Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (49 page)

How new this night-world was. A man with a flashlight could only point out the random human signposts that survived nightfall in the country—the gravel of a driveway, the lawn chairs on a porch. All else was lost in the dark and gnarly mass: the pulsing, growing
stuff
that flashlights could not bear to focus on. Max was in the thick of it now, this world without property fences (only land), without cars (only lights), without houses (only wood). He was not sure if he was running or drowning, and he had lost the deer skin somewhere back on 10th Street. Sometimes he could throw himself fully into this night-run, lose himself in the muscle-searing pursuit of his Stag-Man father who did not run but madly leapt from things that used to be mailboxes to things that used to be trash cans.

And then he would look down at his hands and see his pale, chilled human skin. It made his stomach fold. He was pushing so fast that the ground seemed to roll beneath him, so fast his mind tumbled like a whirligig. And all the while, deep welts grew on his skin where trees had clawed him. With blood in the air, the Stag-Man let out a trembling, hungry, open-throated howl. Max felt it in his spine, as deep and familiar as a knife in a wound. He almost stopped. The boy inside him wanted to crawl home.
This is home
, he told himself.
The others would have found you out eventually. You would have started to stink. So don’t mourn. Don’t mourn.

Bill MacAtee was dead, but he was not the one the Stag-Man wanted. The Stag-Man had killed him with a teacher’s patience, lingering over the precise angle and depth of the slice across Bill’s stomach, encouraging Max to scoop out the viscera. Bill was the kind of asshole that used to drive around town calling quiet men fags, and Max (having been Bill’s target once or twice) tried to be glad that Bill was dead. And maybe he was, but not like that, not with long swaths of Bill hanging out and inviting flies, not so Bill could stare up at the clouds like a middle-schooler rolling his eyes. The Stag-Man had already moved onto the true object of its desire: the MacAtees’ sheepdog, groomed and collared with hair the color of a Holstein cow. It had come running after Bill, barking indignantly, but when the Stag-Man turned toward the dog with its branch-like arms outstretched and its dirty claws dripping with the master’s blood, the domesticated little creature buckled down, whimpering.

At least the Stag-Man killed it quickly. Max wasn’t sure why—some hint of tenderness, or pity? The dog might have been wild, in another lifetime. After it collapsed, blood soaking its blue collar black, the Stag-Man squatted down and dug a hole beneath the dog’s ribs. Liquid gushed out along with a twitch and a squeak as if the little life was not quite gone. Max pressed his hands against his own belly. The Stag-Man pulled tendons and muscles and gelatinous organs out of this cavity like they were the treasures of the damn Sierra Madre, but all Max saw when the Stag-Man’s hands opened was inside-out-dog, all the wet under-the-skin shit that he didn’t want to see. And then the smell—putrid, sour, like drowned flowers—hit him.

Max retched. He slapped his hand over his mouth so that when the salt bubbled up his throat he could chase it back down. When he looked up the Stag-Man was standing at full height. The burnt black eyes drilled down into him as if from the pinnacle of a grotesque tower. The steaming, dripping hand was still available; God only knew he tried to take it. His father was grunting at him, thrusting the hand forward, snorting. He had flashbacks of walking across Fallspur Bridge, and the sunburned children on the other side who screamed at him to hurry and cross. The plank wobbled. The world beneath, the great bottomless funnel, rocked and churned. His body failed him now as it had failed him then. The Stag-Man threw the innards at his heart and Max compulsively shuddered, trying to shake the wetness off without getting it under his nails. Maybe it was this final twitch that ruined it, because the Stag-Man turned then, growling: away from Max, back toward the wild tree line. Max hurried after, mewling like a lost animal. He had not realized until then how warm he had felt in his father’s presence.

And then his father had him by the neck in a bristling, rough embrace. His ribs were groaning, but Max tried not to struggle. His mother had sometimes held him this way.
“Come here. Oh God. Don’t cry.”
A bark-skin hand clenched the roots of his hair—so tightly that he could feel his scalp peeling off his skull, tears shooting into his eyes, so tightly that he forgot all but this pain and an incomprehensible fear—and ripped Max away. Like a man pulling off a leech. A human would have been disemboweled and a fawn would have been taken along, but Max was just tossed into the winter grass, a formless mess not even a mother could love. It came down like an iron gate between them:
you are nothing of mine.

Max flinched and curled his muscles, trying to turn his trembling body into a fist. The Stag-Man was gliding away toward the foggy pines. “Don’t you dare walk away!” Max shouted. “Hey, you look at me!”

There was no response. He remembered his mother sitting in her rocking chair, staring unshaken at the black locust tree. He could have set himself on fire and not drawn her eye—not until she coughed on his ashes would she realize that the skinny thing she sometimes called her child was gone. He grabbed Bill MacAtee’s shotgun, pulling back the cold, thick fingers one by one, and after another warning—another “
Look at me!
”—he fired it at his father. The cartridge opened a hole in the tawny hide of his father’s back. Blood-petals sprayed into the frosted dawn like a bridal bouquet, but for a full thirty seconds, the Stag-Man kept walking. What call could be higher than its own survival? Max’s eyes began to water and when he looked back after wiping his face, the Stag-Man was gone. A deflated lump so unlike the striking figure in his mother’s Polaroid lay in its place. The pines shook and Max hunched over, shivering.

“Bill?” Caroline MacAtee stood on the back porch. Her trembling fingers rose to touch her mouth. Max could not tell—simply could not determine—whether she was staring at him or at the dead things gathered at his feet.

“Everything’s okay!” Max shouted, raising the rifle. “It’s gone now, I took care of it!”

Caroline MacAtee didn’t thank him—she backed into her house and slammed the door. But maybe he couldn’t blame her, because here it was starting to snow.

The wild had been tamed, and now they were losing visibility. Max was too busy clenching his teeth and the steering wheel to manipulate the windshield wipers, and he drifted toward what looked like a glory-white horizon before recalling fear and slamming on the brakes. He slid to a stop half-on, half-off the shoulder. “A fire out in Digby Forest . . . ” KMKO Radio was starting to cut out. “Not sure if they’re going to send the Fire Department on account of . . . hope it doesn’t come near us . . . ” On the other side of the road, a pudgy man in a green Parks and Recreation jacket stood next to a blinking truck. He was trying to shovel the remains of a very large piece of road kill into the truck’s open bed. Black tarp was whipping in the wind.

Max rolled down his window. “What is that?” he shouted.

“Hell if I know,” the Parks and Recreation man shouted back. “Guy said it just showed up in the middle of the road, didn’t even try to get out of the way.”

The corpse was the size of a small horse and covered with icy fur, but elephantine tusks protruded from the garbled carcass.

“Sixth call we’ve had this hour. I didn’t even know we had these many animals to run down.” The Parks and Recreation man started laughing, then coughing. “You know there’s birds falling out of the sky by the racetrack? Something in the weather, I guess.”

Deena used to say that animals could tell when it was time to get the hell out of Dodge. “You’ll know when bad times are coming,” she whispered, “Because you’ll hear them
howling
.” Max closed his eyes. He never wanted to think of that name again. Never wanted to see that bewitched smile again.
Stay dead
, he thought.
Stay dead
.

“You hear that Digby’s burning down?”

Suddenly tired, Max rested his arms against the steering wheel. “Yeah, I heard.”

“I hope they let it burn. That no-good place.” The man’s lower lip was trembling. “It’s just a breeding ground for monsters.”

Burning the black locust tree had cauterized some of the wounds in his young heart. Maybe that was all Cripple Creek needed: a good cleansing burn, some scar tissue to seal away the unpleasantness. He nodded. “Get rid of it,” he said. “Nothing else you can do.” With growing anger, the Parks and Recreation man smashed his shovel against the unknown animal. The creature was fixed to the ice, more figurine than entity, too ugly and beaten to be mounted on somebody’s wall. Max looked away.

Both eastbound and westward, cars were diving off the edge of the road into the white expanse. Max counted eight in all. Their doors were open, their seats were empty. He didn’t know where those drivers thought they were going—did they really think there was anything left to run away to? The world was smothered with ash and snow.

Mallory’s fluorescent windows glared like the beacon of an arctic outpost, so harsh he had to squint. He rang the door bell and listened to her slippered feet approach from the other side. Was she looking through the peep hole? Did she see spatters of blood, any antler stubs? No—she was unlocking the dead bolt, unhooking the security chain. She opened the door, and he was surprised by how empty and sterile her home looked, like a hollow egg. Bare as the sky and the buried fields.
No, not empty,
he told himself.
Safe from monsters.
“Max?” She leaned her listless head against the door. “What are you doing here?”

“I cleaned myself up,” he said. “I bashed in those demons. I dropped that baggage . . . feel lighter already. I’m good as new.” He realized that he could not feel his lips. But after all these years of feeling, he could use a little numbness. It was a small price to pay for the capacity to forget. “I want to start over. Please, Mallory. We can be happy, I know it.”

Mallory’s sleepy blue eyes looked him up and down. She smiled faintly. As she parted her lips to speak the wind rose to an ear-splitting shriek, and all the sound in the world went out.

Biographies

Nathan Ballingrud
lives in Asheville, NC, with his daughter. His short stories have appeared in
SCIFICTION
,
Inferno: New Tales of Terror
,
Lovecraft Unbound
,
Teeth
, and other places. Several stories have been reprinted in various Year’s Best anthologies, and he won the Shirley Jackson Award for “The Monsters of Heaven.” He can be found online at nathanballingrud.wordpress.com.

Clive Barker
was born in Liverpool in 1952. He is the author of
The Books of Blood
(in six volumes),
The Damnation Game
,
Weaveworld
,
Cabal
,
The Great and Secret Show
,
Imajica
,
Everville
and
Sacrament
as well as writing, directing and producing for the screen—his films include
Hellraiser
and
Nightbreed
. He presently lives in Los Angeles.

Laird Barron
’s work has appeared in numerous anthologies. Much of it has been collected in two books,
The Imago Sequence
and
Occultation
. He lives in Olympia, Washington.

Nadia Bulkin
is a writer and political science student. Her short fiction has appeared in
ChiZine
,
Strange Horizons
,
Fantasy Magazine
, the anthology
Bewere The Night
, and elsewhere; more information is available at nadiabulkin.wordpress.com. She spent her impressionable teen years in the suburban wilds of Nebraska. Her world view (and “Absolute Zero”) was greatly influenced by her environmental science minor and the 1982 movie about life out of balance,
Koyaanisqatsi
.

F. Brett Cox
’s fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including
Century
,
North Carolina Literary Review
,
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet
,
Postscripts
, and
Phantom
. With Andy Duncan, he co-edited
Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic
(Tor, 2004). A native of North Carolina, Brett is Associate Professor of English at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont, and lives in Roxbury, Vermont, with his wife, playwright Jeanne Beckwith.

Gemma Files
’s first novel,
A Book of Tongues: Volume One of the Hexslinger Series
(ChiZine Publications), won
Dark Scribe
Magazine’s 2010 Black Quill “Small Press Chill” award; its sequel,
A Rope of Thorns
, will be released in May 2011. She also won the 1999 International Horror Guild’s Best Short Fiction award for her story “The Emperor’s Old Bones.” Learn more about her at musicatmidnight-gfiles.blogspot.com.

Jeffrey Ford
is the author of the novels,
The Physiognomy
,
The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque
,
The Girl In the Glass
,
The Shadow Year
, and the story collections,
The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant
,
The Empire of Ice Cream
,
The Drowned Life
.  He lives in the world capital of Creatures, New Jersey, and teaches Fiction Writing and Early American Lit. at Brookdale Community College.

Christopher Golden
is the author of such novels as
Of Saints and Shadows, The Myth Hunters, The Boys Are Back in Town, Strangewood
and, with Mike Mignola,
Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire
. His work for teens and young adults includes
The Secret Journeys of Jack London
, co-authored with Tim Lebbon, and the
Body of Evidence
series. His other hats include editor, screenwriter, video game scripter, and comic book creator. Golden was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. His original novels have been published in more than fourteen languages in countries around the world. Please visit him at www.christophergolden.com.

Stephen Graham Jones
is the author of
It Came from Del Rio
, the horror collection
That Ones That Got Away
, and seven other books, with two more on the way from Dzanc. His stories have appeared in
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror
,
The Best Horror of the Year
(s), and around a hundred and twenty magazines and journals. Jones teaches in the MFA program at CU Boulder. More at demontheory.net.

Alaya Dawn Johnson
is the author of several short stories and three novels:
Moonshine
,
Racing the Dark
and
The Burning City
. She lives in New York City and can be contacted via her website www.alayadawnjohnson.com.

Michael Kelly
is the author of
Scratching the Surface
, and
Undertow and Other Laments
. His short fiction has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including
Best New Horror
,
Dark Arts
,
Nemonymous
,
PostScripts
,
Space & Time
,
Supernatural Tales
, and
Tesseracts 13
. Michael edited the anthologies
Apparitions
(for which he was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist), and
Chilling Tales
. He also runs Undertow Publications, and its flagship publication,
Shadows & Tall Trees
.

Carrie Laben
, formerly of Buffalo, Ithaca, and Brooklyn, is currently studying for her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Montana. As a result she has eaten more elk in the past six months than she even considered eating in the first thirty-one years of her life. Her work has previously appeared in venues such as
Clarkesworld
,
Chizine
,
Haunted Legends
, and the anthology
Phantom
. When she is not writing she looks at birds.

John Langan
is the author of a novel,
House of Windows
(Night Shade 2009), and a collection of stories,
Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters
(Prime 2008). He lives in upstate New York with his wife, son, dog, and a trio of mutually-suspicious cats.

Sarah Langan
is the author of the novels
The Keeper
and
The Missing
, and
Audrey’s Door
. She is currently finishing her fourth book,
Empty Houses.
Her work has garnered three Bram Stoker Awards, an ALA Award, a
New York Times
Book Review
editor’s pick, a
PW
favorite book of the year selection, and been optioned by The Weinstein Company for film. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, daughter, and rabbit.

Joe R. Lansdale
is the author of over thirty novels and eighteen short story collections. His work has appeared in numerous markets here and abroad. His work has been recognized by numerous awards, including The Edgar and seven Bram Stokers. His novella,
Bubba Hotep
, was filmed by Don Coscarelli and has become a cult film.

Kelly Link
is the author of three collections,
Pretty Monsters
,
Magic for Beginners
and
Stranger Things Happen
. Her short stories have won three Nebula awards, a Hugo, a Locus and a World Fantasy Award. She was born in Miami, Florida, and once won a free trip around the world by answering the question “Why do you want to go around the world?” (“Because you can’t go through it.”) Link lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she and her husband, Gavin J. Grant, run Small Beer Press and play ping-pong. In 1996 they started the occasional zine
Lady Churchill Rosebud’s Wristlet
.

Robert McCammon
is the bestselling author of eighteen novels, including the classic horror novels
Swan Song
and
The Wolf’s Hour
and the imaginative (tour de force?)
Boy’s Life
, which is taught in seventy percent of American schools. McCammon is also the author of the Matthew Corbett mystery/adventure series, set in Colonial America. His latest novel,
The Five
, will be published in May and follows a rock band on their final and fateful tour across the Southwest as they are pursued by a dark force of destruction. McCammon lives in Birmingham, Alabama.

China Miéville
is the author of
King Rat
;
Perdido Street Station
, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award;
The Scar
, winner of the Locus Award and the British Fantasy Award;
Iron Council
, winner of the Locus Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award;
Looking for Jake
, a collection of short stories;
Un Lun Dun
, his New York Times bestselling book for younger readers;
The City & The City
, named one of the top 100 Books of the Year by
Publishers Weekly
; and most recently the novel
Kraken
. He lives and works in London.

Norman Partridge
’s fiction includes horror, suspense, and the fantastic—“sometimes all in one story” says his friend Joe Lansdale. Partridge’s novel
Dark Harvest
was chosen by
Publishers Weekly
as one of the 100 Best Books of 2006, and two short story collections were published in 2010—
Lesser Demons
from Subterranean Press and
Johnny Halloween
from Cemetery Dance. Other work includes the Jack Baddalach mysteries
Saguaro Riptide
and
The Ten-Ounce Siesta
, plus
The Crow: Wicked Prayer
, which was adapted for film. He can be found on the web at NormanPartridge.com and americanfrankenstein.blogspot.com.

Cherie Priest
is the author of ten novels from Bantam, Tor, and Subterranean Press, including
Dreadnought
and
Boneshaker
—which was nominated for a Nebula Award and a Hugo Award, and won the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel—plus
Bloodshot
, the Eden Moore series,
Clementine
, and
Fathom
.

Brett Alexander Savory
is the Bram Stoker Award-winning editor-in-chief of
ChiZine: Treatments of Light and Shade in Words
, co-publisher of ChiZine Publications, has had about fifty short stories published, and has written two novels,
The Distance Travelled
and
In and Down
, and one short story collection,
No Further Messages
. He is now at work on his third novel,
Lake of Spaces, Wood of Nothing
. He lives in Toronto with his wife, writer/editor Sandra Kasturi.

David J. Schow
’s short stories have been regularly selected for over twenty-five volumes of “Year’s Best” anthologies across two decades and have won the World Fantasy Award, the ultra-rare Dimension Award from
Twilight Zone
magazine, plus a 2002 International Horror Guild Award for his collection of
Fangoria
columns,
Wild Hairs
. His novels include
The Kill Riff,
The Shaft, Rock Breaks Scissors Cut
,
Bullets of Rain, Gun Work, Internecine
and the forthcoming
Upgunned
. His short stories are collected in
Seeing Red, Lost Angels, Black Leather Required
,
Crypt Orchids, Eye
,
Zombie Jam
and
Havoc Swims Jaded
. He is the author of the exhaustively detailed
Outer Limits Companion
and has written extensively for films
(Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, The Crow
) and television (
Perversions of Science, The Hunger, Masters of Horror
). His bibliography and many other fascinating details are available online at his official site,
Black Leather Required
: www.davidjschow.com

Jim Shepard
is the author of six novels, including most recently
Project X
, and four story collections, including
Like You’d Understand, Anyway
, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize, and most recently
You Think That’s Bad
, released March 2011. He teaches at Williams College.

Al Sarrantonio
is the author of forty-five books. He is a winner of the Bram Stoker Award and has been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. His novels, spanning many genres, include
Moonbane, The Masters of Mars
trilogy and the
Orangefield
Halloween trilogy. Hailed as “a master anthologist” by
Booklist
, he has edited numerous collections, including the highly acclaimed
999
and, most recently,
Portents
and, with co-editor Neil Gaiman,
Stories
.

Paul Tremblay
is the author of the weirdboiled novels
The Little Sleep
and
No Sleep Till Wonderland
, the short story collection
In the Mean Time
, and the novella
The Harlequin and the Train
. His short fiction has appeared in
Weird Tales
and
Year’s Best American Fantasy 3
. He’s the co-editor of the anthologies
Fantasy
,
Bandersnatch
, and
Phantom
. He still has no uvula and lives somewhere south of Boston with his wife and two kids.

Lisa Tuttle
has been writing strange, weird stories nearly all her life, and this year marks the fortieth anniversary of her first professional sale.
Stranger in the House,
the first volume of her “Collected Short Supernatural Fiction” was published by Ash-Tree Press in 2010. Her novels include
Lost Futures, The Mysteries
and
The Silver Bough.
A native of Texas, she presently resides with her family in the highlands of Scotland.