Kindle Edition, 2016 © Apex Publications

Contact Apex Magazine

by Apex Editors | 27 words

The Apex editors love to hear from our readers. If you have comments, questions, or issues, don't hesitate to send an email to Jason Sizemore (Publisher/Editor-in-Chief — jason@apex-magazine.com ).

Copyrights and Acknowledgements

by Apex Editors | 194 words

“Words from the Editor-in-Chief” Copyright © 2016 by Jason Sizemore
“Damnatio Ad Beastias” Copyright © 2016 by Kristi DeMeester
“Interview with Author Kristi DeMeester” Copyright © 2016 Andrea Johnson
“Pagpag” Copyright © 2016 by Samuel Marzioli
“Starfields” Copyright © 2016 by Andrew Gilstrap
“Winged Beings of the Necropolis” Copyright © 2016 Gary Every
“American Dream” Copyright © 2016 Allie Nelson
“Discovering Somnio: Interview with Travis Milloy” Copyright © 2016 Betsy Phillips
“Zayanim” Copyright © 2015 by Adam Roberts
“Interview with Cover Artist Denis Corvus” Copyright © 2016 by Russell Dickerson
“I Myself Wrote This Horror” Copyright © 2016 by Denis Corvus

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief—Jason Sizemore
Managing Editor—Lesley Conner
Poetry Editor—Bianca Spriggs

Slush Editors—Andrea Johnson, Anna Middleton, Beth Sutherland, Beverly McPherson, Carolyn Charron, Dawn Griffin, Eileen Maksym, Gabrielle Harbowy, Jessica Nelson, Joshua Cowell, Joshua P’ng, Kate Dollarhyde, Lauren Smith, Lia Swope Mitchell, Lindsay Anderson, Lisa Bolekaja, Mandy Johnson-Parker, Mike Baldwin, Rebecca Hurley, Reese Menezes, Samantha Williams, Stephanie Harris, Andrew Tudor, Anna Chapman, Carl Duzett, Carolyn VanEseltine, Dan Schindel, Heather Cale, and Tacoma Tomilson.

Graphic Designer—Justin Stewart

ISSN: 2157-1406

Apex Publications
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Lexington, KY 40524

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Each new issue of Apex Magazine is released the first Tuesday of the month. Single issues are available for $2.99. Subscriptions are available for twelve months and cost $19.95.

Coming in Issue 90

by Apex Editors | 66 words

Next month in Apex Magazine we have four original short stories from four amazing women: “Every Winter” by E. Catherine Tobler, “After We Walk Away” by Erica L. Satifka, “The Island in the Attic” by Natalia Theodoridou, and “When She Comes” by Onu-Okpara Chiamaka. We’ll also have an excerpt of Apex’s next book release Rosewater by Tade Thompson. Plus, a lot more in the November issue of Apex Magazine .

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by Apex Editors | 91 words

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Discovering Somnio: Interview with Travis Milloy

by Betsy Phillips | 2227 words

Somnio has been the darling of the independent film circuit this year. Even before it was completed, it won best screenplay at the Boston Sci-Film Festival, won the Audience Award at the Fantastic Cinema & Craft Beer Festival, and was an Official Selection at the London International Festival of Science Fiction and Fantastic Film. I was fortunate to get to view the film recently and it’s fantastic. I think comparisons to Moon and Minority Report both give you a sense of the style of the film and somehow do nothing to convey what the movie is about.

The movie, written and directed by Travis Milloy, is about a man, Frank (Christopher Soren Kelly), imprisoned in a near-future prison and his relationship with his jailer, Howard (Jesse D. Arrow), a likeable guy swept up by larger forces. The cell is equipped with a machine that puts Frank in a dreamlike state and presumably allows Howard’s higher-ups to scan his memories for evidence of crimes. Frank tries to figure out how to escape and whether he can convince Howard to help him, even as he becomes suspicious that the world outside the prison may have fallen to dark forces.

Somnio is one of my favorite kinds of movies. I like a movie that, like Babe Ruth, swaggers up to the plate, points to exactly where it’s going to put the ball (or, in this metaphor, move the narrative), and, even though it just does exactly what it told you it was doing, I’m still surprised and delighted. A character in the movie flat out tells the audience what’s going on, how the trick is working, and yet I never saw the scope of it until the end. Think less The Usual Suspects and more Penn and Teller.

It’s also the kind of movie that, when you finish it, you immediately want to discuss it with someone. Sadly, I watched it alone. So, I took all my nerdy movie thoughts to writer and director Travis Milloy, which was even better than hashing it out with a friend (sorry friends).

APEX MAGAZINE: Howard reminded me a great deal of the type of character Joss Whedon excels at — the low-to-midrange bureaucrat who’s just trying to do his terrible job with maybe a modicum of humanity. I don’t want to spoil things for viewers by talking too much about why that characterization of Howard was so brilliant on your part (though I will say that, as much as I love Whedon, I was glad to see a movie interrogating that kind of character), but I do want to talk about what it means to have Howard as the authority figure. He’s literally holding Frank prisoner, providing Frank with everything Frank needs to survive, and providing Frank with his only companionship. He’s in charge — at least he’s as in charge as we ever see anyone on his side in the movie being — but his characterization is that he’s just a dude doing what he has do to do get by in the world and he doesn’t know any more than the limited amount he’s supposed to know. Howard surely is the antagonist of the movie, but I still have really mixed feelings about whether he’s the bad guy. It’s just so good! Did you have in mind all along that he’d be likeable? That it’d be hard to see him as a bad guy?

TRAVIS MILLOY: Yes, I never really pictured Howard as a villain, even though he’s the antagonist. I like the idea of blurring the lines about who is a villain and I like to take characters that feel real, have a set of beliefs, and then challenge those beliefs and morals. In essence, Howard isn’t doing anything wrong, he’s doing his job and the fact that Frank actually did lie and commit a crime makes him even more in the right. (That’s a bit of a spoiler.) So I don’t think it’s necessarily a question of right or wrong in a legal sense, it’s more so challenging someone’s ethics, if that makes sense. I really wanted to tell a story where there is no villain. The villain is our society, where we’ve gone, the decisions we’ve made along the way to create a judicial system that at one point made sense but becomes something beyond our control.

AM: While I was watching Somnio , Trump was announcing his vice-presidential pick, Turkey was embroiled in a coup that the world was watching in real-time, and people on Twitter were begging other people to stop sharing the picture of an American Sikh man and claiming that he was the Nice truck driver. So, I had the weird experience of watching the movie seem less and less futuristic as it went along. When I started the movie, it seemed fifteen, twenty years off. By the end, it seemed like people could be in Frank’s position next year. Could you talk a little bit about your world-building? How did you decide what the near future would be like?

TM: I left the future date ambiguous for a few reasons. One, we didn’t have the budget to create a completely futuristic environment but more importantly I didn’t want it to seem too far into the future because it’s harder to connect to that world. I just wanted it to feel “real” and have signs of where we might be headed, more automated and more under observation. Personally, I don’t think our world will look as different twenty or thirty years from now as a lot of sci-fi films portray. Only my opinion, but if we hopped into a time machine and went twenty years into the future, my guess is we’d be surprised at how similar it would appear. If you look at pictures of cities from 1986, (thirty years ago) there’s really not that much difference. Sure, cars a bit different, clothes and hair styles slightly altered, but that’s about it. I just don’t think the appearance of our world changes as fast as most sci-fi films portray. So on that note, I just added very small details to the environment and I tried to make things monochromatic, relying on a black and silver color palette as much as possible. But like I said, I didn’t want it to be too far in the future with flying cars, etc. I wanted it to be something we could more closely relate to.

From left to right: Writer/Director: Travis Milloy, Cinematographer: Jason Nolte (red shirt), A/C: Vincent Patin and Christopher Soren Kelly in the background.

AM: [Note to readers: I don’t think this question is specific enough to count as a spoiler, but it may be a little too spoiler-adjacent for some people’s taste. Please skip it if you’d rather not risk it.] One thing I found really interesting about Somnio is that Frank’s survival mechanism is his capacity for fiction — his ability to lie. I feel like we, as a culture, spend a lot of time trying to thread a needle of “lying is bad, but storytelling is okay.” I think, though, that you’ve made a defense of lying, a story in which lying and a capacity for lying is what makes us human and what lets us survive. Frank, ultimately, is a deceiver, but he’s also the character we’re rooting for. It’s really, really interesting to me that your guileless, honest character, who cannot help but be who he is, is your antagonist and your liar is your protagonist. Do you think a capacity for deceit is actually a positive quality?

TM: That’s an interesting point. And I think this plays into the dilemma of morality and where different people draw the line ethically. Is it okay to lie for the greater good or to deceive for self-preservation? And also, it’s blurred lines with what is accused and what is being admitted or denied. Frank has a certain amount of deception but never blatantly lies. He claims he did nothing wrong but in my mind, the things he had done were not wrong, they were for the greater good, so I guess in his own mind, he’s not really lying, he’s just not telling the entire truth. But existing in a society where the governing body has broken the rules, in my mind this excuses Frank’s actions. Since the government is making up their own rules, he has to do what he needs to survive and succeed. Plus, Frank never really does anything for his own personal gain, I see him as a soldier who is willing to take the risk and sacrifice himself to help others. That in itself I believe is an admirable quality.

It’s interesting because while we were making the film, Chris would question how deceptive Frank should seem, since he is actually hiding a secret. We agreed that Frank should never seem like he has a secret agenda or knows something we don’t.

AM: You raised money for Somnio on Kickstarter. I know independent film-makers spend a lot of time raising money so that they can make their films. But, I presume, in the days before Kickstarter, you had to go to people with lots of money. One thing I find interesting about Kickstarter is that it allows people who previously never would have been artists’ patrons to support art they find interesting. I wonder, what, if anything, changes for you about moving making when it’s not one or two people giving you thousands of dollars, but a hundred people giving you twenty dollars or fifty or a hundred?

TM: Kickstarter was a wonderful experience and even though we didn’t raise the initial money to make our movie with it, I don’t know if Somnio would have been done without it. We tried to raise money for the production but we fell short of our goal. But by using Kickstarter it opened the doors to a lot of people who were interested in what we were doing and created a buzz we couldn’t have gotten otherwise. It was because of this buzz that got us introduced to our investors and really got the project off the ground. We went back to do another Kickstarter campaign when we needed additional money to complete the film and it was amazing how supportive people were. It felt like we gained a whole new circle of friends, much like a family to get the movie completed.

AM: When I interviewed Christopher Soren Kelly, who stars in Somnio , a few months ago, we talked about the necessity of letting a story change from the thing you have in your head at the beginning to the thing it becomes in the end. Were there big changes in Somnio from what you first imagined to the end result? Would you mind telling us about one? What’s your writing process like?

TM: Yeah, I guess the movie starting as one thing and evolving into something else is really the exciting part about film making. You never really know what is going to work and what is going to fail from the page to the screen and that element is what I find exhilarating. It’s a journey of discovery to make a good movie and there were lots of things that did and didn’t work. The biggest change was the structure of the first act and this was something I didn’t deal with until I was editing. When I edited the film as it was meant to be in the script something wasn’t working for me. The first fifteen minutes are so important, whether you can hook the audience in the right way, and the movie just wasn’t moving at the right pace. I wasn’t quite sure what could be the solution but I tried to separate myself from the material and observe it more as an audience member than a film maker and I went at the edit from another direction. I completely altered the structure of the first thirty minutes and it started to work.

The other big thing was the character of Howard. (Spoiler alert!) I had written him more “human” in the script and I really wanted him to feel very flawed and as “normal” as possible with the way he spoke and reacted to things. But while we were making the movie and while I was editing, it seemed more interesting that Howard had difficulty in acting human and couldn’t quite express emotion or react in a human sense. It gave Frank and Howard’s relationship more dynamic the more artificial Howard became.

My writing process has changed over the years. I use to write in a more traditional sense, doing an outline and laying out the structure of the story but now-a-days I’m a lot bolder (or foolish, depending on how you look at it) and I always start writing without any idea of where it’s headed. I like to jump into a situation or scenario without really knowing anything and see what happens. It’s foolish because most of the time it doesn’t work and I don’t know where to go or how to finish it but every once in a while it does work and it’s a thrill. For me, by using that technique, without knowing where it might go gives it a more unexpected and less formulaic feel.

Betsy Phillips is a writer who lives in Whites Creek, Tennessee. Her fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine , F&SF , and other outlets. Her hobbies include crocheting, wandering old cemeteries, and burping loudly, though never at the same time. Yet. You can find her on Twitter at @auntb or at her website betsyphillips.net .

Interview with Author Kristi DeMeester

From a very early age, I never liked a full visual of the monster. The monster is always much more terrifying if it stays somewhat hidden.

by Andrea Johnson | 1584 words

If you could undo what you’ve become, undo what you’ve lost, undo what your life has become, is any price too high? Especially if someone else pays it with you? In this haunting and metaphoric tale of isolation and pain, Madeline has no idea the price Bennie pays for her continued “health,” and she doesn't care.

There are so many layers to read into in this story, I hope you’ll take the time to explore them with me. Madeline is suffering from a diagnosed illness, and it has pulled her away from her family, from social interaction, from everything she knows. She doesn’t care what her “caretaker” goes through, she just needs the medicinal release he can provide. The first time I read this story, I thought Bennie was nothing more than a drug dealer. And that’s literally what he is. But now I see him as more of a caregiver. He’s under no obligation to Madeline, yet he continues to work for her. And she completely takes him for granted. How many at home health care workers feel taken for granted, even though this is just a job for them? How many homebound people feel embarrassed by their situation, their loss of agency, the idea that medications can fix everything that was ever wrong? I love how stories just like this one change shape and color every time I read them. The story doesn’t change, only I do. What will this story be the next time I read it? There’s only one way to find out.

Kristi DeMeester has been writing spooky dark fiction since 2010, with short fiction appearing in The Dark, Shimmer, Black Static, Daily Science Fiction, Strange Aeons, Three Lobed Burning Eye, Shock Totem , and the anthologies The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Cthulhusattva: Tales of the Black Gnosis, and Nightscript Vol 1 , among elsewhere. Her brand of weird fiction touches on inescapable fears, dreamy moments gone wrong, and the edges of the supernatural. Her strict upbringing guaranteed she’d be a bookworm, and youthful watchings of horror films showed that it’s not horror that's so scary — it’s what we can’t see, what’s just off screen that’s so scary.

DeMeester’s Appalachian horror novel, Beneath , about a journalist investigating a snake handling church, hits bookstore shelves in 2017. She was kind enough to let me pick her brain about Madeline and Bennie, the novel, her own personal fears, and the “secret sauce” to getting the tension in stories like these just right. We even chatted about coffee. You can learn more about Kristi on her website, kristidemeester.com .

APEX MAGAZINE: You chose a Latin title, which I'm not going to discuss the translation of because I feel that could spoil a major plot point in the story, but I am most interested in knowing the process behind choosing a title in a different language. Was this a phrase you knew before you wrote the story? Did the phrase help inspire the story or the other way around?

KRISTI DEMEESTER: I wrote the story before I wrote the title. For a long time I searched and searched for a title I thought would fit, but nothing was really pulling at me. Finally, I started playing on variations of the word “beast” and finally the title came forward.

AM: Does Madeline ever think about what Bennie goes through to create her “medications?” And what Bennie does for her, why would he do this for a complete stranger? What’s in it for him?

KD: In envisioning Bennie’s character, this is strictly a monetary thing for him. He does it for the money. What he has to do doesn’t take much physical or true mental effort, so, in essence, it’s easy money. I never thought Madeline much cared what he went through to provide her medication. I think to both of them, it’s the ends to a mean, and neither truly cares about the other. To Madeline, Bennie is a provider. I don’t think she views him as a person. Because of his willingness to do what he does, she’s able to keep him distant.

AM: This story has some amazing tension in it. The reader doesn't exactly know what’s happened in the big wide world, we don't know about Madeline’s past, we don’t know precisely what's wrong with her. You’ve spent years honing your skills as a horror writer, so what’s the “secret sauce” to building tension just right? How do you keep the story so compelling yet play your cards so close to your chest about what’s actually going on? (Because dear reader, what you think is going on in this story is not what's going on!)

KD: Thank you so much! And I wish I had a magic formula I could give because then I would follow it without fail. I know what intrigues me as a reader. Small, slow tips that reveal the edges of the horror rather than a full on exposure. I try my very best to mimic that in my own writing. From a very early age, I never liked a full visual of the monster. The monster is always much more terrifying if it stays somewhat hidden.

AM: Your stories often have a theme of motherhood, and Madeline feels intense guilt over her failure as a mother. Why is this a theme you find yourself returning to often? With so much societal pressure, I wonder if all of us women fear being bad mothers, or fear being “not good enough.”

KD: I’m speaking personally here, but this is a huge fear in my day-to-day life. As a mother, I think it’s common to worry that you’re making mistakes or doing it wrong, but I fear the terrible seed that might be lying dormant inside of me. Because I had a bad mother. And there are pieces of myself that scream loud in the quiet moments just before sleep, and they ask me “what happens if you become her?” It’s something I come back to again and again. The monstrous thing in the ultimate feminine act of having a child. There’s a lot of grief wrapped up in that as well. Writing about it is my way of trying to make it okay. I’m not sure it ever will be.

AM: Congrats on your novel Beneath , which is coming out in 2017 from Word Horde! What can you tell us about Beneath ? Were there particular portions of the book that were easy to write? Portions that were unexpectedly challenging to write?

KD: Thank you! Beneath was a four year endeavor. I started it during my Master’s program, went away from it, and then finally came back. It’s what I like to call my apocalyptic, snake-handling novel. It’s about a journalist sent to write a story on a snake-handling church in Appalachia. She uncovers what initially looks to be some kind of possession or mental illness, but is something much, much older and darker. Writing Beneath was an experience unlike anything I’ve ever had. I’d never written a novel before, and I quickly reached a point where I felt like I’d ran out of ideas and started throwing in every random thought I had just to keep the momentum going. Going back through during edits, I had to cut much of it. Beneath taught me the power of having a plan. But it’s my first novel. I don’t think I’ll ever quite be able to shake the hold it has over me.

AM: You’ve published a healthy chunk of short fiction, and you’re working on your third novel. How has your experience writing short fiction differed from your experience writing novels?

KD: Novel work is so much more about the dedication to the long game. I’m the sort of person that thrives on quick gratification, and short stories provide that. Novels require more awareness, more flexibility. I had to set my software so I couldn’t see the word count while I was working. Otherwise, I’d start to beat myself up. For novels, I have to ignore the daily counts and let myself fade into the work. When I do reach the end, it’s so hard to shake that world. With short stories, I can jump fairly easily from idea to idea, but novels become something like a waking dream.

AM: You were raised in a fundamentalist religious family, with little exposure to television and all the pop culture that I take for granted. Did your upbringing influence your writing or what you choose to write about?

KD: It certainly guaranteed that I would be a reader. Since there were no other distractions, books were what I turned to. In terms of my upbringing, I certainly reflect on how easy it can be to fall into an ideology. To drown. To ignore the blatant horrors and swallow them down and call them beautiful.

AM: You and I have a few wonderful things in common: a love for black coffee and a history of reading every single Christopher Pike and Anne Rice book the library had. So, I’ve got to ask: Drip, French press, or K-cup machine? And more importantly, which is your favorite Anne Rice title?

KD: I roll with a K-cup machine because it’s quick, and I need caffeine inside of me as soon as possible. The Vampire Lestat is the original and only for me.

Andrea Johnson lives in Michigan with her husband and too many books. If she’s not walking around her day job with a coffee mug in hand, then she’s at home with a book in one hand and a craft beer in the other. She can be found online at her book review blog Little Red Reviewer and on Twitter, where her handle is @redhead5318 . You wouldn’t know it from this bio, but Andrea is a very goofy person.

Interview with Cover Artist Denis Corvus

by Russell Dickerson | 725 words

This month’s Apex Magazine cover artist is Denis Corvus, whose art galleries are filled with visions of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. His piece for this month’s cover combines all of that, and much more.

APEX MAGAZINE: Your cover piece for this month’s Apex Magazine , “I Myself Wrote This Horror,” mixes innocence and curiosity with horror. How do you avoid one of these emotions, especially horror, from taking over your intentions for the piece?

forgotten world of imagination

DENIS CORVUS: I’m trying to keep the line between the dark arts and my personality. I really like dark, gloomy paintings, but my desire for peace must be positive. Though, there are moments, when I think about all sorts of things, for example about things happening in the world, about social problems, and problems of personality.

AM: Your fan art includes many characters and creatures from games, comics, and movies. As an artist myself, I have had fan art pieces become something different as I am working on them. Have there been any pieces of your art that started as fan art but became something else in the process?

DC: Yes, I like drawing fan art a lot and the main purpose here is to show the basic personal characteristics. But sometimes I want to change the character, add some new costume, change the design with my own elements or draw it in another setting, for example draw Batman in the Renaissance era. I often play different games and laughable characters interest me, and that’s exactly where I get inspiration to draw fan art. I especially like villains.

AM: You have several pieces on your DeviantArt page, such as “On the other side of sleep” and “forgotten world of imagination,” that people have commented are creepy or scary. What do you think makes something creepy? Is it a character, a texture, even a use of color, or a mix of things?

On the other side of sleep

DC: I think that’s the total atmosphere of the painting. Accent on details is also important, as well as color and light. And textures, the root textures always seemed creepy to me, in a good sense, of course. I always liked drawing them. Cold and dark tones together with some rhythm can give a gloomy mood to any painting.

AM: Your piece, “heart rot,” is more abstract and less about characters, but still offers strong emotion. How do you bring emotion into an abstract piece, and how do you hope the viewer will interpret a piece like this?

DC: In this work, I wanted to show that every heart rots away in time, absorbing hate from the outside, especially to show it for people who keep accumulated anger inside themselves. I think that in some time such people become shameless and impartial to anything, and gradually change to sociopaths. People are born with a pure heart but circumstances and hard environment make them more evil.

Heart Rot

AM: In your piece, “Unknown,” the skeletal remains of soldiers in their trench brings out an element of history. It reminds me of the war paintings of Vasily Vereshchagin, and his many paintings of the aftermath of war. What can art bring to history, especially the history of warfare? How important is art to remembering that history, or even avoiding repeating it?

Unknown

DC: I think it’s necessary to show the world, with all possible ways, that war brings nothing but destruction and suffering for both sides. Prime examples are events of the First and Second World Wars. I think paintings can show people that wars and disagreements destroy everything that humanity has been trying to create. I like different allegories on that theme, where war is represented in different forms. Also, I like paintings that show consequences of cruel battles.

Visit Corvus’s galleries on DeviantArt to see more of his work, including his extensive galleries of game, anime, and film fan art pieces.

Denis Corvus has always loved creating dark and surrealistic paintings — starting from childhood, in school, in the margins of an exercise book. He also enjoys creating fan art of various games and comics. Denis is currently working as a computer graphics artist for a game development company which focuses on mobile applications.

Photo by John Urbancik

Russell Dickerson has been a published illustrator and designer since the previous millennium, creating works for many genre publications and authors. He has also written many articles for various organizations in that time, including Apex, and his work can be found on his website at www.darkstormcreative.com .

American Dreams

by Allie Nelson | 390 words

Maybe some memories run deeper than blood

they hide within the marrow

etch history on

blooming

brains.

Formed in the womb, they are

our ancestors’ whispers

in fetal ears.

The Gold Mountain and silver streets are just

child’s things, dragon’s tails — perhaps real

but always out of reach.

He cuts his hair, surrenders his

language and blood ties

China calls from across the sea.

He runs into the waves

imagining the water caressing

his wife’s cheek, carrying his heart

to the Yellow River where

she’s washing her qipao

the one he traced eternity

onto, fingers teasing

at the lily skin beneath.

She dreams of voodoo dances,

of Baron Samedi riding her:

chili peppers, rich cigars, Haitian drums

the dead walk and the gris-gris blesses, oh!

But torn away from her country the slavers

bring her to the city of swamps, yet she’ll dance

by the bayou, in Congo Square, tear up the streets

with her mad mad feet.

Wind courses through his braids

a brave aback his stallion,

with thunderbird medicine

the wasicu girl watches as

he rides backwards, heyoka .

She laughs at his strangeness,

he laughs at her blindness

she cannot see Wakinyan Tanka

perhaps, when they make love

the storm will enter her.

She prays in silence, in the mesa she walks

with Santa Maria and Tezcatlipoca

her blood sings — it calls out to

throbbing hearts in Aztec hands

the temples of Tenochtitlan,

Communion wine, sacrificial rites

that make life so much sweeter.

The desert whips her bronze

mestizo, Chicana, mixed

a hybrid, oh, cultures

clash between synapse

angels dance with Quetzalcoatl

who threads his plumed coils

around their burning,

thousand-eyed wings.

Return the dreamers, Poppy Lord

Odin’s set up shop on Capitol Hill

dealing in bills, death and grey-haired men

ashes cling to his beard as his good eye

prowls the shadowed streets.

Tezcatlipoca sits beside him

nursing whiskey, hungry, he watches

interns pass by, pencil-skirts dancing

in his lusty obsidian wind.

Monkey scampers past

down Chinatown streets

he swings up a building

peeps into a window

watching his people

always curious

and never, ever

satisfied.

Samedi strolls through back-alley grit

tipping hats to passerby, who think him a bum

a girl dances in his wake, her bracelets jangle-jing

the spirits of the dead flock around them.

And Papa Legba? He holds the spirits at bay

keeps the mixing pot from overflowing

it brews in the night, the stew of our sleep.

There’s something strange about the American Dream

Allie Nelson is an aspiring poet, novelist, and environmentalist who is passionate about nature and the modern mythic. Former Poetry Editor at the College of William and Mary’s Gallery magazine, her works have been published in various anthologies and journals including Folk Horror Revival’s Corpse Roads anthology, POWER Magazine , and Renewable Energy World . She is currently hard at work on too many novels, a chapbook, and grad school.

Starfields

by Andrew Gilstrap | 216 words

We call it a starfield,

which seems as nice a name as any.

There is, after all,

peace in creation’s

creeping self-destruction.

Even before humans slipped

ships into the sea,

never mind the skies,

we softened the world’s endless

layers of strangeness

in comforting, familiar words.

“Four corners” of earth,

the “bosom” of the ocean,

“veils” of heaven,

“ribbons” of stars.

Now we drift through space,

wondering about the “here”

of wherever we happen to be,

remembering the “there”

of where we once were,

marking maps with borders

that fail to contain the growing

void between us.

I look out at nothing: blackness

backwards and forwards, punctuated

by distant stars, pinpricks of promise,

porchlights calling to weary travelers ...

Those familiar words again.

I remember the ships launching, grand

firework streams scalding the sky,

and the small mercy of stealing

one last night with you

before we boarded our own blind

lifeboats, never to meet again.

Grandpa used to talk of his navy days,

of fighting with everything he had not to sink

beneath the weight and gravity of distance,

buoying himself with a single thought:

he and Grandma, each alone, could look up

and find comfort in the same night sky.

We at least have that. As we crawl

across the darkness, each waking

finds us further and further apart,

but the stars remain unmoved.

Andrew Gilstrap lives in the woods of South Carolina with his wife, two kids, a fluctuating population of dogs and cats, and never-ending leaves to rake. His work has appeared in Lakeside Circus , Star*Line , and Mythic Delirium .

Winged Beings of the Necropolis

by Gary Every | 323 words

The noise made by the 60,000 caged birds was tremendous

but the stench which hovered in the air

was strong enough to change the weather.

60,000 Ibises lived in the necropolis,

flapping wings, clacking beaks and screeching.

All of them were unaware they were being raised solely for sacrifice.

The line of the pharaohs had grown weak and fallen,

replaced by a series of foreign invaders and warlords.

The kingdoms of Egypt were in chaos.

No more could the pharaohs intervene in heaven on the people’s behalf.

The people were forced to supplicate the gods on their own.

They sacrificed living animals and paid priests

to bestow gifts and prayers upon the mummified remains.

In ancient Egyptian philosophy

there were no words to differentiate between human and animal—

all living beings had souls.

The cats were arranged, standing on two legs,

forelegs crossed against their chest the same as humans.

One pharaoh had been buried with a hunting dog

and another pharaoh had a favorite feline

who was kept closer to him in the afterworld

than any of his many wives.

By far the most popular animal mummies were the ibises

representing Thoth the scribe god,

who was keeping a list and checking it twice

keeping track of who was naughty or nice.

At the necropolis of Saqqara over four million ibis mummies were buried.

I was walking along the river

banks of reeds crowding the shore,

the ruins of ancient pyramids atop the hill,

when suddenly my approaching footsteps

startled scores of herons and cranes,

giant winged birds rising into the air all at once,

flying this way and that as if

the sky is suddenly full of prayers,

wishes and dreams scattering every which way

filling the horizon like the colors of a sunset.

Gary Every has two novellas available: Inca Butterflies and The Saint and the Robot . He has been nominated for the Rhysling Award for year’s best science fiction poem five times. His short story “Mussolini’s Catfish” was nominated for the Sturgeon Award. He has won journalism awards for articles such as “Losing Geronimo’s Language” and “The Apache Naichee Ceremony,” which are included in his book Shadow of the OhshaD .

Words from the Editor–in–Chief

by Jason Sizemore | 278 words

Welcome to issue 89 of Apex Magazine . It is October, a favorite month for many of our readers: changing seasons, falling leaves, the potential of supernatural evil on October 31 st , and most importantly the return of PUMPKIN SPICE LATTE! After you spend your money subscribing to Apex Magazine , I need you to go to your favorite coffee shop and order yourself an extra-large cup of this glorious caffeinated and sugar filled miracle of fall.

Ahem, where was I? Oh right, issue 89.

While nefarious ghosts and ghouls might decide to leave you be this Halloween, Apex has three dark stories that will add some chill to your nighttime reading.

We welcome Kristi DeMeester to the pages of Apex Magazine with “Damnatio Ad Beastias.” This is a visceral piece that explores addiction, need, and the lycanthropic mythos in a new and heartbreaking way. “Pagpag” brings Samuel Marzioli back into our pages with another story full of ghosts and loss. Marzioli blends his wonderful writing technique with his own cultural background to create a story that is memorable and unique. Adam Robert’s “Zayinim” is a fine example of that most dreaded (and elusive) of things: a quality zombie tale. It makes for the perfect reprint for this creature feature issue.

Our poetry this month comes from Allie Nelson (“American Dreams”), Gary Every (“Winged Beings of the Necropolis”), and Andrew Gilstrap (“Starfields”).

Andrea Johnson interviews Kristi DeMeester about “Damnatio Ad Beastias,” among other topics. Russell Dickerson talks with cover artist Denis Corvus. Finally, Betsy Phillips has a feature on the upcoming film Somnio , delving deep into the movie’s intention with an interview with writer/director Travis Milloy.

Our podcast fiction this month is “Damnatio Ad Beastias.” Be sure to listen!

Until November …

Jason Sizemore

Editor-in-Chief

Damnatio Ad Beastias

Turned her palms face down so she could see the tops of her knuckles, watch the skin go the slightest bit smoother, the gnarled fingers relaxing, jagged fingernails receding into rounded half-moons.

by Kristi DeeMeester | 6956 words

7,000 Words

The blue pills came first. Robin’s egg blue and smelling faintly chemical when Madeline opened the bottle. Then yellow, and a green the color of scum that grew on the pond her landlord called a “water feature.” Finally, a striated capsule all violet and cream. Madeline had liked that one. It made her feel like she was swallowing flower petals.

Her dealer told her that sometimes they would help her, but sometimes they wouldn’t. It depended on the batch. Everything depended on the exact calculations and levels in his body when he hooked himself into the machine and poured out all of the darkness he’d seen that week. Minimal input meant minimal output, and so she waited for the bottles and dry swallowed the pills faithfully.

The pills the government sent every month — pure white and as large as horse tranquilizers — kept her looped out of her mind but did nothing to stop the change. What the dealers supplied may be illegal and inconsistent, but at least it could control the change most of the time.

Plenty of weeks, she’d be on day three of the cycle and the shakes would start up. Her hands first, the fingers spidered over cheap Formica, and then her arms and legs shaking until she couldn’t stand. Delirium tremens without the addiction.

Still, she’d power through, drink glass after glass of water, try not to go near the windows, and chain herself down until the next bottle came.

It was at the end of the violet and cream pills when Bennie appeared outside of her door two days early. He usually came to see her on Saturdays, that beautiful glass bottle clasped in his hands, but it was only Thursday, and it was his face she saw through the peephole when she looked.

“Open the goddamn door, Madeline,” he said, and she threw the lock, pulled the door back so that only a sliver of sunlight poured into her apartment.

“You’re not supposed to be here. Not today.”

He held up the bottle. “You really going to tell me to leave?”

She opened the door wide, and he hurried past her. The air he brought with him smelled of cinnamon, and the back of her throat prickled with something like the reminder of a different life. A life before stale rooms and the taste of blood in her teeth. A life before all of those pills sinking like stones in her belly.

“Well? Let me see,” she said. He tossed her the bottle, and his hands fluttered at his side as if he wanted nothing more than to take back the movement, to secure the bottle and then run, but then his palms were pressed flat against his thighs, and he wouldn’t look at her. That part hadn’t changed.

She lifted the small glass cylinder, let it catch in the scant light coming from the single lamp, and it refracted back to her, a myriad of bright color that reminded her of things she’d long told herself to forget. A thin blanket soft and warm and the smell of baby powder. She shook her head to rid herself of the thoughts.

“They’re pink,” she said, and he shifted his weight from his left foot to his right. Readying himself to move. To run if he had to. It almost made her smile when he did this kind of thing. Almost.

“Yeah. I’m trying something new.”

She barked out a laugh. “Whatever you say, boss.”

He turned his face further away from her and took a step forward.

“So now you want to leave? Act like a tough guy at the door and then don’t even want to stay for a drink?”

“You’ll like them. I promise, but I have to get going.”

“Sure, sure. All of those other clients to see. Right,” she said and retrieved the manila envelope from the drawer of her battered desk. Another relic of a past life. The only thing she kept after everything came apart.

He took the envelope from her with his fingertips, but before he could scurry out the door like some frightened animal, she gripped his shoulder and brought her lips close to his ear. “There aren’t that many of us left, right? If I’m not the last, I’m pretty fucking close, aren’t I?”

She knew what she must smell like to him. Acrid sweat and dirty hair, and underneath all of that the smell of rotted meat. Fetid and close.

“No,” he said, but she could smell the lie on him, felt it twitch through her blood, and she bowed her head. Within seconds, Bennie was out the door, and the interior world she’d built for herself went silent.

Thick dust coated her tongue, clotted against the back of her throat, and she went to the kitchen and poured a glass of water. The pills still rested on the counter, and she eyed them.

“A bottle of roses or candy hearts or some other cotton candy shit,” she said, but she still opened the bottle, tipped one of the pills into her hand and then swallowed it down. May as well see if the new pills were better than the old ones. She could switch back at the end of the next cycle if she needed to.

She always watched her hands first. Turned her palms face down so she could see the tops of her knuckles, watch the skin go the slightest bit smoother, the gnarled fingers relaxing, jagged fingernails receding into rounded half-moons. The pills never took everything away; her hair was still wild and thick, her eyes too large and slightly yellow, but they made it so she could pass for human as long as she didn’t draw attention to herself.

If it worked, she would sleep, and the dreams would flood her mouth, the slick taste of blood on her tongue, and she would gobble down all of those terrible things Bennie had seen, and it would keep her safe until another cycle passed. Keep her from tearing her way out of the apartment, roaming under a bright, round moon until she found what she needed. Hot blood hidden behind the thinnest cage of flesh.

But it had never been the need for blood that changed her into something monstrous. Had never been the drive to hunt that made her spine arch and crack, the limbs lengthening and jaw elongating so the newly formed teeth could snip and snap and tear. No, it wasn’t the blood. It was what bloomed inside of the blood. All of the dark secrets people tucked away. Jealousy or anger or hatred. Terrible sins like dark fruits waiting for her to pluck them, to bring them to her lips and drain them dry.

She’d tried injecting herself with the blood alone, but it hadn’t worked. The flesh that contained those iniquities was as much a part of what she needed as the blood itself. The only thing that would satisfy was to bite and tear and rip until blood flowed warm over her teeth. Even as she gobbled down those awful things, her need temporarily satiated, she felt sick.

There used to be more dealers. More of the greasy, pimple-ridden morons who could plug themselves in and then carry the pills to you in the name of cash in hand, but then the websites began to disappear, and pretty soon, Bennie was the only one who’d respond to her messages.

She could guess at what happened to the others creatures like her. Razorblades and a warm bath. Or maybe a gun if they could get their hands on one, which wasn’t as hard to do as one might think. She knew. She had checked. All of the things they’d done, the people they’d lost, too much to bear so instead of the darkness, they swallowed down fire or poison and hoped that whatever lay on the other side was better than the horror they’d found here.

It didn’t matter what happened to them. If one by one they blinked out, a vacuum of empty space among the living, there was no one left to notice. No one left to mourn if they vanished a second time.

Madeline stood in her tiny kitchen with its shitty appliances and its peeling linoleum floor and watched her hands. Routine. Something to ground her while she waited to see if this month she could go outside or if she’d have to hide herself in the apartment and wait for the next bottle.

Minutes ticked by, counted down by the clock the previous tenant had hung on the wall, and she watched and waited. Thirty minutes passed and nothing happened. No softening skin or straighter fingers. Nothing.

She hefted the bottle and threw it across the room where it thudded against the living room wall and fell to the carpet with a dull thud, the pink pills scattering. “Motherfucker,” she said. She wanted to scream until her throat went bloody, but she clenched her teeth, bit down on her frustration and anger, and swallowed it all down, bitter as an herb.

Her laptop was still balanced on the faded green couch in the living room, and she left the kitchen, turning off the light as she went, and grabbed the laptop. She opened her email and pulled up Bennie’s address. Her fingers ached as she typed, her stroke missing keys, and she forced herself to slow down, to focus on the movement of her breath. She started again.

Your “something new” doesn’t fucking work, Bennie. Even your weakest shit has usually kicked in by now, and there hasn’t been a single change. Not. One. Get your shit straight before you come back here. And I want another bottle. I don’t care how you have to get it, but I want another bottle. By tomorrow. I fucking mean it.

She slammed the laptop shut and drummed her fingers against the top. Two days. He’d been two days early. The next cycle was supposed to start in five. If he couldn’t get her another bottle before then, she wouldn’t be able to leave the apartment, would have to spend the nights chained inside of her bedroom with its pitted, splintered floors under torn up carpet while piss and shit dried against her legs and bedsheets, and the moon lit her body up silver bright.

There was still a practically full bottle of whiskey resting on the kitchen counter, and she stood up from the couch, her joints popping as she moved, and grabbed it and unscrewed the top. She didn’t bother with a glass but tipped the amber liquid back, let it flood her mouth and throat with fire, and float into her belly where it stole through her veins leaving her face and mouth numb.

If nothing else, she could spend the next few hours getting drunk. In the morning, she could put on a hat and dark glasses and go out into the light for the last time before this cycle ended and the next began. Let sunlight and cold air kiss her skin and lungs and hold all of it inside of her until it was over.

When the bottle was empty, the room spun. A bloated, dark stain on the ceiling leered down at her. A water leak with the face of a man. A man whose name she’d spent the past three years trying to forget, but it didn’t matter. She would never forget.

She closed her eyes, and the room tilted, shifted and expanded behind the dark of her eyelids, and she fought against the nausea growing in the back of her throat.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow Bennie would come back. He’d have another bottle of pills, and everything would be fine. He was afraid of her. She could smell the fear roiling off of him in waves when he was standing in her apartment. Closed off and trapped like something she could grab hold of and tear off its skin.

He would do it because he was afraid of her, and she would be fine. She repeated the word, over and over, until she lost the idea that what she was saying was even a word at all. Just a sound stuck inside of a void. A bright thread to follow out of the dark.

§

Madeline was dreaming. She knew she was because she was back in the old house. The house with its front porch and big kitchen and the crib in the back bedroom.

Scott was somewhere in the house. She could feel the weight of him, feel the tug at some part of her she couldn’t see. He was there, hiding in one of the rooms, but she couldn’t see him, and even though it felt like she shouldn’t be afraid, she was.

She stood in the hallway, the bedrooms jutting to the left and right. From the small bedroom in the back — the bedroom with the pink and white walls and the pink blankets and the tiny dresses embroidered with roses — came a soft crying.

Her legs moved without her wanting them to, and she tried to shrink backward, but they carried her forward.

“No, no, no, no,” she said, and a cold sweat broke out across her lower back. She didn’t want to go down there, didn’t want to open the door to that room, and see what it was inside of the crib.

Her legs kept moving.

“Please,” she whispered and then screamed. A raw sound that echoed back to her in hollow tones. Surely, Scott would hear and come and find her, keep her from seeing this thing she knew she was going to see.

Because it was always like this. The dream. Her in the house with Scott hidden away while she walked on tiptoe down the hallway, her calves and thighs aching from the effort to wrench herself away.

Her fingers fluttered feather light against the doorknob, and then she turned it, tried to close her eyes, but her body was a separate entity, something she could no longer control, and she opened the door. And she looked.

The baby monitor blinked back at Madeline. An all-seeing eye in the darkness. Something dark stained the carpet and the slats of the crib. She would not look. She would close her eyes or turn her head away, but her body wouldn’t respond, and she looked, and she remembered.

She had done this. The change newly coursing through her blood, and foolish enough to think she could control it, she was the nightmare come into the room to take what little meat it could find. And she had not been satiated.

Scott wasn’t hiding. Not at all. She’d gone looking for him first, hungry for the sins he carried inside of him. She opened her mouth and screamed, but she knew this part of the dream. She could scream until there was the taste of blood in her throat, but no amount of shrieking would wake her up. There was a final thing to do.

She’d managed to stop herself before the end. Something, some tiny flicker of her real self still alive underneath the teeth and hair. Her baby alive but scarred and taken away. Loud voices and shouting as faceless forms shone a bright light into her face and took the baby from her arms.

Still, in the dream, she went to the crib picked up the tiny form and cradled it, her keening lifted to a moon that would not hear her. When she kissed her daughter and laid the warm, broken little body back in the crib, she woke. Gasping and with her face wet, she struggled to draw air into her lungs.

Scrubbing her face with her hands, she focused on slowing her heartbeat, on forgetting the face of her daughter, the tiny fingers that would clutch Madeline’s as she nursed, the smell of her damp skin, or her downy hair.

Madeline sat with the memory of her daughter and husband, ghosts that would never leave her no matter how hard she tried. On nights she had the dream, she still thought about the razor blades she kept in the cabinet above the bathroom sink, but no matter how hard she tried, she’d never been able to bring herself to do it. And every time, she hated herself a little bit more.

When she could move again, she rose, drifted to the window, and opened the curtains. A bloated moon hung against black velvet sky, a sliver of black still outlined against the gibbous shape, and she waited for the light to pull against her like quicksilver, waited for the slight tingling in her arms and legs, for her heartbeat to quicken, and her blood to warm. Not enough to change fully but enough to remind her of what was to come.

She stood under the wash of moonlight, but was no change in her heartbeat, no awareness of the thing pricking just under her skin as it waited for its terrible birth. She looked down at her hands. Blinked once and then again, holding her eyes shut for a beat, then two beats. Because what she’d seen was impossible. Smooth flesh and long fingers that tapered at the tips. Her hands as they had once been. Before all of this. Before she changed and became a monster.

Her heart hammered in her chest, the air around her gone electric, and she squeezed her eyes tighter. It wasn’t possible. She opened her eyes, and her hands were the same. The knuckles flat and the skin smooth.

Stumbling away from the window, she flexed her fingers, shook her hands, slapped her palms against her thighs, but didn’t change, the skin tingling and warm. She laughed aloud and drew her nails across her face. No sharp edges that hinted at something that clawed and tore. Something bestial.

Her breath caught, and she went lightheaded, the room dropping away, and she lurched forward, her knees hitting the carpet, her hands thrown before her to stop the fall. She opened her mouth, gasped, but the air felt as if it had gone thin, and she couldn’t breathe, and she was laughing and crying, and the light scattered through the room like ice, and her skin . Her skin was normal.

She lay on the carpet, watched the ceiling with its undulating patterns traced into the plaster. Bulbous eyes and twisted mouths reflected back at her, and she watched them morph and change, watched them laugh down at her that this was a trick, a dream. Bright smoke that would vanish in the sun and leave her the same she’d been since the day the monster caught her. Out for a night run Scott had begged her not to go on and absorbed by the music in her earbuds and the thud of her feet against the ground, she hadn’t seen it crouched just ahead of her. Sixteen days later, and she was another statistic. Another number on the plotline of a growing problem that needed resolving.

And they had resolved it. A scientific breakthrough that would keep the wolf from the door, but it wasn’t perfected, wasn’t fail proof. Those white pills her doctor wrote monthly prescriptions for and left her a drooling mess for most of the cycle. But this. This. She held her hands up, the patterns dancing behind in orgiastic glee, and her entire body shuddered.

The pills still lay in a pile against the far wall. Rose-colored deliverance. She pushed herself toward them, gathered them up one by one, and let them clatter back into the bottle. Once she was finished, she stood, and carried the bottle to her bedroom. She felt the need to hide it, to put it somewhere no one would ever look, but glancing around the tiny bedroom, she realized there was no such hiding place. Clutching the bottle tight in her fist, she moved to the mattress and lifted it, placed the bottle underneath, and then stood. It would work until she could find something better. Until she could figure out if the results lasted longer than a few hours.

From the living room, her laptop pinged. A new email. No doubt from Bennie assuring her he could get her a new batch, but she didn’t want a new batch. If everything stayed the same for the next few days, she’d never need any other batch again. She tried not to let the thought sink into her bones, tried not to let herself think she could be normal again, but the feeling infected her, her skin itching with something akin to hope.

In the morning Bennie would be on her doorstep again, his hands filled with empty promises that he could find her something else, something better, and she would take whatever promises he could give her, because she needed him afraid, needed him to understand she could snatch away everything if she wanted to.

Already the hazy light of morning filled her bedroom, the sun on the precipice of the world, and she let herself drift back out into the living room, to the window, where she stood and waited for the world to wake.

§

“I’ll have a new batch by sundown.”

Bennie stood outside Madeline’s door, his eyes trained on some fixed point she couldn’t see. She hadn’t let him inside. Figured it would frighten him more if he thought she couldn’t control herself so close to the full moon, and so she’d kept him behind the door.

She whispered to him, lies and threats evaporating like vapor, and she could feel him tremble, taste the cold, sour flavor of his fear as she palmed tonight’s pill inside the damp hollow of her left hand.

“I’ll have it, Madeline,” he said, and she turned her back on him, closed the door, and pressed herself against it. She felt him pause, felt his hesitation, before he turned and ran, his feet stumbling as he hit the last step, and then he was gone.

Tonight. Tonight and tomorrow night, and then she would know if what was happening to her was real or just a fluke. Because hours had passed, and still her hands had not changed, the skin smooth and unblemished.

Once the sun rose, she’d gone into the bathroom and stared at the mirror. Reflected back at her were pale green eyes instead of yellow, the circles beneath deep, and she’d touched her face over and over, but even still she wasn’t sure if it was her own.

She felt the need to do something, anything that meant she could get out of this dank apartment with its ancient smells of cooked food and human sweat. She wanted to feel the sun on her face, breathe in air made clean by rain. She went back to her bedroom, tugged on a pair of jeans, a long-sleeved sweatshirt. All nondescript. Vague. Nothing easy to identify. She tucked her hair into a baseball cap and before she could remind herself it was too close to the end of this cycle, she grabbed her cell phone and was out the door, the lock catching behind her as she blinked against bright sun.

She walked with her head down, her eyes racing along the pavement, as she took the sidewalk. It didn’t matter where she went, just that she was out , and that her blood didn’t quicken when other people approached, the beast living under her skin quiet and subdued.

She heard them before she saw them. A group of boys hollering back and forth, the steady drum of a basketball as it passed back and forth between them. Her nostrils flared, and her head snapped up.

There were three of them. A lanky boy with tow-colored hair clipped skull tight led the way, and the two that came behind were obviously brothers. Both had the same hardened forehead, the same coltish, dark eyes that watched the boy ahead of them with both awe and hatred. They trailed behind, their mouths opening but never interrupting the stream of dialogue emanating from the other boy’s mouth.

Madeline could smell it on him. The lanky one. All of his private sins laid bare as she breathed him in. Death. Probably he’d caught a stray cat or a squirrel or some other defenseless animal and killed it. Maybe it’d been something bigger. A dog or a raccoon, but she could smell murder in his sweat.

She stopped in the center of the sidewalk, and they passed her, didn’t even look up to notice the woman who blocked their path. Fetid and hot, the scent wormed into her, but her palms stayed flat against her sides. She exhaled through her teeth, pushed all of that darkness out of her, and her head swam. A momentary fever. Nothing more. The feeling came and went without the need to push the boy to the pavement and open him out, his guts and memories filling her up until she couldn’t breathe.

She laughed because she could and walked on.

From her pocket her cell phone pinged. Bennie. He could have another batch to her by that afternoon for three hundred. Cash. Five o’clock at the latest. She smiled and returned the phone to her pocket. Five o’clock was good. He couldn’t afford to be any later.

When late afternoon tinted the air gold and amber, she turned. Her entire body felt light, incorporeal. As if the thing moving back to the non-existence she’d created wasn’t actually her, but a ghost drifting through the motions it had memorized.

Bennie was waiting outside her apartment when she walked up, and he started up when he saw her. “You’re late,” he said, and she grinned, bared her teeth at him, her lips stretching impossibly back and back and back, and he shrank away, his apology already dead as he offered it up to her.

His hands shook as he held out the bottle, and she took it, let her fingers pass over his skin, and he fidgeted away from her touch. “Don’t you want to come inside?”

He cast a glance at the sky, the shadows already grown long, and the wind getting colder. “It’s late,” he said, and she unlocked the door, didn’t look back at him as she let herself inside, and closed the door in his face.

The bottle was light. The pills inside a pale yellow. The color of winter sunshine. Once, she would have been hopeful at the color; hopeful that whatever terrible things Bennie had seen and were distilled down into chemicals had led to something that would make her clean. Pure as the color of the pills.

She reached for the other bottle instead. Let a pink pill dissolve on her tongue, bitter and sweet, and she tasted everything buried inside of it. Cold fear and burning pain, and the feel of hard hands and the night taste of bruises. Screams bound up inside of her stomach, and those terrible things flooded through her, and she shuddered at how lovely and wonderful it all was.

Already, the moon pulled at her. She could feel that full night had fallen, could feel that dark face turn on her, but she stayed the same.

She stripped off her hat and shirt, the jeans, her bra and underwear, until she stood before the window, naked skin exposed to the moonlight, and she let it wash over her. Nothing. Certainly, she felt her body tense, felt herself brace for the moon’s draw, but there was no popping of vertebrae, no teeth grown long and hungry as they did when the cycle was almost complete.

She turned back to face the door. She could go out. Here at the end of a cycle, and she was fairly certain she could go outside. The moon beat glittering light against her back, but it was nothing more than light, and she rose onto the balls of her feet, her calf muscles stretched taut. She could go out.

Dressed once more, she stood in front of the door. Over and over, she pulled her hand back only to put it on the knob again. Her mouth tasted metallic, and she swallowed.

“All this time,” she said and turned the knob and moved out the door.

For a long time, she did nothing more than stand at the foot of her steps with her hands in front of her and the moonlight stretching over her skin like gloves. Gray shadows played in the periphery of her vision. Headlights stretched out of the darkness and cast strange shapes back at her.

There was still a tingling in her chest, still the slight need for her skin to pull itself inside out, but it was something she could shrug off, something she could push away into a deep corner and starve.

She had the thought she could run, strip off her clothes, and dance like some Dionysian nymph, drunk on glimmering light, but she couldn’t bring herself to move. A car pulled into the parking lot, the alarm beeping as the owner walked away, her head tucked down and shielded against the bite of ice in the air. Madeline imagined the woman warm inside of her apartment. Perhaps there was a room at the end of the hallway. A room candied with pink walls. A room with a crib inside.

A sob caught in the back of her throat. Her daughter. If they’d had the pills sooner. If she’d known sooner what it was that attacked her. If she’d paid attention.

Madeline had no idea where the people who found her had taken her daughter. Those people with their cramped, fake smiles and briefcases filled with paperwork. Closed adoption. Her baby lost into a system she couldn’t trace. She thought again of the hidden razor blade. Even if the pills kept her from changing, she couldn’t bring back her baby.

The world blurred. A smear of dark and moonlight, and she groped at the handrail to the stairs and pulled herself up. Back inside the cramped apartment, back inside the box she’d put herself in, back to hiding.

Again, she pulled the hard-edged silver from its place in the medicine cabinet and tested the edge against her thumb. Her insides all crimson blooms and ugly thoughts, and she could open up her skin, peel it back until whatever devil had found its way inside of her fled and then she could open her arms to whatever darkness lay beyond.

A pinprick, and her blood beaded and dropped against the sink, and she breathed through her nose and she breathed again, and she couldn’t. She couldn’t.

“Fuck you,” she screamed. Over and over until there was no sound left inside of her, and she collapsed onto the cold linoleum, her hands pressed to her chest as if they could hold in her fluttering heart.

After a time, she went still. Drifted through a kind of twilight where shapes bent and twisted into things they were not, and noises bloated and elongated into something that seemed like a baby crying.

She slept, and the nightmare came. It always came.

§

She was inside a grocery store. Outside, the full moon streamed through windows. The end of a cycle, and Madeline stood in the produce section and watched it. Around her, tired mothers pushed their carts down the aisles, their children protesting about what sort of cereal they wanted or couldn’t they please have the cookies this time?

And she stood among them. Normal. So normal with her basket and her bag of apples and her coffee. Her hands trembled, and she stilled them, reached for a bag of spinach. Her heart kept beating.

She’d thought about not taking the pill, thought about opening the door wide and letting herself change fully. But even if the police managed to catch her before the night ended, they wouldn’t shoot her. They’d haul her into custody and turn her over to another group of scientists who would cram her full of needles and drugs just to see what happened.

If she was going to live, she wanted to do fucking do it right even if she didn’t deserve it. Maybe she could find her daughter. Call the adoption agency, tell them she’d figured out the pills. That she wouldn’t change. Start with monitored visitations until eventually she regained custody.

Tomorrow, she would pay Bennie a visit, explain she’d been wrong and she needed another bottle. The pink ones. The sooner, the better.

But tonight, she was going to try to move through the world of the living like she belonged there.

Somewhere in the store, a baby cried, and she bit down against her tongue. The taste of hot blood and the lights too bright and everything shifting as if the world had come unmoored, and it was too much. She shouldn’t have come here. She’d thought she could do it, thought she could stand here under the light of a full moon, and be okay. She dropped her basket and moved toward the exit, the moon guiding her forward, reminding her that even if it couldn’t change her, it was still sleeping inside of her.

Fumbling with her keys, she unlocked the door, and shoved herself behind the wheel. She could be back in her apartment in five minutes, the door safely between her and the rest of the world, but she took a left instead of a right out of the parking lot.

The traffic lights bled together, and she couldn’t be sure if they were red or green, but she still drove, her movements a learned habit she couldn’t forget. She didn’t think she ever would.

The house was dark when she pulled up to it, and the windows glinted moonlight back at her. Two cars in the driveway. A sedan and an SUV. A tricycle sat by the stairs leading to the porch and two topiaries flanked the door. A home. Someone had made this place a home.

She parked on the street and watched the house. She half expected some younger version of herself, the imprint she’d left behind, to walk out of the front door, but everything was quiet. Still.

Before she could think, she opened the door, crept along the side of the house until she came to the back fence where she lifted the latch and slipped through. There was a window to her left. A picture window. A window where a little girl could grow up. A place for her to dream.

She placed her hand against the screen. So flimsy. Something she could tear open with her hands, the glass so easily breakable. Inside in less than a minute. Skulking through the rooms she used to inhabit, the hardwoods a learned pattern under her feet. Would they scream if they saw her? This new family asleep in their beds, lost in a tangle of dreams. Would they know her for the nightmare she was if she went among them, her chemically induced body no longer her own? Would they mourn if she stole into the little room, and took the tiny, sleeping form for her own? She could be a mother again. If they wouldn’t give her daughter back, perhaps she could take the child who slept here now. Her mouth watered.

Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked. A warning that she was far from home. This place was not anywhere she should be, and she moved away from the window, away from the place her daughter once slept, and she ran. Left her car behind and ran, her lungs raw and her throat heavy with the taste of iron. She ran until there was only the movement, the other parts of her falling away, and she was only muscle and bone. Something fearful moving through the night.

§

“You look like hell, Madeline.” Bennie stood in the doorway, his left hand crossed over his body and gripping the frame. A posture of “you can’t come in.”

“I need another bottle,” she said, and she thought she saw him frown, thought she saw his eyes go dark, but as quickly as the expression came, it was gone.

“I just gave you another bottle.”

“No. Like the one before. The pink ones.”

“I can’t.”

She stepped forward, placed her hand against the door, and gave it a slight push. “Yes, you can.”

“You don’t understand,” he said and retreated, his hand still crossed over his body as if he could ward her off.

She stepped through the door, let it fall shut behind her, and turned to lock it. Bennie whimpered, the low sound of an animal caught.

The machine stood out behind him in stark relief against a plain white wall. A small, dirty window above poured light into the room. There was nothing else in the apartment. No furniture. No television. Only the machine that drained him of all the terrible things he’d seen and then shaped them into her supposed deliverance. The machine was a box that stood about waist high and glinted gunmetal gray. Two clear tubes extended from the front along with a single black button. An opening on the left hand side led to a glass bottle, already half filled with pills. Pink pills.

“You fucking liar.”

“You don’t understand. I can’t,” he began but then she was on him, her hands against his throat, squeezing and squeezing until he began to splutter, bits of foam flecking the corners of his mouth. He clawed at her, his fingers batting at her arms, her face, and she saw, for the first time, a hint of reflected gold on his left hand.

She let him go. Left him choking against the carpet as she moved across the room and picked up the pills and poured them into her palm. Twelve. Not nearly enough. The next cycle had begun, and she only had ten more pills stashed away in her apartment. Twenty-two days was all she had. Not enough to get her to the next moon. Not enough.

She scrubbed at her face, let her eyes stay closed. “Just fucking do it, Bennie.”

“I can’t. I can’t. Not anymore.” He’d begun to sob quietly, his breath hitching and labored.

“You can. You’ve done it a hundred times.”

“Not like this. It’s too much. I have a little girl, too.”

Madeline went still. “What did you say?”

“I can’t watch it. Not anymore. I have a little girl, too.”

Her knees buckled as the full impact of what he was saying hit her.

“Show me,” she whispered, and he shook his head. “Goddammit, show me,” she shouted.

Slowly, he stood and moved to the window, and he tapped against the pane with his forefinger. “Straight across. First window in the next building.” His voice moved through her like vapor. Insubstantial and hollowed out.

She turned, and she looked. Bennie’s apartment faced the parking lot, the next building tucked so close that each uncovered window was a private viewing for any would be voyeur. Most of the windows were covered with blinds or curtains, but the one directly across from the apartment wasn’t. The blinds had been pulled up as if whatever lived inside wanted to be seen.

At first she could only make out the room, an empty white wall with a door tucked in the center, but then a small form crept into a view. A little girl who couldn’t be more than four or five with curling hair the color of deep earth appeared, a doll tucked under one arm. She turned to face the window, and Madeline could see every curve of her face, every fragile bone covered by delicate skin, every purplish bruise both fresh and faded. The girl smiled, lifted her hand in a wave. Madeline lifted her fingers, pressed them to the window, and the girl turned away and disappeared.

“Sometimes she doesn’t come home. Her mother. It’s better when she doesn’t,” Bennie said, and Madeline looked down at the bottle of pink pills.

“This is how you make them,” she said. He didn’t answer her.

She looked back into the little room, but the little girl was gone. Vanished into the maw of closed doors and long hallways.

Madeline turned back to the door, left Bennie shivering on the floor, and let herself out.

§

Moon. Moon and light and everything torn away. Skin and muscle and teeth. Moving quickly over frozen earth, and Madeline could smell her. She remembered the way. She knew where she was going and why.

The door was cheap, splintered under her fists, and she was inside. Breathing air that smelled of mold and cigarette smoke, and underneath a dark, swirling mass, sweet on her tongue.

The woman lay under a pile of blankets on the couch. She did not scream when she saw Madeline, but her eyes went wide, the pupils dilated and ink black, and when Madeline opened her up, the woman grunted, but she did not fight, and Madeline gnawed her bones and drank her down. The hard fists and soft words and mewling apologies that meant less than nothing.

When the noise came from behind her — a tiny intake of breath — Madeline knew what it was. She turned and the girl stood in the doorway, the hallway light haloing around her.

The girl looked beyond Madeline, her eyes passing over what sticky remains lay smeared over the couch, and then the girl turned her eyes to Madeline.

“Momma,” the girl said. She clutched the same, ratty doll to her chest, and she sank to her knees and sobbed. Everything inside of Madeline broke open, and she ran.

At the end of the next cycle, she would chain herself up. She would keep paying Bennie and hoping every month he got it right. But never like this. Never again.

In the morning, she would come back. Her human face soft and kind, and she would gather the girl in her arms. Her new daughter.

She would never let her go.

Kristi DeMeester received her M. A. in Creative Writing from Kennesaw State University in 2011. Since then her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Black Static , The Dark , Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volumes 1 and 3 , and several others. Her chapbook, Split Tongues , published by Dim Shores Press, sold out in early 2016. In her spare time, she alternates between telling people how to pronounce her last name and how to spell her first. Find her online at www.kristidemeester.com .

PagPag

What few teeth he had peered above his lips, like black icebergs floating in a pink sea.

by Samuel Marzioli | 4969 words

5,200 Words

The Night Watch was scheduled for 10 that evening, but Jay started his patrol at sundown. With a newly sharpened gulok resting on his shoulder, he ambled down the scabrous road that wound throughout the settlement, ducking clotheslines, skirting refuse, and threading the narrow strips and alleyways between each cluster of shanties. Heavy winds made corrugated rooftops rattle. Frail plywood walls banged and trembled, and every once in a while, the sound of someone crying bled into the night, adding a somber note to the symphony of violence.

It reminded him of his wife Malaya’s funeral from two weeks past, shortly after the aswang first appeared. All those solemn people huddled around her closed coffin, chanting prayers lost to the howl of buffeting winds. The thought of it put a knot in his stomach, and he stared into the sky.

“ Mahal na Panginoon ,” he said to the moon, to the stars, to the dust clouds swirling overhead. “Give me justice.”

He let hours pass before resting along the eastern border where a wall of buried garbage marked the start of the local landfill. With his back pressed against the wall, he scanned the distance, focusing on the deep shadows that gathered around his neighbors’ homes. No sooner had he started than he spotted a figure walking down a parallel stretch of road. He squeezed the gulok for reassurance and sprinted to catch up.

“Curfew is at 10 you know,” said Jay, falling in step beside the stranger. “Where are you going?”

“Home,” said a man’s deep and graveled voice.

Jay searched every inch of him, looking for a sign of abnormality. The man wore a hood pulled down over his eyes, his hands thrust into the pockets of his dusty jeans. Added to the scars around his tightly drawn lips, he looked suspicious enough. But Jay had to be sure.

“Remove your hood so I can see your face.”

“Mind your own business.”

“It is my business,” said Jay, grabbing his arm.

The man jerked free and spat a black glob that landed on Jay’s shoe. In one swift motion he pulled his hood back.

“ Putang ina mo , is this what you wanted to see?”

The aswang ’s jaundiced skin cradled the contours of its skull, pulling its features into a scowl. Dark rings surrounded its eyes. Its pupils narrowed and the tip of its second tongue — a slender pink proboscis — slid from its mouth and brushed against its chin.

Jay jolted back. He raised the gulok to defend himself, expecting the thing to lunge, or slash at him with nails thick and hard as ivory like others had done before. Instead, it turned away.

“I have no time to waste on you,” it said.

Before it could take a step, Jay kicked its knee-pit, knocking it to the ground. Rage surged inside him as images of Malaya’s last moments barreled through his mind: the abject terror in her eyes; the way her mouth almost formed his name before pain twisted it into a scream; and her father looming over her, slurping from the proboscis lodged into her belly.

He swung his gulok , catching the aswang between the sloping segments of its neck. With each subsequent hack he shouted, “You want your family? Here’s your family!” and, for a time, the sound of metal cleaving flesh and bone pierced the night.

Once it lay dismembered, he dragged the pieces to the pit beyond the southern edge of town. Roiling darkness filled it up; the stench of rot hovered like a noxious cloud above it.

“Please,” said the aswang ’s head, its voice now feeble, shrunken to a sigh. “My family needs me.”

Jay pinched his nose shut. Without a word, he kicked the parts in where they fell among the low and garbled cries of all the other aswang that had come before.

§

He returned home before daybreak and found his mother seated by the table. Candlelight washed over her, throwing shadows across the grooves and wrinkles of her sleeping face. He didn’t bother to wake her; he simply dropped to the floor and wept into the cotton of her skirt.

“What’s wrong?” she said, when she woke, pushing at his shoulders to get a better look at him. “Are you hurt?”

“I met an aswang ,” he said, his body racked by heaving sobs.

“You were protecting us. No one can blame you for what you had to do.”

“That’s not it.”

“Then what? What could possibly be so bad?”

He lifted his head, meeting his mother’s eyes for the first time. “It’s just … why them? Why does their love bring them back to their families, but she doesn’t return to me?”

“Ah, Jay, you’re not thinking straight. What would you do if Malaya did return? Hug her? Kiss her? Bring her into this house and pretend she won’t do to you what her father did to her?”

“We never even had a chance to say goodbye.”

“Perhaps God is saving you from foolishness,” she said, wiping the tears from his cheeks. “You can’t handle that burden yet. Two weeks is too soon.”

§

They woke at sunrise and finished the untouched pagpag from last night’s meal. The meat had soured in the night and the rice had hardened into clumps, but they ate their share without complaint. It was better than the alternative, when their empty bellies felt hard as stone and the need for food squirmed and clawed like a ravenous beast inside them. Thankfully, those days were few and far between now that Jay had replaced his mother as the family’s sole provider.

After breakfast, Jay stood and stretched his limbs. “I should go.”

“ Mag-ingat ka ,” his mother said, her expression almost plaintive. “You do what you have to do to come home safely.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll be back before you know it.”

On his way downtown, he passed a roadblock where soldiers in BDUs pointed guns and asked him questions: “Where did you come from?” and “Where are you going?” and “Where does your family live?” They shined light into his eyes and checked his fingernails. At the tail end, a man in latex gloves pried his mouth open and, seeing nothing unusual, sent him on his way.

He arrived in Manila’s commercial district by late morning. Not long ago, cars would have choked the roads between each stop sign, and sidewalks would have overflowed with pedestrians. But the fear of aswang had left their mark on the people of the Philippines. While richer families had fled the country, the majority — Jay’s neighbors and those like them — were too poor to travel, and hid within their homes, waiting out the crisis behind barricaded doors. Now he could count those spread across a city block on his hands.

In the rear of his favorite shopping center, the buildings and a high brick wall sandwiched a paved alley. A row of bins lined the wall, a few with lids flipped open and their stink spilling out. Before long, he was elbow deep in garbage.

“Get out of my trash, you mongrel!”

He heard a bark of laughter and turned to find Peter — another frequent scavenger among these parts — strolling toward him. Peter scratched the beard beneath his wide grin. What few teeth he had peered above his lips, like black icebergs floating in a pink sea.

“ Kumusta ka , Jay,” he said.

“ Kumusta po kayo . You almost gave me a heart attack.”

“I’m keeping you on your toes, that’s all. How’s business?”

“There still aren’t enough people dining out.”

“Tighten that belt, my friend. With Laog overrun and Quezon like a ghost town, I fear the worst is yet to come.”

“I hope you’re wrong. If this keeps up, we’ll starve.”

“Look on the bright side! At least there are less of us dogs fighting over table scraps,” Peter said, rubbing his hands together like a kid surveying his birthday spoils.

They worked in silence for a while, but memories of Malaya bandied for Jay’s attention and he was unable to concentrate on anything else. He remembered the first time he took Malaya on a pagpag hunt. A life of scavenging metals and plastics with her father at the adjacent landfill had left her unprepared. The moment she came across a rotted piece of meat — rife with maggots — she hauled herself aside and retched.

Jay kneeled beside her and took her hand. “Have you ever wondered why we call it papag ?” he asked.

She shrugged, wiping the remnant sick from her lips.

“My mom told me it’s because we scoop it up and shake the dust off. It’s not what we wanted, but it’s all we have. We come from dust, we live in dust, and when we die we go to dust.”

The memory faded. Jay balled his hands into fists. A ferocious ache coiled like a snake around his heart and standing straight, tilting his face up into the sky, was all he could do to catch his breath.

“Peter, are you still living in that cemetery up north?”

“Of course. It’s only the most luxurious space on God’s green earth! Why?”

“I’ve been tracking news of the aswang for weeks now, trying to get a better sense about them. Maybe you noticed something while living there that I missed.”

“Perhaps,” he said, scratching his beard again. “How about this: they’re not dead, at least not in the way you might expect. A week ago, before I made camp, I struck up a conversation with a man who had lived in Manila North Cemetery all his life. I asked him how he could feel safe knowing the aswang were all around and he just laughed. ‘There are no aswang here,’ he told me. ‘The crypts are sealed, the ground is undisturbed, and bones are stacked in the common graves up to the highest brick. Assuming God hasn’t plucked those bastards straight from Hell, they come from somewhere, but not here.’”

“So where?”

Peter turned, staring owl-eyed at Jay. “That is a question! I can’t say. In the end, only the aswang know for sure.”

§

A nightmare kept Jay from anything like true rest, the same one he’d had every night since his wife died. In it, he relived the evening of Malaya’s father’s return.

Jay and his family hadn’t known better than to welcome him into their house. At the time, the aswang were still the stuff of myths and legends, mostly shape-shifting she-devils who lived as women by day, but changed into vicious beasts at night. And Malaya’s father had been dead three days. That was key. If it had been longer — a week, a month, a year — maybe they would have feared him and slammed the door in his face. But three was holy. Three was perfection, a sure sign that a divine miracle had taken place.

They spoke with him for hours about his funeral, listing all the friends and family who attended, recounting many of the beautiful things that each guest said. Afterwards, Malaya’s father took her for a walk.

“I prefer we go alone,” he said. “To make up for my absence.”

They left the house together. Less than a minute passed before Malaya screamed, and by the time Jay had thrown open the door and rushed outside, there was little he could do but watch her die.

He woke with the onset of a groan that refused to rise. Sweat poured from his forehead. He turned to his mother, lying beside him in the cramped quarters of their bedroom. With moonlight punching through their wire mesh window, she looked so small and fragile, her breaths straining against the weight of her own bones.

He thought about the question that had haunted him since his conversation with Peter. Where did the aswang come from? While no closer to an answer, he was determined to find out. No matter what it took, he had to see Malaya again.

“I’m sorry, Mom. I know you need me, but I need her too.”

He touched a part of her hair that draped farthest from the bundle of cloth she used for a pillow. Once he settled down again, he drifted back to sleep and to the nightmare of Malaya’s death that never seemed to end.

§

Jay had only managed to collect a small bag’s worth of pagpag the previous day, including chicken bones with a few good bites left, a half-eaten hamburger, and a small roll of ube cake. They saved the ube cake for breakfast. While its outer layer crumbled at the touch, each wedge tasted sweet and they savored every bite.

“Mom, what would you do if I wasn’t around?” Jay asked, after he stuffed the last bite into his mouth.

“Ah, Jay! Don’t talk like that. It’s too morbid,” his mother said, waving her hand as if fanning a bad smell.

“I’m serious. What if I get hurt or, worse, killed?”

“I could go live with Perla and her husband. They wouldn’t like it, but we’ve been friends far too long for them to say no.”

“Maybe you could visit Ate Perla today? I’m going to be late tonight and I’d like to know you’re safe.”

“No. I’ll wait for you here, like always.”

“Please?”

“Am I so old that I can’t make my own decisions? You come back and maybe tomorrow we can visit Perla together.”

He heaved a sigh and enfolded his mother from behind her chair. She went stiff in his arms, but she didn’t pull away. They had never been a hugging kind of family, not when he was a boy, or even between his parents before his father abandoned them for good. Her subtle squirming in his arms felt awkward, but he didn’t regret it. He needed something stronger than words for what could very well be his last goodbye.

Though it wasn’t his turn for Watch duty, he took his gulok with him. By the door, he faltered beside the Polaroid of Malaya, propped up on a shelf. The photo had been taken three years ago by a friendly tourist and given to her as a gift. In it, she was eighteen, her face lit by a full and hopeful smile and framed by long, black hair the sheen of ink.

After kissing his fingers, he pressed it against the photo. “ Minamahal kita .”

“Be careful out there, Jay.”

“I will,” he said and stepped into the morning’s warm embrace.

He had already decided there would be no pagpag hunt today. They still had an emergency supply of rice and, besides, he needed to prepare himself for the day that lay ahead. He went first to the river to bathe. The riverside was an isolated spot, hidden from a housing development behind a row of trees knitted together by their branches. In the distance, the buildings of downtown Manila seemed to dangle from the sky like a faded backdrop.

After stripping off, he dove into the rust-colored waters and settled in. Before each dip beneath the surface, he stared into the sky, calling out “ Panginoon ko ,” and tried to let the river wash away his fears and doubts. It didn’t work. He left with a greater sense of urgency, but nothing more, nothing less.

In the commercial district, he bought a cloth bag with a wide interior and handles sewn along the sides. Then he strolled along the near-abandoned streets of Manila, biding his time until the sun went down. He needed the cover of darkness for what he had planned next.

§

When Jay returned to town, two members of the Night Watch had already started their patrol. Though they meandered along the road, boisterous conversations and their penchant for singing marked their place around him. He had only to drift between shadows and pass through alleyways, and he arrived at the pit beyond the southern border unnoticed.

Setting the gulok aside, he dropped to the ground and dangled his legs over the pit’s edge. Despite the late hour, stars remained invisible and even the watchful moon seemed to shed too little light. It made it impossible to see beyond the black amorphous stain covering the pit’s bottom. The whispers from dismembered aswang drifted out — like funeral songs or unholy prayers — and he saw it not as a fifteen-foot-wide hollow, but as a portal to damnation.

He didn’t want to think about what actually awaited him below, so he took a fortifying breath and gave himself to gravity. The fall was short. He gasped as the darkness consumed him, but soon his feet sank into the muddy ground. For a moment, he imagined hands reaching out to pull him under and severed heads chomping at his legs. He held still, waiting for these figments to pass before trudging through the mire.

Among the chorus of spectral voices, he listened for a single one: the graveled bass of the aswang he’d dismembered days before. While hunched low to the ground, he called out, “Do you remember me?” in hopes it would respond. He paced the pit several times, back and forth, before something finally answered.

“Yes, yes, I remember you. Are you here to see my face again?”

“I need your help.”

“And why would I help you?”

“You said before you wanted to see your family. I can bring you to them, if you show me where you came from.”

“My family first or we have no deal.”

While Jay didn’t trust it to keep its promise, he didn’t have much choice. Without the aswang , his whole plan failed.

“Agreed,” he said at last.

After hoisting the head up and shoving it into the bag, he wiped wet, viscous grime against his pant legs, praying it was only mud. He slung the bag over his shoulder. Then he made divots in the pit wall for hand and foot holds and clambered out to freedom.

The entire time, his wife’s name echoed in his mind. Since her death, he’d avoided speaking it aloud, but now the anticipation of seeing her again begged him to break his silence.

“Malaya,” he said, and a shiver dashed up his spine.

§

With the aswang ’s help, they quickly found its family’s home on the northeast side of town. Jay stood in the darkness of an alley opposite the house, letting the head peer from the bag through a gap in their tarp curtains. Candles lit the interior, enough to see a mother pass to and from the bedroom, and a daughter and son playing hand games at the table.

“Has it been so long?” the aswang said, its waxen face unmoving, save for the tremble of its lips. “When I died, my children were only babies. Take me closer.”

Jay stepped into the road, still within the cover of shadows.

“Closer,” it said, its voice choked and desperate.

He took another step, right to the edge of moonlight.

“Closer, closer. Go to the window.”

Jay could hardly understand its words; the wet gagging of its throat destroyed enunciation. But he knew the motive well enough, could feel the raw, bestial hunger riding the torrent of its moans.

“That’s close enough,” he said, barely containing his disgust enough to keep his words a whisper. “Leave them with memories and stories. It’s better that way.”

The aswang said nothing so Jay closed the bag around it. Once he determined the Watch’s position by the sound of their voices, he fled in the opposite direction.

§

The aswang set Jay on an eastern route along city roads and sidewalks. The light of roadblocks shone bright as beacons in the night and he circled far around them, passing through residential neighborhoods or empty fields to escape their notice. Once in a while, cars would pass, but no one stopped him, not even volunteers of the Watch. For hours, they moved through many cities, and crossed two rivers, until the aswang made them rest along the border of Antipolo.

“Are we close?” said Jay, gazing into the bag.

“No, but you must put me down here,” it said.

“That wasn’t our deal.”

“I can be of no more use to you. The farther I am from my family, the more compelled I am to see them. It won’t be long before I do nothing but beg and cry for you to take me back.”

“But —”

“The doorways between our two worlds are spread across the islands, each one opening and closing according to their time. This one is the closest now. It will remain in place long enough for you to find it and do what you need to do.”

Jay placed the bag on the ground. “I want to see my wife. If I call to her, will she come out?”

“Perhaps, but you’d risk much by even trying.”

“That doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except seeing her again.”

“And if you die?”

“Then I die.”

The aswang laughed, a hoarse rumbling in the back of its throat. “Now I see. Despite the life flowing through your veins, you’re one of us already.”

§

Jay left, following the aswang ’s final instructions. Several miles onward, he arrived at a grove of balete trees fanned out in a semi-circle. Their branches spread into a thick canopy of leaves far above him, blotting out the sky. The tendrils of aerial roots along their trunks twined with those of their neighbors, forming a barrier of living wood. In its center was a gap, wide enough to fit a man, but barely. A faint haze overlapped it, much like the illusion of blue streaks seen on distant roads in summer.

He took a stuttered breath, his heart thumping at a manic pace. “Malaya? It’s me,” he said.

No answer came so he shouted, “Malaya, please come out! I have to see you!”

When that failed, he ventured closer, pressing his lips up to the limit.

“I need you. Come back to me.”

The door flickered, revealing for a few scattered seconds a clear view of the hillside that lay behind it. Was it closing like the aswang had warned and, if so, how much time was left? One minute? Thirty? Enough to call to Malaya for five or six more hours? There was no way to tell, but Jay did know one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt. If his wife’s love wouldn’t bring her out, he’d just have to go in and find her.

He braced himself, strengthening his will with more good memories of Malaya. But the moment he made as if to enter, hands appeared, dangling from the center of the door as if anchored to the haze itself. He scrambled to a safer distance. The hands groped at the air, sliding forward to reveal delicate wrists and arms as smooth and thin as bone. A leg shot out next, and then the entire body emerged into the night.

“Jay, where am I?”

“Mom?”

The world blurred beneath the warm, wet pooling of his tears. He tried to speak again, but his tongue felt three sizes too large and the soft moans squeezing from the back of his throat were all that he could manage.

“I saw Malaya,” his mother said. “She returned, just like you wanted. She forced herself inside our home and asked me where you were. When I refused to tell her, she said she wasn’t an aswang like her father, but that God Himself had freed her from the prison of her death.”

She shuffled closer. Even in the dim light of the balete grove, Jay could see her frailty was false, as if she’d forgotten all her pains and senescence and was just mimicking the motions. Her hands slid behind her back. The muscles of her arms flexed, straining toward a purpose he couldn’t see.

“She thought she could fool me, but I saw through her lies. I screamed, ‘You’re not my daughter-in-law’ and ran for the door. The moment I threw it open, she grabbed me by the hair and dragged me back inside. Somehow I escaped. I had to warn you. I had to tell you that home isn’t safe anymore.”

“Mom, please,” he said, his voice vacillating between a whisper and a shout. He held a hand out, fingers splayed. “Don’t come any closer.”

She took another step, dragging herself to within mere feet from where he stood.

“I was so scared. You were gone so long and I was all alone. But I was brave. See? I’m not as helpless as you think.”

“Think about what you’re doing. I’m your son, the only family you have left,” he said, trying to stall her, to force reason into her brain.

“You think I forgot?” Her lips stretched into a ravenous grin and her pupils narrowed into slits. “That’s the reason I came back.”

A putrid scent rode the wave of her groaning exhale, even as her second tongue slithered from her mouth like a serpent rising from its burrow. When she revealed her hands at last, nails hung like keratin daggers from her fingertips.

“Mom —”

The proboscis lashed out, hooking Jay’s arm, ripping a divot in his skin when it finally retracted. He screamed, more out of surprise than pain, and heaved the gulok overhead. His mother charged just as he sent the blade crashing down. While her claws shredded his shirt, barely missing the soft flesh of his stomach, his gulok found its mark and sunk deep into her skull.

He couldn’t bear to see her — thrashing on the ground, howling like a wounded dog — when he brought the blade down again. But by the sixth and seventh time he couldn’t look away. He had to be sure to strip whatever life had filled his mother’s counterfeit body, so that her soul could truly rest.

§

Seconds and eternity fused into an indistinguishable whole, so much so that when Jay emerged from the doldrums of his mind, he wasn’t sure how much time had passed. He remembered little of the journey home, except that memories of Malaya no longer comforted him anymore, having been razed by figments of how she’d killed his mother. Only hours ago, he would have done anything to say one last goodbye; now he didn’t know if he could even bear the sight of her.

He arrived at the outskirts of the shantytown by daybreak. Quiet filled the empty streets and alleyways, a tainted calm that reminded him of graveyards, or an ancient battlefield where the bodies of the dead had been left to rot. Whenever a stray voice did slip out from the shanties around him, it felt like an aberration, spectral words spilling from another realm.

A sense of unreality bled into his surroundings when he reached his house. Colors faded, objects distorted with exaggerated proportions, and the ground thumped against his feet as if it had acquired its own heartbeat. He hesitated by the entrance and stared up into the sky.

“ Mahal na Panginoon , give me the strength to do this,” he said and muscled through the door.

The stench of rot assaulted him. In the far corner, Malaya cradled the real body of his mother. Blood pooled around them, was smeared across Malaya’s face; her lips and teeth were stained with it, her hands wearing it like gloves.

Vomit burned his throat, flooding his mouth. While he’d believed his aswang -mother’s story, knowing the details only magnified the revulsion of seeing it for himself.

“Why would you do this?” he said, hunched over, spitting sour bile to the floor.

“I’m sorry!” Malaya shouted. “I’m sorry!”

She pushed his mother’s body aside, wedging herself farther into the corner, shielding her face with her arms.

“I’m your husband,” he said, pounding his chest with a fist. “I’m the one you loved the most. You should have only wanted me!”

He advanced on her, not caring for the consequences. Even if she tried to rip his still-beating heart from his chest, he wouldn’t struggle, or even cry out. It would be a mercy, an end to all the pain and confusion glutting up his insides. He stooped and grabbed her arms, forcing them to part, fully expecting her proboscis to thrust into his belly. To his surprise, he found only black tears sliding down her cheeks.

“I don’t understand. Why don’t you kill me? It’s what you want, isn’t it? My blood, filling you up to bursting.”

“I’m too … full. The hungers gone, at least for now.”

He scoffed, shoved her hard against the wall and backed away. “This isn’t how it was supposed to be.”

“I never meant to hurt anyone,” Malaya said, “much less you and Mom. For days I traveled home, thinking about this very moment. With every step, I swore I’d be a good wife and daughter-in-law, not a monster like all the rest. But there’s something else inside me now, a blinding lust beyond anything I could have ever imagined.”

“You should have tried harder !” he said, stabbing a finger in the air at every punctuated word.

“I wanted to, but I couldn’t, Jay. I couldn’t.” She tilted her head, exposing the soft curve of her neck, wiping the wet from her eyes with violent, careless swipes. “You have to end this. The hunger is already returning. Don’t let me spend eternity knowing that I murdered the only man I ever loved.”

He squeezed the gulok in both hands, testing his strength, his mettle. But he couldn’t find the rage that had fueled his long walk home, only a fierce loathing for the thing his wife had become.

“All I have left inside of me is hate. If you make me do this now, it’s all I’ll ever have for you.”

Malaya shivered, as if from a cold only she could feel. Her face squinched with pain and her throat distended.

“It’s coming. Do it.”

“No!”

“Jay, please!”

She clamped her lips shut, but her second tongue struggled in her mouth, disfiguring her face with lines and bulges. Jay raised the gulok over his shoulder, tears burning his cheeks.

“This isn’t how it was supposed to be!” he screamed and swung with all his might.

Malaya crumpled in place, her body wracked with spasms. Just to be sure he drove the life from her, he hacked fissures in her skull. When at last she didn’t move, and the proboscis hung like a withered, pink vine from her mouth, he dropped to his knees beside her.

“I lied before. Minamahal kita . Always”

He brushed her hair so that it covered up her wounds, wiping away the blood and grime until the true brown of her face shone through. Then he closed his eyes and cradled her hand in his own.

“Why?” he said, pressing her hand to his face, pretending it was alive and warm. Pretending it didn’t bite into his skin like a worthless lump of ice. “Why do we never get to say goodbye?”

Samuel Marzioli is an Italian-Filipino writer of mostly dark fiction. His work has appeared in numerous publications and podcasts, including The Best of Apex Magazine (2016), Intergalactic Medicine Show , Shock Totem , Penumbra eMag , and Pseudopod . You can find more information about his current projects at his website, marzioli.blogspot.com .

Zayinim

He wanted to make a race of supermen, and this was because of books like the one you stole from my room

by Adam Roberts | 7806 words

8,000 Words

:1:

Jonie stole one of Daniel’s books. ‘Borrowed’, we might say; but she knew what stealing was, and she knew what she was doing. On the other hand, her mother was always pressing her to read books, and — to be truthful — there was little else to do. Jacob and the others were away, so the rest were supposed to lie low, which was the mostest BORINGness, and Jonie had read all her other books. So she snuck into Daniel’s room. It was actually the cab of one of the trucks, but he’d hung up drapes and set up a bookcase and made it quite homely. She picked a likely looking codex, and danced back to her den.

The book was called Beyond Good and Evil by a guy called Nate Char — an American, presumably, by the name. The title promised a crime-and-punishment story, or (more exciting) a crime-but-no-punishment story. But actually it was all dense prose like this:

Assuming truth is a Jew — what then? Is there not reason to suspect that all philosophers, in so far as they were dogmatists, have known very little about Jews? That the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to the Truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for impressing the Jews? Certainly Truth has never allowed herself to be won; and at present every kind of dogma stands with sad and discouraged mien — IF, indeed, it stands at all!

That was the point at which Jonie bailed. She threw the book on the floor and lay on her bed for a while, chewing her fingernails. She spent five minutes trying to nibble her two pinkie nails into talons, and then gave up on that and bit them both close to the finger. Then she leapt up. Ran, with the uncoiled sudden energy of bored youth, out of her room, past the fence and to where her mother was working.

‘What’s a philosopher?’

‘Somebody who tries to fathom the universe,’ her mother replied, without looking up.

Jonie waited. After a while she cracked. ‘Don’t you want to know why I asked?’

Her eyes still on what she was doing, her mother returned, ‘Why did you ask?’ in a level voice.

‘I borrowed one of Daniel’s books. It says that philosophers are in love with the Jews. So are they not Jews, these philosophers?’

‘There have been many Jewish philosophers,’ said her mother, with that particular tone in her voice that was the closest she ever came to laughter. ‘But there have also been philosophers amongst the Goyim.’

‘Zombies? Zombies want to fathom the whys of the universe?’

Her mother looked up, and angled her head. ‘I didn’t say there were any zombie philosophers’

‘Isn’t Goy another word for zombie?’

‘No,’ she replied, returning her attention to whatever she was writing.

Jonie waited an age in the ensuing silence — whole minutes — before the energy danced out of her. She pirouetted from one end of her mother’s desk to the other, and back again. Her mother continued plugging away at whatever she was doing, undistracted. ‘Is Daniel on the prim?’ Jonie asked.

‘Your uncle is on perimeter duty, I believe,’ Mother replied. ‘Perhaps you wish to apologise for taking one of his books without asking his permission?’

‘Later!’ Jonie cried, and raced out of her mother’s room.

Elisheva was on the main door, but she’d always had a soft spot for Jonie and didn’t need much persuading. ‘Take one,’ she insisted, pressing a loaded bolt-gun into her hands. ‘Remember: aim at the bluest eye.’

‘Sure, yes, OK, of course, I know ,’ Jonie told her, in an ecstasy of impatience. Then the heavy triple-shield iron door grated noisily open and Jonie ran out into the sunshine. She didn’t so much as look back at the compound; she just ran. Lay-low week take that !

The long grass hissed like snakes as she sprinted through it. She came out at the rise, and the lake was spread out all before her in the afternoon sunshine, each of the myriad wavelet inset with a pip of bright sunlight. To the left was a bole of willows, like a knot of giant green jellyfish trailing their tentacles in the water. Everything was pale green and dark green, and the water was blue-green, and Jonie ran in the sunlight direction: widdershins around the island. Down into a declivity, and up onto a small hill, and then she saw Daniel — dressed in bright red, standing like a flame in the field.

The red was on purpose, of course. The Zayinim were attracted to the bright colour, and would strut and stumble in Dan’s direction, rather than bothering the compound. Of course, that put the pressure on Dan’s marksmanship. But his marksmanship was fabled. Zayin was the Hebrew Z, Z-for-zombies, although it also meant dick , and lezayen meant to insert the dick , which Jonie thought was pretty funny, actually. Not that she had a whole lot of experience of dick , and still less of insertion. She hooted Daniel’s name, and galloped so hard down the slope to him that she was out of breath by the time she arrived and it took her ages to get her breath back, and she had to lean her hands on her knees and face the ground like she was about to spew.

Daniel’s creased face was trying to do stern. ‘Shouldn’t cry out like that, little one,’ he told her. ‘Shrieking. They’re not deaf, you know.’

‘To what do you owe the pleasure?’ Jonie said. ‘I’ll tell you, Daniel. I read one of your books.’

‘But I haven’t written any books, Jonie,’ said Daniel, genuinely puzzled.

‘It was called Better than Good and Worse than Evil ,’ Jonie pressed. ‘It’s by an American, and it’s about philosophers. It said philosophers were in love with truth, and also in love with Jews, and I figured that meant they weren’t Jews. But who isn’t a Jew? Apart,’ she added, sweeping her right arm in a broadcast indicative gesture.

Daniel looked nervously around, in case one of them was slouching towards them. But the view was clear. ‘Slow down,’ he begged.

‘A Zayin can hardly talk, and surely a Zayin can’t write, so I’m thinking a Zayin can’t be a philosopher. Thus and therefore I was wondering — since it’s your book, you explain.’

When old Daniel frowned the three horizontal lines on his brow went, as it were, from normal to bold font; but more than that, two angled lines converging on the bridge of his nose sprang into visibility, like a giant V.

He holstered his gun, and pulled a long, sharp-ended stick from a loop on the other side of his belt. Jonie couldn’t imagine what he was going to do with it, until he jabbed it hard into the soil, and then unfolded a sort of hinged canvas seat, no bigger than two cupped hands. He sat on this and took a breath. ‘You’re going too fast for me, child,’ he said, and began extricating materials for smoking: a white tube the length of a live round; a lighter as red as his clothes. ‘But the book is called Beyond Good and Evil , and it’s not by an American. It’s by a German, and it was very popular with the people who —’ And he nodded in the direction of the lake, to indicate all the Zayinim in their terrible masses, somewhere over there.

‘No,’ said Jonie, delightedly, ‘ kidding .’ She flopped into the grass at her uncle’s feet, and clutched her own knees to her chest. ‘So it is a zombie philosophy!’

‘No,’ said Daniel, sounding now like a ventriloquist talking whilst simultaneously holding his cigarette between his lips. A click and the end became an ember. He breathed the smoke in deep. It made a loud, sibilant sound going in, like silk on silk. Then he let it out very slowly. ‘It was written before that. But it inspired the people who made themselves into — that.’

‘Wolf Hitler!’ exclaimed Jonie, excitedly.

‘He was one of them, one of the worst. But not the only one.’

‘Tell me the story again,’ insisted Jonie.

Daniel drew hard on his cigarette again, and breathed out a spear of smoke into the mild afternoon air. ‘Well the Wolf hated Jews. And he was a ruler of Europe, and he made allies with others who hated Jews. And there was a big war; the whole world fought it. But the Wolves and the Bears banded together, and won that war.’

‘If they hated the Jews, why didn’t they kill them?’ Jonie asked.

‘They did. They killed the Jews in Europe, and Russia, and north Africa. There were other Jews in America, and although America lost that war and signed away reparations and agreed to,’ Daniel coughed sharply, ‘dis-ad-van tag eous trade agreements and so on, they at least kept their Jews.’

‘What happened next?’ Jonie pressed. She knew what happened next; but it was good to hear the story told.

‘Well, the Wolf had a dream. He wanted to make a race of supermen, and this was because of books like the one you stole from my room, you know.’ Jonie made a shocked face, but her uncle was smiling. ‘The archetypal warriors, new warriors of a new war, were the üboatmensch, and they were the prototype. That’s what the writer of your book talked about,’ (Jonie began to suspect he couldn’t remember the guy’s name) ‘how to become more like the üboatmensch, solitary hunters, utilising new technologies to destroy and inhabit new worlds and so on. Anyway. Anyway, the Wolf had the resources of the world at his disposal, so he made it come true. Through —’ Daniel drew a curlicue of smoke in the air with his cigarette, gesturing at the vagueness of the next word ‘— science. Invincible warriors. Regenerating flesh, self-repairing gene-loads, immortality. Beyond mortality. And from a simple dose of a serum! So he dosed up an army and invaded China, and destroyed it. But it wasn’t enough to give it to the army only — the people wanted it too. Everybody wanted it!

‘The Wolf’s allies begged for the serum, and he used it to force them to submit further to him. But eventually everybody got it. Everybody, except the Jews. He agreed a treaty with America, and part of the agreement was: not the Jews. He thought — the Aryan Americans and the Spanish Americans and the Noble Native Americans will live forever in a warrior world, but the Jews will be mortal, and die out.’ He was down to the stump of his cigarette now, and Jonie was impressed at the way he held the last bit of it with his nails, so it didn’t scorch his skin.

‘But we’re still here.’

‘Immortality is a bad idea. The body keeps going, but eventually the mind fall apart. The human mind isn’t built to last forever, and eventually it curls up on itself and shrivels down. That’s why the Zayinim are so … thoughtless.’

‘That’s because we shoot for their brains. We shoot their brains and they can’t think. They don’t die, but can’t think,’ said Jonie.

‘Every human on earth was made a zombie, except the Jews!’ said Daniel. ‘You think that we shot every one of them in the head?’

‘I can’t believe everyone in the world was made a zombie,’ challenged Jonie. ‘There must have been thousands and thousands.’ She remembered reading something about the pre-Zayin world. ‘Millions!’

‘Indeed. And a lot died in fighting over the serum. But a lot more got it — just not us , though. Then the new supermen and superwomen discovered that they couldn’t carry children to term any more. The supermen could plant the seed like ever they did before, but the superwombs couldn’t hold on to the babies. But they figured: I’m upset by this? Me? I’m immortal! And they lived to a hundred, and were still as young as when they took the serum. And then they lived to a hundred and twenty, and they were young. And then, at a hundred and fifty — don’t ask me why, am I a scientist? — their minds started folding in on themselves, like a spider sprayed with water in the washtub. You’ve seen the way they’re all legs and motion, and a quick slurp from the tap and they curl into a full stop?’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Jonie, impatiently. ‘And?’

‘And they all went the same way. Immortal, but thought-impaired. Stumbling about. Too stupid and disoriented to avoid banging into things. Like leprosy, they began to knock bits off. Even serum-repair don’t cover everything — fingers regrow like courgettes; eyeballs grow back white as gobstoppers. And the Zayinim were too slow-witted to help themselves, stumbling about. The only thing they knew was: war. They’d been made as warriors. So they stumble about, and when they meet another of God’s creatures they tear it to pieces! Which is why we have to keep them at bay. That’s the definition of a warrior. A warrior is someone whose whole thought is: war.’

‘Other people, apart from the Jews, must have resisted the temptation of the serum,’ mused Jonie.

‘You think we Jews resisted the temptation? We’re such expert temptation-resisters? Don’t be pumpkinny. If they’d’ve offered us immortality, wouldn’t we have taken it? Only they didn’t offer it. That was the deal. Because the Wolf hated us.’

For a while they sat in silence, looking at the lake. The little slurpy waves kept kissing away at the reed-bank, over and over. The sun was lower. Daniel pinched out the last quarter-centimetre of his cigarette, and brought up his tin. Then he placed the demi-stub on the metal, and lit it again with his lighter, bringing his face close to it to suck up the very last wisps of smoke. His cigarette tin was brushed with a score of black marks where he had done this before. But what can you do? Tobacco is precious.

‘When did all this happen?’ Jonie asked. ‘I mean — I know it was a long time ago. I know it wasn’t living memory.’

‘My grandfather remembered those times,’ Daniel said, musingly. ‘He used to tell me about it.’

‘He died. So that,’ said Jonie, with the pedantry of youth, ‘is not living memory.’

‘He died, thank God!’ agreed Daniel. ‘There were a lot more of us, back then. Whole villages-full. Not like now. Ah well. Onward I suppose. Until we find the island and build the New City.’ And he heaved himself off his stick-seat and folded it away.

:2:

That night Jonie had another go at reading the book; but it was indigestible stuff, and Daniel’s handwriting didn’t make it any easier — assuming it had been copied out by Daniel, and not some other scribe. His spelling was idiosyncratic even by Jonie’s teenage standards, and sometimes his vocabulary was simply baffling.

Physiologists should think twice before positioning the drive for self-preservation as the cardinal drive of an organic being. Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength, to roll it forcefully from birth to death: life itself being fundamentally a Wheel to Power. Self-preservation is the oblique perversion of this wheel, the most frequent consequences of zombie life.

Physical-what-nows? And then there was a series of weird proverbs, almost none of which made sense.

Anyone who despises himself will still respect himself as a despiser.

It is the desire, not the desired, that we fall in love with.

The consequences of our actions take us by the scruff of the neck, altogether indifferent to the fact that we have ‘improved’ in the meantime.

We are punished most for our virtues.

Vices, she presumed he meant to write there. And —

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby becomes a monster. And when you gaze long into zombies the zombies also gaze into you.

Cold blue eyes. But, though young, Jonie had enough experience of the Zayinim to know that when they looked at you, there was nothing behind the look. They could not gaze. Most were repulsive-looking, but even the good-looking ones were no better than beasts: naked, filthy, dangerous. At breakfast the next day, she challenged Daniel: ‘Do you write it out, Uncy? Is this book I borrow-éd in your handwriting?’

Daniel glowered at her. They were expecting Jacob back soon: later that day maybe, or maybe tomorrow, or the day after; and until he came back Daniel had to conserve his tobacco. Accordingly he was grumpy. ‘You’ve a problem with my handy writing, maybe? Stealers can’t be choosers, my girl.’

‘It’s hard going, and your spelling is a shocker, and I don’t know,’ Jonie said, haughtily enough. ‘Tell you what the problem is? The problem is the book has no story.’

‘No story,’ snorted Daniel, rubbing the palm of his hand over his tall, lined brow. ‘Stories you want, eh? But we’re beyond stories now. The world has ended, and we’re living in the afterwards, and there are no stories anymore.’

Her mother nodded sagely at this, sipping her tea.

This was hardly a very satisfying answer, and Jonie vowed to give Daniel the book straight back — or burn it, or throw it in the lake, just to annoy him. But she didn’t. She kept reading. There was something weirdly compelling in the mumbo-jumbo of it. And that night, as she drifted off to sleep, it occurred to her with a force like revelation — maybe this was a holy book. Maybe it contained the answer to the problems of the Jews and the zombies.

She was jolted awake by raised voices. She knew immediately what the shouting meant. Sat straight up in bed. Slapped herself on the face. But she knocked her lighter on the floor when she reached for it, and wasted time scrabbling around before she could get a candle lit. Then she put shoes on, and put on her leather coat and gloves, the material stiff as thick cardboard in the cold. Cradling the candle she came out and along the corridor, and clanging up the metal steps to the top of the tower. Even before she reached the top she heard the snap, snap of rifle fire.

Everybody was there: her mother, Daniel, Elisheva, Esther, K., and Ash. K. swiveled the spotlight, and the others took turns at shooting at the indistinctness below. Ash handed Jonie a pistol (all the other rifles were away with Father), but the moon was no bigger than a toenail clipping and some mocking clouds were playing peekaboo with even this small light. The Zayinim could be heard rather than seen, rattling the wire fence, making their distinctive ‘ch’ hissing noise, occasionally letting out dog-like high-pitched whimpers.

‘It’s not good, them being out at night,’ Jonie gasped, excited despite herself. K. moved the spotlight, and three of them were visible in the circle. They turned their eyes up at the sudden illumination, and Mother shot the one on the left — drove a groove right down the crown of its head, like parting its hair. It danced backwards as a spray of black fluid appeared above its head like a rooster’s comb. Then it fell out of the light.

Abruptly, the Zayinim started shambling away. They were dumb, ‘severely mentally impaired’ as Mother put it, but they were not wholly brainless. The fence was not giving way, and they weren’t getting through. ‘It’s not good that they’re out at night,’ Jonie repeated.

‘Indeed not,’ said Elisheva. Zombies usually got active in the warmth of the day. Unless they got food; that was the only way they could get active. Shambling around in the small hours must have meant they’d been feeding. And feeding carried with it the inevitable correlative: feeding on whom ?

‘I’m going to start one of the trucks,’ said Daniel, heading down the stairs. ‘We need more light.’

‘Don’t waste the petrol,’ said Mother. ‘They’re going anyway.’

‘You sure?’

As if in answer to his question, clouds parted and enough pearl-coloured moonlight fell on the field in front of the camp to show it deserted.

‘They’re gone,’ Mother pronounced.

Jonie was sent back to bed, but of course she was too wired-up to sleep now. She read some more of the Char book, though reading by candlelight always made her eyes tired. Was Char really his name? Or was it a pseudonym. The only sure way to destroy one of the Zayinim was to burn it to ash; and in the latter days, when there had been end-times attempts to stem the tide of the zombermen, much of civilisation had gone up in smoke. Several times, when the camp had moved, Jonie had seen the scorched remains of cities, squares of slag where even weeds would not grow, black earth. It was why there were so few books. So little of everything. The philosopher of the charred . He had the answers! If only she could interpret the book aright.

The Jews — a people ‘born for zlavery’ as Tictacus and the whole ancient world says, ‘the chosen people’ as they themselves say and believe — the Jews achieved that miracle of revaluation of values thanks to which life on earth has for a couple of millennia acquired a new and dangerous fascination — their prophets fused ‘rich’, ‘godless’, ‘evil’, ‘violent’, ‘sensual’ into one and were the first to coin the word ‘world’ as a term of infamy. It is in this inversion of values ... that the significance of the Jewish people resides: with them there begins the slave revolt in morals.

‘Zlavery?’ Was the word an artefact of Daniel’s orthography? It wasn’t in her Websters — she got out of bed and checked. So was it a slip of the pen? Or actually intended as a portmanteau of zayin and slavery ? How were the Jews born for that?

She snuffed her candle and lay down again, until she felt sleep creep over her, like sinking into a hot bath. Then it suddenly shot through her mind, a fiery spear in her thoughts. They were slaves — slaves to the persistency and hostility of the Zayinim! A hundred disparate things fell into a gorgeous and meaningful pattern for the first time — with what splendour it all made sense. The Egyptian pharaoh undead mumzombie people keeping the Jews in bondage until the red sea of blood opened its doors across charred black sands and they fled along the Mobius-strip pathway of DNA. The struggle between Jews and zombies would drag on, itself zombie-like, unless they found a way to pass beyond Jews and zombies. The future. She was the future. New blood, and a new beginning. Breaking the old wheel of tradition. Helix and double-helix, and the doubling was a necessary part of the helix.

She debated with herself whether to get up, relight her candle, seek out her mother and explain things — but she could anticipate the cross temper of waking her at this hour. She’d explain it all in the morning. And, giving herself permission, she fell into sleep.

:3:

In the morning she woke with a fizzing in her stomach. But when she got up, and as she was rinsing her face in the basin outside, it dawned on her that she had forgotten the whole glorious unified vision she had had in the night. She sat on the end of her bed and waited for the inspiration to return to her, but it didn’t. Then she grew angry with herself for slothfully falling asleep instead of getting up and doing something. Anything! Writing it down, shouting it in Daniel’s ear. She propped her pillow against the end of the bed and punched it for a while. But that didn’t do any good. Oh, she was in a foul temper when she went through to see what there was for breakfast.

Everybody was there, and they were right in the middle of a discussion about moving the camp. ‘Include me out of this discussion, why don’t you,’ she wailed.

‘We didn’t want to wake you, princess,’ said Ash, separating his beard into two forks that he plaited round one another, undoing the plait and smoothing the beard into one again — a nervous tick of his.

‘We can’t move until Jacob gets back,’ said Daniel.

Jonie scowled at him. ‘Of course we can’t,’ she said, sarcastically. ‘We need the extra hands to help us load the trucks.’

‘I didn’t mean that,’ said Daniel.

‘He didn’t mean that,’ Mother echoed.

‘Then what did he mean?’ snapped Jonie. And as she asked the question she saw, with a horrible internal clatter, what he meant. He meant: what if the others don’t come back? What if they can’t? She saw it. Those Zayinim from the night before had been eating something .

Her thought processes must have been obvious, because A. said, ‘I’m sure they chanced upon a deer, or a sheep, or something.’

Jonie announced: ‘Father is fine. And I’ve been reading Daniel’s book, and I have had a vision. A vision! I suddenly saw how we could escape the predation of the Zayinim!’

Everybody was looking at her now. ‘All right,’ prompted her mother. ‘How?’

‘Actually I can’t remember now,’ she said, trying to look dignified. ‘But I’m sure it’ll come back to me.’ She took a mug of porridge from the breakfast pan and retreated to her room to read more of the Char. But her attention jittered over the words, and she kept trying to cast herself back into the middle of the previous night.

… be assigned to pretence, to the will to delusion, to selfishness, and cupidity. It might even be possible that WHAT constitutes the value of those good and respected things, consists precisely in their being insidiously related, knotted, and crocheted to these evil and apparently opposed things — perhaps even in being essentially identical with them. Perhaps! But who wishes to concern himself with such dangerous ‘Perhapses’! For that investigation one must await the advent of a new order of philosophers, such as will have other tastes and inclinations, the reverse of those hitherto prevalent — philosophers of the dangerous …

It was no good. She couldn’t concentrate. There was some commotion outside, so she gave up on her reading. She put on her jacket and gloves and hat and went to the main gate.

‘There’s one left over from last night,’ said Esther, excitedly. ‘They’re all out there now sorting it out.’

‘Let me through,’ Jonie demanded.

‘Your father wouldn’t want me to.’

Esther was, like, a hundred years old. ‘Don’t be a shrivelled old stupid person, Esther, and let me out .’

‘I’ll tell him it wasn’t my idea,’ Esther grumbled. ‘Take a gun, at least.’

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said Jonie, snatching the weapon and squeezing through the door before it was even a quarter open.

It always felt good to be outside. Spring was everywhere now, which was good in one sense — no more sleeping in all her clothes wrapped in two blankets and still shivering with the cold — and very bad in another. The Zayinim became much more active in the warm months of the year. Not just in terms of moving more rapidly and with more purpose — although until you’d seen a zombie immediately after a feed you had no idea just how quickly they could go — but in terms of aggregating into larger and therefore more dangerous packs. Nonetheless, it was good to breathe the fragrant air.

Someday, she mused, she would escape it all. Start her own life. Have kids, maybe. Except that having kids would not be to escape.

They were all standing, a circle of folk in the long grass. It was indeed one of the Zayinim from the previous night — the one mother had shot across the top of its skull. It was lying on its back in the grass. Jonie came up behind Daniel, and then peered past him.

It was naked, as all the Zayinim were. Their bodies long outlasted whatever clothes they had once worn. This one was nude, but not all of them were — some were covered in hair, like beasts of the field. The thing was the serum, or whatever it was, that made them immortal. It prompted regeneration of the flesh, with almost miraculous speed and accuracy. But the accuracy was not perfect, and over long enough stretches of time weird glitches worked their way into the operation. This could take any number of forms, but a common one was that hair follicles grew thicker and thicker hair. Not this guy, though: he was bald, eyebrowless, pubic-nude and stark as a skeleton. But there were other oddities. At some point in its long life the zombie had been split open across the side. This wound had, of course, healed; but teeth had grown in an irregular pattern along the scar. It had only a finger and a thumb on its right hand, but its left hand was a root-tangle of extra fingers all clutched together. She couldn’t help looking at its genitals: a smaller penis grew from the end of its actual penis, the way potato-buds sometimes sprouted from whole potatoes. The gouge carved by mother’s bullet, an inch deep at its deepest point, divided its cranium along a black crease. But it still had both its eyes, and its mouth was working. ‘Ch-ch-ch.’

‘Burn it,’ said K. ‘The grass is spring grass, the fire won’t spread.’

‘Waste the petrol?’ returned Ash.

‘Jacob will be back soon,’ said K. ‘The others will be back soon. They’ll bring more.’

‘And if they don’t?’ Ash replied, adding hastily, lest he be misunderstood, ‘Don’t bring more petrol ?’ In case anybody thought he meant don’t come back .

‘We can’t just leave it here,’ said Daniel. ‘I’ll get an axe, take its head off.’

‘There’s another!’ called Elisheva, pointing. Everybody looked. Not one but two Zayinim were shuffling round the margin of the lake. Further off were half a dozen more, also approaching. With a nice sense of the incipiency of the drama, the breeze suddenly woke up. It began shaking the willows, which moved their branches sluggishly as if waving the people away. There were, of course, no birds.

‘Back inside,’ said Daniel, aiming his bolt-gun downwards. ‘I’ll try and take out the rest of this one’s brains.’

The others started back towards the camp. Ash started off first, and straightaway, with a booming yell, he fell. The long grass swallowed him. ‘There’s one here!’ he hollered.

Daniel reacted quickest, leaping nimbly over the supine zombie at his feet and hurrying to Ash. There was a jarring bang as he discharged his weapon, and the next thing Jonie saw was Ash being helped back to his feet, blood all over his old head.

‘They’re in the grass,’ Mother cried. ‘Scores of them! They’ve been creeping up!’

‘Back to the compound,’ bawled Daniel. He turned, and shot again at the ground. ‘They’re everywhere.’

Jonie felt her heart go dabbity-dabbity in her chest. She set off running for the compound, but at once the whole world swung about the axis of her right ankle, and the Earth smacked her hard in the face. It took a moment to comprehend what had happened. Grabbed. Its undead hand around her ankle. She twisted in its grasp, aimed her weapon and fired it — missed. Its ghastly bifurcated head turned to her, and its mouth opened. She saw then that its teeth were not teeth at all, but fingernails.

‘It returns,’ the creatures hissed at her, in weirdly accented English. ‘Eternally it returns. And —’

Her second shot did not miss.

The zombie flopped back, its whole face horrible compressed and distorted where the bolt had punched its way in, at the mid-point of its nose. But it did not let go its grip. She put the gun down to free both hands, and tried to prise the fingers off. The creature was still moaning, or trying to make words, or something — but its fingers were set like a stone bracelet around her leg. It twitched and tried to rise again, and Jonie felt a nauseous sense of panic coil in her stomach. The creature’s free hand grabbed her left wrist. With her right hand she scrabbled behind her for the bolt gun — but with only one hand she could hardly reload it. Shuffling her position, she tried to bring her feet to bear. To kick out. The thing’s mouth was still going. ‘It,’ it hissed. ‘Always,’ it hissed. ‘Returns,’ it hissed.

Drums sounded, or maybe it was an earthquake. Sunlight flashed, as if her soul were leaving her body. But she was free, and she hauled herself backwards. The light flashed again. The drums were the hoof beats of a horse, and her father was on the horse. The flash was his sabre, cutting through the two arms of the Zayin.

‘Go,’ he bellowed.

She got up and began running, still wearing the clamped hands of the creature, one on her wrist, one by her elbow. The only thought in her head now was to get back to the gateway. When the force caught her and lifted her from behind she did cry out, terrified that another one of the beasts had her. But it was her father, hoisting her up into the saddle behind him, as they galloped over the undulating ground.

:4:

For several hours they were all too busy in defence for thought. Jacob’s party had not found any petrol, but the assault was on such a scale as to necessitate using their flame-throwers anyway. Ash cut away the two still twitching hands from Jonie, and burnt them in the fireplace. Then she went and took her place in the tower with most of the others, and picked her shots, and tried not to think about how horrible her experience had been.

By dusk the assault had been beaten back. The scale of it was alarmingly unprecedented: dozens of zombies, coordinating their attack. ‘Not so stupid,’ said Esther. ‘I’ve always said so.’

‘One spoke to me,’ Jonie said, but nobody seemed to hear, and she didn’t press the point. Because, once she’d said it, it sounded stupid. How could they speak ?

‘They followed us back,’ said Jacob. ‘They tracked us. We rode day and night, and day again, and they followed the whole way.’ How tired he looked! ‘And more will be along soon. We have to pack up. We must go.’

He had departed with three men and three women. The women were all right, but only two of the men returned. This fact only occurred to Jonie after sunset, when everybody gathered in the yard to wash and snatch food under the spotlight. ‘Where’s Beuys?’ she asked.

Nobody answered this question. A particular answer would have been worse than no answer. It wasn’t as if they needed to ask, actually.

Daniel was sitting on his strange shooting stick, smoking. So clearly Jacob had found some supplies, including tobacco. But no petrol. ‘It’s getting harder and harder to forage round here,’ said Charley, one of the women in the party. ‘We’re going to have to move.’

Feeling bitter and angry and weary and depressed Jonie went back to her room. As if calling the back of a truck with tarpaulin for a ceiling a ‘room’ made it one! Her mouth was full of ashes. It was pointless. They should give up. What was the point in going on?

She slept for a while, and woke up from a nightmare, and slept again. In her dream she heard hoof beats again, but it was not her father’s horses; the horses themselves were undead, chasing her down. She was running through long grass, and the undead horses were just behind her. She had time to think: they must have tried out the serum on animals as well, there must be zombie animals as well, when she woke sharply.

‘Jonie?’

It was her father’s voice. The hoof beats were him knocking on the slats at the end of the truck. He always knocked, politely, before disturbing her in her room.

She put her head out. The sky directly above was pre-dawn pale, mother-of-pearl, and a broccoli-bunch of rainclouds was squatting by the horizons. ‘Dad,’ she said, and jumped down.

Jacob was not a great one for hugs, but he clapped hands to her shoulders and kissed her quickly on her forehead. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It was such chaos yesterday, I did not have the chance properly to greet you.’

She looked around: everybody was busy. They were packing up. ‘Do we have somewhere actually to go?’ she asked. Her voice was still croaky with sleep.

‘We cannot stay here,’ replied Jacob, nodding slowly. ‘Come. We foraged some coffee.’

‘What a treat!’ she said; and then felt immediately sorry for looking forward to the coffee when Beuys was dead.

‘I will take a cup with you, my daughter,’ said Jacob, with characteristic pompousness, ‘and then we must both help with loading the trucks.’ He was looking old, Jonie thought. Everyone around her was old. Except Beuys, and he wouldn’t get any older.

Somebody had already folded away the tables, and stacked them ready for loading. But between them, Jonie and her father pulled out the legs and set one up again. Jacob poured two cups of coffee, and stirred in sugar, and they sat at the table opposite one another and drank.

Behind her father, away to the east, the rim of the world was starting to glow red. The sun returning. The sun always returned. But then, so did the night. That was the nature of return .

‘I’ve been reading one of Daniel’s books,’ she told him, unsure what else to say. Obviously it was impossible to talk about Beuys.

‘Oh yes?’

‘I think it has the answer,’ she told him, and as soon as the words came out she felt their infinite foolishness.

‘The answer to what?’ her father asked, with ingenuous seriousness.

She couldn’t back away now. ‘To all this. To us, and to — them.’

Jacob raised one of his impressively horticultural eyebrows. ‘There’s an answer?’

‘We have to go beyond us and them,’ she said, uncertain where the words were coming from, or where they were going. ‘It’s always the same thing, and that’s a kind of slavery. The struggle to turn the wheel is a kind of slavery. We have to break the wheel. Or — no, wait. Unpack it, unroll it. Squirl it out into a moebius strip. Or …’ She took refuge in the mug, and drained the last of the coffee. Some of the sugar had formed a crusty sludge at the bottom, and she dipped her pinkie finger into this. ‘When we fight the Zayinim, we become Zayinim. The difference between us and them is that we can choose not to be Zayinim. But that means going beyond the fight. Making peace of some kind.’

The eyebrow was still up. Behind Jacob the sky was starting to acquire the same golden-brown sweetness as she knew the sugar possessed. The storm clouds were away to the north, and — who knows? Maybe they would stay there. The light that suffused the heavens was also in her bloodstream now.

‘We can’t go on like this,’ she said.

The eyebrow came down. She had said something to which her father could relate. ‘We cannot,’ he agreed.

They were silent for a while, and the sky grew more gloriously honeyed in its clarity.

‘Daughter,’ said Jacob, putting the cup down, ‘I have rebuked Esther.’

‘It wasn’t her fault,’ Jonie said, automatically.

‘She should not have let you out. I have rebuked her, and she assures me she will not be similarly delinquent in the future.’

‘Dad!’ Jonie squealed. The sunlight had vanished from inside her. Now she felt only resentment and a kind of dull panic. Stuck inside! Stuck inside forever.

He held up his hand. ‘We cannot afford to take risks with you , daughter. You are the future. The only future.’ He meant babies, of course. She hated when he referred to this, although he was never very explicit. She hated the sense of responsibility, not just for her, but for the whole of humanity. ‘Which brings me to my news: we met another tribe.’

This was huge news. ‘You did?’ A whole new group of people? Some handsome young guy her own age?

‘Not a large tribe, and with no … no young people, I’m afraid.’

This was a disappointment. ‘None at all?’

‘I’m sorry. But they said they had heard tell of a larger community, away to the north on the coast. My worry is that we lack the petrol to move the whole camp there. But we must try. The island …’

The island was Jacob’s long-term plan: to move onto an island large enough to support them, cleanse it of any Zayinim that might be there, and build a New Jerusalem. But there was no point in doing that with only 13-year-old Jonie old enough to bear children, and the only men around capable of impregnating her close family. The goal was to gather together a viable number of different families, including youngsters. That had been the goal for as long as Jonie could remember. With the certainty granted only to the very young, she was convinced it would never come to anything.

‘We must look to the future,’ he said.

Jonie wanted to reply: yet we spend all our time looking to the past! But the sun had risen now, and he was standing up, so she stood up too. They washed the cups together, and folded the table away. ‘The youngest,’ Jacob said, ‘was fifty-nine.’

‘The youngest?’

‘Of the tribe we met. Seven people — not a viable number. Two women in their seventies, the rest old men. My age, or older. The youngest was a man called Ephraim, and he was fifty-nine.’

With that he went off to help Daniel and Mother with the crane on the back of the biggest truck, to move the fence portions. Jonie went off to help the others, packing trunks, checking the horses were all right. It only occurred to her much later that Jacob might have given her that information because some manner or type or kind of discussion had taken place about wives and husbands. Who else but her as the wife? But the very idea was so ghastly she put it away, behind her, and refused to think of it. There was a needle voice, inside her head, and it went: What’s the alternative, ducky ? What’s the alternative, my little brood mare ?

What’s the beyond? Good question.

They were halfway through packing the fence portions onto the big truck, and had folded down the tower into its lorry-back, when Ash called out that he could see Zayinim in the field.

It was a horribly vulnerable time for them to attack, but sometimes it happened that way. Daniel, Father, Mother, and K. mounted their horses and rode off as the others doubled their efforts. The sky brightened with early morning, and then darkened again as the rainclouds rolled over. Half an hour after setting off, the riders returned.

‘Something’s off,’ Mother told the group. ‘We put a few down, but they’re not attacking.’

‘Why not?’ K. asked.

‘Never mind why not,’ Daniel called. ‘Let’s just get packed up and head out before they change their minds.’

They finished up the fence sections just as the first rain began to fall. The air chilled and went bluer than before, and big nut-sized raindrops splattered onto the dusty windscreens and dry tarps. Within moments it was a heavy downpour, lines sketching the air all around, hissing hard into the long grass with the sound of somebody frying up food.

They tied down the last of the cargo, hitched the cart to the back of the smallest lorry, tethered the horses behind the medium truck, and set off. Jonie rode in the big truck; Mother driving, with Daniel and Esther. They had to wait a minute because the steaming bodies of the passengers misted up the windshield, and they had to run the air-blowers to clear their view. But eventually they were off, driving in first-gear (as always), moving forward at a horse’s walking pace.

They drove through the grass easily enough, and had an alarming moment going up the slope when the wheels slid intermittently on the new mud. But they crested the top, and if the big truck could do that, the rest would manage.

It was true, though: the field was full of Zayinim. It was the weirdest thing. Indeed, in all her short life Jonie had never seen anything like it. Two rows of zombies formed a kind of blank-eyed honour guard as they drove down the middle. They made no attempt to attack. They did not move at all, in fact. At one point Daniel climbed into the roof of his cab and put a few down with his rifle, but Mother called to him to stop — why antagonise them? And they didn’t seem bothered.

The clocklike tick and tock of the windscreen wipers.

Jonie watched. This one tall, hirsute, with too many ears and the arms hanging at his sides so long they reached almost to his ankles. This one had been a woman once, naked, with her skin covered either in scales or perhaps boils, Jonie couldn’t see very clearly. This one stocky, muscles, with fangs like a tiger poking through the skin of his lips. This one black, this one white, this one with a third arm sprouting from a cankerous looking mass on its shoulder, this other long and smooth and genital-less as a doll. All standing, and just watching them as they rolled by.

‘Spooky,’ opined Esther.

The rain stopped. Soon enough the clouds moved away, and the sun came out.

‘I’m always struck,’ said Mother, as the steering wheel, ‘that the Earth must be heavier after a rainfall than it was before. Isn’t that a striking thought?’

Finally they reached the end of the Zayinim row and passed it, and left the whole grisly crew of them far behind. But the very last individual was the most unsettling of all, for he was dressed in clothes. They cannot have been the clothes in which he had dressed before; for those threads must have long since crumbled to powder. He must have dressed himself — or been dressed. Of all the zombies she had seen, he was the least deformed (unless the deformities were hidden beneath the clothes) — a stack of white hair on his head, and an ageless face. In the sunlight his eyes glinted a clear blue, and he looked straight through the window at Jonie with what seemed like intention. But it can’t have been — of course. He almost looked handsome. If he hadn’t been a zayin, he would have been handsome: with his strong nose, and white-blond hair, and primrose eyes. His head turning slowly, so that his gaze could follow her. A dressed zombie? Wearing his smart suit, and gazing forlornly as the squire’s own daughter passed by. I mean, obviously not that. Obviously not. But it was weird.

‘Have you ever seen them act like that before?’ Jonie asked Daniel.

‘They act weirdly,’ was Daniel’s opinion. ‘Weird is the height and breadth and depth of them.’ To celebrate the fact that they’d gotten away without further mishap he took out a cigarette and lit it. His sigh of contentment was not the sort of noise a human usually made.

It was hard for her to put the intensity of the creature’s blue gaze out of her head. So she took out the book, the Beyond book, from the inside of her leather jacket, and tried to settle to reading it again. There was an answer in there somewhere, she knew.

Originally published in Jews vs Zombies (Jurassic London), March 2015.

Adam Roberts is the author of sixteen novels, the most recent being The Thing Itself (Gollancz 2015), and a great many short stories, some of which are collected in Adam Robots (Gollancz 2012). He lives in England between London and Reading.