flighty, spaceflighty, cerebral, visceral, epic, or mundane. But mundane in a my-local-gas-station-has-elf-mechanics-but-it's-not-really-a-big-deal-around-here kind of way. Got it?

Basically, we want imaginative stories that are well written, but not full of supercilious floridity.

There's a long-standing belief that science fiction and fantasy stories aren't as good as purely literary fare. We want you to prove that mindset wrong (not just wrong, but a steaming pile of griffin dung wrong) with every story we publish. It's almost like we're saying, "I do not bite my thumb at you, literary snobs, but I do bite my thumb," but in a completely polite and non-confrontational way.

We've got more great stories online, with a new story twice a week. Visit our website FictionVortex.com, follow us on Twitter: @FictionVortex, and like us on Facebook: FictionVortex.

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