Litro138 teaser

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Horror

Mystery Issue, March 2013 | 44

LITRO MAGAZINE Issue 138 | October 2014

Toby Litt THERE WAS THIS BOY I MET AT A PARTY, YEARS BACK

Richard Thomas LITTLE RED WAGON

Pete Segall

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WHO WILL SURVIVE AND WHAT WILL BE LEFT OF THEM?

Krishan Coupland 17 2001

Sheila Armstrong 23 BADHBH

Adam Nevill

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Jeff VanderMeer

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THE ANCESTORS

AUTHOR Q&A

COVER ARTIST Ben Scarborough Ben is IGGY’s E-Learning Graphic Designer. Ben creates interactive and engaging academic content for IGGY members including graphics, animation and flash design.

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Horror

EDITORIAL Dear Reader, Welcome to Litro #138, our Horror issue. Within these pages we have some unique visions of what makes our skin crawl: hauntings and mythological deities, mad scientists and weirdly creepy trips to the cinema. What brings them together is the authors’ desire to make us scream. (If you want an example of how horror bleeds into the crime genre too, then be sure to check out our latest Book Club read—the dark and grisly Barcelona Shadows, by Marc Pastor.)

We’re thrilled to have a new piece from Toby Litt as this issue’s opener, a troubling short story called There was this boy I met at a party, years back. With its unexpected ending and distinctive voice it gives a truly modern flavour to the traditional haunting.

Then acclaimed American author Richard Thomas takes us on a trip worthy of The Twilight Zone in Little Red Wagon, a touching (but disturbing) tale, with a twist in the end that reframes the entire story. Pete Segall’s Who Will Survive and What Will Be Left of Them? is similarly surreal but unsettling, as a trip to the cinema takes a sinister turn. Warning: you may never be able to eat peanut M&Ms again.

Krishan Coupland tackles slightly more traditional horror fare, although his unique vision gives 2001 an allegorical depth that you won’t often find in the genre. His simple revenge tale gets deeply weird and disturbing when Skylark and the Bug take to the skies. That’s followed by Sheila Armstrong’s Badhbh, a collision between ancient evil and modern civilisation with an intriguing folkloric angle. Then we close with a story by one of the emerging stars of the horror genre, Adam Nevill, whose dark imagination conjures up The Ancestors. Of all the stories in this issue, this is the one you’ll want to read with all the lights on.

Finally, we talk to Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author of the eerily thrilling Southern Reach Trilogy.

Anyone who’s read VanderMeer’s books will tell you that he has a truly unique take on the familiar horror tropes, and his recent trilogy contains some of the most unsettling scenes in modern literature. We’re also excited to have illustrations from two talented artists—Dan Henk and Jethro Lentle—so watch out for their artwork as you read.

We hope you enjoy Litro’s walk on the dark side. We dare you to read this issue alone, with the lights down low, as a storm rages outside and a branch tap-tap-taps at the window. Turning the page has never been so fraught with peril.

Dan Coxon Editor October 2014

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The latest Litro BookClub read, is BARCELONA SHADOWS by Marc Pastor “As gruesome as it is gripping highly recommended.� Independent, CSI by day, writer by night, Marc Pastor author of Barcelona Shadows Children are going missing. A body is found, twisted and drained of blood. Is the Devil himself haunting the Shadows and spiriting away the innocent?

The perfect Halloween Page turner Litro

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THERE WAS THIS BOY I MET AT A PARTY, YEARS BACK

by Toby Litt and I really don’t know if I should be telling you this, because you might even meet him around here somewhere or—even worse—try to find him and use him. But this honestly is what happened, and I swear I don’t like usually believe in ghosts or anything freaky—and he was definitely not a ghost because I touched him enough to be sure he was really there.

Not like touched him touched him, kissed him, but our shoulders definitely were in contact for a few seconds. I could feel him being there solidly like so if he wasn’t a person, that couldn’t have happened, could it?

This was at Becky’s party, not a birthday party just a Becky-has-loads-ofparties party. And I hadn’t seen him before then, and I didn’t see him again until like yesterday coming home from work.

Our shoulders touched because we were sitting on Becky’s mother and mother’s boyfriend’s sofa. He had sat down next to me because I was crying—that’s what I think now. Back then, I didn’t notice him coming across the room—I haven’t got a memory of him at the party standing or dancing, just close up next to me. The sofa was bright green, though— that I remember. The kind of green that makes you feel drunk and nauseous even if you’re not.

We started talking. I think I said “Hi,” first, but he could easily have said it, or we could have said it at the same time. “Sorry,” I said, “I’m such a mess.”

“That’s okay,” he said. And he didn’t say anything else, but I felt like he meant it. Sometimes people come up to you to, like, get stuff out of you and then go away and tell other people. I didn’t get that feeling about him.

He didn’t say much else, but I did—oh boy, did I. I hope I had the decency to wait at least a few seconds, but that’s not the way it plays in my head, since I’ve started to think about it again. He just opened a tiny little crack of a door and, whoosh, in comes this ocean of me.

I told him all the stuff I never told anybody, although it was pretty obvious that everyone knew it already. I didn’t cover my arms, because it was fine not to—you weren’t joining any kind of club by showing off the scars, but I wasn’t ashamed. Well, I was ashamed but I wasn’t a hider.

And I talked about food and, my god, like told him what I really would like to do—if I could—which was eat nothing ever again and at the same time eat everything ever. “I’m such a total pig bitch,” I said—and he said, I realise I haven’t even described him. I will. Right after I say that he said. He said, “Hmmm.” He did not say, “You’re not,” or “I don’t think you’re a total pig bitch” like he would have done, if he was trying to like pick me up.

He was not all that good looking. He was an average boy. One day, he might have grown into looking a lot better than he did. That sounds mean.

What I mean is, no-one was going to whisper about him from one corner Horror, October 2014 | 05

LITTLE RED WAGON In a desolate future, family is everything

by Richard Thomas Rebecca hated her father for what he’d done, refusing to help him dig the grave, arms crossed, tears running down her face, the body under the tarp no longer Grandpa, no more secret conversations when they were alone, just the two of them now—her father the killer, her father and his constant worries, her father convinced that the old man had finally fallen sick.

They’d been alone for a long time now, the three of them living off the land, the radio antenna built up tall in the back yard, stretching up into the sky. Nobody ever answered, but she sat in the kitchen, turning the knobs, trying to find a sign of life, anyway. The black box sat on the table, static and interference crackling from the device, the puddle of blood on the floor where her grandfather had fallen, the hammer that killed him still lying there like a sleeping snake. Sitting next to her, the thick, black lab nuzzled her hand, whimpering. Sadie was upset, she didn’t know what to do, and neither did Rebecca. She was a teenager now, but inside, she was still a child, a baby—and she felt helpless.

One percent, that’s what Grandpa had said—only one percent had survived. This had been several years ago, when one percent meant something.

He’d tug on his long, grey beard and stare at the television set as the man on the news rattled on, updates so infrequent, most of the population dead and gone now. Around them, the world had simply disappeared— no cars driving by, no planes overhead, with the farm still functioning, but just barely. Their pantry was filled with canned goods—it had been easy to drive around their small town and fill up the bed of their pickup truck with more. In the beginning the stench had been unbearable, meat going bad, bodies lying everywhere, but over time the animals and elements picked at the bones, leaving little behind but broken, white skeletons.

One percent had turned into another one percent, and that’s when it all went quiet, went dark. The second wave erupted, the mutation—airborne or dormant, nobody knew—and then no more frantic man on the television set, hair sticking out in all directions, shouting at the camera.

No, there was nothing more after that.

Grandfather talked about keeping the race alive, that they had to find a female, a woman—that was why they had the radio going, why he’d built the tower, why they constantly scrolled up and down the dial, looking for any survivors. He was a handy man, Grandpa, able to build most anything out in the barn with his tools and charts—his years of engineering so helpful now that the world had moved on. A stack of books sat by his leather recliner—biomechanics, computer programming, artificial intelligence, and bionics.

“What’s your earliest memory?” Grandpa asked her.

“What do you mean?”

“Think back,” he said, easing into the recliner. “What do you remember, the very first thing you can think of?”

08 | Litro Magazine

The Beauty of Ignorance by Dan Henk www.danhenk.com 10 | Litro Magazine

WHOWILLSURVIVEAND WHATWILLBELEFTOFTHEM? In the cinema, no one can hear you scream

by Pete Segall A long and needlessly taxing week is nearing its end and Gathright emails his wife from work and asks if she’d like to go see a movie. Of course, she says. They bat around a couple of different titles before Gathright zeroes in on a pair. Both seem like good candidates to begin scouring the week off of him. This is his aim, above all else. To wash off the stains and smears of the past few days in the mindless river of a movie. His wife, who has intentions of her own, she has, after all, been witness to this week of his and has had a week of her own besides, tries to offer a few alternate suggestions, but Gathright gently swats these aside. They settle on the restored print of the admirable slasher flick. She picks him up and they drive to the theatre in agreeable, windswept near-silence. The girl who sells them their tickets is young and pretty and Gathright flirts with her while she swipes his credit card. His wife teases him about it afterward, not because of the ridiculousness of it but the hopelessness. It’s almost as if he’s stood up and declared himself emperor of the universe, that’s how absurd it is. It’s not a mean thing to point out and Gathright doesn’t begrudge her for doing it, though she is perhaps being a bit insistent. No matter. They are together in the drowsy light of the lobby and there are the smells and expectations and sudden tiny mysteries that come with this place. It makes shrugging it off easier. He needs to use the men’s, she’ll go in and get seats. They unlace their hands and branch off. His bladder emptied, Gathright decides he wants M&Ms. When he reaches the counter, though, he hears himself asking for the M&Ms with peanuts. Why does he do that? The simplicity of M&Ms has always made him happy. To adulterate the basic structure with anything else—like blocky cysts of nut—is lunacy. But his wife likes them. She’d eat the plain kind but the peanuts make her happy. The spark of appreciation he’ll see when he hands her the box outshines whatever reasonable objections there may be. He takes the box and his change and while he’s reaching into his pocket for his ticket stub someone, he doesn’t see who, hands him a folded piece of paper. He opens it and recognizes the writing as his wife’s. I don’t think they’re going to let me leave, it says.

He has no idea what that means. It’s strange and vaguely unsettling and he can’t sort it out but he’s on his way to where she is so it’ll be sorted out soon. Going down the long hall somebody taps him on his left shoulder and when he turns in that direction someone else puts another note into the palm his right hand. They’re gone by the time he’s figured out what happened. They’re saying the ceremony is going to start when the movie does, it says. If that’s true then you should probably go home. What is she doing? A night at the movies should be the simplest thing on earth.

Why, on this night, after this week? He wants his unrepentant savagery, he wants his M&Ms, he wants his hand on his wife’s thigh in a black room. He wants to be assumed into other people’s action. Whatever she’s 14 | Litro Magazine

Horned Devil' by Jethro Lentle www.jethrolentle.com 16 | Litro Magazine

2001 Skylark and the Bug take their revenge

by Krishan Coupland The Millennium Bug was hungry again; Skylark could feel it in her stomach. They were linked, the Bug and the girl. Last night’s shopping sat still-bagged on the table. Quietly, she took food from there: bread, tinned peaches and other things she knew it liked to eat. Her parents were in the living room, arguing, TV turned up loud to mask the sound. She hated them. They were like pet dogs—big, unwieldy, useless. They thought she was asleep.

She went out the kitchen window onto the fire escape. The cold picked at her, made her breath feel brittle. Her footsteps rang hollowly against the metal stairs. As she reached the roof the Bug unspooled itself from the shadows of a vent stack. It was getting easier and easier to make it come.

In the beginning she’d had to strain for it, stretching out on the tiptoes of her mind. Now she could call it before she’d even reached the roof and it would be there waiting. She liked that. With every day that passed she was only getting stronger.

She gave it the peaches and watched it struggle with the ring pull, blunt fingers scrabbling against metal. She took the tin back and opened it herself. This made her feel like a mother.

“What do you say?”

Thank you, Sky. Tonight the Bug’s voice was a deep and throaty rumble.

It changed often. There were a thousand voices in the Bug, and each day a different one seemed to rise to prominence, shifting like the Bug’s massive body shifted, liquid and inky. The only thing about it that was certain were the eyes—two molten rocks in a pool of pitch.

“Be quick,” she said. “I have a job for you tonight.”

Skylark hated to watch things eat, and so she turned her back and went to the edge of the roof. There was no barrier, only a low concrete lip before the drop. She perched on it, feet dangling over nothingness. From up here you could see the world below in surprising detail, everything picked out orange by the streetlamps. Small people and small houses and small cars. Behind her the Bug ate greedily, small coos of pleasure escaping as it crammed the peaches into its mouth.

It had been smaller when it came the first time, but she’d fattened it up.

Taught it how to form words with the loose hole of its mouth. How big would it grow, she wondered, if she kept on feeding it? The Bug was a slowly-unfurling mystery to her—thousands of years old and yet new and impossible and soft and hard and hers. All hers. Like a baby, but precious and powerful.

The tin tinked off the hard surface of the roof. Skylark didn’t turn around, but spread her arms and waited. The Bug made no sound when it moved, but she felt its arms a second before they enfolded her—like the static she sometimes felt hovering in front of screens. She shut her eyes as she was Horror, October 2014 | 17

Horror, October 2014 | 21

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BADHBH Crossing paths with an ancient goddess

by Sheila Armstrong We are made up of the ghosts of moments, I believe. We clutch them to us and steal parts of them to make ourselves more whole. Each action is made up of thousands of others already gone; the result of a hundred different moments converging to create a new one, cresting on a wave of tiny hauntings. My own ghosts are not malicious ones, but neither are they kindly. They behave exactly how they did in life. Some are unimportant—the ghost of a shower once taken in a 3-star hotel room, a brief conversation about nothing, the honking of a car horn as I sat too slow at the lights—but some lurk with intensity; the ghost of a relationship, an idea, a single moment.

When I was very young, my grand-aunt would tell us old stories, of Badhbh, the crow-goddess, omen of chaos and death; of Queen Medb and her pride and the battle for the Tain; the De Danann, that ancient and kingly race; of Fionn MacCumhaill and his lost son Oisin, and all those others that float blearily from the past up to the surface of the present, remembered only in the words and songs of those who care to listen.

We would sit around her as she rocked on her knees and addressed her words to the sky, because she had no fondness for children and preferred to imagine that we weren’t there. We had no fondness for her either; her dark clothes and dark words had no place in our Technicolor world of cartoons and penny-sweets and pin-striped leggings, but we listened all the same. On kinder days, I think that we found some intrinsic pity in us, young as we were, for a lonely old woman; a square peg in a world that was rapidly becoming circular, and softer.

And so, when I was still young, I saw that the trees outside my home were crinkled, like wrapping paper. Their branches would frighten me, black and twisted and straining sky-wards in supplication. Dozens of crows would perch on the highest branches, in twos and threes and entire murders, screaming derision down on us. Often, as if in response to some silent signal, they would take flight in flocks, wheeling around in a giant circle before settling in a tree that looked no different to the rest; furious, terrible.

Our home was built at the end of a road, in a slightly sloping valley, over an ancient forest-bed, and was surrounded by these wrapping-paper trees.

Centuries ago, men had come and dug out the roots and the trees and laid down soil and bricks and iron. The houses and lives around us had changed, grown, shrank, disappeared and was rebuilt, but still the land was kept in order under the harsh grey concrete. Sometimes the trees had tried to come creeping back in, spreading a toe or two across the boundaries, but they had kept them in line with biting axes. And we were safe.

But the woods had a champion. A monstrous hooded crow, as long as a man’s forearm. It seemed a thousand years old and one, that crow, and was Badhbh herself come to life. Every morning the crow would come

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THE ANCESTORS The toys aren’t happy

by Adam Nevill It never stops raining outside the new house. When you are upstairs it sounds like hundreds of pebbles thrown by so many little hands on to the pointy roof. And we can’t go outside to play, so we stay indoors and amuse ourselves with the toys. They belong to Maho, but she is happy to share them with me. My parents never knew about Maho, but she is my best friend and lives in the house too. She has been here a long time.

When my Mama used to come upstairs to put clean clothes in my drawers, or my Papa knocked on the door to tell me dinner was ready, Maho would hide. And wait in my room until I could play with the toys again. Maho sleeps in my bed too, every night. I wish I had hair like her. Maho’s hair is long and silky and thick. When she puts her arms around me and hugs me, I am covered up by her hair. Tucking itself under my arms and winding around my neck it is so warm I never need the blankets on my bed.

I think her hair feels like black fur. Like big curtains she pulls them across her face so all I can see is her little square teeth. How can you see through your hair, Maho? I once asked her. It looks so funny. But she just giggled.

And with their teeny fingers the toys like to touch her hair too. They stand and sway on the bed and stroke it.

In the daytimes the toys never do much, but we still go looking for them around the empty rooms and in the secret places my Mama and Papa never saw. When we find a toy sitting upright in a corner, or standing still as if suddenly having stopped the dancing on tiny fast feet, we talk to them. The toys just listen. They can hear everything you say. Sometimes they smile.

But at night the toys do most of the playing. They always have things to show us. New tricks and dances all around the bed. I’ll be fast asleep but their little hard fingers will touch my face. Cold breaths will brush my ears as they say, “Hello. Hello,” until I wake. At first I was scared of the tiny figures on the bed, all climbing and tugging at the sheets. And I would run and get into bed with Mama and Papa. But Maho told me the toys just want to be my friends and play. Maho says you don’t need a Mama and Papa when you have so many friends. I guess she is right.

Parents don’t understand. Most of the time they think about other things.

That’s why they weren’t needed for the playing.

Maho told me that when the other children who lived here grew up and left the house all of their toys stayed behind. And it’s an old house so there are lots of toys. Maho never left either. She never left her friends. Like I did when we moved out here. I told Maho my parents made me move.

“See,” she said. “Parents don’t understand about friends. About how much we love our toys. And how special secret places are to us. You can’t just leave them because Papas get new jobs or are sick. It’s not fair. Who says things have to change and you have to go to new places when you’re happy where you are?”

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AUTHOR Q&A Litro talks to the author of the disturbing and thrilling Southern Reach Trilogy

with Jeff VanderMeer Litro: The Southern Reach trilogy draws heavily upon nature and the wilderness for its horror. What inspired this direction for the books? What do you find horrific about the wilderness?

Jeff: I’d wanted to write about the American South for a while, but the way my imagination works I knew it wasn’t going to be as directly as some novelists might tackle that landscape. My way in was through the 14-mile hiking trail here in North Florida that I’ve walked for almost 20 years now. Complete with a lighthouse just like the one in the Southern Reach novels. I’ve jumped over alligators out there, been charged by wild boars, been heckled by an otter, and also encountered a Florida panther. This last experience was particularly life-changing and profound because you simply stand there and you wait for the panther to kill you and eat you or go away. You don’t really have any options. It’s a unique wilderness area, too, in how it transitions from pine forest to swamp to marsh flats and then the beach. That lends itself to a layered experience in fiction, and there’s no detail of the natural environment in Annihilation, Authority, or Acceptance that’s second-hand. All of it is lived experience—things I’ve observed.

I don’t find anything horrific about the wilderness, and indeed the Southern Reach novels might be seen as books in which most of the wildlife is doing just fine. It’s human beings who aren’t doing as well, and that’s because we’re divorced from the natural world to a greater extent now than at any point in our history. This is one of the key reasons why we’re in such a problematic place regarding our own future and the planet’s future. A study released in 2010 indicated that, for example, US children grown up developmentally challenged about animals and the natural world. That’s the truly horrific thing: that we no longer fully belong on Earth, or function as a productive part of our world. This needs to change or we will find ourselves rudely and swiftly replaced.

Litro: Do you consider this to be a horror trilogy? Why/why not?

Jeff: There are always horrific elements in my novels and comic elements as well. My favourite novels, like Catch-22, combine all sorts of emotions and textures because that’s the way life is. It’s hypocritical to look away from the disturbing things in our world but it’s also wrong to ignore the absurd and hilariously ridiculous elements as well. And the heroic bits as well—Acceptance, the final volume, I believe exemplifies this. And the real horror isn’t from anything uncanny in these books, really, but in the grotesqueries of human institutions when they’ve been subverted or sociopathically twisted. Which happens all too often.

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Publisher & Editor-in-Chief: Eric Akoto Magazine Editor: Dan Coxon dan.coxon@litro.co.uk General Online Editor : Eric Akoto Online Short Fiction Editor: Katy Darby katy.darby@litro.co.uk Online Fiction Editor: Lia Martin onlinefiction@litro.co.uk Non-Fiction Editor: Patricia Duffaud nonfiction@litro.co.uk Book Reviews Editor: Inder Sidhu inder.sidhu@litro.co.uk Arts Editor: Daniel Janes arts@litro.co.uk Film & Arts Editor: Robin McConnell filmreviews@litro.co.uk Contributing Editors at large: Sophie Lewis, Rio, Brazil Lead Designer: Laura Hannum Marketing & Sales: info@litro.co.uk

Litro Magazine is published by Ocean Media Books Ltd. General inquiries: contact info@litro.co.uk or call 020 3371 9971.

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